Summary: What you pay attention to will change the way you perceive the world, and what you take from it. I have a friend who quotes some ancient theologian to the effect that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” What does that mean? I think I can illustrate it with a story…
Summary: To make your content stand out in a crowded field, consider these nine concepts: voice, focus, frameworks, recurring segments, vocabulary, message, favorites, characters, and skits. Publishers spend a lot of time and money developing their own brand image, which can include typography, colors, logos, and stylized art. Think of the dot-matrix images in The…
Summary: It’s impossible to avoid duplicative functionality in your tech stack. Here are 12 things to consider when deciding where you want that functionality to reside. One of the challenges of building a tech stack is that there are always overlaps in functionality. For example, your customer data platform and your email service provider might…
Summary: AI summaries of books and articles present a copyright threat to publishers, but a wider movement towards summaries and bullet points might have more significance for culture and for understanding. Bo Sacks recently distributed an article titled, “A tech sector dedicated to boiling things down has raised temperatures in some quarters of the publishing…
Summary: When an audience member’s engagement lags you need to take action. Here’s another quote from Amanda Landsaw’s talk at MACMA Industry Day. “Stay on top of inactivity in the database. If a known audience member has not visited in a certain number of days, send an email.” I’ve seen a surprising indifference to this…
Summary: To create a solid content-based business, don’t focus on the “flyby” traffic. Use high-quality, relevant content to attract an engaged audience, then create a robust database around that audience. At MACMA Industry Day last week, Amanda Landsaw said “flyby visitors don’t create robust databases.” There’s a lot to unpack in that statement. Let’s start…
Summary: Brick and mortar stores need a way to connect in-store data with online data. A customer data platform is a good tool for that. Here’s an idea for how shoe stores can provide great service to their customers and also get more customer information. How can I find the right laces and polish for…
Summary: Modern website design — especially mobile design — simultaneously bombards users with content and ads, creating a frustrating, lousy experience. There is another tried and true model that we should explore. Show the content, then the ads, then the content, as we do on TV, in movies, on podcasts, etc. Imagine you’re in a…
Summary: To work effectively in a customer data platform you have to understand the distinction between online and offline data, and how that distinction will affect your marketing efforts. This article explains. Here’s a tricky thing about Customer Data Platforms. On the one hand, you want to import all your customer data. That’s the point,…
Summary: Tricks and tools can help break through to new ideas. This article focuses on ways to get outside the ordinary and re-think and re-imagine your business, product, or project. The connection between writing and design is one of the issues raised in “Lessons on Branding from the World’s Most Iconic Cold,” distributed last night…
Summary: Publishers don’t lose their rights to their content when they post it online. Also, bullet points are nice, but we learn through stories. I like the people vs. algorithms podcast. It’s an entertaining mix of insight and quirky personalities. The interactions between Alex, Troy and Brian are amusing. In today’s podcast I’m going to…
Summary: AI is biased, and its answers are filtered through a woke superego. It is possible to get more balanced answers from AI, but you have to work at it AI bias doesn’t get enough attention, and that’s a serious problem. The truth is that all the results you get from AI are filtered through…
What I hate most about my business is the need to promote myself. I’m not comfortable with that for two reasons: (1) it feels icky, and (2) this proverb rings in my ears: “Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; A stranger, and not your own lips.” I must have read that proverb…
Summary: This article summarizes some key takeaways from a Freeman report on trends in event planning. The full report is available on freeman.com. Ken Holsinger recently gave Joanne Persico’s Bold Minds group a summary of his latest report on events. There’s way too much information there for me to summarize in my short podcast, but…
Summary: How does the Pareto principle, which posits that 20% of causes generate 80% of effects, fit with your tech stack? Can you do 20 percent of the effort and get 80 percent of the benefits? I’ve mentioned the Pareto principle before. It’s one of those odd quirks about life that sticks with you. It…