Get High at Work!

Tag: startups

  • Time

    Building on one of the most important aspects of our Digital Marketing Demo Night on Thursday, I need to emphasize the importance of time, mainly how fast it passes, both in the macro and micro.

    In the macro, guess what? It’s spring. How’d that happen? We get busy. We plan each week in minute detail, and plan each weekend with wild abandon so we make sure we don’t get in bed on Sunday night and wonder what we did with our weekend. There’s basketball season (Final Four tonight! Go Duke!), football season, high school & middle school soccer season, and now spring break. And before you know it, you’ll be making Memorial Day weekend plans.

    Time passes really, really fast, especially when you have children. It’s shocking sometimes. This summer, we will celebrate TEN YEARS since that glorious day we made it back to Atlanta after a harrowing 46 hour global jaunt with our two newly adopted children. They were 3. Now they’re 13. And I’ve been told too many times to count that the next 5 years will go even faster. How is that possible?

    In the micro, we experienced how fast five minutes passes in harsh reality on Thursday night as our digital marketing class brought its 10 weeks to a conclusion. No fewer than 8 of the students looked at me in horror and said “Wha…? Really??” when I interjected with “one minute!” Five minutes is a really long pitch, but for these new marketers, it was like snapping your fingers.

    I asked afterwards how many had practiced their presentations beforehand: six out of 17 had actually said the words and walked through their slides before Thursday night, meaning those six had experienced how fast time passes when you’re up in front of 50 people presenting the work that you created.

    Others were very prepared. On at least 3 occasions, when I said “one minute”, the presenters looked at me and quietly said, “that’s ok,” and clicked to their “Thank you / Q&A” slide. Boom.

    Whatever you’re doing, if you’re going to be timed, you would do well to practice before the real deal. Now, how do we practice being people, so we don’t run out of time?

  • Digital Marketing Demo Night

    Last night over beer & Fox Brothers BBQ, we experienced 17 excellent and entertaining Final Presentations from the 2nd cohort of Digital Marketing students from General Assembly Atlanta. All the students said beforehand that they were very nervous, but all of them were very entertaining, engaging, and the presentations were great. I think there were about 50 people in attendance, including co-workers, spouses, and even some parents. Thanks to everyone who came out to support these new marketers, and thanks especially to GA Atlanta and our T/A Liberty White, who made all this happen without a hitch.

    I asked a couple of questions to everyone who presented during the Q&A after their 5-minute presentations. These were questions like “what was the hardest concept you learned in this class?” or “what one takeaway helped you the most?” Here are some of the things that came out of those presentations and the Q&A.

    • Time went by really fast – I asked everyone at the end how many people practiced their presentation before last night. Maybe 5 or 6 of 17 had done that, and the rest got a real shock when I interjected “one minute left!” at their 4 minute mark. Five minutes is an eternity to wait for a red light to change, and goes by in an instant when you’re in front of 50 people presenting what you’ve accomplished.
    • Relaxed and entertaining – The most effective presentations last night were those who talked about what they know. Just like blogging, when you are totally immersed in a knowledge domain, you can easily converse or present about it to anyone.
    • Video in a presentation is tough – one student had asked beforehand if he could include a short video in his presentation, and while I agreed, I warned him of the potential dangers. Murphy’s law took over and the video did not work, and then when it did, the sound didn’t work. Prepare for the worst, and have a backup plan.
    • Content rules – every single presenter made sure “content marketing” was a huge part of their DGM strategy, no matter what the end product was. Content is king. Every picture, post, pin, tweet, and update is your content. You control it. Content is king.
    • Marketing is math – This concept really caused a lot of students to stumble. The marketing funnel is a difficult concept to imagine, so we made it visual with a literal funnel. That helped, but many of the students still struggled with getting from total exposure down to actual revenue. It’s all about the math.
    • Starting point – having a framework from which to start a marketing strategy is golden. When newbies dive into marketing, they have no idea where to start. It all starts with your brand. Define it, be intentional about it, live it, and defend it.
    • Six new businesses were launched because of this class. Wow.
    • What’s your message? – One student realized her message was about “me”, so she changed it to be about her customers, giving advice to them instead of promoting herself. Total game changer.
    • “Brand is everything we do.” – I cannot tell you how often I repeated this phrase. Towards the end of the class, I would say, “Branding is…?” and the class would shout, “everything you do!” And it’s true. From Chick-Fil-A employees saying “My pleasure!” after every customer interaction to Uber’s cloak and dagger competitive nature to destroy Lyft, everything you do is your brand. Either you define it, or the market will define it for you.

    Congratulations to these new marketers. It was a challenging 10 weeks, but they earned it last night as we brought it all to a close. Thanks to GA Atlanta for their brand, which is open, helpful, willing-to-try-anything, and all about making learning extremely fun and engaging. GA is a top notch addition to the Atlanta tech community. Well done everyone.

  • Why You Must Blog If You’re Running A Startup

    I’m in the content marketing business, so that’s generally the subject that ensues when someone asks me what I’m up to these days. When someone asks me what that means, I break it down into two parts: I create content strategy and I create content.

    What kind of content? Blogs. Those who understand the value of content marketing have no more questions. Those who do not (yet) understand the value of content marketing continue asking, mainly to determine how (and why!) one might make a living creating content (aka writing blogs) for other people.

    After a few minutes of explanation, the conversation usually ends up in the same place, which is what Mark Suster has said any number of times: if you’re a startup, you must blog. I could quote Suster’s Techcrunch article over and over and over, and I highly recommend that anyone considering a startup just bookmark it, and refer to it anytime you wonder why you’re trying to create prose when you’re not creating product. So go there and read it, and heed the advice of one of the most respected tech marketers on the planet.

    But there are other resources out there who (duh!) agree completely and offer up even more reasons that startup entrepreneurs should blog.

    Still not convinced? That’s ok. You will be, either by trying it and seeing the results for yourself, or seeing one or more of your competitors winning through inbound marketing strategies, the simplest of which is starting, growing, and maintaining and active blog.

    Suster repeats what I’ve heard so many times: “I’d like to blog, but I don’t really know what to talk about.” Don’t make it harder than it is. You know enough about something to start a business, right? Then you know enough to blog about that thing you’re building for that space you’re building it for and that problem you’re solving.

    That’s what you blog about. To quote Suster again, and wrap this thing up, “If you write about something for which you’re both knowledgeable and passionate, I’ll bet you can pump out more than you think.“

    Start your startup’s blog. Today.

  • 10rocket’s Blog Challenge

    I’ve known Chris Turner, the founder of 10Rocket since early last year, when he and I met at Tech Talent South. Shortly after that, Chris enrolled in The Iron Yard‘s Ruby on Rails software developer course, because he wanted to be able to build the software product that he had envisioned. A few months later, Chris showed up at Pitch Practice and started working on his pitch for what is now 10Rocket.

    Since then, 10Rocket has rocketed to some serious success as Chris refined his pitch to what it is now:

    We build MVP web apps for startups in 2 weeks for $5k.

    Boom. Well, last time Chris showed off his pitch at Pitch Practice, I reminded him that 10Rocket needs to start telling its story via a blog. They came out swinging today on Medium. Chris is right: most blog posts teach you something or make a list or tell you “How to” this or that, but few posts cause you to do something. 10Rocket’s first blog post challenged its readers to write a haiku about their startup. Brilliant!

    To take it even further, 10Rocket wrote a haiku about Atlanta Tech Blogs in this tweet.

    Not bad! And the challenge caused me to write my own haiku about Atlanta Tech Blogs:

    Atlanta Tech Blogs
    We help you tell a story
    Everyone can hear

    Which do you like better?  What is your blog challenging your readers to do?

  • 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?!?

  • 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.

  • Now they blog for their brand!

    At last week’s “Blogging for your Brand” class at General Assembly, I challenged the 50+ attendees to write a blog post during the 2-hour class and publish it immediately afterwards, or at least real soon after the class ended.  Guess what? They were up to the challenge!  Check out these newly educated, inspired, and (most importantly) equipped bloggers!

    There is no greater feeling than “moving the needle” in anything that you do. If you dig ditches, you get to see your progress. If you blog, you have a sense of fulfillment (if not relief) when you hit “Publish”.  When I teach a class, there is no greater reward than to see the proverbial light bulb go off when someone gets it. But then to see these people immediately put into action what they just soaked up? Priceless!

    Thank you for attending the class, listening, engaging, soaking it up, and then acting on it! Well done. Well done.

  • Blog or Newsletter or both?

    The more I write and speak about writing, the more I get asked this question: should I use a blog or a regular newsletter?  I have my opinion, based on experience, but here are a few arguments for each.

    Newsletter

    • Push instead of pull – when you publish an email newsletter, that email hits your subscribers’ email instantly, and they know it’s there.
    • Instant audience – you already know who your potential readers are, because they’ve subscribed via double opt-in, and they are expecting your newsletter.
    • Simple reach measurement – you can measure within a few hours exactly how many people got the email, opened the email, clicked on the email, and much more.

    Blog

    • Easier to share – the power of social media has changed completely who can and will read your content. When was the last time you shared something via social media? 
    • Indexed by search engines – Google loves fresh new content, and when Google loves your content, your site rankings improve, and more people can find your content faster and easier.
    • Reusable – when you blog, you can then reuse that same content via social media and in a regular newsletter.
    So what do I recommend?  A planned mix. Blog, share, email, repeat.  I do this to an extreme with Atlanta Tech Blogs. Every post is reblogged on atlantatechblogs.com. Every post is shared to Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and now I’m experimenting with Instagram (nothing there yet). Every morning at 9am, Mailchimp’s RSS newsletter function pulls every post that was published since the previous daily digest and emailed out to all our subscribers.  I don’t consider the Daily Digest a “newsletter” per se, because we’re not pushing out “news” and engaging our readers in a conversation. It’s a summary of everything we published the previous day.
    Like I said, this example is to the extreme. What I recommend for organizations that produce great content is the same formula, with a couple of tweaks.
    1. Blog.  Every organization should be constantly telling its story – history, events, vision, successes, failures, new products, new features, new team members, news, product training, industry teaching, support – because no organization’s story is static. You don’t have to blog every day, but you should set a pace (daily, 2-3x/week, weekly, monthly) and stick to it, thereby setting and fulfilling the expectations of your audience.
    2. Share. Every person on the team – whether you’re a 1 man show or dozens or hundreds of team members – should be engaged in sharing the organization’s content. The smaller the team, the more important it is for everyone to share. This tactic requires planning and boundaries around who shares what to where and how it’s shared, because every social media channel is different.
    3. Newsletter. All that content that’s created for your blog is now content for your newsletter, because while your blog has loyal and dedicated readers, not everyone will follow a blog or even know there’s a new post available. When you engage in an email newsletter campaign, you engage those readers who are most comfortable consuming information in their email.
    You can take on the battle of blog vs. newsletter, but I recommend you do both, and add internal social media sharing. There are so many great tools out there that will make it very simple to do so, starting with WordPress and Mailchimp.

  • What we learned in Blogging for your Brand

    We had a fantastic time last night at General Assembly Atlanta!  Thanks to everyone who attended “Blogging for your Brand”!  Even on a ridiculously cold night, we had a packed house full of people who were eager to start or get into first or second gear in their blogging.  Here’s a simple recap of the highlights of the evening.

    • Blogging is popular! As evidenced by the crowd, it’s clear that there’s a strong need for people to learn the basics of regular blogging, and get over the perceived hurdles of blogging every day or every week for your own brand or for your company’s brand.
    • Personal and/or corporate brand – blogging is blogging! There are a few clear differences between blogging for you vs blogging for your company, but for the most part, it’s the same.  Start. Write. Repeat. Anyone can get bogged down worrying too much about whether to use Blogger or WordPress or Medium or whatever, whether to tweet about your blog or post to Instagram, whether to write every day or every week or twice a week, or whether to monetize a blog or not. Your best bet is to start.
    • Start a movement – Just like in this fantastic TED Talk video. Someone HAS to start everything. Why not you?  If you’re hesitant about blogging, it’s ok, just go. Tell your story. Everyone loves a story!
    • Seinfeld did nothing – We defined what everyone’s “story” really is, and it’s everything! Seinfeld made multiple millions saying nothing. You and your company have so much more than nothing.
    • Everyone has content – Consider Seinfeld’s approach. Everything that happens to you or your company is content for content marketing. Every new hire, new product, new feature, new event, successes, failures, partnerships, news…everything. Make a list of everything that could provide value to your audience, and then write about it.
    • Everyone has their own style, cadence, and degree of content. Find yours. For comparison and contrast, consider personal/vulnerable (John Saddington) vs. regular/analytical (David Cummings).
    It really was an awesome crowd, and it was a ton of fun teaching this class. I look forward to doing that one again.

    I’ll be teaching again in a couple of weeks on how to create and execute a social marketing strategy, and then the GA Digital Marketing Class starts Jan 27, and takes place every Tuesday & Thursday, 6:30pm – 9:30pm for 10 weeks.

  • Atlanta’s Tech Startup Blogs

    Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of Atlanta Tech Startup Blogs in alpha order.  Raise your hand if you’re not here.  Seriously, if you don’t see your favorite Atlanta Tech & Startup Blog listed, please tell me.  I’m personally blown away by the sheer number if high quality blogs from Atlanta. Have you read all these?  Wow.  There are only 49 here.  I bet there are well over 100.

    Whether you are or are not on this list, please keep in mind the following simple basics of blogging / content marketing:

    1. Make sure your blog has a valid RSS / Atom feed.  About 1/3 of these don’t.
    2. Make sure your blog has a decent fav icon. More than half of these don’t.
    3. It’s a good idea to use an image in each blog post. WP calls these “featured image”. Blogger calls them a thumbnail and displays the first image (if you have more than one) as the thumbnail image in your RSS feed.

    On the right is my initial categorization: either “About Startups” or “From a Startup”.  I may or may not categorize these more specifically.  What do you think?

    Source URL Startup
    Stephen Fleming academicvc.com About
    AcuityCFO acuitycfo.com/blog/ From
    Allen Nance allennance.com About
    Jon Birdsong atlantastartupcommunity.wordpress.com/ About
    Atlanta Tech Village atlantatechvillage.com/buzz About
    Jeff Hilimire JeffHilimire.com About
    ARPR arpr.co/blog From
    Marketing Eye marketingeyeatlanta.com/blog.html From
    CallRail callrail.com/blog/ From
    Scott Henderson causeshift.com/connected-awesomeness/ About
    CheckAction checkaction.com/blog From
    Cooleaf blog.cooleaf.com/ From
    Synapp.io datavalidation.com/blog/ From
    David Cummings davidcummings.org About
    Digital Assent digitalassent.com/blog/ From
    Dragon Army blog.dragonarmy.com/ From
    Flashissue flashissue.com/blog/ From
    Lance Weatherby blog.weatherby.net/ About
    friendly human friendlyhuman.com/blog/ From
    Paul Freet getoutofthebuilding.com/ About
    Hypepotamus hypepotamus.com/ About
    Kyle Van Pelt inceptionselling.com/ About
    John Saddington john.do/ About
    Johnson Cook JohnsonCook.com About
    Kevin Sandlin kevinsandlin.com About
    Kevy kevy.com/resources/blog/ From
    Kyle Porter kylegport.com/ About
    lindsay trinkle lindsaytrinkle.com/ About
    MailChimp blog.mailchimp.com/ From
    Michael Tavani https://medium.com/@tavani About
    Mike Marian MikeMarian.com About
    John Melanakos notonlyluck.com/ About
    Patientco patientco.com/category/blog/ From
    PerfectPost blog.perfectpost.net/ From
    Pindrop Security pindropsecurity.com/pindrop-security-blog/ From
    QASymphony qasymphony.com/blog/ From
    Rigor rigor.com/blog From
    RippleIT rippleit.com/blog/ From
    Rivalry rivalry.com/blog/ From
    Roam meetatroam.com/blog/ About
    SalesLoft blog.salesloft.com/blog/ From
    ScoutMob scoutmob.tumblr.com/ From
    SherpaDesk sherpadesk.com/blog/ From
    Everett Steele daily.everettsteele.com/ About
    The Iron Yard blog.theironyard.com/ From
    InsightPool insightpool.com/blog/ From
    Venture Atlanta ventureatlanta.org/category/blog/ About
    Voxa voxa.com/blog From
    We Get Around we-get-around.com/wegetaround-atlanta-our-blog/ From