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Getting physical.
As we’ve been recruiting guests for season two of “The Build” I’ve found myself steering toward founders who share my bias for shipping physical products or creating real-world experiences. As much as I love writing and developing, something really amazing happens the first time you see something you wrote or designed show up as a…
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Who cares about your stories when there’s already too much content?
If there’s already “too much content,” why even bother to write anything new? It turns out, the average lifespan of a blog post or a news article is just about three days. Older than that, and your audience has already moved on to something that feels fresher. If you’re remarkable about getting traffic to your…
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The Zero Stack Startup
Most of the founders I talk with on my podcast, The Build, didn’t start their companies with huge investors behind them. Sometimes, they had a stockpile of cash from a previous “exit,” or from a nest egg they saved up from a day job. But, most of the time, they just took the resources they…
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Three signs it’s time for you to upgrade your website
Even though your website anchors your “owned media,” you’re losing control of your audience’s experience a little more every day. For instance, if readers can’t experience all of your content on mobile devices, they’ll skip to a competitor’s site. If they can’t figure out the next action that you want them to take, they’ll get…
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How we learned to love reanchoring our content’s key performance indicators
Ever since we expanded our team and hired an analytics specialist, we’ve been watching changes in how our clients’ audiences enjoy the content we produce. Ten years ago, I would have told you about major spikes in page view, the overall number of unique visitors, and whether our link-building campaigns had any effect on Google’s…
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#TheNewPR for Startups: Early-Stage Public Relations
Philly Startup Leaders’ inaugural accelerator cohort invited me to speak about how we’ve been helping our clients navigate these changes, and about when it’s right for a small company to hire a public relations agency. I’ll convert this into a more polished video for our company site soon, but I wanted to share the deck…
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Burgers and fries: how your customer experience and communications should work side-by-side.
“I never, ever want to get a phone call from a customer about an undercooked hamburger.” That quote’s from a former boss of mine, during a meeting about licensing one of our organization’s valuable brand names to a food service company. He recognized that we wouldn’t have a lot of visibility into all the things…
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The Build: Where entrepreneurs reveal their biggest challenges
We talk about being “in love” with our careers, but can we use skills from the job hunt to help find a real relationship? For my latest project, a podcast I’m calling The Build, I talked with technical recruiter—and matchmaker—Amber Wanner. Amber founded CandiDate after discovering that many of the IT professionals she placed into technical and…
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Seven things I learned about organizing tech events
Earlier this year, I wanted to learn more about why certain technology meetups and gatherings in Philadelphia tended to draw hundreds of attendees, while very similar events failed to launch. Therefore, I sent out survey invitations to subsets of my contacts in the region and via the Philly Startup Leaders listserv. The resulting sample’s nowhere…
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The world’s best content marketing campaign gave us Impressionist painting
Imagine you’re struggling to figure out how to move your family business forward in a crowded market. Your competitors are huge, entrenched in your industry, and content to squeeze your little company out of business. It’s a challenge we often hear about from new clients, especially at companies that want to explore content marketing as…
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How to nail your next job interview
For my speaking engagement at Rosemont College, I put together a quick deck featuring six steps job seekers can use for successful interviews. More commentary’s coming soon, but the deck download for participants is available for download or via the Slideshare viewer below:
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Capturing attention and building media relationships in “The New PR” environment
A client’s investor called me to check in on the status of a communications campaign. Having made it through both “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0,” he shared a perspective I hear often from media and technology leaders these days. Despite a seeming explosion of places where companies can get coverage—blogs and podcasts, along with newspapers…