Category Archives: News articles

Articles appearing in print or online media.

Backstory blog, News articles

Purcellville resident turns 100

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This is an article I wrote for my grandmother’s 100th birthday. It appeared in the March 27 edition of the Loudoun Times-Mirror.

In 1913, during the relatively quiet year after the Titanic sank and before the escalation of the First World War in Europe, Geraldine Jane Potts James was born to Linda Kidwell and Walter Potts at their home in Hillsboro, three days before Easter on March 20. Their kitchen counter meat scale read that she weighed 4 lbs., give or take a few ounces.

One century later and several towns over, Geraldine celebrated her 100th birthday March 24 at the Loudoun Golf and Country Club in Purcellville amongst more than 120 close family and friends. The celebration of her birthday and life was hosted by her three children; Roberta East of Purcellville, Linda James of Round Hill, and Gerald James of Herndon.

As children of the Great Depression, Geraldine and her brothers Raymond and Lloyd Potts – who lived to see 93 and 94, respectively –were expected to pitch in on the farm, especially after their father died when she was three years-old. Her tasks included feeding the chickens and milking the cows. To earn extra cash, her family would dress and prepare their chickens and eggs and load them on the train at the Purcellville station to be sold to city dwellers in Washington, D.C.

“You couldn’t buy gasoline for the car, so we had to be very careful anywhere we went. We bought very little at the store; mainly coffee, sugar and flour with a ration book,” Geraldine said. Back then, “You survived by growing things you had on the farm.”

She credits her long life to her faith in God, being a teetotaler – with an undisputed and never satiated sweet tooth – and “walking for her education.”

While in primary school, she would walk – or hitch a ride on the horse-drawn school bus – to Hillsboro. When she reached high school age, she walked two miles to then catch a ride in her neighbor’s Model – T Ford that was headed to Lincoln High School (now Lincoln Elementary School).

It shouldn’t be a surprise that she later became one of the few women of her time to attend college, graduating in 1935 from Madison College, now James Madison University. Her mother, “who believed in two things; the Lord and education,” died a few months after Geraldine graduated.

On July 3, 1936, she had the pleasure of shaking the hand of one of the most beloved presidents in history, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he dedicated Shenandoah National Park. She was 23. She spent her roaring twenties as a home economics teacher at Lincoln High School, taking respites to swim in “the Big Eddy” in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., and vacationing with a girlfriend to Atlantic City, N.J., where they were reprimanded by a police officer for showing their legs on the boardwalk.

Geraldine wore a navy suit when she married Robert “Bob” James on February 21, 1942, with only the pastor and his wife serving as witnesses. She was 28 years-old. Their long and happy union lead to the proudest moments of her life when she became “a mother of three good children.” She is now a grandmother to five and the great-grandmother of seven children.

During her days as a homemaker she kept a garden and canned, froze or cooked the yield for her family and the workers who helped butcher the meat, harvest the grain and tend to their dairy farm operation. Dairy farms were once the economic mainstay in Loudoun, but today only one remains and is operated by Geraldine’s cousins in Purcellville.

Geraldine considers her greatest achievement to be “becoming a Christian and loving the Lord.” She and Bob, before he died in 1983, were lifelong members of Purcellville Baptist Church where she has taught numerous Sunday school and vocational classes. In 1996, she was recognized by the church as one of the first recipients of their Oaks of Righteousness program for her dedication to God and the church.

“Life has been good. I’ve enjoyed living on the farm; raising my children, feeding all my neighbors,” she said. “We had simple things, but we had fun, a lot of homemade fun.”

News articles

Lean Is Not an Initiative, But a Lifestyle

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As a Lean leader, Mitch Sparber, the Head of HR Service Center Operations at Farmers Insurance, understands Lean isn’t an initiative, but a company-wide lifestyle. In this interview he shows how Farmers Insurance leverages lean concepts to streamline its operations to better serve the internal customer.

Building a lean culture takes time – what are your suggestions on managing expectations and setting realistic metrics along the way?
You are correct, Lean is a journey. It is important that leadership continually reinforces this with team members. While highlighting our Lean efforts during team meetings, I try to make an effort to remind everyone that Lean is not an initiative but an approach that we are trying to embed into our day-to-day activities.

Since success is highly dependent on engagement and commitment from everyone, it is also important to establish the ‘right’ pace of introducing Lean concepts and tools. Lean introduces new terminology, such as customer value-add and tools like time analysis. It is easy for employees to become frustrated in the application of these new concepts. As a Lean leader, I wanted to make sure I was personally involved in our initial Lean events. For example, during our first Kaizen (a four-day event to identify process improvements), I made it very clear to the team that while the outcome is important, it was even more important to me that participating team members obtain a solid understanding of how to use the various Lean tools to identify process improvements.

Finally, don’t forget to celebrate Lean achievements. Recognize the commitment being made by your team members. Leverage food days to celebrate the completion of a process improvement event. Provide special recognition to employees who achieve Lean certification.

Could you share with us how you use lean concepts to support your True North vision by providing all employees with a world-class HR experience?
One of the best examples of supporting our True North vision is by introducing the concept of communication cells. The communication cell is a 15-minute meeting during which a team meets to review and discuss the previous period’s performance, the work plan for the current day, KPIs and continuous improvement opportunities.

Similar to a team huddle, this daily meeting has been the catalyst for getting the team to begin to understand lean concepts. The daily meetings are centered around a Comm Cell board. These boards make information about people, performance, and process improvement easily available to all team members. This activity, coupled with a goal to improve communication between team members, supports our True North vision by leading to better customer service.

What are the top tools you use to engage HR employees in Lean?
We’ve implemented several tools around visual management to engage our employees in Lean. These tools make our progress and results visible. For example, we have our HR Lean News You Can Use bulletin board, which is located in a high-traffic employee area. HR Lean news and success stories including certification requirements and training dates are displayed in quick, easy-to-read formats.

In the true spirit of Lean, our team is constantly checking on its progress. We’ve posted our objectives, targets, and metrics. Making our results visible and linking them to strategic drivers of the organization has been a key focus. When people walk by and see it posted on the wall, they’ll start thinking about metrics in their own areas. By making them visual, people will learn to think about metrics as part of their daily work.

Is there a new or emerging technology you can point to that you think will transform Lean within HR Shared Services?
While I don’t see any special ‘technology’ to transform Lean within a team, I see an organization’s commitment to provide ongoing Lean education to all team members as a key driver of success. For us, all new hires are required to complete a one-hour e-Learning course on Lean. Within the first six months, we ask our newly hired employees to attend a Problem is a Buried Treasure course where employees learn about the 7 Wastes and problem solving techniques.

With this basic knowledge, we now encourage employees to complete their first process improvement exercise, called a “Just Do It” submission. Embracing a Lean learning environment during an employee’s introductory time with the organization allows us to develop a culture in which Lean is the way we do our work, not just something extra to do.

News articles

Tie HR Metrics to Business Performance Measures

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The value of the dashboard or metric varies by the person using the information – for instance, a CEO will want different information than a line manager. Kym Burke, Vice President of HRConnect, suggests HR Shared Services Centers look for ways to tie HR metrics to business and company performance measures.

1. It is one thing for data analysts to discover and digest best practices related to talent through the use of data analytics, but how can this knowledge be imparted to personnel managers?

Personnel – or people – managers must know how to do talent management, which is more than dealing with day-to-day performance issues. If they understand and advocate resource planning and talent reviews, they will be interested in the data available to them through Human Capital Management (HCM) systems. At the same time, they are not analysts and have limited time to dig into the data, so the HR organization should understand their information needs and design reports or dashboards to give them the data they need. Moreover, the role of the HR Business Partner becomes even more critical in this model to help the people manager interpret and apply the data to their work situation and business environment. Lastly, offering this information just-in-time makes it relevant and designing it in bite-size formats makes it digestible and easy-to-read/-use.

2. For large companies in particular, as human resources processes become more automated, HR professionals are starting to drown in large volumes of data related to job performance and satisfaction. Could you recommend any dashboards or metrics that you think work particularly well?

Always look for ways to tie HR metrics to business and company performance measures. And, remember that the value of the dashboard or metric varies by the person using the information: a CEO will want different information than a line manager. Having said that, the cost of talent really seems to resonate with most stakeholders: retention and turnover data, including acquisition costs, time-to-hire or time-to-productivity, turnover percentages, high volatility areas/jobs and other relevant metrics. Managers also request dashboards that give them daily insight into their workforce; they are interested in headcount, roles, compensation, leaves and performance as well as a way to view history to look for trends. Leaders often ask for some of the “big data” metrics that we are just beginning to explore, where we mix HR, sales, finance and external benchmark data to create a glimpse into the highest potential employees that are significant contributors to an organization’s value.

3. What metrics do you depend on to tell you about your organization’s employee retention and whether an organization is meeting its leadership and recruiting targets?

We use much of the turnover data mentioned earlier, including cost of acquisition, turnover percentages, reasons for hire and termination, sheer volume as a whole and by role, demographics and more. We also use an all-employee survey to measure engagement – this data is cut by team and manager and provided to the business to support specific business unit and local team action planning and individual development plans. We also look at continuing education costs: tuition reimbursement usage, learning utilization, training costs and contingent labor metrics.

4. Do you have any suggestions for creating effective employee surveys?

Keep it simple and consistent to check progress. Make it available – we do our survey online, which can be accessed anywhere, anytime and encourage employees to do it at work access points if they haven’t completed it. Offer incentives to encourage participation – limited data makes the instrument invalid. Consider “cuts” of data and who will want to know what. Mostly, consider it as one data point in a much bigger picture.

5. What has changed in the HR Shared Services industry and what excites you for the future?

The availability and reliability of software-as-a-service applications in the HR arena has changed what we can do and how we do it. There is less reliance on often scarce and expensive internal and external technology resources; it has been replaced by HR user communities and common practices and processes. Access and availability is expanding, which keeps people top of mind for business leaders. The systems also force clarity, transparency, performance and simplicity in a variety of ways: roles, process, performance, communication and management. 

I’m excited that HR professionals – who have always been the “people” people – can now speak the language that business leaders and Wall Street understand, that we can tie employee engagement and talent management to productivity, revenue generation and financial success. We’re at our infancy in this space, so it will be exciting to see what the future brings. I’m also excited about the evolving ease and simplicity of the systems to drive customer satisfaction – this makes adoption and usage a no-brainer. I’m also excited to see how the workforce will use this information to revive their passion and engagement in what their companies are trying to achieve and how to build their brands – this will have universal impact.

Backstory blog, News articles

Roll Out New Value Propositions For Your Shared Services Center

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Each transaction is a customer interaction. So it’s incumbent upon managers to reinforce their teams with continuous improvement and customer service training on all levels in order to increase the shared service center’s value propositions. Jim Berry, Director, Customer Service & Innovation, Schneider Electric, shows how to do so in six areas ; cost reduction, quality, people, customer intimacy, transparency and predictability.

1. What factors are involved in creating a more efficient Global HR Shared Service Center?
You must first change the mindset of your organization to truly focus on the customer. They must recognize the value of their daily work to the organization. They must view each transaction as a customer interaction- not just a transaction.

Once your team has a customer mindset, you reinforce it with continuous improvement and customer service training at ALL levels. Finally, you keep it alive by making it part of your team’s daily conversation. You do this by reference in team meeting, visual aide (posters, desk toys), appointing an employee champion in each location, constant refresher of the value proposition, adding the value proposition to the hiring process to ensure you are bringing in the right people, team contests that reward people for customer centric behaviors, and more.

2. What is the biggest value a Shared Service Center can add to an organization beyond cost reduction?
A shared service center can add value to the business in a number of areas. We have expanded the conversation by rolling out a new value proposition that includes the following six areas: Cost Reduction, Quality, People, Customer Intimacy, Transparency, and Predictability. Of these, predictability and quality seem to be very well accepted in business conversations.

3. What are some Shared Services best practices and how do you benchmark your services?
Shared service centers in general tend to be a little bulky and have difficulty changing quickly. As a result, we have started having horizon meetings with the business leaders. These meetings are designed to discuss anticipated business needs 1-3 years out. Shared Services can then determine how best to support these needs, and change before the need becomes and issue. We have implemented global networks to discuss both customer service and continuous improvement. These networks promote best practice sharing in these areas and ensure that we have focus on these topics in all regions.

4. What are three of the biggest challenges or mistakes you see organizations make when implementing a Shared Services Center?
Focus too much on cost reduction and not on adding business value (which of course can include cost reduction) not investing some of the savings produced back into new efficiencies for the shared service center Internal Service Providers do not “Act” and “Think” like a business. This makes them susceptible to outsourcing when vendors come in with an outside approach.

5. Is there a new or up-and-coming technology within the space that you’re particularly excited about?
The technology is not new, but I am excited about the possibility of connecting with our customers (employees and managers) through mobile applications. This solves an ongoing communication difficulty we have had reaching our blue collar population. Not everyone has computer access- but almost everyone globally has smart phone access. Finding ways to connect with all of our employees over multiple time zones- when they want to connect- is extremely exciting.

Backstory blog, News articles

The ROI of Big Data for Marketers

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Chief Marketing Officers know the benefits of Big Data. Oftentimes what they don’t know is how to use it. David Rogers and Don Sexton at the Columbia Business School wanted to gain a better understanding of the changing practices among large corporate marketers. What they found was support for the use of new data to drive marketing decisions and measuring ROI and a widespread adoption of new digital tools.

Still, significant gaps exist between conception and execution when it comes to Big Data Marketing efforts and there remains a need to improve on the use of data, the measurement of digital marketing and the assessment of ROI.

Successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions, 91% of senior corporate marketers

Yet, 39% say their own company’s data is collected too infrequently or not in true real-time

A lack of sharing customer data within their own organization is a barrier to effectively measuring marketing ROI, according to 51% of respondents

Around 85% of large corporations maintain brand accounts on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare

Comparison of the effectiveness of marketing across different digital media is “a major challenge” for 65% of marketers

Financial outcomes where omitted by 37% of respondents when asked to define what “marketing ROI” meant for their own organization

57% of respondents are not basing their marketing budgets on any ROI analysis

Brand awareness is the sole measure to evaluate marketing spend for 22% of marketers

Source: Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data: The 2012 BRITE/NYAMA Marketing Transition Study

Backstory blog, News articles

Words journalists hate in a press release

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Journalists are taught to be allergic to certain words. They downright abhor longevity. Their love of brevity harkens back to the time when the number of allowable words were dictated by the number of column inches designated by the editor.

Today, the Internet has put no end to what a journalist can write. Instead of opening their worlds to words, however, they’ve instead held tight to the notion that less is best. Why? Because reader’s attention spans are still the size of a goldfish’s memory.

You have exactly two sentences to capture a journalist’s attention with your press release. As you can imagine, it takes less time than that to turn them off. Here’s a list of the most common, annoying, frivolous, and downright ridiculous words to never use on a press release:

1. Adjectives

This event/book/promotion is the most “amazing, first time ever, premiere, best” thing that’s ever happened to your company, right? That doesn’t mean the journalist — or the reader they’re writing for — thinks so. Avoid adjectives at all costs. Instead, paint a picture of why you or your company is the best. Don’t tell them.

2. Jargon

You’re a thought leader in the healthcare, information technology space. You’ve secured two million end-users for your product. The company’s new EMR system has already proven to increase efficiency and cut costs. Did you know journalists are trained to write for people who read at an eighth grade level? If, at 13 years-old, you knew that end-users who implemented EMR systems became thought leaders in their space … I pity you.

3. No acronyms

FBI. CIA. NAACP. These are three of maybe 10 accepted acronyms within the AP Stylebook. Don’t assume that the acronyms of your everyday lexicon are understood outside your industry. Please comb through your press release twice before sending it to delete acronyms.

…. to be continued

News articles

Think like a Journalist to Become an Excellent Content Marketing Strategist

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Why can’t marketers think more like journalists? Like myself, Kristine Kelley, Head of Editorial and Content Strategy at Grant Thornton, wants content marketing strategists to start thinking like journalists. Your organization should ask itself: Who is our audience? What do we want them to do with our content? And, how are we going to reach them?

hrh media: Content strategists face a market that is saturated with touch points – from websites to mobile devices to social media. How does a company elevate their content marketing into a content strategy in an effort to gain more consumer attention?

We really shouldn’t talk about content marketing until we have high-quality content – and a process to generate it – to market. Companies must start with the absolute basics: who is our audience, what do we want them to do with our content, and how are we going to reach them?  A solid mission statement is a solid start. Then, mapping our content to a basic sales cycle helps ensure that our content strategy is mapped to our business strategy. A successful content strategy also combines brand with solid writing best practices, to ensure what’s put out there sounds and looks like our company, and is naturally optimized. Finally, companies need to ensure they have a content org in place. Agencies are great, but depending on the volume of content generated (B2Bs generate a LOT of content), we need a team of people who understands how to speak to our audiences, and how to curate content in various channels over the entire life cycle.

hrh media:  What argument can be made to upper management that the time investment involved in implementing and initiating a content strategy is worth the gain?

Content appropriately mapped to the business strategy and corresponding sales cycle ensures that what we’re creating isn’t just stuff being generated and thrown out to see if it sticks. An actual content strategy is just that.

a.    Where do you start to develop a new content strategy, including a framework to keep it going?

In addition to the above, I like following the traditional magazine publishing model to develop a content-savvy org, which can then be executed against our strategy.

hrh media:  Marketing is still, at its roots, about building relationships and trust and evoking positive emotions to its customers. Could you name a company whose content strategy has achieved this and note some of the factors that attributed to that success?

Most big publishing companies have figured out how to execute their original content strategy in a multi-channel world. A few big brands, such as Ford and GE, are doing a great job of keeping their brands relevant and in the conversation. And a few big B2B groups, such as McKinsey, are keeping their markets reasonably satisfied but not completely inundated with solid “thought leadership.”

hrh media: Could you name a few tools you are particularly fond of that help you achieve your content strategy goals?

My tools are tools for writers: inverted pyramid, Strunk & White’s “On Writing Well,” AP Style, our company’s style guide, our company’s brand voice and our marketers’ marketing goals.

News articles

Turn Your HR Department Into A Business Driver By Incorporating Metrics

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In this interview, Human Resources Consultant Shad Raza talks about the importance of incorporating HR metrics throughout an organization’s business plan and how metrics can elevate the department from a cost center to a business driver.

hrh media: How can an organization integrate HR metrics throughout its entire business plan?

To make a business operation effective, a business plan must be translated into functional metrics without deviating from the sanctity of business objectives. Similarly, HR metrics must be aligned with the business plan for the optimum utilization of human capital. For integration with a business plan, HR professionals should drill down into every aspect of their business objectives and align those with people performance.

The success of integration is elevated when it is clearly spelt out in “actionable” terms and is understood by the entire workforce. Once it is aligned, an organization must accelerate its performance level by providing the right support and organizational system.

hrh media: What are some current or evolving HR metrics that may be unfamiliar to many human resources professionals? Furthermore, why should they make an effort to learn them?

There are various traditional and new metrics available such as HRIS, benchmarking, data mining, dashboards, predictive analysis and HR score cards or balanced score cards that are being prevailed and used by HR professionals based on their business needs. These metrics provide an advantage to HR professionals to not only align to the strategic goals of the organization but to bridge the gap by identifying and fulfilling the performance levels in a timely manner. Hence, they must learn, adapt and contribute.

hrh media: On a basic level, how can human resources professionals use metrics to prove to upper management that their department is a business driver and not a cost center?

If used properly, HR metrics cannot only help an HR professional to enhance organizational performance, but it can also prove that HR is a business driver like other functions, which helps an organization achieve and sustain high-growth performance. Translating HR’s tactical and strategic intentions into effective monetary terms is one of the basic tenets of HR metrics.

Therefore, extracting the right data, doing the appropriate data mining, converting them into the monetary term, presenting it to the right people at the right time and utilizing these metrics in a timely way is the crux of HR metrics. Hence, HR professionals must learn, deploy and incorporate metrics into an organizational reporting system, which can drastically change the misconception of HR in the eyes of upper management. It also improves accuracy of management decisions.

hrh media: What are some battle-tested metrics that are still relevant today?

HR Score Card & Balanced Score Card are two of the most powerful and proven metrics that can boost organizational performance, but there are some organizations where they have synchronized these score cards with Six Sigma, too.

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Do You Know Your Customers As Well As You Think You Do?

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Anthony Perez is the Vice President of Business Strategy with the Orlando Magic. He and his team are credited with building a predictive analytics ticketing model that can help the Orlando Magic tailor their fan experience to increase customer satisfaction. In this interview, Anthony shares how he uses data to gain understanding of his customers and to establish a loyalty connection.

hrh media: Would you mind telling us a little bit about your background and how you became interested in data analytics?

I started in finance so I think it was a natural transition into analytics. When I first started with the Orlando Magic I was really focused on the financials of the new arena. From there I went into investment banking for a little while, but ultimately came back to the Magic and my focus, again, started out on the financial metrics side of things. But my position ultimately became the much broader role around analytics that it is today.

hrh media: The Orlando Magic is both one of the most technologically advanced arenas in North America so it’s no wonder that you have a wealth of data at your fingertips. Would you share a key business driver behind the Magic’s decision to use analytics to establish a loyalty connection with fans?

Sure, for us it just really made sense going into the Amway Center with the technology that we have, all the data that we’d be collecting, all of the capabilities that we had in terms of leveraging the technology and the building, we really wanted to make sure that we were doing the best job that we could to drive the customer experience. So, analytics was an opportunity for us to expand the things that we were doing in a much more systematic way to make sure every fan felt like there was a customized experience for them and that we are really marketing to them and what they were looking for. For our season ticket holders in particular, we wanted to make sure that when they came to games and interacted with their service representative or anyone else from the team, that they felt like the experience really spoke to them and their preferences and the like. So that was the main driver behind taking a bigger step into the realm of analytics.

hrh media: How have you and your team been able to turn the data that you’ve collected from the scanned and tracked tickets into a tailored fan experience? Can you provide me with an example?

That’s something that we’re continuing to develop. A great example, in particular for season ticket holders, but really for anyone in the building, we run a program where if you purchase something at a concession stand or at one of our retail stores you can scan your ticket during the checkout process and get entered in for a chance to win courtside seats. What this allows us to do is capture the ticket barcode information and ultimately match that back to the account. So we can see what account purchased the various items for that transaction. We start to see trends around what people are buying and when they’re buying.

The season ticket holders are folks that are coming to the majority of our games, so we can get a feel for when they typically purchase merchandise throughout the season and what their preferences are in terms of concession stands. A great example we like to point to is if a family of season ticket holders is taking frequent trips to Cold Stone at halftime on the terrace level, if we see that they have a preference for Cold Stone, that’s something our service rep can use the next time they want to visit that season ticket holder in their seats. Maybe they’re surprising them with Cold Stone, bringing it to them just as a gesture to say that we really appreciate them being a season ticket holder and everything they do for us. I think that’s the small example but that’s the type of thing that we continue to do.

Right now we’re working through taking all that information that we’re collecting from scanned tickets, putting it into a format that’s actionable for our sales team and service team and ultimately delivering that.

hrh media: Retaining season ticket holders year after year can be pretty tricky for sports franchises. Have you been able to solve this riddle with somewhat of a success rate using data analytics?

I don’t know that anyone will ever solve the riddle completely, but I think for us, we’ve done a good job of being as smart as we can about how we target season ticket holders and how we focus on retention. We’ve done a lot in that area in terms of predictive modeling and trying to understand the biggest drivers behind the renewal decision for a season ticket holder and ultimately boiling that down to things that are actionable and then working with our service team to act upon those things.

A great example is ticket utilization, which I think for everybody is pretty intuitive, but we’ve really focused on that and what we found is that season ticket holders that aren’t really utilizing their tickets to a certain level are ultimately ones that are at risk not to renew. We’ve built an entire campaign throughout the season about touching those season ticket holders that aren’t utilizing their tickets and doing it in a way that we can be preemptive so we’re not finding out that they felt like the value wasn’t there for them because they didn’t use their ticket throughout the season.

Instead we’re trying to jump on that if they’ve missed one or two games, and if we escalate the actions we take as they go further into the season and not utilizing their tickets. I think for us it varies from team to team in terms of how the structure is set up for a service representative and the amount of accounts they deal with. For us, one of our service representatives could have anywhere between 400 to 500 accounts, so it’s really difficult to build a personal relationship with each one of those people, so what can we do to help our service representatives cut through all of their accounts to really get the biggest impact and focus on those people who need or want the additional action—that’s where we try to use predictive analytics to help us do that.


hrh media: Are these actions that you’re taking being noticed and appreciated by the ticket holders?

I think so. For us, with ticket utilization, it’s really making sure that season ticket holders feel like they’re getting the value for their tickets in whatever way that means. It may mean selling their tickets for games they can’t attend or it could just mean giving them away to a client, colleague or friend, but we’re just trying to make sure that we’re proactively driving those actions and making sure that it’s not something that the season ticket holder looks back when it’s up for renewal; and in retrospect says, well if I’d done things differently maybe I would have gotten the value, but I didn’t.

I do think they appreciate it and I think they’ll see that as we continue to go deeper and deeper into how we’re leveraging our data I think they’ll continue to see a better experience game after game.

hrh media: What does the future look like for customer data analysis within your franchise?

I think the future is really exciting for us. We do a lot of really interesting things now and I think we’re a team that’s really trying to push the envelope and be more advanced in terms of how we’re applying analytics. Even from our standpoint I think there are so many things that we can continue to do, there’s a lot of unstructured data that we’re really not leveraging as well as we could, and social media is a whole frontier of opportunity for us in utilizing data. Even just outside of social media when we talk about unstructured data, a lot of communications with our season ticket holders are happening through email correspondence, text messaging and those types of things. So how do we really leverage those kinds of conversations because right now without any type of text mining application, we’re really not able to maximize the insights we can draw. We do a lot of research here and even with surveys we see the open-ended responses and we try to leverage that as best as we can. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there in terms of text mining and just utilizing unstructured data better, whether it’s in our predicted models or just driving key insights for our management.

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If You Build Remarkable Content, the Readers Will Come

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This is the first installment of a two-part interview with content strategy extraordinaire, Rebecca Lieb.

Content is not necessarily a build it and they will come proposition. Content has to be very good for them to come.

It may seem like a basic principle, but according to Rebecca Lieb, many companies still just don’t get it. Rebecca is an author, columnist, journalist and digital advertising and media analyst at Altimeter Group. In this interview she answers some important questions regarding content marketing strategies, going beyond how your organization should create content and into how it should be published and on what channels.

hrh media: Before we dive in, would you mind sharing with us a little bit about your content marketing journey and how you became interested in the industry?

I think you encapsulated it very well when you enumerated some of the positions that I’ve held prior to my current role as an analyst. I’ve effectively only done two things in my life. On the one hand I’ve worked as a marketer, always for media companies; and on the other hand I’ve worked as a journalist, as a content creator. So when you combine content creation, editorial acumen, running a newsroom (which I’ve also done) with marketing, I think content marketing and strategy is a very logical outcome of those two skill sets.

hrh media: Could you define what content marketing is, and furthermore what differentiates content marketing from public relations and even advertising?

I’m so glad you asked that. I’ll even take it a step further and differentiate content marketing from content strategy; first and foremost, because I think those terms get conflated very often. Content marketing is the art and science of marketing with media that a Brand owns; as opposed to advertising that you buy. That’s almost the definition of advertising, there’s a media buy associated with an ad. Content can be created in all sorts of ways, shapes or forms – on a blog, on websites, and certainly in offline channels if you publish newspapers, magazines, etc. What the digital revolution has really enabled is for any brand or any marketer to become a publisher and to become a content provider. You no longer need to buy media when it’s so easy and so accessible to create media yourself.

I really divide content marketing into three different categories: there’s content that is entertainment—this is your typical viral video. It makes people laugh, cry, or pass along. There’s content that’s entirely informative—this is used a lot in high consideration purchases such as a mainframe computers, another piece of technology, or a car that you have to do a lot of studying up on before you’re comfortable buying. The third form of content I’d like to call utility content. It’s things like mobile apps that help you deposit a check into the bank without visiting the bank—you take a picture and you zap it. It’s a vertical search engine that helps you find nearby restaurants or choose the right wine to order. So those are the forms of content marketing and effectively what it is.

The underpinning of content marketing is content strategy. Content strategy is planning for content marketing. Not just how you’re going to do it, how you’re going to create it and who’s going to create it; but how you’re going to publish it, in what channels, and what’s all the rules, processes, technologies and procedures are around the governance of that content. Just like the New York Times has a staff and that staff is specialized at doing different things, and the staff has an editorial calendar that says we publish this sort of stuff on Monday, this sort of stuff on Tuesday, this at the end of the year, this around the holidays, so too is content marketing very calendared, very seasonal. Without a plan you’re just looking at the proverbial white sheet of paper and you’re not going to know what to do next, so I’m very much looking forward to hearing new thinking around content strategies at the conference this spring.