Project Management, Old Ads, and Stories in the Sand

Comment Highlights

We had a great week of content that generated some wonderful discussions. Here are a couple of the most insightful comments from last week. We appreciate all those who participate on our content marketing posts and hope you’ll continue the dialogue.

MailChimp as a project management email update engine

Our post about RSS and its ability to serve as an opt-in mechanism prompted a lot of really great comments. Although we wrote it weeks ago, Steve posted an insight about his use of MailChimp to not only act as an RSS email newsletter engine, but even act as a project management tool. Here’s an excerpt:

Whenever I’m producing a large, ongoing project with a bunch of people in different locations, I create essentially a project blog for posting files, discussions etc. Apart from centralizing the project discussion, the Mailchimp RSS newsletter feature is used to automatically notify project members of new content -storyboards/designs etc. And (big brother) it lets me through its tracking and statistics see who opened it, click throughs etc. For me its like having a virtual project manager keeping everyone informed (and hopefully inline).

- Steve

Feed the beast #4

Jonathan Kranz

Brad wrote a great post that got lots of attention about feeding the beast on a new media channel. Here’s one of the responses, from someone we love to read: Jonathan Kranz.

Too much of the social media chatter involves marketers talking to other marketers: Hooray for our side!

But you know what? There are lots of check-writing, vendor-hiring potential clients who are left out of the conversation. What are pros like us doing to reach THEM?

- Jonathan Kranz

He couldn’t be more right. Many social media efforts seem to be reaching other social media experts! By the way, everyone should read Jonathan’s 10 Reasons NOT to Hire Me section of his website. It’s pure bliss! Thanks, Jonathan, for your insight. We’re honored to have you participating on our site!

Building a Community Takes Work

YourMagz.com Logo

I really enjoyed chatting with Zachary Klein about his experience building a community that’s positive, proactive, and high-quality. John Robinson, a principal at YourMagz.com (which is in Private Beta), had this to say about Zach’s approach:

It’s good to know that policing destructive influences is a successful tactic. Too often there is the temptation for start-ups to tolerate negative behavior because they judge success on traffic numbers alone.

John Robinson, YourMagz.com

What we’re reading

We use Posterous to keep track of what the entire Tippingpoint Labs team is consuming on the web. If you’d like to see everything, feel free to subscribe. Here are some of our picks from last week:

Telling stories in the sand

We did an entire podcast on telling stories. My brother, a photographer in Los Angeles, sent me this crazy way to tell stories using sand! It’s really an amazing piece. (Though it’s almost 10 minutes long, I watched the whole thing.) This is actually a segment from the Ukrainian counterpart of America’s Got Talent. We’re blown away!

More traffic doesn’t mean higher quality or more ad Revenue

This great article submitted by Brad to our Posterous stream is well worth the read! Variety magazine is putting all their content back behind a pay wall! Here’s one of the most telling lines from the article:

At first that made no sense to us—more traffic might mean a CPM discount, but it’s more traffic, so ad revenue should go up. But Variety‘s traffic bump consisted of an audience of non-Hollywood rubes out there in America that none of its insider advertisers cared about reaching, while the brand advertisers that do want to reach all those rubes probably aren’t interested in doing so via an elite niche publication.

Niche networks and valuable traffic is a much better play. But is charging for access the best approach? We’ll wait and see!

AT&T campaign from 15 years ago is pretty amazing

Okay, Brad’s on a roll this week, with some more wonderful content. This advertising campaign from 1993 takes a look into the future when technologies like eBooks, GPS, and even electronic toll payments where a distant dream. This kind of thing makes me feel really old.

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."