Dealing with Unforseeable Issues — Benjamin Shapiro & Todd Hines // MarTech Podcast

Quotes

• “My personal shitstorm started before the Coronavirus because I know I was going to be out for a while, my wife is having our second baby and before that happened in February I had to hop out for a couple of weeks because I had an emergency surgery. My gallbladder almost exploded so I asked  you to cancel all podcast recordings, clear the deck as I’m going under the knife.” -- Ben“It’s hard to put it into words, we felt it within our team and then at a grand scale within our industry and then within our society and culture and it’s just this pandemic has put so much pressure on so many different layers of our lives and our work. I feel even through the adversity, grateful but it has been a trying year.” -- Todd “Going into it we had a foundation and we’ve always relied on the basic processes that we have, the tools that we’ve put together to our MarTech stack. So because of the foundation, everyone on the team, we understood our role, we understood expectations and we were able to hit those and really execute so we could absorb the shocks and keep going.” -- Todd “For us the goal this year was to publish content everyday and we were also focused on ramping up our content production because we knew that I was going to be out for at least a month when my son was born. Part of this was fortunate because when I had to be out unexpectedly, we already built out some padding, some buffering. This speaks to everyone that was running the marketing department where you keep your marketing calendar relatively lean.” -- Ben “To me the moral of the story is, when you’re thinking about your content business or your outreach strategy you want to be working on next month’s project and not this month’s project because you never know what’s going to pop up. You can always re-arrange your publishing schedule but you can’t always quickly produce more content.” -- Ben “There is a clear order of process that takes place from the time that you will sit down with a guest and record an interview, that file goes to our editor who passes it once editing is completed to a copywriter who does show notes and various copy to support the episode. After that, there’s someone on the team who gets it for the scheduling in our podcast hosting platform and then on to the webpage creation. These are the examples of the hand-offs that happened and the lines of communication, most of which are automated to signal people on the team when it’s their turn to take over and move the episode in the assembly line analogy.” -- Todd “It’s one of the things that I’m the most proud of, in terms of what we’ve built in content production is, I am not the person, the entire organization is dependent on. Beyond being the host of the podcast, we have built this content production engine together. There’s also the notion that we have everything relatively well-documented.” -- Ben “The content management system is like our mother ship. Not only is this for the content itself but it’s for the guest communication aspects of the content. It’s for the various production status that the episode is under. It’s emails and links to guest’s social profiles. It’s really where all the information is provided about guests and the episode.”  -- Todd “In our content management system, what we’ve done is not only created a place for all our content to live, so we have a central repository, we have statuses for each episode which are always the same in our content production but those statutes are also tied to the responsible party.” -- Ben “My point in walking everyone through this is, dealing with unforeseeable issues is not something you can necessarily plan for, it’s unforeseeable and god knows we have plenty of that shit this year. What helped us be successful is taking off the manual task and trying to stay as organized and documented as we possibly can.” -- Ben “What matters and what I appreciate more now than ever is how the people that you work with and you see on a daily basis are more than just your co-workers, they are also your support system, they’re your friends, they’re the people where you spend some of the most time in your life with and this year, if nothing else, I have absolutely appreciated getting to spend time with people that I truly enjoy their company, and Todd you’re at the top of that list. There’s never a time in my career that I’ve valued the people that I work with more than I have this year.” -- Todd