Intermission: Links 2
More links, more thoughts
Hi all, more links and thoughts for you this week while I still have yet to properly start writing Mehdeeka S4. My motivation to do any side projects has taken a dive while I’ve been in lockdown, but slowly it’s coming back as I get excited by all the topics and people I’ve listed down to interview.
Until the motivation is 100% back though, there’s always endless content on the internet.
1) Mark Ritson asked 7 big wig marketers how to get people to buy into long-term marketing
There’s always a huge fight between long term and short term marketing; or in other words, brand vs lead acquisition. There’s some nuance in this article, but the TL;DR is you need influence and control of the marketing budget in order to fight the good fight for brand. In an ideal world, 60% of your budget would be dedicated to brand, and in worst case 30%.
Related reading: The Long and the Short of It, the “seminal” long term vs short term marketing paper. Despite this sitting in my Google Drive and only being 84 pages, I’ve yet to read it.
2) A pretty comprehensive list of SEO-related things to improve
SEO can be really hard to understand and so understandably a lot of us outsource it, but it’s still really important to know what to ask for. I really encourage you to read up about it regularly, there were a few terms in here I didn’t know and am now interested in checking out!
Related reading: This Mehdeeka interview with Sam Ficek (in-house SEO at Canva) is the most popular issue ever, and for good reason. Sam’s super generous with his SEO tips in it. P.S. congrats to Sam for his promotion this week!
A warning that it’s only the webpage version that’s free and so that’s annoying to navigate, but you can skip to specific chapters as the index is linked. I actually did public speaking in school and have never had a problem in front of crowds, but whenever I see a free resource I can’t help but hoard (and share) it.
Related reading: this listening mode quiz is kind of the opposite skill to speaking, but listening and speaking really go hand in hand. I’m currently reading Listen Like You Mean It and am finding it good so far.
This site breaks down how to make an exclusive social media service for you and your friends if you are ever so inclined to do so. It is technical though (after all it is building a social media site) but it’s also just interesting to see what goes into making one.
5) A bit of an NYT link dump
I always find it annoying when lots of links have paywalls so I try to avoid sharing them but I’ve accumulated quite a few NYT stories I want to share so I’m going to stick them all together so you get annoyed at me once rather than five times.
5.1 A look into how Accenture is running Facebook’s content moderation (and how it’s not working) - both fascinating and depressing.
5.2 How NYT uses user comments to improve their reporting - and also just a really great example of how community and comments can be a wonderful place.
5.3 For anyone interested in the behind the scenes of how news rooms work, this look into the “flex desk” and copy editing was really interesting.
Until next time,
