Green to Gold: How Army Commander Chad Pollitt Became a Leading Influencer in Inbound Marketing
Since starting ShareBloc, Andrew and I have gotten to meet some of the top influencers in sales & marketing. We’ve profiled a few of them before including AJ Ghergich, Doug Kessler and Justin Gray. This week we did an email Q&A with Digital Relevance’s Chad Pollitt. Here were his responses:
Chad, you’re probably the only marketer I know who was an army commander. Talk about transitioning into civilian life.
There wasn’t much of a transition because I served in the Army National Guard, which meant I served one weekend a month and two to three weeks in the summer time. I’ve been in sales and marketing for 15 years and in the Army for just over 10. Retiring from the military actually freed me up a lot and allowed me to dedicate more time to my family and marketing endeavors. My time as a Company Commander in 2011 and 2012 saw an average of 30 hours per week on Army stuff and another 60 to 70 hours on marketing. Getting out just made sense. I served my country honorably – it was time to retire.
90-100 hours a week is a huge workload. How do you balance the two roles?
I have no regrets in juggling a military and marketing career. The discipline, leadership and communication skills developed as a war fighter have prepared me for the rigors of the fast-paced world of marketing. The Army also teaches you how to compartmentalize stress and plow through it. What freaks the average person out merely gets a shoulder shrug from me. At the end of the day there’s no enemy mortars popping off or danger close by. The year I spent in Iraq puts common corporate pressure and stress in perspective
How did you get into inbound and social media marketing?
My path to a marketing career is probably not very typical. I started off in Sales and eventually found myself doing online marketing to fill up my sales pipeline. I got pretty good at it. As a salesperson it was my responsibility to sell websites. Little did I know that selling websites meant that I’d be doing account management, content creation, SEO, social media marketing and even some rudimentary design work for my clients. It got to the point where the marketing I was doing was far more valuable and enjoyable than pounding the pavement slinging websites. I haven’t looked back since.
You're an active blogger. How do you get inspired on blog ideas? What does your publishing schedule look like?
Inspired? It’s not so much that I get inspired. While I’m working during the day blog title ideas pop into my head and I drop them in a Word document. When I sit down to write I visit that folder and review some of the titles – typically choosing one and writing it out. I don’t really have much of a publishing schedule and try to write a post on the weekend for HuffPo or SocialMediaToday. Anything else that gets written during the week happens because I had a sliver of free time. I also try and stretch my content out, meaning, I’ll create a slide deck and turn that into a blog post or write an ebook and turn that into several posts – always looking at how to get the most out of the content produced.
Your blogs tend to be very direct and to the point. What do you try to convey to your readers?
Anyone that knows me well has heard me say this a thousand times, “I’m not a good writer.” It’s true; I’m a mediocre writer at best. I just happen to be passionate about online marketing and it’s this passion that makes it look like I know what I’m doing behind a keyboard. I’ve been doing this inbound content marketing game for so long now and I’m still waiting for someone to call me out for being a poor writer.
My tendency to be direct and to the point in my writing has a lot to do with my military background. Military writing style eliminates fluff and color from the English language. This is done on purpose because on the battlefield communication has to be direct and to the point. Lives are on the line and any perceived confusion in communication can mean the difference in who lives and who dies.
For the most part, my writing is a view into my mind and what I’m thinking at the time. Whether a reader agrees with me or not, I wish to convey passion and be as helpful as possible. In my marketing career I’m approaching 600 articles written. It seems like a lot, but they add up quickly over the years. One of the coolest things about creating that much content is that occasionally you’ll get to meet someone at a conference who references something you wrote years ago and shares the impact it had on them. It just goes to show you that creating helpful content is one of the best kinds of marketing a person or brand can do.
You're also a very good curator on Twitter. How do you curate your content? Where do you go for content? What would make your life easier in this regard?
I curate so much content because I actually read so much content. The digital marketing landscape changes on an almost daily basis. Marketers who aren’t consuming content on a daily basis are the ones that risk getting left behind. The content I find, consume and curate come from several different sources. I use ShareBloc, Twitter, Klout and LinkedIn Pulse. What would make my life easier regarding curation? It’s hard to say – I don’t know what I don’t know. Is there an easier way? Maybe, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what that would look like.
Describe an average day for Chad Pollitt.
The average workday for me starts at 7am and kicks off with at least an hour of reading, sharing and curation. By 8am I usually know what the buzz is in our industry for the day. The next hour I spend staring at analytics. This allows me to understand the pulse of our marketing team’s efforts. At any given time I can have two or more huge projects I’m juggling so the rest of the day is spent managing that or going in and out of meetings. If there’s any time left between those two I try to write. I’m headed home sometime between 6 and 7pm.
For more great stuff on Chad, download his ebook or find him on Twitter and ShareBloc.
Recently, we spoke with the winner of Chad Pollitt, the winner fo our contest for the Top Content Market Posts of 2013. He's since written a great article about the role of content curation in this piece for The Huffington Post.
Click here to see his post: Content Curation and the Interest Graph: Delivering Context to the Consumer,
