Weekly Alert: What’s Your Flux Capacity?

mlns='> CMAwards regular pricing deadline is today! [View Message in Browser]( / [Add Us to Safe Sender List]( Weekly News 5.29.20 Connect with CMI A Quick Audit to See If Your Content Passes a COVID-19 Exam If your content doesn’t convey awareness and sensitivity around COVID-19’s all-encompassing impact, it will affect your audience’s perception of your brand. Here’s how to check your content before you wreck your brand value. [Read more]( By Jodi Harris [Editorial Process and Teams] Some more of this week's best stuff: - [3 Secrets to Writing Better Video and Audio Scripts [Examples]]( [by]( [Robert Rose]( [Content Creation] - [Stop With the Overused and Incorrect Words in Your Writing]( by Ann Gynn [Content Creation] - [Why Guest Posting Isn’t the Answer in 2020]( Aaron Agius [Content Creation] - [Bounce Back? Nope. What You Should Prepare For Now [The Weekly Wrap]]( by Robert Rose [Trends and Research] - [How to Bring Audiences Together in the Social-Distancing Era]( by Jodi Harris [Chief Content Officer Exclusive]  A Note From Robert Rose What’s Your Flux Capacity? The world right now is filled with uncertainty and change. You might even say things are all fluxed up. Our best-laid plans and activities have been stretched, compressed, and generally bent out of shape over the past several months. Many of us wonder every day if this is the right time to come back, launch that big initiative we put on hold, return to the editorial calendar, resume selling the way we did before, or even go back to work (full stop). In this environment, the word “resilience” gets brought up a lot. How resilient are we? Can we recover quickly from stresses and bounce back into our original shape? Many frameworks have been developed to attempt to quantify resilience (examples include the [Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale]( the [Resilience Scale for Adults]( and the [Brief Resilience Scale](. But measuring resilience is difficult because it can only be observed after the successful negotiation of stresses. It’s a bit like those YouTube videos of people placing rubber band after rubber band around a watermelon until it explodes. You can’t measure how many rubber bands a watermelon can withstand before it fails – it all depends on the watermelon, the strength of the bands, how quickly you place them, and so on. That’s why most measurement frameworks simply try to identify the positive attributes that give people or organizations the capacity for resilience. This capacity is the ability to change and to form new approaches that can address future stresses. When I see resilience in marketing practices, what matters isn’t the team’s ability to get back to normal operations after a crisis. It’s the team’s ability to adapt to the next version of normal. For example, right now I’m working with a content team that, in the last 12 weeks, has had to reprioritize, revisit their content tech stack, and launch a new set of communications platforms, complete with new workflows, standards, and guidelines. They’re not thinking of going back to the old. Their jobs are now reshaped, their technology is retooled, and their governance and workflows are remade.They’ve successfully adapted. I’ve found a combination of attributes improve the ability to bounce forward: I look at resilience as the capacity for adaptation informed by conscious intention. In other words, as you’re stressed, pressed, and bent out of shape, look to whatever the challenge may be and ask three questions: - What is our capacity to adapt our current state into something new? - What is our conscious intention for making this change (if we even have one)? - Would this change, informed by our intention, move us forward or backward? Asking these questions is one way we can become more resilient. Put simply, resilience isn’t the ability to bounce back after disruptions. It’s the ability to adapt to – and bounce forward because of – disruptions. It’s your story. Tell it well. Robert Rose Chief Strategy Advisor Content Marketing Institute This article from Robert is available only in this newsletter for you, the newsletter subscriber. If you have friends that would see value in Robert's weekly updates, please have them [subscribe](. 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