For all the stories of gutted newsrooms and struggling newspapers, there’s still an awful lot of innovation coming out of journalism. Staffed as they are with storytellers, writers, and illustrators, newsrooms can offer marketers and content creators a lot of storytelling inspiration. Here are two of my recent favorites. I The Boston Globe‘s Metro section […]

  I started on Twitter in 2007 as @MarketingProfs, sharing headlines from the site and representing the brand there. Then 5 years later I resuscitated @AnnHandley on Twitter as a personal ID—a handle I’d been squatting on for years but never used. Why the second account? I guess the easiest answer is that it seemed… […]

This post on empathy and marketing is an expanded version of the intro to my forthnightly newsletter, which features a letter from me to you along with ideas worth sharing and a healthy dose of fun. Not on the list? You can subscribe right here. I moderated a panel about Empathy and Marketing last week […]

Ronald Clark’s father worked as a custodian of a New York Public Library branch in an era when library caretakers and their families lived on site. A few of these apartments are still around, although now there are no people living in them. Ronald’s dad kept the NYPL Washington Heights branch clean and tended the […]

This post is an expanded version of my biweekly newsletter content, which features a letter from me to you along with ideas worth sharing and a healthy dose of fun. Not on the list? You can subscribe right here. Nothing ignites fire in the gut of righteous grammar geeks more than the serial—aka Oxford—comma. Why […]

We want everything fast, don’t we? In marketing, we want more leads, more pipeline, more brand awareness… and more fans, followers, and friends. We want more content. We more content marketing programs and more channels (more ways to reach our customers). But, ironically, the companies that have the biggest, most sustainable business wins won’t get […]

Recently my friend Ben Opsahl sent me a note. He had subscribed here in early 2017 expecting a regular newsletter, and then noticed that he didn’t hear from me much. He had four emails from me last year, he pointed out. Four? Yep: F–O–U–R. Because that’s how often I wrote here and how often I […]

My favorite book is always the one I’m reading now. I get vested in the story, in the characters, in the voice of the writer. The last few pages can feel like a kind of death (a sense of foreboding, a final ending), which is why I often sequentially, and (sometimes) obsessively, read the works […]

In marketing, I value three things: quality over quantity, great writing, building an audience over stuffing a pipeline until it bursts at its seams with so-called leads. I value other things, too. But those three things are top of mind for me this morning, because we just released a brand-spankin’-new research report, B2B Content Marketing: […]

We all routinely deal with inconveniences and annoyances—so routinely that most aren’t even worth griping about half the time. We’re just that used to poor service, and mediocre treatment, and apathetic reps, and inflexible business policies, and Press 1* to Return to the Main Menu. The bar for impressive customer care is so low, in […]

What’s omnichannel mean, exactly? And what does it have to do with the best pizza outside of Naples? And where does lively writing fit into all this? Andris Lagsdin has a small company outside of Boston called Baking Steel that manufacturers and sells ultra-conductive metal baking sheets. Its flagship product is its namesake Baking Steel, […]

As an exacting writer and a proponent of a slow and strategic marketing, I should be having an aneurysm (Ann-eurysm?) over how a single, sweary, typo-infested LinkedIn post slopped together in 20 minutes sparked a flurry of online engagement and $90K in sales. But I’m not. Because from a marketing and writing point of view, […]