#content-collab
this channel is for finding SMEs to add expertise to your content or guest posters. no link swaps pls.
Thread
Here's a new one for you - I'm looking for content leads to talk about their biggest f*ck ups. I'd love to hear from you about the strategies that crashed and burned. What went wrong, why do you think it went wrong, and what did you learn? If you're up for helping others learn from your mistakes (and adding some transparency to the content industry) I'd love to hear from you! This is for an article for Relato. (We can withhold your name if needed!)
I was Content Lead at a mental health startup and we never got more than 2 articles "perfect" enough to go out on the app. Does that count? 🥲
LOVE this (please share the piece when it's finished!!)
@Brinda Gulati sure does! What do you think happened? Any takeaways or learnings for you?
We had to kill one major content project the minute we launched it because we didn’t have an approval from a senior stakeholder. It was a project meant for digital PR/link building so by the time we removed the project, my team has already started reaching out to journalists/websites. I can’t name the company in question, but feel free to reach out if this sounds like something that may fit your article
We built a landing page, produced a video and noone clicked to view it because of a technical issue when sending emails about it. It was a total flop.
@Rosie We tried to reverse engineer the success of our competitors/inspirations and while it started off as a fun creative exercise, we got so lost in the minutiae that eventually an article would be rejected wholly based on sometimes a couple of words because it doesn't sound like XYZ. (Even though we were brand-building on a wholly different note.)
Plus, the problem was with far too many stakeholders involved. As Content Lead, in theory, I was supposed to have final say, but by the time it reached the top, the feedback process had become a blackbox. We had a "checklist" but even if an article scored 18/20 let's say, there would still be something "missing" that the key decision maker couldn't articulate. And because of that very lack of verbalized articulation, we chased our tails for a solid year, wrote 100+ articles between the 4 of us, but nothing ever went out to the app.
Even if we were trying to achieve perfection, no one knew its definition.
@Brinda Gulati that's rough. "As Content Lead, in theory, I was supposed to have final say, but by the time it reached the top, the feedback process had become a blackbox." - I'm hearing a lot of this!
@Yonit aaaaaarghhhhh this one just hurts!
It did, I was sure it would work so well