Boston Content
Finding your next marketing role during a ...

Job hunting can be a stressful time, especially if the loss of your job or client-base was unexpected. To make matters worse, 75% of resumes are rejected before they even reach the hiring manager. As content marketers, we spend our days trying to stand out above the noise in the work we do and stories we create. So how do you carry that into the job hunt process? Especially with unemployment at historical highs as the economy navigates through COVID-19.

Finding your next marketing role during a pandemic

A Content Marketer's Guide to Decoding Dev Jargon

Brendan Butts is Senior Technical Lead at Alipes Inc.

Developers often use technical jargon in conversation, forgetting that not everyone has a full understanding of what those words actually mean. This can lead to confusion, especially because when asked to explain what something is, they use even more hard-to-understand jargon. Below, we go over some common technical words and phrases that get thrown around a lot.

Agile Development

This is a software development methodology -- a process used for developing software -- that is very popular with modern-day technologists. Agile itself is not limited to development and can be applied to many business areas, including marketing. It involves small, cross-functional teams, which operate in sprints.

Sprint

A sprint is a timeboxed set of work, the length of which is decided by the agile team. Typically a sprint is a week, two weeks, or a month, though sprints can be shorter.

Backlog

This is the work that remains to be done on a project. It is typically in a project management system and is often ordered by priority. When a sprint is completed, the top items from the backlog typically become the contents of the next sprint.

User Story

A user story is a technique used in Agile to capture some work that needs to be done, from the end-user perspective. For example, “As a visitor to the website, I want to be able to go to the contact page and fill out a form to submit my information to the sales team in order to facilitate a conversation about starting to use the product.”

Waterfall

Waterfall is the old-school style of developing software. You work on a project for an entire year, going from version 2.0 to version 3.0 and finally at the end of the year, you release to software. It’s called this because, unlike agile in which you develop in short bursts and release often, the development process is like a river you travel down for a long time, and the release process is the waterfall, in which everything is released at once.

Scrum & Standup

Scrum is a type of agile development. It is also the name many use for the daily team meeting where each team member tells the group what they did the day before, what they are working on today and what their blockers are. These meetings are done while standing, to keep them brief, and are often referred to as stand-ups.

Blockers

A blocker is simply something that is blocking you from accomplishing a task.

Jira

Jira is a project management product by Atlassian. It is commonly used by development teams to track their sprints, backlog, and to assign work to individuals.

MVP

Minimum Viable Product. In development parlance, this is a piece of software or a website that has the minimum amount of features for it to be useful for early adopters.

AWS

Amazon Web Services. Amazon doesn’t just sell stuff online. It also provides one of the largest and most used cloud services in the world. Without getting into the gritty details, many websites are hosted on AWS and even more assets --images, PDFs, etc. -- are hosted on AWS S3.

CDN

A Content Delivery Network is a geographically distributed network of servers that can be employed to serve up static content like images and files. It is useful because these are very fault tolerant in that if one server goes down, other servers can pick up their slack.

S3

Simple Storage Service is a CDN provided by AWS. Many websites and applications use S3 for storage. When you upload an image to Slack, it is stored in S3. When you upload an image to many websites, S3 is where the image is stored.

Hopefully this has given you a bit more to go on when you’re engaging developers in conversation. You might even find yourself surprising the developers if you start throwing around phrases like “What kind of blockers are we seeing on user stories this sprint?”

What to Consider When Seeking Feedback on Your Writing

Boston-based Chuck Leddy has been crafting engaging content since 1995, as a journalist and B2B brand storyteller. He's written for B2B brands such as General Electric, ADP, Office Depot, Cintas, the National Center for the Middle Market, and many more. He's also been published in print publications such as the Boston Globe, Forbes, the Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle. His website and blog are at www.ChuckLeddy.com.

I was asked recently to be a guest lecturer for a college writing class. The instructor asked me to share some insights about writing (I’m a brand storyteller) with her students, who were filled with energy and lots of thoughtful questions about writing. One student asked me if there was a "right" way to use feedback. The question got me thinking about that, and other, questions related to feedback. Let me answer five basic feedback-related questions here:

1. Is it always a good idea to seek feedback on your writing? The answer depends. You may be working against a tight deadline and hence have limited time to seek feedback. In these cases, I don't recommend you seek it. At other times, you may feel confident about what you're doing (perhaps due to experience) and won't necessarily feel the need to invite feedback. I generally seek feedback when there's time for it and when I feel feedback will improve my writing (in other words, when I have some doubts about what I’m doing). Usually these doubts revolve around beginnings and endings, and the overall narrative flow and tone/voice of the writing.

2. Who should you approach for feedback? It's a good idea to have two or three people you trust who are willing to provide feedback. I have a close friend who is an experienced, savvy business consultant. When I'm writing about business topics and I have time and doubts, I'll email him my draft and ask him to provide feedback. I also ask my wife for feedback. She's a skilled editor (and English teacher) and has always been able to spot weaknesses in my writing, which has been tremendously helpful. Find smart people you trust to offer feedback, and reward them for providing it (with at least a “thank you” note).

3. What feedback is “valuable”/useful? Well, it depends on what you need. I like to have feedback that spots problems in the writing, but I generally don't want the person to offer specific solutions. In my opinion, it's the writer's job to find solutions once the problems have been identified. With my wife, for example, I always ask her beforehand to point out problems but not tell me how to solve them.

On a related note, useful feedback is always about the specifics of the writing itself and never about the writer. To be useful, feedback should be as specific as possible. "Your ending doesn't feel right," for instance, isn't very useful. It recognizes a problem, but the writer wants to understand the problem in more detail. Better feedback might be: "The ending doesn't seem to tie together with the rest of what you've written, so it seems tacked on at the end because you ran out of space or couldn’t think of something more organic." With this latter feedback, I can analyze and solve the problem. All good writers must be strong problem-solvers once specific problems present themselves through feedback.

4. What if the feedback is more about the person giving feedback than the writer or the writing? Then it’s bad feedback the writer can feel free to disregard. Sometimes, the giver of feedback would handle the writing differently, perhaps using a different tone of voice or structure. That's fine, but the writer is the owner of the work and the writing should reflect the writer's perspective. Take in all feedback, yes, but the writer retains the ultimate right to disregard it. If, for example, you write a personal essay about a painful childhood experience, nobody has the right to tell you not to share that story or to make it more upbeat. These choices are the writer’s alone.

5. Do the same feedback rules apply to editors? Yes, but editors should be able to both identify problems and also help you resolve them with precise, actionable suggestions. Editors are supposed to understand the "editorial voice" of the publication or client, so if a writer is off target with the voice/tone, a good editor will help you get back on target. Like a good writer, a good editor is also a problem-solver. Editors who merely point out problems (“The tone doesn't feel quite right. Can you change it?") are not effective editors, and writers won't much enjoy writing for them. When you find an editor adept at providing good feedback, keep working with that editor.

The best practice would be to start asking for more feedback and learning how to use it as you go. That will take time and patience, but will also improve the way you work and the writing output itself. For this reason, and in the right context, good feedback is a gift you should seek out and use wisely.

Telling Stories in the Post-Text World

Ed Harrison is the SVP, B2B Tech Practice Lead at InkHouse.

A version of this post initially appeared on the InkHouse blog.

Are you ready for the post-text future?

(I acknowledge the irony of using the written word to comment on its de-emphasis.)

Earlier this year, the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo headlined a collective of reporters cataloging the trends shaping the digital world.

The takeaway? While words still matter, video, images and audio have taken the lion’s share of our attention from text-based content — attention spans that were already lagging behind that of a goldfish.

From the longform journalism of the New York Times’ podcast The Daily to Google’s ambitious Accelerated Mobile Pages format for publishers, major media players are embracing new ways to create, publish and distribute their content. Our increasingly digitized lifestyle also presents new opportunities for marketers and PR pros to rethink the way we tell stories using fewer words, and more, rich content, such as:

Less Is More

We all know the media landscape is changing (again). My colleague Tina Cassidy recently shared her conversation with a senior editor at a major news outlet. No one is reading the glut of news, and publishers are favoring “fewer stories, but more impactful ones.” PR is staying apace, so the time has come to shed our “more is better approach” and, instead, focus on generating fewer, better stories targeted at key audiences, measured with real data.

As communicators, the post-text world simultaneously changes everything — and nothing. The assets may be more visual, but the foundation — a strong story, grounded in authenticity and extended with a unique point of view — remains critical.

What We Worked on at #FieldDay2018

Last Friday, Boston Content members convened at WeWork South Station to work alongside one another for the day. In addition to collaborating with other content pros while getting that "to do" list done, here's a quick recap of what we worked on during #FieldDay2018:

“Search ads and SEO.”
— Carl Blume, Principal, Atlantic Marketing Advisors
“ I’ll be working on getting out 1 regular blog post, 1 tech blog post, and the company’s weekly Thought Leadership Roundup email, which keeps everyone updated on the week’s social and thought leadership content. ”
— Allison Grinberg-Funes, Marketing Manager, Raizlabs
“Will be working on a white paper for Boston-based digital talent platform Catalant (my client). It’s titled “Re-Imagining Work 2020” and will describe why companies should be exploring “agile talent solutions,” including using Catalant’s software to find internal and external talent for their projects. The white paper will also be prescriptive, describing the steps companies can take to adopt these agile talent solutions.

Will also be preparing for a Freelancers Union “Spark” event, where I’ll be offering attendees (freelancers all) tips on effective negotiation with prospective and existing clients. Might be making some notes and thinking of ways to facilitate and open up this “negotiating” discussion with the Freelancers Union members who attend.

Lastly, will be meeting BosCon member Sean Malvey (he wrote BosCon blog recap of the Wayfair event moderated by Ann Handley) for lunch and “soccer talk.” Both Sean and I are avid soccer players and big supporters of FC Barcelona, the best soccer team in the world.
”
— Chuck Leddy, B2B Brand Storyteller, ChuckLeddy.com
“I set up a few goals for the day: 1 complete post on my own site, 1 for Medium, map out the first 2 episodes of my new podcast, and fill the rest of the time with curation/social. Maybe a little ambitious, but with enough coffee and a positive atmosphere, anything is possible!”
— Katie Dickinson, Blogger, Weird Travel Friend
“The big one right now is trying to push out a new app for online Workers’ Comp insurance quotes, so writing and checking all the content for that on our test site. And for smaller projects, I’m working on writing a style guide for the company, and a project to align and streamline our email and billing communications. ”
— Cat Anderson, UX Writer, AP Intego Insurance Group
“Today I will be working on fleshing out a new venture. Caitlin Pfitzer (also attending), founder of Independent Femail, and I are in the process of starting up a partnership. We will be working on revamping her website to reflect new offerings and tackling a couple branding statements needed for current clients.”
— Kaitlin Provencher, Associate Director, Digital Content & Strategy, Tufts University
“I’m working on a landing page to tell my crazy story for how I came to UX! I’ve found that a resume and portfolio piece aren’t effectively communicating my engineering background in a UX-centric way and I want to try something that I think will work. I’ll be generating some content and sketches today.”
— Katie Fitton, UX Designer, KatieFitton.com
“I’m writing a blog post for a client and setting up an 8-week Facebook advertising campaign for another client.”
— Janet Mesh, Freelance Content Marketer & Strategist, JanetMesh.com

Missed our Field Day event? Not to worry! Check out our events page here to learn more about our upcoming gatherings.