The coming together of editorial and marketing is a powerful brew - but one that can blow up in your face.
Marketing teams often 'get' that compelling content is a great way to connect with targets, but editorial teams don't always want to give time and expertise to it.
If you are a marketing person who can write, then you are likely to be in demand.
There’s no denying the hotness of topics such as security and social media and how these worlds connect. This connection is an area that I have covered in detail on this blog and it’s affecting both goliath corporations and individual home users. A lot of times, security and social media come together to tell frightening stories of phishing and hacking and the like, but there are good stories to be told, too. In this 100 Brains series, I’ve previously profiled more technical and social savvy security practitioners, such as Christofer Hoff and Katie Moussouris. In this edition, I want to introduce Social Business readers to Jennifer Jewett. Jewett is currently the director of global corporate communications at Sophos, a leading security company, and is well known for her time working with the braintrust behind Threatpost from Kaspersky Labs. I spoke with Jewett about her view on the evolution of social, the challenges and wins she’s experienced using social in a business-to-business (B2B) environment, and, of course, social media and security.
Q. Please share with me an important lesson that you have learned while using or promoting a service using social media.
A. The most important lesson I’ve learned about using and promoting social media is this - to be engaged you don’t need ground-breaking information to share, you just need confidence to know that your interests and opinions matter and actually do add to the conversation. This is something that I first came to appreciate when I was at SHIFT and it’s been continuously reinforced by many people I’ve worked with and met since then.
Q. Late last year I asked a lot of social brains what they thought would happen in social in 2010. The most predominant answer was “ubiquity.” Do you believe that has been reached?
A. Can you ever truly reach ubiquity? Especially with the Internet, it seems like there is always something new - a new website, a new angle, a company with the “hot” new solution, and the list goes on. It seems to me that now everyone is talking about social media and knows it is important to use. However I think many companies, especially in the B2B space, still don’t know exactly *how* to use it and *how* to measure the benefits of using it.
Q. When you were at Kaspersky, you spearheaded ThreatPost, which was an absolute groundbreaking social project. Can you talk a little bit about the lessons you learned in terms of paving the way for other companies’ future innovation?
A. Thank you for giving me credit for spearheading ThreatPost, but I can’t take credit for it, at least not on my own. I was fortunate enough to work with a great group at Kaspersky and Ryan Naraine and Randy Drawas were the big brains behind the project. I was part of the team and was able to help them introduce the site.
We learned a lot while developing this site -
1) Time is of the essence! - The world of social media doesn’t wait. Threatpost was first proposed in December and launched in March (with a full site and rock star editorial team, including Dennis Fisher and more recently Paul Roberts.)
2) Content is still king - At the end of the day, readers want good content. Gimmicks and silly ideas might pull viewers in once, but good content keeps them coming back.
3) Editorial independence with marketing integration - Kaspersky has done a phenomenal job of keeping the strict editorial guidelines in place so that the content remains vendor neutral. However, the team has also done an equally phenomenal job of using the site as a marketing differentiator to its partner community by giving partners the ability to host the site on their own websites and bring in leads from there.
The most important lesson we learned is to remain nimble and don’t get too comfortable. At the end of 2008, the media landscape had significantly changed and many, many daily newspapers had folded. By having a nimble team in place, we were able to quickly act on an idea that has ultimately put Kaspersky in a leadership position when it comes to social media in the B2B space. A year later, we reevaluated the site and redesigned it. Today you will see a greater focus on getting the content into social media platforms in an effort to reach the ultimate goal, ubiquity. But the key focus remains the same - providing original, informed editorial content.
