Category: Career Upgrades

Episode 203:

How many words does a message need to be for it to be useful? Would you believe under 35 words, or under 160 characters? Here are some examples:

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “We cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The world will little note nor long. Remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst declared, “We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, on experiencing Nature should be accessible to all, regardless of social or economic status. “The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode”.

JFK “the goal, before this decade is out, [is] of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

Pierre Trudeau: proposed in 1967 that Canada should decriminalize homosexuality. He said “The view we take is, there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

Hilary Clinton 2008  when she lost out to Barack Obama for the nomination to run for president said “we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time,” but added proudly, “it’s got about 18 million cracks in it,” a tally of her primary votes.

Having heard those, you’ll agree that this is doable.

Someone who believes a concise strategy is what it takes to lead people

What’s more, she believes we must show them this learned skill so they can craft their strategies and develop into leaders themselves.  Our guest is a storyteller, a framework-maker, a brand-builder, who talks about strategy, communication skills, and how to forge your own path. She is the CMO for a security technology firm called Field Effect. Shea Cole is a wife and mom and  a 2024 Recipient Ottawa’s top 40 under forty.

 

Timestamps/Chapters:

00:00:00 Intro

00:04:23 Welcome Shea Cole

00:11:27 Build deck & meeting around vision

00:18:04 Slide 1

00:29:20 PSA

00:30:00 Slides 2 through 6

00:36:25 Adding parts that turn strategy into dollars

00:46:06 Contacting Shea

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Shea’s website

Shea on LinkedIn

Shea’s article on the 6-Slide Deck, on Medium

Shea’s course on “How to Build a Strategy”

Labatts 50 – The Beer of the Canadien Working Class 

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Episode 163

Today we’re talking about what analytics has to do with music (check out this music about analytics by songwriter Kai Feng). We’re looking at a musician’s work style and seeing what analysts can adopt from it. According to today’s guest, these two disciplines have much in common.  

Fred Pike is a father, a grandfather and a string musician who both plays in and is president of the Milwaukee Mandolin orchestra. 

He is also a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager expert, having been a founding member of the web development agency Northwoods which just celebrated twenty five years in business. He has also shared his knowledge through various courses and at CXL which is better known as Conversion XL and sessions he has presented at Superweek. 

He approaches marketing analytics in much the same way as he approaches a musical performance. So let’s listen to how he does that, in my chat with Fred Pike. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Northwoods, the agency which Fred co-founded

Fred on LinkedIn

Fred on X/Twitter

Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra

Great video by Kai Feng singing about data: https://youtu.be/D_upBpY1U2I?si=DxFHdl-PO7CqLGXH&t=147

Simo Ahava

Jeff Sauer

Julius Fedorovicius

Sonke Ahrens

This is the second episode in a series on having a thriving career. There is one specific subfield where this challenge is harder than usual – it’s marketing within paid and organic search. There are always new tools and techniques coming along, and In our guest’s opinion, to be a search marketing professional means upgrading yourself, to master them while the iron is still hot. 

I’ll be talking with someone who has dealt with more than her fair share of change – but who feels she is better as a result. Originally from Peru, Giannina Fumagalli has lived in Montreal Canada for the last 18 years and who has been working in digital marketing that whole time, including both agency and client-side roles. She is currently the Growth Marketer at Vircom, a pioneer in B2B Email Security.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Giannina works at Vircom.com

Parisian vs Quebecois French

RSA = Responsive Search Ad

Episode Reboot. “Not all clicks are created equal”

There’s a lot you need to deal with in a marketing career, such as: 

• What skills you should chase after when in an entry-level vs what’s needed at higher levels
• How to manage both above and below your level
• What continuous learning actually looks like
• Knowing when a job isn’t panning out and you need to cut  your losses
• Balancing whether to join a company based on the brand’s cachet, the title, the salary and what you will get out of the experience
• Advice when interviewing for marketing roles – what she looks food when hiring
• How to cultivate your profile within your organization
• When to stay a generalist, or when to gain a specific skill by joining a special project 

This episode’s guest is eminently qualified to cover these topics. Marissa Homere is the VP of Marketing at Irwin, an investor relations and capital markets software company. She is a demand generation leader and for the last decade, she has built and scaled marketing teams in a wide range of industries. She also teaches in an online marketing program. 

In this episode, Marissa shares her thoughts on the marketing industry as a whole, how young professionals can be best prepared for today’s rapidly changing environment, and what it takes to succeed in a fast-paced marketing role. Most importantly, she talks about how, as a wife and mother, how societal issues have muscled in on her life as a marketer. Like being a working parent, handling old oppressive tendencies in the workplace, struggling to balance career ladder-climbing with family responsibilities. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Marissa works at Irwin

Dave Hale

uOttawa Marketing program

Modern Marketing Certificate

Episode Reboot. Marissa’s 3 questions: Are you growing? Are you learning? Are you fairly compensated?