Awesome People - Ep 79
Awesome People - Ep 79
copywriting, memes, content strategy
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
Each week we deliver one awesome person to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, ops wizzes— who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hireable on an interim basis.
Please meet Katya, your Content Strategist and Copywriter 🥳
Copywriting is one of the most underrated skills. The right words convert customers and build a strong brand.
Katya was referred to us by Andrew Przybylski from Tribe Capital. She's trusted by companies ranging from Tesla, to Credit Karma, to Apple.
Most recently, Katya managed all of Tesla’s internal communications — everything from the internal website redesign, to company-wide emails, to employee onboarding.
In a previous life, she was a jack-of-all-trades in the advertising world. She wrote outdoor and in-store copy for retail brands like CAT Footwear and acted as the copy lead and community manager for startups like Credit Karma (acquired for $7B). She also ghostwrote executive thought leadership content for VC-backed companies like Zumper (Series D co, raised $150M+).
Katya has a strong foundation in video. Last winter, she collaborated with Katie Couric and People Magazine to profile the lives of Dolly Parton and Beyoncé for their #SeeHer video series. At Apple, she wrote scripts for the Apple Support YouTube channel. She brought dry topics like “How to clean your keyboard,” and “How to reset your iPhone password,” to life.
When she’s not writing, she’s studying social media trends, chronicling internet history, and studying Khmer, the official language of Cambodia 🤓
You can hire to develop your content strategy, write long-form thought leadership content, and write video scripts.
Want an intro to Katya? Reply to this email and I’ll connect you!
She was gracious enough to share some pro-tips with us here 🙏
Make community management a superpower
Community managers are typically massively underrated and underutilized. They often sit somewhere between “intern” and “entry-level” and are hired to comment on social media and schedule posts. Community managers can do so much more than that. They can be your “on the ground” secret weapon.
The best community managers:
Provide unique insights to marketing, product, and customer experience teams
Understand common user complaints
Keep a pulse on customer sentiment
Help construct the voice of the brand and customer
Determine where your customers are hanging out. Side note: It’s not uncommon for brands to find out they have unofficial Discord servers or subreddits where users are sharing concerns. Untagged tweets are another goldmine.
Strong brand guidelines make creating social content easier and faster
Your brand guidelines for social should include:
Determine your tone of voice. How much humor do you use? Do you use slang? Do you have a preferred casing? (For example, some brands have decided to post in all lowercase to create a more personal feel.)
Choose your content buckets. What kind of content do you post? Educational? Purely promotional? Never promotional?
Define terms. How do you name things? For example, if you’re a fast food restaurant, do you say “soda” or “pop”? Do you ever reference other brands? If so, which ones?
Carve out your space. Are there any topics (holidays, current events, sports, et al.) you avoid? On the flip side, are there any topics you always mention, are there any trends you always jump on? How do you interact with user-generated content?
Stay consistent with any third-party visuals. Do you ever use gifs? Memes? Are there exceptions?
Response guidelines when engaging with others online. When responding to community members, users, or customers, how do you speak to them? How often do you respond? How quickly? What’s your approach when praised or when criticized? When do you block people?
Pre-written responses are great but remember they should be used as guides, not blindly copied and pasted.
Let’s talk about community managers and memes…
We’ve officially entered the era of Chief Meme Officers. Introducing timely memes into your social campaigns isn’t easy and can come off as cringe-worthy.
How do some companies get it right and others get it so wrong? It’s a lot less random than you think.
You need someone who truly understands the mood of the platform that you’re posting on. This requires spending a significant amount of time on each platform. Traditional marketers often don’t have the bandwidth to go deep. On the other hand, community managers do.
A short case study:
Watch this tweet from KFC. It’s targeted toward Spanish KFC customers. At first blush, you might think it’s trying too hard, or confusing or esoteric.
But look carefully at the quote tweets — this tweet went ultra-viral. It went far beyond its target audience and generated a lot of conversation. It’s half-life was much longer than most social posts.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of negative sentiment on this tweet. But ultimately, looking through all the responses, it did land. Why did it land?
There are two reasons:
This meme speaks the language of the Internet in an organic, timely way. This is something that you can’t learn from an article or a book. You have to be there. You have to “read the room.” Community managers are well-equipped to read the “internet room” because they spend all day on social media.
It’s speaking to KFC’s customer base. Do I think that Applebee’s could have gotten away with the same post? Absolutely not. It shows a clear understanding of who’s eating at KFC, and who the brand resonates with.
Want an intro to Katya? Reply to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to any of the folks in this email (including the PS section 🎉).
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures (join the syndicate here)
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Awesome People continued 🚀
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Brian works with founders to become high-performing and conscious leaders. He’s been a founder, VC, and product manager. Most recently, as a coach, he’s helped multiple founders close their Series As and scale their teams.
Tomasz is the Chief Data Science Officer for hire at Tooploox, one of my favorite dev agencies. I worked with Tooploox at Rise. Tomasz built Tooploox’s team of 30+ AI engineers, has worked with world-class startups, and is trusted by Stanford faculty.
Richard is a BD and pipeline expert. Richard has closed clients like Expedia, Square, WeWork, and Airbnb and has worked at the Rebel Fund. He’s trusted by numerous YC and VC-backed cos to scale enterprise sales.
Want intros to anyone here? Lmk and I’ll connect you!
Part-time opportunities
Want to make some extra $$$ and work on interesting projects? The Awesome People job board is filled with awesome flexible advising and consulting roles. They’re perfect for fun-employed folks, self-employed folks, and moonlighters!
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Yes! That’s right! Get paid to do cool shit for awesome people. Help with this newsletter, work on deals, or suggest whatever you want. Check out the bounty board and respond to this email with how you want to get involved!
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