Category: Content Marketing

I am not an attorney, nor do play one on TV. I do however work with a lot of eDiscovery clients, and occasionally crystallize my thoughts into a blog post.

When you are creating your legal ediscovery content marketing, here is an ongoing big pain point: non-compliance, or the lack thereof.

Banks are particularly sensitive to noncompliance charges, since a good part of their business depends on a trustworthy reputation. Traditionally banks approach compliance by focusing on minimizing risk, reasoning that if they minimize any risk of noncompliance then they’re ahead of the game.

Minimizing risk certainly has an important place in compliance, but banks can only guard against risk if they know what it is. New regulations, massive data growth, and new digital communication channels introduce new risk that the bank may or may not be aware of.

1. Defining a high-risk process is not a straightforward process. Many banks define high risk by any impact to revenue in high priority business lines. They may not realize that a less profitable business line may hold higher noncompliance risks. Take a low volume collections process that is barely a blip on the revenue report. In fact, regulators may be quite ready to mount a major investigation for noncompliant collections. How’s that for risk?
2. Well-hidden employee malfeasance. A certain banking division may have a vested interest in not investigating risky actions. Remember Wells Fargo? From at least 2011 to mid-2016, Wells employees created more than 1.5 million unauthorized deposit accounts and over half a million unauthorized credit card applications. Senior executives made money and bank stock rose. Apparently, no one at the bank was interested in the risk of a growth rate that was far above the industry norm.
3. Even when banks mean to comply, new regulations can catch them by surprise. The United States government alone has passed more than 220 new regulations since 2010, and empowered compliance investigators. (In an ironic example, the last thing that Wells Fargo wanted was more bad publicity. But in December 2016 they were surprised when they ran afoul of Dodds-Frank.)

 

Forbes published an article called “3 Steps To Creating A Killer Small Business Content Marketing Strategy” by Jayson DeMers.

Step 1 is research: the audience, your competition, content trends in and out of your industry, and up-and-coming social media platforms.

Step 2 is to set your content marketing goals. Include objective targets like customer retention or more  conversions. Set timeframes: content marketing results don’t happen overnight but they do need to happen. Also set goals around how much time and money are you willing to invest, and when. Don’t empty the budget on a single flashy project, but don’t practice false economy either. Content marketing needs time, money, or both to get top results.

The 3rd step is what DeMers calls “drafts,” although I would call it something different. Essentially he means creating and leveraging content. In this section, he is 100% right on setting phases in your project management timeline. For example, you might build your phases around content bundles on your hot quarterly topics. Write a white paper, then leverage for 3-5 different platforms. Or create a phase around growing traffic on your blog, or increasing shares on social media. DeMers also points out strategically allocating resources, and the importance of being consistent while still staying flexible.

You may already have decided on your content creation strategy. You need a white paper, you need 2 mini-white paper excerpts, you need 3 blogs a month, and you need a slide presentation.

And you may be absolutely right — but you may be awfully wrong. Content is not about what you need. It’s all about what your customers need and what they are looking for when they search to solve what hurts.

To create that content, you need to understand:

• Who your customers are. If you don’t know who your target audience is, or even who might be interested in your content at all, you’ll get nothing out of it. Finding the right people is a large part of content marketing.
• What are their biggest pain points you can solve. You must understand your client’s goals and when they want to achieve them. If you can’t give at least one clearly defined reason (i.e., a compelling benefit) why your client wants your content, you’re not going to have much luck.
• What keywords they’re using to search for solutions. They won’t find you if you don’t rank for their search terms.
• What sale stages you need to align with. Different content appeals to different people. If you haven’t written something that your client(s) want, they won’t buy it.
  What business and marketing trends are drawing your customers’ attention. There’s a time and a place for everything. People who might have needed your content yesterday may not need it today.

Strategy first, then the editorial calendar.

It’s been a month of data breaches and ransomware for me — fortunately not on my laptop, but writing about it for clients. The big news is writing in the morning about Yahoo’s 2013 and 2014 breaches, and a few hours later sending an email to the editor with the subject “Stop the Presses!” I have always wanted to say that.

I had to revise the piece to say that Sony just suffered another big breach on March 1. Suspicion lands squarely on North Korea, which has certainly been busy lately.

I’ve been thinking and writing on cross-border investigations. Here’s my comment to LinkedIn contact Rob Robinson, who shared an article on law firm partners who after all these years STILL refuse to learn about eDiscovery and its huge implications to corporations and the practice of law — and the growing field of cross-border minefields investigations.

[I wrote] Thanks for sharing the article, Rob. It’s absolutely true. The gap is widening between the “I don’t have to know this stuff” and “this stuff is changing the legal industry, I’d better learn it.”

Thus far the partners have been insulated from eDiscovery fall-out because their corporate clients are also doing it the way they’ve always done. But thanks to the GC’s responsibility to control risk, GCs are growing more and more interested in eDiscovery and investigation technologies, some of them pretty sophisticated. Cross-border internal investigations are growing fast, and it behooves attorneys to keep up on the technologies that are making them cost-effective. And keeping the company from getting sued thanks to privacy laws. And protecting the teams from getting arrested. (It could happen.)