Category: Contentions
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Contentions: The best content marketing example is Marginal Revolution
Marginal Revolution should be how every person or company measures success with its content marketing efforts. Let’s evaluate it from a marketing perspective: It has made authors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok undeniable leading thinkers (i.e., thought leaders) It has become an incredibly effective launchpad for their projects (like Emergent Ventures, or acquiring PhD students…
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To promote your work on social media, ask friends to like or share, and send them a calendar invite
Because there’s so much noise on the internet, it takes an extremely loud one to stand out. In marketing, there’s a heuristic known as effective frequency, also less formally as the Rule of 7; in order for a person to commit to trying your product, they need to hear it at least 7 times. Given…
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Contentions: Same campaign, fresh hook
While many marketers, journalists, and writers gather up their year-end round ups and campaigns—each largely only differing in the assortment of inventory—a decade ago, the Bloomberg Businessweek team found a moment of truth within the structure: the jealousy list. It describes the premise as, “All the stories we wish we wrote this year.” It’s a…
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Writing, in the Office of the CEO
Over a year ago, GitLab put a job post out for a Senior Executive Content Communications Manager (CEO), which involved ownership of the current CEO content program (including elements of publicity, guest posts, speaking topics and decks, social media, category creation, etc.) and developing and executing a content plan for the next three years. Similarly,…
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Contentions: Bringing creativity, brand, and distribution together
As an expertise, marketing has an even wider set of specialties and experiences than many other lines of work. Even in the world of organic internet marketing, it’s easy to experience overwhelm considering the many channels; TikTok, SEO, Twitter (X), LinkedIn, Threads, Reddit, etc. While marketing can be extremely fun to work on (and equal…
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Your art doesn’t need more time, your time needs more art
I’ve occasionally written about the experience of writing within small amounts of time. In Big Ideas, Small Papers, I write: One of the most painful things about writing in small amounts of time is the lack of time for re-working. It feels like writing on a scrap of paper that’s way too small. I would…
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Same word, different meaning
A curious thing I learned today, via the marginalia (delightful, as always), in The Shared Language of Props: False cognates are words that look similar but have different meanings; heteronyms are words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently. Even expanding beyond the technical environment, I couldn’t agree more; words are incredibly contextual,…
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A trustworthy expert’s tone
It’s in an expert’s interest to make the case that they can add value to you and your work. That usually means that you need to believe you’re not doing something right. The next time you experience doubt after hearing an expert’s claims, just remember that they’re incentivized to make you feel that way. It…
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The negative press brand litmus test
A couple of days ago, I wrote about how imagining a brand’s hotel lobby could make for a good litmus test. It reminded me of another heuristic a marketing executive once told me about; they measured the health of a brand by how much negative press it gets. When Jay-Z bragged about owning the Nets…
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The hotel lobby brand litmus test
If there’s anything that makes branding more tangible and easier to understand, I’m all ears. I came across this passage recently that fascinated me, from The elegance of nothing by Seth Godin (via Ben Gilbert and Liberty’s Highlights): If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you’d have a pretty good guess about what…