Over the past few months, I have been reading as many HR blogs as I can find. The reason for this is simple: as a speaker/trainer on leadership / management/ innovation issues, the HR professionals in large companies are the gateway to a huge potential market for me, and so of course I am eager to learn as much as I can about this particular “buyer persona.”
I have learned a lot from reading all these blogs, but today I had something of an epiphany resulting from this experience, one which I thought was worth sharing:
So far, every single blog I’ve read by an HR professional is targeted to an audience of other HR professionals.
This is not a huge surprise. Whenever I read blogs by classical musicians, they are always (always) “shoptalk” addressed to other classical musicians. This kind of professional “monolingualism” is exceedingly common, but that’s a topic for another blog post.
I have nothing against shoptalk per se, but here is just one quick example of the benefits of addressing your content to outsiders:
I once dabbled in HR myself, although in the music business, we call it “contracting” and “personnel management.” Years ago I wrote an article titled “The Heart of an Orchestra Contractor,” and this article has gotten a steady stream of visits for over five years now. It basically tells young wannabe professional musicians how to deal with someone who might hire them. This five-year-old blog post is the number one (and number two) result in Google for “orchestra contractor.” It is also one of the most popular pages on my blog.
There are literally thousands of young musicians trying to figure out how to get ahead in the business, and as far as I can tell, I’m the only person who’s ever written a blog post to this constituency about a first-hand experience of hiring musicians. One would think there would be others, but at this writing I have never seen any. (If there are any, by writing this post I am sure I will get a quick education.)
So here is a request, and maybe a little advice, for all you HR bloggers out there: while it is terribly comfortable to talk to people who are culturally and professionally similar to yourself, there’s a much larger audience and market for you in people who are not like you. While there are many books written by veteran HR professionals geared towards other HR professionals, I’ve yet to see a publication by an HR professional on, for example, how a speaker/trainer should market their services to an HR professional.
Given just how many tens of thousands of people there are who would just love to get an edge on selling services to you, that’s a pretty nifty niche market just sitting there. And I suspect the average job hunter/employee would love to get a look into your mental processes as well. (And by the way, all your HR buddies would buy it too, just to see what you have to say.)
So again, if any of you Human Resources folks out there have any advice for folks like me that want to sell their training and speaking services to you for in-house corporate training events, well, if you blog about that, you’ll get a lot of traffic. I’ll be the first one to read it.
© Justin Locke
