If you’re into online marketing at all you might have already come across the new-fangled Chief Content Officer’s (CCO’s) position.
It was a relatively new designation created over the past couple of years to address the critical need for those companies actively engaged on social media channels to be present on all of the platforms. As part of their aggressive rollouts, there would be a twin concomitant requirement to aggressively spin out contents on a regular basis to address deliverables requirements of their content production departments. Someone would have to take point on this.
Basically, if you’re going to play well anywhere near Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the half-dozen other value social media platforms which make any shred of an online difference, someone needs to be in the driver’s seat designing and sourcing the content which features over in those places.
They must make it their full-time occupation-cum-obsession to write the best stuff which has the potential to lure the most readers and supporters as they can possibly draw. The CCO must learn to craft stuff which has the potential of going viral at any given moment. They must remain on top of your site’s traffic, views, metrics, not to mention the dozens of other emerging trends shaking up the online space several times per week. They must be ubiquitous. They must be always-on. They must be relentless. They must read and research and digest constantly. They must be tireless. They must sleep a maximum of four hours a day.
Well, you get what I mean…
Because this space is so quixotic, the marketing industry, in general had to give this position a name. It could no longer sate itself with the knowledge that content could be something left to the marketing department, attended to twice weekly, and hoping for the best.
Office space had to be carved out and a full-time salary allocated for this new position if the job had any expectations of being done well.
Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman spoke about this copiously in their game-changing Content Rules. More than two dozen suggestions for contents a company can create at the drop of a hat (and on a rigid schedule) are among the several hundred inspirational ideas to be found in their book which was one of my top reads of 2011. I made a point of sharing plenty of my findings and discoveries with my clients throughout the business year, as I’m clearly a supporter of the CCO concept.
How so? Well, I’m a Producer of Marketing and Distribution, which is the film business’ equivalent to a Chief Content Officer.
So what does this have to do with PMDs?
Plenty, trust me. If we take a look at the “M” side of Producers of Marketing and Distribution’s apparent “M & D” function, viral contents is part of the PMD’s mandate and really the name of the game.
The problem begins when one person is expected to churn out all this brilliance and creativity on their lonesome. In order to accommodate a full production slate, one person cannot be expected to meet the rigorous needs of a client’s content production schedule while still ensuring the stuff they’re producing actually remains sticky, interesting, and worth sharing. Some PMDs get down and dirty and become an active part of the content team (my approach) while some PMDs direct from the Admiralty Room, like some of my colleagues.
Whatever the approach, the key is to ensure that it gets done or – barring that – that someone is on top of it and it’s the PMD’s job to ensure that marks are being hit daily. There is no room for relaxation, no reason for slacking, and – as prospective CCOs and PMDs will realize, no reason for sleeping or having much of a life outside of film. The one day you miss is one day it counts as a knock against your client’s site for being lax (search engines archive this sort of behavior). The one day you’re not there when someone expects you to be there is that potential chance you miss out on enticing a potentially lucrative prospect or an influential community member who could sew up a lot of trouble for a production. The day you snooze is the day you lose.
What’s an optimal production schedule for a CCO/PMD?
The way I like to structure my clients’ deliverables lists on any given week – and, yes, they all receive theirs latest Sunday of each week (I typically work a full Sunday) – is that the potentially viral stuff gets completed by Monday or — latest — Tuesday each week.
Why? Well, if the challenging stuff is completed by the first two days of the week, these contents can be shared for the remainder of the week, gaining them:
- increased YouTube and/or Vimeo views (but preferably YouTube).
- more robust, meaningful blogpost comments with more involved discussions which that lead to further viral shares.
- viral content shares evidenced through RTs, link shares/Status Updates on Facebook, and/or data scoured from any other inbound marketing/data scrubbing service like Radian6 or HubSpot.
- potentially positive promotion or PR from journalists on sites like Muck Rack, who observe mention of your film or its personnel.
Basically any and all of these make a unit look good. These, too, as Ann and C.C. are wont to tell you, can act as potentially viral pieces of content which your PMD should be on top of, white on rice. You can create content from the content, stories from the story. Any good news whatsoever needs to be collected and collated. Keep an archive of all the good press mentions, and be sure to tattoo these prominently all around your online real estate so people know who they’re dealing with.
Ditto for film festival laurels, any awards you receive, or any pieces of content spun off as a result of something you’ve written by one of your fans or audience members.
As a director or producer, you’ll want to be helming a quick response, crack marketing/distribution team lead by a CCO/PMD which promises to deliver on-time, sharp as a brass tack.
Lamer stuff can be done towards week’s end, like those routine blog posts which are more for suited for direct-to-archive, as opposed to viral share.
Weekends are for catchup. PMDs need to ensure that inertia doesn’t kick in where production heads get into the habit of missing deadlines and pushing things into the next week and the next week, causing the unit to fall very far behind.
Most importantly: all members of the marketing unit have their content to produce – any one particular piece of it potentially able to break out on its own – but to be looked upon as a harmonious whole, pumped out in combination with the other items on the weekly agenda.
How do you hire CCOs and what to pay them?
We’ve held this discussion before, but the gist is to pay CCOs enough to keep them very busy.
As your Chief Content Officer, like your PMD – be they coach, player-coach, or basic overseeing-type PMDs – will essentially be engrossing themselves in the public image of your company or film/documentary.
As such, you’ve got to pay them a salary that acknowledges their time investment as worthwhile, so I leave that discussion to the various parties. I don’t want to suggest any specific amounts, but let’s just say a couple hundred bucks a month isn’t going to cut it.
There are several ways to structure compensation – hourly rates usually being unsuitable (in other words, it could end up costing the hiring organization/the production company much more by the hour), but PMDs or CCOs can also quote too high, thereby pricing themselves out of the market. Again, hammer this out and request a concrete list of things your PMD/CCO is expected to do for you as part of their responsibilities.
Another thing CCOs/PMDs must realize is they represent the entire marketing side of the industry.
If they misperform or are otherwise negligent in fulfillment of their duties, this dereliction reflects poorly upon the profession and only makes future PMDs or Chief Content Officers (and the critical work they perform) more suspect.
The point I wanted to make about pay, however, is that a significant sum must be paid to a content person for the work they do. I repeat, significant.
Never before has the process of marketing and audience engagement (be they viewers or customers) been as important as in our latter years of the Web 2.0 world, and marketing isn’t any longer something companies can just chuck onto the pile and hope for the best.
Content production must be approached with an almost scientific-like rigor. The personnel responsible for branding your film or company’s image must be vetted, well-referenced, and must be always-on. If your content people do not enjoy being in front of their computers all day long, then it is you, as Lead Producer, who needs to seriously consider whether these prospective hires are truly the best fits for the PMD/CCO’s role in your organization because this person is supposed to eat, sleep, and breathe content and the production schedule.
As always, let us know how you’re doing…
Adam Daniel Mezei, PMD | Producer of Marketing and Distribution
http://pmdforhire.com
Marketing and Distribution Services for Indie Films and Documentaries
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RSS:
Your PMD As Your CCO = Chief Content Officer
If you’re into online marketing at all you might have already come across the new-fangled Chief Content Officer’s (CCO’s) position.
It was a relatively new designation created over the past couple of years to address the critical need for those companies actively engaged on social media channels to be present on all of the platforms. As part of their aggressive rollouts, there would be a twin concomitant requirement to aggressively spin out contents on a regular basis to address deliverables requirements of their content production departments. Someone would have to take point on this.
Basically, if you’re going to play well anywhere near Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the half-dozen other value social media platforms which make any shred of an online difference, someone needs to be in the driver’s seat designing and sourcing the content which features over in those places.
They must make it their full-time occupation-cum-obsession to write the best stuff which has the potential to lure the most readers and supporters as they can possibly draw. The CCO must learn to craft stuff which has the potential of going viral at any given moment. They must remain on top of your site’s traffic, views, metrics, not to mention the dozens of other emerging trends shaking up the online space several times per week. They must be ubiquitous. They must be always-on. They must be relentless. They must read and research and digest constantly. They must be tireless. They must sleep a maximum of four hours a day.
Well, you get what I mean…
Because this space is so quixotic, the marketing industry, in general had to give this position a name. It could no longer sate itself with the knowledge that content could be something left to the marketing department, attended to twice weekly, and hoping for the best.
Office space had to be carved out and a full-time salary allocated for this new position if the job had any expectations of being done well.
Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman spoke about this copiously in their game-changing Content Rules. More than two dozen suggestions for contents a company can create at the drop of a hat (and on a rigid schedule) are among the several hundred inspirational ideas to be found in their book which was one of my top reads of 2011. I made a point of sharing plenty of my findings and discoveries with my clients throughout the business year, as I’m clearly a supporter of the CCO concept.
How so? Well, I’m a Producer of Marketing and Distribution, which is the film business’ equivalent to a Chief Content Officer.
So what does this have to do with PMDs?
Plenty, trust me. If we take a look at the “M” side of Producers of Marketing and Distribution’s apparent “M & D” function, viral contents is part of the PMD’s mandate and really the name of the game.
The problem begins when one person is expected to churn out all this brilliance and creativity on their lonesome. In order to accommodate a full production slate, one person cannot be expected to meet the rigorous needs of a client’s content production schedule while still ensuring the stuff they’re producing actually remains sticky, interesting, and worth sharing. Some PMDs get down and dirty and become an active part of the content team (my approach) while some PMDs direct from the Admiralty Room, like some of my colleagues.
Whatever the approach, the key is to ensure that it gets done or – barring that – that someone is on top of it and it’s the PMD’s job to ensure that marks are being hit daily. There is no room for relaxation, no reason for slacking, and – as prospective CCOs and PMDs will realize, no reason for sleeping or having much of a life outside of film. The one day you miss is one day it counts as a knock against your client’s site for being lax (search engines archive this sort of behavior). The one day you’re not there when someone expects you to be there is that potential chance you miss out on enticing a potentially lucrative prospect or an influential community member who could sew up a lot of trouble for a production. The day you snooze is the day you lose.
What’s an optimal production schedule for a CCO/PMD?
The way I like to structure my clients’ deliverables lists on any given week – and, yes, they all receive theirs latest Sunday of each week (I typically work a full Sunday) – is that the potentially viral stuff gets completed by Monday or — latest — Tuesday each week.
Why? Well, if the challenging stuff is completed by the first two days of the week, these contents can be shared for the remainder of the week, gaining them:
Basically any and all of these make a unit look good. These, too, as Ann and C.C. are wont to tell you, can act as potentially viral pieces of content which your PMD should be on top of, white on rice. You can create content from the content, stories from the story. Any good news whatsoever needs to be collected and collated. Keep an archive of all the good press mentions, and be sure to tattoo these prominently all around your online real estate so people know who they’re dealing with.
Ditto for film festival laurels, any awards you receive, or any pieces of content spun off as a result of something you’ve written by one of your fans or audience members.
As a director or producer, you’ll want to be helming a quick response, crack marketing/distribution team lead by a CCO/PMD which promises to deliver on-time, sharp as a brass tack.
Lamer stuff can be done towards week’s end, like those routine blog posts which are more for suited for direct-to-archive, as opposed to viral share.
Weekends are for catchup. PMDs need to ensure that inertia doesn’t kick in where production heads get into the habit of missing deadlines and pushing things into the next week and the next week, causing the unit to fall very far behind.
Most importantly: all members of the marketing unit have their content to produce – any one particular piece of it potentially able to break out on its own – but to be looked upon as a harmonious whole, pumped out in combination with the other items on the weekly agenda.
How do you hire CCOs and what to pay them?
We’ve held this discussion before, but the gist is to pay CCOs enough to keep them very busy.
As your Chief Content Officer, like your PMD – be they coach, player-coach, or basic overseeing-type PMDs – will essentially be engrossing themselves in the public image of your company or film/documentary.
As such, you’ve got to pay them a salary that acknowledges their time investment as worthwhile, so I leave that discussion to the various parties. I don’t want to suggest any specific amounts, but let’s just say a couple hundred bucks a month isn’t going to cut it.
There are several ways to structure compensation – hourly rates usually being unsuitable (in other words, it could end up costing the hiring organization/the production company much more by the hour), but PMDs or CCOs can also quote too high, thereby pricing themselves out of the market. Again, hammer this out and request a concrete list of things your PMD/CCO is expected to do for you as part of their responsibilities.
Another thing CCOs/PMDs must realize is they represent the entire marketing side of the industry.
If they misperform or are otherwise negligent in fulfillment of their duties, this dereliction reflects poorly upon the profession and only makes future PMDs or Chief Content Officers (and the critical work they perform) more suspect.
The point I wanted to make about pay, however, is that a significant sum must be paid to a content person for the work they do. I repeat, significant.
Never before has the process of marketing and audience engagement (be they viewers or customers) been as important as in our latter years of the Web 2.0 world, and marketing isn’t any longer something companies can just chuck onto the pile and hope for the best.
Content production must be approached with an almost scientific-like rigor. The personnel responsible for branding your film or company’s image must be vetted, well-referenced, and must be always-on. If your content people do not enjoy being in front of their computers all day long, then it is you, as Lead Producer, who needs to seriously consider whether these prospective hires are truly the best fits for the PMD/CCO’s role in your organization because this person is supposed to eat, sleep, and breathe content and the production schedule.
As always, let us know how you’re doing…
Adam Daniel Mezei, PMD | Producer of Marketing and Distribution
http://pmdforhire.com
Marketing and Distribution Services for Indie Films and Documentaries
LIKE PMD-For-Hire at:
http://facebook.com/producerofmarketinganddistribution
TWEET PMD-For-Hire at:
http://twitter.com/therealadm
JOIN PMD-For-Hire on LinkedIn:
http://linkd.in/j4GJnf
EMAIL PMD-For-Hire at:
info@pmdforhire.com
SUBSCRIBE to PMD-For-Hire’s YouTube channel:
http://youtube.com/gtowna
SUBSCRIBE to PMD-For-Hire’s Vimeo channel:
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#diy
#marketing
#distribution
#adamdanielmezei
UPDATE: If you’ve enjoyed the materials here, please “like” the page on Facebook (http://facebook.com/producerofmarketinganddistribution) and add us to your G+ circles (http://bit.ly/vyvJaM).