a few sacred cows have emerged about the nature and promise of content marketing – these are the white lies marketers tell themselves. Here are a few myths marketers need to dispel if they want to really reach prospects with their content... The goal of content marketing isn’t to create content, it’s to create educated buyers who are ready to h…

what are the characteristics of videos that engage consumers?... Depending on the expert, success is thought more likely if a video is humorous, shocking, dramatic, topical, warm, arousing, angry, scary, socially beneficial, cute, violent, sexy, uplifting, intriguing, quirky, interesting, authoritative, tear-jerking, educational, controversial…

Facebook seems to be giving Notes a reboot... looks like nothing else on the website: It has a clean, white-space-filled design with extravagantly readable type. It looks, in other words, like Medium. - Facebook, Medium, and the Personal Press Release - The Atlantic

"A large part of corporate economic activity today is still designed to accomplish what high market transaction costs prevented earlier. But the world has changed... coordination can be performed without intermediaries with the help of new technologies. Digital transparency makes responsive coordination possible... Apps can now do what manag…

It wasn’t that I couldn’t find the time. I couldn’t find the attention. My mind fills up with a few key projects and that’s it. I’m absorbed by those. That’s where my attention is. - The difference between time and attention – Signal v. Noise

"nobody tells you anything when it comes to bubbling-up abuse from the trenches. It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone five levels deep in the bowels of the organization to reach out to the fifth-richest man in the world and trouble him ... It doesn’t matter how many invitations to open doors... you extend, it’s just not going to happen. …

Daily I now see posts published authors on LinkedIn that praise the value of finding out your "SSI". . .. while at the same time gently but not so quietly promoting what their score is... I believe the "one percenters" tag is entirely relative since each of have a completely different network from anyone else in the world. - Did LinkedIn go …

networks trump traditional forms of corporate organization, and ... changing traditional ways of managing that organization... If the (transaction) costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically ... The core firm should now be small and agile, with a large network. The mainstream firm... becomes the more expensive alterna…

Long periods of uninterrupted time is needed to properly process new information... Our devices, always being online, constantly interrupt these sessions... Our devices are a collection of multinational companies competing for our attention... They purposefully design their applications to distract you for their goal of selling more ads. - O…

my colleagues and I have created a site entitled, “How To Pitch Me” that aims to help those who strive to pitch reporters in today’s tech landscape.... While reading these various submissions, I have noticed that there are certain tips that repeatedly come up... Here are the top ten pointers... [and finally] ... many writers we asked, includin…

"what people really want is to be treated like individuals and given the tools to help themselves.... Rigour is the cold, hard fact of insight. Magic is the creative talent ... Without great insight, creative may be ill-informed or poorly targeted.... Meanwhile, a data-based body of evidence that isn’t supported by creativity fails to creat…

"by simply learning from disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event, we can come up with a set of principles to prevent the overwhelming majority of the worst behaviors on the Internet... Businesses that run cruise ships …

"... that encourages conversation around stories and can help create community on Digg, instead of farming out that chatter to Twitter or Facebook... This year could be a tipping point in how media companies employ reader comments and conversation...expected to debut this fall. You can sign up to follow the project — and be a beta tester ..." …

"Humans are emotional creatures and they want experiences that engage them as humans. They're not eyeballs, impressions, views, likes, shares, clickthroughs, or conversions.... connect people through sharing and conversation to form communities that we can then cultivate. That takes understanding, purpose, intent and genuineness.

We must be dreamers, rebels, renegades, heretics, outlaws. Everything, in short, that the demagogues do not want us to be... the very leaders that are a broken, hunted, anxious world is so desperately missing. - How Not to Be a Leader — Bad Words — Medium

If you don’t want comments on your website, that’s fine, don’t have them. But don’t act like comments are some sort of intractable problem that can’t be realistically addressed by mortals. They’re not... you could fix this, but your priorities are elsewhere.... Having threads that close, having moderators that redirect entrenched disagreements,…

By combining ride sharing with car sharing—particularly in a city such as New York—MIT research has shown that it would be possible to take every passenger to his or her destination at the time they need to be there, with 80 percent fewer cars. Clearing the roads of four out of five cars has momentous consequences for cities... - Full speed …

A significant proportion of tasks embedded in white-collar jobs can and will be automated in the years ahead. ... as much as 47 per cent of total US employment is at risk, while the equivalent figures for European countries ...from about 47 per cent in Sweden and the UK to 62 per cent in Romania... For now, however, what all too often passes as…

I’m going to call it a Servitude Bubble... makes a small number of people something like neofeudal masters, lords with a corncucopia of on-demand just-in-time luxury services at their fingertips... by making a very large number of people glorified neo-servants…butlers, maids, chauffeurs, waiters, etcetera....“jobs”, sure — but only of the lowes…

How a networking game can get conference attendees out of their seats

People are worried they will lose their jobs to robots but if you ask me, most of us have already lost our minds to the machines. Our personalities. Our authenticity. Who are you as a human? - In Search of Authentic People in The Age of Automation — Medium

Social and mobile have fundamentally altered attention. Platforms for self-expression and communication are the largest and most important media companies of the millennial age, dominating share of attention and engagement for young people. And the behavior of the young is predictive of the future. - May I Have Your Attention, Please? — Medium

We seem to be suckers for a happy ending ... Upworthy and Viral Nova, have become skilled in coming up with headlines that turn a sad tale on its head. Shifting the focus away from sadness changes a story’s emotional footprint, helping it travel further on social networks... While bad news is a mainstay of the media, people tend to avoid passin…

"the C-Suite have optimized the supply chain, digitized marketing and communications, socialized customer care and service. Where else can they get a competitive advantage? Fundamentally changing the way they work, implementing change -- especially culture change -- faster and better, will be the source of competitive advantage going forward.... …

"sometimes organizations get so caught up in showing off their use of social media tools that they forget that those tools have a purpose – strengthening the relationship between an individual and your organization. A healthy social strategy includes both content created to get new folks in the engagement funnel AND to strengthen the “passion-c…

In studies, people report that they feel better after venting. But researchers find they actually become angrier and more aggressive. People who vent anonymously may become the angriest and most aggressive.... We typically sound angrier in print. And when we write down something, we can reread it, over and over, and stew. With e-venting you don…

A decent long read: on @medium, The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes: "Don’t feel constrained by presumed short attention spans. If you put in the effort, so will your audience." - The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes — Data Lab — Medium

"Thoughtful, longform content is king... A young, bare-bones website called Wait But Why is disproving the notion that thoughtful, long-form content and virality are mutually exclusive... monthly averages of 1.6 million uniques and 4.6 million page views... Its newsletter has over 106,000 subscribers... Its most viral article... has well ove…

"at some point, you start to crave something with more substance. Today’s readers want more than listicles and clickbait, and this is driving meaningful change across the digital publishing industry... In the maelstrom of Internet content, we are drawn to articles that make clear promises for what we will get out of them, as well as those that …

social media platforms are ... the main avenue through which we make comparisons with our peers, acquaintances, celebrities ... those comparisons are often what we base our life-expectations on, these platforms can lead to anxiety about our place in the world... Most of the content on social media wasn’t improving my life — in fact, by taking u…