The folks at the top got there, for the most part, because they know the industry and your customer base. Unfortunately, as they move up the corporate ladder, they spend less and less time with the customer and what’s really on their mind.
An interesting book Made to Stick by the Heath brothers talks about the “knowledge curse” of the C-S. Basically, it means that the better we get at generating new insights and solutions, the harder it gets for them to communicate those ideas clearly. In other words, once we know something, it’s hard to imagine everyone already knowing it and when we go on with the thought, we bypass an explanation and go on to make the point, thus losing the audience.
The key with blogging is giving people valuable info that can help them do their job. The challenge for most of us is how do we get that knowledge from between the ears of the big boys and into the hands of the actual user? So what can we do to help get the valuable info out of the C-Suite and yet make it understandable to our target audience? Here are a few tips:
- Narrow the focus of the article
- Give them only a few choices to write about
- Give them a deadline
- Be prepared to edit out buzz words and what I call corporate speak and put it in terms your audience will understand
- Edit for readability
So don’t give up on getting valuable info out of the corner office and into the hands of your customers.
