Bryan Casey @bryanfcasey Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

@hevinsane

@ak_willingham

@lanrekichancawa

@stw_pdg

@te_university

@VmaniakJ

@rahulj9a

@puppyarn

@MdYousu74560858

@BabyNeelou

@stwmaniax

@ibubohay2

@bokeplokalmalam

@IAMTURNINGBLUE

@ibubohay2

@makerofmonks

@wass7854

@bokeplokalmalam

@iLiekVocaloid

@princessmarieac

@stw_pdg

@ripgalwhims

@bokeplokalmalam

@lightsmusicbar

@kanatatheloml

@bokeplokalmalam

@AREschweiz

@Hester4560

@MythosMayhem

@Serkansen_

@KStateCropsTeam

@bokeplokalmalam

@suyasu_ya

@ElMengem

@pinchecristian

Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 months

You gotta admit that “you were four seconds late identifying the mistake we made so we’re taking your medal” is a helluva stance to take six days after the event.

Bleacher Report

@BleacherReport

2 months

The IOC is making Jordan Chiles give back her bronze medal because the coach’s appeal that got her on the stadium was submitted four seconds late, per @WillGravesAP She finished fifth originally but moved into third after her coach successfully appealed Chiles’ difficulty score

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

Over the last 9 months we’ve deleted close to 80% of the marketing footprint off . Tens of thousands of pages. The result is that traffic, conversion and all our experience and NPS metrics are up. It was a gross project but I’ll tell you about it.

IBM - United States

For more than a century, IBM has been a global technology innovator, leading advances in AI, automation and hybrid cloud solutions that help businesses grow.

www.ibm.com

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

4 months

@Austen Only ppl that dont do dishes or laundry would say this.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 months

@sneakyjwo That seems like the obvious thing to do. Choosing to strip someone’s medal, who actually won, because rules are rules, just makes it look like your rules and the way you enforce them doesn’t work, which is a you problem. It’s a many dimensional fail.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 months

@MichaelCPell Well the important difference is that Jordan actually won. They both stink tho.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 months

Incredible if they were also wrong about the technicality.

USA Gymnastics

@USAGym

2 months

USA Gymnastics has submitted additional evidence to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

First, why do this project at all? Simple answer. The site was impossible to manage for our teams and way too hard to understand and use for our customers. We were paying for complexity.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

Many people felt like showing the whole of IBM to a new customer considering one product was overwhelming. Understandable impulse. The result was that became a holding company of websites. Sites within sites. Too often a mirror of the org structure.

IBM - United States

For more than a century, IBM has been a global technology innovator, leading advances in AI, automation and hybrid cloud solutions that help businesses grow.

www.ibm.com

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

That took us just over a quarter start to finish. The minute we finished that we turned our attention to our geo footprint. I will have to return to this thread with a part 2 because I’m on an airplane that’s about to take off. If no one likes this I’m not finishing it 😳

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

6 months

@Boenau No one in this vid is even minimally bothered because they’ve all driven or ridden in cars in NYC and know this is how you use a car in the city. No one wants to sit at a light for a half hour.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We schedule 7 all day meetings with every BU. We do all of them in two weeks. Back to back to back. I open the meeting by saying this is not a workshop. We’re going to make 200 decisions in the next 8 hours. By the end of this meeting this (sub)site will be gone.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

The complexity we create is never without some legitimate causes. IBM operates in well over 100 countries and our website had a sprawling universe of /cc-lc/s as a result. Like 160+. Further, we’re a big company. Tens of billions in revenue. Hundreds of products and services.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

NPS of nav on improved by 30% immediately. And the really cool thing was that our experience scores around content quality improved by the same amount. It proved our hypothesis that the structure of the site impacts your perception of everything on it.

IBM - United States

For more than a century, IBM has been a global technology innovator, leading advances in AI, automation and hybrid cloud solutions that help businesses grow.

www.ibm.com

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We’re going to fix this. The project is called Simplification (codename: just build a normal website) and has three prongs: - navigation - core simplification - geo simplification

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

@BrendanNyhan This one is better.

Heidi N. Moore

@moorehn

1 year

Oh my God, call the billionaire burn unit

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

Everything we did delete got a next best target redirect. No sloppy home page stuff.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

9 months

@buccocapital Oh no we lost bucco to thought leadership and frameworks

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

It’s easy to guess why that’s not a great idea but it’s not absurd either. Does it not make sense to put all IBM’s security products in a security chunk of the website? It doesn’t end up working at scale but you need a better answer for why than lol conway’s law.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

The reason it doesn’t work because all the BUs aren’t as clean in terms of normal market taxonomies as security. Compute and storage is an Infra org but users expect to see compute and storage. So you need to thoughtfully restructure everything, pick the right hierarchies, etc.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

So to recap what we have is an overly compartmentalized website, one that is too BU oriented in its structure and we’ve got 160+ copies of this thing (with varying levels of completeness) across the markets and languages we serve.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

- NPS data says nav on the site is one of the biggest client experience problems in the company - Our bloated solution/product category footprint (10x bigger than equivalent brands) is the culprit - Those pages deliver a small percentage of the value and pareto is very real

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

I’m connected! One thing I didn’t mention was that we didn’t just carelessly delete 1k pages. We kept important things. We consolidated everything we could. We had places where we had 3 pages that could reasonably target the same keyword. Now we have 1.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

And that’s what we did. In two weeks we redefined what the “core” of would be. After that we held a readout, invited every BU team, and delivered the strategy and schedule for deleting or consolidating 1k pages and deploying a new global nav.

IBM - United States

For more than a century, IBM has been a global technology innovator, leading advances in AI, automation and hybrid cloud solutions that help businesses grow.

www.ibm.com

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We need to convince the entire business that it’s Good Actually to blow up all the BU and Geo sites. We started with the core/BU footprint and the argument went like this…

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

My goal with every simplification exercise was to get what I needed to solve the bigger picture problem, 80% of what I’d do if it’s just me and excel alone in a room. But I’m willing to compromise enough to keep everyone at the table. Even better if they walk out an advocate.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

Three months later it was live. The new global nav was deployed to all 160+ locales on day 1 (because those still exist). It carries over 100,000 distinct urls across all of the supported geographies.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We told people we thought that the poor structure of the site was preventing every single team from being more successful. And that we could fix it while putting less than 2% of their results “at risk.” And that the upside would more than offset that small downside.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 years

@Stammy Another good example of current mgmt designing the experience for themselves instead of 99% of users.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

6 months

I love Jon Stewart but an absolutely canon clip about how it’s easy to look smart short-term as a cynic.

Pessimists Archive

@PessimistsArc

6 months

2024: Jon Stewart asks head of FTC how BigTech was allowed to get so big 2012: Jon Stewart laughs at Facebook for buying ‘lame’ app called Instagram

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

People bought the story. Project is a go. We go into data mode. Inventory entire footprint. We build a set of performance and SEO kpis for every page. Put prelim keep/delete/consolidate recommendations for every page. Create prelim new taxonomy.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

26 days

@basedsystems Pretty crazy for a company with 3,000 hospitals and 4.6b arr. Sounds like umich project was crazy or all these numbers are made up, who knows.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

And unlike other “simplifications” we had no intention of trading volume for quality. Our goal was to cut in such a way where we thought we’d be net better across every KPI by the time we were done.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

That’s all for now. Bye.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

Which brings us to the next point that bad translation is worse than no translation. We did a reasonable amount of user research on this and not surprisingly people hate bad machine translation. It destroys trust and credibility.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

The “build a normal website” codename was funny but important. It’s easy to convince yourself why some change is impossible. The better mindset is assuming it is possible and being creative enough to figure out how.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

11 months

A lot of chatter about design thinking in the wake of layoffs at ideo. The issues with design thinking were less with the actual practice and more with what corporations tried to turn it into, which was a belief that you could turn innovation into a manufacturing process.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

The traffic impact was non-existent. We put very little at risk. We handled those things with care. Plus we’ve been growing organically anyway. The net was basically zero impact on traffic or conversion.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

Knowing where to give and where to hold the line is the real key and something for a different thread on a different day. Now we turn to the geos…

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

One other thing I’ll mention is that I’m no religious zealot. Every BU leader is someone I need to work with. We need to get this done and have other teams not feel like they got burned, that they hate what we’re doing.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

4 months

AI Overviews aren’t just good. They’re necessary for the long-term health of the web. It is time for a thread about AI, search and really the (nearish) future of publishing and the web. (and plz subscribe to the podcast at the end in case all our traffic goes to zero) RANT…

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 years

@zachweinberg I think it’s simpler. Most of the famous VCs are intolerable. So they create the public perception of an industry much bigger than them.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 years

@ImpemboGanecue @max_oats As someone that works in SEO there is absolutely nothing that makes me more insane than how far you have to scroll on recipes to get to the recipe.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

For langs vs country/langs we ended up moving from mostly country to mostly langs. We were having lots of duplicate content problems because the site was so big we couldn’t consistently localize so content was identical across locales.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

3 months

SEOs will post an ahrefs graph getting 127 monthly visits and be like follow me to learn how to deliver transformative business results.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We built a “locale service” that provides both inferred and user provided data around country, lang and currency preferences. Apps on are still adopting it but it will enable us to provide country context (pricing, chat routing, etc) on global pages.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

30 days

@RolfHaltza Understand you are trying to hide racism under some pseudo-intellectual analysis but it doesn’t quite land because it’s also completely wrong. Everyone knows that most of these companies have improved dramatically under present leadership.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

6 months

@Boenau They aren’t bothered because everyone in this vid knows how to drive and how to walk in nyc. The pedestrians aren’t mad at the cars because they’d behave the same way if they are driving. There’s some intersections/times of day you need to handle like that.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

The result was that our us-en site was effectively our global english site and we were just pretending it wasn’t. We did user country to country site analysis for everything and found most people weren’t landing where we wanted.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

There’s just no consensus on what good is or what users expect. We cane into the project with only a few things we had to do. - make the site easier to manage - not harm global performance We did a lot of research and analysis.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

@yishan Millions of people work in tech. It has all the same credential/careerist issues as everything else. You’re better off just saying it’s everyones job to ultimately think for themselves. You can also think for yourself without pretending to be a thought leader on everything.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We sought to answer a few key questions… - only langs vs country/lang combos - which langs/countries - translation quality - translation pervasiveness

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

3 years

@RaphaelKahan Big mistake you coulda had a wife that made all the money

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

For our geo sites we really didn’t see outstanding role models or any market consistency. Some sites like gcp and aws are relatively simple. SAP as a ton. HubSpot does only a few langs but does them comprehensively (like translating product screens level comprehensively).

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We are still on this next phase of the journey but we decided that the lang approach would give us the simplest orientation and was aligned to the way our users actually experienced the site.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

To recap… - We went from 165 locales to 10 langs - Support langs in web we don’t elsewhere (campaigns, media, assets, etc) - Bias toward translation quality vs high volume of machine translated content

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

The net result of all this was… - better performance for us (traffic, conversion) - better experience for users (nav, task completion, overall perception of site and content quality) - easier to manage site and more agile team (fewer things, better)

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 years

@Jason @AnkerOfficial I live in an apartment and sit at kitchen table and will be doing an important presentation while my three year old son sits next to me yelling that he wants someone to take all the slightly burnt edges off his English muffin. While on wifi. With no headset at all.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

I can retire now.

Google Search Central

@googlesearchc

1 year

From supporting more users in Search Console Insights to announcing Interaction to Next Paint in Core Web Vitals, @JohnMu covers the latest news happening in Google Search. 📰 Tune in to this month's episode 👉

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

6 months

@Boenau If you don’t live in NYC what you see is someone blocking a cross walk. No one who lives in NYC sees that. As long as there is room between cars to walk it’s fine.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

12 days

@IanColdwater You don’t know me at all but I read basically everything you write.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

11 months

@mrexits We need to double defense spending.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

And as someone very focused on international SEO right now, I never understood how you’d ever earn a legitimate link to a terrible translation. And if you can’t earn any links, you’re not going to accomplish much in unbranded traffic. So translations need to be good.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

3 months

@iPullRank terrible take dude, delete it

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

10 months

Twitter deciding that Harvard and other Ivys are done is just peak Too Online. In the real world the smartest and most ambitious kids are gonna keep going to the world’s best schools. And graduating with a leg up.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

And just like core simplification we were more pragmatic than dogmatic. We let some teams hold onto local campaign and event experiences. We didn’t want 50 pages to stop us from doing what we wanted to do with 50,000.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 months

@tjparker So many of these moves were intuition, maybe even dogma, masquerading as being data driven. Data driven is one of those terms where 90% of ppl that profess to embrace it have no idea what it means.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

4 months

There’s a point in every marketer’s life when they realize “contact us” converts 50x better than basically everything else. And the channel source of that behavior is branded organic traffic. And so the only thing that really matters is are more ppl thinking about my brand

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 years

@TimKPaine @jgreco @ohadsamet I know it feels good to say this but it’s ok to acknowledge that lots of people make more money than you. There are thirty thousand ppl in nyc with income over $1M a year. Best to just find a life you are happy with.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We explored the borderline moral argument that we should comprehensively support at least one official lang in every country we do business but the economics are untenable. Like no chance in hell unless you are doing garbage machine translation.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

@daniellgoldstei HubSpot. Zapier. Datadog. Canva. Atlassian. Adobe. Every B2B tech company? TechTarget’s entire business model is based on it. Nearly every media property. The entire food vertical. Same with travel. Stack Overflow. Every training site? Amazon????

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 years

@AlecStapp I thought this tweet was sarcastic because the line suggests we will be back to normal in a few years.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

9 months

@buccocapital Not sure in the history of the world has anyone needed to delete the app more than this guy.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 years

@paulg I remember I think freshman year of college I got a B- on an essay because professors said it was well-written, fine argument but I wasn’t asserting anything new. It’s simple but the most important feedback I ever got. Realized I’d been writing book reports not essays.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

Finally, we landed on web being the superset of translation activity for two reasons… - assets, demos, emails, etc are all nice to have but if the web isn’t translated you’re just not visible at all - the most important content needs are served via web (eg pricing)

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We had to execute this change across 3 CMSs. We went one platform at a time and worked through “waves” of country footprints at a time. We were deleting 5 sites a week for most of 1H 2023. We started with small markets and worked our way up to UK, India, etc.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 years

@sriramk Tech has a lot of prominent actors that embarrassed themselves and the industry the last few days. It’s easy to understand how we end up with haters when these are our ambassadors. Some politicians and journos responded poorly too, but the call is coming from inside the house.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

It was a good thing we did because we had complicated issues with cascading/overlapping redirect rules ( is an old, big site) that left some things initially broken and in need of remediation. But by the time we got to India and UK it was smooth.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

“You can’t delete that page. It’s very relevant and being promoted across seo, web, events, sales and more.” Sir this page has 7 views YTD.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

23 days

@jasonlk @garrytan My new line is that if you have a big ship that turns slowly you can either a) figure out how to turn more quickly (never happens) or b) simply turn less. Downside is lots of pressure to be right when you do turn.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 years

@rhein_wein Great thread. Best ways Ive seen to keep folks like this is to… a) help them fly through bands b) get into leadership/mgmt faster than they would at better paying cos so those cos feel like step backward in responsibility and scope c) perks (masters, wfh, travel, etc)

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

By the end we had nice real-time dashboards and we could see the minute traffic within a market flipped from one footprint to another. All that visibility, and doing it one block at a time, helped us make sure we didn’t screw anything up.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We only made modest changes to our lang support. We pulled country level revenue data for all IBM, created a little lookup of official langs in every country and just built a table to figure out what we needed to cover to support most of our audience.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 years

@paulg Well we have all seen lots of other CEOs of tech companies not do any of this stuff and be extremely successful. If Satya Nadella or Tim Cook made the same criticisms that regular ppl are making would it be ok then?

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

3 years

@loganbartlett Ya but without kids I’d have probably lived life like I’m permanently in college and then died at like 45. Now I’m sitting here eating a salad cause I have to live forever. So it’s really a short vs long-term optimization when ya think about it.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

That said, one very clear finding that we haven’t found a way to consistently operationalize is that the “translation imperative” is much higher in double-byte langs (Korean, Japanese, Chinese) compared to say Spanish or German. Ideally you would do more in those markets.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

However in practice that is tricky because now you have at least two dif translation depths. It’s just more cognitive overhead. Oh this thing that works in Japanese doesn’t in German. We need two plans now. Not impossible but harder.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

2 months

@jaltma It’s a midwit meme case. Lots of reasonably senior ppl actually don’t know what they are doing. Just means knowing what you’re doing is even more valuable than you thought. But if you think can win without expertise, its a low-ceiling trap.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

We may bring back some country sites in the future when we feel better about automation (currently adopting a new CMS!) but we think this will give us a better foundation to work from.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

11 months

We officially decommissioned our old CMS this week. It had ~100k pages at peak, we still had ~15k pages live when we turned it off. Despite vanishing that much footprint I was expecting sub 1% traffic hit. Data rolled in and it was 8%. Or was it?

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

@pmdude @shreyas High agency is closer to the opposite of having explicit decision making authority. Which never truly exists anyway. It’s more about living in the world of ambiguous decision making and authority and still imposing your will on the world around you.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

17 days

@michelleefang It’s funny how often sf ppl talk about “parties.” It’s like a social scene that never evolved beyond college.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

I think we deserve some sort of SEO final boss trophy for ranking number 1 on “artificial intelligence” right now.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

11 months

I see people talk about the tension between SEO and dev and let me tell you that is not the way things should be. It speaks to organizational dysfunction and poor alignment around priorities. Organic growth is either a business priority or it’s not. End of story.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

@Noahpinion It’s not as good as the expanse but if you like scifi, what else are you gonna watch.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

I see lots of SEOs freaking out because the AI is coming for your clicks. I understand the anxiety when your livelihood is the channel. But it’s the wrong response. Blaming Google is the wrong response. Blaming AI is the wrong response. Here’s the convo I had with my team..

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

4 months

@austin_rief This post is a genuinely fascinating case study in how little crossover there is between the “media” and “seo” communities despite nearly all of seo in b2b being publishing. No shade. Just interesting.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

@5le I’m gonna go ahead and take the opposite of this whole bet. Among other things, why would Google crush its advertising revenue to please an audience they never lost with an experimental capability? Stock would get crushed.

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Bryan Casey

@bryanfcasey

1 year

It’s like hedge fund twitter but science.