Here's a Hint: Be Authentic
Have you ever met someone who not only loves what they do for a living, but they are also great at their job? It's a combination that many people aspire to have but is rare to come by. Their energy is often contagious and their knowledge about their craft is clearly displayed when you talk to them.
Recently, our CEO sat down with someone who has that rare combination, and is an expert in digital marketing and social strategy. In this blog, Hollywood Branded learns about giving your show a voice from the expertise of Zoe Greenblatt, a social media manager at GLOW!
A Little More About Zoe
Zoe is the social media manager at GLOW, an award-winning digital marketing and social media agency in New York. She graduated from Boston University with a degree in mass communication, media studies and she definitely is putting that degree to use with her current field of work. Zoe has worked on some of the agency's largest clients like HBO, Showtime, VH1, and the social media behind hot properties including Showtime's Kidding and HBO's Divorce.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: Glad to have you here today and super happy to talk all things social. To start, I'd love to get a little bit about your background and what led you to decide social media marketing was what you wanted to dive into and embrace as a career.
Answer: Absolutely. I have loved social since the first time I touched it. I definitely am an early adopter, so to speak, but for as long as I can remember, I've been creating content in some way or shape or another. I think when it really started to pick up was when I was a communications major in college and I was always posting stories at the time.
I think it was Snapchat stories then that evolved to Instagram stories. It's kind of my favorite thing to do. I was constantly capturing, probably to a fault in some cases. But what was so amazing about that was everyone was kind of commenting like, "Oh my gosh, we absolutely love you're doing, you're so funny."
]It was funny because then I saw GLOW, and I was like, okay, well GLOW is actually marrying what I love, two, communications and marketing, and I can make a career out of this. It was one of those aha moments where you're like, okay, my entire life someone told me to do something that I love and now I had the opportunity to do it. I started at GLOW as an intern on the social team and I've been there ever since. I absolutely love it. It's great to be surrounded by people who are as passionate about social as I am, for sure.
Question: So, what is the first thing that you do? Because you're working on different properties on different networks and they have different voices. How do you determine what the best voice is and what tone you're going to be writing in before you actually start posting?
Answer: Before any of the posting happens, starting back when we get briefed, the first thing that typically happens with the show for example, is we're given some briefing materials like scripts, maybe an episode or two and the topic. So when you get to something like a comedy for example, we dive in head first, we get all of the content we could possibly find on that topic.
For example, Pen15, the show on Hulu, when we got them in the door, we were like, okay, "This is nostalgia, this is amazing, this is year 2000 and it's middle school. What is there to know about that time period?" We take that and we dive in, in every regard. Is there a book to read? Is there another TV show we can watch? What about this talent? Can we really start to understand? What are the nuances of this audience that we're trying to reach?
From there, what we do is we develop a strategy that's beyond just voice. It's really like our entire creative approach, and within that is voice and tone. We take all of those elements and we say, okay, what about this is going to resonate with who our demo is, where we're trying to reach them, and what the content we're going to be putting out there is. Once we get there, we kind of say, where can we have more fun and how can we differentiate ourselves and really show our added value in this space. I think with Pen15 for example, something that was really interesting was we abandoned platform best practices and we're able to truly nail that down in a way where, you know, we're using emoticons instead of emojis. It's the stuff like that that gets very granular. That's how we try and identify a really authentic and human voice.
Question: Very cool. What is one of the campaigns that you've worked on, you don't even have to be very specific, but general terms, that you think blew it out of the water?
Answer: I would say, so yeah no, definitely. I worked on America's Next Top Model Seasons 23 and 24 and I would say those, that absolutely blew it out of the water. We leaned into our audience, we did a fully interactive campaign, our campaign extended to out-of-home and to other integrated marketing. I mean that's what the real win is, when your fans are involved, they're loving what you're doing, and you're able to take social and what you're doing to the next level.
Question: A lot of our listeners come from the product world or the service world or tech world versus necessarily the content. (We have both, as far as our listeners go.) How do you think a strategy differs when you're working to create the social platform for an entertainment property versus a consumer good or a service?
Answer: It is different, but it's also the same. I think in the same space where you have your core values, you have your brand promise, I don't think that changes no matter what you're doing. I think what does end up changing is thinking about how you're reaching that audience and in what way.
For example, we work with Spotify for brands for a period of time, which is the B2B side of Spotify. When we signed with them, what was super interesting was they just had a LinkedIn and a Twitter account because that's where they're envisioning themselves reaching B2B marketers. It's funny because a lot of brands and a lot of people in that space we're seeing are viewing B2B marketing that way.
At the end of the day, what you always have to realize is, okay, B2B marketers or you and me, I mean we're marketers and we're on every platform. What we ended up doing was launching these other platforms and leaning into the lifestyle aspect of what they're doing as a brand and the overall, what it is that they're trying to get their audience signed on. Your marketers are everywhere, so you want to be everywhere that they are and reach them in a new place because then you're actually breaking a platform best practice, which is always good and you're going to stand out in their feeds.
The best way to go about social is to be more human. I think it would be your fault to put something out there that was completely dry. At the end of the day there's 95 million posts that are posted every single day on Instagram, which is crazy. It's such a saturated market that to stand out, I mean you want to be that tech company that's doing something different and that's going to stand out in the feed.
As much as you can be different, you should. Honestly, a lot of times that starts with, if you're really struggling on a voice, go to the youngest people in your company, maybe it's the interns, and say, you know, "We want to try something new here. What do you guys recommend?" While it's not a one person job, it's a great place to start because they live and breathe the ethos of your company and they're definitely in the weeds and the nuances of social.
Check Out The Podcast!
If you enjoyed this blog, then you won't want to miss the full podcast with Zoe, check it out below!
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