Mob: A delicious digital blend of cool cooking and conscience

Transcript

Cat: Welcome to Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favorite success stories from the world of social media.

This is a space for everyone and really, nearly anything goes, but what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that’s what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know, and some that you don’t. To explore the weird, wonderful ways that businesses, organizations and individuals have achieved success on social media, all with tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies.

And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.

So, this week I’m joined by Michael Sladden, who’s the COO at Mob. Mob, if you don’t know, is a food media platform, whose mission is to inspire young people to cook exciting, high-quality dishes that do not break the bank.

I found Mob during the pandemic, where I was instantly a mega fan because of the high-quality content, the delicious recipes, and they’re focused on making sure that everything could be easily replicated in your very own kitchen.

If you want to see what Mob’s getting up to and try out some of these recipes for yourself, you can connect with them across all of social media at Mob, M-O-B.

Michael, welcome to Social Creatures.

Michael: Hello, how are you doing?

Cat: I’m great, thank you. I’m so looking forward to talking to you because I really am an absolutely massive fan of Mob and I deliberated bringing up my cookbooks to show you, but I thought that might be a little bit fan girlish. So, I’d spare you that.

But I explained in the introduction a little bit about what Mob does, but perhaps, you could tell our listeners in your own words, what is Mob, and what’s your mission?

Michael: We want to help young people predominantly at the moment in the UK, but sort of eventually around the world, help them get back into the kitchen and make it enjoyable, and make it something that people really want to do.

And also, bring sort of like a more youthful, I guess, slightly more cool (very much in inverted commas) — cool elements to cooking. I think that a lot of other areas and spheres like sports and music have those sort of cult figures and that real like amazing focus on branding.

And we saw that that doesn’t really happen in food and we wanted to be that brand. So, that’s what we’re up to, yeah.

Cat: I love that. And I love the grassroots elements of Mob as well and its origins, which is around like your founder Ben was at uni when he realized that his fellow students weren’t really cooking and he wanted to change that.

And yeah, I think it’s really obvious, you’ve mentioned there that focusing on young people to get them cooking is a big part of your mission. But having a community is another part of the stuff that you do.

You’re always asking for community feedback on your channels, the cereal wars; like which is the better cereal and things like this. Is your community only young people? And how has growing that community been part of your strategy?

Michael: In the first instance, Ben wanted to start a social media platform. And I think social media is a place where as you know, community is born and continues to grow. And I think that when building out a platform like we’ve been doing on Facebook or Instagram, you create these sort of sub communities.

But I think like tying those all together to this larger community, which is people that engage in cooking our recipes, inviting their mates around for dinner, it’s all about community.

It’s not just in the sense of like our audience or our community, of course, but like the communities that they create cooking our dishes is something that we don’t have control over, but it’s something that we want to inspire.

So, community means so many different things to us. And I think as we grow as a business, what those communities look like and how they’re shaped constantly changes, and it’s also adapting so you can keep giving those communities what they want, whether that’s in terms of the food that they want to be cooking.

At the moment, there’s a recession around the corner and people are short on funds and that’s something that we want to address and something we want to help with.

I probably should say this, that Mob is a brand that sits under Mouth Group, which is essentially, a group that we’ve developed in order to host multiple brands because we’re identifying the need for communities in different areas.

And we’ve also very recently launched a new vegan platform called Bunch. We’re working on an app called Peckish, it’s sort of like, I guess there’s a little bit of a exciting titbit of exclusive reveal.

It’s out there, but essentially, we’re going to hard launch it soon. And the idea of that is pulling everyone together to share their recipes in a way that sometimes isn’t championed by Instagram, as Instagram really focuses on the people that are already doing so well.

So, we’re always identifying communities and looking to serve them essentially and do it in a way that we think is appropriate and helpful, and also, interesting and entertaining too.

Cat: I’m interested as well. You did mention the cool element a couple of questions ago. How can you make cooking cool? I do think that you do it, but I’m interested given that you like specifically called it out, how do you sort of create content with that lens?

Michael: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I think a lot of that comes just down to sort of our brand positioning and the tone.

Ben, our founder is self-admittedly obsessed with brands and really draws inspiration from the likes of Vice, Boiler Room, Nike, looking at those brands and seeing what they’re doing and trying to lend that brand tone or that kind of vibe to what we do.

And there are many areas where Vice might be able to go slightly down, the more grungy, cultural route, that’s something that wouldn’t sit well with our audience.

So, it’s that balance of like what we think is great and also what our audience want. And I think that the reason I say “cool” because I think that it’s also a word that we would never use in an official sense.

But I think it’s just looking like what is to be cool or what is to make a cool brand. It’s something that is fresh, something that is vibrant, something that’s changing, something that listens to new voices and people coming through the ranks in terms of new chefs and people with new ideas, and try to draw from as many places as possible to take inspiration to create what we think is a really exciting and visually …

Yeah, cool, is the word, is the reason why that word exists, and that’s what we are trying to do.

Cat: And I think as well, you mentioned there about trying to create stuff that’s new and exciting and compelling. And I think I heard a story about your founder Ben way back when was slipping recipes into pizza boxes when he worked at Deliveroo, which in itself, is a really cool, interesting kind of unusual thing to do that would be attention-grabbing. And it’s like quite a nice sort of little origin story.

But it’s very clear that social has always been at the core of Mob, it is where I found you. I wonder if it’s like where most people have found you.

I just kind of wonder, has there always been a clear social strategy form up from the beginning or is it something that has evolved over time, and what would be like your main goals behind your social strategy?

Michael: Oh, it completely evolves over time. TikTok, for instance, wasn’t as much of a thing. I think it was around, but no one was using it anywhere near to the extent as like they are now back when I joined the company, which is around three and a half years ago.

So, a social strategy that doesn’t take into account amazing new platforms that are coming out is one that I think is sort of doomed.

And it’s something that we’ve always been looking to do is to be super flexible. About two years ago, every single food video that we did would’ve been short from above with a really expensive almost cinema level camera. And that’s what the internet wanted at that time, and TikTok has come along and completely changed that.

So, we have very quickly adapted our strategy. So, I would actually say that a strategy that doesn’t take into account the ever-changing nature of social media is one that is honestly doomed.

Instagram changes their algorithms and their feature sets like almost every week and to not adapt would be almost … I don’t know, it would just not be wise.

So, for instance, there’s this guy on Instagram called Adam Mosseri and, in his bio, it says he’s the head of Instagram, but he does these stories and these posts about the features and what they’re doing as a platform.

So, we often watch those videos and get excited about the things that are coming up, obviously, that then changes our strategy quite dramatically. And we’ve actually never had a marketing department, which I think people are quite surprised at.

We’ve never had a department that is solely focused on growing the platform because it’s essentially, what we all do full-time, is we work together to grow the platform. So, that is obviously something that we will need as we grow.

And we do have a small social team now that are growing the out, but it’s something that we haven’t really been hugely focused on.

Obviously, we really care about the growth. It’s important, there’s many people incoming into the community as possible to us, but obviously, we want to make sure that we’re doing the right content. And there are easy ways to get lots and lots of views. And sometimes, we decide not to go down that route.

So, a lot of it is by feel and adapts essentially every other week. Yeah.

Cat: I absolutely agree with you that being adaptable on social media is not just an advantage, it’s a necessity.

But at the same time, I think what’s quite interesting about Mob; there’s a very strong brand stamp on your content.

And I think as well, it’s really nice to see that you do include like kind of bloopers and a real sense of a relaxed feel, which I think as well, probably goes very hand in hand with the fact that you’re trying to encourage people into the kitchen. Like if it’s too formal and terrifying, that’s going to maybe put them off.

I kind of wonder, is that something that can stop people from taking you seriously as a business, or doesn’t really bother you in that manner?

Michael: It doesn’t really bother us. I think we really do focus on the content. It is Ben’s vision for the brand. It sort of ends up with the content that we make and it is relaxed.

It’s the reason that we actually are able to essentially build a community of people who in sort of the marketing world are quite famously hard to talk to, which is people who are sort of like in between the ages of 18 and 35. It’s something that we do because we make content that people respond to.

You see companies try and make social media content, you can tell it’s been shot on an amazing camera and then an editor’s come in and then like cropped it to make sure that it’s vertical.

And you just look at that and think it’s just not what people want these days. People aren’t interested in this like very glossy production style. For people to engage, the content needs to be engaging. And that is now shooting things on mobile, being really personable, having like lots of personality in that content too.

So, I guess if people don’t take us seriously because of that. So, then I would probably recommend that they check out their own social media strategy, if that’s something that they’re in, because they might be missing a bit of a trick.

We deal as a business with serious people and they seem to be very excited about what we are doing. I guess, it’s sort of disruption in the industry. And I haven’t really come across anyone who doesn’t like what we do, which is so humbling and so flattering because we just turn up and we really just try and do our best, and try and make amazing content. And to hear that it resonates with people is just brilliant.

Cat: One thing I have been dying to talk to you about is that there are a lot of people who are really excited to work with you. And it’s not unusual to see collaborations happening.

But Mob has had some unbelievable collaborations recently, like real chef’s kiss moments. Like honestly, as a consumer, I’ve seen them and been like, “That is perfect.”

So, I think one in particular that I just thought this is so wonderful was with Aldi. As most people in the UK know, they are fabulous on social media. Like they really are hilarious, they’re both social media darlings.

But that’s like just one of a number of brand collaborations that you have. I wonder how much are they a part of your strategy and what are your goals around that collaboration work?

Michael: Well, they’re an absolutely huge part of our strategy. It’s how we make money is through brand partnerships. And because we host those partnerships on our socials, you have a decision to make, in some instances.

Do you work with a brand that you’re not comfortable working with and take the money and damage the brand a little, or do you go and look for amazing partners that you really believe in and serve your audience amazing content to the point where people actually celebrate those partnerships.

And Aldi is just a classic example. It is a supermarket that has such an amazing mission, amazing ethos. It’s so relevant to people in our audience and just generally across the UK, but also, across the world too.

And it’s just brilliant that we can have those conversations with these brands and they’re open to working with us. We find it again, really humbling and incredibly exciting.

And especially when the end result is just really great content and creating a user journey where not only do I know the recipe, but I also know where I can buy the ingredients, and I know that I can get them for a budget. Like it’s a really helpful piece of content. And it’s something that we really focus on.

Again, this is very much Ben’s area, but he works so closely with our partnerships team to make sure that we are identifying brands that sit well with our general mission. And I think that that’s why that attention to detail really shines through on the content that we make. Because a lot of work goes into. It really does.

Cat: I think you can see that as a consumer, it feels really intentional in a world where there’s lots of kind of unintentional collaborations or collaborations where you’ve just got … I shared it on my own personal Instagram and said like, “This is like the collaboration of dreams.” Which is God’s honest truth. I would never share about a collaboration on my own personal Instagram, but I did with that one.

Going back to the content for a second, you are on all of the major social media channels, including quite recently, YouTube. So, I’d be interested to hear why YouTube sort of came later. It kind of seems like quite a natural fit for you.

You mentioned about not just cropping content to fit, like how much cross-pollination is happening across these social media channels? And like how are you coping with understanding the nuances of each platform and the different users there?

Michael: So, I’m very glad that you asked that question because it demonstrates that we maybe have been more successful in making people think that we launched the YouTube channel three months ago.

It’s essentially not exactly true because we launched our YouTube many, many years ago, but then decided that we didn’t quite have the resources to do it properly. And we had to prioritize.

So, probably good to just note that in order to do all these things, you really need to be working with incredible people. And there’s a lot that goes into that too.

Coming away slightly from the brand element, and really maybe this is more, my area is making sure that we have brilliant people surrounding us and working with us to help us create incredible content for these specific platforms.

So, our head of content Jake, his background is working in radio. He works for Global, also works at Capital and they had a huge YouTube presence and he joined the team to give us an understanding of how we can make Mob appropriate content on YouTube.

The synergies are that we have the same similar recipes across the platforms, but we adapt the way that we communicate those recipes based on the platform that we’re on.

It really is a full-time job for a number of people, making sure that the content that we’re making is properly tailored to those different platforms. And I think again, you can very easily spread yourself very thin and make sort of average content across all platforms.

Or you can really focus on one until you have the abilities to focus on another. And it’s all about, I guess, resourcing and being true to your brand and to your vision and mission and not trying to do everything at once.

We’re now, in a position luckily, where we can start to do everything at once because we’ve built out that team, bringing in people that know those platforms inside out, making sure that they keep tabs on what’s changing and what’s working.

And then developing that content over time and building it and responding to the feedback from your audience, which is another amazing part of social media, is that you have that instant feedback loop on every platform.

So, if people don’t like it, they will tell you and then you can decide to stick with your guns or you can change. And generally, we decide to change because the feedback’s normally really great.

[Music Playing 00:16:09]

Cat: Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex, even the hardiest of social media users.

Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits in the part of the show we like to call; Sound Advice.

Stacey: Right, I’ve got my cup of tea and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean it is time for us to take a break and cozy down together.

This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, through your trickiest digital dilemmas.

Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today:

Dear Stacey, I own and run a little cocktail speakeasy, which as well as slinging delish drinks has had more and more requests to host weddings in the last year, leading us to want to take our bar on the road.

We’ve invested in a Horsebox Trailer Conversion to take our cocktails to functions and events, which is a very different offering and atmosphere from our little basement bar.

So, now we’re ready to launch for wedding season with a diary full of bookings. We’ve been going back and forth over the question that asks, do we start a new dedicated social media presence for this project?

As it aimed at a different clientele has a different look feel, and even menu, we are nervous about sharing content for this new part of the business on our existing social media.

But we also want to capitalize on the existing following that we’ve worked so hard to build up over the last few years.

So, new project, new social, or evolve our existing? Look forward to hearing your thoughts, Tom.

When I was leading social for clients, I used to get this question all of the time for new business developments and also product ranges. The big question in response to yours, Tom, is how much time do you and the team realistically have to dedicate to creating a new social media presence.

If you are launching this new project and running the existing bar, I’m guessing not so much. If you do have great support from your team and they’re social-savvy, then I’d say, go for it in terms of creating new social profiles. If that’s your gut feeling, you’ve clearly got a great business head on you.

However, if it is a seasonal business, like if you’re only imagining this for summertime, for weddings and festivals, then may be switching your focus to existing channels during these periods is a better use of your audiences and profiles, and think about different networks in addition to what you already have.

So, what I mean by that is keep your existing channels, but maybe add Pinterest. So, you can mix in wedding content and functions content on there, and then may be add a Twitter to join any chatter around festivals that you might be attending.

That way, you can harness your existing audiences by sharing the new content on your pre-built social media presences, but also, reach those brand new audiences by creating and engaging with contextual content around those live events and functions.

But let’s talk weddings specifically. I’ve already mentioned Pinterest here for your new mobile bar, which is a must, but a dedicated Instagram solely for weddings could also be really lucrative.

Namely, because wedding guest posts a lot from the big days that they attend. And especially, I imagine if it involves your delish cocktails. So, creating a place to collate and harness all of that user-generated content can be gold.

You can bank these assets from the wedding guests, and not only will the photos keep your profiles looking up to date and active all year round, but they’ll also provide inspiration for new clients who might be planning their own celebrations.

So, Tom, I hope this sees you raising a glass to even more success on the road and on social this summer.

Until next time, listeners, stay strong and stay social. And now, back to the interview.

Cat: Yeah, I think it’s so refreshing to hear you talk about you maybe had the YouTube channel going prior and it wasn’t really resonating as much because I think that’s something we always try to talk about on this podcast, that the road to success and social isn’t linear and it’s often not incredibly easy all away as well.

So, I wonder actually, if you would like to share any other sort of lessons that you have along those lines, like what other like difficulties have you encountered?

Michael: Yeah. So, I think talking about TikTok, we launched our TikTok maybe three times. Essentially, with TikTok, we uploaded a video, didn’t do well. We were like, oh actually, maybe we’ve sort of missed the market, deleted it. I think we then did it again.

And then our third attempt, or maybe it was fourth, I can’t remember exactly, ended up getting around 10 million views and it just goes to show stick at it. You don’t pride an ego — leave that at the door when it comes to social media, like you have, again, that instant feedback loop. There’s nothing more telling than the performance of a piece of content.

And I think it goes back to adaptability of strategy. Again, we were probably supposed to launch TikTok at this one time. It just didn’t go well. So, we sort of went back to the drawing board. Could we do this better? Could we do this differently? Tried it again.

And I always think sometimes you look at maybe a brand social media and you can see sometimes they just absolutely nail it. And you see these brands, these huge brands.

You talk about Aldi, you talk about people like Ryanair that have clearly just got a really engaged social media team that are just really in the sort of the weeds of what people are enjoying on social media.

But you see other brands who clearly are just sticking to their guns and they’re just sticking to what their maybe creative director who has been at the company for so long and maybe doesn’t understand social so much, them pushing through certain creative decisions that just do not land.

And the reason that maybe you don’t see that stuff is because you would never be served it because it’s not really that engaging.

I think there’s a lot to be said for experimentation in social media, but there are limits to that. You don’t want to obviously offend anyone or do anything that could be seen as problematic.

That is another thing that we make sure that we are always communicating about making sure that our content’s like incredibly inclusive and sensitive too, so that’s something else that we discuss.

But yeah, you need to experiment and you need to take certain risks in order to build out a social media strategy. And I think our sort of launch of TikTok is indicative of that.

Cat: Oh, my goodness. I couldn’t agree more with you. And I think that that’s a real advantage in the world of social media to sort of lead with personality and you guys definitely do that.

But moving outside of the digital realm for a second as well, it’s kind of easy to think that Mob just exists on social media, but that’s also not the case at all. You’ve got a whole line of cookbooks. As I mentioned earlier, you have a traveling food and you collaborate with schools, musicians, and charitable organizations to teach, tour and line stomachs around the UK.

How do you balance between the huge levels of work that you’re doing on social, where I guess is where you’re finding the majority of your growth and momentum being built digitally with all of this non-digital work as well?

Michael: I guess there are different answers for those different areas. The truck was made because we wanted to have those touch points with our audience. There’s nothing more special than meeting the community.

And we did a few book launches, met a lot of sort of The Mob, and they came down and there was clearly such an appetite for these touchpoints and some of our partners and our brands we were working with were also echoing, like it would be amazing if we could work together in the physical space.

So, now, we’ve got an events team of four, which is amazingly exciting. So, there are lots of really exciting events coming up that we think everyone should hopefully love lots of amazing food, great music, that kind of thing.

On the cookbook side, it’s such a natural progression for us as a food brand. We’re really getting into an amazing rhythm of creating really engaging, wonderful cookbooks that really represent our brand.

And yeah, the school stuff, the charity stuff, just stuff that we really want to do. I think we are really ambitious and we have an incredible, incredible team and I think people really buy into the mission.

So, people come into the company and really want to help us develop that vision. And yeah, we’re looking to hire people, so we can focus even more on like charitable partnerships and to really then focus on sustainability in a way that we haven’t been able to do before and all of these different areas, which is yeah, just really exciting.

Cat: It’s so great to hear how values-driven Mob is. Like it sort of almost sounds like everything that you do is very intentional and the core values of the company is baked into almost every decision. Like everything you’ve described seems to be coming from a really good place of moral fiber, I would say.

I wonder what is in store for Mob, because you’ve kind of detailed this huge growth over quite a short amount of time. So, and you’ve mentioned that you’re very ambitious, so I have no doubt that you’re all aiming for the sky.

But I’m wondering what that entails, what you can maybe tell is about. And particularly with social media, are there any big plans in the pipeline?

Michael: Yeah, there are lots of big plans. So, Mob, obviously we’re on this trajectory is like make amazing content, make better content.

We’re really interested in creating almost like a hyper-engaged community. We’re looking at a slightly sort of like subscription-led model where we can offer even more amazing content that’s maybe more bespoke to the super Mob fans, the ones that really want to engage on a new level.

We are also creating other brands too. So, as I mentioned earlier, we have set up what is called Mouth Group. And the reason we called it that is because the mouth is the thing that speaks and communicates, but it’s also the thing that eats. And we thought it was representative of the world of work that we are in.

And we also have Juice, which is our talent management agency, where we represent a number of different chefs on our roster. People like What Willy Cook, Ixta Belfrage to name a few, some amazing chefs, and help them grow their platforms. And are constantly talking to them about what they want to do and how we can help them on their journeys too.

So, it’s really community is at the heart of everything that we do. And now, that we have Mouth Group set up, it gives us the freedom to act in a way that isn’t necessarily constrained by Mob’s identity and Mob’s mission.

We can start building other things that maybe aren’t suitable for like Mob’s branding or Mob’s position. And we want to make sure that Mob can stay so pure. So, we don’t want to distill it with all of these different, crazy ambitions that we have.

So yeah, more brands, more exciting things, potentially looking to go abroad, loads of conversations. We’re constantly talking about ideas and it’s so exciting.

And on a personal level, I just absolutely love being involved in those conversations and being able to bring myself to growing this thing out, because it really is amazing to come to work, into every day and to be part of this mission for sure.

Cat: I love to hear that so much. And I totally agree with you with hearing from an actual fan. That’s embarrassing for me to say, but I am a mega fan.

And so, I’m glad that you’re catering to the super fans, especially when you’re looking at social media metrics, you can see the numbers growing, but it’s nice to sometimes hear from the individual who loves your stuff.

One final question that we have is one that we ask everybody on this podcast, which is if Mob had to delete all of the accounts that it follows on Twitter leaving only one — and we can maybe make it for Instagram. Because it’s more like your realm I’d say or TikTok; which one account would you leave and why?

Michael: God, that’s such a hard question. And also, because I don’t want to upset anyone. Twitter, I imagine what would happen there, if that became something we had to do, I think Lucas, who’s our, I guess, would you call him our tweeter? I guess that’s technically what you could call him.

He’s our Senior Content Editor. He writes all of our articles. I imagine what he’d probably do is just follow himself and unfollow everyone else.

So, that’s my sort of get out of jail free card answer for that one. Maybe I’m a bit stuck with that question. There’s just a few people that we would continue to follow.

Cat: Well, it totally tracks. You’re really focused on community. It’s a community of people you’d still want to follow, and that’s totally cool.

Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. As I mentioned, it’s a real pleasure.

Michael: Yes. Thank you so much for having me.

[Music playing 00:28:31]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Michael of Mob for joining me today and to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

If you can believe it, this is the last installment of the first series. What a journey it’s been. My thanks to all of you, our beloved listeners, as you’ve helped us dive through the weird world of social media.

If you’ve enjoyed the series, we’d love it if you could take the time to write and review on iTunes.

We’ll be back next year with more stories from Social Creatures. So, until then, stay social. Bye.