Apple | Spotify
This week, we’re excited to unveil the Toolkits Brand Publishing Show, a new podcast that explores how brands are building content and publishing operations designed to forge direct relationships with audiences. In each episode, we’ll speak with an editorial leader at a top brand to discuss the strategies, tactics, best practices, and approaches they’re employing and the challenges they face along the way.
This week’s guest is Courtney Symons, editor-in-chief at Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce juggernaut. Shopify’s editorial approach tells the stories of entrepreneurs and focuses on uplifting, aspirational, reported pieces that showcase their impact on their communities. Hand-in-hand with that, Courtney uses the company’s website and its new print magazine to highlight how Shopify arms those entrepreneurs with the tools they need to run their businesses.
Courtney discussed how she built an editorial team within Shopify, why editorial is a “defense” for the company, and how she maintains editorial independence.
Thanks to our friends at AudiencePlus for their support.
How editorial can be a brand’s ‘defense budget’
For brands who want to tell their own stories, brand publishing can be a way to hold on to their own narrative even when traditional media has moved on. For Courtney, Shopify’s publications are a way of putting stories out in the world.
“For years and years, we enjoyed headlines that talked about the same things we do. And then that storyline gets old. And you know, it’s just the nature of the world to want to hear something new. And those stories we still want to tell, they won’t be told anymore unless we are willing to tell it ourselves. So I love the term generative journalism. I view myself and my team as journalists within the organization, creating the stories we want to see writing the headlines we think are important. Of course, there’s a healthy level of bias, we work for the company, but we really hold tight to those journalistic principles of asking the hard questions of digging deep of uncovering interesting stories that are maybe being missed. And in our view, that’s a sort of defense budget, that putting out those stories to the world is our way of still holding on to our own narrative.”
How Shopify finds the stories it wants to tell
Shopify’s mission is tell the stories of entrepreneurs. But it can be difficult to find them. So Courtney and her team figured out a way to unearth those stories.
“Our team was able to build a search query where we could type in keywords where we could say, “I’m looking for a sustainable business, that is owned by a person of color,” and something specific. Which yielded some great results. Then we added a field where you could search the ‘About Us’ page for merchants, and we find merchants who are trying to tell their own story. This search query pulls data from people’s About Us page, and that’s a really rich treasure trove of finding stories we wouldn’t have found otherwise.”
How to not let editorial be derailed by everyone’s opinions
One of the biggest concerns in brand publishing is to not let competing interests and stakeholders dictate the editorial vision. That can often lead to a muddled point of view and a lack of a clear editorial proposition.
“The way to continue to be efficient while managing multiple stakeholders is by defining of roles. And so for me as editor in chief getting to hold the final pen, there is a time and place for debates, for edits, for “have you considered this perspective? Could we incorporate that stat?” And then there’s a period when you just sort of have to say “thank you so much, I will take everything that you’ve shared.” And now we close that document and now is when the editing and the refining happens. Because as much as you want it to be 1,000%, accurate and full of every bit of detail that’s ever gone into any decision, of course we know that doesn’t translate well into a story. Trusting our expertise as people who can translate to the public… is hard.
Hiring for the right skillsets
Courtney’s challenge is one common to anyone in brand publishing — hiring journalists with specific skillsets, but balancing that against the needs of marketing.
“I really have found that journalists within tech companies do so well, because it’s not only that they have writing skills, editing skills, they have curiosity, they can research, they can dig and find things that other people will miss. They know how to reach out and find people get them on the phone, they know how to interview, they know how to parse down complex bits of information into little bits and pieces. They know how to incorporate different viewpoints and perspectives. It’s just pretty much every angle that you look at it, those journalism skills do really well. One shortage of skill set that I’ve noted within myself and other journalists is that the nature of measuring success within more journalistic pieces is very different than a marketer who might use 10 different technology tools to track and measure the impact of every word that they write.”
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson at LightningPod.fm.