Strategic thinking

The Maple Leaf Farms duck farm wanted to send high-value swag to 50 executive chefs at high-end restaurants to encourage them to book an all-expenses paid tour to its headquarters to learn why they should add duck to their menus.

Instead of slapping its logo on some merch, we designed and produced 50 hand-cut wooden puzzles, customized with the logo of each executive chef's restaurant. (And yes, we stayed within the original budget.)

We packaged it up real fancy and mailed it. But we withheld the one puzzle piece that held the whole thing together. We did send a nice explanatory note from the company president.

In the note, the chefs learned that all they had to do to get their missing duck piece was to give Maple Leaf Farms a call. (We even convinced the president to include his personal cell number).

We weren’t jerks, though. Two weeks later, we sent out a follow-up note to the non-respondents, along with the missing piece.

Within the first two weeks, 11 of the 50 chefs called about the missing pieces. In addition, the piece won The Garrigan Lyman Group an Addy Award. The takeaway: you can’t reach everybody, but you can reach somebody!

The Seattle Cancer Alliance partnered with the Copacino + Fujikado agency to develop “The Day I Found Out” landing page, which shared 12 professionally made videos that told people’s stories of the day they found out they had cancer.

After the campaign ended, Copacino + Fujikado took ownership over the site, but did nothing with it for a couple years. When I joined the agency as an intern, I was asked to post on the site’s Twitter page 2-3 times per week.

Coming up with tweets about a website that hadn’t had any new content in 3 years was a challenge, to say the least. I don’t have cancer. Nobody I knew had cancer. We weren’t associated with a cancer center anymore. And there was zero budget to film new videos.

With no content to share, I took a different tack and began to follow accounts from cancer survivors. I regularly reposted their video blogs. After a few weeks of building trust, we asked if they would share self-made videos about the day they found out they had cancer.

Dozens of videos poured in every week. “The Day I Found Out” Twitter following kept growing. To accommodate the vibrant spirit of these homemade videos, I got the go-ahead to build a new website with a more interactive format that focused on building community.

Sometimes you just don’t get many bites when you’re job hunting. I started creating custom portfolios and super-mini social media campaigns to help me stand out. Here are three of my favorite efforts.

To demonstrate my capabilities to Headspace, I built a custom portfolio site that included a video script based on one of their blog posts.

I shared it on LinkedIn and garnered over 117,000 impressions, 79 comments, and the attention of their recruiters!

Seattle-based KEXP is my favorite public radio station. To grab their attention, I created The Cliff McCloe KEXP Fall Job Application Drive and a corresponding LinkedIn post to boot.

In addition to a custom portfolio, I wrote Splunk a script based on their values that starred their pony mascot, Buttercup. After posting the portfolio on LinkedIn, Splunk noticed, and I ended up getting the job!

Late one unremarkable Tuesday afternoon, the HR head at The Garrigan Lyman Group sent out an email informing staff that senior leadership would be attending an off-site leadership seminar. As an afterthought, she added, “Until then, Cliff is in charge.” Pretty funny, right? But what do they say about gift horses?

That night, I created a blog entitled Cliff McCloe is in charge today-Lisa said so) and a corresponding Twitter account. In my first post, I promoted myself to CEO and asked staff to apply for ridiculous leadership positions. I renamed the company The McGarrigan Cloeman Group, emailed the link to the staff, and went to sleep.

The next morning I dressed like this and parked myself at one of our big boss’s desk. The company quickly bowed to my will. The Twitter and blog comments sections went wild—and I responded to every post. Leadership positions filled up quickly. I issued pronouncements throughout the day. But it was the rest of the team that really brought “Cliff is in Charge” day to life.

People got on board. Designers made photoshopped photos of me for the blog. Our newly appointed Mayor of Funkytown created a Funkytown playlist to share with the whole team. When a PM (with the initials LK) took initiative to rename the area by his desk the LK Lounge, we made it so. Even the absent senior leaders engaged throughout the day.

At the end of the day, I reluctantly relinquished my power. But the lessons of the day were not lost. Rebecca Lyman, one of our principals, had this to say: “Every time we had a break in our strategy session, we’d pull out our phones to see what we were missing. We were TALKING about leadership but the team spent the day DOING it.”