How I Use Roam Research To Become a Better Marketer

Over the last two months, I started using a new knowledge management tool called Roam Research.

I was never a big fan of knowledge management tools.

I've tried using Evernote, Dropbox Paper, Notion (single-player). But I always found myself defaulting back to Google Docs, and hastily scribbled notes.

The above approach was clunky, but it was serviceable.

I started trying Roam out two months ago when I was stuck in government quarantine.

The headline - "a note-taking tool for networked thought; as powerful as a graph database" drew me in.

What is Roam?

Here's a quick primer about Roam.

Roam is a note-taking tool. But here's where it differs from other note-taking tools.

The very core of Roam is the concept of the graph.

In Roam, each document is a node. There is no hierarchy, no linearity, no nesting - which is so prevalent in other knowledge management tools like Evernote.

It's basically a giant graph database, consisting of your documents and the connections between them.

Bi-directional linking

The killer feature is the bi-directional linking engine that connects topics together.

“Almost everything you type naturally lends itself to be linked to other topics in your database, and you constantly discover new opportunities to interlink your information." -- Nat Eliason, Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It

This allows you to create documents that link to other documents around a central topic.

Think of it like a neural network, where you have millions of neurons interacting with each other. The magic is not in the neurons, but in the connections between them. This is similar to how Roam works.

The bi-directional linking engine allows you to link existing, or new topics - Roam will automatically collect all documents where the topic is referred to.

Using Roam as a Marketer

So, how do I use Roam to become a better Marketer?

As someone who is trying to become a better marketer, I consume information voraciously.

"If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters – don’t wish to seem knowledgeable. And if some regard you as important, distrust yourself." – Epictetus

Long form blog posts, webinars, podcasts, YouTube videos, masterclasses, physical books, LinkedIn posts, scientific papers, research journals, industry reports, customer interviews, marketing emails from other vendors... I think you get the point.

When you expose yourself to so much information, being able to remember, synthesize, and make use of the information effectively becomes challenging.

This is a big pain point that Roam solves well.

The Zettelkasten method

I am a fan of the Zettelkasten method.

Niklas Luhmann, a proflific German scholar who published over 70 books and over 400 research papers, attributes his productivity to Zettelkasten.

“I’m not thinking everything on my own. Much of it happens in my Zettelkasten. My productivity is largely explained by the Zettelkasten method” -- Niklas Luhmann

I won't go into the specifics of Zettelkasten in this post.

But Roam allows you to use the Zettelkasten system effectively.

Documents are stored in such a way where they can easily surfaced under the correct context, that is useful for you, in a given point in time.

If this sounds strange to you, you have to first understand how your brain works.

Your brain is good for coming up with ideas, for creativity, and seeing the big picture. But it's not built to store massive amounts of details.

Using Roam and Zettelkasten allows me to store and organize my knowledge in a second brain.

Antifragile note-taking

The strength of Roam is that adding more information actually makes the system better. Compare this to hierarchical systems like Evernote, where an explosion of information actually degrades the overall system.

Bi-directional linking and tagging allows me to stumble upon ideas and information that I wasn't originally looking for.

I don't just use Roam for note-taking. I also use it for introspection and analogical reasoning.

Whenever I come across a new concept, or something novel that makes me go "hmm", I would ask myself the following two questions:

• What does this remind me of?
• Why does this remind me of it?

Do you see how the networked graph, and bi-directional approach by Roam lends itself nicely to the above introspection?

In future posts, I will detail how I used Roam to become more creative on an actual growth marketing project.