Eating Our Words

Two days ago, I got my first guilt inducing check in from Scripted to see if I was on track with my staff blog post. Luckily, I managed to pull some strings and stay assigned to the piece. With my post 2 days overdue, I was reminded of every check we have in place when a post risks becoming tardy - we're nothing if not thorough. While this is the last such reminder I intend to receive, here's how I ended up with it in the first place:

A while back, we committed to having a company blog populated by posts from our writers. There were a lot of reasons for this decision, not the least of which was that we have fantastic writers, so why wouldn't we want to showcase that? We chose to eat our own dogfood as a testament to our faith in our product as an effective content solution.

Of course, putting ourselves in the buyer's seat meant more than showing faith - we were committing to seeing things from our client's perspectives and improving based on that insight. When we realized that we wanted writers to suggest topics based on broader criteria (just like many of our clients), we were among the first to test drive our pitching system, and hold ourselves accountable to staying engaged.

When you're running a marketplace, dogfooding gives you ample opportunities to be on the demand side of your business. For example, we learned from the pitch system that insight into the buyer's experience was most useful when combined with insight into writer experience, or the supply side of our ecosystem.

So, having spent some time as a Scripted client, we all recently put on our writer caps. Yes, ALL of us - sales staff, marketers, account managers, engineers - eating our words, and well, supplying them.

In truth, we've been authoring staff posts for some time, but we hadn't actually integrated our product into the process. Now, each of us is held to the same standards as our writers. We have to use the Scripted dashboard, meet deadlines, remain responsive to check-ins, and answer to nitpicky edit requests.

We've committed to running all our content needs through scripted - from newsletters, to web copy, to other custom projects. A mere few weeks into this process shift, and so far our gains are evident:

• Accountability
• Centralized content
• Product experience

Most importantly - when we talk to clients and writers, we clearly know what their day-to-day use of our product will involve.

Our hope is that future gains will be even more meaningful as we become more equipped to make writer and buyer experience improvements, test new product features internally and, with the internet as our witness, never miss deadlines on our blog.