Repurposing Content
David Shifrin of Filament Life Science Communications is helping me by repurposing content I have generated over the last four years on my blog and podcast.
I was lamenting to him that I had to reschedule the episode I had planned to record and publish today because the software I use to record Skype calls wasn’t capturing any audio. He suggested we have a conversation about our project, each recording our own voice locally, to give listeners a peek behind the curtain.
We synchronized the two audio tracks and – Voila! – only 3 hours later we have a podcast where we show you how we are turning blogs into an eBook and nearly 50 podcasts into about 12 more blog posts.
At the same time, we are demonstrating the use audio to create content ad hoc, which I talked about in my last episode. This was a spontaneous conversation that we just decided to record.
About My Guest
David Shifrin is the founder of Filament Life Science Communications where he helps early stage start-ups by crafting a unique and compelling story around their data, their technologies and their ideas. He holds a PhD in Cell Biology from Vanderbilt University.
The Transcript
This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Chris: All right, hello everybody. This is Chris Conner, your host at Life Science Marketing Radio and this is an unusual story. So, I had intended to interview someone for a podcast today and publish it today or tomorrow. And for the first time ever, my recording software has failed and I’ve submitted a ticket to get it fixed. But now we’re going to do something even better. So first of all, you all know I’m a big fan of repurposing, and I am working with David Shifrin of Filament Life Science Communications on repurposing some of my own content. And he was nice enough to say, “Hey, I know you lost your chance at a podcast this morning, do you just want to jump on a call and record 20 minutes about repurposing?” And I’m thinking, “Great,” and since my last podcast was about using audio content and just recording conversations between subject matter experts, this is a perfect example. So that’s what we’re doing. So, David, thanks so much for helping me out.
David: Yeah, you bet, Chris, this is fun. We talk enough as it is, like you said, we might as well turn on the recorder.
Chris: Yeah. So what I’ve asked David to do is I’ve got a…I realized after a couple years of doing this, I have a lot of content on my blog and my podcast and I thought, “How can we turn that into something else?” So I’ve asked David who’s a fantastic writer to help organize my blog posts into an eBook that has more structure than you would find on the blog, right?
David: Yeah. So the basic idea is to compile everything that you have from the past to what I guess it’s three, maybe four years, and turn it into something that can be read, you know, relatively quickly but that’s a fairly coherent…I’m going to use that word, you know, less in a minute into our conversation, but that’s a coherent story for Life Science content marketers, and so that’s what we’re working on.
Chris: Yeah, so and the idea is that I’ve written on many, many topics, now we’ve organized them into an outline that makes sense. So there’s something about planning and something about goal setting, and structuring your content, and repurposing and the whole thing. So there’s a flow to it that you can dive in and look for anything to say, “This is where I’m struggling with my content strategy, I can go right to that part,” and without having to plough through my blog online or whatever, you can find it easily.
David: Right. Yeah, so I don’t remember what the exact number was when we first pulled all of your blog content, but it was in the neighborhood of, I don’t know, 25,000, 30,000 words maybe. And actually now I’m pulling it up here and I think it was significantly more than that. Well, anyway, many, many thousands of words. And as you said, it’s tricky if somebody’s coming to your website and they’re interested in creating content or how to promote content, I mean, they can search for those terms, but they just…it’s hard to find. Blogs are really, I think, useful for somebody who’s kind of a regular visitor and kind of gets the flow of things and take kind of these snapshots, but if somebody wants just like a strategic overview of what’s going on, you know, having a little bit more of a defined piece of content’s a really good way to go. So, yeah that’s essentially what we’re trying to do here.
Chris: Right, so tell them, tell the audience what you’ve been doing, how you’re pulling that together and making it work.
David: So I’m actually going to start by mentioning the software that I’m using which is Scrivener. I’ve been aware of it for years and kind of toyed with some trials on it, some free trials for a long time, but never quite had the relevant use for it, but over the last several months I’ve found how valuable it actually is. So there’s just a free plug for the folks at Scrivener. And what I’ve done is gone through and I… Thank you, Chris, because you had this stuff very well organized to begin with. So you had a pretty good idea of what you wanted this to look like. You had some general topics that come up, you know, pretty regularly in your podcast and in your blog. And it’s been interesting because, you know, as I’ve read through every blog post you’ve ever published, you start to see these common themes emerge whether we realize it or not as we’re creating content. And so it’s just picking out those common themes and then literary putting them in a folder in Scrivener and then naming them. And so that’s kind of the basic idea. And then from there it’s just more kind of massaging and finessing the words so that it’s one cohesive piece of content.
And so what we’ve been doing over the last several weeks is just finding the best place for each blog post, and not just each blog post, but each, you know, section within that. And so one of the interesting things as I said is that there are common themes and quite frankly there is some redundancy. And this is I guess the other part of, you know, a blog versus an eBook versus any other type of content, is you’re going to find areas where there may be some overlap. And so what we’ve been trying to do is just streamline that.
And so in some cases it’s meant completely getting rid of an entire blog post that we thought we were going to use because it’s…all the content is redundant with other stuff and that makes it not as valuable or almost frustrating. You know, people don’t want to reread the same thing. And in other cases it’s taking a paragraph from a blog post and dropping it into another one. And so individual blog posts become chapters, the chapters are grouped by section, and what we’ve ended up with is kind of a four-part… I wanted to have some information right in front of me here.
Chris: We could leave some of this in so people can see how podcasts are actually created and edited.
David: Yeah, that’s fine by me. It’s sort of scary as the one fumbling around, but yeah, I mean this is…
Chris: We don’t have to leave it all in.
David: I mean, if this is going to be behind the scenes, let’s do it. What do they say, “Be vulnerable,” right? So okay, so what I was getting at there is that we’ve ended up with this, actually, six-part series…six-part eBook and the sections are…I’m a fan of alliteration because it’s cheap and easy, but I’ve got the prelude, we have a section on planning content, the next section is on producing content, then promoting it, then repurposing it, and then the last one which I thought was pretty cool, Chris, that you came up with, was people and how to kind of work with people on your team as a marketer and a couple of other things. So, you know, it’s finding the common threads and figuring out a way to turn them into, I guess, a bigger whole. And as of right now, we have a…, not that word count is a relevant metric, it’s kind of like Twitter followers, right, it doesn’t mean anything if they’re not engaged or they’re good words. But right now we’re sitting on a draft eBook that’s in the neighborhood of 35,000 words and I think is a pretty nice introduction to Life Science Marketing.
Chris: Nice, and don’t sell yourself short. So the other thing David’s doing for me, of course he’s doing the massaging as he said, reorganizing, moving paragraphs here and there, but also writing introductions to each section and transitions between the chapters to make sure it all flows nicely. And of course having seen a draft, you know, I know that that’s going really well, and an important part of making this content as good as it can be.
David: Yeah, so that’s been an interesting thing from my standpoint. I mean, before we started recording this we were talking about former Life Science Marketing and their, you know, their work really revolves around archetypes, and so one of the challenges that I have as a writer especially in situations like this where I’m ghostwriting a non-technical piece is kind of figuring out your personality, your archetype as it were, and try to write in that voice for those intros. And I don’t know that I can pull that off for, you know, an entire book, but it’s been pretty fun to kind of learn how to write as Chris Conner for, you know, for a page or two.
Chris: Well I certainly think it’s working. So let’s tell them the other thing we’re doing. So I… Well, you can tell them about what we’re doing with the podcast if you want.
David: Yeah, so the second part of this project that Chris and I are working on is taking the transcripts of all of the podcasts that he has done and again grouping them by topic. And so as I talk here, I’m going to switch over to the other Scrivener file that I’m working in, and this is actually how our conversation this afternoon started, I sent him a Skype…I sent Chris a Skype message, asking for a transcript that I couldn’t find and a couple of other files and whatever and here we are an hour later recording this. But Chris wanted to repurpose his podcast and so for those of you listening, you know he’s been doing this for a long time and putting out great new interviews on a regular basis.
Well, some people love audio content, some people would rather read the transcripts and that’s great, I mean, people have different ways of processing information, but there’s also huge amount of topical information that is…that you can extract from multiple different interviews. So I guess what I’m trying to say here is what we’ve done, best way to describe it is by explaining what we’ve done, right? So Chris went through his podcasts and found common themes, again this idea of umbrella themes for different pieces of content, and then grouped them. And so what I’m working on now in addition to the other eBook is taking chunks out of the interviews that Chris has done over the last several years and instead of grouping them by interviewee, grouping them by topic. And so things like careers and life science marketing, you know, how to find a career or how to hire people, we’ve got a section on marketing automation, and that’s going to include stuff from Guy Page, and Marilyn Cox, and a few others, leadership, storytelling, visual content, branding, all of this stuff. And in some cases, the same interview has turned up in multiple sections because, you know, these people that were interviewing or providing really interesting information on a number of different topics. And so again, it’s going through and finding those common threads and then regrouping them, and we’re going to end up with 10 or 12 pretty extensive blog posts that are going to give people a really, hopefully, interesting look at different aspects of content marketing.
Chris: Right. So I’m really looking forward to putting more content up on the blog. My thinking in contacting David was, when I stopped writing the blog for the most part or an extreme slow down if you will, I had said pretty much everything I wanted to say about content marketing, which was the focus at the time. But then having talked to I think now 42 or 43 different individuals in almost 50 episodes of the podcast, I found there’s a lot of information in there and as David described, it weaves through. You know, there are threads that cross multiple interviews and I thought we could create some great posts with quotes and chunks of interviews from other experts which is the whole reason of starting the podcast, was to curate ideas from other people in the industry because I certainly don’t have them all, I don’t have a tiny fraction of them, but I know somebody who does.
And so that’s what I’m really excited about. So we’re repurposing blogs into eBooks, and podcasts into blogs, and podcasts into transcripts, and webinars into podcasts, so every possible way. And the one thing I want to say just from a general content marketing standpoint is that outside of the life sciences, I see a lot of, what would I say, content producers who have a very tight message and find many, many ways to present the same thing. And I think sometimes in life science, we’re always looking to say something new. And maybe that dilutes our message, or at least we might be afraid to think, “We already said that, we have a piece of content on that.”
But as you think about your own behavior, first of all, you don’t read everything that comes through your email. You don’t read every piece of content you have a chance to maybe because it’s just not the right day. And then it goes…it falls off the bottom of your screen, but if it showed up again a month later and the timing were right, you’d read it and happily so. So I want to encourage people to think about this idea that even though you feel like you’ve already said it and you don’t want to annoy people, there’s low risk of that by repeating yourself. And so I see a lot of very successful marketers outside of our industry, you know, taking that same message and just coming at it a thousand different ways. And so that’s what I’m trying to do here.
David: Yeah, that’s great, I love that. An example of that is Jay Baer, I think it’s Jay who has the…he has a…actually he has multiple blog posts and audio, I mean, he does this… But again, getting kind of meta, he has a whole series of pieces of content on how you can make multiple pieces of content out of one thing. And I think the number for him is seven, where it’s like you can get a, you know, X number of Twitter updates and, you know, blog, and then a video, and then an audio, like a mini audio postcard. I mean, that’s how he does everything and he’s been enormously successful. And yeah, stuff just needs to be reinforced. I mean, you know, that’s why Chevy advertises every single commercial break, you know, during an NFL game. Like it or not, people need that kind of reinforcement.
Chris: Yeah, I noticed the same thing during the Ryder Cup. I was watching that a couple weeks ago and I’m thinking, after three days, “I’ve seen that commercial, like, 20 times, I got the message.”
David: Yeah, it always worries me when my wife and I’ll sit down and watch TV together and she goes, “Oh that’s a really nice ad.” And I’m thinking, “I’ve been seeing that ad for a month and a half.” Spending too much time in front of the TV. Anyway, yeah.
Chris: So that’s pretty much all we wanted to talk about. The other thing was just to give you a peak behind the scenes at one, how we as content creators think about creating content, and also…now I’m going to stumble, again to reinforce this idea about repurposing and every different way you can do it, and finally thinking about how to use audio to create content, which really…you know, I don’t expect every company to start a podcast, I wish they would, with some thought behind it, honestly, and a clear goal. But using audio as I talked about in my last episode, just to get words out, I mean, David or I could have sat down and written a story like the one we just told you, but it would’ve taken a lot longer and been a lot less fun, and now we still have the opportunity to create a written piece of content. And in fact, to get meta again, this conversation’s going to go into the project that David just talked about.
David: So we’re just making the most out of everything we do. So if you’re at work and if you didn’t listen to the last podcast and you’re trying to get information out of a subject matter expert, just think about pulling out your phone and recording a conversation with them. Ask them, you know, what’s interesting about the new product. Ask what kind of problem it solves. Ask your market managers what, you know, people are interested in and you will get content. And you may not be able to transcribe it directly, you should transcribe it and then turn it into something else, but you’ll have plenty of things to help you produce the content you need much faster sooner than you would and more engaging than you would have otherwise.
David: Yeah. Yeah, so if I could… So I guess three things come to mind and they’re all a little bit off topic. I normally wouldn’t do this, but I guess since we’re going behind the curtain and kind of doing stream of consciousness…
Chris: Yeah, let it rip.
David: …hopefully you’ll… Okay, great. Thanks for indulging me. So one thing based on what you…or tied to what you just said, Chris, is you talked about asking questions and taking notes. That is one of the best places to get content. So whether you’re talking to your marketing or your sales team, you know, people internally, or if you’re talking to potential customers, or even customers that you lose, ask one question, you know, what…a lot of time you’ll see the, “What is your biggest problem in X,” and record five minutes with that. Well, now all of the sudden, every time you have one of these conversations, you ask that question, you have a whole series of FAQs, or if your sales team goes out and every time, you know, what…ask them, “What’s the number one question that you get about our product?” And now you can turn that into a blog post about your product or you can…if you’re asking customers directly, you can turn that into a series of FAQs or troubleshooting things or just, you know, what are the big questions in the industry today. So that turns into a whole another set of content that can be repurposed.
And then the other thing that I guess I would say is… Oh right, so yeah, my stumble actually reminded me what it was. The second thing was humanize your company, humanize your brand. I don’t know how much editing Chris is going to end up doing on this conversation before he posts it here, you know, by the end of the afternoon, but you’ve been listening to us and kind of fumbling around and I tend to ramble. That is kind of awkward, certainly, and it may frustrate people, but there is definitely something about having these kind of transparent conversations. It doesn’t have to be exactly what we’re doing now, but, you know, find a new way to put kind of a human spin on what you’re doing. Not everything has to be robotic and technical, and I think that’s really important. Again, as you were saying, Chris, a minute ago, like, people in other industries do this, why don’t the life sciences? And we’re so focused on the numbers and the data, we forget about being human.
So, you know, find a way to present kind of the human side of your company. And then the last thing that I will say, and this goes back to the eBook that we’re working on, this is totally divergent from everything else we’ve been talking about. One of the things that you will see throughout the eBook, we start with it, we end with it and it’s all throughout, is this idea of a content map, a marketing strategy that takes people through the customer journey. And one of the points that Chris makes regularly throughout the blog is, “Don’t create more content than you need to.” And so part of that is repurposing, you know, take one piece of content and turn into something else, and that’s going to save a lot of effort. But the other thing is, as he said, if you know the goals, then you can be strategic and very, very focused about what you actually need to do.
But the other side of that is it gives you a little bit of flexibility when things aren’t working or things go wrong, to do something else. And so I’m going to use this as a specific example, you know, Chris has kind of his content map, he knows the topics that he wants to hit and he’s going to find ways to do that. And so today, your software blew up and so this turned into a completely unexpected piece of content that we’re recording but it completely fits within your map. And so, you know, there’s kind of this idea that if you set some boundaries, you can have a lot of flexibility within those boundaries and have some fun with it.
Chris: Nice. So I want to go back to a couple of things David said, and the first one is about when he’s asking maybe the sales people or directly your customers, the great thing about this, especially if you get it recorded, is it’s really beneficial in content marketing to use the words your customers use to talk about your product or their problems because those are the words they would use when they’re searching. So not just what you think they said or what they meant, but to really think very hard about what are the actual words they use and how can we put those exact phrases into our content. And then the other thing is exactly what he said about humanizing your brand. Your customers will appreciate it. I know maybe your brand monitors to be polite, could struggle with some content that’s a little bit like what David and I are doing here today because it is a little loose, but on the other hand…
David: This is perfect, Chris, I know what you’re talking about.
Chris: …you have to realize that your salespeople and other people are out there, you know, speaking presumably without anyone listening to them. All the time. So unless, you know, you’re bugging their briefcases, or their iPads, which I know is possible, please don’t do that, there are real conversations going on, and the salespeople are the people in your company that your customers like the most, they have those relationships and they’re real. So why can’t we bring that in to your R&D people, and your applications specialists, and your marketing…your product managers and your CEO? This is what makes your company real, and that’s about as powerful a branding as you can do, right?
David: Yeah, I think that’s it, that’s great.
Chris: So I want to thank David Shifrin from Filament Life Science Communications again because this is just a fantastic gift he gave me on a day when I just could not get the software that has worked reliably for two years to work. And kudos to the software because it tells you immediately that it’s not capturing audio, so otherwise we could have had…I could have had an hour long conversation with somebody who went to a lot of trouble to talk to me and then said, “Sorry, can we do that again?” So that’s the good news, the bad news is the software didn’t work, and the best news is that David bailed me out and I think is…we’ve created what I think is going to be a fantastic episode. So thanks very much, David.
David: Yeah, man, it’s been fun, thanks. We have a…between the two of us piecing this together, we’re going to have four or five files and probably about a gig worth of audio to patch together, this is going to be good.
Chris: Yeah, and I have a feeling we’re going to do this again. I hope so. We’re going to find a way to make it happen.
David: Yeah, absolutely, any time. Hit me up on Skype. And like I said, we have these conversations pretty regularly, we might as well record them.
Chris: All right. Oh and in case you’re wondering how I did this when I said my recording software failed, the software that failed records through Skype, but David and I each recorded our own voice on our own computers and then we’re syncing up the tracks. As always, if you liked the show, please tell two friends and if you would like to see more of this type of content, go to lifesciencemarketingradio.com and scroll down to the bottom of the first page on the right you can subscribe to my newsletter where it says, “The best of LSMR”. Thanks for joining me, we’ll talk to you in a couple weeks.
