DaedTech

The Awesome Power of Self-Deprecation in ContentOps

I promise you that I’m going to make some grammar mistakes and maybe even factual errors in this post.  Well, promise might be strong.  But it’s quite likely at least.

The reason, dear reader, is that I simply don’t care enough to remedy that ostensibly bad situation.  That, and the fact that I read at a 5th-grade level on a good day, combine to deliver you a wholly and unapologetically unpolished experience, should you read on.

The Inline Self-Deprecation Example

Real quick, let’s go meta.

What I just did there is something that I do all the time when writing, and I do it reflexively, without really thinking.  I self-deprecate because it’s kind of fun, and come on, we shouldn’t really take ourselves too seriously.  But beyond that, what I did actually serves a pretty significant purpose from an operations and efficiency perspective.

I neatly eliminated the need for at least one quality assurance step (and some person-hours) in my content production.

To wit, it’s now not super important that I have an editor take a grammar pass through this, nor that I find some flavor of SME to fact check.  Why would I bother?  I’ve already inoculated against the critique of “but you did a bad grammar!” and against the critique of “that is factually incorrect, sir!”

Imagine how stupid one of those comments would look in the comments section when I not only hinted at, but practically promised, those outcomes.

I didn’t need to pay an editor, and I didn’t need to pay a QA SME.  I just needed to explain that I don’t care enough about those things to spend that time and money.

Read More

How to Delegate Effectively as Your Responsibility Grows

Editorial note: I originally published this on the Hit Subscribe blog.

I’m gearing up, like some kind of power washer, to spray new productized services into our operations group so they can SOP those services at scale.  And because I’m doing that, this seemed like a good moment to draw on my experience, both in leadership roles and as a management consultant, and lay out a blueprint for internal delegation.

I debated musing about this over on DaedTech, especially since programmers uniquely struggle when asked to delegate (for reasons I’ll get into in a bit).  But then I figured you marketers out there reading likely also have challenges when flipping from individual contributor (IC) to team leader in a growing organization.  So whether you’d have offered a penny or not, here are my thoughts on delegation.

Delegation as a Function of Org Chart

Let me start by explaining how successful delegators at each level of the org chart delegate to their direct reports, in broad strokes.

• Executives: “You are accountable for this organizational goal.  Your deliverable to me is a plan and overseeing execution of that plan.”
• Middle Management: “You are accountable for successfully executing this plan.  Your deliverable to me is judgement-based execution of the plan in a fluid environment.”
• Supervisors: “You are accountable for these KPIs.  Your deliverable to me is executing the tasks that generate the KPIs.”

Now, let’s look at how ICs (and unsuccessful supervisors) tend to delegate.

• ICs: “You are accountable for nothing.  Your deliverable to me is an execution of tasks to my exact specification.”

At the risk of restating the obvious, let’s pause here and observe something.  Successful delegation involves both tasks and accountability.  Unsuccessful delegation cedes only tasks and retains a vice grip on all accountability.

I don’t pay you to think!

Read More

Basking in the Traffic Gains: Our Content Refresh Early Detection System

I’ve made two posts this year about content refreshes.  One was about traffic recovery, and the other was about refresh identification. Both of them were, admittedly, fairly wonky.  I got lost in my SQL statements and graphs and invited you to come along for that ride with me, if you dared.

Not today, though.  Today is the day that I heed the demand, “In English, poindexter!”

I’m going to show off the easy button for refreshing content and realizing substantial traffic gains.  I can now do this because I’ve turned my queries and graphs into a dead simple, prioritized list of content to refresh.  You can explore it for yourself here (click “refresh candidates”), and this is what it looks like.

This is a screenshot from the alpha offering of our content performance monitoring dashboard, which I announced back in June.  (Beta coming soon!)  The dashboard here features our content lab and community site, Make Me a Programmer.

If you’re unclear on what a content refresh is or why you should do it, let me explain.  A content refresh involves making updates to an existing post or article on your site.  As for why you should do it, let me present an actual anonymized field study of the impact on traffic (refreshes executed on this group of URLs at the red dot).

If you’re sold on the concept, I’ll spend the rest of the post explaining how we help you do it, using our tooling and refresh-candidate identification methodology.

Read More