According to New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, almost 40 percent of our daily behavior isn’t intentional. We don’t think about it. We get up, have breakfast, go to work, attend meetings, write email, surf the web, make plans, all without being particularly aware of we are doing. It’s just habit. And changing our habits […]
Audience Development, Weight-Loss, and ‘The Power of Habit’ Read More »
With one sentence, The Atlantic Wire changed their editorial direction and, in the last six months, their traffic has exploded. According to digital director, Bob Cohn, this is the secret: “No More Stories That No One Will Read.” Simple. Bob Cohn via MediaBistro
The Atlantic’s One Sentence Traffic Growth Secret Read More »
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 »
The current state of the media business was roughly predicted fifteen years ago by a Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. In an article entitled “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,” Christensen described how small companies, even those with laughably bad products, were able to take over key markets by gaining small footholds then growing faster
Why Mainstream Media Is Being Eaten Alive (And What to Do About It) 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 »
The thing that you team didn’t do with the time they spent on Project X. Or the thing your company didn’t buy with the money they spent on Project X.
Definition: “Opportunity Cost” 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, as a manager, your job is to hold meetings and send email, hold great meetings and send great email.”
“If your job is to hold meetings and send email, hold great meetings, send great email.” Read More »