Building a Pipeline for Content Ideas
Ask anyone what they remember about a speaker they listened to a few months before and they will focus on the stories. People always remember the stories. They remember any story or narrative, anecdote or case, or any concrete example with vivid details. Nobody remembers the rest.
That simple fact explains why your speaker coach will recommend that you enrich your talks and presentations with examples and, above all, stories. Exactly the same is also true for writing. A blog post built around a concrete narrative is more compelling and more memorable than one which just explains general principles, like a textbook.
To be effective, though, a good story should also be unfamiliar. It doesn’t have to be completely new, but it should be new to most people in the audience. This is what generates the strongest memories.
So how do you generate a regular flow of new ideas so that you can fuel a content strategy for your company or personal brand without ever running out of material?
HOW TO COLLECT IDEAS
First of all, you need to develop a workflow or pipeline to collect, process and organize your ideas. Exactly how you manage your ideas is a personal choice, but all successful solutions are built around the basic idea that you separate the collection from the need. Just like you plant seeds long before you are hungry, you need to be collecting ideas before you need them.
One day, for example, I was scanning media headlines when I saw a story about an archaologist at the University of Uppsala who had published a research paper about tar production in the Viking Age (Viking Age Tar Production and Exploitation, Andreas Hennius, October 2018). This publication included an interesting conclusion: that the scaling up of tar production and the creation of infrastructure in the outlands that enabled the maritime success of the Vikings.
This story, I thought, might be useful in a presentation or talk about scale-ups, adding an unexpected dimension to the usual stories about how LinkedIn gained initial traction or how Klarna moved into global markets. Or perhaps it could be useful if one day I was ghost writing for someone in the tar industry who needs a fresh story where tar plays a crucial role. In the end it did turn out to be useful in a lecture about how to find fantastic ideas.
At the time I first saw this story I had no immediate use for it, but I added it to my ideas collection. This is a fundamental concept. The first secret of successful idea management is that you have to work continually on collecting ideas that might not be used for a long time. What makes a professional content developer different from otherpeople is that they always have a collection of ideas somewhere. Sometimes it is a file with little pieces of paper, sometimes it is a pile of notebooks, sometimes boxes of documents, sometimes text files, sometimes note management apps, and often all of the above.
To make this collection phase work you have to develop the discipline of writing down every idea that comes into your head. Even ones that seem useless at the time. Great ideas often start as very poor ones and are later nurtured until they grow into something useful. This process takes time and effort.
Later you need to review your ideas from time to time, partly to refresh your memory and partly because coming back to an old idea later will often spark more new ideas. You can also extract more value from your ideas by combining two or more to make a new, more interesting idea.
Combining ideas adds value in that often it adds a common thread or conclusion that is more valuable than each example alone. It also makes it more likely that your content is original. Other people with access to the same sources might use one of the same ideas that you have, but when you take several ideas and find a common thread you are adding something that the other people are not likely to find. For example, two people might watch Thomas Thwaite’s 2010 TED video “How I Built a Toaster”, but only someone who has also seen Gianluca Gimini’s Velocipedia project will see the common thread that runs between them, like I did in my November 2018 talk “The Surprising Science of Professional Networking”.
Very often people combine two or three different ideas in their work, but there is also a special case I call a leftover pie, where many smaller ideas are combined to make one larger whole. Often this approach is used by journalists to create stories like “Seven things they don’t teach you in business school”, but it can also result in epic works like Bohemian Rhapsody, where as Freddie Mercury explained in a 1985 Australian TV interview, he “had three songs and just put them together”.
In addition to combining two or more ideas, you also need to spend some time developing ideas. Many people believe that successful writers somehow receive perfect ideas while they get all the second-rate ones. This is not true. Everyone gets the same weak ideas, but some people work hard to develop theirs. One of the ideas in my little black Moleskine notebooks is the story of people at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport who were “trapped” in a revolving door, not realizing that it was manual, not electric. This is still work in progress. I can imagine how this might be used to explain how you need to keep pushing to succeed, but I don’t have a convincing story built around this yet.
One of the most persistent myths is that some people are born with some kind of “gift” or “talent” and have great ideas all the time, while everyone else has nothing at all or only worthless, low-quality ideas. But looking at the genesis of any book, movie, album or other creative work, you will realize that the first versions of everything are weak. In the first rough version of Star Wars, for example, Han Solo was a green, froglike alien and the rest of the story is unrecognizable.
WHERE TO FIND IDEAS
To feed your ideas pipeline you need to develop more sources. Simply using online sources is very limiting, especially if you use anything from the first page of Google search, Wikipedia or popular media because everyone else has the same inputs. There are many other valuable online sources — I often start the day scanning headlines on Feedly — but it helps to develop offline sources. When it is more difficult to find some information, you are surer that other people are unlikely to have the same thing.
One great way to get new ideas is to talk to people. A human expert can answer questions that you never thought to ask, or bring to you ideas from a different discipline. Don’t be afraid to tell random people what you are working on because it is amazing how often someone entirely unrelated to your work has some inspiration that will help you.
You can also find useful new ideas by seeing for yourself. Whenever possible, don’t rely on what Google tells you about something if you can go to look for yourself. Researching the proposed Nobelcenter on Blasieholmen in Stockholm for a presentation I could only find very poor and biased information about the proposed site. With a brief visit I discovered that the site is currently used only for parking and dumpsters, not at all the way it was portrayed by opponents of the project.
Likewise, a visit to Stockholm’s Östasiatiska Museet introduced me to a little-known Swedish geologist, Johann Gunnar Andersson. This led me to one of his books in the Stadsbiblioteket public library and also gave me a valuable story about how he was able to recognize that the fossil bones his geological assistants had uncovered were early humans. Only a geologist would recognize immediately that the quartz tools found with the bones did not come from that area.
To make compelling, vivid and memorable content you need to establish a pipeline of workflow to generate a continual flow of new material. This means that you need to look out for new ideas, write them all down and review them from time to time. Don’t start looking when you need content. On the days when you need to deliver you should be using material that is already acquired and developed. This is the secret of compelling speakers and writers, the people who have an awesome and unusual story to illustrate any point.
