Margaret Magnarelli on creating useful content for Monster's users

My name is Margaret Magnarelli. I head up content marketing at Monster. So I specialize in the B2C side of content, meaning the content we're creating that's aimed at job seekers. We're trying to engage people who are possible job seekers through content, getting them to understand that Monster is associated with jobs. And also to build our thought leadership through content so that people understand that we can help them find a job. We don't just have the job listings, but we have the information that can help make this easier for you. And it's a way for us to bring humanity to the job market. I lead a team of six who are all former journalists, and they create about 10 to 15 content assets a week that includes written content and videos, infographics, interactivity, all things that we push out through our site, through the career advice portal of Monster.com, and also through our social channels, through paid and organic social, through newsletters, and through syndication partnerships. I think we were already seeing a lot of changes in the last couple of years in the ways that people consume content. It used to be something where a company that created content, let's go back to like the newspapers as an example, they owned everything from the production to the distribution and everything in between. And that's really changed. And now media companies no longer own the distribution. Oftentimes, that's platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest and any of another thousand channels. So there's that part of things. And I think that that means that we have to do more to push out content to people rather than having them come to us. So even in the era following newspapers, when we got to the digital era, there was a period of time in which people were bookmarking websites and were going to URLs that they knew. And now people are consuming content in their social feeds. And I've seen data from Pew saying that people are not loyal to the sources of information that they consume information from. And because of that, it provides this really great chance for brands to disrupt the process and be able to produce content. It doesn't matter what source it is as long as it's authoritative content. The key for us is to be able to be where the consumer or where the target customer for your brand is, whether that's a platform or a different kind of site, or if it's an experience. You know, I think I think you have to think about where those people are. And that's going to be that's going to be a big part of the future is getting to them where they are rather than thinking that they're going to come to you. And as we've seen a lot of talk about, especially at South by Southwest, a lot of talk about bots. And I think that might be one of the ways we're going to have to start to optimize content. And, you know, somebody will have to come up with a more clever word than bot to my is maybe I don't know how to optimize your content. But I think that's something that we're going to have to start thinking about. And also, the artificial intelligence and content and how those two things play together but still have a human voice. I think that my personal opinion is that not all content can be produced by a machine. But there is probably a layer of content that for every brand that is structured in some way that's kind of formulaic in some way that can be produced by a machine. But but a lot of brand a lot of a lot of what you're trying to do through content is create brand. And so we can't necessarily let machine create the feeling of our brand. So we have to find those those perfect, the perfect matches for those technologies. I think that interactivity is going to be a big a big portion of things. I think that creating content for bots, creating content, using using using machines using machine learning. I think also, it's sort of the the technology will also play into the distribution of it, like being able to read consumers to know what kind of content is right for them, not even just simply in the, the need the way that we get through search, but also through the emotion, what are they feeling and being able to target the user. And then we have to be able to target content to those kinds of feelings as well. You know, and I think, I think we're in an era where we're very keen on personalization. And we also will have to start to think about like, how do we, how do we do that in a way that's also not too creepy, because I think once personalization becomes like, becomes a part of everything, it, it then you get you get what you wanted, but maybe you get too much of what you wanted. And maybe, and maybe you feel like people know, like maybe we feel like the internet knows too much about you. And people feeling their privacy violated. I can imagine finding that balance is a little bit complicated. Do you have a certain, what do you think will be the way that that communicators can figure out whether or not it's too much or if it's, it's appropriate level? Yeah, I mean, I think it, I think it depends on what your customers needs are. And I think you can, you'll be able to look at metrics and tell how they're responding to it. And I think we're going to have to be as real time as possible in evaluating how things are being responded to. So yeah, talking about metrics and measuring in real time, if you have your content in the future, this rate distributed across so many different platforms, how do you see that, that brands will be able to to have that overview? Yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's a huge challenge is trying to bring everything together and trying to get one, one picture, one dashboard of everything that you're doing. You know, for now, we have to do it in a very segmented way. And I think, I think in the future, there will be, there will be vendors that are coming in to do that kind of thing to create a aggregate picture of everywhere that your content is being is being viewed and, and how people are responding to it and commenting on it and sharing it. That'll be the, that's the dream. Fantastic. Okay, so let's go back to to Monster and what you guys are doing with content creation. What are some of the things that you you you think you'll be experimenting with in the future? New formats or new strategies? I love experimenting. And so we just added video in the last six months. And and we have been kind of throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks for audience from scripted. We're going to be doing our first like sort of more series scripted content. This year, we are looking at different ways to do interactivity. That's more fun to and doing content for specific platforms. We do a lot of we do a lot of publish, publish once and create once and publish everywhere kind of mentality. But I think we're also thinking about like, how do we how do we create content for specific platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and, and I think we're trying to do fun things that will that will help people, you know, are not necessarily direct, bottom of funnel kind of content, but we just launched a career horoscopes, for example, with like some, some kind of influencer astrologists. And we're going to be doing a lot of content that's going to be like, you know, a little bit more ambitious. So kind of excited about that and seeing seeing what happens with something like that and how that can play on especially on on something like Instagram and and other platforms. So so you know, I think I'd like to see us do even more that's tool based that can help us, you know, figure out where a candidate is in their candidate journey, help them figure out kind of what the right career for them is so that you know, we can help usher them through all parts of the process through content, so that the job process can be made to seem a little less stressful and less stressful and kind of like the direction and that it's just a little more seamless and easier. It's such a stressful time for people. And we want to be there to help them through it.