PRMM Interview 21 with Scott Lum on content and social media marketing

This week, I had the opportunity to interview content and social media expert Scott Lum for PRMM Interview #21. We chatted about content and social marketing, becoming a customer-centric organization, and advice for future marketers.

Briefly, Scott has developed social strategy for connecting business decision makers and focused on customer strategies.  He has developed Content Marketing strategy managing a team of writers and served as editor-in-chief for social content, lead cross-team collaboration to drive business objectives across product and audience marketing teams, and managed a digital event program that produced over 400 webinars, 20 hybrid/virtual events, 100 video podcasts and 100 hands-on labs per year. Scott is also an excellent photographer, based in Seattle (I’ll forgive him for being a Seattle Seahawks fan). Connect with Scott on Twitter – @ScottLum. Enjoy the Video!

Here is an excerpt of the conversation:

00:11 –  Please provide a quick introduction.

I am former Microsoft marketing manager overseeing content marketing. Previously worked on the webcast program where they produced over  600 podcasts, 600 webcasts per year, and over a thousand podcasts and also managed their social social marketing programs.

00:50 – Can you give us a little bit of an example of your content marketing approach to manage that much content?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach where content creates value for our customers so that they want to share it with their with their friends. Looking at big companies both from a b2b perspective and b2c perspective, we came up with a strategy of creating great thought leadership content that will attract people to our content that they would share it out with their friends.  As we added those things to our content marketing efforts, we were actually able to track our content marketing efforts a lot better than we have when we first started off and actually show how this content marketing leads to revenue.

03:10 – How did you start bringing in social media as part of that larger content marketing strategy?

Social media is actually a very critical component for a lot of the distribution. We wanted to develop a channel so we’re able to nurture our customers and prospective customers and engage with them in a really fun and valuable way for them and we created a listening center to make sure that we listen to our customers. We wanted to make sure we engaged with them as necessary, provide a way to support them so if they have questions about some of our products or what our products be able to have a channel for that.

We also wanted to make sure that we nurture them after the sale to make sure that we continue to create great content that we push out through those channels so they can make better use of the things that they’re doing.  Able to push those things out through social becomes very important but the challenge is who’s going to own that. A lot of companies are going to have to weigh that.

Forrester talks about the development of the chief customer officer. That person or that group of people will transcend all of those different groups and they look at you look at the customer journey and all the touchpoints that the company has with the customer.  They will manage all communications – whether through social, product experience, or with marketing and advertising. We’ll see social become just one one of the channels that will be using to connect with our customers.

07:20 – Would there be one thing that you wish you could go back in time and change today and why?

One of the things that we always make sure whenever you have a great project or program that they get executive support. If you don’t change the culture, like the way you measure success, it’s very different to maintain that through its ups and downs.

One of the big changes that we’re gonna see is the customer experience is having companies take a more customer-centric approach. If you continue to measure your success by how much revenue you have and how many new customers you’re bringing in – if those are your main success metrics as opposed to looking at the lifetime value of customers or what are your renewal rates for your programs. If you don’t change those metrics, it’s going to be very difficult for you to maintain the innovation and those changes that you want to make with this disruptive technologies. What will happen is a lot of times when you do have stress, have budget cuts, it’s very easy to fall back with what you had done traditionally, which is old-style traditional marketing which is very products centric as opposed to customer centric.

10:30 What’s the one tip you would give to you and said “hey, Scott, I want to get into marketing. What should I do?”

I think there’s no better time to be in marketing than ever before. We’ll start to look at how we engage with our customers in such a way that what we call marketing is gonna look completely different. All these different technologies that are coming down the road may not be seen as marketing but by feeding that information back into the company we’ll be able to create better products. We’ll be able to create more personalized experiences. We’ll be able to create better experience for the customer and it will transcend what we currently call marketing. I think creating those experiences are going to be the companies that embrace it and become really truly customer-centric, those are the companies that I believe are going to be more successful in the future.