Archives for May 2020

Becky Kane became an editor “totally by accident.” After majoring in political science and using Todoist at her summer internship at a marketing agency, she found an old internship posting on the Todoist blog. Emailing them led to a marketing internship in their small Portugal office (the majority of the company was remote), and after that she took over the company blog, which was just starting the transition from  company announcements and product updates to more general content on productivity and self-improvement. Before her chance internship, she had no idea she could get paid to write like that. “I guess I always had this feeling like, ‘If you’re going to be a writer or a journalist, you’re going to have to be a struggling artist.’”

More than five years later, she’s the Lead Editor at Doist. She splits her time between running their productivity and teamwork blog, Ambition & Balance, and leading or supporting other content side projects, including remote guides for their second product, a team communication app called Twist. 

Did Doist know it wanted the blog to become Ambition & Balance? Or was it the result of content experimentation?

We were an all-remote team. We were using Slack and having a really hard time staying on top of that hose of unstructured information, which would get buried by the time someone in another time zone logged on. So we decided to launch another product that our company felt the need for. We decided to do that without really thinking through how we would add a whole other brand, Twist. Would we have it underneath the Todoist brand? Would we have it be a separate brand? Then if it’s a separate brand, how would we do content for that as well?

[The publication change] was out of necessity. Honestly, we’re a small team. We weren’t going to be able to build and maintain publications for each separate brand. There’s a lot of common themes between the Todoist brand and the Twist brand, as well as our overall company umbrella brand, Doist. Even though we recognized, “Oh, we’re going to be losing a lot of domain juice from the todoist.com domain,” we think it’s worth it. That setback is worth it in order to build a foundation that’s going to be able to grow with the company in the long-term.

So we had to stop, step back and think, “How are we going to make this cohesive for readers?” Most people are interested in Todoist, so how do we make sure that we’re giving them the content that they’re looking for or that they signed up for, while also expanding to talk more about remote work and teamwork in general? That was the conclusion the content team — at the time just me and my boss, Brenna Loury, the head of marketing — came to. We thought, “This is the only feasible way forward for it to be sustainable and doable.” It definitely didn’t come without its costs, but I do think that it was the right choice overall.

Jodi Harris has been with Content Marketing Institute (CMI) for almost nine years. She started as editor of the blog, then transitioned to curating and creating content, as well as helping with strategy for other CMI editorial products. In addition to her role as CMI’s Director of Editorial Content & Strategy, she’s also the editor-in-chief for Chief Content Officer (CCO), CMI’s digital magazine for content executives and team leaders. Jodi describes CCO’s editorial focus as “higher-level, more strategy-oriented, and a little bit more future-facing” than the tactics-driven focus of the CMI blog.

Does your ideal magazine audience already have company buy-in for content investment, or do you cover how to demonstrate the value of content and secure that commitment?

No matter how experienced the company is with content marketing, there’s always a measure of buy-in that’s required. Whether it’s securing buy-in for content marketing in general (which is common at start-ups or organizations that are new to the discipline), gathering the additional support necessary when there’s a need to create content differently or under a new strategy, or whether it’s, “We’re doing this well already. How do we optimize?”

Those innovative ideas may come from the content team or the marketing team, but they need to get buy-in from the executive management and corporate team in order to secure the budget and the permission to move forward — and to make sure everybody understands what they’re trying to do and how it’s going to perform in terms of the business goals, not just the marketing team’s goals.

Though you may recognize Patagonia for the clothes, the catalog, or the overall strength of the brand, Books Director Karla Olson says the company has always had a rich storytelling tradition. Founder Yvon Chouinard climbed six months out of the year and came back with his own stories for the company to publish. Karla thinks his 2006 memoir, Let My People Go Surfing, convinced the company that there are some stories that can’t be told in a 750-word essay in the catalog. Patagonia officially started publishing books in 2007.

When did you join Patagonia Books? How does it fit into the rest of the company? 

I joined the company in 2012. The company had already published 12 books and they knew that it was a good way of communicating with our community and beyond. I often say that the books can go where the clothes can’t go, into bookstores. The books are a good branding tool as well, although we are very careful not to over-communicate our brand. I think we actually end up taking out mentions of Patagonia. We just let the story be the thing that convinces the reader that this is an issue they need to care about, or we let it entertain them in some way.

The goal of the publishing program is to educate people, inspire people, and encourage people to become involved with outdoor places and public lands. We’ve published 50 books, and if you look at them through that lens, they might look really disparate in the beginning, but you start to see that connection.  

What is the goal of this book? What are we trying to get someone to do by reading this book? That is a direct action. They’re going to care about the river system. They’re going to go outside and climb outside on public lands so that they are involved in the fight for public lands. They’re going to learn how to be more effective at environmental activism. They’re going to be encouraged to start a business that has social responsibility involved. Those are all goals that we articulate at the beginning of a project.