Ellie Mirman's Startup Marketing Blog

I was both shocked and amazed by Virginia Heffernan's blog post about the reality of early episodes of Sesame Street. At first the article intrigued me because I love all things old-school nostalgia. I love its focus on simple pleasures, which she points out are now designated as "not suitable" for today's preschool child.

"Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole."

She talks about mood-disordered Oscar, diabetes-stricken Cookie Monster, and how the show was originally targeted to the "4-year-old inner-city black youngster." I always find it amazing to look back at children's programming with adult eyes to see what was really going on...

"People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading."

McGill is not really known for its sense of university community or school spirit (except for maybe this little treat we saw in RI:)















The real good stuff is here, though: McGill ranked #1 in Canada and #12 in world rankings. Gotta love it. I always recommend McGill to everyone considering where to go for university. Great education, great people, great city. If you want both reputation and experience (without the pretentiousness that comes with some other schools), plus a much lower tuition, McGill could be the right choice for you.

(This is especially for Andy's interest and any other American politics enthusiasts.)

2 Huge Mistakes by 2008 Presidential Candidates - article on HubSpot's blog about a report I worked on where we analyzed how the presidential candidates are doing on the internet. There are definitely some opportunities to increase their reach and influence on the Internet.

Just found out about this free teleseminar "A Brand You World" all about how to brand yourself. The teleseminar will take place on Nov. 8 and feature 24 speakers talking on different topics and it's all free. I think this is quite relevant for any reader of this blog, as it goes into how to brand yourself to build a successful career, find a great job, etc. Pretty cool stuff.

I found out about the event through David Meerman Scott's blog - he will be speaking at 4pm EST on "Promoting Brand You with Viral Marketing on the Web." He's a very cool guy in the field of modern/internet marketing and I definitely recommend checking him out.

That's what my uncle, Eugene Mirman, said at his comedy show in Boston last night. It's funny because it's true - his mom definitely does. She may even find this post and then my new blog will be revealed to the rest of my family. It's especially funny if you know his mom, and imagine her sitting at the computer typing his name into Google every day to find those Eugene-bashers and Eugene-lovers.

The image is definitely strange to me - but not as strange as the image of my dad on YouTube, which I have reluctantly accepted as a reality.

What I realize is that I'm partly still of the mentality that doesn't quite get how huge the blogosphere and all these other internet marketing things have gotten. But if my step-grandmother is on Google every day and my dad is the one who sends me the most YouTube videos, well, this stuff is pretty big.

So I believe I am reaching a crazy level of number of blog posts in one day. Well, number of significant blog posts that is - I used to post many short, pointless ones all the time. So I believe I am reaching a new level of craziness / devotion to my new blog.

And that actually made me think... if I have so much fresh content, would I actually be getting some more love from the Internet in terms of my blog's popularity? I ran a report on this blog using Website Grader, a free search engine optimization measurement tool that measures this kind of thing.*

I checked a couple of things:
- my old blog: score of 24! I was shocked. I've had that thing for years and posted to it pretty regularly. There must have been something messed up somewhere because the report didn't register any Google indexed pages (how many pages Google sees within my site). Also I had pretty much no inbound links and my Google PageRank was 0 (on a scale of 0-10, 10 being the best).
- my friend Rachel's blog: got a whopping 67 if I remember correctly. Now that's a decent grade. She had more pages indexed by Google and also had quite a few inbound links (the primary measure used by Google to see how important your site is on the web). I felt ashamed.
- this blog: 30 - how funny that just after 2 days and a couple blog posts that I'm already doing better than my old blog. Very funny. My Alexa traffic rating was quite good (13) but I need to investigate how that's actually calculated, because I know that I'm not the 13th most trafficed site on the web absolutely. No inbound links or indexed pages... I need to check if blogspot sets up separate pages for each of my blog posts - because that is key.

Alright, I'm cutting myself off now. Definitely past my bedtime.

*If you're interested in seeing a sample report from WebsiteGrader.com, you can check out the report on my site here.

I absolutely loved my liberal arts education. I think it is important to know about different cultures to understand the world around you and a BA in [insert useless major of your choice here] is incredibly valuable, I believe, for being able to function and succeed in today's world.

The dilemma, of course, is what to do when you graduate. So I've got a bachelor's degree in Religious Studies - now what? To those new to this question (and even those in their last year of undergrad with one month to go until graduation) you may have no idea what is the logical progression - or any possible progression - from this degree to the business world. Well I'm here to tell you - a BA in Useless Major = Successful Career in Marketing!

A lot of people either (a) have biases against marketing and/or (b) have no idea what marketing actually is. So I thought I'd provide a quick overview to show you how awesome it can actually be, and why a liberal arts degree is actually good preparation for this career.

What is marketing?
The end-goal of marketing is to generate leads to pass on to your sales people for them to contact and try to generate new business.

Traditional marketing includes:
- Public Relations (PR) - writing press releases about company news and working with media to pick up your story
- Direct Mail - sending snail mail with promotions/offers
- Email Marketing - sending email with promotions/offers
- Advertising - video, print, etc. advertisements
- Collateral - designing, writing, and printing things like brochures
- Branding - figuring out how to present your company externally, developing the messages you want to convey by your brand
- Events - organizing events, from holiday parties to user conferences to trade show exhibitions
- Web marketing - managing the company website, including textual content and design

But what's even more interesting is what's included in modern marketing - modern marketing focuses hugely on internet marketing, which now not only includes managing your company website but even more:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - optimizing your site (content, structure, etc.) so that you are more easily found through search engines
- Blogging (& Podcasting) - there are numerous benefits, including SEO, customer relationship, and branding benefits to having a company blog
- "Web Collateral" (my term) such as eBooks - developing more valuable content for the web
- Focus of PR turns to optimizing your press releases for easier, cheaper, yet very effective distribution via the web
- Viral marketing - generating tons of buzz around your company by, for example, a popular YouTube video

Neither of these lists is complete, but gives you a general idea of what's going on in marketing in case you had no idea. People very frequently get marketing and sales confused or believe marketing is manipulative. To this last point I will clarify: there is psychology involved in successful marketing, but you use this same type of psychology in your everyday life during which you marketing yourself. Taking some time to pick out what you wear in the morning? Thinking about how to tell your friend you lost their favorite sweater? These simple things alone are marketing activities in which you are marketing yourself - you are still the same person but your presentation of yourself is chosen somewhat carefully.


So what would make me a good fit for a marketing job?
I don't want to put down any business majors reading this, but an undergrad business degree is, in my opinion, pretty pointless. I'm sure this isn't the case across the board, but undergrad business programs tend to be packed with dumb classes with some theory that students don't understand how to apply to the real world. You learn weird things like how to organize a group of people, but without actually learning how groups work and how successful groups function.

So in my opinion, a liberal arts degree keys you up very well for a marketing job because marketing includes a lot of:
- Communicating - particularly writing, which is an essential component of any liberal arts degree
- Organization - if you have a rigorous education, then you've by default had to deal with a large work load and had to figure out how to organize yourself to get things done
- Project management - marketing projects often involve many different tasks, which require good general project management skills

In addition to all this, if you like working on a lot of different types of projects, marketing is a good place to go because there's so much that falls under marketing and marketing is a dynamic field, so there's always new things to learn.

Maybe it's because I'm not over the novelty effects of my new job and so I feel compelled to share my excitement. But I don't think these feelings are fleeting. I get a lot of satisfaction out of working in this field, and I know I'm not alone in that. I'm happy to share my thoughts / sales pitch here, even though, if successful in reaching people, would actually product some job competition for me! Let's hope we can all work together amicably...

This fall I finally got to dive into a couple things that I'd just been itching to do: internet marketing, graphic design, and even a little usability. I started a job at an internet marketing company and I started taking graphic design classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, finally scratching those itches.

Strangely, each of these things seemed somewhat separate in my life - at work I did little design, and in class there was very little understanding of the use of the internet for marketing and design.

So I was very excited to see these things finally united in a recent blog post on our company blog on some Must Read Design + Usability + SEO Articles. We've got tons of great posts on that blog, but this one has got to be my favorite. Perhaps you will enjoy as well.

I was telling my friend earlier today that I am no longer on a student schedule (waking up late, staying up late) but rather on a regular work schedule (waking up early, going to bed early).

And here I am, almost 1:30am on a Thursday night, still awake - but swearing to go to bed soon!

What I realize is that I'm not on a regular work schedule, I'm on a startup schedule. That means getting up early... but also staying up late. I don't consider myself a workaholic, but I'm probably in denial. After all, I was working until about 1am.

Yes, that's a ridiculous number of work hours, and no, I'm not getting paid overtime (I wish). It's just that there's a lot of work for me to do, and, well, I pretty much love my job.

Around the time when I first started my job (about a month ago), I wrote a blog article on "Why I Love Working for a Startup - and Why You Might Too." It was at a time when I was incredibly in love with my job and feeling oh-so-mushy. I never actually posted the article, and I'm somewhat glad because it was BEYOND mushy. But, one month into my job, I stand by the five points I outlined and I thought I would finally share them with the world.

So here is why I love working for a startup, and why you might too:

1. A startup can be a huge investment of time and effort because of the lack of resources. But the positive side of this is the depth and range of experiences that comes with that. There are only two people in this marketing "department" - me and my boss. That translates into getting much greater responsibility. I get to work on tons of projects, and exciting projects at that. I could never get to do this in any other entry level marketing position and the level of knowledge I have gained in this time could not have been met in any other job.

2. One thing I didn't actually expect is that I would get to see how a company works. When the group is small, you end up sitting amongst sales people, product developers, and even the CEO and co-founders. And you hear their conversations and you engage them in conversations and you see how people interact to bring together one functioning whole. For someone like me, with little business experience, this is incredibly valuable.

3. And that leads me to my next point - you are surrounded by smart, accomplished people. At least at this company, there are numerous people who have started a number of businesses and have extensive entrepreneurial experience and frankly are just really, really smart about what they do. They know a lot and, because there isn't really anyone between you and them, you get direct access to some incredible resources.

4. As a slight bonus, especially for people who aren't really into the cookie-cutter office lifestyle, a startup offers a fun, relaxed atmosphere with great interactions. Yes, I work hard, but I can show up at noon if I feel like it (of course, tomorrow I have a meeting at 10am, so I need to be in to the office in about 8 hours). And - eliminating one of my pet peeves - there isn't huge bureaucracy slowing you down. You get incredibly efficient processes. For example, we run a marketing campaign and generate a bunch of leads. We pass them on to the sales people right next to us, and hear how the sales call goes. We can get immediate feedback on the quality of those leads to understand the effectiveness of our marketing programs. Pretty cool.

5. My last point: my mom says I have potential, and I believe it. The greatest advice I got when making my job decision was to always surround myself with smart people. There are definitely plenty of those around my office, and they, plus the high level of work I get to do, truly challenge me. And challenges are the key, in my opinion, to really succeeding. You can't get very far if you're always playing it safe. You need to take some risks, take a leap, work your ass off, and then you can really start experiencing success.

So there's my little shpiel about how great it is to work at a startup. At first I was definitely very hesitant about taking this job. But I can't even imagine what my life would be like if I had done anything different. OK, I can imagine it, but it's not nearly as awesome.