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Welcome to The Content Experience Show where content experience is the new content marketing. It’s not only about reaching our audiences where they are, but engaging them with a personalized experience of meaningful, useful content that they’ll take with them over time. The guests on the Content Experience Show share strategies, tips, and real-world examples of how they’re taking their content marketing to the next level and providing their current and prospective customers with a true content experience. This isn’t just a trend. It’s a movement.
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The Marketing Book Podcast
Shannon Paul, VP of Social Media at Fifth Third Bank, stops by the Content Pros Podcast today to discuss the challenges of digital marketing in a regulated environment and the best ways to collaborate with legal and compliance staff to create great content.
Social Media in a Regulated Environment
Shannon Paul is the Vice President of Social Media at Fifth Third Bank. She leads social strategy and also serves as the internal subject matter expert for all things social at the organization.
She has worked in social leadership roles for healthcare in addition to financial services organizations, so she has a lot of experience working with social media within regulated industries. Surprisingly enough, Shannon proves that it can be done; just look at some of Fifth Third Bank’s successes, like the Retweet to Reemploy campaign.
There are, of course, certain challenges that come with doing social media (or any kind of marketing) in a regulated environment. The major downside is the multitude of extra steps between ideas and execution. But the upside is the spirit of collaboration that comes with the territory, because everybody understands that it takes a lot of different people to be able to create, review, and publish content.
“You have to work with people who have risk in their title. It’s their very job and their very nature to just kind of look at something and pinpoint all of the things that could go wrong, so that we can make sure that we have adequate controls in place.”
People in marketing and content roles can be a little less quantitative and a little more creative, so sometimes we take it personally when we hear someone poking holes in our ideas. But if you can set your ego aside and remember that they’re really just trying to do their job, you can get a lot accomplished. You have to remember that everything you do is going to require more work from other people. Approaching conversations from that standpoint and understanding expectations goes a long way.
Buy-In Outside the Marketing Team
Shannon has long since done away with the idea that everyone in a company (such as executives) needs to not only have a presence on social media, but also understand how to use it. When you focus on those tactics, you spend your time answering silly questions about how many times to Tweet per day. You’ll go further by focusing on “how social media adds value to the organization and supports broader strategic initiatives” instead.
What’s more, folks in the compliance and legal departments don’t have to completely buy into the ideas behind each marketing campaign to be able to get them off the ground. If they understand how each piece affects them and fits into the bigger picture, they’ll be able to help turn ideas into realities.
“People on the content side will often times talk about, ‘We need to create content that creates value for the consumer,’ but we’re not able to take that same sensibility and apply it internally. And that is where I think a lot of people get very frustrated. I focus on the ‘What’s in it for me?’ for my internal counterparts just as much as we have to focus on the ‘What’s in it for me?’ for the consumer. I think it’s important to just be respectful of other people’s time and to know that they don’t have the same perspective or the same skill set that we do, and that’s why we have jobs.”
The other key is all in the timing. If you go to the compliance/legal department before you’ve given some real thought to how you might execute an idea, it’ll be dead in the water. But if you wait until you’re ready to go, with the creative already developed, the vendors on board, and everything in place, it will be too late. There will be changes that need to be made that you won’t have time to accomplish and the whole thing will have to be scrapped.
You have to find the middle spot when it comes to working with your compliance team. “The key is really putting enough effort in that you’ve got something that they can react to, but not so much effort in that you’re too far down the path, that their feedback won’t undo some of your good work.”
What did you want to be when you grew up?
“I was really torn between a rock star and an astronaut.” Joan Jett and Sally Ride were Shannon’s two primary idols when she was small. (Very different, but both women she looked up to.) Shannon grew up playing music and loved Joan’s edginess. On the other hand, Shannon felt Sally being the first woman in space was a really incredible thing. She couldn’t decide between the two.
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