Ask Amanda About Marketing – Episode 15: Experiments Aren’t Just For Chemists [Ft. Michele Linn]

Buckle up, ladies and gents. It’s time to perform some EXPERIMENTS!

Well, not the beaker-and-test-tube type of experiments — marketing experiments! The content marketing world is constantly changing, and if we want to succeed, we need to change with it. Content marketing experimentation can help you determine what new tactics and strategies are worth exploring to get the best results.

But how do we change? What do we change?

Michele Linn has the answer.

This podcast seeks to answer your questions about content marketing and digital PR with straightforward, actionable tips. You can find all episodes here.

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Episode 15: Experiments Aren’t Just For Chemists – Show Notes

This week’s question is:

• 5 Editorial Experiments You May Want to Try [CMI blog post]
• Joe Pulizzi
• Jay Acunzo 
• 17 No-Cost Ways Writers Can Extend Reach of Their Editorial [CMI blog post]
• Where Should You Spend Time on Your Website? 5 Data-Driven Opportunities [CMI blog post]
• Most Desirable Content Marketing Job Skills [Fractl study]

This week, Michele Linn, VP of content at Content Marketing Institute, joined me in a discussion about experimenting with marketing strategies and why it’s effective.

Here’s her insight.

Importance of Experimenting

Just because your content is staying the same doesn’t mean the world around you is.

Having one content plan and sticking to it just isn’t good enough anymore, because everything is constantly evolving in the marketplace, Michele said. You might even be worse off, struggling to get readers, shares, and traffic on your site because your content isn’t relevant or engaging enough.

With social media platforms taking over and offering new ways to interact with content, there’s a lot of opportunity to develop your marketing strategies based on current trends.

Experimenting with marketing strategies allows you curate unique and exciting methods that appeal to a new generation of audiences.

Be Observant

Knowing how your business, team, and readers have evolved will help you know what experiments need to take place in order to be effective.

Be communicative with your team, and based on the conversations you have with them about their ideas on how marketing strategies can potentially be improved, prioritize those ideas.

Be attentive to daily habits of your coworkers and audience, as you want to better understand their everyday lives, whether it’s checking social media on a daily basis or reading the newspaper with your morning coffee.

You can also get in contact with people outside of your team and get their input on what would be of interest. Your target audience is growing and it’s your job to know how to reach them! But even your current readers have invaluable insight. Maybe your content has been answering their questions up until this point, but now they have

Know your goal. If one of your methods isn’t working, figure out why and adjust it. Look at everything that’s changing and ask yourself what would make sense to try differently.

Don’t Give Up on Change

Some people aren’t as open to change as others, but it is important for everyone to be comfortable with the advances taking place in their work environment and career course.

Know the person you are working with and their level of comfort when it comes to change. If your manager is not comfortable with the experiments being done, try a different approach with a smaller experiment and work your way up. Present timelines, expectations, and justifications that express what you’re trying to achieve and what you’ll learn from the test.

Lastly, make sure your voice is heard and challenge the norm. Marketers are encouraged to work in organizations where is it okay to experiment. A lack of experimentation will cause a plateau in your traffic, leading to stagnance in other aspects of your business.  

Build a Solid Team

Experimenting with marketing strategies is exceptionally harder if you don’t have a solid marketing team to begin with.

Michele said priorities should be in this order: people > process > technology.

First, you need to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, who you’re helping, and how you’re going to measure that success.

Once that’s set as the guiding principle, make sure you have the right people in place on your team.

When hiring, do not underestimate the importance of the get-it-done attitude. When you’re interviewing people, don’t only look for skills but for attitudes that work for your culture

Also check out their personal brand. Michele has found that a lot of the people who do well have outside passions and use what they do really well in their job tend to utilize those skills well in other parts of their lives, too.

Have a question you want to submit to the podcast?

Email me at [email protected] or comment below!

Have any additional insight on marketing experimentation? Post it in the comments! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Full Transcript:

Amanda Milligan: Welcome to Ask Amanda About Marketing, a podcast in which I, Amanda, or occasionally a special guest, answer your questions about inbound marketing. Straightforward, right? If you want to submit a question, email me at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you. Let’s get right to it.

On the podcast this week, I have a guest, Michelle Linn, and we’re going to discuss the answer to the question: How can I experiment with marketing strategies effectively? So I think this is something a lot of marketers wonder about. It is kind of the core of marketing which is experimentation. Actually going out testing, seeing what works and what’s going to be the best for your particular brand or strategy because sometimes even something that works for most people isn’t going to necessarily work for you.

So experimentation is huge and I’m really excited to have Michelle Linn on the show. She actually published a post—I think maybe in June—about this very topic and how Content Marketing Institute has been instituting some experiments. So I’m looking forward to speaking with her. So, Michelle, thank you so much for being on the show.

Michelle Linn: Thanks so much for having me, Amanda.

AM: Of course and just to start, can you give a little bit of background about your history of Content Marketing Institute and what you’re working on now?

ML: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been with Content Marketing Institute (CMI) since we launched in May of 2010. I was one of the first people that Joe Pulizzi, our founder, hired. So it has been such a wonderful experience to be a part of building this business.

In my role—you know, my role has definitely evolved over the last seven years—but I’ve been a part of all sorts of editorial on the site from blogging to research to, you know, the event and everything that we do. So right now I manage our team who produces all of the editorial. Our fabulous, fabulous team.

Like I mentioned to you right before we started recording, right before the show, I’m actually transitioning away from my full-time role at CMI the end of this month and I’m going to be consulting for them, but I’m also going to be consulting for other clients too. So I’m really excited about that.

AM: That’s great. So a lot of this podcast is going to be based on a post you published recently about some of the experiments that the editorial team has been putting on at CMI. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, what do you think or why is the experimentation part of marketing so important for marketers to try out? Why is it important to experiment with your tactics?

ML: Yeah, I think that the rate at which everything is evolving in the marketplace between social and between how readers interact with your content and all the different tools and technologies, I think if you had one plan and you stuck to that, that would be a huge mistake. Even though you’re not changing, it doesn’t mean that the things around you aren’t changing.

So it’s a really good idea to definitely experiment and try different things and I’ll just give you know, one quick example. I know that a lot of people—and we’ve actually seen this too at CMI—a lot of people are experiencing doing the exact same thing that they’ve always done but it’s getting increasingly more difficult to get readers and to get shares and to get traffic. So, you know, if you keep doing things the way that you always have been doing them, chances are your results are going to be worse than they were in the past.

AM: Yeah, that makes total sense and I think on the last podcast episode I just released with Nadya Khoja for Venngage we were talking about how, you know, infographics, when they were the trendiest thing ever and they still are super effective—but everybody got into the space, right? Everybody was producing infographics.

So it was no longer good enough to just put out infographics. You had to be doing it better than everybody else and figuring out what was going to be the most effective. So it’s interesting to see the same kind continue on where just because something’s worked, doesn’t mean it’s going to continue working the exact same way. You kind of have to change things up and see what works the best.

ML: Absolutely. Good enough is typically not not good enough anymore. That’s not a very good measure of success these days.

AM: Right, absolutely. So when you’re trying to come up with different things to test like how do you come up with the ideas for what to experiment on? Where do you get that inspiration from?

ML: You know, for us, we just looked at how our readers are changing, how our business has been evolving—like I mentioned, CMI’s been around for the past seven years. So where we were as an industry seven years ago—even three years ago or two years ago—isn’t where the industry is today. So looking at that. We’ve also looked at how the team has evolved. So for us, we just kind of looked at everything that’s changing and we said, what would make sense for us to try differently knowing where we are now.

So it’s a very iterative process. I have a lot of conversations with people on the team and a lot of other things that make sense rise to the top from that.

AM: Yeah, do you get ideas even from outside of your team? I’d imagine maybe it’s good to get an outsider perspective sometimes. Or does a lot of it come from just looking back on how things are performed and talking internally?

ML: Well, we do a lot of conversations internally because I want to make sure that everyone is comfortable with what they’re doing. But to your point, we also do talk to other people outside of the team and kind of figure out where they are.

I was talking to one gentleman and even said he goes, you know, when I started with CMI, everything you guys wrote was so relevant to me, but I’ve grown up with you guys as you guys have, you know evolved. So now I’m looking for these different things. It was an obvious thing that he said, but it was also one of those “aha” moments at the same time.

So to your point, it’s a lot of the conversations with both the team as well as with those from out outside of the team. What we’re trying to do now more of is even talk to those who we don’t know as well and make sure we’re really trying to figure out what people who don’t necessarily know who CMI is very well, talk to those people also.

AM: Right, okay. So when you do decide how you’re going to move forward, what you’re going to experiment on, how do you decide how long to run that experiment for? Because I think there’s there’s a lot of balance between not wanting to stop too soon before something has the chance to succeed. But also, you don’t want to do something for too long and waste of time and money on it if it’s not working. So how do you tend to gauge when is an appropriate time to stop doing an experiment or stop testing something out?

ML: Yeah, so I’m actually going to you know back up for one thing. The one thing you need to make sure that you have in your culture is someone who is willing to have you experiment. So if you’re working with someone who’s nervous about experimentation or your leadership’s not so certain, you’re going to have to make your timelines and your justifications. Make them feel comfortable.

AM: Yeah, I was actually going to ask you about that because I saw on your post that I think one of the examples you had was you were going to start repurposing content on the blog based on information you would already published but updating it and reposting in that you got some pushback on that. So, what is that advice you would give to people who maybe initially, some people would say that they’re not sure it’s the best idea. They don’t know that they want to try it. What do you suggest they do in order to convince people that it’s worth experimenting, that it’s worth trying out new things?

ML: You know, I’m very, very, very fortunate. Again. I work for a gentleman named Joe Pulizzi who runs CMI and I think Joe is the best. So he’s always open to experimentation. He’s usually open to experimentation. Let me say that, so I feel like my brain is pretty big. That said—there are certain things—giving him a bunch of ideas and there are certain things, he’s like, no this isn’t really the right time to try that. So it goes back to knowing the person who you’re working with. I think that’s really huge. And then I think that you need to make that case.

If the person is not so comfortable, find a small experiment that they are comfortable trying and then see how things go. I would also encourage marketers to work those organizations where they can try different things. It’s hard when your hands are always tied.

AM: Right, right. Now, I really like that point you made about starting small. I think people hear the word “experiment” and it’s intimidating. It sounds like this big, large-scale project and it really doesn’t have to be. I think one of the other examples for your post is that you were going to change the style of your podcast show notes and include less to try to encourage people to listen to the podcast which is interesting and that’s not a hugely time-consuming change and it’s a tweak that could be really effective.

Have you done any of these other little experiments? Or what do you think are some good experiments people can do to improve their content quality?

ML: Yeah, you know, if I can actually talk about the podcast show notes for a minute and I would love to jump back to your question too. Our team is relatively small and we have one woman on the team and she’s the person who writes these podcasts notes every week. So, we talked about [how] we had other things that we wanted to try and have her do and she basically said I would love to do that. But I’m going to need to find more time in my schedule to make those to try these different things.

So the simplification of the podcast notes actually came out of that conversation. We’re like well, hey, if we can simplify what you’re doing with the podcast, that’ll free up time so you can try something else. So that’s actually how that whole shift happened. So sometimes it’s nice to almost look at experiments in tandem because if it makes something simpler, it’ll give you time to try something else. And so, for this particular case, it’s been about a couple of months since we’ve been doing this now and we find the results are very steady if not better than what they were in the past and it’s taking that person a lot less time to put those together.

Again now it’s freed her up to do other things and it almost kind of feels like no harm, no foul, because she has that extra time on her plate.

AM: It sounds like the perfect kind of experiment to try first if you’re in an environment where they’re not sure experimentation’s right way to go, like you said, there wasn’t really a lot you can lose and you were gaining in another way anyway.

ML: Yes, but if to your point about how long to try experiments. If we had looked and said, oh my gosh, you know things are really crashing and burning here, I don’t know if he would have gone back to the original way but we would have experimented again to figure out if there was a better way to do it.

AM: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

ML: So and then just to mention about time too, I would definitely look at each experiment one by one and figure how much time you need to give it to actually succeed. So for instance, this summer we talked about how we have vertical labs—industry labs at Content Marketing World. I don’t know if you read the post. We’ve covered industry content in the past and it’s never really performed all that well for us.

For this, we said hey, we’re covering twelve industries during Content Marketing World no matter what happens. We’re going to cover these 12 industries this summer. That’s another way to put constraints on an experiment to say, this is how many we’re going to do and when we’re done, we’re going to figure it out. We think this is the right thing to actually do for our audience and for the industry.

AM: At the beginning—not just setting a goal or a hypothesis for what will work, but even just setting a scope like you said—this we’re going to do it this long or this many times and then we’re all going to commit to reflecting on how I performed.

ML: Yes. So I think it’s experiment by experiment how you have to judge how you’re going to judge it and how long you’re going to let that experiment go.

AM: Right, yeah. That’s great. So jumping back to before when we were talking about more of those little experiments. Do you have any other suggestions? Maybe somebody has a blog where they’re not getting as much traffic as they like or not as much engagement on the page. What do you think are some good little introductory experiments people can do for their content to try to get some more engagement, some more eyes on their content.

ML: Yeah. I don’t know if you follow Jay Acunzo—this is probably a couple years ago that he was doing this—I remember that he said every single thing that he published he was going to try one different thing every single time. I thought was really interesting. So I think you could certainly do something like that.

But if you’re looking to do more regular experiments, we actually just recently did an internal lunch and learn and we were talking about different, easy ways that you can extend the reach of your editorial. So it’s anything from adding in links on your existing podcast to posts that have to have performed really well to make your post more sticky. Or going back to previous posts and adding links to those new posts in an attempt to get traffic or adding things like “click to tweet,” tweets that show up in your post that people can easily share those phrases. Or experimenting with how you’re doing outreach to your bloggers or to the influencers and things like that. There’s a bunch of little things. I think that people can certainly try to see what works and what doesn’t and what’s worth the time and what’s not.

AM: Do you think that the best content to experiment on is the newer stuff you’re putting out? Or do you think it’s worth going back to the really high performing content and tweaking that to see if it continues to get the same amount of traffic?

ML: We actually do bot. We put out content every single day at CMI, but I have a running list of all of the different content all of our—I actually look at I actually have a system—but I look at those pages where they have the most opportunity either to get more traffic or to get better conversions or to come up in search more. I look at three different reports in Google analytics and I mix and match them for different insights to figure out where are the opportunities on our existing content. Where should we prioritize our time with those pages?

AM: Got it. So it’s a solid mix to be able to get the most optimization out of tweaking things.

ML: Yeah and be very cognizant of what you’re trying to do on that page. If it’s already converting, well, maybe you don’t want to mess with what it’s doing. But you want to get that page out more in social or people are getting there but they’re not converting. Then you have a different issue to actually solve on that page. So not just saying these are pages that get traffic. Let me optimize them. But really being smart about the actions that you’re taking.

AM: That’s a great point. I think a lot of people have gotten lost in experimenting like they forget why they were even doing it in the first place and they just end up tweaking and tweaking and then they’re like, okay why was I doing this in the first place? So probably keeping that in mind is really effective.

ML: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been a system that’s been working really well for us because we know why we’re doing it instead of just trying things all willy-nilly which we’ve done in the past. So we’re just trying to get systematic.

AM: Right, so you mentioned before that a lot of the success that comes with experimenting is just having the right work environments. A lot of experimentation comes with just having a streamlined process, knowing how you’re going to get the normal work done and explore new tactics—so I want to transition a bit and talk a little bit about forming the appropriate marketing team or content team and how you found has been the most efficient way for you to work and get everything done that you’re setting out to accomplish.

ML: Yeah, absolutely. So like you mentioned, it’s all about a few things, but I always speak I always talked about strategy, the people process, and technology—it always comes in that order. So first you need to have your strategy and understand your “why” and why are you doing what you’re doing? And how is it different from what others are doing? Who are you serving? Who are you helping and how are you going to measure that success?

Once you have that and once that is every single person on the team’s guiding principle—you need every single person to have a shared understanding of what that strategy is—you know, the next thing I would recommend is making sure that you have those right people in place on your team. So, you know, we actually recently did a Twitter chat every week—it’s the CM World Twitter chat and we’re asking people what different skills that they look for when they’re hiring for their content marketing team.

So [much of] the conversation was around—not necessarily skills like SEO or proficiency in email or anything like that—but it was around attitudes: the get it done attitude or asking questions or not accepting what the norm is, so I would definitely recommend that when you’re looking for people, you’ve got to look for not only skills, but you also look for the right attitudes that makes sense for your culture.

AM: Absolutely. We have found the exact same thing at Fractl. It’s never people who have a marketing background or not—I won’t say never but it’s so much about what’s revealed in the interview. Whether people are going to be self-starters, if they just have enthusiasm about online marketing about content marketing.

It’s so interesting because there’s not a ton of industries are like content marketing where you can’t really go just get a degree in it and you’re done and you’re not going to learn anything else and you’re set for life. It’s so much about continuing to learn, continuing to innovate, and having that attitude just from the get-go. That’s how you’re going to succeed. Do you have any advice on how to figure out that sort of thing in an interview?

ML: I will look at an interview plus have a look at other factors too. In the interview, I would ask behavioral questions—maybe that’s not the right psychological word. I would ask someone who I was interviewing, “can you can you evaluate this content on CMI’s site?” I want to see that because every I’m positive everything that we do can be better. I want to see that they’re okay giving feedback and want to see how they give feedback. I want to make sure that they’re fine questioning what’s already out—that norm, not have that fear.

I would ask those typical questions about looking at how someone’s dealing with something instead of just those very quantitative questions. And I also am a really big fan of looking at the person’s personal brand because a lot of content marketers who do well from my experience have been those who have outside interests and outside passions and have used what they do and their jobs for other things also. I think it’s really interesting just to see the type of person that someone is.

Then lastly, because I hire a lot of writers and editors—I will pay someone to do this. I won’t just ask them to do this for free work—but I always ask them to write something and/or edit something. Someone could be a wonderful editor, but if it’s not in our style it might not be the right fit.

AM: Right? I want to say that I love the notes you said about how everything can be improved and fostering—we’re talking about how to get a sense of somebody through an interview, but I think that’s also a great way of having an interviewee get a sense of the organization. If you’re setting out from the get-go saying, we believe in feedback, and you know supporting each other and being honest about how things could be improved. To see that so early on is probably fantastic for a potential candidate and I really just love that overall approach.

ML: I never really thought of that to be honest with you, but that’s a really good point. A lot of people in this industry want to be those people whose feedback is really valued in that makes you feel valued as an employee.

AM: Absolutely and I don’t think that’s a common thing in interviews, right? People probably go into interviews really nervous. They don’t want to challenge the norm but you’re setting a standard there that says, this is normal. This is what should be done and I completely agree with that. I think if anybody if you’re settling on—okay, this is perfect—you’re probably not seeing the whole picture.

It’s a difference between knowing that something is working but can still be improved especially over time. Just like you mentioned at the beginning, things change so much in content marketing that it’s hard to imagine that anything will work perfectly forever.

ML: Yes, and the people I hire like—I don’t want someone I work with to say, yeah looks great. That actually makes me kind of cringe. I mean, not everything has to be looked under the microscope but I want those people who really challenge me, people who always want to make things better. It goes to a certain extent. At a certain point, done is done. We work with those kind of people too.

But I think that’s huge. I always work with very honest people who just tell me how [they] feel and what it is and it’s professional, it’s not personal, but that works well on my end, but it might not work well for others. So you got to figure out what works well for you and for your culture, you know?

AM: Right, right. So once you’ve hired this team and you had talked about keeping everybody kind of on the same page, I’m interested to hear how if you have people with different roles. Maybe they’re not it working on the same projects like how you’re able to have a unified mission, front of mind, for everybody. Even if it’s not necessarily part of their day-to-day or they’re not all working together. How do you maintain that “all eyes on the end goal” type of mentality?

ML: Yeah. Again, I think everyone first needs to know what that mission is and truly know what it is. Not had management think, yep, everyone knows what we’re doing. We have a lot of conversations within our team. I do a lot of one-on-one conversations. I think those work well. It’s taking the time—if something’s not hitting your mission to not just fix it but to go back and say, why don’t we frame it like this or why don’t we do this so it better does what we’re trying to do as an organization.

So I think it’s a lot of those conversations to really make sure that everyone’s on the same page. It’s a constant evolution and it’s a constant conversation. But after a while, you start to see people that are picking that up on their own. I also think it’s also important to keep the team updated on what’s going on, what’s working and what’s not working, how you’re trending towards those goals that you’ve outlined.

So it’s just it’s a lot of when I first started with CMI, I was the person in the trenches doing the writing and the blogging and the production—I was the “jack of all trades,” but as the company’s progressed, I’ve become more of the person helping the people, which is an entirely different role. I can be on the phone for five hours in a day, which is not uncommon. So it’s just having a lot of that open door communication.

AM: Yeah, that makes total sense. Just being completely aware of how everybody’s feeling about their roles and what they think that the purpose of everything they’re doing is and it’s good that you have the time to kind of analyze that, make sure things don’t go off the rails. I could see how experimenting comes back into all of this because everybody has to feel comfortable in their workspace and confident in their day-to-day work to feel confident suggesting an experiment that’s worth doing that may be related to their work. Have you seen that confidence in their day-to-day impact their willingness to kind of come forth with suggestions?

ML: I hope so. I mean, I truly hope that anyone I work with knows they can come to me with an idea and even if it’s not something that we do, you know, obviously you can’t jump on every single idea or else you would never get anything else done.

I’m also a huge proponent of taking what you’re going to do and focusing on it and getting that done and then moving on to the next thing so there’s definitely that balance between getting stuff done and constant experimentation. There’s those things that we might not be able to do now, but ideally, let’s put them “parking lot” or put them to the side and then we have a little more time, let’s look at that list. So I really try hard to help. I hope that everyone feels like their ideas are appreciated and respected even though we obviously can’t act on everything. But I think it’s just it’s all how that team functions.

AM: And do you use the same type of prioritization, as you were talking about with which blog post to optimize in which ones can be improved upon, when you’re thinking about what to move forward with first?

ML: To an extent. Sometimes I look at blog posts or I look at pages on the website to optimize. There’s hard metrics so I know which ones to go after.

AM: This is more of an intuition in this case.

ML: Yes, and this I think is a more of an intuition and more of all like, who wants to take this and who’s excited about this. So more factors come into play. Or what’s the downside? Like, what’s the risk if we try this and it doesn’t go well? So it’s a different thought process that than you know saying “let’s optimize, you know XYZ pages.”

AM: Right. Yeah. So this is a little bit off topic from the experimentation theme, but I’m just curious since you are involved with hiring and trying to get the sense of different attitudes and work ethics that people have—what do you think is one of the biggest learning curves for people who might be new to content marketing like what do you think is the main thing they struggle with at the beginning like the biggest hurdle they have to cross in order to be successful?

ML: You know, I think it’s going to depend on where that person is coming from. So for instance, if the person is coming from a very traditional marketing role, it might be that hurdle might be you know—content marketing is not product marketing.

I came from product marketing a decade ago, but it’s not about collateral brochures and selling products and services. It’s about putting that aside and what’s really helpful. It’s a whole mindset about really trying to help your audience or if you hire a writer from a journalism background, you know, that’s going to be a different shift that they have to make in their mindset. So I hate the answer it “depends,” but it depends on where that person is coming from.

AM: A lot of its just getting over what they were used to—which is kind of like the industry standards and adapting. I keep coming back to the experimentation thing because I think that was one of the major things that I learned when I started in content marketing. My background is in journalism, and I’m used to rules and following certain procedures and I mean a lot of it translated really well because it was what’s newsworthy and what do people like and what do they share.

But in terms of just like how you work within content marketing, it was really interesting to see—I would expect that everybody just knew off the top of their heads all the right things to do all the time. Then it occurred to me that a lot of it’s through testing and through reading what other people are doing, other case studies, forming your own case studies. Researching what’s effective for other companies and then taking the time to analyze what has worked for yourself.

So maybe that’s where I got that question from because I think—and that’s why this whole topic is really intriguing to me—because I think that it’s so important to the core of how content marketing can be successful for you but it’s really interesting.

ML: I think because I’ve been doing this for a while that’s just been part of the culture that I’ve been in, you know what I mean? I’ve been in content marketing plus startup equals—a lot of figuring out, a lot of just let’s see what happens and experimentation. So it’s really interesting to hear your perspective. That would be a really big mind shift from where you came from.

AM: Yeah. No, it’s and it’s fun. I think I was in a Twitter chat the other day, I think maybe it was the Content (CMI) chat and people are talking about their previous jobs and what their cultures were like there. One of the things I mentioned that I had a job once where my boss was like, okay, just tweet one time per week. Like I don’t think that’s how it works and yet, the culture there, I did not feel comfortable really challenging that.

Everything we’re talking about now resonates so much with me because I’ve been in the environment where it’s not the way it is and yeah, you don’t feel empowered and you don’t feel like you can take chances and risks and it’s something Fractl values so much. It’s so interesting when you’re hiring and to see people kind of make that evolution if they’d come from a different industry.

ML: Yes, and you have to make sure that person is okay with doing that because I used to work in the corporate environment and it was very corporate and I wasn’t allowed to take risks. I was marketing Mainframe software—if you don’t know Mainframe software, that’s old old technology—there wasn’t any experimentation. So you almost have to find the people in the right spot where they’re willing to try that and they’re not so nervous. You know what I’m saying? Because so many of us have been in situations where that was not something that was valued, right?

AM: That’s right. Interesting. Well Michelle, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about some of the stuff you’ve worked on and how other people can effectively do the same.

ML: Well, thank you so much for having me, Amanda! This was fun.

AM: Thanks again for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, click subscribe. Don’t leave me with the realization that I’m talking to no one and please rate and review on iTunes so I can keep making this podcast better and your lives easier. Take care.