Blog @ Percolate

I began working at Percolate in October after having spent the beginning of my career working for a Fortune 500 company in Columbia, SC. While there, I learned sales, interfaced daily with clients and was exposed to a variety of procedural training. I quickly realized that the job, culture and city weren’t for me.

I’d lived and worked temporarily in New York a couple of different times and wanted to move back permanently. I’d always admired technology companies and been drawn to social media so I started applying to startups that looked interesting and would give me the opportunity to grow personally and professionally.

My search led me to Percolate where we’re building multiple products for marketers to create efficiencies in content marketing. Historically, social content creation has been a very manual process from ideation to managing content calendars to publishing across multiple social channels. Percolate’s technology creates a system around the content creation cycle to strip away inefficiencies by streamlining that process and rooting it into software.

Most recently we’ve partnered with Getty Images and Aviary, aiding in ‘Art & Copy,’ to visually inspire clients, mitigate risks associated with copyright law and allow for creative image editing.

My prior experience helped me implement a process-driven approach to my work. From prospecting new clients to sales outreach to client tracking, I’m constantly thinking about how to reach my goals efficiently and effectively, and that always involves products. I use products to systematize my sales process and drive efficiencies.

One product that has helped me manage tasks better is Asana. It helps me self-impose deadlines and provides structure to my weeks.

There are many other tools in my toolbox like Sparrow, Evernote and others that I’ll share in the coming months which are all meant to create a seamless workflow and reduce frictions. If you have any products you think I’d be interested in to help drive more efficiencies, please get in touch at Michael.Harris@Percolate.com.

Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about media, advertising, content marketing and technology from @Percolate.

It’s All About Content
Yesterday, Facebook announced Home instead of a dedicated phone like many anticipated. The Verge reports that everything is full-screen, incredibly visual and will be available to select Android devices on April 12.

Twitter Enters Wall Street Through Bloomberg’s Side Door
The New York Times’ DealBook looks at Twitter’s debut on Bloomberg terminals today. This comes on the heels of the Security Exchange Commission outlining rules for disseminating corporate information via social media services like Twitter.

Who’s Putting Ads on Instagram? 
It isn’t Facebook, but instead the celebrities and brands that have the largest audiences on the platform.

Brands Favor Social Shares Over Likes
Executives from Ford, JetBlue and Boylan Soda weigh in on the value of likes, comments and shares for Chris Heine’s ADWEEK story.

Percolate + Getty Images + Aviary = Awesome
On Monday, we announced our partnerships with Getty Images and Aviary to help brands create more visual content quickly, and TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha covered the news. We also announced our LinkedIn partnership via our blog on Thursday. Let us know what you think.

LinkedIn has been on quite a tear for the last few months. Beyond the significant product and interface changes, they’ve made a full-on commitment to content. It’s seen in their influencer program, which has been amazing to follow and read, as well as their commitment to groups and company pages, the latter of which saw its first company (HP) break 1 million followers in late-February. This is clearly exciting for us, as we believe content is the lifeblood of social and LinkedIn is the leading platform for professionals. But beyond that it’s fascinating to watch a platform with 200 million global members ship new product at the speed and quality they have.

All of that is a somewhat long and glowing preamble to announce that we’re excited to be the newest member of the LinkedIn Social Media Management program. Our newfound status means that clients will be able to publish, target and track posts on their LinkedIn company pages right inside Percolate. This has been the single most-requested feature from our B2B clients over the last six months and now they’ll be able to publish, manage and analyze across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr using the Percolate platform.

To show off the functionality we’ll use Tidy B2B, a fictitious cleaning company catering to small and large enterprises. To set the stage, Tidy B2B is on the (imaginary) cutting edge of eco/cleaning solutions and using Percolate to raise status around their green, design and innovation practices. Based on what the system knows about them, Percolate bubbles up a story about the London Underground’s carbon-reducing campaign that seems relevant to the brands interests, messaging and UK-heavy audience. The Tidy B2B community manager is inspired to create a post around the story and decides to push it out to their LinkedIn company page.

Since Percolate has already scraped the article’s keywords, the system is able to use those to recommend images that the brand owns or has the right to license through our partnership with Getty Images. Tidy B2B selects one, crops it and adds a bit of context for their LinkedIn audience about why this is relevant to the Tidy B2B mission.

As you can see below, Tidy B2B’s has now published an original piece of content on their LinkedIn company page all within Percolate. Percolate handled the entire workflow from inspiration to creation, editing, stakeholder approvals and publishing.

If you have any questions about our LinkedIn integration or would like to see a demo, please get in touch.

Every day 300 million photos are shared on Facebook, another 40 million on Instagram, and, while Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest don’t report daily photos shares, we believe it’s safe to say nearly 500 million photos are shared daily across just these five social platforms. Another way to look at our photo production is of the 3.8 trillion photos that have been taken in history, 10% were shot in the past 12 months. And this is just the beginning, as the world continues its march from 2 billion connected internet users to 6 billion in the coming years we’re only going to see the numbers of photos shared online continue to explode.

In the past twelve months, we have significantly grown our client base from nine to 43 of the world’s top brands. Over that time, each client has approached us with a similar problem: How to create timely, relevant, visual content. The visual piece has become especially important over the last year as platforms have shifted to focus more on images. Facebook Timeline, Twitter Media Cards, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram all point to a future where engagement revolves around people and companies creating and sharing images in real-time.

Before today, brands didn’t have an easy way to create real-time images that addressed the quality and legal guidelines Fortune 500 companies require for all of their visual content. Today, we’re changing that by introducing two new product features for the Percolate platform that help clients create engaging content in a legal manner and at the speed and scale social platforms now require.

1) Percolate Media Library: Intelligently surfacing millions of Getty Images

We’re partnering with Getty Images to solve one of the biggest challenges for our clients: The lack of access to images that they can tailor to the specific needs of their brand and share across social channels.

To solve for this challenge, we intelligently surface images based on topics, colors, events and a brand’s interest graph, inspiring community managers to create highly-relevant, real-time content for their social channels.

In addition to our clients having access to their own media libraries through the Percolate Media Library, they now have access to millions of royalty-free Getty Images in the Percolate publishing workflow, thus inspiring visual creativity and removing any copyright concerns.

To illustrate the functionality we’ll use Tidy Soaps, a fictitious soap company on the (imaginary) cutting edge of cleaning products. Below is Tidy Soaps’ new Visual Homepage and Media Library. It’s ever-changing images constantly inspires their community manager’s visual content creation.

2) Percolate Image Editor: Creative editing tools built in partnership with Aviary specifically for brands’ social needs

Through our partnership with Aviary, we’ve built out a unique set of social brand editing tools. With this new tool, brands are able to filter, crop, add custom text, and, in a first for Aviary (and we believe the web) add custom brand logos/assets all within the Percolate platform. From our research, these four attributes cover nearly all the use cases brands need to make the biggest impact with their images in social.

Here’s an example of Tidy Soaps pulling a image from their Image Library into the Percolate Image Editor where they’ll add two soap bottles, apply a filter and add the text “#SolarDay”. From there the system makes it easy to preview the newly-created image across their social channels before publishing.

Both partnerships push the Percolate platform forward and change the speed in which brands can create content in social. We’re looking forward to seeing and sharing the creative examples our clients produce. If you have any questions about our new partnerships or would like to see a demo, please get in touch.

I have always been fascinated by why some startups succeed and others fail. Many companies have similar ideas about how they want to solve a specific problem, but usually, only one, maybe two come out on top. Do they execute better or faster than everyone else? Do they have smarter people working for them? Or, did they do something unique with the culture early to set the standard?

In my opinion, the best thing any startup can do is establish a culture early that inspires everyone in the company to believe in one mission and pushes employees to succeed.

I co-founded a technology company in NYC and helped guide the growth of that culture. Anyone that has been a founder of a company can attest to certain things being lost in the commotion of daily work or areas where they felt they might have neglected as the company grows. One of the most important indicators of a successful company is culture: Do people love coming to work every day? At my startup, I was so focused on building a successful business that in hindsight, I could have done a better job contributing to building the culture.

At Percolate, Noah and James’ commitment to culture starts from day one. Our entire team believes in one common goal: Re-define digital marketing and communication. As Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great and Built to Last says, “Commit to a set of core values that you will want to build your enterprise on…for 100 years.”

Building culture takes constant iteration and a willingness to fail and try again. Each Monday morning, both the product and business teams meet to set strategic goals for the week. We all then support each other in reaching those goals, and once Friday comes around, we celebrate our weekly ‘Wins’ with an all-hands meeting. This structure is an important contributor to building teamwork.

That teamwork is extended to new employees when they’re assigned a “Percolator” who acts as their mentor for the first few weeks to get them up and running. It’s present in our recently formed Percolate clubs to align similar interests inside the company like: art and culture; winter sports; bread baking; running; and yoga.  And, it’s present as we build our internal knowledge network, Barista, that both Greg and Noah discussed in previous posts.

Percolate has given me the unique opportunity to experience the growth of culture at a startup from the employee perspective after seeing it as a founder. Does our culture sound like something you’d want to contribute to? We’re hiring.

Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about media, advertising, content marketing and technology from @Percolate.

The Twitter Battle for @LauraEllen’s Chocolate Affection
Digiday chronicles the real-time KitKat and Oreo battle for one fan’s attention. Another great example to be added to the short list of Twitter brand disputes from the likes of AMC and Oreo, Taco Bell and Old Spice, and Orbitz and Priceline.

Seeking to Make Change Through Social Media?
Henry Timms outlines four key learnings that #GivingTuesday used to transform the hashtag into a movement on the heels of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The Wolverine’s Director Tweases Fans
AdWeek highlights director James Mangold’s teaser for the teaser with his Vine post sent out earlier this week. Do you expect we’ll see more Vines to tease trailers?

What are Top Publishers Saying about Native Advertising?
Fast Company reports on the Native Ad Summit, which brought together top publishers like The Atlantic Digital, Vice, Gawker, College Humor to discuss the challenges and opportunities of native advertising.

LinkedIn’s Search Gets Buttoned Up
CNET details the latest from LinkedIn’s new search feature giving users new kinds of professional content to discover.

Last Tuesday I took part in an American Marketing Association webinar sponsored by one of our clients, Aquent. The topic was brands in a social world and I talked about the shifts in scale, pace, and pattern (as inspired by Marshall McLuhan) that we’re seeing these days. (If you’re so inclined, you can watch a video of the whole thing here.) It went for an hour and I wasn’t able to answer all the questions. I got to a bunch on Twitter, but there was also a chat room in the webinar and I thought it would be good to take a minute to answer some of the questions that were asked in there. So …

For Facebook, you can represent yourself as the “Insider”, but can that “Insider” label work in other social media/channels

This specifically referred to one of the ideas I discussed around brands being a little more informal in social than they might be elsewhere because of the personal nature of the medium. Specifically I suggested that brands that are successful in social these days are doing so by bringing brands behind the scenes, either figuratively or literally. I think the answer here is yes, that same tone can work across all the platforms. The key idea here is interpersonal with scale: While social makes it feel like a brand or individual is talking directly to you, they’re actually talking to a potentially massive audience.

What are your thoughts about branding is dead?

Not really sure where this question came from or why someone asked it, but I think branding couldn’t be further from dead. In a world of infinite channels and websites and Twitter handles, brands are more important than ever.

What is your definition of content marketing?

I generally try to stay away from defining things that other people are arguing about because it doesn’t lead to much good. I think for most of the people who are talking about content marketing these days they’re referring to things like SEO and blogging. For me, the most exciting content streams are, obviously, on the social platforms. On top of that I believe all marketing and advertising is, and has always been, content.

What are your thoughts on selling access to your social channels for other brands to leverage your followers/fans?

I haven’t heard of any brands doing this, but I suspect it’s something we’ll see in the future. Brands are the ones amassing the largest followings and they’ll find opportunities to partner with like-minded, non-competitive, companies to help build audience together.

In terms of scale, how do you scale social for B2B audiences vs. B2C?

I’ve always believed marketing for B2B and B2C should be approached the same way. I’m obviously not the first to suggest this, but at the end of the day you’re talking to people and the big difference is that B2B audiences are much more contained and targeted. With that said, I do think B2B has more experience creating things like white papers and other similar documents, and there is an opportunity to take that sort of expertise and transfer it to social. There I’d suggest thinking about how you break those big stock assets into smaller bite-sized flow pieces.

What is the role of marketing research as it pertains to the immediency of the social context?

I think research will have a bigger and bigger role in social moving forward. We’re still in the early days and we’re using the data the platforms are giving back to understand how our content is performing from an engagement perspective, but brands aren’t doing enough to understand what that means from a brand-impact standpoint. Twitter recently announced that it’s working with Nielsen on Brand Effect studies and I’m hoping that’s a start to a long road of platforms doing more to correlate engagement with brand lift. However, I think research teams can start getting involved now with social teams and start working together to think about how to make these sort of correlations on your own.

How do you keep people engaged with the social pace of “snacking”?

I think the answer here, at least in part, is that they keep themselves engaged. The natural behavior here is for people to dip in and out of the stream. With that said, the clear trend in the way social content functions (led by Facebook) is that higher engagement equals higher reach (since more people are going to see something more people in your audience engage with).

With the emergence of mobile, do we need to reconsider how we present content for that platform?

Yes, definitely. The good news here is that the leaders in mobile are the social platforms and they’re naturally situated to help you with that. When you use Instagram or Twitter (or even, increasingly, Facebook) you have no choice but to create content that’s naturally optimized for mobile. Obviously as a marketer you also need to think about your other touchpoints as well and the level of social adaptation should probably depend on the type of company, product, consumer you have.

How can a brand avoid coming across as being self-serving in their social efforts?

Create a balanced mix of content. Instead of all promotional messages, mix in a healthy amount of interesting (but still brand-relevant) content.

Part of the Percolate engineering team attended this year’s PyCon, held in (comparatively) sunny Santa Clara, CA. Attending the conference was an enjoyable, productive experience for us; it gave us a chance to think about the direction of our system and development practices outside of the frenzy of everyday development. Not to mention it was nice to relax in warm spring weather over a few beers.

Many good talks were given, and the hallways were abuzz with enthusiastic creators.

Relaxing after a “long day” of conferencing

“Readability counts.”

Of the many topics that were discussed at the conference, there was one theme that resonated strongly with me: the community’s focus on clarity and simplicity in the language. In particular, Raymond Hettinger gave a number of good talks that promoted using Python language built-ins to simplify the expression of ideas in code.

Let’s take a fairly contrived (but illustrative) example. In Java, if I want to sum the squares of a list of integers, I’ll probably write something like

public Integer sumSquares(List list) {
    Integer sum = 0;
    for (Integer i:list)
        sum = sum + (i * i);
    return sum;
}

The same idea expressed in idiomatic Python would read:

def sum_squares(alist):
    return sum(i ** 2 for i in alist)

I don’t mean to pick on Java here; it’s a language I admire for many reasons. That said, the relative readability of Python is a big win. Less boilerplate for the eye to parse means quicker comprehension. Logical omissions or faults are more easily identified, which decreases bugs and time spent reviewing. A clearer language facilitates more frequent deploys.

The contrast above might not strike you as being significant, but if you consider magnifying that kind of difference to web applications that are thick lattices of complex business logic, the contrast goes from pedantic to essential. I won’t sell old news, though; this subject has been well covered.

Hettinger also mentioned exciting additions to the standard library in Python 3 that will help make commonly-expressed ideas concise. For example, take the way we’d disregard an exception in Python 2.7:

try:
    content = f.read()
except IOError:
    pass

versus a built-in context manager in Python 3.3:

with ignored(IOError):
    content = f.read()

Pretty nice, huh? There’s nothing like being in a big room of people who get excited about this sort of stuff.

@raymondh delivering the goods.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the talks at PyCon was watching core developers negotiate the balance between language simplicity and convenience. Any additional “conveniences,” by necessity, introduce added complexity to the language. But if no conveniences are ever introduced, the result is overly-verbose, stiff code. Python’s leaders do an impressive job of managing trade-offs in this department.

“One– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.”

So, readable code helps us build Percolate quickly and safely. But the speakers at PyCon weren’t just concerned with simple syntax: they also discussed conceptual simplicity. Oft quoted documents included the sometimes-cryptic but profound Zen of Python and PEP8, the canonical source of style.

We’ve found PEP8 in particular to be a huge aid as the size of our engineering team grows. Many other environments I’ve worked in have been wrought with argument and frustration around proper code formatting; Python provides a standard. This encourages a uniform, consistent presentation and allows us to avoid many style-related arguments by appealing to a neutral document. This kind of standardization allows us to use automated tools that ensure new code is easy to read.

“Flat is better than nested.”

One of the most exciting parts of the conference for me was hearing Guido Van Rossum, Python’s Benevolent Dictator for Life, discuss his work on the new asynchronous framework Tulip. This project seeks to combat the hairy problem of asynchronous execution with a mechanism called coroutines. It is Guido’s attempt to unify a few disparate approaches in the Python ecosystem into a standard, consistent way within Python.

Almost every experience I’ve had with callbacks as a solution to an asynchronous problem has resulted in deeply-nested code that seems more difficult than necessary to trace through. The result is often lengthy debugging sessions. Guido’s approach with coroutines is exciting because it is an augmentation of Python’s flat function calls (prefix a “yield from” to the call), so we can read through code in a consistent way, independent of concurrency.

“Simple is better than complex.”

Percolate as a tool has many of the same aims that Python does, namely simplicity and effectiveness. Our trip to PyCon reminded me that there is huge value in studying the tools that we admire as we construct our own.

Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about media, advertising, content marketing and technology from @Percolate.

Brands, Move at the Speed Twitter
Digiday outlines 10 lessons for brands to consider from The Huffington Post. The first: Real-time content creation. And, just how much content does HuffPo create daily? You’ll have to read to find out, but that shouldn’t intimidate brands.

Shepard Fairey Takes Design to Space
Watch the famous street artist and activist Shepard Fairey on PSFK as he talks about the badge he designed for the upcoming ARK1 mission.

What’s Facebook’s Newest Advertising Feature?
Inside Facebook breaks down the recently announced ‘Lookalike Audiences’ feature showing how advertisers can target users similar to those in their Custom Audience databases.

When Line Breaks Meet Tweets: The Best of the Bunch
Twitter recently launched the ability to display line breaks in tweets and GE doesn’t disappoint.

In Order to Build the Future Systems of Content, Forget the Past
Our James Gross challenges AdAge readers to think about the new speed, scale and tools needed for real-time content creation.

Building a thoughtful technology company takes many minds. Last week we brought together the entire Percolate company to brainstorm the next iteration of Percolate’s software.

Our product manager Stacy and lead designer Dom organized the session and set the stage for how we should be thinking about the future of Percolate.

Having grown almost threefold in size since the last company-wide brainstorming, Dom walked everyone through the evolution of Percolate since day 1.

This brought newbies and veterans alike up to speed on how we got to where we are today and how what we’ve learned along the way might inform future plans for Percolate.

Before diving into the actual brainstorming of the new product, we were asked to forget everything we knew about Percolate to date. So as not to bias our ideas for new features and functionality, Dom and Stacy outlined the following criteria for brainstorming 4.0:

1. Forget everything
2. Think in workflows
3. Sketch (Actions, Flows, Interfaces, States)
4. How might we create the most amazing version?
5. Have fun

We then broke into groups, sketched out individual ideas channeling a little Percolate Pictionary, presented those to the group and then assembled the best ones to present to the entire company.

I came out of the 4.0 brainstorming session with a few key take-aways for building an awesome technology platform:

• Create an environment that sifts out the best ideas: During the brainstorming session our time limitations forced us to prioritize what was most important. Our short 10-minute bursts of brainstorming forced us to focus on the most critical features for our given challenge.
• More inputs lead to better outputs: Involving the entire company helped us to crowdsource the best ideas for Percolate 4.0.
• Designing to build a culture and community: Getting Percolators to wear a designer’s hat for a day brought everyone together in a unique way. Each person had a say in the company’s future and had an opportunity to exercise their talents in new and different ways.

If joining us sounds like an awesome idea, get in touch or check out our jobs page.