I’m obviously already a huge @UnMarketing fan, being a social media ninja/rockstar/jedi/princess and all. But this talk absolutely blew me away.
The title of this post is a play on a quote from Eat Pray Love. During the “Pray” portion of the author’s year-long, post-divorce, tour de self reflection/indulgence, she takes a few months to meditate in India and tap into her spiritual side – ultimately deciding one truth: God exists in you, as you.
This isn’t the blog or time or place for me to contemplate the validity of that statement. But 2010 has taught me something somewhat similar: home isn’t a matter of location. It’s not found in other people. Home, your comfort, your point of reference, your strength, your truth… home exists in you, as you.
Home is: Choosing your choices
When I first moved to Boston in June 2009, I was extremely homesick all of the time. I went home every six or eight weeks. I constantly longed for my car, the suburbs, Wegmans, Tim Hortons, and most obviously – my family.
Something clicked for me when I was home this Thanksgiving. A year and a half later after moving to Boston, I woke up one morning and wanted coffee. Walking to Dunkin Donuts, like I do most mornings in Brookline – not driving to Tim Hortons like I was about to do in Buffalo – made more sense to me. I don’t know what it was. It was just what I wanted to do more than driving to Tim Hortons. I missed the city. (I drove to Dunkin Donuts.)
Later that day, I walked into Wegmans (a colossal, multi-department supermarket foodie-dreamland emporium) and was overwhelmed by the aisles and aisles of choices – I longed for the brevity and hustle of the Coolidge Corner Trader Joes. There’s one choice for Ketchup, orange juice or string cheese. And you will walk a mile and a half home in the rain with your bags. But somehow the thought of that shopping trip made more sense to me. I wanted to walk a mile and a half home in the rain from Trader Joes with my overpriced hippie groceries more than I wanted to drive home from Wegmans.
It wasn’t about Wegmans or Tim Hortons or even City Life in and of itself: I realized that day that I wanted what I have in Boston. I wanted my choice, without the regret, “what if’s?”, or look backs on the life I could’ve made in Upstate NY. Up until recently, I lived here with a constant voice in the background telling me it was selfish to move so far away from my parents, selfish to want to be here for career opportunities. There was a lot guilt – like I valued the wrong things or something.
I know this is what I always wanted though. I look at pictures of myself and I see myself as happy here. I can tell. I needed to get out of my own way and embrace my own decision.
Me, happy in Boston – February 2009. Night before a bunch of job interviews.
Me, happy in Boston – July 2010
I moved here in June 2009. But I chose my choice this year.
Home is: Your comfort zone
Sometimes they emphasize the idea of stepping outside of your comfort zone to get things done and reach the next level. I’ll offer a counter argument: I think if you dig deeper within yourself and identify what really drives you, what you really like to do and what you’re really good at – you actually get further. You’re happier, more relaxed and more productive when you discover and embrace your comfort zone. When you do what you want, you are who you are meant to be, and you live your right life: no matter where you are.
This year I finally had/gave myself the chance to ask: What would I wake up and do today if I didn’t do what someone else expected or wanted? I’m so thankful for that.
I realized: My natural speed is 150 miles an hour. I feel fulfilled when I feel productive. I don’t like to worry if things will get done – I just like to do them. I’m just not a lazy morning kind of gal, or a lazy evening kind of gal, really. I need Janet Time. I feel smothered without it. It’s just me. No more apologizing for it.
What activities make you feel alive, make you feel most like yourself when you’re doing them? When I’m up at 5 or 6 am going for a run, writing a blog post, in a leadership role, or drinking wine and having a one-on-one conversation with a friend – I feel like Janet. What makes you feel like you? Do more of those things.
Home is: Understanding where you came from but going where you’re going
Remember where you came from. Figure out where you’re going. Now, separate the two.
My life isn’t in Buffalo anymore, but my family is. It’s the people, not the location, that makes it a part of my core. My bubbly personality is my dad. “Sassy Janet” – my assertive side which I’m so happy to say is coming out more and more – is pretty much just me channeling my mother.
Every day in Boston someone hears my accent and asks me if I’m from Michigan or Chicago. I’ll never be from New England.
But the 150 miles an hour? The startup chick? This girl:
Me on my first day at oneforty
All that stuff is completely me. Remember where you’re from: embrace it, love it, talk about it – it’s what makes you unique. But you don’t have to over-explain and over-justify where you’re going to people who want differently for themselves.
Home is: Being at peace with the pieces
My definition of home isn’t about having it all figured out. Trust me, Hello Kitty debit card in hand – I’m hardly a real adult yet.
What this all means to me is taking the pieces that you do have figured out and clawing on tight to them. Focus on your strengths. And think about how you figured those things out, and how you can apply that process to the parts of your life that you don’t have figured out yet. Because that’s the beauty of home: once you find it, it translates to whatever, wherever.
Today I threw this question out there on Twitter for my personal community:
I got a lot of support on this front…
When I came into my community management gig I had about a year of agency PR experience. So, that’s not a ton of professional experience, right? That said, I did six internships throughout college that added up to some semi-professional experience that I think aided in my preparation for this role.
I say this because come the new year many college seniors will be looking for jobs post-graduation. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, just like I was, you are going to apply to many different job postings. I think you should focus on the ones along the lines of:
There may certainly be the occasional rockstar/prodigy out there that can step up and handle this amount of responsibility right out of college. If you know you are that, then ignore what I say and go get the community manager gig you know you want and deserve. But, I think for the most part, people are better off getting some actual on-the-job experience so that you can really kick butt in the CM role.
Not all CM roles are created equal. I happen to do a lot of extra marketing stuff because I work at a startup. But, here are some things I do in my job and the type of professional experience that will help you:
1. Content Creation – I direct the content for my company’s blog. In the new year we will expand this to ebooks and more offerings.
2. Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn Princess – I’m the internet voice of my company’s brand.
3. Strategic Communications – When we screw up, I talk to people about it
4. Social Media Strategist - I decide what we’ll Tweet, from what tool, and I measure it to see how effective it was
As you can see, this is a multi-faceted role. It varies at every organization. Personally, it was a role I had to grow into as an ’09 grad, and luckily I loved it enough to put in the hours and additional effort it took to step up to where I needed to be despite my lack of professional experience. What I’m trying to say is that there is a lot more that goes into fostering, establishing, managing and measuring successful community programs than may first appear. We don’t actually just Tweet for a living!
So, 2011 grads, get some work experience. Learn some marketing, customer service and social media. Become the best writer you can become. Learn about the industry in which you think you want to manage an online community. How much work experience do you need? I heard at a conference that five to seven years was the target. I don’t know about that. I think two years is fair. But that, my friends, is what I’m hoping you’ll comment on.
REWORK is written by Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson, the founders of 37 Signals. With refreshing clarity and a flutter of snark, they share their ”cookbook” – a collection of short essays about lessons they’ve learned along the way from growing their product and business. I think it’s a great book for anyone working at a young company who wants a quick read and an uber-motivating kick in the butt.
These were some of my favorite lessons from REWORK:
Workaholism:
This resonated with me. They condemn workaholics, saying that those who like to burn the midnight oil just like to feel like heroes. They throw shear hours at a problem rather than effectively searching for a solution. Workaholics claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they focus in on needless details instead of moving forward onto the next task. I know sometimes I can get caught up in details too much, and it is incredibly time-consuming. Although marketing is very detail oriented in nature I think (someone has to nit-pick about grammar in copy!) you have to learn not to fixate on the stuff that won’t move the needle. You have to learn. I have to learn.
Draw a Line in the Sand:
This how you attract superfans. Whole Foods is an example. They sell high quality foods, and sometimes it costs more. (Ever heard someone call them Whole Paycheck?) When you don’t compromise on what your product is offering you’re going to turn some people away. However, you’re also going to earn a loyal following of evangelists who agree with you. In a somewhat similar essay, “Pick a Fight”, they explain the value of taking a stand on something, or against a competitor. Dunkin Donuts is the anti-Starbucks. Under Armour vs. Nike is another example they cite. One example I thought of was HubSpot, and how they draw a line in the sand and chug the inbound marketing KoolAid. They pick a fight against old marketing tactics and create content around why inbound marketing is the way for businesses to generate leads.
Out-teach Your Competition
This essay preaches from the gospel of inbound marketing, whether that’s intentional or not. Your competition is buying advertising and hiring salespeople. You can do the same thing, but early on, you can’t out-do them. But you can out-teach them. They point the Gary Vaynerchuk teaching people about wine with Wine Library TV as an example. This is especially critical for startups. You can’t afford to buy a Superbowl Ad, but you can blog about your industry and teach your customers, and that actually creates a greater impact than any advertisement long term.
Hire When It Hurts
This concept is the idea that you should only hire when you absolutely need that position on your team – when there is a gaping, obvious hole in your organization and the quality level is slipping because you don’t have someone there doing that work. The thing is, each person you add to the team alters the structure and culture. You can always add people, but if you grow too quickly before you are ready, you can’t eliminate positions ( 
!! ) without damaging morale. So only hire when you absolutely need to, and hire only after you have done that job yourself for a while so that you are able to properly manage that position.
Throughout the book, they seem to emphasize the advantages of being uncluttered. Desks, software, meetings, extra employees, extra policies – all of these things take a company away from focusing on their core, and well, getting things done.
Strangers at a Cocktail Party
When you hire the wrong people or hire too quickly, you might end up with a “strangers at a cocktail party” environment on your team. It’s a bunch of strangers in a room. This environment means that no one calls anyone out, no one gives constructive feedback or says what they mean. It’s too nicey nice. It’s too friendly. It’s too politically correct.
I couldn’t agree more. The NY Times had a great article about Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO and Mark Zuckerburg’s Work BFF. They work so well together because they are able to communicate. I’m pretty sure that not all of their conversations are rainbows and butterflies. They can probably call each other out, give each other critical feedback and say exactly what’s on their minds. “Nothing goes left unsaid” is vitally important to me, and it’s a cultural value I try to instill in my workplace relationships (and in my life in general.) One of my mentors put it this way: Transparency is freedom. Try it at the office.
Meetings are Toxic:
I. Love. This. Concept. I can’t explain this as well as they are going to. But, if there is one thing I want everyone who reads this post to realize, it’s that your next one hour meeting with ten employees didn’t just take an hour’s worth of time. It was ten hours worth of time. Also, how much are ya’ll getting paid per hour? Meetings are expensive, kids! Was that conversation actually worth it, or could two people have sat down for ten minutes to get those decisions made or that to-do list mapped out?
(I want to run a marketing department when I grow up!)
Just… cancel your next BS meeting and watch this 17-minute video from Jason Fried about why you can’t get anything done at work instead:
As you can tell, I truly enjoyed the book and I think you’ll benefit from it to. You can buy it on Amazon here. If you’ve read the book, feel free to share your favorite lessons from it in the comments.
Let me know if this situation is unique to my experience.
You’re at a startup and it’s mostly engineers. There’s one marketing person. It’s not that you don’t heart each other, but you don’t collaborate. You feel out of the loop. You actually have no idea what the other person is working on because you don’t understand their language, so their projects don’t become real to you until you see them deployed on the website.
This was my experience for the first six and a half months of oneforty, and it boiled down to a communication issue. Product things that I knew were being worked on had titles I didn’t understand, so I didn’t understand how it could translate into action on my part. (Oh, so this fancy code thing is a sick new website feature that could be promoted in a screencast for our users? Oh, so this feature is actually kinda huge and I should do some blogger outreach about it?)
We devised an incredibly elaborate and complicated solution to this problem. Now, this may be hard to comprehend, so here is the visual map-out:
Ask more questions! Talk to each other more. Explain your projects to each other. Provide some context. In the wise words of one of my engineers, “trust me, you don’t want to hear about every piece of code I push out.” He’s right. I don’t. He doesn’t want to see all of my Tweets either. Don’t micromanage each other – just communicate.
Ever feel like you’re “on an island” at your organization? Here’s my challenge: swim away and communicate. When you’re all in the loop, you don’t feel so alone on the startup rollercoaster. And when you’re communicating things internally, you’re better able to externally communicate new features. So jump in the water. Start swimming.
By now, you may have heard of the tragic loss of Jenny-Lyn Watson, a 20-year junior at Mercyhurst College who was killed by her ex-boyfriend last month. She went home for Thanksgiving break and went missing Saturday, November 20th. A week later her body was found in a park near her home in Liverpool, NY.
The week-long search for her sparked extensive media coverage of her case. In social media, a Facebook group grew rapidly with messages from friends passing along current information about the case. The Facebook group now has over 26,000 members. A search for Jenny-Lyn Watson on Facebook turns up dozens of tribute pages, sadly, some restricted to no commenting.
Why no commenting? Well, there are trolls. There are people who write dumb shit in online forums. But I’m compassionate. I think people get angry and upset. Even if they didn’t personally know the family, maybe the situation hits close to home for them and it sparks a misplaced outburst. Is that ok? No. But I try to believe that people are good, just hurt, and not just trolls.
Even the pages that allow for commenting show that there’s trouble controlling the comments. Sometimes, they have to shut down the commenting capabilities because of disrespect.
My question to the community managers is this: What can we do to help? I’m serious. We are professionals with experience establishing and moderating online forums. Raise your hand if you are in charge managing one of these for your company:
Did you raise your hand? This means you have experience dealing with online conversations. You have likely written community guidelines, flagged comments, done a little policing, done a little engaging in an online community that is essentially similar to a Facebook tribute page.
Maybe we could help set up the pages and manage it during the crisis period. We could write guidelines, flag comments, moderate the page, etc. Or, we could simply offer training or “on call” advice to those who wish to moderate the pages. Would it be tough work? Yes. It’s a tribute page. This is sad and awful and real and it sucks. But I had this re-occurring thought about the whole thing: I didn’t know Jenny-Lyn. However, someone that knew her very well is managing this page right now in the middle of grieving. I don’t know if the page is making his or her process any easier, and maybe a little help from someone like myself could.
In November 2008 my friend Lindsay died in a tragic accident. She was in critical condition for several days, and the fastest way to get information was through a Facebook group. It was updated much quicker than the traditional news outlets. When it came to finding news from traditional news outlets, I would see awful, hateful things written about the situation in the article comments. Much worse were the comments in community forums that popped up in a Google search. One person’s honest search for information turned into a twisted game of dodging digital landmines. Seeing how media and communication had changed during that experience is what got me involved in social media.
So, I can’t say I know how Jenny-Lyn’s friends feel when they see the comments. But I can relate somewhat. And I’m wondering what my next steps are.
