Words matter. These are the best Ryan Holmes Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Every day I’d come home after school, pop the hood of my mom’s car, put alligator clips on the battery, and wire into the house and go play on my computer. If I used it for too long, I’d wear down the car battery, and my mom would be all mad at me the next day.
One of the ironies of a conference dedicated to all things digital and virtual is that the best ways to connect with people are surprisingly old-school. Social media tools can improve the odds of a serendipitous encounter at SXSW, but old-fashioned hustle, palm-pressing and – above all – creativity go a long way.
The point is that instead of a monolithic brick of printed content – delivered more or less unchanged to all subscribers – social media offers news that is personalized and nimble.
I think that Vancouver as well as Canada needs a boot camp for young entrepreneurs. We have already seen tens if not hundreds of people put their names forward to be involved in the program, and we just think this is an amazing way to accelerate what they’re doing.
Hammer down product fundamentals first. Make sure you’ve got something that works before doubling down on promotion and marketing. Create a groundswell of organic support, and only then leverage PR and advertising to spread the word.
Social media listening tools make it easy to track brand references and mentions, and these functions can still be handled ably by a small, dedicated team.
I grew up off the grid in Vernon, and I saw my parents work hard every day, as teachers but also while farming and building a log home. So from a young age I knew the value of hard work.
Social media teams tend to be decentralized – a motley mix of in-house experts, off-site consultants and international partners. The result: Confusion, rogue tweets, and off-message posts are almost inevitable. The worst gaffes live on in social media infamy.
Anyone working at HootSuite will tell you that I don’t sugarcoat my opinions. I heavily encourage feedback and suggestions – partly because I’m blunt about offering the same in return.
The decision to leave a company you founded and move on to a new project is never an easy one.
One thing I would like to see in Vancouver and Canada is something similar to the PayPal mafia. They were all early employees of PayPal. They all had monster exits with PayPal, and they were able to take their winnings and form a syndicate that co-invests.
Entrepreneurs, by disposition, are built to think big. When a role no longer affords those opportunities, it might be best to leave it in capable hands and move on.
Social media is the most disruptive form of communication humankind has seen since the last disruptive form of communications, email.
Everybody getting a significant exit creates a legacy and creates something that you can pay forward and bootstrap an industry in a substantial way.
The growing role of enterprise social media, plus the growing budgets and authority of CMOs entrusted with choosing the best platforms, translates into an exciting future for apps that harness social potential for large companies.
When my company was first getting off the ground, we were completely lost in the shuffle, despite our best efforts. In 2012, however, we had a 28-foot-long, 15,000-pound secret weapon. To stand out amid the gala parties and blow-out bashes hosted by much bigger tech companies, HootSuite decided to take to the streets.
By monitoring the activity taking place on social networks, retailers can amplify successful marketing and sales strategies and avoid weak tactics which can later be tied back to organizational objectives.
If you catch me lying, it’s probably because I’m about to surprise someone for their birthday, or hide away the specific details about a company getaway to a strange but amazing place.
Since social networks gained popularity extremely rapidly, there had been a debate as to whether social media was a fad. There are countless pieces of evidence now proving the contrary, among them the explosion in Twitter growth and Facebook’s public listing.
South America’s most populous country, Brazil, is also emerging as one of the region’s most social-media savvy.
At the most basic level, prioritizing design also represents a practical consideration. It’s far easier to design first and engineer later.
Workflow and usability are not afterthoughts; they impact the core of any project and dictate how it should be engineered.
Don’t be scared to try new things, but remember to hold on to the vision of your company and the initial successes that defined your brand.
By allowing multiple partners to contribute, an open platform can nurture an entire ecosystem of developers and apps. Good products integrate and become great products. Users get a one-stop solution for social needs.
An exit is only a success if you set an exit as your primary goal. My primary goal was to build a globally influential tool, to build something from the ground up that could literally change how we communicated in business and individually.
I don’t know how many times I’ve turned to Twitter and Facebook to commiserate and celebrate, bounce ideas off of friends, colleagues and other entrepreneurs, and just connect with the wider world outside my office.
Building outrageous expectations about the next big thing – be it a personal video chatting service or venue-based photo sharing app – can create all sorts of complications when things don’t go as planned.
Social media, for all of its limitations, is rarely irrelevant. The stream of updates on your Facebook page, for instance, is algorithmically engineered to be darn-near irresistible.
Early in my career, I was involved with engineer-led projects, where designers came in late in the game and were expected to put lipstick on an existing code base. This almost never works.
When you think of technology that gets people excited – long lines at stores, enthusiastic reviews in the blogosphere, passionate evangelists – the first thing to come to mind probably isn’t thermostats. Then, along came Nest.
For an older generation of employees, social media often remains misunderstood and underutilized.
Landing a million-dollar investment for your startup is exhilarating. But as big as that number sounds, it doesn’t go far. Many startups just getting off the ground won’t have a CFO to monitor finances. It doesn’t take much for spending to spiral out of control.
Pizza made me who I am. In the summer of 1998, I dropped out of college and started a pizza restaurant called Growlies in my hometown in rural Canada. My seed money: a credit card with a $20,000 limit.
Providing better computer science education in public schools to kids, and encouraging girls to participate, is the only way to rewrite stereotypes about tech and really break open the old-boys’ club.
For everybody in their busy lives, you need to invest in sharpening your tools, and you need to invest in longevity.
HootSuite never had a big launch. We were lucky to even have office space.
Email is familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today.
Social media is the future, with employers recognizing they need to start hiring people with the right skills.
LinkedIn and Flickr, among other sites, have already proven freemium can generate revenue in the social media context.
One of the most important principles I’ve learned is, every so often, just drop everything. Stop racing from one party to the next.
Understanding and respecting your roots is critical not only to winning the tech talent wars but leaving a legacy that transcends bottom lines.
We’ve all been inundated with so many ingenious, must-have, time-saving apps and tools that we really don’t have a second left to spare.
Companies and managers that find a way to harness social media stand to gain.
As technology has improved, our digital lives have only grown more tangled and cluttered.
I often talk about the PayPal mafia out of San Francisco, people that were in PayPal and got out of PayPal and continue to reinvest in other start-ups and create a huge pay-it-forward type of network there.
