Three years later…
The About.com social story has been one heck of an adventure
On July 15, 2013, I started a new adventure with an old friend. It started with a crazy idea, “make About.com, this relic of Internet history, social media friendly”.
I distinctly remember a conversation I had on with our CEO Neil Vogel, who had started just a few months before, where he said, something to the effect of, “Look at it this way, our social couldn’t be any worse”. And he was right. Back then, the list of things we didn’t have:
- Exchange or Google Mail or any kind of usable email (at the time we used something called SquirrelMail?)
- Shared meeting calendars
- Any social media tools to publish with
- Barely any social media audiences
- No real way to measure success
- No process for curating and creating social content
- A social audience measured in the tenths of a percent
- No social share buttons on our article pages
- A site that looked like it has been designed 10 years before.
Was much longer than the things we did have:
- Me
- An ambition to fix stuff
- Many other smart people willing to give it a try.
Well, spoiler alert, we’ve come a long way since then. What’s happened to our team since July 15, 2013?
Well, a lot. And it hasn’t always been easy, but it’s been a heck of a lot of fun:
- The company has more than doubled its team size.
- We grew the social team from one to four people (and for this summer, six!)
- We added a full suite of social publishing tools and established some great partnerships with Buffer and Simply Measured.
- We’ve built some great relationships with amazing people at Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.
- We’ve grown our social audiences by more than 3000%.
- We’ve grown our average weekly social traffic by more than 400%.
- We’ve created and shared more than 60,000 posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+.
- We had a big part in the redesign of the entire about.com site.
- …and the launch of Verywell.
- I’ve spoken at more than 15 conferences representing About.com, including SXSW for the first time.
- I’ve spoken to countless people about what we’re doing here.
- Got featured in a Pinterest case study.
- I got to go on a really long and really fun train trip from Los Angeles to Austin for SXSW with Amtrak.
- My role got expanded to include partnerships with content platforms.
- I had a post get more than 100 recommends on Medium!
- I got to go live from one of my favorite places in the world, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway!
- I got to play softball!
- I’m sure i’m forgetting something!
But in all seriousness, I wanted to say thanks to Neil Vogel for reaching out, pitching and taking a chance on an initially very skeptical dude. Also unexplainably huge thanks to Nicole Schuman, Emily Faherty, Astrid Taran, Lindsay Sanchez, Jessica Spar, and our 2016 Summer Crew Frank Navas and Bianca Bello for having made up the best team in social.
Thanks also to all of the people at About.com who make it great to work work with and learn from people smarter than I, and to countless friends and family who have helped me to stay focused and inspired to keep doing amazing things. About.com makes it easy me to do things outside of work that I’m passionate about, and for that I am truly lucky.
The road has certainly been a crazy one, but I’ve learned so much more than I ever could have imagined. There’s still a lot left to do, so here’s to what’s next!
Cheers!
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