A few months ago, Paul Graham, founder of the startup incubator YCombinator, wrote that most really big ideas are frightening. He believes that you can tell if you are on the scent of something really ground-breaking by how much anxiety it produces personally and institutionally. This phenomenon is one of the most important things you […]
In this week’s New York Times, David Carr reports on a new committee to formulate standards for content aggregation. The committee, created by Ad Age columnist Simon Dumenco, has the support of some of the major media websites, but few prominent bloggers. Dumenco decided to form the committee after writing a series of columns in
Guidelines for Content Aggregation and Curation Read More »
Every campaign is unique, from a new product launch to a membership drive — but wouldn’t it be great if there were some general principles that govern success or failure? Maybe there are. They come from a fifty-year-old textbook called “The Diffusion of Innovations,” by Everett M. Rogers. Rogers studied how Iowa farmers adopted new
How Products (And Ideas) Find Users Read More »
Everett M. Rogers, author of “The Diffusion of Innovations,” studied the adoption of new technologies and attempted to identify why people choose to use new products. According to Rogers, any product that lacks all of the traits will find significant difficulty in attracting users. Advantage: Your product needs to be more useful than the currently
The Five Traits of Successful Digital Products Read More »
Stumbled across an old but interesting memo from Gawker Media writer Paul Boutin to managing editor Noah Robischon (which was immediately leaked to New York Magazine’s Vulture site). Valleywag (a Gawker sister site) then reported on the leak, linking to NYMag and running the piece themselves. Here are the bullets: How About Headlines? James
How to Write for Gawker Read More »
If you are searching for a model of how to integrate social media and content — Twitter, Facebook and websites, Guy Kawasaki deserves some attention. Guy (actually a blogger who works for Guy, named Catherine Faas), serves up the story three ways: short and direct on Twitter, a long teaser with an image on Facebook,
Lessons in Social Media – Guy Kawasaki Read More »
“Saying you have more than two priorities is like saying you have more than two arms. You still only have two, but now you’re also crazy.”
“Saying You Have More Than Two Priorities Is Like…” Read More »
Smashing Magazine calls it “The Ultimate Guide,” which is a bit of an overstatement, however they have published a first-rate introduction to creating simple experiments to improve email subject lines and more. The secret is to create rigorously structured tests by showing random groups of users different content and watching how they respond — one
An Introduction to A/B Testing for Email and More Read More »
While “going viral” isn’t quite the industry buzzword that it once was, the goal still is first on most sites’ wish-lists — somehow getting a piece of content to grab the public’s attention and deliver a waterfall page views. There is an ongoing conversation in media about the costs and compromises one must make in
Buzzfeed’s Jonah Perretti: How to Go Viral Read More »