Match the Speaker First

In my ad-hoc Content Therapy Manifesto, I said:

(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.

A couple of people asked me, eyebrows raised, what I meant by this. “But shouldn’t we put the reader first and focus on what people want to read, instead of what our copywriters want to write?”

Connect the dots between the manifesto and Sunday’s post, The Currency of Trust. The more a content creator believes in what she’s writing, the less she’ll have to strain to make the text “sound authentic.” It simply will be authentic, because the writer is authentic.

Copy made to sound authentic reeks of pretense. Not like a broken barbeque set stinking of smoke, but like an otherwise nice person who has accidentally put on two different perfumes for the day.

Identify which content is of real use for your readers and customers. Then identify people within your team, or other teams, or from external sources, who, as recipients, would devour this kind of content. Those are your writers. Let them speak and write freely, and they’ll become content superstars in no time.