A Content Therapy Manifesto (kinda)

Yes, manifestos are so 90s, but I needed to quickly put my ideas down while the gnocchi were still cooking.

So, here is …

… A Very Brief and Spontaneous Manifesto of Content Therapy

1. People think that they are complex, but in fact they are pretty simple.
2. People think their businesses are complex, but their core is, in fact, for the most part, pretty simple.
3. Content needs to match the speaker first and then the listener,
4. because the listener can only trust the content if the speaker trusts himself.
5. Thus, before any content strategy work can be really productive, each content producer (or, for that matter, curator) needs to be the best he/she can be at a very personal level.
6. Building trust with third parties can be boiled down mostly to technicalities and strategies: This is the realm of Public Relations. But …
7. … building trust with oneself means getting oneself’s mental processes and emotions tidied up, because …
8. … publishing content is always publishing oneself, where “oneself” must refer to the actual, individual people involved in the process, and explicitly not some vague representation of a corporate entity. (Don’t get me started on corporate personhood here.)
9. Everyone involved in the creation/curation process needs to have (a) trust in himself, his own skills, abilities, hopes and dreams, and (b) shared trust in his teammates and the corporate environment in which they function.
10. Getting a heap of unsorted content in order and (re-)published is a one-way street if the individuals’ personalities (including their very own quirks, ideas, visions, “wholes”) are not taken into account.
11. Only if published content feeds back into the creators’ personalities, impasses in content creation, curation and governance can become highways. (Bolded. My fave.)
12. If a client presents a heap of unstructured content to the consultant, it is the consultant’s job to assist in tidying up the client’s mind, then the corporate mindset, then the content. This is neither top-down nor bottom-up; it’s inside-out.

(Written off the top of my head, so it’s drafty as can be.)