Month: February 2016

I’m sure that you’ve at least heard about the Eat24 employee out in San Francisco who wrote an open letter to her CEO on Medium, expressing her distaste for the company’s negligence in supporting her financially.

When I started reading the article, I immediately sympathized with her. After all, as human beings, we’re conditioned to side with the underdog– someone who’s up against the system. You want to root for them.

But the more I read, the more I began to lose my stance on supporting her. Her ridiculously transparent feedback on a public forum turned more into a rant about a company that she decided to work for. A company that led her to decide to live in San Francisco (arguably one of the most expensive places to live in the US). A company that she was just using as a launching pad to another point in her career.

I began to realize this wasn’t really the company’s fault– it was more of her falling victim to the system and the unfortunate realities of working entry level while trying to live in the Bay area. And she was just complaining about it.

Well, Yelp (the parent company of Eat24) was quickly enlightened and she was promptly fired. To salvage some sort of monetary gain from all this, she added links to her PayPal, Venmo and Square accounts to the end of her viral Medium blog.

Ugh.

There was probably some big miscommunication along the way of her going through college and starting her career– she was most likely under the impression that if you work hard enough, you won’t be subject to unfortunate circumstances of the professional world of your livelihood. Or maybe she wasn’t told anything at all.

Regardless, my point here is be careful about the feedback you provide. While I’m a huge supporter of transparency, there’s a time a place for constructive (or scathing) feedback. There’s merit to offering positive feedback in public and constructive criticism behind closed doors. It’s how our culture is programmed.

This girl obviously wanted to garner attention (and she did) but I’m not sure her message ended up resonating with the right people.

Or I could be completely wrong. What do you think?

 

 

To be ironic, I almost made this strip a multi-page slideshow. But then I realized I actually want people to read my comic and not be frustrated about the UX (user experience) of the website.

UX is part of the reason why I switched to the vertical format you see today (as opposed to horizontal) — people gave me feedback that the horizontal strip was difficult to read on their phone. After hearing this, I dug a bit deeper and found that most people visiting this website were coming from a mobile browser, such as a smart phone or tablet. So, I made the switch (and I’ll probably make more UX tweaks as the strip evolves).

Anyway, back to the point of this commentary. I’m sure that you’ve at least stumbled upon content setup in slideshow format somewhere on the web. While doing this, you probably also got very frustrated with how you couldn’t view the content on one page and instead, needed to click on a little arrow to progress down the list of movie stars from your childhood that got really attractive in their 20s. Nevertheless, you decided to start clicking through and aw dammit, an ad popped up and a video started playing.

So you end up leaving the website.

Well, although you found your way there, actually bouncing (leaving the website) rather quickly after arriving can have a negative effect on a website’s search engine ranking. Even though it’s true that more pages on your site builds more website authority which in turn boosts your site pages’ rankings, having a bad UX can have a detrimental affect. So, choose your website optimization techniques wisely!

As marketers, we always talk about how important it is to have goals, but we tend to focus a lot less on how to actually set them accurately. I think we just generally get swept up in the “feel good” attitude of deciding on a threshold we want to reach and usually attempt to ignore that nagging thought of “maybe I really didn’t set a goal based on logic or purpose.”

If you ever feel like a goal is out of place or not grounded in any sense of reason, you’re probably right. Better to question and dig deep as to why it was set and what might need to change in order to make it logical. Nobody wants to explain why they didn’t hit a goal, much less explain why they didn’t know how it was set.