Does anyone care about incremental change?

In my consulting practice, I see one challenge again and again at businesses large and small: Incremental improvements fail to excite people enough to motivate change.

When a content process is suboptimal but not so broken as to undermine success, the anticipated pain of changing feels greater than the pain that might (or might not) arise if you change nothing.Continue Reading

A CMO recently asked if he could push back on a word I used in a webinar – a word that marketers tend to throw around a lot.

I replied, “Sure, push away.”

The word was strategy.

I had talked a lot in the webinar about how the content itself provides no sustainable competitive advantage. However, a content strategy might.

The CMO asked: “What is a content strategy, and how does it provide a competitive advantage if the content itself does not?

“Isn’t the strategy supposed to define the content?”

OK, yeah, time to go get a cocktail.Continue Reading

“Isn’t it obvious?”

How many times have you asked this? That phrase often comes out when you realize some request or suggestion you thought you conveyed wasn’t acted on.

This signal amplification bias (as psychologists call it) explains how most miscommunication happens. People routinely fail to realize how little they actually communicate to their colleagues.

In other words: People believe they said a lot more than they really said.Continue Reading

I saw a stat not long ago that said marketers spend 30% of their work week learning, implementing, or searching for new technology to make content creation and management easier and faster. I can’t find it now, so maybe I imagined it.

But even if that isn’t true, it feels true.

My experience with two content teams over the last month shows why this happens.Continue Reading

Are you inspired?

I was struck by a long article I read last weekend. In it, a content marketer lamented the state of content marketing and thought leadership.

His primary complaint? The increasing uselessness of content platforms like Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even trade publications. The author pointed to algorithmically driven content marketing as the culprit. Continue Reading

We’re exhausted.

Whether it’s one of the many side effects of the pandemic or any of the myriad choose-your-own-doomsday scenarios from the last 12 months, we can all agree on one thing: We’re tired.

Didn’t somebody say 2022 would be better?

The last two years have created a kind of fatigue that’s hard to pin down. Ask people how they’re doing, and they say, “Fine.” But it doesn’t take too many follow-up questions to get to the truth at the center: “Actually, no.”

Leading teams, guiding clients, and even working with colleagues feel challenging now. Add in the complications of acquiring new talent, and you can see why managing to higher standards feels so difficult.

Your first impulse is to manage expectations down – to let people off the hook. I think you should do the opposite.Continue Reading

“Do more with less.”

That’s a phrase most in marketing have heard like a drumbeat over the last 20 years. Interestingly, it doesn’t matter whether budgets are going up or down, the message is still “let’s do more with less.”

The only question is which word to emphasize – more or less.

How do you switch the emphasis when economic or other headwinds are present?Continue Reading

A great content strategy doesn’t apply only to what you’re going to say. It also should shape and change what you’ve said in the past.

In The 4 C’s Formula: Your Building Blocks of Growth, entrepreneur coach Dan Sullivan talks about acquiring new capabilities (one of the titular 4 C’s). He wrote that a “new capability creates confidence ahead of it, but it also rearranges everything behind it,” and any jump in capability “automatically transforms both the past and the future.”Continue Reading