Archive for the ‘Required Reading’ Category

Great little post from Team Simple.

Have been collecting Marketing Workflows which I think, done right, unleash marketing productivity and efficiency. What’s interesting is how, well, primitive many of they are. Then I was bouncing around my Feedly feed and came across this piece over at Stacking Bricks. Was a really interesting view of a content workflow that you could manifest and largely automate in Simple.

THE WORKFLOW

• We write our articles in Markdown
• We use git locally to save our work
• We use github to share the repo across our team (me (Amy), Alex, Thomas and Becky)
• As we edit local files, the local (developer) copy of the site is continuously refreshed by guard
• The podcast listing and individual pages are automatically generated from our podcast feed
• When we git push all committed changes are automatically deployed to our host
• We added some features to nanoc to make curating our content so much easier, and will be adding so much more!

Lots of other stuff worth noting in the story – the idea of a clear process that gets into the meat of standardising things like meta data and more. And gotta love this:

Every piece of content has a slug — or short name — we can use to build links without having to touch absolute URLs. That means if the filename or path for a page changes, so will all the links. (YESSSSS.)

Am interested in hearing about your Marketing Workflows!

“In the retail business the more you can give value with products, with service and with image, the more you’re able to get in price,” Mr Meij told The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Wednesday.

“As we develop our model from the analog world to the digital world … if we can continue to innovate in the eyes of the customer, innovate on price, service and image … it means we can get more for our products,” he said.

“Differentiation is the custodian of profit and we can create more value.”

… Spot on… 

Reflecting on Ben’s latest post on Twitter and their obsession with live…  One year ago Twitter committed to a “live” strategy; management wrote in a letter to shareholders:

We’re focused now on what Twitter does best: live. Twitter is live: live commentary, live connections, live conversations. Whether it’s breaking news, entertainment, sports, or everyday topics, hearing about and watching a live event unfold is the fastest way to understand the power of Twitter. Twitter has always been considered a “second screen” for what’s happening in the world and we believe we can become the first screen for everything that’s happening now. And by doing so, we believe we can build the planet’s largest daily connected audience. A connected audience is one that watches together, and can talk with one another in real-time. It’s what Twitter has provided for close to 10 years, and it’s what we will continue to drive in the future.

For me Twitter isn’t about live. And if it was, they’d need a much clearer interface to surface and filter live events. The noise to signal ratio is too off the charts for an enjoyable live experience on Twitter. 

For me Twitter is about moments that the user chooses to broadcast and the audience chooses to consume on their time. We time-shift “live” to best fit our day. Adam Bain gave me the same insight over lunch sometime ago. That isn’t a live strategy – its a capture, share, curate strategy… the stream is where my moments live.

Twitter remains my go-to social platform. But its stagnating. The genius of the original product idea is close to being exhausted. So what will Twitter do next? 

Is a product I use daily and have come to love. Just amazing growth story.