Internship Diary #7 – Putting Faces to Names and Personalities to Faces

I remember, as everybody does now, where I was the day the world changed. It was March 13, three years ago, and my job consisted of traveling around the country with a non-profit. Traveling became, literally overnight, taboo. It was the primary thing, in fact, that you should not do at all anymore. The only thing more off limits, I suppose, would have been sneezing directly in someone’s face, but that wasn’t in my job description anyway. I went home, as the whole world went home, and my job changed, as did everyone’s. 

There was a plastic card table on the screened-in brick porch behind my sister’s house, and she had good WiFi, so that became my office. It took exactly one cardboard Amazon box and two paperback novels to elevate my laptop from the surface of the table to an even height with my face for the Zoom conferences that became my daily occupation. I badly wanted to avoid the up the chin and nostrils Zoom camera view, for the sake of my ego and my audience’s sensibilities. 

This became the new normal quickly, and I believe that for the most part we are better for it. My dad, who for my entire life had gotten up before dawn to make the 45-minute commute to the power plant where he has worked for three decades, was suddenly home in the mornings. He sat at the kitchen table with coffee and his laptop and did his work as he always did. He lost nothing in productivity, nor did anyone else from his office. But I got to say good morning to him when I woke up and made my own coffee and began my own work. 

That new normal extends to today, as the American work landscape has changed dramatically and in all likelihood permanently. I’m afforded the luxury and convenience of accomplishing all my work with Adelsberger Marketing from the comfort of the desk in my dorm, or a table at a coffee shop, or as was the case last week, from a camp chair beside the tent I shared with friends in Chattanooga. 

You will hear no screed from me about the dangers of working from home, the terrors of letting people reclaim the little minutes between work that might otherwise be spent staring at the wall of a cubicle. Enough ink has already been spilled on that subject by people who probably reminded the teacher when homework was due in grade school. 

That said, I do think there is distinct value in knowing the people with whom we create. Not every job, or every company, or every internship involves this aspect. But any working creative will tell you that it is vitally important. While there is a time to sit and think and fuel, there is also a time to exercise the muscles that allow us to actually make something. Ricky Santos and Katie Howerton, who together form the design team for Adelsberger Marketing, agree on the importance of collaboration and having a second voice. They bounce ideas off of one another all the time. That requires some baseline relationship, some idea of who the person on the other side of the screen is that includes them in three-dimensional form, a flesh and blood human. 

For all of these reasons, it was particularly refreshing for me to join Alex Russell and Tamara Waller, video team extraordinaire, on a shoot for the Leaders Credit Union podcast recently. One of the primary benefits of working with creative people is that they tend to be fun. This is true of Alex and Tamara. Over the course of the shoot, from the setup to the filming to the takedown to loading the van in the parking lot, easy conversation flowed between them. They knew things, not only about the work itself but about how the other liked to work, about how the clients liked to work, and about how to put the atmosphere at ease by having fun with the whole thing. I asked them questions about their lives and their hobbies and the music they listened to and gently ribbed them for their taste in artists and songs. They did the same to me. Though I have no wish for a permanent office or a cubicle or a desktop computer, I will say this: it’s good to get out and know the people behind the work, to put a face behind the graphic or the video. The workplace has changed, but we still need each other. I don’t think that will change.

How We Market Ourselves | Content Machine Ep. #44

As a marketing company, we think about marketing for other people all the time. It’s what we do for a living. But it also means we think about marketing for ourselves all the time, but we just don’t always have the time to do it. The phrase, The Cobbler’s kids have no shoes comes to mind, even though everyone on my team has never heard that phrase before. A long time ago, we decided to focus on three pillars to conquer our marketing. After talking about those, if you hang on to this episode, we’ll look at the next steps as we invest more in ourselves. Our three pillars of marketing: invest in the community, position ourselves as experts, and build stark raving fans. Investing in the community is actually a part of our mission. It says, in a culture that values our team and community. We invest in our community because we believe we have a responsibility to give back as someone who has had success here with the people and the businesses from here. We believe a rising tide floats all boats. If we support our community and help to make our community a little bit better, we can also prosper a little more together as a whole.

 

When the community improves, we fulfill our mission, and we open up more opportunities for us to do business with people in the future because more businesses will exist and existing businesses will do better. One of the secondary benefits to investing in the community through service to the community is meeting new people. Working shoulder to shoulder with some folks or supporting their causes through discounted work is a way to build better business connections than handing out business cards in an event. It builds a genuine connection and mutual trust, and this sometimes leads to new business opportunities, which I’m never mad about. We believe strongly in positioning ourselves as expert guides for marketing in our area. We want to be viewed as who you want to talk to when marketing is on your mind. Being positioned as the expert leads to new business and helps create top of mind awareness as people move through the community. The more people view us as experts or the people to call, the more likely someone is to refer to us even if we’re not close friends. How do we do that? We do that primarily through education. We are willing to educate others on marketing through blogs, speaking at events, or participating in things like the Co’s Office Hours.

 

At Office Hours, folks can sign up for a free consultation with us and walk away with free action steps. And a nice benefit of being positioned as an expert, it allows you to charge a higher fee for your expertise and sets you up to do advice-only work or consultations. We want to get to a place where a significant part of our revenue comes from head work, not just the work we can do with our hands. But the biggest thing that we’ve done to help our marketing is we make stark, raving fans. Most of the folks we have worked with, not all of them, of course, but most of them love working with us so much so that they’re willing to talk us up and recommend us to the community. How do we create stark, raving fans? Well, one, we deliver. This is actually one of our core values also. We do what we say we are going to do, and if it is within our power, when we say we are going to do it every time we show up and we get stuff done. Also, when we deliver, we deliver good work. We make work that accomplishes goals for our clients, and they appreciate it.

 

While we deliver and we do good work, we also make a great partner. We are fun to work with, and we push people to do better for their companies. Going above and beyond in customer service is a long-term investment in building a reputation that precedes us. Now moving forward, there are two particular things we’re going to do to pour fuel on the fire of our business. The first one is creating more content. We are investing the time in creating content like this podcast or this video to help build our position as an expert and help expose more people to our work. In this, we are taking a little bit of our own advice that we give to clients. More content equals more opportunities to be discovered. So expect to see more content from Adelsberger marketing this year. The second thing is that we’re investing in culture. We want to be the best place to work in West Tennessee. Why? Well, I believe creativity wins the day. How do you have creativity? By having good talent. And how do you attract and retain good talent? By having a great company culture. Having a culture that values our team is part of our mission statement and will give us an advantage in the future talent war.

 

I believe company culture will be the biggest defining feature of a successful company in the next 50 years. And so, we’re doing our best to be ahead of that trend now. Thanks for listening to the podcast. If you found this episode helpful, text it to a friend. If you want to talk about doing business with us, contact us at adelsbergermarketing.com.

Onboarding For Culture | Content Machine Ep.

We believe company culture is key to any successful company. We also believe that that culture is visible and important from the moment any prospect comes in contact with your company. The entire hiring process can help show an applicant how your company acts and thinks. But when the onboarding process begins, you really get a chance to start setting expectations and instilling who you are as a company. A successful onboarding process shows who the company is in three ways: relationally, culturally, and technically. Successful onboarding is relational. We have a small, tight-knit company, so we work to to exercise this in onboarding, allowing new hires to quickly build a rapport with their supervisors and coworkers will help them transition smoothly. At Adelsberger Marketing, we start each new hire and each new intern with a company lunch. This helps them meet everyone and experience the environment of our interactions. We follow those up with each person, spending about an hour with each staff member one on one. This time allows us to get on a first-name basis with each new person and helps them learn about what each team member does and what they bring to the table.

 

These also expose interns to a few different fields of study and may give them a chance to learn about a new discipline that they had not considered before. Having these one-on-one contacts will help us with cross-communication as we get into the real work. Most of our projects are touched by lots of people on the team, so being able to have good communication with everyone is key. Quarterly, I have check-ins with each team member, one-on-one. But when new staff or interns start, I make sure to check in them several times in the first few weeks to make sure that all has gone well and that they are ready to do the work. Onboarding also covers culture. We want to make sure that our onboarding is not just relational, but it also clearly covers our culture. We have been working to define in words the culture that we have built here at Adelsberger Marketing for years. So we take time in onboarding to communicate who we are as a company. We cover the mission and the vision, but we also take time to explain the how and why behind those statements. We also work through our core values and explain how they work out in our day to day lives.

 

This also allows us to set the expectations for behavior at the company. We also give each person some swag to make them feel part of the team. Finally, we cover the technical bits of working at our company. We cover what software we use and what we use it for. This is what everyone thinks about when they think about onboarding or orientation, but we go as far as to explain what modes of communication are for what needs. When should you send an email? And when should you send a Slack message? We additionally cover our AI policy and our communications expectations. Our goal with all of this is to not only set expectations, but to also help a team member or intern be successful and not leave them in the lurch of not knowing how to work with us. When someone comes to work with you, it’s your responsibility to make them successful. We are always working on updating this process to make it more successful. And then we make changes to our checklists. So a question for you, what’s the biggest difference maker you have seen as a new person at a company? I would love to hear some ideas and maybe it’s something we can add to our process.

 

Thank you for listening to the Content Machine podcast. If you found it helpful, please send it to a friend. We hope to see you on the next episode.

Internship Diary #6 – Learning the Language, Raising My Cultural Capital

There’s a concept in sociology called Cultural Capital. Now I’m no Sociologist, so don’t go quoting me on this, but essentially this idea refers to our ability to understand the slang, the jargon, and the little signifiers that say we belong in a place or group. All these things operate as a form of social currency: they purchase credibility.

As the new guy in any place, your cultural capital is almost inherently going to be low. You’re the new guy. This has nothing to do with the kindness of the people who came before you, or even how welcoming they are. It’s just a fact — you don’t know the landscape yet. There’s not a lot of capital in your cultural bank account. It takes time and effort and knowledge to fit into this new environment.

In this sense, adjusting to a new place — whether you’ve moved places of residence, or you’ve started attending a new church, or you’ve joined a new company — is a lot like learning a new language. For instance, when I began my internship with Adelsberger Marketing, I was bewildered by the jargon used in conversation or on Slack.

“You’re managing the Content Machine.” Ok, what is the Content Machine?

“We have a shoot for Leaders next week.” I’ll bite, who or what is Leaders?

“That’s like Alex and Taylor Swift.” I know what all of those words mean by themselves, but I have no clue how they’re connected.

Overtime, and especially as I was taught my new responsibilities, the team at Adelsberger explained all these terms to me. They began teaching me the language.

Unfortunately for me, I have never been good at language learning. It’s my academic Achilles heel. I took Latin for two years in high school — not my choice, please don’t judge — and all I remember is the word “Oremus,” because I would say it as a joke before my family prayed at dinner. (Oremus means “Let us pray.”) I am in college now and taking my second semester of Spanish. Sadly, my language aptitude has not improved. Despite my love for words and writing, I have simply never been able to grasp the grammar, the syntax, or the intricacies of language that a truly fluent person understands intuitively. In my defense, I would tell you that I love words, not grammar. They’re different. I write for the meaning, not the commas.

But as I’m sure you’ve heard, the best way to learn a language is not a class, or a textbook, or a test. You learn by speaking, the same way a child does. You learn by immersion. For instance, anyone at Adelsberger Marketing will tell you that understanding Alex Russell, whether his quirks, his intricacies, or his relationship to Taylor Swift, is not a simple exercise. There’s certainly no textbook. You have to be immersed in the culture of Alex.

Over the past two months, give or take, I’ve gotten a crash course in the language of Adelsberger Marketing. I’m not fluent yet, but I’m conversational, which is a vast improvement. Immersion, simply diving in, has paid off. Hopefully it’s put a few more dollars worth of capital in my cultural bank account, too.

Our A.I. Policy | Content Machine Ep. #42

We have all heard so much about how AI is going to change our world. And most of that really started to kick up in late 2022. Now, fortunately, I was at a marketing, artificial intelligence conference in summer of 2019 that helped me start framing my thoughts on the issue. In marketing, AI is going to be a game-changer. It already is in some ways, and in some ways that we can’t even fully appreciate. And while we are testing it and using it where we can, I felt it was important to implement an AI policy at the company to make sure that we had some guidelines on how to use it well. As more and more workplaces grapple with the effects of AI, I wanted to share our guidelines to potentially help your company think through it too. The first thing is that we, for one, welcome our robot overlords. We know that AI is going to change things, and we want to be inquisitive and use what we can to improve our work while maintaining safeguards from some of the unclear liabilities of the technology. And we have two main unclear liabilities that I’m concerned about.

One, where is our information going and who will have access to it? We are cautious about what AI tools we are using and what information we are feeding it. We are careful to make sure that we are not exposing secret information or trade information to AI bots. Frankly, we do not know who or what might be reading that data and what it might be used for in the long run. Number two, copyright for images and text is still up in the air. Any image generated by AI is generated from other images. The courts still have to deal with who owns what, and we would not want to put our clients in a bad position by creating a liability for them by using an AI-generated image that could end up in a lawsuit. Until there is more clarity on this, we will continue to be cautious. So with those two things covered, here are our 11 rules that we are using as an agency. One, we may use AI to generate ideas and inspiration. Ai is going to be able to help us look for new angles and ideas that we might not have easily thought of.

This is one of its most promising uses as a tool. Recently, I used AI to help find different DIY ideas for a home services industry client. I use those concepts then to write ads for our customers. Number two, we may use AI to generate text. We are willing to use AI to help write portions of content, but as you’ll see later, this is not the last step for anything. This is a starting block. Number three, we may use AI to edit, rewrite, reframe, or otherwise modify text we write. Ai can help us with the tone and examination of a topic that we may need help with. Number four, we may use AI to generate editable images. We are willing to use AI to help us edit our images and improve them. A staff member used AI to remove power lines from a photo recently. Number five, we will fact check any AI text because we know that AI is not perfect and any resources it helps with need to be fact checked. Number six, all AI generated content will be edited and refined by a writer. Nothing generated from AI is completed until it has been edited and refined by a human.

Number seven, the person who uses AI to generate text is responsible for its accuracy and fact-checking. This one is pretty self-explanatory, and it goes back to our core value of responsibility. Number eight, we will not submit or publish AI-generated content straight from the source. This rule spells out some of the previous rules. Number nine, AI does not replace the role of a subject matter expert, editor, or creative in the process of creating content. We value human creativity and seek to use AI as a tool for inspiration. Number 10, we will not use AI tools to generate anything based on the work of artists or creatives that they created that they have not been adequately compensated for. This one is tricky and it limits our use of many tools, but this one is going to be really key to the court’s determination of things moving forward. And 11, we will not use AI to generate deep fakes for content. I think deep fakes are going to be a social problem, and with a lot of our work is in video. It could be tempting to employ these, but we are going to avoid these for good or ill for our business.

These rules are not perfect and they will continue to change, edit as we go, but it gives us a start. I also want to give a shout out to Banker Creative that shared their list in the Agency Builders group that was an inspiration for much of this list. If you have any insight on rules that are governing your business with artificial intelligence, please send us a DM or shoot me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast. And if you found it helpful, please send it to a friend. And unless the robots take over before next time, we’ll see you on the next episode.

Internship Diary #5: Growing As a Creative by Saying Yes to Everything

“Never, ever turn down a writing opportunity. Say yes to everything.” My journalism professor told me that last year as I sat in his office debating whether to accept an offer for freelance work. The job was simple, just writing a few press releases for a mayoral candidate. Still, I was busy and taking the title of “Writer” from theoretical to the professional world was intimidating. I recognize the contradiction in that: the whole reason you study something in college is to do it professionally. New horizons are scary, though.

Interning with Adelsberger Marketing represented another new horizon. Yes, I’ve written a lot, but there’s a marked difference between writing for an assignment and writing something that goes up on a company website. I’d never written a blog post before, or helped with scripting a promotional video, or done marketing writing in any capacity. But, “say yes to everything.”

As a part of this role, I’ve said yes to every form of writing I listed above. I did not understand what I was doing, and there are parts I still don’t understand, and I’m sure next week there will be more, new parts I also don’t understand. That’s the whole reason behind saying yes, though: you get confused, you ask questions, you try again, you get better. Rinse, repeat.

At the beginning of my internship, I was told that one of my responsibilities would be helping to write blog content for certain clients. Brittany Crockett, writer and content creator for Adelsberger Marketing, would be the lead on these projects. She reached out to me quickly and kindly to offer resources, examples of work, and easy projects just to get my feet wet. I ran into problems almost immediately, though — the prompts confused me, as I didn’t have a lens for understanding what the client wanted simply because of my own inexperience. Frustrated and a little embarrassed by my own incompetence, I reached out to Brittany. She graciously agreed to meet with me via Zoom to answer my many questions.

Over the course of that call, Brittany patiently answered questions, including not only the ones I asked but the ones I didn’t even know I needed to ask.

You see, I don’t think saying yes to everything is as simple as it sounds. The prescription is not as simple as “become a workaholic in order to get better.” It is, however, about stepping out a little further into roles you’ve never filled before. And asking a million (probably annoying) questions when it turns out you don’t know what you’re doing.

Asking questions, getting answers, and doing a new thing. And then finding another new thing to do next.

So, I’ll make one small amendment to the adage my professor gave me: Say yes to everything, until you understand how to do everything you need to do, plus maybe a few other things for good measure.