Entrepreneurs Are Unsatisfied. But That’s A Good Thing.

Source: Gaping Void

Most people think of entrepreneurs as aspiring go-getters that start businesses. That is undoubtedly a very common version of entrepreneurship. However, entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes, all professions, and goals. In fact, entrepreneurial individuals are well-suited to work extremely well within the “normal” workforce.

Don’t be afraid to hire someone who may want to do entrepreneurial work on the side. Why? Because entrepreneurs have certain combination of qualities that make them  extremely well prepared to succeed as intrapreneurs.

They are insanely driven.

To be an entreneur, you have no other choice. If you are not ambitious, if you are not driven, it’s highly unlikely that your business will succeed. An insanely driven person does more than just the bare minimum to succeed. In fact, they’re likely to push further than even what one would consider the maximum effort.

They are unsatisfied.

That is not a bad thing. At every step, they look for ways to improve the world around them; they look for ways to improve: themselves, their relationships, friends, their connections, their team, their industries, people, processes, and performance. Having an entrepreneurial-minded person on your team means having a person that will constantly look to improve themselves, their teams, and their company. If anything, a company should search out these types of people, as they will keep a company fresh, innovative, and on an upward trend.

They have an insatiable desire to make a dent in the universe,

They are not content with simply going about their lives, going through the motions. They want to make an impact. They want to leave a legacy.

Source: Gaping Void

They are creative.

It takes a creative mind to be an entrepreneur. You often have to come up with creative solutions to problems that businesses or consumers are facing. Every business will face problems. How do they make their marketing more efficient? How do they speed up their development process? How can they create better relationships with their agencies? How can they adapt to the way modern customers consume information? Every team needs people who are creative problem solvers.

They are kept up at night.

An entrepreneur does not know the meaning of 9-5. They love what they do. They love the impact they can have. Their work is constantly on their mind, even at 3:00am. They are thinking about what they can do to improve, they are researching, they are self-educating, they’re taking online coding lessons, they’re reading Hubspot eBooks, they’re, writing, designing. They’re working. Constantly. This doesn’t mean thay they are in the office, 70 hours a week, getting burnt out. It simply means that they are passionate about what they do, and it is on their mind even when they should be sleeping.

Don’t be afraid.

Don’t be afraid to hire an entrepreneurial-minded individual. In fact, if you want your company or department to reach the next level, perhaps these are precisely the types of people you should hire.

Cheers,

Ross Andrew Simons

Humanity should not be judged by the evil of the few, but by the good of the many

Boston is my home. I know I’m not from here, and that natives have a frenzious passion about Boston, but Boston is my home nonetheless. I adopted it (and it adopted me) when I needed a home the most. 

It is a city of passionate, intellectual, driven people that are instrumental in pushing the world forward. 

It’s a city etched with history, marked by a dynamic present, and faced with an undoubtedly vibrant future. 

In many ways, the Boston Marathon is a perfect little microcosm of Boston: a group of people training, and working, and pushing, and pushing, and pushing, ever forward, never slowing, even when the finish line is in sight. Just like with the Boston Marathon, people flock from all over the country–nay, all over the world–to come here. Just like with the Boston Marathon, people here are united through an overwhelming sense of pride at what they can accomplish not only as individuals, but as a collective.

What happened on Monday (4/15/2013) was a tragedy; there is no other word to describe it. Some individual, or some group, felt the need to hijack a momentous event for their own sick gain. They felt the need to end the lives of the innocent. And for what? To send a message? To make an impact? As a political ploy?

Are those reasons ever worth the loss or injury of human life? Should the lives of children, of fathers, of mothers, of brothers, of sisters, of runners, of spectators, of wives, of friends ever be put in danger for the sake of ill will?

Whoever you are, I will tell you this: Boston is not afraid. I am certain that your 15 minutes of fame are up. The fear that Bostonians felt will soon be replaced by an intense feeling of connectedness, and a desire to push forward, move on, and be better than they have ever been before. United, Boston will rise again. 

One needs only to look at the efforts of the first responders, that risked their own lives to help at the scene. If that doesn’t convince you, one needs only to look at the marathon runners who continued running another mile in order to donate blood. If that doesn’t convince you, one needs to only to look at the outflowing of support and money that will flood the city in the following weeks. 

You may be evil, but you are few. And the good outnumber you 10 million to 1. Humanity should not be judged by the evil of the few, but by the good of the many.

Vegas, Baby, Vegas: A City Built By Marketing

 

I’m sitting here in the lobby of the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Im surrounded by silver, glass, flashing casino lights, comfortable seating, and $15 cocktails. It’s classy, let me tell you. We’re about to check in to our hotel and get settled in, before going out to visit the town. It’s going to be an intense, memorable experience–one in which I’m excited to experience for my final college spring break. It’s really the perfect capstone to the college experience. On another note, I’m not the first person to say:

Marketing Is Everything.

In many cases, marketing is everything. Elections? Marketing. How we often express ourselves to our peers (through products)? Marketing. The clothing we buy and wear? Marketing. How we excel in an interview? Marketing. We’re just the product we happen to be marketing.

As I think about what I’ll be doing the next few days, I’m struck by the reality that we’ll be spending a good portion of our time in the bars and casinos within hotel lobbies. Think about that for a second: we come to Vegas for a vacation, spend money for a really nice hotel, and all of the attractions we’ll be visiting are also hotels. It’s literally a city comprised of hotels and hotel lobbies. When you go to a place like Florida, it’s because of some intrinsic characteristics of the area, that aren’t specifically built for tourists–maybe, you’re going on a cruise, maybe hanging out on the beach, maybe you’re going to visit disneyland. If you’re going to London, it’s because of some intrinsic qualities of London–Buckminster Palace, London pubs, architecture. When it comes to Vegas, though, you’re visiting for attractions built specifically to entice you to visit.

When I consider this, the statement “Marketing Is Everything” has never seemed more real. But I don’t care, because it’s gonna be awesome.

Cheers,

Ross Andrew Simons

Why, and How, You Should Measure Your Marketing

This is writing I did for project work in my digital marketing course during Fall 2012. For this project, we analyzed the Gap brand and created a full-scale digital marketing plan for the brand. This analytics section is just one of many. 

Every good digital marketing plan should also focus on the measurement and analytics. A company wants to know how their marketing efforts are doing, not only to determine ROI and future marketing expenditures, but also to learn actionable insights in how to tweak the marketing plan and make improvements for future versions. Analytics allows you to start understanding those things.

A/B Testing

A/B testing will allow us to constantly monitor, measure, and tweak the copy of our websites, newsletters, e-mails, PPC ads, forms, CTAs, and more. By running multiple slightly different versions of these items, we can understand what type of copy results in the highest conversions. Then, we can begin to incorporate more of that copy into our future digital marketing efforts. Below, we have provided an example to illustrate A/B testing for a PPC ad, on a search for “Men’s Fashion”.

 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs will be the specific things we will be looking for in our measurement. Below are five KPIs with an associated Funnel/Clickpath.  The clickpath indicates what series of pages the customer will take.

Social to Website

Through understanding the amount of users who end up on the Gap website from Social Media posts, it will allow us to develop greater content for our social media presence. We can begin to understand which types of posts (type of content, “voice”, CTAs, etc) result in the highest number of website visitors.

 

Number of Newsletter Subscribers Per Month

By measuring the number of newsletter subscribers we obtain per month, we can alter the location and availability of our signup forms to assure the greatest success and numbers of subscribers.

Newsletter to Customer

Through measuring the success of our newsletters and other forms of e-mail marketing, we can tweak future versions in order to achieve higher conversions to purchases.

Organic Search to Customer

We will also want to measure what percentage of people became customers from organic searches. The primary reason this will be helpful is it will allow us to tweak our SEO strategy moving forward. For example: our initial thoughts are to create an SEO strategy around the idea of “style guides” for both men and women. However, in this hypothetical scenario, we find that people ending up on Gap from search terms similar to “style guide” are not actually converting into customers. As Gap moves forward, they would need to investigate why, and consider adapting their SEO strategy to reflect the low conversion rate.

 

PPC to Customer

We will be doing similar things with our PPC keyword strategy as we do with our SEO strategy. Likewise, measurement will be used to create actionable insights (e.g. the “style guide” example above) that we will then be able to use to improve the effectiveness of our PPC/Keyword marketing.

Heatmap

We will be employing a heatmap. Heatmaps are used to determine site activity. The red areas indicate high traffic and activity centered around that specific area of the site. This will help us in future web-design, as it will allow us to adapt the website to better reflect the natural actions of the end-user.

Social Listening

In addition to quantitative methods of measurement and analytics, we will be using the more qualitative measurement tool of social listening. Through a strong social listening practice, we can understand: general sentiment towards the brand, what customers are saying about us, specific topics that often come up (e.g. quality, fit, colors), and more. These insights will allow us to monitor social chatter around specific Gap events (logo redesigns, new campaigns, new products). They will also allow us to understand which type of content to produce going forward. For example: through social listening, Gap finds that a lot of social chatter has been focused on quality control issues. Because they understand that a large number of consumers are worried about QC, Gap can create a content campaign centered on reframing the discussion in that area. They could create a series of videos that take you behind-the-scenes of gap facilities, outline quality control measures, and consumer interviews that highlight the quality standards of Gap clothing. Using social listening, Gap will be able to: understand its brand image as consumers perceive it, and work with dedicated content campaigns to get some of the power of defining the brand image back in their hands. 

Conclusion

Hopefully this gives you a quick guide into the value of measuring and analyzing the performance of your marketing plan, as well as numerous examples of what to measure. Analytics is important for a key reason: it not only allows you to analyze the success of your current marketing plan, but it gives you actionable insights to improve your marketing. 

As always, reach out to me at rasimons1@gmail.com if I can help you in any way.

Sincerely,

Ross Andrew Simons

How to Gain A Marketing Edge Using Facebook EdgeRank

A day in the life of a Facebook fan

Ross likes Dunkin’ Donuts. He likes it a lot. He thinks to himself “Hey, I’ll like DD on Facebook. Maybe I’ll even get some sweet coupons or sweet Dunkin Donuts swag sometime because of it!” So he goes to the page, clicks like, looks at a couple of the comments, then leaves. From then on, he rarely ever interacts with the Facebook page. His initial hope of getting sweet coupons goes unrealized, and he rarely sees anything about Dunkin’ Donuts pop-up in his newsfeed. The only time he sees Dunkin’ Donuts Facebook activity, despite their strong presence on the social network, is if he thinks about them and then decides to actively seek out their Facebook page—a rare occurrence, even for a young advertising professional interested in how they use social media. The question for Dunkin’ Donuts (or Verizon, or any other brand on Facebook) is how can they push Dunkin’ Donuts Facebook activity in front of Ross’s eyes when he is not the type of consumer that regularly seeks out their Facebook activity? The simple answer is by showing up in his newsfeed.

How to show up in a Facebook fan’s Newsfeed

A brand that is advertising on Facebook must create extremely engaging content to cut through the Facebook clutter. Facebook estimates that only 16% of an average company’s Facebook posts are seen by the consumer¹. If you’re a brand spending a lot of resources on Facebook, that is a concerning figure as you’re already starting off at a low reach.  Obviously, the brand wants to tweak this reach; they want their content placed in front of as many Facebook users as possible. The goal, thus, should be to increase the amount of users’ newsfeed that a given post pops up in. Therefore, a brand should be concerned with Facebook EdgeRank.

So what is EdgeRank? EdgeRank is Facebook’s way of giving a user’s social media life some context. Using an algorithm, it seeks to deliver content that is most relevant to them, based on their prior history. This is beneficial to the average Facebook user; they would much rather receive content (on the newsfeed) relating to their best friend’s updated relationship status, rather than an acquaintance’s teeth brushing habits. This is great for the user—they get content that is much more relevant to their interests. However, it is not so great for a brand as it makes it harder to get in front of the user. But, through understanding EdgeRank, a brand can increase their EdgeRank score for a post, thus increasing its reach.

The equation to the left is the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm. Facebook uses it to calculate a given post’s EdgeRank score. The score is basically comprised of three factors:

Affinity: Affinity measures the amount that a Facebook user engages with you, or their “Affinity” for you. The more they like, comment, browse, click links, etc. the higher their Affinity score will be. This is in place because it indicates to Facebook that they actually do enjoy your brand, and would like it to show up in the newsfeed more often than other brands. As a Facebook user, if you comment on someone’s status, you will see their show up in your newsfeed more often than they did before. That’s affinity working.

Weight: Facebook assigns a different Weight score based on the type of content and the type of interactions that have occurred with it. So, a comment on a picture is worth more than a like. A sharing of a video is worth more than a view.

The jury is still out on which form of content is given more Weight (Facebook keeps many of the fine details of it’s algorithm secret/frequently changes it). However, general consensus seems to be that the rankings are as follows:

1. Pictures
2. Video
3. Links
4. All text-based posts

As people interact with a post (share, like, comment, click, etc.) it gains more Weight. This makes sense to be in the algorithm, as it would indicate to Facebook that a specific post by Dunkin’ Donuts (such as the reveal of a menu item or contest) has been gaining a lot of engagement. That means it should have a higher EdgeRank score, and thus a higher probability of showing up in the Newsfeed of a Facebook user that had previously become a fan of Dunkin’ Donuts.

Time Decay: The last portion of the algorithm is Time Decay. This one is the simplest of the bunch—as a post gets older, it’s EdgeRank score decays and it’s likelihood of showing up in a fan’s Newsfeed decreases. Does this mean that a brand needs to constantly post to its Facebook in order to combat time decay? No. That creates a risk of seeming spammy. It also risks cannibalizing your other posts from gaining affinity and weight.

So, how can you improve your posts’ EdgeRank score?

Now that you hopefully understand the algorithm that Facebook uses, I’m sure you are wondering how you can use this knowledge to your advantage.

I’m going to focus the remainder of this post on increasing affinity. Affinity is all about how engaged a specific user is with your brand. The more engaged they are, the more likely it is that your content will pop-up in their newsfeed. Facebook judges engagement by how much they view, like, comment, share, click, and interact in other ways with your brand’s Facebook.

You should undoubtedly start with creating great content. If you create great content, then you will see a natural uptick in affinity. But I’m sure you knew that already. Beyond content, there are some surefire ways to increase engagement.

1. Raise the “barrier’ to entry. As mentioned above, many consumers view a brand page one time, click like, poke around a bit, and leave—maybe never to return. This means you run the risk of losing out on increasing that person’s affinity for your brand. A good idea is to find ways to make a new “liker” immediately engage with your Facebook. This can be in the form of contests, promotions, or something odd, but intriguing. For example, Grey Poupon recently created a social media initiative called “The Society of Good Taste.” In order to get in The Society of Good Taste (on their Facebook page) you must  apply and give access to your wall. Upon applying, the application analyzes your Facebook friend count, tagged photos, check-ins, like, interests, and more. The application then gives you a score, and if it’s high enough then you are admitted into The Society of Good Taste. Not only is this fresh, and intriguing, but it caused me to engage with the brand immediately. I applied, liked the page, shared my score on their wall, clicked like on a number of their posts, and even commented and interacted with a number of the other people that had went through the application process. This type of social media initiative is just the type of thing that would increase my “affinity” for Grey Poupon and increase the chances that they start showing up in my newsfeed.
2. Pictures. When people scroll through their newsfeeds, or Brand Timeline’s, pictures catch their eye. I don’t think I need to wax philosophically about how the attention span of the new consumer is fragmented—we’ve all heard the stories, we’ve all read the statistics. Pictures are more likely to be seen, and engaged with. You can do some interesting things with pictures, too. With pictures, you can put two images side-by-side and have users vote. For example Dunkin’ Donuts could do a photo post that asks “which is your favorite fall drink—DD Pumpkin Coffee of DD Apple Cider?” with an included image of the two side by side.
3. Create actionable posts. This means your posts should include questions, or the all-important call-to-action. Tons of research shows that by including call-to-actions in a post, the engagement increases significantly, sometimes 12x as much. Just simply adding “click like if you agree that fall is the best time of the year” can dramatically increase your engagement. And yet, many brands do not include regular call-to-actions.
4. Contests. Contests are a great way of increasing engagement with your posts. Everyone loves free stuff, including the pride of winning a contest. If you can create fun contests (for example, Dunkin’ Donuts did the “Create Dunkin’s Next Donut Campaign”), people will interact with you more frequently. Contests are also great opportunities for a little OOH advertising in the form of point-of-purchase materials in stores.
5. Don’t post too much. Buddy Media in their report “A Statistical Review for the Retail Industry: Strategies for Effective Facebook Wall Posts.” Revealed that brands that posted less than three posts a day received 40% more engagement than those who post more. In addition, 32% more likes and 73% more comments.

Here’s a perfect example of many of these ideas in action:

This post by Wendy’s received over 4,000 likes, 1,250 comments, and 1,000 shares and it’s one of their most popular posts. The last number, shares, is particularly great; the average Facebook user has hundreds of friends, and 1,000 people decided to share this post on their own Facebook with their own friends.

So that’s EdgeRank, and that’s how to effectively utilize it. As always, if you have any questions or anything I can help you with, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at rasimons1@gmail.com

Signed,

Ross Andrew Simons

How to Make Your Mark at an Advertising Agency

Hi Everyone,

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reflecting on my time at Erwin Penland (a Hill Holliday Agency). It was a really great experience, and I thought I would share what I’ve learned from the experience to help you make your own mark in agencies, or any other industry you work in.

Without further ado, here goes:

1. Be co-operative, not competitive

During my junior year of college at Babson, I took a negotiations course. I went in thinking that in a negotiation, someone “wins”. Most people think of negotiations like this. Whenever I would describe a class negotiation to others (which happened a lot since it was an awesome class), it was inevitable that their first question would be ‘well, did you win?”.

This is how most people think of negotiations–that there’s a pie on the table and your goal in the negotiation is to see if you can get 55% of the pie to their 45% of the pie. This is called “competitive” negotiation and it’s all about getting more at the expense of others. I quickly learned that this is a terrible negotiation mindset.

You see, the best negotiators do what is referred to as “co-operative negotiation”. It’s all about co-operating with your fellow negotiators to see if you can expand the pie. So instead of saying “No, I want 55% of the pie and I won’t stand for anything less.” you say “How about this–I know you really love pie. I’m not that crazy into it. How about you give me some of your ice cream, and i’ll let you keep more of the pie?”. It’s all about understanding that you don’t have to succeed at the expense of others–that in fact you can both get more than you could’ve possibly hoped for if you work together.

I promise, this has a point–it’s that you should adopt a co-operative mindset in your approach to your profession instead of a competitive mindset. Just like in negotiations, you should approach life and relationships with the intent to create value for the people you touch, not capture value from them.

If you’re an intern or even a new hire in an ad agency (or many other agencies), I know it’s easy to think of how you’re going to succeed. That usually means being competitive. I heard horror stories from some friends this summer about how they felt that their intern groups were always “out to get them” or something, and that there just wasn’t a real cohesion with their groups. This is because when you’re young, you’re trying to make it ahead–thus you view your fellow interns as adversaries and not allies.

That’s a mistake. Begin every morning by thinking “who did I help out yesterday?” Your goal every day should be to be a support system. Always think of what you can do for others–be it putting them in touch with someone that can help them, sharing a useful article with them, or taking some of the workload off of their shoulders. If you do this, you will get recognized.

2. Build ideas together

I believe that one of the big reasons my intern group was so successful as a group was that we “yes, and”-ed. You may not have ever heard of the term “yes, and”.

“Yes, and” originates from improv comedy. You see, one of the biggest problems in an improv comedy scene is the word “no”. What I mean by that is that if you are in an improv scene with your partner and you come out talking like a pirate and they don’t join you–that’s saying “no”. Or if you come out and say “man I can’t BELIEVE Brad challenging you to a fight like that…man you got taken down too…HA” and your partner goes “what are you talking about, I’ve never fought a day in my life”. This is often the worst type of partner because they sacrifice the full scene for a couple of cheap laughs or out of fear. Saying “no” to what your scene partner does will kill an improv scene and make no one want to work with you.

In improv theory, you should always adopt a “yes, and” mindset; it’s all about accepting what your scene partners gives you, agreeing, and then building onto it–or, “and”-ing it. So if your scene partner comes out and says “man that vacation was crazy, what did we get ourselves into?” your response should be “SO CRAZY, I think I saw you literally punch a tiger!”. “Yes, and” is the foundation of a good improv scene and allows you to take a basic idea (such as a vacation) and build it into something bigger and better together (such as getting in a fight with a tiger and winning).

I promise, this too has a point–it relates to the creation and expansion of ideas. If you’re in a brainstorming session with your group, you’re bound to hear some ideas straight out of left field, ideas that make you stop and do a double-take. And that’s okay. Extremely creative people sometimes produce extreme ideas. Or, maybe someone shares an idea that isn’t crazy but you just don’t feel it’s strong enough or big enough. That’s okay. Just like an improv, you “yes, and” it. Accept the idea, and then build it together. Looking back to many of our ideas that my group came up with, they almost always started as something small or strange, but they ended up being built into something great because we were willing to accept and work with virtually any idea.

3. Share

Don’t hold onto your ideas. I’m sure you are extremely intelligent, and you can come up with some great ideas all on your own. However, there’s a huge strategic advantage to working with a group–you all bring a wealth and diversity of perspectives, experiences, mindsets, thinking processes, lives, and ideas to your team and your workplace. Release your ideas to the world and see if they fly. Tell your teammates. Tell your non-teammates. Tell your family (if there’s not a confidentiality agreement issue). Remember, in order to be “yes, and”-ed, you first need to put something out to be built up. On that note, once you put your ideas out there, don’t hold onto them tightly.

In the early days of my college career (god, I feel so old), I had a tendency of creating an idea on my own, sharing it, and then not wanting it to change. I would take it personally if someone tried to change it–as if it wasn’t good enough–as if it needed to be changed because it was not yet valuable. It was my idea and I wanted it to end up just as I originally envisioned it. This isn’t a good approach, and one I abandoned by sophomore year. The fact that a group has accepted the idea and is now working on it tells me that they’re saying “this is a great foundation”. And that’s a compliment–a house is nothing without its foundation.

So welcome the changes–they’re a good thing!

4. Be active

Luckily for me, my intern team was given an intern project that actually took quite a bit of time per week to complete. It was a great project and it kept me occupied. Without it, there may have been times where I had a lot of downtime–but that’s speculative.

With that said, the amount of work you have is only limited by the amount that you seek it out. Do you have a few free hours this afternoon that you’re not sure what you’re going to use it for? Use that to take the workload off of others. Walk around your department and ask everyone if there’s anything you can help them with. Not everyone will have work for you, but the people who do will appreciate your willingness.

Or, maybe you work in the Social Media department but the Account Planning or Content departments really intrigue you. Maybe this a good time to take a trip to those departments, introduce yourself, and explain that you’d love to do a project or two for their department.

5. Create something tangible

Or, maybe this is a good time to give yourself a project. As I mentioned before, the intern project took a lot of time. The thing I didn’t mention is that it produced something tangible, something usable, and also something the agency could really evaluate and refer back to as they thought about the time I spent there.

Just because your internship program didn’t assign a project doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take some self-initiative. One of the most commonly-requested skills in job listings is for someone to be a “self-starter”–this is your chance to be one! Take a trip around your department, or fire some e-mails off. Ask people what project they would like you to work on for the next month or two. After you get a solicit a bunch of ideas, write them down and assemble a long term project to work on.

At the end, you’ll have a high-quality, tangible, deliverable or presentation to your team.

6. Make the best of every opportunity

Don’t half-ass anything. If someone gives you an assignment, devote some time and effort to make it a high-quality performance on your end.

7. Don’t send a ridiculous e-mail to the entire agency–or do, i’m not sure.

So I’m sure your agency has an e-mail list that includes the all of the employees in your office. Now, I don’t think I need to tell you twice that you shouldn’t email this list about frivolous things, or accidentally.

I’m telling you twice because it happened to me, though. Erwin Penland does a ton of pro-bono work for the Greenville Humane Society. One component of this is that they send order forms out every couple of weeks for employees to put in orders for GHS products. Well, I happened to need a product–an awesome fur-removing brush called the “furminator”. So I responded to the order form requesting one, but accidentally clicked “reply all”.

Haha, well I didn’t live that one down for the rest of the internship: “Hey Ross, I really hope you got that Furminator thing…I mean, it was so important you e-mailed the entire agency–i’m getting worried man”.

So moral of the story, stay away from the “reply all” list; or don’t, it may provide something memorable–and being memorable is the way to succeed in an agency.

Signed,

Ross Andrew Simons

P.S. As always, if there’s anything you think I can help you with, let me know–shoot me an e-mail at rasimons1@gmail.com

Blogging for Success

I’ve been writing a number of blog posts this summer as a guest blogger for Babson’s Center for Career Development.

I received a grant to assist me during the summer, and one of the conditions was that I blog about my experience at least eight times. I was more than happy to do that because of the help that CCD was providing.

However, I didn’t fully expect that blogging would also help me at my agency. Through blogging, I was able to have my thoughts shared around the agency, even to people I may not typically interact with. They were able to see not only my writing skills, but the level of thought that I put into the work I do.

The reason I say all this is because I’m now a blogging believer. If any of my readers have an internship (or a full-time job) it’s a great idea to blog about your experiences and share it with a supervisor or two–you never know who could end up reading it!

Signed,

Ross Andrew Simons

The Crazy8 Chronicles — Interview with Mandy Stinson

Hello Everyone,
A few weeks ago, I sat down with Mandy Stinson, an employee here at Erwin Penland. She was one of the members of the intern committee, and she was one of my interviewers.

I picked her brain about the application process, what she looks for on application materials, and much more.

Hear all of her sage-like advice at the following link:

Interview with Mandy Stinson

Sincerely,

Ross Andrew Simons

The Crazy8 Chronicles — The Best Group I’ve Ever Been In

My fellow interns and I on an excurson.

All internship long, I’ve been working on a final project for the agency with three other interns. We’ve been working on developing big ideas for new business pitches for a couple of big time multinational companies.

First off, it’s a phenomenal project topic. Working on new business pitches is about as “agency” as it gets. We need to go through research, find where the company is strong and weak, develop consumer insights, create a list of tons of ideas and then connect this huge list of ideas and refine the list to a few really great ideas. If our insights are correct and our ideas are great, two things could happen: 1.) in the final week we will be able to actually deliver the pitches to the companies and 2.) Our ideas may find themselves in future agency pitches as EP goes after the business. I think we have some good stuff, and one of our ideas has gotten a huge amount of praise from a couple of big wigs here–it just might get implemented sooner rather than later.

Second, my intern team is functioning on another level. It’s something I’m really not used to. I will say, Babson really works hard to get its students exposed to working in a group and collaborating. With that said, you learn as much about working with groups from Babson as you learn about how to not work with groups.

I’ve been on many a group where me and one other person were forced to do all of the work for a five person team, I’ve been on many a group where 60% of my groupmates were non-existent the night before the project was due, I’ve been on many a group where splitting up the sections of the work resulted in a jumble of different quality work that required a lot of work to make it cohesive and consistent. Admittedly, i’ve been on some good groups at Babson but a large amount have been pretty tough to manage,

The team I’m on isn’t like that at all. All of my teammates work hard to try and go above and beyond the call of duty–I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve opened up my e-mail to a brilliant document or piece of creative work that came out of their own initiative and their own drive to support the team.

The Babson writing center talks about two architectures you can give to a team.

1. You can split the team up by section of the project. This means that one person takes the “finance” section, two people take the “marketing” section and two take the “microeconomics” section. Everyone writes their individual sections, turns it in, and then try to put it together. They typically don’t like this. Someone in the group gets stuck with trying to re-write it all and fill in the gaps the night before–so they had to contribute in the early stages and they also get burdened the night before too.

2. You can split the team up by task. This means that if one person is really good at writing a cohesive paper, they are given that responsibility. Since writing a full paper can be difficult and time-consuming, they usually don’t have to do stuff in the early stages and their main responsibility is in the final couple of nights. Another task would be researchers–people who are great at going through, collecting information, sifting through it, and giving a short summary of it all. You also have people who are creative–they may be responsible for developing the presentation or any tables and graphs for a paper. You get the idea.

The writing center says this is a preferred method, since everyone is really playing to their own personal strengths. A great researcher that isn’t that great at writing isn’t forced to write a huge section of a 15-page paper. The best writer isn’t going to have to do hours of research and also hours of writing.

For any Babson readers of this post, I think most of you have probably exclusively had projects broken down by section–it’s kind of the norm for Babson projects. I’m here to personally advocate for breaking up by task and my intern group project has really shown the strength in this method. Each of us is doing tasks that really play to our individual strengths, and what we’re getting is a really high-functioning team that’s producing great results.

Carefully defined roles equal success, who would’ve known. Give it a try.

Signed,

Ross Andrew Simons

Erwin Penland Internships: The Summer of Champions

Erwin Penland Internships: The Summer of Champions

Okay, third place. But that’s awesome!

They beat out tons of competing agencies from Ogilvy & Mather to BBDO to Digitas to Hill Holliday to CP+B and more. What an accomplisment!

Gotta say, I’m not surprised.