INBOX INSIGHTS, September 29, 2021: Project Failures, Content Marketing World, Content Roadmaps

INBOX INSIGHTS: Project Failures, Content Marketing World, Content Roadmaps (9/29) :: View in browser

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Where do projects fail? People.

I forgot about writing this part of the newsletter this week. I blanked on it. In the middle of the night, I woke up and remembered. Yes, I swore. So now, here I am writing, a minute from when Chris needs this content to push the newsletter out the door on time.

It got me thinking about where projects fail and our approach to solutions.

People. People are where things fail more often than not.

For some reason, instead of trying to fix the people, we tinker with the process or the platform. We say that the data is wrong. We say that the process broke down. These things may be true but I have a secret to tell you. A person sets those up. The fault does not then lie with the process or the platform. It lies with the person that pushed the buttons.

Think about something like Robotic Process Automation. It does repetitive tasks and unless there is a power outage, it is not going to fail. It’s going to do what it’s told to do over and over again.

Think about your MarTech stack. It’s going to collect data over and over again without fail because you told it to. You set it up to do something and unless the internet crashes, it is going to do it.

Do you see the common denominator in those two examples? It’s you. You told the process what to do. You told the platform what to do.

I have reminders that have been set up to tell me when this content is due. I have a project management system that owns those reminders that are set up to tell me what to do. But I failed. Those reminders were still there this morning when I looked at them. But I didn’t look at them yesterday when I needed to know the information.

I asked our Slack community what questions they have about change management. Interestingly yet unsurprisingly, all the questions are about people and behavior changes. Over the next few months, I’m going to tackle the questions.

You can change a process, you can change a platform. But those are just extensions of the people executing tasks.

People are notoriously the most difficult element of a project. People are historically the first thing overlooked when there is an issue. Why? Because unlike machines people are complex and unpredictable. Unlike machines, you might not know everything going on. Unlike machines, you can’t flip a knob and get a different outcome.

What questions do you have about behavior change or change management that you want me to cover?

Let me know in our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers!

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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Binge Watch and Listen

In this episode inspired by a question from Content Marketing World, Katie and Chris talk about how to use data and analytics to build a content marketing roadmap. What data should you pay attention to? What does a data-driven content marketing roadmap look like? Tune in to find out!

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Data Diaries - Interesting Data We Found

In this week’s Data Diaries, we’re taking a look at Content Marketing World. One of the more interesting things the CMI team does is use the conference hashtag, #CMWorld, throughout the year for their content marketing Twitterchats each Tuesday. As a result, there’s a robust library of social posts to analyze – and a great way to see who your champions are all year-round, instead of just at an event.

What does it look like when an organization has a consistent Twitter strategy? Instead of having a single spike around an event and then fading away, we see engagement throughout the last year:

CMWorld Twitter activity by week

While the event does comprise a decent number of the tweets around the hashtag, the most engaged content isn’t always about the event. Weekly guests for the Twitter chat often show up in the top Tweets – and form most of the top 10:

CMWorld hashtag top tweets

When we examine behaviors, we note that the people who post the most aren’t necessarily always the ones most favorited or retweeted, but one thing remains consistent across all the different basic measures:

CMWorld Twitter content performance

The consistent factor is that CMI – the organization which runs Content Marketing World – has the commanding role in fostering the conversation and the audience.

This is a key lesson in community management: you have to drive the conversation, even in large, mature communities. Communities don’t run themselves well, if at all. Community management in a well-run community is equal parts reactive and proactive – letting people have a space to share and speak, but knowing when to jump in to maintain momentum and engagement.

Methodology: Trust Insights extracted 23,636 unique tweets around the #CMWorld hashtag, excluding tweets with more than 10 hashtags (which were spammy and unrelated to the actual conversation). Tweets were de-duped based on highest engagement numbers. The timeframe of the data is September 8, 2020 – September 29, 2021. The date of study is September 29, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

Weekly Wrapup

This is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Social Media Marketing

Content Marketing

Data Science and AI

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Where can you find us in person?

  • Content Marketing World, September 2021, virtual
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