INBOUND 2016: Rebecca Lieb "Global Content Strategy- This is Gonna Be Big"

Good morning, I'm Rebecca Lieb and thank you so much for coming to this session. So I'm going to kick this off with a question to you just so we can level set a little bit. How many of you are doing content marketing on any kind of a global basis or international? Whoa. Where were you guys all when I was doing the research for this report? I should have interviewed every single one of you. So I'm doing something today that I've actually never done before. This research report was supposed to be locked and loaded by November 15th and I am experiencing a bit of delay in publication. So for the first time, although I have concluded all the research, I am presenting research that is in progress. I have not actually written and published the report yet. So you're going to see work in progress in a couple of weeks. I hope the report will be ready and it will be downloaded from my website. I'll show you the URL at the end of the presentation. But this report sort of stemmed out of two things. During my marketing career, before I became an analyst, all the marketing I did was international or global in scope. I basically brought brands across borders. And I've also been noticing a huge, huge trend in the clients that I work with. I work with a lot of companies on building content strategy, and more and more people are asking for help in creating global content strategies, in really scaling things up. So this is coming out of both research and a lot of direct experience with international brands. And part of the challenge of this is telling stories that are going to resonate. If you want to learn about a culture, you have to learn about their stories. And if you want to change the culture, you have to change those stories. So, so how are we supposed to approach this across languages, across international boundaries, across cultural sensitivities and everything that goes into global marketing. So this is a little bit about what I want to talk to you today. The goals and challenges that I'm hearing global content marketers say that they're facing. And then the PPT thing that really came up a lot people, process and technology. These are really the core sort of foundational. What's that word? Like when you have a tripod? The three legs of the stool that global content strategy is standing on. And finally, the best practices and recommendations that I've extracted from interviewing a couple dozen global content leaders, mostly at very significantly large enterprises. So what goals and challenges are content? Oh yeah, first the definition slide. Because you really can't talk about a topic until we all have some sort of agreement or alignment. Around the topic that we're addressing. So global content strategy exists when content's importance is evangelized, enterprise and worldwide content is shared and made accessible. This is a huge, huge pain point creation, collaboration and creativity are encouraged and content flows up and downstream as well as across different regions. Getting content to move, getting content to socialize, getting people to work together and to share stuff is really, really hard. I'm sure a lot of you who work on the east coast with the west coast know about some of the barriers there. When you start adding a 24 hour CL and lots of people and languages into the equation, it can get really, really difficult. I talked to David Beebe, who heads up content marketing at Marriott, who made a really salient point. Marriott's eyeballs. Marriott's audience, the people that their content marketing and their content initiatives reaches, is much larger than any publisher out there. And when he says publisher, he doesn't just mean newspaper or Magaz means movie studio because Marriott is producing actual feature films for their audience. So brands have become publishers, they become content producers on scales that are larger than say, Time magazine was during its heyday. There are literally brands that publish more content now on a daily basis than a magazine like Time or Newsweek or Life did back in their heyday on a weekly basis. Yet guess what? Brands really aren't supposed to be publishers or studios. Brands are supposed to be hotels or manufacturers or all those other things that they do for a living. So when I spoke to marketers and I said, what are your biggest challenges as a global content marketing leader? What do you wake up every day and really have to deal with that doesn't settle down? That's like a game of Whack a Mole. It's a continual problem. Creating a strategy came up very, very often. One of the questions that I asked marketers, I asked two questions. Do you have a content strategy and do you have a global content strategy? Of a couple of dozen very senior executives at very international organizations I spoke to, very few answered yes to both questions, which I thought was really, really interesting. Secondly, they're having trouble evangelizing and socializing their strategy when they do have a. There are regions that have their own ideas of how things need to be done. There are different layers of leadership that don't necessarily buy in completely to the strategy. So this idea of evangelization, communication and buy in can be an overwhelming hurdle. Change management is something that nearly every single person I spoke to said was a hurdle. They see themselves as change managers even if their organization doesn't necessarily Take the same view of a content operation being part of a change management initiative. Then there's the people, processes and technology piece that we're going to talk about in more detail. There's scale. How do you take an idea and blow it out so that it it is effective and appropriate worldwide? And then there's localization, which relates very closely to scale. Should you have global content and localize it? Should you let local content bubble up and be its own thing? What about when global has the budget but the local offices really don't have the budget? How do you manage all that stuff? Then I asked the same marketers, what are the barriers you face that's different from the challenges? What are the things that really get in your way and prevent you from doing the stuff that you need to do? Collaboration was huge on this. Getting people across time zones, across borders, with different languages, with different cultural approaches, obviously with different bosses and lines of reporting, and very often with different strategic goals. How do you get them to work nice together, play nice together, share stuff with each other, share best practices and even to share content assets so that you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel and take 99 product shots, because that one overwhelming product shot doesn't travel. So that gets into the sharing part, which is not very far removed from collaboration budgets and resources very often a huge problem. I've been working on a 93 country content strategy for a global nonprofit. It was actually, I can say it, it's Save the Children. You can bet that their offices in the United States and London and Italy and Australia are way better resourced than their offices in places like Kenya and the Philippines. Yet where is the content for an organization like that coming from? It's coming from Syria, it's coming from Kenya, it's coming from the places that are the least resources, have the least budget, and have the least bandwidth for creating or socializing content, given the nature of what they do. Yet the importance of extracting content from the under resourced areas is paramount to the success of their operations, which is raising money with content to continue those operations. As my friend Piers Dickinson, who heads Dupont Kant's Digital center of Excellence, says, one size doesn't fit anybody. So global content marketing is very much about creating this one holistic idea, but then sort of turning.