Building Your Category of One with Content, Community, and Curiosity

The relevance of the Category of One concept in the corporate world is that it focuses on the unique capabilities and mission of the companies for solving complex problems. It does not strive to compete or pull each other down (a strategy adopted by losers).

It entails empowering the community members with refined credentials and a generous spirit to help them serve the larger community. The members understand and appreciate the macro mission for which they are together.

Here is a discussion of how the Category of One concept can change the landscape of your business. This blog features the expertise of Utkarsh Amitabh, Founder and CEO of Network Capital, one of the world’s largest career intelligence communities.

Methods to Build a ‘Category of One’

Content creation companies build a Category of One when they focus on their core values and mission. It strives to give a renewed sense of purpose while playing the infinite games on what they want to do and why. To achieve this, they first need to follow the methods below.

Building a community

Building community is all about scaling trust, intimacy, and a sense of belonging in community members and creating the narrative of a shared sense of purpose for them. These elements are the fundamental design principles for building a community.

Content creators need to build a culture and a community-driven system where peer-to-peer learning happens at a defined scale. It serves as a platform that codifies the unique knowledge of each community member and scales it. This encompasses pooling in the intellect and empathy of the millennials from all over the world.

Building community or being a part of a community helps creators reinvent themselves. It leads them to introspect to ascertain ways to add more value to the system. This induces network effects, the community-driven systems where the addition of every new community member makes the network stronger, smarter, and more robust.

These effects are beneficial to the community and the creator economy. It facilitates organic growth by bringing specific value to the network and keeping the intimacy alive.

Creating quality content

Producing quality content is a vital component of any growth strategy. The focus must be to excel the content creation skills of the community members day by day and strengthen the creator economy.

Content that serves a unique purpose lasts the most in the minds of the end consumers (readers, viewers, or listeners). They resonate with the content and take on the role of making it viral within and beyond the community.

Creating quality and audience-specific content requires considerable research, editing, time, and coordination. A Category of One content provides meaningful insights to the consumers or subscribers and addresses their unique needs.

Each community member feels responsible for leaving a lasting legacy of valuable, long-term, and relevant content on the internet for generations to consume for years. They create an ecosystem of generating innovative solutions for content creation to build a Category of One. It reaps benefits to them for the rest of their lives.

Content creation also entails disengaging oneself from the digital noise (having short-term relevance). It focuses on the matters least talked about or written. The Category of One content is unique and stands the test of time in the long run. But it requires the content creators to get better every day and compound their learning curve.

Curiosity

If good content is a stack, then its core pillar depends on how and where the content creators channel their inner curiosity to nurture that content stack. Expertise or a ‘know-it-all’ mindset has no place in building a Category of One in the long run.

Curiosity makes a creator a better version of themselves with each passing day, competing with themselves. They then do not focus on what they know the best or are experts at.

They focus on areas that they are intrinsically curious about and propel them to look within to find ways to create their Category of One. Following their natural curiosity will always generate favorable results for the content creators.

Note: This blog is an excerpt from a session on Evolving Agencies: Building Your Category of One with Content, Community, and Curiosity with Utkarsh Amitabh, Founder and CEO of Network Capital. The session was part of Elevate–a global virtual content summit organized by Pepper Content, bringing together industry leaders in content marketing.