The “hack day” is a popular and effective practice used by developers and designers alike to quickly ship new products with minimal administrative overhead. These events have consistently proven fruitful by the likes of Google, TechCrunch Disrupt, a variety of startups, and even the US Government in allowing creativity to turn ideas into reality much quicker than a traditional release cycle. Subscribing to the Facebook philosophy of “move fast and break things,” hack days are not about releasing a perfect product with signoff and approval from every boss in the building, but rather quickly developing and acting on great ideas.
In early 2012, Distilled held an internal hack day of our own. There were 40+ of us in the same room, and we were given the green light to run with any thoughts we had on how to make Distilled better. With little instruction, teams were formed, ideas were hashed out, a lot of coffee was consumed, and at the end of the day, we ended up with 70+ new ideas going live. Ranging from improving how we track data, fine-tuning a daily process, or somehow producing 57 SEO protip videos for our clients and blog readers, the main benefit from this day was how motivating it was to see the collective effort of a team creatively coming together to improve things for everyone.
Seeing the success of this effort, our Outreach team now applies this hack day concept once a month to a rotating list of projects. We typically pause other work and, as a team, pour all of our focus and resources into one client for eight hours straight. Thus far, this collective effort has quickly revealed itself as successful and most certainly worth the resources.
Below I will outline what a typical hack day looks like for our outreach team here at Distilled, which is to act as merely a skeleton of what could work for you. Things might be completely different for you and your team, and that is perfectly fine. There are very few rules as to what makes for a successful hack day, but we do recommend every team, whether you are in-house, agency, or even freelance, give it a try.
Under each section, you will find italicized text referencing the specifics of our most recent hack day for those hoping to briefly peek into daily operations here on the Distilled Outreach team.
But first, three key things to keep in mind:
- Get creative: No strategy should be off the table here as this is a great opportunity to try new tactics and see what sort of results they may yield. Nothing should be counted as a failure, even low success rates. Editing a Thomas Edison a bit here, “I have not failed a thousand times at building links. I have successfully discovered a thousand ways to NOT build a link!”
- Set lofty goals: This should be a great time to prove that your team working together is when it is at its strongest.
- Have FUN: This should be a break from daily routine, and is a great opportunity to enjoy some time with the team. Keep the fridge filled with snacks and soda, put on some music, and enjoy!
Second, a brief introduction to our main cast — feel free to reach out to any of us and ask any questions you may have:
Adria “Jersey” Saracino (follow on Twitter): Head of outreach
James “Jamazing” Daughtery (follow on Twitter): Outreach coordinator
Alyssa “Unofficial Distilled Rapper” Ennis (follow on Twitter): Junior outreach coordinator
Kyra “Dirty Look” Kuik (follow on Twitter): Content writer, editor
Luke “Tuts” Clum (follow on Twitter): Creative designer, content creator
And myself, Rob Toledo (follow on Twitter): Outreach coordinator
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8:00 AM – Prepare a ton of coffee:
This goes without saying.
I like to show up early to settle in a bit. There is a growing internal competition between myself and several others to see who can be the one to arrive early enough to unlock the door and get first shot at the Aeropress (soon to be replaced by an espresso machine).
8:15AM – Create a collective workspace:
Getting away from your desk can be one of the easiest ways to create almost instant productivity. Breaking daily routine will immediately foster outside the box thinking, which is exactly what leads to the most success during a hackathon.
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It is also beneficial to have the team in the same room. If this is not possible with people working from various locations, consider setting up an all-day webcam for easy and quick communication. We also use a shared Google doc to track our progress throughout the day (feel free to copy our template here).
Consider offering your clients (or managers if you are working in-house) the opportunity to sit in for as long as they want. The enthusiasm that comes out during a hack day is very contagious.
We have a (relativey) cozy conference room here at Distilled Seattle, which makes for a great work environment for such collaboration. Adria will typically project the shared gdoc onto the wall so we can all watch in real-time as we make progress throughout the day.
8:30AM – Preliminary strategy and goal setting:
This will vary greatly depending on the project. When looking to promote existing content, we might discuss what types of sites would be interested in the piece, what previous contacts would want to help, what benefits the content provides to niche communities, etc.
If it is more of a freestyle project, the strategy extends well beyond that. What creative work can we throw together? What sort of design can we get done in a day? Do we have time to start at square one and put out feelers to see what kind of content bloggers are interested in hosting, and then immediately turn around and provide that content?
Nothing is off-limits here. This time should be used for hyper focus on one project, figuring out what expectations you can set, and making a plan to achieve your goals all within a limited one-day period.
Looking for a few ideas to get the ball rolling? The only one Paddy Moogan gave an epic presentation on 35 ways to get links at MozCon 2012 with plenty of great ideas.
Our most recent hack day featured the Small Business Guide to WordPress. We tend to focus these monthly efforts on clients who have taken a chapter out of Wil Reynolds #RCS Bible (did you see their RCS Money project?) in order to not only maximize success, but to encourage more of this type of behavior.
We broke down this specific project into several areas of potential interest: small business blogs, web designers, social media influencers, and tutorial sites. We discussed what our pitches would look like, how we would reach the most people, and in what ways we could quickly turn around and provide the content we were hoping to deliver.
We agreed that the time would be best spent for the first few hours with James and I focusing on outreach to our previous contacts, Alyssa and Luke outreaching to new contacts, and Kyra prospecting at first then transitioning into writing once we started receiving positive responses.
9:30AM – Start taking action:
Put your head down. You should be tweeting, you should be emailing, you should be making phone calls, delivering hand-written letters, perhaps sending the occasional smoke signal. Start communicating your successes in real-time to the team. Update the Gdoc, do a quick happy dance in the room for everyone to see, but then get back to work. Turn it into a light and friendly competition among the team if that motivates everyone to push one another.
One thing to keep in mind, though: a link building hack day is not an excuse to get sloppy. As I will explain later, a bad pitch is still a bad pitch, so make sure you are still utilizing best outreach practices.
At Distilled, we start off our outreach efforts by pushing the magic “get links” button we built and then kicking back with a beer and opening up a bag of Cheetos (it’s noon somewhere) as the successes just start rolling in…
…Ok but seriously.
This is where things turn into a complete frenzy. It is fun to take the occasional step back and watch everyone hyper-focused on one collective project. It acts as a real incentive to act similarly. On this project, we started seeing immediate results as our initial response rate was pretty high, which immediately meant Kyra had plenty on her plate.
Adria normally takes this time to start playing some Top 40 to get us all pumped up. James most likely is on his second bag of Cheetos, and I won’t be found without at least one pack of Hi-Chews (which I think translates into “little slices of heaven”).
11:30AM – Check in:
This is a great time to touch base, pivot away from things that aren’t working thus far, focus on what has been successful, and discuss new ideas for after lunch.
We realized there was quite a bit more immediate success in the design space than expected, so we decided to place a little more focus on that niche, shifting focus a bit away from social media outreach. Small business bloggers had been about as responsive as expected, so we kept on pace there.
12:00PM – Lunch:
Take a deep breath. Get something to eat. Refresh the coffee pot. Get back to work.
1:00PM – Follow up:
This part will vary greatly depending on countless factors. Ideally, by the time you come back from lunch, you will have heard back from the majority of people you pitched your ideas to in the AM. If that is the case, congratulations! Now you’ve got your afternoon cut out for you making sure you can deliver the content promised in a timely manner.
But what happens if you didn’t hear back from very many of your contacts? It could be any number of reasons, but a couple things to keep in mind:
What day is it? We try to avoid scheduling outreach hack days on the bookends of the week as Tuesday and Wednesday are typically the most fruitful. Be mindful of time zones as well.
What are you offering? Are you targeting the right bloggers and influencers? Are you providing them with something relevant to their readership? Are you offering them enough quality?
And most importantly…
How was your pitch?
B.L. Ochman, a contributor for AdAge, owner of the What’s Next Blog, and all around awesome person, is always someone I can chat with about all the bad pitches she receives daily. In fact, she has an entire section on her blog dedicated to them: Press Releases From Hell. When I asked her for some input, here is what she had to say:
“The pitches I read and reply to:
– Are from people who have bothered to read my blog and refer to a post that I wrote that is relevant to what they’re pitching.
– Are briefings about topics I cover and care about. I’ll never write anything related to a pitch that starts “Because you cover the Internet (really, they say that!) I know you’ll want to write about ____.” Nope! You don’t know what I want to write about. I’ll make that decision.
– Tell me in one sentence or two (max) what they want and why it might be news.
– Are pitches from people who know my dog’s name.
The pitches that will be deleted immediately:
– Have unsolicited press release attachments.
– Are clearly going to everyone and their dogs. Give me an advance, an exclusive or some detail you haven’t given anyone else and I may be interested.
– Are from people who keep sending the same pitch. I get hundreds of emails every day. If I didn’t answer yours I’m not interested. It’s ok to remind me (once), but tell me what you’re reminding me about.“
The reason your pitches might be getting ignored is because you need to improve how you are communicating your efforts in the first place. But don’t get discouraged! There are plenty of great resources available to help you learn how to improve on your outreach efforts. How to Write an Elevator Pitch is a personal favorite that has some fantastic takeaways that can be translated into outreach efforts.
And by all means, feel free to contact me with your specific questions about how we handle outreach at Distilled. I am always happy to offer advice, review pitches, and give my brutally honest feedback on what I think could be improved.
We had a pretty fruitful morning at our hack day, with everyone seeing pretty high response rates. Our afternoon quickly shifted into delivery mode, making sure Kyra was as stressed as possible with all our requests for copy and introductions. We had to start focusing most of our efforts on content creation, but were not slowing down too much on our initial outreach emailing.
3:00PM – Crunch Time:
The last two hours should focus heavily on both distributing out your completed content as well as scheduling follow-ups, planning your emails for the next few days, cleaning up your reports, and ideally recapping the event with a brief breakdown of how everything went. Totaling your successes, discussing what worked, dissecting what didn’t work, and creating as much takeaway information as possible in order to improve your next hack day.
We used this time to send out some final emails, finish up and distribute content to those who were waiting for it and one more big push through social channels. We used the last 30 minutes or so to clean up the report that would eventually make its way into the client’s hands. We debriefed at the end about what we accomplished, what we learned and what we could take with us into future hack days.
5:00PM – Beer O’Clock:
Crack open a beer, pat yourself on the back, throw your feet up, and relax. While the next few days will require some project management, it’s best to step back at the end of the day and breath a bit.
What do you think? Does your team do anything similar to this? Could you see benefit from trying something similar?
