Women’s Web put up this video of me talking about how entrepreneurs can use content marketing. Enjoy.
How do you recover from startup failure? This is good advice. What I did is not.
Throw yourself into your job and try not to think about it. Don’t talk about it to anyone. Focus on the new work, new city. Push your feelings down.
Feel your self-esteem plummet and blame yourself for failing your team and yourself. Question all your life choices. Severely deprecate your intelligence.
Sink further down into a depressive spiral. Stop engaging with the world — no friends, no events. Just hide and escape into fiction when you can.
Still feel sad, but somehow able to feel again. Start talking to people again — your ex-startup partners, old friends. Start to forgive yourself.
Now self-deprecating humor is just humor, and not a cry for help. You like work again and start working on other things you love. You may not ever start a startup again, but you’ll keep trying things you enjoy and trying to find meaning in life. It took two years, but you are happy again.
The U.S. legal system’s attempts aside, businesses aren’t actually people. Yet we often speak of brand personalities – and in fact, many of our purchasing decisions are influenced by not just how good the product or service is, but whether we like the brand and if it aligns with our values.
For a startup or small business, creating and managing a brand identity is both more difficult – a tiny marketing budget! – and easier. It’s easier because as a small business owner, you can keep your communications more consistent and effectively showcase your brand personality.
Here’s a five step guide to doing this.
1. Decide on a persona that works with your values and strengths.
In other words, get your strategy in place. What do you envision your brand to be? Are you pedantic or casual? Experienced or youthful? Staid or vibrant?
It seems all I write about here anymore is about our failure. I hope this will be the last time, for a while at least!
I’m quoted in this book–Undeterred, by Rania Anderson–on my experience on starting and failing at a business.
I’m quoted a few more times, but if you want to read that–and the stories of a bunch of other interesting women from all over the world–buy the book!
And I’m always a bit touched that the person — a colleague, or a friend, or an online acquaintance (or some combination of these) — cares enough to reassure me, to want to make me feel better. And I know Nilesh has had much the same experience.
But the thing is, we did fail. We failed at building a startup — we didn’t even get over the initial bump. Markitty failed.
But I am not sorry we tried. I don’t regret it — I regret making the mistakes we made, but we learned from it. I’m happy about where I’ve landed up and what I’m doing now.
Failure isn’t a bad word. In this case, it’s just the truth.
Markitty taught me I had skills I hadn’t realized. In that year plus a few months, I have gone on sales meetings and to networking events, handled product management, and done other things I hadn’t really done a lot of in the past.
So even though we got so many things wrong, I am glad we tried. I am sad that we failed, but so proud that we survived the experience and landed on our feet. We made connections, even friends. We got involved in the community and met so many wonderful people—people who are passionate about their work, which I love to see.
I agree with a lot of this article that says typos don’t matter. Getting overly fussed over typos is silly: it’s the message that matters. And typos don’t have much to do with intelligence and maybe with how good a writer you are (at least, it’s not proportionate – you could be a great proof-reader and an indifferent writer.) (Case in point – I just wrote ‘indiffirent’ in that last sentence and took half a minute figuring out why the word had that red squiggly line under it.) (Though my being a better-than-indifferent writer is up for debate, of course.) And yes, pointing out typos is just a way for other people to mock you and feel superior.
Wait. Back up. Read that last sentence in the last paragraph again.
Actually, I was pretty excited to be not writing poetry. Despite my frustrated literary ambitions, over the years, I’ve come to realize that the same qualities that make me a bad poet also make me a good business writer. I express the idea simply, directly. I don’t look for complex metaphors or novel turns of phrase. I focus on the goal of the message, not its beauty.
I recently saw a play that was really a bunch of small plays. (It’s called Trivial Disasters, if you’re interested.) One of them was about a celebrated poet who was commissioned to write public safety messages for hoardings, which were then discarded by petty bureaucrats for more straightforward, somewhat hilarious messages (like a pun on “helmet” and “hell”). As a reader, I would find this appalling (and do often laugh or feel horrified at badly worded public safety messages. If you’re the target audience, however, you’re more likely to read and remember the pithy, inelegant “hell met” message than the beautiful poem.
Yet I see way too much business communication that is ridden with cliches and nearly incomprehensible turns of phrase. Too much that takes so long saying what it wants to say that it loses the audience. Whether it’s your website or a blog post or press release, you really can’t afford to do this. One good thing about social media is it’s training us all to say something in fewer words.
Since we aren’t doing a weekly marketing links round-up anymore, I’m going to try and put together interesting marketing stuff I find once in a while (as you can see from the title, I’m shooting for once a month).
I found this article about retailers tracking shoppers through their cellphones a little scary. Maybe it’s time to switch off your phone when you go shopping!
Great infographics have high information density. Unfortunately, most infographics these days are really just charts, but with more drawing on them. The best infographics convey a lot of information in a lot less space than it would take to write about the topic or have regular graphs of the data.
Your world view is a compelling interpretation of the challenges and opportunities that your buyers face. It describes their past, present and future in a way that leads inevitably to your solution.
Your world view is the environment in which your marketing lives.
Everything you do and say must be consistent with it.
Your world view has to be built on reality. It’s a story that makes sense.
And while on B2B marketing, this article points out a disconnect between what buyers and marketers think sales should be doing.
Jennifer Lewis voyaged into entrepreneurship with her own food business, and now helps other food businesses become successful. Her site, smallfoodbiz.com, has lots of resources and advice for artisan food entrepreneurs. She tells us about the specific challenges of running a small food business, her favorite social media platform, and more.
One thing most marketers and business-owners want to know is how their marketing is doing over time. Most of us have a pretty good idea of how many Facebook likes we have today, but forget how many we had last month or the month before.
Here’s where Markitty takes your data from Facebook Insights and gives it to you in a more useful form: apart from showing you your total page likes every day for the last three weeks, we also show your likes per month for the last three months. So you can see your fan base growing over time.