It’s always a treat for us to get to sit down and talk one-on-one with our users, but it makes us smile extra big when we connect with someone from the local Pittsburgh area. We had the pleasure of speaking with Jim McKenzie, a Global Project Manager at Philips Respironics, who has been using UpContent for his work with the Pittsburgh chapter of Product Development and Management Association (PDMA).

Meet Jim

Though Philips Respironics is an internationally recognized company and there’s always a great deal of buzz surrounding them, Jim explained that when it comes to social media, the company has set a clear expectation that engaging online should occur outside of company time. As a result, Jim has become more involved in developing PDMA’s online presence and currently sits on both the marketing and talent committees. Part of his responsibilities includes curating interesting and relevant articles and blog posts on Twitter every week that fall under PDMA’s “Topic of the Week.”

For example, Jim used UpContent to share content about big data for last week’s topic:

Driving #innovation with Big Data: https://t.co/GwYOCmWWmX @techworldnews #BigData #business #tech pic.twitter.com/eqAQcUQcIp

— PDMA Pittsburgh (@PDMAPittsburgh) May 30, 2016

When Jim took on this responsibility, he realized that it was way more time-consuming than he initially expected. He describes his old process of Google searching until he found the right content as “arduous” and “a hunt and a peck.” After a certain point, Jim felt like there had to be another way. He asked, “Instead of Googling this stuff, how do I find articles and relevant information that would be interesting to people who have similar backgrounds to me?”

Luckily, a PDMA colleague introduced UpContent to him and he was eager to try it out, especially because of the Pittsburgh connection. After trying it out, he was hooked and has been using it as part of his workflow every week since.

We asked Jim how he would explain UpContent to his colleagues and we think he really nailed it:

“If you wanted to be an opinion leader in your field–to find pertinent information for all of your contacts–this tool helps you find and categorize it.”

Since the goal is to keep PDMA as a go-to authority for others, curating content is a natural and important part of their marketing strategy. But Jim believes that nearly anyone can benefit from using UpContent:

“If you’re trying to establish your organization, or yourself, as a position of authority in the market, absolutely. If I were a professor who publishes papers regularly, they should be using this. Any marketing professional should be using this. It would be silly not to.”

Some of Jim’s favorite features include the ability to create multiple search queries to really hone in on the specific content he’s looking for–a perk that makes choosing articles and blog posts for particular themes a lot easier. He also really enjoys the card layout and the visualizations within the relevance and influence graphs–something he’s hoping to explore more moving further.

Related: Meet Clementine Holman, a BuzzSumo to UpContent convert

We love feedback of all kinds from our users so we asked Jim what he would like to see in UpContent in the future. He shared that he would love the ability to sort by a specific influencer–to view content by a particular source in that niche. We think that’s a great suggestion and we hope to offer even more flexibility within our sorting filters in the future.

Agree with Jim or have an idea for UpContent? We want to hear it!

Take a look at the PDMA Pittsburgh Twitter profile and you’ll see an actively engaged community of talented and ambitious innovators, thanks to Jim’s efforts. We’re just thrilled to play a small role in keeping those conversations going.

Jim McKenzie is a global product manager for Philips Respironics. He also volunteers on the marketing and talent committees for PDMA Pittsburgh where he curates interesting content for the “Topic of the Week.” You can view his topic about Inspirational TED Talks here.

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