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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.

Since 2011, Magazine B has devoted each monthly print issue to a single “well-balanced” brand, uncovering untold stories from the business and its customers, and providing original insight and analysis. Eunsung Park took over as Content & Editorial Director in 2017, but she’s been on staff since the magazine’s fourth issue in 2012. She corresponded with Wonder Shuttle on how she runs the “brand documentary magazine,” their global network of correspondents, and why their financial independence is so important. Her answers were written in Korean, and translated to English by Magazine B staff, with special thanks to YB Kim. 

Can you describe your responsibilities as Content & Editorial Director? How do you understand the magazine’s audience?

From planning and creating content to marketing and selling it, I guide the overall direction, conduct business strategies, and do my best to share my vision with our team. I believe it’s important for all the editors, marketers, distributors, and designers to look in the same direction, so I try to give thoughtful advice as the person who has worked at the magazine for the longest period of time, guiding them on what Magazine B is about. It’s fair to say, however, that our members now have the ability to make the right decisions themselves. 

In addition, I strive to communicate how important I believe it is for the people making this magazine, myself included, to consider ourselves as the core reader. There is, of course, an ideal target for Magazine B readers, but our original expectations of it can often be different from when we receive feedback and discover new readers. As opposed to trying to predict our changing audience, we have set a high standard to satisfy the people creating the content, believing that there will be many more people that have similar standards.  

Holloway, a new digital publishing startup, makes comprehensive guides on how to navigate modern work. Courtney Nash is the Director of Editorial Development, overseeing the creation of the guides. She’s currently putting together a guide on remote work, navigating complex topics and recruiting experts to share knowledge with startups and high-growth companies. Now that they’ve produced a few guides, Holloway is also opening up its platform to independent authors, which Courtney described as “reverse Netflix”: they demonstrated the value of the in-house guides, and now they’re bringing in outside talent. 

Was Holloway already focused on editorial development, or did that come in with you and other editorial hires?

What drew me to Holloway was that it isn’t just a technology company or just a publishing company. Pretty much everybody there is in some way a writer and an editor. Everybody is a huge fan of books and knowledge. Even on the engineering side, there has always been that focus. So it’s been a combination of a really strong editorial philosophy paired with a product development philosophy. They’re largely intertwined; everyone at that company is thinking about publishing as an entire value chain, instead of pieces of it, which is where places tend to spend more of their time.

Design and development consultancy thoughtbot launched Purpose-built as a newsletter for non-technical founders, which curated relevant and digestible content from their technical blog. Tori Shaffrey has been their Digital Marketing Manager for almost 2 years. She joined the team just after the newsletter launched, when they realized they needed a permanent resource center where founders could find the articles, videos, and podcasts. She’s been curating and editing Purpose-built, the resource center and the newsletter, ever since. She corresponded with Wonder Shuttle on the user research and design thinking behind Purpose-built, as well as her role in editing the content so it makes sense to their non-technical audience.

Do you focus on specific metrics to measure the success of Purpose-built’s content and communicate it to the company?

Yes! We track several metrics, and there are different ones for the resource center and the monthly newsletter. The resource center lives on the thoughtbot domain, so we track traffic from our header navigation, referral traffic, bounce rate, and how many new opportunities engage with the content. For the newsletter, we monitor open rates and click-through-rates. Most of our audience subscribed organically, so we have a very low unsubscribe rate.

Another great indicator of success happened about six months after Purpose-built launched. We sent out a survey and almost 10% of our audience took it, which is pretty unheard of in our industry. To put that number into perspective: usually, email click-through rates are less than 3% in tech. They voted on potential topics, told us their favorite way to digest content, even commented on the design of the newsletter. This helped with the content roadmap of Purpose-built and showed our team that the audience was getting value from the newsletter.

As Frame.io’s Senior Content Marketing Manager, Ron Dawson worked with senior management to execute the company’s content strategy. As Managing Editor of their blog, the Frame.io Insider, he determined its strategic direction, while managing a small in-house team and their freelance writers and photographers. He told Wonder Shuttle that their goal was “to provide both practical and tactical information for predominantly post-production professionals.” He gave this interview before his departure from the company.

Is the Frame.io Insider a resource for people using Frame.io’s product, or is it covering the industry for a more general filmmaking audience?

If you think about it from a content marketing perspective, our blog is what you would call “a top-of-funnel play.” The audience for it are predominantly in the post-production industry, whether or not they are in the market to sign up for our services, and so it is, by far, one of the largest resources of traffic to the Frame.io website in general.

What really sets our blog apart from the thousand other filmmaking blogs out there is the depth in which we go into our topics. Our blog posts average around 2,500 words, and it’s not uncommon for us to have a post that gets into the 3,000- to 5,000-word range.

One of our top 10 blog posts is actually north of 10,000 words. And one of our top 10 posts is about time code, which is a topic that, on the surface, is about as dry as you can get, but believe it or not, there’s a lot of technical stuff that goes into time code. The more technical our articles are, the better they perform. We have a very technical audience who likes to get into the nitty-gritty, and our blog gives them that meat, so to speak.

John Collins says Intercom had a pretty successful blog when he brought his journalism experience to the company in 2014. As Director of Content, he now manages a team that’s split between two continents and works with Intercom employees around the world. He spoke to Wonder Shuttle about having the content investment come from the top and breaking through the noise of the content marketing industry.

How has Intercom’s content evolved since you joined the company?

I came in with a lot of my background as a journalist, mostly covering tech and business for close to 20 years. I inherited the blog and social media. I added podcasts to that, when it was kind of like, “Oh, will people be interested in a branded podcast?” Slack launched their podcast the same day as we did. It’s almost like the podcast is the new blog these days, but five years ago that wasn’t quite as obvious.

Then I also added gated content. There was definitely an era where almost everything was gated. People would produce a spreadsheet-macro-template thing and it would be like, “Give us your email address, and your mother’s maiden name, and all this information if you want to get it.” And it just didn’t feel like a fair value exchange. 

So we didn’t rush into gated content, we wanted to establish the quality of our content and trust with the people who were reading and using it. We started to do books, which have been huge for us. One of our books is not a 30- or 40-page PDF, it’s a 20,000- to 30,000-word publication. It’s something that we spend probably three to four months working on. It’s got an ISBN number, it’s available in multiple formats, we do print versions. And then we feel like, “Well, OK. To get that, give us an email address and let’s actually start some kind of relationship that hopefully, if there’s a good fit, will end up in you becoming a loyal and happy customer.”

We are a team of 11 now, split between San Francisco and Dublin. In the last year, we’ve started to add more things behind the scenes. We now do a lot of work like sales enablement and supporting campaigns that the broader marketing team would be doing.