Apr 01, 2020

The Challenges and Opportunities of Marketing on a Global Scale, with Devin Moore

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An experienced leader and creator with a broad digital media background, Devin Moore is a Global Marketing Manager for Xbox, and specializes in channel strategy, creative ideation, technical problem solving and tactical implementation. Devin is skilled in content creation, campaign, and asset deployment, measurement, and management with a strong focus on measurable, results-driven execution of business objectives across all communications channels.

Devin prides himself on ensuring businesses achieve their goals through hard work, thought leadership and creative solutions to business challenges. 

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

  • How engaging, authentic marketing content helps differentiate Xbox from its market competitors like Sony and Nintendo
  • How Devin works to keep his team aligned to the branding goals of Xbox, and why branding through social media is more challenging to control and keep consistent
  • How Xbox plans out its content creation and marketing strategy, and why detailed, shared tracking of content is critical to the brand's success
  • How Xbox Game Pass uses both organic, social marketing as well as paid media, and paid media is vital for a large brand like Xbox
  • Why social media algorithm changes are inevitable, and how Xbox adapts to these major changes
  • Why relevant social media channels change constantly, and why adapting the strategies big brands are using to work for your own brand is a viable option
  • What changes Devin expects for the marketing landscape in the future that brands will need to learn to adapt to, such as consumer privacy concerns

Additional Resources:

 

Show Transcription:

Intro:

Welcome to A Brave New Podcast. The podcast all about how brave entrepreneurial companies are unlocking their business potential using inbound marketing. Here is your marketing expert and host Polly Yakovich.

Polly Yakovich:

So, welcome back to A Brave New Podcast. I'm super excited to have my good friend, Devin Moore with me today. Devin is the marketing manager at Microsoft on the Xbox team and he'll tell you a little bit more about his bio in a second. He's also my personal Instagram coach.

Devin Moore:

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Polly Yakovich:

Which is like not even a joke at all.

Devin Moore:

Got to do it right. Got to do it right.

Polly Yakovich:

You taught me how to use Instagram-

Devin Moore:

Stories.

Polly Yakovich:

... Stories. Yeah.

Devin Moore:

It's a great thing to work closely with that team.

Polly Yakovich:

So Devin, tell me, just give me a little bit of your bio-

Devin Moore:

Great.

Polly Yakovich:

... and what you're doing now and sort of paint the picture for us.

Devin Moore:

Awesome.

Polly Yakovich:

So, when I start asking you probing questions, there is some context.

Devin Moore:

Of course, of course. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on, excited to do this. Great way to spend a Friday afternoon. Yeah. So, I've been working in the video game industry now coming up on five years. It's definitely not a path that I could have predicted six or more years in the past. This is definitely fresh, but really exciting. My background spans public relations to advertising agencies over the last decade. I started off my career in Toronto, had a lot of fun working there with some larger Canadian media brands, some alcohol brands and Budweiser and that kind of thing. And then I met my wife and at Coachella, as you know, and we were living there and then she got a job opportunity in London, so we moved there. I started working for Bacardi and I was the digital manager for Gray Goose and Bombay Sapphire. So, I worked in the drinks industry for a bit, which was credibly fast paced, a lot of fun, late nights and sadly early mornings, definitely a young person's move and career.

Devin Moore:

And then from there, I was headhunted at this WPP event by a guy named Craig Hepburn, who was leading the Nokia digital engagement strategy and Nokia had recently been purchased by Microsoft. So, I accepted a role and started working on their team as a social engagement manager which in, let's say 2016 meant experiential activations revolving around social media. So, a lot of fun with the Nokia brand, there for a little while before it was underwritten and no longer supported with marketing. And then I made the move into gaming and Xbox, it's an incredibly fast paced very, very interesting and very involved industry, entertainment industry and yeah, so I've been creating digital content for social channels and campaign end to end strategies for Xbox now for four years.

Polly Yakovich:

So, tell me a little bit more about maybe not your day to day, but what are you working on in like an average week or month? What are you thinking about?

Devin Moore:

Yeah, so it's interesting, right? My direct responsibilities revolved around a service called Xbox Game Pass. So, Xbox Game Pass is like, let's say a subscription service for films like Netflix.

Polly Yakovich:

Oh, I've heard of that.

Devin Moore:

And you've heard of that, right? Small little outfit out of California. So, monthly price, a set of games that you can play on your console or on PC with multiplayer attached to that. So, it's a very attractive offering for gamers in the gaming community and we're happy to say that we're absolutely at the forefront of that within the business. Our main competitors being PlayStation, Nintendo. So yeah, it's very, very involved and busy and we try to ensure that we stand out a little bit as Xbox Game Pass. We're taking an approach to point to our marketing strategies for social media directly towards Gen Z leveraging a lot of internet culture memes and trying to be as authentic as we can to gamers.

Devin Moore:

So, that's what makes us stand out a little bit from larger brands like PlayStation or the Xbox mother brand, because we're really sort of in the weeds testing and learning strategies that might be considered a little bit more gorilla. So, a lot of my day to day revolves around working with a creative agency in Los Angeles, working with the team that I have up here in Redmond to ensure that our proactive and reactive social media strategies and content creation is industry leading, cutting edge and honestly is engaging as possible.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah. I want to get into that specifically a lot more, but first talk a little bit about... take us behind the scenes of this global brand that's so known, so trusted, people are so loyal to it. What would you say some of the main challenges are for you with your role in your team?

Devin Moore:

Yeah.

Polly Yakovich:

Is it really about being relevant to your audience? And-

Devin Moore:

So, that's a great question. I think the big challenge with big corporate brands is, red tape is everywhere. And as a creative thinker, it's really hard to get senior buy-in on things that involve risk. So-

Polly Yakovich:

Or maybe aren't proven.

Devin Moore:

Or aren't proven, exactly. And if you haven't proven it and your ROI's is a bit shaky. And you're saying just trust me, it's a really hard sell for senior executives at Microsoft, and that's who you're dealing with, right? I mean, we try to be as nimble as possible and we're working on that, but it is tough sometimes. So, I would say a big challenge that we have is making sure that we are getting buy-in from our internal partners and from our external game partners like EA and Rockstar, et cetera, et cetera, so that we can go and test these things. How we're doing this is we're showing engagement, greater engagement than our peers. So, a metric that we use a lot of the time is engagement as a percentage of followers. Which means that per 1000 followers engaging X many and we're constantly beating PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, as Xbox Game Pass because the content that we're pushing out is human authentic and designed to engage, it's not designed to sell. So, we've taken a little bit of a different approach there and it's working and the businesses listening. Yeah and-

Polly Yakovich:

So, then do you have a variety of behaviors that you then would classify as an engagement?

Devin Moore:

Yeah, well of course, right? Social media has direct metrics that are engagements, a Like, a Retweet, a comment are all considered engagements. The big one is a share, right? What we really want people to do as a growing brand to grow brand affinity is to ensure new people are seeing our stuff. So, if we can encourage a share, that means our content is growing in front of a new audience's eyeballs for them to judge, potentially Like, and Follow us in return.

Polly Yakovich:

And how do you get access to competitor information? Are you just aggregating and guessing where they are?

Devin Moore:

So, we are very fortunate in Microsoft to have the number of entire business groups dedicated towards business intelligence. We-

Polly Yakovich:

That must be nice.

Devin Moore:

It's great. It really is great. So yeah, it is absolutely an advantage being in the situation at Xbox and working with our social intelligence partners to ensure that we are understanding Share of Voice, that we're understanding what big beats our competitors are going through, understanding where they're sitting as far as market share, et cetera, et cetera. But that's all very important but it's also really important for us as a digital engagement team to ensure that we're focusing on the consumers that we can actually impact with our owned and operated channels, social media, customer relationship management, websites, that kind of thing. And just really making sure that the content and tone and voice is mirrored across those so there's not a broken up sort of subjective presence on any of those channels.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah. Brand consistency is something I wanted to ask about because it is so challenging, especially when you're moving nimbly and quickly and reactively. What are the, whatever they are, cornerstone pieces or how do you keep your team aligned to the brand in the right way, even as you're-

Devin Moore:

Yeah. It's wild. I mean, honestly, I use an example, funny I'm a big fan of coffee and one of my favorite coffee grounds is from Ballard is called Kuma Coffee. And they've got great branding and it's very, very informative and consistent and attractive and clean and they show up with their logo, the same logo in every place, it's scaled properly, it is in situation properly, it just looks good and you recognize it from afar. That is in Seattle and potentially in other coffee nerd areas around the country. Xbox is in every country. It is being represented through hundreds of social media channels, hundreds of versions of the website.

Devin Moore:

Web is a little bit easier to control because it's a page based sort of presence. Whereas social media is different and branding is a little bit more difficult to control at that level. We have specific brand protocols, a senior brand manager that we work with to ensure that what we're leveraging as far as aesthetics, logos, anything that represents the brand visually is consistent. When that changes, there are mass emails that go out and say, "The tint has changed. Use this, replace everything." But that being said, it's very challenging to remain consistent with such a big brand but we do a decent job. There are teams of people responsible for reviewing things and making sure that everything is aligned before it goes live through all of our owned and operated channels. So, it's definitely a challenge there's things in place that work pretty well but could always be improved.

Polly Yakovich:

Do you have just regular calibration with your content creators to make sure that-

Devin Moore:

Yeah. The thing with Xbox, so we call it the Nexus, if you're a gamer you know what that means, if you're not, it is the green globe X that you see on an Xbox, it's the main button that you press top center and that is like the epicenter nucleus of our brand. As far as that goes, that is a standard piece of content that, or a standard logo that should be on any piece of content that we're pushing out for Xbox, with a few considerations. But yeah, it is a challenge and it's something that we're aware of. I think as modern marketers consistency is key. It's a very busy space, you don't want to show up as three different things, selling the same message when you could join up and be more powerful.

Polly Yakovich:

That's great. I think especially for us marketers who are quite creative and get bored doing things that are the same all the time. And so, just that reminder that that consistency has to be underlying or the rest of it is valueless.

Devin Moore:

Agreed. Agreed and consistency doesn't mean that look, feel, tone, has to be the same every time. Consistency could mean a video mnemonic at the end of every video that you make tying up the video and making sure that you can relate that back to the master brand. I think honestly it is those little absolute consistent pieces that are more powerful because then creativity can be flexed but at the end of the piece of content that you're viewing, or reading, or whatever you realize that it's coming from the same source.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah, that's great. Walk me through a little bit, I mean you're producing a ton of content, so walk me through the content planning process. What periods of time are you biting off in chunks to do a campaign or a theme around, how do you approach planning?

Devin Moore:

So, in the games business, our world revolves around new games coming to our service as Xbox Game Pass and launching as standalone titles that you can now play. So, our marketing revolves around when things are launching. So, we will look at a month, say March, we will find out what things are coming to the service, what titles are launching, if there's a console launching, like we are for Xbox this year is launching the Xbox Series X. I mean, these are big beats that we kind of hang our campaign and marketing strategy on. It's a little bit interesting to plan around a service model when we're not a hundred percent sure of what titles are coming in and going out. But broadly we will look at a month and say, "Okay, this is a tier one title, we're going to create three pieces of tier one content around this. This is a tier two title. Maybe it only needs a Tweet and a key art image that we can share with other people for amplification." We stack rank title importance versus depth of creativity we'll dedicate towards that.

Devin Moore:

So, for Hero Moments, we will be thinking through live video, we will be thinking through GIFs, we'll be thinking through reactive strategies for replies on Twitter and Instagram. We'll be thinking through as many touch points as we can reach in order to better engage our fans. If it's just an awareness play with a tier two or three title, we might just amplify our partner. We might just put out one single native post or something like that. But that all seems simple but there are hundreds of movements like that per month, right?

Devin Moore:

So, we are pretty nerdy about how we track content. We've built a extensive tracker in Excel that we're quite proud of in the nerdiest way possible that just details every single action that we've ever done with a link to that creative when it was approved, how it went, what the metrics were behind that, do we try this again or do we not try this concept again? Things that are in the works are much more detailed, like who needs to approve this next? What are some brand watch outs? All of those kinds of things. And then in the future is also involved in the tracker and we can ask people how they're feeling about creative, creative feedback. What do we need to plus up? What do we want to boost with paid media? All of those lovely details are baked into a single document, which I think is really important. And it would look busy to a first timer coming to it, but we find it's very important for us as a creative team to have a shared location where all of our work lives both past and future, so that we can share that with our product marketing partners, our engineering partners, our PR partners, so that they understand exactly what we're up to. And if there's any actions for them, they can be made aware.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah, I think that's great because I think with a lot of those trackers that every team has built over time, there's always this impulse to simplify it and this is getting too hard to read and look at. But sometimes you just need everything all in one place or you cannot be effective. And it has to have all of the data there.

Devin Moore:

So true.

Polly Yakovich:

So, if you're linking out to other places, then people just aren't going to go there. So, they're not going to have a full picture going to the planning.

Devin Moore:

Yeah, agreed.

Polly Yakovich:

How do you blend paid and organic?

Devin Moore:

Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting. So, when I started working in social media it was not quite a pay-to-play model at that time in 2010, 2011, 2012, you were able to reach organic communities, specifically through Facebook effectively and you cannot do that now. You're talking in an echo chamber on a lot of channels if you don't pay-to-play that being said, there are great tactics, engagement tactics that you can use organically to grow your audience and we leverage those all the time. So, organic social media for a brand like Xbox Game Pass is our bread and butter. That is what we spend the vast majority of our time on. It's incredibly authentic, we're pushing content out there and getting a very clean read whether it's good or not. And by that, I mean whether it's successful as far as engagement goes. You can't hide behind boosted dollars or boosted metrics, you're polled pretty perfectly plainly whether something is successful or not. So, that's our standard litmus test.

Devin Moore:

When we do work with paid media, we often split that into two categories, boosted or performance media. Boosted would be let's amplify this Tweet it's successful, let's promote this Tweet and push it into a like-minded audience it will succeed. That's great. If we're doing a paid media strategy around acquisition to the channel or awareness, we would do A/B testing with Twitter or A/B testing with Instagram to make sure that the content that we're supporting with the bulk of our money is successful at driving, whatever KPI would previously decided upon. But it's interesting I would say for big brands like Xbox paid media is incredibly important for campaign awareness and driving reach and top of funnel, top of sales funnel, funnel brand awareness and affinity. It's really important to drive people down the sales funnel.

Devin Moore:

For Xbox Game Pass a challenge or engagement based, very internet style comedy... it's we have a lot of fun with some of the paid media that we drive, right. We're putting out text only tweets that say, "Follow us for 100% handwritten tweets." That kind of thing, right? And it's like we want to make sure that if we are spending money to promote a message that we really stand behind that message. A lot of paid media is directed at sales, so generating a click through on a call to act and it's click here to do X, click here to do Y and that's great and effective. But I think what's interesting within paid media is that if you are proud of the vibe and authenticity that you've created within a social channel, you should be promoting things that support that directly and do it for engagement purposes and reach purposes to drive more people to be aware of your breath.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah. I think that's great. Particularly when you're talking about not just a subscription service where you're trying to delight people and keep them coming back to you and engaged and feel like part of the club, but for lots of purchases, you are looking for that repeat customer. So, it's not just driving that top of the funnel-

Devin Moore:

No.

Polly Yakovich:

... customer, but I am still curious about what your advice would be because not all people, I mean, you say it's pay-to-play now, and I would agree with you that that's true, not all people are able to work for a brand as well known and as well funded as Xbox. So, if you were working for what I would say, most of us are like a smaller brand, or a B-to-B, or someone just starting out, what would be your advice for the approach to organic and paid that would [crosstalk 00:19:35] started-

Devin Moore:

Right, SEO.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah, you think?

Devin Moore:

Yeah. No, I think... Well, if we're talking about social media specifically, I think the most important thing for new and smaller startup brands is to really understand what channel you need to be on. I would almost say-

Polly Yakovich:

Put all your eggs in a basket.

Devin Moore:

I think maybe not all, but do you really need to be on Facebook? Do you need to really be on LinkedIn? Do you need to be... what is the goal of your social media marketing, right? Are you trying to reach mass? Maybe Twitter's great. Are you a brand that depends very highly on visuals? Are you an Etsy style brand, maybe Instagram is the location that would be most beneficial to you. I think people need to really kind of cut back and honestly, we do this at Xbox. The wild thing is that brands as big as Microsoft Surface, Xbox, Microsoft Office, Excel even these brands are saying like, "Okay, when we started we grabbed every handle on every social media platform." TikTok-

Polly Yakovich:

I love the Excel Pinterest.

Devin Moore:

Yeah, like-

Polly Yakovich:

Nothing more riveting.

Devin Moore:

Nothing more riveting than that. But yeah, it's sort of reconsidering where do you need to be based on what your marketing goals are, I think it is really smart. And if you have paid media dollars, I think it's important to understand that if you've had a successful Tweet and it's going really well and that supports your brand message, you can amplify that Tweet because you know that it's successful within the group that you're marketing to already, it will most likely also perform well with some boosted spend behind it. And that will spread that message and you don't need a ton of money to play. But yeah, it's good to kind of learn what does and doesn't work. I would say don't spend your money as the first thing that you think that you need to do. If you have it, I would consider making sure that you should be on the channels that you are and then strategically placing that money behind where are you want your [inaudible 00:21:36] to end.

Polly Yakovich:

So, you know more about what's going on in a lot of these social channels or digital channels than any of those of us who are managing slightly smaller brands or budget. Which channels are performing best for you and what's the current landscape? What are you learning about them?

Devin Moore:

Yeah, it's really interesting.

Polly Yakovich:

Can you pull back the curtain on-

Devin Moore:

Yeah, it's wild. Like we'll be in meetings and the senior executive will mention TikTok and be like, "What's our TikTok strategy?"

Polly Yakovich:

That was my followup question.

Devin Moore:

Yeah. So, there are-

Polly Yakovich:

Tell me.

Devin Moore:

... a lot of new channels popping up that are wildly popular, right? I think TikTok is something that the Xbox team has been looking at as an opportunity for awhile. And-

Polly Yakovich:

You're going to hire some middle schooler.

Devin Moore:

Well, it's this wild thing where it's risky.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah.

Devin Moore:

We have personally been advised to just be careful and we can't ever count on what our content is going to show up beside on TikTok. We have to be careful about IP, like song IP, because it revolves around music. We have to be careful about a thousand things. HP is one of the only tech brands, that I know of, that's run a reasonably successful TikTok campaign and they've got tens and tens of millions of views on one of their videos within 24 hours. And that's the metric that brings people into TikTok, is those incredibly high, tens of million views within 24 hours. And that is the eyeballs looking at the app directly, that's the engagement of the application. For bigger brands like Xbox and other Microsoft brands, it's a tough space. I actually don't know, currently a big issue that we're facing is, do we develop a TikTok strategy and I can't answer that. I don't know if we will, it's risky. We are not risk averse but there are certain things that we need to express more caution on. And emerging social channels that are incredibly popular for younger individuals is something that we just need to raise a little bit of a flag on and do our due diligence to make sure that it makes sense.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah. What's going on with Instagram?

Devin Moore:

Yeah, Instagram. So, it is absolutely a key channel for us. As Xbox Game Pass is a service that involves video games that have lots of wonderful imagery that we can share and characters and things that are very relatable for our fans. So, it is absolutely one of the main channels that we leverage for a brand like Xbox who have Xbox design lab controllers and beautiful consoles that are custom, et cetera, et cetera. It is absolutely the spot that we want to make sure that we're leveraging to show our consumers cool new stuff. So, Instagram will be a big part of our strategy in FY21, with the stories component with Instagram TV component, with the live component, with filters, with custom filters, being able to be leveraged, with its integration of GIPHY is a great thing where you can upload your own brand GIFs to GIPHY and use them within Instagram Stories. So, it's becoming a little bit more open, playful and yeah, it's my favorite Facebook product I'll say that.

Polly Yakovich:

Do you fear platform changes, algorithm changes, decisions, do you get heads up about them? Do you adapt?

Devin Moore:

No, nobody gets a heads up and they are as surprising to a Fortune five company as they are a ma-and-pa brick and mortar shop.

Polly Yakovich:

So, as an experienced marketer, do you fear them? Or is it a fun challenge about, okay.

Devin Moore:

It's not a fun challenge.

Polly Yakovich:

It's inevitable, right? It's like an act of [crosstalk 00:25:33]-

Devin Moore:

It's so inevitable, right? Like I think it's funny, right? It's like almost social media lore, right? Social media has been an important pillar of a marketing strategy, let alone digital marketing strategy, four years now and I can remember having so many conversations with people that weren't necessarily in the weeds in social media, like my team and I were about algorithm changes, right? This was a big thing when Zuckerberg was like, "You're not going to be able to reach as many of your fans now because we're reducing this and this and this." And everybody freaked out but it had been decreasing for years already. So, if your thumb is hard on that pulse, it's a slow transgression of how it's been sort of rolling out.

Devin Moore:

So, do I fear them? For instance, like The Twitter feed, there's big conversations around that where it's not necessarily chronological, you're getting things injected in there that are done 36 hours ago by a brand or blah, blah, blah. So, that would suck if they pulled the chronological ness of Twitter completely. Instagram is the same way I think. Yeah. It's just social media is evolving and we have to understand that content will always be king. If you produce great engaging content you are going to be successful. The channels that you post that too will help you be successful. I think YouTube is a really good example of this, which is like the age old... people sometimes don't consider YouTube social media. It absolutely is and it's massive, it's Gen Z's search engine. We all know that classic quote that, "You're not using Google if you're 21, you're searching for anything on YouTube." Right? It's just how you search, right? It's just interesting to see that.

Devin Moore:

And YouTube's algorithm genuinely is one of the most intricate things known to man. You can make a lot of money on YouTube from, obviously advertisements and that kind of thing. And on YouTube it's very interesting. Like we work with a YouTube specialist on our team named Gaston Perez who's fantastic and what he's taught us is that everything down to the thumbnail, everything down to the description, every single little nuance of this video, will help you. If you concentrate on these nuances, it'll help you succeed on the platform. And that's a whole day job. Absolutely, that is somebody's main gig is to make sure that what we're pushing out on YouTube is important and that it's successful.

Polly Yakovich:

That's amazing. I loved it that you said content is king, obviously that's music to my ears, but it's also nice for any of us doing any work on a smaller scale that if we're relevant and authentic and have engaging content, we're going to be successful with our audience.

Devin Moore:

A hundred percent.

Polly Yakovich:

A couple more things before I don't keep you all day. What would you say is fading away that used to be really successful that you're just not spending your time on anymore?

Devin Moore:

Great question. Snapchat.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah.

Devin Moore:

Yeah. So, Snapchat has had a really interesting trajectory as far as social channels go. We all remember it's massive valuation, it not selling, it's massive decrease. You might remember the sunglasses that they made that you could snap from. You might remember that being a huge Instagram contender until-

Polly Yakovich:

Instagram stole all their filters.

Devin Moore:

Exactly. But nothing's original-

Polly Yakovich:

Borrowed.

Devin Moore:

... anymore, right?

Polly Yakovich:

Yes it's true.

Devin Moore:

Right? It's so true.

Polly Yakovich:

It's so true.

Devin Moore:

Right? And I will-

Polly Yakovich:

I'm saying that very tongue in cheek.

Devin Moore:

No, no, it's true though and this is the thing and it's been really hard for me to accept this, authenticity and being human is very important on social media. So, being authentic to your brand, being authentic to who your brand ethos is and where you want to go is very important to your community. But it's also to understand successful tactics that other people or brands are using can be augmented and borrowed to work just as well for you. You remember Listicle, the BuzzFeed lists of five, six, seven years ago, how many other brands took that and borrowed that? Mashable-

Polly Yakovich:

All of us.

Devin Moore:

... People Magazine.

Polly Yakovich:

Right.

Devin Moore:

Everybody did, right? It was a successful tactic and everybody used it and 15 comments down, you might get Jim from wherever saying like, "This is ripped off." It's like, fuck, who cares? It doesn't matter anymore. Right? These are the kinds of things that-

Polly Yakovich:

Come on, Jim.

Devin Moore:

Yeah. Come on Jim, get with it. So, I will say that tactics are shared, right? Like you go on Instagram, you see all of the great meme pages and just people are ripping off, sharing and blah, blah, blah. That's the nature of the new social internet, whether we like it or not. So I would say, "Don't be afraid to look at what great brands are doing tactic wise and see if you can shift that slightly to make sense for your brand."

Polly Yakovich:

I love it. So quickly, knowing that you cannot tell the future, teleport yourself five years from now, how do you think that you are successful in the same kind of role?

Devin Moore:

Yeah.

Polly Yakovich:

More channels coming online.

Devin Moore:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), it's really interesting to think-

Polly Yakovich:

Keeping content authentic.

Devin Moore:

Yeah. It's crazy to think about it. I mean-

Polly Yakovich:

AI.

Devin Moore:

I think AI... Listen artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, all of these buzz words that have existed for years, aren't dead. Their AR filters specifically for social media are immensely popular. I think that that will continue to grow. I do see new channels popping up. TikTok came out of nowhere and it's immense. It's just immense the numbers on some of these things are wild. And as marketers and as brands, you see 37 million views on a video, you want that.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah.

Devin Moore:

Right? So-

Polly Yakovich:

You're the heart [inaudible 00:31:48] emoji.

Devin Moore:

Yeah.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah.

Devin Moore:

Do you know what I mean? So, it's very tough to not pay attention to them. Like I was mentioning earlier, do your due diligence, make sure that it's worthwhile for your brand to get involved. But I do see the social media landscape continually shifting. It's a part of celebrity culture, it's a mega part of pop culture, it's a part of community culture. It's really broken down walls and barriers and I see it continuing to do so. I see privacy being a massive issue. I genuinely do. But I also, I see a lot of people, I would love if more people did their due diligence and understood what they've signed their life away to already, right? There's a lot of tin hatting going on with, "Alexa's listening to me do this." Or, "I said this and now it's on Facebook." There's a lot of theories around the privacy issues that come from mega corporations and some of them may be true, but do your due diligence and don't be a Facebook SJW, is that the term?

Polly Yakovich:

How do you work to stay relevant and agile in a big corporation? Like personally.

Devin Moore:

Yeah. It is tough. I mean, yeah. Staying original, and agile, and aware of what's relevant is super challenging and very, very important. I think that looking outside of Redmond is a big one for me. We come into campus, there's 120 buildings, you're eating at a Microsoft café, you're taking a Microsoft shuttle to another Microsoft building and it can be a lot, right? You're putting your Microsoft Surface into your bag and leaving the Microsoft parking garage. And it's like, we call it being Redmond centric it's something that we want to avoid, right? We're a global brand but a large core of our global efforts are executed from Redmond. So, we've really got to be aware of making sure that this makes sense in the UK, that it makes sense in [inaudible 00:34:01]. Of course we produce core things at the central group in Redmond and distribute those off into the markets but I think it's really important that we exercise more global thinking in order to stay relevant is one thing.

Devin Moore:

And agility is making yourself uncomfortable with who you're going to have to contact right away. And by that I mean, being agile means not being afraid of emailing, talking to, setting up a meeting with people that you may not have a direct connection with, but you need to get involved quickly so that you can do a thing. For us that happens all the time, where we want to launch something and we're like, "Hmm, this might... PR might have an opinion. And corporate and legal affairs might have an opinion. We're adding those people to the chain and we require a response."

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah, that's great.

Devin Moore:

Yeah. I think it's also about not being afraid to... a big thing for me in last year that I've tried to really focus in on, is not being afraid to set deadlines for requests and emails. I will say, "Hey, I need a response by this time." Because everybody's busy, we know that and everybody has a billion things to do but sometimes your thing needs attention immediately and it's okay to ask and then just be flexible.

Polly Yakovich:

I love it. Last question and then I will-

Devin Moore:

Okay.

Polly Yakovich:

... release you into the night. What would you say is your super power?

Devin Moore:

Oh, great question. So, my super power is connectivity. And by that I mean, I have the power to bring an engineer, a marketer, a 19 year old intern and a 56 year old aged almost retiring business lead at Microsoft into a room and bring down barriers and find the common thing that we can vibe on. Whether that be, "Oh, you like beer." Or you like food, this capacity, blah, blah, blah, really level setting people to go, "Oh, okay. We're all humans, blah, blah, blah." And then we can talk about the task at hand. I've always tried to bring in people from various different backgrounds and different experiences into one place to drive diverse opinions. So, connectivity but loudly, I'm a talker I'm always one of the louder people in the room. If somebody asks a question, whether I think that my answer's a hundred percent correct, I want to make sure that I say it so that I can get feedback on it.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah.

Devin Moore:

So, that's it. Loud connector.

Polly Yakovich:

That's a great one. So, tell people where they can follow you, find you.

Devin Moore:

Yeah. Awesome. So, I'm DTM Dev Mo on Instagram and Twitter and you can give me a Follow there for general musings. But I tend to creep more on social than actually practically posts now but yeah, I'm on there.

Polly Yakovich:

Yeah. And you're on LinkedIn too.

Devin Moore:

Yeah, on LinkedIn as well.

Polly Yakovich:

Devin Moore.

Devin Moore:

You got it.

Polly Yakovich:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I feel like this has been so helpful for people.

Devin Moore:

Awesome. Yeah. It's been really, really nice to kind of do a brain dump. It's interesting to talk through social media specifically where it is and where it may go. It's an interesting subject.

Polly Yakovich:

It is. Thank you so much.

Devin Moore:

Take care.

Polly Yakovich:

One of the things I really loved about my chat with Devin was just this reminder of the balance and the management between the organic social side and the paid digital media side. I think, especially for those of us who are working on behalf of clients, particularly if the agency is getting paid to post on the digital side and the client is doing the organic social posting, just a reminder about how important it is for that to be really well integrated and not to forget one or the other. I think the other thing that I thought of as he was talking is that, often I see clients on the organic social side forgetting what their content should really be about and they lose that helpful content for their audience. And they make their organic social posts more like cultural and talking about themselves and featuring their own employees. Now, there may definitely be a time and place for that but the content should really, even if it's coming from a brand perspective, it should be the same everywhere. It should be really helpful, it should be really relevant. It should really call on those brand principles like Devin was talking about and what you want your audience to feel, think, interact with the brand about.

Polly Yakovich:

So anyways, I thought that was really super helpful and I hope you did too. I hope you got something out of that that is a really good nugget that you can take into your practice or your marketing today. The other thing I wanted to say before we go is, we just released a brand new ebook at A Brave New, we're really excited about this resource. It's super comprehensive and it digs into exactly how you can use inbound marketing to sell a high value product or service online. So, we hope you will go to our website, download it, enjoy it, and let us know what you think. You can visit our website at abravenew.com to get your free copy. See you next time.

Outro:

Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating and reviewing A Brave New Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts.

 

Polly Yakovich

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OCT 11, 2021

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The Beginner’s Guide to Generating Inbound Leads

Marketing doesn’t have to be painfully intrusive, like getting yet another telemarketing call right when you sit down to dinner with your family.

Read More

OCT 11, 2021

cover

The Beginner’s Guide to Generating Inbound Leads

Marketing doesn’t have to be painfully intrusive, like getting yet another telemarketing call right when you sit down to dinner with your family.

Read More

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