Picture a time when a new technology angered many because of the copyright infringement risk to creators, yet people considered technology and media company leaders heroic.

A new technology protocol prompted an entire version number upgrade to the web. A new technology challenged Google for search supremacy. And every startup name contained fewer and fewer vowels.Continue Reading

Happy new year.

It’s that time. You dust off the journals neglected in the end-of-the-year rush. You locate the gym membership card and wonder if it will still scan since it’s been a few months – or maybe a few years, given the concern about being around people. And you create New Year’s resolutions.

Or maybe you don’t.

Have you come up with your 2023 word yet?

Resolutions seem so old school. Instead, pick one word to summarize your intentions and hopes for the new year. I’ve been doing it for about 20 years, and it’s worked well.

My yearly word sets the foundation for where I want to focus. It acts as the root of all the intentions I write in my new year journaling.Continue Reading

Editor’s note: And now, for our last post of the year, something completely different. 

‘Twas the night before break, Elon was high,
Content marketers worried they’d be replaced by AI.

Inflation persisted, economic signals unclear,
And all hoped that more layoffs wouldn’t soon appear.

All content practitioners climbed into their beds,
While visions of first-party data danced in their heads.

Continue Reading

Have you heard a lot about ChatGPT lately?

I thought so.

In case you haven’t (maybe you’ve been too tied up with holiday shopping or closing the fourth quarter), ChatGPT is a prototype artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI that’s gotten a lot of media and social media coverage. This class of generative AI technology receives prompts from users, then generates new text or images (based on the data set used to train the model) in response.

That means if you’re a software engineer, you can ask it to write (or check) your code for you. If you’re a writer, you might ask it to write a blog post on technology (reasonable) or a history of London in the style of Dr. Seuss (Why? Because you can). If you’re a student, you might use it to write a college application essay. You get the idea.

The results are impressive – sort of. But I’ll come back to that.

Continue Reading

When a brand creates a new content marketing or content strategy team, they often ask, “What function or department should the content team report to?”

My answer? “Yes!”

Now, I’m not trying to be a smart aleck. (Well, I am a little bit, do you even know me?) But seriously, my yes comes from years of helping implement content teams in dozens of businesses. My affirmative response indicates the most important thing isn’t to whom content reports; it’s that content teams report to the business.Continue Reading

“The stock market is not the economy.”

When the stock market is up, it doesn’t always follow that the economy is great. When the stock market crashes, it doesn’t always mean the economy is bad.

That’s as true today as it was 25 years ago when I first got into marketing. And it’s a great reminder to avoid basing business decisions on faulty connections.

Over the years, I’ve learned an adjacent lesson about content and audiences: Popularity isn’t a sign of differentiation. People don’t necessarily regard what is popular among online audiences or the media as high quality – or even true.

Continue Reading

Content practitioners create a spectrum of creative content. Some, like thought leadership e-books, entertaining videos, or customer stories, are seemingly filled with storytelling opportunities.

Then, there are the more process-oriented pieces – standards, guidelines, how-to instructions, and other initiatives that relay valuable information. Though necessary, these “constructed” pieces are rarely considered a place to stretch the creative legs.Continue Reading

CMI first described the Chief Content Officer (CCO) job more than a decade ago.

In those days, companies needed senior leaders to spearhead the integration of “content marketing activities” into more traditional marketing campaigns.

Today, content leadership must expand beyond marketing (even content marketing) to encompass an all-communication strategy.

That means today’s chief content officer (regardless of whether that’s the title the person holds) guides the content that makes up every experience a customer, audience member, or prospect has with a brand.

What does that look like in practice? I’ll explain and provide a chief content officer job description you can copy.Continue Reading