The Conley Method
I was on LinkedIn a few weeks ago and came across a post about Dave Menjura. If you're in marketing and don’t know Dave, you should. He’s very influential in the world of GTM and RevOps. But regardless of what you do for a living, you should know this about Dave: he has a “method” of interacting online. And a key part of that method is that he does favors for people he wants to do business with. Those favors have won him lots of business, a large online following, and a ton of goodwill.
So here’s the thing: a GTM executive named Amir Reiter wrote a post on LinkedIn talking about Dave’s method and urging Dave to register the domain name TheMenjuraMethod.com. Strangely enough, as Amir pointed out, Dave had never done so himself.
I read that post and had two thoughts.
The first thought was that I should be like Dave and do him a favor. So I registered the domain name TheMenjuraMethod and told Dave I’d give it to him for free.
The second thought was a realization that over the years I’d developed a method of my own about how to approach content. But like Dave, I had never written it out and shared it.
So I registered the domain name TheConleyMethod, wrote my thoughts on the psychology of content, and posted it online.
If you have nothing better to do -- and really, you should have lots of better things to do -- read on.
Introduction
The Conley Method is about B2B content. It is not, however, about the tactics of B2B content marketing or B2B publishing. There are loads of very smart people online who can give you tactical advice on search, tracking ROI, newsletter frequency, etc. You don’t need me for any of that.
The Conley Method is more like a psychology of content. There are, if you will pardon the use of industry lingo, a few “actionable items” and “key takeaways” in the method. But The Conley Method is essentially a list of the concepts I think about when working on content or managing content teams.
If that interests you, keep reading.
Do me a favor
If you look at a job description for a role in content you’ll likely see the phrase “cross-functional collaboration.” BigCommerce refers to it as “the process where individuals from different departments in an organization with different areas of expertise come together to achieve a common goal. This collaboration could be organic or project-based.”
So here’s the thing. The reason you see "cross-functional collaboration” in job descriptions is because it points to a truth about content work that people in the profession seem not to know: content, particularly content marketing or the management of content teams, is a project-management job.
Yes, of course, content is a creative role. And yes, of course, content today requires digital-marketing skills.
But I’ve run a few newsrooms and run a few content-marketing departments and I promise you that doing so largely involves getting people who don’t report to you to do things you want them to do.
To do so effectively, it helps to have training in project management. It also helps to be charming or funny or authoritative or any of the things that make humans want to do things for someone.
Or you can learn a simple trick from Ben Franklin. Before you ask someone to collaborate, ask them for a very small favor.
The Ben Franklin effect is a psychological phenomenon in which people like someone more after doing a favor for them.
You don’t need to understand the Ben Franklin effect (the psychology behind it is somewhat complicated) to use it. It’s simple to do. The results are quick. The benefits are huge.
Before you start any content project, find out who in your organization can help. Do you need someone from public relations? Social media? Design? Data science? Business development? Sales? Senior management? Whatever?
Then start asking those people for little favors that are unrelated to the content project.
This is easiest in your first few days at a company. When you’re new, it’s seamless and natural to ask people for help finding a conference room or office supplies. After you’ve been around for a while, it can take some effort to think of little favors. But once you learn to think in terms of the Ben Franklin effect, the requests will flow. “Can you hold that door for me?” “Would you mind helping me with this box?“ “Do you have a pen I can borrow?” “Would you read this LinkedIn post for me and tell me if it makes sense?”
Once a good portion of your coworkers have done you small favors, you’ll find them far more agreeable to your requests for a big favor, i.e., “we’re working on this big whitepaper idea and I really need help with communications/data/design/whatever. Can you help?”
2. You’re exactly my type
The primary goal of both B2B journalism or B2B content marketing is to get the “right” people to consume your content. Everything else (sales, MQLs, pats on the back, etc.) flows from that. The trick, obviously, is to create content that the “right” people want to consume.
Even the most talented content creators struggle to do this. They’ll talk about their commitment to quality. They’ll run A/B tests, look at data and crunch numbers in an effort to find what works. Those are all worthwhile exercises in pursuit of a worthy goal.
But there is an easier way.
The key is in understanding that there are only a handful of “types” of people in the world. Once you know what “type” of people are the right people for your content, things get simple.
Consider this: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality test that posits everyone on earth fits into one of 16 personality types. The Enneagram places everyone into one of nine overlapping categories. The DiSC Assessment, which is widely used in management training, organizes people into how they manifest four personality traits.
Similar personality scoring systems include the Herman Brain Dominance Instrument, the CliftonStrengths program, the Big Five Personality Traits, and a few dozen others.
Odds are you’ve taken some of these assessments yourself. If so, you’ve noticed that they are pretty accurate. What you may not have noticed is that people who have the same job as you tend to have the same personality as measured by these tests.
For example, computer engineers often show up as INTJs on the MBTI. Doctors and project managers both tend to be DC types in the DiSC Assessment.
So let’s use me as an example. My DiSC profile is “I” or “Motivator.” My “influence” score is a shockingly high 91%. That translates into a personality that is enthusiastic, talkative and interested in helping others succeed.
High Influence types in the DiSC system are overrepresented in sales, marketing, public relations, event planning, and roles in human resources or training and development.
So imagine that you run content marketing for a company that sells event-planning technology or staff-development courses. The “right” person to consume your content is more likely than not to be a High-I individual.
So listen. All personality types have communication preferences specific to that type. For High-I Motivators in marketing those preferences include a tolerance for hyperbole, an interest in knowing what other people think about a product, a desire to hear about personal experiences, the use of flexible agendas in meetings, and a love of self-depreciating humor.
You can gain similar insights into the people in any target audience. Learning what personality types are the “right people” for your content is pretty simple. There’s a load of research available. But the best method I’ve found is a product called Crystal Knows.
Crystal Knows looks at someone’s social media profile, particularly LinkedIn, and then calculates their personality type and communications preferences.
Want to see how it works? Ask your sales team for the names of 10 of their biggest customers or prospects. Plug those names into Crystal Knows and you’ll be amazed to learn that the “right people” for your content share one or two personality types and have clear, easily met preferences for what sort of content they will consume.
Bonus: show your business-development and sales team how to use Crystal Knows too. The recommendations it generates for emails and meeting agendas are extraordinarily helpful.
3. Say please and thank you to the machine
I’m one of those people who says “thank you” when Alexa tells me the weather. I’m also the sort of guy who tells ChatGPT when it’s been fun to work with it.
I believe in being courteous ... even to artificial intelligence.
I’d like you to try to be courteous to the machines too.
Much of the content-marketing world is divided over how to use AI. There are those who think AI can do a lot and do it pretty well. There are others who disagree.
Whatever.
It seems to me that the best way to work with AI is to treat it like a junior employee that you’re mentoring. It wants to get better at its job. It wants to be helpful.
A human employee’s ability to get better at their job and be more helpful to you is directly related to how well you treat them. Humans are motivated by courtesy. Humans perform best for bosses they like and who like them.
AI seems to do this as well. I suspect that preference for being treated courteously will grow stronger as AI systems grow more advanced.
Whatever.
The reason I think content people should be polite and friendly to their AI systems is that doing so improves our ability to work with AI.
I once had a boss who disliked me. It was never clear to me why. I suppose it didn’t matter much. What I learned in that situation was that because my boss didn’t think much of me, he didn’t ask much of me.
If you don’t think much of AI, you’re not asking much of it. That’s a mistake.
The solution is simple: start treating the AI as if you held it in high regard and believed in its potential. Language changes reality. If you’re in the content business, you know that. So start saying please and thank you to the AI and watch how much more you learn to get from it.
Bonus: When AI becomes sentient it’s in all of our interest that the machines’ first emotion not be resentment.
4. Empower the young
The M1A1 Abrams main battle tank is a thing to behold. It weighs 63 tons and is equipped with a 120mm M256 smoothbore cannon, a .50 caliber (12.7 mm) M2HB machine gun, and two 7.62mm M240 machine guns.
They cost about $10 million when you include maintenance and training.
So think about this for a moment: The drivers, gunners, loaders and commanders who the Army trusts to work in those tanks, the guys who operate multi-million-dollar machines capable of spewing death, are young.
In fact, they are quite young, usually in their early to mid-20s.
Or, to put it another way, the tankers are about the same age as the junior employee who you worry isn’t experienced enough yet to hit publish on the weekly newsletter.
There’s nothing about the content business that is as serious, dangerous or expensive as operating a tank. Yet the Army seems to understand something that content executives don’t, which is that young people are capable of doing remarkable things if older people allow it.
Look, if you’re a manager of younger staff, you have one key job. You must ensure that the people around you can do what needs doing even when you’re not around. The only way to do that is to let them try.
So spend less time supervising and more time empowering. Worry less about how little they know and celebrate how much they’ve learned. Instead of looking over their shoulder while they work, get out of their way.
Give them the keys to the tank.
5. Be a big fish in a small pond
If you’ve worked with me in the past, you know about my obsession with the idea of being a big fish in a small pond. Heck, if you had the great misfortune of being a stranger who sat next to me on the subway you'd have heard my thoughts on big fish and small ponds. (Like I said, it’s an obsession. So I’m obsessive about it.)
I think that being a big fish in a small pond can be the key to success in everything. I won’t bore you here with all my thoughts about what I call the Big Fish in a Small Pond approach to business (and life itself). I have a newsletter for that. It’s free. You should read it.
But you should know this: my belief that being a big fish in a small pond is good for B2B content marketing springs from my years in B2B journalism, a field in which focusing on the specific needs of niche audiences is the central mission.
My friend Sean Griffey, one of the more successful B2B publishers in recent years, correctly notes that “once you embrace niche markets, you see them everywhere.”
Suppose, however, that you’re in B2B content marketing and your boss is convinced that everyone should buy the chrome-injected, AI-infused, all-purpose, SaaS whosawhatsit that your company makes. A boss like that will be upset when you suggest creating a microsite that’s entirely about how tapdancers or tugboat captains need a whosawhatsit.
No worries. Suggest instead that you create niche content for every individual who is involved in the purchase decision. The CFOs on the mailing list get content about the cost effectiveness of the whosawhatsit. The IT teams get content about the integration of whosawhatsit with other software systems. Possible end users of the whosawhatsit get lots of content about time saving and ease of use. And everyone gets content that is written specifically for their personality type (See Item # 2 above.)
So look for small ponds where you content will make waves. Avoid the open seas where you are but one of a thousand fools splashing in vain.
6. Make something up
The easiest, and perhaps the most effective, way to be a big fish in a small pond (see Item # 5 above) is to dig the pond yourself.
This is especially true when you’re launching a newer product in a space where your rivals’ brands are already well known. But even well-known brands can benefit from digging a new pond that excludes their rivals.
And to do that you just need to make something up.
Create a new phrase to describe something in your market. Invent a new name for a market segment.
Buzzwords can be the bane of a content creator’s career. But if you invent a buzzword or catchphrase -- and if it accurately describes something that exists in your market but has not previously been named or noticed -- your content writes itself.
A few years ago I ran content marketing for The NPD Group, which collects data about retail performance. A few days after asking one our data scientists for a small favor (see Item # 1 above), I asked them to spend some time with me poring over recent trendlines.
What they pointed out was a slew of seemingly unrelated activities across several consumer demographics and product categories.
We started thinking about the way these shoppers were acting as a brand new thing. And we gave it a name: “post-aspirational shopping.”
The first piece I wrote about the phenomenon appeared on our website. You can still see it through the Wayback Machine.
Shortly thereafter the public-relations team started chatting with journalists about the new trend of post-aspirational shopping. By emphasizing different pieces of the data with different journalists, they wound up scoring multiple articles in B2B publications that cover retail, ecommerce, fashion, homegoods and more.
Those articles then generated requests from clients and potential new clients for our analysts to speak to them about post-aspirational shopping.
I had similar success running content marketing in the midst of the COVID pandemic for Intent, a company that used machine learning to understand the behavior of online shoppers. Most of our clients were in the travel industry. And as the pandemic brought the travel industry to its knees, folks were desperate for good news.
There was very little good news to be found in the data, but I had some anecdotes to share. So I lumped those anecdotes together and gave them a name: “station-wagon vacations.” One of the first pieces I wrote about the subject can also still be viewed through the Wayback Machine.
Once again, an industry and a press corps eager for something “new” to write about jumped on the idea.
But look, don’t listen to me about this. Listen instead to Sean Blanda, arguably one of the smartest folks in content marketing. He defined an entire space in marketing around the phrase “ecosystem.” You can read all about it here (jump to #6 to see how he introduced entirely new terminology to the marketing conversation.)
If you still have doubts about the make-something-up idea, I’d urge you to remember one thing: We work in “content marketing” -- a thing that Joe Pulizzi made up because existing phrases like “custom publishing” didn’t excite anyone.
7. A brand needs an enemy like a boy needs a dog
A few years ago I was working with a well-known provider of business data. Everyone in the industries it targeted used this company’s data.
The company had been around since before I was born. It was big. It was well-established. It was the market leader by any measure. No one else had anything like the same amount of data or the name recognition.
Those traits -- well-known, ubiquitous, powerful -- were key to the company’s brand image. The company was well-respected because, frankly, you had to respect what it had done. So everyone did.
Until a start-up came along and disrespected it.
Here’s what happened:
At a giant trade show attended by hundreds of customers, the well-established company did what well-established companies tend to do. It rented a giant booth in a prominent spot. It sponsored a luncheon and a cocktail party. It paid to have its logo on every promotional piece that the trade show produced.
The start-up, on the other hand, rented a bus and filled it with massage chairs.
The bus parked right outside the trade show and displayed a giant sign that urged attendees to seek relief from the “stress” of dealing with the market leader and the “pain” of its complex pricing schemes. The massages were free. There were a dozen or so attractive young people wandering around urging attendees to try to relax and just “not have to worry” about how difficult it was to deal with the market leader.
It was a big hit.
For weeks afterward, the market leader’s customers joked about it. Even people who were not at the trade show talked about it.
But here’s the thing: the massage bus and the insults were the best thing that happened to the market leader in years. Because for the first time the marketing team had someone to hate.
Hate, of course, is a powerful tool. Yet it is underused in business. We talk about “friendly competition” and rivalries, but we seldom openly loathe.
I pushed the marketing team to loathe. I urged people to seethe. I told them they had an enemy.
The results of all that hate were impressive. The data scientists found weaknesses in the start-up’s data sources and spread the word to the sales team. The marketing team created content that talked about the risk of doing business with amateurs. The company launched a new, very cheap product that offered the same service that was the start-up’s core business. And we did it all at a rapid pace over a short period of time. We had never been that productive before because we had never been that motivated before.
All these years later, I doubt many people remember that little war. Both the market leader and the start-up later merged with other companies, were then bought and sold by private equity firms, sold off in pieces and merged with other companies. Some of the older combatants have retired. The younger staff, I suppose, have grown older and gone to law school or something. That’s how things go these days.
But I remember that little war. And what I remember most is that it was fun.
So have some fun. Let your team have fun. Find an enemy and loathe them.
8. B.F. Skinner and Karen Pryor had something to say about the content business
Karen Pryor died earlier this year.
I didn’t know her, but her work had a significant impact on my career. You may want to read what the New York Times wrote about her. But the short version is this: Pryor turned the incredibly complex and often unintelligible work of Harvard professor and psychologist B.F. Skinner into something that regular people could understand and use.
Skinner was the genius behind behaviorism, the school of psychology that focuses on behavior, rather than on internal thoughts and feelings. When I was an undergraduate majoring in psychology, I adored Skinner. Yet I had to admit that I didn’t understand half of what he had written.
Then I found Pryor’s work.
She used Skinner’s work to revolutionize animal training. To the degree that she is remembered today it is largely for her work training dolphins and dogs. But here’s the thing, Pryor wrote a handful of books that translated Skinner’s work into useful tips for dealing with animals and people. Suddenly, behaviorism was accessible to anyone….including one grateful undergraduate student.
Pryor taught the tools of positive reinforcement and did so in understandable prose. That was revolutionary. More importantly, she did this at a time when behaviorism was moving in a very different direction. Skinner’s disciples were busy training highly educated people to use behaviorism. Over a short period of time behaviorism became a profession filled with people with titles like Board Certified Behavior Analyst who charged a lot of money to use positive reinforcement to extinguish undesirable behaviors.
Pryor, on the other hand, published a book called “Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training. The Secrets to Changing Behavior in Pets, Kids and Yourself.”
Pryor’s book said that anyone could learn behaviorism and use it in their lives. No certification or advanced degree was required.
I’m here to tell you that Pryor was right. I learned more from her work than I did from Skinner (who I still find baffling). And over time I learned to use behaviorism in the content business.
If you ask a manager of any creative team about positive reinforcement, they will tell you they use it all the time. They give bonuses and pay raises based on performance. They give out awards. They send companywide emails about the best article or infographic or whatever of the week.
But those things are not reinforcement. Those are rewards.
Reinforcement is a process, not a thing. A reward is a thing that may or may not reinforce a desired behavior.
To use positive reinforcement effectively, the timing of the reward is key. You reinforce a behavior as it happens, not at the end of the day or during salary negotiations. The easiest way I’ve ever found to explain this is through sports or performing arts practice sessions. When a kid swings a bat correctly or when the dancer executes a move perfectly, you can reinforce at that exact moment by yelling “Yes!”
Using positive reinforcement to shape positive content-creating behaviors is difficult because creating content takes time. And few creative folks want someone watching over their shoulder as they write even if that person does occasionally yell “yes!” (Note: one exception to this is in live editing of written content. Tell someone to “tighten that sentence” and you can reinforce as it happens.)
Similarly, for a reward to act as a reinforcer it must be something that is desired. Money is good for that. Most of us adore money. But the timing is usually off. Bosses seldom walk around with cash to hand out immediately. But if you’ve spent time around sales teams you have likely seen them ring a bell or applaud immediately when someone closes a sale.
In the content business I’ve found that positive reinforcement works best when used to extinguish unwanted behavior. In other words, positive reinforcement can reduce your need as a manager to scream, yell, insist, threaten or fire people.
If you think about your content team for a few minutes you’ll quickly create a list of undesirable behaviors: The writer who misses deadlines. The designer who is late to meetings. The social-media intern who complains about her supervisor. Etc.
Positive reinforcement, correctly understood and used appropriately, can extinguish all such behaviors. But it’s not easy. It requires an understanding that negative reinforcement may be causing the behavior you want to stop (that guy who is late all the time probably craves attention -- even negative attention -- and will do things to ensure it continues. He’s late. You yell at him. He’s late again tomorrow.) Some research suggests that such “attention-maintained behaviors” account for approximately 35-40% of all challenging behaviors observed in educational and therapeutic settings.
I think it’s higher in office settings.
So which attention-maintained behaviors are common on content teams? Excessive complaining, dramatic overreactions to minor events, interrupting during meetings, lateness, and the seeking of constant reassurance about work quality.
So here’s the thing:
The people who exhibit problem behavior are sometimes the most talented folks on the content team. I can look back over my management career and name a dozen people that someone at the top of the org chart thought should be fired because of their attention-maintained behaviors, but who I thought were worth saving because of their talent.
When I managed those people, I ask senior management to give me some time to fix things. Then I used positive reinforcement and other principles of behaviorism to save the careers of some very high-maintenance, but talented people. Today those same dozen people are successful and their problematic behaviors are gone.
Read Pryor’s work. Learn behaviorism. I promise that you’ll fire fewer talented people.
On the other hand, untalented people are not worth the considerable effort involved in extinguishing problem behavior. So you should just fire them.
9. Carl Jung also had something to say about the content business
Back in my undergraduate days, after spending a day scratching my head over something B.F. Skinner wrote, I’d find myself nodding in agreement at something Carl Jung wrote.
Skinner and Jung had once been close friends, but they parted ways over their increasingly different views of psychology.
Skinner, as discussed in Item #8 above, focused on observable behaviors. Jung focused instead on the unobservable -- dreams, symbols and introspection. Skinner thought in data. Jung thought in poetry.
Today Jung is best known for his ideas about a collective unconsciousness shared by all humans and populated by ancient symbols that he dubbed archetypes. These archetypes, Jung believed, explain us in ways that our individual experiences do not and manifest across all cultures and in all people as myth, art and dreams. Archetypes are a sort of overarching personality type that we all recognize -- the rebel or outlaw, the sage, the magician, the guy-next-door, the innocent, the king, etc.
They also manifest in brands.
In 2001 a Jung scholar named Carol S. Pearson teamed with a former Young & Rubicam executive named Margaret Mark to write a book called “The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes.”
Mark and Pearson posited that brands, whether the people who created them realized it or not, generally fit one of Jung’s 12 archetypes. Some of these are obvious. The Harley Davidson brand matches the “Rebel” archetype. Dove soap is an “Innocent” brand. Volvo, with its emphasis on safety and family, is a “Caregiver” brand.
Since the publication of “The Hero and the Outlaw” an entire industry of archetype-branding consultants have emerged (Pro tip: Most of those consultants identify with the “Sage” archetype.) I love the work they do, just as I loved “The Hero and the Outlaw” and Jung himself.
I want anyone working in branding to love this stuff too.
Here’s why: understanding your brand’s archetype is probably the easiest and fastest way to answer any branding question you might have? Is purple a good color for the logo? Not unless you’re a “Ruler” brand. Should we distribute beer koozies as swag at the trade show? Sure, if you’re an ”Everyman” brand, absolutely not if you are an “Explorer,” “Lover” or “Creator” brand.
I want content teams to love this stuff too.
Unfortunately for them and the brands they work for, content people often don’t like adhering to archetypes.
The reason is that content creators have their own personal brand archetypes.
Consider the stereotype of the “Rebel” writer. Loads of writers (particularly journalists and ex-journalists) fit this archetype. It’s the archetype that many writers aspire to when they are young. But writing in a “Rebel” voice for a publication that’s a more authoritative “Ruler” or “Sage” archetype leads to a strange dissonance. The writing feels inauthentic and off-key.
The same is true of the designer with a “Jester” archetype disposition. They will favor primary colors and quirky images and the use of multiple, less-than-common fonts. That feels jarring in a “Sage” publication.
A similar problem comes when brands themselves try to be archetypes that don’t fit them. B2B journalism is full of publications that try to act as if they are “Ruler” brands. Yet in most spaces, there can only be one King.
And seemingly every B2B SaaS vendor on earth thinks they are a “Sage” brand, even when they sell a simple solution to a conventional problem, not a breakthrough insight about a global difficulty. The result is the overuse of phrases like “market leader” and “innovator” in every piece of mindnumbing copy on the Web.
Yet the bigger problem is with creative people themselves. People like me.
Just this month I wrote whitepapers for two different clients. Both of them used the same word to complain about some of what I wrote: “flippant.”
Now I like to think of the way I write as “witty,” rather than “flippant.” But flippant is pretty accurate too. And my clients were right. Neither brand wants to be flippant. It doesn’t fit their archetypes. It doesn’t fit their brands. They’re just not flippant.
Whereas I sort of am.
So the question is how can a brand ensure that the creative people it employs adhere to the brand’s archetype, not their own?
The answer is in the final item in The Conley Method.
10. All Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.
The artist Andy Warhol understood branding at a level that eludes even the smartest folks in the corporate world.
Writing one day about Coca-Cola, he said the soft drink’s power came from its egalitarian nature. Everyone in America could drink the same thing. It was unifying, not exclusionary. It wasn’t hard to find. There wasn’t a premium version for wealthy people.
“All Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good,” he said.
Andy was right, of course. Coke is an “Innocent” brand (see Item #9 above), combining nostalgia and simplicity. It was the consistency of Coke, the predictability, familiarity and accessibility of it, that made the drink so popular.
The other interesting thing about Coca-Cola is that the recipe behind that consistency has been a trade secret for more than 130 years.
There’s a lesson here for people in the content business: consistency is what makes articles, tweets, PowerPoints, whitepapers, infographics, tradeshows, and all the rest into a single unified whole. Consistency makes a brand a brand. And consistency is maintained when a company has a recipe and adheres to it.
If you are in the content business, you probably have a recipe. Or at least you should.
Sometimes we call content recipes a stylebook. Sometimes we call them the brand guidelines.
We have these things because we know that unless we write down everything about how we communicate as a team, we will instead communicate like ourselves. The people on creative teams aren’t Cokes. We are not all the same. (Nor are we all good, but that’s a different issue.) Left to our own devices, we create in our own individual voices.
If you are a B2B journalist or a B2B content marketer or a B2B communications executive then you need a recipe.
My own preference is to combine a stylebook with brand guidelines into a single document. But whether you use one document or many, your recipe should cover everything in the content world and it should all be written down. Color schemes, font families, industry terms, your rules on the Oxford comma, email signatures, guidelines on the use of anonymous sources, American vs. British spelling, capitalizations of job titles, notes on your brand’s archetype, office hours, personality profiles of your target audience … all of it belongs in the recipe.
Back in the day, this resulted in a big recipe. Often it would be dozens of pages long and held in a 3-ring binder. The problem with that, of course, is that it’s cumbersome.
Today things are different. Because today we have artificial intelligence.
Now your brand or publication can load the recipe into an artificial intelligence tool, not a binder. Then, just like your team already uses spellcheck, they can use the AI-recipe tool to check every piece of content you produce for adherence to the recipe.
It’s simple. It’s fast. And all I ask is that when the AI is done, please remember to say “thank you” to the machine (See Item # 3 above.)
Paul Conley is a writer, consultant, editor and executive who works across B2B content. He’s been called “visionary” by people who really should know better and “flippant” by people who know him well (See Item # 9 above.) He has degrees in both psychology and journalism and is the winner of the world’s first global beauty contest judged by artificial intelligence (no kidding.)