There’s a saying in marketing: “If something is free, you are the product.” It’s derived from a mid-1970s interview with artist Richard Serra. Serra said that the advertiser was the consumer of TV, and everyone who was watching was the product. The advertiser was buying attention. Social media is the same today. When the big social Continue Reading...

People don’t read the newspaper as much as they used to — but its legacy is still with us. For a couple of centuries, the newspaper was the primary source of news. People read the paper with their morning coffee, digesting the day’s headlines along with their breakfast. And the top headlines, the ones you really needed to know about, were the Continue Reading...

Marketers go where the attention is — and that means social media. Over 4.59 billion people on this earth have a social media account. It’s the easiest way to get people to know who you are, and most businesspeople know that. But social media isn’t the whole meal. It’s part of a balanced diet. I talked to several people recently who seemed Continue Reading...

“What you call love was invented by guys like me … to sell nylons.” So said Don Draper, the most famous (fictional) adman in the world. Millions of people tuned into Mad Men every week, and it shaped public consciousness about how advertising worked. But Don Draper would have needed to adjust his approach if he lived in the 21st Continue Reading...

Keeping up with your engagement channels can be overwhelming. You have to worry about your own website, podcast, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram … the list goes on and on. Each social media channel has its own flavor and its own audience, and you can’t just publish the same content across the board. The solution to the problem Continue Reading...

Most musicians are bad marketers. As a musician and music fanatic myself, I’m signed up for updates from a lot of artists. That means I should get a lot of emails. I don’t. Most of the time, the only emails I get from bands are concert tour announcements. There’s no conversation. It’s solely used for sales. And music isn’t the only field Continue Reading...

The most valuable design lesson I ever learned came at a study party in college. As I was wearing out my yellow highlighter on my history textbook, one of my friends walked past the spot where I was sprawled on the carpet and stopped me. “You’re highlighting too much,” he said. “If everything is important, nothing is.” I’ve never forgotten Continue Reading...

Remember Vine? Second Life? Google+? These platforms were powerful. They grabbed media attention and attracted large audiences. And it wasn’t just users that invested in these — companies plowed money into them. People built audiences there. And then they disappeared. If your web presence lived on one of those platforms, your audience died Continue Reading...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) content is becoming common on the Internet today. These tools can now generate readable content that can trick both human marketers and search engines. When I was researching for this article, I was actually surprised to see how much AI content had improved; some of the new AI writers are shockingly good. I’ve Continue Reading...

Do people keep coming back to your content? Good content marketers create useful content. But they have another responsibility: driving return traffic. If people are only looking at your content once, you’re not creating traffic that builds business. Good content marketing creates resources that people come back to again and again — Continue Reading...