SHARING SCHMARING. According to certain creative directors I’ve heard from, you may be shooting yourselves in the foot, you who’ve bought into the content marketing movement. In their opinion, its tenet of freely disseminating business insights is not only an unsustainable business model, but it’s also contributing to widespread job losses every day. I wrote extensively…
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EARLIER TODAY I returned to my home in Dallas after visiting family, traveling on Amtrak’s Heartland Express, a line that in about four hours crosses the prairie that flattens out between Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Fort Worth, Texas. I took advantage of the peace and quiet, spending the majority of my time writing, but along the way…
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NOT EVERYONE IS ALL that crazy about the big changes in marketing that social media hath wrought. I’m referring to certain individuals in my tribe, the “creatives,” who are going through a kind of evolution of their own as they figure out how to respond to this changing landscape. More specifically, they question the validity of…
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MUSICIAN FRIENDS WILL BE quite impressed when you sprinkle into the conversation a little lyrical lingo from their universe, and one of my favorite old books, the American Thesaurus of Slang, is just the place to find it. Jazz slang, and where I heard it first My own introduction to that world came at a…
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MAYBE THERE WILL always be some little thing we don’t like about the work we love. I have my own “damned dailies” as Dr. Phil calls them. But it’s not coming up with ideas for content that I find most challenging. It’s the tedium involved in bringing those ideas to fruition on the web page….
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WAITING PATIENTLY ON MY BOOKSHELF for the occasional trip down my father’s Memory Lane is a 65-year old copy of The American Thesaurus of Slang. I think the book is out of print by now, but in its day it must have been the essential reference manual for detectives, sailors, and other niche inhabitants whose…
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PERHAPS I JUST need to be watch my diet. Admittedly, as a content creator, I end up ingesting mass quantities of social media every day. But lately my stomach has been churning over what I’ll call fast-food content. I think it’s adding up to too many empty calories for all of us, in an already…
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SUPPOSEDLY, CONFESSION IS good for the soul, right? So, yes, I confess that I’m a social media idiot. Social media, like the human beings that make it thrive, is a lively, ever-changing, almost organic kinda thing. And I’m willing to admit that, even as one who works in this medium every day, I’m constantly learning new things. For…
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CHRISTMAS EVE is tonight, and if, like me, you’re no longer eight, you may soon be ruminating on the paradoxes, contradictions, and ironies of the Season. For those of us in the West, there may be no greater philosophical clash than between the frantic celebration of abundance that Christmas has become and its impoverished beginnings; between…
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GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH includes a tool I find fascinating, because instead of requiring you to describe in words what you want to see, it allows you to provide an image you’d like Google to match. But it also says a lot about why we’ll always need people to ride herd on technology. I’ll elaborate on that below,…
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