TOM CRITCHLOW

Why Your Agency's Content Marketing Sucks

Or, how understanding tacit thought leadership can improve your content marketing

I have a friend who’s world class at running workshops. I’ve run a fair number of workshops myself but they’re on another level. If they ever make a film like Jiro Dreams of Sushi but about workshops then my friend is going to play the star role.

Their ability to design, orchestrate and execute an effective workshop with a big company where multiple stakeholders are involved is just incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it.

The first time I participated in one of their workshops my jaw hit the floor.

We’ve had plenty of conversations over the years about helping his agency “do thought leadership” or “start content marketing” or “blogging”. Each time I stress the importance of demonstrating their expertise - their product is so differentiated it’s not even funny!

They’ve been blogging and such for a while now and… it’s not bad, but it’s kind of generic. They write articles like “Avoid these three pitfalls with email marketing” or “Black friday holiday tips for ecommerce sites”. The content is fine - and keeps them moving forwards - it shows up on their site, in their emails. There’s good tips!

But it’s not thought leadership.

I can see that there’s an extreme level of expertise and operational excellence at my friend’s agency, but it’s not well articulated in their marketing and content.

This story is, unfortunately, very common. Agencies and consultants who are great at what they do but produce “content marketing” and “thought leadership” that is generic, bland and not very effective.

Why is that?

Enter Tacit Knowledge

The answer to this puzzle lies in understanding tacit knowledge. This from Cedric Chin’s just outstanding series on tacit knowledge:

The crucial part about tacit knowledge is that it’s extremely hard to teach and pass on to others:

One of the most fascinating things about tacit knowledge is not only that it’s hard to teach - but once you have tacit knowledge you might not even understand how it works…

Again, quoting Cedric’s posts (you really should read the whole series) - he talks about this situation where expert tennis players are able to detect the type of serve within a 100 millisecond window:

But! The plot thickens - the experts can identify the serve but they can’t explain why:

What a phrase - the experts can’t see what they’re seeing.

Let’s come back to my friend the master workshopper - the Serena Williams of workshops. In conversations I grew frustrated - “If you could write your 10-part guide to running workshops it would be an incredibly useful piece of content that would get referenced everywhere and by everyone”.

But with our understanding of tacit knowledge…. maybe my friend can’t see what he’s seeing? It’s not a failure of effort - he finds it almost impossible to produce this series on running workshops.

In reality you struggle with questions like:

  • What’s the right level of abstraction?
  • How do I explain the ideas clearly?
  • Which bits should I include and in what order?

And the effort to produce the ultimate guide to workshops stalls and loses momentum.

Is all hope lost?

Enter ACTA - Applied Cognitive Task Analysis

The good news is that there’s research and methods on how to extract tacit knowledge from experts. Sneaky eh? The simplest approach is ACTA. From Cedric once again:

In that post Cedric actually walks through an applied version of ACTA to extract John Cutler’s product expertise. And I think it’s compelling - I think it’s the same process that my friend should go through to build an outline for the “ultimate workshop guide”.

It’s not going to solve all of the problems - and it’s not trivial to do - but it provides a framework and process to follow that gets to a reasonable outline of where the expertise lies. In short, how to produce content that focuses on the expert insights and not the generic “how to” advice.

How do you start? Small b blogging!

This all seems quite cumbersome and heavy handed - going through an ACTA knowledge extraction process sounds like hard work, and doing it from a cold start might not be very effective. Instead if you find yourself trying to get better at thought leadership or content marketing I’d encourage you to go through a process that looks something like this:

  • Step 1: You first need to start creating content (writing, podcasting, slide decks etc) that allows you to expose your thinking. Thick data - rich in context. Don’t focus on tightly polished and absolute statements and “how-to” but focus on questions, context and musings. What you want is less “5 ways to run a remote workshop” and more “Unanswered questions and thoughts about zoom workshops”. Some inspiration:
  • Step 2: Small group feedback! Once you’re producing this kind of rich context content you should be getting input and feedback from a small group of peers / respected contacts / prospective clients etc. The key idea here is that you don’t need distribution, you just need to listen! Simply email 5-10 people and ask them what they think - have conversations with people about the ideas. This will begin to expose the shape of your tacit knowledge - the things you’re writing about and the way you’re framing your thinking will naturally start to expose where the real insights and expertise lies. This will build confidence that you “have something to say” and might even begin to point out some areas of tacit expertise.
  • Step 3: Commit to deliberate conversations on the topics you’re writing about. This can be with peers, friends, co-workers etc. Personally I find that podcasts have been great at helping me articulate and talk around subjects - repeatedly touching on key ideas helps you find clear ways of talking about them but also helps you realize which bits are “aha!” moments for your audience.
  • Step 4: Run an ACTA workshop! Find someone who knows a bit about your field - ideally a peer - and have them run through an ACTA workshop with you - formally extracting, shaping and articulating the tacit knowledge.

I think this process would be very effective - both in building a public presence and in building confidence. You can see how if you follow this process you will begin to build an audience (albeit very small!) and you’ll get more confident and articulate at writing and thinking in public - and eventually you’ll reach the output from the ACTA workshops that will give you a clear outline for producing world class content - world class thought leadership that matches your world class expertise.