seven things you need to know about winning digital content
Or… what I learned leading the world’s best digital team
You want world-beating social channels? Here’s are some things I learned shaping the world’s top digital communications team at the World Economic Forum.
experiment to innovate
Tweets with an image have ten times the reach of tweets without.We know this because we tested it. How? Some time ago, the team spent two weeks running an experiment posting tweets with, and tweets without, same copy same content, different times, a posting programme structured to reveal Twitter’s preferences regarding this particular question.
Algorithms change. Platform preferences change. Even the platforms don’t know exactly what their preferences are at any one time, because they are so fiendishly complicated that it is difficult to say for sure. So the only way to find out what works best is to try stuff out and see, in a scientific way. Hold as many different factors constant, and vary the factor that you are trying to understand.
When we asked Facebook how many times a day it is optimal to post, their answer was: “We don’t know, experiment and find out.”
- Define the question
- Design an experiment
- Experiment
- Implement results
innovate → commoditize → outsource → innovate
You can’t afford to not innovate. You also can’t afford to maintain content innovations in house once you’ve developed them.
Example: Instagram stories
These are fab storytelling media that helped boost the Forum’s Instagram following over 1 million within six months, when the account had been bumping along at around 300,000 for ages. And… they are not brain surgery. Tell a story using, maybe, 10 plates with a limited number of words on each plate, and, where you can, use the tools and tricks that Instagram provides: polls, slider bars, swipe up to reads, all that good stuff.
Not brain surgery, but expensive if you have to carve each one individually. So, you need to innovate: keep trying until you’ve found the best way to use this format on this platform — what works versus what doesn’t — then, once you’ve settled on a style, template or commoditize it. So for these stories, the video team produced a series of templates that could be used by the editorial team without breaking style or looking ugly.
Then the editorial team is free to either build the stories themselves, or outsource story building to freelance, and cheaper, resources to ensure that the volume of stories is maintained, and everyone still gets to go to the bathroom, sleep at night, and have the occasional vacation.
At the same time, digital content moves too fast to properly “commoditize” — there is a constant need to adjust to changing tastes, and whatever suppliers you are working with, whether an outsourced editor, or an agency, or should be able to respond to the changing environment in the same way as you would. It has to be a dynamic partnership between you and your suppliers .
So:
Innovate → find the best format for storytelling on the platform
Commoditize → template it, build editorial guardrails, and make it easy to do so outsourced and economic resource, can do it
Outsource → to build volume while managing risks.
Continuous innovation → continuous customization based on changing requirements of the environment
Click this link for a wonky justification for this theory, invoking Nobel prize winner Ronald Coase. Really though, its just common sense and good management.
editorial, editorial, editorial
I have attention deficit disorder. It drives my wife nuts, but it is perhaps my greatest asset as an editor. If something doesn’t grab me in the first 3 seconds, I’m done, moved on, next thing. Yet my attention span is an aeon compared to your average internet user. Let’s call this user Brian.
It should go without saying… Brian doesn’t have to read or watch your stuff. He certainly doesn’t have to share it. He’s scrolling through his social feeds on the subway, or guiltily at his desk, or while he’s waiting for his boyfriend at the Starbucks. If you want him to 1) stop scrolling and spend 8 seconds of his life reading and considering your content, 2) click “share”, and 3) actually write a short post endorsing this piece of content, you have to give him something.
Give him insight, give him something he and his network can relate to, give him emotion, make him think “that’s smart”, give him something he will be proud to be associated with. When someone shares something to their social networks, they are associating your brand with theirs. What are they saying about themselves when they click “share”? How can you make those things positive, forward looking, engaging, relateable, insightful?
volume and curation
If you are the custodian of a valuable brand, you need to own the conversation. It s not enough to publish a good blog post or video. You have to be in the conversation continously.
It sounds impossible. It isn’t. And expensive. It could be. In the end it is good value for a number of reasons.
Firstly, because with everything you publish, you are telling your story — the story of your brand — and these stories are complicated, multifaceted things. So the content you publish has to also be multifaceted. The best way to express all the different sides of your brand personality is to publish as many stories that are relevant to it as possible.
These stories don’t have to be written and produced by you. Even better if they are pieces from other brands or websites or media that are relevant and brand safe.
Secondly, volume provides you air cover. If you are only publishing one post a week, that post comes under immense internal pressure to reflect the organization’s position accurately and without offense. Queue turgid jargon-filled caveated unreadable waste of time. But if you are publishing twenty or better even sixty pieces a week, each piece doesn’t have to be perfect. It can be superseded by others, defended or attacked by others. Organizational positioning has to be fluid, and volume publishing is a great way to provide that fluidity.
Challenging, yes. Politically perilous, maybe. Imperative… in today’s world, definitely.
video, video, video
People are lazy. They want instant gratification, they want to suck in insight without putting too much effort into it (see editorial, editorial, editorial above), and feel smarter than they did before. Video can provide this hit, it can be absorbing, compelling and provide the brand with just the right and if you structure it right, it can be (almost) as easy and cheap to produce as text content.
In this post, I described how video provided the World Economic Forum with a growth boost just when we needed it. With video, we innovated, commoditized, and then outsourced the bits that could be outsourced. today, the Forum produces four fresh videos a day, customized for different platforms. And it’s video that provides the bulk of traffic referrals.
it’s a system
At business school I did a course with a crazy redheaded professor on “system dynamics”. If you google it, you’ll see its a way of drawing complex systems with “stocks” and “flows” of stuff — lots of boxes and arrows — and a way of visualizing how things fit together.
Digital publishing, like any manufacturing process, is a complex system. No good having lots of ideas if you don’t have the production pipeline to turn them into content. No point having tonnes of content if you don’t have a platform that can serve it, or a following that will consume it. You need the right number of people (and the right people!) with the right amount of time to produce the amount of content. You need a realistic budget to pull it all together. You need organizational air cover to ensure the team keeps focused. You need workflow systems that can track what is going on and where everything is within the system. You need management processes to ensure everyone knows their part in the system. All of this needs to grow together, and fit together, and work together and if one part of the system breaks, you need to understand the knock on effects.
And… what’s the most important ingredient in the system? It’s…
laughter
Some might call it “culture”. In the end, the team need to be able to take risks, failure has to be an option. The best way to facilitate this? The ability to laugh, at yourself, at the team dynamics, at the inevitably awkward situations that happen when people are working together in a complex system to the best of their ability in tight and stressful situations. The team, and its leaders, have to be able to look at success and failure and treat those impostors just the same… so everyone else can too.
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