Courtney Seiter
A collection of posts by Courtney Seiter
A collection of 188 posts by Courtney Seiter - Page 3
Buffer People Report August 2016 * Last month’s report * All People reports * All Buffer reports Key Stats Applicants 365 –49% Offers completed 0 Open blog posts published 15 +87.5% Team NPS score 54% –5.3% Hello from Buffer’s People team, which works to build,
1/6/2016: We’re excited to share an update to this article about our Snapchat strategy here at Buffer. All of the details are below. In short, we’ve felt encouraged to see the strides Snapchat has made with diversity and inclusivity initiatives, and we’re eager to return to the network! How we came to the decision to rejoin Snapchat In August of last year, we chose to take a break from Snapchat (details in the full article below). Over the course of the last few months we’ve kept up with the t
It’s hard to believe that this used to be a totally acceptable way to advertise a product in America: Thankfully, our world has taken quite a few steps forward since this ad of the 1950s. Today, the marketing that wins hearts and minds is likely to look more like this: Even as “masculine” a pursuit as beer-drinking is getting in on the act, with Budweiser going from an ad like this in the 1980s: …to an equal pay ad in 2016. Beer ads that support equal pay? Feminine hygiene brands redefining
What would happen if you were to “like” everything you saw on social media? The developer Rameet Chawla found out when he built a script that liked every photo that passed through his Instagram feed. * He grew his followers by about 30 a day * He got invited to more parties * He got stopped on the street by people who recognized him from Instagram * He got message after message from friends encouraging him to post more. He said it was “almost like they were frustrated, like they were longi
See the previous hiring report → See all Buffer reports → People Report July 2016 As we’ve grown at Buffer, it’s been fun to watch the People evolve. This group works to build, retain and encourage the best team we can at Buffer, and includes roles focused on recruitment, human resources, inclusivity, and team-building and togetherness. Here’s what we got up to in July! July’s People metrics Applicants: 543 Interviews: 18 first stage interviews Offers made: 1 (Full-stack Develope
When you’re a fully remote team , all forms of communication take on much more importance. Since we don’t see each other face-to-face very often at Buffer, we have to think up other ways to express ourselves, so we focus a lot on our written communication , including emojis and lots of exclamation points, and of course, GIFs. The same applies for our wonderful Bu
Something really awesome happens when you search for images of an “entrepreneur” in Buffer’s super-simple social media image maker Pablo: We’re so delighted to add the Women of Color in Tech Chat photos into Pablo, to complement our other great photo partners including Pixabay and Unsplash. When you search Pablo using words like “entrepreneur,” “designer,” “developer,” “engineer,” “business,” “founder” and more, you’ll see these high-quality, free-to-use images from Women of Color in Tech Chat
What if bringing more diversity into tech could be as simple as having a coffee with someone new? At Atlassian , where Aubrey Blanche is the global head of diversity and inclusion, one successful program is just that simple: Women of Atlassian opt in, are matched randomly with a new teammate, and grow their professional network through an occasional latte. It’s just one example of the way Aubrey makes the tech industry’s diversity cha
Sometimes it seems like everyone in the world is learning to code . Coding jobs are plentiful, and coding bootcamps have become their own cottage industry. But coding isn’t the path to workplace happiness for everyone, and there’s a growing realization of the limitations of the “everyone needs to code” mentality. That’s where Ariel Lopez comes in. The entrepreneur and career coach founded 2020Shift (of whic
There’s only one shortcut in life, according to David Cancel . The serial entrepreneur (and sometimes Buffer advisor) is currently working on his fifth startup, Drift , which allows you to talk to your website visitors and customers in real-time, from anywhere. But his biggest passion—and his top secret to a great life—is continuous, voracious learning. It’s a topic he explores in his own podcast, Seeking Wisdom . (It’s
It’s easy to get tunnel vision as a marketer. You’ve got lots of goals to achieve, and only so many hours in the day to get there. So you put your head down, get focused, and get results. At the same time, it’s important to let yourself be inspired by others. Our industry can be creative, groundbreaking and a lot of fun. If you’re in need of a marketing recharge, here are 28 amazing marketing campaigns and experiments—and the amazing people who dreamed them up. Read on, and get inspired to ad
When you think about your coworkers, ask yourself: How many of them are happy? Who’s frustrated? Unchallenged? Looking for another job on the side? How do you gauge employee happiness, anyway, or turn what you learn into action? At Buffer, we’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with the employee engagement tools from OfficeVibe. Our friendly Slack bot (more on him later) asks teammates 5 questions each week, right from Slack, about how things are going at work. For some reason, it’s surprising
Angers activates. That’s the quote a friend shared with Christina Morillo, and it stuck in her mind. So when she set out to find some stock photos for the side project she had started with her friend Stephanie Morillo, she recognized what she was feeling when she couldn’t find them: Anger. The project, Women of Color in Tech Chat , is a community for women of color and non-binary people of color in tech. The goal was to build a simple splash page. “When we we
I believe you can learn something from everyone—as long as you’re listening. We’re always building on the legacy and lessons of those who have come before us. For marketers, this is quite a legacy indeed. Although the discipline of marketing only emerged in the 1900s, it builds on a foundation of sales, advertising, copywriting and relationship-building that is much older. Some of its wisest teachings are hundreds of years old. Some of its big lessons happened only months ago. And for every br
Ai Ching Goh didn’t know what kind of company she wanted to start. She just knew she wanted to stop having the “Monday blues.” So together with her husband, the experimental psychology student and former Procter & Gamble corporate exec founded Piktochart , a web app that helps non-designers tell visual stories through images and infographics. Today, Piktochart has grown from 4 people working in a small Penang-based warehouse to more t
The CEO and founder of Clef is trying to get rid of passwords forever. But Brennen Byrne, better know simply as B, still found a few hundred extra hours to build Clef’s company handbook from scratch—even though the company is currently a team of 7. “We take building a company really seriously,” he told CultureLab. “Even as a small team, so much of what gets done at Clef isn’t me. It’s important to us to build a great company at the same time as a great product.” Clef pro
“Unconscious bias” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot these days. What does it actually mean? Who has it, and can we even fix it if we do? In this episode of Buffer CultureLab, I got the chance to chat with Natalie Johnson, who answers all our burning questions about bias. Natalie is an expert in unconscious bias, from analyzing potential bias in companies’ people processes to training employees and managers on how to manage and mitigate bias. As a former People Analyst at Google, Nat
I can’t believe we’re on Episode 5 of the podcast! Every time we get together for Buffer CultureLab it is both fun and educational, and this week is no exception. On this episode Carolyn and I talk about Millennials at work, and then welcome Buffer investor Kanyi Maqubela, who is a partner at Collaborative Fund. It’s a very different kind of investment fund that looks beyond traditional investing criteria to think about things like creativity, values and culture. Language alert! Things get a l
Accessibility isn’t a topic that just affects some of us. As no less of an innovator than Google puts it , “the accessibility problems of today are the mainstream breakthroughs of tomorrow.” We at Buffer are delighted to have Neil Milliken (@neilmilliken ), Debra Ruh (@debraruh ), Antonio Santos (@akwyz ) of AXSChat
(Editor’s Note: Hi there! We’re experimenting with sharing the transcripts of our new podcast, Buffer CultureLab , on the Open blog. Would love to hear how this feels for you!) This is Buffer CultureLab, a podcast by Buffer – where we’re slightly obsessed with creating happier more human work. Here are your hosts, Courtney Seiter and Carolyn Kopprasch. Carolyn Kopprasch: Welcome to the show, this is episode 4. Courtney Seiter: Woohoo! Courtn
Whenever I’m working on a new challenge and keep getting stuck, there’s one post that I seem to return to again and again. It’s by our CEO, Joel, and it’s called “I Have No Idea What I Am Doing.” We’ve likely uttered that exact sentence 30 times over the course of the last month as we worked to figure out the ins and outs of launching our new podcast today. Despite talking a lot about podcasts at Buffer—sharing the podcasts we love [https://buffer.com/resources/p
It’s nearly inevitable: Humans tend to associate with those who are similar to us—whether politically, economically, racially or otherwise. This phenomenon, called clustering, is so prevalent that white Americans have 91 times as many white friends as black friends, according to research from the Public Religion Research Institute reported in the Washington Post: And not only are we more likely to have friends who are similar to us, but many popular social networks employ algorithms that “rewa
Whenever I hop onto Facebook to do something specific—find a link I saved for later or see what’s happening on Buffer’s Facebook page , perhaps—something strange happens. Despite my best intentions to stay on track and accomplish my goal, I get sucked in. Suddenly I’m checking my own notifications, looking at what’s been recently posted and generally forgetting why I came to Facebook in the first plac
Recently I learned something new about the history of photography that illuminates a lot about the relationship of technology and diversity. In the 1950s, Kodak sold almost all the color film used in the U.S. To make sure the colors of their prints were calibrated correctly, Kodak had to set a standard that any studio that processed film could match against. So they came up with the Shirley card [http://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-t