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Essential Small Business Management Tools
Update (5/4/2022): Since I first wrote this post and granted this podcast interview, some major changes happened at Basecamp that caused me to change my mind. Tara and Shannon from the excellent What Works podcast (and from the What Works Network, of which I’ve been a member for years) rounded up a crew of folks…
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The Syllabus 2020: The Brand You 50
Tom Peters made bold predictions about the future of work in 1999. Here’s why I still recommend this powerful (but tiny) book on building a personal brand.
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Personal Branding’s a bunch of bulls#!t! (But we’re going to need it, anyway.)
Smart professionals recoil at the phrase, but personal branding’s going to play an important part of your career in the next decade.
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How I’m using Facebook these days
Earlier in the year, I wrote about getting louder and how I hadn’t really been active on Facebook very much in the past few years. Even though I was one of the platform’s earliest adopters, I’m no longer a fan of a system that routinely invites so much personal abuse and harassment into the lives of its users. And…
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Introducing Podcast Taxi
It was just a matter of time. For years, I’ve been recommending podcasts, audiobooks, and other personal audio recordings as a pillar of a successful content marketing strategy. In a media environment that’s become so crowded and noisy, podcasts still offer the potential to build strong relationships with audiences without interference from bots or clickbait.…
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Beautiful evening. You can almost see the stars!
Jay Frank gave a toast when Lori Taylor and I got married that might have been as long as the actual ceremony. And though I teased him about it in the years since, I never doubted his sincerity. That really was the driving force behind our friendship over the past three decades. Because as many…
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An Hourglass and a Flower Pot
It’s the fall of 1987. There’s a new kid on the school bus. An Army brat, if I remember, or maybe the son of a frequently-transferred corporate executive. He was at our Catholic high school for such a small amount of time that I barely remember his name. Yet, wearing a leather bomber jacket and…
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Measuring your messaging’s real ROI
You’ve got “reach.” You’ve got “engagement.” You’ve even got “amplification.” But all the online media jargon in the world won’t help you if your content marketing campaigns don’t convert to actual sales. Agenda 1. Making sure your compass points “true north.” We’re always surprised how many brands launch campaigns without checking in on their mission…
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We broke the 10K hours threshold without breaking me.
Every year has been 2820 Press’ best year ever on just about every metric. However, the end of 2017 nearly broke me. Here’s what we did about it. Christopher Wink warned me this would happen. Back in 2016, we recorded an episode of my podcast and he told me about the challenges he faced when…
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Getting louder in 2019.
On their Rework podcast, the Basecamp team expressed their desire to become a Facebook-Free Company. (DHH wrote an article about this on their Medium publication, as well.) They don’t depend on Facebook for new business, nor do they rely on it to reach their audience, and that’s 100% the right decision for them. That said,…
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Revisiting my favorite World Cafe sessions
It’s been a year of reinvention for me. 2820 Press has been rolling along for six years now, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had bandwidth to devote to personal projects. Maybe that’s why I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on parts of my career that have been in the rear view mirror…
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Getting physical.
As we’ve been recruiting guests for season two of “The Build” I’ve found myself steering toward founders who share my bias for shipping physical products or creating real-world experiences. As much as I love writing and developing, something really amazing happens the first time you see something you wrote or designed show up as a…
