“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.“ — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dots:
· “…you’re in the business of making change happen,”
· The content creator is negotiating and brokering knowledge.
· A social entrepreneur applies the principle of value-motive.
Let me remix this a bit. Borrowing from Seth Godin’s “This is Marketing”, he makes a claim about marketers that I want to mashup for content creators. So, I say, “The change might be trivial or it may be profound. Regardless of the specifics, if you are a content creator, you’re in the business of making change happen. Denying this is a form of hiding.”
Hiding is irresponsible.
Content creators must realize they work at the hub of massive changes in business innovation driven by seismic shifts in business philosophy. All of that has materialized in gargantuan networked platforms.
To be oblivious to that; to ignore it; or to be indifferent is irresponsible.
If you are doing your job correctly your work is at the hub of product creation and product development. Development of services and communicating with audiences who will be customers of those services.
This is not a passive responsibility. But, rather, the position of an active intentional agent.
Who is a content creator?
Content creators are various types. They could be individuals, agencies, or departments. The function and job is to produce digital content: voice, visual, or written. They go out in search of the scarce resource of attention in a cacophony of noise and static produced over digital and social media channels.
Using blogs, vlogs, podcasts, or visual art content creators — working in niche market — are a conduit between the audience and the content provider.
What makes this role particularly specialized is that the content creator is negotiating and brokering knowledge of the audience’s needs and wants to a service-provider or producer who is using that information to inform product and service development.
What’s overlooked in this complex relationship is the opportunity for misalignment.
Who is a social entrepreneur?
A social entrepreneur applies the principle of value-motive and designs systems of value creation. This is different from the profit-motive that seeks value appropriation. That is, simply, because it undermines business and society.
Social entrepreneurs are serial student-teachers, masters of entrepreneurial thinking, and drive collaborative product and service development.
They desire to transform social norms by designing innovative value propositions and business models that incentivize changes in behaviors and systems.
How does social entrepreneurship lead to being extraordinary leaders?
Social Entrepreneurs have a broader view of the role of content creation to businesses. They understand that it is not enough to a content creation strategy absent of alignment with the business. They understand how businesses values, operations, management, and finance must be aligned with the new approach to customer acquisition (i.e., social media and content creation).
A customer centric approach is a 180 degree turn from 20th century business practices. In a customer centric business the lifeblood of creating value for both the customer and company is organized around an iterative approach to product and service development and delivery. That means businesses should learn how to listen to customers. They need to learn how to translate signals to meaningful information to make decisions.
This is not the model of make and push.
Content creators who want to thrive as solo creators, agencies, or departments will only thrive as long as their clients. If their clients are unaware or have not aligned their businesses to these changes in business and culture — time, effort and money will be unnecessarily wasted.
The social entrepreneur has a greater understanding of business, in general. And they have a deeper understanding of their client’s business. They are not on the fringe of the business slinging out videos, pictures, and audio. They are new leaders.
Recap
Social Entrepreneurs are new leaders driving change. Change in people. Change in systems. Content creators have an opportunity to deepen their relationships with clients to become trusted advisors not limited to content creation. However, this requires deep leadership skills — improvisational leadership — that leverages knowledge, entrepreneurial thinking, and collaboration.