ann handley

Slay the Ignosaurus; Change Your Life

The Ignosaurus (Latin: Ignosaurus Status Quo) is a beast that lurks in the shadow of Marketing. Some say it doesn’t exist. That it died out millions of years ago along with the other dinosaurs. Some say it never existed. But insiders know the dirty secret… that the Ignosaurus is very much *ALiVe* in marketing. It lurks in our industry—holding you or your teams back, bringing everyone down. The only way to slay it…? Take away its seat at the table and invite another creature in its place. This is a lightly edited transcription of my keynote at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, illustrated by a few of the slides. The full deck is here, too: Slay the Ignosaurus; Change Your Life from Ann Handley * * * San Francisco, November 14, 2018 This morning let’s talk about slaying the Ignosaurus—what it is; why we need to slay it. This is Ignosaurus. […]

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What Marketing Can Learn from the Most Outstanding Meal I’ve Ever Had

What if we thought about Marketing the way this restaurant thinks about dinner? One of the best things about being a marketer is that your work intersects almost everything. (It’s not like being a professional shepherd, say. The disjoint is greater between the work of sheep-herding and the rest of the world.) One of the worst things about being a marketer is that your work intersects almost everything. We’ll be standing in line at the post office, and a woman behind me, whom I know vaguely from somewhere (maybe our kids played soccer together?), is telling me about renovating her house. She’s figured out who has the best take-out. She knows all the best laundromats. She wonders whether she might launch a crowd-sourced online resource for locals who might value such information… The next thing I know, I start verbally mapping out a whole website and marketing plan for her.

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A Writing GPS: The Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Next Piece of Content [Infographic]

The writer Andre Dubus (House of Sand and Fog) has described writing as inching your way along a very dark, very long tunnel: you can make out the next few feet in front of you, but you’re not quite certain where you’ll end up or when you’ll get there. What helps with the uncertainty and enormity of the task is to start with some kind of process to guide the way. Process? Ew. I know. Process is one of those things that in many parts of life I consider hopelessly boring and mind-numbing. Like alphabetizing canned goods. Or peeling beets. But in writing, process is necessary, because you need a kind of road map to get you to where you need to be. So here’s an infographic based on the 12-step writing GPS I outline in more detail in Everybody Writes. This GPS gets you from one place to another:

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10 Ways to Create a Culture of Writing

Many organizations have hired a content manager or director, or chief storyteller, or chief content officer. But how can content leaders champion a more content-oriented company culture so that everybody on their team writes? I got this question recently. Let me paraphrase what that question-asker was really asking: How can you get busy coworkers (or lazy slackers—ha!) to write for the company blog? But I think the question could be broader than that—or should be. Because creating a writing culture doesn’t mean simply producing more blog fodder. It also means creating a culture of more efficient and effective communication. And, ultimately, a writing culture develops more leaders. “Business leadership is a lot about communications. People really stand out if they are articulate, if they can actually write sentences and get them presented properly,” says Paul Danos, Dean of the Tuck School of Business. Becoming a better writer means becoming a

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Twitter Helps Me Get My Lost Book Back, and What You Can Learn from It

Last Wednesday I flew from Boston to Philly on a midday JetBlue flight. I’m a nervous flyer, even when the weather is cooperating. Last Wednesday, it was not. It was stormy and rainy, and so the flight bounced around aggressively in those 59 hellish (for me) minutes; by the time we landed at PHL airport, I felt how an ice cube might feel inside a cocktail tumbler shaken by a jacked bartender. So, as soon as we got the OK, I bolted out of my seat and out of that plane to thank baby jeebus and kiss the ground my feet were happily back on. In my haste, I left behind the book I was reading. It was a copy of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work that the author himself had signed for me just weeks before, when he keynoted the MarketingProfs B2B Forum. I didn’t realize the book was missing until

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