Lifehack: Leave Home Before You Work From Home

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Working from home, or working remotely, has become a somewhat popular trend over the last few years, and it certainly has some benefits: Lack of commute time, employee morale boosts, even potential improvement in productivity. I’m fortunate to work for an employer that allows for one “work from home” day per week; however, I rarely take advantage of this opportunity, as my house is a mere half-mile, 10-minute walk from my office, and I feel more productive when I am at my desk, with my phone and co-workers immediately available. That being said, I do occasionally need to be home throughout the day for some reason or another. Over the last several months, I have realized there is one essential tactic to making remote work effective.

Leave your home in the morning.

Think about it. When you go through the morning routines of hygiene, breakfast / coffee, locking up, and driving (or however you travel) to work, you have already gotten yourself into the process of doing things. You are already making things happen. When you work from home, it’s very easy to fall into a rut of stumbling downstairs from your bedroom, sitting down on the couch, then staring at your computer screen, losing focus and checking personal email, Facebook, and so forth.

So when you work from home, don’t just go through your regular morning routines, but actually leave your home for a little while. Go to a coffee shop, pick up some items at the grocery store, grab breakfast somewhere, what have you: The point is to get outside. On the rare occasions that I do work remotely, I like to start my morning by going to a local diner and getting a cup of decaf coffee and a bagel, after which I start responding to emails that piled up over the previous night. Doing this ensures that I’m not only looking respectable to the outside world, but I’ve also gotten myself into the process of getting things done.

When you feel good, look good and start the day off well, you will succeed.

Digital Marketing as Cooking, Part II

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A (very long) while back, we looked at how digital marketing and cooking happened to share some common principles in terms of some ground rules that one has to follow in order to enjoy success. Today, we’re going to continue exploring this metaphor, with ways to color outside the lines, so to speak (or as WhatCounts Services Account Manager Sean McGarry says, “just get weird with it”).

Spice

A common saying is that “baking is science, but cooking is art.” I firmly agree with that, and digital marketing is the same way – no two organizations will map out their marketing strategies in exactly the same way, and there’s a real art to understanding and planning how to reach (and grow) your particular audience. In that same manner, there’s a real art to deciding exactly how one is going to spice and flavor a dish.

One of my favorite snacks is popcorn. Some time ago, I decided that I was going to move away from air-popped popcorn, which tastes like Styrofoam unless you douse it in butter and salt, and start making stove-popped popcorn. Several messy attempts and one completely ruined stock pot later, I had developed a pretty solid understanding of how to actually make this delicacy, but it was coming out somewhat bland, and the results weren’t quite what I was looking for. I rummaged through my spice cabinet and thought to myself, “What if I sprinkle some Old Bay seasoning into the oil that I’m using to pop the corn?” Let’s just say I’ve never looked back.

It works the same way in marketing. When I lived in Iowa, I once had an email campaign with metrics that were plummeting after years of success, and I couldn’t understand why. So, I decided to throw a little spice into the mix: I went on Facebook and asked our audience (this was before the days of Facebook trying to extract money out of you in exchange for getting more people to see your posts), “Hey, those of you who are subscribed to our newsletter – what can we do to make you read it again?” The overwhelming response (that the wall of text and events that we were sending was just too much) resulted in us making a pretty significant shift in our content strategy, and the campaign began to return to its original levels of success and then grew beyond them.

Plating

Once upon a time, “plating” consisted of putting a cheeseburger and fries into a red plastic basket, or dropping a steak and some mashed potatoes on a plate and calling it a day. Those practices still exist, but watch any cooking show nowadays and you’ll see some very creative, non-traditional, even outlandish plate presentations, to the point that how a dish is laid out on a platter is regarded as almost as important as how it actually tastes.

Take a look at the design of your email templates. Are they a cheeseburger in a basket, by which I mean very plain and perhaps a bit stale, or are they filled with zest and flourish? If it’s the former, think of ways to mix things up: If your complaint rate is far exceeding your opt-outs, for example, throw a giant unsubscribe button at the top of the email. Change the entire order of your email’s content. Put a running joke in the footer of each email. (These are just suggestions, of course.) Don’t be afraid to experiment and see if some creative “plating” of your email gets your audience to stop treating it as something unimportant and begin regarding it as something that they look forward to getting.

Approach your digital marketing programs like you would a great dinner, and you just might enjoy newfound success.

Stand and Deliver

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We’ve all heard the phrase that when setting work expectations for a client, it’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to over-promise and under-deliver. While that’s a nice, comforting maxim, both philosophies are extremely misguided and can signify a critical breakdown in the client / vendor relationship and project process. Under-promising, over-promising, either one means at some point, there will be a disruption in the Holy Trinity of Project Management: Time, budget and scope (or, as the old saying goes, “you can have it fast, cheap or good; pick two”). When one or more of those elements gets out of whack, everything else in the project is affected.

 

In any project, these are the three elements which need to be in sync at all times, from the initial conversations at the onset of negotiations to the client receiving final deliverables. After a contract is signed or an agreement is otherwise made, almost every single interaction between client and vendor affects this triangle of priorities to some degree or another. All three points require the utmost honesty — not only for the client and vendor to be honest with one another, but for the client and vendor to be honest with themselves.

 

Having managed or otherwise been a part of several digital marketing projects in my career, on both the agency side and the client side, I’ve seen firsthand just how terrifyingly quickly a project can get completely out of hand, and it can be due to any number of reasons: The schedule goes off the rails in catastrophic fashion because a vendor didn’t adequately allocate resources, or a client has expectations of work valued at triple the budget, or a vendor has promised functionality that hasn’t even been developed yet, or there is a complete lack of understanding of the scope of work and what it entails … you get the idea.

 

There must be honesty, on both sides, of what functionality / technology will be delivered; understanding of what every contracted line item –the scope– entails (meaning that both sides understand what is being expected for the agreed-upon price); and that both sides not only agree on the targeted timeline, but understand how the scope of work affects that timeline and why the timeline has been set accordingly.

 

These areas of understanding come from frequently asking “why,” and actually listening to the response that is given.

 

Before any work begins on a project, have a clear understanding of what is involved in the budget, scope and timeline, and ensure that all involved parties have the same understanding. In doing so, you will establish clear ideas of what is expected from vendor and client, and in doing so, you will promise and deliver. Nothing more, nothing less.

Objects in Motion

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Taking a break from the marketing talk…

 

I believe that when we leave a place, a part of it goes with us, and part of us remains. Go anywhere in these halls, when it is quiet, and just listen. After a while, you will hear the echoes of all of our conversations, every thought and word we’ve exchanged. Long after we are gone, our voices will linger in these walls for as long as this place remains. But I will admit that the part of me that is going will very much miss the part of you that is staying.
– Citizen G’Kar, “Babylon 5″

 

Outside of brief travels (generally for business, occasionally for leisure), I have spent my entire life in the Midwest, from growing up in Chicago to briefly going to college in Wisconsin, finishing my education in Iowa and living there until spring 2010, and having set up shop in Madison, Wisconsin, since then. I had originally planned to be in the Capital City for a long, long time to come … but, as we know, sometimes life doesn’t always go as we plan.

 

Change comes to us all; sometimes we expect it, sometimes we don’t. And, in just a few short weeks, the next step of my journey begins.

 

I’m going to Baltimore.

 

I’m joining the Baltimore office of Atlanta-headquartered email service provider WhatCounts as a strategic account manager. I’ve known several members of the WhatCounts team for a few years, now, and top-to-bottom, they’re an excellent crew of smart, focused and creative professionals with an unparalleled dedication to customer service. I’m incredibly honored to be joining that team, and I look forward to learning from them.

 

However, even more importantly for right now, I have to thank Madison. Not just the Greater Madison Convention & Visitors Bureau and my amazing colleagues there, not just my family and friends here in town, but Madison itself, and everyone and everything that makes this an amazing place in which to live, work and play. I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into moving here, and I never imagined that I would call this city “home.” And yet now, leaving it is one of the hardest things I have ever done.

 

And so I thank you, Madison. Thank you for being such an amazing community, from the people to the scenery of the lakes to the vibrant arts to the farmers’ market to the restaurants to … well, you get the idea. Thank you for allowing me to be part of the team that tells your story 365 days a year.

 

The economic impact of tourism each year is staggering: Every convention and event here, no matter how large or small, brings temporary taxpayers to the destination, and those taxpayers sleep in our hotels, eat at our restaurants, drink at our bars, shop at our stores, and in general spend money here. In the massive engine that we call our economy, tourism isn’t just a spoke in a wheel, it’s a life-essential component — and I am supremely honored to have been a part of Greater Madison’s tourism effort for the past two years.

 

As the saying goes, as one door closes, another one opens. The next chapter of my life begins in just a few short weeks, and I couldn’t be more excited.

 

So long, Madison, and thanks for all the fish. We’ll meet again.

When It All Goes Horribly, Horribly Wrong

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We’ve all heard the horror stories: Some Domino’s employees tape themselves doing awful things to customers’ pizzas and then put it on YouTube; Coke tries – and fails, in epic fashion – to launch New Coke; Gap’s attempt at a rebranding goes over about as well as a fart in church; Netflix announces it’s launching Qwikster without even bothering to see if the handle was in use on Twitter; just recently, Apple has been catching flak for its latest, somewhat ham-fisted television campaign. It’s an inevitable fact of marketing. Eventually, at some point, somewhere, your marketing efforts are going to go wrong. It may not be as catastrophic as the Kenneth Cole blunder during the Cairo uprisings, it may be something as relatively minor as your website traffic experiencing three months of decline, but something’s going to create, as Christopher S. Penn calls it, “a perfect inversion of negative momentum.”

 

When this happens, you need to keep one fundamental thing in mind: You have to allow yourself to move on.

 

I’m not saying you should act as though there are no consequences. There will be, and you’ll need to deal with them, whether it’s taking the time to refine or even overhaul your strategies and tactics, shifting personnel, parting ways with a vendor or an agency of record, or — just for honesty’s sake — accepting your own responsibility and stepping down, if the need arises. No matter what the consequences are, you need to start addressing them as soon as possible.

 

However, even though we often try our best to detach ourselves from the marketing process and just let it unfold, when something goes wrong, it is human nature to take it personally and to dwell upon it. As with any other perceived failure in life, dwelling upon it isn’t just hideously unproductive, it’s dangerous.

 

Think back to your first nasty relationship breakup, whether it was in middle school, high school, college, whatever. It was almost comforting to wallow in self-pity for a while, believing that the sky was falling. But did that period of lackadaisical, self-indulgent sorrow actually get you anywhere? In the grand scheme of things, you were really just wasting time.

 

The world doesn’t stop just because you’ve had a component of a marketing campaign blow up in your face. Your competitors aren’t going to slow down their own efforts just because you need a little time to catch up and get back in the saddle. Marketing isn’t Little League Baseball; there’s no “mercy” rule that gets invoked just because you’re getting beat up.

 

So, when it all goes horribly, horribly wrong, take a tip from the Serenity Prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

 

The mistake has already happened. You can either dwell upon it and let the rest of your industry pass you by, or you can step back, take a breath, and move on, in doing so addressing and mitigating the factors that led to the mistake in the first place and making plans to avoid that mistake in the future.

 

Choose the latter.