Advertising Marketing PR

August 4, 2017August 4, 2017

Defining My Ethical Boundaries

(Note: This is based on one of the prompts from Robert S. Kaplan’s book What You’re Really Meant to Do.)

So last time I shared some of the ethical guidelines I’ve striven to adhere to over the years I’ve spent working and advising clients and employers. Guidelines are great, but it’s also important to know where the absolute boundaries are, the lines you won’t cross.

Just as with anything else regarding personal and business ethics, adhering to these guidelines and boundaries is going to bring you into conflict at some point or another with someone you work with. That’s inevitable. It’s not that these are bad people. Most of the time it’s just because they aren’t as well-informed as you might be on a particular issue so has a different perspective. They simply think the guardrails are in a different place. It’s therefore incumbent on subject matter experts to educate and inform, providing the background and context for why a line in the sand isn’t just a subjective, arbitrary one but is objective and immovable.

So Where Are My Own Boundaries?

When I think about the lines I’ve drawn over the years in the workplace they almost all have to do with transparency and misrepresentation. It’s been a “thing” for me in more than a few meeting and I’ve taken every opportunity to explain to the other people in the room or on the phone why it’s so important to me.

Long before the FTC was even considering guidelines around disclosure of paid sponsorships or the reviewing of free products, my coworkers and colleagues and I were pushing for anyone we worked with to be transparent about the relationship. Back when Tom Biro and I were putting together an influencer review program, we included a caveat in the contract saying that while participants were not required to write about the product on their blogs, if they did so they needed to disclose that they got it from us as part of a marketing effort.

That focus has continued over the years. Influencers or fans recruited into marketing plans needed to explain to their audience that they were getting special access or products from the company. Paid ads that were placed on the networks I was managing needed to include clear messaging flagging it as an ad. This was all before Facebook or Instagram put tools in place to formalize these disclosures.

While that commitment to disclosure has remained firm, I will admit to evolved thinking on another issue. Like many of those in my generation, I was initially strongly against any form of ghostwriting in the budding world of corporate blogging. If a post said it was coming from the CEO or CMO, it darn well better be coming from the CEO or CMO.

I’ve mellowed on that, though. Eventually, it became clear that these blog posts weren’t all that different from other C-level communications like bylined op-eds or shareholder letters which were often written by marketing teams and signed off on by their eventual “authors.” Not only am I more understanding of this being a common practice, I’ve done it myself.

What Are You Comfortable With?

It comes down to what sort of tactics you’re comfortable not only with signing off on but being held accountable for. Someone may not have a problem in theory with saying no, influencers don’t *need* to disclose how they’re being paid for creating marketing content. But when you explain how it can embarrass both the agency they work for and the client they’re working with, ultimately getting them fired for encouraging the violation of clear rules, one would hope their tune would change.

What’s been your core issue, the hill you’ve been willing to die on?

July 28, 2017July 28, 2017

In Defense of Scheduled Social Media Posts

If you talk to the purists, the ones who frequently litter their motivational talks with terms like “authenticity” and “connection,” you may come to believe that scheduling social media posts is a cardinal sin. You can’t be authentic, the thinking goes, if you’ve scheduled posts to be published at a later time or date. Social media marketing should be immediate and anything less than that is a crime. Variations on this argument have popped up here and there ever since the first scheduling tools were introduced.

That argument is bunk.

The thinking behind it isn’t wrong. Social media should be different from the rest of your marketing to a degree. That largely comes from being one of the few forms that directly with the audience, not only through a media vendor, be it paid or earned placement. It’s also more or less the only outlet that allows for immediate feedback from that audience. Social still needs to be part of the overall marketing plans, though and should be subject both to its own and overall business goals and objectives.

There are several advantages to scheduled content, including:

Ensures *something* is being posted: Even the best content programs are going to want for lack of material from time to time. There were days where, even with a program that regularly posted 40 items a day across 15 social profiles, there was just no news to curate. Without those posts I’d already scheduled a couple days ago, things would have gotten awfully quiet, which would impact engagement and network growth. It also just would have looked bad.
Gives the team a breather: Not everyone has access to a global team of a dozen staffers who can publish in the moment 24 hours a day, seven days a week. People sleep, take the weekend off and are otherwise offline. Or maybe the whole team is being pulled into a day-long meeting. Whatever the case, scheduled posts let you keep posting when the team is occupied elsewhere or enjoying the rest of their lives.
Allows you to resurface old content: If you’re running a decent content program you likely have a healthy repository of “evergreen” material in the archive that continues to be relevant long after it was first published. Spreading out new posts to old material is a great way to fill in those gaps where nothing new is happening and increase the ROI you see from that content’s production.
Lets you hit consistent beats: One of the best things I did on a couple different client programs was say “This type of post is going to always be on this day at this time.” It meant that each morning we knew exactly what was going to be published and, more importantly, the audience had the same expectation.

The important caveat here is this: It’s all flexible. If you have a post scheduled for Thursday at 2 pm because you don’t think anything interesting will be happening that day but then all kinds of news breaks, move the post. It’s simple. Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, SproutSocial and all the rest of the software that allows for scheduling will let you edit that schedule. So adjust your ed cal, change the planned time and you’re set.

With X% of your daily content cadence planned and scheduled in advance, you’re also freeing up resources to focus on filling in the remainder of your editorial calendar. The team can then work on creating new material, curating outside news and other activities.

Don’t buy into the idea that scheduling social media posts is some kind of heresy. It’s not. It’s an effective use of resources and a great way to bring consistency to your content marketing program.

July 21, 2017July 21, 2017

How the Needs of the Industry Have Changed Over the Years

(Note: This is based on one of the prompts from Robert S. Kaplan’s book What You’re Really Meant to Do.)

I’ve been doing content marketing for over 10 years, in some form. As I’ve said on a number of “get to know you” phone calls, that’s changed a lot over the years. It used to be about blogs, RSS and wikis. Then social networks started popping up and we needed to incorporate them. Then those social networks started adding photos, then videos and so on. So the platforms that have hosted the end result of the strategy I and my colleagues would develop certainly changed over time.

The skills and mindset necessary to do the job, both on a strategic and tactical level, also changed over time. Here are a few examples of how.

Visual Thinking

When I started out, it was mostly about text. Blogs offered writers a great outlet for their skills and if you were a decent writer you could get noticed in the early days. Eventually Flickr caught on with photographers and YouTube with video producers, but before mobile prevalence adding media to either was clunky, at best, and had to be done after the fact for the most part.

Eventually, though, the rise of Instagram along with more multimedia adoption by Twitter and Facebook along with YouTube’s mobile functionality meant text wasn’t enough anymore. People clearly responded more to photos, videos and eventually GIFs and that had to become part of the thinking that went into all content creation. That became even more important as Snapchat and other messaging apps that were built almost solely around media rose to mass adoption status. It wasn’t just about the update, it was about what graphic would accompany that update.

Get Over Content Permanence

Blogs and social networks promised you the ability to build up a whole history online. You could look back days, weeks, months and years to see what you’d posted and take it all as a portfolio with you wherever you went. We trained an entire group of young people to be careful what they posted online because it was going to follow them their entire lives. There were massive debates over whether to delete posts and how to mark edited posts to draw attention to the most relevant updates.

Again, tools like Snapchat have upended what used to be the law of the land. Now these shots you’re spending hours planning and setting up are gone in a heartbeat, as soon as they’re consumed. There’s no archive to go back to. The rules and best practices around creation might be the same, but there’s no record of it after it’s sent out to the audience. It’s lost, like teardrops in the rain…

Dig Deep Into the Audience

Let’s be clear, there was never really a time when knowing nothing about the target audience was acceptable. But now the extensive nature of the metrics and insights that are available either natively on social platforms or through third-party tools means there’s no excuse to not know a lot about who it is that’s connected with you on those networks and who’s interacting with the content being published.

That’s exactly what clients expect. “I’m not sure” is a terrible answer because the numbers are right there. It means things can be planned better and content more targeted for maximum appeal. It also means you’re that much further on the hook if things don’t turn out fantastically. It’s now table stakes for anyone at any level of a content marketing program to be able to navigate Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and other tools to extract audience data.

Pay Up to Achieve Reach

Remember the halcyon days of the social web, when all you needed to succeed was good content that was search-optimized? I know I do. But those days are long gone. Search is no longer the primary way people find what they’re watching or viewing, replaced by social networks. And those networks are increasingly putting restrictor plates in the form of feed algorithms in place to decide what is “important” for people to see based on mysterious factors.

As part of that, the promise has been that if you want to escape the shackles of the restricted feed all you have to do as a publisher is open your wallet. If you don’t, you’re saying you’re happy with reaching 1-2% of the audience you spent years building up on Facebook or elsewhere, versus the 8-10% that could be yours for a few sponsorship dollars. Again, content marketing pros at all levels now need to be well versed in the paid promotion options offered by social networks so they can make appropriate recommendations to their clients.

Do you have any further thoughts? What do you think has changed the most in your job over the last few years?

July 20, 2017July 18, 2017

Defining Core Versus Premium Content

Last week when I was taking issue with a point of view around focusing on “campaign” content at the expense of a steady content marketing cadence I used a couple terms: “Core content” and “premium content.” I offered brief explanations in that post but wanted to take the chance to offer some more in-depth definitions of what I meant with those labels.

Core Content

Core content is the meat and potatoes of any content marketing program. It may not be flashy, but it’s the foundation the program is built on. Without it, for a variety of reasons, the entire construct will come crashing down.

What’s the Cadence

Ideally, core content is being published multiple times most every day of the week. There are countless examples of best practices from various companies that say you should post on Twitter no more than X times per day, on Facebook no more than X times per week and so on as well as which time periods are best. What I’ve found over the years is that while those are fine guideposts, the best results come from digging into the metrics and adjusting your own program accordingly. If you find you get more engagement when you post twice per day on Facebook, post twice per day, assuming you have the content to support that. Don’t be beholden to general tips at the expense of your own program’s success.

Where is It Coming From

Hopefully the legwork regarding content sources has been done long before you’re having a conversation about post cadence. A full content audit of an organization will uncover what kinds of news is being shared internally (e.g. is someone putting together a recap of relevant news for their department that you can tap into), what the usual schedule of product announcements and other news is, whether you can curate news from outside sources and more. Whether it’s internally- or externally-sourced, all of it should – or at least can – feed into the content program. The determination can then be made as to when and where to share that news based on timeliness, which audiences are most likely to be interested in the story and how similar stories have fared on various platforms.

What Are the Benefits

Here’s where it’s important to remember that not all social networks are created equal. This isn’t like RSS or email, where content lands in an aggregator and is viewed by the recipient at a time of their choosing, regardless of when it was delivered. Social networks move fast and quickly disappear posts. On Twitter updates are lost to the stream, on Facebook and Instagram they have to fight their way through the algorithm and could appear hours or even days after they’re published. So an approach that includes multiple posts throughout the day provides more opportunities to reach someone at the time they’re paying attention to their social networks. Regular posting also creates more touchpoints for people to latch onto. That post from two hours ago may not have been interesting to them, but this one they just saw now is and so they’ll RT it.

Not only is relevance and engagement a major benefit of an approach that includes core content but so is audience acquisition. All those touchpoints that give people new chances to RT and amplify your message also mean they’re exposing your messaging to their own network. That means you’re reaching a new audience and potentially making some of them your own. If you’re not publishing regularly, you’re not taking advantage of organic audience acquisition.

How Is Success Reported

The metrics pulled here should be evident: Engagement, click-throughs, network growth are all basic numbers that are based just on the social aspect of the program. Digging in a little deeper, though, numbers can be reported on site visits, lead conversions and more that speak more directly to business goals like sales, leads and more. Here’s another benefit of a daily, regular, organic publishing cadence: Reaching people with specific and actionable messages that go beyond “news” and include sales, signups and lots more.

Premium Content

By way of contrast, premium content is bigger in scale. These are the big pops of more substantially content that’s been planned for a longer period of time and is generally tied to something that’s larger scale than the news that trickles out of a company regularly.

What’s the Cadence

This is largely going to depend. I’ve seen programs that have launched a premium content execution every quarter and others that save their powder for a once-a-year major event. The key point here is that everyone involved is in agreement that some upcoming moment – an industry conference, the release of a major new study, a new product announcement – is worth pulling out all the stops for.

Where is It Coming From

Most likely these moments are being sourced internally. Again, they’re going to come from Marketing, which lets you know a big campaign is coming up, or Product, which lets you know a new item is being made available or something along those lines. This is why it’s so important, when you’re setting up a program and aligning stakeholders around goals, for that conversation to involve representatives from as many different departments as possible.

What Are the Benefits

These are the moments that only have the potential to become big because of the daily work that’s been done on the core content program. It’s largely through those efforts that you have the audience that will now turn its eyeballs to these bigger moments. There are the same potential benefits – sales, conversions, engagement, time-on-site etc – but you won’t achieve any of them if the audience isn’t there. Conversely, these big pops can support the core program as more people become attached to the brand’s profile and so on. The best premium content moments, I’ve found, come along with traditional press outreach efforts that can result in industry or general coverage, increasing the benefits for the program.

How Is Success Reported

Success can be found in many of the same numbers as for core content, though there may be specific metrics you’ll want to track and report on that are dependent on what form this premium execution has taken. So if it’s a whitepaper, you’ll want to track downloads. If it’s a VR experience you’ll be tracking views. If it’s an interactive timeline you’ll be tracking site stickiness and specific engagement points. Again, though, these metrics should be agreed upon by everyone involved before launch so everyone knows what success will look like.

Conclusion

In most everything I’ve laid out here I’m assuming the program being run is primarily focused on organic – meaning non-paid – content. Many advocates of the campaign-centric mindset rely on paid promotion of social posts to boost the reach of the program. In my experience paying for bigger moments is fine and certainly recommended. But if you’re relying on it to achieve any sort of substantial audience reach or engagement it’s because you’re making up for not doing the hard work that’s involved in running an organic content program with a regular publishing cadence.

There are some who eschew the “core” and “premium” labels in favor of something like “Hero, hub and hygiene” but I’ve found the definitions don’t quite match up and are indicative of a different approach. Not worse, but different and not quite analogous to what I’ve laid out here. That’s a post for a different time.

July 11, 2017July 10, 2017

Discarding Cadence for Campaigns is Shortsighted Content Strategy

There’s a guest post on the Spredfast company blog that takes the position we in the content marketing industry need to focus less on cadence and more on campaigns. Rachel Datz, the guest author, is of the opinion that emphasizing a certain number of posts on each social channel per day means content is being posted for its own sake, not as part of a bigger strategic objective. Instead, she argues, the mindset needs to be around “storytelling” but that we can only get there if we drop the daily/weekly minimum post count.

There are parts of Datz’s argument I agree with. All social strategy needs to be driven by business objectives. That might be pure engagement or audience acquisition, it might be a conversion of some kind. And she’s right that only be selecting the right channels to meet those objectives will a program succeed.

I don’t disagree that there’s much more importance now placed on making sure posts are seen than just the sheer volume of content produced. Her solution to post less frequently and pay for exposure is pretty much exactly what Facebook and Instagram want content marketers to do. It’s why those platforms have put restrictor plates on organic reach. It’s also how many social CMS platforms have been reconfigured, to lump everything into a campaign.

Campaigns are great, but my question is this: For programs that don’t have the dollars to pay for audience attention, what foundation are those campaigns meant to be built on?

The kinds of campaign Datz talks about are what I and my colleagues used to refer to as “premium content.” Those are the big spikes that come along once every two months or so that promote big events or major efforts. Those are the moments to pull out infographics, white papers and other content that is meant to draw people’s attention out of the everyday.

Without a bed of core content – the everyday small news that’s posted – those premium moments are left on their own, though. The core content, the 3x daily posting on Twitter, the daily post on Facebook etc, is what builds up that audience. That’s what makes the account a valuable one to follow.

Put it this way: If I’m not already engaging with and interested in what the company is posting every day, why am I going to be interested in those campaign stories?

Also, how does audience acquisition happen in the periods between those campaigns? While I don’t question that lots of people will find the account during the campaign periods, discounting the fallow periods and not continuing to pursue a strategy of consistent core content is shortsighted. You’re leaving people on the table, so to speak.

I’ve been responsible for a number of content programs over the last 10+ years and in every case I’ve counseled my clients to adopt a strategy of consistent daily publishing. Here’s why:

If you’re not putting messages out there you’re not giving the audience any opportunities to see your name.

If you’re not letting people see your name regularly, you’re ceding mindspace to the competition.

If you’re not putting messages out there regularly you’re not giving the audience any opportunities to amplify those messages.

If you’re not giving the audience opportunities to amplify your message, you’re not taking advantage of a significant source of organic growth.

And if you’re not publishing regularly, during different parts of the day every day, you’re ignoring big chunks of the audience.

It’s the equivalent of saying a local business should pull in the sign hanging over its storefront and only focus on TV commercials. Those are fine, but they’re not everything. It’s a mix of all many different content types, both big and small, that add up to success. Abandoning a consistent publishing cadence may be fine for brands with deep pockets who can afford to buy their way to the attention of hundreds of thousands of people, but that’s not everyone. Even for those who can afford it, the ROI is *much* different.

I’m not discounting a focus on a “storytelling” approach to content marketing, though that term gets thrown around a lot by many people who don’t understand what it really means. It’s just that needs to be one tactic in a bigger program that also includes the kind of core content that creates everyday connections and opportunities. Yes, the social marketing world is shifting, but there are ways to take advantage and reap the benefits of both approaches.

June 30, 2017June 29, 2017

Movie Marketing Madness: The Little Hours

Religious humor is funny, at least if you’re the kind of person who can laugh at themselves to any extent. Seeking to test the boundaries of even that concept is this week’s The Little Hours. Based in part off a section of The Decameron, a 14th-century Italian collection of short stories, the movie stars Aubrey Plaza, Alison Brie, Kate Mucuci and Molly Shannon as nuns in a convenient overseen by a priest played by Fred Armisen.

These aren’t your conventional nuns, though. Not only do they drink, swear, threaten the local farmers and have wanton sex, they…well, there’s no kicker there. They do all that. One day a young man played by Dave Franco seeks shelter in the convent, passing himself off as a deaf mute so as not to draw attention to himself. But his presence in the convent just adds another to a long list of temptations the sisters already can’t resist.

The Posters

The first poster is pretty on-point thematically. It’s meant to look like a stained-glass window and features an image of Reilly standing over the other characters like he’s a prophet or something, with everyone else dressed in the garb of a convent. It’s not all that funny, but it conveys the basic premise that the story takes place in a religious setting well, so we’ll call it a success.

Another poster took the same approach, framing all the main characters in a halo of heavenly light. This time at least the faces of the actors are more clearly shown. There’s no tagline or copy, just some positive critic’s quotes at the top.

A series of character posters put each one of the major characters within an angelic glow that’s undercut by the often horribly-inappropriate quote from them. These are pretty funny.

The Trailers

The red-band trailer that really kicked off the marketing starts off serenely enough, right up to the moment a couple nuns tell a passing farmer to fuck off. From there on out the story and characters are presented within the framing device of a priest enumerating the sins of those nuns, which are plentiful and graphic. We see scenes of the the incredibly inappropriate things that happen, which are too plentiful to describe.

I can’t believe I just saw that and I immediately need to watch it.

A green-band trailer came later that told pretty much the same story, just without the cursing and overt sexiness. There’s a bit more context about how Brie’s Allesandra wants to get married and not be a nun, but that’s about it in terms of new material.

Online and Social

The pretty simple official website is in keeping with the small scale of the release. Two big buttons in the middle of the page encourage you to either “See the Film,” which takes you down the page to the list of theaters it’s playing at now and a calendar for future expansion, or “Watch Trailer” which offers you the option of the red-band or green-band versions to enjoy.

Scroll down the site and you’ll see a story “Synopsis” that decently recaps the plot of the movie and shares some of the credits. Keep going and there are photos and short bios for the cast. Then there’s the same list of theaters it is or will be playing at, the trailers and a “Gallery” of stills. Up at the top of the page there are also links to the movie’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram profiles.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

The only paid efforts I’ve seen so far are some promoted posts on Twitter and Facebook that have used the trailers to drive ticket sales. Not surprising this would be a movie that’s hard to translate into TV spots and may not be big enough to warrant a sizable online or outdoor push.

Media and Publicity

Just before it premiered at Sundance there was a first look still released along with a brief synopsis. More photos followed just a week or so before Sundance, where it was eventually picked up for distribution.

Plaza would bring up the movie and her research for the role in various other interviews about other projects. Of course some of the publicity was pretty off the wall, including a video of Plaza smoking and discussing weed with a couple of nuns.

Plaza and others involved in production talked here about the journey the story took over years of drafting and such as well as how the shoot was largely improvisational and how the Catholic League has (predictably) gone after it.

Baena and Plaza did a joint interview where they talked more about making the movie and what it was like to adapt something like this and make it this outrageous. Franco also had a few opportunities to weigh in, especially on the love scene he had to shoot while real-life wife Brie was on-set.

Overall

I feel like this campaign is the very definition of “only going to appeal to a select group.” It’s foul-mouthed, borderline blasphemous and completely off the deep end. There’s no attempt to actually adhere to the period the story takes place in, nor is there any to make the main characters anything but wholly unlikable. It’s not a big enough campaign to reach a mass audience and a good portion of the niche it does reach will be actively turned off by some aspect of what’s on display.

On the other hand, it leans into being unlikable and accepts that as its brand identify. It’s actively and aggressively and intentionally unlikable. If you can just focus on the material and humor and not get caught up in thinking too much about it (looking at you, Catholic League), the campaign promises a raunchy good time with some of the best young comedians working today.

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June 28, 2017June 28, 2017

Movie Marketing Madness: Baby Driver

Director Edgar Wright is back, bringing his unique cinematic storytelling sensibilities to this week’s new release Baby Driver. Far from his collaborations with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, this new movie isn’t a genre satire but instead a crime thriller with musical sensibilities. The story follows Baby (Ansel Elgort), a savant behind the wheel of a car who uses music to compensate for an incessant buzzing in his ears. Baby is in hock to Doc (Kevin Spacey), a crime boss who uses Baby as a getaway driver for his heists.

Baby is tired of the life and wants to get out. That desire only increases when he meets Debora (Lily James), a beautiful young waitress who he immediately falls in love with, and vice versa. Those plans to escape a life of aiding and abetting crime are hampered by Doc’s insistence Baby help him out with one more score. But as the plans come together it looks more and more doomed to fail and Baby must decide when and how to make his stand and make his own getaway with Debora.