- Camille Ricketts and Sonal Choksi discuss measuring the effectiveness of content
- They emphasize the importance of tying measurement to goals and strategy
- Metrics like time on site, engagement, and uptake are valued over page views
- The length of content is not as important as information density and conveying insights
- They discuss using subheads, pull quotes, and bullet points to improve readability and engagement
- They mention the challenges of measuring effectiveness and the importance of editorial instinct
- They also mention the importance of social sharing and tracking influencers in the space

- The speaker discusses the importance of influencers and their follower-to-followee ratio in determining their influence.
- They mention the use of Slack to manage mentions and the issue of dealing with trolls and irrelevant tags.
- The speaker explains that their firm has a strong focus on building their brand through content marketing, with a cohesive strategy and a network-based model.
- They suggest not being shy to reach out to influencers and taking advantage of opportunities to engage with them.
- The speaker shares a trick of creating lists on Twitter to find true fans in different industries.
- They discuss the importance of finding what you do well and prioritizing your efforts in content marketing.
- The speaker mentions that their firm focuses on long-form text content, aiming to provide detailed advice in a literary style.
- They emphasize the importance of having a guiding North star and a clear purpose in content marketing.
- The speaker highlights the need to understand the goals and purpose behind content marketing before choosing the best format.

The video discusses the importance of executing ideas and making choices in content creation. It emphasizes the need to understand the audience and their preferences in order to choose the appropriate medium. The video also suggests various methods for gathering information and insights, such as holding listening sessions, utilizing customer advisory boards, attending events, and actively listening to conversations. It highlights the value of always listening and being aware of what is happening in the industry. The video concludes by emphasizing the importance of adding value and starting or contributing to meaningful conversations in content creation.

- Crowdsourcing editorial can be detrimental to content creation as it lacks a clear point of view.
- Creativity is limited when content is solely driven by data and popular demand.
- The success of a long-form writing piece on WeChat demonstrates the importance of trusting one's instincts and investing time and effort into content creation.
- The production time for a piece can range from several weeks to three months.
- An editorial calendar is crucial for balancing reactive and proactive content creation.
- Creative energy and focus are essential for producing high-quality content.
- The maker's schedule, manager's schedule concept can help tech founders understand the importance of dedicated creative time.
- Managing distractions, such as notifications, is crucial for maintaining focus.
- Knowledge workers need to prioritize and manage their time effectively to maximize productivity.

- The speaker discusses the benefits of a work-from-home culture and how it allows for productivity and recognition of output.
- The speaker shares a three-tier framework for conducting interviews, focusing on asking deeper questions to elicit valuable responses.
- The speaker discusses the importance of grounding conversations with shared language and precise definitions in the context of discussing new technologies and innovations.
- The speaker emphasizes the need to make interviewees feel comfortable and to break the script in order to have engaging conversations.
- The speaker mentions the challenges of dealing with negative comments and the importance of not being deflated by low views or engagement.
- The speaker highlights the value of evergreen content and the need to add value to the conversation rather than being reactive or following trends.

- The importance of discipline in content creation is emphasized, focusing on what not to do rather than what to do.
- Leveraging customer stories in marketing content is discussed, highlighting the use of customer success stories as examples for aspiring entrepreneurs.
- The importance of being useful and authentic in content creation is emphasized, with a focus on data-driven narratives and avoiding sales pitches.
- The potential for messaging native content in platforms like WhatsApp is mentioned as a future opportunity in content marketing.

- The speaker finds the flow of content through social networks fascinating and sees potential for future exploration in this area.
- They discuss the rise of long form newsletters, which have defied traditional thinking about email newsletters.
- They emphasize the personal nature of email and its enduring relevance.
- The speaker believes that attention is a competition in the media landscape and that differentiation is important.
- They mention a favorite piece they published called "Radical Candor" and the importance of frameworks in storytelling.
- The speaker and the interviewer discuss their favorite pieces and the importance of specificity and domain knowledge in content.
- The speaker reads a lot of historical nonfiction, while the interviewer enjoys fantasy novels and fiction.

- The importance of measuring the effectiveness of content and tying it to goals and strategy is discussed.
- Metrics like time on site, engagement, and uptake are valued over page views.
- The use of subheads, pull quotes, and bullet points to improve readability and engagement is mentioned.
- The challenges of measuring effectiveness and the importance of editorial instinct are discussed.
- The importance of social sharing, tracking influencers, and managing mentions on platforms like Slack is highlighted.
- Building a brand through content marketing with a cohesive strategy and engaging with influencers is suggested.
- The importance of finding what you do well and prioritizing efforts in content marketing is emphasized.
- The need for a guiding North star and clear purpose in content marketing is highlighted.
- The importance of understanding the audience and their preferences in content creation is emphasized.
- Various methods for gathering insights, such as holding listening sessions and attending events, are mentioned.
- The value of always listening and being aware of industry trends is emphasized.
- The importance of adding value and starting meaningful conversations in content creation is highlighted.
- The potential drawbacks of crowdsourcing editorial and solely relying on data-driven content are mentioned.
- The success of a long-form writing piece on WeChat demonstrates the importance of trusting instincts.
- The importance of an editorial calendar, creative energy, and focus in content creation is discussed.
- Managing distractions and maximizing productivity through effective time management is highlighted.
- The benefits of a work-from-home culture and the value of recognizing output are mentioned.
- A three-tier framework for conducting interviews and the importance of shared language and precise definitions are discussed.
- Dealing with negative comments, focusing on evergreen content, and the importance of discipline in content creation are emphasized.
- Leveraging customer stories, being authentic, and avoiding sales pitches in content creation are highlighted.
- The potential for messaging native content in platforms like WhatsApp is mentioned.
- The fascination with the flow of content through social networks and the rise of long-form newsletters are discussed.
- The importance of differentiation in the media landscape and the use of frameworks in storytelling are mentioned.
- The personal reading preferences of the speaker and interviewer are shared.

- The speaker doesn't think that their writing is directly influenced by anything in particular, but they share the philosophy of borrowing influences from different fields, as seen in the movie "Bring It On".
- The speaker is currently interested in physics, specifically quantum entanglement, and has been impressed with how physicists can explain complex concepts using metaphors.
- They mention several physicists and writers who have written about analogies and the importance of using them in explaining esoteric concepts.
- The speaker believes that there is a lot to be learned from how scientists who are writers write, as they are similar to tech founders in their approach.

The speaker discusses their philosophy of borrowing influences from different fields, using the example of the movie "Bring It On". They are currently interested in physics, particularly quantum entanglement, and are impressed by how physicists use metaphors to explain complex concepts. They mention the importance of using analogies in explaining esoteric concepts and believe there is much to learn from scientists who are writers.

Camille Ricketts - https://twitter.com/camillericketts - is the Head of Content and Marketing at First Round Capital.

Sonal Chokshi - https://twitter.com/smc90 - runs the editorial team (part of the marketing operation) at a16z.

YC's podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - http://twitter.com/craigcannon

Today we have Camille Ricketts from First Round and Sonal Choksi from A16Z.

And we have a ton of questions about content, content marketing, editorial from Twitter.

So I think we're just going to jump right into them, okay?

So Adora Chong, partner of YC, asked 2 questions.

First of which is, how do you measure the effectiveness of your content?

You're asking me first, I'm like, ask Camille first.

Well, I'm gonna give you guys a cop-out answer, which is, cause I actually think content measurement's like 1 of the hardest things that has not been solved.

And I've been looking for tools and things for years.

And in media, you have obvious things like page views and time on site.

But I think the number 1 question is you have to really tie it to what you're trying to do.

And I know that sounds like a really obvious thing, but actually people don't stop to pause and ask themselves, like, what are we trying to measure and why?

Like, how does it fit our strategy and our goal?

And then also what you measure is what you're actually gonna bother changing.

Because why measure something if you're really not gonna do anything about it?

And so things that I value most are things like time on site, engagement and uptake, much more than page views.

But of course, it is kind of a nice high when you get a lot of people reading something or paying attention or listening.

And so to make that more specific, what is like a good time on site that you're looking for?

Do you like base it on the word count of an article, of a video?

Yeah, no, there's no, it's not an arbitrary number for sure.

Cause I have a, I actually have a big pet peeve around word length.

Like I hate when people get into religious debates around length.

Do you guys have word counts on your stuff or...?

We don't have word counts, but we write extremely long.

And so we get a lot of people saying, why are you doing that?

It really depends on the content you're trying to share.

That's what I hate as a religious debate around it, because that's exactly it.

Like, what is the amount of length that you actually need to convey the point?

And so it's more about information density to me, like how many insights are you conveying?

Like not like per square foot, but you know what I mean?

Like, you know, are you really packing it in or just like, are you just meandering for no reason?

And so the length thing, So to go back to your point about the measurement, like there isn't an actual number because it depends on the length.

You know, a 4,000 word piece is gonna take 10 minutes to

And I know that seems like a cop-out, but you do get a sense, like this is a piece that has high engagement.

Like a lot of people are actually really staying with it.

And I don't know what the tools you guys use, but I still use Chartbeat, even though we don't have to use Chartbeat because you don't get that kind of traffic like you do in a media outlet.

But it does kind of tell you where people drop off.

And I think that data literally informed how I think about writing and editing and how I think about being an editor.

Because you really pay attention to keeping people hooked for every turn, at least in the first third of a piece before they're committed.

Right, so are you mixing it up with like pull quotes, like images, what do you guys do?

gonna say, because you guys have a really beautifully designed, I really like the look, no, I really genuinely like the look and feel of what you guys put out.

Yeah, when we redesigned the site, we really wanted to focus on readability because we do write quite long.

So how can you keep someone reading really engaged?

And the types of things that we found to be most effective as subheads, obviously, in order to give people sort of trail markers for that a piece so that they can literally skip ahead to the content that they might be looking for in particular, but then also pull quotes that keep them feeling the voice of the person that we're featuring, because that's a huge part of the appeal we think is that you feel sort of this conversational tone of the person being interviewed.

So both of those tricks have made a big difference.

And then also, bulleting as much content as we can, numbering as much content.

If you give people a sense of how much they can anticipate from a certain section, they're more likely to read it because they're like, oh, I feel like that's gonna be digestible.

And so knowing that people make those types of calculations and feeding into it has been really helpful.

We don't use pull quotes as much because in our content, which is I think a slight difference is that because you guys do more reported voices and ours is a first person voice.

We don't do as many pull quotes, but I do think it's a great feature, but we totally do the scanning and subhead thing.

And in fact, 1 of the tricks that I love is when you can actually kind of make the subheads tell the story without having to read the piece, but you have to reveal just the right amount to kind of give you the info scent for what you're getting, but not so much that you're giving all the goodies away.

So people think, okay, I can just scan the subheads and not read the piece.

Like there's sort of like a balancing act there, but I completely agree with you about that.

Yeah, we kind of break all the rules of like English 101, where like, you know, paragraph opener, closer, all the stuff in the middle.

Yes, well, in fact, on the English 101 thing, 1 of my other things is that, you know, I know there's a whole rule in journalism around the inverted pyramid and, you know, and I agree when you edit academic experts, especially, they always have a huge buildup before you even know why you're reading.

So I'm a big, big believer in the net graph.

Like in fact, when, you know, And the net graph is sort of like the nutshell paragraph.

I'm only saying this for the, because you guys all know what that is.

to explain it also, because we spell it, nut graph, N-U-T-G-R-A-F.

Because I keep saying it, but it does matter to have that, because you need a place to anchor people right away.

And for argument pieces, I really strongly believe you need an argument in that graph.

Like the argument is not conveyed by having a very provocative headline and just assuming people are gonna read.

And I like to have a rule of thumb that I like the nut graph to come in by the third paragraph.

That's 1 of the journalism rules I don't mind keeping, actually.

But I don't like the classic inverted pyramid.

I actually like nonlinear narratives sometimes that don't follow a perfect five-point essay.

Especially when you're doing volume, right?

You can track like what works, what doesn't.

Yeah, I mean, I will say that sometimes like you can tell what works, But I think it's hard to pinpoint.

Like, just because people responded a certain way to a type of thing you did in a certain piece, you can't really make a conclusion there.

That that's going to apply to everything.

It might have worked for that piece, but it's not going to work for every other piece like that.

Like, we had this thing happen where everyone's like, oh my God, these explainers work well, let's do more explainers.

But I'm like, it's not the explainer that worked well, it's the fact that it was an explainer with an argument built in.

It's not just saying AI, you know, here's how AI works and deep learning and machine learning.

The argument was why it's an AI spring and given that there were so many past AI winters.

It could be the people that are speaking about the topic.

You don't really know unless you've tried something consistently across many, many different versions.

I have to say I'm dying to hear your answer on the measurement

Like so often I think like, oh, this is gonna be a good 1.

Like, I mean, we have the same challenge.

Like I think my theory about it is that you get an editorial instinct by just doing it like pattern recognition by the stupid 10,000 hours, whatever rule, you get enough.

So it's not so many data points, but you get so good at what you do because you've been doing it for a while.

But how do you know otherwise that it's working?

I always get this question, I never know how to answer it.

You kind of develop this weird instinct that you can't even explain it to the other people who are asking you why you made a decision.

You're like, I just know that if I phrase it this way or if I use this subject line in an email that it's going to get more intrinsic interest than it's not.

I mean, I think that's why like the more results you have under your belt, like if you're doing your own content effort, the better because otherwise people get so caught up in these abstract discussions and they're debating their strategy that they're not actually just figuring out what works.

That goes to your point earlier about like just sort of having enough of those points.

And also there's content all over the internet.

Like you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, which is something that I was like, dude, like New York times knows how to write a headline.

But so how do you guys measure effectiveness?

I mean, I'll echo everything that Sonal said in terms of, you know, page views.

It's nice to have as a guideline, time on page, very important to us.

We like seeing where people have dropped off from a scrolling perspective.

You know, what could we have done better about a segue or a turn in the piece?

The other things that I'll mention is we're really, we pay a lot of attention to social sharing.

Like we actually have the counts listed and that's been a feature that's been very important for us to maintain for the social proof quality, for readers, but also for us to see, did people find this so valuable that they felt compelled to share it with their community?

That's the type of feedback that is extremely valuable for us and our motivation for why we create this content to begin with.

And we even have some mechanisms set up on Slack where if anyone that has over 10,000 followers tweets about a piece of our content, we get an alert so that we can keep tabs on how many influencers in the space are engaging with and sharing

I verbatim think that's exactly the right way to think about it and the way social is important.

And I think people tend to think social in terms of, you know, social media sharing as this like marketing word, but actually what you care about is that it's creating conversations around your content.

And as a writer, editor, a strategist, whoever, whatever your job is, you care about that conversation and where it's going, where people, and there's opportunities in some of the misunderstandings, the disagreements.

It's also, I think the other key about it is that what you said about influencers, like 10,000, more than 10,000, I like to look at the ratio of how many followers to followees they have.

Because sometimes there are some influencers that are just really focused in how often they tweet, so they don't have as many followers, but they're very, very influential because they have these multiplicative sort of cascading effects that their followers have 10,000 followers and 100,000 followers and it multiplies and cascades.

And so I like to look at that differential.

I love that you guys have a Slack mechanism.

We dump everything into Slack, all of our mentions.

And It's kind of a pain because you can't, you also get these trolls, all these random people like you know, randomly emailing you, you know, for no reason.

You're not even, it's not even relevant to the firm.

It's just randomly tagging random companies.

And so you have no way of filtering that, but I do think that helps.

So how do you guys connect with those influencer type folks?

I know you like you kind of have a focused effort there.

Is that just by inviting them on the podcast?

I mean, I think in our case, and I want to give huge credit to the bigger picture at our firm Which is that the content operation sits in this broader marketing group run by Margit Wendmachers Who's my boss and she's really the driver behind building the brand for A16Z So I will say that we had this context of this existing brand of influence that definitely helps.

Now we did not have a fully, you know, operational content effort in place.

Like there were definitely individual blog posts and blogs and Ben had his blog and individual folks had their blogs.

So we did put it under more of a cohesive strategy when I joined and changed our focus on what we do for content.

So to get to your point about the influencer, they have like a whole network of relationships, you know, both as a firm because the model is around a network of networks, like it's a really network-based model.

And the networks are everything from media networks to Fortune 500 and Global 2000, like different operating heads manage each of those.

not to give too much detail on A, 6, and Z, but that is a context in which we operate.

So I think in our case, it might be a little different in terms of how we engage those influencers.

Yeah, well, because these like, you know, if I look through all the questions people sent in, more often than not, they seem to be from early stage founders, right?

So they're looking for basically like the effective dose.

You know, like I'm going to like find an influencer, like how many do I need?

Like, what do you guys recommend when you're just getting started?

I think not being shy to reach out to folks.

Like if you see that someone is interested in what you're doing, don't let that opportunity go by.

So whenever we see someone who might not be in our community already or who we might not know tweet about us, we will reach out and just be like, hey, how's it going?

And there's a few other things at First Round that they can also engage with, you know, our events, our mentorship programs.

And so part of why we focus so much on content is being able to feed really extraordinary people into those programs

So we really try to not let those opportunities pass us by.

Yeah, I'm gonna share a trick that I love, which is it goes, it steals the idea that Kevin Kelly talked about a lot, which is like the whole, you know, 10,000, 1,000 true fans.

Like you really want sort of the true fans and you can in every industry figure out who those true fans are.

Like I used to keep these lists, private lists on Twitter of different verticals that I was interested in when I was at Wired.

Like it could be machine learning at the time or it could be developer influencers or it could be, you know, I'm really personally into maps and map making.

So I had a whole list of all the people who are really geeks about maps.

And so you can just find all those people by having those lists.

So first of all, I think even culling and putting together a really good list is a first place to start.

But my friend, Dan Wang, who I think you know.

And 1 of the things that he told me is that early on, he sort of got the attention of 1 influencer who's Tyler Cohen.

And his strategy in his head sort of became, is this a piece that I'm writing that Tyler will pay attention to and read, and he only targeted in his head that I'm gonna get Tyler to read everything that I write.

And sure enough, Tyler reads everything he writes, shares it, and it's kind of created this amazing thing.

Yeah, I mean, it totally makes sense, right?

You just like build up that fan over a couple pieces.

Yeah, it's something we need to get better with.

Yeah, I mean, we're not as interactive on our Twitter followings.

Yeah, I honestly bluntly, I, you know, We use our Twitter feed as more of just like updates and sharing because there's enough other people in our firm who tweet and share.

So we don't need to be doing as much of that under our account.

Which I think is fine as long as you admit that to yourself.

I think a lot of people kid themselves into thinking like, oh, we're going to interact with our community and grow it this way and that way.

And I actually think that's a real mistake because then you don't prioritize or know where to prioritize your effort because every content resource, Every content operation by definition is resource constrained because there's always more you can do.

You know, we were just talking about this.

It's the number 1 thing is that you really have to be like, this is what we're going to be very good at.

Like I love, when I walked into A16Z, I walked in like, I love what First Round is doing with their deeply reported, well, like, produced in a very, like, highly produced in the sense of it's not just like someone just puts up a post and then there's no design, no editing, nothing.

Like there's clearly a process behind it.

When you find out what you do really well and it hits for you.

I mean, you pretty much are the audio game in town when it comes to- Thank you.

The best part about that is that, you know, a partner, I think it was Chris Dixon, had originally said, let's do podcasts.

And of course, like, you know, you can do it as an experiment, but then it can go nowhere.

And in our case, what we realized very early on was, you know, we don't have to actually only do podcasts with our folks, which is great.

We love our folks, but we can also, because I missed editing my folks at Wired, like the outside experts, and I used to also be the book excerpts editor.

So I also missed having all these book galleys that I'd get and no way to do anything with them and because our whole philosophy is this like network we have and these collective of voices not like a single point of view why wouldn't we bring all those voices on and that was sort of what created the podcast like flywheel that sort of like a lot more voices and their audiences, cause you're right.

Cause then in the beginning I had to book like beg book publishers to get on our podcast.

Oh yeah, all the time, until you get going.

But now it's like, they're like, we get hit with too many pitches.

I can't even, like we have to say no to most, It's great.

This is important to keep in mind, right?

Because like first round injuries and Horowitz are like mega brands, right?

And so someone who's just getting started has to think about that.

Like same with YC, like the podcast is basically just getting going.

So that's the question I wanted to get to.

So Twitter account, Learn Educate Discover asked 2 questions.

First question is, which medium are you most excited about?

Second question is, how do you choose a medium?

So you can kind of answer those in whatever order.

Yeah, this was a big deal for us at the very beginning.

We knew we wanted to do content marketing.

We weren't sure what format was going to resonate the most.

At the time, doing long form was not the immediately obvious thing to do.

Most tech reporting also is very snackable, very short.

So it was kind of a double theory of what is it that our audience really wants?

What is something that our ideal reader needs and doesn't get in the course of their daily lives?

And our answer to that was access to people who are extremely skilled in this particular area who are willing to share their advice.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Content Marketing Tips from Experts at First Round Capital and Andreessen Horowitz