Latest / Content, Briefly / Meta: Sonja Jacob and Mahu Sims on content ops and enterprise strategy

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Meta: Sonja Jacob and Mahu Sims on content ops and enterprise strategy · Content, Briefly

• 0:01
  You have to be really, really intentional about building the right team and the right structure.
• 0:05
  When you are building a content team that so many people depend on, operations, specifically content operations, becomes incredibly critical.
• 0:16
  [upbeat music] Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Content Briefly. Got a really cool one for you today. I'm talking to two content folks from Meta. Yes, that Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, et cetera.
• 0:28
  I've got Sonya Jacob, who's an old friend. We've talked on previous podcasts. We've collaborated on blog posts.
• 0:34
  She's an incredibly smart content marketer, and she brought along her former coworker, Mahu Sims, who was the operational person in charge of bringing scale to this new content program that they launched together.
• 0:47
  Really interesting to hear how a large enterprise-grade company brings a content marketing strategy to life. It is very, very different than how a small startup or even a Series A or B company would go about it.
• 0:59
  So we go into all the intricacies of that. I found it to be super cool. I hope that you do too. If you like this episode, we'd really appreciate a rating or review in whatever podcast app you like.
• 1:09
  Okay, I'll get out of the way now. Enjoy this episode. [upbeat music] Hey, everyone, Jimmy from Superpath here with another episode of Content Briefly.
• 1:19
  I have my old friend, Sonya Jacob, who we've done a number of things together over the years, various office hours, quoting each other in blogs. I think we even did a podcast a couple of years ago, so. I think we did.
• 1:30
  Yeah, it's good to be reunited. And a new friend, Mahu Sims. I have a ton of questions for you both about your work in content marketing at Meta and beyond.
• 1:39
  But maybe first, would you mind just each giving a quick intro of yourselves? Talk a little bit about some of your background in content marketing, some of the things you've been working on recently.
• 1:47
  I think that would be really helpful for the listeners. Sure. I have been in content marketing, a little side dabble in product marketing, for about sixteen years now.
• 1:56
  Uh, so really seeing content from the early days when it was a bit like the Wild West and to the present day where it's a little bit less like the Wild West, and essentially been standing up content programs at startups and large companies alike.
• 2:10
  I just finished up a couple of years at Meta working on their B2B business products, and then before that, I was at Cisco for three years, and then currently I am at Athenahealth, where I am Director of Content Marketing.
• 2:23
  So really, really excited to chat through team structure, operationalization, you name it, I'm here for it. Awesome. My name is Mahu, and I've been adjacent to content marketing for about nine years now.
• 2:36
  My background is in marketing operations.
• 2:39
  Most people think about marketing technology, and I spend a good amount of my career focusing on marketing tech, optimizing tech stacks, and working with teams on technical processes and such.
• 2:49
  Um, spent the last two-ish years at Meta on the content operations side, working really closely with Sonya to build more process around how the team works and how we kind of build efficiency into our working model.
• 3:03
  So excited to talk more about that. Yeah, I have a lot of follow-up questions about that. Maybe first, I think not everyone is used to calling Facebook and its other businesses Meta.
• 3:13
  There's Facebook, there's Instagram, there's WhatsApp. Maybe there's more, actually, I don't know. But I certainly don't think B2B when I think of Meta.
• 3:20
  Could you talk a little bit about what does B2B marketing look like at Meta? I mean, I assume this is, like, you're creating content to reach current or potential advertisers, but I assume I'm also oversimplifying that.
• 3:31
  Yeah, I think generally speaking, when people hear Meta or Facebook, they're not necessarily thinking enterprise-grade business software.
• 3:39
  But during my time at Meta, we were really building out a function to support enterprise-level business messaging solutions.
• 3:47
  And so that was really how do we connect with and engage with enterprise companies that could potentially use business messaging solutions like WhatsApp, for example, to actually further some of their marketing goals, potentially some customer support goals.
• 4:03
  And so while that may not be what Meta is necessarily known for, having come from a B2B background myself, that's actually what really brought me to Meta a few years ago to really just sort of stand up that B2B practice within the context of this enterprise-grade business messaging solution through WhatsApp.
• 4:22
  That's super interesting. So okay, that makes sense.
• 4:24
  I was just thinking advertisers, but it's really for any business who could potentially benefit from using a Meta product to further their business in a number of different ways. Yeah.
• 4:34
  You know, and Mahu can speak to this as well, it's not just me. I think advertising obviously plays a really integral role in that offering and how we go to market.
• 4:42
  So yeah, happy to chat through that, but definitely advertising, it's not off the mark. It's very much on the mark. [chuckles] Got it. Okay, cool. Could we talk a little bit about team structure?
• 4:51
  So there's the two of you, obviously. Sonya, I believe you're primarily thinking about strategy. Mahu, you're primarily thinking about operations and process.
• 4:59
  Are or were there other folks involved in the content creation and content distribution process? Yeah, totally.
• 5:06
  So I'll back up a little bit, but when I joined Meta a couple of years ago, I was coming into an organization that really had never seen a B2B content function.
• 5:17
  And I think when you are working within that kind of environment, you have to be really, really intentional about building the right team and the right structure.
• 5:26
  And I think one of the things I've learned over the last sixteen years is that when you are building a content team that so many people depend on, operations, specifically content operations, becomes incredibly critical.
• 5:39
  And so the first person that I wanted to hire was basically Mahu.
• 5:43
  I was like, "I know how it should work," but someone like Mahu is an actual expert in making that happen and creating the efficiencies, but also helping to take a vision for a team and scaling the processes and resources around that.
• 5:58
  So while Mahu and I were partners in crime, there were also several writers.
• 6:02
  So I think at our largest, we were actually a team of about nine in total, and that included junior and senior content marketers, content operations.
• 6:11
  I'll let Mahu speak to her resources on her side, but really making sure we had all of the players in the right seat, and that also included a visual-... designer as well.
• 6:20
  So really it was all about how do Mahu and I work together to scale that content marketing function in the most efficient way possible. Cool. That's incredibly helpful.
• 6:29
  Mahu, could you talk a little bit about content operations? I personally have never had the pleasure of working with someone who specializes in content ops. It's just like- Yeah...
• 6:37
  on small teams, the content lead figures it out on the fly, and it's probably not all that organized. So I'd love to know, like, you come in the door, what are you looking at?
• 6:46
  How are you assessing what's going on and making a plan for... The plan is really for scale, right? Yeah. That's what you're building a foundation for. Yeah. And, like, when coming to Meta, I had two luxuries probably.
• 6:57
  One, being able to kind of define what content operations meant to the team and the org. You mentioned this, Sonya, but the team was very new. We hadn't had all of those resources that Sonya talked about.
• 7:08
  We hadn't even had many channels or that many teams that we were supporting yet. So I had the luxury of building what this meant kind of from the ground.
• 7:18
  I think the other thing is that Sonya, as she mentioned, was pretty bullish about having content operations function, [chuckles] and she was super supportive.
• 7:26
  And as an ops person, that's not something you find everywhere. It's like having a team lead that's super supportive and willing to help the team kind of build that scale and help get my vision out there.
• 7:39
  So when I came in, I think the first thing was around how do we even accept requests? How do we take requests from other teams that we're supporting, and how do we take that content through the life cycle?
• 7:51
  What does our process look like end to end, I think is something that I was eager to kind of resolve.
• 7:57
  So, like, a large part of the plan was getting a project management tool to kind of get in there and, and be able to help us, you know, [chuckles] manage tickets, manage requests, and, and make sure that we're pushing the content all the way through.
• 8:10
  The other thing is what did we need beyond our current resources to scale? So looking at things like what agencies do we bring on board? How many more resources? How do we plan ahead?
• 8:22
  And then the third thing I would say is governance. We're producing all this content. How do we make sure that it stays up to date, stays legally compliant, which is a, a big thing at Meta?
• 8:32
  How do we make sure that it can live its full life cycle? It's evergreen in a sense. And then the last thing was reporting and metrics, which surprisingly hard to get [chuckles] I believe it, yeah...
• 8:43
  at those larger companies, right? So, like, how do we work with the teams to support us on the data side to get the reporting we need to understand the impact of the content?
• 8:51
  So those are the four things that I was looking at. That's so interesting. I once heard Seth Godin, famous marketer and writer, on a podcast, and he was asked about what tool he uses to write.
• 9:03
  And he said he wouldn't answer the question because he didn't want to fool people into thinking there was any magic in the tool. [laughs] You know? Yeah.
• 9:09
  But I wanna ask you, Mahu, were there any tools that you uncovered that you found to be particularly useful given the constraints within which you're working, right? Like large publicly traded company. Yeah, yeah.
• 9:21
  A lot of folks we talk to, they're like, "Oh, we spin up an Airtable base, and that's our content calendar." Like, I assume your needs are different than that. Yeah, yeah.
• 9:27
  No, like we used Asana for a lot of project management and such. A lot of tools that companies like that, that they build theirselves.
• 9:35
  Um, and they have their version of that, that we had to pretty much integrate in order to, to make sure that the front end where people go to request support matches up to the back end that our team uses to kind of manage content through the life cycle.
• 9:51
  So, like, that was our main tool, and that helped us a lot when it came to, like, efficiency and making sure that we were understanding of all the content that comes out and when it's due, right, and, and all those good things.
• 10:02
  Okay, cool. That's exciting actually. Asana's great. I definitely have something to piggyback. One of the things that was really critical for us with Asana was the customization element. Yeah.
• 10:13
  Because we were choosing to use Asana as sort of the first team on this side of the business to use it in this way, we had to be really self-sufficient, and I think that's really where Mahu was able to really jump in and accelerate the entire process.
• 10:28
  So she has all that experience on the ops side of scaling those things, and so that allowed us to take that simple project management tool like Asana and really start to connect the pieces across the organization. Yeah.
• 10:39
  And I think that that customization element was huge for us. Yeah. Mahu, there was one thing you mentioned that I wanted to follow up on.
• 10:44
  You had mentioned the other teams at Meta that you supported with content, and this was one of the things I had written down for you both, which is at some companies, usually the smaller the company, the more content marketing is just purely a growth function.
• 10:57
  It's like, get people on the website, here's our keywords, do this thought leadership thing, get it on LinkedIn, like just create awareness.
• 11:04
  The larger the company, the more content marketing becomes sort of like an in-house agency to service needs all across the business, while probably also still shooting for some of its own growth goals independent of support it provides to other teams.
• 11:20
  So sort of a big question, was that the case? And how did you balance those two things? How do you prioritize the needs coming in? How do you say no to other teams if there's something more pressing?
• 11:29
  Were there certain things that your team was responsible for that were not related to other teams also? Yeah. Sonya, I know you have some strong thoughts on [laughs] equating our team to an agency. Oh, yeah.
• 11:40
  Definitely some strong feelings. [laughs] I think for sure you hit the nail on the head, Jimmy. There's this, like, process by which you're at a large organization and suddenly everything becomes content.
• 11:51
  But one of the things I always say is if everything is content, then nothing is content.
• 11:57
  And that's mainly because we have to start to define what content means to our organization, and that really requires sort of a step back to figure out what are we trying to do, and then how do we on a daily basis implement criteria that will ladder back up to what we're trying to do.
• 12:13
  And this might seem kinda unsexy, but when you're defining your intake process and you're thinking about operationalizing your content function, you need to think through what your criteria are for intake.And those things will help you live each day as honestly as possible- [laughs]...
• 12:30
  based on the resources that you have, and also ladder back up to those objectives.
• 12:34
  Now, fully realize that not all the time can we, like, actually have super clear objectives, but that's where content teams need to take the reins there and actually figure it out and define it for themselves, and hopefully bring other people along.
• 12:47
  And I think by having that clear charter, it really helps you avoid becoming this total support function where you're getting requests, they don't really connect to any of your strategic objectives, you can't really measure them because they're all qualitative and have no why.
• 13:03
  That's what we use. That was sort of our process, and I, I feel very passionately and strongly about this. [laughs] Yeah. Did you have to advocate for it a lot? Yeah. 1,000%. Yeah. [laughs] It was a constant process.
• 13:14
  Yeah, yeah. It makes me feel better, actually. Mm-hmm. I've been in that situation myself a few times. I worked at Intuit for a while, and we ran into the same thing.
• 13:22
  And I don't know if this is true of all enterprise businesses, but at Intuit, there's a strong emphasis on collaboration.
• 13:26
  They really want you to work across teams because good things come of it, for sure, except it also becomes really easy to say yes to a lot of things, and then- Yeah... you start to lose sight of what you're doing.
• 13:37
  One very quick thing, who did content marketing roll up to? Oh, sure.
• 13:41
  For the bulk of our time at Meta, our function actually rolled up into a specific business messaging organization which was focused on really nurturing and growing the growth of the business messaging business for Meta.
• 13:55
  And so that was where we rolled into initially. Towards the latter part of my tenure there, we ended up rolling into a central marketing org which was about 90% focused on more consumer-driven marketing. Got it.
• 14:08
  Okay, cool. Mahu, I, I think you were gonna weigh in on some of the in-house agency verse content as growth function thing there. And I assume, especially, like, as you're thinking about operations and scaling- Yeah...
• 14:20
  you have to be thinking about, like, we have to streamline this, otherwise- Yeah... it's gonna be impossible to scale if we're trying to take on everything. Yeah.
• 14:27
  So, uh, I was the first line of defense when it came to, like, all these requests that come in for the team, so I had a good understanding and a good handle on what we were getting and where we probably need to clarify our communication around what we do, how we support teams, and the goals that we're responsible for that these requests should ladder back up to.
• 14:48
  So a lot of the work that I did there was try to, like, create an evaluation framework in order to, like, make it simple for us to say yes or no, and make it objective, too, right?
• 15:00
  Because the thing is, I can make friends, and I can put something through or slide something through for the friends that I have, but I think that breaks down your processes, right?
• 15:09
  So, like, we wanted to be super objective about how we handle these things and make sure that they met the criteria that we were focused on. Yeah, that's super interesting. I am curious about metrics.
• 15:21
  Are you able to share some of the metrics that your team is responsible for? I mean, I think we could broad-strokes it. I'm happy to broad-stroke it, and Mahu, jump in if you think this is not a great way to phrase it.
• 15:32
  [laughs] So I think in general when you're trying to support an enterprise-level business, and you're really trying to unlock the most massive scale in terms of demand as possible, everyone sort of has to be fully invested in that process.
• 15:46
  And I think one of the things that we were able to do by having a clear content process and clear resources dedicated to demand was drive many, many, many thousands of leads for our enterprise business in, like, an 11-month time span.
• 16:03
  And I would really credit the process that Mahu built with accelerating that process. It grew our business, you know, something like 40% in one year. Oh, wow.
• 16:11
  And so I think that that is a testament to having clarity and distinct roles and responsibilities when it comes to content.
• 16:18
  Was there a sales team or account execs that you all worked with on a regular basis where, you know, one, to sort of understand, like, what challenges they're facing, but two, just to be, like, getting a steady stream of feedback from customers so that you can build sort of in real time some of the problems they're having into content that you create?
• 16:33
  We absolutely had a function within the business messaging group that was really on the front lines taking our solution to market, so we were able to get real-time feedback about the content that we were producing.
• 16:44
  I think the other thing that was really very much in the back of our minds is in addition to that sales funnel that was staffed internally, we were also trying to build out this presence on our web surface.
• 16:56
  So we were actually in closed beta for I think maybe two years before we were finally able to debut a public-facing website in May of 2022, and that was really our first foray into starting to get that feedback from the market.
• 17:08
  Yeah.
• 17:08
  And I think one of the things that can be challenging almost at any large company, but can be specifically challenging in environments like these, is making sure that we're getting out of the building, that we are just as much paying attention to the market forces and the feedback that we're getting there as we are paying attention to the forces from inside the company.
• 17:26
  Because I think you can get into an organizational inertia if you're over-indexing on the internal feedback. Hmm. That's a great point. Was there, like, a relearning process there?
• 17:34
  Like, kind of pulling on my Intuit experience, I remember I had just come from a role where I was focused on writing for SAS startups and VCs and things like that, and then I got to Intuit, and I had to, like, recalibrate my brain because all of a sudden the target customer runs a deli.
• 17:47
  [laughs] I don't know anything about running a deli. Like, I don't know this customer at all, and it took some time to get up to speed with that.
• 17:52
  So I'm curious, like, was there kind of, like, an onboarding period as you're rolling all this out to, like, get that feedback, iterate on it until you finally, like, feel like it's, uh, refined enough to really resonate with that persona?
• 18:04
  I think definitely, but one thing I will say is, like, for us, we captured so much of that in the governance process.
• 18:10
  A large reason why we had such a robust governance process, aside from the fact that that was due to Mahu's operationalizing it, was that we were constantly getting feedback from every facet of the organization and external to it.
• 18:25
  So Mahu probably has a lot to say on that. Yeah, yeah.
• 18:28
  We needed to be able to capture that feedback but also made sure, like, we had a plan for making updates because we would become a team that solely existed to update our content versus creating [laughs] that new content if we didn't have that.
• 18:42
  So yeah. So we built this process so that we could make updates quarterly or, orOr so. I think one of the biggest things that came out of it in the learning was how do we factor in the global perspective, I think, right?
• 18:56
  WhatsApp is obviously global first in that most of the people that use the platform aren't in the US.
• 19:03
  We need to capture a lot of that feedback that came in, and also be able to build in translations into our process and things of that nature.
• 19:10
  So there was a lot of that that I wasn't necessarily looking at day one that came in over time. Got it. A quick follow-up about the refresh piece.
• 19:18
  I think when most content teams are thinking about refreshing, it's like the article was ranking well in SERPs and it's lost a few spots, let's spruce it up or add a new section or... This is not that.
• 19:29
  I mean, maybe that's a component of it, but this is so that it is compliant more than anything.
• 19:35
  I would say compliance is a big piece, but also making sure that it's relevant to maybe global markets or, or something else in that nature. And also making sure that it's up to date, right?
• 19:45
  Like, as a newer platform, there were changes being made to the platform all the time. Something that was new, you know, last quarter had been iterated on, right, and we needed to pull that into, to our content.
• 19:57
  So the product piece was actually probably the largest piece that we were focused on. Oh, wow. Yeah, how do you even begin to keep track of that?
• 20:05
  Especially if the product is iterating quickly, I assume there's probably updates happening pretty much constantly, right? Yeah, constantly.
• 20:12
  So, so what I tried to do was have a really good understanding of the product roadmap so that we could map that back into, like, our process for governance, right?
• 20:21
  So if we understood that there were three releases happening over the quarter, we would make sure that we're working with those folks from PMM, from the product marketing team, to update the content as necessary to ensure that we were focused on the right things, and we had the, the right technical content in there to make sure that it was always up to date.
• 20:40
  I'm just sort of fascinated. It's just like content at a different level. So many of the folks in my kind of small world are like the Series A-ish- Yeah... businesses.
• 20:48
  They have a different suite of problems, and I think that it's so interesting, Mahu, to hear you talk about a lot of this operational stuff because a Series A company typically doesn't have most of these things on their plate.
• 21:00
  It's just like grow, grow, grow. Mm-hmm. We'll figure everything else out later.
• 21:03
  So it's so interesting to hear how like a very mature, also publicly traded business handles all this stuff because, yeah, it's just different. But I find it fascinating. I think it's super interesting.
• 21:11
  I think the other thing is there are some interesting lessons that even if you're a smaller company can help you prioritize the right work.
• 21:18
  I think one thing you learn operating in these super large companies is like, hey, there's just really no way for you to serve everyone.
• 21:27
  And there's really no way to be, going back to that whole agency thing, this support function for everyone.
• 21:34
  And I think that's where you have to be practical about the types of content that you will update at that cadence.
• 21:41
  So for us, that meant calling out a set of core materials, your core pitch deck or your core product guide, and then maybe you have two or three other core content assets that are being leveraged by product marketing, sales, or other cross-functionals at any given point in time.
• 21:58
  I've seen a lot of content teams struggle because they think, "Oh, well, if it's content, then we need to do it." Actually, no. If it's content, maybe you develop criteria for when you own and support it.
• 22:09
  By and large, you need to productize the content you're delivering to folks, and make sure that they are getting sort of that core set of assets, and then you're enabling them to actually make updates on the fly or as needed so that they're not constantly coming back to you outside of the regularly occurring governance updates.
• 22:29
  Another thing I wanted to ask you both about, which is sort of relevant to this in a second, is who writes? I'm always curious to ask content teams, like, at some point the content is created.
• 22:38
  That's where the rubber hits the road. Mm-hmm. And the company has to make a decision about who handles that.
• 22:44
  And for many companies it's a mix of like, you know, we do a handful of things in-house, we outsource the rest to agencies or freelancers or whatever.
• 22:51
  But content creation is quite expensive and quite time consuming, which I would imagine also plays into your prioritization because the stuff is not free. You have a budget to work with, you have deadlines and et cetera.
• 23:03
  So I think you said, Sonny, that there were two content marketers on the team whose primary job was writing. Is that right?
• 23:09
  So we actually had three content leads, and then we had a few junior content folks laddering up to those leads. Got it. So all in all, we had five to six people at any given point in time.
• 23:22
  Plus we also leveraged external vendors to sort of handle any overflow. I think you definitely run into...
• 23:31
  at resource-rich companies, you definitely run into, "Oh, just hire another vendor," or, "Just have the vendor do this."
• 23:38
  But I think what we ran into, and I think is pretty emblematic of large scale content functions, is that vendors are awesome, and for many companies they're the key to unlocking the puzzle of growth, but you have to deploy your vendors on the right work.
• 23:53
  Your vendor, Jimmy, you know from animals back in the day and presently, it's like there's a level of, for lack of a better word, superficiality to leveraging external vendors because there's less of an incentive to go deep into the product, for example.
• 24:08
  Mm. And so I think what we were always preoccupied with is are our vendors actually working on the right stuff? And for us that was like, okay, let's take it back to top of funnel.
• 24:19
  Let's deploy those resources on the right work versus asking them to be embedded deeply in product content creation. And I think that's actually like an ongoing struggle.
• 24:29
  Candidly, it's tough to unlock that because the idea at many companies is like, "Oh, get a vendor to do it and, you know, they'll just run with it."
• 24:37
  But time and again, I think we've all seen, you know, specifically Mahu and I, that that's actually not the best way to deploy your, your external resources in, in most cases.And I think with us too, we had to make sure that we were spending the extra time onboarding them and enabling them.
• 24:54
  The business messaging business is fairly complex, right?
• 24:57
  So, like, it took more time than one might usually expect to get our agencies up to speed on all the things that there is to know in order to begin crafting content or, or coming to us with content ideas that make sense.
• 25:12
  And that's for writing. For design, there was a whole other set of criteria, right, with design guidelines and branding guidelines that we needed to stick to.
• 25:20
  So, like on both sides, we, we had to spend a lot of time on agency enablement. I've never heard the term agency enablement. I really like that though. I feel like managing your vendors is a highly underrated skill.
• 25:32
  You never heard a career coach, or I never have, say, like, "Learn how to manage vendors," because in many cases that's how you scale yourself. Yep. Yeah.
• 25:40
  Partially because, like, they bring lots of resources to, to the table, but also, like, at a lot of companies, adding headcount is extremely difficult, but getting access to budget is probably within reason.
• 25:50
  I remember when I was at Intuit we were trying to figure out content creation needs as well, and it was like, well, adding headcount is, like, impossible. Just forget it, you know? Oh, but here's $100,000 [laughs] Right.
• 25:59
  [laughs]... that you can spend to bring on agencies. I was like, "Oh, okay. Sweet." [laughs] "I've never, I've never had that much money to spend on content before." So I think that's really, really interesting.
• 26:08
  And another thing you mentioned, Mahu, was brand guidelines. You had mentioned it in the context of design.
• 26:13
  I assume there's style and brand guidelines for the written content as well, which raises another question, which is where does that come from? Does the content team create that, or is that, like, a company-wide thing?
• 26:23
  And then who enforces it? Did you have an editor on the team? Did you have a freelance editor? Whose job is it to go through the copy of a blog post and make sure that it... all of it adheres?
• 26:33
  In retrospect, perhaps, uh, like, a freelance copy editor would've been an ideal solution, but I think also in the context of Meta, super hard to get to a point where you have clarity on that because I think in large organizations you have so many different inputs and ideas of how you should show up.
• 26:51
  I think what we ended up doing specifically at Meta was making sure that everyone was carrying that torch, so to speak. So every content lead knew what we were going for.
• 27:02
  Each of the leads prepared at the beginning of every half a full and very robust content strategy, which included those things, so that you could actually kinda live out in a very practical way how you wanted to show up.
• 27:13
  If I recall, like, we didn't actually, our team, put together that brand and style guide until we were fairly mature because we had had that chance to actually take stock of what good looked like and then codify it with a brand and style guide.
• 27:29
  That's really cool. One other thing on my checklist of stuff to make sure we cover is team communication, just generally how your content team communicates with each other. I think you said there were nine people total.
• 27:41
  That's kind of a lot of people to keep in the loop. So there's sort of two pieces to this. Is or was there a kind of a regular meeting cadence, and what did that look like?
• 27:49
  Are you able to share just loosely, like, things you might cover in a meeting beyond, like, status updates and, like, maybe how you brainstorm ideas or any other, like, creative, fun stuff that happens in those calls?
• 27:58
  And then, two, async. Is that all happening in Asana and Slack or Teams or were there other tools or methods that you relied on to keep async communication going? Yeah.
• 28:07
  I think for us, we wanted to create process that mirrored natural touchpoints, and I'm implementing this at my current company as well for the content team.
• 28:17
  [laughs] But you have that beginning of the week stand up, which is, you know, your big rocks for the week.
• 28:22
  You know, you're not talking about long-term vision or strategy or necessarily any of those big, audacious efforts. You're talking about what needs to get done this week. You're looping in the people who need to know.
• 28:31
  You're flagging anything that might be a bottleneck. And so I think that's core to any content marketing team, having that stand up, using Asana to guide those conversations if you have Asana.
• 28:41
  I think the other thing is that you then have to make sure that you're giving your team the ability to show off that work in a meaningful way.
• 28:48
  So what we did was in addition to actually having a stand up, we were on an ongoing basis collecting all that work in a what's shipping dock, and then that what's shipping dock fed into an end of quarter show and tell.
• 29:02
  Ooh. And so those meetings were all reinforcing, like, a whole process for how we shared information, showed off work, you know, and accomplishments and wins.
• 29:13
  And then at Meta specifically, there's a really strong culture around posting and sharing on Workplace, you know, the fruits of your labor.
• 29:20
  So a big, big part of that process that I just outlined was complementing that with the right cadence of, you know, workplace posts, sharing of that information. That's cool.
• 29:31
  Mahu, there was one other question I wanted to throw at you, which is about data and reporting, which I know, like, we could probably spend a couple hours just talking about that.
• 29:39
  I won't ask you to do that, but could you just at a high level talk about analytics, attribution, reporting? I mean, I know it's difficult, and it's, I'm assuming, an imperfect process. How was data shared?
• 29:52
  Y-You know, I assume it's not as simple as, like, a Google Analytics report but probably, like, custom dashboards built for different folks who are interested in keeping track of certain things, probably, like, a permissions layer to make sure, like, who gets access to it, all that kinda thing.
• 30:06
  And maybe it's difficult to talk about it in broad strokes because I assume there's-Some complexity there, but any insight you can give us on the data piece would be really interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
• 30:15
  I so wish it was easy as using Google Analytics to spin up the reports that we need, but [laughs] obviously it wasn't. I think there are two things.
• 30:24
  One, the better half of the time we spent that meta, we didn't actually have a website. The live website didn't come until a bit later, right?
• 30:32
  So, like, our primary channel that we were using to, like, share some of our content were tools like Brandfolder or DAMs that we would essentially use to share content across the org and external stakeholders.
• 30:46
  And we would use the kind of reporting that we got from those tools to essentially, you know, understand how folks engage with the types of content that we put out.
• 30:56
  Part of that was kind of building custom dashboards off of that data so that we could kind of share out some high-level metrics around how our content is performing and also get our creative folks the data that they needed to understand how their specific pieces were performing on the market.
• 31:12
  So that was part one.
• 31:13
  When we did have our website, we then had access to more external data around how folks were, were engaging with our blog and things of that nature and also, like, traffic types, like how much organic traffic we were bringing to the site with our content.
• 31:27
  And further down the pipeline, how those converted into leads.
• 31:31
  And what we did do when we did get the website, we had to, like, spend a lot of time building out what that reporting looked like and also defining metrics, right?
• 31:41
  Metrics that you would probably see come out of the box pretty quickly with a tool like Google Analytics, we had to define here, right? Because everything is custom-built.
• 31:50
  So we had to spend a lot of time defining what organic traffic was versus other types of traffic. So I think that's how we reported on our content at a high level. Got it. Really interesting.
• 32:02
  Did Zuckerberg ever pop his head in to say, "Good job, team," or check in on reports and see how things are going?
• 32:08
  [laughs] Well, I mean, I think specifically with the business messaging unit, while we never had a direct pop-in, a lot of our reason for being was because of Mark Zuckerberg's belief in the opportunity and potential of business messaging, and I, I think it 100% applies.
• 32:25
  And so the growth that that function saw was purely because he really had his finger on the pulse of that. It's clear it was a priority because we grew very fast. Yeah. That's really cool.
• 32:36
  Also, just, like, the team and the content function that you built is legit.
• 32:41
  That is a serious investment in growing that line of business, which is super cool, and, like, we talk about content culture a lot on the podcast, and usually the shape that that takes is, you know, it's more like smaller companies, it's startups where a founder believes in content marketing, and it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
• 32:58
  Like, if you believe it, you can make it happen. But it's cool to know that even on, like, a massive scale like this, that top level buy-in enables the investment, which brings it all to life. Yeah.
• 33:06
  Which is super cool, and then- Totally... you all get to come in and build it, which is amazing. That's the cool part. Cool. Well, I wanna be respectful of both of your time.
• 33:13
  This is so cool to talk to both of you, just so fascinating. Can we link people to Twitter, LinkedIn, personal websites, or anywhere else that folks can connect and follow along with your work?
• 33:25
  Maho, I'll let you go first. Sure. Right now, my only surface is LinkedIn, so you can follow me @mahu-sims. Yeah, that's all I got.
• 33:33
  Yeah, I think for me, although the bird has lost a lot of its allure, you can find me @Sonja, S-O-N-J-A, but you can also find me predominantly on LinkedIn. That's probably the easiest. Cool.
• 33:45
  Sonja, Maho, thank you so much for joining us. Super appreciative of your time. I'll make sure that we link to LinkedIn, Twitter stuff in the show notes so that people can go connect if they wanna follow along.
• 33:57
  And maybe we can do a round two sometime and learn more about things you're working on. You both bring, like, really interesting expertise that we don't typically get access to, at least on this podcast.
• 34:07
  So really appreciate you both, and hope we can talk again soon. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Take care. [outro music]