The Essential Role of Leadership in Establishing a Content Creation Process

There are all kinds of perceived obstacles and real roadblocks to instituting a smart strategic content creation strategy, and this is good news for the thoughtful leader.

• We need to know the roadblocks and the pitfalls to avoid failure. 
• We need to go understand the obstacles, both real and perceived, to assess reality. 
• We also need to understand the value of strategic content. We want return on investment. We will basically discuss the cost of creating strategic content and the value and then you can make your own decisions. 

It makes sense to get a true perspective on the value of useful content. Value created helps alleviate the anxiety of investing time and money and thinking. Great content and the useful leveraging of this content on the Internet, in social media, in online advertising, in newsletters, in nurturing email, off-line- is the big lever in the battle for business growth. Lets look at this value quite closely. 

There are many pitfalls you have to watch out for.
There are so many traps that let us create content that sucks. Useless content is easy, but it does take time, and it provides no useful results. Yet why is there so much useless content? We need to be clearly differentiating between the usual blah blah blah, the usual self promoting bilge and useful content that attracts the web visitors you would like to know better.

There are many obstacles that are just felt, that are just basically fear.
Creating a process for effective content creation can sound hard to do. It can feel like folly. There is this boogie man that keeps companies standing still when action is needed and the highest real risk is standing in place as the world changes how it buys stuff.

This is the problem of the lizard brain- the fight or flight response to any change from a ancient psyche that kept us safe when the dangers were real not imagined but, today keeps us standing on the virtual railroad tracks as technology changes the way we do business at at rapid pace.There is the tyranny of the daily urgent and unimportant that can displace the attention to the important but not urgent.

There is often an overbearing sense that everybody is busy now or that we need to concentrate on the tasks that make income right now.  A strategic content creation strategy that interlinks useful content is important, and is a good investment and needs to be engaged now as the way people buy, is changing. But even when this importance is understood, the daily urgencies intervene, and the usual rush to get something done, pushes for pragmatism right now. Leaders with vision cannot be satisfied with industrial thinking but can take the time, to find the space to fit in what is important.

There is actual disruption in creating a process to create useful content
 but this disruption of existing process is no different than say, moving from a paper working environment to a paperless environment. It takes a vision from leadership who understand the tremendous value of having shared docs and not having to depend on tracking and sorting and filing pieces of paper. Moving forward, requires a description of the process, and maybe even a procedure for dealing with issues which will arise. Right from the start we plan well to minimize possible disruption.

The actual changes are first led by the early adopters and then there are some laggards on the other end who take longer. And when all is said and done, there is a big gain in productivity and an improved ability to manage data and you are better able to care for customers.

Useful content requires a team and we lay out a rough outline for creating useful content here.

Leadership is responsible for the vision forward. Leadership must create the tenor, must create the safe environment for people to participate here, to share ideas, and move forward. And Leadership must not allow the daily urgent to interfere. Leadership must have the patience to let the team develop some new habits and acquire some new perspective. It is all good. Maybe you need to go back and review the section of actual value of content. This is the big tool with which to build and sustain business development.