BTL 7: Developing your own content

Our last lesson discussed ideas about starting to engage using comments and curation. There will, however, come a point when you need to create your own content, because there is no other way to express your ideas.

There is one very important question to bear in mind: Where is the story in your message?

How you get your point across is very important. To put it bluntly, you need to tell a story, or you are just lecturing your audience—and they won’t like it. A story has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it makes a point but without necessarily being obvious about it. Stories work because they hit a chord that goes back millennia, and so we find them easy to remember—and memorable is good for thought leadership. Stories with the classic beginning–middle–end structure also cause our brains to release oxytocin, and that helps to build trust.

It is well worth thinking about how you can use stories to get your point across. There are more useful tips to help you develop your storytelling ‘muscle’ here.

Another way to tell a story is to use a metaphor. These help you to express complex ideas in terms that people will understand, by using something that is familiar. You need to be careful how you use metaphors, because there are a lot of bad metaphor blogs ‘out there’. Done right, however, they can help to make your point.