دانش یا مهارت + شور و اشتیاق

Part 2

The Sweet Spot

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

MICHAEL PORTER

Every successful content creator has a sweet spot. Now it’s your turn to find yours.

Chapter 3

Knowledge or Skill + Passion

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.

BUDDHA

Matthew Patrick grew up in the small city of Medina, just outside Cleveland, Ohio. For as long as he can remember, he’s been passionate about gaming, from growing up with a Mario-themed bedroom to late nights with friends playing Dungeons & Dragons. During high school when most boys in his class went out for sports, Matthew joined show choir, played the viola in orchestra, and took part in every stage show the school offered.

Yes, Matthew loved performing, but he was also a genius, scoring a perfect 1600 on his SAT on his way to a college degree in neuroscience. Instead of going to fraternity parties on weekends at college, Matthew hosted “Friday Fondue” nights playing Zelda (a popular video game).

After college, Matthew had his sights set on acting and moved to New York, where he toured with various shows. For two years, Matthew took whatever role was available—and saw about as much success as the average starving actor in New York. To put it lightly, times were tough. Theater wasn’t the life Matthew was hoping for.

By 2011, Matthew gave up his dream of becoming an actor and decided to go after a “real” job. Unfortunately, acting and directing were not skills that innovative enterprises were hiring for. Over the next two years, Matthew sent out countless résumés. During that time he was unemployed, and worse yet, his confidence had bottomed out. Not one person opened a door to give Matthew the shot he seemingly deserved.

Matthew pulled himself up by his bootstraps and decided to create a résumé booster that companies simply couldn’t ignore. He believed that if he could show companies that he knew how to create an audience and that he understood the inner workings of new media, enterprises would see value in those skills.

While watching an online program on learning through gaming, the idea of creating Game Theory videos was born. Game Theory became a weekly YouTube video series that combined Matthew’s passion for gaming and video games with his skill set of math and analytics.

After 56 episodes over a one-year time frame, Matthew had an audience of 500,000 YouTube subscribers interested in his take on how math works in gaming. For example, his episode “How PewDiePie [an online video celebrity] Conquered YouTube” generated more than 5 million views. His episode “Why the Official Zelda Timeline Is Wrong” saw more than 4 million downloads.

Today, Matthew Patrick’s Game Theory brand has well over 4 million subscribers. Matthew has been hired directly by some of the biggest YouTube stars on the planet to help them attract more viewers. Even the mighty YouTube itself hired MatPat (his online name) to consult directly to help YouTube retain and grow its audience numbers.

THE SWEET SPOT

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

ARTHUR ASHE

The Content Inc. model is dependent on first identifying the sweet spot. Simply put, the sweet spot is the intersection of a knowledge or skill area and a passion point.

Let’s take a look at a variety of sweet spots among other Content Inc. entrepreneurs.

Claus Pilgaard (Branded as Chili Klaus)

As we said in the Introduction, Claus grew up a musician. He was admitted to the Royal Academy of Music, where he graduated in 1996. He became a music director for several reviews in Denmark, going by the name of “Klaus Wunderhits,” and even appeared on a local variety show called Varieté 007.

Claus had always been an amazing musician, but it wasn’t until he found his sweet spot, in combination with chili peppers, that Claus became a Danish phenomenon.

Michelle Phan

At an early age, Michelle Phan found that she was an artist. Simply put, she could draw with the best of them. Michelle’s childhood was fraught with turmoil. Her family moved dozens of times while she was a child, and abuse was something she was unfortunately familiar with.

Drawing on her face (makeup) became a release for Michelle. She believed that makeup could make everyone superheroes, where they could escape and defeat evil, even against all odds. In 2005, Michelle started a blog combining her skill in art and drawing and her passion for makeup.

Today, Michelle’s makeup tutorials have been seen over a billion (yes, billion) times. Now one of YouTube’s top stars, Michelle has expanded her empire to include a book (released in 2014) and a full cosmetic line called “em,” produced by L’Oreal.

Andy Schneider (Branded as the Chicken Whisperer)

Andy Schneider is the backyard poultry king and has become the go-to resource for anything and everything chickens. As Andy began to raise chickens in his Atlanta-area backyard, he began to sell them to his friends directly and then on Craigslist. There were many who were interested in raising their own chickens, but they needed a lot of education to just get started. So Andy formed a “meetup” in Atlanta to answer questions from those interested in backyard poultry.

According to Andy, “All these people are from the Atlanta metro area; we could meet once a month, have a great time, break bread in the meeting room in the backroom of a restaurant, and share our experiences and learn. So I got online and found a great resource, Meetup.com, very popular, millions of meetups all around the country for people who have hobbies.” That club met several times a month, and as the club grew, local media started to notice. The local CBS affiliate did an interview with Andy, which was picked up by Atlanta’s major newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution. From there, Andy grew the Chicken Whisperer platform into a book, a magazine (with over 60,000 subscribers), and a radio show, which has now run for over five years with more than 20,000 weekly subscribers. He also travels around the country doing road shows, exclusively sponsored by Kalmbach Feeds, his major financial supporter.

FINDING YOUR SKILL OR KNOWLEDGE AREA

In looking at various Content Inc. subjects, the model can work by identifying either an exceptional knowledge area or a unique skill. What do we mean by knowledge? Knowledge is information acquired about a particular subject through study or observation.

Joseph Kalinowski, our creative director at Content Marketing Institute, has knowledge (by the definition above) in a number of areas including the band KISS, the Pittsburgh Steelers, Star Wars action figures, and Jack Daniels. In any one of these topics, Joseph would destroy the average person with his knowledge in that area.

In addition to his knowledge areas, Joseph is also a skilled graphic designer. Skill is defined by dictionary.com as “the ability to do something well” or an area that a person has “expertise or competence” in. Simply put, skill is knowledge used properly.

If Joseph were going to employ a Content Inc. strategy and look to build an audience in a specific market or demographic area, he could choose from the number of knowledge areas he has, or he could look to his skill in graphic design.

Maybe your situation is closer to that of the Indium Corporation. Indium, a global manufacturing company headquartered in upstate New York, develops and manufactures materials used primarily in the electronics assembly industry. At its core, the company develops soldering materials to keep electronic components from coming apart.

Rick Short, Indium’s director of marketing communications, knew that Indium employees had more knowledge about industrial soldering equipment than just about any other company in the world. This makes sense … soldering is the knowledge area where Indium manufactures most of its products.

At the same time, the Indium culture is that of sharing knowledge … of a rising tide lifting all ships. The company had subject-matter experts that were willing to share, as well as a marketing team that was excited about sharing knowledge via social media (a rarity for a manufacturing company, especially in 2005).

That platform chosen for this sweet spot was a blog. Today Indium has over 70 blogs and 21 bloggers. Since the first blog was begun in 2005, Indium has generated more leads at just 25 percent of its previous marketing investment.

UNLEASHING YOUR PASSION

Steve Jobs’s commencement speech, given in 2005, has been watched over 10 million times. In it, he gives the following advice: “You’ve got to find what you love… . [T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.” Cal Newport, author of the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, believes that if Steve Jobs had taken his own advice, Apple Computer would have never happened. Newport states that “if a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers.” Walter Issacson, who authored the Jobs biography, sees it differently. Jobs’s passion was not for Zen Buddhism specifically; it was for simplicity. Everything in Steve Jobs’s life revolved around the simple, which extended into Apple’s core design construct. As Jobs noted: “The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple was fueled by Steve Jobs’s passion for simplicity. And as Charles Schwab is quoted, “A person can succeed at almost anything for which they have unlimited enthusiasm.” This is exactly what we find in the Content Inc. model. Skill is one thing, but the passion is the energy behind what makes the model successful. It’s why for months, and in many cases years, entrepreneurs create their content, ultimately waiting for the payoff.

Simply put, for Content Inc. to work, you need to get up every day loving the right side of that sweet spot, or the work doesn’t get done. Matthew Patrick has a passion and love for video games. Andy Schneider loves being the teacher. Claus Pilgaard has a passion for chili peppers that most people simply do not understand. Michelle Phan gets up in the morning every day, ready to cover herself in makeup. Rick Short at Indium had the insight to understand the company’s passion for sharing knowledge.

All these “passions” made it possible for the work to be done. With Content Inc., passion is the fuel that makes the engine go. All the skill in the world won’t make your content engine go without passion.

Can Content Inc. Work Without Passion?

Jay Baer is CEO of marketing consulting firm Convince & Convert, as well as the New York Times bestselling author of Youtility. The following is taken from an interview with Jay on Content Inc. and passion: Content for which you do not have a passion is really hard to get good at. If you don’t love the content you’re creating, it is unlikely to be good enough to have an impact. And that’s why most of the people who you would consider to be disproportionately good at content have a true love, either for content marketing as a discipline, or a true love for the subject matter that they’re creating content about.

Marcus Sheridan [former CEO of River Pools & Spas] is effective not because he’s the greatest writer in the world, but because he really wants to educate people about swimming pools. Joe [Pulizzi] is effective because he really wants to evangelize about content marketing. It’s not that he has some disproportionately extraordinary writing techniques. That’s the part that we don’t talk about very much because we want everybody to believe that all you have to do is want to create content and follow the instructions in the books that we write and everybody can do it; and yeah, everybody can do it, but they can’t do it great because they may not have the same level of passion.

And if you do have that passion and you have that burning desire to educate or teach about whatever subject lights you up, that content can be good enough, can be infused with passion to the degree that you can build a business out of it like never before. Ten years ago you couldn’t ever do … say … publish your own newspaper … how’s that going to work? But today you can just say, I’m going to make a YouTube video every day about Japanese whiskey; and if you keep your nose to the grindstone, eventually you can be the Japanese whiskey guy and you can take ads, you can give speeches and all of those things that can happen.

AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW OF THE SWEET SPOT

If you are an established company with an existing product base, finding the sweet spot between knowledge or skill and passion may not come naturally. In my last book, Epic Content Marketing, I offer an alternative sweet spot model that may work in replacement.

Why is this model important? Your business might have a knowledge area that may not be relevant to customers. For example, there are a number of General Electric executives that are knowledgeable in business strategy. GE’s internal training programs are some of the most famous ever developed by a corporation. That said, that knowledge may not translate into solving a customer issue or pain point. So GE’s knowledge of business strategy may not work in the sweet spot model, depending on the customers GE is targeting with a Content Inc. initiative.

Doug Kessler, cofounder of content agency Velocity Partners, believes the sweet spot is three-dimensional: it’s important to know the exact size, shape, and depth.

“Size—your sweet spot should be a focused area; as tight a focus as possible without leaving stuff out.”

“Shape—you need to know exactly where your expertise reaches and where it stops.” Just because you have knowledge of certain areas doesn’t mean that authority naturally extends to other areas.

“Depth—your expertise goes as deeply as it needs to go; you don’t have to pretend it goes deeper.”

I’ve found that this sweet spot example gains more traction in a larger enterprise environment, and I’ve seen both types of sweet spots work in different situations. Find the one that works best for you.

CONTENT INC. INSIGHTS

The Content Inc. model begins with the sweet spot, the intersection of your knowledge or skill area and your passion. While it’s possible to develop a sweet spot without a passion point, it’s the passion that gives us our drive to continue until we build a successful Content Inc. model.

While we have many knowledge and skill areas, we have much fewer passions. Life is too short to work on something every day that we are not passionate about, so you may want to start with you passions first.

If your company is already established, consider replacing your passion area with a customer pain point to develop your sweet spot.