Reading Time: < 1 min A few days ago, I received an email from a company that could “help us out”. Among other things, they promised to show us great ways to do telemarketing, email blasts, and ways to automate our connections and messages on LinkedIn. If you’ve followed this blog much at all, you know that I detest automated […]
Social Media
Screenshots versus links
Reading Time: 2 min I’m seeing it more and more on social media, particularly on Facebook — someone will share an article, but rather than sharing a link to it they’ll just share a screenshot of the title and the first few sentences of the article. The problems This causes a few problems, with the main one being a […]
Making content that lasts
Reading Time: 2 min The odds are high that you’ll create some kind of content today, with the majority of it likely being on social media. Will it last? Seth Godin recently shared about the “cultural half-life” of ideas, and how our world is moving increasingly toward vaporous ideas that come and go as the social media algorithms move […]
Grace or outrage?
Reading Time: < 1 min To paraphrase Tim Kreider in an Op-Ed he wrote for the New York Times, “people love to feel right and wronged“. Particularly when it comes to social media, many people either want to be right or else they want to be offended. It’s easy to hate those you disagree with. For those that are Christians, […]
4.5 Billion Facebooks “likes” every day
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve said before that you are “the media”. Certainly big cable news channels and other outlets make an impact in our lives, but that impact is increasingly overstated. I tried to do some math to see how this works out, comparing the largest social network (Facebook) against one of the largest cable news shows (Tucker […]
Earn the trust first
Reading Time: < 1 min The other day, I got a message on LinkedIn from someone that I barely knew (I had met them at a Meetup some years ago, and hadn’t talked to them in at least three years). The message was something like: We have a new xxxx service with a “xxxx.” business model. It’s great for xxxx. […]
Fuel versus friction
Reading Time: 2 min When it comes to marketing, there are two main directions you want to work to push — adding more fuel, or reducing friction. This works in many areas of life, as explained wonderfully in a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, but it’s particularly interesting with marketing. Fuel When it comes to marketing, fuel […]
News websites are starting to realize they should have worked to own the conversation
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve made no secret that I think individuals and organizations should work hard to own their content. This includes not only the primary content (like the actual story or post), but also the comments and interactions to the extent possible. The second part of that is difficult, as social media is the default for most […]
The Streisand Effect, slapping teachers, and critical race theory
Reading Time: 3 min Back in 2003, photographer Kenneth Adelman was taking photos of the California coastline from a helicopter to document coastal erosion. He had taken approximately 12,000 photos of the coast, including one that had Barbra Streisand’s home in it. She wasn’t happy about it and sued Adelman to remove the photo — and she lost. Prior […]
The difficulty of trying to moderate content is hard to comprehend
Reading Time: 2 min Moderating content on social media is incredibly difficult. People love to complain about it, and it’s indeed imperfect, but it’s a tough system. I shared the story of Chole before, but I recently came across a great article from Techdirt that gives some amazing statistics. In a recent a talk from Evelyn Douek, a Lecturer […]