Archives for April 2020

Margarita Noriega joined Glitch a year ago, and has since founded its tech culture publication, Glimmer, which launched in February. Glimmer consists of Podcasts (run by Glitch’s Media team), Original Features (assigned to freelancers), and The Playlist and Starter Kits, which lean more toward content marketing (sourced and written internally). Margarita says you won’t see a ton of content marketing in the podcasts, and you’ll see almost none of it in the original features. Though she reports to Marketing, her role as Principal Editor combines content marketing with editorial.

What made Glitch decide they needed an editor to champion content?

The original Culture Zine came out of a very strong personal love for zine culture at Glitch. I think there was a cultural and technical skill set alignment when Glitch launched and they started producing media formats that really aligned with the skills of the people in the room. Eventually you get to a point where the people in the room cannot tell the stories in the formats you need for other things. At some point, tiny experimental media content doesn’t work as well for general audience brand awareness. 

I was hired to run a zine that wasn’t in print, for a tech company that is really a community, about cultural topics, for an industry that’s been pretty controversially connected to culture. So there were all these threads I had to undo and then try to weave back together. And that led to the Culture Zine becoming Glimmer. 

We were using Ghost for the Culture Zine, and we loved Ghost. We needed something that our brand partners could jump into as a CMS. So we knew we needed to make a choice about ramping up our backend to create a website along with the platform. 

Glitch is already a platform, that’s what we call the Glitch community, and that’s really what you see in the messaging on glitch.com. But there also has to be an engine for creating content that isn’t in an app, that isn’t a zine. We still do a lot of content as apps, but they are very experimental. So from a marketing perspective, editorial perspective, and the media team’s perspective, we needed juicier stuff. 

We chose Prismic, it’s a newer CMS. We’re running Glimmer off of Prismic and that allows us to do all sorts of content strategy we couldn’t do before. And of course, that requires an editor. Before I came to Glitch, I was consulting and contracting for companies, and that included WordPress. So I came in with a certain knowledge of the CMS world.

Framer doesn’t have a traditional marketing team. Four years ago, Asha Indralingam was its first content hire. Even as it grew, nobody at Framer had “marketing” in their job title. Instead it was handled by a mix of the content and design teams. Now that the product is changing, the marketing needs are changing too. Asha is now Head of Content, and her team has grown to cover marketing while maintaining a content and editorial focus.

It must be nice to build the marketing side from the ground up with such a focus on content, rather than coming in later and having to figure out where a content team fits into a company.

Yeah, I’ve also been lucky because the founders are very into quality content. They are into maintaining the quality of our brand, but the content factors into that, very much so. Not a lot of companies give you the free rein to really try doing that with content without immediately telling you to run some ads or do some aggressive growth marketing hack.

There’s a very typical struggle at a lot of companies between the content team and the design team. We’ve definitely had our share of that. We’ve finally gone to a good place with a lot of things on the marketing side, where the content is leading design. Now that the designers have seen firsthand that it’s actually amazing to have messaging in place before we start coming up with ideas for the visual design, that has been super successful. 

As the first Managing Editor of Shopify UX, Gene Shannon’s priorities are the blog’s content, maintaining its social media, and running their newsletter for the UX community. The blog has been around for about 5 years, but before Gene became the editor, it was being managed on the side of the UX team’s roles, and their designers, content strategists, researchers, and developers contributed as they saw fit. He told Wonder Shuttle that creating his position was an investment in putting out a more cohesive message and lowering the barrier for contributors. “We felt we had a lot of people who have good things to say and we wanted to help them say it.” 

Since everyone contributing to the blog has a day job, how do you incentivize them to make time for it?

I think what helps for us is that one of the company’s cultural values is, “Do things, tell people.” We’re a very large team, we’re distributed across a bunch of different offices, in different time zones, in different countries. Even though the audience for the blog is nominally external, I think it’s really helpful internally for people to share interesting projects or techniques. 

I know for some of our other outreach activities, like if you’re speaking at a conference, Shopify will pay you a bonus for that and cover your expenses. So we’re looking at doing something similar to that around blog content, but for content that we think is really high value and that takes a bit of extra time for the person involved. 

We’ve actually given people who want to contribute resources about how to talk about that with their managers and with their leads, saying, “Here’s the time commitment involved. Here’s why it’s valuable. Here’s what Shopify will get out of it.” And a lot of people have it as a personal development goal that they want to get better at communicating, and this can be a way to help them do that.