Johanna Snow

Thought Leader Interview

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Crystal King

Social Media Professor, HubSpot Academy

Background

Crystal began her career almost 30 years ago in human resources, she realized quickly that wasn’t a great fit for her and started looking for opportunities in marketing. She worked at several startups where she wore many hats, like being a marketing generalist and doing public relations. In 2006 she was working in PR for Sybase, a software company, and then shortly after, doing PR for CA technologies which is another software company based out of California. She began to realize that editors weren’t really reading press releases, responding to phone calls or answering emails so it was getting harder and harder to get the news out to people. However, she noticed that editors were responding to things on Twitter and watching YouTube. 

During this time the scandal with Enron was unfolding, and because she worked for such large tech companies, they began to impose restrictions on everything. You could barely access your emails, let alone YouTube. It was becoming harder and harder to do her job. She formed a task force to show why being on social media was important, and thus also created her first role in social media in a time when there weren't social media jobs. She worked to develop an entire program to help manage their global PR strategy, by creating templates and processes for other staff to use. This was the catalyst that launched her into a career of social media.

After that, she was at Keurig and Green Mountain coffee and worked to build their social media programs. According to her LinkedIn she “Built a team and program from the ground up to over 20 social channels across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Vine, Instagram, Google+ and soon, Tumblr. Strategized with other department leaders on social media needs and programs. Oversaw a robust content program across those channels, working with agencies, internal teams and through the cultivation of user generated content.” From there she moved onto Pegasystems, a software company in Cambridge, where she drove the strategy for their Pega Discovery Network. Eventually she found her way to Hubspot where she has been for the last 5 years working as the Social Media Professor, driving the development and growth of HubSpot academy. “Collaborating with industry-recognized social influencers, agencies, vendors and leading academic thinkers to demonstrate the power of social media paired with Inbound marketing.”  In the midst of doing all of this she has taught social media courses at Harvard, Boston University and the Massachusetts College of Art. She is also a published author and has two books out that are fictitious accounts of Italy’s culinary greats. 

Teaching Social Media

King first began teaching social media in 2008 at the Massachusetts College of Art, I asked her what has changed from what she was teaching then versus what she teaches now. 

She said initially she was teaching social media to artists, showing them how to best market themselves and their work to further their careers. The courses she taught at Harvard and Boston University were more geared towards people interested in leveraging social media as a career and she noted that there is always a lot of change from one year to the next. Every time she prepared to teach a new course, she had to audit presentations from the past and make sure she was not teaching anything irrelevant anymore. She said the course material can change significantly depending on what is happening in the world. 

Back when she first started teaching, she said that Twitter was less of a place where information was just being pushed out, it was known as a micro-blogging service and was tiny stories. The focus wasn’t on selling people products, or being used as a political propaganda machine, it was a place to engage people in conversation and connect to a community. She said that back then you did not have to deal with the spam, misinformation and deep fake videos, she laughs sadly and says, “it was a simpler time”. 

Now when she works on her courses, she asks herself how she can create a certification to teach the concepts and core strategy of social media without it being irrelevant in a matter of months.  Her goal is to always make something as evergreen as possible. Of course now her Twitter course is obsolete, Facebook is in written chapters that she can go back and easily edit, but the strategy she teaches is on video as one of the evergreen courses.

Social Media Upheaval

Naturally the situation with Twitter came up in several parts of the conversation. She said that she has noticed that people are now flocking to Mastodon, a decentralized server system that was created by two Japanese students in 2017. The difference between Mastodon and Twitter is that it is an open source platform, meaning that anyone can set up a server and create their own community for micro blogging. It is completely free to use, there is no advertising and it runs on crowdfunding. 

She says social media is really the wild west right now, people are trying to find their balance. In addition to everything going on with Twitter,  Facebook has fallen in popularity, Instagram is trying to be TikTok, Pinterest is really just for retail and who knows what will happen next with TikTok. 

She said that more and more, people are craving conversations. Brands are going to have to go back to the days where you have to talk to people and actually engage with them rather than just serving ads. They will need to create communities for people to talk about things they love and gave the example of Keurig- they can create a community for people to talk about coffee. 

Staying Ahead of Social Media Trends

With things changing at such a rapid pace, I asked her how she stays up to date on trends so that her course content always stays relevant. She said right now the biggest hurdle is Twitter, she is not even sure if she should keep it in her lessons, it is really in limbo until more things unfold. However, she did say that everything happening now is giving her more ammunition for her theory that we need to be building more places for community. 

King said she is a voracious reader which has helped her to keep ahead of trends because she is able to consume so much information. After reading so many blogs, tech journals etc, she notes that you will start to see patterns appearing which can help to provide insight into what the next trends might be. You have to watch how people are using the platforms, keeping a pulse on what they are saying and how they are interacting. She curates modes of information like feedly accounts, other rss feeds, talks to journalists, influencers, advertisers, and looks at what kind of campaigns are being created across platforms. There is so much information, it can be tricky to keep track of it and says there is no science behind it. No one knows what could be happening in six months but she said you can usually get a 3 month ahead idea (like Instagram changing their UI). 

A Typical Day in the Life at HubSpot

Her job is fairly unique at HubSpot, she has more autonomy than most. While she does have guidelines as to what kind of criteria goes into her lessons, like how their product will support what she is teaching, she brings ideas to the table and proposes what should be taught. She said that she is grateful to have a lot of leeway with what she is going to teach within social media topics and sets the whole curriculum. King writes all of the scripts, does all of her filming at home, and working with a team of editors and video editors, she sets the production schedule. 

She noted that she is very grateful for the spot she is in now, she loves to teach but being a teacher is really hard. She gave up teaching at universities on the side because she didn’t have enough hours in the day.  She said her biggest piece of advice was to be kind to all of our professors, they work long hours and do not get paid enough. King said having this job is the trifecta. She gets to teach what she loves, but do it in a way that she can have a decent salary and set her own schedule. 

Advice for Students Looking for a Career in Social Media

I asked her what advice she has for students in the field. She said, most importantly, you need to have social accounts, you need to show that you are actively engaged in the medium if you want to be taken seriously. If you don’t have any social profiles yourself, or you do not care about engaging in the outside world, it is going to show in your work. You need to be enthusiastic about it, if you enjoy social media and are a part of it, there is a lot you can learn. You don’t need to have a huge following, it matters more to have a carefully curated audience that cares about what you are talking about. King said, “Curating the right audience is the best advice I can give to anyone overall regarding social media. If you are in marketing, or a novelist, having conversations with the right people makes a big impact and they will remember you later.” She said if you have companies you are interested in working for, it is a good time to start engaging with them, figure out who their teams are and follow them in the places that matter. She noted that LinkedIn is a great resource for networking. Small micro conversations over a long period of time helps cement you in the minds of people and they will remember you when jobs come up, or can refer you to others in their networks. 

“Free” Time

In addition to working at HubSpot, King is also a published novelist, writing two books (The Chef’s Secret and Feast of Sorrow: A Novel of Ancient Rome) that are fictitious accounts of historical food and real epicureans of ancient Rome. I asked her what she liked to do in her free time, and if she actually had any free time! 

She said that very early on she was determined to find something that she loved as a career so that she would have time to write on the side. King said that writing is her passion, but she knew it wouldn’t be a fulltime job. She began writing in her mid-thirties and at first she thought it was silly to attempt because she had no time, but she soon realized that you will always find time for the things you love. Her first book took over five years to write, she worked weekends and whenever she could find spare time, but she loved every second of it. “You find time for things you love, even if it's just 10 minutes a day, you always find the time.”

She said she feels fortunate that she has a job that she loves with HubSpot and they are fully supportive of her book career. If she ever needed to take time off for a book tour they wouldn’t hesitate. 

King said that she also loves to entertain with her husband and go out to eat. They love going to Italy which has inspired her books. 

Final Thoughts

After a wonderful conversation, I thanked King for her time and asked if she had any parting thoughts for me and my fellow classmates. She said being an early adopter is great, but don’t place all of your bets in one place until it starts to roll out and become more mainstream. Follow people who are doing cool things, watch them and learn all that you can from them, it’s something she still does every day. 

Be really thoughtful about who you are in social and the kinds of things that you want to represent. So many people don’t know what they want to do or who they want to be in the next ten years, but what you post now lives forever. We are living in a really polarized world, something you say could offend someone years down the line. Of course if you feel very strongly about a subject you should always speak your mind, but the more you go towards a polarizing view or stance, the trickier it is if you are looking at a job where you need to have some neutrality. It is important to show that your persona to the public isn’t going too far in one direction. 

My final thoughts after speaking with King was how the concept of community kept coming up throughout our conversation. It sounds as though now is the time for companies to rethink how they are reaching people on social media. Gone are the days of just serving up a bunch of ads on Facebook, now is the time to get back to basics, be humans again and talk to each other about the things we love. Community is a great thing to begin rebuilding and hopefully social media can be the catalyst for bigger change within how we are engaging with one another. 

 

Sources

Crystal king - greater boston | professional profile | linkedin. (n.d.). Retrieved November 27, 2022, from https://www.linkedin.com/in/crystalking

King, C. (n.d.). Crystal king, author. Crystal King, Author. Retrieved November 27, 2022, from https://www.crystalking.com/

Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, November 22). Enron scandal. Wikipedia. Retrieved November 27, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, November 23). Mastodon (software). Wikipedia. Retrieved November 27, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) 

 

Digital Media Entrepreneur

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Peyton Rose

Digital Marketing Entrepreneur

The beginning.

As most great stories start, Peyton was born in a small town in Arkansas called Skunk Hollow. He described it as “very Huck Finn”. There were dirt roads, he lived on a lake and even had a dog named Hobo. However that is where the idyllic themes stopped, his father was an alcoholic and abusive. He said that the first 15 years of his life were incredibly challenging but thanks to after school programs and sports, he was able to find outlets rather than going home. While these times were tough, he credits them for shaping his perfectionist attitude. He was determined not to fail at anything he did. Things came to a head that summer when he was 15 and he left to go live with grandparents in Little Rock and credits this move to the start of the journey that led him to digital marketing. 

The journey.

When Peyton arrived in Little Rock he attended Central High School known for the Little Rock Nine of 1957. He dove into sports and spent all of high school planning on going to West Point on a basketball scholarship. At the last minute he shifted gears and realized that he wanted to pursue academics more. He traveled to Chicago shortly after and fell in love with Lake Forest College. During his time there he got very involved in abroad programs. He traveled through Greece, the Middle East and somehow ended up in South Africa eating lunch at a table with the Dalai Lama. He said that the conversation they had still guides him through to this day and helps him to remember that there is always hope. All of these experiences were setting him on his path to become an operator, he knew by then that he wanted to get things done.  

Why digital marketing?

Peyton returned from his travels, graduated from college and began his career in Chicago. He traveled to China for work and became obsessed with the idea of the internet. He described the internet of the early 2000’s as “a spam filled mess of awesome” but it fascinated him and how he could connect with people all over the world. During this time he published his first book and realized that he had no clue how to market himself. He began teaching himself branding and learning everything he could about the internet. When the recession of 2008 hit he had no choice but to shift gears and go into the oil industry. He almost forgot about marketing, he was out on rigs all day, making great money and able to provide for his new family. The universe had other plans and Peyton was in a horrible car accident. He was in the hospital for over three months, had to learn how to walk again and during that time was fired from the oil rig. He said he knew that was his turning point and that he had to completely redefine everything in his life. He got a sales job for Google, basically going door to door selling Google Business View. He wanted to learn everything he could about digital marketing. Soon he was leading the sales team for the southern region and taking advantage of every course Google had to offer. An opportunity came to work for Catholic Health Initiatives and he jumped at the chance to be able to utilize everything he had learned about AdWords and local search. He taught himself even more about optimization, web development and digital marketing and he found himself consulting for other businesses on the side. He realized that he wanted to take it bigger and so he created Alpha Wave. Now he works with medium to large companies that “have their infrastructure set but none of their digital processes in place.” 

A typical day. 

Peyton said that no two days are the same and he wouldn’t have it any other way. He is very disciplined and has succinct schedules for how he tackles his work flow. He said it is important to block out time for deep work and be able to concentrate on the tasks at hand, otherwise you can fill up your time with meeting after meeting. For consulting work he said that he will meet with a business and come in to set up scalable processes and systems in digital marketing for them to implement. He then leaves them with the tools to succeed and grow. Alpha Wave also offers companies a la carte services like search engine optimization, social media, paid advertising, OTT and content creation. His goal for the next 3-5 years is to package these processes and to create a toolkit that they can sell to other companies allowing them to grow their digital media presence. 

Looking forward.

Peyton’s advice to students and his hopes for the future of digital marketing all seem to tie back to the same sentiment, “do no harm”. He mentioned this multiple times in our talk and was an important theme throughout his past and future. He said that digital creation is a powerful, powerful tool if we can use it in the right ways. He believes that one of the problems is that our brains have not evolved enough to keep up with some of the technology and we are interacting with it in very harmful ways. 

He worries that digital technologies are pulling us away from important health and relationship functions that we need as humans, and that we are losing the ability to sit alone in quietude. He also mentioned the ability for digital marketing and social media to influence us in harmful ways, “everyone should know what happened with Cambridge Analytica and be scared by it.” 

He said we can apply theories from digital marketing to our daily lives and “optimize everything”. Not only should we be optimizing websites, we should be optimizing our sleep schedules, our diets and balance our personal lives with our professional. “If we live optimized lives, we have balance and balance should be our goal for everything.” 

What I learned. 

Talking to Peyton was amazing. He did not hold back on any part of his life or career so it was great to have such a candid interview. For me, as an older student, the most important thing that I learned is that the journey is never over. Life can take you so many places, it is important to always keep learning and growing- especially in a field that is as ever changing as digital marketing. 

Teaching people processes for digital media was interesting to me too, it was eye opening to see that there is such a need for consulting work and helping people to implement their own strategies. My biggest takeaway was the sentiment of “do no harm”. It seems as though there has been an underlying theme from a lot of our speakers that the future could be a dangerous place if we do not use the tools at hand wisely. 

I have hope in mankind that we will work to do no harm in the future. That mantra is something that I am going to take with me throughout my professional career and personal life. All in all it was a very inspiring conversation, if you are curious and open, life can take you in many different directions! 

A Farmer’s Life

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Rural Thailand

“Things are different in the country,” says Jib as we cycle through the rural farmland of Sukhothai, Thailand. Sukhothai is a place, for many, that is merely a stopover as they make their way south to the beaches from Northern Thailand. Some come for a day and visit the ancient ruins, then it is onto the next big attraction.

I was one of these people, and with a couple extra days to spare, I booked an all day cycling tour touting itself as a nice scenic journey through the countryside of Sukhothai. It ended up being much more than a sightseeing tour, it was a glimpse into a way of life that is slowly vanishing.

Jib picked us up bright and early, wearing a crisp orange shirt, and took us to his family home. After fitting our bikes, we set off through the town. 

Our first stop was a wood mill, Jib explained that many rice farmers are out of work because of drought and the extremely low prices that the government offers for their crops. He estimated they were paid somewhere between 50-60% less than years prior. Not nearly enough for a farmer to make a living on, let alone support an entire family. Many have no choice but to walk away, or to only grow crops that provide enough sustenance to get their family through the year.

The wood mill was established as a means to an end, farmers can work there building various furniture pieces to be sold in Bangkok. There is no start time, no finish time, no set breaks. You simply work until the project is complete, as much or as little throughout the day as your schedule permits.

As Jib explained this, he again reiterates how so many farmers have lost their jobs because of the government. “Things are hard here,” he says. “Many people are leaving for jobs in Bangkok.” The big city life holds a lot of appeal for the struggling, small town farmer. Jib himself was one of those farmers who went to Bangkok at the age of 16. It wasn’t easy. He said that there is a lot of prejudice towards people from small villages. They are judged by the color of their skin, and how much darker it is from years of toil under the hot sun. “When I got to Bangkok I asked a lot of questions, I didn’t know things. People could tell I was a boy from a farm, they would take advantage of you, rip you off.”

After 10 years of working in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Jib returned to support his family. He taught himself english and learned as much as he could about the tourism industry. His earnings for the bike tours help to support his entire family, but they struggle as they too were displaced from rice farming.

As we rode through the sweltering heat we met a woman plowing rice fields alone. Her husband left for Bangkok years ago, never to return. Her children abandoned the farm, so now she plows the fields alone, day after day. She barely makes enough to live on, but has no choice, it is her only means of survival.

This seems to be a recurring theme in the farmlands. Men leave their families, seeking a better income in the city, sending money for a while,  but then it eventually tapers off as they become more ingrained in their new world. 

Jib takes us to eat at a small lunch stall run by a woman supporting her entire family. She used to be a chef in Bangkok but returned home to take care of her ailing blind mother. Her husband refused to go with her, and shortly after her return, her teenage daughter became pregnant, leaving her no choice but to stay and support them all. 

As more and more people leave to pursue an opportune life in the city, and the government continues to reduce compensation for farmers, one can’t help but wonder what will happen to those who remain. A farm cannot be sustained forever run by an elderly woman. Will they simply just cease to exist? Will new government regulations come in with a better compensation structure? The uncertainty remains.

There is a gritty resolve among all of the people. They know the system is unjust, the pricing corrupt, the work backbreaking. Yet, they know that they have to do it, their very existence depends on it. Such is the life of a farmer. 

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