#and it doesn’t have to be glaringly different within the same media

[avicecaro]

ugly or mid men in media irrationally piss me off because i get too distracted thinking about the standards actresses face to even pay attention to what they’re doing

[freddiekluger]

Why Cap Being Internally Closeted Is Not Only Possible, But Valid Representation 

i wrote this to a lot of mitski and onsind, so you can’t blame me for any feelings that bleed through

now i don’t know if it actually exists, but i’ve heard of there being a lot of discourse surrounding the captains story arc regarding his sexuality- i believe the general gist is that having a queer character that remains closeted to themselves is either unrealistic or ‘bad’ representation, and as someone who really treasures the captain and relates to his story so far a lot, i thought i might break this down a bit. 

i’ve divded up every complaint i’ve heard about this into four main questions which i’ll be covering below the ‘keep reading’, because this is gonna be pretty comprehensive. full disclaimer i reference my experiences as an ex-evangelical non binary butch lesbian a couple times, and i spent a year studying repression and the psychological impacts of high demand sexual ethics for my graduating sociology paper, so this is coming with some background to it i swear

the big questions:

can you EVEN be gay and not know it????

but isn't this just ANOTHER coming out arc, and aren't we supposed to be moving beyond those?

but if cap can't have a relationship with a man because he's a ghost, what's the point?

since cap's dead, isn't this technically bury your gays, and isn't that bad? 

1. "but is it really possible to not know? Isn't that bad representation?"

short answer: no and no.

before i get into the validity of the captain's ignorance about his own orientation as 21st century rep, let's break down how the hell the captain can be so clearly attracted to men and still not even consider the possibility that he might be gay, as brought to you by someone who literally experienced this shit.

the captain's particular situation is both a direct result of the lack of information around human sexuality he would have had (aka clear messaging that it's actually possible for him to be attracted to men. i don't mean acceptable or allowed, i mean physically capable of happening- the idea that orientations other than heterosexual exist and are available to him, a man), and a subconscious survival mechanism. the environment in which he lives is outright hostile to gay people, while the military man identity he has constructed for himself doesn't allow for any form of deviation from societal norms, let alone one so base level and major. as a result of this killer combo of information and environment, instincts take over and the mind does it's best to repress the ‘deviant’ feelings until a. one of these two things changes, or b. the act of repression becomes so destructive and/or exhuasting that it becomes impossible to maintain. the key to maintaining a long-term state of repression of desire is diverting that energy elsewhere, and a high-demand group such as the military is the perfect place for the captain to do this (this technqiue is frequented by religions and extremist ideologies worldwide, but that’s not really what we’re here to focus on). 

while the brain is actively repressing ‘deviant’ feelings (aka gay shit), this doesn't mean you don't experience the feelings at all. when performed as a subconscious act of survival, the aim of repression is to minimise/transform the feelings into a state where they can no longer cause immediate danger, and something as big as sexual/romantic orientation is going to keep popping up, but as long as the individual in question never understands what they’re feeling, they’ll be able to continue relatively undisturbed. you know how in heist movies, the leader of the group will only tell each team member part of the plan so they can’t screw things up for everyone else if they get caught? it’s kind of like that.

this is how the captain appears to have operated in life AND in death, and it’s a relatively common experience for lgbtq people who’ve grown up in similar circumstances (aka with a lack of information and in an unfriendly-to-hostile environment), and accounts for how some people can even go on to get married and have children before realising that they’re gay and/or trans. 

personally, while i can now identify what were strong homo crushes all the way back to childhood, at the time i genuinely had no idea. there was the underlying sense that i probably shouldn't tell people how attached i was to these girls because i would seem weird, and that my feelings were stronger than the ones other people used to describe friendships, but like-like them in the way that other girls like-liked boys? no way! actually scratch that, it wasn't even a no way, because i had no idea that i even could. i even had my own havers, at least in terms of the emotional hold and devotion she got from me, except she treated me way less well than cap’s beau. snatches of the existence of lgbt people made it through the cone of silence, i definitely heard the words gay and lesbian, but my levels of informations mirrored those that the captain would have had: virtually none, beyond the idea that these words exist, some people are them, and that's not something that we support or think is okay, so let's just not speak about it. despite only attending religious schools for the first couple years of primary, until i got my own technology and social media accounts to explore lgbtq content on my own- option a out of the two catalysts for change- the possibility of me being gay was not at all on my radar. don’t even get me started on how long it took me to explore butchness and my overall gender, two things which now feel glaringly obvious. 

when shit starts to break down, you can also make the conscious choice to repress which can delay the eventual smashing down of the mental closet door for a time (essentially when the closet door starts to open, you just say ‘no thanks’ and shut it again by pointedly Not Thinking About It). in the abscence of identifying yourself by your attractions, it becomes quite common to identify with a lack- in my case, this meant becoming proud of how sensible and not boy crazy i was, and in the captain’s case, this means becoming proud of how sensible and not sensuous/wild (aka woman crazy) he was, identifying with his LACK of desire for women and partying (which, even in the 40s, involved the expectation of opposite sex romances and hook ups). i’m not saying that’s the only reason he’s a rule follower, but i think the contrast between About Last Night and Perfect Day pretty much support this. (the captain getting on his high horse about general party antics that he inherently felt excluded from because of underlying awareness of his difference & his tendency to project his regimented expectations of himself onto others, vs. joining in the reception party, awareness of how the environment supports difference in the form of clare and sam, and relaxing his own rules by dancing with men- the captain doesn’t mind a party when feels like he has a place there.)

so the captain was operating in a high demand, highly regulated environment (primarily the military, but also early 20th century England itself), with regimented roles, rules, and expectations. working on the assumption that he wouldn't have had out/disclosing lgbt friends, he would have had little to no exposure to lgbt identities, and what information he did receive would have been hushed and negatively geared. while my world started to open up when i started high school was allowed to have my own phone + instagram account, resulting in me realising something wasn't quite 'right' within a few years (making me a relatively early realiser compared to those who don't come out to themselves until adulthood), in life the captain never had that experience. he didn't receive the information he needed, his environment didn't grow less hostile. with the near-exception of havers related heartbreak, his well disciplined and lifelong method of repression never became destructive/exhaustive enough to permanently override the danger signals in his mind and allow him to put his feelings into words. neither of the most common catalysts for change happened for him, so he continued as usual, even after his death.

BUT, and here’s where we come to why this is actually great representation, arrival of mike and Alison represents the opening up of new world. for the first time, the captain is actively made aware of the fact that his environment is no longer hostile, and better than that, it’s affirming. he’s also getting access to positively geared information about lgbtq people and identities, so option a of the two catalysts for change is absolutely present, and resoundingly positive. 

the captain’s arc is also relatively unique as it acknowledges the oppressive nature of his environment, but actually focuses on the internal consequences, and the way that systems like those that the captain lived in succeed because they turn us into our own oppressors. for whatever reason, we repress ourseslves, and often can’t help it, and i find that the significance of the journey to overcome that is often overlooked in more mainstream queer media. perhaps it’s just not very cinematic, or it remains too confronting for cishet audiences, but ghosts manages to touch on it with a lovely amount of humour and hope. Jamie Babbit’s But I’m A Cheerleader is another favourite piece of queer media for the same reasons.

not only does it show this, but as the captain continues to get gayer and lean into some of his less conventional traits (like an interest in fashion and the wedding planning), it shows lgbt people who have been or are going through this that there CAN be a positive outcome. it takes a lot to unlearn all the things that have painted you as wrong, especially when a massive institution is desperate to continue doing so, but you can do it, you can be happy, and it's never too late. (i've been meaning to say that last point for ages for ages, but a mutual beat me to it here)

2. not just another coming out arc

i absolutely support the demand for queer stories that don’t center around coming out (it’s like shrodinger’s queer: if you’re not coming out on screen, do you really even exist?), but i don’t align with the criticisms that the captain should already be out. for the reasons mentioned above, the captain’s particular story is fairly different to the ‘young white teenager who mostly knows gay is fine, it’s just everyone else that’s got the problem, but have a unremarkably straight sounding soundtrack, a trauma porn romance, and a cishet saviour’ that we keep seeing. the captain’s ongoing journey with his sexuality emphasises the overaching theme of the show: recovering from trauma and humanity’s endless capacity for growth, and i think that’s worth showing over and over again until it stops being true.

additionally, while the captain’s journey regarding his gayness is a big part of his character and story, ghosts makes it clear that it’s not the ONLY part, and being gay is far from his ONLY characteristic or dramatic/comedic engine. the fact that i’m even having to congratulate ghosts for doing that really shows how much film and television is struggling huh.

while all queer media is, and should be, subject to criticism, i think if it helps even one person then it absolutely deserves to exist, and i can say i’ve found the captain’s journey to be the lgbt story i’ve found that’s closest to my own, which says a lot considering he’s a dead world war 2 soldier who hangs out with other ghosts including a slutty Tory, a georgian noblewoman, and a literal caveman. 

3. if captain gay, why he no have boyfriend???? 

another complaint that’s been circulating is that since the captain doesn’t, and likely won’t, have a boyfriend, that makes him Bad Representation because it follows the sad single gay trope. i kind of get the logic from this one, and a lot of it is up to personal interpretation, but part of me really enjoys the fact that the captain’s journey towards accepting himself is separated from having a relationship.

coming out is often paired with having romantic/sexual relationships (either as the reason or reward for doing so). my own struggle with repression didn't end the second that came out, and i still struggle with letting myself develop & acknowledge romantic feelings as a result of actively shutting them (and most other feelings in general) down for years, and statistics show that lgbtq youth in particular tend not to live out their 'teen years' until their twenties. by not giving cap a relationship straight away, ghosts separates the act of claiming identity and sexual orientation from finding a partner (two things which are, more often than not, separate), and also provides some very nice validation to folks who have yet to have the relationship they want, especially when lots of mainstream queer media is now jumping on the cishet media bandwagon of acting as if every person loses their virginity and has a life defining relationship at sixteen. it’s essentially a continuation of the earlier theme of “it’s never too late”, and who’s to say the captain won’t get a gay bear ghost boyfriend to go haunt nazis with??? people die all the time, it could happen.

(also, i think him and julian will have definitely shagged at least once. it was a low moment for both of them and they refuse to speak of it.)

lots of asexual/ace spectrum fans have come out to say how much they’ve loved being able to headcanon cap as ace, and while that’s not a headcanon i personally have, i think it’s brilliant that ace fans feel seen by his character- we’re all in this soup together babey (and sorry for cursing everyone still reading this with that cap/julian headcanon. i’m just a vessel)

4. “okay, but cap’s a GHOST- doesn’t that make this Bury Your Gays?”

this is a bit of a complex one, but i’m going to say no as a result of the following break down.

Bury Your Gays (BYG), aka the trope where lgbtq characters are consistently killed off (and often with a heavy dose of trauma, while cishet characters survive) is probably one of my least favourite lgbt media tropes. BYG has two main points:

1. the lgbt character is killed, thus removing them from story entirely- hence the use of the phrase ‘killed OFF’ (killed off of the show/film)

2. the character’s death reinforces the perception that lgbtq people’s lives must end in tragedy, instead of being long and fulfilling, or are inherently less valuable. bonus points if the character is killed in a hate crime or confesses same-gender love right before they die (that one implies that queer love genuinely has no future!)

not every death of an lgbtq character is bury your gays, and i personally feel that the captain is an example of an lgbt death that isn’t. 

first of all, while the captain is dead, so are the vast majority of characters in ghosts. the premise of the show means that death is not the end of the line for its characters- for most of them, it’s the only reason we get to see them on screen at all. as such, the captain being dead doesn’t remove him from the story, so point one is irrelevant.

at the time of posting, we don’t know how or why the captain died, but we've had nothing to suggest his death was in any way related to his latent sexuality, so his mysterious death doesn’t actively play into the supposedly inherent tragedy of queer lives, nor the supposedly lesser value. that’s as of right now- since we don’t know the circumstances of his death it’s a little tough to analyse properly. while the captain’s life absolutely features missed opportunities and it’s fair share of tragedy, hope and growth (which seems to be the theme of this post) abounds in equal measure. the captain may not be alive, but we DO get to see him growing and having a relatively happy existence, that for the most part seems to be getting even better as he learns to open up and be himself unapologetically- that doesn’t feel like BYG to me.

while writng this, it’s just occured to me that death really is a second chance for most of the ghosts, especially with the introduction of alison. from mary learning to read, to thomas finding modern music, they’ve all been given the chance explore things they never could have while they were alive, and hopefully grow enough to one day be sucked off move on.

in conclusion,

i love the captain very much and i hope his arc lives up to the standards it’s set so far. i don’t know where to put this in this post, but i’d alo like to say i LOVE how in Perfect Day, the captain wasn’t used as an educational experienced for fanny at all. i am very tired of people expecting me to be the walking talking homophobe educator and rehabilitator, so the fact that it’s alison and the other ghosts that call fanny out while the captain just gets to have fun with the wedding organisation made me very happy.

here’s a few other cap posts that i’ve done:

the captain’s arc if adam and the film crew stayed

a possible cap coming out 

the captain backstory headcanon

if you’ve read this far,

thank you!

also check out @alex-ghosts-corner , this post inspired me very much to write this

[veryvincible]

The Shitstorm That Is TS:IM and IM2020: The Allegory of Nothing

4 / 4. We’re here.

The writers don’t know what artificial intelligence is.

1 2 3

Let’s go back to the beginning. Jocasta is the robotics ethicist of Stark Unlimited. The company has adopted a system wherein the automated employees are in a non-hierarchical environment. Tasks are “suggested, not ordered.”

And guess what that does? Well, when these employees are needed, this happens:

The majority of them are non-compliant. And what’s the solution to this?

Apparently, give them a phat beat for Tony to kick Fin Fang Foom’s ass to. That’s what Andy Bhang decided to do, but only after following the “proper ethical protocol” when speaking to Jocasta. Which is... saying “please.”

Because, you know, saying things like, “Hey, I need you to do [whatever the fuck]” when a giant dragon is laying siege to your city is... oppressive, I guess. It doesn’t matter that that’s how humans tend to talk to other humans in emergencies, because Jocasta’s a robot ethicist and a functioning AI, and this "proper ethical protocol” is to slow things down with formalities instead of allowing everyone to treat each other like individuals.

By all means, continue to buffer the solution so everyone can say “please.” It’s only Tony who’s out there fighting a giant monster.

I actually like Jocasta. I think she’s a good character in most of the media she appears in. But here? Well, here, everyone is shitty.

It’s glaringly obvious that the goal here isn’t robot... equality. These sentient machines are just free rein. Sure, they work for Stark Unlimited. Sure, they’re employees... but they actually don’t have to do any work, like, ever, unless they want to.

So, they’re obviously not being treated like human beings. They’re practically high-tech babies, which is exactly how you want to present your oppressed group in your revolution plotline. Especially in this political climate! Hierarchy is most certainly oppressive! These robots can’t handle having real human jobs! They’re just so innocent and flawless.

...

And out of place.

Here’s the thing. Dan Slott... doesn’t really know what AI is. These little nano-suits that are coming in to help save the day have no reason to be sentient. Sure, they might be artificially intelligent, but sentient? No.

Artificial Intelligence refers to a computer science field that focuses on learning and problem-solving machines. These machines gather data and use this data later on in order to make decisions. If you use email, your spam filter is a result of AI. Our phones learn how we respond to certain messages (and pick up our diction even out of context) as a result of AI and machine learning.

Chatbots simulate human speech, often by using messages compiled from other humans. The more you talk to them, the more organically they’ll seem to respond. They recycle human messages and send them back.

Deep learning is a more specialized form of learning that more closely resembles how the human brain functions by organizing information in a non-linear fashion with interconnected neuron nodes. This is what leads to the sentience that’s seen in characters such as FRIDAY, and it’s very obviously not present in every machine with AI capabilities. In essence, artificial intelligence is not synonymous with sentience.

So... Why does TS:IM treat these concepts like they’re interchangeable? Why is it that the featured AI revolution is so dependent on the feelings of machines that have no chance of becoming sentient? Again, Tony’s nano-suits could be just that: nano-suits. There’s nothing saying that these suits have to be sentient. In fact, it’s worse if you consider them to be.

If all it takes for a machine to be considered a part of this AI revolution is some problem-solving, wouldn’t Tony’s actual suits also be considered AI? They have autopilot, don’t they? They avoid obstacles. The HUD provides useful information regardless of whether or not a character AI is residing in the suit. 

For example, here’s a scene wherein some researchers are doing a robot stability test with one of these lovable dog-like machines.

Now, I cringe when I see the poor guy get pushed down. But you know who doesn’t cringe? The dog-like robot, because the dog-like robot feels nothing. It’s a learning machine, but it is not a sentient being. Not even a loving heart emoji directed toward its robot savior.

Another example?

This right here.

From combat drones to... coffee makers? Coffee makers are supposed to be oppressed here? What’s a Keurig going to do with sentience anyway? How’s it going to get to the fight? It doesn’t have legs. This machine doesn’t have legs. Or wheels. Or anything.

Because it’s a coffeemaker, not a member of society. And this dilution of meaning with regards to sentient beings also dilutes the message of the AI revolution. It’s not pointed out in-universe how fucking crazy it is for all of these machines to be considered oppressed when they don’t even have the mental capacity to think past prompting “French press or Espresso?” on a touch screen.

There’s also a serious question asked here: What would a sentient machine think about being a sentient machine?

And we have gotten some pretty thoughtful answers out of this. For example, Jocasta thinks she has a soul. And Tony, despite his flesh and blood, is still in existential limbo because of the idea that he might be artificial intelligence after all.

And... the depth ends there, because all sentient machines in this universe want to do is... be human.

Like, really. They want to be human.

The reality of what it would mean to exist solely in one form without ever experiencing what it’s like to be in another is completely swept away here. There’s very little differentiation between robots who want to be humans and robots who want to be robots with rights. Also, there’s very little differentiation between robots who want to be robots with rights and Keurigs.

But really, this is also kind of frustrating. Sure, it could be a nod to certain feelings of oppressed groups who don’t fit in. It could be a clever bit of characterization akin to that of a young Asian-American girl wanting to be white so she doesn’t get bullied in school, or a gay person who’s always wished they could be straight.

Except it’s not, because nothing in this run feels like it’s been thought through to that extent.

Instead, what we have is a confusing mess. Most of these robots (with the exception of some) want to be treated exactly like humans, whether it’s actually better for them as a species (?) or not.

For example:

What makes an AI feel “cooped up?” FRIDAY, from what we’ve been shown, was usually given free rein of the tower. The same way our phones respond when we say, “Hey Siri!” or “Okay, Google!”, FRIDAY responded when she was called on. No matter where Tony was in the tower, she could be there, too.

And also, she was in the suit.

There is no reason that any AI should have to be restricted to one specific place or another, and yet throughout the entirety of the run, AIs are only allowed to be in one place at any given time. Why is that?

Sure, it’s nice to have a body. And if they want a body to go out and interact with the world, more power to them. The body is the least of my concerns.

I just hate that any AI is considered to be a “helpless passenger” at all, when machines the likes of these should be more than capable of not only going wherever they’d like to go within their allowed boundaries (which, again, should be and has been shown to be much larger than “just the suit”), but also going wherever they’d like to go at any time. They can be in two places at once. Presumably, if they’re complex enough to seriously contemplate the philosophy of being, they’ve got the processing power to be on multiple simpler trains of thought at once, and they’ve got the ability to control multiple bodies or project in multiple locations at once.

And even if this were a total retcon, and it turned out that actually, the capability for AIs to be in multiple places at once was never a thing before now...

It’s specifically stated on the exact same page that this is possible.

It’s truly dumbfounding.

And perhaps the worst offender of all: the complete disregard for any kind of philosophy or conversation about what it means to be an entity.

So, we’re all aware of 616 Tony’s current story if we’re reading this. Multiple times in his life, he’s been replaced by backup copies of himself, mostly holographic or otherwise exclusively digital.

And Jocasta treats him like Tony. Or, well, she treats him like a version of Tony. Whatever the case, she’s never shown any hostility toward him whatsoever for being a fleshy backup. This never made him any less valuable.

But... She’d rather let FRIDAY die for good than be given a second chance at life, because if they loaded up the backup, she’d be... missing a week of memories.

A week of memories that made her “a completely different entity.”

Now, I’m not here to lecture anyone on what it means to be yourself. I’m really not.

But the main difference between the original Tony and this current Tony (if we’re working off the assumption that he’s not supposed to have a totally different and fucked up personality) is the “memory loss,” or rather, lack of available data. Functionally, it’s amnesia.

And you know what? The original Tony has this too. There are already things that Tony doesn’t remember because of his time spent as an AI. Essentially, every single Tony that could possibly exist in 616 canon right now (even TonAI, our lovable blue friend with a control freak streak) is just as Tony as all the other Tonys, because they all have the memories of their developmental stages and quite a bit of the time spent with the Avengers, and they all have missing information.

So, if FRIDAY’s one-week-ago backup were to be loaded up, what would happen? Would she be completely different?

No. She would have every single memory that FRIDAY had originally, with the exception of whatever memories she saved in the last week of her life. And yet, because of the lack of critical thinking that went into the writing process, Jocasta decided that a dead FRIDAY was better than a FRIDAY with memory loss.

The writing is lazy. The thinking involved in this entire plotline is little to none. Coffeemakers are not oppressed, and a friend waking up from a comatose state with a few memories missing is better than that friend dying. Not every AI is sentient.

And to top it all off, after arguing for 20 or so issues that AIs are people, too, and every life- even the life of a Keurig or a stability testing machine- is valuable...

Tony devalued his own, concluding the worst AI-centric plotline I’ve ever read.

Whoopsie.

[littlemisssquiggles]

I'm worried about Volume 7 for RWBY. What if they pander to the Bumbleby fans again like they did in Volume 6? What if they make Blake a full-on lesbian and make her and Yang kiss in front of Sun? WHAT IF THEY MAKE EVERYONE IN THE SHOW LGBT!!!???? D:) I'm just a little worried that CRWBY is going to make the show more LGBT (Not that I hate LGBT even though I'm heterosexual, its just that there was too much in Volume 6.

Ooof! This is a pretty touch and go subject anon-chan. So I will do my best to remain as humble and respectable about it while still providing an honest opinion on the matter. Fair warning, it’s a rather long answer post:

I see what you’re basically saying anon. I’m also a straight person but  I am supportive of the LGBT community. Like anyone in today’s media, I’d like for my LGBT brethren to receive just as much good representation because why not? Why shouldn’t their stories and experiences be told too, y’know what I’m saying? Why shouldn’t they be able to look at a character on screen and see themselves in said character since they can relate to who they are as a person and what their experiences?

That’s how I look at it. But there is a fine line between what could be considered great representation and pandering. I’m a glutton for good storytelling and character writing so what I consider great representation is when you’re able to take a certain kind of character—any kind of character regardless of who they are— and just tell a good story with them. Something that makes me as the audience care about said character regardless even if I may not relate directly to them as a person or their experiences.

For example: I may not be LGBT but if you give me an LGBT character with a great story and terrific writing to back them up—one who is not just an LGBT character but a good character overall who is LGBT (believe it or not,there is a difference) then I can support said character. Not just because they are LGBT but because they are a good character. Just like in real life, there is more to an individual than just their sexuality or one characteristic about them. I get that a character’s orientation is a part of who they are but it’s not ALL that they are; y’know what I’m saying?

What I personally don’t like seeing is when showrunners make half-ass attempts at appealing to certain demographics by introducing characters who feel more like cardboard cut-outs or props placed on a string to dangle to said target audience as opposed to being actual characters who feel like real people with exceptionally-written stories that the audience can connect with.

Personally, I am tired of the whole schlock where showrunners introduce LGBT characters like it’s a last minute brain fart. It’s especially worse when they take characters who weren’t initially confirmed to be LGBT at the start of the series but suddenly make this a big reveal later in the series run. I’m not talking S2 but like in way later seasons; like near the very end when the series is about to wrap up. And I’m not even talking like it’s a thing where the character go on a journey of self-discovery where they are unsure of their orientation at first and the seasons are about building up to them coming out. I’m talking straight up saying “This character is LGBT now. That’s it. They just are. Nevermind that they weren’t that several seasons ago. They’re just that. The end.”

I’m looking straight at you Voltron: Legendary Defender and before you, Legend of Korra.  

Additionally, what sucks is that often times, if an LGBT character is introduced in a such a contrived way and you as an audience member complain about it due to how it was portrayed, you end up being labelled with some derogatory term that overlooks what you were trying to say. It’s like some folksactively believe that you should automatically support something just because it represents a minority group and you should be happy that this is what certain shows are doing to breech that.

For example: I, as an audience member, should automatically be supportive of an LGBT character and relationship within a show I like because it is LGBT. Nevermind if it’s good representation, I should just like it because it is this and if I don’t, I’m labelled as being homophobic. Nevermind that I have justifiable reasons for not supporting said character or pairing that have nothing to do with them being LGBT. I’m just automatically roped in with the people who are like this despite my views not highlighting any kind of animosity towards LGBT representation overall.

To tell me that I should automatically support all LGBT rep in RWBY because it is LGBT is like telling me that Emerald Sustrai should automatically be my all-time favourite character because she is a black female character in the show and I am a black female.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Emerald but she isn’t my favourite. Ya’ll know who my favourite is. I don’t need to repeat myself. But should I be considered a racist just because I say Emerald isn’t my favourite despite my reasons having little to do with the colour of her skin but rather how she is written in the series? No.

This is why I don’t like seeing examples where fans are labelled homophobic just because they don’t support Bumblebee or any other LGBT character or ship within RWBY.

Let’s use the favourite character example again. My favourite character in RWBY is Oscar Pine. Oscar isn’t the best developed character within the series but my interest in him stems from the tremendous potential he has to become one of the best written characters in RWBY given the calibre of characters and stories he draws inspiration from. That being said, I can understand why not many people like Oscar. As a matter of fact, my main frustration with Oscar as a fan of his is how he’s portrayed within the show and how his growth and development is often handled by the CRWBY Writers. I understand why it’d be difficult for others to get behind Oscar as a favourite character since the writing, more often than none, doesn’t support how good he could be. (We’ll see if V7 finally changes that).

The same thing can be said for the Bumblebee pair and why there are those folks who are unable to support it 100%. I’ll focus on the Bees as my primary LGBT rep example since they’re the pair you mainly brought up.

I’m aware that there are those special folks out there who harp on this pairing simply because it is LGBT. I know those fans exist and it’s a shame that that’s their feelings but, to each their own. However, as I must say with great emphasis—not everyone who dislikes or isn’t supportive of Bumblebee are homophobic.

I’ll use myself as an exemplar of this. I’m a BlackSun shipper who has zero issue with Bumblebee or the prospect of it becoming canon endgame. On the contrary,as of V6, I’ve wholeheartedly stopped caring about who the showrunners put to be Blake’s final love interest. After watching 6 seasons of the showrunners tease both BlackSun and Bumblebee, I’ve grown tired of this charade they’ve forced us fans to dance to. 

I don’t care who Blake ends up with. I just would very much like for the CRWBY Writers to make up their mind on who they wish to push to be with Blake and stick with said person.

One of the reasons I’ve heard folks say the Writers are pushing Bumblebee now is because Sun is out of the picture and in all honestly, I can see the truth in this. It does feel rather suspicious that the instant Sun is out of the story, it’s suddenly bee season. Say what you wish to say, BlackSun is a ship that has always been at the forefront since V1. 

By my observations, Bumblebee didn’t become as glaringly apparent as it is now until the end of V5 going into V6. 

The Beekeepers can debate as much as they’d like about ‘Bumblebee being planned from the beginning’ but this is simply not true. I rewatched all of RWBY with the recent two seasons still being very fresh in my mind. I recapped the series with an open-mind to see if all those hints that Beekeepers have preached about for years on end held up.

In V1, Blake and Yang were teammates slowly becoming friends similar to Weiss and Ruby and that was basically it. In V2, it was the same energy and I know they had their famous moment in ‘Burning the Candle’ that most Beekeepers like to use as leverage to imply that this was the starting line of Blake and Yang ‘falling in love’ but again, this was not the case. 

That moment could easily be argued as a mere meaningful scene between two very close friends. Blake and Yang weren’t lovers or even seen to be falling in love with each other in that scene. It was just one friend trying to help another during a dire time where she almost destroyed herself with her own obsession over Torchwick.

In V3, same thing—friends looking out for each other. You can basically say that the Beacon Trilogy did a great job of establishing the friendship between Blake and Yang. Particularly Yang’s loyalty to Blake as one of her closest friends.   

From V1, Yang was always seen as someone who had Blake’s back no matter what. No matter how many times Blake was called out for her actions, she had Yang’s support. It’s what made it so heart-breaking to watch in V3 when Yang needed that trust and support reciprocated by Blake during the moment where she was framed during the Vytal Festival or even after losing her arm.

Instead of being there for her, Blake either expressed doubt in Yang (due to her past with Adam) or straight up ran. As unfortunate as it is to say, Blake wasn’t as good of a friend to Yang as she was to her and this was good because it was a set up for her whole arc during the events of V4-V6.

Up until this point, everything regarding Blake and Yang’s relationship had been about their friendship. Friends who are there for each other. That’s the thing. I can make the argument that Bumblebee, as a couple, did not become a real focus until the end of V5. 

And from V6, that’s when the pandering started to slowly happen. This is why I never bought into Beekeepers celebrating the Bees being canon after V6. I didn’t see that and I still can’t understand how the Beekeepers can see Blake and Yang murdering Adam Taurus as a triumph for their relationship.

It is…sort of…but at the same time it isn’t. It’s morally stained. On one end, you have two friends who both suffered at the hands of this villain before working together to take him down but on the other hand, they killed him.

Now his blood is on their hands and what’s bothersome is that the series simply treats it like nothing. No emotional or psychological repercussions for either girl. Again we’ll see if V7 does anything with that, but nonetheless, I did not believe Bumblebee being canon after V6.

Bumblebee isn’t there yet for me. It has the potential to get there if that is what the showrunners wholeheartedly wished to do. I just wished they would take their time to continue to flesh out the Bumblebee dynamic before possibly bringing in romance if that’s in the cards for these two. And I certainly hope that they aren’t only pushing the Bees to score points with the Beekeepers, using their support to push the show.

I’m not saying all the Yang and Blake moments were blatant pandering; but I will admit there were one or two that were glaringly obvious.

Similar to you anon-chan, I didn’t particular enjoy the pandering to this ship last season either. I honestly felt that the showrunners were more focused on the pandering than actually continuing to develop Blake and Yang’s bond overall. 

This is especially sad because there was room for further growth as brought up in V5. However it feels like most of the former tension that was highlighted in V5 suddenly got dropped by the finale, which made me question why even bring it up in the first place, y’know what I mean?

My main justification for not lobbying behind this pair is because there hasn’t been much evidence within the show to really sell these two as lovers for me. And the pandering doesn’t help. I don’t like pandering.

Nothing wrong with tossing some delicious breadcrumbs for potential canon ships within a series. But what I tend to dislike is when showrunners only bait certain ships to score points with the audience members lobbying for this kind of pair when in actuality they have zero intentions of making said ship official. I’ve mostly seen this sort of thing done with LGBT ships in animated series and it gets annoying after some time.

Why string people along like that? If you are not serious about making certain relationships canon or developing them in a way that feels natural, realistic and relatable to a variety of audiences; not just the one it’s mainly targeted at, then…don’t do it at all. 

It’s like what J.K. Rowling has been doing with the recent queer baiting in the Fantastic Beasts series. Why claim that you have that rep within your franchise only to not do it when you had the chance to? So basically you were only doing it for the attention it brings in today’s modern media. Gotta score dem sweet woke points. 

That level of pandering is what I find obnoxious and in the case of RWBY, I wouldn’t like for that to be done for Bumblebee ship or any other LGBT character or ship to come out of the series moving forward.

But to be fair, in defence of the CRWBY, sometimes it’s not always them. In terms of LGBT rep, sometimes a show might not introduce two characters or their bond as being LGBT but some audience members, for whatever reason, end up interpreting it that way and that’s the appeal of it for them. Some might even end up advocating for the show to confirm said characters to be LGBT purely because that’s what they like to see regardless of whether it was the showrunner’s intention or not.

This is what I’m seeing currently within the FNDM where a lot of Bee-shippers are seeing the conclusion of V6 as being a sign that Bumblebee is officially canon when the reality is that that’s not the case. You can almost say that is an example of an instance when the show is pandering to a certain type of audience and that audience takes what’s given and runs far with it even though that’s not the confirmed case within the series itself.

Again, I don’t believe Bumblebee is canon. While I feel like that may be where the show wants to take them, they’re not there as yet. And until the show takes the proper time to develop this pairing in that supposed direction, I’m not going to fully buy into it. But this is only my view. I have no control over how another fan interprets something. I can only speak for myself.

What if they pander to the Bumbleby fans again like they did in Volume 6?

Honestly, I’ll say this again. If Blake and Yang being canonically revealed as LGBT is the CRWBY Writers’ vision for these characters, all I can hope for is that it’s handled well. 

Like I said. I have retired from caring about who Blake ends up with romantically. While I will always remain a BlackSun shipper at heart (since I love my Sunshine boi), Blake’s love life is no longer of interest to me moving forward. I don’t care who the CRWBY picks just as long as they make up their mind and stick with it.

I really hope that the CRWBY aren’t pushing the Bees now because of no Sun. I honestly hope that we don’t get plenty of Bees for the majority of the Atlas Arc only for them to introduce some boring unnecessary drama between them and Sun as soon as they head for Vacuo. Please no! 

Up until now I never got the impression within the actual show that there was ever a love triangle between Yang, Blake and Sun. That kind of stuff was mostly reserved for the toxic side of the FNDM with the ridiculous shipping wars between BlackSun and Bumblebee. I would honestly be mega pissed if the Sunnybees love triangle is made into an actual subplot for RWBY in a future season. HELL NO!

Even now I still believe Bumblebee to be one-sided. What made me get behind Bumblebee was mainly for what it would mean for Yang. Between the two girls, I felt the Bumblebee vibe strongest with Yang more than Blake since at the time back in V5, she was with Sun and her focus was on Adam. 

Because of this, I looked at the show using Bumblebee as a way of showing Yang coming to terms with her sexuality  through realizing what her feelings for Blake meant to her and I was down for that. Very rare do I see animated series touch on the topic of showing characters coming to terms with their sexual orientation and having that ‘coming out’ moment. I’ve mostly seen it done in live action TV shows but not so much in animation. 

After V3, I thought that was what Miles and Kerry were going to do with Yang. Did that happen? Not really. I’m not even sure what was done for V6. All I know is that as soon as Sun was taken out of the picture, the Bumblebee hints started dropping; sparingly but so hard that it’s almost in your face.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting any Bumblebee hints like that. Since V5 introduced Yang still having tension with Blake over the end of V3, I was hoping that V6 would’ve shown these two sitting down, have a nice long talk and then slowly rebuilding that trust and good rapport that was originally there between them.

 Instead Yang just magically forgave Blake at the end of V5 and then they really never honestly spoke about what happened in V3 at all that season. Sure it had the talk during Brunswick Farm which was a good start; but it never really went anywhere substantive from there. At least not to me.

We got one moment of Yang and Blake discussing Adam in V6 C5 and then the next time that actually had relevance was in C10 after Adam suddenly shows up to mess with Blake. We are thrown headfirst into this grandiose confrontation that I honestly wish the Writers had spent a little bit more time building up to. I knew it was going to happen at some point. I just wish it didn’t happen so soon after Team RWBY just reunited at the end of V5.

We barely got a full season of the girls rekindling their team dynamic; particularly Yang and Blake. Yang and Blake barely had time to truly recover from their prior two seasons of ups and downs before being tossed into the literal lion’s den.

If the Writers end up pandering more to the Bees in V7, I think it should be expected at this point anon-chan. If they did so in V6, it’s going to obviously continue into the next season. I don’t expect it to stop any time soon. Not when they can milk it for what it’s worth. Personally I don’t mind if the Writers plan on providing more great heartfelt character building moments between Yang and Blake unless it leads into their relationship being properly developed. That’s all.

If pandering is part of that then…okay,I guess? I just hope it’s not ALL of it. If Bumblebee is endgame and the show is serious about that then they need to stop puppeteering it around to tease those hungry and rather impressionable Beekeepers and actually focus on ensuring that the relationship is a well-written one. Pandering is not exactly development.

Another thing is that the Beekeepers kind need to tone down on taking everything that happens between Yang and Blake are a sign that they are canon. The lengths at which some of them reach to prove that their ship is canon is…wow, what a reach. I get that you guys want this to happen but for Pete’s sake, practice some patience why don’t you. I get that some of ya’ll are really eager and very passionate about this ship but Jeez Louis on cheese, wait for a clear defining moment that cannot be argued, please.

Let your Writers do your ship justice if they’re serious about it. Let them build upon it. Reinforce it. You can’t really complain too much about a romantic relationship that’s been developed properly. If the Writers do that well for V7 and onward—not really confirming the Bees but taking the time to show their bond progressing from close friendship to love before adding romance into the mix.

If the ship is developed well, I can’t have much complaints. I’m no tsure about you anon-chan.

What if they make Blake a full-on lesbian and make her and Yang kiss in front of Sun?

Yang and Blake kissing in front of Sun…I honestly hope it doesn’t happen because it’d be such a tasteless move; even for the show. Beyond that, I honestly don’t see Sun having a problem with Blake and Yang being a couple. While he might be surprised by it at first, it’s been established in V6 that Sun is only out for Blake’s best interest and overall happiness.

Sun Wukong cares more about Blake Belladonna as a person. As he told Neptune, his reasons for following her to Menagerie wasn’t out of a desire to make her his girlfriend or that she’d fall in love with him for it. He did it because he cared about Blake and wanted to genuinely help her get over her problems with Adam and rekindle her friendship with her team. That’s what was more important.

If Blake and Yang became a couple and Yang is shown to be the person that makes Blake happy then I can only see Sun being earnestly supportive of that; believe it or not.

I’ve said it before and I will reaffirm this. I cannot picture an envious Sun Wukong jealous of Blake’s relationship with Yang. It’s so uncharacteristic of Sun that it sounds nonsensical to even entertain the very thought. 

As a Sun fan, I would actually be more pissed at the Writers making Sun angry over Blake and Yang’s relationship overall than the action itself. 

Sun has always been one of the most supportive friends to Blake so he’d be happy for her even if she’s happy being with someone else and not him.  If Yang is the one who makes Blake happy then that’s all Sun would need to hear. That’s how this squiggle meister sees it.  

WHAT IF THEY MAKE EVERYONE IN THE SHOW LGBT!!!????

Uhmm…I think you need to give the Writers a notch more credit than that anon-chan. 

Just because they’re introducing more LGBT characters; particularly in the main cast doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to alienate their straight audience members. I don’t see them making everyone LGBT. 

There are characters within the series who were already confirmed to be straight (like Ren and Nora, Jaune, Pyrhha, Ozma, Neo, Qrow, Tai Yang and the list goes on). I’m sorry.  I just don’t see this being possible. I can see them adding more LGBT characters to the cast, but not every character in the show. That’s ludicrous!

The reason why we have more LGBT characters is to push for more representation of everyone regardless of gender, sexual orientation, culture, etc. RWBY has always been kind to include a plethora of diverse characters for fans to relate to. That’s one of the things that makes it such a good show. Making EVERYONE one thing, even if its LGBT, contradicts that.

I don’t see this being possible because I’d like to believe the show will always have that nice blend of characters that can appeal to any and everyone.

 I’m just a little worried that CRWBY is going to make the show more LGBT (Not that I hate LGBT even though I’m heterosexual, its just that there was too much in Volume6.

Uhmmmm…..the thing is anon-chan, inclusion is important.

But I also get what you’re trying to say. You’re not against more LGBT rep, you’re just concerned with the pandering aspect of it, right? The kind where the showrunners only shoehorn in these types of characters to push a certain agenda, steering focus towards these characters who aren’t written to be properly fleshed out characters with good stories but rather tokens to meet a certain quota and score those sweet brownie points with the queer community while alienating or downright changing pre-established characters to fit this new mould? Is that what you mean?

I don’t mind more LGBT rep in RWBY. That’s perfectly fine. Speaking mostly for mysef here, I like my LGBT characters the same way I like my straight characters. Well-written and properly fleshed out with good relatable stories and relationships that can appeal to anyone.

I’m not too big on characters who were originally introduced one way and then seasons later, we get the sudden reveal drop that this character is LGBT. I saw this kind of pandering in Voltron when the character of Shiro went several seasons with his past and previous close relationships (outside of Keith) never being an integral part of his arc. 

It was more tailored at characters like Lance and Pidge who were heavily family driven from S1 (which made the Hunk family focus in S7 so odd to me since Lance was the second character to think about his family next to Pidge buuuuut…I digress).

But suddenly in S7, the showrunners revealed at SDCC that Shiro was gay. They announced it at a con before we got the full reveal in the season. His former fiancé was named Adam. A love interest that prior to that season was never mentioned, teased or remotely made into a recurring aspect of Shiro’s story.

Shiro being LGBT was treated more as a marketing ploy for the folks behind Voltron to sponge off with the massive appeal it received from the queer community. However this also ended up backfiring and blowing up in the series’face when that very season showcased Adam—who was only brought in during S7 being killed off in that very same season. The audience was outraged by this and there was massive backlash (which led to some odd choices in S8).

This brings to light my issue with the way in which LGBT representation is handled by certain showrunners,in animation. I don’t think any kind of representation in media is something that should be pandered to. If straight characters are given the respect of being written well with the audience being allowed to buy into their stories and bonds on-screen then why shouldn’t the same treatment be done for LGBT character. In my experience, particularly for RWBY, the way in which the LGBT characters are revealed in the series often feels…forced.

Take for example; the recent reveal of Scarlet David of Team SSSN and Coco Adel of Team CFVY being dropped as queer characters. For Scarlet, it was done in the RWBY Red Like Roses Anthology and for Coco, it was in After the Fall. While I understand that the argument could be made that we never got those reveals in the main series since the show never took the time to really delve into these characters, that still doesn’t make it look less fishy, at least from my perspective.

I dunno. Because of my experience with the Voltron fandom, I get rather suspicious when showrunners suddenly spring the idea that a character is LGBT on its fans years after the series had been long-running, y’know what I mean?

Overall, I just don’t like it when the promise of more rep is used as a ploy to score points with a certain demographic when the attempt winds up feeling hollow and half-assed. 

Not trying to imply that this will be the fate of the Bees and/or LGBT rep in RWBY. I’m just saying, as far as Bumblebee goes, it needs to be handled much better than what we’ve seen in recent seasons.

For now, only time will tell with what happens next. For what it worth. I hope it’s good. 

Sorry for the long talk anon-chan (or to anyone who reads this post). As always, I hope that my thoughts and view points on this particular subject didn’t end  offending anyone in any shape or form.  I’m mostly expressing my honest views on this topic at hand and disrespect is never a direct intention regardless of how blunt my words can become at times/

Overall that’s all I have to say. Hope this answers you anon-chan.

~LittleMissSquiggles (2019) 

[sinrau]

sara.ziegler ( Sara Ziegler, sports editor): It’s been an incredible couple of days in the sports world, with athletes using their voices in ways that are nearly unprecedented. The NBA is on pause again tonight, though games in the playoff bubble will resume tomorrow. Before games start up again, though, we wanted to stop and talk about what this strike has meant, what it might accomplish going forward and how the players are changing the conversation.

What did you all make of Wednesday’s strike?

chris.herring ( Chris Herring, senior sportswriter): I had already seen the reports about the Celtics and Raptors contemplating whether to call off their game Thursday. But then Milwaukee beat everyone to the punch by doing it themselves. And I probably should have seen that possibility there, given the Bucks’ proximity to the Jacob Blake shooting, and the vocal nature of their players concerning police brutality.

dubin ( Jared Dubin, FiveThirtyEight contributor): I think for me the biggest thing was the domino effect the Bucks’ decision not to take the court had not just in the NBA, but in other sports. WNBA players have been leading on social justice issues for a while now, and once the NBA players decided not to play, it made sense that WNBA players would follow suit. But seeing players from MLB, the NHL and even the NFL take similar stands was notable.

dre.waters ( Andres Waters, FiveThirtyEight contributor): The snowball of everything was what really caught me by surprise too.

I understood the NBA as a whole being active and speaking up, because that’s become normal. But, when I saw the MLB and NHL was when I realized just how big this could get.

chris.herring: Yeah. I was kind of stunned when the reports on Wednesday night were coming out about the player meetings. At one point, LeBron James walked out, and it briefly looked like the season might be over. I’m still thinking about what kind of statement that would have sent, if that had been the case.

I’ll wonder for a while what that would have done, or how things might have been different.

tchow ( Tony Chow, video producer): I remembered it took a moment to fully realize what was happening. Seeing the images on Twitter of the empty courts was pretty jarring at first, and you could almost feel a collective sense of “holy shit, this is big.”

dubin: Right. And at first, it just seemed to me like George Hill was going to sit out. He’d said earlier in the week that the players should never have come to Orlando in the first place, and then he was listed as inactive for the game.

Oh, and before we get into everything else: The coverage on NBATV was absolutely riveting. I thought Bob Fitzgerald and especially Jim Jackson did a remarkable job, and then Sam Mitchell, Chris Webber and more people kept rotating in and out and making it even better.

chris.herring: I found myself peeling away from all the coverage at times. Maybe that’s weird. But it feels weird that people have to put their pain on display for some folks to realize how serious the subject of police brutality — and the lack of justice when it happens — is in the Black community.

The pandemic has magnified it for whatever reason, and the players protesting did, too. But it shouldn’t take all this to draw attention to it. I’m glad the attention is there now, though.

dre.waters: The craziest part to me was when I saw Elle Duncan’s tweet about the only other boycott of a game in the NBA in 1961.

And seeing this boycott is about the same issue of racial injustice really hurt.

sara.ziegler: That’s a great point, Dre. Black athletes are still having to fight the same fights, 60 years later.

dre.waters: I guess I’m pretty young … so I had never heard much about the Celtics boycott. But as soon as I saw the tweet, my only thought was WTF…

dubin: It’s definitely uncomfortable to watch people process such raw pain on TV. It shouldn’t take something like that to raise awareness for an issue that’s been so glaringly obvious for so long, but if it did make even one person more aware and wake them up to how much it affects Black people (and specifically young Black men like the players are and the former-player commentators once were), I feel like that’s good.

What stuck out to me, too, was how proud it seemed like the former players were of the current players for taking this stand. That was a big part of what C-Webb said, and you’ve seen guys like Bill Russell say the same thing on Twitter and elsewhere since. Considering how often former-player commentators rag on today’s game and some of the players, it was pretty striking.

sara.ziegler: Kenny Smith walking off the TNT set was also very moving, to me.

I confess that I was a little surprised that they did decide to start playing again — I thought this was it for the season. Did that surprise you guys?

tchow: I definitely thought by Wednesday night, after hearing those reports about the meetings Chris mentioned, that the season was done. It was difficult to see how they would continue and get back on the court after that.

dubin: It didn’t help that the reports about the meetings were conflicting, depending on whose timeline you were following. I think that contributed to making it seem more like the season was over.

dre.waters: The reports about the Lakers and Clippers voting not to continue is when I really thought it was over, honestly.

sara.ziegler: And LeBron! Seems like it would be hard to keep going if your biggest star doesn’t want to play.

dubin: Right. When we heard LeBron walked out of the meeting, I thought it was done. But then within like a half-hour, we heard that the votes from the Lakers and Clippers were more of an informal poll. Or something. It was all a lot, obviously.

dre.waters: Who could imagine the playoffs without LeBron and two of the favorites to win the championship?

dubin: Plus, the Bucks were the first team to not take the court, and the day before, it was the Raptors’ Fred VanVleet talking about how the players need to “ put our nuts on the line ” to get something instead of just T-shirts and slogans. Those might be the four most likely teams to win the title. Their willingness to sacrifice so much for real change was powerful.

chris.herring: Yeah. The season would have been over — there would’ve been no coming back from that.

sara.ziegler: How strange will it be on Saturday to just go back to playing the games? I don’t really want to “go back to normal” right now.

chris.herring: It probably depends on who you’re asking. It might be a bit strange for some of the players. I truly wonder how someone like George Hill — who’s already said he doesn’t know why they went down to Florida in light of some of this stuff happening — feels at a time like this.

I think them coming back after a couple days will feel normal to a huge number of fans. And that, in some ways, is the problem. It’s certainly an enormous part of the challenge, with the media, too: Instead of focusing on issues, we inevitably shift our attention back to the games. It’s why stuff seemed to get through so much more at the beginning of the pandemic, IMO: There weren’t other things like sports to distract us from the reality of how shameful this stuff is.

dubin: I think that for the teams that make the second round, having their families be able to come down within a few days could be a source of relief. Not necessarily to distract from what they want to accomplish, but being away from their families when another shooting happened has to have played a role in so many guys just saying enough is enough and we don’t want to be a distraction right now.

chris.herring: Amen to that part. The family members who are quarantined are supposed to be able to join them on Monday.

tchow: I can’t imagine the story of what happened Wednesday night and why it happened will go away anytime soon? I’m sure there are fans or media personnel who can’t wait to go back to covering Luka Dončić triple-doubles and James Harden highlights and all that. But it’s hard to see a world in which the media at large goes back to business as usual and covering these playoffs without constantly reminding fans of what happened this week.

dre.waters: I’m really interested to see how they go about covering this going forward. Much like we’ve talked about all through the quarantine, what is the new “normal”?

tchow: Or maybe I’ll reword that. It will say a lot about the U.S. if, by this time next week, we’re only reading about the Lakers’ chances of making the Finals or if Russell Westbrook will return to play.

dre.waters: They mentioned in the statement that the league and networks will use advertising spots to promote civic engagement, etc. What does that actually look like?

dubin: Also, does that actually do anything? I saw Diana Moskovitz say that the NFL has been doing that for a few years, and I didn’t even know about it. Seems … not effective.

chris.herring: I keep saying how conflicted I feel about all of this in one sense: The decision to stop playing — not just for a day, but for the rest of the season — would have been monumental. It would have been the biggest statement you could possibly make. I think LeBron probably could have triggered something along those lines by himself.

I also think it would have been incredibly risky. Not every player could afford to do that. It could have triggered a lockout. But I also imagine it would have helped the players get a seat at certain tables and afforded them more power to ask for more action, or more money for certain things to tackle some of these highly systemic problems.

The feeling I had after hearing that, one day later, they’d agreed to go back to play was similar to how I felt when Colin Kaepernick settled his suit with the NFL.

No sense of disappointment on my part whatsoever. Because I know how much it must be to bear that weight on their shoulders. And it’s personal to their lives, as far as money and the ridicule they face by staying in that moment. But I will always be curious about whether more could have been achieved had they gone all the way with it and ended the season. We’ll never know.

sara.ziegler: I completely agree with you, Chris. I wish we could know what response would have had the best outcome.

tchow: What I would give to be in these meetings to learn how much it took for the players to agree to come back to play. Because this is such a drastic statement, I can’t imagine the players would agree without some reluctance. With the initiatives and commitments they announced, I want to know if the players think this is enough. Is it a good enough start? I have so many questions.

dubin: There has been some positive movement already:

Breaking: Senate Majority Leader @SenFitzgerald says the state Senate will convene Monday for the special legislation session called for by @GovEvers.

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) August 28, 2020

That’s explicitly what the Bucks asked for in their statement.

sara.ziegler: Oh, wow.

dubin: But it’s something a lot of people have said the past few days: For all this to be on the shoulders of NBA players is asking way too much of them. It’s so much responsibility and so many different competing and possibly conflicting motivations. Even handling it the way they did is pretty incredible.

chris.herring: Absolutely, Jared.

That part is so important: It’s not their responsibility.

dubin: Like, a) it should not have to fall to Black people to fix systemic racism; b) it should not have to fall to young people to fix systemic racism; and c) it should not have to fall to young, Black people who are separated from their families at such a fraught time to fix systemic racism or anything else, really.

chris.herring: It’s so bizarre to me that they’ve done so much to shine a light on all this stuff, yet people still expect more of them, as if it’s not people that look like them that are being shot and disproportionately killed while unarmed. That they’d play in the middle of a pandemic that’s disproportionately infecting and killing off their community, and play in a bubble away from their families. That a number of them have started organizations to support voting reform. That a number have spent time talking about solutions with police and people in their cities. And yet people will hit them with a “ What about China? ” as if the players don’t actually care about the stuff in their backyards and their own communities.

(I also think a ton of people disingenuously ask that question, much the same way people ask “ What about Chicago? ” whenever a community of folks is rightfully up in arms over a police shooting.)

sara.ziegler: ^^^ THIS

dubin: Definitely agree with that. But also, it’s possible for people within the NBA (or outside it) to have been wrong on things relating to China and 100 percent right about this.

chris.herring: Absolutely.

tchow: From the statements we’ve seen both written and those that players have read aloud or said to the media, it feels like this action comes more from just exasperation and frustration. They are TIRED. And I think that sentiment can be shared by a lot of Americans right now.

dubin: It’s exhausting and frustrating to me, and I’m a white man who doesn’t have to physically fear for my life in every interaction I have with police. I can’t imagine how it is for people who have to live that reality every day.

chris.herring: I’m quite tired of people being held to a standard of caring about something that the critics don’t hold themselves to — especially when the players appear to be taking actionable steps on so many other human rights issues that are happening in this country.

dubin: Also tired of people pretending that because (some) NBA players make hundreds of millions of dollars, these things don’t affect them.

tchow: YUP

dre.waters: AGREED!

dubin: Also, every player in the NBA has family and friends who are not in the NBA. They also were not in the NBA from birth. They had to grow up into the people they are now. So, they didn’t always have this fame or money or influence.

And then something that doesn’t get talked about a lot: most NBA players are, comparatively speaking, HUGE compared to the rest of the population. In a world in which police can exaggerate the size of Black men to justify being scared and then using force, already being really, really big could make things even more dangerous for them.

dre.waters: That’s a great point, Jared.

tchow: Yeah, one thing I’ve noticed recently is the number of NBA players who are sharing NEW stories about the times they’ve been profiled by the police and a lot of their interviews to the media have acknowledged that “when I leave the court, I’m still Black” sentiment.

dre.waters: Watching all the coverage of this should be a reminder of that. How many Black commentators and former players have we seen still mention that they have the same talks with their families and loved ones that every other Black family has to have?

sara.ziegler: I hope that white fans are listening to that — and really hearing it.

chris.herring: I’m cynical. But I hope at some point I’m wrong for being that way.

What Happened In The NBA This Week?

[roguepythia]

Fandom Meta: Art, Fandom, and throwing rocks at Artistic Expression

Art is the medium by which we- as human beings- are able to relate to each other. Art allows us to understand things that are more than ourselves, and imagine life through the agency of others. (-Vikas Shah)

One of my very first memories was being on-stage for a performance of Beauty Lou and the Country Beast. I think I was 6. My mom thought I’d have fun with the children's touring company as it came through our small town. I don’t remember much, just me singing away on a fake barrel with my little blue bonnet tied tight around my head. But that one moment changed the course of my life forever. I never left the stage. And now theater is in my blood. It’s not just what I do, it’s who I am.

To me TV shows are like a theatrical performance, only on a flat, rectangular screen. While it serves as a form of artistic expression as well as a mirror to society, to me the artistic expression comes first. I understand not everyone sees it that way. But art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It needs a creator first and an audience second.

There is a saying in theater. One hundred people walk into a theater to see a show and they walk out with 100 different interpretations and all are valid.  So to me, all interpretations can be valid all at once. Each individual audience member, with their own perceptions, will experience the material differently. So when I see fans attacking other fans over their interpretations, I’m flabbergasted. I don’t get it. It’s so antithetical to what I do everyday that it makes no sense to me. 

I’m not saying that discussions about representation in media shouldn’t happen. Or discussions about what responsibilities artistic expression should have or not have. But from what I’ve seen, those aren’t the discussions that are happening in fandom on Tumblr. Now it seems to be a game of absolutes. There is no wiggle room. No compromise. No valid interpretations but the ones we agree with. It’s become glaringly obvious that Tumblr is ill-equipped to be the venue to have these types of thought-provoking discussions and probe at sometimes unanswerable questions.

Humans have been fighting over artistic expression since we were still in caves throwing rocks at one another for our cave drawings or the tall tales of victory on the battlefield. I shouldn’t be surprised to see the rocks continue to fly here. But one post after another where fan attacks fan, or all of the fandom, for something as simple as which character you like or not, is absurd. 

I once wrote out a very long post in response to a user that had called other fans vile and disgusting over something to do with shipping. I made many counter points, but was ultimately asking if they could tone down the rhetoric. I had hoped for, and dreaded, a response all at the same time. But I thought it needed to be said and I’d hoped that I was polite enough to maybe bridge a gap. I went back a few weeks later to see if they responded and saw that they had deactivated their account. Though some might have, I didn’t feel victorious. This wasn’t a vanquished foe I’d drilled out of the fandom by my acerbic wit and sass. I was disappointed and sad. Another member of fandom had decided they needed to leave. Perhaps they signed back up with a different name. Perhaps my comment had absolutely nothing to do with them leaving. I sincerely doubt it did. At least I hope not! That wasn’t my intention. But left, they did.

On the one hand, I adore the cacophony of fandom activity! The thrill when your favorite character goes up against a foe and wins. Or lamenting the heartbreak over a lost love. I love each and every excited exclamation point! The old interviews that a research obsessed fan digs up for all of us to enjoy. Or the art and fiction! Just all of the art and fic, all of the time. I will never get enough of it!

But then that cacophony turns inward in the worst way and we start ripping each other apart and there isn’t anything I can do about it but sit and wax poetic about my fandom times past. Which, granted, weren’t always as peaceful as I now remember them. Nostalgia makes the memory grow soft around the edges. I threw down with the best of them back in the day. But I didn’t get any enjoyment out of that so I don’t plan to do it again.

But what is happening now is a whole different kind of throw down. 

I rarely post anymore cause of the atmosphere here and then when I do it’s to poke the venue of Tumblr in the eye for its faults. Mostly because I’m frustrated that fandom has become so entangled with SJ that it’s almost impossible to see between them anymore. There is a place for both in society. Fandom as a form of artistic expression, separate from the source material’s own, and social justice all have their place. But they don’t need to all be in the same place at the exact same time.

I look forward to the day they each can find a home more suited to peaceful co-existence. Which, Tumblr is not. 

Whole swaths of fandom genres have collapsed under SJ's constant assault. I requested dark!fic and kink!fic recs in my last post and though I received a handful of lovely comments in PM, nary a rec was to be found. It seems as if that form of artistic expression has been all but driven out of the fandom sphere and it’s not only troubling but disappointing as well. Those voices have been silenced. That art form lost. I take heart in that fandom, like life, is cyclical. I fully believe there will be a day when fandom’s artistic expression will be free from SJ’s stranglehold and thrive again. 

I’m not looking for any kind of fight with this. I’m tired of all the fighting. Maybe by linking to the below article about art and its relation to society, it will be an interesting read for some and thought provoking for others. Maybe it will help someone struggling to find a way to express themselves in our current fandom environment. And just maybe someone will find it so interesting they decide to look into a theater class and become just as enamored with art, as I myself have been since I sang my little heart out as Young Beauty Lou.

(It’s funny, as I was reading though the below article, they mentioned cave dwellers as well as the first form of artistic expression. I guess us theater geeks tend to think alike!)

Art is one of the most valuable assets of human society, yet the truth is that while we may attach art to a time and a place; it’s true provenance and relevance remain intangible. We can look at the raw materials (the paint, the instrument…), the composition (the brush strokes, the music) or even the act of consumption (viewing, listing…) – but the thing that we observe only becomes art within us. The phenomenon of art emerges within the intangible mix of experience and cultural inputs that create our mind. (-Vikas Shah) bolding mine

https://thoughteconomics.com/theatre-performance-and-society/ - Article and Interviews by Vikas Shah

[conniecogeie]

5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience

Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.

When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”

That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.

Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.

Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:

They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).

What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.

What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.

A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.

These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.

We've forgotten how to create high-impact content. – Robert Rose Click To Tweet 1. Tear Down the Silos

Siloes are problematic when they stand between:

The marketing department and other departments, especially sales

Individual teams within the marketing department

Different software tools that don’t play well with each other

In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.

But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.

This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

2. Start and End with the Customer

“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”

We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.

We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.

“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying to answer a single question,” says Tonya Parker, Content Producer and Manager at Parker Content. “Each piece should provide a solution to a known consumer need.”

Sometimes we think we know our customers’ most pressing questions and needs, and it’s easy to let our perspectives be colored by existing company assets and internal assumptions. But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality.

3. Audit and Map Out All Content

It’s not good enough to simply consult that list of customer questions on a semi-regular basis, as we churn out an ever-expanding library of assets. Instead, we should use the questions to build a strategic content map that’s clearly documented and easily shareable with all who have a hand in content creation.

As you engage in this process, you’ll quickly identify those old assets that have no place in your new plan—making it glaringly clear how much dead weight you’ve been creating and carrying around.

“To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. “I’ve used quarterly content pillars, with each defined by a persona a specific use case, to help identify priorities.”

That’s one way to do it. Here’s another.

Bob Warfield, CEO and President at software provider CNCCookbook, has grown a large business (4.5 million visitors a year) almost exclusively through content marketing. He produces content for only two reasons:

To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience.

To bring in new readers via the usual SEO-originated traffic.

“These two needs require different content,” Warfield says. “In many cases, #1 is achievable with short articles that are fun and interesting with my audience. That’s not to say they don’t like skyscraper content too, but I cater to about five personas, and it’s better to give at least a couple of them something new every week when I can’t afford to produce a new skyscraper every week for every persona.”

Lucas and Warfield have differing approaches to strategy, as they should, given that they serve different consumers in different markets. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy.

4. Murder Your Darlings

You may or may not be surprised that this tip was inspired by a quote from horror author Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

He’s not talking about characters here—heaven knows there’s lots of bloodshed in the typical King novel. Rather, he’s referring to the importance of brutally editing your own work. Just because you adore a particular sentence or turn of phrase that you’ve crafted doesn’t mean it serves an effective purpose. When it doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character, you have to kill it, no matter how brilliantly worded it is. And the truth is, it hurts much less if you eliminate the sentence yourself rather than having someone else swoop in and excise it.

The same principle applies to your content experience as a whole. Every team that produces or owns content is going to have their favorites—pieces that they spent a lot of time on, that they’re particularly proud of, or that they’ve otherwise invested attention and affection in. Even if the piece is a dud in terms of performance or it doesn’t fit customer needs, some of us still cling unreasonably to pet content pieces.

You can’t create a stellar content experience without weeding out the bad stuff or the stuff that no longer fits. Someone is going to have to make those tough calls. If you can’t handle it at the team level without starting a civil war, turn to the overall content strategy as defined by management. Whether it’s a director of marketing, a marketing VP, or a CMO, the person driving the ship has to be the one to lay down and enforce the rules regarding which darlings will be sacrificed to create a better content experience.

5. Fine Tune with Measurement

“88 percent of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to 72 percent of the overall sample and 56 percent of the bottom performers,” according to the B2B Content Marketing report, which highlights benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North America in 2017.

Indeed, without regularly looking at the ROI of your content efforts, there’s no objective way to know which darlings to kill (who wants innocent casualties on their conscience?), you can’t effectively refine your strategy and content map, and it gets ever harder to break away from the company talking points and look at your work from the customer’s viewpoint.

No content experience is going to be flawless out of the gate, no matter how many brainstorms or rounds of review you go through. Only a strong routine of gathering and discussing performance data for each link in the content experience will allow you to locate and strengthen—or eliminate—the weak links.

And no, you don’t have to squeeze in extra meetings in order to share performance data, which will only be forgotten or lost soon after the meeting. A silo-smashing work-management solution, as mentioned in tip one, gives you an easy way to disseminate analytics to all stakeholders and participants. Plus, your ROI data will be permanently archived alongside all other relevant project information for easy retrieval later.

Less Is More

Are you comfortable following the path of least resistance, which usually results in sprawling, unfocused, ever-proliferating content—the “more is more” approach? Or would you rather adopt a “less is more” mindset, devoting your energy to creating lean, mean, unforgettable assets—and fewer of them? Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2uek5tU

[kraussoutene]

5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience

Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.

When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”

That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.

Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.

Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:

They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).

What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.

What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.

A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.

These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.

We've forgotten how to create high-impact content. – Robert Rose Click To Tweet 1. Tear Down the Silos

Siloes are problematic when they stand between:

The marketing department and other departments, especially sales

Individual teams within the marketing department

Different software tools that don’t play well with each other

In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.

But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.

This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

2. Start and End with the Customer

“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”

We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.

We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.

“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying to answer a single question,” says Tonya Parker, Content Producer and Manager at Parker Content. “Each piece should provide a solution to a known consumer need.”

Sometimes we think we know our customers’ most pressing questions and needs, and it’s easy to let our perspectives be colored by existing company assets and internal assumptions. But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality.

3. Audit and Map Out All Content

It’s not good enough to simply consult that list of customer questions on a semi-regular basis, as we churn out an ever-expanding library of assets. Instead, we should use the questions to build a strategic content map that’s clearly documented and easily shareable with all who have a hand in content creation.

As you engage in this process, you’ll quickly identify those old assets that have no place in your new plan—making it glaringly clear how much dead weight you’ve been creating and carrying around.

“To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. “I’ve used quarterly content pillars, with each defined by a persona a specific use case, to help identify priorities.”

That’s one way to do it. Here’s another.

Bob Warfield, CEO and President at software provider CNCCookbook, has grown a large business (4.5 million visitors a year) almost exclusively through content marketing. He produces content for only two reasons:

To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience.

To bring in new readers via the usual SEO-originated traffic.

“These two needs require different content,” Warfield says. “In many cases, #1 is achievable with short articles that are fun and interesting with my audience. That’s not to say they don’t like skyscraper content too, but I cater to about five personas, and it’s better to give at least a couple of them something new every week when I can’t afford to produce a new skyscraper every week for every persona.”

Lucas and Warfield have differing approaches to strategy, as they should, given that they serve different consumers in different markets. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy.

4. Murder Your Darlings

You may or may not be surprised that this tip was inspired by a quote from horror author Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

He’s not talking about characters here—heaven knows there’s lots of bloodshed in the typical King novel. Rather, he’s referring to the importance of brutally editing your own work. Just because you adore a particular sentence or turn of phrase that you’ve crafted doesn’t mean it serves an effective purpose. When it doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character, you have to kill it, no matter how brilliantly worded it is. And the truth is, it hurts much less if you eliminate the sentence yourself rather than having someone else swoop in and excise it.

The same principle applies to your content experience as a whole. Every team that produces or owns content is going to have their favorites—pieces that they spent a lot of time on, that they’re particularly proud of, or that they’ve otherwise invested attention and affection in. Even if the piece is a dud in terms of performance or it doesn’t fit customer needs, some of us still cling unreasonably to pet content pieces.

You can’t create a stellar content experience without weeding out the bad stuff or the stuff that no longer fits. Someone is going to have to make those tough calls. If you can’t handle it at the team level without starting a civil war, turn to the overall content strategy as defined by management. Whether it’s a director of marketing, a marketing VP, or a CMO, the person driving the ship has to be the one to lay down and enforce the rules regarding which darlings will be sacrificed to create a better content experience.

5. Fine Tune with Measurement

“88 percent of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to 72 percent of the overall sample and 56 percent of the bottom performers,” according to the B2B Content Marketing report, which highlights benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North America in 2017.

Indeed, without regularly looking at the ROI of your content efforts, there’s no objective way to know which darlings to kill (who wants innocent casualties on their conscience?), you can’t effectively refine your strategy and content map, and it gets ever harder to break away from the company talking points and look at your work from the customer’s viewpoint.

No content experience is going to be flawless out of the gate, no matter how many brainstorms or rounds of review you go through. Only a strong routine of gathering and discussing performance data for each link in the content experience will allow you to locate and strengthen—or eliminate—the weak links.

And no, you don’t have to squeeze in extra meetings in order to share performance data, which will only be forgotten or lost soon after the meeting. A silo-smashing work-management solution, as mentioned in tip one, gives you an easy way to disseminate analytics to all stakeholders and participants. Plus, your ROI data will be permanently archived alongside all other relevant project information for easy retrieval later.

Less Is More

Are you comfortable following the path of least resistance, which usually results in sprawling, unfocused, ever-proliferating content—the “more is more” approach? Or would you rather adopt a “less is more” mindset, devoting your energy to creating lean, mean, unforgettable assets—and fewer of them? Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2uek5tU

[fairchildlingpo1]

5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience

Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.

When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”

That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.

Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.

Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:

They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).

What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.

What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.

A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.

These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.

We've forgotten how to create high-impact content. – Robert Rose Click To Tweet 1. Tear Down the Silos

Siloes are problematic when they stand between:

The marketing department and other departments, especially sales

Individual teams within the marketing department

Different software tools that don’t play well with each other

In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.

But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.

This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

2. Start and End with the Customer

“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”

We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.

We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.

“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying to answer a single question,” says Tonya Parker, Content Producer and Manager at Parker Content. “Each piece should provide a solution to a known consumer need.”

Sometimes we think we know our customers’ most pressing questions and needs, and it’s easy to let our perspectives be colored by existing company assets and internal assumptions. But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality.

3. Audit and Map Out All Content

It’s not good enough to simply consult that list of customer questions on a semi-regular basis, as we churn out an ever-expanding library of assets. Instead, we should use the questions to build a strategic content map that’s clearly documented and easily shareable with all who have a hand in content creation.

As you engage in this process, you’ll quickly identify those old assets that have no place in your new plan—making it glaringly clear how much dead weight you’ve been creating and carrying around.

“To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. “I’ve used quarterly content pillars, with each defined by a persona a specific use case, to help identify priorities.”

That’s one way to do it. Here’s another.

Bob Warfield, CEO and President at software provider CNCCookbook, has grown a large business (4.5 million visitors a year) almost exclusively through content marketing. He produces content for only two reasons:

To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience.

To bring in new readers via the usual SEO-originated traffic.

“These two needs require different content,” Warfield says. “In many cases, #1 is achievable with short articles that are fun and interesting with my audience. That’s not to say they don’t like skyscraper content too, but I cater to about five personas, and it’s better to give at least a couple of them something new every week when I can’t afford to produce a new skyscraper every week for every persona.”

Lucas and Warfield have differing approaches to strategy, as they should, given that they serve different consumers in different markets. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy.

4. Murder Your Darlings

You may or may not be surprised that this tip was inspired by a quote from horror author Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

He’s not talking about characters here—heaven knows there’s lots of bloodshed in the typical King novel. Rather, he’s referring to the importance of brutally editing your own work. Just because you adore a particular sentence or turn of phrase that you’ve crafted doesn’t mean it serves an effective purpose. When it doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character, you have to kill it, no matter how brilliantly worded it is. And the truth is, it hurts much less if you eliminate the sentence yourself rather than having someone else swoop in and excise it.

The same principle applies to your content experience as a whole. Every team that produces or owns content is going to have their favorites—pieces that they spent a lot of time on, that they’re particularly proud of, or that they’ve otherwise invested attention and affection in. Even if the piece is a dud in terms of performance or it doesn’t fit customer needs, some of us still cling unreasonably to pet content pieces.

You can’t create a stellar content experience without weeding out the bad stuff or the stuff that no longer fits. Someone is going to have to make those tough calls. If you can’t handle it at the team level without starting a civil war, turn to the overall content strategy as defined by management. Whether it’s a director of marketing, a marketing VP, or a CMO, the person driving the ship has to be the one to lay down and enforce the rules regarding which darlings will be sacrificed to create a better content experience.

5. Fine Tune with Measurement

“88 percent of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to 72 percent of the overall sample and 56 percent of the bottom performers,” according to the B2B Content Marketing report, which highlights benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North America in 2017.

Indeed, without regularly looking at the ROI of your content efforts, there’s no objective way to know which darlings to kill (who wants innocent casualties on their conscience?), you can’t effectively refine your strategy and content map, and it gets ever harder to break away from the company talking points and look at your work from the customer’s viewpoint.

No content experience is going to be flawless out of the gate, no matter how many brainstorms or rounds of review you go through. Only a strong routine of gathering and discussing performance data for each link in the content experience will allow you to locate and strengthen—or eliminate—the weak links.

And no, you don’t have to squeeze in extra meetings in order to share performance data, which will only be forgotten or lost soon after the meeting. A silo-smashing work-management solution, as mentioned in tip one, gives you an easy way to disseminate analytics to all stakeholders and participants. Plus, your ROI data will be permanently archived alongside all other relevant project information for easy retrieval later.

Less Is More

Are you comfortable following the path of least resistance, which usually results in sprawling, unfocused, ever-proliferating content—the “more is more” approach? Or would you rather adopt a “less is more” mindset, devoting your energy to creating lean, mean, unforgettable assets—and fewer of them? Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2uek5tU

[maryhare96]

5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience

Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.

When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”

That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.

Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.

Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:

They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).

What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.

What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.

A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.

These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.

We've forgotten how to create high-impact content. – Robert Rose Click To Tweet 1. Tear Down the Silos

Siloes are problematic when they stand between:

The marketing department and other departments, especially sales

Individual teams within the marketing department

Different software tools that don’t play well with each other

In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.

But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.

This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

2. Start and End with the Customer

“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”

We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.

We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.

“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying to answer a single question,” says Tonya Parker, Content Producer and Manager at Parker Content. “Each piece should provide a solution to a known consumer need.”

Sometimes we think we know our customers’ most pressing questions and needs, and it’s easy to let our perspectives be colored by existing company assets and internal assumptions. But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality.

3. Audit and Map Out All Content

It’s not good enough to simply consult that list of customer questions on a semi-regular basis, as we churn out an ever-expanding library of assets. Instead, we should use the questions to build a strategic content map that’s clearly documented and easily shareable with all who have a hand in content creation.

As you engage in this process, you’ll quickly identify those old assets that have no place in your new plan—making it glaringly clear how much dead weight you’ve been creating and carrying around.

“To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. “I’ve used quarterly content pillars, with each defined by a persona a specific use case, to help identify priorities.”

That’s one way to do it. Here’s another.

Bob Warfield, CEO and President at software provider CNCCookbook, has grown a large business (4.5 million visitors a year) almost exclusively through content marketing. He produces content for only two reasons:

To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience.

To bring in new readers via the usual SEO-originated traffic.

“These two needs require different content,” Warfield says. “In many cases, #1 is achievable with short articles that are fun and interesting with my audience. That’s not to say they don’t like skyscraper content too, but I cater to about five personas, and it’s better to give at least a couple of them something new every week when I can’t afford to produce a new skyscraper every week for every persona.”

Lucas and Warfield have differing approaches to strategy, as they should, given that they serve different consumers in different markets. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy.

4. Murder Your Darlings

You may or may not be surprised that this tip was inspired by a quote from horror author Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

He’s not talking about characters here—heaven knows there’s lots of bloodshed in the typical King novel. Rather, he’s referring to the importance of brutally editing your own work. Just because you adore a particular sentence or turn of phrase that you’ve crafted doesn’t mean it serves an effective purpose. When it doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character, you have to kill it, no matter how brilliantly worded it is. And the truth is, it hurts much less if you eliminate the sentence yourself rather than having someone else swoop in and excise it.

The same principle applies to your content experience as a whole. Every team that produces or owns content is going to have their favorites—pieces that they spent a lot of time on, that they’re particularly proud of, or that they’ve otherwise invested attention and affection in. Even if the piece is a dud in terms of performance or it doesn’t fit customer needs, some of us still cling unreasonably to pet content pieces.

You can’t create a stellar content experience without weeding out the bad stuff or the stuff that no longer fits. Someone is going to have to make those tough calls. If you can’t handle it at the team level without starting a civil war, turn to the overall content strategy as defined by management. Whether it’s a director of marketing, a marketing VP, or a CMO, the person driving the ship has to be the one to lay down and enforce the rules regarding which darlings will be sacrificed to create a better content experience.

5. Fine Tune with Measurement

“88 percent of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to 72 percent of the overall sample and 56 percent of the bottom performers,” according to the B2B Content Marketing report, which highlights benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North America in 2017.

Indeed, without regularly looking at the ROI of your content efforts, there’s no objective way to know which darlings to kill (who wants innocent casualties on their conscience?), you can’t effectively refine your strategy and content map, and it gets ever harder to break away from the company talking points and look at your work from the customer’s viewpoint.

No content experience is going to be flawless out of the gate, no matter how many brainstorms or rounds of review you go through. Only a strong routine of gathering and discussing performance data for each link in the content experience will allow you to locate and strengthen—or eliminate—the weak links.

And no, you don’t have to squeeze in extra meetings in order to share performance data, which will only be forgotten or lost soon after the meeting. A silo-smashing work-management solution, as mentioned in tip one, gives you an easy way to disseminate analytics to all stakeholders and participants. Plus, your ROI data will be permanently archived alongside all other relevant project information for easy retrieval later.

Less Is More

Are you comfortable following the path of least resistance, which usually results in sprawling, unfocused, ever-proliferating content—the “more is more” approach? Or would you rather adopt a “less is more” mindset, devoting your energy to creating lean, mean, unforgettable assets—and fewer of them? Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2uek5tU

[rodneyevesuarywk]

5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience

Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.

When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”

That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.

Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.

Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:

They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).

What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.

What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.

A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.

These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.

We've forgotten how to create high-impact content. – Robert Rose Click To Tweet 1. Tear Down the Silos

Siloes are problematic when they stand between:

The marketing department and other departments, especially sales

Individual teams within the marketing department

Different software tools that don’t play well with each other

In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.

But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.

This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

2. Start and End with the Customer

“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”

We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.

We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.

“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying to answer a single question,” says Tonya Parker, Content Producer and Manager at Parker Content. “Each piece should provide a solution to a known consumer need.”

Sometimes we think we know our customers’ most pressing questions and needs, and it’s easy to let our perspectives be colored by existing company assets and internal assumptions. But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality.

3. Audit and Map Out All Content

It’s not good enough to simply consult that list of customer questions on a semi-regular basis, as we churn out an ever-expanding library of assets. Instead, we should use the questions to build a strategic content map that’s clearly documented and easily shareable with all who have a hand in content creation.

As you engage in this process, you’ll quickly identify those old assets that have no place in your new plan—making it glaringly clear how much dead weight you’ve been creating and carrying around.

“To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. “I’ve used quarterly content pillars, with each defined by a persona a specific use case, to help identify priorities.”

That’s one way to do it. Here’s another.

Bob Warfield, CEO and President at software provider CNCCookbook, has grown a large business (4.5 million visitors a year) almost exclusively through content marketing. He produces content for only two reasons:

To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience.

To bring in new readers via the usual SEO-originated traffic.

“These two needs require different content,” Warfield says. “In many cases, #1 is achievable with short articles that are fun and interesting with my audience. That’s not to say they don’t like skyscraper content too, but I cater to about five personas, and it’s better to give at least a couple of them something new every week when I can’t afford to produce a new skyscraper every week for every persona.”

Lucas and Warfield have differing approaches to strategy, as they should, given that they serve different consumers in different markets. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy.

4. Murder Your Darlings

You may or may not be surprised that this tip was inspired by a quote from horror author Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

He’s not talking about characters here—heaven knows there’s lots of bloodshed in the typical King novel. Rather, he’s referring to the importance of brutally editing your own work. Just because you adore a particular sentence or turn of phrase that you’ve crafted doesn’t mean it serves an effective purpose. When it doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character, you have to kill it, no matter how brilliantly worded it is. And the truth is, it hurts much less if you eliminate the sentence yourself rather than having someone else swoop in and excise it.

The same principle applies to your content experience as a whole. Every team that produces or owns content is going to have their favorites—pieces that they spent a lot of time on, that they’re particularly proud of, or that they’ve otherwise invested attention and affection in. Even if the piece is a dud in terms of performance or it doesn’t fit customer needs, some of us still cling unreasonably to pet content pieces.

You can’t create a stellar content experience without weeding out the bad stuff or the stuff that no longer fits. Someone is going to have to make those tough calls. If you can’t handle it at the team level without starting a civil war, turn to the overall content strategy as defined by management. Whether it’s a director of marketing, a marketing VP, or a CMO, the person driving the ship has to be the one to lay down and enforce the rules regarding which darlings will be sacrificed to create a better content experience.

5. Fine Tune with Measurement

“88 percent of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to 72 percent of the overall sample and 56 percent of the bottom performers,” according to the B2B Content Marketing report, which highlights benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North America in 2017.

Indeed, without regularly looking at the ROI of your content efforts, there’s no objective way to know which darlings to kill (who wants innocent casualties on their conscience?), you can’t effectively refine your strategy and content map, and it gets ever harder to break away from the company talking points and look at your work from the customer’s viewpoint.

No content experience is going to be flawless out of the gate, no matter how many brainstorms or rounds of review you go through. Only a strong routine of gathering and discussing performance data for each link in the content experience will allow you to locate and strengthen—or eliminate—the weak links.

And no, you don’t have to squeeze in extra meetings in order to share performance data, which will only be forgotten or lost soon after the meeting. A silo-smashing work-management solution, as mentioned in tip one, gives you an easy way to disseminate analytics to all stakeholders and participants. Plus, your ROI data will be permanently archived alongside all other relevant project information for easy retrieval later.

Less Is More

Are you comfortable following the path of least resistance, which usually results in sprawling, unfocused, ever-proliferating content—the “more is more” approach? Or would you rather adopt a “less is more” mindset, devoting your energy to creating lean, mean, unforgettable assets—and fewer of them? Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2uek5tU

[christinesumpmg1]

5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience

Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.

When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”

That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.

Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.

Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:

They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).

What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.

What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.

A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.

These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.

We've forgotten how to create high-impact content. – Robert Rose Click To Tweet 1. Tear Down the Silos

Siloes are problematic when they stand between:

The marketing department and other departments, especially sales

Individual teams within the marketing department

Different software tools that don’t play well with each other

In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.

But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.

This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

2. Start and End with the Customer

“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”

We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.

We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.

“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying to answer a single question,” says Tonya Parker, Content Producer and Manager at Parker Content. “Each piece should provide a solution to a known consumer need.”

Sometimes we think we know our customers’ most pressing questions and needs, and it’s easy to let our perspectives be colored by existing company assets and internal assumptions. But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality.

3. Audit and Map Out All Content

It’s not good enough to simply consult that list of customer questions on a semi-regular basis, as we churn out an ever-expanding library of assets. Instead, we should use the questions to build a strategic content map that’s clearly documented and easily shareable with all who have a hand in content creation.

As you engage in this process, you’ll quickly identify those old assets that have no place in your new plan—making it glaringly clear how much dead weight you’ve been creating and carrying around.

“To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. “I’ve used quarterly content pillars, with each defined by a persona a specific use case, to help identify priorities.”

That’s one way to do it. Here’s another.

Bob Warfield, CEO and President at software provider CNCCookbook, has grown a large business (4.5 million visitors a year) almost exclusively through content marketing. He produces content for only two reasons:

To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience.

To bring in new readers via the usual SEO-originated traffic.

“These two needs require different content,” Warfield says. “In many cases, #1 is achievable with short articles that are fun and interesting with my audience. That’s not to say they don’t like skyscraper content too, but I cater to about five personas, and it’s better to give at least a couple of them something new every week when I can’t afford to produce a new skyscraper every week for every persona.”

Lucas and Warfield have differing approaches to strategy, as they should, given that they serve different consumers in different markets. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy.

4. Murder Your Darlings

You may or may not be surprised that this tip was inspired by a quote from horror author Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

He’s not talking about characters here—heaven knows there’s lots of bloodshed in the typical King novel. Rather, he’s referring to the importance of brutally editing your own work. Just because you adore a particular sentence or turn of phrase that you’ve crafted doesn’t mean it serves an effective purpose. When it doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character, you have to kill it, no matter how brilliantly worded it is. And the truth is, it hurts much less if you eliminate the sentence yourself rather than having someone else swoop in and excise it.

The same principle applies to your content experience as a whole. Every team that produces or owns content is going to have their favorites—pieces that they spent a lot of time on, that they’re particularly proud of, or that they’ve otherwise invested attention and affection in. Even if the piece is a dud in terms of performance or it doesn’t fit customer needs, some of us still cling unreasonably to pet content pieces.

You can’t create a stellar content experience without weeding out the bad stuff or the stuff that no longer fits. Someone is going to have to make those tough calls. If you can’t handle it at the team level without starting a civil war, turn to the overall content strategy as defined by management. Whether it’s a director of marketing, a marketing VP, or a CMO, the person driving the ship has to be the one to lay down and enforce the rules regarding which darlings will be sacrificed to create a better content experience.

5. Fine Tune with Measurement

“88 percent of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to 72 percent of the overall sample and 56 percent of the bottom performers,” according to the B2B Content Marketing report, which highlights benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North America in 2017.

Indeed, without regularly looking at the ROI of your content efforts, there’s no objective way to know which darlings to kill (who wants innocent casualties on their conscience?), you can’t effectively refine your strategy and content map, and it gets ever harder to break away from the company talking points and look at your work from the customer’s viewpoint.

No content experience is going to be flawless out of the gate, no matter how many brainstorms or rounds of review you go through. Only a strong routine of gathering and discussing performance data for each link in the content experience will allow you to locate and strengthen—or eliminate—the weak links.

And no, you don’t have to squeeze in extra meetings in order to share performance data, which will only be forgotten or lost soon after the meeting. A silo-smashing work-management solution, as mentioned in tip one, gives you an easy way to disseminate analytics to all stakeholders and participants. Plus, your ROI data will be permanently archived alongside all other relevant project information for easy retrieval later.

Less Is More

Are you comfortable following the path of least resistance, which usually results in sprawling, unfocused, ever-proliferating content—the “more is more” approach? Or would you rather adopt a “less is more” mindset, devoting your energy to creating lean, mean, unforgettable assets—and fewer of them? Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2uek5tU

[christinesumpmg]

5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience

Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.

When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”

That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.

Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.

Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:

They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).

What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.

What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.

A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.

These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.

We've forgotten how to create high-impact content. – Robert Rose Click To Tweet 1. Tear Down the Silos

Siloes are problematic when they stand between:

The marketing department and other departments, especially sales

Individual teams within the marketing department

Different software tools that don’t play well with each other

In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.

But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.

This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

2. Start and End with the Customer

“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”

We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.

We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.

“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying to answer a single question,” says Tonya Parker, Content Producer and Manager at Parker Content. “Each piece should provide a solution to a known consumer need.”

Sometimes we think we know our customers’ most pressing questions and needs, and it’s easy to let our perspectives be colored by existing company assets and internal assumptions. But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality.

3. Audit and Map Out All Content

It’s not good enough to simply consult that list of customer questions on a semi-regular basis, as we churn out an ever-expanding library of assets. Instead, we should use the questions to build a strategic content map that’s clearly documented and easily shareable with all who have a hand in content creation.

As you engage in this process, you’ll quickly identify those old assets that have no place in your new plan—making it glaringly clear how much dead weight you’ve been creating and carrying around.

“To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. “I’ve used quarterly content pillars, with each defined by a persona a specific use case, to help identify priorities.”

That’s one way to do it. Here’s another.

Bob Warfield, CEO and President at software provider CNCCookbook, has grown a large business (4.5 million visitors a year) almost exclusively through content marketing. He produces content for only two reasons:

To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience.

To bring in new readers via the usual SEO-originated traffic.

“These two needs require different content,” Warfield says. “In many cases, #1 is achievable with short articles that are fun and interesting with my audience. That’s not to say they don’t like skyscraper content too, but I cater to about five personas, and it’s better to give at least a couple of them something new every week when I can’t afford to produce a new skyscraper every week for every persona.”

Lucas and Warfield have differing approaches to strategy, as they should, given that they serve different consumers in different markets. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy.

4. Murder Your Darlings

You may or may not be surprised that this tip was inspired by a quote from horror author Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

He’s not talking about characters here—heaven knows there’s lots of bloodshed in the typical King novel. Rather, he’s referring to the importance of brutally editing your own work. Just because you adore a particular sentence or turn of phrase that you’ve crafted doesn’t mean it serves an effective purpose. When it doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character, you have to kill it, no matter how brilliantly worded it is. And the truth is, it hurts much less if you eliminate the sentence yourself rather than having someone else swoop in and excise it.

The same principle applies to your content experience as a whole. Every team that produces or owns content is going to have their favorites—pieces that they spent a lot of time on, that they’re particularly proud of, or that they’ve otherwise invested attention and affection in. Even if the piece is a dud in terms of performance or it doesn’t fit customer needs, some of us still cling unreasonably to pet content pieces.

You can’t create a stellar content experience without weeding out the bad stuff or the stuff that no longer fits. Someone is going to have to make those tough calls. If you can’t handle it at the team level without starting a civil war, turn to the overall content strategy as defined by management. Whether it’s a director of marketing, a marketing VP, or a CMO, the person driving the ship has to be the one to lay down and enforce the rules regarding which darlings will be sacrificed to create a better content experience.

5. Fine Tune with Measurement

“88 percent of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to 72 percent of the overall sample and 56 percent of the bottom performers,” according to the B2B Content Marketing report, which highlights benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North America in 2017.

Indeed, without regularly looking at the ROI of your content efforts, there’s no objective way to know which darlings to kill (who wants innocent casualties on their conscience?), you can’t effectively refine your strategy and content map, and it gets ever harder to break away from the company talking points and look at your work from the customer’s viewpoint.

No content experience is going to be flawless out of the gate, no matter how many brainstorms or rounds of review you go through. Only a strong routine of gathering and discussing performance data for each link in the content experience will allow you to locate and strengthen—or eliminate—the weak links.

And no, you don’t have to squeeze in extra meetings in order to share performance data, which will only be forgotten or lost soon after the meeting. A silo-smashing work-management solution, as mentioned in tip one, gives you an easy way to disseminate analytics to all stakeholders and participants. Plus, your ROI data will be permanently archived alongside all other relevant project information for easy retrieval later.

Less Is More

Are you comfortable following the path of least resistance, which usually results in sprawling, unfocused, ever-proliferating content—the “more is more” approach? Or would you rather adopt a “less is more” mindset, devoting your energy to creating lean, mean, unforgettable assets—and fewer of them? Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2uek5tU

[mercedessharonwo1]

5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience

Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.

When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”

That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.

Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.

Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:

They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).

What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.

What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.

A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.

These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.

We've forgotten how to create high-impact content. – Robert Rose Click To Tweet 1. Tear Down the Silos

Siloes are problematic when they stand between:

The marketing department and other departments, especially sales

Individual teams within the marketing department

Different software tools that don’t play well with each other

In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.

But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.

This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

2. Start and End with the Customer

“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”

We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.

We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.

“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying to answer a single question,” says Tonya Parker, Content Producer and Manager at Parker Content. “Each piece should provide a solution to a known consumer need.”

Sometimes we think we know our customers’ most pressing questions and needs, and it’s easy to let our perspectives be colored by existing company assets and internal assumptions. But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality.

3. Audit and Map Out All Content

It’s not good enough to simply consult that list of customer questions on a semi-regular basis, as we churn out an ever-expanding library of assets. Instead, we should use the questions to build a strategic content map that’s clearly documented and easily shareable with all who have a hand in content creation.

As you engage in this process, you’ll quickly identify those old assets that have no place in your new plan—making it glaringly clear how much dead weight you’ve been creating and carrying around.

“To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. “I’ve used quarterly content pillars, with each defined by a persona a specific use case, to help identify priorities.”

That’s one way to do it. Here’s another.

Bob Warfield, CEO and President at software provider CNCCookbook, has grown a large business (4.5 million visitors a year) almost exclusively through content marketing. He produces content for only two reasons:

To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience.

To bring in new readers via the usual SEO-originated traffic.

“These two needs require different content,” Warfield says. “In many cases, #1 is achievable with short articles that are fun and interesting with my audience. That’s not to say they don’t like skyscraper content too, but I cater to about five personas, and it’s better to give at least a couple of them something new every week when I can’t afford to produce a new skyscraper every week for every persona.”

Lucas and Warfield have differing approaches to strategy, as they should, given that they serve different consumers in different markets. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy.

4. Murder Your Darlings

You may or may not be surprised that this tip was inspired by a quote from horror author Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

He’s not talking about characters here—heaven knows there’s lots of bloodshed in the typical King novel. Rather, he’s referring to the importance of brutally editing your own work. Just because you adore a particular sentence or turn of phrase that you’ve crafted doesn’t mean it serves an effective purpose. When it doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character, you have to kill it, no matter how brilliantly worded it is. And the truth is, it hurts much less if you eliminate the sentence yourself rather than having someone else swoop in and excise it.

The same principle applies to your content experience as a whole. Every team that produces or owns content is going to have their favorites—pieces that they spent a lot of time on, that they’re particularly proud of, or that they’ve otherwise invested attention and affection in. Even if the piece is a dud in terms of performance or it doesn’t fit customer needs, some of us still cling unreasonably to pet content pieces.

You can’t create a stellar content experience without weeding out the bad stuff or the stuff that no longer fits. Someone is going to have to make those tough calls. If you can’t handle it at the team level without starting a civil war, turn to the overall content strategy as defined by management. Whether it’s a director of marketing, a marketing VP, or a CMO, the person driving the ship has to be the one to lay down and enforce the rules regarding which darlings will be sacrificed to create a better content experience.

5. Fine Tune with Measurement

“88 percent of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to 72 percent of the overall sample and 56 percent of the bottom performers,” according to the B2B Content Marketing report, which highlights benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North America in 2017.

Indeed, without regularly looking at the ROI of your content efforts, there’s no objective way to know which darlings to kill (who wants innocent casualties on their conscience?), you can’t effectively refine your strategy and content map, and it gets ever harder to break away from the company talking points and look at your work from the customer’s viewpoint.

No content experience is going to be flawless out of the gate, no matter how many brainstorms or rounds of review you go through. Only a strong routine of gathering and discussing performance data for each link in the content experience will allow you to locate and strengthen—or eliminate—the weak links.

And no, you don’t have to squeeze in extra meetings in order to share performance data, which will only be forgotten or lost soon after the meeting. A silo-smashing work-management solution, as mentioned in tip one, gives you an easy way to disseminate analytics to all stakeholders and participants. Plus, your ROI data will be permanently archived alongside all other relevant project information for easy retrieval later.

Less Is More

Are you comfortable following the path of least resistance, which usually results in sprawling, unfocused, ever-proliferating content—the “more is more” approach? Or would you rather adopt a “less is more” mindset, devoting your energy to creating lean, mean, unforgettable assets—and fewer of them? Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2uek5tU

[mariasolemarionqi]

5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience

Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.

When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”

That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.

Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.

Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:

They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).

What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.

What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.

A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.

These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.

We've forgotten how to create high-impact content. – Robert Rose Click To Tweet 1. Tear Down the Silos

Siloes are problematic when they stand between:

The marketing department and other departments, especially sales

Individual teams within the marketing department

Different software tools that don’t play well with each other

In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.

But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.

This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

2. Start and End with the Customer

“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”

We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.

We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.

“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying to answer a single question,” says Tonya Parker, Content Producer and Manager at Parker Content. “Each piece should provide a solution to a known consumer need.”

Sometimes we think we know our customers’ most pressing questions and needs, and it’s easy to let our perspectives be colored by existing company assets and internal assumptions. But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality.

3. Audit and Map Out All Content

It’s not good enough to simply consult that list of customer questions on a semi-regular basis, as we churn out an ever-expanding library of assets. Instead, we should use the questions to build a strategic content map that’s clearly documented and easily shareable with all who have a hand in content creation.

As you engage in this process, you’ll quickly identify those old assets that have no place in your new plan—making it glaringly clear how much dead weight you’ve been creating and carrying around.

“To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. “I’ve used quarterly content pillars, with each defined by a persona a specific use case, to help identify priorities.”

That’s one way to do it. Here’s another.

Bob Warfield, CEO and President at software provider CNCCookbook, has grown a large business (4.5 million visitors a year) almost exclusively through content marketing. He produces content for only two reasons:

To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience.

To bring in new readers via the usual SEO-originated traffic.

“These two needs require different content,” Warfield says. “In many cases, #1 is achievable with short articles that are fun and interesting with my audience. That’s not to say they don’t like skyscraper content too, but I cater to about five personas, and it’s better to give at least a couple of them something new every week when I can’t afford to produce a new skyscraper every week for every persona.”

Lucas and Warfield have differing approaches to strategy, as they should, given that they serve different consumers in different markets. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy.

4. Murder Your Darlings

You may or may not be surprised that this tip was inspired by a quote from horror author Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

He’s not talking about characters here—heaven knows there’s lots of bloodshed in the typical King novel. Rather, he’s referring to the importance of brutally editing your own work. Just because you adore a particular sentence or turn of phrase that you’ve crafted doesn’t mean it serves an effective purpose. When it doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character, you have to kill it, no matter how brilliantly worded it is. And the truth is, it hurts much less if you eliminate the sentence yourself rather than having someone else swoop in and excise it.

The same principle applies to your content experience as a whole. Every team that produces or owns content is going to have their favorites—pieces that they spent a lot of time on, that they’re particularly proud of, or that they’ve otherwise invested attention and affection in. Even if the piece is a dud in terms of performance or it doesn’t fit customer needs, some of us still cling unreasonably to pet content pieces.

You can’t create a stellar content experience without weeding out the bad stuff or the stuff that no longer fits. Someone is going to have to make those tough calls. If you can’t handle it at the team level without starting a civil war, turn to the overall content strategy as defined by management. Whether it’s a director of marketing, a marketing VP, or a CMO, the person driving the ship has to be the one to lay down and enforce the rules regarding which darlings will be sacrificed to create a better content experience.

5. Fine Tune with Measurement

“88 percent of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to 72 percent of the overall sample and 56 percent of the bottom performers,” according to the B2B Content Marketing report, which highlights benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North America in 2017.

Indeed, without regularly looking at the ROI of your content efforts, there’s no objective way to know which darlings to kill (who wants innocent casualties on their conscience?), you can’t effectively refine your strategy and content map, and it gets ever harder to break away from the company talking points and look at your work from the customer’s viewpoint.

No content experience is going to be flawless out of the gate, no matter how many brainstorms or rounds of review you go through. Only a strong routine of gathering and discussing performance data for each link in the content experience will allow you to locate and strengthen—or eliminate—the weak links.

And no, you don’t have to squeeze in extra meetings in order to share performance data, which will only be forgotten or lost soon after the meeting. A silo-smashing work-management solution, as mentioned in tip one, gives you an easy way to disseminate analytics to all stakeholders and participants. Plus, your ROI data will be permanently archived alongside all other relevant project information for easy retrieval later.

Less Is More

Are you comfortable following the path of least resistance, which usually results in sprawling, unfocused, ever-proliferating content—the “more is more” approach? Or would you rather adopt a “less is more” mindset, devoting your energy to creating lean, mean, unforgettable assets—and fewer of them? Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2uek5tU

[byronheeutgm]

5 Steps to a Super-Focused, Super-Successful Content Experience

Few marketers would admit to valuing quantity over quality—or volume over effectiveness—when it comes to content. And yet for many, their actual output tells a different story.

When I interviewed content marketing aficionado Robert Rose last year, he observed how marketers in general have “become so focused on becoming an on-demand vending machine of content for sales enablement, for filling social channels, email newsletters, and blogs—all those things that have grown up organically over the last seven years—that we’ve forgotten how to create high-impact content.”

That constant drive to expand content, to saturate the market, to produce more, more, more, it’s like marketing’s version of gravity—a constant but unseen force that we never consciously notice.

Unless we’re mindful about process, strategy, and results, our content volume will continue to grow. And what’s so bad about that? According to Shelly Lucas, an Austin-based B2B content marketing consultant, when you create too much content, “it doesn’t get used, the quality is lower, and optimization falls by the wayside.” And it becomes less focused, targeted, and effective as a result.

Lucas points out several factors that contribute to marketers’ tendency to produce too much content:

They don’t have a content strategy (or they don’t stick to it).

What they produce isn’t getting the results they want or expect, so instead of testing and optimizing, they create something different.

What they create is working, and everyone wants a part of it.

A certain critical mass of content is needed to feed digital campaigns.

These are all compelling forces to reckon with, but they can be overcome with five simple practices and changes in perspective.

We've forgotten how to create high-impact content. – Robert Rose Click To Tweet 1. Tear Down the Silos

Siloes are problematic when they stand between:

The marketing department and other departments, especially sales

Individual teams within the marketing department

Different software tools that don’t play well with each other

In all three cases, these barriers make it difficult to get the right information into the hands of the right people at the right time. Content teams are usually too overloaded to deal with a laborious process for tracking down the performance results of their most recent releases. With a dozen deadlines always looming, they have no choice but to move on to the next piece, more or less blindly.

But what if all teams with a content-related role shared the same work management and reporting tool, with all relevant information gathered into a single source of truth? When this is the case, content marketers always have the latest analytics at their fingertips before they start a new campaign, ebook, or video. They have the intelligence they need to pivot and react in real time, effectively building upon past successes and avoiding recent failures.

This, of course, requires the CMO or another department leader to recognize the benefits of unifying all teams into one solution and appoint someone to start the discovery process of finding the right tool. It will take some up-front effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

2. Start and End with the Customer

“We’ll never be perfect at every step of the customer’s journey,” Rose says, “but how do we become remarkable at a few strategic steps, so that the thing the consumer wants is to have another experience with us?”

We can start by shifting our mindsets to be more customer-focused, rather than relying too heavily on internal talking points. This can be done by following our personas on social media, hanging out where customers congregate online (whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), interviewing actual customers, and other similar practices.

We can then use these discovery experiences to compile a list of questions that real customers and prospects need answers to—and design a content experience that satisfactorily answers those questions in the right order and the proper place in the funnel.

“I recommend that producers shift from trying to catch every keyword to trying to answer a single question,” says Tonya Parker, Content Producer and Manager at Parker Content. “Each piece should provide a solution to a known consumer need.”

Sometimes we think we know our customers’ most pressing questions and needs, and it’s easy to let our perspectives be colored by existing company assets and internal assumptions. But time spent in the field listening to actual customers has a way of bringing us back to reality.

3. Audit and Map Out All Content

It’s not good enough to simply consult that list of customer questions on a semi-regular basis, as we churn out an ever-expanding library of assets. Instead, we should use the questions to build a strategic content map that’s clearly documented and easily shareable with all who have a hand in content creation.

As you engage in this process, you’ll quickly identify those old assets that have no place in your new plan—making it glaringly clear how much dead weight you’ve been creating and carrying around.

“To make content development leaner, define a strategy and stick to it,” says Lucas. “I’ve used quarterly content pillars, with each defined by a persona a specific use case, to help identify priorities.”

That’s one way to do it. Here’s another.

Bob Warfield, CEO and President at software provider CNCCookbook, has grown a large business (4.5 million visitors a year) almost exclusively through content marketing. He produces content for only two reasons:

To maintain engagement with his current readers and audience.

To bring in new readers via the usual SEO-originated traffic.

“These two needs require different content,” Warfield says. “In many cases, #1 is achievable with short articles that are fun and interesting with my audience. That’s not to say they don’t like skyscraper content too, but I cater to about five personas, and it’s better to give at least a couple of them something new every week when I can’t afford to produce a new skyscraper every week for every persona.”

Lucas and Warfield have differing approaches to strategy, as they should, given that they serve different consumers in different markets. The point is that they both have a strategy that informs a documented content map, and they stick to the strategy.

4. Murder Your Darlings

You may or may not be surprised that this tip was inspired by a quote from horror author Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

He’s not talking about characters here—heaven knows there’s lots of bloodshed in the typical King novel. Rather, he’s referring to the importance of brutally editing your own work. Just because you adore a particular sentence or turn of phrase that you’ve crafted doesn’t mean it serves an effective purpose. When it doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character, you have to kill it, no matter how brilliantly worded it is. And the truth is, it hurts much less if you eliminate the sentence yourself rather than having someone else swoop in and excise it.

The same principle applies to your content experience as a whole. Every team that produces or owns content is going to have their favorites—pieces that they spent a lot of time on, that they’re particularly proud of, or that they’ve otherwise invested attention and affection in. Even if the piece is a dud in terms of performance or it doesn’t fit customer needs, some of us still cling unreasonably to pet content pieces.

You can’t create a stellar content experience without weeding out the bad stuff or the stuff that no longer fits. Someone is going to have to make those tough calls. If you can’t handle it at the team level without starting a civil war, turn to the overall content strategy as defined by management. Whether it’s a director of marketing, a marketing VP, or a CMO, the person driving the ship has to be the one to lay down and enforce the rules regarding which darlings will be sacrificed to create a better content experience.

5. Fine Tune with Measurement

“88 percent of the top performers measure content marketing ROI, compared to 72 percent of the overall sample and 56 percent of the bottom performers,” according to the B2B Content Marketing report, which highlights benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North America in 2017.

Indeed, without regularly looking at the ROI of your content efforts, there’s no objective way to know which darlings to kill (who wants innocent casualties on their conscience?), you can’t effectively refine your strategy and content map, and it gets ever harder to break away from the company talking points and look at your work from the customer’s viewpoint.

No content experience is going to be flawless out of the gate, no matter how many brainstorms or rounds of review you go through. Only a strong routine of gathering and discussing performance data for each link in the content experience will allow you to locate and strengthen—or eliminate—the weak links.

And no, you don’t have to squeeze in extra meetings in order to share performance data, which will only be forgotten or lost soon after the meeting. A silo-smashing work-management solution, as mentioned in tip one, gives you an easy way to disseminate analytics to all stakeholders and participants. Plus, your ROI data will be permanently archived alongside all other relevant project information for easy retrieval later.

Less Is More

Are you comfortable following the path of least resistance, which usually results in sprawling, unfocused, ever-proliferating content—the “more is more” approach? Or would you rather adopt a “less is more” mindset, devoting your energy to creating lean, mean, unforgettable assets—and fewer of them? Unlike so many other aspects of content marketing, there’s just one right answer here, and you’re only five steps away from making the right choice for both your customers and your team.

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