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Often when I meet new clients, the first thing they will say to me is “Oh, I want to launch a Facebook page”. And that’s typically it. The entire marketing plan hinging on one platform. My next question will always be: “Why?” This is usually met by surprise or confusion. Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world. Shouldn’t we all be there? Don’t get me wrong, Facebook can be an incredibly powerful tool for your business, and I still recommend it to many of my clients, but while it may be useful to most, it is not the best for all. Depending on your business and the stage of your business and challenges, Facebook may play a role in helping you achieve your objectives or it may be a nice-to-have, whilst other activities should take precedence. But how do you know? How can you decide?

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It’s no secret that email marketing is, and continues to be, the most effective form of marketing to date. In fact, active email account…

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Nine ads. They are not “great” ads. I saw zero great ads this year. But these are good.

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In case you weren’t aware, podcasts are seeing an enormous surge in popularity. At least 112 million Americans have listened to podcasts…

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Well, maybe not brief…

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Marketing is a practical necessity for all businesses — big, small, new, and old — but unlike an area that’s fairly cut-and-dry (like…

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In the age of A.I. and machine learning, just being more productive won’t cut it. The future belongs to the creatives. ----- In a sense, humanity has been doing the same thing for centuries: “hiring” people and machines to take over every mundane and repetitive action that consumes our natural human resources (work, energy, carbs — however you want to frame it). Sure, you could walk half a day to get your crop to market, but if a truck will get you there in half an hour, you’ll earn your revenue quicker and have more time to spend planting the next crop. From cars and industrial machinery to databases, algorithms, and office productivity tools, we have an insatiable desire to free our mental and physical energy for higher-order tasks.

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One argument is that if you just use free social media, the platform will limit your reach. The only way around that is to find some people who are so excited about what you have to say that they tell everyone they know. The hope is that among that person’s tribe there are other “sneezers” who will spread your message like some people spread cold viruses. Suppose you do buy ads. What happens if you run out of money before your product makes a ton of money (or any at all)?

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Building an audience for your work is easier and harder than it’s ever been. It’s easier because we have the tools and resources to create our work, and the distribution channels to spread that work. Every aspiring author doesn’t have to wait for a publisher because they can self publish their books on Amazon. It’s the most valuable thing aspiring authors can do for their careers. If you want a TV show or Radio show, you can record videos and post them on Youtube, or start a podcast and distribute it with iTunes. It’s harder than ever to build an audience because there’s a scarcity of attention. Most people spend a few minutes on dozens of web sites instead of several days reading the books of one author. With such a scarcity of attention, the only viable strategy to build an an audience for your work is to focus on mastery instead of metrics.

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Terms like ‘Disneyflix’ and ‘Apple Prime’ essentially describe how the most powerful global brand owners are coming to terms with the new rules of engagement. This is not just another story of new versus old, it’s a fundamental shift in the natural order of consumerism. Brands have traditionally been prized, while distribution has been more commoditized. The ‘must have’ things held the power. But if the pipes into people’s lives have become more powerful than the products that go through them, then we’re in the beginning of a new era. and the change is just beginning.

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It starts off great. The recruiter you spent two months talking to over emails and voicemails takes you on a tour of your new office. They show you all the free snacks. You spy a Foosball table. Someone walks by holding a beer. You notice a DJ booth in the corner. You don’t know how you earned the right to work among these intimidatingly cool people, but you have. You rush home after work and stay up all night bingeing the first season of Mad Men. “Wow, this show is pretty good,” you say to yourself. Whether you’re a man or woman, you spend hours deciding what to wear on your first day. You get to work and realize immediately that your clothes are all wrong and vow to never wear them again. You arrive at work on your first day. The agency has not assigned you a desk yet. Your laptop is being cleared of files from an employee that quit last week. They introduce you to one of your team members and tell you that you’ll be shadowing them until your desk and computer are ready. Your teammate gives you the same tour you got in the interview, but with more small talk and questions about where you came from. When you list a couple companies she hasn’t heard of, you receive an affirmative “Oh yeah, I know them, I think I had a friend that worked there. Do you know…?”

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When it comes to starting a new business, all entrepreneurs want to be ahead of the game and up to date on the latest trends. Still, it can be hard to predict what is changing in the complex and intricate world of branding. From naming techniques and brand campaigning, here are five trends for new and growing businesses to watch out for:

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It started with a simple idea: What if we could monitor what people across the world were saying about Microsoft products?

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Metcalfe’s Law essentially describes how networks grow exponentially not incrementally in value with the addition of nodes or users. When you add one node to a network of a million, there are potentially a million new connections not one. The law addresses the technological and quantitative side of networks but ignores the qualitative value of networks. The Network Effect is fundamental to the power of social media networks, however they are fraught with human complexity too. A network with 10 of your close friends is worth much more than a network of 1000 strangers. There are many reasons why Instagram is growing while the main Facebook platform is declining in places. The cleaner product features and visual nature of the posts are key factors, but so is the age of the network and its users. When I joined Facebook in its infancy, everyone invited everyone to connect. I’m connected to an exhaustive list of my high school, university and early career peers. When I joined Instagram, years later, I was more selective. It’s become a more meaningful network for me as it offers more relevant engagements with close friends. In a sense, rebuilding my contacts there (which was relatively easy as it was already owned by Facebook then) was like spring cleaning. When I look at my teenage nieces’ Instagram accounts though, they are again connected to thousands of their school peers. There’s a high likelihood their Instagram accounts will eventually be stuck to 2019 the way my Facebook account is stuck in 2009. Social networks grow stale.

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While listening to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts recently, I experienced an interruption. It happens to me regularly. In the midst of really beginning to dive into a topic, as the threads of the story are about to pull apart, spin around me and draw me closer, I hear it. After this quick word from our sponsor. I begin to take the reflexive action I’ve developed for this moment, reaching for my phone, skipping ahead 15 seconds at a time until the ad is over, tracking back 15 seconds if I’ve gone too far. But this time, something stops me. Instead of a typical ad read I hear my host, Malcolm Gladwell, begin down a rabbit hole of sorts. Like many of you, I spend a lot of time thinking about the fall of the Roman Empire, and let me just read to the names of the last five emperors before everything went to hell in a hand basket. Anthemius, Olybrius, Glycerius, Julius Nepos, Romulus Augustulus. Hold on. I was told there was an ad coming, but instead Gladwell seems to be launching into a separate segment about the Roman Empire. This isn’t the subject of the podcast I’m listening to, but I’ll bet he brings it around. After all, relating the seemingly unrelated is what he does. I know what you’re saying, you’re saying, ‘I’ve never heard of any of these emperors,’ and that’s my point. They were all terrible! They ended up beheaded, poisoned! What do you think would happen to the rest of the Romans? At this point, I’m hooked. Where is this going? What connection is there to be made?

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Why won’t the company let us truly filter our feeds?

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The surprising reason why your brand sucks at storytelling, and what to do about it. --- To succeed, you just need to stop talking about yourself…and start talking about what your audience already cares about.

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If you own a small business, it seems like everyone is trying to get you to use social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are pushing hard for small businesses to embrace social media marketing. Digital marketing gurus are spending big money to try and get you to spend big money on their social media marketing services. You’ve probably already dabbled with social media marketing. You might have a Facebook business page. But, in your gut, you also suspect that social media is a bit of a scam. You’re wrong. Social media marketing isn’t a bit of a scam. Social media marketing is a complete scam for most small and medium-sized businesses.

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In recent years, the advertising industry has sextupled down on finding out who consumers are on a personal level. This is powered largely by a plethora of companies who fundamentally exist to collect any morsel of data that users drop into the ether. Perhaps no example is more comical than MoviePass, a company that is essentially a giant subsidy given to consumers to mine personal information. That information costs so much to obtain that MoviePass ran out of money last month. The “value” of the data obtained is still entirely unclear.

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Instead of kicking data brokers off its platform, Facebook should empower its entire user base to be their own brokers of data.

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Amid growing concerns about Facebook’s role in spreading misinformation and polarising its users, these last months have seen much lively debate on how this platform could reform itself. According to Frédéric Filloux, Facebook needs to keep its users on its services as long as possible to sustain its pageview-based business. It has no objective interest in exposing them to news that contradicts their beliefs and could make them leave the site. Its algorithm is built to maintain users “in the warm, comfort of the cosy environment (they) created click after click”. That might be why we should not expect too much change from within Facebook.

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“I block ads because I believe ads can be so much better.” This was a direct quote from an advertising student at the University of Texas. I visited campus recently and had the opportunity to talk informally with advertising students from the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations. What I learned affirmed my faith in the future of advertising. I also walked away with a strong sense that these young students, if given the chance to practice the craft the way they see it, would upend the whole industry. First, I was blown away at how smart, thoughtful and energized these young professionals are about advertising and media. It’s exactly what our industry needs: young talent who believe advertising and marketing can both be better as well as help society, and who want to lead the way. They were passionate, and we discussed a wide ranging set of topics throughout our 75-minute chat. Second, the students already have a high standard for corporate excellence and behavior. They are savvy and sophisticated, watching and studying everything. This extends to how they think about brands, advertising and the value exchange between their time and attention, as well as a brand’s message or promise.

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By devaluing journalism, Facebook risks abandoning the public square. By becoming a true platform, it could *build* that square.

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The 5 Elements of a Brilliant Sales Narrative The sales deck I showed Tim came from Zuora, the IPO-bound Silicon Valley company that sells a SaaS platform for subscription billing. If you pay for anything on a recurring basis (e.g. enterprise software), there’s a good chance that Zuora facilitates those transactions. I had received the deck from an ex-Zuora salesperson, who said it helped him close the biggest deals of his career. (I have no connection to Zuora, and no relationship with anyone who currently works there. UPDATE: Some current Zuora employees have connected with me after reading this.) Abandoning his naan in a puddle of curried goat, Tim grabbed pen and paper and took notes as we ran through what made the Zuora deck so effective.

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Back in March of last year, Condé Nast Traveler did something a little unusual in the social media universe. They played hard to get.

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The news seeker is overwhelmed by the quantity of information in their lives. The’ve turned away from social platforms. But they expect intimate, personal experiences from the apps and services that shape their daily lives. Journalism has yet to deliver that experience. And that is the greatest challenge and opportunity of 2019. Some of us have the luxury of starting again, and learning from the mistakes of the past. A common trait of start-ups featured in Nic Newman’s report (including The Correspondent, Civil and Tortoise) is our common focus on building strong communities from the start. In Kinzen’s case, this meant the active involvement of our first members in research, product development and curation. The result is a mobile app which will be publicly launched next week, and a roadmap for the growth of the Kinzen community and partnerships with publishers. Few newsrooms get to start from scratch. But this new wave of media start-ups could provide a template for publishers who see the opportunity in the rise of the empowered news seeker. The Kinzen formula, as Nic Newman describes it, is a news routine that is “time limited, personalised, and mind broadening.” Our team is already working on the publisher version of this news experience, and the Reuters report echoes some of the priorities on our roadmap. As news organisations focus on developing new bonds of loyalty, publishers say they are putting more focus on newsletters and a hefty majority of those surveyed say audio will be a more important part of their content in 2019.

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Like the overhyped marketing channels that came before (TV spots, billboards, banner ads) content marketing peaked — then slumped. After the huge success of a few early adopters, more and more people joined the party until the novelty disintegrated. Resistance has built, but expectations haven’t faded — from marketers, at least. And the tighter they cling on, the less effective content marketing becomes. So where do we go from here? Quitting isn’t an option. Content marketing can’t be consigned to the past like those other clearly-defined tactics, because the boundaries around it are so fluid. If content marketing is simply the strategic distribution of valuable content, then it encompasses almost all of marketing today. And it can be as powerful as it once was. But first, we need to understand the recent changes it has undergone, the barriers that stand in our way, and how to overcome them. We don’t have to bin the playbook — we can rewrite it. Here’s how.

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Earlier this year, in mid-March, eSports and Twitch experienced a massive crossover where the macro gaming entertainment scene became widely accepted by the masses because Drake and Ninja got together on Discord and streamed Fortnite. Now, If you’ve been pretty deep into my content over the past three years, you’ll know that this didn’t come at any surprise to me; I knew that a crossover moment where Twitch and eSports would become a part of pop culture was coming because of the exponential growth of both the Twitch platform and the eSports industry. However, for what is likely the vast majority of you that haven’t been following me closely over the past three years, I had my team put my process of documentation to good use by recalling a myriad of times where I gave my thoughts on Twitch and eSports as a whole and putting them into a short one-minute video.

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Mark Zuckerberg has a job like no other human has ever had in the history of the world. There is no one on earth—not Tim Cook, not Bill Gates, not Donald Trump, not even the Pope—who can so directly and powerfully affect a third of the world’s population (2.23 billion monthly active users as of June 30, 2018) with the click of a button. Mark Zuckerberg has absolutely changed elections, hell—he has swayed all kinds of global events. But there isn’t a 34-year old on the planet who could have run a company this influential, and this large, to perfection. Or a 44-year old, 54-year old, or 64-year old. He may be naive, but the evidence that he’s actually malicious is flimsy, and often dressed in tin. For that, my friends, we are lucky.

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Autonomy is the biggest reward people wish for. They want to have options - to feel that they manage their own actions. Autonomy is not 'total independence,' but a system to promote accountability.

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