Reading Time: < 1 min It’s been said that “perfection is the enemy of done”, in that people will work so hard to make a product or idea absolutely perfect that it never gets finished. However, something doesn’t need to be perfect for it to still be excellent. In his book “Unreasonable Hospitality“, author Will Guidara puts it like this: […]
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Boast or fact?
Reading Time: < 1 min When marketing your company, there’s a fine line between boasting and sharing facts. Boasting can be fine is certain cases, but facts should always win. A recent post from Jonathan Stark laid this out perfectly, and he compared it to the movie “Elf” where Buddy tries the “World’s Best Cup Of Coffee”. If you’ve not […]
Give or take?
Reading Time: 2 min After my recent post “experts don’t cold call“, I had an interesting comment from a friend. He defended cold calling to a degree, and ended with “you have to start somewhere when you’re new“. I agree with that, but you have a choice when you’re new: you can choose to give of yourself, or you […]
Personas are specific, but not precise
Reading Time: 2 min When working on defining your target audience, building a persona can be a great exercise. It’s something I do with some of my writing, where I occasionally write for a specific vision of a person. Having a person in mind when writing content can be a huge benefit, and it can ensure that you’re using […]
Google Reader hurt the internet the most
Reading Time: 2 min Over the years, Google has killed off a lot of products, with the “Killed by Google” site listing 280 of them as of now. Most were pretty small ones you’ve never heard of, but some were rather substantial. I was a big fan of Google+, and I’m still upset that they canceled Stadia. While those […]
Experts don’t cold call
Reading Time: 2 min Some of the funniest emails I get are from “SEO experts”, and I’m sure you get many of the same. My initial thought is “if they’re so good at SEO, why do they need to resort to spam?”. Of course, they’re not any good at it, which is why spam becomes their tactic. In a […]
The truth versus paywalls
Reading Time: 2 min It feels like most information today is free, and it largely is. Movies and music are locked up in services like Netflix and Spotify, but most news and information is free, right? It largely is, but the growing list of news outlets that are putting up paywalls is becoming troublesome. I don’t object to them […]
Keep it simple: Sonder to Empathy, or Experience to Work
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve written a few times on here about the goal of keeping things simple, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t fall prey to overly-exotic words sometimes. Two examples showcase that. Sonder First is the idea of sonder, which I wrote about a few years ago. While many people may not know the word, reading […]
Distinction is good. Clarity is better.
Reading Time: < 1 min When marketing your product, you always want to stand out and be memorable. In an effort to be memorable, though, you can run dangerously close to simply being unclear. I talked about this a few months ago with the death of Google Stadia. Their main commercial for the service was bonkers, and simply being clear […]
Did I write this?
Reading Time: 4 min AI technologies continue to improve, as I shared a few months ago with my post about AI-generated art. Along with art, AI-generated text has been improving rapidly as well, and the new (currently free) ChatGPT has taken things to a whole new level. In short, it’s a chatbot that can create unbelievably solid text about […]