Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Jocelyn Chan, content team lead at Detectify, on how to develop a fun tone of voice, even for cybersecurity content:

Shaheen Samavati 0:13
Hi everyone. I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix and I’m excited to be here with Jocelyn Chan, content team lead at Stockholm-based web security scale up, Detectify. Thanks so much for joining us.

Jocelyn Chan 0:23
Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here speaking with you Shaheen about content and content marketing.

Shaheen Samavati 0:32
Absolutely. So just to get started, could you tell us a little bit about your background? You have an unusual start, right? You started out in food science and then transitioned to marketing? How did that happen?

Jocelyn Chan 0:42
Yes, exactly. So I started studying Nutrition and Food Systems when I was at university, thinking maybe this is the path that I want to go down. I’ve always had marketing at the back of my mind and when I left university, I had the opportunity to join a food company. A really cool, natural foods company in Canada, I’m originally from Canada, called Daiya Foods. I need to shout out to them because they are so great. I really enjoyed it, I was doing brand experience marketing, meeting people and I really liked that aspect of just talking to the public, understanding what people’s interests are and needs and how you can improve their lives in different ways and products. So then I moved to Sweden, I fell in love like many people do when they go to Sweden, in 2013. So I’ve been in Stockholm, Sweden for like seven years now. I started working at Booking.com so I had to find a way to reinvent myself and my career and what I wanted to do. So I ended up going into the travel industry and getting an entry level role within marketing, being a Content Editor. I always had this approach in my mind that I want to learn by doing and learn the ropes of marketing that way. That was a really good experience because at Booking.com they’re very data driven and you really get to see the value of content or marketing or what they’ve calculated. So I learned a lot in that process and how to have a business mindset, which has really benefited me today working at Detectify. I started as a marketing coordinator there, so a generalist doing many things at once, wearing different hats in a startup environment. That’s what one comes to expect, you get your hands dirty here and there. I’ve been with the company for a little over two and a half years and now I focus on content marketing, and luckily now i’m a content team lead.

Shaheen Samavati 3:22
Could you tell us a bit more about Detectify and who their audience is for content?

Jocelyn Chan 3:27
Yeah, so Detectify is a web application security company and we work with ethical hackers and rely on the power of the crowd to generate cutting edge security research, and we build that into our automation. So when I’m doing marketing, messaging and material, i’m speaking to a lot of developers and security engineers, IT managers, information security managers, it’s a very technical audience.

Shaheen Samavati 4:03
Very cool. Did you have any background in that before you joined Detectify? Or was it a whole new world?

Definitely a whole new world. I was forced to reinvent myself again leaving Booking.com, a B2C travel travel company, and going into something out of my comfort zone working with hackers. The whole idea of working with hackers, going in I had this image like aren’t hackers these guys in hoodies that are just trying to break into a system. Can they be trusted? I think joining Detectify, a company that really wants to change that dialogue, has been really exciting for me and got me interested in learning something new. To get into this role, accumulate all the knowledge that I have about security today and to speak with people who are working with security daily has been really fun so far and a great challenge for myself.

So could you tell us about how you built your hacker community? What is the hacker community?

Jocelyn Chan 5:26
Yeah, good question. Detectify was founded by a group of friends who are hackers or ethical hackers, I want to emphasise that. They’re believing that there’s very few people that have security knowledge out there. Cybersecurity in general has a big talent gap and it’s simply because it’s in great demand but there’s also not enough talent that you can hire into the company. So they thought of this idea because there’s a tonne of hackers out there like them that have the knowledge and have hacked companies like Google or Facebook or Uber and this is really specialised knowledge. How can you get that out to other other people who need it like developers, or engineers that need to secure all the products that we love to use today? For example, like Zoom, or Slack or whatever, Zoom is everyone’s favourite in the pandemic. So they have this idea of why don’t we crowdsource that knowledge, that’s what we do in our regular hacking hobbies. So we created a community where other hackers, with the interest of reporting vulnerabilities they find in companies or websites they tried to test, can rebuild the platform where they can submit that information and also get rewarded on a continual basis based on how many companies are affected. Detectify then uses that knowledge from the hackers to check our customer base and we then see who is vulnerable. Every time something occurs, the hacker then gets that reward, a financial kickback. Does that make sense?

Shaheen Samavati 7:31
So the hacker community is actually core to the offering of Detectify?

Jocelyn Chan 7:37
It’s like gig economy, like how Uber has their drivers, or where you work with freelancers for maybe design companies like Fiverr. Share economy where there’s a lot of people who maybe don’t want to be employed, but they still want to offer their skills in some way to help the lives of other people.

Shaheen Samavati 8:12
So could you tell us more about the approach to content marketing that you take at Detectify, and how you source your content as well?

Jocelyn Chan 8:22
Historically, we’ve had content marketing as a big part of Detectify, because we have a lot of experts in house that do security research. We’ve tried to put their research out to the public where possible, where people can make use of that information to either create more awareness but also apply a lot of the research directly in their everyday. So that’s been a great part of what we are doing. Also, we take a very educational approach where we want to educate our audience. We find that especially with developers and engineers, who are very allergic to marketing so to say, that they will prefer things that are more like adding value to their life and educated so we spend a lot of time trying to curate content that will help them in everyday situations. They come across vulnerability or we find a vulnerability in their web applications, then we can also provide that same kind of education to help them fix it on the spot so that they don’t have to search the internet for more. With that approach and with the combination of research and educative content, it also helps us create content that will be evergreen content for us. It can stand the test of time because the ways that people want to exploit websites or not can still exist like five years ago and today. So that is one approach. Then because a concept isn’t easily understood by everyone, the idea of having a hacker community on the side or can we trust them and whatnot, we need to gain trust from our audience that they can trust the hackers and we need to ensure that. So I do my best, with my team, to give them a spotlight. The hackers that we choose to work with in our crowdsource community, I invite them to our guest blog, because a lot of them also have interesting things to share. That has helped to build awareness for the community. So to recruit hackers into that community, but also, for the business side of things, for them to understand that hackers are also people you can trust and can be a benefit for your security strategy.

Shaheen Samavati 10:59
So could you share an example of a piece of content that worked really well for you and why you think that was?

Jocelyn Chan 11:04
Yeah, actually, I have a great and funny example from this year, on April Fool’s Day we had this idea to involve our hacker community to help us create some content. In the security realm we have a term called pen testing, which means that someone is kind of doing a security audit, they’re trying to check and break the company’s system and that’s called pentesting. So we had this idea to take a spin on it and do literal pen testing, then also get our hackers involved by just simply asking them to use their Twitter handles and if would they be willing to be featured in the post. This was a funny thing and I didn’t expect the result, but what ended up happening, because they themselves have their own networks, they helped us amplify this message across Twitter and it got to a bigger audience so we saw an uplift in our signups. We have an SaaS product so we look at signups. Also, they looked to trick a few people along the way and I think that’s the whole point of an April Fool’s joke, to have a practical joke.

Shaheen Samavati 12:35
What was the punchline of the joke?

Jocelyn Chan 12:39
So it was like a top list of pentesting tips. So someone would expect, okay, this is going to tell me how I’m going to do some cool hack against the system. But then we started showing pentesting, like how you would test a pen, like, okay, you write it or make sure it’s the right way. So it was really fun and we did it BuzzFeed style, with gifs. So after I was like, I should probably apply to write on BuzzFeed. I have a new profession with gif filled blog posts.

Shaheen Samavati 13:25
Yeah, very cool. It’s interesting discovering new platforms as you go along that fit with your content strategy. It sounds like a really fun campaign and we should put the link in the blog article. So if you have the link to the article, I’ll put it in the blog post.

Jocelyn Chan 13:44
I think it’s very hard to get earned media to get other people to share what we create, so when you make it fun, and you can invite people who are in your community and willing to represent you, I think it can go a long way and it’s organic. So in that sense, it’s free to produce.

Shaheen Samavati 14:10
What would you say is your tone of voice at Detectify? It sounds like, I don’t know, go hack yourself and everything.

Jocelyn Chan 14:20
Yeah, that’s something that I’m working on, the tone of voice. We’ve always had this casual approach, it’s more informal, we use the tagline, “go hack yourself”. It helps us stand out because in the world of security, you often see a lot of locks and hoodies or hackers put in hoodies with a dark background or an anonymous mask. So we want to take a different approach to this and really stand out because it’s also in our company culture, when you go in everyone is very easy going and friendly. We would prefer that people just wear t-shirts and hoodies instead of a suit and tie. I think what you see on the site, it’s also in real life, when we go to events we also stand out in a casual way. We try to be an approachable brand but also it takes a little guts to say something like, “go hack yourself”. We have experts in the field and we are confident in what we are doing. We’re working with a whole community of experts that we also want to show that even if we have fun colours, and a more casual look, we take security seriously and we’re very passionate about it in everything we do. So we want to keep on in that direction and also make sure that people feel like they can have a conversation with us. You can get very nerdy about security with us or even if you’re a beginner in security, we are happy to talk to you as well and share the security gospel as I like to say.

Shaheen Samavati 16:30
It’s interesting because cyber security sounds like such a serious and technical thing. It’s really cool that you guys have made it fun.

Jocelyn Chan 16:39
Exactly. We want to make security accessible for everyone in that you don’t always need to be really educated in security and living and breathing it. We hope that people who run their own websites or small startups also take cyber security seriously and see the benefit it has for their company. So in order to appeal to them we also need to approach it in that way, it’s not like black magic, it’s something that you can do. It’s not rocket science.

Shaheen Samavati 17:16
So what’s a typical day like for you in your role as content team lead?

Jocelyn Chan 17:21
Yeah. A typical day in a startup. Detectify is, as you said, a high growth, fast paced company. We expect day to day to be a little different, but it’s nice to get a little routine in. Some productivity hacks I have is planning out my day and trying to make sure all my meetings are clustered together in the afternoon so I can spend the morning doing the work that keeps us going at Detectify. That can be writing copy with our campaign team or creating blog ideas and getting blog content down. I’m newly a team lead, can you say that? I have two people on my team so right now a lot of my work is supporting them. There’s some kind of learning curve with security, but my team also feel like they’re gonna own this thing and that we’re going to create an awesome content machine together.

Shaheen Samavati 18:38
I’ll go into my next question. What was it like moving from a huge company like Booking.com to a high growth startup environment?

Jocelyn Chan 18:47
Yeah. So at Booking.com, since it’s so big and it’s a really established company, I think it’s a very good environment to learn the ropes of how to develop good work ethic or processes and taking advantage of corporate learning. I got that of out of Booking.com.

Shaheen Samavati 19:12
I imagine there’s a lot of expertise there and they know a lot about digital marketing. They’re masters of it and I guess they have a lot of resources to do the best possible online marketing. It’s like learning from the best.

Jocelyn Chan 19:24
Yeah and from there, you learn what it takes to run a company, for a company to grow really quickly, then you really need to make data decisions and keep track of your metrics. So I think it was very beneficial working at Booking.com, but also at a big company you are limited to how much you can influence. You’re given a ball and then run with it. So it’s very good for building up your foundation or if you want to home certain skills, but for me I felt ready to take on more responsibility. I wanted to learn more about digital marketing and I did take small courses online to try to get the foundation and keep the learning journey going until I felt ready to apply for something new. So then I got into Detectify as a marketing coordinator. There were only four people, I think I was the fourth on the marketing team and we were 23 in the company two years ago. Then it was like, okay, you want to do something, awesome run. It can be very exciting, high energy, you are often the first to take on something or try something. From the start Detectify has been very supportive of that, they’re like, you have an idea, great, go do it and see how it works. I really think that is the biggest difference, you have the space to try out some ideas and really take it on. Whereas if you are in a bigger company you might have an idea but it can take some time for it, the process and approval, which makes sense. The company is so big, you cannot just go try whatever you want, but in a startup, it’s very much like that, because you don’t know if you will get funding next time so you might as well try everything that you can, so it’s been very exciting. For me, I’ve been very lucky to also have energetic and skilled colleagues that are really eager to make a lot happen and take action. So I think a big difference is you can suddenly have many things happening at once in a startup. Today, we are running 10 different projects and initiatives versus Booking.com where it was very focused on, we know we need to fix this particular thing so let’s put all our focus in and just make this happen and move this metric. Whereas in a startup, there’s all these five different metrics we want to measure and move, what can we do to keep everything going? It’s very exciting. I think it’s not for everyone, like someone who needs order, it’s a very dynamic environment. But yeah, it’s really fun and I’m sure you know this from running a company yourself.

Shaheen Samavati 22:54
Yeah, absolutely. I can relate a lot to everything you’re saying, for sure in my experience working in startups to my current company as well. Going to the metrics point, what are your metrics for content marketing? What do you think is most important to look at?

Jocelyn Chan 23:10
I would like to get to a point where we can say, this blog has contributed to our sales in this way. I think that’s very exciting. I know it’s possible because I’ve seen it at Booking.com, or at least they put numbers to it to predict how much it can bring in. But today we mainly look at, MR, it’s very classic for an SaaS company where you look at the monthly revenue that’s being brought in specifically from marketing activities. We look at things like traffic, since I’m content team lead, we are very much trying to increase the traffic that we can attract to “.com” through all the content that we put out there. Also sign ups, does this encourage people to keep moving through the site and the brand experience enough to sign up and start something? So I think those are the main things we look at today.

Shaheen Samavati 24:17
Going back to your personal story, because I know we have a lot of international people trying to break into marketing in Europe. I was just curious, was it very difficult to get your first content job in Sweden? What’s the market there like?

Jocelyn Chan 24:32
I think it’s probably got better today. At the beginning it was like, where do I look and start. I wish there was an obvious hub that said, hey, international marketer or someone who wants to get into marketing look here. So I think it took some time, actually, because a lot of Swedish companies still market to the Swedish population. But what was really lucky about Stockholm is that there’s really a growing tech scene and naturally with tech you are going to go for a global audience because tech really has no borders. For us we have customers in Australia but also in all the parts of the US or in Canada and also throughout EMEA. For anyone looking into a tech company, if you’re international, tech is looking for English speakers as they’re often having English as the company language. That is, if you are an English speaker, and comfortable speaking English.

Shaheen Samavati 25:51
Yeah, as they expand a lot of companies go into more markets as well. They need content creators and makerketers for the other markets as well, at a later stage I suppose. So I totally get this tip.

Jocelyn Chan 26:05
Go into tech! But also I think what you are doing is amazing. You build up a community for people to connect with each other with other marketers and they exist. You just have to do a little extra search on Facebook or MeetUp. Even in Stockholm, we have expat groups, there’s one in particular called Girl Gone International and I think they have different chapters across the world. So there’s one in Stockholm and there’s tonnes of marketers and we’ve started a small networking group that I hope will grow into something more.

Shaheen Samavati 26:48
Yeah, I’m in their Facebook group in Madrid.

Jocelyn Chan 26:51
Yeah?

Shaheen Samavati 26:51
Yeah, I totally agree with expat groups. The Content Mix kind of grew out of those kinds of groups. We’re an expat group in a way, I guess. We’re a mix expat people.

Jocelyn Chan 27:08
That’s awesome. There’s so much talk about diversity and inclusion today and I think that’s a strength you can bring in. When you bring in an international marketer, they’re not only giving you English language, but also they bring all the experience that they probably have from their home culture or wherever they have lived and the markets they’ve served. So I think that’s also why it’s really benefited tech in Stockholm. Stockholm is a mini Silicon Valley in that sense, we can attract a really diverse workforce.

Shaheen Samavati 27:53
Yeah, absolutely. So I want to ask you for a few more of your recommendations, you already shared a few. Do you have a favorite marketing or business book to share?

Jocelyn Chan 28:06
Yeah, I just finished reading one called The Runaway Species and it’s a really cool book on creativity. It’s helped me demyth the idea that you need to always come up with something original. In this book they discuss how human creativity is based on how we do a new take on something that we’ve seen before and it doesn’t always have to be this totally original idea. I think it’s great for any marketer to consider, you don’t need to always create that one viral video or have the best idea to create a viral video. I don’t know if that’s such a big word to say more. I think it’s a really good book of inspiration to talk through how others have created or brought in creativity to their life.

Shaheen Samavati 29:00
Very cool, i’ll definitely check it out. Then a source of inspiration you’d share?

Jocelyn Chan 29:12
More and more, I’ve been watching TED Talks. LinkedIn knows me so well, i’m spending so much time on it snd then it just sends me all these TED Talk videos, but what I really like is that they have diverse speakers. They feature a lot of speakers from different backgrounds and I think it’s really great to draw inspiration from. Especially when it doesn’t have to be a marketing video or a security video. It can be about how they did a home experiment and from there, I can get new ideas for marketing somehow.

Shaheen Samavati 29:53
Yeah, absolutely. Do you recommend any software tool or app you’ve discovered recently or particularly enjoy?

Jocelyn Chan 30:03
Yeah, I really like Canva. I don’t use it for work, but I like it for my personal projects, I think it just makes design so easy. You can make really great presentations with templates that they have or even a small graphic to promote. If you have a meetup group and you want to promote something, it’s really easy to use and generate the graphic there. So I recommend it. There’s a free version, of course, and it’s really great.

Shaheen Samavati 30:38
Yeah, definitely. A secret of marketers around the world. Do you recommend any online courses?

Jocelyn Chan 30:48
I have to dig to the back of my head. But I took one called “My Complete Digital Marketing Course” on Udemy by someone named Daragh Walsh. I thought that was really good for foundational skills just to get the beginnings if you want to run your own business online, or if you want to pursue digital marketing as a career. I thought that was really great. In general, I like to watch more videos or podcasts. I get a lot out of podcasts, because I think marketing just changes so much that I like to look to experts for what I should pay attention to or what has changed and to keep up to date that way. I have a good example where I bought the content marketing book, earlier this year, I was like this is so great I’m going to learn all this strategy and create a content strategy. Then when there’s a section about social media they mentioned Vine, I was like, Oh, no, I can’t keep reading this book, they have quoted Vine, I cannot take this as the truth and only the truth.

Shaheen Samavati 32:02
It’s true, marketing books get outdated in a year now, right?

Jocelyn Chan 32:09
I was like, Oh my gosh, Vine was like so long ago. I would recommend diversifying your educational courses.

Shaheen Samavati 32:23
Absolutely. Take recent ones if it’s a course or a book. Some concepts of marketing, I suppose, never change but when it comes to the tactics and speific things related to digital marketing, yeah. We’re reaching the end of the interview, so I just wanted to give you the last chance to say any final takeaways or parting advice for other content marketers in Europe?

Jocelyn Chan 32:48
From content marketer to content marketer, I think it’s really important to define what it is that you want to achieve with the content that you create. It’s very easy to get caught up on many ideas that you have, but setting a goal, getting to know what is it that you want to talk to your audience about, it’s important for you to have these goals so that you know what to celebrate. I think it’s very easy to forget to give a pat on yourself, like I did a great job. So I think that’s one tip. Then I always like to say to anyone who’s writing or wants to contribute writing, remember that you aren’t writing for yourself, you have a target audience that you want to write for and just keep that in mind. Make it relevant for them. You don’t have to create content all by yourself. You have a network you can reach out to, to find people to collaborate with and then you can amplify your message and get the word out through awareness.

Shaheen Samavati 34:05
Absolutely. A very good point to end on. Well, thank you so much, Jocelyn for sharing your insights with us today.

Jocelyn Chan 34:10
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed speaking with you and talking about content.

Shaheen Samavati 34:17
Yeah, it was awesome. I loved hearing your insights. So thanks, everybody, for listening in as well. For more perspectives on content marketing in Europe, check out TheContentMix.com. Keep tuning into the podcast for daily interviews with content experts. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai