Latest / Content, Briefly / Slack: Sara Yin on navigating content marketing in a tech giant’s world.

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Slack: Sara Yin on navigating content marketing in a tech giant’s world. · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  So that was like in the earliest years. It was just very much top of funnel content. The team has moved a lot within the org over the years.
• 0:09
  At one point it was under product marketing, and it was very focused on creating sales enablement content.
• 0:14
  Right now, for the past couple of years, it's been under field marketing, and that's sort of a broader group that consists of global campaigns, events, and digital marketing.
• 0:22
  [upbeat music] Hey, everyone, and thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, I'm very excited to have Sarah Yin on the podcast.
• 0:32
  She's the senior editor at Slack and has previously worked at Shopify, Intercom, Atlassian, and before that for PCMag and some other journalistic publications.
• 0:42
  Really fascinating career, and we go a little deeper on that than we typically do on this podcast. Then we shift gears to talking about her work at Slack.
• 0:50
  I'll tease a little bit that Slack has been kinda late to the content game. Now, granted, they didn't [chuckles] necessarily need content to grow.
• 0:57
  They were growing just fine, and then as the company grew up, they added content as a motion.
• 1:01
  She talks a little bit about that transition, some of the things she's working on today, what it's like to work at a large enterprise. Remember that they were acquired by Salesforce.
• 1:10
  It's truly a massive company at this point.
• 1:12
  Sarah has a really fantastic background in editorial, and she's brought those skillsets and that perspective to Slack, where she's working on more traditional marketing initiatives. So really interesting episode.
• 1:23
  She had a lot of good stuff to say. As always, I really enjoyed it, and I hope you do too. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here with another episode of Content Briefly.
• 1:32
  Very excited to have Sarah Yin, senior editor at Slack, on the podcast today. I have brought Sarah on to offer some product suggestions for people who run Slack communities. No, I'm just kidding.
• 1:42
  We're gonna talk about your career. Um [chuckles] you have a really interesting content marketing career, so I'm gonna hand it over to you in a second. But you're at Slack now.
• 1:50
  Previously, you were at Shopify, some freelancing. You worked at Intercom for almost six years. Before that, you were at Atlassian. Looks like you were in journalism prior to that.
• 2:00
  So, you know, we don't typically go super deep on career stuff on this podcast, but I would love if part of your introduction, you could just give us the overview of your career.
• 2:09
  I would love to know a little bit about each of those experiences if you're open to it. Absolutely.
• 2:14
  I know y-you mentioned right before on the call that my LinkedIn profile looked amazing, but I have to say it is, [chuckles] it is pure luck and serendipity that I worked at all those amazing companies, to be honest.
• 2:26
  So, you know, as you mentioned, I started out in journalism. I worked in different publications in Hong Kong, Singapore, New York City.
• 2:34
  The last place I worked was PC Magazine, where I was reviewing mobile security software. I think a lot of journalists back in, what, 2010 or so, we just weren't making money.
• 2:43
  We were hearing about the death knell of journalism.
• 2:47
  And so as soon as I got any offer to move in-house into a tech company, I did, and that happened to be Atlassian, which I'd never heard of at the time, and I completely did not relate to the audience, which was very dev-heavy.
• 3:01
  This is back when Jira had first launched pretty much. And so I moved from New York to the Bay Area, and s- at Atlassian, I was responsible for creating customer stories.
• 3:10
  I was the first person to start doing customer stories there. This was... I laugh when I think about that one year I spent there because I had no metrics, I had no real strategy, and we weren't getting a lot of...
• 3:22
  We weren't having to go through a ton of approval processes. We were just launching lots of awesome customer stories, and I had a ton of resources to create amazing sort of, um, documentary style stories.
• 3:34
  What a cool way to transition from journalism into content marketing. Like, that feels- Yeah... like a perfect segue. Oh my God.
• 3:39
  And I mean, I'm j- you're just interviewing people, which is the, pretty much the best part of journalism. Yeah. But you are not worried about deadlines or scoops or online trolls or anything like that. [chuckles] Right.
• 3:50
  Right. Yeah. It, it felt like a luxury. And I, I left Atlassian just at the point when they were starting to think about going public, and I think this was super naive on my part, you know, I left a lot of shares behind.
• 4:01
  But I think a lot of early journalists when they first move into content marketing, as soon as you're, you're told that you need to think more about metrics, you're like, "Okay, I'm out. This is not fun anymore." Right.
• 4:12
  So from there, I naively, I think sometime [chuckles] in part joined a bunch of other former Atlassians to another startup, also which I didn't understand at the time, but it was called Intercom, and I immediately, I just loved this very small team that was in the SF office.
• 4:28
  It really appealed to me as somebody who's almost anti-marketing in a way because, you know, Intercom is still is all about doing things from first principles. Yeah.
• 4:36
  They don't wanna copy or follow what any other marketing team's doing, and that, so that really appealed to me. And so, you know, when I joined Intercom, I would say it's this...
• 4:47
  We didn't really even have proper job titles, but John Collins was the first, and you know John very well. He was helping devs run this very small but popular blog for product market managers.
• 4:59
  And then my job in joining was also because I brought over a customer story experience, so I started pumping out customer stories, helped ramp up the cadence of blog publishing.
• 5:10
  That's when we started expanding beyond just, like, devs blogging to other subject matter experts, both in San Francisco and in Dublin. I was there at Intercom for about six years. [chuckles] Did a lot of...
• 5:22
  You've heard about all the wins, but I can share some failures too. Oh, for su- Oh, there, there were failure? I [chuckles] didn't know that. Yeah.
• 5:28
  [chuckles] Intercom to me is, like, the pinnacle of B2B SaaS content marketing, you know? It's the stuff of legends. Yeah.
• 5:35
  I, you know, every legend also has a bunch of failures that- [laughs] Like, you've heard of all the awesome books and the podcasts- Yeah... that they did, the, you know, hotshot blog posts.
• 5:46
  I think the biggest failure started to come when we, when we started scaling, and we brought on leaders from other, like, other marketing leaders who came from other extremely successful companies, you know, demand gen, acquisition, like SEO growth, all that kind of-Good acquisition stuff.
• 6:05
  And they were, I think they c- they were coming in with, like, a very strong expertise in a certain channel or a certain way of operating, a certain tool set, and they were trying to replicate it in Intercom.
• 6:15
  And, you know, as I mentioned, Intercom is still is very, I think, anti... not anti-marketing, but just anti going with the status quo of marketing.
• 6:24
  So there's an, a huge culture clash, and one way that manifested early on was we [chuckles] we were asked to create an infographic in the content marketing team, which sounds so simple.
• 6:36
  [laughs] Sounds really easy, we just outsource it, come up with a bunch of data. But my gosh, it, I mean, for a content marketing team that was used to not even-- we didn't even call eBooks eBooks, we called them books.
• 6:49
  We published at a very, very high quality sk- level of execution, and to be forced to create an infographic with a very s- prescriptive outline and, and even design ethos, it was really hard to produce something that normally probably is not so hard to produce, was very hard to produce at Intercom.
• 7:09
  And, you know, it just... I think all of the people who were there at the time even knew that it wasn't something that aligned with our brand, our content brand, or even our audience.
• 7:19
  I mean, can't imagine any product manager really wanting to share a- an infographic [chuckles]- Right, right... generated by an agency.
• 7:26
  But we did it, and, you know, surprisingly, I'm sure you've never heard of an Intercom infographic. We did a bunch of those. We did a bunch of live gui- or no, what's it called?
• 7:35
  Ultimate guides to live chat, ultimate guides to, uh, you, you know, customer support, things like that, that also you've probably never heard of.
• 7:44
  But my takeaway there is just, you know, when, when something feels really hard to create, it's probably not the right fit. [laughs] That's very interesting.
• 7:52
  That's very interesting because I think, just outsider observation, it seemed like Intercom captured this magic.
• 7:58
  I read somewhere, I don't know if this is true, that Des Traynor wrote 95 of the first 100 blog posts on the site. So there's a culture there around content.
• 8:10
  There's total top-down buy-in on this channel, but it's more than a channel. It's a way of operating. It's not just- Yeah... a channel to be optimized.
• 8:19
  So then you gotta scale it at some point, and then I just feel like what you're getting is the tension of, like, do we lose the magic, you know- Yeah... if we over-operationalize these things, you know?
• 8:31
  Again, outsider's perspective, it seems like Intercom has navigated all that very well over now more than a decade. Yeah. I mean, I think
• 8:40
  it's, yeah, it's come with a lot of failures, which is probably [chuckles] the main thing that I'm trying to drive at too, you know, behind the other.
• 8:48
  And something that I remember Des Traynor telling me early on that has stuck to me throughout the years is that all business problems are ultimately people problems, and I think that is so true in content marketing.
• 8:59
  When you think about what succeeds, it's the things that have top-down alignment and buy-in, and it comes from very much within, you know? Yeah.
• 9:08
  I adore Des, but I would argue to say it's probably wasn't terribly hard for him to write 95 blog posts 'cause he had a lot to say, and he loves... He's a great writer. It was easy for him.
• 9:17
  On the other hand, another series that never kicked off was we were trying to create a video version of the blog, like getting Des, getting other people to just be thought leaders in, like, short LinkedIn videos.
• 9:29
  That was incredibly hard. People were uncomfortable being on video. There just wasn't internal, like, that kind of widespread buy-in. Sure.
• 9:37
  And, you know, again, it's, it's just a, it was a poor culture fit of, between content and the people within. Um, and it also didn't do well. Yeah. That, I mean, it's very interesting.
• 9:51
  I've never thought about the, the quote unquote "failure" side of it, but I imagine in any, with any medium, in any industry, this is what happens. Like, there's tons of experimentation inside. It's incredibly difficult.
• 10:04
  The final product is great. It's sort of a tip of the iceberg.
• 10:07
  If you, like, really understand what it took to get there, you have a much greater appreciation for how difficult it is to just publish content that people really like. [chuckles] Yeah, absolutely.
• 10:17
  I mean, I think you've said this so many times too, it's all boils down to execution [chuckles] and the ex- the journey. This is like the weeds, in the weeds stuff, but it's- For sure... often the place. Yeah, yeah.
• 10:29
  Well, you've given me some good stuff to, I'm gonna ask, ask Jad about. But truly- Great... like, just have huge respect for Intercom.
• 10:34
  Like, and I know a few people, I know John, and a few other people who worked on Intercom content over the years, and, um, there's a very consistent experience I have in talking with those folks in that, one, all incredibly smart, humble, very focused on the reader, trying to learn, trying to put the best stuff out that they possibly can.
• 10:53
  It's a culture of excellence. So what a cool way to spend a couple of years. I wish I could've been there. I actually applied. Sorry, we're getting off track.
• 11:01
  I applied to be on the Intercom content marketing team, and I had an interview, and I was gonna have to lo- relocate to Dublin. Dublin. Oh. And I just, I, I was like, "Ah, we're, this remote thing is so great.
• 11:14
  I love remote." And so it ended there. I was not offered a job, but as soon as they said, "You gotta be in Dublin," I was like, "Gosh, I could just sit next to John Collins. How great would that be?"
• 11:23
  But it just- No [chuckles]... it wasn't gonna work. It's too bad. But, I mean, you're in a, you're in a great place now. Yeah, no, I, and no, no regrets. No regrets.
• 11:31
  I guess, so from there, you, you go to Shopify, which is another company which has a track record of excellent content, and the alumni network of content folks that work there is incredible.
• 11:45
  Like, really, truly some of the smartest, best minds in content marketing that I've ever come across have Shopify on their resume also. Could you give us a taste of- Yeah... of what that experience was like? Oh my God.
• 11:55
  I mean, you know Greg Ciotti. He was my manager. He is as smart and humble and nice externally, inter- like, as a manager as he is it appears externally.
• 12:05
  Like, every one-on-one with him felt like I was getting a content marketing workshop that would just blow my mind. [chuckles] That's so cool. Yeah. And Shopify w- uh, is such a special place.
• 12:16
  It's filled with-I don't know if it's still like this now, but at the time, like, it was a requirement for every person who joins Shopify to essentially have experience as an entrepreneur themselves.
• 12:25
  So, you know, there were a lot of store owners. There's a huge store owner Slack community channel within Shopify- Oh, cool...
• 12:32
  all, like, teaching each other how to improve and grow their business, which also is great source of, like, blog ideas for us. But at Shopify, the content team was, you know, also very small.
• 12:41
  The writers-- we had in-house writers. We had an external contractor who focused a lot on SEO.
• 12:48
  I would say coming from Intercom, where we didn't have an SEO, like, motion at the time, Shopify had an extremely successful one, as I'm sure you know.
• 12:57
  And I know Greg's even told you that, you know, SEO has gave him the runway to take some big creative risks. Yep. And that is exactly how he managed and how we operated.
• 13:08
  So there was always, like, very high quality SEO that was coming out every day at Shopify. And then the in-house writers who, they were hired because they were super creative and great writers.
• 13:17
  They were able to take more interesting stories, often that they'd come up with themselves because they were store owners.
• 13:23
  They would interview other store owners and create these just home run blog posts and video content. You know, the podcast is still running, where they also interview store owners every week.
• 13:34
  I mean, it was an, a very eye-opening and just an amazing content operation there. Yeah, very cool. Cameron Jenkins was an early guest on this podcast, and it was fascinating.
• 13:46
  We went deep into the complexity of content at Shopify because it is a large organization. There's different departments dealing with, like, point of sale, retail- Yeah... brick and mortar.
• 13:58
  I mean, there's a lot going on, and it was really interesting. The focus of that was primarily like, how do you navigate this? You know, like- Right... what does the org structure look like?
• 14:05
  How do you as a content leader navigate it? But again, it was, like, very, like, thoughtful. It was really interesting because you could imagine it's complex. There's a lot of internal stuff to be sorted out.
• 14:16
  So for the content that is eventually published to be good and remain good is, is quite difficult, I think, to do it at that type of scale. Was there-- How did you find the experience?
• 14:28
  Because Intercom, relatively small at the time, I'm guessing, as a company, was there a learning curve when you got to Shopify of like, kind of like navigating a larger organization? For sure.
• 14:38
  I think I feel it more now at Slack. Shopify feels almost like a startup in comparison to the in terms of complexity. Sure. Yeah.
• 14:46
  But, you know, even like you mentioned Cameron, like, she was working on a different blog, a different audience, different Shopify product, and even just, like, finding alignment with all the other products within the Shopify ecosystem was and, and still is, I'm sure, very hard.
• 15:03
  Like- Yeah...
• 15:04
  I feel like it's a very common problem enterprises that you are finding content teams that are probably writing or creating very similar pieces of content, and if, you know, the obvious answer would be that everybody is not just creating that new content, but they're able to, like, repurpose each other's work.
• 15:22
  It's the most efficient way to run, but so incredibly difficult somehow. [chuckles] Content at Slack, like, give us the, like, the beginner's version of it. Okay.
• 15:32
  To tell you where we are today, I'm just gonna give you an evolution of how the team has evolved, 'cause it's- Perfect. Yeah. I mean, Slack started back in twenty twelve.
• 15:40
  The team has expanded and contracted a lot based on what the businesses hence required at the time.
• 15:45
  You know, when Slack first came out, it was-- we had the luxury of being a very viral product already, and so the content team was super focused on just continuing that brand and that mind share.
• 15:55
  It's very thought leadership driven. It was a much... I think, a much bigger team of ed- mostly editors and writers, and they were just blogging really cool stuff.
• 16:04
  You know, things that were writing about the work of work, you know, how to eliminate meetings, how to make your standards more efficient, you know, stuff that is still very relevant today.
• 16:14
  And they were also blogging about, you know, Slack best tricks or tips and tricks. And I know a lot of companies do that, but I think it just, it was such a perfect alignment with Slack because Slack is all about work.
• 16:27
  So, you know, all these topics are just like it's helped create Slack's domain authority, which I am a very lucky recipient of today. [chuckles] So that was Slack in the earliest years.
• 16:37
  It was just, you know, very much top of funnel content. The team has moved a lot within the org over the years. At one point it was under product marketing, and it was very focused on creating sales enablement content.
• 16:49
  Right now, for the past couple of years, it's been under field marketing, and that's sort of a broader group that consists of global campaigns, events, and digital marketing.
• 16:58
  And as a whole, our North Star metric is marketing pipe. So, you know, essentially SQLs.
• 17:04
  And we pro- as a content team, that means we are largely creating a lot of gated content that is targeting a very wide group of personas.
• 17:14
  Um, but, you know, we're a team of five right now, so we're involved in a little bit of everything. You know, we help self-serve team create customer stories.
• 17:21
  We're involved in all the, almost all the product launches, like creating campaign content for that. A big thing that's coming up for us now is SEO.
• 17:30
  You know, Slack didn't start with SEO in mind, like a lot of companies, and so we're kind of retroactively trying to fill that part of the portfolio.
• 17:38
  And so right now, a, a huge part of my job is actually running a lot of the SEO motion, trying to figure out how to scale that. Um- That's really interesting. You know,
• 17:48
  just speaking of the kind of viral nature of the product, like I remember- Mm-hmm... begging my manager to get a Slack in probably like twenty fourteen, 'cause we were on HipChat, like maybe you were at Atlassian.
• 18:00
  I don't know. Oh, yeah. [chuckles] And, and we were using HipChat, and then we heard about this thing called Slack, and we were like, "Dang,"- No way... "this is cool. We want, we want this. We want this."
• 18:07
  Obviously, the company grows up. You know what I mean? It's like you sort of tap out all the- Yep... kind of early adopter types who are like, "We want this thing."
• 18:15
  And then it's like you gotta sell plan to enterprise, and there's all... You know, then you gotta do all the things that are required to do that, so then you end up building this kind of the motion as you go, I guess.
• 18:25
  But there was- Yeah... very early on, the founder, Stewart Butterfield, wrote an article called We Don't Sell Saddles Here.Which was a really important piece of content, I think.
• 18:35
  I mean, certainly from the outside, it was like, dang, this is really smart. I love this approach. It's like, you know, we floated it around as like, should we do content like that? You know, like it was really cool.
• 18:46
  And I'm curious if the ripple effects of a blog post like that are still felt at Slack today in the same way that like Dez Trainer's ninety-five of the first hundred posts sort of set the company up to be great at content.
• 19:01
  Like, is there some of that? I mean, it's only one blog post. Maybe there are others that I don't know of. I completely understand what you mean because that was such a seminal blog po- like- Yeah...
• 19:10
  philosophy that any person joining the company pretty much had to buy into. Right. I s- I could see it getting shared almost every week in internal channels. It's just like people don't even need to summarize the post.
• 19:21
  It's just, you know, I think there might even be an emoji repre- it's a, there's a saddle emoji [chuckles]- Nice... that represents that blog post. That's awesome. So yes, it still helps.
• 19:30
  I think that post really spoke a lot to the challenges of creating a brand new category, but Slack is sort of at a different space right now.
• 19:37
  Or we're in a kind of an interesting inflection point where, like you mentioned, we've kind of saturated the audience that will immediately gravitate towards a new way of working, and we're trying to reach the much bigger, much harder, more unrelatable audience of people that are like hardcore Webex fans or- Yeah...
• 19:55
  Teams users or even like people who are using Salesforce who have-- just don't get Slack. You know, they, they're much more, they're using more traditional tech stack.
• 20:05
  So that's where we're at now, and it is incredibly hard. [chuckles] Oh, yeah, I can imagine. Well, so also along the way, Slack is acquired by Salesforce, which is a huge deal, you know. Yeah.
• 20:15
  So then like you become part of this larger company. How much are you working with folks across Salesforce as well? Like do you interact with their content team or is there a, are these teams separate or...
• 20:27
  This is an incredibly broad question, but like how does that work? Like you work just on Slack, other people work just on Salesforce content? Yes. The Salesforce content team is huge.
• 20:35
  They, and they operate a bunch of different channels. So right now there's not a ton of like collaboration yet, but we do, we have like regular meetings with each other just to learn best practices.
• 20:47
  I think we're both start- trying to figure out like the new landscape of SEO for instance and- Right... maybe the best way, also best way to use AI tools for this.
• 20:56
  We-- and I, I really appreciate that because Salesforce is, their blog audience is exactly who we're trying to target now at Slack, or it's a large part of it and even how they speak is, their voice and tone guide is very different from ours.
• 21:11
  So I think the greatest challenge that our small Slack content team is facing now is how to adapt our voice and tone to that audience without losing our original identity, the saddles so to speak, that has lasted throughout the decade.
• 21:27
  Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. You know, I'll let the saddles thing go in a second. [chuckles] But there's- [laughs]...
• 21:33
  Jeff, J- Jeff Bezos has written about this and there's a, he has a name for this framework, but it's this sort of culture building technique of boiling a philosophy down into a simple phrase.
• 21:45
  Like at Amazon there's day one. It's like there's buildings on the campus called day one and things like this, and everybody buys into this. And kinda same thing with the saddles, like you have a saddle emoji.
• 21:55
  Like I think that's kind of incredible actually that this is 10 years ago that blog post was published and they're still, you can boil it all down to an emoji at this point.
• 22:03
  There's a content marketing lesson buried in there somewhere. You know, like they kind of, not really great examples, like a lot of people like try to sort of make up terms or like capture an ideology- Yeah...
• 22:14
  with like marketing type terms like the skyscraper technique is like a good example of that. But there is like a higher brow version of that. Anyways, this is just sort of a thought. Not, not really here nor there.
• 22:23
  I just think it's fascinating when- Yeah... words,
• 22:27
  blog posts even, which are not I think typically thought of as this sort of like novel medium retain power like that, you know, that maybe typically would be reserved for books, you know, or some other- Yeah...
• 22:40
  medium which is, you know, maybe thought of in a higher regard than the simple blog post. Yeah. It's interesting too, because I can't think of a s- they're all blog posts. They mostly originate as blog posts.
• 22:50
  I haven't heard of an emoji that derived from like a viral founder's video [chuckles] or something. Yeah, totally. Well it's something about like the act of writing, you know? Like- Yeah... it is a...
• 23:00
  Anyways, like I said, I'll let the saddles thing go, but I love that article. I've reread it many times over the years and, um, it's good stuff. Related to the SEO work you mentioned, can you give us a sense of that?
• 23:11
  Is it, are you running through like kind of the traditional proven SEO method, do the keyword research, write the content, maybe outsource it, publish lots of it?
• 23:19
  Or are you kinda, do you have a spin on it that is differentiating? It's gonna sound ridiculous.
• 23:24
  I think the spin on it is that I actually don't know too much about SEO, so I'm not coming at it from like an SEO point of view. I'm coming at it from like an editorial point of view.
• 23:32
  You know, so we- That's perfect actually. [laughs] Please tell us about that because there's a lot of companies who do the opposite. It's like they bring in the keyword people and they- Yeah...
• 23:41
  pump out content, you know, and you lose that, you lose that whatever it is, like that editorial dash that like a, someone who really understands how to communicate to a reader has like you. Yeah.
• 23:54
  I mean if SEO is all about standing out in a very crowded browser, I think we approach SEO in a pretty like obvious way where, you know, we get a bunch of keywords that we're trying to target that ladder up to a certain whatever business topic or product that we are trying to sell.
• 24:10
  And the way we approach SEO is pretty I think typical. We get a list of keywords.
• 24:16
  We even get outlines for these keywords of like these are the phrases or the topics that are most frequently asked or the things that need to be in H2 versus an H3. You know, your very standard keyword outlined.
• 24:28
  I personally really struggled with outsourcing those outlines to third party vendors. I mean I found a couple that are amazing and sup- not surprisingly they are power Slack users and we collaborate through Slack.
• 24:40
  But I think the, the spin on it is that-All these keywords are about, essentially about the work of work, and Slack has a lot of opinions, very distinct opinions about the work of work.
• 24:52
  So it- it's very important for every SEO blog post that we have to have that opinion kind of as a through line for the post. I'm trying to think of a recent example.
• 25:02
  Even something like generative AI, like what is generative AI and all that stuff. I mean, Slack, you know, very...
• 25:08
  We've just launched an AI product, a native AI product, and our product team has very distinct positions on how AI show up in a product.
• 25:17
  Like, you know, like for instance, we believe that an AI should always make it obvious when it's AI generated versus not.
• 25:24
  And so even things like that, like going back to the SEO post about generative AI, like what's, you know, if the header is like, "What should you look for in AI tool?"
• 25:31
  We talk about, you know, trust and security is obvious, but even just like transparency to end users.
• 25:38
  So that's a pretty simple example of how a, you know, very distinct Slack opinion will show up in something as basic as an SEO post, and it, it takes a lot of work.
• 25:48
  I'm still honestly- Yeah, that's what I was curious about. [chuckles] Yeah. Yeah. How does the, how does the opinion from the product team make its way into the blog post? Because you could imagine
• 25:59
  this is like a classic content marketing problem. Like, there's all this subject matter expertise and opinion that's just like trapped in the company. It's like, how do you get it out, you know?
• 26:09
  Oh my God, Jimmy, I'm gonna sound like a product pitch right now. [chuckles] It's all in Slack. Yeah. I mean, um- Well, that's a good point, I guess, yeah. [chuckles] I can...
• 26:17
  And also with Slack AI, I can't believe I'm saying this. No, good. Sell it. Sell it. I like it. [chuckles] Okay. I love Slack AI's search feature right now because you can literally...
• 26:26
  I don't know if you can access this now yet. It just launched yesterday for pay users, so you should be able to soon.
• 26:32
  But you can literally search for like, what is our product designer's take on AI, and the AI will, like, spit up documents or any relevant conversations, and it's better if you haven't read through. That is awesome.
• 26:44
  I know. It's a game changer. I mean... [chuckles] I... Yeah. Wow. We have, interestingly, in our Slack community, we have a, a bot that kinda does this, you know, and it does okay.
• 26:56
  But that's the beauty and the challenge of Slack, like you said, is it's all there. It's just how do you, how do you get to it? But AI is the perfect solution. Yeah.
• 27:03
  Makes sense, and it's makes things a lot easier for a content team that's just trying to wade through tons and tons of information. Yeah.
• 27:10
  Does everybody have to sign a waiver that says, "If you say this in Slack, we might put it in a blog post," [chuckles] you know, or do you have to... Do you, you know- No... is there any- Exactly. [chuckles]...
• 27:18
  is, is there red tape? You know. I mean, we always get approvals from the people that created the original blog post. There's even every... A lot of things go through our legal team too before they get- Yeah...
• 27:28
  published, so. That makes sense. But I would imagine that smaller company, you would wanna [chuckles] sign a waiver anything you Slack or tweet might be subject to a blog post. Yeah. That's interesting, and that's...
• 27:38
  This is-- I'm fascinated by this actually, because this comes up sometimes on the podcast, this idea of raw material. Mm.
• 27:44
  You know, and different companies have different ways of building the library of raw material that the content team can then go and pull from.
• 27:53
  And over the last, I don't know, six months, I've heard more and more interesting ways to do that. You know, where it used to just be, it's trapped. It literally is just trapped. Like, how do you get it?
• 28:04
  You can't, you know.
• 28:05
  And now most of the SaaS tools we use have good search features and stuff, but there's still like some level of, of buy-in that needs to happen because you do need many voices, and you do need people to be comfortable with, I don't know if risk is the right word, maybe the vulnerability of sharing opinions in SEO content, which you don't have to do.
• 28:25
  It certainly differentiates and makes the content way better, but not everybody is comfortable. You know, I can imagine like the developer being like, "This isn't my thing." You know what I mean?
• 28:33
  "I wanna build the product. I don't wanna be, like, quoted in the blog post." Like, whatever, stuff like that. But the...
• 28:39
  Just doing it directly in Slack is really like a simple and sort of elegant way actually to go about it. It is. Even if you wanna scale that, I mean, just ask, put an ask out, like, who wants to be...
• 28:50
  who consider for a thought leadership blog post in the future, and you've got your little list of product mat- you know, subject matter experts.
• 28:57
  You know, even at Shopify, some of our best posts, like I mentioned, that store owners channel where people were actively asking each other for tips and tricks on how to grow a store.
• 29:06
  I remember I often would go in there and Slack them, like, "Can I work with you to turn this into a byline?"
• 29:11
  I mean, something as simple as that, and more often than not, people are pretty excited to do that, especially to work with, like, a professional writer. For sure. For sure. Well,
• 29:20
  as someone who runs a Slack community, I fully agree. It's just an amazing source of ideas- [chuckles]... and examples and different voices. Like, there's a lot- Yeah...
• 29:30
  of really great things that happen when you get a bunch of people talking and- Yeah... make it visible and accessible to the folks with the writing jobs. Yeah. And- So that's very cool...
• 29:40
  this could be something separate to that, but even, like, the reason why I became interested in working for Slack content team to begin with is 'cause I freelanced for them very briefly back in the day, and they manage all their vendors, even now, they manage all their freelancers and vendors through Slack.
• 29:55
  And just being able, as a freelancer, being able to talk to somebody through Slack versus an email to get more information or just get quick feedback is, like, it was just life-changing as a...
• 30:07
  being on the other side of that, and I knew I wanted to join that content operation. Yeah.
• 30:12
  So I think one of the, like, as it relates to the content marketing world, I think one of the best things about Slack is just it's management vendors that way.
• 30:19
  You know, you create a relationship with writers no way that you re- normally wouldn't. Right. What has surprised you about working on content marketing at Slack?
• 30:29
  And I'll, I'll, I'll give you a second to think about it by adding context. The...
• 30:33
  Have there been pieces that have performed really well that you maybe didn't expect, or are there things you poured lots of energy into that fell flat, you know?
• 30:40
  Or is there, like, kind of really cool things that have come from a cross-org collaboration that, you know, maybe can only happen at a company that size or, you know.
• 30:48
  I'm just sort of curious, like-Especially at a company as large as Salesforce, like, is there still the opportunity for surprise and serendipity? I think two things come to mind.
• 30:59
  The first one that I've never experienced in any other company before is we have two in-house copy editors, and they are responsible for reviewing literally every word that goes out in public, whether it's tweet, landing page copy, blog posts, they review everything.
• 31:15
  And I cannot overstate how vital they've been in pr- helping us protect some of that, that voice and tone, those challenges that I've talked to you about. And it helps that they are a little bit divorced.
• 31:26
  They're a little bit separated from, like, the day-to-day marketing operations, so they're not, like, fully, like, drinking the Kool-Aid. They're a little bit removed from that.
• 31:34
  And, you know, I've worked at companies where you've had, like, freelance copy editors, and it's really not the same.
• 31:39
  [laughs] You know, our in-house copy editors, they, they create the style guide, and they're even trying to train an AI right now to copy the MLF. Oh, that's cool. It's CLF. Yeah, very cool. It's not working at all.
• 31:49
  [laughs] Yeah. But, but in-house, they're like- Yeah... the guardians of the brand, in a sense. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
• 31:54
  So I'd say that's one thing that's kind of surprised me that's been so, such an unlock for us to scaling, and while retaining that magic of s- you know, Slack voice. It's just having in-house copy editors.
• 32:07
  I think another project that I worked on last year and that was a lot of work, it was a big lift, but I was surprised at how well it did, was the second State of Work Report that we launched.
• 32:18
  So just for context, Slack released its first State of Work Report back in 2019. It was, you know, it was not, it was under res- or just had very few resources.
• 32:27
  It was essentially a blog post with some cool GIFs and really interesting data points. But it created this, like, franchise brand for us that we didn't really take up until last year.
• 32:38
  We didn't take up again until last year.
• 32:39
  And so last year I worked on the second State of Work Report, poured in a ton more resources, collaborated really, really heavily with comms and the research team, which I had never done to that degree before.
• 32:50
  This was, like, across Salesforce comms and Slack comms, so you can imagine the number of, of, like, people involved- Yeah, yeah... in deciding this.
• 32:59
  I remember I often felt like, God, this is such, this is one of those things that's just gonna be... It's like a heavy, hard thing to do, and it's just gonna fall flat.
• 33:07
  [laughs] So going back to my statement of, like, content culture fit, I was like, "This is not gonna work."
• 33:12
  I, I don't think it was so much the centerpiece content, but the campaign and the repurposed materials that came out of it that was hyper-targeted towards all the different personas, all the different countries and industries, that in fact did amazingly.
• 33:25
  And it's, you know, last year it was our best performing piece of content from- Oh, wow... like, a pipeline view. Um, so that was my first real experience, I think, as doing content at an enterprise.
• 33:37
  Like, you know, coming from a startup background, you just wanna, like, do your shit and pump it out really quickly- Yeah... within a few weeks. But this one took, like, months and so, so many layers of approvals.
• 33:49
  It was worth it in the end. That's really cool. [laughs] That's really cool. Well, it, it requires a different skill set, right? Like, getting good content out the door- Yeah... is not always about writing.
• 33:56
  It's, can be about many other things. No. And some of those things, I think, I wonder sometimes if enterprise companies, people sense like a bureaucracy or red tape or whatever, but- I know... but it's- Yeah...
• 34:08
  you also have, you know, to your point earlier, really amazing people to work with, with very specialized skills.
• 34:14
  And so if you can bring those people together, keep the project on track, like, really, really cool things can happen. Exactly.
• 34:20
  And like you said, you're exercising a different muscle, which I think was also a big draw for me coming from the startup world. I didn't wanna just be doing startups for the rest of my life.
• 34:28
  I wanted to learn how to, like, stand up for strong opinions I had, you know, across, like, a cross-functional board of people.
• 34:36
  I wanted to learn how to collaborate better and really do more team-based projects that would have a huge impact. And, you know, I'm excited to say that I got to experience that last year.
• 34:47
  Sarah, it's so nice to talk to you. It, I mean, this is our first time meeting. It's wonderful that we can do it on record, so thank you for taking time and being willing to do it with me.
• 34:56
  As I always recommend at the end of the episodes, you've heard it, now go look at it. Go look at the State of Work Report. Go look at Slack's content. Like, see, see what it's like now that you've heard it described.
• 35:06
  And I feel like that's oftentimes where people glean the things that they can then bring back to their own content marketing org. So I wanna encourage people to do that. And then how about you?
• 35:14
  Where is the best place that we can send people to connect with you and follow some of your work? You can DM me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
• 35:21
  I never post, as you've probably noticed, but I am, I'm, I listen there socially a lot, so you know my DMs are always open. Perfect. I would love to hear from you guys. Perfect.
• 35:30
  We'll have a link in the show notes for people to make that easy. Sarah, thank you so much. Wonderful to chat. Hope we can do it again sometime. Same. It's so great to be here. [laughs] Take care.
• 35:43
  [outro music]