Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Oliver Mott, global social media manager at Grant Thornton International:

Shaheen Samavati 0:12
Hi everyone, I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix, and I’m excited to be here with Oliver Mott, global social media manager at Grant Thornton International, one of the world’s largest professional services networks, headquartered in London. Thanks so much for joining us.

Oliver Mott 0:26
Thank you.

Shaheen Samavati 0:27
Yeah, so first, can you just tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in social media marketing?

Oliver Mott 0:34
Yeah, sure. I think like a lot of people in social media currently, I kind of fell into it. I actually had a previous career working in sports, which I left around 10 years ago. And in that career, I ended up overseeing the opening of our first Facebook page, and things like that, and got interested in that world. Left the world of sport and entered the world of finance and professional services, primarily as a marketer. But as social media became what it has become now, I found myself drawn to it. And over time became… I had a job as a campaign manager, working for Legal & General, which is a big financial services firm. And then from there went agency side, went client side, to the position where I’m in now, overseeing global social media strategy for Grant Thornton, which has been two years of great fun and always learning.

Shaheen Samavati 1:39
Awesome, so can you just give us, for those who don’t know, just a little overview of what Grant Thornton does, and then what your day-to-day is like in your role there?

Oliver Mott 1:47
Sure. So, Grant Thornton, we’re a global network of independent advisory firms. So the firms themselves specialize in tax audits and business consultancy. So, the global team I work for oversee that network. We don’t have clients ourselves, but our firms do. And we’ve got firms in 133 countries now, around 56,000 people in those firms. So what we do in my team is help oversee the brand, obviously social media strategy and policy, and make sure that we’re sort of convening groups of expertise within the network to help those firms, you know, with their marketing, digital marketing, events marketing and social media marketing as well.

Shaheen Samavati 2:39
So how much is actually done at the local level versus at the global level? Are you actually managing pages, or you’re only advising the local managers?

Oliver Mott 2:48
Yeah, so it’s advisory. Yeah, it’s dotted lines and things like that. And it changes a lot for each firm. Obviously, the US and the UK firms are our two largest, and they have extensive teams. And what what we do increasingly is leverage their expertise for the rest of the network. Overseeing a global brand means that you can’t just have two or three really strong firms and everybody else all over the place. So what we try and do is leverage their expertise in those bigger firms to help everybody else. And then there’s another layer of firms, 30 or 40 firms in Europe and Asia Pacific and Americas, who are also fantastic. There’s a lot of great expertise out there. And what we do is find those experiences. There’s always somebody trying something new; can we learn from that? Extend that out to the rest of the network, and create opportunities and synergies across member firms that might otherwise not exist.

Shaheen Samavati 3:54
So what does Grant Thornton do differently in terms of social media? I mean, do you have any particular content that you’re really proud of, or initiatives you’ve done recently?

Oliver Mott 4:04
Yeah, so I think what we do differently to our competition in professional services… The industry is divided into the Big Four, you know, that’s Deloitte, EY, KPMG. And those firms are absolutely enormous, you know, big global brands. And I think what they do very well is having huge corporate pages. What you don’t get an awful lot from those big global brands—from any global brand—is a sense of who they are, who the people are behind that brand. Who are the partners, who do I work with? If I’m going to be a client, what’s the people experience there? And I think what we do really well at Grant Thornton, not just in social media, but across the whole business, is being really very much people-led. And, you know, that comes back from the research and insights we get from our clients, and from people who join our network as well, from the Big Four. It’s really our people that lead the organization. It’s not really this big sort of faceless global brand, but it’s led by people. And we’ve seen that to an enormous degree, since this global pandemic started, where the content that we’ve been producing has all been coming from partners and directors. The content that we’ve been producing has not been corporate. It’s been coming from our people, and first and foremost, it’s putting our people at the front of it. And social media is just such a good place to do that, right. So it’s been a really interesting time, recently, in terms of getting our people out there, and getting our people in front of their clients. And I think our structure has allowed us to do that really quickly. So, technology is fantastic. You know, people were immediately able to create content at home, create really high-quality video at home. What I’ve been most proud about is seeing partners taking that upon themselves to create things and understand that they’ve got to do that to get in front of clients, and it’s not about selling, it’s about solving. And I’ve been really impressed with the network in the last few weeks, of how we’ve done that.

Shaheen Samavati 6:43
Yeah so, I think that’s a challenge that a lot of businesses face is sourcing content from employees, and in your case, they’re not even direct employees; they’re members of your network. So how do you manage that? How do you get them to produce that content, how is that all set up?

Oliver Mott 7:01
Well, really good question. I think, you know, it’s partly that we have two types of relationships—I have two types of relationship—with the network. One is with our marketing, communications and business development professionals, who I see as my colleagues, in all of the firms. We’ve always had very regular calls with them, we host webinars, they present on these webinars to the rest of the community. So we’ve always had a very good, close working relationship with those people. So there’s a very good understanding between us all of what good content looks like, how to produce that, how to then get that and publish that on social media, whether it’s on our corporate channels, or through individuals’ own social media. And so that understanding existed already, so people know what good content looks like. And there are some firms who are fantastic at it, and we don’t tell them what to do—we we look at what they’re doing, and show it to the rest of the network. The other relationship we’ve got with the network is increasingly with the partners, with the people, the client-facing people within the network. And that’s something that’s really come on in the last few weeks and months, which is helping them understand how to do it, when to do it. And then it’s about shaping what they’re trying to do. So it’s been quite easy in terms of communicating that. You know, like I said, we’ve got really good technology, we’ve got an amazing global intranet, which has really facilitated sharing that knowledge with everybody. And I think, yes, it’s come from our people, but you know, everybody is now a digital marketer. And I think that understanding has taken root in our network very quickly. So we’ve been working, that sort of team of people we’ve been seeing content come from has gone from a couple of hundred digital marketers in the network to probably a thousand people, including all of the partners who are creating this content, and we’re helping them craft it. So it’s been a huge team effort.

Shaheen Samavati 9:25
It sounds like you’ve done an excellent job of kind of convincing everyone of the value of content as well, and that sounds like it would, you know, make them want to contribute.

Oliver Mott 9:35
Yeah, I think it’s made us wonder that perhaps that message had got through before. But you know, people were, I think particularly in professional services, if you’re a partner at a professional services firm, you’ve got there through doing it face to face. And understandably, they wanted to continue doing that. And digital marketing was something they understood but didn’t rely on. Now that we have to rely on that, and like I say everyone feels like they’re a digital marketer, the pivot from not being able to do face-to-face work to recording themselves, writing content and getting it out there happened so quickly that I feel like that message had got through. And you know, it was then the job of our colleagues in digital marketing, in the firms, just to help shape that, and the amount of content produced has been astounding. The quality has been very good as well. And not just articles and thought leadership, like client tools, things that clients can use to understand, you know, government advice, which most governments have just been chucking out there, and medium-sized business owners don’t know what to do with it. So the understanding of client needs has been really interesting as well.

Shaheen Samavati 11:05
And I think in this time, we have to recognize that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. So I just wanted to know how that’s impacting your marketing plans, and your production of content as well.

Oliver Mott 11:19
Well you know, I think like most industries, there have been immediate looks at budgets for these sorts of things. Incidentals have been looked at, you know, and we’ve been doing a lot of survey work with our firms to see what impacts there have been on a local level. Most firms have been asked to replan. Obviously you couldn’t… in terms of content, we all had stuff that we were going to, you know, content that we were going to be publishing in Q2, going to Q3. That’s all had to be put on ice, because that’s just not where our clients are. They’re not thinking about what they were thinking about two or three months ago. So we’ve all had to replan. We’ve had to think about the tone of content. Had to think really, really carefully about what our role is, and what our client needs are. I think marketing, like I’ve touched on, is now being seen as a vital resource. How do we get in front of the clients? How do we make sure we’re helping them solve their problems? And in doing so creating brand value? And so I think that’s how things have changed. The pace at which we’ve been communicating with people has doubled. You know, the calls that we were doing that were monthly are now fortnightly; the webinars we were hosting quarterly are now monthly. So, you know, we’re busier than ever. Some firms are feeling it differently to others, of course. But we do have some member firms who are going back to the office now. In our last survey, we found that about 10% of firms are either returning or planning on returning in the next couple of weeks. Not saying that’s a return to normal, but we feel like we’re sort of getting over this hump of working from home. And we’re starting to think about exit from this and the rest of the year. So things have changed, but we’re moving with it. And I think we’re changing constantly, you know, there’s a path we’re going through, which has been interesting to see.

Shaheen Samavati 13:42
Well as this podcast is focused on Europe, I usually ask people about the challenges of working in the European market, but it sounds like you work way beyond the European market and across the world. But maybe any thoughts on how Europe compares to other markets you work in? And how many markets are you in?

Oliver Mott 14:01
So 133 on last count, and firms come and go, but it’s around 133 at the moment. Europe’s probably our most active market, you know, in some countries we have two member firms because of legal reasons; audit and tax have to be separate, or audit and advisory, etc. So it’s probably our most… it’s our busiest market. It’s the market that we naturally have the most interaction with because of time zones and geography. Pre-lockdown we saw them more often face to face. But yeah, we work globally, and I have the same relationships I have with our firms and our colleagues in European firms as we do in Australia, you know, and Africa and Latin America as well. It’s truly a global organization. As I said, our technology really supports that. I don’t do a lot of trips to member firms at all, like we were living on Teams six months ago. So in that sense, kind of, everyone’s quite equal. But you know, particularly with Europe right now, we’ve all been going through this at the same time. And it was interesting to see our firms in Asia Pacific experience this first, and then it sort of came across to us, and then we all went into lockdown at the same time. And we were able to then advise our firms west of us, you know, in Latin America, who perhaps came to the pandemic a little later, a week or two later—not just how to deal with this in terms of marketing tone and content production, but how to lock down, you know, how to work from home. And it’s the firms in Europe who are now most resilient and are trying to get back into the office. So that’s great to see.

Shaheen Samavati 16:03
So I just wanted to finish off by asking you those rapid-fire questions about a few tools and resources. So an app or a tool that you can’t work without?

Oliver Mott 16:18
Dynamic Signal and Microsoft Teams. So Teams everybody knows about, you know, that’s how we communicate. I live on Teams the whole time now. And Dynamic Signal is our employee advocacy and engagement platform. And that’s how we’re making the most of our people. You know, our social media strategy globally has been about our people for a long time now. Corporate accounts are fantastic. But you know, getting energy into our people to get them to make the connections and build their personal brand is vital to our business model and our marketing strategy. And Dynamic Signal is really delivering for us, for a lot of our firms.

Shaheen Samavati 17:04
And a marketing influencer in Europe you follow?

Oliver Mott 17:09
Matt Navarra. He’s great, he’s fantastic. I’m sure you know who Matt is. He’s brilliant.

Shaheen Samavati 17:17
And then just any other valuable resource, event, group or forum?

Oliver Mott 17:24
Yeah, Social Media in Finance, I’m happy to give a plug to. They’re run by a really small, young events agency called Social Tree. And they do small, really bespoke events that I love attending and speaking at. And Social Media Week, much bigger, they do global events. They’re doing online right now. I’ve met a couple of the best agencies I’ve ever worked with at Social Media Week. That’s a fantastic event as well.

Shaheen Samavati 18:00
Any final parting words or advice for other social media and content marketers in Europe?

Oliver Mott 18:06
Yeah, you know, I think the best thing that we ever did was start training our people and giving them the confidence and the tools to use social media themselves. Particularly in professional services, but anything B2B really, it’s got to be about your people. It’s really difficult. It’s really difficult. There’s a lot of literature out there about the psychology of sharing—understand that. Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset”—read that. It gets you into people’s heads, because you don’t know who’s going to share and who’s going to do it well, and be confident on digital channels until they do it, and until you train them. But the payoff when people do that is far greater than running corporate accounts, which will always be important, but get training your people. It’s hard. It’s really hard sometimes, but it’s really worth it. And start with the most difficult people; don’t start with the people who are already doing it, start with the curmudgeons. That’s my top tip.

Shaheen Samavati 19:12
Excellent, those are great tips. So thank you so much Oliver for sharing your insights with us, and thanks everybody for listening in. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out TheContentMix.com. And we’ll be releasing a lot more of these interviews, like this one, with content and social media marketing professionals, so keep tuning in. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai