Family

20 Ridiculously Useful Holiday Gifts for 2020

A version of this story appeared in Total Annarchy, my fortnightly newsletter that helps you be a better writer, storyteller, marketer. Get it in your inbox; you’ll love it. * * * It’s easy to nod along to the narrative that 2020 is a raging dumpster fire, the worst year ever—what with the pandemic and the near-daily googling of “Do I have Covid or is this always what my throat feels like?” See also: the wildfires in California and Australia. Social unrest. Racial tensions. Divisive US election. The Beirut explosion. International conflicts. Locusts. Genocide. The existential freight of it all feels like we’re wearing a snowsuit stuffed with sawdust. And we’re pedaling a bike. And the bike is under water. Which is why it’s so weird to think about holiday gifting right now. Or is it? Because if there’s anything we need to close out 2020 (and stay out!), it’s the […]

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Love Rolls Downhill

“Are you going to write about this, Mom?” my daughter Caroline asks me. (She knows I’ve written about her brother.) The question is half tease, half challenge. I can’t tell whether she wants me to write, or not. Maybe she doesn’t know, either. Caroline is 18, and she’s about to begin her freshman year at college. She’s moving across the Atlantic Ocean to spend her fall semester on another continent and another time zone from me. She left Tuesday night, on a red-eye flight. London is five hours ahead of Boston. She’ll be living in my future (literally) instead of in my present. Which seems fitting. The recent months have been an emotional time for us both. Today, when I was getting my hair cut, I heard a stylist say to someone in her chair, “Hasn’t the weather this summer been awful?” And I couldn’t for the life of me

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Swinging Doors and Second Chances

Usually I write about content and marketing here. But today I’m temporarily returning to this site’s roots with a personal story. 1. Nine years ago I drove from Boston to Connecticut to pick up an almost one-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Abby. She was to be a foster dog for a short while, until the rescue group found her a permanent home. The details were murky: A family somewhere in NY had surrendered her – something about how they bought her from a pet store, and she spent much of her time at home in a cage. I guess her original owners knew she deserved more. And so they gave her to Rescue, to give her a second chance. The first time I met Abby she was tiptoeing like a cat along the back of the Rescue coordinator’s couch, acting like she owned the place. (She didn’t.) She was

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How to Innovate in Your Marketing: Ask a Teenager

If you’re a company looking to use social media and content in innovative ways, ask a teenager. And not because you want to market to teens (although you might), but because teenage behavior online draws a kind of road map to where marketing is going. Here’s what I mean: My 17-year-old daughter bought a prom dress online this week. Before it even shipped from the warehouse, she had already posted a photo of it in a private Facebook group that the girls in her school set up weeks ago expressly to showcase what dress they were wearing to the prom, which is in May. The girls are essentially staking their dress claim and (at the same time) soliciting validation for their choices with likes and comments of their peers. In other words: Then: You bought a dress at a dress shop. You wore it to prom and hoped no one

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Lessons from Skype: Your Story Is about People (Not Your Technology)

Whether you sell technology or toasters, your marketing should always be about people. In other words, your customers should be at the heart of your content, not your products. Your product might be as revolutionary as an escalator to the moon, but your story isn’t about that: It’s not about what you do or what you sell, it’s what you do for others. How does your product help people? How does it shoulder their burdens? How does it ease their pain? How does your product live in the world? That’s a subtle shift. But focusing on how your business connects with people makes a huge difference in your content. It makes the customer—not your product—the hero of your story. In the business-to-business space, especially, it also gives puts flesh and blood on the dry bones of a “solution.” That’s why I really like this new video from Skype, which tells

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Follow The Fear: Do Things That Scare You

I used to think that being afraid of everything was a weakness. Then I learned how to “follow the fear,” and use fear to my advantage. This is an annotated version of a talk I gave on the Bold Talks stage at Hubspot‘s INBOUND event. I published the essay that became the basis for this talk over at LinkedIN. But here, ima give you the slide deck. It more efficiently tells the story of why a “Bold Talk” pushed me out of my comfort zone. (Speaking publicly about content marketing is a piece of cake. Speaking publicly about myself? Not so much.) (Note: This might be best viewed in Full Screen mode. But maybe your eyes can handle it. Your call.) #FollowTheFear: Do Things That Scare You from Ann Handley Thanks to: Amy Gahran, for articulating so well the idea that your comfort zone is your dead zone, which I

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‘My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter’: The Story and Content Lessons of the Best Pinterest Board Ever

This is the story of Quinoa, a small, trendy child who wears haute couture and a model’s aloof expression. It’s also the story of how a hilarious Pinterest board for a fake child blew up this week on the interwebs, growing its follower base more than 100-fold in 24 hours, from around 100 to almost 11,000 (at last count). First, the child: More than a legend in her own playroom, Quinoa is an icon in the fashion world who always has the perfectly accessorized outfit no matter her mood or activity: She wears a chevron maxi for a stroll through a field of wildflowers; an outdoorsy kilt and cloak for a damp stroll by a bog; and totes a spare “urban outfit” in her mother’s purse in the event they’re going to be around a lot of chain link fencing. Pleather crushes her tiny soul. So does the poverty, which

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#ContentTools: Effortless Storytelling from Disney’s New Story App

I love content creation tools that put wizard wands into the hands of Muggles. Instagram did this for photos, allowing mere mortals like me to create and share photos that were beautiful and expressive. Vine allows us to elegantly create short, 6-second videos through an intuitive interface. Takes is another neat mobile tool I particularly love for the way it effortlessly creates video by capturing the context around still photos. And now Disney has created a branded tool called Story that allows any of us (well, anyone with an iPhone) to effortlessly tell and share annotated narratives. Think of it like creating a mini scrapbook with a pulse. What it does: Story allows you to organize new or existing photos and videos from your iPhone into sharable digital flip books. You can also add captions, text, and play with various themes and layouts. (But no filters. Guessing that’ll come later.)

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Some Thoughts on Leaning In: Giving Context to the Soundbites

Friday I had the opportunity to see Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speak at the Harvard Club of Boston. She was in town to promote her new book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Let me preface my comments with a preface: 1. Lean In the book had its roots in Sheryl’s 2010 TED talk. I’ve watched it a few times and shared it with a few important young women and teenagers in my life. I even referenced it in a talk I gave at Digitas once. But I hadn’t followed the more recent discussion around the subsequent book because, well, I’m busy. Much as I liked the original talk, I had encoded Sheryl’s book as the kind of gender-specific discussion that annoys me. As my friend Erika Napoletano wrote last week, “It’s time for the conversation to shift away from gender and to lean towards talent.” Yeah. What

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