Be a SME, Not a Salad

Both of this week’s Say It For You blog posts represent my reaction to Ryan Law’s very provocative piece “The Four Forces of Bad Content”. The first big negative “tell” of poor quality content, Law asserts, is a “bait-and-switch” approach, in which product Calls to Action are ‘smuggled” into an ostensibly informational article…. 

The Think eBiz Blog agrees with Law’s point about CTAs. “The blog should not be sales oriented… Provide good useful information and establish trust and credibility – sales will follow.” In this Say It For You blog, I keep coming back to the idea that business writing needs to be conversational and informational, not sales-y. Readers understand you’re writing for business purposes. Ironically, the very reason they have made their way to your site in the first place is that what you sell or what you do is a good match for their needs. It is not necessary – in fact, it will defeat your purpose as a content marketer – to punctuate the text with a “salad” of Calls to Action – either overt or disguised.

According to About.Com, “a Subject Matter Expert is an individual who understands a business process or area well enough to answer questions from people in other groups who are trying to help.” Actually, the term SME (pronounced “smee”) is not new to me.(When I was a developmental editor for Pearson Education, the course writers would turn to the SMEs for specialized knowledge to put into student textbooks.)  At Say It For You, “SME development” is all about presenting our business owner and professional practitioner clients as experts in their respective fields, a way of translating the bad advertising “noise” to which Ryan Law refers into well-considered courses of action for readers.

The “salad” concept, on the other hand, need not be considered a “force for bad”. “Cutting” or “chunking”, breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest new information is a very good teaching technique, as e-learning coach Connie Malamed explains. Still, Ryan Law is absolutely correct in that a “salad” garnished with poorly disguised CTA s represents a bait-and-switch approach doomed to fail.

In their fact-finding mission, online readers have arrived at a particular site, looking specifically for information about what that business or that practitioner does and knows about. The tone of the blog content should assume that with complete information, readers will translate that information into action.