Power in Pause

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My to do list is bulging.

I failed to empty the coffee pot yesterday so there was a cup of coffee over flowing on the counter top when I woke up.

My child decided that not only did she not want her hair brushed, she also didn’t want to be looked at, or taken to school. In fact she’d prefer to not. Not what? Not anything.

We have a major project in the balance – if it happens everything is golden. If it doesn’t – it’s time to hustle. Will it all work out? You bet. Will I worry about it until it does? I guarantee it.

I sit down. The emails ding in. The list grows. The noise grows louder.

And then, I hit pause.

I remember that there is plenty of time.

I remind myself that I will figure it out.

I exhale knowing that everything always does work out.

And then I hit play again, because sometimes, you just have to start.

Remember Why You Started

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Hi.

It’s Cass. It’s been a while since I’ve pulled myself into our own WordPress window. It’s comfy here! This morning Sarah of Silly Grrl wrote a great post – you should read it – and it was exactly what I needed to read this morning.

Sometimes this business of running a business is stressful and lately that’s been the case. It’s good stress – all of the problems are good problems – and it all adds up and before you know it you’ve run yourself into another night of working until 11pm. And here’s where that great trigger phrase came up for me today:

remember why you started

You may have read this at the bottom of our homepage.  It’s why Capra Strategy is Capra Strategy.

Capra strategy was founded in 2013 when Adam Burton and Cass Comerford were having a conversation that was supervised by the most condescending goat they’d ever seen. It was in those early conversations that the idea of a joint venture sounded like perfection. Things picked up steam quickly – people, and then clients agreed – this was the right thing to do. So there is a goat. We like them. They’re nimble and thoughtful and they scream like little girls and we think that’s hilarious. You should work with people that are willing to admit how funny it is. Authenticity is important. Why all this about a goat? Capra is Goat in Italian. Now you’ve learned something today.

But before Capra Strategy there was CC Interactive Marketing Services.  Which was my little company. It was me and sometimes another person – but mostly just me for the past nine years.  I look back at why I went off on my own and here were my reasons …

  • I want to do great work. I want to do work that I’m proud of. I want to be all in on what I deliver. I want to be able to deliver four amazing ideas and know that the client would be a winner with any one of them. 
  • I want to own everything – which is really  about accountability. When I tell someone that something is going to be done on October 4th – it will be done on October 4th and I won’t have to make excuses about why other people didn’t do what they said they were going to do. I want the ability to ensure that delivery will happen.
  • I want to stand behind what I built. When a client sends me an email on Friday night and says “something isn’t quite right here” I want to fix it – I want to fix it right away. I don’t want to have to talk to them about change orders – because the right thing to do is to fix it.
  • I want to have the flexibility to be the kind of person that I want to be. And sometimes that means I work at 4am so I can pick up Lexi from school. And sometimes that means I take Friday off so I can take a hike and get back in touch with what it means to exhale. And I want to be able to do that AS NEEDED and without someone else getting a vote.
  • I want to have people on my team that feel the exact same way. I want to treat them the way that I treat myself. And because of that I want them to respect their role in this company and the money they earn from doing great work the same way I do.
  • There are a lot of choices in this marketing vendor agency space. Some of them are cheaper. Some of them are more expensive. But no one can beat us on passion. Meet us? Sure.  Beat us? Not even on our worst day. And when you’re a business owner or you hold responsibility on a big project you want people like that standing next to you. You want us.

When I look back at why I started CC Interactive Marketing Services – on how that evolved to Capra Strategy I can tell you this:

We’re nailing it. And that makes me proud.

Where Businesses Go Wrong with Twitter

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Social media in the business world is still hard for some people to understand. This is true for all companies, big and small. No one is immune from the potential for slip ups. This was demonstrated quite clearly yesterday, when AT&T tweeted an image of a cell phone displaying a picture of the “pillars of light” in place of the twin towers with the caption “Never Forget.

Many people thought this was in bad taste, and numerous news organizations, including ABC, CBS and the Huffington Post commented on the Twitter outrage. AT&T removed the tweet, and the company’s CEO issued an apology. The story continues to gain negative attention in the media, though some do praise the rapid response. What does this mean for you in your social media marketing? A few things:

  1. If you EVER feel like an update/tweet/status/post may be in bad taste, you’ll probably want to play it safe and NOT post it. There should be limits to being provocative, and to the lengths to which you will go to sell a product or service. AT&T crossed the line here.

  2. 2. If you DO screw up (and it will probably happen eventually), acknowledge it immediately, don’t be defensive and own up to your mistake. A sincere apology is key, and AT&T didn’t do a bad job here.

  3. Have a process for reviewing your social media activity before it is posted. Often, companies will have one person or a small group in charge of social media. This is generally fine, but you must be sure to vet any content to make sure it is tasteful, on-brand and meets company guidelines.

There aren’t many mistakes from which you can’t recover, but the easiest way to handle it is to avoid the mistakes altogether. Be careful out there, folks!

 

Making Sense of Twitter with Topsy

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Twitter is big. Millions of people, companies and other organizations share tons of information through the service every day. A few years ago, several “real-time” search engines (eg: Collecta, OneRiot, Crowdeye, etc.) appeared to help people sort through the mountains of content. Now, only one of them is left standing – Topsy – and it recently achieved quite the milestone.

Topsy now claims to have indexed every single tweet from Twitter’s inception in 2006, totalling over 540 billion tweets according to the company. Topsy is getting a lot of attention now, including a recent piece on the New York Times’ website, as well as coverage from other industry observers.

What does this mean for you? Well, while it’s not perfect, Topsy will let you search Twitter for subjects that are important to you. Twitter’s search function is nice, but it’s algorithm sorts and filters results in a way that may not meet your needs. In fact, Twitter itself has used some of Topsy’s tools when publicly tracking major events on it’s service.

Here are a few things you can do with Topsy:

  1. Use search terms to track individual tweets or topics that may not be hashtagged.
  2. Get simple analytics around terms or keywords on Twitter.
  3. Refine Twitter searches to focus on certain types of media or particularly influential personalities.

Bottom line: you may not need an expensive social tracking solution to see what’s going on with Twitter. If your needs are simple, so is Topsy.

 

Three signs that your plan is not really a strategy

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Last week we asked a question on our Facebook page to see if anyone was curious about how we do things at Capra and now we’re going to start answering these really good questions.

What’s the difference between a plan and a strategy?

Here’s my two cents: All true strategies are plans.  But not all plans are strategic.  What does that even mean?

When you’re working a plan that lacks strategy you’ll know it because….

  1. You don’t know WHY you’re working the plan.  Sure, you know what the end goal is.  Maybe it’s to build a new website.  But you don’t know WHY you needed that new website.  You don’t know what’s going to make that new website WORK for your business.

    When you’re working a plan to build a new website and you know that your strategy is to make this a revenue generating machine for you then you know that you need to build a store – that you need to have ad placements – that you need to consider alignment for potential sponsorships.

  2. You want to stop.  You’ll hit a road block and you’ll think things like “This isn’t working – I’m going to stop this now.” When you have a strategy your ability to persevere extends itself because it’s clear that you must in order to reach your BIG goal. If your strategy is really not working you’ll look for detours instead of throwing in the towel.

  3. You don’t know WHERE this plan is going to leave you.  When you finish a plan you’ve moved from Point A to Point B.  When you have a strategy you know what happens next – you know what your Point C is.  It’s good to know what you want next and that’s what a strategy gives you.  A plan tells you how to get there. A strategy guides you forward.

So the next time you lay out the plan think about the strategy – think about the reason – and clue people in to that reason.

CAPRA Behind the curtain: I think strategically but I’m not always the best at communicating that strategy with my own team. We’ve been starting an effort to bring on some craft breweries as clients. I think everyone @CapraStrategy was excited to hear about that effort because beer is fun.

What I don’t know that they knew is that strategically it’s really important to me that I have an excited and engaged team that wants to tell people about the kind of work that we do.  Every single one of our clients have either been a referral from a past client or someone that heard directly from one of us on the team.  I want this business to grow so that the amazing people that are a part of Capra can provide for their families and that we can give this kind of job to other people.  And the best way for that to happen is to do work that we love and we’re proud to talk about.

Talking about beer is something that two of our Capra team members do really really well.  So it’s not just that I want everyone to have fun and do great work for some craft breweries – it’s that I want Capra to grow and that means giving our team something to talk about.  Cheers!