Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
Tommy serves as the President at ThreeWill. In this role, he works with his leadership team to hire the best people, find the right business opportunities, and ensure that ThreeWill delivers for our clients on projects.
Content Marketing Plans for 2019 Transcript
| Danny Ryan: | Welcome to the Two Bald Brothers and a Microphone podcast. This is your host, Danny Ryan. I am here with Tommy Ryan. How are you doing, Tommy Ryan?
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| Tommy Ryan: | I’m doing well. Still bald today.
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| Danny Ryan: | Still bald? Yeah? Bald and beautiful.
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| Tommy Ryan: | That’s right.
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| Danny Ryan: | Bald and beautiful, brother. Love it.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah. I get a free haircut every day.
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| Danny Ryan: | Excellent. Excellent. And sorry you’re feeling a little under the weather today, but-
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s all right.
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| Danny Ryan: | … I think for doing these, it’s fine. This is fun, making this transition over to video, and I had a great time with you, and talking to Sam, and making the move, this year, over towards more video-based content. So I’m excited about that. And wanted to talk to you, in this episode, what the plans are for this year. We’ve had some conversations in the podcast about, you know, I took some of the Yoast training last year, and looking at things from an SEO perspective, and organizing our content. And we went through what were some of the key decisions that we needed to make.
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| Danny Ryan: | I’ve gotten through to the end of the year where I’ve basically reorganized a lot of the content that we created on our website, primarily through our blog, and then also through some of the podcasts that we’ve created, and videos, and different things like that. And one of the key things that you do is you create what’s called cornerstone content. That’s content that’s … I like to think of it as if somebody came to our website, what are the pieces of content that you want to be known for? And they package it up, which I like, which is creating guides, and I like to think of ThreeWill as a guide to all the stuff that Microsoft has with Microsoft 365, here to help people wherever they might be on that journey.
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| Tommy Ryan: | That’s right.
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| Danny Ryan: | So, part of this whole looking at our content was coming up with what do I think are the five key categories that we have out there? And creating guides for those five key categories. And what we ended up with was, and I’ll read them off from here. I’m looking at OneNote right now, which is we’re creating a guide for migrating to Microsoft 365. Part of this is it’s fun to talk about Microsoft and the Cloud and all that stuff, but if you’re not over on it, you can’t take advantage of it. So, we’ve seen through the years that this is just something that’s key for us to do, is to help make sure people have been migrated over into Microsoft 365.
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| Danny Ryan: | And then, the next one is the one we’ve been doing for so many years, which is the SharePoint intranet. So it’s using SharePoint as our platform, building out collaborative sites, starting out with team sites, and then department sites, and then overall company sites, or portals, or intranets, whatever the local way that you call the place where you’re collaborating together within your organization. The one for that is, I rode off of what [Bow] created a couple years back, which was Award-Winning SharePoint Intranet.
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| Danny Ryan: | So, we have a guide up on our website. You can nab it right now. It’s already up there, which is the Ultimate Guide to Creating Award-Winning SharePoint Intranets. And then, the next one … So, that’s the second one. The next one is we’re seeing the term digital workplaces, and boy, just through the years, it’s very similar things to what we’re doing, just might have a different name for it. For us, it’s just the place where people get work done inside of an organization.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Right. Same business problems there, it’s just a fresh new term to look at it. And I think it broadens it beyond just a SharePoint site. It becomes your workplace where you get things done. So, that promise of trying to get things in that portal that you have it connected to other parts of your organization. A lot of times, it’s not all Microsoft. It’s SAP and other enterprise systems where people get work done. And I think Microsoft’s really thinking of it from a cloud that is more broader than just Microsoft’s cloud, which is exciting to be a part of that.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yep. Really, this all feeds underneath the umbrella of work together better. I mean, it’s collaboration, it’s individual productivity along with team productivity. And how do we help people inside of these organizations take advantage of technologies to help them to do that?
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| Danny Ryan: | So, the digital workplaces is key. There, I think one of the things I came to the conclusion with, which is our focus in on using the term Microsoft 365, because it encompasses … I think in the past we’ve primarily focused in on SharePoint, and now, with the advent of things like teams and people, also for large organizations using Yammer, and some of the other technologies like Planner, and Flow, and some of the other things that are coming into play, really all these things are needed for the digital workplace. So, that’s the term that we’re using, and I think it’s also one being utilized within the industry as well.
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| Danny Ryan: | The next one is, it hearkens back to our early days of creating applications, and custom apps, and that’s creating custom Microsoft 365 apps. And that’s really about line of business apps, and utilizing a lot of these technologies to build something on top of it that departments can use for line of business purposes. So, I see that as a key thing that we’re doing. We’re wanting to … Within an organization, we’ve got a lot of passion around that.
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| Danny Ryan: | Then, the fifth one is, I called it Scrum and Successful Projects.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I like it. I like it.
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| Danny Ryan: | We’re going to have the Ultimate Guide to Scrum and Successful Projects. There’s an aspect of this, this is back to the Choose to Succeed, the heart of why a lot of people come to us, because we’re technology experts, but then in the end the reason why, the experience they get with us, has more to do with our process than it does the technology.
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| Danny Ryan: | So, we’ve got a lot of content that we’ve already developed, and this is something I’ll be utilizing you, Bruce, Bob, Rob, all to help out with creating content and updating that guide. And what I’m going to end up doing, from a tactical standpoint, is taking, we’ve got the Approach page that’s underneath the company and I’m going to pull that over into the guide, and see about … So, some of this is repurposing content that we’ve already created.
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| Danny Ryan: | Right now I’m in the middle, I spent a couple of hours yesterday working on the Microsoft 365 Digital Workplace Guide, and I’m repurposing some of the stuff that [inaudible] materials, and I’m basically-
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s material that was ahead of its time.
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| Danny Ryan: | It was ahead of its time.
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| Tommy Ryan: | And now it’s time to make it shine.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yes. And so, I’m taking that and just, you know. And there’s parts of that that might not pertain any more, but then there’s a lot of this, you know, Pete’s vision of this new business operating system is it really is, you know, this is where business gets things done, which is really what a digital workplace is all about.
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| Danny Ryan: | So, taking some of the content that we’ve already developed and repurposing it and getting it into a form of these guides, and then the last piece of all this is linking up the content that we already have developed to these guides, and so that everything points back to it. From a SEO standpoint, this is what they consider creating structure within your site, and it helps Google to know what are the important pieces of content on your site?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Right.
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| Danny Ryan: | And so, those guides would be something that we’re keeping up to date, constantly looking at refreshing and making sure that they have the latest information in there. And then, we’re also thinking about what are the different blog articles we can create that help support that guide, and adding to those as well. So that’s our plan for the year, and right now I’m excited about getting those up, and out, and up onto the website. I’m about halfway there with the guides that we’re putting up, and that’s a really large part of what I want to focus in and am focusing in on right now.
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| Danny Ryan: | We also, when I looked at reorganizing the content, we recognized a couple of other categories that were out there. One fell underneath all of the migration work that we do, which, we’ve been helping companies migrate from other platforms into Microsoft 365, so we’ve got a whole set of platform migration categories that I want to develop over the course of this year. Starting with … We’ve already got the Jive one, so I’m repurposing. We’ve already got the White Paper. We’ve got the Guide. We’ll get that up.
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| Danny Ryan: | And then, going after some other platforms where people might want to migrate from, including Slack, Google sites, Facebook For Work, Salesforce, Chatter, Community Cloud and some other different platforms that a company might want to migrate over from into Microsoft 365. So that’s something we’ll be working on this year, you and I. And I think I’m coming up with the plan around that, and I’ve broken it off into different, you know, what do we want to work on first, and when do we work on those things?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s one that really helps build initial relationships, are those migration paths, to get the people into Microsoft 365, because at the end of the day, if they’re not there, we can’t show them the value, if their content’s not there. So, it’s kind of the necessary work to start the journey with the client [inaudible] with Agile, because I really think that’s what makes our customer love us the most, is the way we approach them, and it’s the relationship that we build through a very lightweight methodology that’s effective, and just enough process to allow people to organization around a key problem, get it solved. And I think a lot of organizations are hungry for that. They see it, they desire it, but they don’t exactly experience it. And I think we can make agile real within organizations. I think that helps our relationship with our customers.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah. And I think with something like that, is you can write about it and talk about it for so long, part of it, people need to experience it.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah. So, I think that’s where … We’ve had some discussions looking at this year, and folks who’ve been listening to the podcast know that we’re putting [40X] into play here at ThreeWill, and we’re having discussions about our [inaudible] for the year, and coming together as a group. And it was really neat the other day, we had everybody together. We were talking about … It was getting into our uniqueness and things that we can focus in on for this year, and it was really all about Agile. It was about speed. There was also an aspect of this where, as an organization, where somebody is able to see … I think the word was agility.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yes.
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| Danny Ryan: | That was the word Bob kept on-
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| Tommy Ryan: | That’s right.
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| Danny Ryan: | That was the key aspect that he saw with us. And with that, I think I look at it, you know, you should be selling the same way you deliver. And so, what are the things that, when somebody from the get-go interacts with us, how can they experience agility? And I think, for us, it’s like how quickly do they get back an estimate? How detailed is that estimate? How much feedback do we get from them on that estimate? And so it’s like, how can we show agility even before they engage us? How can they experience that from us from the get-go? From starting out and even before we’ve started a project together?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah. And I think you see some of the concepts that are agile that I think we gravitated towards, is making key commitments. Agile creates that framework where you can have those frequent touchpoints and schedule touchpoints to make and keep commitments, and build momentum that way. I think you want that in the process of talking to a customer about how to help them. That they’ve got a problem, that there’s an anxiety associated with that, and if you can put structure around how do we get to an answer to that, and do that in an iterative way where we don’t go crazy over the estimate and spend three weeks building something out. We try to do something within a couple of days, and then get back in front of the customer and make sure we’re understanding the problem. And then inspecting and adapting to what we hear when we review our initial understanding.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yep. Yep. Yep. Just a couple other things, then we’ll wrap up. One was, again, coming back to the content that we had up on the website, and I’m just going to read them off here. What I ended up doing was creating 12 of these topics. I called them Microsoft 365 Sub-Topics, but they’re really just different aspects of, if I use Microsoft 365 digital workplaces, this is just 12 different areas that are sub-topics as it relates to Microsoft 365 and creating digital workplaces. And those topics were integration, security, workflow, search, mobile, social, video, governance, business intelligence, document generation, UI, UX, and branding.
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| Danny Ryan: | So, what we’ve done for those topics is, again, organized all of our content underneath those, and what I wanted to do for this year was, with each one of our monthly newsletter that goes off, it just focuses in on one of those topics. Also this, from, I’ve got to create a cornerstone content for each one of these. So these are at least 400 word articles for each of them that I’m creating. My thought was for that month, we’ll focus in on that, creating the cornerstone content, and that being part of what I send out in the newsletter. So, I’m educating everybody through the year on these 12 topics. It gives me some structure for what are we … You know, I’m not just sending out a, “Hey, how’s it going? I have a great [crosstalk]
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| Tommy Ryan: | That’s right.
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| Danny Ryan: | “Hey, it’s Danny. Give me a call sometime.”
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah. Yeah. That becomes more sales-y than consultative.
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| Danny Ryan: | Exactly. Yeah. And part of that, I want people to sign up for the newsletter because they’re getting some sort of benefit out of it. And up to this point, I think we’re doing good. I’m sharing what the latest blog posts are and what the important things are that I think people need to know.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, there’s definitely some value there.
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| Danny Ryan: | But this, I think, for me, just provides a little bit of structure for the year. And something I can focus in on covering for that month. So I’ve created a plan for this, and you and I reviewed it for the Q1, Q2, Q3, and dividing all this content that I want to create, and putting it into different buckets for the quarter, and then putting that into creating a planner. We’re going to put it into a planner, and then working through that.
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| Danny Ryan: | And I think there are also … Let me hit this, and then I want to talk a little bit about developing the content. We also had some categories on the website. I balled all of the ones that were about ThreeWill into this Inside ThreeWill category. So, if it was stuff that was metadata about ThreeWill, I want to just have that overarching place that I put things. And then I had one, our culture is vital to us, so I kept one that was a ThreeWill Culture, so we’ve got a category that’s all ThreeWill culture related.
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| Danny Ryan: | Then, I also kept, there was a ThreeWill Partners category that I kept, as well. So, I brought those down to three important ones, one that’s a catch-all, and then about our culture, and then about our partners.
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| Danny Ryan: | The last aspect of this is we want to do, as the year progresses, do … You and I talk about these different subjects, maybe pull in different subject matter experts, pull in folks from ThreeWill, but what’s nice about this as well is I feel like I want to be a little more proactive with people about the content that we’re creating. Up to this point, I’ve tried to provide some people some guidance on what’s a good blog post look like, and it’s typically what did you Google last week, and let’s package that up and make it available to the world, and give back in that way.
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| Danny Ryan: | But also just thinking of, with creating these guides, is I’m now … Like for Kirk, we talked with Kirk yesterday. He’s aware of these guides, and now I’m giving him some guidance on I need you to make sure that these are up-to-date, and this is important. It’s not like … Because often I feel like people write a blog post and it’ll be done and we wouldn’t update it in three years.
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| Tommy Ryan: | It allows us to curate some things.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah. Curate, and make sure, you know, differentiate between this is really important content versus I wrote this up and it’s from a couple years back, and I’m not going to be updating it. It’s just up and out there. And then also, what I was trying to do last year was saying, for some of the more popular content, or some of the content that looked like it needed updating, let’s go back and revisit those and maybe do an update on those things.
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| Danny Ryan: | Then, I also wanted to, as we looked at this year, is to be a little bit more proactive inside of ThreeWill and letting people know where do we need content, and what can you write on? I’d love for people … People are so busy on projects, and we have to do that. We got to keep the lights on. But trying to find out from folks inside of ThreeWill, within, for instance, those Microsoft 365 sub-topics, is there somebody who wants to lead up talking about Microsoft 365 video? Or is there any way for us to have different subject matter experts on different areas. And it’s difficult, because I think the nature of what we do is everybody has got to almost be that utility player. Right? Because they don’t know what their next project is that they’re going on. So it’s sometimes difficult for people to do that.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, but someone can sign up for let me help figure that out for the team. And maybe they are not the person that’s on the project, but they’ve enabled someone to know what’s out there and what’s important.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yep. So, I appreciate this. This is our laying out our plans for the year. I’m excited about moving the podcast to video, and then if some of these topics are, if you’re in the world of creating Microsoft 365 digital workplaces, or looking for somebody to help you out with this, we are out here. We’d love for you to subscribe if you’re watching this on YouTube, to subscribe to this channel. And I’ll add the … I don’t know if we have any links that we’ll need to add for this. Maybe last year’s, I’ll link up to last year’s discussion about what we’re creating for the year. But appreciate you taking the time to do this. Hope you feel better, Tom-
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| Tommy Ryan: | Thank you. Thank you, Dan.
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| Danny Ryan: | And we’ll pick back up next week. And thank you, everybody, for watching and listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
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| Tommy Ryan: | All right. Bye-bye.
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