I joined Matt Bailey on his Endless Coffee Cup podcast
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Answering Brian Morrisey — what comes after email?
On The Rebooting Show, Brian Morrisey and his guests wondered what will replace email. They made a few salient observations. Email was never meant to be a content delivery platform. Using it that way is a bit of a hack. You can’t embed a video player in an email. You can’t even control fonts very…
When it comes to book publishing, can personalization beat quality?
I don’t often comment on book publishing, but Bo Sacks recently distributed an article called “The Imitation Game” by Ken Liu, and it caught my attention. The article is about whether AI will start writing all our bestsellers, and Ken’s somewhat tentative point is that an algorithm looking for the most likely “token” given a…
Engagement is the key to retention and renewals
Charlotte Tobitt wrote an interesting article called “How to keep subscribers: What’s working at Hearst, Immediate and Mark Allen Group,” which Bo Sacks distributed recently. It’s not one of those annoying mystery articles. She gets to it right away with three things: “Friendly friction; personal phone calls, and positive reinforcement.” The first example is from…
A paywall success story from ELLE
ELLE and Poool have optimized ELLE’s paywall to increase conversions. It’s an interesting story that publishers should know. ELLE’s paywall strategy came out of three strategic challenges. Diversify revenue Enlarge the audience Make them younger I’m very interested in how they made people younger. ELLE worked with Poool, which is a French startup that focuses…
Practical next steps with AI for publishers
A few episodes back I applied the Gartner Hype Cycle to AI. (I’ll provide a link below to that article.) I thought we were still climbing towards the peak of expectations, but there are signs we might already be heading towards the trough of disillusionment. At least with large language models. In fact, I might…
A killer ChatGPT prompt to extend the reach of your content
Yesterday I saw a post on LinkedIn from Jay Schwedelson with an interesting ChatGPT prompt, as follows. Repurpose the Newsletter below into a: Top 10 Checklist 7 Pitfalls to Avoid List Quick Start Guide with 8 Bulleted Ideas Linkedin Post with Less than 100 Words Twitter Post with Less than 280 Characters Blog post with…
Collect data today for AI wonders tomorrow
(See the video version at the bottom of this post.) Today marks the 50th episode of my “Something I Learned Yesterday” podcast, so … I guess I’ve learned 50 things. And if you’ve been coming along for the ride, so have you. So congrats. Bo Sacks distributed an article by Matt Turner titled “A top…
Will AI make SEO obsolete?
Last week Bo Sacks distributed an article with the compelling headline, “Barry Adams on why AI will not kill SEO.” That piqued my curiosity because I have said that AI threatens to disrupt Google’s business. Once people can simply get an answer, rather than getting a list of homework to do, they won’t be following…
Is Google in danger of being displaced?
Summary: AI that can answer questions is making lists of search results seem quaint. The nature of search is about to change radically, but Google has to protect its ad business. Competitors don’t have that burden. It sounds ridiculous to say that Google might be displaced. Google has been the 800-pound gorilla for a long…
AI and the Gartner Hype Cycle
On the “People vs Algorithms” podcast, Brian Morrissey recently mentioned that we should view the reaction to AI in the context of the Gartner Hype Cycle – which was new to me. It’s a graphical representation of the phases of adoption of and reaction to new technologies. Phase 1 is the Technology Trigger. This is…
An intro to cognitive biases for publishers
Our minds are very complex, and our choices are often influenced by strange factors. In this article I want to touch very briefly on the psychology of persuasion and focus particularly on cognitive biases. I can’t do justice to the topic in this short space, but I’d like to pique your interest by mentioning a…
How to use ChatGPT for content creation
Summary: Six ideas for incorporating AI-powered writing into content generation workflows using ChatGPT. They are (1) get new ideas, (2) get keyword suggestions, (3) create a first draft, (4) check word choices, (5) summarize or expand content, and (6) integrate ChatGPT into a content management system. There was some conversation at the Renewd Summit earlier…
Is the word “webinar” holding you back?
In one of the first talks at the Renewd summit in Arlington, Diane Schwartz mentioned that how you name something can have a big effect on the perception of an event. For example, is it a webinar or a seminar? Is it a summit or a meeting? Is it a trade show or a conference?…
Composable vs packaged CDP – What is the difference?
As if the CDP landscape wasn’t complicated enough, now we have the additional complication of composable vs. integrated, or packaged CDPs. To unpack this, let’s start with “composability.” From Wikipedia … Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides components that can be selected and…