#cmas interviews

Q: Fill in the blank: The best content ______

A: Elicits an immediate reaction, whether it be love or anger or outrage. If content is middle-of-the-road, it typically doesn’t inspire anyone to do anything.

Q: If it doesn’t elicit a reaction do you think it's just a waste of time to produce the content?

A: I don’t know if it’s necessarily a complete wast to time, because a lot of times you can come up with something that is well thought out--the best bit of content--and for some reason it just doesn’t hit people.

Social is full of surprises; every time I think I know an audience I'm working with, I'm proven wrong. You can go in with a strategy, but if you see that the approach is not eliciting a reaction then continuing to make that type of content is a waste of time.

Q: Can you talk about the role that content marketing plays at Groupon and why are you creating it? What are the objectives for it?

A: Deals, especially big national deals for things like Starbucks or other brands, have driven a lot of traffic to the site, but over the past year--since Facebook tweaked their algorithm to start prioritizing video content and editorial--we had to rethink our approach.

So we pivoted and upped the amount of video and editorial content. What we like to do with that is hook people in--to teach something or give insight into something you do every single day, and have the audience think about it a little bit differently.

Our editorial team is constantly thinking about trends that affect local markets; so we create pieces to educate consumers about like things about Brazilian waxes, the appropriate way to check hairstylists, what to do with coconut oil; things that are very human interest.

When people read these pieces we try not to beat them over the head with marketing, but within them there will be drivers to a deal. The same thing is true of videos; we use them for a lot for product demonstrations as well as PR drivers.

Q: Is it fair to say that your content marketing is a mix of editorial and performance marketing?

A: Definitely. Much of the deal-based content that we put into news feeds is very much attuned to ROI, so those have to be in there.  At the same time we usually get much bigger reach out of the editorial-based content, which then ends up feeding the more deal-based content.

Because people are clicking through on this editorial content, our subsequent deal content performs that much better because Facebook sees the good response, so both feed each other.

Q: Do you have a formula on how you balance editorial versus performance? Have you figured out that a certain amount of editorial will result in a certain amount of performance that will then deliver an objective ROI?

A: We are in the process of reevaluating. When Facebook--and I will continue referencing Facebook a lot because it is our primary driver--when they made those changes to the algorithm,  we had to completely rethink our approach.

We were posting things that were geo-targeted and we realized that wasn’t working; we were posting a lot but we were not reaching as many people. We had to rethink that approach and right now we are reevaluating the exact number of posts per day. Our process is very, very formulaic, all the way down to the time of day and the types of posts that we publish.

Q: You wrote this great piece--The Secret to Content Marketing Is Collaboration--can you talk about it a bit? Groupon operates in so many markets, how do you collaborate effectively internally? How do you create good content at that level of volume?

A: It's tough, that was the problem I came to Groupon to solve when I moved over here.

The really short answer is the way that we collaborate effectively is learning and then teaching.

I had come from an agency where social was much smaller compared with their traditional channels, so I had to teach them about it, because if people are not exposed to it they kind of fear it.

When I came over to Groupon it was kind of a two part process. First, I established a reporting structure tracking the metrics of all the social channels to show the editorial team how they were doing. People that work at a creative outlet don’t necessarily like to be be told that what they are doing is incorrect, so the method I used was to show results--when you post like this we get this kind of response, and if you maybe shorten something, or use a question mark right here, or think about it in this way, this is what ends up happening.

Second, I led a brainstorming sessions that came a couple of days after the reporting. I would start by showing the team a couple of cool ideas, so I had the chance to be the curator for something interesting for them to see, and tell them why this was a good execution, not just because it was subversive or funny. Then we would have a brainstorm on it, and the ideas were that much better because I was showing them things that were out there.

That's part of how we have been able to dramatically increase our social engagement in North America; in 2014 we increased engagement by something like 260%, clicks nearly 500%, impressions went up by 200% as well; so it's been really effective.

In terms of other regions, we use Sprinklr across the company, which is a massive platform that we do all of our publishing, measurements, and customer services through. In there we have something that is called the "social asset manager" where Groupon employees can see which posts in other places got good click-through and engagement, and then create their own versions. This has been particularly effective in Latin America; with one country seeing a post that it kills it and then rejiggering it for their channel. That’s one way the technology has allowed us to collaborate without having facetime time necessarily; we can see other cool things that we are doing across the world.

Q: Groupon has a pretty humorous voice throughout its content. How do you maintain that across different markets and social accounts? Does that same voice translate to other markets, or do you take different approach?

A: The humor with Groupon is a legacy from when it started. We had a lot of people from Second City, which is a really popular comedy group, so a lot of those writers were actually people that we employed from the beginning. They established a humor team and they always wanted to keep it interesting; in the addition to the deals being descriptive they wanted to make people laugh and surprise them.

As to how our humor scales, definitely other countries and other regions of the world have had some really great ideas. Australia had this really funny one with Pimp my Cat, where they created a deal game which included promo codes.

We share a lot of our ideas globally that we do in North America--like the catapult video that was pretty popular last year, which spoofed Amazon's drone delivery idea and was redubbed in other languages.

Sometimes people in other regions take these ideas, sometimes they modify them, and sometimes they just don’t do them at all.

Q: Last year you guys launched on Snapchat... how did you approach creating a presence on Snapchat? What was the objective when you did it and how are you using it today?

A: I've been a champion for that platform since a year and a half ago. I don’t know how to describe it, but I’ve got the same feeling from Snapchat as I did from Instagram--there was just something to it.

I really wanted to speak to more of a Millennial market. Much of our other content is geared to females ages 25 to 44; but a lot of the organic social content that’s out there, in terms of the stuff of that people are creating about Groupon, is much younger than that. I felt like we were doing ourselves a disservice by only speaking to an older demographic. For example, in colleges what better way could there be to get young people to try new things near their schools than with Groupon?

I found a lot of stats because typically whenever you say the word "Snapchat" people instantly say: "Isn't that what people send naked pictures on?" So I prepared a whole deck on how often college students are using it, and the fact that they are actually open to be marketed to via the platform and would follow a brand.

We launched it with a deal with Wiz Khalifa, which was great; we had tickets to his album release show in Colorado and we were allowing people to purchase. We think what's really cool about Snapchat is that things disappear quickly, so it's perfect for time-sensitive offers.

As for how we sustain it, we don’t want it to be just another marketing channel. We want to use it as a way to speak to people who aren't checking our other social channels. We use it a lot for giveaways or when we have something like Starbucks deals on the site, because those things go fast. We use it as a way to give some of our fans more insider access to what’s going on at Groupon.

You can’t really use URLs within Snapchat but we can use shortened links that people can type into their browser; we always make a really short link that’s either funny or very easy to remember.

We’ve had a lot of success so far with Snapchat. Sometimes we’ll just use it to showcase our artistry--we did a great partnership with Sesame Street and Mashable involving Grover, which was fantastic.

We sometimes highlight the weirdness that goes on in our office, just to show that we are people at the same time. We like to have fun at work--lots of weird stuff happens here, like we had a tyrannosaurus come through here for this Walking With Dinosaurs deal that we had.

The critical thing is that I don’t want it to be only a marketing channel because that’s not really why Snapchat was created. It’s more of a one-to-one conversation, so I don’t want to go too heavy on marketing because I feel like it will jeopardize our audience on there. It’s a small audience but highly engaged, we get up to 20 times more engagement on Snapchat compared with Twitter posts.

Q: You recently had a huge social media win with the “Banana Bunker”--a risqué product that you brilliantly presented completely straight-faced. What’s the story behind that?

It is actually something we feature regularly, and we had a lighter day in terms of customer service inquiries so our Community Managers had a bit of fun with it. We all agreed it would be funny to reply on social media innocently to as many comments as possible -- and it went viral.

I'm curious what it says about us as people that an innocent approach to a phallic joke could turn into 165MM organic impressions and be called "genius" by various trade mags and sites. What a funny business we work in.

Q: You've already touched on this, but can you talk a bit more about the goals of broader editorial content, like this Day in the Life of a Dog-Sledder piece?

A: When we do the long-form content, one aspect of it is that it really helps is SEO. If we have people that are doing local searches for "Chicago pizza in downtown" we want to be showing up, so we have to have a lot of inbound links; editorial content has been one way that we’ve been able to navigate that. We look at how to incorporate keywords within our editorial content.

On the other side, it's human interest pieces that people typically find compelling. When you read these pieces it doesn’t seem like we're trying to beat you over the head with any advertising, but if you look on the side rail there’s deals for you to check out and at the bottom there are other references to deals that you could do in the snow, whether it’s sledding, skiing, or vacations.

It's definitely helping our conversions, because it's bringing in people who are interested in certain topics.

Q: What’s your favorite piece of content so far that you guys have developed?

A: Probably the Alexander Hamilton thing we created for President’s Day last year because it was so big for us.

We wanted to have a promo code saving $10 that day so we thought we would make a joke about President Alexander Hamilton being on the $10 bill; essentially 80% of what we were saying was true and 20% was just absolute lies. So we put it in a press release, put it out, and just waited.

It completely delivered. Every news source picked up on it because they thought we made a legitimate mistake. People were calling us idiots and saying that we were revising history incorrectly--but the funny thing is that in all these articles trashing us they included the promo code. The reach was insane, we would have had to pay millions dollars to reach the number of people we did by trolling the news.

Q: Outside of Groupon, which companies do you look to for inspiration? Which companies you think do a great job of creating content?

A: My two favorites are Red Bull and GoPro.

Red Bull has managed to ascribe a whole lifestyle to the drink. Their content is very captivating because it always puts you in the driver’s seat of whatever it is going on. The content really embodies giving you wings--from snowboarding competitions where you get to watch firsthand, to crazy things like the Flugtag they do in Chicago, which launches giant contraptions into the lake.

On the other side is GoPro, which is a beautiful product demonstration. So you are actually getting to visually see all of the benefits of using the product without you being told: "Hey go buy this!" When we can we try to do that with our goods content, so we have a lot of products that we sell on site like drones and video cameras which we try to create content with.

I also think the Weight Watchers ad that likened eating disorders to drug addiction was fantastic. I have never seen a TV ad go straight to the message and beat on it as hard as possible as it did. I want to see more ads like that, taking the gloves off and then speaking directly about an issue that is hurting a lot of people. It's being confrontational in a way that's necessarily confrontational, which gets back to that idea that the best kind of content forces an immediate reaction.

Q: What's the future of content marketing for Groupon and for the space overall? What do you think people will be talking about at Content Marketing World not this year but a couple of couple of years from now?

A: The future of content marketing for Groupon will probably continue down the video path in new and interesting ways, ways that get more interactive. Also, there'll be more social media plug-ins on the site that give you exclusive access for certain things. I think that’s something that’s worked out pretty well for us in tests we’ve done and that’s an area I would like to continue pushing on.

In general, the future of content marketing is going to continue away from one-to-many and towards one-to-one. People are really into personalized experiences and having direct conversations. They want less content thrown onto their Facebook feed, people aren’t necessarily that excited about having branded content on their page or sharing it.

Snapchat and now Meerkat have kind of opened up a very interesting avenue for content. Snapchat adds a lot of value when it's used at certain events. People like this exclusive access to something that no one else can get, or for a short amount of time.

Meerkat is opening up a whole different world where people are alway on. Streaming has existed for a while but now it’s now in a way that’s a lot easier and more mobile to do. Jimmy Fallon is on it constantly now, like when rehearsing for the show, and the value is in that little bit of exclusive access.

Social media has already pulled us all together, but things like Snapchat and Meerkat will pull us even closer. This unfiltered look at what's going on is cool to a lot of people. The great thing is that it doesn't have to look produced, there's something beautiful in the stripped down thing.

I think that’s kind of where we are going, we are going to have more exclusive access. I can't wait to see something like Meerkat come together closer with television. Imagine if you could watch a football game or a baseball game and have a branded announcer. Imagine a world where you could pay $5 or $10 to watch the Super Bowl but instead of the normal announcer you are hearing Will Ferrell talk the the whole time about what’s going on. I think that’s where we could get into some really interesting stuff; things that sort of hack the normal means which we’ve been getting content.

I think the best content is effective at helping people achieve their goals and serving their experiential interests. Effectiveness is the key there. 

There are a lot of reasons that content can be ineffective, but often it seems like the team that was collaborating to create and publish the content didn’t have a clear goal in mind as to what that content was supposed to do.

Right. It really means understanding what the needs, goals, and the experiences are that people want to have. For that you need to clearly understand people outside your own skin; you need to talk to them, you need to research them. The next step is how do you create something that relevant and well suited to serve those goals?

A lot of times in the world of content marketing, you’ll hear two main centers of gravity. You’ll hear that content marketing is all about stories and we all need to be great storytellers. Then you’ll have people who are more on the utilitarian end of the spectrum asking how is content the helpful, how is it useful as a utility?  That tension has been a big struggle for people certainly here in 3M.

The focus for me is helping to transform content culture in the organization, to train people, to orient them, to provide them with the tools that they need to be more strategic.  And part of that is shaping their worldview and their thoughts to help shape the mental model they have about content.

What I developed here are eight content personas to help people understand the function of the content at the moment that it’s relevant. When I say persona, I’m not talking about the customer persona, not the dentist or the nurse, that kind of persona. I’m talking about the persona that the content actually is, depending on the type of relevance at its delivery.  

So one of these is the Storyteller/Entertainer. The Storyteller/Entertainer opens worlds to someone emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. They take the ordinary and make it extraordinary.

Another is the Thought Leader. Great leadership content delivers a new way of seeing the world for people or understanding something that creates a new productive value in their lives.

Another is the Journalist. Journalism has its own relevance and helps people. When it’s effective, it helps people better understand what’s going on around them and helps people become better citizens.

Then you have the Diagnostician. A Diagnostician is a kind of a consultative salesperson who helps people better understand the nature of their current situation and helps them find a path forward to improve that situation. Diagnosis and prescription.

Then you’ve got content that is way more Functional.  It’s assisting people helping people get from A to B.  Helping people do things like install a television, or getting their Bluetooth device to connect.

Then there is the Mentor. Mentorship content helps people achieve a greater degree in mastery and excellence. That’s where Mentors comes in and are really relevant.

There’s also the Spiritual Advisor, which tends to be less relevant in business. But ultimately exists to help people achieve their highest aspirational purpose in life.

The final persona is the Friend. The friend is kind of a mode of delivery; it’s about timeliness and personalization. The friend really anticipates what you need--sometimes ahead of your own realization of it.  

Developing those personas has been really helpful in helping people break down what content is and who are we are as an organization at the moment that we’re delivering relevance. It’s actually a very useful tool in ideation when matching what is the right content to choose for a particular situation. If you don’t have a methodology like that, it gets a lot more arbitrary.

Do you think there is one type of persona that is more dominant inside 3M?

No, 3M is “all of the above” in different situations.  We are such a big complicated company, and are in just about every market there is, so somewhere in the organization you’re going to find a valid purpose for every type of content there is, and for every type of content persona there is.

Something like the thought leadership is really key for us because we have so many deep subject matter experts in the organization. So there’s a lot of internal subject matter expertise that can be used across all those personas.

The thought leadership persona seems to be the default persona many organizations go after. Would you say that’s a fair assessment?

I’m not sure.  I don’t think that I have enough of a grasp broadly over what everybody is doing to answer that well.

I do think that sometimes people might use the term “thought leadership” too widely.  For example, for me if you’re not really transforming how a person sees the world or a particular thing, on an ongoing basis, then it’s probably not strong enough to be real thought leadership.

I would challenge a lot of people’s definition of thought leadership, because that kind of stuff doesn’t really happen every day. When people say: “Should we produce more content even if it’s not that great or should we invest more time and energy in producing really incredible content that may have more enduring value?” That’s where I think the definition of thought leadership can be very helpful, in that it makes you examine what is really, truly, a new and relevant perspective that you bring to a situation.

How do you determine which format of content will best convey the persona?

It’s really a challenge because you can translate the same communication in many formats. Sometimes people get really prejudiced about what is the best format for certain kinds of things, which tends to reflect their own bias.  It kind of reminds me of my time in theater when people would argue we need a human actor to tap into true emotions and move an audience. That’s a bunch of crap; you can make people cry with finger puppets if you know how tell a good story. Effective communication is not about the format per se, or at least not exclusively.

Formats do have their strengths and unique contributions; you certainly can’t create an infographic with a sound, you can’t hear a color.  By in so many cases you can translate the same message in many formats. You can take an article and translate it into an infographic, then turn that into animations, etcetera.

So, since you can translate the same message into different formats, the key for deciding what to use is to really understand the customers’ use-context, their media preferences, and their culture.  You need to identify how the target audience will consume the content; for example, will they be consuming it with an iPad, standing on an oil drill? Are they scanning and snacking? Or using it for business training with their entire team?

Do your experiences in theater have an effect on how you approach content marketing?

Yes, it has had influences. One of them is the fact that theater, similarly to publishing a magazine or a book, is a content product.

In the world of content marketing there’s a lot of discussion around what content marketing means; what’s the definition of it? One of the ways that I help people in our organization understand the nature of what content marketing is and why the word “marketing” is justified as a term, is because in the case of content marketing, you are marketing a content product. You are not just creating content that describes and talks about something that is valuable; you’re creating a product that has value. It’s self-contained and has its own relevance, which is why people will seek it out and pay for it and all those kind of things.

My background in producing content products certainly informs my perspective because what people like me are trying to do is to help these organizations that don’t create content products as their core revenue stream adopt the methodology of those who do. So there’s that connection.

The other connection has to do with shaping experiences. So when you’re a theatre director or a filmmaker you’re thinking a lot about how your audience perceives what’s next. You’re trying to get a story that comes across; you’re trying to emotionally connect with the audience. You’re shaping experiences with a lot of inputs that are very subjective. You have to understand a lot about human beings and the ways that they process and interpret information and what all those inputs are. The more you understand your audiences in depth, the better stories you can tell.

My background in theater and understanding all of these things has heavily influenced not only the kind of content that I create, but understanding what it is that you need to cultivate in an organization to help transform people to act as if they have that level of knowledge themselves.

3M is so big; with so many different people that are creating content from different parts of the company, how do you manage consistency across the body of work, in terms of both quality and effectiveness?

Well in the future when we have dozens of robust content channels the job becomes much easier because you’ll have a lot of strategic alignment around who the audience is and how you are trying to develop that audience. You’ll have a lot of production alignment. Furthermore you’ll have a mature editorial process which can create alignments across all of the distributed entities involved in targeting similar audiences or engaging around particular topics that unite otherwise siloed divisions and customer-facing functions.

The challenge is for organizations like 3M who are still evolving now. What should their customer or market focus publications look like? How they should be structured? How many of them should there be? There isn’t a maturity of a vision yet. In building toward that, there’s a process of helping the organization develop a vision; what does the world look like five years from now?

Driving that vision is really key, but so is connecting the dots between entities in the organization, whose objectives, ultimately, are aligned even if they are not currently aligning yet in a practical way.

For example, human resources departments from a talent acquisition perspective may be very interested in marketing the organization to communities of subject matter experts. Similarly, businesses that have engineers within them would benefit if they turn their engineers into content marketing rock stars and are leveraging more of their expertise in a marketing context. Therefore both those divisions and human resources can benefit from aligning to the same target audience and adding value around common topics by leveraging and creating transparency to existing internal talent.

So people like me are actively trying to connect dots between different people’s content initiatives--their various customer and audience development initiatives--and to help align them and ultimately, develop federations.

Very often in organizational development we talk about big philosophical questions like whether there should be a content ‘centers of excellence’ or should there be a content boss or chief content officer that runs everything from a top down perspective. Certainly there’s value in those kinds of roles. However, there’s also the concept of a ‘matrix of excellence’, where you’re developing federated relationship across entities whose strategies and tactics and resource management can benefit tremendously from aligning, but that don’t always necessarily need to report to the same boss.  They just need to come together and federate from a process perspective to get that done. These federations can be very powerful, but also very vulnerable. If they are purely informal and not institutionalized they can collapse with the disappearance of a single individual.

In other interviews you’ve mentioned 3M’s content ideation guide. Can you talk a little bit about what it is and how it works?

Well, I created a program in the company called Content-2-Customer, C2C for short.  The Content-2-Customer program is a framework that helps to accelerate organizations to achieve excellence for content, and ultimately, add value to the customer relationship across its total life cycle. 

There are five components to C2C program.  There’s 1) operational and organizational development; 2) a planning process; 3) a workshopping process; and 4) an architecture and deployment process--and by that I mean architecting in the initiatives or ‘campaign’; and 5) ongoing optimization and maintenance.  So there’s those five sections. 

The ideation guide that you are asking about relates to the workshopping section, that’s the third part. During the second part, strategic inputs, we identify who the customers are, what are their roles in the influencing and purchasing process, what their goals and pain points are, what channels they use--all those inputs we gather.  Then the information is filtered into a tool called the ideation guide, which facilitates the workshopping process. That process has a lot of exercises in it, such as mapping topics to tactics, mapping tactics to pain points and goals; there’s a number of journal mapping related exercises, exercises relating to goal development and key performance indicators, and exercises that relate to setting up straw man deployable campaigns and initiatives. 

The ideation guide is a key tool because it supports the different exercises in the workshopping session. The guide takes the information that was gathered during that preparation work and it structures it into an almost gamified kind of framework, so that when people are doing brainstorm type exercises, they are not just relying what’s in their heads, they’re actually able to create very solid ideas at high volume that are well-aligned to strategy.  

So, the ideation guide is an 11x17 book that leverages information design and storytelling to create an ideation machine that accelerates both the quantity and quality of ideas in a structured way.

The teams in the workshop are all cross-functional; we have marketing, customer care roles, sales roles and in many cases, technical services roles. We have them working together and by the end of the workshops they are able to go into a room for 90 minutes and come out with very solid, detailed concepts for campaigns and strategies, initiatives that ladder up to quantifiable business goals.

We came across this photo that 3M retweeted of the Ohio state football team wearing the uniforms with reflective numbers... what’s the value of a picture like that from 3M’s perspective?

What you’re talking about strikes a really core challenge and opportunity for 3M; 3M is the “Intel inside” that nobody knows about. They say you are never more than 15 feet away from a 3M product, and we have somewhere between 60,000 and 250,000 products; nobody really knows. We’re what people very often call an “ingredient brand,” because even though we have some brands that some people recognize from a consumer perspective, like Scotch tape, we have all these technologies that are also invisible and inside a lot of things. A lot of our clients might be the more recognizable brand name.

So this photo itself I think wasn’t actually put out by 3M, it was user generated content, but more broadly, showing 3M in the context of its applications is something that we really need to work hard to do. Visual content is really helpful for it.