Focus on the Urgent and Important.
Category: Project Management
Core Infrastructure Supporting People and Business
CRM, CMS, and Measurement technologies are fundamental for working at scale across teams, shifts, and time zones. Having this core infrastructure in place lets you focus on your differentiators and building experiences at the scale you want to operate.
CRM
CRM technologies are core to supporting your business. Your contacts are customers, clients, colleagues working in and around your business.Knowing them as individuals, groups, and teams lets you collaborate across programs, channels and platforms.
CMS
Simple intelligent tools to build product catalogs, marketing campaigns, and sales reports are fundamental to Commerce, Marketing, and Sales teams as they are to social, comms, and editorial teams. We work in text, photo, video, and audio content all day. CMS tech helps us create, discover, and package that work.
Distribution and Measurement
Distribution and Measurement technologies manage access and activities across colleagues, clients, and campaigns. Standard processes for handling partners’ access, endpoints, tags, and terms-of-use is a foundation for operating at scale. Activity and performance measurements are core to proving markets and informing continuous improvements.
Progressive Elaboration
Progressive Elaboration: We know more today than we did yesterday. We’ll know more tomorrow.
“New shit has come to light, man.“
Content Creation Tools @ Hearst
Content Creation Tools let marketers, editors, and brand managers create, curate, package, and promote custom experiences at scale. Role-based access and non-destructive content updates let creators get more done in less time with more opportunities for thoughtful product, partner, and messaging integration. Content Creation Tools give team leads confidence to distribute tasks, scale their teams, and drive more participation within and outside current team members.
simple and efficient
We work with builders and makers — who create content using words, images, video, and interactivity — to fit the tools into their workflows. Drag and Drop simplicity and live editing gives creators more time for making compelling stories and experiences.
Collaborations focus the work on our clients’ most important channels, content types, and sales opportunities. We smooth access to their photos, video, and text assets and tie into their in-house and SaaS platforms for distribution, promotion, and performance measurement. The tools we built are force multipliers for our colleagues who support advertising, editorial, social, and marketing programs.
We build on technology that’s structured and flexible for rapid iteration of new features and functions. We create the infrastructure to support distribution and measurement at scale across mobile, social, email, and web properties. Clients create custom experiences at scale which drives new revenues at scale.
Games @ Hearst
Games @ Hearst officially launched in partnership with Microsoft in 2016. Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and Good Housekeeping created games that were featured daily on msn.com and distributed across their own mobile, social and web properties.
Tens of millions of people played and shared these games weekly. They showed us the topics they liked and the types of games, puzzles, quizzes worth their attention enough to play another and come back tomorrow for more. Publishing new games every day let us test new ideas from what we learned yesterday and last week. We’d been launching, learning and iterating across Hearst properties before public go-live.
Keys to the success of Games @ Hearst include:
- New Revenue and sales funnels from programmatic sales, to self-serve sponsorships, to high-touch programs integrating custom content and contextual placements at scale across brand properties and channels.
- Content creation tools that allow marketing and editorial teams to produce brand-relevant games at the scale required
- Intelligent insights into metrics that matter showing what’s happening in-flight and performing over time
Communication, Success and Teams
Effective communications, enabling success, and building teams include well-worn ideas. Working these into habits can still improve yourself, your team, your organization.
A consistent way to succeed is also a simple one – Tell folks what you’re planning to do, do it, then let folks know what you’ve done. It’s effective and ensures nothing gets too far afield before it’s caught and corrected.
Communication is paramount. By encouraging communication, you encourage cooperation.
Basics include
- Reading and answering email
- Returning calls
- Not leaving too much detail in voice mail; noting when, where and how you can be reached and when you’ll call back
Maybe less obvious: Note how you prefer to communicate. Be flexible in considering others’ preferences.
Meeting in-person allows for nuances and serendipity. It’s the best way for new folks to learn about one another. Meetings allow for multi-party back and forth. It’s also the most time-consuming and coordination-intensive. Meetings need active management to be kept productive.
Phone calls are personal through putting voice to name. A conference call can keep a team attuned with events. A call is intimate and immediate because good phone calls are all that’s happening for the duration of a call. They take coordination, too.
Email allows for more thoughtful response. They can be written, sent, received, and read on individuals’ schedules. They can cover detailed information and provide a record for same. They miss out on personality. Beyond facts, they can be tone-deaf.
IM can be great for one-on-one and small-group communication. “Presence awareness” – who’s online and reachable – gives this mode a leg up on email and the phone. Messages can be disruptive, and the expectation that they’re responded to immediately creates pressure and difficulties for those who are in a work zone or mid-conversation with others.
Meetings are important they’re a great way to share information with a wide group, foster conversation. and speed the question and answer process. Actively managing them will improve their effectiveness.Schedule lengths; posit an agenda; request feedback before the meeting; stick to the agenda’s focus. Manage meetings to scheduled length and agenda. Recall that when five people are in an hour-long meeting, that’s five hours spent.
Communication is key to preparing your team for success. Transparency is a key part of communication.
- Share the overall vision with the team
- In smaller groups and with individuals, tailor that vision to their areas of participation
- Note where individual contributions fit into the overall strategy
- Be aware of sensitivities, yet opt for openness
Say Thank You.
- Dollars are a great way to say Thank You
- Time off is a great way to say Thank You
- Saying “Thank you” is a great way to say thank you – This one’s no-cost and often overlooked.
photo credit: woodleywonderworks