What is that Publicate thing?
At least three people have asked me in the last few hours.
Then last week as I hurriedly threw together my newsletter for the 20th time in Publicate,I thought I’d mention it, mainly as Chris, the founder, is a mate and also is launching the paid product after getting funding and two years of being Beta / pre-revenue – or whatever you Old Street kids call it these days.
I did what any dumb marketer would do and mentioned it in my newsletter without context and then asked people if they’d clicked the link and signed up. No one had.
Of course, this is doubly humiliating for me as I have spent large chunks of my time taking the piss out of people who say things like, “I need to get in front of as many people as possible” or “every company needs this” and then can’t say why.
Working Out Loud
It is also “working out loud” week which is another of those things I am wildly enthusiastic about / love the idea of / keep meaning to do.
Plus all the blogs and newsletters where I just ramble about some help and share a few struggles are the ones that do best in the Bernie eco-system and also the ones I like reading the best.
So SMUG internet guru with a shit book makes me want to kill myself, just in case someone realises we are from the same species let alone the same platform.
People who share and connect online via podcasts and blogs and are out to help people and get help – bring it on.
I pitched Chris a couple of ideas about how to get Publicate rolled out and he said he’d hire me to do that.
His sentence included ‘if they work’ – the but all I heard was ‘hire me’, I whipped out my FreeAgent app, sent him an invoice and then shot back to my Bernie cave to get to work.
This is where it did not go to plan.
I started to research, which is the exact opposite of what my mate Steve says in ‘Do the work‘ – I blogged about research vs giving up smoking is easier here a few days ago.
I really have read and re-read 10 books in the last few weeks and spent fucking hours crawling round Growth Hackers and Inbound.org to get a feel of the land.
AMA – if you ask me anything about Inbound marketing, Scrum, Agile, Coworking, Sharing Economy, communications or caffeine I can answer. I am like IBM’s Watson of these topics in the East End of London.
I started at least 50,000k conversations and pieces of content (if you think I am exaggerating for effect you’d be wrong) and drank too much caffeine in two weeks, collapsed and went to hospital in an ambulance. Actually that bit is true and to add some context I’d given up caffeine this year.
I was given permission by #Supercoolwife to lie on the sofa all weekend and chill out and then spent a week drinking homemade juice, eating avocados and decaf-bulletproof coffee and now my head is back.
Eat Your Own Dog Food and Start With The Why
I had a little moment of ‘eat your own dog food, Mitchell’ – last year as I was running round London giving keynotes to stadiums of business owners on how they could blog openly and with vulnerability to connect with people.
Or said another way like my mate Simon says (see what I did there) ‘choose to do business with people who believe what they believe’ and be telling some kind of story rather than just copy and pasting your brochure to get people connect with you.
That is what fascinates me about companies like Buffer, Tree House and Copyblogger where they share what is going on in their company rather that say, Hootsuite is good at content marketing but I don’t really feel connected to these guys. Even though I know more people in Hootsuite directly than in Buffer – interesting, eh?
I have been following the Working Out Loud dudes on the web and have even spoken with perceived authority a couple of times and sent people in the direction of John Stepper, the Working Out Loud website and Luis Surez site.
Of course, the whole point of working out loud is that you are doing that. I have cancelled the band, the caterer and the keynote speaker and in the last week jumped back to what always works best and is the most fun, the community around me, this blog and my nimble machine.
So I’m on a research diet and just writing about what is going on – in fact I feel better already.
You could ask me anything here: I am looking for user questions to turn into blog posts on the launch site that is about to birth any day soon.
