Tune in below as our resident data geek, founder, and Head of Product/Marketing Seth Bridges outlines all of the newest changes to your Rival IQ toolset. These fall features are designed to integrate seamlessly into your product usage for faster and more efficient social media data analysis.

Feature Updates Video Walkthrough

The new feature updates include:

• • Support “AND” and “NOT” as well as “Include” and “Exclude” queries for post tags in social posts, insights, and custom dashboards
  • New custom dashboard widgets for your reporting, including “Focus Company at a Glance”

Watch the quick 7-minute video to see these new features in action as Seth walks through a skincare landscape with Kate Somerville skincare as the focus company.

Advanced Boolean Search in Post Tagging

With the post tagging features, we perform a quick analysis of Kate Somerville Instagram post performance with a specific emphasis on partnered and giveaway style campaigns. Seth uses the new advanced boolean capabilities of the post tagging features including “AND/NOT” and “Include/Exclude” queries for a deeper understanding of content performance.

Custom Dashboard At-a-glance Widgets

Seth also uses this skincare landscape to demonstrate the new custom dashboard at-a-glance widgets which include the advanced post tagging capabilities as well as new additions to the focus company. These widgets can be customized for slices of your data like auto-grouping based on time periods and adding in benchmarked averages in the main metrics for your focus company metric summary panel.

More fall features

Along with these great features explained in the video, we made some small but mighty changes to your abilities within the app. We’ve extended all data limits to now be able to look at year-over-year and two-year comparisons with 100 companies. If you have more than 200 companies you can now look back an entire year.

Plus, you can now add more companies to your account in increments of 1-5 without having to contact your CSM. You can add to your company count in the subscription settings of the app.

Wrapping it up

These latest features are an expansion of our updated Automated Insights and Expanded Competitive Benchmarking feature set from September. If you’d like a refresher on what else is new, catch this video walkthrough that demonstrates how to utilize automated insights and the competitive benchmarking features.

We’re thrilled to roll out these newest features and hear what you think, so if you have feedback please reach out to your designated CSM or DM us on Twitter.

The post Fall 2020 Feature Updates appeared first on Rival IQ.

The conference came just before the coronavirus was in full force within the United States and we’re lucky to have been there at all. A lot of digital marketers are working from home and strategizing for the future in these uncertain times. For some inspiration and to spread the knowledge from one of the last US conferences this spring, I wrote down my favorite bite-sized experiments and tips to try out with your own digital strategy.

1. Make content with context

Mike Kim, an expert marketing consultant, reminded us that context is important in our content. Make sure you’re answering these three questions:

• What pisses you off?
• What breaks your heart?
• What’s the big problem you’re trying to solve?

Your content should address these three questions to remain contextually relevant to your audience.

2. Stick with a tone

Mike Kim also encouraged marketers to use a consistent brand voice for each of your initiatives. Some options are:

• Academic
• Professional
• Emoji speak
• Snarky
• Motormouth

Your tone can change depending on the platform, a brand tweet is certainly different than the LinkedIn article you’re writing, but you should maintain a consistent tone in each vertical. It doesn’t matter what tone you choose, as long as it fits your audience and your brand.

3. Your copy shouldn’t read like a sales call

Write your copy without being salesy by adding value within your message itself instead of thinking about what you’d like to achieve in your message. For example, if you want customers to read an article about the “Top 10,” give them a really good #1 in your email promoting the article. This way, they’re’ still getting some use from your email even if they don’t end up clicking.

Showing value upfront earns mutual respect with your viewers, so they can trust that your brand communications will be useful.

Read all of the principles from expert Ray Edwards.

4. Spice up your Stories

Get consistent views of your Instagram Stories by developing a connection between the brand and the audience. Use video, text in your Stories, and engagement stickers to keep your Story viewers involved and coming back each day.

Get all Instagram expert Sue B. Zimmerman’s tips in her own Stories, or check out our video interview with her all about Instagram Stories here.

Here, Sue B. shows off her brand colors and use of stickers in her Story.

5. Investigate where your copy is falling short

Let your data show you content that isn’t getting its job done. Andy Crestondia, CMO at Orbit Media’s tip on how to start with checking out the page path analytics to your FAQ page within Google Analytics. Wherever those users came from, they didn’t get what they needed.

Crestodina’s end goal is to fix the source page so that your content is solving the problem. Or at the very least add a compelling CTA to your FAQ page.

6. Find out what questions your visitors want answered

Crestodina also elaborated with another great idea about FAQ pages–pop a heatmap on that page and see which questions are most popular. Consider fleshing out the topic in your main page copy or writing a separate post outlining the problem.

Good reminder, Andy!

7. Don’t mess with your ads

When you’re using Facebook ads DON’T edit your campaign when you want to make a change. If it’s not doing well, or you need to edit something, be sure to duplicate, change, and republish your campaign instead of editing the existing one. The poor performance of the initial campaign could tank your second chance for optimization.

Pro tip: If you’re using tools like Adespresso they apply this principle by only getting rid of your ad variations when you edit within their app, not by changing an existing campaign variation.

Andrea Vahl, a Facebook marketing expert, was adamant about this rule for advertising on Facebook and it’s certainly one we’re taking to heart.

8. ABT: Always Be Testing

Facebook marketing strategist Jon Loomer gave away his latest top experiments with Facebook advertising encouraging others to try them out.

• When you’re using micro-locations in your ad targeting to reach a specific event or group, consider adding an “Interested In:” segmentation in your ad audience to enhance your pinpointed approach.
  • For instance, when you’re advertising to Mariners fans during a game, you can ensure your audience is a good fit by micro-targeting the stadium. To make it even MORE specific, add an Interested In: Ken Griffey Jr. to your segmentation to make sure you’re not advertising to visiting fans.
• Test out Messenger ads for lead generation, which can behave like a bot but will allow for more personalization. Not to mention, usage on Facebook messaging apps have skyrocketed amidst the virtual socialization happening as of late.
• The extended value of Instant Experience ads includes more real estate to advertise with. Plus, interactions with your ad allow you to retarget your audience for a dual reward. Loomer maintains that these underutilized ad types could be a great fit for your goals.

9. Give LinkedIn video a shot

LinkedIn video gets 3x more engagement than text-based posts. While the standard LinkedIn video is definitely a great option, Goldie Chan, the Oprah of LinkedIn’s, top advice is to get your beta applications in for LinkedIn Live and take the plunge into live streaming your content.

Keep your videos informative, under 20 minutes, and put some effort into a polished background/camera angle for high quality and useful content. Plus, Goldie explained that with LinkedIn Live being so new, there’s never been a better time to get started with the features to make your brand stand out. Not to mention, you can easily repurpose your LinkedIn videos by embedding them in your blog. Like this one!

Here Golide is going live on LinkedIn with her branded series #DailyGoldie

10. Support your content with more content

Convince & Convert’s President Jay Baer broke down his team’s playbook for content impact. My biggest takeaway from Baer’s talk was the 1×8 rule for content amplification. Your one piece of big content should have eight supporting pieces, whether they’re promo ads, video, blog posts, opinion pieces, etc. Those eight pieces will help lift and amplify the one large one, plus recycle the in-depth piece for content variety.

For example, if you have a quarterly video series episode as your big initiative, you could promote the large content piece with a behind-the-scenes clip, a blog post about the host, a follow-up article with reactions to the episode, a repurposed episode clip to tweet, and so much more. All of these supporting pieces of content not only add value on their own but bolster the authority and hype surrounding the main initiative.

While we stay home and crank out content, ads, and measure everything, give some of these expert tips from Social Media Marketing World 2020 a try and let us know how they turn out on Twitter.

The post Top Takeaways From The Experts at SMMW 2020 appeared first on Rival IQ.

In a few recent conversations with folks outside our organization about Rival IQ, I realize that what I’ve enjoyed most in these discussions is sharing how we run our business and not what our product does for customers. Don’t get me wrong, I love data and measurement, and I love helping a customer be more successful. But, to get to the core of how we run our business, you have to get into the people at Rival IQ and the behaviors they exhibit that make me thankful to work with them every day.

As people who live in Seattle, working in tech, we’re privileged in that we have a broad set of employers to choose from (and in so many other ways). As a founder, I’m humbled whenever anyone makes a decision to work with us. Even more so, I’m grateful to all of our teammates who continue to choose Rival IQ as the place they want to work.

But most of all, the thing I’m grateful for isn’t that the talented humans around me just choose Rival IQ as a place of employment. It’s that they choose to invest in each other and in our culture. They choose to work toward making our workplace better today than it was yesterday, and doing that work requires the trust and vulnerability that I’ve discussed in my past Thanksgiving reflections.

Though I think that, on the whole, we’re doing a good job at living our values—prioritizing family, embracing diversity, and being data-driven— at Rival IQ, we still have many ways in which we can improve. As you might expect, the best source of ideas for improvement come directly from our team, and that feedback is something for which I’m very thankful.

We have two primary channels for employee feedback: weekly one-on-one meetings and Officevibe (anonymous, quantitative and written survey data). Though Officevibe has been very helpful in highlighting broad areas for improvement, I find that my one-on-one conversations with my team to be where the hard work happens.

In the last year, in a one-on-one setting, I’ve had no fewer than 20 conversations where one of our employees put their trust in me and provided direct feedback about an issue affecting their (or a teammate’s) happiness, satisfaction, or outlook. Having this type of candid conversation is emotional work and requires us to take risks and push us beyond our personal comfort zones. For that reason, I’m grateful to spend my days with people who decide that taking that leap is worth any potential risk.

Beyond providing honest, direct feedback, I’m surrounded by many examples of behaviors where I see our team investing in each other and our culture. Two of my favorite examples right now are things that happen almost daily, and each of them brings me joy.

First, our engineering team engages in a peer-feedback and coaching system they call #dev-design. It’s a Slack channel and post-standup discussion where anyone can ask for help or get feedback on something they’re working on. Though I don’t participate directly (for the most part), I love to watch the questions and discussions in this forum because of the genuine curiosity of the participants and the lack of ego on display.

My other favorite daily occurrence is Fruit O’Clock, our daily 4pm gathering in the office. It’s a chance to chat, connect, and enjoy each other’s company along with a healthy snack. The conversation is always lively, and it’s a way for people across the company to connect outside of their work. Plus, I’m thankful for Team Fruit that puts in the work required to produce this event.

In closing, thank you to all of you at Rival IQ who make our workplace an environment that I’m happy to be a part of. Your hard work is truly noticed, and I, along with everyone else, appreciate it very much.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The post Thankful for Our Team: Thanksgiving Reflections 2019 appeared first on Rival IQ.

MozCon 2019, an SEO conference which takes place in Seattle every July, was filled with speakers and attendees from all over the world focusing on the importance of SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) for your organic traffic, brand recognition, and conversion rates. Check out MozCon’s day-by-day breakdowns if you’re ready for a whirlwind of live tweets, or read below some standouts from the conference as they relate to social media.

I was joining in this conversation wearing multiple hats: part of my Digital Marketing role means I’m an SEO always looking to drive up my metrics in Google Analytics, and I’m also an in-house marketer for a social media analytics tool. Since we live and breathe social media metrics at Rival IQ we care a lot about what’s working for our customers, the latest marketing trends, and algorithm updates.

My frame of mind wasn’t solely in the “SEO first and forever” camp at last week’s MozCon like the cheering data scientists around me. But luckily, the philosophy behind SEO is widely applicable to any type of digital marketing, social media in particular.

Social media wins can help your SEO

Before we dive into the glories of SEO as a subset of digital marketing, it’s important to shout out the power of social media as it relates to SEO. SEOs can forget that social sharing gets more eyes, links, and engagement to your content and website, which can in turn up your SEO value (including backlinks and traffic) significantly.

Social media marketing is sometimes treated as the “little brother” in digital marketing, often an afterthought or assigned to the rotating class of interns, so it doesn’t always get the technical treatment SEO is known for. Ideally, following these latest SEO “rules” for your content on social media will bring in the organic traffic gains across the board.

Expertise matters to the algorithms

Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) update last August left marketers reeling from ranking drops, but the intention behind the mega search mogul’s move was to protect searchers from bad information that happens to have good SEO. Google’s algorithm doesn’t like spammy sites with fake backlinks because they make the trust in the content appear higher regardless of quality. Marketing consultant Marie Haynes had an excellent and actionable piece of advice on the subject:

Adding an author bio to an article tells the reader (and Google) the article can be trusted because it was written by an expert. If your article doesn’t contain expert-level advice, it probably doesn’t deserve to rank #1.

This same strategy can be applied to social media. For example, brands frequently struggle with the “voice” of their company on LinkedIn. Some companies use individuals as brand advocates, like a CEO, while others use the company page as the source of authority on their brand. Most LinkedIn experts agree that LinkedIn is a people-to-people platform and content there generally performs better from an individual than from a company page. That’s not to say that some brand pages aren’t killin’ it on LinkedIn (Bumble and Social Chain to name two), but it’s one place where authorship stands out.

With 29,781 followers on LinkedIn, Social Chain’s 15k+ video views are impressive for a brand page.

Your audience is tired of keyword-driven content

Ross Simmonds of Foundation Marketing asked marketers to do more with content than boring listicles one-upping the old SERP. At MozCon, he provided lots of great ideas for fresher content in his full slide presentation, and a few really jumped out at me.

1. Using Quora Ads Manager as a topic generation tool.

Now as marketers, we know that Q&A forums like Quora can be a great place to get ideas, or swipe some interesting anecdotes (we’re looking at you, Buzzfeed). But Ross takes this a step further by illustrating that keywords in Quora’s ad platform include top questions with average weekly view data. That’s some valuable data to use in your content strategy when you’re choosing topics and headlines.

2. Another data-backed example Ross outlined is that links are more prevalent on Reddit than on any other social platform. Knowing this channel-specific use case should be part of each of your social strategy as well as SEO. Find what works everywhere you’re posting advertising and use it to determine what you’re sharing on that platform.

Throughout his presentation, Ross underlined the need for channel-user fit, which means sussing out the behavior of your audience on a particular platform, understanding what they want, and giving it to them.

Ross’ protip for Reddit is to search subreddits for a competitor’s site name or URL so that you can see what’s getting buzz in the forum. Off Reddit, you can check your Rival IQ landscape for sites or URLs to see what your competition is sharing with our Posted URLs feature.

Reactive Content is Valuable on Social Media

Aira’s Head of PR and Content Shannon McGurik perfectly summarized why her title is so important for SEO.  Varied content is important to successful SEO strategy that can survive algorithm updates and trending topics alike. McGruick separates journalism-style content into three buckets.

Tailoring your content and PR pitches towards these three types of writing will cover all your bases when it comes to SEO.

1. Planned Content: Content on your calendar, including product updates, strategized articles based on keyword research, rewrites of older content, etc.

• Example: You write a blog post about the top 10 things to vlog on your road trip.
• Return: When a user searches “Top 10 things to vlog on your road trip” your piece of content outranks the previous SERP “Top 9 things to vlog on your road trip.”

2. Reactive Content: Your content is a response to an event in real time.

• Example: Google changes its algorithm and you tweet about it as soon as you find out.
• Return: Your tweet goes viral.

3. Planned Reactive Content: An update to an existing piece of content or data set or planning content around a particular event.

• Example: Every fall your website releases a campaign about the outlook of apple crops in Eastern Washington and how it might affect Thanksgiving pie recipes.
• Return: When citing the research on apples this year, your article is linked to as a source. Your brand following can expect this content to get refreshed.

Reactive content in particular stood out to me because it emulates all of the best parts of PR. In the way that PR is fresh and relevant to the conversation, reactive content is quick to respond to trends in search, new data, news, and more, with thoughtful insight. Different from news, reactive content gives way to opinion or response by the author. All three variations are great strategies to employ in your content, not only for engaged readers but to create content that journalists and other bloggers want to link back to.

McGurik later went on to explain that while planned content is necessary, oftentimes being “first” in a trending topic is more likely to rank than what you think people want. Sound familiar? Reactive content can stretch beyond SEO into social media. We all know the faster the tweet, the more relevance it has. Roughly 1/3rd of your on-site content should emulate that PR timeliness and be the first to document findings and boost authoritativeness.

Putting on your SEO diving helmet

Me and my colleague Blair Feehan diving deep into the SERP with Moz’s mascot Roger

Overall, MozCon was much more than just an SEO conference. The principles of quality, ingenuity, and resourcefulness that good SEO is based on are overarching themes for strong marketing in general. SEO has always been my favorite part of digital marketing (shh! Don’t tell email), so it’s exciting to shift my frame of mind and apply the best tips from MozCon to social media marketing. After all, whether you’re marketing on Facebook or Google, you’re still playing by their rules.

Content, whether it’s a blog post, a tweet, or SERP, wins out online when it’s the very best. This is why search and social algorithms alike generate new rules every day to challenge marketers to be better. Hopefully you’re inspired to give it a shot with these top takeaways from MozCon 2019.

A few other notable mentions from MozCon 2019

They aren’t social media specific but these presentations were  standouts at the 2019 conference. Take a look at the slide decks if you’re ready for more expert insights.

• Emily Triplett Lentz‘s presentation on how to audit your content for inclusivity and accessibility was a worthwhile practice for anyone putting content online.
• Paul Shapiro‘s talk on redefining technical SEO includes a ton of great hacks for streamlining your site and making algorithms happier. He also provides the Python Scripts he used in practice so you can clean up your own site’s technical SEO.
• Ruth Burr Reedy‘s take on quality scores for humans and machines in lieu of Google’s latest changes and the argument SEOs find themselves having repeatedly gave us a definitive end of the argument.
• The keynote presentation from Moz founder and former CEO Rand Fishkin on investing in the future of search and the changes we’ve seen so far this year. (Keep an eye out for the nod to Rival IQ’s 2019 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report!)

The post What Social Media Marketers Can Learn From MozCon 2019 appeared first on Rival IQ.

Starting April 1, we’re thrilled to add MySpace and Friendster to the Rival IQ family of social channels and clinch the spot as the most complete social media analytics tool.

Gone are the days of having to log into these networks separately to see whether you’ve added any new fans besides Tom on MySpace, or whether your friends have liked your latest post in Friendster.

Read on to find out more about how you can start integrating these networks into your social analytics right away.

MySpace analytics

Whose space? Your space, of course! We know the savvy social marketer is still plugging away on MySpace posting blog entries and blurbs, so we worked hard to integrate your most-requested MySpace features in Rival IQ. Here are just a few of the things you can now track within our app:

• Site hits: Those website visits aren’t going to count themselves (well, unless you have a site visit counter). We make it easier than ever to see how many tens of people are visiting your MySpace page each month so you don’t miss anyone.
• Top 8 tracking: Receive a custom alert right to your inbox every time a friend moves you in or out of their top 8 to maximize your engagement.
• MySpace mood support: Obsessed with setting your mood on MySpace as a warning or invitation to your friends and fans? Our interactive moods custom dashboard will show you the impact of posting five blurbs a day about how excited you are about the new Backstreet Boys album on your friends and followers. Tailor your content to their moods (or don’t–Backstreet boys rule).

Sadly, there’s one MySpace analytics feature we simply aren’t able to offer: any MySpace Music stats before 2015. We were all wired up, but weren’t able to map our servers to MySpace’s to pull in stats on your music because of some mayhem on the MySpace side.

Friendster analytics

Sure, Friendster users are all about the close personal relationships, but that shouldn’t stop a marketer from trying to get a closer look at all that data, right?

• Friend, member, and fan counters: On your way to becoming Karen Kong, the Malaysian pop star with the highest number of Friendster supporters? We’ve got you covered with everything you need to skyrocket to popularity on the world’s biggest (er, oldest) social networking site.
• Site loading speed: We know that slow site performance has led to your Friendster friends jumping ship for faster social media networks like MySpace, so we’ll help you keep an eye on your loading time.
• Music reviews: Friendster’s name is a mashup of “friend” and “Napster,” so we knew we needed to support tunes here too. Track your music reviews, and even discover new bands to review. Hot tip: we hear Destiny’s Child’s lead singer is going to be huge.

Wrapping it up

We really want to thank all our customers for their patience–we know it was a tough 17-year wait, but we hope it was worth it.

Do you have a social network you’d like us to include in Rival IQ? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter with your suggestions.

Oh, and happy April Fools’ Day, everyone!

The post Introducing Friendster and MySpace Analytics in Rival IQ appeared first on Rival IQ.

We’ve all sat in endless interview loops where it’s hard to keep your answers straight from one interviewer to the next. And don’t forget the dreaded (and downright discriminatory) blank whiteboard. Scratch that and reverse it for the final (and hopefully fun!) hurdle before you can call yourself a full-fledged Rivaler.

We’re at least this goofy in person.

First things first: What’s an Engage day?

“I liked that they wanted to experience someone as a coworker and not just an interviewee.” –Tiffany Lin, Rival IQ Product Manager

After a few 1:1 or 2:1 interviews, we invite our top candidate for an open role to spend a workday at our office collaborating on a specific project. We spend time together with the candidate before the big day getting them onto Slack and email, and invite them to hop into our communication streams by asking questions and/or looking around to get a feel for us. Knowing that a candidate’s time is valuable, we also put them on our payroll–a full day of work plus prep is a significant time investment, and we think it’s important to compensate, whether the day results in a hire or not.

We partner with the candidate to identify a project that they can work on during their Engage day. The candidate has time to prep, but the day is focused less on a polished presentation and more on providing plenty of chances to work together with our team. Projects have included email marketing projects and blog posts (like this one), and coding problems like fixing social posts bugs and changing how we pull keywords. We do our best to make sure the project speaks to the candidate’s strengths and can be achieved in a day–the Engage process is all about candidate engagement, evaluation, and collaboration, not just testing.

The candidate spends the day working on their project and collaborating. There’s also more 1:1 time with other members of the team, and a team lunch that’s strictly social.

Once the day is done, we ship the project together and traditionally include a fabulous GIF, like this one.

Both sides head home to do some thinking, and hopefully an offer is extended and accepted.

Why we interview this way

“It was really fun to be able to “test the waters” and see the team at work without the pressure of a first day. Of course there were nerves, but by the end of the day it didn’t feel like a job interview anymore, just a project we were working on together.” –Christina Everett, Rival IQ’s Digital Marketing Manager (and newest hire).

Seth Pollack, our head of Engineering and Culture, knows that he can get a good sense of skills from a resume or phone screen, but all the interview loops in the world won’t tell you whether someone can actually get things done or how they’ll fit in with the team. “The Engage day (formerly known as an Audition) arose from the need to get a better sense of a candidate before their first day on the job,” Seth says.

This whiteboard session was completely staged for the photo op!

Originally, the interview process culminated in a sizable trial period–we would contract candidates for a week (or more!) before making an offer. Contract-to-hire is a common startup hiring practice, but can be tough on a candidate who’s after stability or benefits. Without the job security, contracting at a company for 30, 60, or 90 days can also discourage a candidate from jumping in with both feet, which is exactly the kind of employee we want here at Rival IQ.

All this time together really helped us assess fit on both sides, but wasn’t feasible as the company scaled, so we set out to shrink down this trial period into something that’s manageable for both the candidate and for us. We’ve reduced the time a candidate spends in our office to one jam-packed day, and find that the Engage process leads to stellar fit and retention.

Of course, we also want candidates to get as much as they can out of the day by seeing our team in action. From our codebase to how we interact at the food trucks at lunch, they can decide if we’re a set of folks with whom they want to spend 40 hours a week. The decision to jump to a new company is a big one, and as data-driven people, we always think more information is better .

About half our company has been formally hired this way, and of course, that number grows every time we add another team member. We also want to pour one out for candidates who aren’t the right fit at the end of an Engage day–always better for both sides to figure that out early instead of a few months in.

Wrapping it up

If you read this blog or have talked to any of us, you know that one of our central values as a company is transparency. From financials to sprint planning, we want every Rivaler to know exactly where we are and where we’re headed. We apply this same spirit to our hiring process, so a candidate has full knowledge of what we’re up to as they make the big decision about whether or not to come work with us. Asking a candidate to spend a full day with us may sound like a tall order, but that mutual investment makes all the difference in creating a fun, warm, collaborative working environment.

The post Let’s Get Engaged: Our Alternative to a Full-Day Interview appeared first on Rival IQ.

Last year, I wrote about how trust unlocks deep collaboration and flexibility. Previously, I’ve written about our sprint retrospective and how it creates a regular opportunity for openly sharing feelings of gratitude.

Looking back at these past reflections, trust is the common element that enables the things for which I’m most thankful: the collaboration, the flexibility, and the open sharing of feedback and gratitude.

But how is the trust created in our team? My answer won’t be surprising to you because our mutual trust is built in the same way that all human trust is.

By being vulnerable. By being transparent. By owning our mistakes.

In opening ourselves up in these ways, we remind ourselves that we’re works in progress, and we demonstrate to our colleagues that personal growth is a priority.

This year, as I reflect on the 12 months since last Thanksgiving, I can think of numerous examples of my teammates exhibiting vulnerability. In each case, I can see how that vulnerability created personal growth and a positive outcome for our company.

And, these acts of openness that come to mind aren’t grand gestures. Rather, they’re simple expressions of a willingness to invest in self improvement.

“I want to get better at…can you give me feedback on…?”

“I don’t feel like that went well. Can you help me think through it?”

“I’m not sure what to do in this situation. Can you help me think through what to do?”

“I’m sorry I’m not getting this as quickly as I’d like. Can you spend more time teaching me?”

As a leader, there’s no set of questions I love hearing more than those. They let me know that I’ve done a good job of creating trust in my relationships with the people around me. So much of what I love about Rival IQ centers around the honest collaboration and flexible, fluid way in which we work.

For this positive environment to continue, it requires ongoing investments in our mutual trust. Part of my role as a founder and a leader is helping to create an environment in which everyone feels comfortable being open.

There are many facets of that trust-building, such as equity and inclusion, whose scope extends beyond this post. (Please note: I’m not declaring that we have succeeded in creating an environment where everyone feels comfortable being open. As the white, male founder, that wouldn’t be a valid declaration from coming from me.)

One way in which I’m consistently working to create trust is by being open and vulnerable myself. As someone who spent too many years in graduate school, I’m aware of how much I don’t know. Fortunately, I’m also most interested in putting myself in situations where the potential to learn is high. These two things, when put together, make it both easy and common for me to say: “I don’t know. Let’s figure it out together.”

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful to be in an environment where we, as colleagues, can be open and vulnerable with one another. I see the positive collaborations and personal growth that results for me and others, and it’s one of the reasons I love coming to work every single day.

Happy Thanksgiving to each and every one of you.

The post Vulnerability Creates Opportunities for Growth: Thanksgiving Reflections 2018 appeared first on Rival IQ.

Blair, why don’t you start with “Who are you?”

My name is Blair Feehan, and I’m the content marketing manager here at Rival IQ. And I’m also a big theatre person on the side—that’s my alter-ego.

We’ll come back to your alter-ego in a moment. What does it mean, you’re the content marketing manager?

Our team is in charge of all the words that go out of Rival IQ that don’t have to do with the product. I help write our blogs, e-mails, reports, and our social media. I try to make sure that we have a consistent voice throughout our content, and that things feel informative and analytical to help our customers become even more data-driven than they already are.

Love it. Other than the “words,” what else do you do?

I think some people might say that one of my important jobs here is I’m the fruit lady (editor’s note: Seth P. recently promoted me to CFO–that’s Chief Fruit Officer!). Every Tuesday I toddle down to Pike Place Market to grab fruit for the office, which is one of my very favorite parts of my job. It’s so fun to be at the market to see and taste what’s fresh.

Let’s go back to what you mentioned earlier: your alter-ego in the theatre world. Can you talk about what it is that you do when you’re not at Rival IQ?

I’ve been a theatre person for ages. I’ve acted, designed lights, been a sound designer, stage managed, and done just about everything in between. What I settled on really loving was theatre administration. It’s not very sexy, but it’s totally fun to help the plays happen really, really, really far behind the scenes. I’ve worked in marketing and fundraising at Seattle Repertory Theatre and On the Boards, and I’ve been on the board of Annex Theatre, a small fringe theatre up on Capitol Hill, for many years. A couple of years ago, I helped start 18th & Union, a small fringe theatre up in the Central District. You can find me volunteering my time at a couple of those places when I’m not here at Rival IQ.

Helping out around 18th & Union

There’s something else you also do when you’re not at Rival IQ, right? Is it true you’re a little bit of a book fiend?

Guilty! I love to read all different kinds of books: nonfiction and fiction, novels, sci-fi, astronomy, and everything in between. Last year, I started a project that I’ll definitely continue where I categorized my books and visualized the data within, like author gender, page numbers, genre, and more. I had the best time figuring out my ratio of fiction to nonfiction, and Kindle to audio to paper books: it was a good indication that I really wanted to work at Rival IQ, which is such a data-driven place! I love getting lost in stories, but I also had a total blast figuring out the stats of what I read last year.

What was an interesting stat from last year’s book data?

95% of the books I read last year were Kindle books! As the granddaughter of a librarian, I had a huge bias against reading on a Kindle for a long time. You can’t smell them, you don’t know how long they are, you don’t know where you are in your chapter. But a couple of years ago, I made the switch over to Kindle, and I went from reading a few dozen books a year to more than 100. Being able to check books out from the library without ever having to go to the library made such a big difference, and the joy of getting to hold this really light device in your hands really changed reading for me. So, figuring out last year how few “real” books versus Kindle books I read was a total shock to me.

Have you thrown out the real books and fully switched to Kindle?

There are several books on my nightstand, but I never reach for them. I feel like I’m betraying my grandmother. But using the magnification and backlight on my Kindle to read in the dark with no glasses wins every time.

How you use data in your day-to-day?

One of the answers definitely has to do with work. I get to use this amazing product called Rival IQ to measure our social impact. It’s so handy (#sponcon). And because I run our social media (follow us!) it’s really fun to get to take a look at that to see how we’re doing, what’s working well, and what isn’t. I lost a bunch of content recently on a website I run outside of work, and in trying to restore it I learned recently that Rival IQ backs up a lot of your website history. I had no idea that our product did that!

But the overwhelming “How does Blair use data outside of work?” answer is the book spreadsheet. And boy, have I learned a lot about integrating data with Google Data Studio and data visualizations. I think the 2018 book spreadsheet is going to blow the 2017 book spreadsheet out of the water.

You mentioned using Rival IQ — what is your favorite Rival IQ feature?

As part of my Rival IQ interview, I was tasked with writing a blog post about holiday recipes. The piece was all about how food magazines like Bon Appetit talk about cake versus pie, turkey versus ham, etc. during the food-heavy holidays. Without any prior knowledge of the product, I was able to figure out all of that information just using our Social Posts search feature. I could search for any term, like “apple pie,” to figure out which food magazines were using it, which weren’t, how often it showed up in hashtags, or a million other things. It was so easy to search for that stuff and get results that I could use immediately.

What about Rival IQ enticed you to join?

It was 100% the people. I imagine that folks who’ve read all of these staff profiles are totally sick of everybody responding like that, but it’s true.

On my audition day, it was so fun to get to be at Rival IQ for eight hours and really get to know the team. Everyone was so kind in submitting family recipes for the article I was working on and showing me the ropes in an unfamiliar office setting. I enjoyed going out to lunch with the team, and seeing how people work. And if working on these staff profiles has been any indicator, the people that I get to work with are even cooler than their first impression.

Couldn’t miss the chance for a team photo in the elevator on our way to lunch recently.

Speaking of lunch with your coworkers: When it’s your turn to order Wednesday lunch, what are you most likely to order?

I love things with rice in them. Last time I ordered Hawaiian food, and it was the best (in my totally unbiased opinion). I also love ordering Chinese. We haven’t braved sushi during my tenure—maybe one day.

So I learned something new right before this interview—tell me about drumming.

I’m a drummer! For a short, blissful period, I played in a cover band with buddies from college, where we would play whatever songs we could find that called for a guitar, a keyboard, and drums. It was a total blast, and I hope to play in another band one day again soon.

Rocking out at Ladies Rock Camp, a local Seattle program for female musicians.

How do you use social media outside of work?

I was a Facebook and Twitter lurker for a long time. When I got hired on here, a girlfriend of mine said, “You’re going to be on Instagram in three months.” And sure enough, since I started at Rival IQ, I’ve jumped into Instagram with two feet.

Getting to hang out on Instagram Insights and learn all these amazing things that we can measure, like taps forward and exit rates in Stories, engagement, video views, and so much more, has been fun too.

Last question: what do you want your legacy at Rival IQ to be?

I hope my legacy will be not a particular product, style, report, or social strategy, but instead: Fruit o’Clock. Every day around 4:00, I like to cut up some of the aforementioned office fruit, and sometimes I would share it with my deskmates. Before long, other people got in on the idea of eating fruit at 4:00. Now, whomever has a free moment and a hankering for a snack gathers around for some tasty treats from the market. It’s such a nice time of day to connect with our coworkers away from computers, and hear what their kids are up to, or what they did over the weekend, or what their cats are doing. So, I hope Fruit o’Clock carries on, even if Rival IQ outlives me. Or whatever the less morbid version of that ending is.

Who wouldn’t want to have fruit with these crew every day?

Any other questions I’ve missed?

You did great.

Thank you. Coming from a master.

Yeah, exactly. Whoo, that was a long one. Nice going. That wasn’t against the wall at all.

Against the wall?

You know, I was expecting the firing squad.

The post Blair: Staff Profile appeared first on Rival IQ.

Since Rival IQ was but a glimmer in our founders’ eyes, we’ve relied on sprint planning to help us set and achieve our company-wide goals. (Spoilers: we’re now on our 168th sprint!) From mapping out new features to planning team events, our two-week sprint planning model helps us stay on track while giving us a good excuse to order in lunch and integrate our work.

For a peek behind the curtain, we’ll take a look at how sprint planning works at Rival IQ and why it’s so important to us as a team.

Sprint planning: what’s that?

I admit, I hadn’t worked at a company that relied on sprint planning before I came to Rival IQ, so here’s a quick primer. We (and tons of other organizations and brands) borrowed the idea from the agile method of team management. It varies from org to org, but for us a sprint is a two-week period of time in which we map out and achieve a concrete set of goals that help move our business forward in a measurable way. Many companies use sprint planning just for their engineering team, but aligning our goals company-wide is really important to us.

The process below is critical for keeping us on track, and so is our monthly metrics review meeting, where we look at how the goals we set during sprint planning are affecting Rival IQ’s momentum.

If the goal of coming to work is getting your work done (what a concept!), we look at sprint planning as a way to break up the work into achievable chunks while keeping everybody accountable and collaborating on the regular.

The team at a recent sprint planning meeting.

The backbone: bi-weekly sprint planning meetings

Every other Wednesday, you can find our team stuffing our faces smack in the middle of our office during our sprint planning meeting. We chat over lunch, spin up any remote colleagues on a video call, and then get down to business.

Here’s the basic structure of our sprint meetings:

Reporting on the last sprint: Each department (business development, sales, customer success, marketing, product, engineering, and culture) references the goals we set at the last meeting and shares progress and/or roadblocks. We usually leave ongoing/maintenance work out of these reports (like squashing bugs, posting on social, writing these blog posts, etc.): sprint goals generally focus on larger, often team-wide projects and/or new team initiatives.

Retrospective: We spend the middle of our sprint planning meeting celebrating when specific team members made something amazing happen, and reflecting on opportunities to do better. (Though more often than not it turns into a gratitude-fest in our office ?.)

Sharing our goals for the next sprint: We go around the horn again, and each department shares goals for the next two weeks. Sometimes this means carrying goals over from the last sprint, and other times it means collaborating with other departments or asking for help to achieve a goal together.

Announcements: We leave a little time at the end of each sprint planning meeting to update each other on engagements, new hires, team member departures, fun team events, and other things everyone should know about.

Bi-weekly maintenance: pre-sprint planning team meetings

One of the many joys of working at Rival IQ is our commitment to efficient meetings, and sprint planning is no exception. To make this all-hands meeting run as smoothly as possible, teams gather for a pre-sprint planning meeting where we review our backlog of tasks from our last sprint and our quarterly road map to make sure we’re on track with our big-picture goals. We also work together to draft goals for the next sprint.

This meeting helps each team construct goals that we feel we can own in the next two weeks ahead of being under the spotlight during the full team meeting. It also gives us breathing room to examine our capacity and select projects that we’re excited about.

Daily maintenance: stand-ups

A pretty average marketing/sales team stand-up.

Most mornings, you can find the sales/marketing and engineering/product teams coming together for a few minutes to share what each team member worked on yesterday, what they’re hoping to accomplish today, and anything that’s blocking their work that another team member could help out with. These check-ins are an integral part of sprint planning in that they keep our work moving forward, identify roadblocks long before the end of a sprint, and give our teams a little face time every morning. The sales/marketing team is especially guilty of going over our allotted 15 minute slot because we’re so busy talking about what we did over the weekend or what our families are up to, but that’s a different blog post.

Sprint planning: the origin story

Okay, so Rival IQ wasn’t started in a garage, but it definitely spent some serious time in coffee shops and our founders’ living rooms. Sprint planning was an excuse to bring the remote team together on the regular for all the benefits listed above, and one more key motivator: Lunch! Our tireless founders knew that breaking bread (or cheeseburgers, or noodles) as a small team would help galvanize everyone from the get-go, leading to a more cohesive team that was working towards the same set of goals. Lunch also felt like a great way to say thank-you each week for everyone’s hard work in the sleepless initial stages of a new startup.

The spirit of Wednesday sprint planning and lunch lives on in our office today, and is a wonderful moment of pause where we all come together to catch up while chowing down.

What has sprint planning done for you lately?

Well, actually, lots. If all we got out of sprint planning was a well-organized, de-siloed company, I think we’d all be stoked, but the benefits go way beyond a staff moving in the same direction. Here are a few of our favorites:

In-person face time: In the age of working remotely and always being connected, 1.5 hours of time together is rarer than we might think. Since Rivalers work from home on Mondays and Fridays and all have varying schedules, sprint planning is our only time each week to connect in-person without distraction. Which leads me to my next benefit…

The chance to share stories: From hires to company updates to one very memorable birth story, being in-person for these moments of celebration and change beat the all-staff email announcement every time. I always leave our sprint planning meetings feeling closer to my colleagues because I know more about what they’re up to in and out of the office, and have a chance to connect about families, kids, adventures, and more.

Out-loud accountability: There’s nothing like sharing your team’s upcoming goals with other people who are dependent on you to make it happen. Knowing that your teammates heard your upcoming projects and are going to be asking after them in two weeks is both a diabolical management technique and an incredible motivator ?.

Celebrating success together: Retrospective (where we all have a chance to thank our colleagues for saving the day) is my favorite part of sprint planning–I love shouting my coworkers’ amazingness from the rooftops, and learning about the behind-the-scenes magic that happens in other departments to keep the trains running. Having dedicated time to share these successes helps us all stay involved in the whole team’s work while reinforcing a culture of gratitude around the office.

The finish line

We know that all agile-based companies do sprint planning differently, but we wanted to shed a little light on how it works around Rival IQ, and why it works so darn well for us. And if you’re looking for us around noon on Wednesday, you know exactly where to find us: parked in the middle of our office talking goals, food, major life changes, and so much more.

The post Race to the Finish: Sprint Planning appeared first on Rival IQ.

Tell us about yourself, Lisa.

I’m Lisa: I am a digital designer, and a mom, and a wife, and a soccer coach. I love to travel and explore new places and cultures. For the first time in my career, I am working part-time. I am enjoying spending more time with my kids and the everyday life of our busy family.

Lisa and her family love exploring the great outdoors.

What do you do at Rival IQ?

I am the digital designer and I work on product design as well as marketing, so I get to work on a bunch of different features at Rival IQ, and then help make things look pretty for marketing ads and reports.

What are some examples of work that you’ve done here recently?

Recently, I’ve done UX work on our Posted URLs Analysis feature. I’ve also worked on some custom dashboard features and client user access features. So, I’ve been helping wherever the team need updates, tweaks, or UX design help.

Our latest feature, Posted URLs analysis, in action.

I also worked on the Data-Driven Marketer logo [editor’s note: our regular webinar series]. I created the logo to help Cassandra and Blair with the brand for that.

What did you do before Rival IQ?

I was an art director at ESPN.com. I primarily worked in the advertising product group and ESPN Partnerships for the bulk of my time there. One of the highlights was working on the ESPYs (the ESPN award show) website.

Lisa behind “her” desk at ESPN.

After all that ESPN excitement, what makes you excited to work here?

I really, really love the culture. That was one of the things that drew me to the company. Everybody’s profiles and bios on the site cracked me up. And, after spending a day interviewing at Rival IQ, it just felt like a really good fit and the people were great. Everybody is just really warm and welcoming, and supportive, and it’s just a fun place to work. Oh, and there are snacks!

Snacks are the best. So, switching gears to a more data-themed topic, how do you use data in your day-to-day?

I use data by looking at my family’s financials and budgeting: pie charts and bar graphs to see what we’re spending money on. In designing, I look at engagement metrics to see what is working and what might need to be tweaked to improve usability.

That really counts. Can you tell me about a favorite Rival IQ feature?

Probably the one that I just finished, which is Posted URLs Analysis. We’re just wrapping up on that, and it was one of the first big projects that I worked on after I joined.

How do you use social media?

I like to post pictures with my kids and my family, and I like to check out Facebook and Instagram to see what my friends are up to.

Lisa and her family on yet another amazing adventure.

Do you have a legacy that you want to leave at Rival IQ?

I’d like to leave great-looking and effective marketing products and have everything that’s customer-facing for the company look sharp and represent the company well.

A recent (awesome!) ad Lisa worked up for us.

The post Lisa: Staff Profile appeared first on Rival IQ.

Who are you?

My name is Jacob Wuest, and I’m a Customer Success Manager here at Rival IQ. I help clients get the most out of their subscription and find new ways to use the product. I like to make sure that they get their money’s worth. I also wear a few other hats around here like video and Salesforce.

Jacob and his wife Francesca on a recent trip to Teotihuacan, near Mexico City.

What did you do before coming to Rival?

Oh, gosh. How far back do you want me to go?

Totally up to you.

Well, I originally started working in film and TV production. I did that right out of college for a little over two years. In the beginning, I ran an arena in-house camera mostly for football games, but also other events. I was usually working on ground level, the sideline, up in the rafters, in the stands, that sort of thing.

Jacob in action as a cameraman

No way.

Yes, yes. That was pretty cool. Got tackled once by a football player.

I also worked for full-blown scripted television productions, like Friday Night Lights. I worked on that show for the last season. And I did the whole season of Top Chef Texas. I’ve done really wild stuff too like an episode of Real Housewives of Orange County and an episode of Bridezillas, that really uncool TLC show.

Eventually, I moved on and got a job working as a retention specialist at a SaaS company. Then I moved to another SaaS company which was social media-related and did the same thing for them, and now I’m here.

What makes you excited to work here?

It’s just got to be the culture. I think that makes me most excited to be here: everyone’s so chill and nice. Honestly, everyone just really cares about the clients and about each other.

What are you most likely to order when you’re in charge of Wednesday lunch, and why?

I’m probably most likely to order Mediterranean, because it travels really well. Even if it’s a little cold, it still tastes pretty good.

I also really like barbecue. That might have to be the next thing I order for the team since I’m originally from Texas.

Tell me about how you use data in your day to day, either at work or at home.

Here at work I use data to help me understand which clients are really excelling at using the product and which ones could use some extra help. In my personal life, I’m a big gut guy. I like going with my gut instinct quite a bit, although I do appreciate the data to back it up. But probably the most frequent use is in finances, like forecasting and budgeting, and making sure I’m set for the future.

Do you have a favorite Rival IQ feature?

I really like our Instagram Stories feature, because I think it’s cool that we can save and track them, even after they’ve expired. You can go back and do your analysis on them just like you can on the posts.

A few of our recent Instagram Stories seen in Rival IQ.

Do you use social media?

I do. I’m not too active on social–more of a lurker. I’m actually on Facebook and Instagram probably more than I need to be, but if you were to pull my name through Rival IQ, I would look completely dead because I don’t do much at all on there.

Jacob and his pup Jupiter.

Last question: what’s your legacy at Rival IQ?

I would say the overhaul of the video room would have to be my legacy. It had an echo and was poorly lit before, but during a recent Hack Day with a few screws and sound panels and tinfoil we made the room much more suited to filming webinars and help videos for our clients.

Jacob in our new-and-improved video room

The post Jacob: Staff Profile appeared first on Rival IQ.

So, who are you?

My name is Seth Pollack, and I am one of the cofounders of Rival IQ. I run our engineering and success teams as well as wear various other hats.

Seth planned a kayaking outing for the whole team recently.

Tell me more about that. What does it mean to be the leader of the engineering team, and what are some of the other things that you do here?

In terms of running the engineering team, it’s a lot of fun. I have a talented team, and we design, build, maintain, and operate the product. It’s great: we get to play with data all the time.

One of the neat things about being in a smaller company and being a cofounder is you get to do lots of different things. In addition to engineering, I’ve taken on managing our success team, and also being our culture person. It’s really important to us to have a healthy culture and for us to like working, like being here. And so it’s something that we really put a lot of focus into, and it’s something that I personally put time into every week.

Can you talk about what you did before you founded Rival IQ?

I’ve been doing software for a long time now. I worked at Microsoft. That was my first job out of school, working on operating systems and working on web server technology. And I created something called Active Server Pages, which is now a million years old. But it was one of the first really popular web server development environments that got really broadly used. So, it was exciting.

After I left Microsoft, I did some things that weren’t related to software for a couple of years, like photography and traveling and climbing, which was awesome. But I was pretty mentally bored. I missed the teamwork and the intellectual engagement. So, then I joined a sort of mid-sized startup called Impinj, which was a semiconductor company. I knew nothing about hardware, so I got to learn a lot about it.

Seth takes to the rocks whenever he can.

From there, I co-founded V2Green, which was a technology startup in the electric car space. I ran our engineering efforts there, which was pretty fun. The grand vision was controlling the recharging behavior of a fleet of electric vehicles as kind of a big distributed battery and using that as a way to make it easier to integrate more renewables into the grid and such. Eventually we sold the company and I worked at the parent company, GridPoint, for a while. A lot of good learning that came out of that. After running all the software engineering there for a while, I left GridPoint and then founded our current company with Doc and John.

Speaking of our current company, what makes you excited to come to work every day?

Our team, first of all. It’s just a great group of people. It’s fun to work together.

Everyone has answered the exact same thing in these interviews. People are going to start thinking that I’m planting the answer in these interviews. [Editor’s note: I’m not!] [Laughs] So, that’s one. Two is…I just love building things, whether it’s building the product, or problem-solving, or taking in the data, or learning a bunch of new technologies and such. That’s a lot of fun, but I also love building the team, and the company, and the culture.

Speaking of building the team, when you’re in charge of Wednesday lunch, what are you likely to order or reserve for the team?

If we’re bringing it in, probably Indian food. If we’re going out, I have my standbys. I feel like I need to get out of my rut, to be honest. But yeah, probably Von’s, or Elephant and Castle.

Seth is never far from tweaking our product, even at team happy hours!

Can you talk about how you use data in your day to day either at work or at home?

Sure. There are so many ways! Just a moment before we came in here to do this interview, I was working on some performance optimization with our ElasticSearch service. And so I am staring at all this data, having to do with performance of queries, and thread queue backups, and memory usage, and cache usage, and all these different things, and all these lovely graphs and charts just trying to get to the heart of why we see certain performance characteristics and how we can improve it. That’s the kind of stuff I love doing.

A peek into ElasticSearch.

Nice. That might be why you founded a data company.

That probably has something to do with it, yeah. [Laughs]

What’s your favorite Rival IQ feature?

Favorite feature? Wow. Well, it’s like your kids. How do you pick a favorite?

That must be why you only have one kid.

Spotting likely boosted posts within Rival IQ.

That’s awesome. Can you talk about how you use social media?

I do use Facebook a bunch for sharing with friends and family, but not really in the broader universe. I am also on Twitter, but I’m almost entirely a reader and not a content generator. But I certainly find it really interesting: there are a bunch of fascinating people out there with a lot of good stuff to say. So, when I have spare time, I enjoy reading it. And I like pictures, so Instagram is fun too.

Clearly as a founder you have a ton of legacies here, but if you had to pick one, what would it be?

Well, I’ll go with the more silly answer because we already talked about the serious stuff. I worked on a little thing called IQBot. We have a bot on our Slack system that contains a virtual me. So, when people mention my name in Slack, it will say funny…well, now tired, but used to be funny quotes from me. So, if you ever notice if you ever put my name into Slack, it will respond with quotes from me. I don’t even need to be here, and you can get my words of “wisdom.” [Editor’s note: quotes mine.]

[Laughs] I never knew that.

The post Seth P.: Staff Profile appeared first on Rival IQ.