7 Ways We Try to Make Internal Emails Better

Date / nov 16, 2012 / Category / SEOmoz, Startups, Team

Email is a tough communication medium. Conveying tone, voice, attitude and disposition are all stymied by the the format. Efficiency is a good thing over email, but it can lead to suspicion of dismisiveness or even contempt by a reader. And the cycle of misinterpreted emails leading to bad blood between people is something we’ve all experienced.

So how do we build a culture where emails are both A) effective communication tools and B) positive experiences that fit with the company culture?

There’s no simple answer, but there are a few things we’ve done at Moz to help. Many of these are experiments still in process, so they may not work perfectly, but hopefully they’ll help inspire or inform the thinking and applications at your companies.

Where Does Creativity Come From?

Date / nov 11, 2012 / Category / Personal, Product, Psychology

I love discovering that long-held wisdom or cultural beliefs are mythology. Ideas are so often what hold people back from achieving greater potential – and freedom from the prison of those ideas can create revolutions that make us all better, stronger, and wiser.

This weekend I watched some videos on the site Everything Is A Remix that changed my preconceptions about what it means to be creative, what an inventor is, and how brilliant new ideas come to be. Much like Simon Sinek’s talk on Getting to Why, this video has the potential to be a touchstone for many of us who operate in the fields of marketing and technology.

Some of my big takeaways after watching include:

The Evolution of My Public Presentations

Date / nov 8, 2012 / Category / Marketing

This week at Distilled’s Searchlove conference in Boston (which, BTW, is probably the best marketing content I’ve seen at an event, period, including Mozcon – yes, I’m a little jealous), I presented the slide deck below on earning marketing love:

For those of you who’ve seen me present this year, or who’ve followed my decks on Slideshare, you can probably tell that this one’s a significant upgrade from the past, and an obvious amalgamation of prior content. This is also the very first deck I outsourced – I didn’t actually create most of the graphics, the transitions, or the visuals. Instead, I used a design firm in Seattle, Zum Communications, to do the bulk of the work.

Weaponized Humor

Date / nov 5, 2012 / Category / SEOmoz, Team

There’s a constant fight raging at Moz, and every other scaling startup I’ve seen. On one side are the forces of corporateness – trying to make the workplace a more stodgy, inauthentic, TPS-reports-to-be-filed place. On the other are the defenders of humanity and authenticity – the people who built the company and are, by and large, doing their best to make it a good place to work.

Unfortunately, those defenders have an ugly bucket of hurdles to overcome:

• The long-standing tradition of corporate workplaces to be soul-sucking vacuums
• The momentum that people who’ve worked at those companies bring with them
• Laws, regulations, and policies that get more stringent with size and require
• Increased risks (legal and otherwise) of abuse that come with scale
• History (that one time that one bad thing happened? Yeah, that’s why no one can have nice things anymore)
• Non-culture fit employees, who, rather than being let go (see this graphic), are kept on and change the company
• Inattentiveness to slow, subtle shifts that are making things worse

Against these odds, there’s an unlikely and volatile ally in the fight for authenticity – humor.

Why Every Company Should Have a Marketing-Focused Webdev Team

Date / oct 30, 2012 / Category / Hiring, Marketing, SEOmoz, Team

Ask any marketing consultant focused on inbound channels (SEO, social media, conversion rate optimization, email, etc.) what the most challenging part of their job is and 75%+ will say: “working with the engineering team.”

This should come as no surprise. Engineering and webdev resources are, along with web marketers, the biggest scarcest and hardest to hire for web-based businesses. We need to build stuff faster and we need to reach more people. If you want the time of the engineering team, you need to wait in line, and marketing projects often get last billing on lengthy to-do lists, not just because of prioritization by management, but because it’s often not what software engineers signed up to work on.

Thankfully, there’s a solution.

_{Casey and Devin from Moz’s web engineering team}

A specific engineering/webdev team (even if it’s just one person) devoted to the marketing functions of the website has some of the highest ROI you’ll ever encounter in the business world. If you build an exclusive function dedicated to this practice, everything you do to attract and retain customers will improve, and all those projects you know you should have invested in will get the time they deserve.

Why Does a Big Funding Round Slow Down Your Pace of Innovation?

Date / oct 29, 2012 / Category / Product, SEOmoz, Startups

“Why can’t we build it faster?!”

I’ve never met an entrepreneur in the software field who doesn’t ask themselves that question daily. For a lot of the past few years, I had an excuse: the constraint of capital. But, since April (when we raised $18mm), that argument’s invalidated. There’s an excess of cash on the balance sheet, and yet, from an external, customer perspective, it probably feels like we’ve slowed down.

Brad warned me about this. In our first call after the round closed, he said that the first year would be frustrating, as we invested in all those things we’d let slide over the last 5 years because revenue outweighed everything else. After 6 months, I finally understand what he was talking about, and why the pace of innovation, at least initially, slows down after investment.

Why Are You Hiring for the Job I Want to Grow Into?!

Date / oct 26, 2012 / Category / Hiring, SEOmoz, Startups, Team

I really, really like SEOmoz’s Renea Nielsen. I was having a rough day at the office today, mostly because my calendar was filled with calls to Wall Street market analysts (more on that in a future post), but also because my sleep this week hasn’t been great. 45 minutes with Renea and it was gone – I was just… excited.

Renea started on our help team, then moved to be my EA for a short time, and now runs retention marketing on Joanna’s team. In that role, she’s been learning and growing tremendously, and it shows. She’s already a remarkable performer, despite having little formal background in the industry (to be fair, there are very, very few longtime retention-focused marketers thinking about self-service SaaS products).

_{(via Robert Jay Kaufman on Flickr)}

One of our topic of discussion was the new, marketing analyst position recently posted to our jobs page. Renea told me that at first, she’d been frustrated that we were hiring for a role that overlaps with so much of what she’s doing today and wants to grow into in the future. It feels like we’re saying “you can’t hack it,” or worse, “we don’t think you’re the right person for this.” That sucks.

You Must Choose Metrics, But Choose Wisely

Date / oct 24, 2012 / Category / Data, Psychology, Startups, Team

I had lunch with Thomas from our production engineering team today. During our chat, we talked about the future of the company’s organizational structure and plans to split into feature-focused teams after a big launch we have planned for 2013. Thomas noted that in his previous role with Amazon, teams were judged directly against metrics for the features on which they worked, and this had both good and bad elements.

_{“choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.”}

The good is obvious – a feature team that not only knows what they’re building and why, but can also see the progress and transparently share that to their teammates, managers, and the rest of the company is far more likely to succeed. They can focus on the problem, test, analyze, improve, and have all the positive emotions associated with measurable goals, to boot.

The bad is less obvious.

We Can Do Better Than Bit.ly

Date / oct 23, 2012 / Category / Data, Marketing, Product

Of all the tools I use each day on the web, perhaps none frustrates me more than bit.ly. I like being able to track all the sharing I do across networks with a single URL shortener, but the site’s frustrating from numerous levels. Historic data and habit are most of what keeps me from moving to other services (along with a lack of knowledge of better platforms, though awe.sm seems worth a shot).

We can do better than being forced to take multiple, non-intuitive actions to shorten a URL and getting mediocre analytics data in return. A couple weeks back, I complained on Twitter about this, and received many replies asking what features I’d want to see. So, tonight, I spent a little bit of time noodling on the subject and mocking up a hyper-simplistic wireframe of something that might work better, at least for me.

Understanding Stock Options at Startups (and at Moz)

Date / oct 22, 2012 / Category / Hiring, Startups

Last Friday, SEOmoz held our “allhands” meeting at the Big Picture theater. Out of ~98 Mozzers, 85 of us were in attendance (sadly 3 had to leave intermittently to deal with a misbehaving Riak database we’d just upgraded). We’ve grown a ton over the last 6 months (from ~50 in January) thanks in part to our funding round in April. While there were a lot of good discussions and data from the meeting that I’d like to share here, one of the most interesting revolved around stock options.

Technology startups have a tradition of providing employees with stock options. Those options are what helped make thousands of Microsoft and Google employees millionaires, and they’re also the cause of a lot of strife, confusion, and anger among startuppers.

I have some personal experience with these emotions. My wife joined the Cranium team in 2005 and received a small but attractive chunk of options that we both thought might be worth a lot someday. When Cranium sold for $77mm in 2008, the stock options were, sadly worthless. Many much earlier employees who thought those options might be a golden ticket were left in far worse shape. The experience was sobering and frustrating.