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The Secret to Marketing that’s Impossible to Copy

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As marketers, we’re always searching for a formula for how to be successful — but there’s no formula for this:

http://idonethis.wistia.com/medias/e807mgfdhp?mbedType=iframe&videoWidth=640

While watching Wistia’s recent dance video promoting a feedback survey, I realized that it wasn’t the production, the camera, or the lighting that made the video so compelling, or explained why I watched and shared it with friends. It was the personality of the company’s people shining through.

Wistia offers an incredibly comprehensive guide on how to make incredible marketing videos for your company, but there’s one vital ingredient to successful content marketing that can’t be taught in an instructional video.

Today, it’s company culture that creates marketing messages that spread. It’s that secret sauce that’s impossible to replicate.

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How Benjamin Franklin Stayed Focused on What’s Important, Every Day

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image Benjamin Franklin was a man who got a lot done. He was “a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat” — in addition to being one of America’s founding fathers.

But early in life, Franklin was just another guy who struggled with time management. At age twenty in July of 1726, on a sea voyage home to Philadelphia from London, Franklin began to think more about what productivity really meant and how to achieve it.

What was important to Franklin was not the external goals of making money or being famous. It was about the type of man he wanted to be. Out of that thinking, Franklin developed his thirteen virtues, a list of character traits to live by.

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The One Thing Virtusize Does Every Day to Provide the Perfect Fit

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Anyone who’s ever had to return ill-fitting clothes bought online knows how disappointing and annoying the whole process is. The two-year-old Swedish startup, Virtusize, solves that problem with a sizing application placed on product pages of online stores such as the British retailer ASOS.

Virtusize logo

Inspired by seeing how top sellers on eBay provided detailed specifications, the founders of Virtusize realized they could help shoppers buy clothes on the web with the right size and fit by comparing measurements to garments they already own. This simple yet handy service, currently used by customers in over 100 countries, is reducing fit-related returns by up to as much as fifty percent.

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Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s Unexpected Advice on Preserving Startup Culture in Your Company

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Startups are fast-moving and exciting, with a culture of getting stuff done. So it’s one of the biggest shocks for startup founders to see that culture change as the company grows, and naturally founders often get nostalgic for the days of yore and they make preserving startup culture a priority.

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Founder of Evernote Phil Libin has seen his company skyrocket to a billion dollar company in six short years, ballooning its headcount from 45 people in 2010 to pushing 400 just three years later. Growing concerned over what that precipitous employee growth meant for Evernote’s company culture, Libin reached out to Dick Costolo, CEO at Twitter, who’d gone through it before.

As Libin recounted to PandoDaily, he asked Costolo how to preserve the startup culture at Evernote that had made it so successful. And Costolo gave him an unexpected response that stuck with him, shaping his views on scaling company culture.

Don’t, Costolo said.

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Productivity and Happiness at Work: The Best of the Internet

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PUBLISHED by catsmob.com

This dog’s ready to rumble! Now read the best of what we shared on the interwebs this week:

Breaking the Bad Meeting Habit

How ShopLocket uses I Done This to Maximize Progress

What a messy desks says about you

Do —> Measure —> Learn faster

The Grumpy Employee’s Guide to Being Happier at Work

 

imageDundee’s Tips of the Week:  Like our blog? Sign up for our free newsletter if you’re interested in productivity, management, startups, and how to work better.

 

How ShopLocket Maximizes its Progress By Celebrating Wins

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When ShopLocket cofounder and CEO Katherine Hague once wanted to sell some ninja T-shirts, she found herself stuck, feeling that the cost and process of building a whole storefront to do so didn’t make any sense. Seeing a gap in e-commerce options between all the bells and whistles of building a virtual store and throwing a posting up on Craigslist, Katherine and cofounder Andrew Louis started ShopLocket to provide a microshop tool to embed products into whatever platform you’re already using, from Facebook pages, blogging sites, and beyond.

shoplocket logo

Creating A Happy Workplace at ShopLocket

Having gone through a Toronto accelerator, raised a seed round of $1 million in funding, and expanded to a team of seven since 2011, ShopLocket is now focused on understanding their sales funnel and growing their product team. Throughout this progression, Katherine’s been careful to ensure that ShopLocket’s company culture remains strong and employees happy by cultivating a workplace where people actually like to be.

In starting ShopLocket, Katherine explains, “We wanted to create a place where we wanted to work. A lot of that creating a happy place comes from the Zappos mentality but we’d heard a lot of stories of people who woke up one day to realize that they’ve created a company where they don’t even want to go.”

ping pong at shoplocket

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Why Foursquare, BuzzFeed, and Shopify Use Google Snippets

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There’s one internal communication tool, little known outside of tech circles, that’s been the management engine behind many of tech’s biggest successes. Known as Google Snippets (having started as an internal tool at Google), this single tool has grown to become one that many of the best technology companies use to keep their teams aligned and working in sync while giving them the freedom to work creatively and autonomously.

The reason the system at Google caught on is that it’s not only powerful but incredibly simple to use.

Snippets sends everyone a weekly email on Monday asking you what you did last week and what you planned to get done the next week. When you reply to the email, your response goes onto an internally accessible webpage, and the next day, you’ll get an email that shows you what everyone else in the company is working on.

What began as a modest tool for keeping everyone in the loop became a powerful tool for company-wide transparency, as Google grew from hundreds to tens of thousands of people. With Google snippets, every employee had access to important knowledge regarding what was happening in the company — a stark contrast from the old days when managers hoarded information and kept it from their reports.

As Googlers eventually spread their wings and left the company for other tech pastures, they brought snippets with them, which is how similar systems became critical management tools at companies like Foursquare.

Here’s why three of the fastest-rising tech companies today use snippets and how it fuels their success:

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How Annie’s Weaves Its Publishing Web for Crafters

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From its start as a small, mail-order needlecraft company, Annie’s has grown into a craft media empire. Based in Berne, Indiana, the family-owned business produces magazines, catalogs, kits, books, newsletters, and even its own TV show, PBS’s Knit and Crochet Now!

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Annie’s web development team handles everything web-related for the company’s wide range of products, which means constant content updates, new sites, and creative projects such as online classes with experts who teach everything from Bavarian crochet and quilting to jewelry-making and knitting magic socks.

Since the web department’s formation in 1998, it’s had to adapt right along with the web revolutions of publishing and retail. Project manager Michelle Lawrence describes the team’s busy role in the transformation that’s had to take place at Annie’s to keep up with the times and the business’s exponential growth: “In addition to performing our technical support duties, we also help guide others when dealing with anything that goes on the internet. It’s not necessarily a part of everyone’s background and explaining what we need and what we do in order for things to run smoothly is not always factored into the time we allot for various tasks!”

With so many parts involved in producing the various media channels, Annie’s web dev team has to make sure those parts keep moving. Michelle notes, “The most challenging thing about all those moving parts is communication, to make sure everyone relevant to a conversation is in the loop.”

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Customer Service and Empathy: The Best of the Internet

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PUBLISHED by catsmob.comLook at this tough guy! Now look at the best of what we shared on the interwebs this week:

The Golden Rule of Management: treat others the way you want to be treated.

Why iDoneThis is part of Love With Food’s company rhythm.

How the Lost Art of Empathy affects your employees and customers.

6 Tips on Designing the Perfect Remote Office

The oddness of optimizing for happiness at home and misery at work.

imageDundee’s Tips of the Week:  Hey iDoneThis teams! Keep track of specific kinds of dones by using #hashtags! Anywhere in the text of your done or comment, just type “#” followed by a keyword or topic name, like this: #reimbursements or #win or even #todo.