 Hello there and welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here bringing you this video back in my usual location of this delightful home office here in Jerusalem after a couple of weeks well actually just one week exploring the beautiful scenic and rugged island of Ireland where I saw whiskey distillery, saw friends, drunk lots of stout and discovered that my family have absolutely no idea what I do for a living. So I thought I would do another video about marketing communications commonly abbreviated as Marcom. I did a video before in which I tried to talk about marketing communications explaining what this field or profession is about and I got a couple of nice comments and emails from folks saying they appreciated the video it helped them in their own interview processes to understand what a Marcom person does so I thought to expand on that effort I would do another video about what I do as on a typical day as a marketing communications manager. Okay so this wasn't exactly a typical day because I got up at about 10 a.m. really really not early because I returned from this trip to Ireland like 7 in the morning the day before my sleep schedule has been totally knocked out but I'm not a super early riser anyway usually about 8 a.m. I get up. Now the difference between me and what a lot of Marcom managers do is that I work a hybrid job that means of course that I go into an office irregularly in my case it's usually once every two weeks although I can sometimes be as irregularly as once a month. Now I have worked before in a company environment in fact I was Marcom manager at two different companies and I have to say I adore the remote and hybrid working lifestyle but it's probably fair to say I don't know because it's COVID times and what's changed what's not changed that most Marcom managers are working in an office although I would imagine if I took a straw poll on my LinkedIn network I would find a lot of Marcom managers who are also doing this job hybrid or remote can you be a fully remote marketing communications manager? I'd say yes. You don't really need to meet people unless you're doing stuff like organizing events in which case you do kind of need to actually physically meet people but it can definitely be a hybrid job. Now when I got up in the morning I began work for an individual I'm working for his name is Sir Ronald Cohen. He's a very interesting guy and he's also quite informal. He prefers to be called Ronnie. So I'm currently the communications manager for an individual who is a philanthropist and is involved in a couple of important international organizations two of them being the global steering group for impact investment called the GSG and the impact weighted accounts initiative at Harvard Business School called IWAI So I am the communications manager at a nonprofit and for an individual and this is slightly unusual the previous two Marcom jobs I held were at tech companies I'm giving all this detail so that my day-to-day has a little bit of context around it for anyone thinking about doing this as a career So the first thing I did today when I got up in the morning was I looked at a press release Now you might think if you've ever received a press release if you're a journalist or you've ever thought I could write a press release You can write a press release but there's certainly a bit of an art to it and the version I was working on was V11 So we've gone through 10 rounds of feedback which for a press release for an international foundation when you've got maybe two or three different groups and people have their own compliance There's approval processes Can people be listed on the release? Can this quote be approved on the release? When are we distributing the release? Are we going to distribute it ourselves? Or are we going to work with our PR agency? How do we avoid double pitching? Who are the target journalists and media publications for this press release? This is all the hard work that goes into creating a press release We don't just write a press release in five minutes and spam it to every news website That would really, really not work So that's how my day started looking at the latest round of changes to version 11 for a press release and giving a couple of comments from things I thought were very important about the wording that I hope will be taken on board but given that there's about six or seven other stakeholders in this process nothing is guaranteed Second part of my day building my own media list So this is again another kind of classic PR duty that often gets subsumed into Marcom I've talked about before in my previous video about Marcom about the fact that Marcom tends to be a job position in my experience at smaller to medium size organizations It's great in my opinion for folks who have brains like mine who are not really super experts in one field of communications we have our hands in a lot of different pies I think is the expression We have our fingers in lots of pies So when you get up to the enterprise level of scale typically that scaling marketing team has been very, very segwayed or siloed into different marketing channels and hierarchies for each channel or geography As marketing communications manager you do basically, you remit is everything involved in communications that have a marketing purpose So that could be public relations that could be developing collateral, etc So after working on the press release and after working on the media list for distributing this press release I then got to planning a couple of social media posts So the social media posts that I draft on behalf of my client slash person I'm working for So Ronnie is not actually a huge volume compared to what I'm used to working in tech Ronnie is a classic thought leader He's a thought leader in the field of impact investing and has quite a following among people involved in the world of sustainable finance So we put a lot of thought into what we're going to put out on the different channels Currently we're only active on two channels LinkedIn and Twitter with the majority of engagement happening on Twitter Third part of the day, and this is just routine This is kind of a routine typical day is doing a bit of media monitoring So the first thing I do is I have about 10 or 12 different Google Earths set up for keywords and I'm keeping tabs on what's being discussed about the space I'm working in whether it's about the concept of impact weighted accounting or sustainable finance or sustainability linked bonds and loans which are financial instruments for sustainable finance So I get a lot of these alerts every day and I go through them and one of the alerts is of course for Sir Ronald Cohen Sir Ronnie Cohen, I also have an alert for his name in Hebrew So every day I'm checking Twitter, LinkedIn and the internet in general for any mention of Sir Ronnie and if it's something noteworthy someone's tagged him on a post in LinkedIn and we should contribute something we will talk about that Now in terms of my meetings with the boss and I say the boss in inverted commas because it's basically me and Ronnie so we're a very very small team and flat hierarchy but if you had a if you were doing this in a bigger organization it would be, you know, you might have a kind of more classic boss who was just really looking at your workload we meet about once every two to three days and that's I would say pretty typical for this kind of a job some people have daily meetings you might be reporting to the CEO but a lot of work for me goes into keeping track of an agenda which I prepare between the meetings so between our meetings I'm bucketing all the things that need his attention and I'm doing a bit of filtering, I don't bring every single media mention to his attention because that would just be too much I try to be thoughtful about how I brief the person that I'm working for as his communications manager why? Where are we? Lunchtime approximately between all these different activities Turkish coffee another thing that I do as marketing communications manager and this really falls into the whole kind of PR bucket as well more than social media content creation and videography so I've been running a YouTube channel for a few years and that's proven quite useful because now a lot of the things that we get requests for on this particular team are requests for pre-recorded video so I use video in our social media work I record videos of Ronnie I script videos I literally go out to record him or if we're doing this remotely I use a great tool called Riverside.fm and that's a fantastic resource if you are looking to record videos for social media but you're not physically located and because Ronnie travels a lot and I've been traveling a bit this year that's proven really really useful so we'll get requests in for Ronnie to write articles to give speeches to give comment to journalists and I will typically do the first draft of those remarks now this is obviously reactive rather than proactive and the only reason it's that way is because we're essentially a two person team so we don't have time to develop a lot of blog content or contributed content but we do a bit of that as well so a lot of my job is looking at requests for podcast interviews, radio interviews, TV interviews other kinds of interviews and saying doing a bit of research firstly about the outlet is this aligned with our messaging what our messaging going to be for this opportunity and what should we say and again this is kind of a global thinking process where I'm keeping tabs not just on the particulars of the request I'm trying to read the media and get a handle on what are the debates of the day in the space I'm working in now which is sustainable finance the last thing that I did today my working day is officially over which is I'm recording this YouTube video is that I had a call with a PR agency as a marketing communications manager you're typically or depending on the organization working with a few agencies you might have a digital marketing agency a PR agency, a content agency in this job there's a PR agency for one of the organizations that Sir Ronald chairs and we had a call with them to discuss our promotional approach for an upcoming webinar that we're trying to attract media attention to so whenever you're trying to attract media attention the name of the game in PR is relationships so as I've only been in this particular job for about seven eight months today so I'm relatively new here a lot of my work goes down into building a media relations that might mean sending a journalist an email engaging with a journalist on Twitter having an introductory phone call to a journalist sending out a media release to a journalist who you've never interacted with is kind of like inviting a random to a barbecue party with all your close friends it's not really the best approach so typically a lot of work in PR people who have a negative approach about PR tend to think of it as it's just about spamming it's not it's all about relationship building and relationship maintenance and keeping an eye on the topics of the day and finding it's really about finding a synergy in fact between journalists who are really interested in what you're doing and trying to feed them relevant interesting news so that concluded my day now that's only kind of the whistle stop tour of some of the stuff I got involved with in this job Ronald has also written a book so some of my job is keeping tabs on book sales and different geographies talking about book promotional plans but you probably get the idea now in my other video I talked about marcom and why I think it's a great career who was I in school just if you're interested in what kind of skill set might be useful for this job so some of my first memories are producing when I was literally six or seven years old a family newsletter called the Daniel Times one of those old school digital time writers I'm really really interested in media communication nowadays interested quite a lot in videography, audio and the debates of the day in shaping debates I was probably initially looking going into journalism did a bit of work as a freelance journalist which I did up till a couple of years ago and then got segued into communications that is pretty common place because the media market has been in decline for number of years the environments I worked in this job is would be broadly defined as the non-profit or foundation or philanthropy sector I've worked in the tech sector similar responsibilities very different context I've worked in houses marketing marketing communications manager and I've also worked at a PR agency that was a pretty brief tenure at the start of my time here in Israel the agency environment is different than the in-house environment but you will pick up a lot of experience quite quickly anyway if you're thinking about getting into marketing communications pursuing marcom as a career I hope this was this insight into my day-to-day work and life was useful what's the best way to annoy me to call me a content manager or a content writer I've never applied for job with content in the job title because I would personally find that too narrow one of the pillars of marketing communications is in-bind marketing and content marketing that draws a lot upon digital marketing what I really like about marketing communications or marcom is that it's broad there's a bit of involvement in different fields and that mixture for me keeps it interesting and allows me to think about the big picture which for me is really about communications what are our messaging what are we about how are we going to communicate that effectively to further our ends anyway hope that video is interesting if you have any questions of your own about what it's like to work in marcom marketing communications or communications don't get hung up on the exact words different companies have slightly different job title names do feel free to drop me an email or shoot me a comment and if I have time I will reply thank you so much for watching more videos for me coming soon on this youtube channel