How to manage content campaigns & tell relevant stories

Janine Michaels worked at Featurespace, a high-growth technology company that helps the financial services industry fight fraud and financial crimes, for only a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Being in a high-growth, high-tech environment gave her an advantage by quickly embracing change and completely revamping the content and campaign plans she had in mind.

In this interview with Shaheen Samavati, Janine shares strategies that worked for her in 2020 and which helped her design smooth processes for content creation management and measurement.

Managing content creation effectively ultimately comes down to having great communication with all of the stakeholders involved and providing super clear briefs to content creators and contributors.

Janine also discusses how to identify valuable resources in your networks when creating content, strategies for measuring the success of content, and how her past sales experience has impacted her approach to marketing.

You can watch the full conversation in the video above or on YouTube, and listen to the podcast on Apple or Spotify.

Rapid-fire recs

Source of inspiration: Jacinda Ardern. “She’s been an incredible leader. She’s taken a lot of criticism and has stuck to her plan despite it all.”

Favorite app: Jungle Marble Blast. “It’s a mindless way to disconnect after work.” Design Home. “It’s a great creative outlet, and getting points for designing homes is fun.”

A productivity hack: “I try to cram as many meetings in on a Wednesday. I think that having a day of meetings on a Monday is counterintuitive because you really need to get back up to speed of where you left things off from the previous week and perhaps finish some things. If I cram in as many meetings as I possibly can on Wednesdays then I have Monday and Tuesday to really get ready for them, and then Thursday and Friday I can move things forward and proceed with the next steps.”

A group or hashtag to follow: Cambridge Rare Disease Network. “I wanted to talk about them because COVID is such a rare occurrence, hopefully. It also proves how something can come from nowhere and really disrupt and destroy lives. COVID is getting a lot of attention, because of the number of people it affects, but there are people that have very rare and unique diseases that don’t get the same research, input or funding to find solutions for that. This year they had a virtual “Rare Fest” which you check out by searching #RAREfest20 across social platforms. What they do is very, very special.”

“Get a good, comprehensive brief at the get-go. Make sure you include all the right stakeholders as well. If you’re not sure who they are, ask. It makes your job easier when you want to go live.”

Connect with Janine and Shaheen on LinkedIn.

This post was edited by Jamie Albert, a freelance editor based in Madrid.