What It Takes Us To Prose
What does it take to maintain, develop, and grow a social media network like Prose?
I am sure many of you will have asked yourself that question at some point along your Prose journey, and we are about to answer it.
Prose has a way of getting under your skin. It’s true. The Prose team live, eat, and breathe all things Prose. We are all in love with words, the way words can evoke such vivid imagery and provoke thought and emotion.
We spend each and every day thinking about and working on Prose; even within our limited downtime we use Prose just like you all do too. We read and feel each and every word you type, and agonise over each and every word we bleed.
Every single day is different in terms of what we do. We have the regular things we do, that need to be done every day, and other things that come up from brainstorms or team meetings that become a focus until that task is completed.
We are a small team, that we will be introducing to you better, through a Q&A blog series with each and every one of us! HB, Paul, & Sammie work on everything non-code related, Z (Zach) works on everything code, and our two wonderful interns Ryan and Vanya work on Android and iOS respectively. Last but never least we have our genius designer, Karen, who provides us with everything visual, we love her images so much we just want to lick them!
Having such a small team could be perceived as a negative thing, however, we all get on incredibly well, even if Paul’s jokes are rubbish! (Ask him to tell you one, we’re not kidding, they suck). We are a family, very tight-knit, and extremely supportive of each other. Both within our careers but within our personal lives too. It really is a one-of-a-kind team.
Paul, Karen, and Sammie, reside and work from the U.K, so if you have ever received communications from us at stupid-o’clock, that’ll be us working away while you’re asleep.
So what do we all do daily?
To itemise everything would take a long time, and probably bore you, we also don’t want to spoil anything that we have in the pipeline, so we’ll spare some information to keep the suspense.
Karen creates beautiful images, all-day-long. We often spring last minute requests too, because we are nice like that. Karen’s designs have us all discussing how awesome they are behind her back and during message / phone conversations. Karen has also just helped lighten the load on Instagram, so be sure to say hi, and be nice to her, she’s awesome! You’ll also find her meandering through Twitter on certain weekend days too. Yep, we cover social media in real-time, seven days a week!
Paul and Sammie write ALL copy for the company. Let us tell you, that is a LOT of copy. From blog pieces, to email newsletters, in-app announcements, social media captions, you name it, they write it.
They also share the customer service side of the company. Any time you contact us by email, in-app via direct message or comment, through social media, anywhere, it’ll be them.
Every marketing initiative you see, either in app, on social media, or via email, will be a team effort. Data mining, writing design briefs, outlining the plan, execution of the plan, copy, scheduling, launching, it takes every single one of us to make it work.
Sometimes we have to liaise with outside agencies for partnership opportunities, or for awesome interviews, and you’ll find us all sending emails, hitting the phones, and banging our heads against brick walls.
HB spends a lot of his time tapping the keys of calculators, and keeping us all in the loop with metrics and analytics. We, just like any company, keep an eye on statistics, they help us know whether we’ve done things correct, or not. (This has happened. We have got things wrong. And boy does that hurt us all.) He also spends some of his time networking with colleges and the education authorities.
HB’s researching skills are incredible, and we rely on lots of research for a lot of our initiatives. We do not want to replicate what is already out there. We want to provide you all with a fresh and new experience with words, one that is always evolving.
Z and the tech team spend hundreds of hours per month cranking code, fixing bugs, and fine tuning the apps and the website to make your experience even better than before.
We meet as a team once per week, 5pm GMT / 9am PST, every Monday. We share our triumphs, our low-points, we talk about you guys, pieces we have read, feedback we have received, you name it, nothing is off limits.
We usually begin each meeting with a joke, hence how we can tell you how rubbish Paul’s jokes are, or a random fact. These are often NSFW yet there we are being completely inappropriate, and non-funny in Paul’s case. (Yes, we’ve milked that enough now.)
Once the jokes are done, it’s straight down to business. We can’t tell you how long each meeting is, because it depends what we need to discuss. Our longest meeting has lasted almost 3 hours. Putting creatives on one phone call can bring a plethora of ideas we discuss and explore.
We use a communication application called Slack, which is where we all keep in touch throughout the day. We talk, we discuss, we share ideas - some good, some awful, we even share random meme’s or articles that we find online.
We read, we read a lot, inside and outside Prose. We keep up-to-date with what technological advances occur, and how we can use them to shape Prose. We keep our ears open for new changes in the publishing world, the literary industry, and the social media world.
We make mistakes, we learn from them. We are constantly learning and improving. We hate it when we get things wrong. We want to make you all happy, and we want everyone worldwide to use Prose. We want the world to write more, and read more than what shows up on their Twitter newsfeed, or Facebook timelines. We want imaginations to be woken, and ultimately, we want everyone, to love words and Prose, just as much as we (the Prose community) do.
Prose is our baby. Prose is your baby.
We want you to help us shape it. We are working hard behind the scenes. Blood, sweat, tears, pride, joy, passion, and happiness go into every single day. If you want to support us further than you already do by being here, sharing your words, and supporting your peers, we’d really appreciate you spreading the “Prose Word.” Whether that be by social media, or by word-of-mouth, it really would mean a lot to us. If you’d like to help further than that, please contact us. There is always something we’d love to collaborate on with you.
We are writing this on a Monday, it’s 16:17 GMT, the team meeting will be in 40 minutes, and we’ll get to talk all about the place that we all adore. Prose.
That’s all for now, but stay tuned for more behind-the-scenes snippets real soon.
Happy Prosing.
The Prose Team.