Category: Marketing
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Why Does Your Company Exist? Brand That Before How and What
It’s refreshing to rewatch Simon Sinek’s TED Talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.” The lesson of first communicating why you do what you do, before how or what, is convincing. We’re barraged with messages online, and our filters are thick. Why has the best chance of getting through. Just be sure the how and what are worth…
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The New Republic Editorial Shake-Up: The Long/Short, Old/New Media Debate
Two recent Charlie Rose interviews – see below: One with Leon Wieseltier, long-time New Republic editor who resigned in protest last fall, and one with Chris Hughes, the Facebook cofounder and young grandaddy of online political organizing (Obama ’08) who purchased The New Republic in 2012. It’s fascinating to see them wrestle with topics such…
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Duolingo.com: Learn a Language, Translate the Web, for Free
In this TED video, Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon introduces Duolingo.com, a free online language tutorial site that (in the background) uses your quiz answers to help translate the web. Massive online collaboration. Along the way, von Ahn explains reCAPTCHA – those two-word “type the mangled words to prove you’re a human” tests found on…
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A First Look at Medium.com
Medium.com is in beta launch, allowing posts from friends and family and inviting reader reactions via Twitter sign-ins. The intro page describes it as a new platform for sharing stories and ideas. It’s longer-form than Twitter and organized into collections, by topic. So far, the design is very readable – gray-on-gray and all text (no…
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John Battelle’s “Musings on ‘Streams’ and the Future of Magazines”
John Battelle muses on the shift from page-based content (magazines, blogs, and similarly grouped content) to streams of aggregated content. What’s lost is that experience of consuming one publisher’s meal – instead, we stream a mishmash of snacks. That “page-based content” experience has value – editing and designing a publication is an art – but…
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Grammar Is for the Front Office and the Back Office
I have to agree with the managers quoted in Sue Shellenbarger’s June 19, 2012, Wall Street Journal article, “This Embarrasses You and I*” – practicing good grammar in the back office can help ensure that a company’s external communications are boo-boo free. Internal proposals and communications – especially when pitching a strategy or explaining a decision –…
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Benchmarks for Estimating Editing Speed – Update
I was happy to hear my article “Benchmarks for Estimating Editing Speed” will be discussed in Heather Severson’s workshop “The Mercenary Writer’s Guide to Setting Fees: How to Bid a Project in 5 Minutes or Less” on Tuesday, April 17, in Tuscon, for The Arizona Chapter of the Editorial Freelancers Association. Heather was kind enough…
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Fred Lebow and the NYC Marathon: Thinking Big and Scaling Up a Start-Up
Today, on Thirteen (TV, not online), I saw Run for Your Life, the documentary on Fred Lebow, the runner who dreamed big, lived what he loved to do, and created one of the most successful start-ups the City has ever seen: The New York City Marathon. Most years, we head down to 4th Avenue, in…
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Women Over 40 – This Book’s for You: Get DARE From Here!
My MBA classmate Liz DiMarco Weinmann just released her first book, Get DARE From Here! ($23.95, 330 pp.: https://www.createspace.com/3626200). Soon after we started our MBA program at NYU, in 2007, Liz told me she was thinking of writing a book someday. She knew I’d been in book publishing/marketing for 15+ years at that point –…
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My Entrepreneur.com Article Is Up: Four Sales Lead Generators
If you use e-mail marketing, telemarketing, or direct mail, check out my roundup of four services (Jigsaw, InfoUSA, Hoover’s, and Sales Genie), “When You’re Hungry for Sales, Consider These Lead-Gen Tools.” Here’s a snippet: Using a mix of advanced online searching and old-fashioned elbow grease, sales-lead generators gather, cross-reference, clean, and deliver email, phone, and…