For the past three years, I’ve taken a “sabbatical.” I spend the month of June traveling with my family. Sure, I check in now and then but for the most part, I am decidedly not working. For the first ten years of running my own business, I couldn’t take a single full day off. I… Read more »
Author: andigraham
Want to get a promotion? Ask for help.
Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness. If you want someone to trust you with something difficult — perhaps a project that’s normally above your pay-grade or a task that you haven’t done before — you have to learn when to raise your hand and say “help me, please.” If I can’t trust… Read more »
Agile is not an approach; it’s a mindset
The Sea Dragons team at Big Sea just finished a website design project with one of the original authors of the Agile manifesto, Alistair Cockburn. We’ve had a difficult time approaching traditional marketing-oriented websites from an Agile perspective. We just couldn’t get the iterations and sprints to line up with the very waterfall-esque nature of… Read more »
Standing Up and Standing Alone
I had a long conversation with my 9 year old daughter last weekend about how doing the right thing is often really difficult. About what being empathetic really means, about understanding why a friend might be teasing or ignoring you. About what they really might be feeling that’s causing their behavior. We talked about how… Read more »
We’re just not *there* yet.
As much as you might want to rush into things, I’m just not ready to commit. We’re not *there* yet. Forcing me to endure your sales pitch by calling as soon as I download a whitepaper is basically a death sentence for our relationship. (It’s why we talk about “nurturing.”) You never get a second… Read more »
Don’t speak unless it improves the silence
I run a digital marketing agency, and we are HubSpot Gold partners. In fact, we are partners with a lot of digital marketing platforms, but HubSpot is the one that best defines the approach we use for marketing. That is: HubSpot is an inbound marketing platform, and we are an (mostly) inbound marketing agency. Content marketing is… Read more »
What got you here may not be what you need to go farther
At an awards ceremony recently, I noticed an incredible parade of horrible logos flashing across the screen. These are companies with minimum $2m in annual revenue. These are growing, successful companies. But the logos looked like they’d been made in Microsoft Paint or by someone’s nephew who took a graphic design class in high school. They… Read more »
Things that are not marketing (but really are)
Because your customers and clients ultimately tell your story, you have to understand that everything you do is marketing. Every touch point, every communication, every little thing you do or that you don’t do tells your story. Here are a few things that aren’t marketing, but really are: Answering the phone Sending an invoice Responding to job… Read more »
Your brand doesn’t belong to you
The research I did for my Master’s degree focused exclusively on digital communication. Specifically, I studied how a company’s social media activity influenced brand perception. At that time, reviews and how information spread was all new and exciting. I did a comprehensive reviews of dozens of brands’ MySpace profiles (it was the social media platform de… Read more »
Numbers don’t mean a thing
I run the marketing and content teams at Big Sea. We are currently servicing 22 total client accounts on ongoing monthly marketing retainers — which is a lot of clients. And a lot of clients means a lot of reports — you know, roughly 22 of them. We have tried just about every reporting… Read more »