Self-publishing has undoubtedly made the book publishing process much more democratic. People can publish themselves or work with a publisher, and on the whole, that’s a good thing. We see this happening across so many media channels. YouTube democratized TV. Podcasting democratized talk radio. Blogging democratized op-eds; Twitter democratized news to the point where some…
Over the weekend, I noticed that the blueberry bushes in the yard were starting to yellow a bit. Yellowing leaves, after a few minutes of Googling, is apparently a symptom of either dryness or insufficient acidity in the soil. I decided to test for the latter first, since it’s the more challenging thing to test.…
All value is relative. I was traveling recently, from San Francisco back to Boston, and at San Francisco’s airport is a little coffee shop/breakfast stand. At the stand, I got an egg sandwich: What’s funny is that 30 minutes prior to getting the sandwich, I was in Union Square, an area known for its magnificent…
We are always looking for more time. We want to be more productive, to get more done, perhaps to work fewer hours, but always to increase the impact of what we do. Yet when you watch people work, you see very few people who can squeeze the most out of the time they have. The…
Put down the Oreos. Real-time marketing is dead. I mean that metaphorically, of course, and in reference to the famous real-time marketing incident in 2013. If you’re eating actual Oreo cookies, please do carry on. Why is real-time marketing dead already? For the same reason that the retail investor on Wall Street has no hope…
One of the first maxims of great marketing analytics is to have a goal with an objective value set. Tools like Google Analytics make this elementary to configure; simply decide on a goal and decide on the value of the goal, input it into the software, and you’re up and running. But what if you…
Mark W. Schaefer wrote an excellent piece about why more and more marketers are going in-house, and why companies sometimes can be better served by an in-house professional rather than an agency. If you haven’t read it yet over on HBR, do so. One key reason why a marketer might be better served at an…
