Flora Paul

Flora Paul developed an analytics practice she calls "editorial intelligence" during her time at BuzzFeed Brasil. She firmly believes that writers and content strategists "can be friends with numbers and data."

Flora and I talked about:

UOL, the huge internet portal in Brazil, her current employer

her prior work at BuzzFeed Brasil

how she came to coin the term "content intelligence" - which arose from the culture of data at BuzzFeed and her curiosity about the numbers behind their editorial work

how she transformed "boring data into cool content" - turning her data discoveries into editorial goals

the origins of her curiosity about numbers

the importance of understanding what did and didn't work with BuzzFeed branded content

how she used tools like Looker, a SQL tool that let her dive deeper into her editorial data

the custom publishing tools developed by BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti and publisher Dao Nguyen

how Looker dashboards helped her share with her team the editorial insights she uncovered

how she mixed and matched content formats like listicles, quizzes, and popular internet memes with different topics (like food, lifestyle, etc.) to generate large numbers of editorial ideas

how BuzzFeed's reliance on "relatable content" may have been responsible for the rapid growth of the popularity of quizzes in Brazil

her transition from "staff writer" to "content strategist" at BuzzFeed - and how her "annoying Type A personality" may have been a factor :)

how content formulas helped shape BuzzFeed's success - but also how the editorial staff balanced that dynamic with long-form content and innovative story formats

the differences between "data journalism" and her data-backed work as a content strategist

her optimism about, and hope for the future of, content strategy and editorial intelligence

her advice for writers:

"We can be friends with numbers and data."

"Numbers are on our side."

Flora's Bio

Flora Paul is head of content strategy at UOL, the largest Brazilian online content and digital services company. With a bachelor's degree in journalism and working for print and digital media for over a decade, Paul was a reporter for MTV and Glamour magazine before developing content strategy for BuzzFeed Brasil.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/tBLiqODCFXE

Transcript

Larry:

Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 43 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Flora Paul. Flora's down in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She works currently for an outfit called UOL which is ... I'll let Flora tell you more about that, because it sounds kind of like AOL meets GoDaddy or something like that. Can you tell me more about UOL?

Flora:

It's one of the largest and oldest portals in Brazil. I remember when I was using dial up internet in 1997, we would use you UOL to connect to the dial up. It's pretty old in a way, but they really kept up with what was happening in the internet board, and they're really trying to focus to gain more millennial views, so they're really trying to be up today.

Larry:

That's so interesting because when I look at this site, I see a combination of AOL and Yahoo, which have completely lost relevance in the U.S. They're just gone, but UOL is huge. I think, they're the fifth most visited website in Brazil. Is that correct?

Flora:

Yes, I think that's right. It's huge, and the numbers are pretty close to Facebook and Google actually.

Larry:

Interesting.

Flora:

It's a huge portal. Usually, people would just go to UOL to know if their internet con...