drshaleenagarwal-blog

[bestshipsmackdown]

is mod a kinnie of any kind ??

Nah. I have my comfort characters and characters I call my spouses (mostly Aizawa from BNHA) and characters that I’m like “that’s my kid right there”. But I don’t tend to like the characters I can identify with, because a lot of it is stuff I’ve grown from or learned to not act in certain ways, and they drive me up the wall falling into situations that I’ve long ago grown out of.

[yuvon-writes-letters]

Yu, Jake,

I am glad you talked it out! I think both of you needed it. And I understand the need to recharge, I hope you feel better when this letter reaches you, Yuvon :)

It's still evening and I think I am done with preparing everything for tomorrow. I cooked. Chinese. Once again. I mean, I needed to use the food before I go, right? And Max will be happy tomorrow. (Please imagine I sighed here. Because I did.) I really don't know what to think. I'd rather be with J

No new messages from the Crow-Crew.

Now to Jessy, you're probably right. I don't even know if she'll answer again, I just hope she would've contacted us before her and the others just handed over their Jakes whereabouts.

If I could I would hit

And you are right, their whole timeline is pretty messed up...And the MWAF still out there (since I cannot imagine any Jake to be him)

Maybe you're also right, I shouldn't worry that much about TSB. I guess. Yeah. I am very sure Goldie did everything they could.

[For this one sentence the writing becomes more clean than Lis' normal writing] Like they always did...

[The writing's normal again, but a few pink stains are on the paper]

Sorry, I suddenly got a bit dizzy. Spilled my tea. Probably a bit exhaustion?

Yeah, Jake, you got things right. Somehow a Jessy comtacted us. I guess this could happen because she read Matts letters? Somehow? But I think that could be a reason we got the letter. She probably threw all of them in a mailbox together. (Since she said she wrote some everyone who sent Matt letters I think?)

You're also right about the fact that this Jake got framed... Are you Is everything Is the thought DAMN. Why is writing so difficult

I actually DO concur with you, Jake. It honestly makes much sense to me. Like, when I was enjoying my maladaptive daydreaming as a child (totally not still doing it) I liked to create my own worlds. Manipulate them while daydreaming.

We don't know much about different entities, but it just makes sense to me. And I don't know why I brought this up or where I wanted to go with this. I hope it was somehow understandable.

Jake also has some more things to say. I am not allowed to read, Yuvon can if she wants to. But it mainly is for you, Jake.

And one more thing before that...Is he in danger? Because I know Jake is working on something new. Just tell me he is not in danger.

Lis🐾🔥

[Again the screenshot of a message is glued to the back of the letter]

Before I start, thank you again for your help, Jake. I was able to work much faster with the knowledge you gave me.

But I have to ask you one thing. Liska gave me the possibility to read all letters until the letter where we could talk the first time without her reading. Did something happen? Or did anyone write something that disturbed her?

She doesn't show me the letter anymore, just telling me some information, saying it wasn't important. She changed topic when I want to ask her. What happened that she does not want to tell me?

If you are so nice Yuvon, if you read, I would like you to stop here. It's something that I don't want to tell you when Jake isn't ready :)

About your diagnose, was it ADHD? If you do not want to tell that's fine.

As for me, since you gave me the chance to get to know this about you. It was never diagnosed, but after my life I am pretty certain it doesn't need to.

I have had social anxiety since early childhood. That's the reason I am an complete introvert.

My mother never wanted to get me diagnosed, though.

I thought detail for detail wouldn't be that bad, and I understand what you mean. We're all similar but different. As well as Liska, Rai and Yuvon.

~ Jake

Lis,

We definitely needed to talk, yeah. I think Jake might have already said it, but thanks for pushing us into it. That misunderstanding could've snowballed into something bigger if we hadn't talked about it. It's sort of hard for me to parse that he could be concerned about me, because that's MY role in my head. I'm the one who's supposed to worry.

I'm trying to be better about that.

While it would've been nice if she'd contacted us before her Jake was imprisoned, it wouldn't have made sense in context. You don't get affairs in order before you work on getting the murderer imprisoned. Priorities. Besides, Matt apparently never even opened these letters, so we wouldn't exactly be first on the list of contacts to inform of his passing.

Lis, I have a bit of an odd request. Do you know about word association? It's basically, I give you a word and you write down anything that comes to mind when you think of it. It could be words with similar meanings, words related to memories that are connected to that word, if it's an object or related to an object a description of the object, etc etc. You don't have to think hard about it, it's probably better if you don't think about it too much actually. I'd like you to try it. Your word is "yellow".

I don't know how you're sending your letters, but I need to send them in here, and there's no mailbox or anything. I just put them in an envelope or am handed an envelope by Jake, throw them in the air, and say "send".

Yes, I learned this through trial and error. Yes, the first edition of the "send" command had a lot more cursing.

What's this about agreeing with Jake?

Jake just told me. Definitely seems like it, yeah. What I saw in the north room also supports that theory. I don't think it changes much for us, though. Whether we're being made into entertainment or not, we've still got to find a way out of our circumstances. If it means we have to break Fate to do it, fine. We'll find a way.

Mmm, probably not too much more danger than usual? All Jakes are in some danger at all times, so it's hard for me to judge. But I haven't really been reading the inter-Jake correspondences, so I don't know for sure.

Anyhow, that's all from me for now. Talk to you later, Lis :)

—Yuvon

(The handwriting changes to Jake's.) Hello, Lis and Jake.

That version of Jessica handed over my alternate self's whereabouts? That is... disturbing. I will endeavor to show more caution in what I reveal to Jessica in the future in this world, though admittedly her releasing my current location is not a great concern.

I suppose anyone can write to Yuvon, then, if they know of her existence. Is there a return address on these envelopes when they are sent? Yuvon and I assumed the method of returning letters was a little more mystical than mundane, given the method of sending, but it seems we leapt to conclusions.

I second Yuvon's suggestion of word association. As Yuvon said, do not think too hard about it. Simply write anything and everything that comes to mind. There is no right or wrong answers, so do not feel pressured, nor linger overly long on each association once it is written.

Yuvon seems very confident in her ability to "break fate". She was muttering something about rebirth and change while writing her section of the letter, as well. I am not entirely sure what she means by that, but if she has some sort of plan, far be it from me to stand in her way, so long as she does not put herself in danger.

I do not think it is precisely my place to tell you one way or another whether your Jake is in danger, but I assure you that your Jake is nowhere remotely near going the way of TSB. You do not need to worry on that count.

As always, it was a pleasure to speak to you, Lis. Or write to you, I suppose. If you would please stop reading here, I am about to address your Jake's message :)

You are welcome. That bug frustrated me for an embarrassingly long time; that is why I recalled it in such detail. Saving you the trouble was the least I could do.

There are two possibilities I can see as to why Lis may not be showing you the letters.

First: From what I understand, an alternate Jessica contacted Yuvon. Her version of the Detective, a man named Matt whom she was romantically involved with, was murdered, and that version of Jake was framed and possibly incarcerated. Yuvon did not share the letter with me out of respect to Jessica; Liska may feel similarly.

Second: I introduced a theory that the entities may be more involved with all versions of the Detectives than we previously believed. Tragedy so far seems to be particularly attracted to even the Detectives with no ties to the supernatural. Lis may not wish to share that information with you for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, other than that, I can think of nothing as of yet, but I will read back over recent letters later to ensure I have not missed anything.

That was a good guess, but the diagnosis was not ADHD.

Thank you for telling me. I suppose social anxiety would be another possible reason for our "flaw". Detail for detail sounds quite fair :)

Before I sign off, you should know that Lis is expressing concern over your safety. I informed her you would not go the way of TSB, so please do not make me a liar.

Good luck,

Jake

(The letter tucks itself into the paper clip with the others.)

[frozenmiwa]

Review: Rise of the Turtles part 1 (TMNT 2012)

I know, I know I promised to post this during summer but instead I ended up editing my TMNT 2012 fanfiction. I ended up having some technical difficulties with this post. I did watch the episode but somehow all the screen shots I took just vanished. My guess is some form of Windows update happened and poof, all screen shots were gone.

I actually just got the first season on DVD yesterday – I finally ordered it online three or so weeks ago, I’ve been looking for Finnish release of the show ever since 2014 when it started to air in Finland but we got nothing. Not that I minded, the dub was decent but definitely lot worser than the dub 2003 series got from the group called Dubberman. So I’m more than happy to have the UK release of the first season.

Firstly I’d like to address one thing: I was hesitant to watch this show because I don’t like CGI that much anymore since it’s everywhere these days, but I was interested in it after scrolling some Turtlepedia especially after I saw one of my absolute favorite character from the 2003 show, April. When I read about Donnie’s crush on her, I recalled their relationship in the 2003 series – seeing Donatello and April interact was one of my favorite things about the show so naturally I was interested to see how well 2012 series pulled that off. Then I had this boring weekend and I decided to give it a try. I did and absolutely loved the show, I loved the turtles, I loved what they did with Splinter, I even loved this one character I thought I wouldn’t, what I didn’t love however was April – instead Karai became my favorite character.

But we get to that when we get to that. Let’s start this thing!

Like with the previous post I’m not going to do full plot summary here, instead I’m doing this brief summary. If you are interested in full summary please go to sites like Turtlepedia for that!

Now this episode starts similarly to the 2003 series. We are introduced to our main characters as they are in training session. It turns out the turtles are celebrating their fifteenth birthday today and wish to go top side for the first time even though Splinter is hesitant to let them go. Eventually he does and the turtles get to see the what the world looks like outside sewers. It seems to be full of wonder… and dangers. Turtles witness a family of two, father and daughter getting kidnapped by a group of identical men, but are unable to rescue them due to their inability to work as a team. And Mikey finds out those men weren’t exactly human… but no one believes him. The group returns to the lair and they get scolded by Splinter for letting the kidnappers getting away because they couldn’t work as a team – then again, he does admit it’s partially his fault as he never trained them to fight as a team. While Splinter suggest they have another year to wait until their next visit to the top side, Donnie isn’t having it as he wants to save the poor kidnapped girl, he fell in love with at the first sight. After some convincing Splinter agrees to let them go and save her. Before they go however Splinter makes Leonardo their leader – the group does need a leader in order to function correctly after all, but as to why he chose Leo, isn’t clear. So, to the back side we go, after some time they manage to find one of the kidnappers and chase him until his car falls over. When Raph opens up the back door to the car a mysterious cannister filled with green ooze rolls over – looking a lot like the one broken cannister the turtles have in their lair, the one that had something to do with their current forms. And with that the first episode ends.

What I liked about the episode

+ Turtles actually acting like teenagers. I don’t think we have seen that in any other incarnation despite the show being called “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”.

+ What they did with Leo’s personality. I was so used to Leo being this perfect serious leader who’d win any training session against Raph, seeing Leo actually losing against Raph not to mention having this kind of geeky awkward side to his character was refreshing to see.

+ Master Splinter. I liked how he looked nothing like his former counterparts, I loved how they brought up his personality and most of all now he actually felt like a caring father to the turtles instead of being just their teacher. Not to mention how cool his design looks in this show!

+ The plot in general. For a pilot episode it did good job at presenting our four main characters, showing they, each have different personalities without spending too much on that. It had this sense of wonder when we see the turtles discovering the world for the first time. And there was action included as well but not in a way that our heroes just swoop in and save the day, I liked the fact they messed it up on their first try. I also liked how the episode didn’t end with turtles saving the day but rather with a cliff hanger because that would get viewers to want to catch the next episode – unlike 2003 series where it just ended, personally I wouldn’t have waited to see the next episode, unlike with this 2012 show.

+ Interaction and comedy between the turtles was well done, I definitely did have some laughs here and there.

+ The way flashbacks and ending stills are done in this version. What can I say? I just love the comic book style they went with!

What I didn’t like about this episode

- Well in general I liked this episode fine; it really didn’t have much to complain about, characters were solid, their backstory was solid, story was solid and the action was solid. Over all I’d say it’s a good episode. But if I had to pick one thing I did not like; it would be the way April was presented. Unlike the turtles she didn’t seem like a character, just a pretty girl shown to our faces who needed to be saved. I know that’s how it was intended but if I’d have to pick one thing I didn’t like about the episode, this would be it.

And now let’s say few words about the dub my country eventually got...

When this series finally started to air in Finland you better believe I got up every Sunday to watch this show, not because I hadn’t seen it, it was January 2014, I had already seen the episodes couple of times in English but I wanted to check out the dubbed version especially after seeing the voice cast. Just by looking at the voices seemed like this dub would go either way. It could be good or really bad. Like with seasons 3-4 and 6-7 of TMNT 2003 a group called Dubberman. And I wasn’t completely trusting for the fact they would do the show justice. I mean they did skip over the season 5 in 2003 series – and later season 3 in 2012 series so…

The dub was decent, not great, not the worst we could have gotten but decent. There were some errors like they called Raphael “Rafaello” or “Rafa” for short like in the dubbed VHS/DVD release of 1980 series – luckily, they stopped doing that after few episodes because it bothered me a lot. Another thing was how those Japanese phases were pronounced – in this episode by Leo. They didn’t sound right at least when you compare to the original version.

The voice cast was okay. It consisted of some familiar and great voice actors like Jon-Jon Geitel as Leo who has also voiced characters like Jack Frost from the Rise of the guardians or Jake Long from American Dragon: Jake Long – I think this is where I first heard his voice acting. More recently he voiced Aladdin in the live action version from 2019. Another familiar voices we had were Aksu Palmén as Donatello who had voiced characters like Hiccup in How to train your dragon, and Markus Bäckman as Master Splinter – It’s better I won’t go in too much details on his voicing career because he has done a lot of good voice acting in TV and Disney movies. These two were probably the most suited for their roles. Especially Markus Bäckman as Splinter. He sounded just right for the part. Then there was Henri Piispanen who I hadn’t heard much voice acting from before TMNT. I think he was solid pick for Raph – not as good as Sean Astin but they could have gone for worse. Then there were couple unknown actors Miro Loopperi who voiced Mikey and Ella Jaakkola who voiced April.

Miro Looperi did fine job as Mikey but he didn’t really sound like him. This reminds me of 2003 series as Mikey had a voice actor in the Finnish dub that I liked, but one that didn’t sound like him when compared his original voice. This has the same feeling to it. And now Ella Jaakkola, she had this high-pitched kind of bitchy voice I found annoying but at the same time I thought it kind of worked for April’s character because I knew what would become of her character in season 2. I remember thinking: “I can’t wait to hear this voice in Mutation Situation!” – Too bad they changed her voice for season 2.

Now, don’t expect me to do this thing for all the episodes where I talk a little bit about the Finnish dub as I’ve only seen the first season dubbed – I don’t even know when season 2 aired. And I don’t have many notes about the dub. Nor do I remember much of it. I have notes for I think five or so episodes and very good memory for Karai’s debut episode but that’s about it. As I said earlier so far now DVD releases have been made in Finland so I would only have access through streaming services to seasons 4 and 5 – which I haven’t even watched completely yet. I can only hope Netflix or Viaplay would upload the dubbed versions of TMNT to their servers but as we lack DVD releases or reruns of seasons 1 and 2 and season 3 in general that’s very unlikely.

And now some screenshots!

Would you look at that? Leo actually lost to Raph.

Is that supposed to be Splinter? He looks kind of cool - were my first thoughts when he appeared on the screen.

Happy Mutation day! I just love their expressions here.

And it’s flashback time! I really love the way they did and animated the flashbacks in this version.

Splinter holding the broken mutagen canister.

...And Mikey giving it a hug.

They are finally able to go to the top side. Look at how happy they are - I mean even Raph is smiling.

Well I just like this shot of Splinter.

Leo and Space Heroes. I love how proud he looks here.

“Hai, sensei!” - This is probably one of my favorite scenes in this episode. It shows that over protective side of Splinter which is one of the many things I love about the show.

Turtles entering the top side for the first time.

Donnie geeking out at computer stuff while Raph is not interested. Personally being a geek myself, I see lot of myself in Donatello during this moment.

Turtles are about to find out what pizza is.

Oh, look at that it’s a love interest... I mean it’s my least favorite character... I mean it’s April.

And Donnie is in love with her. Just like that.

I know April is supposed to be scared here but I find her expression hilarious. It cracks me every time.

Fighting is not going too well here.

Or here.

Saving April.

I really like this shot of Donnie smiling. He looks kind of adorable. I mean who would scream after seeing that adorable face?

April of course!

I find Donnie’s reaction and posture here priceless, it’s like: “Oh my god, what did I just touch?”

April is being cornered by creepy men.

And Donnie’s offering to help her.

But that doesn’t really work out. Mikey looks adorable though!

I guess The Kraang didn’t fancy April’s screaming either.

And here’s Mikey, facing a suspicious man all by himself.

...That is not a man at all.

Okay what the hell is that thing?

You know what Mikey, I totally agree with you.

Turtles are having a conversation about the leader stuff. And they all can’t believe what they just heard.

Here is Leo facepalming. One of my favorite scenes in the episode.

“I thinking of something green. Green.” “Is it Raphael again?”

Cornering Snake.

Ending still.

Anyway, this was my review for the first episode of TMNT 2012. Next time I think I’m doing review for the second episode of 2003 series, so stay tuned for that. Or something.

[dorothydelgadillo]

11+ Lessons Every Marketer Can Learn from Verblio's Rebrand

So you’re thinking of rebranding your company, or you’re naturally lumped into the process as a marketer.

(Yes, these decisions can come from the top and can come in the form of a pile-on. I totally feel you!) Don’t fret.

I’m here to share some insights as someone very fresh off the process, and whose learnings both haven’t been fully repressed as bad memories nor fully eclipsed by rose-colored, nostalgic glasses for those parts that went particularly well.

Coming off the rebranding process at Verblio just five short months ago (at the time of this writing), it’s high time to sit down and reflect and see what we really learned. Honestly, few actually take the time to do this, so if you’re in the same boat, set aside reflection time, a la Mulan:

Whether you have a designer in-house (we didn’t before this last year!) or you’re coordinating freelanced or outsourced talent, going through product development changes or updating help pages screenshots, it’s easy to underestimate the scope of a rebranding effort.

For all those going through a full company rebrand, or something at a smaller scale, here’s what we learned that any marketer can take and apply.

1. Rebrands don’t mean your old brand was no good.

A quick intro: we’re Verblio, long-time IMPACT friend, more recent IMPACT partner, and fellow championer of HubSpot. We write all different types of content for businesses and the agencies that serve them.

Up until October 2018, we were known as BlogMutt—again, long-time HubSpot integration and partner in outsourcing content.

I’m Kali Greff, the head of content for Verblio, one of the members of our two-people-strong marketing department, and one of the defenders of the BlogMutt name to the bitter end. :)

I mean, I dare you to disagree that our BlogMutt mascot, Buddy, is the cutest:

...which brings me to my first point. 

Rebrands, in and of themselves, don’t mean your old brand was no good. 

In our case, the name BlogMutt grew our company to $2M in revenue over the course of seven years, steadily building over time, all while completely without investment, bootstrapped.

Aside from this, the BlogMutt brand played a significant role in how we did business and fostered a community of thousands of loyal, hardworking, flexible writers, and countless adoring clients/fans to match. 

And now, just because I know it’s coming... 

So, why did we rebrand? 

Largely, we made the decision to rebrand because we had outgrown the name. 

Every day, our community of writers collaborates with clients on much more than blog content, which was reason enough to leave BlogMutt in our rearview mirror. 

However, we were careful to carry the BlogMutt hardworking, approachable legacy to Verblio throughout the branding process. While leaving the clunky series of consonants behind. 

Takeaway #1: Don’t leave the best of your brand behind—reimagine it, evolve it—to fit your future vision. 

We even Verblio-ified Buddy the Mutt to make the newest Verblio character “Party Mutt,” who personifies this evolution so gracefully:

2. Stay agile and expect chaos, no matter how well you plan.

I’m sure anyone recalling their rebranding process can attest to battle scars. For us, the first cuts were the deepest. Our original website designers dropped out after several months of working with them, forcing us to really go back to the drawing board to even get our new website built. Even though we had full-fledged spreadsheets organizing multiple teams at the time, those spreadsheets were rendered useless in the absence of clear delineation of tasks (and people to do them, in our case!). 

This first obstacle was especially critical for two reasons—to call us all back together to a) rally behind the cause and b) pick ourselves back up to stay true to our “North Star” objectives. 

The result? We had our first all-hands-on-deck call to the whole team (one of many)—beyond just the marketing team—to execute well. And, out of this period of doubt and utter confusion, emerged the bright idea to hire our freelance design resource, the brilliant Mandi O’Brien, full-time (after we convinced her to move from NYC to Colorado, of course). 

This first cut was deep, yes, and was not the first of its kind. The main constant, we came to find, was c h a o s. But over the course of experiencing these obstacles and moments of utter madness, we healed, banded together, and developed resilience as a team—the new team of Verblio. 

Staying agile and expecting chaos was our secret to staying sane. 

Takeaway #2: Bend, don’t break, and expect bumps in the road…no matter what. 

3. Alignment around messaging is key—but don’t get crazy. 

On the tails of the point above, rallying behind the new brand is necessary (and great!). One of the ways to do this as a team is through opportunities to “try on” the brand as individual contributors and feel how it really “walks and talks.” To facilitate this, we engaged in a couple important workshops to compare our “versions” of Verblio to open conversations and narrow in on a voice that felt authentic to all of us. 

What’s less important, though, is exhausting messaging before the rubber even hits the road. 

Across the varying functions of team members, each department is going to naturally bring different lenses to the messaging table. In broad strokes, sales will overstate and seek to simplify, marketing brings the branding in strong to keep readers interested, and operations seeks to clarify and get the messaging spot-on to prevent customer confusion. 

And, as a company, we’re a bunch of wordsmiths at Verblio, to further exacerbate these pain points. We had our share of excessive iterating around messaging. 

But wordsmithing for wordsmithing’s sake will take exactly as long as you let it take. Meaning: it can go on FOREVER. 

Takeaway #3: Draw a line in the sand. The iterating on messaging as a team can, and must, follow. 

We finally agreed that we wouldn’t be able to unanimously align around our motto/tagline after weeks of toiling on it. 

The tagline only solidified when we were ordering business cards for the team in a flash moment of brilliance, courtesy of our stellar website copywriter, Annika Nagy. It’s hilarious how these things happen!

Exquisite tagline brilliance, served up by Annika Nagy. 

An interesting component unique to our situation outside the internal team was getting buy-in and over-communicating with our community of writers on need-to-knows and whys of the new brand. They have just as much stake in the company doing well as in-house employees—so they were a key aspect of the rollout plan and it was paramount to consider our messaging from their lens as well. 

As one of the last defenders of BlogMutt as a brand, I made a point to include our loyal writer base actively in the rebranding prior to the big “switch flip” to Verblio by sending “limited edition” BlogMutt T-shirts to these evangelist writers, as well as customer segments. 

This was wildly successful. Taking good care of your evangelists through what sometimes feels like over-communicating is always appreciated. Don’t skimp on that. 

(An aside: family buy-in rolls deep. We didn’t expect the degree of the hard conversations with family members about the rebrand—my boss and VP of Marketing Paul Zalewski talked all about the trials of getting buy-in from his opinionated 4-year-old daughter Kenzie in our official rebrand blog post. It’s definitely worth a read…promise.) 

3a. Devise a plan of what you want weigh-in on, who the decision makers are, and how to keep the whole team included without falling prey to “too many cooks in the kitchen.”

This is a slight extension on the last point—yes, it’s important to communicate, and over-communicate whenever possible, especially during a rebrand. Winning all aspects of a team’s buy-in comes in many phases, and often not all at once. 

It might feel counterintuitive in the context of project timelines to make allowances for seemingly peripheral tasks like this. But, it’s far from peripheral to take the time and care to hear as many voices as possible surrounding a rebrand. Including those voices in the process in some small way can convert your evangelists of Brand #1 to Brand #2. These evangelists you transition to the new brand serve as a critical foundation to your audience starting out. And man, as a marketer, those are pretty compelling low acquisition costs for a new brand, right?! 

There is a yin to this yang, however. There is a fine line between over-communication, cycles of feedback, and getting yourself in a nasty case of too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen. It is an ongoing struggle of getting voices heard beyond the core decision-makers during this period of transition and great change — while also needing to move forward and make decisions to keep the projects progressing. It is hard. There’s no getting around that. 

My best advice… 

Takeaway #3a: Keep conversation lines open. We had a #rebranding Slack channel to continue brainstorming as a team, apart from the one-off, scattered meetings to voice concerns, discuss in-person, and determine to-dos for each team member. 

4. You don’t have to be a Virgo to appreciate a good spreadsheet.

As mentioned previously, our kickass spreadsheet to align across departments and freelancers was so powerful, and in the face of personnel, organizational chaos, it really was the grounding force. (And yes, I’m a Virgo…why do you ask?) 

In fact, we’d love to share our spreadsheet with you (email me—kali@verblio.com—I’d be happy to send it your way)! It was the one thing we really weren’t able to find through the powers of content marketing to manage our rebrand…so we just created our own. 

Aside from that, this one source-of-truth spreadsheet was essential to organize and rally our team around the hundreds (yes, hundreds!) of cross-departmental tasks that needed to be completed. Beyond the main timeline, it also was a lifesaver AFTER the rebrand launch date to return back to quick-follow tasks. (And yes, stuff was missed! But at least we were able to know we missed it, amirite?) It became the catch-all. 

Takeaway #4: Ask me for our project spreadsheet. It immediately makes everything feel better. 

5. Moving to a new domain is painful for SEO, no way around it.

As excited as we were about our rebrand, we were equally worried about doing a website migration, for a couple of reasons:

Our company is lucky enough to count inbound as one of our most important customer acquisition channels.

In terms of migrations, this was a big one. In this wonderful guide to site migrations from the Moz blog, there are five major types of integrations listed. We were doing them all. All at once.

(source) 

So, we had good reason to be worried. 

But we also decided we wanted to be as prepared as possible. We met with our SEO agency. Paul, our in-house SEO expert, read guides, met with our technical team weekly, created checklists and did more worrying. We had a team of interns comb through our thousands of old blog posts to get them into ship-shape. We created a massive list of 301 redirects. 

I think in the end we were about as prepared as we could be. And, even with all of this, there was a drop in our organic traffic of 20% to 25%. 

It was scary. It lasted about six weeks. 

We also missed things. Despite that massive list of redirects, we missed a bunch. We changed some naming conventions and missed those changes on the redirect side of things, which caused hundreds of long-tail pages to 404. Paul and Wade, our CTO and co-founder, developed a daily cadence of fixing them. 

Here’s what our dip and recovery looked like for new organic users to the site (rebrand was launched early October 2018):

Takeaway #5: Find a great guide, read it twice, use it to make a checklist, and solicit expert help. Even with all that, prepare for the dip. 

6. Consider ongoing function AND design in website development.

A primary objective for our new website of the rebrand was to have a website we could easily manipulate—both text and design-wise. Previously, we could make text changes just fine, and everything was mobile-responsive, etc. But from a design perspective, it was unwieldy. We had to go back and forth with a designer to implement any layout changes (even small ones!) in our specialized template environment. 

No longer! And thank goodness. As agile marketers, we needed the capability to iterate, build, test, and make changes according to these experiments on our site. As marketers, you simply cannot settle for less! 

That said, it’s also hella easy to fall in love with the whimsical promises of a design agency wanting to make the flashiest new website. Yes, we all want nice websites, but clunky, beautiful websites that just don’t work well are never the goal. 

Keeping this objective front-of-mind from the beginning was a critical point we escalated time and time again in design conversations to really determine the best route for us. 

Since we were building our new website on WordPress, we landed on Beaver Builder as the framework for the design of our site, mostly recommended by our new designer, Mandi. (And we landed on this despite my boss, Paul, thinking that all visual composers for WordPress were bad). 

Takeaway #6: Be mindful of nice-to-haves vs. must-haves (and call them by those names!) in the rebranding process and how those affect your tech stack. Rebranding is a point to revisit and streamline if at all possible. 

(I cover this a bit more in point #11, too.)

7. There’s no time like the present to make a formal content style guide.

This point speaks for itself. Despite being a content creation company, we hadn’t yet formalized a content style guide like a branding style guide. It’s embarrassing and shameful to admit. 

However, we took notes from one of our favorite IMPACTers, the mighty content juggernaut Liz Murphy, who recommended establishing a content style guide right away. She was kind enough to share this post in its drafting stages to get us started on the right foot. 

It proved ESSENTIAL (yes, all caps) to us iterating beyond our in-the-trenches website copywriter to bring more in-house contributors in on the brand voice. The baton pass to the remaining contributors with this style guide in hand proved seamless! 

Takeaway #7: Don’t wait as long as we did to make a formal content style guide. Rebrands are a perfect time to do it. 

8. You will never find a brand/website/logo/copywriting style that makes everyone happy.

In fact, if you do, it might be a sign something is wrong, or worse—you’re not being bold enough. This harkens us back to an old Seth Godin post. Being forgettable is too big to risk in a rebranding process, given how expensive it is in emotional, time, resources, and actual money spends. 

Among the most polarizing components of our rebrand included the pink in the logo (our CEO Steve Pockross pulled a veto of it in the early days!), different names in the conceptual phase, variants of our logo (the term “bloated hippo” was featured!), our early Facebook retargeting ads asking prospects if they were “Verb-curious,” and our voice overall. 

Internal and external haters should be expected. 

The point that these haters can rally around, though, is that at the end of the day, it’s all about how you need to be making your audience happy… 

Everything, yes EVERYTHING, comes back to what works and resonates for your audience as marketers. This is a drum that the marketing department can, and should, beat like no one else. Without any compelled audience, any message, product, service, company becomes moot. So, beat it, marketers!

Takeaway #8: Internal and external haters should be expected. If your goal is to make all parties happy, rebranding is not going to solve your base problem. 

9. Figure out a way to “soft launch” various components and do iterative rollouts.

When we started talking about rebranding, I daydreamed about hitting one big, metaphorical button that said “Rebrand!” that did every single thing in one brilliant, fantastical moment. And there was indeed one day we appointed for more or less this purpose (for us it was a Sunday—we had a party at Verblio HQ). On that day, our CTO did change a few lines of code that implemented all of our redirects and became the official “moment” of the rebrand. And it was magical! 

But, in reality, all of the things that went into the rebrand were done over a much longer period of time. 

We made changes to our product that would be announced as part of the rebrand weeks before as a “soft launch” that allowed us to test them with a small group of customers. We launched our new domain name about a month before the rebrand with a “splash page” to start to warm the domain up and ensure our new site would rank #1 on Google for “Verblio” on Day 1 of rebrand. 

And, crucially, our CTO Wade suggested that we actually set our full website live a few days before the big day. Even though we’d tested it in staging, we ended up catching dozens of things that were wrong with the site because of this early launch, and put in hours of work on the Friday and Saturday before Launch Day to make sure it was ready for prime-time. (And technically Google got a preview of the site due to a Yoast sitemap submission we weren’t expecting.) 

All of this “pre-rebrand” launching totally saved our bacon and made Launch Day go off nearly without a hitch. 

Takeaway #9: Whenever possible, find ways to test or “soft launch” features, websites, domains, and creative assets before your big day. 

10. Show your quirkiness and prove there are real humans behind your brand.

It didn’t take a genius to notice in 2019’s round of Super Bowl ads that the general population is terrified of robots. And, to some degree, yes, we all are afraid of them. Yet, we as consumers interact with them consistently, in the form of “nicer robots,” like chatbots on web pages, email automation, and Alexa and Siri. As marketers, we know they have a critical role and continue to embrace the possibility for innovation within the marketing space. 

However, all this change begs for bringing humans forward whenever possible, especially in all forms digital. That’s why companies like Vidyard and Soapbox have made such gains in the overall market—we as humans love interacting with humans. It’s in our DNA. 

So, naturally, in a digital setting, and especially for us as a company backed by 3,000 talented, industry-expert freelance writers, it was a no-brainer to highlight our happy writers with much more focus for the Verblio rebrand. The BlogMutt iteration of this was definitely of its time—highlighting a crowd of writers vs. each of the individuals who would serve our clients. 

That, and we wanted to highlight the quirky humans we employ in-house, too! We have book club meetings, we write weird blog posts, we riff and make bad puns (though I wholeheartedly maintain that NO pun is a bad pun!) on Slack daily, and we wanted to be more personality-forward with the new brand. 

And we sure had fun with it. 

From our announcement splash page:

From our announcement blog post:

Also from our announcement blog post, our future Verblio music album cover, probably:

From our ‘Meet Verblio’ page, where we share our favorite words:

Takeaway #10: Have fun, both internally and externally. Like, REAL fun. The creativity that is part and parcel of uprooting your entire brand’s concept lends itself to super memorable and just plain fun results. Welcome it! 

11. Remember what you’re rebranding for.

This ties back into point #1, but keep the strengths of your old brand, and where you seek to fill the gaps with the new brand, near and dear to your heart. 

As nerdy and basic as it sounds, make a list of guiding objectives for your rebrand and laminate it or otherwise make it easy to refer back to. You’re going to need to keep returning to it again and again, and over time it transforms into a “love language” of sorts for your in-house team. It will be a crucial communication point to keep everyone aligned around the same things you all deeply care about. 

As you embark on the rebranding process, it’s an equally slippery slope to either over-complicate the process or significantly under-complicate it.

Looking back from where I’m sitting, I’m pretty sure rebrands typically fall into two buckets:

Companies that internally fight tooth-and-nail throughout the process to “elevate” to an uncommunicated, vague, impossible level of perfection for the new brand, or

Companies that are so eager to get from point A to point B that the rebrand turns into a simple new coat of paint or swap of a template vs. a true reimagining of what the website, and brand, should feel like. 

Don’t be either of these guys. Both undermine what a rebrand should do and accomplish. 

Keep that nerdy, basic list handy and keep returning to it. Guide other team members to return to it. Just like I’m doing now. 

It can serve as the breadcrumbs to your Hansel and Gretel to take you back home, home to your new, awesome brand.

Takeaway #11: Sounds nerdy, but make a list of objectives for a rebrand. Keep returning to them, starting meetings with them, and continually remind the team members what it’s all for. 

Conclusion/Over to You

As promised, here’s our list of takeaways (and bonus! It was more than 11!) to carry with you into your own rebrand.

Takeaway #1: Don’t leave the best of your brand behind—reimagine it, evolve it—to fit your future vision. Takeaway #2: Bend, don’t break, and expect bumps in the road...no matter what. Takeaway #3: Draw a line in the sand. The iterating on messaging as a team can, and must, follow. Takeaway #3a: Keep conversation lines open. We had a #rebranding Slack channel to continue brainstorming as a team, apart from the one-off, scattered meeting to voice concerns, discuss in-person, and determine to-dos for each team member. Takeaway #4: Ask me for our project spreadsheet. It immediately makes everything feel better and tackle-able. Takeaway #5: For SEO, find a great guide, read it twice, use it to make a checklist, and solicit expert help. Even with all that, prepare for the dip. Takeaway #6: Be mindful of nice-to-haves vs. must-haves (and call them by those names!) in the rebranding process and how those affect your tech stack. Rebranding is a point to revisit and streamline if at all possible. Takeaway #7: Don’t wait as long as we did to make a formal content style guide. Rebrands are a perfect time to do it. Takeaway #8: Internal and external haters should be expected. If your goal is to make all parties happy, rebranding is not going to solve your base problem. Takeaway #9: Whenever possible, find ways to test or “soft launch” features, websites, domains, and creative assets before your big day. Takeaway #10: Have fun, both internally and externally. Like, REAL fun. The creativity that is part and parcel of uprooting your entire brand’s concept lends itself to super memorable and just plain fun results. Welcome it! Takeaway #11: Sounds nerdy, but make a list of objectives for a rebrand. Keep returning to them, starting meetings with them, and continually remind the team members what it’s all for.

Now, it’s your turn. What’s your rebrand process looking like? What of this list was or wasn’t helpful to you? What do you wish I covered more of? I love feedback—the good, the bad, the ugly. I also love nerding out on rebranding and content at large. 

Let’s keep talking and get in touch with me in the IMPACT Elite group on Facebook—feel free to @ or message me directly! I’d love to hear from you—I’m so fresh off this process and am happy to lend an ear or help brainstorm on any of this stuff.

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/11-ish-lessons-every-marketer-can-learn-from-verblios-rebrand