Editorial content: Strategies and tactics | Sonal Chokshi

Transcript

[Music] thank you guys thanks for doing this and for being here I'm so excited to talk to all of you about content marketing and content strategies and tactics just to give you like a quick overview on what I'll talk about today you know I'll talk about the why and the what some of the how where when kind of going Beyond Vibes like things very specific to crypto in our industry and then leave sometime hopefully for Q a and if we don't get to a lot of q a we can definitely cover it in our round tables tomorrow so definitely come especially if you're in a workshop specific strategies or pieces because a lot of the advice the best advice is

actually very bespoke to whatever your goals are so today I'm going to try to give a super fast high level overview and why the reason I say fast is one I do talk very fast but two I do want to cover a lot of info and because a lot of this is based on frequently asked questions I get all the time from Founders like yourselves other builders people trying to navigate media all across the board and you know a lot of this is based on my own expertise and experience including talking to a lot of companies so in terms of the why and the what the first question that people ask now maybe some of you in this room might not need to have this answered because you might already say oh my god of course we have to do content that's a given sometimes

people don't really realize why and how they should invest in their content and content strategy and those are two different things by the way and I'll talk about that more one the most obvious reason for why to bother is so that you can quote own your own narrative I put that in quotes because I don't really believe you can fully own your own narrative in this day and age with social media and community and everything else involved like it's much more bottom-up organic kind of harnessing what naturally happens you heard Amanda talk about that earlier today this morning another reason is because it's a more authentic expression of who you are now people tend to throw around the word authentic very broadly like oh be authentic but really there is no better way of being authentic than to actually show showing your work showing

how you think showing who you are and content is a great way to do that obviously and I just want to make a distinction between what's more generally marketing content and then editorial content and so a lot of marketing content can include things like demand gen like connecting to a direct conversion to a sale sometimes includes SEO strategy that can also fall under editorial content marketing those things are involved in content strategy my talk today will be much more focused on editorial content marketing because one of my beliefs and I actually think we're seeing this born out is pretty much everything is a media Outlet today whether a company every company is a media company every person is a

publisher whether it's on social or your blog and I think you all probably already know that so now the question is how do you level up and play the game in a way where you get the most out of your effort and the reason why this matters is because content really lets you punch above your weight and at startups growing startups content is one of the ways that you could literally supercharge your operation like go up like 10 weight classes with a really good viral piece and a long-term strategy so some Basics let me just start with some really basic kind of mindsets and fundamentals a lot of this again may or may not seem obvious but I think it's really important to share some nuances before we go into some

specifics and I am going to share some specific tactics and strategies too because I don't want this to be all high level only and a lot of it again will depend on what your strategy is and we can talk more about that specifically but you know you heard this morning and earlier today to know your audience where they are how to reach them and to be able to know and tier your audiences is a pretty important skill to have by tier I mean have a prioritization a clear prioritization who you're trying to reach who do you think you're trying to reach but who are you really trying to reach because oftentimes I find when I talk to teams they think they're trying to talk to X but they're really talking to why and they don't know that the other quick basic note I want to make

because this is a frequently Asked question I get all the time is should you treat your blog as a publication and what I mean by that is blogging is obviously not just blogging it's also a Content management system for publishing your pieces and that can include a written post it could also include a press release it could include a new feature announcement and my answer to that I'm going to give you a really basic easy answer instead of a complicated one is yeah yes you should treat your blog as a publication if you can most cases you should separate your quote editorial content from your quote marketing content even if it lives on the same place in your brand and on your website it could be part of like this whole expression of who you are and the reason is because you have an

opportunity to punch above your weight so going back to my kind of recurring theme in this talk which is how to punch above your weight and get way more for your effort you can punch above your weight more when you sort of separate that editorial content and make it a bit more branded as editorial versus like product announcements more resources for people things that people might even find on a really good magazine site theoretically there's no reason that kind of content can't come out from anyone given that everybody is a Content company these days and if you really want to you could even consider sub-branding that publication like giving it a name like for example in our portfolio many years ago a company called mixpanel they had a Blog called the signal kind of playing on

their product and the idea being that it was sort of signal from data and they kind of gave it its own name but it lived on their website so it's very clearly tied to who they are and I just wanted to share that because sometimes some of these most basic things can actually do a lot for your operation and you also have to remember that there's other media you can include in your operation so this could include podcasts I'll obviously talk more about that but I want to make a really important note here the name of the game is not just quote going direct and having a direct channel to reach your audience and not be dependent on intermediaries like journalists and others to tell your stories

it's also about owning your own distribution and you know the month around real estate location location location location in content the Mantra is distribution distribution distribution you could have the best possible content and you know this if you don't have distribution good luck getting people to read it it doesn't even matter it's like that analogy of a tree falling in the forest so distribution is pretty important and this is where I'm going to add that having an email list and newsletter strategy is probably one of the most low hanging high impact things you could do and you know you heard Amanda this morning talk about ctas or calls to action I like to think of email and newsletters as a lot like compounding

interest like the way sometimes if you save money in the bank not everyone does but if you do save money in the bank and you can actually collect your interests and that compounds over time having a list and an email list is critical for the same kind of thing like I can't tell you how many websites and products launch without an email sign up list it's okay if you don't email them right away collect it passively just like you do collect that interest in your bank similarly you and then later on you can actually use that to do more so I'll talk more about newsletters as well and then finally just on this basic note a common kind of frequently Asked question I get and this is coming up a lot in the last five years I would say

as companies and brands have evolved in the age of the Creator economy it's how do I balance the individual versus the collective and that could mean I have an employee great writer they also want to put this on their own site but they actually work for us it could also mean something like hey we have an Engineering Group that's really great they want to write a lot I think we need a separate engineering blog should we do that you're going to get this question a lot especially as you grow and scale and even before that frankly because a lot of people are kind of mini influencers themselves in companies the way I would think about it is by easy short answer because I'm trying to give you guys really straightforward answers and I can of course give you more nuanced answers in

our detailed one-on-one q and A's is go for the collective not the individual wherever you can and the reason is because a lot of you this goes back to that goal of punching above your weight you're not going to be able to punch above your weight unless you aggregate a lot of that so having all that live across different people so it's fine if an employee publishes it on their own site after like 30 days so that the SEO comes to you first or it's fine if maybe in a few years your engineering blog is separated because it has to be and it has its own following but for the most part you can put all that content on the same blog and simply just index it taxonomically with the better taxonomy so that you can reach different

audiences and help people find what they want then try to create a separate engineering blog oftentimes a lot of content operations their websites look basically like people took the org chart and put it on the website which is literally the worst way to design a Content operation so don't do that and then the final note on this basic slide is I know you know this but everything is an intention game and attention game not intention game but intention too and you're not just competing with your competitors you're actually competing with Netflix YouTube TV shows a podcast something on Twitter someone's kid screaming down the street like you're competing with everything so keep that in mind and that's going to be

why Finding Your Edge is going to be critical to punching above your weight so I have some tips for how to find that edge and they're really hard earned tips actually from working with lots of teams that you you'll be surprised going through these exercises how few people do this so one rule of thumb I have I call it my two word rule it's also my Domino role the first thing is to be able to express what does your brand stand for like kind of the vision and strategy and what you want to express through your content and to do it this is the key in just two words like not a mission statement not like a big paragraph in an about section you should have all that can you

say it in just two words and then can you distill it clearly not just for yourself but for your team and especially other content contributors who might contribute to your operation of content or Freelancers or people from your community if you're drawing from your open source and Community marketing to fill your content and this is the key those two words they could be generic or general but together they have to be specific enough to be youthful to you in figuring out how to filter pieces like what to kill what to keep this is a bad pitch kill it this works let's run with it and what how to shape those pieces so how to edit

it level it up package it design it even and I'll give you some quick examples from my own career because I can speak to that so when I was at Xerox Park which is an r d Center but it was like kind of famous for inventing a lot of the things we use in our world today the two words that we had were entrepreneurial scientists two words which by themselves could be generic but taken together they're very specific they basically tell me this means when you get this pitch from 20 researchers at the organization 10 10 of those pitches fit that lens and the other 10 don't and that's a very helpful lens the second phrase that I heard and this came from my former Mentor at wired the

former editor-in-chief Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine was informed optimism again two words that by themselves could be whatever put them together it's incredibly useful for providing kind of a true north for your content strategy so to give you a concrete example of how we did that at wired we had a rule that we wouldn't cover Kickstarter projects in our write-ups why they're optimistic they're exciting ideas about the future but they're not informed because they haven't been built yet so duh we don't run pieces that are based on write-ups from Kickstarter so that was a very simple way of applying that rule

another concrete example I once had a really good pitch about a cool device project and way to think about the future of mobile and smartphones and I was kind of waffling about whether to run it or not and I went to one of my fellow editors and I was like God I kind of think this pitch is so good it would work really well for a wired audience and he's like yeah but could you see it on CNET and that's not to say CNET is a good or bad Outlet it just didn't it wasn't quote wired and so because of that I killed that pitch and I was able to take a ton of pitches to sort of turn my section into one of the top sections at wired where other contributors wanted to contribute to it because it became a thing to be a

part of that section like we created a brand around that and that's why a lot of content people and content creators which everyone in this room probably is they think in terms of how do I produce the content and not enough in how to package and brand that and so this is critical to find your Edge because if you get this right I guarantee you will punch above your weight so that was the first rule the second rule of thumb I want to give you is what I call my fungibility rule I could give it a better more pronounceable name but I have I have nothing better than fungibility because I love that word fungibility um it's just you know the idea that things can be interchangeable so here's a trick to how to apply the lunchability rule could you easily swap

another person besides yourself who's authoring that piece or another company think about your own company description I know a lot of you are working on that right now or just submitted them for demo day could you swap another company in if so it's not specific enough it's not it's fungible that's not great for thinking about your content Edge so the idea here is to find what I call writer topic fit or WTF for fun it's kind of a cutesy acronym but it's helpful because people remember it this is very similar to the idea behind product Market fit and the idea here is that just like entrepreneurs travel and idea maze that was an idea Queen biology and popularized by Chris Dixon you kind

of go through this idea maze this journey that you're on all of you in this room where you try to figure out like what your product is you've earned this expertise to be clear this is not credentialist you don't have to go to like some fancy school and get a degree in X it's just that you've experienced the problem that you're trying to build and solve for so you've gone through that idea Maze and that Journey at the other end of it if you and only you can solve that problem because you have some insight that nobody else does you're gonna win and of course you have to build it but you have an edge the same thing is true in your content can you literally make it fungible to someone else if so either kill the pitch or think about how do I make this more

me what can I add to it or subtract from it to make it unique so that I am bringing something very specific whether it's data some analysis A framework a way of thinking I guarantee you have it inside of you and I'm happy to help Workshop this in our round tables but that is how I would think about finding your Edge so these two rules the two word Rule and the fungibility rule quick Side Story just to tell you why I called it the Domino rule it was actually inspired from the old Domino magazine which is a design decoration magazine that I loved in the early 2000s and they had an experiment where one of their writers went and found her style imprint like a style astrologer which is

kind of cheesy but the cool part was that that person came up with two words to describe her style and it could be something like Urban Warrior or you know um Metro princess or whatever the style is but then when you have that signature you kind of have that style that tells people that's so and so and this is their style and so I was inspired by that which is why I call it my Domino rule too okay so now I will shift into some more tactics and a quick survey of questions on the how where and the when so let's talk about formats for content and all the possible ways you can produce content or have others produce content whether freelancer whether people on

your team whether yourself so I like to think of it as like a big plate of food or your whole food diet and these are all the different kind of courses from small bites like in a moose Bush to a big meal and the idea here is first of all you can go across mediums and one of the lightest weight things as I mentioned you can do is something in email so newsletter is great audio because oftentimes people find it very easy just to talk out loud and share what they're thinking video you know you can hop in a room and have a hallway conversation and then there's articles so here the idea is to go from the most lightweight effort at the top to the most heavyweight and the reason I present this information this way is so

that you guys all see anything is possible and you could literally pick the most lightweight thing to the most heavyweight thing what a lot of content operations do is they stall out and get confused and frustrated because they feel like they can only do things on the bottom right when you can actually do a ton of stuff on the upper left so I want to make sure I make this point like one example is a newsletter that's simply link curation or it could be a full dedicated Edition that's like about some theme or Trend similarly with audio you can go everywhere from like a hallway style Jam or you're just talking to each other and sharing cool ideas to a very produced like oral essay or launching not just a show but a series of like a limit did series of podcasting maybe you

don't have to do a full podcast yet another thing is you know video like if you do a lot of presentations that are useful like at a Devcon or a Dev connect or some conference why wouldn't you run those on your website as a piece of content like in our in our operation we would not only run just the slides we'd sync it up with a simple talk track without any new video done super easy you could also do very produced videos like an animated whiteboard explainer or wired's one concept five ways videos there's a lot of options same with articles like people get really hung up on this like oh my god I've got to have like my magnum opus piece no you could literally publish a chart a day you could also go for your magnum opus and also write your Journal paper or white paper in the space in

crypto it could be any of these things but I just want to share that you can think about those options so now let me just give some quick tactical super quick advice even though I know a lot of you work in these mediums but these are like the editors tricks to think about because again they can help you really punch above your weight which is my recurring through line through this talk so for written pieces you may think podcasts go viral because you see everyone talking about that episode but guess what everyone is talking about that episode when you actually look at the numbers it doesn't always translate to listens and anyone who's built a large show or a series of shows like some of the shows I've built have had 200 000 listens per episode like I can tell you right now there's really

almost no correlation the only correlation really is that sometimes having some social um around audio can help increase top of funnel brand awareness for a show but it doesn't necessarily convert into listeners so to go viral you should have a written piece why does this matter let me give you concrete two examples one you launch a cool product a reporter wants to write about it they need to be able to quickly find in your piece well I'll talk about the nut graph in a minute but they need to find like a way to see like what is the big idea here and how can I kind of crib from their piece to grab it that's where your neck graph will come in that's the second point on my slide I'll explain that in a minute the other thing is like what if you want people to

screenshot quotes and share it what if you want more people to write about it so they can easily embed it written pieces are critical and they should accompany any multimedia pieces I want to make a note about the net graph even super seasoned Pro editors we once had a meeting at wired where there was a bunch of senior editors and the question on the table was why the f aren't you guys all putting net graphs in your article a neck graph is a nutshell paragraph and you'd be shocked at how many people write and they don't put one in now to be really clear I want to be really clear I'm not saying write a five paragraph essay that's so off Vibes and also not very with it for crypto and also kind of boring and on the nose but you have to kind of know the rules

before you break the rules and the net graph is not a rule you want to break for a lot of strategic reasons including if a media person or person who wants to talk about your product writes about it you need to give them an easy way to kind of Orient it's like the way I think about this as an analogy is you're driving and isn't it so effing annoying when someone is next to you and they say turn right turn left but they don't tell you the route ahead you don't really know what's coming like give me a little bit of a map or a little bit of an overview that's what the net graph does for the reader so it's super important it's super powerful another big really important tactic I would share for written pieces is to use think about the user experience

particularly for scannable subheads what I mean by that is people should a be able to figure out the information architecture of your piece the exact same way they might on a website just by looking at the structure of the subheads like they could even maybe figure out the gist of it they could jump around and find out what's for them two reasons this is super important one the idea that people read linearly is so outdated so an artifact of print and not at all web or mobile native so ditch that idea that people read linearly they skip around two this is also super helpful for helping you resolve a common religious debate I see in a lot of content operations which is how to decide how deep or not deep

you should go I will always hear from technical pieces which is a lot of my specialty oh my God I don't want to dumb it down blah blah blah and I'm like great don't dumb it down you don't have to condescend to your reader but you can bring them along and even if someone is not a technical expert in X if you do a really good job of sign posting and putting like like map uh landmarks on the terrain you can really bring people along and I'll give you one example and the A6 and Z operation we had a piece where we did a primer like an explainer on the Dell EMC merger which is the wonkiest corporate development thing ever like seriously it was all charts and graphs and like financials talking with the team working with them collaboratively I figured out a way to

structure it help make their Concepts become more understandable Beyond insiders and that piece went viral and not only that people wrote it up and shared it in Business Schools as a case study and as a way to think about oh my God this is like a course in how to understand business like it became bigger than it could be simply because we took the time to think about that information architecture so that's what I mean about this whole Insider debate don't get caught up in it it's a religious debate it's pointless it's more of an and than an or another religious debate by the way is how long something should be this is so funny because people will say I believe pieces should be short someone else will say long is what I want that's true to my heart neither one of those things matter

actually because those are the wrong reasons I have a very easy answer here it should be as long as it needs to be and what I mean by that is don't get caught up on the religious debate if it's long and it's great good if it's long and wordy unnecessarily not good the real metric to think about here is Insight per minute or Insight per inch because you are earning your reader at every inch when I was at wired a tool that we use and today people use a tool like parsley with chart beat and I was addicted to it because a I loved high traffic numbers and kind of beating records but I also love that you could see where readers drop off and that was super helpful for thinking about oh great this is

important for me to know when I think about how to structure my pieces and that's not to say you should only think like data driven you should actually have your own point of view here finally the other note I want to say for written pieces and it's going to apply to the rest of these types of formats everything to me personally is an op-ed what I mean by that is everything's an argument piece whether it's a written piece a podcast a video you're making an argument and know that argument because if you want again to punch above your weight have your pieces go viral reach more people be shared making it an argument for something or against something or about something is the way to go so quick notes on newsletters really quick I already mentioned this do not save your newsletter for last make it one of

the first things you do um and then the other thing a question I often get is you can actually make it to help it grow because a lot of newsletters don't grow Beyond current customers try to make it a resource this is obvious advice but people again shockingly don't do it enough if you're going to put company announcements put it at the bottom if that's not the goal of the newsletter and your goal is to create and expand your list and then finally you should gather info but maybe don't overwhelm your your subscribers but you can gather info the first time they subscribe to get some basic info to tier them even if you're not tiering initially I don't want people to stop starting a newsletter just because they think they have to have a separate newsletter for engineers in a separate newsletter for community in a separate

newsletter for X just get people's names on a list to get started don't get caught up in that and then later on if you want you can tier your list finally for videos and podcasts again I could teach a whole course on podcasts I don't know how to squeeze all this into like one or two slides the first thing I'll say is I don't think there's that much difference any longer between videos and podcasts so that's a great medium like you're losing growth if you're not doing it on YouTube as well but I do want to also make sure I emphasize that it is also very different to build an audio only brand and what I mean by that is audio is so different than text you can't fake authenticity and Authority so you need to make sure you get that writer topic fit right

also I find that when I bring written people to the audio medium they do two common mistakes they try to put like an overview net graph which I just talked about on the written part in an audio thing you can't really do that it doesn't work a natural conversation never goes that way and then two people will a lot of written editors will try it or other editors will try to cut things that feel like too much detail worst thing you could possibly do because when you cut too much detail you turn the conversation into all platitudes and people tune out so it's actually the opposite of written so there's a lot of nuances to building an audio brand and then finally if I could give you one piece of advice for anyone who wants to start a podcast in this

room just one piece of advice this would be it don't think to yourself I'm just going to start a podcast which is a great way to get going yeah good but what'll happen and I've had lots of people complain to me that their show growth stalls out they hit an invisible asymptote what will happen is you'll stall out why does that happen one of two reasons you didn't launch it well so you missed the top of funnel at the beginning or you didn't actually you don't actually have a show you have a podcast a podcast should be a show it needs a show concept that you could clearly describe and have something to help really Define just

like I talked about earlier to help really filter the pitches to help really filter what this show is and isn't again if you want to punch above your weight you're building a brand so that's super important okay I'm going to take a quick pause here and just talk about some common misconceptions in editorial operations this one cracks me up the first one is what I call the myth of repurposing marketers and Engineers love this one marketers because it's a great strategy for how can we get more mileage out of one piece can we do it five different ways Engineers often love it because it's a really efficient thing to do it's efficiency whatever the reason it's not a good thing it doesn't work I have a Nuance here I call it the myth of

repurposing because you cannot take one piece of content and dress it up five ways what you can do however and this is a really important nuance and this is how to repurpose your content without literally transferring it across like let's turn an audio podcast into a written post into X is you have to adapt it to each medium the most successful content if you can will be created natively for that Medium whether audio or video or text but if you want you could take for instance like don't spend time so let me give you just one concrete piece of advice when you have this debate if you have a podcast or an audio operation don't spend time trying to write the transcript up into cool op-ed just post the transcript that's fine because there are other reasons to

do this which is like SEO or helping with virality so that people can quote to your podcast episode if you actually want to write an argument piece based on a podcast then write a separate argument piece so the idea here is don't think about repurposing a single piece of content think about your entire platform your idea platform for that particular idea and then all the ways you're going to express it across the mediums how do you choose those mediums you heard Amanda talk earlier today about knowing where your audience is there's your answer knowing what they do already if they happen to be more into audio than video then do that first or something else one caveat if you have a big original fresh idea make it a written piece first not a

podcast first for all the reasons I shared earlier about virality and owning your ideas a quick note so a common misconception in in audio is like you need to have things release on the exact same day this is a myth you do need some regularity to create a routine for listeners and it can help with rankings and very subtle nuanced ways there's a whole game there what I'm saying here is invert your model this idea that you think or anyone thinks like oh my God I'm going to release this then and people are going to listen to it because it's going to time with such and such news cycle no what happens with podcasts is people listen based on their information diet their info diet which I talked about earlier they're going to listen when they're on a run when they're on a vacation trip they load up

a bunch of podcasts they listen when they listen and that's what I mean about orienting it in the listeners info diet versus trying to orient it and what you think they're doing so kind of obvious but not really unless you're really in the space and then I mentioned already having text to accompany it I also want to say one more common misconception there's a lot of conflation of aggregation curation and syndication first of all why does this even matter for small startups like yourselves you may not have the budget or time or operation to run a big content operation so one of the easiest ways to bootstrap is to run content from others or to aggregate links this is a great strategy you can do a lot but here's the thing curation is critical

and I would say to follow the same brand rules that you do for you know that I describe the two rules the two word rule that you would do for curation as you do it for everything else what makes the pitch what makes a cut what doesn't what isn't you what is how can you shape it or add analysis that better expresses your Vantage Point everything is a packaging opportunity and I swear to you the more you do you will see more mileage out of this I already mentioned that you can be a resource to grow and one note if you decide to Syndicate pieces so let's say a big part of your strategy is community marketing and you have a lot of people in your community with Rich content and you decide hey I want to Syndicate all these pieces more regularly great

but think strategically about it don't do it accidentally what I see a lot of people do they just sort of randomly crowdsource and they don't really think about what they're trying to do think strategically if you can have a percentage of an ideal syndication ratio so for instance the ratio is important not the amount for every nine pieces we put out one of those pieces the tenth piece can be syndicated or two out of ten so have a ratio so you have a little bit again it's all about creating the Brand This is where people Miss they publish content they don't make a brand and then the note on community and contributor strategy I've ran contributed strategies quite a bit and quite successfully I have a rule which I call my LinkedIn rule which is any contributed section like expert opinion section or op-ed

section over time will inevitably come become LinkedIn and that's not meant to be a bad thing because LinkedIn is great for what it does but here's the thing LinkedIn is a network with content on top it's a network first the content serves that goal for most operations you're not a network and that's the danger so you have to be very careful when curating and crafting your brand to be very strategic about your syndication contributor and communication and con and um Community strategy okay one more piece of advice this is my famous mccleskey curve but I say mine it's really my former colleague Mark McCluskey who was at wired and then he went to Sports Illustrated to lead digital there he had a great chart this

graphic that he would put up on our on our whiteboards often and it's basically one thing that people try to figure out is how do I time my content there's an art to timing and I have to tell you I love this because I I love timing content it's like my favorite thing it frustrates my colleagues and my team a lot because they're like oh my God we're not running that piece we're gonna hold it or okay we're running that too fast all of a sudden like you were waiting on and now you're saying let's get it out this is why the idea here is you have value add which is how much value you're adding to the conversation and then the timing of when you go in the cycle you either should be first and leading or you should have a deeper and differentiated or better take you want

to avoid the middle which is the dead zone you'll be lost it'll be noisy all your hard work will be like lost and it'll be really hard to control yourself and hold back because you're going to see all these people talking about this exciting mini topic and if you haven't gone first I would wait till that comes calms down and then go next unless there's some specific other crisis reason to do it but generally speaking this is a very powerful rule of thumb for supersizing your content the other thing I mentioned the attention game the info diet you should think about news cycle is this the right mood for something about this like this is what's consuming the headlines do we really want to drop this explainer now or can we wait the Zeitgeist like what's in the Zeitgeist

is this too trendy and followy and you want to be a leader or you actually want to add value like you should think about these things even time of week and time of day can be strategies to help you you know punch above your weight and what I mean by that is time of week so I'll tell you a funny thing when I first like came to working in in corporations at Park a lot of people would say like and a lot of the pr agencies would work with would say we have to run this on Tuesday because that's when everything is gets the most traffic and that's certainly true in certain media announcements and like certain press releases for certain reasons because of how newspapers operated but in reality you should Arbitrage timing if you can

like why not take advantage of When there's less competition and more attention for your piece especially when you're trying to punch above your weight and get heard drop something on a Friday night or a Saturday morning you would be shocked at how many of the pieces I've dropped at A6 and Z included that have gone more viral and I have a lot of data points on this over the years for being dropped on a Thursday Friday or Saturday than if they had gone like Monday Tuesday in the in the business week time of day if you want to go viral this is not like a hard and fast rule but the earlier in the day the better because the more time people have to seed and engage around things like Hacker News the better and then another quick framework that could be handy for you

here is to think about um in media we used to have this framework like there's a day one story there's a day two story there's a day three story which is more analysis and big picture just one example like apple apple announces a new phone day one story here's a phone here's the features day two take it's not as good as the last phones they're not really innovating day three take and doesn't have to literally be day three this is just a phase in the cycle it could be day five let's talk about the trend of mobile and whether mobile is dead and now the future is VR that's the kind of a way to think about the timing of the zeitgeist all right a couple of quick notes on tools and process because I just want to make sure I give you some more operational tactics

have an editorial calendar I cannot believe how easy this is and how few people do this it drives me insane it could literally be a Google Calendar it could be airtable like ours is both I like a date view because I want to see the timing as I mentioned of what's happening in the world and where our Cadence and content is living especially if I know there's big conferences and Industry events happening or holidays because that's an opportunity it's also sometimes a time to do blackout dates airtable is great because it allows you to have a pipeline view so I like to see on my team the editor's views by pipeline do we have enough balls in the air so if you're doing an internal operation and you're trying to run content so that you have at least one

piece a week and I'll make a note about volume and Cadence in a second but if you want to hit that Cadence you're dependent on other people and you'd probably need to have five at least five balls in the air to have one piece of content land on a particular week so the more balls you have in the air the more content will land if you're running a strategy with community and external contributors like from your your own open source Community or elsewhere you probably need 10 to 12 balls in the air for one to land so I'm just sharing these ratios because even seasoned editors don't know to think about this and it's pretty critical because volume and Cadence are so important so in the initial phase of your operation

people ask me what kind of cadence should I hit God if you could hit daily great but really at least weekly if you can't hit weekly you're gonna have to find a solve like drops or monthly editions or clever packaging but you need to have some volume in the beginning phase of an operation in order to really build a presence and then this is why the phasing matters once you've established a presence you can zag your zigzag your strategy a little and go in a different direction and actually focus more on strategic drops or other things so kind of a dance to all this I also want to make a note about this idea of stock versus flow so Robin Sloan had a really good framework which is simply flow is the feed it's a posts on the tweets it's a stream of daily and

sub daily updates that reminds people you exist stock is the durable stuff it's the content you produce that's as interesting to in two months or two years as it is today Evergreen basically it's what people discover is what spreads slowly but surely building flat fans over time in any content operation you need both of these motions and I would argue if you want to think using a magazine analogy think of like the day to weekly stuff as flow and kind of monthly packages or special features as stock just like a magazine very helpful there's a reason it works and most importantly it keeps you proactive not just reactive the number one complaint I

hear from content operations and frankly I haven't even saw this I've had the same problem my own operation bluntly which is we can often be more reactive because there's so much going on and so much coming in it's a good problem to have but you need to also be really Proactive or you're not winning and punching above your weight quick thing on resourcing so a lot of people have asked me questions about how to hire who to hire how do I do this I have a very simple kind of framework for this which is whether you hire a writer first or an editor first so the first thing you should do is do an internal asset inventory and asset audit and I don't mean your p l and your op capex and your operations and your servers I mean your people and ideas like do you

have people like a CEO who's charismatic that you can use great but excuse my language their CEO they're probably not going to be too busy to be like a regular host and a regular contributor do you also have like say an engineering team that's like super motivated and excited to write about their work great that's an asset you have let's say you have nobody what do you do that's where this question comes in so if you start with your asset inventory and answer that question it'll tell you whether to hire or freelance if you want to hire contractors because not everyone will have budget a writer first or an editor first a writer is someone who can create fast output like they can write they can help you volume and Cadence an editor is someone who's really great when you have Rich assets in-house like a lot of great

ideas but not enough ways to get them out so the editor is like a multiplier a writer is great but they're rate limited by how many writers you have because there's only so many hours in the day that they could write and then an editor is someone who can multiply that content so that's a way to think about it uh writers help with volume and Cadence editors help with cadence and diverse volume The Voice challenge with the writer is making sure their voice is also kind of the voice of your brand The Voice challenge with editors is how to create enough diverse voices but enough of a sense that this piece's signature our brand and it works so that it feels like it's part of your brand otherwise you're

going to run into the problem a lot of operations do which is a lot of great random content that doesn't really kind of fit into a brand package another quick thing is you should know who owns the the vision and the strategy before you even try to hire even if it's a freelancer because what a lot of people do is they'll say oh I just want to hire a journalists and they'll make magic happen it doesn't work that way it could be someone who's never worked you know in building their own brand they worked at a really established media Outlet so they don't know how to build a brand it could be someone who doesn't know how to navigate inside a company it could be someone who's worked with a lot of other people doing a lot of other things and they don't know how to do this thing so

I say don't get caught up in all the titles it is too complicated half the titles are made up they're really different you know it's so confusing just go to the basics find out specifically what did they actually do and what do they like to do because you want to keep them motivated creatives have to be kept motivated to stick around don't be fooled by portfolios if you see a big fancy list of links ask them what they did on each piece because don't forget there's a bunch of other people invisible who could have worked on that if you really want to level up you can ask for before and after samples I love doing that because I want to see what specifically they did but you have to have someone who knows how to assess that work don't Focus only on the outcomes like

the product ask questions about what process it took to get there because this will help them assess whether their process can match your org small or big and then don't forget to test it's crazy to me like editorial hiring is just like engineer hirings I mean it's different but people don't hire Engineers without doing certain technical tests like why wouldn't you do the same for editors like people hire editorial Talent all the time without testing them and I cringe when I hear that I'm like oh my God what are you doing you can de-risk it before you go in so that's a high level overview now the last few minutes I'm going to give some quick kind of updates specific to crypto one a common thing I hear this is happening a lot with new spaces like

ours is how to create like one question I get a lot is how do I create a category with my content so you want to map the terrain kind of know where people are have a diagram again you kind of already probably know this in your head for your business so content almost always flows from business strategy it also often goes the other direction where getting pen to paper actually drives what is our strategy so it's a little bit of an iterative process so you have to kind of map the terrain your goal is to understand where people already are and then where you want them to be and what inferential leaps need to be made in between and how your content can literally map that two this is really a huge opportunity lay landmines for your competitors

people do this in sales marketing content all the time why wouldn't you define the narrative and without depositioning them you don't want to be an like set the narrative for the entire category and one concrete way of doing this is to give you a specific example is if you do like an analyst like chart that essentially defines this is the category that people fit in and you're kind of depositioning your competitor and somehow you're miraculously the one that has the answer why the F not similarly you can do things like metrics that matter in this industry like a lot of people have a lot of debates like right now in crypto there's a lot of debates around what are the right benchmarks and metrics for ZK and zero knowledge like the company that will actually get that right could also lead

with marketing first before they even have all the answers that's not meant to be exaggerated and lie but there is a way that you can reset and frame The Narrative and you should take the advantage to do that write a category defining op-ed or a piece an argument piece can be a call to action it could be something that inspires people especially Talent this is critical for recruiting talent I can't tell you how many portfolio companies have talked about how a piece literally was why someone came to them over another person that was their equivalent there's also making people feel you get them like the buyer it can also be something that incites people to a movement like a community and this is where even things like using mirror

could be great because if you have a piece that's like a movement type op-ed why not NF to create an nft that people can partially own that piece if it's a big seminal idea like you can do a lot with that and then finally this is really about how to power up in your game keep hitting the core message but don't be a one-hit wonder I see this all the time writers content creators Etc they can do a great piece they write it they get it placed they do interviews and then they don't do anything more or they keep repeating that same idea Like A variation on it it's more of the same you should keep evolving and think in terms of building a body of work that is how you sustain and continue playing the

game over and over and over again these are two concrete examples of op-ed techniques and how I applied a lot of these techniques with the collaborators an example of an op-ed that is sort of a category defining op-ed and the links are in the notes so I'll send these around and you can read them more closely than one was the case for developer experience and then the other was this piece on when one app rules them all that Connie Chan and I did in 2015 that became uh the first time that the New York Times cited a non-media outlet as a top piece of writing ever because they didn't even know how to describe us they were like on the website like it wasn't even like a media property and a lot of it was taking this challenge of how do you take a product piece and make it more

ethnographic piece so I'll share those examples a lot of times people ask me questions how do you think about harnessing Community for the content operation some advice you should establish your own presence and brand identity first or you'll kind of get lost in The Fray especially in crypto because it can be pretty crowded and people are in a lot of communities so you kind of can't tell after a while like who are they writing for because they're writing for everybody so have an idea of what your brand is it doesn't have to be like wait 10 years like just wait a little bit till you know what's working before you introduce too many other variables to it identify and enlist your power users but not just as writers as editors who can help curate a sign and shape and then don't fall under the Trap

of crowdsourcing and this again goes back to that framework I talked about the difference between aggregation curation syndication think in terms of building a brand again not a user generated platform where it's fungible and you're just a host because you're just not going to create an identity and when in doubt try to go Niche or vertical first Stephanie's in on my team she's our editor for engineering and she's also our audience development lead and she was formerly at GitHub but I asked her for tips for marketing specifically to open source so this is the slide that she put together and I added just a couple of notes but here she makes a point and I just want to make sure I emphasize this that

documentation is a Content opportunity so don't lose that you've heard this again this morning with Amanda meet your audience where they are help people find and follow your project and then find content opportunities in code and that includes things like the importance of onboarding and thinking about how to bring more people in think about the difference between you know the change log versus Forum contributor support versus like other marketing I'll send these slides so you can have this note and then last two notes this comes up a lot so I want to make sure I at least quickly hit this which is how to measure your operation I like to think of two types of metrics there's passive metrics which are metrics or measures that help you assess

the overall health of your operation and these are kind of including vanity metrics and honestly things that execs like to hear about like traffic overall page views total downloads lessons per month total subscribers all great and the reason I say it's vanity is it's to me it's helped I think of these as passive because they're important for knowing the health of your operation like is it working just like getting a pulse check is it like does something break why do we have a sudden hike or like a sudden Drop Like does something not working it's useful for kind of keeping a pulse on that in forums you'll often hear in this category I'm on the front page of Hacker News and I always crack up when people say that because that is such a function of time of day what's a better metric is actually how

many points the piece has so the other metrics that I care about are the active metrics and these are the things that you can use to measure progress against your goals like if your goal is influence or help you test hypotheses and figure out what's working or not so subscribers everything I talked about distribution subscribers is literally owning your distribute distribution in in metrics parlance it's very similar to the LTV for your product like the lifetime value of your customer is how I think of subscribers for your content time spent super helpful for Content teams because it tells you where people drop off total unique listeners is a good proxy for subscribers on podcasts because you can't really get subscriber data on podcasts otherwise some platforms can give this to you

for podcasts I care about listens per episode don't fall for this trick people will tell you oh my God my podcast has so many listens it has one million per month and I'm just like yeah but they also have like an episode a day so they got that from like a lot of volume you care about per episode because it tells you what's actually how strong the show is gain and loss and subscribers this is critical because attrition data is something like lost data is something a lot of people don't account for you have to know if you're losing people and why if you can and then month over month growth growth as tied to specific pieces not just generically because you want to know what are your inflection point pieces what are the type of pieces that are

super sizing and super growing your operation I use this a lot in the podcast and in fact I have a very sophisticated framework for podcasts which I won't go into but it has to do with how to think about your episode rankings and how how often do your episode rankings your top 10 episodes change because I can tell you a lot about how you're really growing way more important than and I use this to kind of Drive growth for our podcast in the early days and then uptake which is like things like anecdotal doesn't have to be all quantitative like is this a piece that vitalik shared I think that kind of counts for more points or is it like from another influencer like this is kind of the way to think about that the idea here is play the long game don't be a one-hit wonder

of course a meme your way it's a great way to supersize and grow fast but don't hit the invisible asymptote where then you stall out I see so many great people they burn out like fires in the night and if you want to go big it's super ambitious and great I would argue the game today is about Niche verticals aggregated to be big I actually wonder if it's the end of big in media and then of course you know always quality thinking about the balance of quality and quantity so I'll share these afterward um and these are all ways to think about punching above your weight like that's the recurring theme I want us to really focus on today because that's what you're here to do you can do a lot and when in doubt just ask yourself

does this really Advance what I'm trying to do one thing with content is people have endless ideas and that's a good thing but you can't do everything so you've got to think about like what's going to work and what's not going to work who you're trying to reach and I always give people this advice which is based on one of my favorite quotes from a stunt coordinator for the show Daredevil because there's a scene early on in the show for those who haven't seen it where the main character it's all non-verbal he's punching and fighting in the hallway fighting off like the bad guys the villains whatever and you see him get visibly tired and like start to like harder to try to and you see that in the emotional Arc of the story he's tired

he's he has to do his duty but he's this is a hard job and so when they designed that sequence this was his quote the choreography has to push the story forward if it doesn't push the story forward it's just punches and kicks which is what people do in their content operation so think in terms of everything you do even if it's something fun and lightweight I'm not saying be precious about it how can you advance your Brands and your narrative because otherwise it's just gags or punches or kicks for the sake of it it all has to be relevant and have the emotional content of the scene which in your case is your mission and your goal so I thought that would be a good note to end on awesome thank you

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