Christine Perkett, CEO of Mindfull Marketing + PR, was interviewed by Medium about the best leadership practices and the top five traits leaders should exemplify now.
Host David Reske interviews Mindfull Marketing + PR’s Founder and CEO on the value of personal branding
In today’s digital landscape, personal branding is no longer optional; it’s essential. Our Founder, Christine Perkett, a renowned PR and branding expert, shares her wisdom on this topic in an insightful episode of the “In the Now Podcast.” Perkett highlights the significance of personal branding, likening it to a “walking resume” in our interconnected world. Her approach emphasizes the seamless blend of personal and professional lives online, empowering individuals to shape their own narratives.
What sets Perkett’s perspective apart is her focus on authenticity and evolution. Drawing inspiration from Martha Stewart’s brand journey, she illustrates how personal brands can pivot and grow over time. This adaptability is key, especially for those new to the field. Perkett advises identifying core values and tailoring content across various platforms, clearly distinguishing genuine personal branding from the pay-to-play world of profit-driven influencers.
This episode is more than just a guide; it’s a reflection of the expertise and approach that our agency embodies. As you listen to her insights, consider the impact such expertise could have on your personal or corporate brand. Mindfull Marketing + PR, with its deep understanding of branding dynamics and over 25 years in business, is ideally positioned to help you navigate the complexities of the digital age.
👉 Watch the episode now and discover how the rules of personal branding are evolving and how they can benefit your career at any stage.
Medium turned to our Founder & CEO, Christine Perkett, for her thoughts, insights, and advice on the future of work and lasting leadership.
Being a leader today requires the same mental fortitude and ability to guide and inspire that it always has. Still, it also entails new levels of understanding and the ability to adapt to an ever-changing and faster-than-ever business environment. This adaptability includes navigating uncertainty like we had to during the pandemic or are doing today with looming recession concerns and mass layoffs.
Christine also shares her thoughts on the top five traits leaders should exemplify now.
Read the full story here.
The Mindfull Marketing team is excited to share our latest interview with Dara Brenner (Dara Brenner | CentralSquare), Chief Product Officer at CentralSquare Technologies. As an integral member of the leadership team, Dara is known for delivering innovative and disruptive technology solutions that deliver world-class customer experiences. CentralSquare Technologies is the largest independent public sector software provider that powers all aspects of managing local government to build smarter and safer communities. Dara shares insight on her role and how she enjoys mentoring and coaching her Product Management team.
Please tell us a bit about your role as Chief Product Officer.
As the Chief Product Officer at CentralSquare, I am super proud to lead a team of Product Management professionals creating the best solutions to help make our communities smarter, safer, and more connected.
What do you find to be most challenging in your role?
I have been in Product Management for over two decades. Yet, this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to work in a field where what we do every day impacts the communities in which my family and friends live, as well as the people who keep us safe every day. I can’t think of a more fulfilling way to apply the skills and leadership experience I’ve gained throughout my career.
Can you tell us a little bit about Central Square Technologies and your mission to help the public sector?
CentralSquare’s mission is to provide the broadest, most intelligent, and most unified public sector software suite to power all aspects of managing local government. We are constantly innovating with new solutions in partnership with the communities we serve. More than 8,000 customers trust CentralSquare, which translates to more than 375,000 sworn officers in the US and Canada. In fact, our software supports three-quarters of US citizens daily.
Any recent developments you would like to share?
Two developments have significantly shaped my six months here at CentralSquare:
What drives you?
Beyond what’s outlined above, I love leveraging technology to solve customers’ business problems. Also, I consider myself very lucky to help coach, mentor, and grow the next executive leaders of Product Management.
What keeps you up at night?
It’s probably working through the next big idea that pops into my head and trying to determine if it’s crazy or viable.
Outside of your career, what are you enthusiastic about?
My family is definitely what I am most enthusiastic about, but beyond that, I’m a huge sports fan, and I also love spending time with family and friends at the lake.
Favorite place to travel?
I’ve been fortunate to have traveled to every continent, with the exception of Antarctica (soon, I hope!). I love to travel to experience the people, food, and culture. However, my favorite place, and one that I’m hoping to revisit soon, is Australia. I was just blown away by the beauty of the country and the people.
Our CEO, Christine Perkett, will be speaking Tuesday, December 10, at the National Association of Women Sales Professionals (NAWSP)’s “Break Out of the Girls’ Club” event. Joined by fellow panelists Jay Green and Rabih Shanshiry, they will discuss the importance of women in sales leaning on male mentors as well as other female leaders. Learn techniques on how to seek out the male collaborators, mentors, and connectors who can offer you a leg up.
Register here.
We all know there’s no “I” in team and yet, we often see executives making basic mistakes in communications that would indicate otherwise. Particularly in the client service business, it’s crucial to think carefully about how you and your team are presenting information.
For example, in the agency world, clients are serviced by account teams comprised of individuals who are often responsible for different pieces of work. However, each piece of work is important to the overall success of the account. Without content, media and advertising don’t work. Without the right messaging, nothing works, and so on. Clients need to know that the team, although working on different pieces, is a comprehensive unit.
If your employees are updating clients during a meeting and talking in terms of “Me” vs “We,” the team will come across not as a comprehensive unit working together towards a common goal, but rather as a group of individuals more worried about getting credit for their piece. This is not conducive to building client confidence.
So as a manager, what can you do?
It isn’t a complicated proposition to build a team-oriented culture, but it has to be a consistent effort, and definitely takes some training. People are naturally driven to point out their contributions – which is understandable and welcomed. But in a business where they’re servicing a client, they need to understand that the best time and place to do so is with their boss, not to the client. Of course, it’s important to ensure recognition – both good and bad – happens regularly but it must be done in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the client relationship. Remind employees of the greater good that comes from not only working as a team, but thinking and presenting as one.
Our Founder & CEO was included in this article about managing remote teams.
We are pleased to share another insightful “Effective Executive” interview with Eric Newman, Vice President of Products & Marketing for Digby. In this role, Eric Newman helps brands leverage the power of Localpoint, a cross channel marketing platform. During his 18-year career, Eric has ridden the cutting edge of a number of online revolutions at a successful startups, including Demand Media’s Pluck, Powered, IBM’s DataBeam, Ask Jeeve’s Direct Hit and Motive Corporation’s Question Technologies. He holds a M.B.A. from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Information Systems and Marketing from the University of Cincinnati.
Eric shared his thoughts on location-based marketing behavior and which loyalty programs top his list. He also shared his insights with us on why Austin has become such a growing city for tech companies, especially start ups.
What’s the challenge in attaining a location-based marketing strategy?
Using time and place as a real-time trigger for marketing, engagement and customer service in brick and mortar locations adds a whole new dimension to an organization’s marketing and operational thinking – and therein lies the challenge. It starts with figuring out how you want to react to a consumer’s entry into a store, or presence in a target neighborhood – notifying associates of the consumer’s entry or sending a visit-encouraging message to the consumer as examples. From there, the retailers we work with are using that real-world event as a key juncture for mapping the consumer’s cross-channel history – understanding that they shopped on the ecommerce site last night and are likely entering the store to put their hands on the product before making the purchase. That kind of omni-channel use is where location really shines as the link between the on and offline worlds, but it is also the most challenging for an organization to adopt when typically those worlds were organizationally separated in the past.
What have you seen over the last year in terms of measured success of a good location-based marketing strategy?
We have witnessed some amazing results. While we cannot speak to specific customers’ performance metrics, we can talk about campaigns where 60+% of consumers in neighborhoods near a store opened a location-based announcement with push notification set up by the marketer and then in turn, visited the nearby store to redeem the offer. We’ve seen social check-in campaigns through the retailer’s app generate astounding redemption rates as consumers walked into the store, received an offer and then shared the offer with their friends.
What are some of the best loyalty programs you’ve seen for customers?
As a marketer I really appreciate the Kohl’s cash program. Giving consumers discounts they can apply against any product in a virtual cash format makes it easy to earn and easy to spend those points, but all within Kohl’s stores.
As a consumer, I like loyalty programs that offer something a little different as a loyalty reward. Using earned loyalty points at a grocery like Randall’s to get a steep discount on gas at their fueling station is significant enough to actually spur conversation about it at the family dinner table. Any time you can get someone teaching their children about a loyalty program, that’s longevity.
What’s your dream customer – i.e., who could use some improvement with Digby?
Location context as a trigger to more relevantly market and engage the consumer is not limited to one vertical or most appropriate for just one customer. We see interest in Digby from brands in many sectors – from hospitality to dining and even sports franchises – anyone who has a physical place of business and would like to better engage their customers. Interestingly, we learn new use cases for our technology with every potential customer we meet. One of my favorite unexpected use cases was a convenience store chain that builds 50-100 stores a year. That’s millions of dollars of real-estate investment where building on the wrong spot can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars of missed revenue. In this case, the retailer wanted to identify locations where they were considering store development, and use the knowledge of how many of their app-holding, loyal customers drive by these various locations as a set of decision input into their real estate evaluation.
What’s the connection with mobile apps to successful in-store service?
There are so many use cases around customer service where awareness that the customer is at the store is so important. For example, a fast food restaurant wants to allow consumers to order their burgers online for pickup in the restaurant. Doesn’t sound all that complicated until you realize that a fast food sandwich has about a two minute shelf life under the heat lamps. Get caught at a red light on the way to the store for pickup, and they have to start the order all over again. Instead, the restaurant wants to use our Localpoint platform to know when the remote ordering customer has entered the parking lot and place the order into the queue at that moment – ensuring a burger ready to go with minimal waste.
Any predictions for 2014 in terms of marketing behavior, from a B to B or B to C standpoint?
Location is becoming white hot right now as organizations see the relevancy and depth it can add to their customer relationships, and the ROI it can drive in terms of incremental store visits, conversion and cart size growth. Generally speaking, this technology applies best to the B to C experience, given the nature of shopping behavior where consumers visit malls, stores and other retail locations.
Weigh in on Austin and its growth in the tech world – how would you say Austin has changed over the year climate-wise for tech companies?
Austin is an incredible place for technology and has been for many years. A startup community increases in velocity as it builds momentum with entrepreneurs at all organizational levels building startups and then facilitating the sale and integration of the startup into larger technology companies. This creates a powerful secondary effect of drawing larger companies into Austin and then setting up the entrepreneur to make a run at their next big idea. Austin has been doing this successfully for 20 years and has mature, fertile field of technology companies and startups spanning from the B to C space, like MapMyFitness who recently announced acquisition by UnderArmour, to B to B and even hardware solutions. The whole city has adopted tech as a mainstay of the economy and culture and the tech companies fit right into the “Keep Austin Weird” message we are known for.
Have you gone to SXSW? What’s your experience or viewpoint on it as a value for organizations or evangelists?
SXSW is an amazing mix of digital technology, media, movies and music. However, its meteoric growth has moved well beyond its roots as an interactive conference to an expansive showcase. The biggest challenge is navigating the breadth of things you can do during the show, ranging from actually learning something in session, to hobnobbing with the digital elite, to immersing yourself in the non-stop party swirling around the event. You need a SXSW plan of action before stepping foot into the show and sign up for the sessions you need as early as possible to ensure attendance.
Top marketing outlets you read?
Being all mobile, all the time, I spend most of my reading budget on sites like Mobile Commerce Daily and the Location Based Marketing Association. I augment that with industry specific sites like Stores Magazine and Advertising Age. As a technology product guy, I cannot live without Business Insider or our Forrester relationship, as industry analysts give a deep, cross-vendor view of the world that is hard to find from more traditional industry media publications.
This week’s “Effective Executive” interview is with Ric Calvillo, co-founder and CEO of Nanigans. Nanigans is pioneering the next evolution in media buying with its predictive lifetime value platform for performance marketing.
Ric Calvillo is Nanigans’ co-founder and CEO. Ric has over 20 years of startup experience, having founded and led three technology companies. Prior to co-founding Nanigans, Ric was Founder & CEO of Incipient, Inc., a venture-backed data storage infrastructure software company.
We asked Ric about his current role and the early days in his career as well as what is next for Nanigans for the remainder of 2013.
Can you explain your technology in simple terms for our audience?
Nanigans is the transformative SaaS platform for performance marketers, focusing on customer predictive lifetime value at scale. Most of our clients right now are in the e-commerce, travel and gaming verticals and use Nanigans across social and mobile.
What is the most exciting part of your role as CEO and Founder at Nanigans?
The most exciting part would be watching the growth of our customers, employees and the overall business. I started Nanigans in 2010 with the simple idea that performance marketing was inherently broken, and just a few short years later we’re up over 200 customers, 100+ employees and have offices around the world. Feeding off of the energy and successes of Nanigans employees is also contagious, and that vibrant culture is seemingly always on display walking around any of our offices.
Back in the early days of your career, what did you envision Nanigans to be? Have you met or exceeded your expectations?
I always wanted marketers to buy media based more on data than anything else. We know that consumers want to see a certain amount of offerings from advertisers and engage, especially online. For us, it was helping our customers find those purchase-minded consumers at scale and develop long-term relationships with their best target audiences.
In such a fast-paced tech industry, how do you keep up with the constant changes and developments?
We have an always-on engineering team. There’s no “easy solution” or “10 step method” to keeping up with the ever-changing tech industry. We focus on partnerships, planning and execution to ensure we’re always meeting goals. Our team meets every day to confirm nuances or updated plans, and we all sit together in an open floor plan to ensure open communication can happen in-person not just via email or phone.
You recently celebrated a huge milestone (1 Billion conversations enabled), how did you celebrate internally and how does this milestone motivate you and your Company to achieve future goals?
It’s always nice to highlight “big wins” for the company, so we celebrated the same way we always do, which means to take a step back for a moment and understand the impact and then move on. This industry changes on a dime, and we’ve seen great companies fail in the past few years so we don’t like to spend too much time on “accomplishments” but rather focus on how we can continue to provide value for our customers and innovate within the industry.
What is next for Nanigans for the remainder of 2013?
We’re focusing on how to best scale the business. In terms of verticals, we like ecommerce, travel, gaming and a few others while also looking at where to expand geographically. We currently have offices in Boston/NYC/SF/UK, which leaves a lot of opportunity on the table so finding the right combination for growth while continuing to maintain our level of quality and success for our customers is the main priority right now.
This week’s “Effective Executive” interview is with Shelli Trung, Founder of reality date-a-thon website, 3six5dates.com. The social experiment follows the adventures of four women in four international cities, all going on about 100 dates each, within one year. Shelli was recently listed as one of Australia’s Top 10 female startup entrepreneurs, and is frequently quoted in the media on Marketing and Branding for startups. She is currently located in New York, discussing partnership opportunities to grow 3six5dates – including turning the dating stories into comics and animations.
How did you come up with the concept of 3six5dates?
I had set myself a goal at the age of 25 to have started my own business by the age of 30. With this in mind, I started researching the range of businesses that would suit the lifestyle I wanted. I knew I wanted to create something fun that would not tie me to a specific location. I love storytelling and was specifically inspired when watching Nora Ephron’s “Julie and Julia,” which is about a woman who cooks through all of Julia Child’s recipes in one year while simultaneously blogging about it. I combined this curiosity with the gap that I felt the TV series “Sex and the City” left behind when it finished up. I didn’t want the voice of the mature, professional, single woman to fade into the background. 3six5dates is an attempt to fill that gap in some way.
As someone who is passionate about female entrepreneurship, can you provide some ways that women can empower themselves and embrace entrepreneurship?
Regardless of whether you are male or female, going out on your own is exciting but can also be scary. Historically, women have let men lead the charge. However, I am seeing more and more women stepping up to the challenge, which is uplifting.
Women need to recognise that their unique talents – such as being excellent relationship builders, natural multi-taskers and the simple fact that women make more purchasing decisions than men – to be great assets to starting a business. The key thing that has really made the difference for me, is to go out and get your support system if you are not surrounded by other entrepreneurs. I certainly wasn’t when I started! But it is this single reason alone that has sustained me through the tougher moments – and there will be plenty of those. Learning to ask for help is another key factor. Women tend to think they can do it all – but they should realise that they don’t have to! Burning out is the fast track to wanting to give up!
Can you tell our audience about any obstacles you faced when creating your Company and how you overcame those obstacles?
At one stage, we were trying to work on 10 projects at the one time and not completing any of them. It was definitely a lack of focus – trying to do too much and accomplishing nothing. We instead now concentrate on – and are committed to delivering – three larger project outcomes every quarter.
How do you manage your busy team of volunteers and what tools have you found to be effective on a day-to-day basis?
I can work pretty much anywhere there is an internet connection. Being a virtual team does come with its unique challenges. We make use of a lot of online tools – many of them free.
We run all our meetings and training through Skype, which allows us to share one another’s computer screens – extremely useful for design work.
All our files are shared on Dropbox and we are also heavy users of Evernote to keep track of tasks. To minimize the number of emails we send one another, we have a 3six5dates private group to relay any team announcements.
Most of my team, including myself, have their emails feed into their phones which has been a great time saver.
As the sole founder of your Company, how do you keep up with the everyday demands?
I have a wonderful team who are very supportive and make me feel like a superstar so I don’t feel like a solo founder!
I think running any business effectively and ensuring you are leading and driving the vision – as opposed to working ‘in’ it – requires that you automate and delegate as much as possible. This means equipping, empowering and trusting your team once they are trained.
What is next for you for the remainder of 2012?
3six5dates has spent the last six months developing strategic partnerships with dating organizations in the US. We have and will continue to roll out cross-promotional activities with them, including comics and animations.
In addition, I am working on launching another startup in Australia called MenuHub with a good friend and co-founder. As the name suggests, it is food-related and early testing has shown extremely positive results so far. I am excited about this new challenge!
The rest of the year looks to be full of possibilities!
