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Do I have to sit down and chisel some tokens out of copper or something?

“Sorry we don’t accept card”

Okay yeah great I’ll just go fuck myself and hop on my Razr scooter so I can fax my bank to send me some shekels by pigeon.

While I’m at this:

May is the best month, followed closely by September.

Ted from HIMYM sucks major ass.

Calling is superior to texting.

And cards are more important than cash.

Thank you for reading my #gr8 content at caleb chin dot com.

*”but muh fees/chargeback vulnerability” my rebuttal to that and any response is that this is my website, and I can say what I want. 😤

The best experience I had in college was when the University of Kansas’s department of Marketing Communications approached me to join their social media team*.

It’s not just because it opened the doors for me into professional social media or that I finally got to tweet from @KUnews. Rather, it gave me my first real exposure to working with a tightly integrated group of highly competent people who are genuinely passionate about what they do (that’s wordy and could probably be articulated better. Whatever. I’ll edit this later). A personal goal I’ve always had is to surround myself with great people that I can learn from and I’ve found few work environments rivaling that of 1314 Jayhawk Boulevard.

If you zoom out and ask “Why does KU’s social media see higher engagement compared to other Big 12 universities? Why do they get more likes/retweets/favorites/etc?”, what would the answer be? It would be because the social media teams of other colleges don’t understand their audiences. If you really look at KU’s social media, its strategy has a huge focus on engagement and looking ahead (a good example of this is the revamped emphasis on GIFs. I remember my boss predicting way back in March that GIFs were in their ascendancy on social media. Adweek later confirmed our gamble in June). We wanted to publish great content, and only great content. That requires people who are willing to stay in the office past five, meaningful collaboration, and most importantly saying “no” to a lot of ideas instead of publishing every single thing. One of the biggest mistakes a brand can make is flooding an audience with dozens of posts, tweets, and pictures that are mediocre at best.

When you look at universities from other conferences and their rivals, it looks very similar. The usual suspects will try to copy what the better social media team does and it will take them some time. Maybe they’ll get close but often their content is still uninspiring and the strategy looks at least a year behind because if they really cared they would do more than the bare minimum. A big red flag is when a brand/company doesn’t even create their own visual content (e.g. images, infographics, GIFs). That’s why KU enjoys the success it does in social media. It’s a lot of creative A-grade players that genuinely care about publishing relevant social media content for their audience.

I graduated from KU in May and my student employee eligibility status maxed out in July. Since that time I’ve looked around at social media jobs for brands and companies in between client work and realized something important. I had made the mistake of applying to dozens of places without investigating their social media profiles. It turns out many of these institutions will often have a huge following but no engagement. Why? Nine times out of ten it’s because their content is uninspiring and it really, really shows**.

Part of me wonders if I should have accepted their job offers but after working with a team of A-grade players, who would want to go back to potentially working with B-grade or C-grade players? I know I have a lot more to learn so I only look at places where I think the people are passionate and I can grow under their tutelage.

*This is actually one of my favorite stories. Maybe I’ll make a post about it when it’s not 5 am.

**It also doesn’t help that buying likes/followers is a frictionless process

AT BUZZFEED:

• Increased the e-commerce team’s average monthly earnings by 39.6%, average earnings per day by 43.6%, and exceeded holiday revenue goals by upwards of 40% by improving organic affiliate post performance on Facebook through close collaboration with the Market team and aggressively researching our audience’s buying behavior, post and product performance on social, and A/B testing headlines and thumbnails
• Integrated learnings from Social and the Market team to implement the first paid social campaign between the two teams with early experiments yielding ROI’s over 150% within the first 10 days
• Create social-friendly videos for multiple Facebook pages which have accumulated over 212.8 million views
• Curate and strategize rollout of affiliate marketing posts on Facebook across 20+ pages, including BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed Video, Nifty Home, As/Is, Food, Parents, Health, Tasty, Nifty, Goodful, SOML, and Bring Me by optimizing images, thumbnails and headlines for different audiences
• Directly manage all link posting strategy on Buy Me That, Nifty Home, Parents, and Nifty
• Managed BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed Video’s Facebook page on weekends, consistently surpassing traffic goals by an average of 8% and remaining on call in case of breaking news

AT ATTN:

• Curated ATTN:’s most trafficked article in its history, driving millions of hits in less than 24 hours
• Led a team of 3 to successfully implement ATTN:’s “Where Is The Love?” Twitter campaign strategy with the Black-Eyed Peas, which outperformed other tweets in engagement by 218%
• Managed, edited, and curated content to grow ATTN:’s presence on social media platforms
• Used news judgement and social analytics to package stories with optimized headlines and thumbnails so they best resonated with our diverse audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat
• Provided coverage during breaking news and live events, including assisting writers with gathering, verifying, and confirming social content

AT BUSINESS INSIDER:

• Grew Instagram audience by 18%, average like per picture by 73%, and the most liked media by 40% in less than three weeks of full creative control by analyzing our audience engagement, framing content to align with a revamped strategy, and aggressively researching optimal posting behavior. Business Insider still iterates upon the strategy’s core findings today.
• Curated and scheduled content across our social media platforms to a daily audience reach of over 15 million in order to boost engagement and drive traffic to BI’s website
• Increased BI Politics Facebook Page Likes by 291% and people reached by 315%, BI Entertainment Facebook Page Likes by 7% and people reached by 45%, and BI Science Facebook Page Likes by 109% and people reached by 155% in the month of March

SIDE PROJECTS:

DoesKansasHaveABudgetYet.com

Just For Fun