Last week I wrote a piece on AdAge revisiting Stock and Flow. If you’re interested you should read the whole thing, but here’s a snippet:
To answer that question, let’s start with what’s changed. The core social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, have continued to explode. Mobile has enabled a host of new social platforms such as Pinterest and Snapchat to grow at breakneck speed. LinkedIn has added informational content like LinkedIn Today, LinkedIn Influencer and sponsored updates. Google has built a massive social system with the deepest mobile integration of any platform we’ve ever seen (thanks to Google’s Android mobile operating system). “Native” advertising has come to the fore. And search and social have crashed together: According to SearchMetrics, seven of the top eight signals in social now come from search.
January 29, 2014 // This post is about: advertising, marketing, percolate, stock and flow, Technology
On Friday a rather long piece I wrote on content marketing went up over at Re/code. The point of the piece was to try to answer the three main questions we hear around the space: What is content marketing, why is it a big deal for brands, and how big could it really be? I did my best to answer all three questions and while I won’t reproduce the whole thing here, I did want to give a little flavor for a few of the points I made that I think you’ll find most interesting.
On the future of following brands:
The last note on the “why” question is around followers. For a while now, questions have been asked about why consumers follow brands, and what this means. Whereas at one time follower count was a meaningful metric for brands, it’s not any more. The major social platforms have a clear message to marketers: We have the scale and ad products to allow you to reach any consumer segment for a reasonable cost. The marketer’s job, then, returns to creating content that captures their attention and achieves the brand’s objectives, whatever those objectives may be.
On why mobile is so meaningful for the future of digital advertising and content:
What happens in mobile is that all the things that made up digital marketing over the last 15 years start to go away. That means no more flash, cookies, banners or Facebook sidebar ads. The mobile opportunity is about “native advertising,” which, in English, is just about the content and the ad being the same thing. To think about the market opportunity, then, you need to look at the market opportunity for the biggest social platforms (a.k.a. mobile media companies) in the world: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. (I’m leaving Google off for the sake of simplicity, but I think they belong in this group, as well.)
And, finally, my three big/almost-definitely-inarguable conclusions driving the growth of content marketing:
1. Massive amounts of consumer attention are moving to mobile social platforms.
2. Those platforms are made up of streams of content, and will offer brands increasingly impressive parameters for targeting unique groups of consumers.
3. For brands to be successful in reaching consumers, they will need to create engaging and on-brand content.
It seems relatively simple, then, that content — and therefore content marketing — sits at the center of the next phase of marketing technology, and offers a massive opportunity.
The whole thing is at Re/code.
January 27, 2014 // This post is about: content marketing, percolate, WRITING
I posted this over at the Percolate blog last week and thought I’d post here as well. It helps explain what I’ve been up to for the last few years. To all of you: Thanks so much for your support along the way. I really really appreciate it.
In trying to write up this post recapping 2013, I kept trying to come up with a way to define the first three years of a startup’s life. The first year is clearly about identifying the problem. We spent 2011 with a clear sense that there was a challenge to be solved in helping brands create content with technology (because James and I had lived it in our previous lives in the marketing world), but we still had to prove it was something we could solve and would drive value for our clients.
By the end of year one we had some great clients and a good sense for what needed to be done. From there we spent year two proving it. We started to build a bigger team and bring on more and bigger clients. By the end of year two (2012), we had seen real client success and continued to see momentum in the content space (especially from the big social platforms, who after Facebook’s IPO in May, 2012, were taken a lot more seriously by the business world).
Year three, last year, was about building out the business. We nearly tripled the staff in 12 months (we’re now almost 90 people), shipped an incredible amount of product, and brought some of the world’s best brands on board as Percolate customers. As a co-founder it’s a crazy and amazing feeling to walk into our office and feel the buzz of that many people working on delivering great marketing technology for clients. That our mission, to be the leading content marketing platform, has stayed the same, only makes things feel even better.
But, of course, the life of a startup isn’t about looking back. So what does year four (2014) hold for Percolate? I’d say this is the year we fully establish ourselves in the market. We’ve learned enough (both over the last three years of the company and the course of our careers), to know definitively that we are solving the number one challenge in marketing: How to create engaging, relevant content on a continual basis without throwing an unlimited amount of money against the problem. We also know that we have built the best product and team to solve the problem, so this year is about making sure everyone else knows those things, as well as continuing to bring top-tier service and features to our clients day-in-and-day-out.
Finally, the last note here is a gigantic thank you to all our clients, both new and old. Their support, guidance, and ideas, have really driven our product, and more broadly business, through the last few years. It’s a cliche to say that without clients you don’t have a company, but it’s also very true. So, to all of you who are reading this, thanks for all the support. We wouldn’t have made it this far without you and it’s our commitment to continue to go above and beyond expectations (surprise and delight as Kiva, our VP of Sales likes to say). Keep being awesome.
January 13, 2014 // This post is about: Life, percolate
I’m incredibly proud of this blog post by James OB, one of the engineers at Percolate, about why he likes the engineering culture at the company. The whole thing is well worth a read, but I especially liked this bit:
The autonomy to solve a problem with the best technology available is a luxury for programmers. Most organizations I’ve been exposed to are encumbered, in varying degrees, by institutional favorites or “safe” bets without regard for the problem to be solved. Engineering at Percolate has so far been free of that trap, which results in a constantly engaging, productive mode of work.
August 27, 2013 // This post is about: business, culture, engineering, percolate
I spend a lot of time thinking about building products (and, more specifically, building teams to build products). With that in mind I really enjoyed this rc3.org post about the seven signs of a dysfunctional engineering team, especially this bit about building tools instead of process:
Preference for process over tools. As engineering teams grow, there are many approaches to coordinating people’s work. Most of them are some combination of process and tools. Git is a tool that enables multiple people to work on the same code base efficiently (most of the time). A team may also design a process around Git — avoiding the use of remote branches, only pushing code that’s ready to deploy to the master branch, or requiring people to use local branches for all of their development. Healthy teams generally try to address their scaling problems with tools, not additional process. Processes are hard to turn into habits, hard to teach to new team members, and often evolve too slowly to keep pace with changing circumstances. Ask your interviewers what their release cycle is like. Ask them how many standing meetings they attend. Look at the company’s job listings, are they hiring a scrum master?
One of the thing I try to communicate to the whole company is that it’s everyone’s responsibility to build products. Products are reusable and scalable assets. While process is a product, tools are (almost always) better. I am working on a long and sprawling explanation of all my product thinking stuff, but that will have to wait for another day.
July 30, 2013 // This post is about: business, engineering, Interviewing, percolate, products
