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Why Typewriter-Like Linear Thinking Works Better Than Tools for Content Creation

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Why Typewriter-Like Linear Thinking Works Better Than Tools for Content Creation

Marketers routinely discuss content production in terms of tools, tech, and processes. Use that app or this device, and we’ll produce better content.

We want to know which tools other marketers or content creators are using as if they might reveal the secrets to their success.

I’m not criticizing – I’m just as guilty.

It’s incredibly tempting to imagine a new tool could be the path to stress-free and frictionless creative brilliance. You know, like in all those movies where the great author sits at the typewriter and bashes out a classic novel, only pausing to load each new sheet of paper.

Why can’t I write like that? Perhaps I could if I used the same tools and adopted the same practices.

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That’s a more comforting thought than the truth: Creativity is hard.

But treating creativity as the product of tools is like discussing the art of the novel by analyzing the brand of typewriter George Orwell used.

Would 1984 or Animal Farm have turned out different if Orwell wrote with pen and ink instead of his Remington Home Portable? Probably not. And if I bought a Remington Home Portable typewriter, would I be more likely to write a classic novel than I was before? Definitely not.

Sure, without a camera, you can’t make a video. Without a mic, you can’t make a podcast. The right tools can enable different kinds of creativity. But don’t mistake the tool for the task.

The right tools can enable different kinds of creativity in #ContentMarketing. But don’t mistake the tool for the task, says @kimota via @CMIcontent Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: You Can Write Faster With This Guide

A solution in search of a problem

Tools are helpful (if not essential) for getting work done. But tools aren’t solutions – no matter what the clichéd website copy says.

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The word “solution” is a personal bête noire that I’m forever discouraging clients from using in their copy. It’s lazy, vague, and usually obscures what the product or service does.

Worse, referring to tools as solutions reinforces the idea that tools have the answers – even if we’re not sure of the question. It’s like holding a shovel and calling it a hole.

A shovel doesn’t tell you where to dig. Or how deep. Or what to do about that massive tree root you come across that threatens to scuttle your planting plans. (Yes, I’ve been working a lot in the garden lately. Why do you ask?)

I’m talking specifically about content creation tools here. Tools for distribution, analytics, asset management, and so on offer different benefits and may provide some guidance for where to dig, figuratively speaking.

But those are different tasks – more functional than creative. Tools are functional by definition. But in the creative process, too much functionality may be a bad thing.

Linear creativity: gone but not forgotten

Have you ever marveled at the handwritten manuscript of a famous novel?

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Charles Dickens’ handwriting looks virtually impenetrable to modern eyes, and his manuscripts look like they must have been difficult to decipher even for his Victorian publishers.

Image showing a page from the handwritten manuscript of They Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens.

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Creating like this is unavoidably linear. With each word indelibly applied to the page, there’s no going back – only forward. Mistakes would have to be serious to warrant tossing a page in the trash and rewriting a section.

Dickens produced only one manuscript of A Christmas Carol. No second manuscript. No V2.1, V2.2, and definitely no V4.6_Final_Final_FINAL. Rewriting the text to create a second draft would have been time-consuming. Minor mistakes were no reason to step out of the creative moment. Perfectionism just wasn’t viable.

Typewriters solved the problem of legibility – and were faster, too. But writers could still only compose in one direction. However, the typewriter era introduced the concept of cut-and-paste.

A typewritten manuscript is more uniform in spacing, making it easier to cut out and rearrange paragraphs before pasting them onto a fresh sheet. Stationers would sell long-bladed editing scissors, capable of cutting across a sheet of paper in a single snip. (You see them today in the icons that represent the cut feature in many apps).

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Cut-and-paste was still a retrospective activity. Not anymore.

Word processors have dramatically changed how we write

Word processors gave us that instant ability to delete, revise, cut, paste, check spelling, format, add styles, and otherwise tinker with the words on the page – going far beyond anything that could be achieved with a typewriter.

The line between writing and editing blurred to become almost non-existent. Creativity is no longer linear.

If you spot a mistake higher up the screen, you face the urge to move the cursor and correct it instead of typing the next sentence. And if your writing flow stutters for just a moment – perhaps as you ponder your next point or the right word – the temptation to find easier problems to fix elsewhere in the draft is hard to resist. Suddenly, you’re revising, polishing, and rearranging previous paragraphs to feel productive instead of being genuinely productive by completing the draft.

Tools that let you revise, polish, and rearrange paragraphs make you feel productive but can get in the way of completing drafts, says @kimota via @CMIcontent #ContentMarketing Click To Tweet

Or is that just me?

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Tinkering with styles and fiddling with layouts may result in a good-looking document, but at this point, it’s still an unfinished, good-looking document.

When the “perfect” tools weaken your content

Tools (or the insistence on the perfect tool) can affect content creation beyond writing, too. I worked on podcasts for a major brand a few years ago. Each episode featured interviews with small business owners about their use of technology.

No problem. All we needed to do, I suggested, was send each guest a Snowball mic with a few instructions on how to ensure good sound quality. We would then record each interview over Skype. With a little planning, I suggested, we could produce each podcast quickly and easily with minimal post-production. The guests could keep their mics as a thank you for taking part.

But the company’s marketing team was skeptical of anything too simple or low budget. Instead, they insisted that we use the company’s high-tech recording studio. Each guest flew to Sydney and stayed the night in a hotel. Then they spent half a day in the recording studio with a presenter (who also flew in), a sound engineer, some of the client marketing team, and me.

In this studio environment, many interviewees became self-conscious about their responses – even though they felt fine talking about the same topics over the phone just a few days earlier.

Meanwhile, the marketing team continually pressed the intercom to interrupt with suggestions and feedback. And once the guests realized multiple takes were possible, they also stopped the recording whenever they wanted to repeat an answer. “Sorry, I stuttered a bit there. Can I try again?” It didn’t matter if no one else noticed or that the response sounded perfectly natural. Perfectionism reigned.

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The takes and retakes – along with the post-production costs – added up.

The sound quality may have been as good as any major broadcaster, but the interview quality suffered. The conversations were drained of spontaneity and zest, edited together from a mess of second, third, or fourth takes – a couple of minutes here, a few seconds there.

Do your tools help or hinder?

Just because tools enable you to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Sometimes, the result might be little or no better than if you’d used the most basic tools.

When selecting tools for content creation – for yourself or the team – try not to be tempted by shiny features and specs that supposedly give end users more flexibility, customization, and control. All that does is make those users responsible for more decisions that ultimately matter less than the creativity they supposedly enable.

Technology can help most with creativity when it stays out of the way.

Some apps offer a stripped-down writing experience akin to using a typewriter. The simple writing tool Draft, for example, supports basic markdown language. However, it also provides what they call Hemingway mode, which enforces that linear writing discipline. Delete is disabled along with just about everything else. You can only type and type and type, with no going back. You can’t even move the cursor to a different spot.

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When it’s time to edit, your team can collaborate on and mark up Draft articles before publishing them directly to your CMS, social channels, and more. Simple and minimalist from beginning to end.

I recently discovered Descript for rich media, which makes editing audio or video as easy as editing a transcript. I don’t think Descript will make my other editing tools redundant just yet. But for a simple rough cut, editing from the transcript keeps me focused on the content – the words being spoken, for example – instead of working in an editing console so complex it could be mistaken for a flight simulator.

These tools won’t make you more creative, but they’ll make being creative a little easier. Your chosen tools should support a workflow as simple and uninterrupted as possible. Consider whether each tool adds distractions or removes them. Does it introduce more steps or eliminate existing ones? Does it create a new set of notifications that, like those Tamagotchi toys in the ’90s, continually beg for urgent attention? Or does it remove all but the most critical decisions from the creative process?

Tools for creating #ContentMarketing should support a simple and uninterrupted workflow. Do the one you use add distractions or remove them, asks @Kimota (via @CMIcontent Click To Tweet

Microsoft Word has over 700 fonts, whereas a typewriter has just one. I’m not saying you should equip your team with typewriters. I’m just saying that Orwell never lost a moment’s thought to whether Animal Farm might look better in 12-point Helvetica.

All tools mentioned in this article are identified by the author. If you’d like to suggest a tool, please add it in the comments.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute




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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

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