Get High at Work!

Author: Kevin Sandlin

  • Normal is just a setting on the dryer

    We’re in session 3 of Digital Marketing at General Assembly, and the word “normal” has popped up in our discussions of analytics and measurement.  What is normal?

    Some would say “normal is just a setting on the dryer”, but we’re not talking about “life” normal, but marketing analytics normal.  In the DGM world, “normal” is what we would define as our baseline or what we generally expect.  For example, for this blog, I can expect on a day to day basis to get a certain number of users. That’s normal. I can also expect to get a certain percentage of that traffic from the normal sources, as exhibited below in the pizza chart from Google Analytics.

    Yes, I said “pizza chart” because my son said he thinks it looks more like a pizza than a pie, so he wants to call it a pizza chart. Pizza chart it is.  The chart above covers all of January, which is when I reverted back to Blogger from WordPress for this blog. So, this is my new normal, until the trend changes.
    Why do we care about normal?  Here are a few reasons.
    • Normal is my baseline. It’s what you can expect if nothing else changes.
    • Knowing normal, now I can manage traffic sources by exception, meaning that, whenever I see a spike or dip in any of the above percentages, I know to check it out.
    • Anything outside of normal is either good or bad. A spike can mean a popular post or a new social medial influencer shared a post. A dip might mean a domain, DNS, or bad link shared.

    Just like when you start monitoring any aspect of your health – weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc. – you first establish a baseline. Then you manage by the changes to that baseline, either good or bad.
    So, while normal is a setting on the dryer, it’s a very important setting in the health and growth of your web property.  Find your normal, and measure against it.

  • How to Generate New Ideas For Your Blog

    Essentials-of-blogging-and-content-strategy

    One of the most frustrating things about blogging – or writing in general – is coming up with new and fresh topics. You may call it “writer’s block,” and everyone who is even somewhat engaged in creating written content has run into writer’s block at least once.

    Well, no more for those of us who blog for our brand! Here are a dozen different ways to help you establish regular topics that you can count on for keeping your blog fresh, relevant, and compelling to your readers.

    For more on starting a blog for your brand, check out the first post from this series.

    1. Remember why you’re blogging.

    Often, taking things back to their most simple form can help regenerate the original purpose of starting a blog in the first place. When all else fails, refer to your original goals for your blog, and start there.


    2. Remember for whom you are writing.

    Always, always, always try to empathize with your audience, your readers, those who are interacting with your brand. What are they saying? You may find that a reader comment is easily translated into a full blog post.


    3. What does your audience need to know?

    Consider everything your company is doing right now – all the projects everyone is working on or just completed. Now ask yourself, what do our customers, users, channel, or fans need to know? Tell them!


    4. Read other blogs.

    For inspiration for content, style, topics, and ideas. Following blogs in your market space also helps you keep tabs your competitors, customers, and the market itself.


    5. Every company event is a blog post.

    What is your company doing in your community? There’s no better way to gain genuine goodwill and press than organizing a company outreach into your community.


    6. Every company success is a blog post.

    Every success should be touted from the rooftops as well as the company blog. Did your company raise some money, win a new customer (get permission), do well in a market survey, win an award?  Every company success should be a blog post.


    7. Every new product should be several blog posts.

    The beauty of the 300-500 word SEO optimization is that you can stretch your content over a series of blog posts.


    8. Every new feature is a blog post

    Not only because it’s a new feature, but because it’s an opportunity for you to teach your users and/or customers how to use the new feature and why the feature was added.


    9. Every company team member is a blog post.

    Sometimes, when a team member leaves, it’s a blog post, too, as you fondly remember the team member’s contributions and wish them well in their new adventure.


    10. Company news is a no brainer.

    Some of the above points may also serve as “news”, but actual news that used to be traditionally shared in a press release should be on the blog immediately after the press release, or, some might argue, instead of the press release.


    11. Company history

    Detailing your company’s history is a great way to share your humble beginnings, your culture, your team, and generally why your users and customers have stuck with you for all this time.


    12. Teach your audience how to use your products

    This is a great way to maintain a long series of blog posts, and using video and great images really adds to these posts. Also, your sales and support teams can (and should) refer to these posts for their direct contact with customers.


    13. Have your support team answer the most frequently asked questions.

    Answering FAQs is a great way to address your customer’s needs, and for your team members to shine in their deep technical knowledge of your offering or the dynamics of your market.

    That’s a baker’s dozen ways for you to avoid blogger block, and keep your blog’s content new, fresh, compelling, and relevant to your company culture and your audience.

    Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and veteran of 7 tech startups. He runs Atlanta Tech Blogs, Pitch Practice, mentors startups and entrepreneurs at ATDC, and teaches Digital Marketing courses at GA.

  • How To Start Your Email Newsletter

    Email-Marketing-Optimization

    There are many parts to a content marketing strategy. One of the most important parts is an email newsletter. Despite many cries to the contrary, email is not dead as a marketing tool. In fact, email remains the most effective digital marketing tool, in spite of the meteoric rise of the most popular social media platforms. Your customers may or may not check their social media accounts during the day, but business email remains the go-to choice for communication.

    Knowing and understanding that fact, you may be considering producing a regular email newsletter for your customers, users, sales channel, or other audience segments. Before you get anywhere, you must remember that an email newsletter is an integral part of your content marketing strategy, so the goals of the newsletter should support the goals of the content marketing strategy.

    Here is a straightforward 8-point plan to beginning your email newsletter.

    1. Choose an email service provider (ESP).

    Please, do not try to operate an email newsletter with GMail. There are hundreds of email service providers to choose from. However, since you are just starting off, my advice is to find one that has a freemium option, meaning you don’t pay for a certain limited number of subscribers. Mailchimp is one such provider: emailing even daily to up to 2,000 subscribers is free. I use Mailchimp to manage all aspects of the Atlanta Tech Blogs daily digest email.

    2. Ask the hard questions before you ever begin to create your first newsletter.
    • who is your target audience?
    • what content will you share in the newsletter?
    • where will you promote your newsletter?
    • when will you send each issue out?
    • why are you creating a newsletter (what are your goals)?
    3. Gather content.

    Gather content from all of your available sources— including your blog, social media channels, company news, customer and employee testimonials, video training, customer support, and product/service documentation. Remember, you’re creating a vehicle to share content, so you need to make sure you have a lot of content to tap into for each newsletter issue.

    4. Prepare & Plan your content strategy.

    For this piece, I mean to put it on paper with a plan for each of the following:

    • frequency
    • format (template)
    • types of content
    • amount of content
    • calls to action
    • opt-in tactics
    5. Promote the newsletter.

    Promote your newsletter on every page of your website, email signatures, social media channels, your blog, and every other digital marketing channel you employ. Most of all, to promote your newsletter, offer something of value to your would-be subscribers.

    6. Use best practices for maintaining your email subscriber list:
    • double opt-in – when a subscriber enters their email address, they should receive an email confirmation that they must click on to confirm that they did opt-in to subscribe.
    • easy opt out – make it very simple if someone no longer wants to subscribe to your newsletter. Don’t take it personally, just let them out.
    • “you’re receiving this email because” – include the simple reminder in the footer of your email newsletter template that reminds the subscriber why they’re receiving the email.
    • datavalidation offers a free service to check your email list against spam reports.
    • offer an alternate contact method such as a phone number or your social media account
    • respond to email inquiries from your newsletter
    7. Measure performance against your goals.

    All ESPs offer measurement and analytics tools, so you can easily track your most common metrics:

    • Open & read
    • Click rate
    • Subscriber growth
    • Unsubscribes
    • Spam reports
    8. Iterate what’s working or not working.

    Just like you should do with your blog or any other aspect of your content marketing strategy, you should constantly measure the results of your email newsletter against your goals, and change what’s not working. 

    If you walk through these eight steps in the creation of your email newsletter, you’ll be starting off on the right foot. Content is king, and email is still the killer app of content marketing.

    Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and veteran of 7 tech startups. He runs Atlanta Tech Blogs, Pitch Practice, mentors startups and entrepreneurs at ATDC, and teaches Digital Marketing courses at GA.

  • Week 1 of Digital Marketing @GA

    I could not ask for a more enthusiastic and engaging group for this session of Digital Marketing at GA’s Atlanta location. In our first two sessions, there has not been a dull moment.  So far, we’ve delved mainly into creating a brand and articulating that brand’s message.  Last night we got a great insight into why some people are more successful at articulating and achieving their goals through this wonderful TED Talk from Simon Sinek.

    Understanding that “people don’t buy your what they buy your why“ had a profound effect on the rest of the evening’s learning.  After the video we started with a blank white board and named 4 brands that the group thought were “good” and then four brands the group thought were “bad”. Very interesting dynamics occurred during this discussion.

    You can see the discussion starting to escalate below on Instagram,plus a demonstration of Comcast’s continued misunderstanding of “brand”, and then a good example of how not to do social media.

    After praising the good and torching the bad brands, we realized somethig very curious: the words, thoughts, feelings, and other things evoked by these brands – good and bad – had nothing whatever to do with their products.  That really brought home how we must be intentional about creating our own brands (personal and company) based on a set of core values, taught to us by FAKEGRIMLOCK.

    The final exercise for last night was for each of the students to create their own individual brand brief based on Mr. Grimlock’s MVP model above, and then get full-barrel feedback from someone else in the class, one-on-one. AS FAKEGRIMLOCK SAY…

    In this #DGM2 class, we’re learning by doing, by creating our brands, then creating a strategy for marketing and promoting our brands successfully. Next week, we dig into analytics. Who doesn’t love analytics?!?

  • How To Start a Blog For Your Business

    Cross-posted from the General Assembly blog.

    Blogging-for-Business-How-to-Extract-Value

    In the daily operation of Atlanta Tech Blogs, I have spoken to dozens of daily and weekly bloggers about what, how, and why they blog. Unfortunately, I’ve spoken with many more businesses who do not blog. The reasons so many startups and small businesses do not blog are many, and include the following:

    • Not enough time
    • Can’t write well enough
    • Not enough content
    • Don’t see the advantages

    These are valid points that anyone can make; however, the biggest obstacle I’ve seen in those who “get” content marketing and really understand that the need to blog is this: they just don’t know where to start. To help everyone overcome that obstacle, here’s a step by step plan to get you started blogging regularly, consistently, and effectively.

    1. Choose a service/platform

    Sometimes this decision is the hardest one!  Isn’t it odd when life gives you too many choices that it’s even harder to make a decision? That’s how I feel when trying to decide on a new pair of running shoes. I just shut down, and that’s how it can be when you dig deep into all the different blogging software available today. It’s amazing! But fear not. Here’s a short list that beginners won’t find overwhelming.

    • WordPress – simply the easiest, most flexible, most popular, and most well supported platform for anyone to start blogging.
    • Blogger – Google’s clean and simple blogging service gives you a free yourblog.blogspot.com domain or your can use your own custom URL, e.g., yourblog.com
    • Tumblr – Yahoo acquired Tumblr last year, and has generally left the service alone, allowing Tumblr to remain a really, really simple user experience.
    • Medium –  If you just want to write and show off beautiful images, Medium (built by the same guy who created Blogger back in the day) is for you.

    I’ve used all of these, and now in my daily blogging I use Blogger because of its simplicity. For more flexibility (via plugins) to manage Atlanta Tech Blogs, I use WordPress. Don’t fret too much about it. Just pick one and make a start. A year from now, if you want to switch to a different blogging platform, you can do it. It’s not the end of the world.

    2. Ask a few questions: who, what, where, when, why

    More specifically, you should ask these questions about your intended audience. Your target audience could be your customers, your prospects, your partners, your community of resellers, or a group of users who cause your community to thrive.  Asking – and answering – these questions as the purpose of your blog will help you every time you sit in front of that blank screen wondering what to write. (We’ll cover that in part 2 of this series!).  Here’s some food for thought on each of these questions.

        • Why are you blogging? This question is first for a big reason, or I should say dozens of reasons, but you need to understand why you are blogging for your brand. That’s part of your plan (next step)
        • Who do you want to read your blog? This answer is the audience you will reach with your words.
        • What does your audience like to read or consume (e.g., images or video or podcasts)?
        • Where are your readers? The Bitter Southerner is targeting an audience is mostly located in the south, so colloquialisms and southern phrases are the norm.
        • When (2 parts) can you write and when will your audience read? Both are very important. You will develop a rhythm of blogging, whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, or 2-3 times per week.
    3. Prepare a plan for your blog

    The worst mistake you can make when you start a blog for your company is not having a plan. What does that mean? Well, the result of not having a content marketing plan looks like this: “OK, what should I write for today’s blog post?” Don’t do that. Create a plan, no matter how simple. Here are the basic elements of your content marketing plan for the first 3 months.

        • Goals – back to the why you’re writing a blog question, you aren’t just blogging to say that your company has a blog. You must have goals before you start. Some common goals of a blog are:
          • to establish your company as an authority in your market space
          • to keep your ecosystem updated on the changes in your software (or whatever you make)
          • to share your customers’ successes
          • to generate buzz for an upcoming launch..
        • Writing team – who owns this blog? In a small company or startup, it might be just you. ProTip: make sure company leadership is completely 100% on board with content marketing as part of the company’s marketing plan.
        • Posting frequency – how often will you publish posts? Decide and agree on a frequency (daily, weekly, twice a week, but no less than once a month) and stick to it.
        • Post length – for SEO purposes, 300-500 words is optimal; however, you should try (and measure) different length posts to see what your audience prefers.
        • Post image types (or not) – decide from the start whether you will use images in your blog posts and to promote your blog posts. I recommend using at least one beautiful, relevant image in each post and to promote each post.
        • Subject matter categories – what sort of topics will you write about? You really want to decide this long before the first post.  The next post in this series will provide different ways to come up with ideas for individual posts, but here are a few “buckets” of topics to consider writing about:
          • Company events
          • Products and product updates
          • Your market space
          • The company’s ongoing history
          • Announcements (in addition to press releases, if you do that)

    The idea behind your plan, no matter how simple the plan, is to make sure you never ever sit down in front of that blank screen knowing you have to publish a blog post later today, and asking yourself, “so, what should today’s post be about?”  Don’t do that. Create a plan.

    4. Tell your story

    So many times, I have had the conversation that starts with, “But I just don’t know what we should even write about!”  It’ll come back to your plan (above), but in its simplest form, a blog is by definition a “web log” of happenings or events or thoughts.  So when you start your company’s blog, start by telling your story, one little bit at a time. If it’s your company, then nobody is as good as you at telling the story, because you invented the story.  So tell it. Break it down into digestible chunks, and write it.

    “How much detail, you know, should I share?” The acronym “TMI” should never be in the reader comments of your blog, but your company is a reflection of who you are, and so your blog should be as well. The most important purpose of a blog is for the readers to get to know the people behind the blog. When someone reads your content that you’ve written, they are consuming your content and getting to know who you are and what you’re all about.

    5. Check your grammar

    Fortunately, not everyone majored in English in college.  For those of us who did, it is our blessing to understand grammar and our curse to not be able to correct every single mistake we see on the internet.  For the everyday blog writer, if you are not comfortable with your own grammar knowledge, you are not alone. That’s why there are free services like Grammarly to do it for you. Give it a try, and if you don’t like it, that’s ok. I highly recommend that you find someone – on your team or outside – to do a simple grammar check on each of your blog posts.

    There are those who think that grammar is not important in this text language world, and it may not be important to you, but there is no quicker way to remove a reader from your audience than to make a big, ugly, glaring grammatical mistake on an important point.

    6. Promote your blog

    If you don’t tell anyone, then nobody will read your blog. We won’t get into your entire social media strategy here, but generally speaking, your most effective methods of promoting your blog are as follows.

    1. Link to your blog front and center on your web site.
    2. Use your blog content in your monthly newsletter if you have one (you should).
    3. Share each blog post appropriately on all your social media channels. There are best practices for sharing on each different social media channel, and you will do well to follow them.
    4. Make sure everyone else in the company also shares it to their social networks, and give them appropriate text and images to use.
    5. Measure it

    You cannot change what you do not measure.  Remember that as you start your blogging adventure.  If you use WordPress or Blogger, the stats are built in so you can see how many people are reading your blog posts, how long they’re staying on each page, which are your most popular posts, and what they are clicking on when they arrive at your blog. Those are easy to do, and you should align your goals (above) with your measurements so you can tell at a glance if you are hitting your goals or not.  Establish goals first, then measure against them regularly (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually).

    7. Iterate

    Not meeting your goals, or blowing past them? Then it’s time for a change! If you’re not meeting your goals, try something – anything – different. Longer posts. Shorter posts. More images. Fewer images. Do something different to see if it moves the needles in your statistics. That’s the beauty of digital content marketing: you can change it as often as you want to meet your goals. The most important part of changing though, is re-setting goals and expectations. When you change strategy or tactics, your goals will change, too.

    8. Repeat!

    That’s right, repeat! Whatever you’ve done right, do more of it. Whatever you’ve done wrong, change it. The more often you post, the more and faster you will learn, and the more effective you will become in your content marketing.

    I have found that getting over the first hump of actually creating and maintaining an active blog is the hardest, and most important, step. You can start an effective, popular blog if you follow these simple steps.  Then you’ll be able to enjoy all the benefits of content marketing for your brand.

    Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and veteran of 7 tech startups. He runs Atlanta Tech Blogs, Pitch Practice, mentors startups and entrepreneurs at ATDC, and teaches Digital Marketing courses at GA.

  • DGM: It’s on

    The Digital Marketing (DGM) class at General Assembly‘s Atlanta campus starts TONIGHT, and it’s on from the start.  Here’s a quick peek into what the next 10 weeks will hold.

    Day 1 – we’re bringing Pitch Practice into Digital Marketing! Can you believe it? That’s right, the first step in your digital marketing journey is figuring out and then planning out your brand strategy, and that includes your elevator pitch. Everyone in the class will get to deliver their (real or made up) elevator pitch.

    Day 2 – FAKE GRIMLOCK TAKE STAGE WITH MINIMUM VIABLE PERSONALITY. THIS WHAT MAKE STARTUP.  I can’t believe I’ve kept this one quiet the whole time I’ve had the DGM curriculum at my disposal.  I reached out to FAKE GRIMLOCK on Twitter, and asked him to make a special appearance to the class, via skype of course. His reply? “ME CONSIDER THAT.” Either way, we’ll be referencing his awesome model for marketing.


     Guest Speakers galore! We’re pulling digital marketing rock stars from the Atlanta startup and marketing community, and bringing them into the class to overwhelm the students with their experience, expertise, and general awesomeness. If you’re not following these people on Twitter, in addition to Mr. Grimlock, you should be, and you will be after soaking up their DGM genius.

    Jason Dominy – The Dalton Agency
    Lindsay Trinkle – Write2Market
    Maria Joyner – Synapp.io
    Van Baird – State Farm

    And the over-arching theme of the 10 week, 60-hour class is taking a web property – new or existing – into the digital marketing stratosphere as we learn by doing the job, and create a real world digital marketing plan that these students will use on real businesses during and after the class.

    I am so excited to meet all these students and lead this class, and share their progress along the way.

  • Teaching Assistant Needed for Digital Marketing Class

    I’m leading the Digital Marketing class at General Assembly Atlanta starting Tuesday Jan 27. The class will take place every Tuesday and Thursday night through April 2 at GA’s location at Ponce City Market in Midtown.  The class is full, and we need a teaching assistant.  While there will be an occaision or two to actually lead the class, the main responsibilities for the TA are as follows:

    • handle administrative tasks
    • coordinate office hours 
    • planning outside-the-class activities, including:
      • field trips
      • panels
      • social events
    The requirements for the position are:

    • At least 1 year of industry experience (should not be only freelance work) OR former student of class who has worked 3+ months
    • Fluency in all topics of the DGM course
    • Approachable and works well 1:1 with students, 
    • Organized – ability to manage calendar, student progress tracking, class resource organization, etc.
    • Proactive – takes initiative to make the program better
    • Strong team communication skills


    It’s a sweet part time gig that pays a flat fee for your time, and you get full access to the entire Digital Marketing class, which is quite a value.  If you’re organized, positive, helpful, and have an unseemly liking to Google Analytics and spreadsheets, this one’s for you. Please DM me on twitter @kevsandlin or send me an email to kevinsandlin at gmail.  I’ll put you in touch with the GA folks to handle the particulars.

    If not, will you help spread the word?  Class starts in 3 days!  

  • 4 steps to outsource your blog

    After Monday’s post outlining some of the benefits of outsourcing your content marketing, I received several surprised reactions and comments, mainly they didn’t even know they could outsource their blog.  Here’s where we are:

    Now here’s how to outsource your blog.  The first thing to remember is that outsourcing your content creation is just like outsourcing anything else. At the end of the day, it’s going to have your name on it, so there is no “set it and forget it”, and it requires a plan. Here are the 4 steps towards outsourcing your blog.

    1. Create and agree on a plan and create a content publishing calendar, keeping in mind any seasonal events. Here’s a thorough write up of how & why to maintain a content marketing calendar.
      • Topics – create “buckets” of types of content, for example events, team, product, support, etc.
      • Frequency – every day, 2-3/week, once a week, once a month? Choose, and stick to it.
      • Length – For SEO purposes, at least 300-500 words per post. Measure and see if your audience prefers short (300-350 words) vs. long form posts, and adjust accordingly.
      • Images – photos, infographics, marketing images? Who will create them?
    2. Determine an editing / publishing process, meaning who will review each post prior to publication, and the iteration process for each post. Remember: nothing is perfect the first time around. Everything needs edits. Google Docs makes a great collaboration tool, and it’s safe: nobody can accidentally hit “Publish”!
    3. Tell your story, while we listen, ask questions, record, and take notes, for 1 hour once a week. Yes, you could go on for days because this story is your dream and vision, but this is your time, and the purpose of outsourcing is to save your time. 
    4. Begin publishing, according to your agreed-upon content calendar.

    There it is, your simple 4-step process to outsourcing the creation of your most powerful and reusable marketing content. After a few weeks (every case is different), you should be able to trim down to 30-45 minutes per week. Make this time part of your weekly rhythm. You should work towards having at least your first 30 days of content ready to publish, because life happens.

  • Social Media Strategy Class Recap

    I’ve written before about how we learn more when we teach something.  Last night’s Social Media Strategy Mapping class at General Assembly was no exception for me.  I always learn from those whom I am supposedly teaching, and that is a very good thing.

    Thanks to everyone who attended.  I counted 35 in the audience, which was far more than I had expected, but it shows clearly that, while it’s easy to jump into social media, it’s a bit more complicated to (a) market using social media (b) for your company, and (c) to get it right every time.

    One of the topics that came up was the recent #fail by BestBuy, among others by various airline brands.  The bigger the brand, the harder the social media fail. That’s why you need a strategy and a plan when you engage in social media marketing for your brand.  We went pretty deep last night into how to create your own social media strategy, but here are the highlights.

    1. Define your brand. Atlanta Tech Village is a solid example of how to be intentional about your culture, values, and, hence, your brand. When in doubt, remember the core values of your brand.
    2. Define your audience. You have to know who you’re talking to, who you want to talk to, and where they are engaging in social media.
    3. Evaluate your competition. It’s easier than ever to follow and keep tabs on your competitors these days. Do it. Find out what they’re doing that’s working/not working.
    4. Set realistic goals. You’re not going to get a million followers in the first 12 months, if ever, so set some goals by which you can measure progress.
    5. Map out your approach. That means write it down, and follow it, like a map. There are no shortcuts.
    6. Define success. How will you know if you’ve succeeded? That’s what setting goals is all about.
    7. Measure everything. You cannot change what you do not measure. Measure everything at the start, then you’ll slowly learn the metrics that you need to live by.

    It was a great class, and I look forward to digging deeper into Digital Marketing for the next 10 weeks. Will you join me?

  • Learning Instagram

    When I learned that Instagram had overtaken Twitter with more than 300M users, I though it might be time to try it out. I was in the early majority on Facebook and Twitter, but obviously I’m way behind the laggard curve on Instagram.  Here’s what I’ve learned since joining and participating on Instagram since January 1, 2015.

    • The UI is great. I’ve read a lot of other people’s opinions on the Instagram user experience, and they’re right. It’s simple, and very intuitive. Capture, edit, add text, share.
    • Not friendly with Twitter. But don’t share directly on Twitter. Obviously, the higher ups on one side or the other have decided they don’t want to play nice. When you share an image from the Instagram app to Twitter, you get a link and not an image. Bad form, and I’m guessing it’s on the Twitter side. Anyone know for sure?
    • Integration with Facebook is complete. Instagram is a startup unicorn success story (<2 years old, 10 employees, sold for $1Billion to Facebook), and Facebook has done well in integrating the service into its main UI. When you share an image to Facebook from the Instagram app, it looks great; however…
    • The image in Instagram has to be square, or else it’ll get cut off like mine did yesterday, when I shared an image and quote from MLK. The quote got cut off, as you can see below, on both Instagram and Facebook.
    • “Take and share pictures that nobody else would see otherwise” is the main calling of Instagram, so it’s not (or at least no longer) about selfies (thank. you. God!).  That’s a great mantra, and I hope they continue to preach it.
    • Instagram breaks their own “Best Practices”. I teach classes on Digital Marketing for General Assembly’s Atlanta location (in fact I’m leading “Social Media Strategy” tonight!). Instagram is now a big part of the Digital Marketing strategy for any business. One of the best practices is to use less than 200 characters of text with any image.  Follow Instagram on Instagram, and you’ll quickly find out that they don’t abide by that rule.
    • You can’t share links. This one was the biggest surprise for me, but now I get it. Instagram wants the image to be the destination, not the bright shiny object that takes you someplace else. You can tag users (like @kevinrsandlin) and use Twitter-like hashtags, but not URLs to other sites.

    I avoided Instagram for a long time because I figured it was just selfie-central, but that’s not the case (or maybe I just don’t follow any selfie-kings).  It may have been like that early on, but because the crew at Instagram has done a really good job eating their own dog food and teaching their users how to use the medium very well. It’s a great place to share and see great images of life.