Mozcon 2017: Lisa Myers

Lisa Myers at Mozcon 2017

DISCLAIMER: This post is written as a live blog from Mozcon. There may be typos and grammar to make my high school English teachers weep. Please excuse those … it’s a fast-paced conference with back-to-back sessions and no time for proofing or even proper writing.

Lisa Myers is up after Rand to chat about big links.

She starts by talking about how it got more difficult to get links and specifically good links. She talks about the content volume that was being produced making it difficult to get noticed. She restructured her company to become a creative agency “thinking like 50s ad execs and executing like geeks”.

She reminds up you need to come up with a lot of crappy ideas to come up with great ones.

Business Insider did a piece listing moving ordered by number of onscreen deaths. She took the piece and made a “director’s cut” of the information. Guardians Of The Galaxy actually came in #1. It got HUGE coverage. The fact that the result was surprising is what made it powerful and they got over 700 solid links.

Take a good idea and update it or make it better.

NOTE: “Social may not be a ranking factor but it sure as hell helps you get links.”

She did the same with a billionaires list including data like female and age trends, etc. It got 97 links from sites like BBC and hundreds of thousands of links.

Once that was done and new systems generated for it they launched the top esports campaign built on the same systems and technologies. It got 198 links from strong sites.

This is a key – learn from your strategies and technologies and find ways to duplicate it.

So How Do You Do It?

Types of content that works

Data drives creative but isn’t what converts people. People make decisions on how they feel. It’s called post-hoc justification and that’s the justification of what we want to believe using available information that fits.

So while they use data to drive most of their content, it’s the creative that makes people react to it.

Outreach …

The largest department in her company is outreach. There is no one method that works. They use the tools we all do (Buzzsumo, etc.) It’s not about the volume of emails, it’s about tailoring tot he scenario. For some, a long email would work and for others a short and snappy gets the job done. In some scenarios, volume will work and in others, a more sniperish approach is the way to go.

Fun Fact – people who use Chome and Firefox and 17% more likely to stay at a job because they seek what they want instead of accepting defaults.

You’ll find her slide deck here.