by Caroline Leach | Jan 9, 2016 | Marketing & Analytics
What are great blogs for marketers?
And why read blogs anyway? Because they’re a quick, timely and entertaining way to learn about the latest trends in marketing and get interesting viewpoints on how the field is rapidly evolving.
Researching top marketing blogs reaffirmed 2 things. First is my devotion to 3 blogs marketing-related blogs. Second is 3 more I’m adding to the blogs folder on my iTools (the collective name for my personal iPhone, iPad and MacBook).
3 long-time favorites –
Seth Godin. Also known as “Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.” Ever since Linchpin, I’ve been a fan. His post, Don’t snow globe me, bro, not only helped my former Corp Comms team focus on what’s most important. One of my team members was so inspired she had a snow globe made for me.
Chris Brogan. Also known as “media, marketing, lead generation and customer acquisition strategies for business.” Ever since Social Media 101, I’ve been a fan. And I’m endlessly inspired by Chris’ perseverance – with blogging and with life.
Harvard Business Review. Also knowns as “ideas and advice for leaders.” Ever since I found back issues in a colleagues’s office, I’ve been a fan. So many terrific thought leaders – Umair Haque, Peter Bregman, Heidi Halvorson, Alexandra Samuels, Tom Davenport, Dorie Clark, Tony Schwartz, Karie Willyerd and more. Now I’m following posts on marketing, market research, analytics, branding and data.
3 new favorites –
Ryan Holiday. Also known as “meditations on strategy and life.” Ever since I visited Ryan’s blog, I’ve been a fan. Of all the marketing blogs I searched – and there were dozens – this captured my attention. I clicked through post after post, and link after link of this author, marketer and entrepreneur.
Ann Handley. Also known as a “content marketing keynote speaker and best-selling author.” Ever since Everybody Writes, I’ve been a fan. Her expertise is digital content marketing. She’s the chief content officer at MarketingProfs, with marketing resources for marketing professionals.
FiveThirtyEight. Also known as “using statistical analysis – hard numbers – to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science, economics and life.” No, it’s not a marketing blog. But since my new role is in market research, reading this blog launched by statistician Nate Silver is another immersion strategy to accelerate my learning project.
What are your favorite marketing blogs?
by Caroline Leach | Jan 3, 2016 | Marketing & Analytics
What are good questions to ask about new research?
That was the question I had as I revisited Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding + Using Analytics.
Written by Tom Davenport and Jinho Kim, this is a book I read a few years ago when I led our company’s employee engagement survey strategy.
Working closely with our partner, Towers Watson, I was learning a lot. Yet I wanted to better understand the underlying analytics.
As I moved into a new role and have embarked on a learning project, I’ve revisited the book.
It includes a great list of questions that leaders should ask about analytics projects. They’re summarized from marketing and strategy professor Liam Fahey‘s article in Strategy and Leadership.
Here they are:
Overall questions:
- What business issue or need is the analytics work intended to inform? (This reminds me of the McKinsey & Company question, what problem are we solving for?)
- What are the core insights relevant to understanding the business issue and its context?
- How can I leverage these insights in the work I do?
- How do the insights affect decisions confronting us now?
- How do the insights help shape emerging and future decisions?
Questions for preliminary findings:
- What is surprising about this finding?
- Can further analysis be done to strengthen or refute the finding?
- Should others be involved to challenge this emerging finding?
- Is there a significant insight emerging here?
- If the thinking holds up, how should it affect my thinking on this or other topics or issues?
Questions for new insights:
- What is new to each insight?
- What was the old understanding?
- How significant is the difference?
- What is the reasoning or “argument” that connects the data set to the insight?
Questions after insights have been delivered:
- Who was/is involved in shaping the new understanding?
- How might they have influenced the outcome?
- What might be the principal difference across individuals or units?
In our ever busier and faster world, I also ask myself what the one key takeaway and implication is from the research. How would I summarize the insights in a sentence or a tweet?
In addition, I ask myself if I truly understand the work. If not, it’s time for more questions.
After seeing the movie The Big Short this weekend about the 2008-09 financial crisis, I wish more people had asked a lot more questions.
by Caroline Leach | Nov 22, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Learning, Marketing & Analytics, Social Media
What will jumpstart my learning project?
Looking no further than my iPhone, a few apps already have valuable marketing content. During my morning news ritual, I’ll scan a post from these 3 areas.
First, The Wall Street Journal app has a CMO Today section. The articles there now about Hulu, Fox and Snapchat are all relevant to my organization’s technology and entertainment space.
Second, my favorite blogs folder already includes Seth Godin and Chris Brogan.
Linchpin was my introduction to Seth in 2010, and I’ve been a fan ever since. His “don’t snowglobe me, bro” became a rallying cry on my corporate communications team to focus on our audience and our customers.
Social Media 101 and The Impact Equation were my previous introductions to Chris Brogan. They helped guide my early forays into social media.
Third, my Harvard Business Review subscription has a custom news feed. I’m now following the topics of branding, customer service, data, marketing and market research.
This post came with another learning opportunity. I’ve been wanting to try Canva, a graphic design platform. I heard about it on an IABC webinar by Guy Kawasaki on The Art of Social Media.
It was easy to get started with the iPad app. It’s loaded with beautiful images, plus you can use your own photos. It has great templates for social media platforms, presentations, posters and more.
As I write this post, I haven’t yet included any women who are marketing thought leaders. So I’ll go with Ann Handley. She’s head of content at MarketingProfs and the author of Everybody Writes, a quite engaging book I started reading this weekend.
The most delightful learning from this post is how much marketing-related reading I’ve been doing all along. I’m not really starting from scratch, after all.
Like most things in life, we know more than we think we do. We just have to claim it.
Recent Comments