Marketing in Real Life

This is the way the world should work, right?  People who have some financial means helping others chase down the things that are most important to them.   I'll admit that I am what my friend Kate would call - "capitalist hippy" but that notion certainly feels right to me.  It's all of the good parts of the internet wrapped into one.  A meeting of the minds where people can help one another do great things.     So yeah, I'm in on crowdfunding as a concept.   And I'm not alone.  Kickstarter - a site focused on funding creative projects - just announced that over 1 Billion dollars have been pledged on their site. With a B.  Other sites have received massive funding as they go global and extend their platforms.  And I've been able to help my favorite drummer, Stanton Moore, create a new album and support my friend Erin in bringing together an amazing dance show in Brooklyn without having to solely dig into her own pocket...

As a parent of a toddler boy, I've often found myself getting so frustrated, to a place I don't like, that I started doing some real self hard thinking about the causes (it’s the research background!). One of the major realizations I've had is that the frustration is in part because "working" with a toddler goes completely against how I spend most of my day as a marketer. And I know I'm not alone. In fact, I've seen lots of friends and colleagues who work with data struggle with toddler thinking. Don't get me wrong, parenting is obviously hard for everyone, but I wonder if it feels even harder for the modern marketer (or researcher) because of the way we are trained. We take pride in using data to identify what works and modifying what doesn’t. Unfortunately, my little dude seems to fall outside the realm of data integrity. Below are four things that are particularly confounding in our dual roles as parent and professional. 1) It's the journ...

As you probably may saw, Facebook turned ten this week and they've been thanking everyone they can reach for helping them get this far.  Businesses got a thank you note and every user got a cool look back video of their own experience with site.  Kudos on both! As a marketing professional, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Facebook.  Without it I would not be where I am today, and that's a fact.  In truth, lots of my friends wouldn't be and we are all grateful as users and as marketers. When I set up my first Facebook Page for Chadwick Martin Bailey I was just checking it out.  A year later we published research on why people like brands on Facebook and began making our way onto sites like Mashable , eMarketer and Wall Street Journal Online .   As a company we started doing more and more around the evolution of marketing and as a marketing team we were out in front of the whole market research industry. As an individual I secured speakin...

Without much budget, startups have to really be careful about investing too much in technology.  On the other hand, you need to use systems that will scale.   So, having worked recently at a SaaS company I was sympathetic to wanting to make a fair deal when I went searching for marketing on automation software knowing I needed to push a little bit harder than I might be comfortable with.   I'll spare you the three weeks of back and forth after I had decided what system I wanted... But the end result was shocking.  Let's just say I was able to get a discount over 50%.  OVER 50%!  And this was from a market leader.   After I went through stages of delirious laughter, anger about what I had paid in the past, sadness over how willing I was to take 29%, and pride in the deal I just got it hit me that the truth was that list price is a bit f a joke.  And that pushing hard is expected, and pushing really hard is acceptable.   So next time you're buy...

Back in October I started working at an early stage startup and said to myself… “Self, you should write a blog post about what you learn each week.”   Well, I have been negligent to this point but now I’m ready.   Here we go! Most startups I know take immense pride in “bootstrapping” and doing just enough to get investors and potential users excited.   We’re taking a very different tact and building for scale from day 1.   That means being extremely thorough in our product design, buying third party tools that will last, and hiring people who can execute in pre-launch, post-launch, and scaling worlds.    ( LinkedIn talks about this philosophy here .) Product Design:   Don’t just think through some of what might happen, think through all of what might happen. You may not want to build everything today but at least you’re making conscious decisions about what to wait on. Third Party Tools:   Unless you absolutely have to, don’t buy ...