Ann Handley

Ann Handley is one of the most respected voices in marketing and the world’s first Chief Content Officer. She’s a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of three books, keynote speaker, and entrepreneur who has built two multimillion-dollar companies.

She’s a partner at MarketingProfs, a LinkedIn Influencer with 496K followers, and the author of a popular fortnightly newsletter with 51K subscribers. With more than 1 million social followers, Ann was named by IBM as one of seven people shaping the future of marketing.

Ann lives in Boston, loves dogs, and collects vintage typewriters. Her fourth book will be published in 2027.

‘Hey, Pretty Lady!’

A few weeks ago, I had some time to kill at Boston’s Logan Airport before a flight to Denver, and eventually to Santa Barbara. I’ve taken the same, lonely trip a dozen times or so, and it’s always a tiring day that reminds me again how profoundly disappointed I am that the seven-league boots I coveted as a kid still aren’t commercially produced. They would, after all, make travel so much more palatable. And quicker. Today was a quiet Tuesday in the terminal, and nothing there (a sundries shop, a TBCY staffed by a yawning clerk) seemed to hold much in the way of a half-hour’s distraction. But as I cased the concourse, the guy who operated the shoeshine stand caught my eye and called out to me, “Hey, Pretty Lady!” he said. “Look at those boots! You need shoe shine!” If you’ve been in a major municipal airport, in

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How I Invented Blogging

When I was a kid growing up, and my parents’ friends would ask me the inevitable question, “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I would look them square in the eye and say definitively, “I want to be a blogger.” Well, that’s not entirely true. I did go through a period, when I was about 8 or 9, of wanting to be a vet, until my mother pointed out the inherent limitations of a veterinarian who accepted appointments only with cute, healthy dogs under a year old. That, and I was rather shy—so I never actually looked an adult square in the eye. Truth be told, I never spoke to them, either. But other than that brief diversion—I always wanted to be a blogger. In fact, I invented blogging. It’s just that it took 25 years for the technology to catch up. So while I

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In-Your-Facebook

I got an email from my friend Sharon this morning. She had recently signed up for a Facebook account and had just been “friended” by someone she didn’t know very well. Actually, she didn’t know him at all. She asked something like, “So who is he? Is he a creep? What does he want?” Then, she added, “And since when is ‘friend’ a verb?” For those of us who work in the digital space and have readily embraced online social media tools like Facebook, it’s easy to brush off Sharon’s condition as Neophyte Nerves. But, in truth, the essence of her concerns about privacy and access to her personal life has been clouding my wizened brow, too. And by “privacy” I’m not talking about access to my data—where I’ve been on the internet, or what I’ve bought, or what I’m emailing about. I’m concerned with something more fundamental and frailer

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4 x 4 Secrets About Me, And Why I’m Uncomfortable Talking About Myself

Over the weekend, my friends Peter Kim and BL Ochman independently tagged me “It” in two blog games (called memes). The object of each is for the tagged writer to reveal personal bits about themselves that you wouldn’t know otherwise, and then to tag other blog authors to similarly spill their guts. BL (who had been tagged by Toby Bloomberg) asked for “8 secrets,” and Peter (himself tagged by Shiv Singh) asked for four details about four topics of esoteric “things about me”; Peter called it a 4 x 4, which I kind of liked. Truth is, I’ve been tagged lots of times in the past. But I’ve rarely played along, in part because I didn’t have the right forum: I feel a little weird talking about myself on the MarketingProfs group blog. Or so I thought. Now that I have my own blog here, I’m surprisingly just as uncomfortable.

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Alpha Females

Two or three years ago, I found myself on a list of people who take turns cooking in a soup kitchen. And so, every few months, I do. I can’t say I particularly look forward to it. But to beg off the list at this point would require a phone call to the organizer. I imagine the hypothetical exit interview: “So in what other ways do you help the homeless?” And then I imagine my lame stammer—so, when my number comes up, I again show up at the shelter. As much as my turn behind the stove never seems to come at a good time, once I’m there, with my hands as two of the several helping to knead 30 pounds of ground beef into 10 meatloaves, it’s not so bad. Actually, it’s pretty gratifying, and it makes me appreciate the basic necessities that I and those around me take

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A Virgin in Hollister

Being a parent for the better part of two decades, I’ve gotten used to accepting the fact that my kids are attracted to things that I don’t like. When my son Evan was about four, he was shopping with me in a second-hand children’s shop. Rummaging in the forgotten bits at the bottom of one of those boxes of toys that shopkeepers sometimes keep in the corner to keep kids occupied, he eventually unearthed a shopworn plastic figurine of Hulk Hogan. It wasn’t for sale, but we bought it anyway, and the minuscule Hogan, which innocent Evan sweetly named Kimby, instigated a love of larger-than-life heroes, rangers and comic book characters that has stayed with him in various expressions, even now, as he enters the downside of his teen years. In other words, no matter how much I advocated early on for Pooh Bear, he had his own ideas. The

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