Boston Write Now: Highlights From Our Latest Event

Sean Malvey is a digital content marketer with a strong background in data analytics, project management, and international security (he’s a former Interpol agent). Sean currently writes for the DailySoccerDigest.

Last Thursday night, Boston Content teamed up with Wayfair to organize a panel discussion and networking event featuring some of the city’s leading content and copywriting pros. In all, 212 word nerds attended, enjoying pizza, drinks (provided by Drizly), and a whiskey tasting from Relativity.

Co-Executive Director Katie Martell welcomed the crowd, highlighting some upcoming spring #BosCon events, including a writing workshop and a field day. Martell then introduced the event’s moderator, Ann Handley, a popular marketing expert, and the WSJ best-selling author of Everybody Writes.

Handley shared some anecdotes from her life and career, then passed it over to the panelists, who were:

• Amanda Morrison (Senior UX Copy Manager at Wayfair): Worked years in various copywriting projects before honing her skill in customer journey content strategy (CS).
• Beth Dunn (Product Editor-in-Chief at Hubspot): Winning the “most circuitous career path” award for her background as a former paleontologist, chef, and romance novel editor; Dunn is now a leading figure in Hubspot’s UX and content writing space.
• Dana Young (Manager of Content Strategy at Brightcove): Worked under a variety of titles in her content marketing journey. She emphasized the importance of CS, especially in the app industry.
• Michael Baker (Senior Manager of Global Content Strategy at Crimson Hexagon): coming in a close second to Dunn on “career circuity,” Baker once worked as a farmer and pre-school teacher. He’s also the former Executive Director of Boston Content, and in his current role, he weaves meaning out of the trillions of social media data points at Crimson Hexagon.

After the panel introductions, Handley posed some questions:

Q. Is there a real difference between content & copy?

• Baker: No, not really. The audience doesn’t care. Don’t forget the goal here is always conversion.
• Rest of panel: Agreed with Mike, but also depends on your company. It can be helpful to separate the two for organizational purposes.

Q. How do you get in the mindset of the customer?

• Baker: Build legitimate customer personas. We (Crimson Hexagon) talk to our  sales and customer service teams, find out what questions customers have, and build from there.
• Dunn: Live customer feedback is very helpful, also Hubspot uses a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to make decisions grounded in data.
• Morrison: Our content team holds weekly meetings to review upper and lower funnel content to vet the tone/voice of our writing. We read it out loud, and if it doesn’t sound like how you’d say it to your friend, then it gets edited.

Q. What skills are helpful to have for your career? And how did you acquire them?

• Morrison: Organizational management skills are incredibly useful for us right now. I’ve acquired these skills by reading from experts like Karen McGrane and Abby Covert.
• Dunn: I’ve had to become more globally conscious with my work because Hubspot translates its content into various languages, and has readers all over the globe. You have to be cautious what you create. What reads well here may not translate so well in another culture.
• Baker: Learn how to own the means of production, (and) you don’t need to get in line and wait. The objective is to get content published, so take on new work and teach yourself new skills.

Q. How do you choose where to insert your copywriting in the marketing funnel, especially with so many different content related touchpoints?

• Morrison: We (Wayfair) view our website as a storefront, always making sure every piece of content is clever and clear for the user.
• Young: It can definitely get blurry at times, but the same voice needs to be in all parts (email/product/corporate/website/etc.)
• Dunn: Your CS should stress the continuation of the story for the user. You don’t want the user thinking they signed up for Princess Bride, and they get the Exorcist!

In the final minutes of the discussion, the panel opened up for audience questions, many of which focused on how best to collaborate with internal departments and teams. Panelists offered advice like taking joint projects early on in the process -- not midstream -- or hosting multiple department teams in joint Q&A events, to help break silos and establish clear lines of communication.

One audience member asked, “How do you manage the hiring process when it’s time to scale up?” Morrison provided the most illustrative response by explaining that Wayfair takes a headcount each year across departments to determine if each entity is scaling at the same pace, and then her team makes hiring adjustments accordingly.

After the last question, many stayed to network, and lined up for signed copies of Handley’s popular writing guide, Everybody Writes.

Stay tuned for details on Boston Content’s next event -- details to come soon! Sign up to be notified here.

A Marketer's Approach to Creating Ethical Content

Dan Shewan is a web content specialist and journalist based in New England. He is a regular contributor to the WordStream blog, where he writes about everything from emerging search technologies to content marketing strategy. Dan’s essays and journalism have been featured in a wide range of publications in print and online, including The Guardian, Pacific Standard, The Daily Beast, The Independent, Dig Boston, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and many other outlets.

In 2013, Buffer shocked the world of content by publishing the salaries of every member of staff on its payroll.

Many people dismissed Buffer’s commitment to radical transparency. They said it was crazy, that it would tank investment, that merciless headhunters would poach Buffer’s best and brightest.

The naysayers were wrong.

Thanks to the courage of startups like Buffer, blogging about employee salaries is no longer viewed as exposing sensitive proprietary information; it’s seen as a positive, desirable brand attribute, and rightly so. But something that far fewer companies seem willing to talk about or even acknowledge is the profoundly negative impact that many of the companies we rely upon and work with are having on their workers, their users, and society as a whole – and our complicity in it.

The ease and convenience promised by today’s tech often comes at great cost. Facebook may be able to offer advertisers the ability to target dozens of highly granular audience segments, but Facebook faced intense criticism when reports surfaced that it had shared sensitive data about the psychological well-being of schoolchildren in Australia and New Zealand with an advertiser. Twitter may be unbeatable for interacting with large audiences in real time, but Twitter has failed utterly to consistently enforce its own abuse policies and protect its users, and even issued temporary bans to victims of abuse. Amazon may be able to offer consumers delivery in one hour or less through Amazon Now, but the average Prime subscriber probably hasn’t heard of Amazon Flex, a virtually invisible network of independent contractors that delivers millions of packages for Amazon using their own vehicles, as part of a system with virtually no workplace protections in which drivers are forced to compete for delivery assignments using an Uber-style app.

Few companies are willing to risk losing revenue, users, or future acquisition prospects by weighing in on what are seen as largely political issues. Unfortunately, as inconvenient as it may be for Silicon Valley’s most prosperous startups, you can’t be an agent of transformative social change while enjoying the benefits of political neutrality. When you set out to “disrupt” things like public transportation by reinventing the bus for wealthy white people, or seek to capitalize upon an already predatory housing market rife with discrimination, you become part of the political landscape – particularly if you knowingly and repeatedly break the law in the pursuit of profit.

To complicate matters, many of us – especially straight white men – enjoy positions of such immense privilege that we’re more concerned with the click-through rates of our e-commerce campaigns than we are about the news of workers in Amazon’s fulfillment centers in Scotland who were reportedly forced to live in tents in the woods because they couldn’t afford to commute.

Simply put, it’s easy to ignore inequality and exploitation because we either directly benefit from them, or they don’t affect us.

Initiating a Dialogue About Ethics in Content

Sadly, there has been virtually no meaningful public discussion about the pervasive, structural inequality in tech among the content marketing community. For an industry with so much self-described “thought leadership,” this is as surprising as it is disappointing. It seems we’re much more comfortable talking about the ethics of accepting bribes from brands than whether we should be working with immoral tech companies in the first place.

Having difficult conversations about inequality in tech doesn’t necessarily mean trash-talking valued partners; all it requires is a commitment to the truth and the courage to voice it. Editorially speaking, there are very few ways to put a positive spin on a project like Uber’s Greyball tool or Palantir’s Investigative Case Management system, and even fewer ethical justifications for doing so – but content doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it doesn’t happen by accident. Someone has to write Palantir’s copy. Someone like you or me.

It’s never easy to be the person asking uncomfortable questions when everybody just wants to finish their work and go home. But we have to be those people, and one of the best ways to start talking about ethics in content is to frame these conversations as an extension of your company’s brand values.

If your company offers a way to ask questions of senior management, such as a regular company meeting, ask how – or if – ethical business practices factor into your company’s growth strategies. If you’re comfortable doing so, consider running a series of workshops to talk about how your company’s partnerships reflect your brand values. If your editor asks you to write something that conflicts with your personal ethics, ask how this content truly serves the best interests of your audience.

What else can you do? Before you start your next content project, ask yourself some difficult questions:

• Does this content overlook, rely upon, or otherwise obscure unethical business practices to make its case or provide value to the reader?
• How racially, economically, and socially diverse is the audience you’re writing for, and is this audience truly representative of the kinds of people who could benefit from your content?
• Does any aspect of this content project conflict with your personal morals? If so, what would you need to do or change in order for you to stand by your content in good conscience?
• Will your content meet the ethical standards of professional journalists? If not, why not?

We don’t need to resort to hyperbole or invective to start a conversation about unethical business practices in tech, but we do need to agree that the current system is unsustainable and that we all have to try harder and do better. Yes, we all have bills to pay, but we also have a responsibility to speak out against business models that encourage the exploitation of the disenfranchised and reward callous disregard for basic human decency.

And if we really can’t get behind ethics in content for its own sake, there’s always the profit motive for a more ethical approach to business.

How to Create and Organize Visual Assets in a New Role

Nisreen Galloway is a digital marketer and foodie with a strong background in writing, graphic design, and social media. She began her marketing career as an intern at Yelp and then worked at several B2B and B2C companies in the food and luxury markets, focusing on content marketing, graphic design, and social media management. Nisreen lives in Boston with her loving boyfriend, fridge full of spaghetti squash, and temperamental, but adorable cat Lilly.

My first full-time content marketing job out of college, I was lucky enough to have thousands of visual assets at my exposure. There were high quality photos, HD videos, and dozens of opportunities to create original content. As I created content calendars and social campaigns, it was easy to find the images I needed without draining our budget or struggling to meet deadlines.

At my next position, I was not so lucky. There were a few images hiding in buried folders and forgotten websites, but for the most part. there was nothing up to current brand standards. Luckily, we had a deep marketing budget, but there was no action plan for creating more content. Did a new product launch mean we needed several new photoshoots or just a few product shots? Did we need video of every event or just a few? Each decision was crucial to the marketing campaigns and assets for the year, and the first couple months were definitely a learning process. If you’re starting a new role with limited content, there are a few ways you can ensure your success.

Step 1: Assess and Organize

Determining what visual assets are already available when you start in your role is important. Are there photos from an old photoshoot hiding on a server? Is there a forgotten Flickr account with event photos you can use? Headshots? Having a solid idea of what’s available means you can organize the imagery in a central location, archive content that’s no longer relevant to the brand, and create a plan to move forward. When assessing backlogged content, it’s helpful to determine if any imagery can be updated or reused. One of my favorite pieces of content marketing that food and fashion bloggers are infamous for is showing their growth through comparison articles. Try taking a similar angle with your company’s old content to showcase your brand story, logo transformations, or even celebrate a company anniversary.

Step 2: Create a plan

It’s important to align your visual assets with your content strategy and goals for the year. If you want to grow your social presence, it might make sense to focus on acquiring more videos. If your focus is on email marketing, then creating pertinent graphics and photos may be your focus. Whatever your goals are, having an outline of your needs and wish-list items will help you better plan photoshoots, events, and the must-have moments to capture. If you’re operating on a small budget, try to think of places where you can double-up on asset creation. For example, if you need to update team headshots, consider also grabbing video Q&As with the team to use on social down the line. Doubling your efforts at each photoshoot will save you time and money.  

Step 3: DIY Visual Assets

If you’re working with a really small marketing team, you may not have the resources to hire professional photographers or video teams. Consider looking into things like Adobe Stock Photos or other stock photography websites and come up with a plan. iStock even offers some video clips that can be easily edited to create outstanding visuals for website upkeep or make your blogs stand out. For your social needs, it’s widely accepted to use a DSLR or an iPhone to grab images, or stage a mini shoot in your office. Get creative and don’t be afraid to try something out of the box — the best visual assets often resonate when they’re followed by great content.

Starting with little to no visual assets can be hard, but by having a plan, staying organized, and using the most of the free and downloadable resources online, you’re sure to slowly create a library that can easily support your content marketing needs.

3 Tips for Hiring a Stellar Content Writer

Kaite Rosa is Senior Director of Marketing at Payfactors. Prior, Kaite held content-focused roles at Boston-area companies including Virgin Pulse, Lionbridge, and Brafton. She has also reported for Boston-based online publication VentureFizz, and New York City-based online publications Mobile Marketer and Luxury Daily. Follow her on Twitter @kaiterosa.

Hiring a new content writer to your team is rarely an easy task. Today’s talent market is incredibly tight, and the big-time Boston-area companies offering unprecedented perks can make things that much more competitive. Not only that, but screening for strong writing skills isn’t exactly simple -- even for the seasoned content pro.

So how can you make hiring a little easier the next time you’re looking to expand your team? Here are some of the tried-and-true tactics I’ve used to find stellar content writers.

CAST A NARROW NET

I work for a tech startup, and our marketing team is still in its infancy. I know firsthand how tough it can be to clearly define what your new hire will be doing -- particularly when you’re still figuring out the team’s needs (and especially when you’re creating a new role from scratch).

Will your new hire be writing data sheets for product marketing? Helping your business development team with sales enablement content? Owning content for inbound and demand gen? Writing for the blog? Supporting product with technical copy? Interviewing the C-Suite for thought leadership pieces? Penning press releases? Crafting content for social media?

If you’re thinking, “Yes! All of it!” then let me be the one to break it to you: You’ve already set yourself up for failure.

A job description containing all of the above is innately flawed for two reasons.

First, one person can’t possibly own all those responsibilities successfully. It’s just way too much work for a single writer.

Second, the writer who kills it with your product marketing content is going to have a vastly different skill set than the one who writes creative copy for your demand gen offers.

ADJUST AS NEEDED

Instead of hopelessly searching for a content unicorn, narrow in on the near-term skills you absolutely need your new team member to have.

Maybe product can handle their own technical documentation for now, but you can’t wait another minute to find a writer who has a more creative slant to handle content for the blog. Outline your immediate must-haves, then adjust your job description (and job title!) to attract the kind of writer you need today.

Once you start reviewing resumes, reading writing samples and meeting candidates, be flexible. Maybe you’re looking for someone to own content for product marketing and sales enablement, but you end up finding an amazing candidate who’s also got a journalism background and would be great for interviewing execs and writing thought leadership content. Can you adjust that job description a bit further, to fit both your needs and the candidate’s strengths?

Be adaptable, and pivot when you need to.

GO BEYOND THE PORTFOLIO

While a writing portfolio is a great way to see what your candidate might be capable of, it’s impossible to know who edited that copy (and how many rounds of revisions it actually went through).

A take-home test may seem like a sure-fire way to weed out poor writers -- but it’s flawed, too. There are a billion variables that can skew an off-site writing test: a home environment very different from the workspace. An extended deadline. Outside help to edit.

Instead of sending your candidate home to work on a writing sample, prep a variety of quick assignments for your candidate to complete on-site.

For example, draft a bit of copy in advance for your candidate to edit. Sneak a few intentional errors in there -- some obvious, some not so obvious -- and see what they do with it.

The best writers not only catch the errors, but they’ll offer up suggestions to make your copy stronger, too.

Have your candidate use the piece they edit to craft some short content, like social media or ad copy. This’ll give you a sense of their ability to write clear, concise, compelling content.

At the same time, provide your candidate with a handful of statistics or some bullet points related to your product or industry. Ask them to use that information to storyline a quick blog, an infographic, or even a video script. This will show you how they approach a new project and help you understand how they think about visual content.

Finally, keep time to a minimum: I suggest giving no more than 30 minutes to complete the full test.

This tactic might seem unrealistic (cruel, even!), but it’s a solid way to figure out how your potential new hire works under stress and against a tight deadline.

When all is said and done, hold a quick debrief after the writing test. Ask the candidate to walk you through their work. What did they spend the most time on? What didn’t they get to? How did they decide what to work on first?

This helps shed light on how and why they prioritized all the projects. It also gives you a good look at how they approach the creative process.