Last Thursday, September 10th, 97th Floor’s CEO Chris Bennett spoke at the SearchLove Conference in San Diego. SearchLove SD is an especially great conference for those who are really interested in learning about good tactics. This was the fourth SearchLove conference at which Chris has spoken. In the past, he has also given presentations at SearchLove conferences in Boston, London, and New Orleans.
Chris was a bit hesitant to speak on the topic he presented because the tactics were not earth shattering, but that was the point he wanted to make. His presentation, “How to Never Lose at Content Strategy,” emphasized that you don’t have to chase the newest tactics to succeed in content marketing. In fact, sometimes by just working a little harder and longer during the preparation stages, you can gather insights and data that will dramatically increase your chances for success. Particularly, he recommended not skimping when it comes to keyword research—SEO 101.
In the end, focusing on results is what really matters. Chris gave several examples of different campaigns that reaffirm this, including some that did not end up going viral and garnered very few social media shares, but which still significantly improved organic traffic to the site—which directly translated to revenue. Meanwhile, another campaign seemingly had all the right ingredients for success but only resulted in a brief spike in traffic. This focus on results shows through not only in 97th Floor’s work for its clients, but also in the company’s culture. It trickled down to the company’s employees when 97th Floor became a Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE.
While each of these concepts seems very intuitive, it proved to be exactly what the audience needed to hear. Overall, the presentation was very well received.
SEO 101: Remember the keywords! Do real keyword research, not 5 minutes, 3 hours. @chrisbennett #searchlove
— Julien Brandt (@Julienbrandt) September 11, 2015
Ohh boy! >> "Add 3 hours to the 5 mins of keyword research you usually do" - @chrisbennett #searchlove
— Megan Cynaumon (@MeganCynaumon) September 11, 2015
The 90s called: they want their keyword research back. @chrisbennett #searchlove
— Marli Mesibov (@marsinthestars) September 11, 2015
Sometimes, the best presentations remind you to just do basics #notshiny #searchlove @chrisbennett
— Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) September 11, 2015
Not only that, Chris’s presentation was featured as one of the top decks on SlideShare a few days later.
The final takeaway is that no matter your resources, everyone can work a little harder and focus more on the details. This is exciting, because it means that anyone can can compete when it comes to content.
View the full deck from Chris’s presentation below:
We’re excited and proud to announce that 97th Floor is now officially a ROWE™ Certified Organization!
ROWE stands for Results Only-Work Environment, and is a human resource management strategy that was created by Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler. The idea behind ROWE is to give employees 100% autonomy in exchange for 100% accountability. Employees are judged only on the work that they accomplish, rather than on irrelevant issues such as the hours that they spend in the office. Since creating ROWE, Jody and Cali have founded CultureRx™ to train, assess, and certify organizations in the use of their results-only approach to employee management.
To prepare for our transition into a ROWE workplace, all employees of 97th Floor completed an in-depth series of courses and discussions provided by CultureRx. Each employee was then given a test to ensure that as an organization we’d be successful at implementing this new—and very important—aspect of our culture. We passed with flying colors, and are now operating as a fully certified ROWE company!
If you want to learn more about ROWE, I invite you to read about it in Slate, Inc., or HuffPost. Better yet, check out the CultureRx website, GoROWE.com. However, the basic idea behind ROWE is found in this slogan:
“Work whenever you want, wherever you want, as long as the work gets done.”
At 97th Floor, we charge our clients based on the results we deliver them, not on the amount of time we work (other than consulting projects). Our clients couldn’t care less if we spent 100 combined hours or 1,000 combined hours during the term of the contract—as long as the agreed upon goals in the contract are met. As such, it seemed inappropriate to judge our own employees based upon the hours that they work, rather than the work that is being accomplished. This was a wake up call for us.
Despite the obvious benefits associated with ROWE, this isn’t a decision that we made lightly. In fact, we’ve been weighing the pros and cons since the beginning of 2014. It all kept coming back to one fear: How can we know that an employee is working, if they aren’t in the office? This is a valid question, but it is one that is rendered moot by a second question: How can we know that an employee is working even when they are in the office?
It’s normal for management to want to exert some form of control over those on the company’s payroll. After all, employees are expected to earn their pay, and when they choose instead to ignore their duties, it can cause serious problems for the business in question. However, the reality is that a bad employee will find ways to avoid responsibility, even while sitting at his or her desk surrounded by coworkers. In fact, by giving employees a standard of measurement based upon something other than accomplishments, leaders enable low-productivity. In essence, they tell workers that they don’t have to work; they just have to show up.
Well, after more than a year of discussion, we decided that we weren’t content with sticking with a flawed strategy. We wanted employees to be adults. We wanted them to be respected. We wanted them to be in control of their work and their lives. We’ve believed for a long time that our agency has the best talent in the industry. Now we are letting our employees decide how to provide the best work possible for our clients—which, in reality, is what we’ve expected of our people all along. Traditional HR tools such as time clocks, office hours, limited vacation/sick days, and mandatory meetings all just get in the way, and distract employee focus from what is really important. ROWE puts everything back into perspective, making it possible for employees to work at the times and in the locations that are best suited to their own talents, and it helps management improve as well, by freeing it from the need to constantly supervise and ‘hand-hold’ those who work below them. When all is said and done, the only viable measure of success is success itself. ROWE allows us to release control over a number of things that we are now realizing that we never wanted to control in the first place.
Being giving the freedom to work on my own terms has been absolutely amazing. Today I went to see Disney Pixar’s Inside Out with my wife and daughter at 3:30pm, and now that my daughter is in bed and my wife is out with a friend, I’m able to get back to work... albeit in my backyard with my dogs while I enjoy this warm summer evening! And I’m not the only one enjoying ROWE. One of our Senior Graphic Designers, Maggie Call, recently travelled through India for a month with her husband (and yeah, she represented 97th Floor at The Taj Mahal). And while she was traveling, she still produced amazing work and met on-going project deadlines. One of our Team Lead’s, Cole Rieben, just had gorgeous twin girls. Complications kept them in the hospital for a few weeks, and Cole was able to be there for his family as a husband and a father, while still providing exceptional work for the company. Think about what type of work Cole would have produced if he had had to neglect his responsibilities at home in favor of arbitrarily putting in eight hours a day at the office resulting in him being stressed out. What kind of quality would Maggie’s work be if she were burned-out from being forced to choose between occupying a desk and following her dreams? How effective would I be in my position if I was depressed from missing this time in my daughter’s life? The sad truth is that when freedom is restricted, results suffer. According to Gallup, over half of U.S. employees were not engaged in their jobs in 2014. I wonder how many employees would be happier and more engaged if they had more autonomy.
Success doesn’t breed happiness; happiness breeds success—that’s the happiness advantage (read Shawn Achor’s book). If we’re tired, stressed, burned out, or just having a crappy day, we don’t need to just sit at the office anymore and fake it. We can do something else and get back to work at a better time. Now our clients are getting work from happy people who are ready to share their own excitement and heart in everything that they produce. Our work in the past has been amazing—just look at our retention rate and the awards that we win. With this improvement to our culture, we can’t wait to see just how much better our work will be!
While one purpose is to attract and retain the best talent, another purpose is to increase productivity. Leaders at 97th Floor no longer have subjective conversations about how hard their team members are working. Now, they only focus on the results. This gives 97th Floor 100% accountability from all employees. To put it simply: No results, no job. That’s how clients treat us, so that’s how we need to treat employees. Does this mean that if an employee has a bad month, we simply fire them? Probably not. Clients usually don’t cancel on us if we have one bad month, or if one campaign fails to perform as expected; they look at the overall track record of our work. 97th Floor will do the same with employees. So while we’re not absolutely cutthroat, we are completely serious about maintaining an A-Player culture. This requires fast firing, regardless of how hard an employee is working. Our clients deserve the best talent working on their accounts, and our employees deserve to be surrounded by the best individuals. ROWE helps us recognize those individuals, and to offer them the best possible environment for them to be able to reach their full potential. In the end, it is the employee who achieves the best results that is recognized and rewarded, regardless of how many hours he or she has spent in the office.
We’re excited about this as a company! If you are a client or a prospective client, you should be excited as well. 97th Floor will be even better than what we’ve been in the past! If you’re a prospective employee, you should be excited as well. Come join us, and see for yourself just how great of results you can achieve!
There is obviously much more to be said about ROWE and what it means to us here at 97th Floor. I’ve talked enough though, so I’ll now let our work and our culture speak for themselves.
Here at 97th Floor, we believe that the best gifts are the ones that provide the recipient with an opportunity to help others. This is why for our holiday card this past December, we created the #20helps campaign. We wanted to be able use our success as a company and as individuals to help others. More than that, we wanted to inspire our clients, partners, friends, and anyone else who might be interested, to join in the spirit of charity, and to give back a little something to help those in need. You can read more about our holiday card here.
The holiday card was also a hint at some of our big plans as a company for 2015. Last year was the year that our company really came into its own. To accommodate our extraordinary growth, we moved into a new and better office. We upgraded our equipment to take better advantage of recent technological advances. We created and filled several new positions in order to further improve our overall performance. However, for 2015, we feel as though we need to mature as a company and start helping others. So, at our company holiday celebration last month, we announced our plans to become much more heavily involved with charitable organizations in 2015.
The first aspect of our plan is to donate 1% of our gross revenue to charity. Based on our projections, we estimate that this will mean $65,000 donated by our company to charities in 2015. Each employee of 97th Floor will be able to select a charity of their choice, and 97th Floor will donate a portion of the 1% to that charity. The 1% pledge was inspired by Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce. To learn more about The Salesforce Foundation and their 1% model, go here.
Charitable organizations are always happy to accept monetary donations, but sometimes the donation that does the most good, is a donation of service. The second phase of our 2015 charity plan is to provide a substantial amount of pro bono work for these organizations. We’ll be doing this by bringing on charities as we would normal clients, however, the work that we do for them will be done completely free of charge. We’ll have two charities as clients at all times, and we’ve already built a team at 97th Floor dedicated to service these charities. Our first two charity clients are both local organizations headquartered here in Utah: The Road Home (helping people step out of homelessness and back into the community) and United Way of Utah County Women’s Leadership Council (promoting programs that empower children). 
We have a great deal of respect and admiration for both organizations and for what they do for the communities in which we live and work, and we look forward to a long and fruitful relationship. We are just getting started, but over the next few months, expect to see some great things coming from these partnerships! The work itself that we’ll be donating in 2015 is equivalent to $360,000.
Above all, we realize that it’s our amazing clients that keep us in business and allow us to give back to the world that has given us so much. To quote President John F. Kennedy, "As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them." We believe that brands work with us because of the results we’re able to help them achieve. However, we also believe that people do business with people. Through our ongoing charity efforts, we intend to focus on the human side of digital marketing, and to improve not only our clients’ businesses, but also the lives of those with whom we come into contact. Thank you for partnering with us on your digital marketing efforts!
never do anything just to make money. only do those things you’re passionate about.
In this episode of 97th Floor Radio, Chris Bennett, CEO and Founder of 97th Floor discusses his start in graphic design and computer technology and all things digital long before design, web development and online technology were part of the mainstream workflow. A fascination with traditional marketing and digital marketing, namely the idea of being able to create something that compels action on the part of consumers, whether it be to purchase a product or sign up for a course or subscribe for more information. His move to online marketing came as he learned more about the competitive marketplace and the great equalizer that is digital, where a solopreneur can compete with big name brands by applying best practices in content and testing.
You will learn:
do more than you read - continue your education but remember to test everything and find out what’s true for you.
Links and Resources Mentioned:
Learn more and connect with Chris Bennett | LinkedIn | Twitter
10 Coolest Entrepreneurs in Utah by Utah Valley BusinessQ.
Agency of the Year - 2014 Gold Stevie Winner
Connect with 97th Floor on YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn
What’d you think of today’s show? The conversation continues in the comments below. Be sure to leave your insights.
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97th Floor was presented with a Gold Stevie® Award for Marketing or Advertising Agency of the Year in the 12th Annual American Business Awards in Chicago on June 13th. They also received Silver Stevie® Awards in the Viral Marketing Campaign of the Year category and Brand Experience of the Year -- Business-to-Business category.
97th Floor is a finalist at the new products & tech awards for Best Home/Welcome Page.
More than 3,300 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories, including Most Innovative Company of the Year, Management Team of the Year, Best New Product or Service of the Year, Corporate Social Responsibility Program of the Year, and Executive of the Year, among others. Stevie Award winners were selected by more than 240 executives worldwide who participated in the judging process this year.
“It’s an honor for us to recognize and celebrate such an outstanding class of organizations and individuals,” said Michael Gallagher, president and founder of the Stevie Awards. “The judges were especially discerning this year. All of this year’s Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie winners should be proud that the judges recognized their achievements and their ability to express those achievements in a way that captured the judges’ hearts and imaginations.”
Details about The American Business Awards and the lists of Stevie winners who were announced on June 13 are available at www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.
Found below is the video of Chris Bennett accepting the Gold Stevie Award for Agency of the Year.
97th Floor was named a finalist in four categories in The 2014 American Business Awards, and will ultimately be a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Stevie Award winner in each category.
The American Business Awards are the nation’s premier business awards program. Past winners include Proctor & Gamble, Sony, American Express, Tropicana, Wynn Las Vegas, AT&T, Domino’s and Aflac.
97th Floor is proud to be honored for the following awards:
Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Awards will be announced at the 2014 awards banquet in Chicago on June 13th.
Click here to see a list of all the finalist in each category.
97th Floor also recently received an Honorable Mention Webby Award for the www.pixartheory.com
