How the CIA Trains Spies to Hide in Plain Sight

Despite how easy it looks in James Bond movies and heist flicks, good disguises are hard to pull off. A good wig and some makeup don't make you a new person—full transformation requires a full attitude adjustment. Just ask any contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race. And when you're a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency, being able to execute a perfect disguise can be a matter of life and death. Just ask Jonna Mendez.

"One of our officers, probably working out of the American embassy, would have surveillance 24 hours a day; they'd have teams of people following them," says Mendez, who spent years as the CIA's disguise chief. "But they had work to do; they had to communicate with people, clandestinely. The extremes we would go to to disguise those people was the most interesting, and the most challenging, part of the job."

So what does the agency do to protect its assets in the field? A lot of it, Mendez says, involves hiding a person's tell-tale features. If they have straight hair, make it curly. If they're young, give them a few streaks of gray. It also helps to change the way they walk or talk by putting a brace on their leg or an "artificial palate" in their mouth. Americans have a certain way of standing—weight on one foot or the other—and if they're trying to pass themselves off as European, it helps if they stand squarely on both feet. Good disguises, Mendez says, are almost always "additive;" you can make someone taller, heavier, or older, but "we can't go the other direction."

The CIA can also give a person the ability to do a "quick change." If someone knows they'll be trying to shake a tail, they can change their look as they move through busy sidewalks. Add a hat, change a shirt, add sunglasses, and—if it's done right—it'll look like someone has disappeared.

"You want to be the person that gets on the elevator, and then gets off, and nobody really remembers that you were even there," says Mendez, whose husband, Tony Mendez, was the subject of the 2007 WIRED story that became the movie Argo. "That is a design goal at the disguise labs at CIA."

Check out more of Mendez's tricks in the video above and in her Reddit AMA here.

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More Great WIRED Stories

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How Online Reviews Can Foster a Deeper Connection Between Brands and Consumers

Influencers and anything social media are the words du jour in brand building. Brands are clamoring to create branded connections via tactics like Instagrammable moments or encouraging their users to be visible brand ambassadors in an effort to drive awareness.

But most social media is ephemeral. Snapping a quick picture creates a momentary spark that is quickly offloaded to the cloud of your mind and then is just as quickly forgotten. Rarely do these actions foster a long-term memory because these fleeting instances are not stored in the part of your brain that memorializes experiences. However, neuroscience offers a proven path to help memorialize customers’ experiences with your brand.

As Ray Kurzweil writes in How to Create a Mind, neuroscience tells us the most effective way to memorialize a brand experience: put it in writing. The act of writing triggers your reticular activating system, which reminds your brain to pay close attention. By putting a brand experience into writing, as opposed to taking a quick photo, that moment is captured in the part of the brain that will more easily recall that memory. In other words, putting that experience in writing helps preserve that memory.

In the brand building world, the best manifestation of memorializing a customer’s experience is via online reviews, which are largely written down. Simply through the act of writing, these experiences become memorialized, and not just for the user who is creating the memory, but for others to see. Social media in general is a fleeting media with a short memory life. Reviews, on the other hand, are evergreen. They will continue to influence long after their original creator has hit “post.”

Social media in general is a fleeting media with a short memory life. Reviews, on the other hand, are evergreen.

Instead of chasing an ephemeral brand connection, brands should enable a deeper connection via online reviews.

Make it easy for customers to write a review of your brand

Enable them to memorialize that experience when it’s positive and even if it’s negative. A negative experience creates a strong emotional reaction, and if you’re responding to that review then you’re creating a dialogue that will form a lasting impression for your customer. Brands can encourage customers to write reviews easily from their site via a Review Us call-to-action or invite them to do so with a post-transaction email. The key is to make it as easy as possible for your customers to leave a review and to cement that experience in their mind.

Validate customers’ voices and experiences by responding

Responding to customers who took a few minutes to write a review validates their preservation of that brand memory, and it allows those who find the review years later to see your willingness to acknowledge their time and energy, perhaps even prompting them to write their own review. That review response can be in-house or via leveraging a third party that can be an extension of your marketing department, which can be a more cost-effective model.

Reward your five-star reviewers

Most brands ignore the positive reviews and focus only on the one- or two-star reviews. But let’s face it: Someone who wrote a five-star review took a few minutes to compliment your brand. They have already memorialized their love of the experience. The best way to make them even more of a brand ambassador is to reward them, and there are many creative ways to do that. You could, for example, embed a code within a review response that invites them to another microsite where there are different rewards for their effort and time.

Harness untapped insights from these experiences

Reviews are ripe with insights. There are thousands of comments that talk about your customers’ unmet needs and what they love or hate about your brand. There’s a reason why Amazon is mining reviews as they expand their private label brands or why Glossier analyzed thousands of beauty blog comments to develop new products that served unmet needs. Leverage companies with capabilities to not only pull reviews into one place but who can also employ natural language processing, word frequency techniques and statistical analysis to cull down insights that yield specific actions.

Stop chasing fleeting moments of brand connection and start capitalizing on what neuroscience has taught us, and leverage online reviews—your evergreen influencer—as a demand creation tool.

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Alexa is implementing self-learning techniques to better understand users

Where Facebook AI research moves next

Five years is an awful lot of time in the tech industry. Darling startups find ways to crash and burn. Trends that seem unstoppable sputter-out. In the field of artificial intelligence, the past five years have been nothing short of transformative.

Facebook’s AI Research lab (FAIR) turns five years old this month, and just as the social media giant has left an indelible mark on the broader culture — for better or worse — the work coming out of FAIR has seen some major impact in the AI research community and entrenched itself in the way Facebook operates.

“You wouldn’t be able to run Facebook without deep learning,” Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun tells TechCrunch. “It’s very, very deep in every aspect of the operation.”

Reflecting on the formation of his team, LeCun recalls his central task in initially creating the research group was “inventing what it meant to do research at Facebook.”

“Facebook didn’t have any research lab before FAIR, it was the first one, until then the company was very much focused on short-term engineering projects with six-month deadlines, if not less,” he says.

LeCun

Five years after its formation, FAIR’s influence permeates the company. The group has labs in Menlo Park, New York, Paris, Montreal, Tel Aviv, Seattle, Pittsburgh and London. They’ve partnered with academic institutions and published countless papers and studies, many of which the group has enumerated in this handy five-year anniversary timeline here.

“I said ‘No’ to creating a research lab for my first five years at Facebook,” CTO Mike Schroepfer wrote in a Facebook post. “In 2013, it became clear AI would be critical to the long-term future of Facebook. So we had to figure this out.”

The research group’s genesis came shortly after LeCun stopped by Mark Zuckerberg’s house for dinner. “I told [Zuckerberg] how research labs should be organized, particularly the idea of practicing open research.” LeCun said. “What I heard from him, I liked a lot, because he said openness is really in the DNA of the company.”

FAIR has the benefit of longer timelines that allow it to be more focused in maintaining its ethos. There is no “War Room” in the AI labs, and much of the group’s most substantial research ends up as published work that benefits the broader AI community. Nevertheless, in many ways, AI is very much an arms race for Silicon Valley tech companies. The separation between FAIR and Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning (AML) team, which focuses more on imminent product needs, gives the group a “huge, huge amount of leeway to really think about the long term,” LeCun says.

I chatted with LeCun about some of these long-term visions for the company, which evolved into him spitballing about what he’s working on now and where he’d like to see improvements. “First, there’s going to be considerable progress in things that we already have quite a good handle on…”

A big trend for LeCun seems to be FAIR doubling down on work that impacts how people can more seamlessly interact with data systems and get meaningful feedback.

“We’ve had this project that is a question-and-answer system that basically can answer any question if the information is somewhere in Wikipedia. It’s not yet able to answer really complicated questions that require extracting information from multiple Wikipedia articles and cross-referencing them,” LeCun says. “There’s probably some progress there that will make the next generation of virtual assistants and data systems considerably less frustrating to talk to.”

Some of the biggest strides in machine learning over the past five years have taken place in the vision space, where machines are able to parse out what’s happening in an image frame. LeCun predicts greater contextual understanding is on its way.

“You’re going to see systems that can not just recognize the main object in an image but basically will outline every object and give you a textual description of what’s happening in the image, kind of a different, more abstract understanding of what’s happening.”

FAIR has found itself tackling disparate and fundamental problems that have wide impact on how the rest of the company functions, but a lot of these points of progress sit deeper in the five-year timeline.

FAIR has already made some progress in unsupervised learning, and the company has published work on how they are utilizing some of these techniques to translate between languages for which they lack sufficient training data so that, in practical terms, users needing translations from something like Icelandic to Swahili aren’t left out in the cold.

As FAIR looks to its next five years, LeCun contends there are some much bigger challenges looming on the horizon that the AI community is just beginning to grapple with.

“Those are all relatively predictable improvements,” he says. “The big prize we are really after is this idea of self-supervised learning — getting machines to learn more like humans and animals and requiring that they have some sort of common sense.”

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7 things to think about voice

Tom Goodwin Contributor

Tom Goodwin is EVP, head of innovation at Zenith Media and the co-founder of the Interesting People in Interesting Times event series and podcast.

More posts by this contributor

• Social media, politics, and the bubble of distraction
• Patterns, Predictability, and the Rise of Donald Trump 

The next few years will see voice automation take over many aspects of our lives. Although voice won’t change everything, it will be part of a movement that heralds a new way to think about our relationship with devices, screens, our data and interactions.

We will become more task-specific and less program-oriented. We will think less about items and more about the collective experience of the device ecosystem they are part of. We will enjoy the experiences they make possible, not the specifications they celebrate.

In the new world I hope we relinquish our role from the slaves we are today to be being back in control.

Voice won’t kill anything

The standard way that technology arrives is to augment more than replace. TV didn’t kill the radio. VHS and then streamed movies didn’t kill the cinema. The microwave didn’t destroy the cooker.

Voice more than anything else is a way for people to get outputs from and give inputs into machines; it is a type of user interface. With UI design we’ve had the era of punch cards in the 1940s, keyboards from the 1960s, the computer mouse from the 1970s and the touchscreen from the 2000s.

All four of these mechanisms are around today and, with the exception of the punch card, we freely move between all input types based on context. Touchscreens are terrible in cars and on gym equipment, but they are great at making tactile applications. Computer mice are great to point and click. Each input does very different things brilliantly and badly. We have learned to know what is the best use for each.

Voice will not kill brands, it won’t hurt keyboard sales or touchscreen devices — it will become an additional way to do stuff; it is incremental, not cannibalistic.

We need to design around it

Nobody wanted the computer mouse before it was invented. In fact, many were perplexed by it because it made no sense in the previous era, where we used command lines, not visual icons, to navigate. Working with Nokia on touchscreens before the iPhone, the user experience sucked because the operating system wasn’t designed for touch. 3D Touch still remains pathetic because few software designers got excited by it and built for it.

What is exciting about voice is not using ways to add voice interaction to current systems, but considering new applications/interactions/use cases we’ve never seen.

At the moment, the burden is on us to fit around the limitations of voice, rather than have voice work around our needs.

A great new facade

Have you ever noticed that most company desktop websites are their worst digital interface; their mobile site is likely better and the mobile app will be best. Most airline or hotel or bank apps don’t offer pared-down experiences (like was once the case), but their very fastest, slickest experience with the greatest functionality. What tends to happen is that new things get new cap ex, the best people and the most ability to bring change.

However, most digital interfaces are still designed around the silos, workflows and structures of the company that made them. Banks may offer eight different ways to send money to someone or something based around their departments; hotel chains may ask you to navigate by their brand of hotel, not by location.

The reality is that people are task-oriented, not process-oriented. They want an outcome and don’t care how. Do I give a crap if it’s Amazon Grocery or Amazon Fresh or Amazon Marketplace? Not one bit. Voice allows companies to build a new interface on top of the legacy crap they’ve inherited. I get to “send money to Jane today,” not press 10 buttons around their org chart.

It requires rethinking

The first time I showed my parents a mouse and told them to double-click on it I thought they were having a fit on it. The cursor would move in jerks and often get lost. The same dismay and disdain I once had for them, I now feel every time I try to use voice. I have to reprogram my brain to think about information in a new way and to reconsider how my brain works. While this will happen, it will take time.

What gets interesting is what happens to the 8-year-olds who grow up thinking of voice first, what happens when developing nations embrace tablets with voice not desktop PCs to educate. When people grow up with something, their native understanding of what it means and what it makes possible changes. It’s going to be fascinating to see what becomes of this canvas.

Voice as a connective layer

We keep being dumb and thinking of voice as being the way to interact with “a” machine and not as a glue between all machines. Voice is an inherently crap way to get outputs; if a picture states a thousand words, how long will it take to buy a t-shirt. The real value of voice is as a user interface across all devices. Advertising in magazines should offer voice commands to find out more. You should be able to yell at the Netflix carousel, or at TV ads to add products to your shopping list. Voice won’t be how we “do” entire things, it will be how we trigger or finish things.

Proactivity

We’ve only ever assumed we talked to devices first. Do I really want to remember the command for turning on lights in the home and utter six words to make it happen? Do I want to always be asking. Assuming devices are select in when they speak first, it’s fun to see what happens when voice is proactive. Imagine the possibilities:

• “Welcome home, would you like me to select evening lighting?”
• “You’re running late for a meeting, should I order an Uber to take you there?”
• “Your normal Citi Bike station has no bikes right now.”
• “While it looks sunny now, it’s going to rain later.”

Automation

While many think we don’t want to share personal information, there are ample signs that if we get something in return, we trust the company and there is transparency, it’s OK. Voice will not develop alone, it will progress alongside Google suggesting emails replies, Amazon suggesting things to buy, Siri contextually suggesting apps to use. We will slowly become used to the idea of outsourcing our thinking and decisions somewhat to machines.

We’ve already outsourced a lot; we can’t remember phone numbers, addresses, birthdays — we even rely on images to jar our recollection of experiences, so it’s natural we’ll outsource some decisions.

The medium-term future in my eyes is one where we allow more data to be used to automate the mundane. Many think that voice is asking Alexa to order Duracell batteries, but it’s more likely to be never thinking about batteries or laundry detergent or other low consideration items again nor the subscriptions to be replenished.

There is an expression that a computer should never ask a question for which it can reasonably deduce the answer itself. When a technology is really here we don’t see, notice or think about it. The next few years will see voice automation take over many more aspects of our lives. The future of voice may be some long sentences and some smart commands, but mostly perhaps it’s simply grunts of yes.

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Mintel announces ‘Sub-Zero Waste’ as 2019’s global beauty and personal care trend

Available 24 hours a day, Mintel's global public relations team is pleased to provide accredited journalists with access to our research, arrange interviews with our expert analysts and share the latest insights across categories and countries.

December 05th, 2018December 05th, 2018

Beauty manufacturers, companies, and brands must shift to a whole new paradigm when approaching zero waste and sustainability, focussing on every aspect of the supply chain.

Mintel, the world’s leading market intelligence agency, has today (5 December 2018) announced ‘Sub-Zero Waste’ as the trend set to impact global beauty and personal care markets in the coming years.

The zero waste philosophy is gaining momentum as more and more consumers are affected by natural disasters and dwindling natural water resources. Better informed consumers will no longer tolerate egregious waste like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a direct consequence of years of indiscriminate abuse of single-use plastics. Moving forward, focussing efforts on reducing packaging is not enough; there is far greater potential for ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking from manufacturers and brands at every stage of the beauty supply chain.

Over the next five years, the focus on sustainability will reach new heights around the world as environmentally conscious consumers look for ways to reduce waste in all aspects of their lives, including their beauty and personal care routines. Brands that purposely create limited shelf life products or encourage overconsumption run the risk of consumer backlash. Consumers will demand that brands be more environmentally responsible and take accountability for their actions.

Andrew McDougall, Associate Director, Mintel Beauty & Personal Care, discussed how the ‘Sub-Zero Waste’ trend is set to influence the beauty and personal care industry worldwide:

“‘Sub-Zero Waste’ is not just a trend; it’s a movement towards a ground-shaking new archetype for the beauty and personal care industry. Some companies are already discussing completely removing packaging from the equation. Whether reducing or eliminating waste altogether, if brands don’t change their approach now, they will become insignificant and may not exist in the future. Brands that place current profits ahead of making the necessary investment in zero waste and sustainability will not be around in the future.

“We’re seeing that some indie brands have the upper hand with regard to sustainable beauty as they have built their business practices around ethics and environmentally friendly practices. Larger brands must adopt new practices in order to catch up with these smaller, more nimble competitors. Consumers today are paying a lot more attention to their impact on the planet and climate change calls are more drastic than ever before. A bigger-picture focus is needed throughout the beauty and personal care industry supply chain for a true zero-waste mentality.”

We have no doubt that ‘Sub-Zero Waste’ will transform the beauty and personal care industry over the next five years, but what other trends are on our radar? Contact the Press Office to speak with our global Beauty and Personal Care Research Team to learn more. Read the full details about ‘Sub-Zero Waste’ in a new thought piece available here for free download.

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Next X: The future of Health and Wellness

The Growing Business of Helping Customers Slow Down

Amazon looks to airports for cashier-less stores: report

Beth Comstock and Kara Swisher on Irritants and De-riskers (coming to a corporate culture near you.)

[This essay was published on Medium on Sunday (December 2)].

This is a wonderful interview. Two smart people expressing themselves at speed with power and precision. Swisher stops from time to time to sing her own praises. But I’ll take it, especially now that podcast practice is often sloppy thinking coated with a syrupy glaze of “the only thing I really owe you is the sound of my enchanting voice.”

This Recode interview is plain spoken, tough minded, and more or less unfreighted by fashionable ideas. It’s a troika driven bracingly through woods and snow to the safety of a country inn stacked with useful ideas and a blazing hearth of creativity. For the moment, we are rescued from the cold (and those nay-saying corporate cossacks).

Success Theater

Comstock talks about “success theater,” the way an organization beguiles the CEO with an appearance that all is well, that every one of her ideas is irresistibly sensible, and the deep reassuring promise that her kingdom come, her will be done.

Innovation Theater

Comstock also gives us a glimpse of “innovation theater,” those moments when everyone puts on a bright face to embrace the new orthodoxy. Yes, we are well outside the box. Yes, we are going to reinvent near everything. Dude, no problem.

The reality, Comstock knows from her experience at NBC and GE, is otherwise. People are frightened, competitive, and often blinded by a narrow reckoning of their own self interest. Worst of all, new ideas provoke our provincialism. (Surely, NIMBY [Not In My Back Yard] is the least worthy and the most dangerous reason to refuse the future. Because, really, if the future is not in your backyard, you’re are, as a professional and an organization, just asking for trouble.)

Failure

So there’s no “isn’t the future wonderful?” blather here. This interview is about the sheer and dour difficulty of change. We have all heard the “war stories” from the early innovators. Too often these are “just so” accounts that conceal the importance of failure and politics. And not just failure as in “ok, that didn’t work, let’s pivot!” But failure as in “oh, shit, we are committed to an idea that hemorrhages value as it loses altitude.”

Comstock is candid about her failures, including iVillage.

“Bought iVillage. It didn’t work. It took it a while not to work.”

Comstock learned something from iVillage as it was failing. This is how we win even when losing. If we are not learning, then the investment really was squandered. But if IP comes out of failure then the loss was a win and the investment worked. This will demand a C-Suite time-line not to mention accounting subtleties we have yet to master.

Comstock built an early in-house content studio. This was a chance to see what worked and what did not, at a time when nothing was obvious or intuitive. You had to try stuff. Comstock’s group invented The Easter Bunny Hates You and Microwave Gorilla. And then Comstock had to protect her lab from the broadcast mothership which really only grasped big, formulaic TV shows, not to mention C-suite carnivores who felt they could spend these resources more intelligently…not to mention an organization that wanted any kind of short-term success for the sake of balance sheet and PR.

Hulu

Still more trial and error, and before you knew it, Comstock had invented Hulu. (Which, thanks to this interview, I now think of Hulu as a kind of YouTube for old media.) And this in turn forced new forms of advertising. Suddenly there were 10-second “post-rolls.”

Lots of useful self criticism. Here Comstock is on politics.

Politics (or, stop being so University of Chicago)

One, I think the big mistake I made, personally and with the team, is kind of the cool kids versus the not-cool kids. And I think that happens a lot in change and I hired a bunch of digital Turks and we were gonna take on the world and I was out with my face on every magazine cover, like, “Yay, digital’s the future.” And I didn’t spend enough time building the bridges and building the partnerships internally.

I think many creatives and strategists tend to think the idea is everything. (Certainly this is the idea I brought out of University of Chicago. And it is, someone told me, the attitude of many Israeli innovators. Both see politics and anything promotional as so much time-wasting and glad-handing.) Both say, “Once we have the idea, we’re done!” The reality is of course, very different. Ideas are where you start, not where you end.

Irritants

There is also great thinking here on the role of the irritant. (The term is Swisher’s.) The idea is that someone has to tie the bell on the cat, someone has to say to Mark Zuckerberg, “What? Are you kidding me? No!” Who dares risk their career like this? Who wants to be the sacrificial lamb? Only those with Swisher-scale self confidence need apply. They know they don’t need their present position. At all. They can be truth tellers because the world is their oyster, er, option.

(This has wacky implications for hiring. Now we have to hire people we want to keep precisely because we know they’re going to leave. And, er, we want them to. Huh? (I leave this puzzle to the team at Coburn Ventures who recently met to contemplate these issues.)

De-riskers

In additional to irritants, we need those who mint permission, “de-riskers” as Swisher calls them. Someone has to make it OK for others to take risks. Swisher points out that Elon Musk made it ok for Ford and BMW to take the risk on electric vehicles.

Because he paved the way for them. He was the early risk-taker, right? He was de-risking it for them. So you need somebody in your organization who is willing to take the arrows.

The thing we especially forget when beating the innovation drum is how hard a really new idea is to think. In the usual “biz lit” prayer book, innovation is a joyful experience. We just summon our courage. And jump off the deep end. Eazy peazy. Right?

Wrong. New ideas are painful and frightening. The innovation zone is not sunny or fun. Things we haven’t thought before are strange and weird. Eventually we will skin them with familiarity, but when new, brand new, ideas either resist thinking altogether or pin-wheel around inside our skulls like a Hot Wheels stunt truck. Too often, senior management (well, everyone, really) doesn’t want to think new ideas until they are nice and smooth and worn with wear. Because before the novelty disappears, everything looks like the Microwave Gorilla and provokes a “yeah, right” skepticism.

Or as Comstock puts it,

You have to get out in the world and discover. You have to go where things are really weird. You have to make room for it and people have to see it’s valuable.

Multiplicity

But my favorite piece here are thoughts from both Swisher and Comstock on the importance of multiplicity in the way we think.

Comstock:

I think companies don’t spend enough time thinking through [different scenarios]. I always liked those red team, blue team exercises that came out of the military, where you deliberately seed one point of view versus the other and you kind of set up a cage match. … I think if you’re really serious about innovation, and your investors are serious about you having a future, you have to have a separate lane where you’re investing in some of these things, longer return, you’re testing ideas.

This is not the first time, Comstock has talked about multiplicity. See her comments here. I have tried to imagine a scenario-centric corporation here.

Swisher:

I wanted to do scenario-building. I was obsessed with the idea of what are the 10 things that could happen … that’s how I do my reporting actually. That’s my little secret.

Comstock:

Journalism is a great background for that.

Swisher:

I make up things all the time, and then one of them is right.

Comstock

Yeah. Because then you’re testing. You’re constantly testing.

Swisher:

Yeah, then I’ll call people and they’re like, “How did you know?” And I’m like, “I just made it up. Turns out to be true.” One of them is true. Like it’s interesting and it’s always pushing against something.

This is, or should be, management and journalism now that the world rushes in at us. The time between first sighting and ‘right on your doorstep’ is collapsing by orders of magnitude. So you have to spot things early, imagine them ferociously, and domesticate them fast. Otherwise, we are captives of catch-up.

This is where multiplicity and complexity come in. We have to surround ourselves with many versions of the world and we have to learn to manage the intellectual complexity this makes necessary. And this surely means that some captains of industry may not have quite enough intellectual omph to make the journey. For this group, Microwave Gorillas, not to mention much of the rest of the world, must remain an enduring mystery.

Related

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Back to basics: Measuring your social media efforts with unique acquisition channels

Most organizations are spending a considerable amount of money and resources on their social media marketing efforts. These efforts generally take the form of three types of effort – organic, paid and promoted (also referred to as owned, paid and earned). No matter how you label them, you should segregate them into three unique marketing acquisition channels in your analytics reports to correctly evaluate how effective your efforts are.

To segregate traffic driven to your site from various social media properties, you’ll need to configure custom channels in your analytics tool. (For a detailed explanation on how to do this in GA, see the Marketing Land article The Google Analytics Social channel is broken. Here’s how to fix it.

Defining custom social channels

Before starting any configuration changes, first decide not only the names of these new channels, but what they represent for your clients (both internal and external).

I’d recommend setting up the following three channels.

Paid social: Consists of any paid ads you are running on any social media property to drive traffic to your website.

Promoted social: All activity performed by your social media team where no additional marketing fees are required. Typical activities that fall under this channel include typical posting to your social media channels.

Organic social: Any activity that the general public (people not on your payroll) drive traffic to your site from social media. This includes a person clicking on a “Share This” icon on your blog post or perhaps just including a link to your site in a spontaneous social media post.

Once you’ve defined your social media channels, you need to define the medium definitions (for GA the utm_medium parameter value) to be used your generate a custom URL to track (see Google URL Builder). The great news is you don’t need to do anything for organic social.

Here are some typical medium definitions (required by your analytics software) or make up your own. Note you can use more than one to refine your analysis at a later date.

Paid social: Paid-social, Social-PPC, Social-CPC, Social-display, Promoted-post

Promoted social: Psocial, Promoted, Post, Tweet

Remember, these changes to your analytics tool are permanent and will remain in place unless deleted. They will not impact historical data.

Repeating the benefits of custom channels

With this additional information, you’ll be more effective at evaluating which content is performing best and you’ll be able to compare its performance across the organic, paid and promoted social channels.

 

Another advantage is it will be much easier to compare conversion rates and goal achievement between different channels. In this example, a Data Studio report was created to showcase different goal conversions by all defined channels.

It is only by segregating paid from organic from promoted social activity that a complete picture of which activity drives which type of conversion. From the above chart, the Paid Search channel generated the most contact forms being submitted, while social (organic) and paid social drove zero forms being submitted. In this case, it’s important to look further into your analytics reports for assisted conversions (does a site visit generated from Paid Social come back to the site later through another channel) to determine the influence of Paid Social on contact forms being completed or other conversion points.

Any questions?

I hope you found this useful, and hope you’re as thrilled as I was to be able to segregate my client’s social traffic into meaningful refined channels. We are now able to put a true value on all our social marketing efforts (paid or promoted) and to calculate a realistic ROI which makes all business owners happy.

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Alan K'necht an independant SEO, Social and Analytics consultant , a public speaker, award winning author and a corporate trainer (SEO, social media marketing & digital analytics).

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Do brand politics impact consumer purchases? It’s complicated

A majority of consumers (63 percent), according to a new survey from SAP, say they prefer to purchase holiday gifts from brands that support specific social causes. This echoes earlier surveys that argue consumers increasingly want brands to take public social and political positions.

The emerging consensus among marketers is that in the current climate brands are no longer able to “remain on the sidelines” and are compelled to stake out positions on controversial social issues. The most recent, high-profile example of this was Nike’s Just Do It anniversary campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, which was controversial but actually helped Nike financially and with key audiences.

Two very different kinds of studies now paint a more nuanced and complex picture of how consumer behavior is affected when brands take sides.

Politics didn’t affect store visits. The first study, from location intelligence company Gravy Analytics, found that public positions taken by brands have not played out in terms of who is or isn’t buying their products.

Gravy compared actual store visitation by “political activists” at more than 2,000 retail stores, hotels, restaurants and grocery stores. Among the brands in the study were Apple, Athleta, Bloomingdale’s, Cinnabon, Dave & Buster’s, GAP Outlet, Haagen Dazs, Jos. A. Bank, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, Lacoste, LensCrafters, Marriott Hotels, Nordstrom Rack, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Six Flags and US Airways.

Political activists here were defined as “mobile consumers observed at events categorized as either liberal (Democratic) or conservative (Republican).” Gravy found that the location of brands (urban, suburban or rural) had an impact on visitation to some degree. For example, New York based pharmacy chain Duane Reade saw more liberal-leaning visitors by default.

But overall, the company said politics did not appear to impact brand/store visitation in the aggregate. There were even some counter-intuitive findings. According to the company’s data:

• Patagonia: Conservatives were 13 percent more likely to visit than liberals (Patagonia is closely associated with environmental causes).
• Ben & Jerry’s: Liberals were only 3 percent more likely to visit than conservatives.
• Nike: Conservatives were 1 percent more likely to visit stores than liberals (this data was captured largely before the Kaepernick campaign).
• Starbucks: Conservatives were 8 percent more likely to visit than liberals.

Politics are connected to brand affinity. Engagement Labs found something very different. The company asks people about recent shopping and purchase behavior. It measures online social media sentiment and offline conversations through surveys. It doesn’t ask about future behavior or purchase intentions; it asks about very recent behavior (this week, yesterday).

In contrast to the Gravy study, Engagement Labs found that consumers’ brand preferences were definitely influenced by politics. Engagement Labs’ Brad Fay was unable to fully account for the seeming contradiction between the Gravy data and his firm’s findings, but explained that Engagement Labs’ survey methodology was sound. He cautioned however, that brands should not rely exclusively on social media sentiment because it’s the least likely to be an accurate predictor of consumer purchase behavior.

He affirmed that brand affinity and party identification are definitely connected. He also told me that some brands are more polarizing than others and may see a larger effect accordingly. Brands such as Allstate Insurance, Capital One, Panera, JetBlue, KitchenAid and the NBA were “blue brands.” Audi, American Express, GE, Hobby Lobby, Kroger and State Farm were “red brands.” Fay says this definitely plays out in visitation and purchases.

Brand marketers: think like a politician. The totality of evidence does suggest that brand positions on social and political issues do matter. But it’s not a simple equation. The specific impact may partly depend on variables like the contentiousness of the issue itself, the physical location of stores (urban vs. rural) and how long the controversy lasts. In other words, the effect will likely fade over time.

Engagement Labs’ Brad Fay’s advice to marketers is that “they should think like politicians.” Fay says that brands need to thoroughly understand their audiences. “Figure out what you want to do and whether that’s consistent with the audience. Brands may need to lead but lead cautiously.”

He adds that the broader the brand’s audience the more likely it is to be taking a risk by taking a stand on controversial issues. Smaller brands have more upside, he says. “You want to generate advocacy and smaller brands are better able to do that. Advocacy is fueled by passion; that can be rocket fuel as a brand.”

By contrast, “Big brands have to weigh alienating segments of their audience,” explains Fay. Yet Fay say that brands do in fact need to decide what they stand for. “People want to give their business to brands with values that they believe in. That affects all brands off all sizes, but it’s easier for small brands to take advantage of that.”

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About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog,

Screenwerk

, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on

Twitter

or find him at

Google+

.

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The new best practices for digital brand storytelling

People have been telling stories for thousands of years, and the elements of what makes a good story have changed precious little in that time. Through the stories we tell, we not only entertain and connect with others, but we also convey information about our own beliefs, tastes and aspirations.

Brands use stories in the exact same way, and the best marketers understand how important stories are when it comes to demonstrating the how, what and why of a brand’s offering. Although the components of a good story remain as they’ve always been, the process of telling a story in the digital age has evolved considerably as new advertising technologies have emerged.

It’s incumbent upon marketers to ensure their use of new technology adheres to the principles and ground rules of good storytelling and advertising. Rather than common, linear storylines, we can now build complex story frameworks, capturing the right user’s attention, in the right place, at the right time, on the right device, with the right array of messages. Stories are no longer stuck on one set of rails but are capable of more and more unique variations. What follows is an overview of the new components of modern brand storytelling in the digital age.

Stories should be real time

When stories are told around a campfire, the best storytellers adapt to their audiences’ reactions and new information they might provide during the story. Today’s digital brand stories must do the same, and emerging automation tools make this possible. Automation enables data to be analyzed and executed well within the blink of an eye, leading to instantaneous ads that can make use of a variety of data sources.

One pivotal way real-time advertising can support creativity and storytelling is through dynamic ads, which help improve efficiency and optimization, as well as personalization. In short, a dynamic ad allows for the delivery of multiple variants of the same ad through automation, making it possible for the same ad to say different things depending on who it is being delivered to. A travel company, for instance, could take live data on flight options and then send relevant holiday packages and pricing to users depending on their travel interests, browsing activity, location and more.

Reporting should inform your stories

Reporting and attribution are often viewed as being on the opposite end of advertising’s creativity spectrum from storytelling. But in reality, reporting has become a critical component of the brand storytelling process.

Data from accurate reporting on user interactions with an ad can be used for intelligent retargeting and can help execute complex and adaptable campaigns. User interactions logged in an ad server can be used to build real-time segments, which can then be actioned and correlated with creative to build the story. It is the relationship between the analytics, data and creative that builds the fundamental story framework.

Your stories must be built for reach

As advertising technology enables access to more and more channels, advertisers can extend their scope and speak to more users. With new channels and media comes the potential for more interesting and emotional storytelling, and advertisers have a responsibility to adapt their messaging to make the best use of these different platforms.

Modern brand storytelling must be built to follow users as they hop across multiple devices during their daily internet browsing. Reaching the same user across mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop become an ever-present challenge, particularly when understanding their preference for using each device. With purchases, for example, one user might favor their mobile phone via an app, whereas another may prefer their laptop. Understanding these preferences is a challenge that must be met for the sake of efficient retargeting, frequency capping and to measure a user’s interaction with the ad. Cross-device is also required for successful sequential messaging across difference devices, a mainstay of modern storytelling.

Don’t neglect relevance and reaction

Relevance and reaction have always been cornerstones of good storytelling, and they are even more important in the digital age as far as consumer expectations go. Regarding relevance, data is bringing about a renaissance that has the potential to bring ads and users closer together. In fact, the key driver behind the digital advertising revolution has been the gift of personalization. Advertisers are no longer shouting into the void, but can instead tell stories to users that they can safely assume have at least some interest in their offering.

Meanwhile, every good story should elicit a reaction, and marketers must ensure the stories they tell are designed to elicit the right ones. While marketers can use data to find the right audience and ensure ads are reaching as many users as possible, their ads need to form an emotional connection with the audience to move them to action.

Technology can and should help facilitate the continuous interplay between user and advertiser as a brand narrative unfolds. In this regard, technology neither replaces or hampers the modern brand storyteller. Leveraged correctly, technology can make the story all the more powerful.

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Julian Baring is Adform’s General Manager – Americas, based in New York and has more than 20 years of digital media experience. He started his career in agencies at BBDO and Saatchi & Saatchi before co-founding travel-site Weekends.com and riding the dotcom wave all the way to the bottom. Julian has worked across the UK, US and APAC in senior executive roles at Vodafone, Operative, Facilitate Digital and most recently, Adslot. He has an MBA from Oxford University and a BA in history from Brown University and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.

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Digiday Research: Improving data quality is the top goal for marketers in 2019

First-party is now more valuable than ever, as online giants Amazon, Facebook and Google have demonstrated in recent years. As a result, marketers now say improving the quality of their data and their data collection practices is now a key priority for 2019.

In a survey of 229 brand marketers by Digiday this November, 30 percent of respondents said improving their data quality will be their organization’s top marketing goal for 2019, ahead of other initiatives such as improving their technology and hiring and retaining talent.

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‘In-house isn’t easy’: Insights from the Digiday Brand Summit Europe

Why Brands Are Crucial To Innovation

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine the engineers working in the product development labs at Volkswagen A.G. develop three innovations: a suspension for a smoother ride, a more fuel efficient ignition system, and a better safety restraint system. The strategic question for the company then is: which of its brands will carry each innovation? It wouldn’t make sense to introduce all of the innovations in all of its brands — not just because that would be too costly, but because the meaning of the innovation would differ depending on the brand that carries it.

So if you had to choose, you would probably suggest that the better suspension naturally belongs in the Bentley and Audi brands while the better fuel efficiency may be best introduced by the Volkswagen, Seat, and Skoda brands. The optimal strategy for the safety system may well be to do something unconventional: to license the innovation to a competitor, in this case, Volvo, to get that brand to first introduce it in its cars. Pioneered by Volvo, the safety innovation would then gain traction and market credibility.

Features or innovations introduced by the wrong brand can fall flat. An example from the news business provides a case in point. Henry Farrell, a professor of political science writing in the Washington Post, describes how Wikileaks grew frustrated that the general public wasn’t paying attention to its highly newsworthy stories. Eventually the organization realized that, in order for its revelations to have any impact, it needed brands such as the New York Times and The Guardian to make the news “impossible to ignore.”

Similarly, every product and feature innovation is a potential story whose impact on the marketplace is a function of the brand that carries it. Innovation is not just about R&D efforts or new product and feature development. Without brands that consumers trust, the story of any innovation is incomplete. In other words, brands are just as critical to innovation success as are new products. Trustworthy brands do three things:

1. They reduce the customers’ risk of trying new products and features.  American consumers are willing to try a finger-print sensor on the iPhone from Apple, but might not be so eager to try one from Huawei.

2. They position the innovation and give it meaning. Suspension systems developed by Volkswagen engineers make more sense in an Audi, a brand known for its comfort, than in a Skoda, an economy brand. Similarly, a quick lace-up system on Rockports would be interpreted as adding to convenience and comfort, while the same system would connote performance and speed to action on a pair of Nike shoes.

3. And finally, brands normalize the new product or feature; they give it credibility. MP3 players were invented as the MPMAN by Saehan Information Systems of Korea, but it wasn’t until the iPod was launched that the market truly took off.

Downstream, marketplace assets such as brands aren’t just nice-to-have complements to upstream assets such as R&D labs. They are a necessary condition for innovation success. Brands facilitate consumer acceptance and pave the market path for innovations.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Niraj Dawar, Author of TILT: Shifting Your Strategy From Products To Customers

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This piece originally appeared on HBR.org

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The One Competitor Marketers Underestimated

Looking back at 2018, there’s one competitor we underestimated this year.

It’s slowly draining the attention of every human on the planet.

It plays into almost all human needs — as they are defined by the Maslow Hierarchy.

It’s the rectangular status-seeking device in your hands. That’s right. It’s your smartphone.

Maslow’s needs start with the basics. Starting at the bottom of the pyramid, we all need food and water. Then safety. Next up is belonging, then esteem, then self-actualization.

The hierarchy was first introduced in a research paper by the psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943. He had no idea that 64 years later, the invention of the smartphone would supercharge the famous pyramid.

Here’s why: We now check our phones the equivalent of one day a week, and 20 percent of adults spend 40 hours a week on it. The stats suggest we check our phones 80 to 150 times per day, on average.

That’s not new news after a decade of the smartphone’s existence, but one of today’s biggest marketing mistakes is underestimating what people are doing with those phone checks.

With Maslow’s guidance, it’s clear we are reinforcing our need to belong, checking our status, and ultimately building our esteem toward self-actualization.

So, what can brand marketers do about it?

Marketers Marketing To Marketers

This amplified need to belong and check status has turned into hundreds of millions of personal advertising campaigns, all competing against brands for attention.

It is much more likely for people to adopt a brand based on friends and family sharing content than TV, Facebook and YouTube advertising combined.

They’re not just looking at friends and family content all day. They’re making it. Millennials might spend two hours a day creating and posting. Plus, there’s important time spent checking the metrics and seeing who liked their posts.

The sheer weight of personal messages from friends and family minimizes the “cut through” ability of advertiser-paid messaging. Literally, everyone is building status in real time, 24/7, with instant gratification of shared photos and videos traveling at lightning-fast smartphone processing speed.

If you multiply personal posts by the total number of friends on everyone’s contact list, you have a lot of ground to cover to join the conversation. The world of organic reach is a nonfactor for brands, leaving engagement as the affordable metric of choice.

Going forward, your job as a marketer is not just to engage one audience group. You also need to engage friends of friends.

That means, stop focusing on just your target market. It’s your target’s target you need to reach.

So, what to do differently in 2019?

Create A Brand Community

Fans sometimes love the identity of a brand so much, they brand themselves with it. Why is this important? Because whatever they’re doing ultimately will be the formula for building organic participation. When there’s enough participation, a community forms around the brand. Once that happens, creating friends of friends is no longer insurmountable.

Logically, if people are talking positively about your brand to reinforce their status, the marketer-to-buyer barrier is broken. You are one of them. In the friend set.

“Superfans” are those who feel a true sense of identity in their chosen brand relationships and are able to say that their friends would agree. Superfans are more likely to share content and brand themselves with the identity of their favorite brands than other fans. They “mentally smile” when they see others using their preferred brands.

Brands have achieved success in cultivating this type of following by following a formula:

1. Ignite the Fire
2. Fuel the Flame
3. Pass the Torch

This is the path for competitive brands going forward. The cost of finding that moment in the world of “friend posts and shares” as an outsider is a price tag that few can afford.

Ignite The Fire

Brands that have a unique story easily can get past “advertiser” and move to “friend” status. What’s true about your story? What’s likeable about it? Can you tell it in an inviting way?

Fat Face is a European clothing chain that got its name when its founders didn’t want to get off the French mountain they were skiing on. They were from the UK, and the name of their favorite slope translated to “Fat Face” in English. They started selling “Fat Face” t-shirts out of their VW van. Those original t-shirts amplified into a line of clothing and stores, and a style all their own. It’s a real story. And people want to brand themselves with it.

Organic Valley calls itself the “un-corporation.” It started as a group of independent farmers — and though the farmers themselves haven’t changed, they now they bring more than US$1 billion worth of dairy goods to stores throughout the U.S. They have videos with their CEO barefoot, and they show an organization chart with him at the bottom. Packages with cows kissing farmers just makes it a great brand and a believable story.

Fuel The Flame

Driving involvement in your brand can take many forms — from unique lingo and secret menus to co-creation concepts and gaming. The point is to give the consumer a connection point. Xbox allows users to custom design its own game controllers. It’s personal. It’s virtual. And it’s tactile. All in one idea.

Starbucks has a simple form on its website entitled “My Starbucks Idea.” This began in 2013 — and the company has created 277 products from more than 150,000 suggestions, including free WiFi, splash sticks, cake pops and pumpkin spiced lattes.

Designing shoes, playing games and interacting all lead to real conversations and entertainment, and allow brands to meet consumers where they already live and play. Joining them before they join you is the groundwork that all marketers need to do.

Pass The Torch

Appointing loyalists to tell your story builds reputations organically, as long as the tone is sincere and the rewards are fulfilling.

Southern Tide is a clothing line that targets a college market. It does so by recruiting college reps and benchmarking their status with trendsetters who are selling their credibility every day. For some, getting chosen to rep the brand has as much status as getting into the school of choice.

TheSkimm is a daily newsletter targeting a female audience. Advertisers can participate — not by submitting ads, but by providing rewards for Skimmbassadors. How to become one? Get 10 of your friends to sign up for the service. There are now 12,000 of them and more than 5 million readers.

Taco Bell created a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. The package includes memorable (and shareable) moments and a taco 12-pack for guests. It’s joining people where they are and having fun with them. By the way, there’s a four-hour notice required in case you get the marriage fever.

Consider the economics of owning versus renting. Much like any other equity, it’s better to own. Own your data. Own your audience. Don’t be beholden to social networks. Email and e-commerce are far more affordable than paying for reach.

So, the lesson for 2019, is to move past just asking consumers to buy the brand. Instead, ask them to join the brand.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Norty Cohen, CEO and Founder of Moosylvania and author of Join the Brand, 2018, and The Participation Game, published in 2017.

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How to Hire a Content Strategist

So, you need to hire a content strategist. What fun! I can say from experience that hiring content strategists is a blast. It is also ... excruciating. With over 17 million Google results for “content strategist jobs,” and search queries increasing steadily over the past five years, the competition for great talent has never been higher.

But never fear: Our team at Brain Traffic has been hiring content strategists for nearly 20 years, and we’ve learned a thing or two about how to find the right folks for the job.

Write a better job description

While it’s always important to be clear in what you need from a prospective candidate, content strategy is frequently plagued by mistaken assumptions. Here are a few frequent missteps:

• Your organization isn’t familiar with or ready for content strategy, and they are just renaming a different job. There is nothing wrong with wanting a writer who thinks strategically, or looking for an editorial project manager, or wanting a content-focused person on your UX team. But slapping the label “content strategist” on a more specific need is only setting you up for heartache. Be as straightforward as possible when you label and define the role for which you are hiring.
  
  
• Your organization already LOVES content strategy, but what you actually need is something else. If you are lucky enough to work in a place that truly values this approach to strategic communication, you may have inadvertently developed a blind spot. Do you really need a content strategist? It’s possible that what you really need is an analytics expert, a customer service lead, or a social media strategist. Be introspective about what you already have and what is missing.
  
  
• You haven’t yet determined the level of expertise you need. Think about where this person will sit within your larger team. Do you need somebody to create meticulous and monotonous spreadsheets? Then hire an inexperienced person with the moxy and curiosity to do it in style. Do you need a fighter who can persuade leadership to move in a new direction? That may require a more seasoned peer. Remember, a job description is an invitation, and you want to welcome exactly the right candidates.
  
  
• You haven’t yet determined the level of expertise you can afford. I hate to break it to you, but a salary of $50,000 is not going to attract a senior strategist. Do your research here and be sure you are ready with a salary window that makes sense for the role you are filling.
  
  
• You think content strategists are actual superheroes who will save you from all of your problems. Heyyyyyyyy, friend. I see you! While it’s true that great content strategists are the kind of tough, savvy compadres you want as colleagues and bridesmaids and organ donors, even these mythical beings have limits. If your job description aims for the moon, you may not recruit the stars. If you write an unrealistic set of criteria, you are inviting people to embellish, overpromise, and eventually fail. Set reasonable, attainable expectations, and you are more likely to hear from people who can help you achieve great work.

Once you’ve fully evaluated what you need from the position, create a job description that communicates all of the following:

• A clear understanding of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual expectations
• A list of specific tasks you’ll be asking this person to perform
• A sense of the personality of your workplace
• Enticing reasons a person should want to apply

It takes time to write a great job description, but it’s time well spent. You’ll be saving yourself even more time and heartache by attracting exactly the right people for your job.

Cast a wide net

Once you have a rock-solid job description, it’s time to seek great applicants. Although content strategy as A Thing™ now exists, you may not get very far posting a typical local classified notice. Fortunately, there are multiple ways to broaden your search for the ideal applicant.

• Find groups where content strategists are already paying attention. There are active content strategy groups on Slack, Facebook, and LinkedIn. In addition to reaching those people who already care about content strategy, you’ll be reaching people who know people. This is the best way to attract ideal candidates.
  
• Revisit memory lane. Remember when you used to work in publishing, or marketing, or library science? Well, just as you’ve moved on to the wide world of content strategy, some of those associates may now be working in digital communication. Hit up your faves for applications and word-of-mouth recommendations.
  
• Go remote. If your company culture allows for remote working, take your classified listing to the places where content strategists are more concentrated. Markets like Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and others have lots of bright folks doing good work. (So does Minneapolis, but BACK OFF WE CALL DIBS.)
  
• Flex your local network. If you really need an in-house person, get creative about putting the word out in your community. Look for nearby meetups, lunch-and-learn events, and other professional development organizations. And be sure to forward that link to your sister-in-law with the corporate job.

Screen candidates with precision

Once you have all of those applications in hand, think about what matters to your workplace. I’ve screened hundreds of folks over the years, and here are some worthwhile practices that have helped me narrow the pool:

• Start with a “blind” read. When you do your first pass on résumés or applications, remove all identifying information to ensure that you’re looking for specific content strategy skills and experience, rather than affinity or familiarity. An unbiased screening will surface the best candidates.
  
• Scan for strengths. After you’ve thrown down the gauntlet on what you expect from a content strategist, start drafting criteria for yourself. What, exactly, are you seeking in an ideal candidate? Are you looking for a trusted partner who will quickly back your agenda? Or maybe you need an unflappable content creator to be a liaison with stakeholders? You might find that it’s worthwhile to create categories for specific strengths, and organize incoming résumés into piles, so you can compare and contrast your applicants.
  
• Think expansively. Is your content team operating from more of a journalistic perspective, a marketing perspective, or a UX perspective? If you could pluck a candidate from any other employer, which one would you pick, and why? Does it really matter where a person attended college? When you consider the bigger picture, questions like these can help you determine which educational backgrounds, work experiences, and skill sets will be the best match for you.
  
• Test skills—within reason. Sometimes, it’s hard to know how a candidate will perform without actually asking them to perform. However, giving assignments that take hours to complete will unfairly burden the applicants who have constraints on their time or money. (A single mom can’t afford to hire a babysitter while she completes a three-hour content audit.) Be judicious and strategic when you ask applicants to demonstrate their expertise. Rather than wasting their time with complicated deliverables, ask applicants to respond to a fictitious email, or invite them to describe what they would change about a sample spreadsheet. Be clear about the fact that you don’t want or expect folks to spend too much time on this portion. You can still learn a lot about their work style without wasting their time.
  
• Involve your whole team. The reality of most content strategy work is that it involves a LOT of personalities. While it may not be realistic to conduct interviews with your entire team, thoughtfully inviting folks to review materials makes the job more sustainable for the person coming in. Invite key staff to sit in on interviews, or welcome interview questions from the folks who don’t have time to attend.

Write targeted interview questions

Egad. We all know the standard recipes: “What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Please stop and ask what you and your team ACTUALLY needs to know about incoming candidates—and what they need to know about you. It can be wise to do at least one phone interview and one in-person interview. Here are some sample questions I’ve found particularly useful in hiring content strategists:

• Describe one content project or accomplishment that went really well for you.
• Describe one content project that didn’t go well for you.
• What’s one company you think does content strategy well? What do you think they do right?
• How would you describe your ideal day of work as a content strategist?
• What will be your biggest learning curve in this particular job?
• How do you track and measure success in your content strategy work?
• How do you manage changing expectations or deadlines?

Bad interview questions are like bad analytics: They have you measuring the wrong things. Hiring a content strategist means you need targeted questions that will help both of you get at the heart of what the job requires, and what the candidate brings to the table.

Be wise about deciding, communicating, and inviting

After all of the effort that you’ve put into the process, don’t take a hardline approach after the interviews. Talk with HR and the rest of your staff about how you are deliberating and extending your invitation. Make the invitation process as transparent as the rest of the effort.

Once you know you have the right candidate, extend the most genuine invitation possible. Of course it’s not appropriate to keep others in the loop on salary negotiations, but tell both the applicant and the rest of the team about the status and excitement level whenever appropriate. People genuinely want to get excited about working together.

As for the negotiation itself, be ready with answers to detailed questions about benefits, time off, daily schedules, and your salary window. Some good numbers to know, according to Glassdoor:

• The average national salary for content strategists in the United States is $89,698*
• The average salary for a content strategist just starting out (0–1 years of experience) is $57,517*
• The average salary for a seasoned content strategist (15+ years of experience) is $109,876*

* As of November, 2018

Now, there are LOTS of factors that could put your salary somewhere different from these numbers. The cost of living varies widely from place to place, and employee benefits and workplace culture can make a huge difference in the value of a position. Be prepared to articulate exactly what your offer includes.

Go forth and hire!

There is nothing more daunting than a stack of 200 résumés—but it’s all worthwhile when you find just the right person. And you know what else? Content strategy people are the best people! If you play your cards right, you might even be hiring one of your new favorite humans.

By

Tenessa Gemelke

Tenessa Gemelke is Director of Marketing and Events at Brain Traffic. 

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Infographic: What Consumers Want From Branded Sweepstakes

In an increasingly digital world, brands have to constantly reevaluate their strategies, and branded sweepstakes are no exception. New research from digital marketing solutions company HelloWorld found that the key is to keep it simple: 64 percent of consumers would prefer a prize that makes their daily lives easier over one that makes them feel special.

“Consumers have come to expect seamless brand experiences that simplify everyday life, and our findings suggest that prizes are no exception,” said Amy Burnside, HelloWorld’s marketing director. “We’re seeing a shift away from special, more luxurious prizes toward those that are convenient to use and add utility to consumers’ lives.”

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Over 70 Percent of Millennials on Twitter Have Commented on Companies’ Customer Service

Twitter partnered with enterprise social technology company Sprinklr to analyze millennials’ habits and customer-care preferences.

Sprinklr revealed the results of a survey conducted on its behalf by Toluna Group, which gathered responses from 1,255 U.S. adults aged 18-34 who use social media. Of these users, 528 use Twitter. The responses were gathered in December 2017.

The survey showed that a majority of millennial Twitter users (70.67 percent) have used social media to comment on the quality of a company’s customer service. In addition, 73.7 percent of millennial Twitter users said they would be less likely to buy from a brand that has negative comments from other consumers on social media platforms.

Almost 40 percent of Twitter users said they have sent a complaint or comment to a brand via social media because “they thought it would elicit a quick response.” Nearly 40 percent of respondents also thought that other people on social media may be able to help them find a solution to their problem.

According to the survey, 67 percent of Twitter users said they’ve decided to purchase a product because of an interaction with a brand on social media. Twitter users were also found to be 11 percent more likely than users of other social media platforms to make a purchase based on an interaction with a brand on social.

Finally, 59 percent of millennial Twitter users said they expected to increase their use of social media to contact brands with their comments or questions. Almost two-thirds of Twitter users (62.48 percent) said an increase in personalization of responses is “the top way brands can improve customer care on social media.”

In a Sprinklr blog post, Kenny Lee, head of partner and demand marketing at Twitter, said, “Building brands with a great reputation is all about working hard to deliver the best care possible. Listening to every brand mention, responding in a timely manner, taking responsibility for issues and communicating proactively with engaging content are all part of a strong care strategy. Brands don’t often have the opportunity to interact with customers in a personal, human way—but with Twitter, this connection is possible.”

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