Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 267 posts
After launching its first brand to market, the team reflects on the journey and what’s next for Pattern.
Inspiration doesn’t always come from obvious places. Can 70’s jazz music encourage a culinary revolution?
Slow down. Pause. Step Back. The road to launch isn’t always straight.
Rediscovering the joy in everyday moments pulls the team towards a new mission.
With their agency at the forefront of its industry, success wasn’t quite what it seemed.
You’ve probably heard the news: Instagram is in the process of removing like counts from posts in the Instagram feed . At first blush, this might appear to be a massive change. They’re removing one of the most recognizable elements of social proof that’s ever existed. Likes are the way that we measure the world’s most popular posts [https://buffer.com/resources/tentree-earth-day-social-media-ca
You can audit your marketing in many ways—be it a quick-and-simple social media audit or a full-scale blog review. You can take the time to run the numbers yourself (a useful exercise!), or you can plug a URL into a new tool and have it tell you what it thinks. The more feedback, the better. That’s why we’re such big fans of quick and efficient marketing graders. You get actionable data, and you get it in seconds. I’ve bookmarked several of my favorites and dug up a handful of other useful gr
What if the most valuable data person on your team is your social media manager? It certainly might not seem that way at first blush. When you think of all the many data roles on a team, social media rarely bubbles to the top. Instead, you think of: Data scientists. Growth marketers. Analysts and quants. Or maybe there’s no data team and it’s just you and your closest confidantes, poring over the numbers together. Regardless, teams with social media managers are sitting on a goldmine of da
Social networks change and evolve, rapidly. We’re seeing this happen on Instagram today: less polish, more authenticity. In particular, we’re noticing an embrace of memes — that historically unpolished, yet highly relatable category of social media content. Recently, we’ve picked up on the proliferation of memes across many major Instagram profiles, and we’d love to share how brands are making the most of this form of visual marketing and what it could look like for you to give it a try with
Product marketing can seem like a catch-all for the many various skills, tasks, and activities that help people discover and love a product . Because of this, product marketing can have few bounds. It can feel loose yet vital. Abstract yet essential. Fuzzy yet powerful. And because of this juxtaposition, there’s a risk that you won’t get the full impact of proper product marketing if you don’t have things figured out for your team. This is
Within any company, the organizational chart lives a complicated, contradictory experience. At times, the org chart represents beloved clarity and organization. Other times, it represents rigidity and the tyranny of top-down, hierarchical systems. Organizations often phase out their org charts only to resurrect them again when they find themselves looking for an answer on organization and structure. While some may come back in original form, many companies are looking for new and improved ways
Only 10% of customer messages are answered on social media . Yet some brands find a way to answer 100% of requests. What’s their secret? Having many hands on deck certainly helps. We’ve found that some of the fastest-responding, maximum-delighting brands on social media employ a two-team approach to responding. Customer support teams handle all inbound product questions, and m
We hope you’ve had a great year. We’ve had a lot of fun here at Buffer , and have learned a lot while serving our customers and building our business this year. And, as always, we’ve done our best to capture all these learnings here on the Open blog to share with you. Thinking about all that’s happened here over the last year, several key moments stand out. We’d love to look back with you on some of the biggest Open blog posts from 2018
With transparency in business on the rise, more and more businesses have been talking openly about their hiring, their diversity and inclusion efforts, and even their revenue. Transparency is more than just a PR or marketing ploy for a business. There are significant advantages to productivity, trust, culture, and morale when you embrace transparency. We are fortunate to have been learning about transparency for the past seven years at Buffer — lots of lessons, good and bad, that we’re ex
Can you tell when you’re talking to someone from Buffer ? Absent any Twitter handle or an email “From” name or other identifying element, if you were essentially Internet-blindfolded, could you distinguish between a conversation with one brand versus another? If so, what a powerful impact that brand must have! We’d love to cultivate this type of unified voice and style at Buffer. As part of that journey, we created a company-wide content style guide as a resource on communi
Diversity and inclusion is one of the most important areas for us as we grow our company. We’d love to help others embrace it as well. In addition to all the benefits we’ve seen — innovation, product quality, unique perspectives, team morale, success — we believe in diversity and inclusion because it is the right thing to do and is the type of future we want to build toward. This article contains a lot more detail on the subject as well as specific strategies and tactics that you can imple
Highlights: * We spent $93,653 in August 2018 * We spent $3,041 on ads. We budget $4,000 per month (total!) * We spent $3,151 on software tools (our stack includes 28 paid tools) * Grab your free marketing budget template Tweet this ☝️ When I first started managing our marketing budget, I was a bit over my head. To put it mildly. What software were we actually spending money on? I didn’t know. What made sense for a monthly ad spend? Not sure. How much should we budget for the followi
Facebook now has over 2.23 billion monthly active users. And as small business owners and brand managers, there’s a very good chance you’ll be able to reach and connect with your target audience through Facebook. Great! So where should you start? And is there an easy blueprint to follow? From creating our Facebook Business Page to posting several hundred times over the past few years, we’ve experimented a lot with various Facebook marketing tips
Imagine a world without Slack .. Weeping, mourning, and gnashing of teeth, right? Slack is a ubiquitous part of so many workplaces. The real-time messaging and communication app has become the go-to for so many remote workplaces , distributed teams, and offices. Buffer , included. It’s also been a point of contention in our always-on, always-connected “alerts” culture. Are we too reliant on Slack? Many [https
“I just sit in my office and read all day.” This is how Warren Buffett, one of the most successful people in the business world, describes his day. Sitting. Reading. He advises everyone to read more, and that’s certainly a goal we can all get behind. Our personal improvements at Buffer regularly come back to the books we read—how we aim to read more and make reading a habit. I imagine you’re in the same boat as well. Reading more is one of our most common ambitions. So how do we do it? An
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post: One of the biggest questions that comes up when exploring how to work as a remote team is a question of operations: How do all those people, in all those places, stay organized and productive? Since Buffer is one of those fully remote teams, we get the chance to try out many different strategies and tools [https://buffer.com/resources/remote-wor
Content marketing comes in many different shapes and sizes. Creators like you have a lot of options: blog posts, social media updates, visuals, video, slide decks, and even more. You can even add podcasting to this mix. Audio is being used in clever ways to fit into the content plans of some of the top forward-thinking websites and blogs. Tim Ferris—author of The Four-Hour Work Week—started a popular podcast on his blog. Copyblogger runs their Lede podcast amid their traditional awesome marketi
bThere are very few moments when a Terms of Service agreement gets the spotlight. They crop up during the signup process then linger in the footer of a web page. On occasion, whenever the terms change, you might receive an email notification to let you know. Many people click through these terms with equal parts automation and trust, believing that the company behind the terms will be doing the right thing by them, the customer. This is exactly the trust we hope to engender at Buffer, and we f
For the Denver Broncos—and most any major sports team—there’s so much to share on social media not just at game time but all week long, all year long. How do you get the right content out at the right times? How do you ensure that all the awesome material from your site makes it to your social profiles—and know which content resonates? How do you get your whole digital team to join in and contribute? Look no further than the Denver Broncos. Their digital media team has a slick and efficient