Kristin Tynski, Fractl – Content Marketing That Fuses Data Journalism with PR
Kristin Tynski is the co-founder and Senior Vice President of Creative of Fractl, a content marketing agency that fuses data journalism with PR. At Fractl, Kristin leads a team of creative professionals that includes not only designers and programmers, but also SEO specialists, journalists, and writers.
Kristin has a BA in Communications from Boston College, and for the past 13 years she has been at the forefront of viral content creation and promotion online. Today, she helps brands create and promote content that provides value for their audiences and yields consistent and high levels of success.
What’s in This Episode:
- Who is Kristin Tynski
- The importance of creating unique content that provides real value
- How Kristin’s team at Fractl sources and uses data sets to brainstorm new story ideas
- Positioning your content for sustainable virality
- Kristin shares the success story behind one of her past projects, “Examining Barbie’s Body”
- The qualities of great content, according to Fractl’s success model
This transcript was created using an automated transcription service and may contain errors.
Episode 23:
Prologue
Welcome to The Rankings Podcast where we feature top founders, entrepreneurs, and elite personal injury attorneys and share their inspiring stories. Now let’s get started with the show.
Chris Dreyer
Chris Dreyer here, CEO and Founder of Rankings.io, where we help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings. You’re listening to The Rankings Podcast, where I feature top business owners, entrepreneurs and elite personal injury attorneys. Speaking of entrepreneurs, I have Kristin Tynski on the show today. Kristin is the Senior Vice President of Creative of Fractl, a content marketing agency that fuses data journalism with PR. At Fractl she leads a team of creative professionals made up of not only designers and programmers, but also SEO specialists, journalists and writers. Kristin, welcome to the show.
Kristin Tynski
Thank you so much for having me.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, I’m really excited. Another SEO nerd on the show. It’s very rare that I get to speak to another specialist.
Kristin Tynski
Right? Yeah, I’m excited to be here.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah. So you know, I gave kind of a brief overview of Fractl but what in your words? What is Fractl? What are the special? What are the services that you specialize in?
Kristin Tynski
Sure, well, I think you actually did a really great job encapsulating what we primarily do. And I would call Fractl a content marketing agency with a focus on earning top tier press. And typically, most of our clients are looking for high authority link building as their primary goal with achieving press. We do that kind of by splitting our agency into two sides. One is a content creation side, which I lead, and one is a content promotions or PR side. So the way that we approach content really is from an understanding that in order to be newsworthy, you have to present something new and interesting. That hasn’t really been done before. In our experience, and this has really guided the way that our agency has grown, is that the best way to do that the best way to find new and interesting information is through data journalism practices, essentially. So I’d say 90 plus percent of the content that Fractl creates on behalf of our clients is data driven content. And we do everything so so from the ideation to the data acquisition, which can come in many different forms, scraping using government data sets using private and public datasets, using our clients, datasets, surveying and many other methodologies. God, I’m sorry.
Chris Dreyer
No problem. No problem. We’re all at home. We’re all at home. I want to dig into one thing you said. That’s kind of interesting that I’ve been talking about lately. Is it what you said is unique content. I hear so many people say well, it patched past the Copyscape. It’s unique, it’s unique content. So what would you say to those individuals?
Kristin Tynski
I would say that the time of creating content that real humans don’t really care about for SEO gains is sort of long over. And if your approach to building a site or trying to rank for keywords is, you know, just making sure that the words that you’ve written don’t exist elsewhere. It’s, it’s not going to get you very far. And it certainly isn’t a methodology that you can build links to sustainably. And so I would strongly recommend against it. I think in order to to build links, well, you need to do something that that really matters, and that either can attract attention from other sites or from the press, or it’s just such a great resource that other relevant blogs and websites would be interested in linking to the content for the sake of the content itself and Because you paid them or they did you a favor? Or you did a link exchange or some other, you know, deprecated SEO technique.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, like those old school, three way trades, all those things, the right, the reciprocal links, you know. So I completely agree when everyone’s creating content, and they’re all citing from the same sources. It may be unique from a plagiarism standpoint, but it’s not really providing value, especially when thousands of pages are all citing from the same source. Well, one of the so So tell me a little bit about the data component. And because you’re basically taking information that’s not out there, and you’re putting it on the web. So how what’s what’s your process look like for for that component?
Kristin Tynski
Well, I would actually say most of the data that we use in our data projects is data that that exists on the internet. What’s great about the last five years or so is it’s just the An enormous emergence of open data. And that’s coming from many different sources. So the government itself has absolutely massive amounts of data coming from all departments, private industry, NGOs and nonprofit organizations are putting out, you know, new and interesting data sets all the time. And so at Fractl, a big part of our job is is trying to stay on top of what’s new and what’s available. And then thinking of interesting and creative ways to weave these datasets that we find into new story ideas, or, or thinking about datasets that we used in the past and examining the data and investigating it in new ways. So there are many data sets that we’ve used, you know, maybe 10, even 20 times like, for instance, the fatal accident reporting system which tracks all autumn Be all deaths. It’s a massive, massive data set that goes back really far. And it’s incredibly detailed. And so we’ve done lots of types of investigation for that. And, you know, if you have, you know, an auto insurance business or something related to that they’re, you know, there are just almost an infinite number of content ideas that could come from that data set alone. But there are many, many others that could be used, and it’s really your imagination that would dictate what you can get from the data.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, and I can see because many of our audience members are personal injury attorneys that specialize in auto accidents. So I could see that, you know, many different directions. I could go with that information for from a link outreach approach and collect, you know, acquiring those those really high quality links from PR.
Kristin Tynski
Absolutely. And that, like the fatal accident reporting system is just one example amongst a giant ocean of potentially interesting data sets that the government has that could be leveraged in those ways. And then there are obviously also lots of third party data sets. And Fractl also does a ton with surveying. So just asking questions of the community can be a great way to, to create an interesting data set for yourself without having to necessarily do some of the more in depth data work that’s required with large data sets.
Chris Dreyer
I like that. I like that a lot. So you know, you could even maybe do some branding studies or surveys, you know, if you’re in an accident, who would you hire who comes to mind maybe for a local type of survey? This isn’t, you know, my specialty, but I can think of a lot of different ways that usually surveys look, one of the things that I like you have kind of a contrarian approach and basically what I mean is everyone says, You can’t make content viral. It says you got to get lucky. You just gotta get lucky and no Over time, you’ll just get one of these pieces that go viral, but you, your agency’s created basically a process or a system to strategically try to position yourself to create virality. Could you explain a little bit about that?
Kristin Tynski
Yeah, I think when people think of virality, they think of like, I guess what I would call true virality, which is a piece of content that is so compelling on its own that it needs no promotion at all right? You could put it almost any place on the internet and somebody would notice it, and then they would share it and then somebody else would share it with more than one other person. And I would just have like this our value of one and we just continue to grow no matter what. That sort of virality especially if it’s attached to some kind of commercial goal is incredibly rare. It almost never happens. And even when it does happen, it was probably orchestrated in some way or supported by promotions in some way. I think when we’re thinking about a sustainable methodology for, for creating content on behalf of our clients and getting attention for it, generating press for it. The goal isn’t like that kind of super virality like that, that, you know, we’ve probably had, out of all the campaigns we’ve ever created, maybe like 10 or so that might fit in that category of like, super viral, that built thousands and thousands and thousands of links. It’s great when that happens, but it shouldn’t be an expectation. The goal instead should be to write something compelling for a target audience. And then matching that content with the right people in the space, the right journalists, the right publications, that would have an interest in that, that piece of content. And if you can do that, well then you can predictably, quote unquote, go viral within the subject matter that you’re talking about, which is an You know, it didn’t destroy the internet, but perhaps it, you know, was viral within a specific vertical and got a lot of attention and built a lot of really, really relevant links, which maybe could be as important as as like a true viral post.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, that’s incredible. And one of the things I talk about a lot is when, when we’re doing SEO, and we’re looking at competitor analysis, or we’re looking at directories, I think these are all easy to replicate. It just takes time you have to go fill in the directory, claim it or do the page directory, even the guest posting component, many of these individuals will accept guest posts at the same location. So I really love what you’re doing because it creates this gap. That’s hard to replicate. You’ve gotta go to this specific set of data and, you know, create a unique piece of content from that that’s easy to interpret, and then Utilize for your pitch to PR and then it has to be picked up. So there’s, there’s this large gap that is created as opposed to just doing directory submissions or guest posting.
Kristin Tynski
Yeah, I think that’s completely true. And I think it’s one of the reasons why this this type of content marketing link building activity has much, much higher ROI than other types of link building. And kind of given what we’ve seen, and the process that we’ve been able to create a Fractl, we would never recommend those sorts of link building activities to our other clients. I’m not saying no one should do it. You know, it can be a good way to get links that your competitors have, which which certainly can help. But if you’re looking to make big gains quickly, then you’re going to need to generate larger amounts of highly authoritative links that your competitors don’t have. So content marketing through a database As the methodology is, and then associating that also with with having a good understanding of how to pitch that content to the press, is the methodology that has the highest ROI in terms of link building?
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, you’ll be able to attract those those very authoritative and topically, relevant links. And it’s also just natural. If anyone manually reviews the website, they’re not gonna raise any red flags when they see this type of activity occurring, as opposed to some of the other tactics,
Kristin Tynski
right, it’s also very sustainable thing to do. So I actually did a research project about a year ago looking at all of our clients projects, from when we reported to them what the results were. So how many links we were able to build for them how many press pickups we were able to get and all of that and then look at it six months later, and it ended up being that on average. After an additional six months, the number of links that we found was roughly twice the size. So it’s something that can build links in perpetuity. I mean, depending on what the content is, if it’s something that’s evergreen versus something that is tied to some recent time dependent event, but in most cases it ends up also creating an evergreen resource for you that will continue to build links over the long term.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, that’s incredible that this has that momentum, that compounding effect, it’s it’s hard to catch up to. So let’s take what about an example, what’s a something for our audience? What’s a story or a project that you did that really had a lot of success? Could you kind of walk us through that, that that big picture, that 80/20 for that project?
Kristin Tynski
Hi, yeah, I mean, we’ve had many projects that, like I said, have done quite well. And why. One that I was really, really proud of was a project called Barbie body or examining Barbie’s body. And basically what we did is we we found a research paper that and this actually wasn’t, it was a data acquisition project and that we use data from a research paper. But beyond that it didn’t leverage any other datasets. But essentially, what we found was a research paper that examined the proportions of the old style Barbies, and how realistic those proportions were. And I mean, it turns out if a real woman had the proportions of Barbie like her ankles would break and she wouldn’t be able to stand up and like all these other funny things. So this approach was actually a more of a design oriented approach where we had one of our designers make a very realistic looking woman in the proportions of Barbie. And then also associated the data with it so showing, you know the waist sizes like X percent smaller versus a real woman the bust size is X percent larger versus a real woman, wrist and ankle size, all of that. So it had a really deep emotional connection to people. And it also, I think, played on like this, this idea of nostalgia. And then also, you know, current event topics around body positivity. So that was one that I think hit a lot of important points in making a project successful. And it’s also one that leverages data, but data wasn’t so important to it, that it had like a massive overhead of data acquisition, cleaning or analysis to it. So kind of a more approachable example, I think, for your audience.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, that’s incredible. So you got a lot of high powered links, and it just attracted a ton of attention. Was that kind of like just just diving into that? Was that kind of like a shoulder niche to health or fitness or was it more or was it was it
Kristin Tynski
so I really believe it was for like a rehab and rehab rehab. realization client that had centers that addressed like anorexia and bulimia. So it was associated in that way, which is a good point to make the content that you’re creating should be related to your brand. And the sniff test that we use is Does it make sense that your brand created this? So it can be tangential to what you do. But it still needs to make sense that there was a reason for you to do this right has to make sense that you should want to create it.
Chris Dreyer
Absolutely. Yeah, let’s let’s let’s shift over to personal development. Are there any books that you have helped you develop you professionally, any business books that you recommend or you’re reading,
Kristin Tynski
and there’s, there’s one that I always mentioned, because it’s been kind of foundational to Fractl from the very beginning. And that’s a book called Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, and they have a model in it called the success model, which is really the model that We use that Fractl for evaluating our ideation and deciding which ideas we think have the best potential, we add layers to that. So like the PR component is also involved, like, how’s the press talking about this? What targets do we think would be good for it and that kind of thing. But it really centers around, making sure that your content is simple. So it’s not trying to do too much. It’s unexpected. It’s concrete. So unexpected really just hasn’t been done before. And that’s one of the reasons why we love data sets so much. So concrete, so making sure that what you’re whatever you’re trying to convey is done in a not a sloppy way, but a straightforward way. So it’s easy for people to quickly understand, attention spans are really short. So you need to get to the point, fast and make your point really strong. And if you’re doing data visualization, so there’s a lot that goes into making data visualizations, concrete, easily readable. And then credible is the next one. So making sure that whatever data analysis you’re doing, you’re doing it in a credible way that you’re the claims that you’re making can be supported by the data and that you’ve done the proper statistical tests and analysis to make sure that whatever you’re claiming is true. And that also, if you’re using like Princeton survey methodologies that you’ve, you’ve done the survey in the right way, and not introduce bias into it. And, and then the next one is emotions. So I’ve actually written a few pieces on this, but virality is predicated on an emotional connection to the content. And if you don’t feel something, when you read it, then you know, unless it’s like a really practical thing, a really useful resource. It’s unlikely that you’re going to see a lot of attention interest from publishers. And then the last one is stories. So you want to structure the content that you have or that you created in a narrative format. You want to bring people through an article in a structure that builds and has a really clear thesis and has human examples in it and tells it in a human way. And so, all those things are really important to our methodology. And they were informed by Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, so I always recommend that book to anyone has like a foundational understanding of how to make good content that resonates with audiences.
Chris Dreyer
I’m not gonna lie. So we did a data study recently on with that evaluated personal injury attorney search results. And then I found this success acronym afterwards and I was so mad that I didn’t find it before and utilize some of those recommended cause I definitely missed the mark on on most many of those letters. Um, you know, one final question here, Kristin. So is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven’t discussed?
Kristin Tynski
Now I think you’ve asked some great questions.
Chris Dreyer
Okay, awesome. Awesome. Yeah. So, guys, we’ve been talking to Kristin Tynski, SVP of Creative at Fractl. Kristin, where can people go to learn more about you?
Kristin Tynski
Um, you can find me on Twitter, Kristin Tynski, or Kristin@frac.tl.
Chris Dreyer
Awesome. Thanks, Kristin.
Kristin Tynski
You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
Conclusion
Thanks for listening to The Rankings Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
