Head of Content

We're looking for a candidate to fill this position in an exciting company.

Responsibilities

The successful candidate will act as a chief-of-staff for content in our team of product managers, helping each product manager to plan and execute their content strategy. This requires leadership, mentoring and the ability to assess and exercise judgement over the quality and productivity of product managers from a content perspective. This person will represent product management to the marketing team, acting as primary sponsor of all product-related media, messaging and communications. This includes:

• Leadership of product messaging by all product managers - across 30+ technical products
• Development of standards and processes for product content
• Mentoring and development of content skills in the product team
• Coordination with development, marketing, sales, and field teams
• Ensuring all content is consistent in terms of style, quality and tone of voice, and optimized for search and user experience for all channels of content including online, social media, email, point of purchase, mobile, video, print and in-person. This is to be done for each buyer and user persona within Canonical's open source and enterprise communities.
• Mapping out a content strategy that supports and extends marketing initiatives, both short- and long-term, determining which methods work for the brand and why. Continuous evolution of strategy is a must.
• The development of a functional content calendar throughout the enterprise verticals, and defining the owners in each vertical to particular persona groups.
• Developing standards, systems and best practices (both human and technological) for content creation, distribution, maintenance, content retrieval and content repurposing.
• Enabling Product Managers in their role as writers and content strategists; be an arbiter of best practices in grammar, messaging, writing, and style.
• Integration of content activities within traditional marketing campaigns.
• Conducting ongoing usability tests to gauge content effectiveness. Gathering data and analytics to make recommendations based on those results. Working with owners of particular content to revise and measure particular content and marketing goals.
• Leveraging market data to develop content themes/topics and execute a plan to develop the assets that support a point of view and educate customers that leads to critical behavioral metrics.
• Establishing work flow for requesting, creating, editing, publishing, and retiring content. Work with technical team to implement appropriate CMS.
• Conducting periodic competitive audits.
• Supervising the maintenance of content inventories and matrices.
• Ensuring consistent global experience and implement appropriate localization/translation strategies.
• Participation in the hiring and supervising of content/story leaders in all content verticals.
• Work closely with design on all creative and branding initiatives to ensure a consistent message across channels.

Success Criteria

The Head of Content is measured on the continual improvement of awareness, customer nurturing, and retention through storytelling, as well as the increase in new prospects into the enterprise through the consistent development and deployment of content to each persona group.

Success criteria include:

• An increase in defined customer engagement metrics (measured by users taking the desired action???i.e. conversions, subscription, purchase, etc.).
• Website and social media traffic growth.
• Conversion metrics definition and growth.
• Social media positive sentiment metrics.
• Customer feedback and survey data.
• Increases in key search engine keyword rankings.
• A decrease in length of sales/buying cycles.
• Clearly defining content distribution during particular stages of the buying cycle (lead nurturing).
• Identifying up-sell and cross-sell opportunities through content analysis, and deploying content assets for higher conversion rates. Primary criteria for success are customer and employee affinity. Success is measured around lifetime customer value, customer satisfaction, and employee advocacy.

Experience and Education Required

• Bachelor's degree in English, Journalism, Public Relations or related communications field. MBA in marketing a plus.
• 5 years of experience as a respected leader in multichannel content creation at companies who target B2B or open source technical audiences
• Experience with creating compelling messages for technical products and communities in the B2B space.

Skills Required

The Head of Content requires a combination marketing and publishing mindset, with the most important aspect being to think "customer first". In essence, the Head of Content is the corporate storyteller that must be empathetic toward the pain points of the customer.

Specific skills required include:

• Proven editorial skills. Outstanding command of the English (or primary customer) language.
• Training as a print or broadcast journalist and has a "nose" for the story. Training in how to tell a story using words, images, or audio, and an understanding of how to create content that draws an audience (it is critical that the Head of Content retain an "outsider's perspective" much like that of a journalist.)
• The ability to lead, inspire, and organize large teams of creative personnel and content creators to achieve company's stated goals.
• Skill at both long-form content creation and real-time (immediate) content creation and distribution strategies and tactics.
• The ability to think like an educator, intuitively understanding what the audience needs to know and how they want to consume it.
• A passion for new technology, technology infrastructure, and the open source communities around them
• Proven ability to write about technology and the tech landscape
• Familiarity with open source and the major technology platforms
• A technical or science background and qualifications
• Awareness of Ubuntu and Canonical competition and opportunities
• Clear articulation of the business goal behind the creation of a piece (or series) of content.
• Leadership skills required to define and manage a set of goals involving diverse contributors and content types
• Project management skills to manage editorial schedules and deadlines within corporate and ongoing campaigns. Ability to work in a 24 hour project cycle-utilizing teams or contractors in other countries.
• Familiarity with principles of marketing (and the ability to adapt or ignore them as dictated by data).
• Excellent negotiator and mediator.
• Basic technical understanding of HTML, XHTML, CSS, Java, web publishing, etc.
• Fluency in web analytics tools, social media marketing applications and leading social media monitoring platforms
• A willingness to embrace change and to adapt strategies on the fly.
• Great powers of persuasion and presentation
• Experience creating a resource or library of content organized indicating SEO, translations and version control.
• Needs to be continually learning the latest platforms, technology tools and marketing solutions through partnerships.
• Able to screen out sales pitches and look for the relevant brand and customer story.