Marketing Is Art
25/10/2015
Singapore Art Memo
24/01/2016

Why Writing

Three years ago, on November the 8th, 2012, I published my first blog post on betterness.it. At that time, I had just moved from Milan to Shanghai, and everything in my life was marked by a very specific trait: change, big change, and writing was the perfect tool in my hands to clarify the direction I wanted to take in that context. Right after seeing my first blog post, a close friend asked me a very simple question: “Why blogging? Why writing?”.  Today, as I am writing my 32nd post (about one post every month: enough or not? Honestly, I don’t know and I don’t care much, I write when I feel compelled to), it’s time to address this question, while celebrating the 3rd anniversary of betterness.it. The answer is actually twofold: on the surface, blogging is about personal branding; but at a deeper level, writing is a strong forcing factor to drive clarity.

Personal branding, or the art of establish a reputation and an identity, is becoming increasingly important both for freelance professionals as well as for corporate executives, as audiences wants to trust the people in the companies they are dealing with. The best way to build personal branding is to show off expertise, by sharing relevant content, either in the form of blog articles or speaking at events, with strong narratives based on personal experiences.

As promised in the “Betterness Manifesto”, I do write about leadership, relationship, and innovation, while over time the discussion is mostly on living these three principles within Marketing, which is my area of expertise. My posts have been read on betterness.it more than 3,600 times. Starting last year, I added Linkedin as a publishing platform, and the 11 articles I posted there have been read 2,694 times (making the professional social network my favorite publishing platform). My presentations uploaded in Slideshare, mostly related to blog posts and keynote speeches delivered at marketing events, have been accessed more than 10,000 times, as it seems busy professionals still prefer going through charts instead of reading plain text.

Maybe just drops in the ocean, but all in all it seems this work does help my personal branding. Then, there is the deeper intrinsic value of writing, even more valuable, at least to me, than the personal branding piece. Writing demands clarity; it requires to look back and rationalise lessons learned; it calls for a more precise, better defined use of words; it compels to focus on what is relevant and decluttering from information overload. And through clarity and focus, it helps to connect to people, which is the essence of good marketing. As IBM CMO Jon Iwata declared in a recent interview: “Clear thinking and clear writing are at the core of strong marketing and communication. And I mean writing very deliberately. Even though people may not read what’s been written on paper, writing expresses itself in formal and informal communication. When you hear people say “I’m not a good writer”, sometimes they’re actually not a good writer. But in my experience, chances are they haven’t thought clearly about what they want to say”.

Thanks for reading, and start writing: it’s worth it, and never too late!

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