Louise McGregor Editorial

It’s My 10 Year Anniversary

I started this blog 10 years ago.

I’ve changed jobs three times, ended relationships, lost friends, visited a dozen countries, changed industry twice, moved to a new house in a new city, learnt loads, made new friends in that time and the blog has remained constant.

To celebrate I’m reposting a few posts from previous years and commenting on what I got wrong (ipad), how stuff has changed (URLs) and what I got right.

I started this as a way to explore and write about the innovation I was seeing all around me working in digital/communications. As I explained in my first post

I want to write about ideas relating change in business, new technology and communication; only ‘idea’ seems so big and sweeping and life changing. Ideas belong to the ivory towers, the philosophers, the educators. So I chose the word “meme” instead.

Despite that intention my most viewed post ever was one about adding green to your twitter profile during the Iran revolution.

Here’s what I’ve written about over the ten years.

I’ve sustained this blog because I like writing, and I am fascinated by I’m writing about. Here’s some practical tips about how I get it done.

  1. Capture your writing ideas. I usually start a draft post for future use that I can add ideas, images and resource links to as preparation for eventually writing a post.
  2. Think ahead. I usually plan the subjects I want to write about about a month ahead and spend some time creating header images, which is the fun part.
  3. Set aside regular writing time. For me it’s Sunday morning, and I can combine reading up on my work areas with writing blog posts.
  4. Find a sustainable rate of posting. That’s two posts per week for me, usually one is in depth and one is simpler.
  5. It’s a hobby. So I don’t put pressure on myself to get it done if it’s not feeling like fun. There have been months when I’ve written 20 posts and months where I haven’t managed any. But I’m still writing after 10 years. Might be time to develop the habit into a book.

image champagne

 

 

Louise McGregor Communication

Modular Content

If something is modular more pieces can be added to it, or replaced, yet the thing still functions. Think of lego bricks that can be used and reused to build everything from a pirate ship to the Death Star to an the Art of the Brick. Some companies have made a business model out of this, it is exactly how Fairphone have designed their phones to be made up of interchangeable, replaceable, components.

What about our content?

Very often traditional communications departments separate teams by the audience, so you have media relations, internal communications, external communications, investor relations, sustainability, corporate branding. Each team produces their own content, even though the stories have the same facts behind them and need to be somewhat consistent.

Modern communications departments are transforming and the new approach is called a newsroom approach, where all potential stories are discussed and assigned to a communications expert – a reporter – who is responsible for the creation of all the content relating to the story for all audiences. So one person might lead the production of a short video interview with an expert and a post for the company’s internal collaboration platform for internal audiences, a press release for the external channels, and an FAQ for media enquiries.

But lots of content is evergreen, meaning that a manufacturing company knows they’re going to say something about safety every month, a consumer brand knows they’re going to campaign around father’s day every year, and a listed company knows there will be quarterly reporting on company performance.

So what if we turned the content around and produced assets that could be combined into content, essentially content becomes data.

There’s a line in Steve Krug’s excellent book “Don’t make me think” that talks about creating content. Someone stole borrowed my copy so I’m going to misquote him… “we write content for the web like we’re creating great treaties, but people read our sites like they read billboards on the highway”. Content that gets consumed easily is short and clear, content that gets shared is short, clear and visual – we need to build that into our content plans.

The only way we can do that and meet the ever shrinking timelines for content generation is to take a modular approach and build teams around skill-sets rather than audience. Think of your content in micro chunks and build up from there.

  • Think of your company’s top five products or services and the need they answer and build infographics for those needs, but leave the text editable (use Canva, it’s cheaper than photoshop and your team can collaborate).
  • If your company provides services, think of five themes that would be relevant to those services and build micro content, images, quotes 2 minute videos that relates to those themes

Think about how your modular content could then be repackaged into a presentation, or an article, or an e-book. Think of how much easier it would be if you were building up a warehouse of re-usable items, rather than a library of articles.

image: source unknown (translation: I found it ages ago and don’t know where)

 

Louise McGregor Business

Web Summit Highlights; Day Two

I headed to the marketing stage this morning, and ended up spending most of the day there.

Content is King

A discussion with Adam Singolda (Taboola) Ian White (Sailthru) Sean Moriarty (Demand Media) Michael Learmonth (IBT)

Brands are more important in digital; as the due to noise:signal ratio grows, branded content helps viewers/customers find quality.

Brands need a content strategy, it’s not enough to just push content out there. Need a strategy behind it, and to measure the value to readers. Keep the ROI high, this allows you to keep building quality content.

In conversation with Clara Shih

This was the most relevant to me today, and I found myself agreeing with everything Clara Shih said.

Social is normal for people in their personal lives, it will become the standard operating procedure for companies. It always takes a decade or more to operationalise these things for enterprise, it seems to take a while for the change management to kick in.

Must understand social throughout the company – it can’t just be a team sitting in marketing – but through the company including the C-suite.

Shih sees 3 trends for social;

  • social becomes a service layer on top of everything; IoT, wearables
  • more data, meta data = shift towards hyper targeted “segment of one”
  • customer will expect exchange of data to give them something in return

Connected World

Raced over to the Machine Summit to hear a colleague talk about the Connected World. There was a queue to enter to prevent overcrowding, I was about the last person they let in.

There was some discussion on the opportunities of a future connected world. More features on devices came up as one option, for example adding a camera to a Roomba so that you can document what happens if your house floods – all I could think of was put a camera on it and film your pets. I guess that’s why I’m not working in connected devices.

One of the biggest challenges in this area was data standards and privacy questions. If you extract data from a device how do you protect that?

  • Explain what you do with the data in a way people can understand
  • Do a better job of always making it “opt in”
  • Define and share best practices around privacy and security on collection, anonymising, use and re-use of data
  • Privacy and security seen as a base layer – beyond that let people choose what to share

The future of connected – in the next five years?

Move from thinking about discrete devices to infrastructure and embedding connection into our homes and workplaces.Move to network of devices, and move to connected services. Move to configuration of homes for different purposes, eg; your home office disappears when guests visits.

Joanne Bradford from Pinterest

Introduces Pinterest as “inspiration plus action”, people use it to design their homes, think about their wardrobe, get inspired about exercise, collect recipes. The engagement is high because people use their boards. (OK, I’m the exception).

It was a platform created as a series of communities, starting with mum bloggers, and that meant it was under the radar in Silicon valley to start with.

They still see that community matters and arrange events for pinners, and invite them to press events.

Some stats;

  • 750M boards
  • 300B items
  • best pins have great image + useful link + good description
  • #1 category = comedy

Future of Media with John Ridding (Financial Times)

Always believed in the value of quality journalism, even when others saw a crisis of print media and declared that no-one wanted to pay for content. The mantra was “internet wants to be free”, but the internet is a channel so has no desires of it’s own.

More than half of their revenue now comes from Digital, and it’s the subscription model, not the ad revenue that’s winning it for them.

Innovation Divide

The challenge of getting some “start up” innovation fire into large enterprises, and an inside peek into the fantastic Unilever Foundry, which is great way of bringing fresh ideas and working them into something practical.

Pointing out the dangers of perfection mindset this presentation gave me the quote of the day

every day that a good idea sits in a powerpoint presentation is another day that the idea dies.

Keith Weed, CMO, Unilever

They’re one of the world’s big spenders when it comes to marketing, and they continued spending through the crisis although the breakdown of where that spend goes is shifting.

Marketing spend winners in general are social, search and increasingly mobile. But in terms of social media spend there isn’t a “winner takes all” platform as it makes sense to use multiple platforms depending on your purpose.

For consumers in social there are ongoing privacy and trust issues, right now technology is ahead of regulation, there are things being developed in technology that legislators don’t understand. I’d add that customers understanding is also often behind – even as their expectations grow.

As the Dutch saying goes “trust arrives on foot and leaves on a horse”

Brands have an opportunity to solve this ahead of regulation, and build trust with customers.

It was another packed day – lots of great speakers. The agenda on the marketing stage was rather random, as adjustments had to be made for speaker availability. So it was a bit of a surprising day, the other – less happy – surprise was the wifi. It wasn’t keeping up with demand, so my “life tweeting” was all over the place. OK, for an attendance of 20,000 people I guess it’s a challenge.

I’d still like an answer to my sheep tweet though.

Louise McGregor Marketing

Starting with Social Media – The Discussion

I had the opportunity to be one of the experts in a round table discussion on Social Media last Friday with young artists as part of the Realisme event. The other expert, with more claim to the title then me, was Martijn Verver.

At the end of the round table sessions the advice we had could be summarised in to two phrases; “just do it” and “tell your own story”. So much for expertise!

But the discussion was really interesting and some of the questions were really pertinent and I’ve tried to summarise the answers here (with links I hope are helpful).

Behaviour

There is a real and understandable temptation to focus on the technology, to go straight to the tools. But it’s worth keeping in mind that social media is about how you behave online; it’s about connecting people.

1) You need to be yourself online.

2) You can connect to others – even people you haven’t met before. You can ask them to also “friend” or “follow” you. It will take time to build a following.

3) Should it be in English? If your target audience is international then you probably need your content to be in English; but you can rely on visual content, you don’t need a lot of written content.

4) I’m not comfortable promoting myself, how can I use social media? (This came following a discussion of how social media can be your “marketing department”) You don’t have to describe your work in glowing terms; you can just post pictures of progress or inspiration, and say what you’re working on – let others praise you!

5) You may get negative comments – they will probably be outweighed by the positive ones – but be prepared for it. If you have a mature following your followers may defend you, but you may have to decide whether, or how to respond. Generally speaking discussion is a good thing.

Tools

Perhaps the most questions were about the tools themselves – here are the most interesting.

1) Should I use facebook if my audience doesn’t?

Probably not – at least not to address that audience but you, or the gallery you work with, might want to use it to promote an exhibition.

If you’re using facebook think about setting up a separate fan page for your art, rather than using your personal page. ING Art Management has a fan page for example. This means that you won’t be promoting your new exhibition right after lamenting that you burnt the spaghetti.

2) Should I be on linkedin?

Linkedin is particularly relevant for business, so if you run your own company, or are a freelancer you should be on linkedin, it’s a question of reputation.

Linkedin offers ways of sharing content; you can connect to your blog, a slideshare presentation or display your portfolio.

It’s also worth looking for connections via the groups function, which does give you the opportunity to have a discussion in a ‘closed’ group, and the chance to email members of the group.

3) How can I share my work?

There are a lot of different tools out there; the easiest and most used one for images is flickr, on the site you can share your photos – including with a creative commons licence if you like – and you can contribute to relevant groups, or start your own.

Other tools worth considering to store your content are tumblr, wordpress or blogger or posterous,  youtube.

Look for “post to many” options on tools, for example I can update my twitter and linkedin status at the same time – in fact I could update facebook at the same time but choose not to. Being smart about the content can save you time.

Content

1) What content can I use?

Profile your work, update this often even if you draw on older works, perhaps saying how you’ve developed since creating that works.

Photographs , poems, stories or articles that inspire you.

Progress updates of your work – this is fascinating for a non-artist, particularly if you’re working on a bigger project

Behind the scenes – take the visitor through the creation of a work, perhaps as a slideshow or a video. This is really time intensive for you you but it would create a piece of content that could stay on your site/blog and be re-used regularly as showing how you work.

Resources

Mashable – good resource for discussion on the latest tools

Problogger – tips on writing, maintaining and thinking about content

PR squared – tips on promoting yourself online

Etsy – great resource of supplies and artists

Cool Hunting – a group blog promoting great design, get ideas on how to present your content.

Style Cowboys – a Dutch site about design, again with great ideas on presenting your content.

The summary of our advice stands – “Just do it” and “be yourself”. On reflection I’d add “connect”; connect to other artists, connect your content, connect your tools (to be more effective). Have fun!

What other tips would you add? Do you have other questions? Add a comment below.

image connection /Sara Lando/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Louise McGregor Communication

Internet for content

I firmly believe that content is the most important part of a website, and that visitors are more likely to repeat their visits to your site for new content rather than great design or cool widgets. So when I read “CHART OF THE DAY: The Internet Is Finally, Primarily A Content Platform” I was cheered.

I opened up the chart, at first glance it seemed great, but when I squinted at it a little more I wasn’t so sure.

So I went through their figures of actual time spent on each of their activities and my graph looks a little different.

It seems to me that some of the “communications” we were doing in 2003, we are in 2009 doing under the community category. This makes sense; my sunday brunchers sort out time and place via facebook – whereas once we would have used email or in really ancient times called each other. I use flickr rather than email to share photos (although I might still email people the link) and aren’t we all tweeting now?

I also took a look at the change, and here the obvious winners are community and content.  Community has gone from zero to 181 minutes per month of our online time. Of the 413 extra minutes per month that we’re spending online 196 of them are in consuming content. If this change continues it won’t be long before content really is king.