Category: Articles

  • Scale teams at breakneck speed — without breaking necks

    “When an organization grows in size, things that were previously easy become difficult.” — Ben Horowitz Getting people to work together is harder when they can’t all fit in the same room anymore. This is a big problem for high-growth startups: the rate at which teams change is so extreme it is difficult to keep up. Doing…

  • Can you honestly sell?

    Every now and then, someone will give you a piece of advice that hits your brain like a lightning bolt. It happened for me when I was preparing for an interview and my former co-founder Bjorn said “When you’re doing sales, find a way to like the person you are speaking to”. Instantly I understood…

  • Key Performance Indicator (KPI) frameworks

    Original publish date: 28th January 2014. Key Performance Indicator (KPI) frameworks are very important. As far as Web Analytics is concerned, they have been referred to as the “difference between winners and losers” by none other than Avinash Kaushik, the Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google – one of the most influential people in digital marketing….

  • Why NPS is great even though it doesn’t work

    Last month I was lucky enough to hear a talk given by Simon Lyons, the director of Marketing & Communications at Aggreko plc. at the Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust (PSYBT) Elevator networking event. Simon had one piece of advice for the roomful of young entrepreneurs eager to grow their businesses: listen to your current…

  • Stop reading Mashable

    Just because you are being followed by some massive celebrity, does not mean that they are paying any attention to what you say. It’s not physically possible for the likes of Christopher Penn to read even a small amount of the content produced by the 22,197 people he follows on twitter. So who does he…

  • Information layer cake

    I recently found Glen Cathey’s blog post on LinkedIn search rankings and something struck me instantly. This is a long article. At about five pages, it’s still manageable, but I came to the site wanting answers quickly, and I’m sure the length of the article turns a good percentage of readers off. Don’t get me…

  • Basics of a social media campaign

    A social media campaign can be summarised in the following flowchart: This graphic could be pretty much used to illustrate quite a few processes, but it’s important to make sure that when we are trying to use social media for marketing, we have to be able to learn from and improve the efficacy of the…

  • A tip on how to organise your Twitter presence

    I recently had the opportunity to ask Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) about something which I’d be thinking about for a while – how to represent yourself/your company on Twitter. There are a quite a few different ways to do this – here’s what Chris had to say. http://twitter.com/#!/chrisbrogan/status/1639144346353664 (apologies for the typo:) http://twitter.com/#!/zeal_doug/statuses/1639536081768449 http://twitter.com/#!/chrisbrogan/status/1639876587954176 So what…

  • LinkedIn for the minimalist

    With LinkedIn, there are only two things you need to be doing right now: i) Adding connections, and ii) Getting recommendations You need to be doing these things on an ongoing basis because people’s willingness to connect/recommend you decreases the longer they haven’t spoken to you. You need these things in the first place because…

  • Social Media motivation

    I thought I’d kick off this version of the blog with some videos that can’t help but get you motivated about social media. Here’s one from @equalman, which I warn you in advance is a little sensationalist: For a complete breakdown of statistics and their sources, check out this socialnomics blog post. A more instructional video…