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The most powerful marketing content today, the content you should be striving to create, is the stuff that creates the right discussions in the right context among the right people.

If your content is all about your company, your brand and your products, you’re missing the point of what makes today’s marketing content more effective and memorable.  In other words, you’re not getting what you’re paying for.  If your outreach is basically driven by cultivating a few opinion leaders and staying in control of your message, you’re not making the most of the new landscape and the new tools available to you.  Worse, you’re likely losing ground to competitors who are.

To Bob Duffy, senior social-media strategist at Intel, it’s not about controlling the message so much as providing the context in which information is exchanged and interpreted.

Duffy told Social Media Explorer that brands, not unlike Intel, are doing a lot of what the traditional media (and industry analysts) have always done: publishing what they learn from developers, for example, revealing best practices and creating connections between different tech players. Like his counterparts at other technology brands today, Duffy is creating the context for important discussions in the industry that will ultimately pay off down the road for his employer.

The takeaway for today’s marketing pros? Reach out to anyone who could be part of your community and jump-start the discussions you want to be part of.  Discussions to which you can add value and build your reputation as somebody who’s worth engaging on a long-term basis.  Just keep in mind that you have to stick to the subject matter of the discussion and not be a shill for your brand.  Your community is street-wise.  It is more than capable of connecting the dots. Do as Duffy does: “We don’t try to control the conversation or message, we just want to provide the context.”

What are you doing as a marketer to instigate industry discussions and engage your communities?  What are you learning from, and sharing with, the people who matter to your brand?  What kinds of connections are you creating among them?  How are you measuring it?

In his book “Corner Office”, the New York Times’ Adam Bryant interviews a bunch of CEOs and describes how they got their jobs. One of the traits of a good CEO, he says, is understanding human psychology. Specifically, CEOs who do the best jobs are the ones able to mold stars into teams. First, you have to spot the difference between a star player and team player. Then you ensure that the stars are willing and able to put the team first. The ones who can’t must go.

These team dynamics apply to writing projects, too, especially the bigger ones that cross functional lines. Creating remarkable content for successful marketing and selling involves talented individuals, “stars”, working as a team. In the end, a superior creative product emerges not by committee but by collaboration. It’s tricky to negotiate the fine line that separates the two but this is precisely what needs to happen.

The best marketing content gains and holds attention then compels some form of action by the reader. So an effective piece of content is not unlike a powerful speech. Just as a good presenter visualizes talking to a single individual instead of roomful of them, talented writers imagine they are creating a message, a letter to someone they know, vividly describing something of specific interest to that reader and asking for a response. The typical problem with marketing content is its “committee” feel. Trying to speak to everyone, it addresses no one. How does your team overcome committee-speak? How do you encourage content creation that is collaborative?

Start-up companies are not alone in making the missteps we continually see from folks who run marketing and sales today. Too often, established brands fall into the same avoidable traps. The caveats as we see them:

1. Most conspicuous is the knee-jerk tendency to putting the 20-somethings in charge of social-media marketing strategy and tactics. “Hey, they’re the digital natives, they eat and breathe Facebook and Foursquare, let THEM drive this!” sounds like an epitaph on a departmental gravestone. Rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t put total greenhorns (read: an intern) in charge of sales support or customer service, do not anoint them keepers of in-bound marketing. It’s far too elemental to the revenue line and becoming more central all the time. Make the youngsters part of the team, not the captain.

2. Obsessing on competitors to the point of aping their every move. This isn’t competitive analysis it’s competitor envy. If every time someone sends you an “FYI” describing a piece of content created by a competitor you stop what you’re doing to automatically follow suit, your company is being led by that competitor’s tactics, not your own content strategy. Monitor competitive material closely, of course, but appraise it through the prism of your own objectives and customer requirements. What are the current needs and expectations of your own users? Where do you believe your market is headed? What is most central to your content strategy? The answers to these questions will best advance your mission.

3. Asking “how high?” every time an investor screams “Jump!” Satisfied customers make satisfied shareholders. Resist the temptation to force-fit every idea or suggestion put on the table by board members and investors. Acknowledge their interest with a customer-driven response but never forget that they are advisors, not cue cards.

Props to the academics at Edit911, the guys who were instrumental in editing our book a few years years ago, for inspiring today’s post. You can read the full Monty here. Below, our expurgated version.

I. Use shorter sentences. Your readers will not only thank you, they’ll be much more likely to read you.

II. Read it aloud. If it doesn’t sound right, it’s wrong. If it sounds good, it reads well.

III. Give it to someone else to read. Preferably someone known for their candor. This is the essence of test-marketing.

IV. Outline your thoughts. This ensures a beginning, a middle and an end. It also guards against repetition and rambling.

V. In lengthier pieces, use subheads. Another way to ensure that you follow your outline.

VI. Make your main idea your compass or “true north”. If you need reminding, put it on the corner of each page as you write.

VII. Think of possible objections. If you’ve ever taken a class in debate, this is like the exercise of arguing both sides of an issue. Anticipating objections enable you to build in persuasive counter-arguments. You want your opinion to make a difference in someone’s thinking, not just make your point.

VIII. Know your audience. Never stop asking and reminding yourself exactly who your readers are as you write to them.

IX. Use spell check and grammar check. They are heavenly tools.

X. If there is one thing worse than underestimating (insulting) your reader’s intelligence, it’s overestimating their knowledge of your subject. It’s no coincidence that the best writing happens to be the clearest and simplest.