TRAINING & MARKETING WITH MINDMAPS

Content Mapping for Success

Do you communicate for business?

Ha! Of course you do.

Then keep reading, and you'll learn no fewer than 4 challenges most of us face in doing so, how mindmaps can help, how to go about using them, and where to start.

Training & Marketing with Mindmaps - Part 1 [ 9:29 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1917)

Part 1: Balancing Time-Linear Detailed Content (WHY)

Whether you deliver your training or conduct your learning-based marketing campaigns live (classroom seminar, teleseminar or webinar), time-delayed (podcast, audio/video blog) or packaged (CD/DVD, book), your students or prospects receive a stream of information in time-linear form.

Let's take, for example, an audio tele-course, such as Alex Mandossian's Teleseminar Secrets. This is an 8-module, extremely rich, highly sophisticated training in the art and science of creating profitable teleseminars for marketing and training. Students consume over 150 hours of audio content. Even the preview session is over 3 hours long. Add to that hundreds of pages of action guides, module summaries, and spectacular presentations. Diligent students will go through the entire material once, perhaps twice. (Many people may not even be that diligent, in spite of having spent thousands of dollars to attend.)

Let's take, as a second example, a no-cost promotional series such as Mark Harris' and Jay Abraham's Thought Leader Secrets Mini-Course. This is an 6-part series of short but very rich and powerfully impactful materials, delivered as a combination of audio, video, teleseminar and text. Even the first lesson, a 10-minute animated video, is rich in insights. In this case, a diligent student must spend a few hours for each run-through, and it will take several such run-throughs to really get all its value.

What do these and numerous other resources have in common?

Challenge #1: Time-Linear Delivery

The are all time-linear.

What does that mean?

Simply put, you receive the information over time. Yes, you can “jump in” at any point (e.g., read from page 22 of the transcript, listen to segment 3 of the audio stream, watch from slide 65 of the Spectacular Presentation, read only items 5-7 on page 4 of the Action Guide), but to really get what you’ll need (and often paid for), you’ll have to listen or read over some time period.

Depending how well indexed the content is, that “time period” may be longer or shorter. It’s never really quick!

But there is a second issue you're faced with.

Challenge #2: Detail-Oriented Delivery

This one is much subtler: they tend to be detail-oriented.

What do I mean by “detail-oriented?”

Simply put, when consuming this material, you are more likely to see each tree (or even each leaf), but less likely to view the entire forest or an area of the forest. When you listen to a replay, you’ll hear every single word, every time. When you watch a video lesson, you’ll view every single frame and hear every single word, every time. When you read a page of a transcript, you’ll see every single word on that page, every time.

So what?

The problem is that we are all time-constrained, yet we need to learn, absorb, act, and re-learn.

The question is: How do we mitigate our time limitations with our limited capacity to learn?

Past Solutions: The Software Industry

Have we done it before?

I started my career in the software industry. In the old and not-so-old days, for every software product we built, we used to produce two manuals. One was a User’s Guide, and the other was a Reference Manual. They both contained roughly the same material, with a huge difference.

The User’s Guide was meant to be read like a novel: from the beginning to the end (or to however far into it one had the patience to get!). It was pedagogical, starting with simple things and evolving into more advanced topics; it had a story. In other words, it was designed to be consumed in a time-linear fashion.

The Reference Manual was meant to be read like a cookbook or an encyclopedia. You read what you needed, when you needed it, and mainly to refresh memory. It was heavily indexed, highly organized, and well structured. It other words, it was non-linear.

Present Time Challenge & Solutions

Back to the present time.

The best trainers, teachers, gurus, marketers and experts produce amazingly much and often superbly great learning content: teleseminars, videos, transcripts, and such. These are the modern times’ “user’s guides” to whatever the topic is. They are all time-linear, and that is good. (I don't think we can replace the time-linear forms, but that is a subject for another episode.)

But somehow, somewhere we’ve lost the other side, the “reference manual” version, the non-linear delivery. We’ve lost the means to see both the trees and the forest. We’ve lost the means to be able to quickly, efficiently and precisely go back to some piece of information and recall it, or even go back to an entire sub-theme and efficiently recall it.

The good news is that there are solutions to this problem. One of the most powerful such solutions is content mapping, that is creating a well-structured, well-balanced mindmap of the time-linear content.

How?

Their highly structured nature lends itself to rapid, efficient, laser-focused reference.

Their hierarchical nature makes them perfect for both “forest and trees” views, and many in between.

Their radial appearance makes them non-linear, and thus ideal for focused review and recollection.

Before I can get to what exactly is a mindmap, what makes a mindmap a great content map, and how can you create one of these, I need to lay out some more foundational ground.

In the next episode, I will reveal two more difficulties modern training, teaching and marketing content faces when consumed by their intended audience.

See you then…