11. Thinking out loud in public

Maintaining a blog or producing articles for LinkedIn is a great way to connect and engage with customers as well as build community.

Writing regularly on your corporate blog, Tweeting or even just producing articles on LinkedIn is a bit like those directors’ commentaries you used to get on special edition DVDs, where a movie director and cast would provide an intimate, shot-by-shot breakdown of how they made your favourite film. Similarly, writing for public consumption can bring nuance or clarity to areas such as your vision or purpose or even just specific product or service characteristics in ways that the best-designed and scripted web pages cannot.

Whether it’s commenting on your strategy or industry trends, new features or initiatives important to your customers, writing is a great way to build an audience and engage with customers in two-way feedback.

Being deliberate about blogging and being accessible on social media definitely helped Xero engage with the world with an authenticity and effectiveness that people were not used to. In the early years of Xero’s blog, I think Rod and I were probably the most prolific bloggers and tweeters in the company, and I suspect this will have been helped somewhat by the fact that we both had been blogging personally for some time in the lead-up to that. Comfortable thinking out loud in public, and with the keys to Xero’s WordPress account, we could log in and write, proofread (occasionally) and publish, often within 30 minutes of the impulse to do so.

However, it’s the case that this blog-first-ask-questions-later approach works best in the startup stage and isn’t so advisable when you’re larger when you have multiple stakeholders who contribute, edit or choreograph your overall comms output.

The famous Steve Jobs line, “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy”, perfectly encapsulates a startup’s unique ability to move quickly, unencumbered by bureaucracy. And particularly when you’re small and competing with large incumbents, the capacity to move quickly to communicate and engage with the outside world can be a significant competitive advantage. So I recommend you use it while you have it.

I accept that not everyone is comfortable with being out there, so first, you’ll have to overcome the awkwardness of exposing your writing skills (or your perceived lack of them) for the world to see. These days, however, services like Grammarly do an excellent job proofreading and fixing clunky prose, so there’s really not much to fear in that regard.

Making an effort to write publicly won’t light up your sales funnel overnight. Still, for a small investment of time, it can be a hugely effective way to build awareness and grow an engaged and vibrant community over time.