Picking Your Tech Battles

The internet changes rapidly. Right when you grow accustomed to one style, a new one emerges. Apple vs. Windows. MySpace vs. Facebook. HTML5 vs. Flash. You participated in at least one of these epic beefs, and it wasn’t easy to take a side. Maybe you waited it out, dual booting and double posting until the outcome of the battle became evident. Maybe you were an early adapter who had to constantly justify your decision to everyone else. Whatever the case, information is the key to making good decisions.

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I love being in the kitchen, huge five course meals are my specialty because then I get to concoct my culinary delights for hours on end.  I cook Thanksgiving dinner every year on my own – it takes me seven straight hours and, because of that, Thanksgiving is my favorite cooking day of the year.   Not that it isn’t already an obvious metaphor, but a good recipe is the same as a good online marketing campaign.  You have your ingredients:  SEO, PPC, web design, social media engagement and PR.  Then you have your methods of combining them:  Should you braise, boil and simmer, sauté, or just bake for an hour – possibly with a cheesy crust?

Managing a client’s marketing campaign is very similar to my kitchen escapades.  Now not every client is going to be up for a seven hour turkey basting extravaganza, some are your average week night meals complete with a protein, a grain and a green.  However, these guys still take creative thought – you can’t serve the same meal every night, there needs to be some variation in ingredients and flavors even though the basic concept may still be the same.  Larger meals are more exciting for plenty of reasons:  you plan it out days ahead of time, your shopping budget is bigger, there’s more than one course, you never stick to a recipe and you almost always end up burning something (occasionally salvageable depending on who’s coming to dinner).

I appreciate other cooks in my kitchen as well; it’s the best way to learn new things since I’m completely self-taught to begin with.  Every time a dish is produced you’re able to generate immediate feedback and shift gears accordingly for the next go-round.  I’ve never made the exact same meal twice because of this as it continues to evolve each time I attempt it.  While I definitely have more experience at the stove than I do at my laptop I’m assuming that the same can be said for the way I put a good campaign together.

The principles are easy:  Understand your ingredients, know what works together and what can be complementary, eat what you ruin – I guarantee you won’t make the same mistake twice.  Satisfy not only your hunger, but your need for nourishment.  Don’t make a huge production out of every meal – my best meals have been the ones with no planning where I just open the pantry and put together something based on what I already have, there’s a lot more creativity required.  Always use fresh ingredients, keep sea salt handy and never ever put soy sauce on tomatoes.

Photo Credit: birdies-perch

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The following post will be be a double hitter. Rather then two separate posts on the same event, we’ve commissioned two of our team leads (Jillian & Lori) who attended last night’s Refresh Houston meeting with Matt Mullenweg at our offices.

A Pre-Holiday Treat

Santa came early this year, in the form of our good friend Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), founder of blogging platform Wordpress and Chief BBQ Taste Tester of Automattic (just kidding… sort of).

Matt, armed with one of Pop Labs’ famous margaritas, delivered an informative and entertaining Q&A for Refresh Houston. Having seen Matt last year at his HTC presentation, I thought that maybe this year’s presentation/gab fest was going to be similar. Talk about the future of open source. Talk about online liberties. That sort of thing. (more…)

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