I received a comment on my last post, and it made a lot of sense. And I thought, instead of addressing the comment directly, I would address it in my next post. Here’s the comment in its entirety.

 

I completely agree that writing is critical for online marketing success; in order to get more traffic of good intent to your site vs your competitors’ sites. And I agree that one of the first things that even a small business should do is dedicate resources to writing on the web. However, I do not agree that this person needs to be a specialized writer. Isn’t writing a basic business skill that we all learn in high school? Admittedly, all writers are not equally skilled. However, CEOs should be pretty good writers. So should sales engineers, in house marketers, product managers, etc. And the best part about engaging your internal employees to help with writing and engaging online is that they are the experts at what your company does. I believe it’s more difficult and costly to hire an external writer to intimately learn your business, industry, typical client needs, your products and services, etc… than it is to train, equip and incent internal employees to contribute to web content creation. At the very least, both options should be evaluated.

The comment makes several very good points, and I want to be clear what I’m really saying when I talk about using professionals.

Question: Isn’t writing a basic business skill that we all learn in high school?

Answer: Absolutely No! Just ask the editor of your favorite magazine, or any publisher. They’ll tell you that they get thousands of submissions from many would-be writers who are much better skilled at just about anything else. If you really want further proof of that, just think about how difficult it is sometimes to read your e-mail.

But the crux of the comments hinged around this:

… CEOs should be pretty good writers. So should sales engineers, in house marketers, product managers, etc. And the best part about engaging your internal employees to help with writing and engaging online is that they are the experts at what your company does. I believe it’s more difficult and costly to hire an external writer to intimately learn your business, industry, typical client needs, your products and services, etc… than it is to train, equip and incent internal employees to contribute to web content creation. At the very least, both options should be evaluated.

The short answer to this question is: ‘Yes. It would be much easier to have these people put their skills to good use.’ But we’ve all read marketing material or documents written by sales people and cringed at the overuse and abuse of the quotation marks, bolding and italicization and the blatant efforts to try and sell us something.

Writing for the Web is a different skill, even for those in the company who can write. But I’m not talking about writing per se, I’m talking about content.

·         Content managers understand first and foremost that they’ve got seven seconds with their potential customers, and they’d better make that count.

·         Content managers understand that they’re not writing just for humans, they’re writing for search engines too.

·         Content managers understand that Google searches differently than MSN, Yahoo, AOL and other portals.

·         Content managers know how to seed their content with keywords and links and images to bring both the human and spider elements of the Web back often.

·         Content managers understand how to serve up information best to their potential customers in such a way that it’s easy, manageable, and reliable.

·         And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

 

Content manages do far more than write, and that’s really the point I’m trying to get across. A good content manager is not a “writer.” Usually they rely on the specialties of other within the company, but they know how to serve it up. And in all reality, these are things sales people and CEOs shouldn’t be worrying about.

Content managers are like cooks. The raw food can be rather unsavory, but you get a good cook and they can work wonders with all the various ingredients. That’s what I mean when I talk about hiring the right people for the job.

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