Do Something With Your Marketing: Build a Burning Question

In this week's Do Something with Your Marketing, I want you to build a burning question. One of the things that I recommend people do before they go into a conference or an event, and we're obviously coming up on conference season. I record as I record this, it's early spring in 2020. And people don't get enough value from conferences. People go to these events, they take a bunch of notes, they they get enthused, they get emotionally satisfied, and then they go back to work and nothing changes, right?

You've had that experience. I've had that experience, right? We we go to some place, we go to a thing, and we're so excited, but when we get home, we don't make use of what we learned. It's a big jumble, right? Uh depending on how many after parties you went to, it could be more of a jumble than other some other times.

But we don't take action. Why not? Because what happens is people just pour a whole bunch of information on us and you know, we have to organize it and and try and figure out what to do with it. And there's nothing that we went to the event with to help us focus what we collected. Instead, it's just, I'm just gonna try and take in everything, try and learn everything.

I've seen people say that uh on social media. I'm just trying to take it all in. No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, it's good to collect information, but take in what you need most. And so what I tell people is something that my teachers in the martial arts told me.

Come to an event with a burning question. What is a question that you absolutely must have an answer to in order for you to get value and to overcome a major hurdle that you're having in your own training. I remember I was at a a seminar uh with uh headmaster Stephen Hayes, and he's like, he went around the room. What's your burning question? And some people were were ready to go.

They're like, I want to know this. And other people are like, I'm just here to learn. And there was no shaming of the people who said I'm just here to learn, but obviously, it's a lot harder to craft and tailor the content for the person who's just like, oh, I'll take anything, as opposed to the person who says, I want to learn how to win in a situation where uh two people are coming at me, one of them has a knife, and the other one is um the other one's behind me. Like, okay, that's a very specific situation. How do we deal with that kind of situation?

Now, I'm not saying your marketing question has to be quite so quite so dire, but it should be that important to you. And so come with a burning question. Well, that's the advice I've been telling people for a while. The logical question is, well, what is a burning question? How do we build one of these?

So there's a bunch of different tips that I would suggest for building a burning question. Number one, it has to be something that you deeply care about, a topic, a specific focus, uh, an obstacle, and it should be something that's meaningful to you. Now, obviously, if your company is sending you to a marketing event, and they're like, hey, you know, we're trying to solve this problem, then yes, have that question handy. But what's important to you? What's important to your professional development?

Where you're like, I I need to learn understand, I need to wrap my brain around this particular thing. You know, for example, right now, uh in the work that I'm doing, I am struggling. I am struggling to implement named entity recognition in natural language processing. Tried a bunch of different libraries, tried a bunch of different things, and I'm not getting the results that I want. And so if I were to go to a data science conference or a machine learning conference, my burning question was: I tried all these things.

How do I get named entity recognition working in a compute sensible way in the R programming language? Right? That's a very specific question that I can go to expert after expert and say, What would you do? How would you approach this problem that I'm trying to solve? So, number one is have a topic that you deeply care about and that will benefit you.

Benefit your company, yes, benefit you too. Make sure that you're going to get something out of it. Number two, have an inventory of the information, the data you've already collected. What things have you tried? Um, what have you learned?

What have you Googled uh and dug into and said, Yep, I I can't get the I can't seem to get the answer to this. Going back to my situation, I've tried like 13 or 14 different packages in uh or libraries in R and different sample code. I've collected all this information about the way it should work and what's not working for me. It's like, hmm, okay, I've got all this information that shows that I'm not just making up a question and it's or it's not unimportant to me. It's not it's not important to me.

Um it's something I really care about, it's something I've done my homework on. So I'm not asking an easy question, I'm asking a very specific difficult question. Number three is of course, have those theories or those answers you've tried that didn't work. What have you already done? What homework, what legwork have you put in so that when you come to one of these events, you can quickly uh summarize the things that you've tried.

So the person's like, oh well, you know, you should try the CRF suite uh package in R. Well, no, I I tried that. If I if I can say that relatively quickly in a compact way, when I ask my question, um, it will help that expert that I'm asking rule out that answer or say, Yeah, but did you do it right? Number four, be specific in your question and ask for the experts' view. Again, specificity matters.

How do I do named entity recognition is a broad question? How do I do it in R in a compute-sensible way, using, you know, uh the tidy format uh and ideally leveraging some of the libraries like UDPipe or Quantata? Very specific, right? So that if I'm asking that to an expert who's better than me uh and more skilled than me, they can either ask a follow-up question right away or give me some very, very specific directions. Number five, and this is the tough one, be concise, be as concise as possible, because you have a limited amount of time.

One of the things, again, that my martial arts teachers are always saying is that treat every interaction with a teacher, with an expert, with a uh someone who's got a lot more experience than you as a one-shot deal, right? Pretend you're never gonna see this person again. What's the one question that you would ask to get as the maximum amount of information back out of them? And that involves some way of the lamp, but it also involves being concise because you want to be able, if they ask a follow-up question, to have enough time to get a sensible answer. So be as concise as you can be.

And six, ask your question to as many experts as possible while you're at the event. If you're going to say uh content marketing world, and you have a question about named entity recognition for content generation, ask anybody on the the speaking roster those questions, ask your fellow attendees, hey, I'm working on this thing. Um have you ever worked in this thing? This named entity recognition? Oh, you have.

Oh, well, how did you do it? Like, this is what I've done, and it's I can't get it working. How would you do it? Right? Asking everybody that you can within reason to get multiple perspectives on your question.

So those would be the six things to do to build a burning question. There's four things not to do. Number one, this is a minor pet peeve of mine. Um, as a speaker, is someone asking a question to either seem smart or try to impress the other person or impress the room, or in the worst case of speaking, just trying to uh sneak in a plug for their company. Um but don't do that.

And my hands up, and I in my past I have done that, and I have been duly embarrassed and shamed by my teacher for doing those things. So I've done it, I get it. You want that positive attention from an expert, but your one-shot burning question is not the place to do that. Number two, don't ask a question you already know the answer to. Again, you got one shot with this person.

What's the question that you need an answer to? Right? Not a question you already know the answer to. That that doesn't help anybody. Ask the question that you just don't know the answer to, and you've worked really hard to try and find it.

Number three, don't ask a question whose answer is generally available, right? If you didn't do the legwork, you didn't Google it beforehand, i you're wasting your time and you're wasting your teacher's time or your your your uh experts' time. Don't do that. And number four, don't ask a question that's incredibly vague. Um again, a question like, so how do I do uh named entity recognition?

That's a really, really, really big question, right? And it's not something you're gonna get a usable answer from the expert. They can explain it in broad terms, but chances are if you're asking that particular question, you already probably maybe have an understanding of what the topic is. So be specific in the questions. Don't ask vague questions.

This takes time. Coming up with a burning question takes time. Um it's probably if you're serious about it and honest about it, it probably comes from research you're already doing uh or work that you're already doing, and you're hitting roadblocks, you're hitting walls, and those are the questions that make great burning questions. I've hit a wall and I can't seem to get over it. And you explain it.

What would you do? How would you go about this? What have you tried in the past that worked for you in this particular situation? Those are the ways to ask great burning questions because you will get answers that will immediately lift you over that wall if you do it, and then hopefully provide you uh a roadmap for where to go immediately after that to help you get back on your journey. In Japanese and the martial art that I practice, the word sensei literally means born before.

And it's implied that this is the person who is ahead of you on the trail, right? So they've already walked that trail, they've already been down that road, and so when you ask them a question, there's a good chance that they've been down that path and they can explain how they got around it. Now they may the way they did it may not be the way you do it, but at least they can tell you if you're stuck, here's one approach for getting around that. So that's my do something with your marketing for this week. Craft a burning question that you desperately need an answer to.

And the next event that you go to, ask that question to as many people as possible. And again, make sure it follows the the general guidelines, the six things to do, the four things not to do. If you're going to be at an event that I happen to be at, and if you're reading this in my uh weekly newsletter, uh go down to the end of the newsletter and see the events I'm I'll be at. I would love to hear your burning question. If if it's applicable.

I mean, if it's not. I'll hear it anyway. I just won't be able to offer anything usable. Um but I would love to hear your burning question at the next event that we run into each other at. As always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

Uh, leave your comments in the comments box below if you're watching this on YouTube, and uh I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.