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HIRE ME TO SPEAK

Understanding an audience and creating great content

I write about strategies to turn fans into customers and customers into fans. I also share ways to use real-time strategies to spread ideas, influence minds, and build business.

Case Studies  |  Marketing  |  YouTube  |  Brand Journalism  |  Best Practices

At every speech I give, I suggest one of the best ways to create great Web content is for companies to hire a journalist, either full or part time, to create it. Journalists (print or broadcast) are great at understanding an audience and developing information that buyers want to consume.

Nalog

At a recent speaking gig in North Carolina, I met Kathy Boyd who works in corporate communications at Neighborhood America, a company that creates enterprise social networks for organizations to reach consumers.

Kathy is exactly the sort of person I'm talking about. She studied Mass Media Communications and Broadcast Journalism at Florida State. Upon graduation, she spent a few years as a TV reporter for WFTX-TV, the Fox affiliate in Ft Myers, Florida.

After Kathy honed her journalism skills as a TV reporter, she joined Neighborhood America and now works on the company's corporate newsletter, produces some stellar videos, and develops customer case examples.

Here are two videos Kathy created that you must check out.

The first one is a video case study of Adidas, a Neighborhood America client Adidas Goes Mobile At NBA All-Star Week 2007. Note how different this approach to a case example is compared to most written case examples that are either a) dreadfully boring or b) prattle on about the product or c) both.

This next video Mission Impossible: So, What Does Your Company Do? is Kathy’s video riff on my Gobbledygook Manifesto. After hearing me talk about gobbledygook, Kathy thought it would be fun to cleverly capture interesting information about Neighborhood America in a fun and approachable way. It works, don't you think?

Well done, Kathy. And kudos to Neighborhood America for taking a chance on hiring a journalist to do marketing instead of the "safe" route of hiring someone with a traditional marketing background.

How about your company? When will you hire a journalist?