We all know being inclusive in our digital marketing is important. But do we all know how to do it? What questions should we be asking ourselves before anything “goes out the door”? How do we select imagery that represents a diverse target market? What can we do on the back end of our website or social media posts to ensure they are accessible to everyone? This Ask Me Anything session dives into how to be inclusive across all of your digital marketing channels.

Robyn:

Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining our livestream this week, Ask Me Anything about Inclusive Digital Marketing. My name is Robyn Addis, I’m the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at LISI. And I am joined by as always my colleague, Kristyn Brophy, who is our Director of Client Strategy.

Kristyn:

Yes, that one. Hi everybody.

Robyn:

Yeah, we’ve had a week, we’ve had a week and a half here at LISI. Our brains are a little bit fried. So, if we go a little bit cuckoo, please bear with us. But, everyone, I also want to say hi to everybody who’s watching the rebroadcast potentially on LinkedIn or maybe on our website or on our YouTube channel at a later date. And for anybody who’s listening to the audio rebroadcast via our podcast. Welcome to you too. And if you didn’t know that we have a podcast, we do, it’s called All the Things and it is where we rebroadcast our livestream sessions. So we’ve got monthly, we’ve got a Three Things We’ve Learned, we’ve got a News + Views + To Do’s interview. And we’ve got an Ask Anything session once a week every month. But then that fourth week of the month, we’ve got a podcast exclusive episode, it’s One More Thing. One more thing we wanted to talk about, one more thing we wanted to share but we didn’t quite get to it, or maybe that another person from our industry gave a presentation that month and they didn’t quite get to their one more thing. So we invite them onto the podcast. Next week we’ll be dropping our episode with Rob Kates, who is the Founder of Kates Media and a good friend of ours both in the legal marketing community and LISI in particular. Okay, so that’s me, I’m done plugging all the stuff. How you doing Kristyn?

Kristyn:

I’m doing great. I’m going to say that I’m doing great because ask, believe, receive, or whatever. If you say you’re doing great, the universe will automatically think that you’re doing great. I don’t know how that all works, but I’m doing great. It’s been a week. I had to pick up recycling trash this morning and drove to an appointment for an oil change, only to find out that that appointment’s next week. So, that’s how my week has been going.

Robyn:

Yeah, yeah. I showed up at the babysitter’s house this morning forgetting that my one child did have school and the other two don’t. So I was not prepared whatsoever for that. So I like was like throwing stuff together in a bag. Again, we’re a little bit kooky right now. But, if you are joining us right now, live on the live stream, drop a hello in the comments, we’d love to hear from you. And if you have any questions, this is an ask me anything session. We have plenty to talk about, but we definitely want to hear what questions you have. So to sort of start off on a little bit more serious tone, ’cause we’ve been sort of joking around here.

Our Ask Me Anything session today is about inclusive digital marketing. And what does that mean? So, let’s take a step back. For the month of February at LISI, we have been focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion. And in all of the things that we’re doing, how to make sure that you’re focusing on these things in your content, how to be inclusive in your digital marketing. And we’ve got lots of content on our website about this topic. And so this is a chance for us to come to the table with you and have a conversation about what that means. And in full disclosure, in preparing for this program, Kristyn and I had a very raw conversation about what credibility do two white cisgender women have to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion issues? And we don’t have necessarily a lot of shared experiences with minority groups in all different categories because of, again, our sort of status as a cisgender white woman.

But, where we are kind to this conversation is an awareness of that, an awareness of what some people call the privilege of that and our true goal to constantly be learning and evolving our understanding of how to be inclusive in our marketing. How to be inclusive of people who look different than us, who experience things differently than we do. And who might just have experiential differences that are just in a different status of their stage of their life. Maybe have a different parental status, marital status, whatever the case might be. There’s a lot to think about in that. And we, I would… Kristyn kept throwing articles and information at me. Again, when we were preparing it, I finally said, “I’m overwhelmed.” There is so much to read and there’s so much to consider on this topic. So, again, we’re not coming at you saying that we know all the things and that we are here to come from a place of that, we’re coming from a place of learning and we want to share what we’ve sort of learned. Is that fair, Kristyn?

Kristyn:

Totally fair to say. And just kind of dovetailing off of what you’ve said, I feel the same way. It’s just like, how do I talk about these issues? And how do I be intentional about it as a cisgendered straight white woman? Oh my God, I can’t talk today. But one thing I can kind of speak to a little bit, and this is something that’s important for digital marketing and all marketing initiatives really, is I’m dyslexic. And I digest information in a very different way from others. And that’s a diversity component that I don’t think a lot of people really think about all the time. People will look at diversity as a, oh, are people coming from different age groups? Are they different genders, different ethnicities, different races, different sexual orientations, things like that. But what are the differences of ability? Or what are some other struggles that people deal with every single day? And mine, one of mine is dyslexia. And in digital marketing, when I’m reading content on LinkedIn or a blog post or things like that, if it’s a wall of text, I won’t read it. It’s so daunting. It’s terrifying to me to go look at someone’s LinkedIn post and it’s just a wall of text. And a wall of text basically means that there’s no breaks in the paragraphs, there’s no breaks in the sentences. You’re not chopping it up in an easy to digest way for someone with dyslexia or someone who might have another kind of learning disability or reading disability. So that’s something that I can speak to. And I am happy to give tips on that to anybody who wants to reach out and talk about their struggles with dyslexia or how to market to people with dyslexia. Hi, I’m one of those people, I’m happy to help. 

Robyn:

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think one place to that we can start is probably something that a lot of people have heard of, either that they know about very well or that they’ve heard of in passing, and that’s just in terms of alt tags. So, two things actually. Alt tags on your images online and using camel case and hashtags. So, Kristyn, tell us what those things are and why you should use them.

Kristyn:

So, alt text, I’ll start with that one, is kind of like the TLDR, too long; didn’t read. Alternative text, alt text is that text that is attributed to an image or visual asset in your social media or on your website for people with visual impairments or visual disabilities. So, if you are blind and you’re using a screen reader and someone has a visual asset attached to a LinkedIn post or a blog post, or somewhere on their website, it’s important to have an alt text attributed to that visual asset, especially if it is a chart or something that has to do with your content. If it’s just for decoration, then that alt text isn’t as important. But having that alternative text in there, will trigger a screen reader for someone who’s visually impaired to then describe to them what is in that image. So when you’re using alt text, you should definitely think about what that image is. Is it a graph? How are you going to explain it? Is it a picture that you just want to say this picture is for decoration? Or oftentimes when I’m doing a blog post image for a client on LinkedIn or something, and I just use a decoration image, I will put the title of the blog post in there saying like, this is the title of the blog post, which will trigger that screen reader to say, title of blog post, X, Y, Z. So that’s alt text.

And then camel case hashtags. This is something I learned about a while back and I’ve seen it being posted everywhere. I know our good friend, Jennifer Forrester has posted about camel case text, camel case hashtags, and such. And what camel case hashtag means is, so a hashtag doesn’t have any spaces, it is all one word. And camel case is you use a capital letter to start each individual word in your hashtag. So say your hashtag is digital marketing, it would have a capital D for digital and a capital M in front of marketing, rather than all lowercase, all one word. And it’s tough to do camel case hashtags on platforms because it’s not built-in yet on LinkedIn or Instagram or Twitter where you are using these trending hashtags and you just want to… You just want to use like what they’re suggesting in the hashtags. It all is all lowercase. So you oftentimes will have to go in and manually update to camel case text and use that uppercase hashtags. Another way for differently-abled readers to view your hashtags, is putting an underscore in a hashtag. I don’t recommend it ’cause it does make it look really long, but it is a nice way to differentiate different groups of hashtags and things like that. So, if say if you’re doing digital marketing, you could do digital_marketing, and that would still on hashtag, but that underscore can kind of get in the way sometimes.

Robyn:

Yeah. And the challenge with that too is ’cause you just read my mind, I was thinking the same thing. The challenge with that, and this isn’t necessarily anything to do with accessibility, is that that hashtag is a different hashtag than digital marketing all one word in quotation marks. And it might have fewer followers. So, to the extent you’re trying to be inclusive, potentially you could include both hashtags, depending on what works best with the platform that you’re on, because it might have different groups of followers and you actually might be more inclusive with people without necessarily intending to be inclusive, but you’re making your content more understandable. And one thing you said too about the alt text on an image, even if it’s just for illustration, it’s just for… I forget the word you used, but–

Kristyn:

Decoration.

Robyn:

Decoration, there we go. Even if it’s just for decoration, I have seen people on, I think on Facebook. And where they in the body of their post, describe the image and it’s not because it necessarily adds anything meaningful to the post, but it just creates a richer fuller experience for somebody who is not sighted, is blind, partially blind. Whatever their issue, whatever the challenge they might be facing is, it helps them perceive that content in a full way, that as a fully sighted person we don’t even think about the fact that we are able to sort of take that in, in connection with the text of that post, even if it is for decorations. So, I do think adding that alt text, either within the image if it’s possible on the platform or in the description of your post, just creates a more… That comes into the inclusive piece of the conversation. Just being inclusive for people so they can have the full experience. Other things that we have talked about, just sort of questions that we’re always asking ourselves.

This is an ask me anything, so you can ask us questions. But I’ll tell you what we ask ourselves when we’re doing marketing for our agency or for a client. We often at the imagery that’s being used and how it, one, accurately represents us or our client. But accurately represents the people. But two, how it represents inclusivity. Do you… If you look for stock photography and you look for meeting, I often find myself looking for that for some reason, although I never use most of the images I find. But if you look for a meeting, you might have a room full of white men and one woman. And to be fair, I do think stock photography platforms are working on improving the stock photography that they have available so that it is more visually inclusive. But I do come across this still right now. It’s a bunch of white men in suits in a conference room. And that just doesn’t… Maybe that is what your firm, your company, whatever, actually looks like. I mean, full disclosure, our agency is largely a homogenous group of people. Not intentionally, it’s just is the way we’ve sort of built our talent pool.

But if we are trying to create representation so that people understand or perceive from our marketing campaigns that we want to be inclusive and that we are seeking diverse voices and diverse perspectives and opinions, et cetera, it’s important to just, again, show that inclusivity in a visual way and that diversity, ethnic diversity. Diversity of ability, even showing people who might be amputees or in wheelchairs, all of that representation. You hear all over the place, representation matters. And it really does. It really, really matters. So for people feeling like we understand and we care about. Maybe not even fully understand, but we care about how people are differently-abled. That’s just a takeaway, I think, for anybody listening to this AMA. Just to show that you care about those groups.

Kristyn:

Yes. Oh, I totally agree. And it’s not just the things you would think about either with a… Is somebody missing a limb or is someone missing an eye like those sorts of visual differences, but body diversity. Maybe somebody is very thin, maybe somebody is very large. Maybe somebody in there is a woman with facial hair. Who cares? You want those types of different body diversity to be represented in there too. And just be very intentional about that inclusivity aspect.

Robyn:

I think that it’s such an excellent point. And as a marketer, I notice this in marketing that I see out there and I really appreciate it when I see somebody represented that I can’t remember having seen represented before. To your example, somebody who is, doesn’t look like everybody else, a woman who doesn’t look like every size six model. And I think the great thing is too… Sure, there’s a lot of work to be done here, but I really think that advertising and marketing has come a long way in this. And I really feel that… Again, I’m not saying that there isn’t a lot of work still to be done, but I do feel like I am seeing more and more representation. And not to go off on a complete tangent for a second, ’cause I said to Kristyn, I didn’t want to get soapboxy on this topic. But I do think it’s interesting. I am almost 40, and I think I am in this interesting sandwich generation in the sense that my kids are going to grow up where so much of what we are talking about that inclus… I hope, that so much of this inclusivity is come completely normal. And my parents grew up in a time when it wasn’t… Not that… I don’t like using the word normal.

There was a stigma around that and all these things. And I am in this interesting sandwich generation because I grew up with parents who were not prejudiced or biased overtly in any way, but they just grew up in a different time. And so now instead of necessarily having those conversations brought to the forefront for me as a child or young adult, I sort of had to learn it in my 20s and 30s and become more aware of it and take a conscious perspective on diversity, equity, and inclusion. And now that leads me to have those conversations more purposefully with my kids. And I’m going to do one last sort of tangent thing. So my kids watch the show on Nickelodeon, it’s called “The Loud House,” it’s about a family with 11 kids, five girls, then a boy, and then another five girls. So this poor boy in the middle, Lincoln, he’s the only one in a house of 10 sisters. And one of the sisters is a lesbian.

And in this show, they’re not… They’re making it accessible like for kids’ minds to sort of understand it. But they talk about this young woman having a crush on her friend and everything. And I was standing in another room when my two boys were watching it maybe a year ago. And the daughter kisses her girlfriend. And my younger son goes, “What is happening?” ‘Cause he had never really experienced it. And my older son says, “what? There are two girls, two girls can like each other.” I literally did like a jump up and down dance in the other room because I just felt so positive that my children are growing up in a time where it is totally normal to them, something like that. And that they’re educating each other. That was like the real win for me, that my son felt very comfortable saying that he didn’t feel out of place or like he would be ostracized or made fun of if he felt that that was totally normal. Okay. I am off by sandbox, or my soapbox. I’m sorry, I lied to you Kristyn. I said no soapbox and them I’m soapboxing.

Kristyn:

It’s okay. I’m looking at the comments and our friend Nancy said in the comments, “This is your livestream, you can get sandboxy, it’s totally fine.”

What is Jennifer saying? I have a charity thrift shop with some social media and we are intentional… I help a charity thrift shop with some social media and we are intentional about showing outfit photos and looks that are gender-neutral, plus-size and fashion styles across generations. I’m going to put this up here. I love that, Jennifer. Just showing that there are people who are… There are all types of people. As my mom says, it takes all kinds to make the world go round. And for people to feel comfortable going into those stores or whatever, they know that they’re seen, that they’re whatever. Okay, can we get back to digital media for a second? I’ve taken us down… I’ve taken us down a whole path. I’m so sorry. Okay, so we’ve talked about alt tags, we’ve talked about camel case, we’ve talked about selecting inclusive imagery.

Robyn:

Another thing obviously is accessibility for your website. And there’s a lot of what we’ve talked about as part of that, but making sure that people are able to navigate your website in a way that works for them. Because, so I often say when I’m talking to somebody about our accessibility services. I don’t think many people realize this, but according to the CDC, one in four Americans is living with some sort of disability. That could be a blindness, hearing loss, physical impairment, cognitive impairment, some sort of disability. 25% of the population is living with a disability. Again, according to the CDC. And so if you… I always kind of use this point to sell, to say, what does it say about your website, if you are not paying attention to 25% of the population? Just off the bat, not making room for them in your digital marketing. And your website is your landing page, it’s your brand’s landing page, it’s your digital storefront so to speak. And so it tells that 25% of the population that it’s not a priority for you or your firm, and that might not be the firm that they want to work with. So just think about that. I know there’s a lot of talk about litigation and fear coming to driving people’s decision about web accessibility. But, yes, that matters, I’m not trying to, whatever, say that that doesn’t matter. But I would rather people come because they really understand that again, they don’t want to not include 25% of the population. You know what, Kristyn, I think would be kind of cool if you would talk a little bit about? When we were doing the research, the different feelings of inclusion.

Kristyn:

Yeah, absolutely. So, there are different… Or I forget what article I found this in, but there are nine different feelings to evoke inclusion in your marketing efforts. And they are celebration. So celebrating the people, the success, their holidays, not just your holidays and your company’s holidays, but the holidays of maybe the, and successes and celebrations of your audience. So celebration. How do you celebrate them? Not just, how do you celebrate your stuff? How do you celebrate them? The zest for life. So zest, that’s another one. How are you conveying enthusiasm and energy? What kind of zest is your marketing, and are your marketing efforts bringing to that person hope? Being intentional about bringing hope and conveying hope to the next generation or to your customers and consumers. Relaxation instead of portraying your need to be on guard or I’m selling something, I’m telling you this, I’m telling you that. It’s relaxation, calm, don’t invoking anxiety.

Relief, relief from a concern or a worry. Are you helping somebody? Are you giving them that sense of relief? Safety, creating an experience of safety for your brand that includes everybody. Are you a safe person to come to? Are you a safe service provider to be working with? Are you going to help them feel comforted and safe. Confidence, give them confidence in their belief that you are striving to act the right way. Acceptance. You are accepting and open to others differences. Whether that be all those differences we were talking about with body diversity or disabilities or their race or their gender or their gender identity. Whatever it is, are you accepting of that? ‘Cause you should be. Clarity. Are you bringing a sense of clarity to their… Are you bringing a sense of certainty and clarity and transparency in your marketing? Are you bringing clarity to a confusing situation? Are you helping somebody see more clearly? That sort of thing. So those nine feelings are what you should be invoking in your marketing efforts. And I’ll just list them out really quick. Celebration, zest, hope, relaxation, relief, safety, confidence, acceptance and clarity. Those are your nine feelings to invoke.

Robyn:

That’s great, thanks Kristyn. The other thing that I had not like consciously thought of when we talk about diversity, I think diversity can sort of be a sticky subject because sometimes people think it only means racial diversity or ethnic diversity. And I certainly think that people’s understanding of the definition of that word is broadening. But one that we found as, again, as we were preparing for today, is experiential diversity. And I sort of mentioned this earlier, but talking about somebody’s marital status, parental status, their ability, their military status, their affinity groups or even their job functions. I… It really sort of smacked me across the face when we started talking about that, because, so I think of this in the context of I’m a parent. And my worldview is largely informed by the fact that I’m a parent. And my understanding of certain situations, again, is informed by that experience that I have in life. But there are plenty of people out there who aren’t parents, for whatever reason.

Don’t want to be, never going to be, can’t be. And so an understanding of that different experience too, we’re really getting sort of down the rabbit hole when we talk about experiential diversity and like how to even bring that forward. But just an understanding and a sensitivity to that, I think is really important, especially in law firm marketing and legal marketing, because different practice areas will potentially focus on different subsets of the population with specific experiences. And so how to bring that forward in your marketing so people understand that the work that you do really does focus on those groups or in how to help those groups and work with those groups. So, just think about that too, as life experience, the where people are in life as a type of diversity as well.

Kristyn:

Absolutely. And it’s interesting, and I feel like I could get up on a soapbox about this forever. But it’s interesting to think of things in terms of experiential… Wow, I can’t say this word, experiential diversity, is like single parent versus a two-parent household or a two-parent family, something like that. My mom was a single mom and taking time off at work was difficult for her because single parent, she has to take care of everything on her own. And then with the family leave stuff that’s been happening in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it’s like, oh, you get family and parental leave for all of these things. You get your leave to take care of a family member or to take care of your family. But is her firm including her, she is a family of one at this point because her kids are grown up and out of the house, my brother and I. And she doesn’t have a spouse or a partner, she’s on her own. And you know what? Family comes first, she’s a family of one, which means she has to take care of herself. And that’s just something that I always think about going into these types of things with experiential diversity is like, are you a one-person household? Are you a two-person household? Are you a three-person household? Who am I communicating with right now? What kind of struggles is this person dealing with on their own? That type of thing. I could get up on a soapbox about single parents all day.

Robyn:

Well, and you know what, Kristyn? I honestly think it’s funny. This was supposed to be an AMA and we’re not necessarily getting a lot of questions, but I think that the conversation that we’re having is so important. I mean, this was actually believe it or not representative of a conversation, of a continuation of a conversation that we have sort of behind the scenes all the time. How do we just make ourselves aware? And one sort of last point I have before I kind of wrap it up that we haven’t even touched on, is the use of pronouns. And wherever you sort of land on whether or not like you should use pronouns or be asked to use pronouns and all of these things, I guess the point that I come down to is this, is that if you can make the language, just make the language on your site neutral, just as neutral as possible.

So that you’re not including or excluding any specific groups. Who’s that going to hurt? You know what I mean? And I’m sort of coming, I have negative viewpoints in the back of my mind that I’ve heard about this specific topic. And again, however you feel about it, just make it neutral. It’s not hurting anybody, it’s not helping anybody, you’re just being as neutral as possible. So, and we’re talking about it instead of saying she/her, she/her/hers, he or he/him/his, just using, they/them/theirs, just it’s okay. And I know that for the grammar nerds, this is very hard to do when we’re talking about using they/them/theirs as singular pronouns. But it is… That is the way the world is shifting, just saying. But, we’ve hit the 30-minute mark and I can’t believe we’ve been talking for 30 minutes. Oh no, you have something you want to add.

Kristyn:

– I have one thing… Actually, Nancy reminded me of this with her comment. Did you discuss captioning videos? I was a bit late, might have missed this.

Robyn:

Yes, caption videos. Obviously, that is a very important thing to do for the hearing disabled. Just somebody can’t hear, they need to be able to see what you’re saying and read what saying. And if you’re not captioning your videos, then at least download a transcript, so when you post something to YouTube or LinkedIn or somewhere, you can link to that transcript and someone could read it if they can’t listen to it. So it’s important. If they’re not live captions, you could burn them in in post-production after the fact. Or you could have a link to the transcript so that someone could be reading that transcript and following along with the video.

Oh, Nancy, you’re a God sent, thank you for reminding us of that. Because that is actually a huge topic here, a huge point. And we got lost in our soapboxing. But… So, many platforms like LinkedIn right now, if watching on our livestream or on our YouTube channel, it is auto generating captions. And they’re pretty decent. I’m sure there’s some AI behind the scenes that helps them get better over time. But full disclosure, what we always do, and we recommend this to clients, and there are tools out there to do this. It is somewhat time… It can be a little bit time-consuming, but it doesn’t require you literally having a human being transcribe it, but is you download the video and you generate a transcript as Kristyn said, and you also generate what’s called an SRT file. And by creating an SRT file, that’s S as in Sam, R as in Robin, T as in tarantula, that is a special type of caption file that you can go back in and replace the auto-generated captions with the SRT file. So that gives you an opportunity to clean up misspellings or ways… ‘Cause it’s an AI, sitting here listening to me right now and generating captions in almost real-time.

So go through, watch your video, start to finish, listen to it and fix the words that need to be fixed, generate that SRT file, replace it on your videos. And then if you can, there is some debate about how compliant auto-generated captions are in general. I am not well educated enough to get into this topic too deeply. But I have heard tell in passing, that even on YouTube auto-generated captions or the generated captions that can come with videos, aren’t truly compliant. So, if you want to go a step further as Kristyn mentioned, do burn in the subtitles into the video, so it’s right there. And we’ve talked about this before on different live streams and for different reasons. The burned-in captions of course have an inclusivity and an accessibility component, but also something like 98% of people are watching videos on social media on mute. They might be commuting or whatever their reason is. And so if for some reason the auto-generated captions aren’t working, if you don’t have burned in captions, they aren’t able to see what you’re saying, and they’re going to scroll on past.

So, huge kudos to Nancy Merlin for reminding us to talk about that, thank you so much. And if you have any more questions for us about this, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, Robyn with a “y” @legalisi.com or Kristyn with a “y” @legalisi.com. Don’t know if you know this, but you have to have a y in your name to work with us. I’m kidding. Thank you for listening to soapboxing. I hope that you found some part of this useful today. Please reach out to us and have a great long weekend, everybody, happy Presidents’ Day weekend.