Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with David Blundell, the British Council’s global social media manager, on the future of live streaming :

Shaheen Samavati 0:14
Hi everyone, I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix, and I’m excited to be here with David Blundell, global social media manager of the British Council, the UK’s international organization for cultural relations and educational opportunities. Thanks so much for joining us.

David Blundell 0:27
Hey, how you doing? You read that very well, I mean, it’s kind of a long thing that…

Shaheen Samavati 0:32
You’re calling me out for reading!

David Blundell 0:37
Behind the scenes, guys, this is what happens. No, I was gonna say it’s interesting. People often ask, what does the British Council do? And in Europe, you’ve probably similar organizations like the Goethe-Institut, Instituto Francés, and where we both live in Spain, we have the Instituto Cervantes. So it’s kind of similar organizations all over the world, and it’s very much about sort of making friends between countries, doing shared projects, sharing, you know, knowledge, etc. So you know, I think we work in a very nice space, people who work in cultural relations. It’s a nice space to work in.

Shaheen Samavati 1:14
Yeah, cool. I think like being in Spain, a lot of us know the British Council because of work related to English teaching. But I guess it does more than that, right?

David Blundell 1:14
Yes, it’s interesting that you say that. So yeah, in Spain we’re very much known for English teaching. Also, there’s a British Council School, which is actually 80 years old this year, so originally opened in 1940; the British Council, when it started in Spain, started as a school. And after that, it sort of expanded into everything else. But as you say, I mean, we do a range of things. We’re most well known in many European countries for teaching English and delivering exams. So exams like the First Certificate, Proficiency, and IELTS—IELTS is an exam if you want to go to university, maybe in the States or Canada or Ireland, and you need a good level of English, you would do an IELTS exam typically. So that’s kind of on the education side. But then also we do lots of things around arts and society. Lots of projects, you know, stuff around disability arts, we’ve got a very good disability arts program at the minute. So yeah, kind of like a whole range of stuff, really. That’s what makes it fun going to work.

I see. So how did you end up at the British Council here in Madrid?

So very good question. Long story. Many, many years ago when I was still in short trousers, no, I came out to Spain like many people did, and I had met my wife-to-be in the UK actually, we were both working on the same English language course. And I enjoyed actually being an English language teacher. So I took an exam, came out and actually got a job, and I thought I’d just see how it goes, how it would go with the relationship, how it would go living in Madrid. And 25 years later, I’m still here. I drove over in my little Škoda, and that was one of the old Škodas, not these posh new Volkswagen jobs but the original Škoda, you know, which actually were better, to be fair. But that’s my opinion. I drove over on a little ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, drove down to Madrid, and now I’m happy to say really, I’ve been established. And I’ve got two little Spanglish kids, well they’re not little anymore, they’re teenagers. And yeah, so just really like yourself, I kind of find myself drawn to Madrid, the people, the culture and it’s just a great place to live.

Shaheen Samavati 3:30
So how was that transition from, you started out as a teacher when you came to Spain, and now you’re in social media. So when did that transition happen?

David Blundell 3:38
In fact, I was a trained journalist, and I worked as a journalist back in the UK. In fact way, way back, because I’m obviously quite old, I was in a chart band that had a top 10 hit. And so I did the music stuff for a couple of years, and it all, as it happens, falls apart, got into music journalism and was doing it for quite a few years, and then sort of fell almost by accident to the English teaching side, and loved it, absolutely loved it. So when I first came to Spain, the first year actually I just worked for different sort of local academies. And the second year when I came back, there was a job going at the British Council, luckily enough, and I applied to that. And for about three or four years, I worked in Somosaguas, which is kind of a little area outside the main part of Madrid. And then there came up a job for communications manager in Spain, and I thought, aha, this is what I do. This is what I know. And by that time, I thought it’d be quite nice to change from teaching, and I was lucky enough to get the job. So that was kind of the next thing, and I did that for quite a few years. And then in 2012, the job of global social media manager came up, so in fact, I work for, even though I’m based in Madrid I actually work for the kind of, the whole organization. And the global social media manager, I mean we look after 110 countries. We have 440 social media channels. That’s why I’ve got bags under my eyes, you know. I don’t manage them all myself every day, I’ve got a fantastic team across the world. And essentially my job, Shaheen, is about sort of really putting strategy together for social media, looking after brand, looking after governance or doing lots of reporting, things like social listening. I think later we’ll talk a little bit about some social listening stuff. And also, with content marketing campaigns, I don’t do the marketing myself, I don’t actually own any channels myself. But we advise all of our teams on how to do that. And we have quite a few global campaigns. So if it’s a global campaign, I’ll often get started on, get in there right at the start and sort of with the advice, and looking at how we can get it, you know, use our channels to best effect, think about how the content is going to reach people and so on and so forth. So yeah, never a dull moment. And of course, in the times that we find ourselves, there’s a massive demand for digital as I’m sure you’ve heard from all your other guests in The Content Mix.

Shaheen Samavati 5:58
Absolutely. So why is social media so important for the British Council? And like, who’s your audience for social media?

David Blundell 6:05
I think that’s a really interesting question. I mean, social media in general, I think is one part of sort of the marketing mix. It’s not the only thing. And I tend to think social media is very good at sort of big impact. So imagining your marketing funnel, it’s quite good at getting people, getting stuff, products, well known at the top, and maybe bringing people into the funnel, but actually much more better for kind of awareness raising. So for an organization like the British Council, depending on where we are, so for example, our business in Spain, as you rightly said, is very much focused more than anything on teaching English and delivering exams. Whereas in Germany, obviously people in Germany they speak English so well, they don’t really need English teaching. So we do lots of projects with the, actually working with the Goethe-Institut on some of them, and sort of cultural relations projects, shared arts projects and different things like that. And of course, social media is such a great visual media, it’s very immediate. And I think you can actually, what I love about social media, you can make such a good connection with your audience, if you do it right. When you do it wrong, and quite often, I do see lots of examples of people doing wrong everywhere across the world, it fails quite a lot. But actually the other nice thing about social media, in a way, it’s quite a good media to try stuff out. And if it fails, you can move on quickly. And if it doesn’t, if you do something great, it’s a bit like, you know, rinse, repeat, do it again. So but for me, I think it’s a very good opportunity to get close to your audiences, to really understand what your audiences want. And for me, that’s probably the most powerful thing about social media.

Shaheen Samavati 7:45
I see. Yeah, it’s true that it’s like extremely public, but it’s also transient in a way. We used to say that, I used to work in newspapers, and we used to say that actually. But I think that was a lot more permanent in print. Now in digital, you can edit as well.

David Blundell 7:59
It’s amazing, if you look at big organizations like BBC, they’ve got fantastic social media presences. But, and I think “traditional” broadcasters were kind of nervous about social media in the early days. But now some of the broadcasters around the world have got some of the best social media channels. CNN, they’ve got a great TikTok channel, for example. You know, who would have thought?

Shaheen Samavati 8:20
Yeah, it’s true. There’s definitely a lot of really cool things… People are finally catching on on how they can use it, I think, and we’re seeing better results from traditional media than ever before. I was curious though, you mentioned that tons of people do social media wrong—what do you consider doing it wrong?

David Blundell 8:38
I see so much brochureware, what I call brochureware. So essentially, people take it, a bit like you were mentioning earlier, the old fashioned traditional print thing, going, “okay, just to stick that on there.” And of course, it gets zero views, you know. These days everyone on social is probably on their mobile phone, flicking through their Instagram channels. You really need what I call thumb-stopper content. So something, as you go through you go, “Oh, what’s that?” So it might be an unusual image, it may be kind of like a funny video, it may be something just to stop you in your tracks. For example, I don’t know, if your audience are aware of the Royal Opera House. Now they’ve got a brilliant Instagram channel. And it’s really interesting how they use Instagram, they’ve really thought it out. They, for example, on regular posts, they’ll just have sort of like, typical images about what’s going on at the Royal Opera House. Then they’ll use IGTV for specific interviews. And then they’ll use a live Instagram to take people behind the scenes. So they’ve really thought about, you know, what is it that this platform, Instagram, what does it offer? What different facets are there? And how can we use those different facets in a different way? So we don’t just plonk everything on exactly the same way, without thinking about it, without thinking about the audience. But actually what is, you know, how are we going to use these different features to the best effect? And I think, you know, when you see, sort of as I say, companies like that, who you can see have really made a great effort, it’s impressive, you know.

Shaheen Samavati 10:07
Absolutely. So speaking of thumb-stopper content, what are some things that you’ve been trying out to get people’s attention on social media?

David Blundell 10:17
Yeah, it’s funny. We’ve done quite a lot of live streaming recently. In fact, I’m in my studio in London, haha, not really, this is obviously a green screen background. And I’m actually in my garage, which is, I’ve got a converted playroom. Which my kids don’t seem to come here anymore apart from doing a bit of PS4 action. So I’ve stolen it to be my studio. Yeah, so we’re doing lots of, kind of, stuff around live streaming to actually try and get content online, content out to people. And what I like about live streaming—I mean, I think it’s very easy to do. Once again, you need to think a lot about it. There’s many things you need to think about, like, have you got a good WiFi signal, is your lighting okay? I’ve got this, now actually this might cost next to nothing, but if I was just speaking to the regular computer mic, it wouldn’t be quite so clear, I imagine. So there’s a few things you need to think about. What I really like is there’s some great tools out there now to help your live streaming. So for example, there’s one called StreamYard, which is actually a browser-based tool, you just literally, you go into the browser, it sends you a link, and it takes you straight into the studio. And it can almost be up and running live in five minutes. And you can do things like putting in your logo for your organization, you can put in, you know, lower thirds as they call them, some information down at the bottom…

Shaheen Samavati 11:38
Does that let you stream on more than one channel at once?

David Blundell 11:43
It actually depends on which offer you’ve got. The basic offer, I think, there’s a free offer where you can’t. There’s sort of like an offer, which I think is something like 15 bucks a month, and you can stream on two at once. So for example they go to Facebook and YouTube, they also go to Periscope, they go to Twitch. And also just starting to do LinkedIn Live as well, which is interesting. And then I think they’ve got, sort of like the pro version, I don’t remember what they call it, where you can actually go to like five streams at once. So that’s interesting. And then another one we’ve actually started to use a lot more in the British Council is called Ecamm. Now, that’s actually a Mac-based studio for live streaming, and it’s a lot more professional. So you can actually, whereas StreamYard is kind of a bit limited with what you can do, with Ecamm you’ve actually got sort of, you can actually adjust all the camera settings, you know, the brightness, you’ve got a typical Mac type of, it’s a bit like Adobe Premiere, but for live streaming, that’s the best way to describe it. And again, it’s really cheap, it’s about 12–15 bucks a month as well. So the only thing with Ecamm, it’s only Mac, it’s Mac only, so that’s kind of the restriction. And also you bring your guests in on Skype, which is an unusual thing, which actually doesn’t happen for StreamYard. But I mean, I would recommend your viewers on Content Mix, if they want to have a look at, you know, think about live streaming, check out either of those tools: StreamYard or Ecamm, because I do think they make it easy. And of course, you can of course just go live with Instagram, there aren’t actually any tools, any third party tools that actually connect directly with Instagram, that’s because of the API that they’ve got set up. So with Instagram, you literally do have to kind of use your phone to, you know, to do it. But a lot of the same things apply, you still need good WiFi, you need to think about lighting. And of course, you’re a content expert, Shaheen, so the other thing to do is you’ve got to make the show interesting, you know. Otherwise, people are going to switch off after a couple of seconds. So what you need to talk, I mean really just, I think, sort of script out a little bit is the best way to do it. It is possible to go live, it depends a little bit on the content you’re getting across. It is quite nice sometimes to actually just see someone just suddenly going live walking down the road saying, “Hey, I’ve just seen this,” or doing a behind-the-scenes thing, as we mentioned earlier on. That’s actually quite nice. I think if, you know, in the days before lockdown all over the world, when you used to be able to go places, you could actually kind of walk in and look, for example, behind—can you imagine looking at a famous theater, walking through the back part of the theater, looking at all of the behind-the-scenes things. And that type of content is often very, very interesting for our audience, because that’s something that social media can do is to, you don’t just get sort of like, you know, the pristine thing—you actually get, you can actually see the warts and all, how do they do this? How they put that together. TV sets, that’s another one. I’m waiting for someone to invite me on the TV set of Doctor Who, I would love to see that.

Shaheen Samavati 14:34
Definitely, that’d be really cool. Yeah. Yeah, there’s lots of things you can do with live streaming, I think and there’s like tons of potential for where it could go, right? But I think it’s a good point, like even if you’re not completely scripting, it, just having some kind of plan is important, right? Because it’s just… get the most out of it.

David Blundell 14:49
Absolutely. I think that’s for anything you do. You know, you can, there’s sort of one side if you don’t script it at all, it comes across as very genuine. And actually that’s another thing about social media. I think people see through stuff if you try to be too produced. It’s kind of like it’s almost a turn-off. It’s actually quite nice sometimes if suddenly a microphone falls down in the middle of an interview or whatever, it doesn’t matter so much. And actually, particularly now everyone is online, you know, you see a lot of that happening, even with like, professional broadcasters, etc. But I do think, yeah, if you want someone to spend 15 or 20 minutes with you, you know, of your time, of their time, everyone’s time is valuable, it’s got to be interesting. You’ve got to give them something to take away. So hopefully, they come away from whatever the live stream is, or the show or whatever it is, and go, yeah, that, you know, I’ve got something out of that. And then hopefully, you who are doing it, if you’re selling something or trying to sell something, or trying to give information, hopefully, whatever that objective is that you want, you’ve got that across as well.

Shaheen Samavati 15:50
Okay. And I was curious, how can you tell if your live stream is doing well? Do you measure that in some way?

David Blundell 15:58
You find that it drops off very quickly. Actually, Facebook is disastrous for—I’ve got one tip for your users. I think you should consider streaming to Facebook and YouTube. Because Facebook is notorious for people watching the first 10 seconds, because you know what happens? Something goes live on Facebook, so if you’ve got, for example, you know, 10,000 followers, all your 10,000 followers get notified straightaway. So most people go, “Oh, great. Yeah, yeah. Oh no, not interested in that,” and off they go, or they’re on the bus or whatever. And the strange thing about Facebook Lives, though, is the first 24 to 48 hours after this live stream often gets much more cumulative audience. And that’s because people see that something went live, but it’s not convenient for them at the time. Maybe they’re sitting down later, at the end of a long day, feet up having a cup of tea or a mojito or whatever. And they go “Oh, I’ll have a look at that.” And actually, that’s when the audience comes in. And that’s something we discovered a lot, and so often, and I actually spoke with Facebook in the UK about this, they said it’s actually if you’ve got a good audience on your live stream, the best time to boost the post is 24 hours afterwards. If you’ve seen that you’ve got, you know, like a good healthy audience, then you can do your, boost that post and also maybe do a lookalike audience as well. Because you’ll know that actually, you know, you’ve actually got like, you can really amplify what that original audience was. Now, as I was saying about YouTube, I don’t know if you’ve ever come across, I don’t know if you’re a fan of the blog, the Social Media Examiner. I’ve been to, I follow them a lot, and the guy who actually runs that is a guy called Mike Stelzner. Really, really savvy. He’s been in the social media business for many, many years. And he made a great analogy about the difference between live streaming on Facebook and YouTube. Facebook is a bit like kinda, you know, driving down a highway and you see a billboard. You go “Ah yeah, that looks interesting, I must,” you know, but you don’t really focus on the attention, whereas YouTube is much more your destination. So people who go to YouTube will watch either a live stream that’s been on YouTube or a piece of content. People tend to go to YouTube to spend time. And you know, it’s a classic thing, you know, gamers are obviously massive on YouTube. But also things like, you know, you want to know how to change the battery in your car, you want to know how to put down some flooring on your, you know, you’ve never done it before. What do you do? You go to YouTube, and inevitably, five or six videos that can tell you how to do something. So you tend to go to YouTube to stay and spend time, whereas Facebook is much more, you know, driving down the highway, you get attention about something, you think about it, but you don’t actually necessarily stay there for a long time. I think that’s quite an interesting analogy between the two. It’s completely stolen from Mike Stelzner. Thanks, Mike, I like that one.

Shaheen Samavati 18:41
That’s a really good point, though. Yeah, you go to YouTube when you’re actually looking to engage with content, right?

David Blundell 18:47
I think so.

Shaheen Samavati 18:49
I wanted to go back to, earlier you mentioned that you have 440 social media channels. Why so many? You’re global social media manager, so I imagine those are channels for different markets, right?

David Blundell 19:03
Sometimes I wake up in a light sweat and go what am I doing?! No, seriously, it’s a very good question. The whole, I think that the way that social media works best is to make connections with your audience, and understanding the local context. Now for the job of the British Council, our job is to make connections with people. So I think if we were to do sort of like, I don’t know, like a Nike or a Coca Cola, one big corporate channel, maybe just sort of five or six channels for across the world, I don’t think it would really work. It’s very important for us, for example, I’ll give you an example: in Ukraine, and in Turkey, both those two—I mean, Ukraine, we’ve got almost 200,000 people following our Facebook channel. In Turkey I think 170k, 170,000 Facebook fans in Turkey. Now a lot of the content is localized, it’s in local language. And because of the nature of the work that we do, the idea very much is to bring the British Council close to people within countries. So often it is about language. It’s about understanding the audience, you know. How you might, for example, I don’t know, talk about an exams course to someone in Spain might be completely different to how you talk about it in Turkey. In Spain, I can tell you a very concrete example actually, for example, one of the other things we do, we’ve got a big thing called Study UK. Now Study UK is the British Council’s way of encouraging people to go to UK universities, you know, we want people to go to not just Oxford or Cambridge, maybe Bristol, Manchester, Southampton. I’m afraid we don’t want them to go to America, we don’t want them to go to Canada, we want them to come to the UK. So that’s the British council’s thing for the UK. Now in Spain, one of the questions Spanish people often, it’s often the parents who say, “I want to make sure that the most important thing is that my son or my daughter has good accommodation. What’s your accommodation like? What’s the town like? Are they gonna be safe?” That’s a typical kind of Spanish parent thing. Now, that might be a completely different context if you’re living in Georgia, or if you’re living in Ukraine, you know, the context is different. And that’s the reason that we took a very early decision, not just to have one big channel, which is kind of generic, you know, because our job is to make relations, to build relationships, you know. So we thought even though it costs me sleepless nights, sometimes, so many channels, we think it’s the best way to do it. Back in 2012, Facebook was kind of prevalent then more than anything, so we’ve got like, 160 plus Facebook channels. Then Twitter came up very fast, so we’ve got not so many, but quite a few Twitter channels. Obviously now Instagram is very, very big. And YouTube’s been very big all the way along. So there are four main channels. I’ve never gone down the road of Snapchat, basically because Instagram stole is close, and it’s actually easier to get data out of Instagram then it is from Snapchat. We’ve obviously got variations across the world. So say for example, in Russia, we’ve got some VKontakte channels, which is sort of like a Russian mix of Facebook/Twitter. In China, we’ve got a couple of channels on, well we’ve got five or six channels on Sina Weibo, which is again, like the Chinese version of Facebook, although it’s kind of government controlled. And WeChat, which is very big. WeChat is a bit like WhatsApp, Chinese version. So yeah, again, the driver is like, where are people in country? What’s important to them? And how do I understand, how do I speak to my audience properly? And I think that’s the way you build those relationships. So for me, you know, always the starting point for people who want to do content marketing in channels: understand your target audience, you know, ask questions. If you don’t know, speak to people; try and find out what are the things that concern them? Because I think there is so much kind of social media, we’re all gonna live 24 hour lives, you know, and as we were saying earlier on, it’s very easy to flick through and not to stop your thumb on that piece of content. So if you’re not reaching your audience, or haven’t thought about what it is they want, if you can’t answer the question, their question is what’s in it for me? Why should I bother with the British Council? This, you know, exams piece of content? You know, too busy. So, if you know your audience, and you know actually what you’re doing is going to be of relevance. You know, maybe your audiences are looking for jobs somewhere else, they need a exams qualification because they want to travel abroad. Maybe it’s like one of these things that they need to have a specific level for a school or something like that, then fine. But you need to know that, and if you don’t do that research, and you don’t get under the skin of your audience, your content’s gonna fail, I think.

Shaheen Samavati 23:50
Right. So I’m gonna go to the recommendations. So what’s an example of an app or a tool that helps you in your job or that you’d recommend?

David Blundell 24:01
Yeah, well, I’ve already mentioned the two live streaming ones, so we won’t talk about those again. On the social listening side, there’s a great tool called Digimind. Now, there are a lot of social listening tools out there. We used Sysomos, one called Sysomos, for years, which is kind of good for Twitter, but not much else. What I like about Digimind, and it’s a French company, by the way, and they’ve got an office in Madrid too, which is coincidental and I found this out afterwards. What’s really good about it, it uses AI, it uses machine learning. So say for example, to do sentiment analysis on campaigns. So we’re running a hashtag campaign called “Culture Connects Us.” That’s something we’re doing across the world at the minute, and sort of linking together various bits of activity we do, all around culture connecting people across the world. Now I can get sentiment analysis on that, and I can look in there, it’s got machine learning, so sometimes, all the sentiment analysis on these tools, you always have to do extra work, because they don’t understand context. But the nice thing about Digimind is that you can go in there, and if it says something is negative and you look at it and you go, actually that’s not negative. It’s got the word crisis in it, so Digimind says that’s negative. So you go, “no, that’s neutral,” or “that’s positive,” you change it, and then the machine learns. So if there’s retweets, or shares, or similar combinations of words, they go “ah no, I remember that from before.” And that is really good. And the other thing I like about it is that not just Twitter, they could actually get data from Instagram, from Facebook, and from VKontakte and from Sina Weibo. So for my job, having a big spread of channels across the world, I think it’s great. So yeah, Digimind, I recommend that as a social listening tool.

Shaheen Samavati 25:41
That’s a really good tip. I didn’t know about that, so I’m definitely gonna look into it.

David Blundell 25:45
Check it out.

Shaheen Samavati 25:47
And then, would you recommend any marketing influencers in Europe?

David Blundell 25:51
Yeah, well, I mean, funny enough, my two favorite marketing influencers in Europe are both called Ian. So there’s a guy called Ian Cleary, who runs a company called RazorSocial, very, very influential. I mean, he’s been doing, he doesn’t just do social media marketing, he does content marketing, he does SEO marketing. He always is very good at saying, “here’s a bunch of new tools that have come out.” So yeah, Ian Cleary, RazorSocial. And then there’s another guy called Ian Anderson Gray who also is very well known. He often attends the, you know, Social Media Examiner events, etc. Again, he’s very, very knowledgeable, he’s an English guy. He’s, again, he’s quite tool savvy. So he does quite a lot of things on his blogs about “here’s a new reporting tool, how to look at this, this is what I think.” So he does lots of evaluations on different types of tool. And I think, I can’t remember his website, it’s something like iag.me or something like that, but perhaps you can drop it into the blog later on. But yeah, I recommend those two, the two Ians. If you connect with them, you’ll be doing well.

Shaheen Samavati 27:03
Awesome, cool. And then any European industry group or event? It sounds like you’re pretty well connected and up on these social media resources. Also could be a resource that’s not necessarily an event.

David Blundell 27:16
Yeah, there’s actually a group run from Denmark called JBoye. And they actually do, I’ve attended their digital marketing conferences, but they actually do kind of leadership conferences around lots of different areas. So yeah, I can definitely recommend checking them out. I mean, there are a lot of really good conferences out there. And of course, it’s a big challenge at the moment, to have people run them going ahead and you know, hopefully we’ll get back to normality at some point. Who knows?

Shaheen Samavati 27:50
Yeah, just to keep in mind for the future. Also I noticed that you curate this Social Media Bites. Maybe you want to plug that a little bit. What is that about?

David Blundell 28:00
Yeah, Social Media Bites. So this is something I do on Scoop. So every, I have been a bit naughty, I haven’t done anything for the last couple of months. So I’ve been a bit naughty on that. But essentially, I just curate, yeah it’s… Social Media Bites is essentially whenever I’ve got, there’s news come out—for example, news came out yesterday, I don’t know if you saw it, Instagram are now going to do ads in Instagram Television. Now, great opportunity for marketers, some people might go “Oh, I don’t like that. I quite enjoyed Instagram, IGTV, without adverts.” Because we get adverts everywhere. So it’ll be interesting to see how that is. So I’m going to do a Scoop about that. I’ve got it on my to-do list, which is very long. But yeah, so yeah, so I run that. And the other thing I’m going to do is, as I said, I’ve been doing lots of live streaming recently, and I’m actually just about to put a video on my LinkedIn channel about live streaming using Ecamm actually. So hopefully when everyone sees this interview, pop along to my LinkedIn channel and have a look, and let me know what you think, you know. If you like it, give it a thumbs up. If not, don’t.

Shaheen Samavati 29:06
Awesome. Yeah, we’ll definitely put all the links in the blog post that we’ll publish along with the podcast as well.

David Blundell 29:12
Fantastic.

Shaheen Samavati 29:13
So we’ve got to wrap up the interview, but just if you have any parting words, before we go, or any final advice?

David Blundell 29:19
Yeah, keep watching The Content Mix, to start off with, this is a great show. And good luck with everything Shaheen, I think it’s a really good idea. And just to sort of recap today, just think about… I think, be genuine. You know, people know on social media if you’re not being genuine. Make sure you know your audience, make sure you think about, you know, don’t just—as we discussed earlier—don’t just put stuff on social media channels without thinking about it. Think about, how does the platform work? Put yourself in your customers’ shoes, how am I going to receive that content, and what’s going to make it a valuable piece of content for me? And I think if you kind of, I mean, there’s you know… as you know, I talk a lot, I could go on for hours and hours. But those are the kind of key things I think content marketers need to think about. Because social media can be so valuable if it’s done right.

Shaheen Samavati 30:13
Absolutely. That’s great advice. So thank you so much, David, for joining us.

David Blundell 30:19
Thanks for having me. It’s been really, really enjoyable.

Shaheen Samavati 30:23
Yeah, it’s been a great conversation. So yeah, we really appreciate you taking the time to do this. And I just want to say thank you to everybody else listening in, and for more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out TheContentMix.com. And of course, keep tuning into the podcast; we’re posting interviews like these almost every day. And yeah, thanks again, David.

David Blundell 30:42
Fantastic, thanks everyone at The Content Mix. Bye!

Shaheen Samavati 30:45
Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai