Kevan Lee

Kevan Lee

Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer

A collection of 267 posts

Breaking BrandNov 26, 2019
Next Up

After launching its first brand to market, the team reflects on the journey and what’s next for Pattern.

Breaking BrandNov 19, 2019
Equal Parts

Inspiration doesn’t always come from obvious places. Can 70’s jazz music encourage a culinary revolution?

Breaking BrandNov 12, 2019
Enjoy Daily Life

Slow down. Pause. Step Back. The road to launch isn’t always straight.

Breaking BrandNov 6, 2019
The Major Leagues

Rediscovering the joy in everyday moments pulls the team towards a new mission.

Breaking BrandNov 6, 2019
Gin Lane

With their agency at the forefront of its industry, success wasn’t quite what it seemed.

If Likes No Longer Matter on Social Media, Then What Does?

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

Online MarketingJul 29, 2019
10+ Indispensable (and Free!) Marketing Graders and Social Media Scores

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

Who’s Driving the Data Movement? Social Media Managers

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. Regardl

InstagramJun 13, 2019
The Meme-ification of Instagram

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

OpenMay 27, 2019
The 6 Lessons We’ve Learned About Product Marketing at a Startup

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

OpenMay 13, 2019
10 Org Chart Styles We Admire (And the One We Use at Buffer)

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

Case StudiesApr 10, 2019
Inside Look: How Two Teams Share a Social Media Inbox

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

OpenDec 28, 2018
Best of 2018: Our Top Articles and Experiments from the Open blog

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

OpenOct 29, 2018
Why Transparency in Business Matters (and How to Get Started)

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

What Voice and Tone Sounds Like in Practice: Inside the Buffer Content Style Guide

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

OpenOct 8, 2018
An Intro to Diversity and Inclusion in Business: Resources for HR, Hiring, Managers, Founders, and Allies

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

Z - PopularOct 4, 2018
How Our 10-Person Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month

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

FacebookOct 3, 2018
How to Create the Perfect Facebook Page for Your Business: The Complete A to Z Guide

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

Slack-off Fridays: What Happened When One Team Experienced a Day Without Slack

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

OpenJun 24, 2018
Warren Buffett’s Best Kept Secret to Success: The Art of Reading, Remembering, and Retaining More Books

“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

OpenJun 20, 2018
How We Stay Organized as a Remote Team: Our Fave Trello Boards

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 MarketingJun 18, 2018
Podcasting for Beginners: The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Podcasts

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

OpenDec 18, 2017
Why Terms of Service Matter and How We’re Evolving Ours at Buffer

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

Case StudiesDec 17, 2017
How One of the Most Popular Pro Sports Teams in America Shares to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and More

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