Author: Dylan Kissane
Read the Wikipedia article on the printing press and you’ll see it is described in glowing terms wherein: …the invention and spread of the printing press was one of the most influential events in the second millennium revolutionizing the way people conceive and describe the world they live in, and ushering in the period of modernity. First to be printed were books, but later newspapers, journals, and magazines would emerge. Mastheads, papers of record, tabloids with massive circulations, and daily readers measuring in the millions. For hundreds of years the way that news was consumed was in print. Whether that…
You’re on Facebook and so are all of your friends. Your mom is on Facebook and your aunt, too. Most everyone you went to high school with is on Facebook and from time to time you ask yourself if you really have as many friends as Facebook suggests you do (answer: probably not). Today Facebook counts nearly 1.6 billion users worldwide and you can find heavy concentrations of people on Facebook almost everywhere in the world. Except China. The People’s Republic of China remains essentially closed to Facebook. The government control of the internet and the so-called ‘Great Firewall of…
Welcome to the week! I spent all weekend moving house for what turns out to be the latest in a series of moves over the last ten years. In that time I moved continents, moved countries, lived in apartments, flats, single-bedroom studies, and large sprawling urban spaces, too. I’ve become very good at sorting, triaging the things I own (Do I really need this? Do I really want to pack this up and move it?) and getting it all from one place to another. Like my marketing day job, it gets easier with experience. What seems overwhelming the first time…
It’s a truism of content marketing: it takes time to create something good. When you’ve poured many hours into a blog post, a video blog or podcast, an ebook, white paper, or a slide deck for a conference, it’s the ultimate short-sell to walk away after clicking the publish button and start work on something else. Instead of simply moving on, why not find a way to use existing content to your advantage? Sure, there’s syndication and republishing, but there are other ways of getting your work out there that might be even more exciting. For one, there’s repurposing content,…
With elections and referendums in full swing in the United States, in Australia, and in the United Kingdom the nightly news and the morning newspaper are becoming dominated by politicians, political parties, and their supporters. There are attacks from one side, responses from another, campaign events that range from massive rallies to cheesy photo-ops, interviews, press conferences, and “gotcha” moments galore. And beneath it all is the marketing, the sales job, and the branding. Sometimes the branding is simple – a primary color, a slogan repeated ad nauseam – and sometimes it is a little more complicated with subtle hints,…
I work in the technology field and keeping abreast of the news about marketing, technology, and Silicon Valley is part of my job. I keep Twitter scrolling on a second monitor, I read the right subreddits, I hang out at Inbound.org with other marketers, and I make sure I have all the newsletters I can possibly read (or, well, scan the subject line before deleting) every day. So I hope you’ll forgive me, then, if I was under the assumption that, when it comes to music, streaming is where it is. Because it’s not. In this post I’ll lay out…
News broke today that Microsoft is set to acquire professional social networking site LinkedIn. In an all-cash deal worth $26.2 billion the giant of professional software offer is worth $196 per share, a significant premium over LinkedIn’s Friday closing price of $131 per share. While nowhere near the largest acquisition in history, it is amongst the biggest acquisitions in social networking, new media, and technology sectors in recent years. In particular, the $26 billion far outstrips the the $22 billion that rival network Facebook paid for messaging application company WhatsApp in 2014. What Microsoft is getting for its money can…
Welcome to the week! We’re back. Yes, last week there was no Welcome to the Week post as DOZ was busy launching our new product, Quoter. Quoter is the easiest and fastest way to launch a marketing campaign and users can move from plan to price to launch in just minutes. It got a lot of notice on Product Hunt, in Tech Crunch, and around the web. If you haven’t already checked it out, DOZ CEO Anji Ismail wrote a short piece about Quoter on the blog last week – check it out. For those of you who did give…
In the business world we often use words and phrases that suggest conflict. We talk about being “at war” with our competitors, we talk about “taking a hit” when a product underperforms, and we use terms like “walking wounded” and “target rich environment” to discuss the market and those who compete in it. The war analogy might sometimes seem appropriate but no matter how aligned the fight for customers seems with a fight to survive, it’s also clear that business world is not really a fight for survival to the death. At the worst you might lose your job, your…
Writing a great blog post is one thing. Getting that blog post in front of interested readers is another thing altogether. Optimizing a blog post for keywords, making sure that search engines can index and deliver that post to interested and qualified leads, and keeping a reader on your site once they do find you is the work of hours for every single blog post that you publish. What’s more, it’s an ongoing effort that continues well after the post is published as search engine algorithms rank, re-rank, and shuffle their search results around over time. Every week we assess…