Insights from Nebo

Last year I served as the president of a campus organization called TechList. Some days I wanted to punch a wall. Some days all I could do was laugh, using humor as a shield against the onslaught of insanity. When advising the incoming TechList president before he ascended the throne, I told him that campus leadership, much like Toy Story 3, is a roller coaster of emotions.

During my time at Georgia Tech, I’ve been involved in as many organizations as humanly possible. This kind of lifestyle can be exhausting, but I've also helped found two organizations, run for vice president of the GT student body and — when I came in first loser — worked within the GT Student Government Association as graphics chair and creative director.

And I haven’t just been involved on campus. I’ve worked and interned at a tutoring agency, an enterprise mobility management company called AirWatch, and now the most excellent of digital marketing agencies — Nebo.

All these experiences taught me a lot about the joys and frustrations of leading. But most importantly, leading has taught me how to follow.

Interns and young professionals: It’s important to know that being a good follower isn’t intuitive. Like with many soft skills, it’s easy to overlook competent following as an asset until you experience its alternative up close.

Here's what I learned from my stints in the C-suite:

Wednesday, November 9th was a hard day — an unexpectedly hard day, thanks to political analysts. I woke up with a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. A feeling similar to the time I found out my dog killed my neighbor’s guinea pig — empty with a sense of grief and no real explanation for the feeling. But it was still Wednesday, a day like any other day, so I made my avocado toast and went to work. As I got on I-20, I found myself filled with anticipation and with one question on my mind:

What would my coworkers say?

When the British government levied another tax on tea entering the new world, American colonists decided they’d had enough. Gathering in Boston Harbor on a cold December night, the protesters boarded an East India Company ship and hurled 342 chests of tea straight into the harbor.

Before there was an America, or even an American Revolution, there was a single protest and a catchy slogan: “No taxation without representation.” An emotion took hold and an idea took flight, spreading through the new world.

But this feeling wasn’t unique to the Boston Tea Party. In fact, most great movements begin the same way — with powerful messaging that we think of as PR and advertising.

I’m a millennial who works from home. Not all that rare or interesting, right?

Except I’m not a fan of it.

Ten months ago, I relocated from Atlanta and had to leave Nebo behind — at least in the physical sense. I was thrilled to find out I could work remotely, and I was even fantasizing about how amazing it would be. I mean, who gets to work for an awesome company, doing cool projects, while hanging out at home every day?

Well, it’s actually becoming more common. But the point is, it seemed ideal. And then I did it for a while.

Flux.

If we had to describe digital marketing in just one word, that would be the winner. Between new platforms, new technologies, new dreams and desires, the digital landscape is in a constant state of change. As our needs and wishes evolve, marketers are always shifting and innovating, blazing new paths just to keep up. It’s what makes working in digital so epic.

That’s why we’ll be keeping up with the digital world with a round-up of the trends and tech that are changing our industry and our society. So without further ado, here’s what’s up in the digital world — for now.

We SEOs know that what we do is best. We reign supreme and all other digital marketing specialties just wish that they were our specialty. They all want, just for a second, to bask in the awesomeness of true organic visibility.

Paid media might protest. They might say that organic results are just part of the whole. Paid ads come first and foremost in the SERPs and organic visibility cannot deliberately target the user at different touch points in their buyer journey, or gently remind the user to return to their site. And to that, we say, sure. You can pay for clicks and impressions. You can pay for lots of things, that doesn’t make it meaningful. We all know that PPC only exists to feed us SEOs granular data.

Content might also chime in. They would say that they spend their days crafting inspiring copy to cut through the din and address the user directly. They think that without them there would be no brand voice, that without them engagement would plummet. But we know that they are only here to flesh out our ideas, to strengthen our keyword themes with every word until we achieve visibility. They are the worker bees and we are the queen. Buzz, content, buzz.

And isn’t social media just adorable? With their hearts and likes and shares… so sweet. But we don’t actually care about social because Google told us that likes and shares don’t factor into the algorithm. Algorithm good. Everything else bad.

So is there any reason for SEO to think twice about social? Actually, yes.