Committing to Content Strategy without a Brand Strategy  When a client is not established yet, or in startup mode, brand strategy is part aspiration and part adventure — these are exciting times. But when you are working with an established company the rules are bit different and excitement is tempered by the stakes being much higher. Early this year we entered into a lengthy content strategy engagement with a large company that admitted it did not have a brand strategy in place — we’re “working on it,” they said. While we did a lot right: conducted internal interviews that identified disconnects in a +$1mm content strategy process, established baseline communication guidelines and fixed huge holes in a supposed “Agile” process — we never got over the hurdle of brand clarity. It nipped at us during every turn because we had no baseline to build on. Throughout the process of establishing and tuning the strategy we inevitably kept asking -  Does this fulfill the brand promise? Is this message on brand? We never had an answer. So…we never had an answer.

Lesson learned: Brand needs strategy and strategy needs brand.
Tip: Get 5 min of (non-marketing) C-suite time and discuss brand. Ensure this resonates with your stakeholder’s version of brand and buy this Four Steps to the Epiphany

MISTAKE #2

When you think small. You stay small. When we started the business 5+ years ago I had an imaginary number of 11 as a perfect head count. We had good reason for the smallish number (so we thought) 2 children under 2, experience managing/working with smaller teams and some (now transparent) quality of life requirements Tim Ferriss sold us. When you’re small you need to hire yourself (the owner) to do many things you wouldn’t otherwise hire yourself for if there was someone else more qualified. Sometimes this is challenging in a good way, like: Our mobile strategy work with Weendy. Other times it is challenging in a bad way, like: stuffing boxes when you should be wireframing. I now realize that establishing a business based on head count is crazy talk. We need to be the “size of amazing” and that number might be 5, 500 or 5,000. Whatever size is required to provide the best customer experience for our clients and our client’s clients, that’s our goal. Of note we are growing and looking to hire a Sr. Strategist. Now!

Lesson learned: We are our people.  Not the # of desks we have.
Tip: read this Minimum Viable Personnel article from Inc. 

MISTAKE #3

You can’t do everything, at once. Historically I’ve successfully* been able to break this rule, but time catches up, luck runs out and magnification points out flaws. During Q4 I put some ridiculous deadlines on my team and myself. (So ridiculous I’m embarrassed to list them out here.) It took attending Seth Godin’s Medicine Ball event and a LeanStartup event (on the same weekend) to realize I was pushing too hard. Specifically I realized that it was unfair to my family, friends, employees and investors for us not to be operating at optimal efficiency on every project. In our case, that means moving forward we are only taking on client projects that I am 100% committed to and if they are internal projects they need to have the ability to go big. If I don’t follow these rules I’m not just wasting my time but the time of those most important to me: family, friends and co-workers. Somewhere in a book, or on the Twitters, I picked up the line – “Do fewer things extraordinarily.” It’s a hard transition for someone infinitely fascinated in possibilities but it’s the right direction to take for 2012. (As of 3 weeks ago I stopped working on 3 pet projects and turned away 2 smaller jobs that would strain the team.)

Lesson learned: Not every good idea has a viable market. Having a great idea and bringing a great idea to life are two very different commitments with two very different responsibilities.
Tip: 2+2+2 = If you had 2 people that could work on 2 projects for 2 months each, every year, would you choose this project to be one of them? Ask yourself this whenever you are wondering whether or not to dedicate time to pet projects.

*Example: Rebuild house while living in it, while having a newborn and launching a business and coaching basketball. 

MISTAKE #4

Hiding behind email.  There is a strange device on my desk that gets less attention each year despite its power — the phone.  Three proposals last year with potential clients totaled over 400 emails. Let’s write that out in check format – Four Hundred Emails and Zero Sense. I should have trusted my intuition as well heeded last years #2 rule. Notwithstanding that flub-up I should have just picked up the phone and said, “Hey, let’s nail this down, on this call.” Instead, I wasted 33 hours on email (400 emails x 5 min).  Emails are great for binary decision making but not so much for back and forth conversations. You lose the nuances, pauses, concatenated thoughts and the process becomes less of a playing field and more like a race track.

Lesson learned: Pick up the damn phone! Emails rarely clarify things and almost always lead to more emails.
Tip: If you find yourself substantively rewriting an email — call instead.

MISTAKE #5

Not Celebrating.  The founders of Eat Media (that would be Britta and Ian) tend to be a fairly serious duo. Not Accenture Consulting, Brooks Brother suit serious but intense and focused serious — like Janáček – we tend to wear our hearts on our sleeves, to a fault. When we land a new account we tend to get right into solution mode, before the ink dries on the contract. Internally the team deserves to celebrate a win and too often we skip that part.  On the external/marketing side of things we tend to believe in that old adage of “great gets found”.  I think great “used to get found;” now what gets found is what gets heralded. Under promise, over deliver. Get paid a dollar, do a dollar-fifty worth of work. Great building blocks and inspirational bullet points, but announcing a win and celebrating that win with others gets both internal and external teams excited for you and with you.

Lesson learned: Lunch on the boss is not celebrating. Celebration is active and necessary.
Tip: Go a little crazy every once in awhile.

These are my confessions of a growing agency. What were your 2011 mistakes?

—Ian

@eatmedia

Like this article? Check out the Top 5 Mistakes I made in 2009, and 2010.

The Food Chain is Eating Itself
We are witnessing a trend of big “startups” purchasing little “startups” solely to extract talent – dumping products on the side of the road – truncating talent from code bases and passion from purpose. We also have lost the etiquette of thieves, highlighted by the rampant poaching of talent – sometimes from as close as across the hall – turning “community” into to a dog-eat-dog competition of preferred stock options and flavor-of-the-week.

The early Internet was a top-heavy system full of theorists and inventors. It wasn’t perfect but passion and payout seemed to have more healthy balance than today. The 2nd Internet phase (e-commerce) consisted mostly of early monetizers and a few stylists. The 3rd Internet phase (social) has many stylists,  more how-to-ers and a blur of monetizers. The Web Worker food chain is a delicate ecosystem that requires an adherence to stages. But the pressure to monetize before and after every stage is upsetting that balance–our current lack of qualified developer/designer talent is but one symptom.

The Web Workers Hierarchy
Stage 1: (Web) Theorists are traditionally ahead of curves, way ahead.
Stage 2: (Web) Inventors are tactile theorists.
Stage 3: (Web) Stylists are practitioners who found a method that worked for them, shared that methodology and initialized distribution to the masses.
Stage 4: (Web) How-to-ers are documentarians who show users/practitioners how to use the work that stylists have manifest.
Stage 5: (Web) Monetizers support all of the stages above to differing degrees. (And historically have always worked with and through stages 1-4.)

(Web) Theorists
Provide value by opening the doors of invention and triggering possibilities.
Example: Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message.”
Extract value when they succombe to, promote monetization too early.

(Web) Inventors
Provide value by bringing possibilities to life. Placing theories into real world scenarios.
Example: Håkon Wium Lie inventor of CSS
Extract value by accepting capital for unproven concepts or moving to distribution prematurely.

(Web) Stylists
Provide value by optimizing the experience of service/product.
Example: Aaron Walter author of Designing for Emotion
Extract value by providing one size fits all solutions as a possibility for user/practitioner. (Not their intent.)

(Web) How-to-ers
Provide value by popularizing an experience
Example: David Scott Meerman author of New Rules of PR and Marketing
Extract value by providing one size fits all solutions as a possibility for user/practitioner. (Uninformed intent.)

(Web) Monetizers
Provide value by moving a product/service into the arena of solvency
Example: Fred Wilson managing partner at Union Square Ventures
Extract value by forcing theorists and inventors to productize and go to market too early. (How they make money.)

I’d be remiss not to note that theorists, and organizations that historically supported theorists, have always had a relationship with a capitalist bent. Universities have wings dedicated to corporations, Bell labs = for profit, IBM labs = R&D and most recently we got a peak at Google Labs = convert product development.  Innovation is wonderful and so is making money. The friction resides in needing money to innovate and/or being more interested in making money than innovating.  And it is the distance between these poles that abandons the current web worker somewhere between these two quotes

My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. – Steve Wozniak

 

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” —Fred Wilson

Amazing is birthed at the top of the web worker food chain by theorists and inventors — people who play with possibilities. I see too many of these people being extracted, or self-extracting, and no longer pushing envelopes but instead settling to sell paper goods. Somehow we need to ensure that world class talent stays at the top of the food chain and continues to be inspired by the possibility vs. the payout.  Else, we reinvent Foursquare 30 different ways without making it any better, rewrite practitioner books for glory instead of education, and watch “amazing” dwindle into “just fine.” Potential – the fuzzy “what if”- that inspires us, is a requirement for all successes from Post-it notes to Packet switching. I’m not saying startups shouldn’t take VC/Angel funding, but rather that we should invest in our Web Worker future by supporting theorists and inventors to the same degree we do stylists and how-to-ers.

Making money is generally fairly easy, making a difference is tough and getting tougher, especially as we look to monetize everything right out of the gate.

—Ian

*Disclaimer: The Internet is a Playground is the title of a very funny book by David Thorne. You can buy that book here. This post has very little to do with the book.

calculator.eatmedia.net

INTERVIEW WITH SELF

What inspired you to make the Content Calculator?

1- We had a client who requested we break down content costs by piece but the hard cost of a word rate or per finished minute rate didn’t factor in their excessive stakeholder review cycle and training users on their new CMS.

2- The Time is Money Clock

3- Unruly excel spreadsheets

4- Umair Haque’s book – The New Capitalist Manifesto

I noticed that in some cases creating less content is more expensive. What’s up with that?

In some cases, like copywriting, it is harder and therefore more expensive to create less content.

Are these numbers for real?

Yes.

Didn’t you start this this awhile ago?

Yes.

Why should I care about soft costs?

So you can make more informed decisions related to content?

What are the calculations based on?

Our 5 years of experience estimating content strategy/creation/management projects.

Can I enter my own numbers and variables?

It’s coming.

What should I do with this information?

Make a smaller site? Invest in a content-first solution? Streamline your operations? Gosh, the opportunities are endless.

Are you still tweaking the tool?

Yes, that’s why we need your feedback :)

—Ian

1- Optimizing production based tasks requires a tremendous amount of documentation.
2- Optimizing creative tasks by running them through a production filter results in either crappy creative or missed deadlines.
3- Creative solves problems and requires understanding what questions to ask.
4- Creative is rarely creative when is treated like production.

The benefit of thinking with a content-first mindset is that it requires you to think through all possible scenarios, across multiple practices. On a daily basis I had to think about design, code, reporting, messaging, ad rates/specifications, campaigns, legal issues and IT. Managing multiple variables seems easy, or at least part of what we signed up for running an agency. I often like to say it all comes down to how many shovels do we need, how many guys do we need and where is the sand going. The creative is figuring that all out. Then, and only then, is the digging (the production) part of what we signed up for worthwhile.

Occasionally clients try to assuage the details of creative projects and cover it with disguise of “execution-only” primer — the end result is rarely good. Sometimes it’s a money issue, other times it’s a vision issue, but in reality it becomes a production vs. creation issue. Creativity is about hands-on experience coupled with the ability to ask the appropriate questions at the appropriate time, while managing the change necessary to implement that creative.

Once a project starts to house phrases like: “seems pretty basic” and “should take you 5-minutes” you have either knowingly or unwittingly moved from the creation of something to the production of something. All shovels down.

—Ian

Every day a new app that curates knowledge or helps users skip the process and get right to decision making is pushed to web. I use many of these sites/applications — they save me time and money. But at what cost?

To Doug’s point, at the cost of process creation, process understanding and the information/experience loss that comes from understanding complexities. Is opinion formed from a deep understanding of process more valuable than a decision quickly culled from a slider, input box, submit button and results page?

—Ian

In this case, he was fresh out of college and I hired him to be an editorial assistant for a regional magazine group. He was probably there less than a month when I was up against a deadline for our annual food issue–with no cover story. I took a chance and assigned it to him, and he nailed it. I’ve never seen a story about french fries tackled with such sophistication.

I received this thank you note last week after writing recommendation letters for his MFA applications.

It not only made my day week month, but it inspired me to reach out to some of the managers who made a big impact on my career.

Because when it comes to being an editor/manager/employer, isn’t that what it’s all about?

And the ever popular –

- “Make the logo bigger.”

The magic of experience and forever asking “why” solves every one of the issues above brilliantly.

Your job as a practitioner is to keep digging until you get to the root of the clients phrase/concern. Only then can you deliver a successful project.

-Ian

1) Update all passwords. Dig up passwords to the sites I can never log in to (that means you, EZ Pass). Add everything to my beloved Keeper app. Add license plate numbers and other important account numbers while I’m at it.

2) Update projects sites and remove stale people. We have a ton of outdated people on Basecamp–clients who no longer work for their former company, vendors we no longer work with, etc. Time to clean house and make room for new partners.

3) Manage email filters and subscriptions. Late last year, we migrated to Gmail for Business. I love the filters–all my newsletters skip the inbox and go straight to the Biz Newsletters folder. But based on the 406 unread newsletters in that folder, I think a better use of my time/inbox space would be updating my Google Reader and unsubscribing from 99% of my newsletters.

4) Do a massive paper purge. Before I transfer all our 2010 paperwork to those tax document storage boxes my bookkeeper orders for me, I’m going to scan and shred as much as possible. You don’t realize how much paper you have until you move offices (like we did last year). Paper clutter is a huge mental weight for me, and I want to get rid of it. Ditto for all the project folders hogging valuable space in my filing cabinet. They are all digitized and backed up–I don’t need paper copies, too.

5) Ditch vendors or services that aren’t working. For us, that means our payroll company, who insists on sending us gigantic stacks of paperwork 2x a month and acts as if we owe them the world for sending us PDF statements. Among other annoyances big and small. Switching payroll is one of those pain in the ass tasks, at least mentally, but there’s no time like the new year to tackle it.

BONUS POINTS: Block out vacations for the year. I’m determined to spend 10 days in Salt Spring Island this summer. So I’m going to put it on the calendar and make it happen.
(Not familiar with Salt Spring? Check out “What It’s Like Living Here” from my dear friend Carrie Cogan.)

–Britta

MISTAKE #1

Not listening to that inner voice that says, “The time is now!” Despite ever-sophisticated analytics, tell-tale advisors and detailed market reports, I often find the most accurate predictor of what to do, when, is intuition. Unfortunately intuition only works when you respond to its alarm bell. Case in point: we had plans to build four Eat Media tools/products this year for our newly created Lab section. Two of the ideas I sketched out almost 3 years ago. At the beginning of the year, intuition kicked me in the ass, saying, “Time to get started on those projects, Ian,” but my “urgent” list of projects (vs. my “important” list) kept me from completing them.

Here are the results of that waiting:

Project 1 #fail – Three days after buying the URL Slangr.com, the awesome Muledesign launched Unsuck-it.com.

Project 2 #fail – 3 weeks prior to launching Calcium (our vetted conference calendar), Lanyrd.com was launched.

Lesson learned: Ideas are worth very little without prompt and proper execution.

MISTAKE #2

Not bringing up pricing early enough in the conversation(s) Historically we have had 4-5 exchanges (including email and meetings) prior to discussing pricing with clients. Any time a prospective client brought a project/problem to the table I got giddy and immediately started thinking of ways to make things better and then double better. Often this entailed a boatload of research, tests, comps and even sample content. We had more than one occasion in 2010, where I rocked all-nighters and tasked staff with work that I filed under the line item of “research” which really should have been under the line item of  “after we cash the deposit.” On one hand, I think we are going to land every client and love finding the solution(s). On the other hand, a solution that doesn’t fit the client’s budget doesn’t solve the client’s problem.

For 2011 we are testing Sliderocket for proposals as well as Proposable. Addtionally, we now discuss price at 2nd, or at the latest, 3rd contact with the client.

Lesson learned: Not providing pricing as early as possible is unfair to us and the prospective client.

MISTAKE #3

Not being able to reel in the best talent For the past 4 years I have art directed most of visual design and/or comps for our clients, but we reached a point at the beginning of 2010 where in order for the agency to grow we needed (still need) to hire people with more talent so that Britta and I can focus on other parts of the business. We entirely underestimated how scarce great (available) talent is in NYC; especially in the web design and front-end development world. To make things exponentially more difficult, we were/are looking for a FT, in-house web design/developer combo which the esteemed UX/CS Karen McGrane told me was like “hunting for unicorns.” We saw this need coming a year prior and should have started putting out feelers in 2009. The days of placing an ad and getting hundreds of applicants has gone the way of the animated .gif.

We are now offering hiring bonuses, referral bonuses and developing a GEO location campaign to lure talent to our agency.

Lesson learned: Craigslist is a waste of time to capture real talent. All our talented friends were snapped up 3-4 years ago.

MISTAKE #4

We should have expanded beyond content strategy/development two years ago Very early on in our business, Britta and I realized that we would, at some point, need to become a full-fledged agency. Since that is a tough sell out of gate, we decided to start with content development/strategy, build up our portfolio and then expand. Some amazing clients kept us very busy with content development/strategy early on but the desire to provide [content-first] design, development and ideation services was driving us. Why didn’t we move faster? Things were good, our staff at the time probably wasn’t as ready for that shift as we were, and frankly I think we were afraid to rock the boat. In retrospect, we should have bellied up to the table sooner and built the business we wanted. Our clients would have been better for it and we would be closer to becoming the agency we envisioned more than 5 years ago.

Lesson learned: Be flexible but follow your original vision. Sacrifice is more than a bad Elton John tune.

MISTAKE #5

The (client/agency) love is gone Half-way through 2010, we let one of our biggest clients go. It was both a very difficult decision and an absolutely necessary one. Unfortunately it was a business decision we should have made at the end of 2009. After more than 3 years working with this client, we hit a massive change management wall and became little more than executors. Two month projects were dragged out over the course of six months. Conference calls had become bloated and unproductive and our strategy and creative services were lost in the mire of middle management approvals and proposal re-dos. We stayed on mostly due to an amazing relationship with our lead contact, but at some point it was clear that we had both lost the love. It happens, we were a small agency in a huge company that regularly burns through small agencies. We had a good ride. Problem was we had so many projects with them it was very difficult to untangle our operations, project management and culture from them. In the end we parted gracefully(ish) and the breathing room helped us finally expand our business (see Mistake #4).

Lesson learned: Once you are no longer getting paid for your ideas, strategy and creative, the clock starts ticking. Loudly.

These are my confessions of a growing agency. What were your 2010 mistakes?

—Ian

@eatmedia

Like this article? Check out the Top 5 Mistakes I made in 2009, one of which should be the orange headers.)