Friends, hi,
Thanks for joining, new friends. It's the year of the rabbit (this one's to you sis!) and the sixth year of firing off these e-letters and I’ve chunked out the four types of content you can expect here, at least until it changes again:
creative strategy writing (focus on brand, content, editorial, etc)
poetry (angst is our friend)
creative nonfiction (bridging the first two)
quotidian photos, squishy illos (whatever visually spouts out)
On the last bullet - this year I'm aiming to spin out more small things on my mind, testing this out today. Collage together digital newspaper clippings from what's going on in the market/media, sprinkle links into little whispers of reaction. Inspired by these etchings from Matt Webb.
On the first bullet - I'm excited to announce I'll be a quarterly columnist for The Content Technologist in 2023! (Joining 7 other talented people!) It'll be a series on content strategy, and doing it better through the lens of its sister disciplines: design, research, brand, and overall business strategy, that pesky quantifying the impact of your work part. Learnings will be applicable across B2B/B2C/product/services/the whole matrix. Sign up here to receive issues in your inbox - I'll let you know when they're out too.
Now onto the bricolage—
SEO is geopolitics
"Death is a fact but it’s easy to forget and there are lots things like that right where you know them to be true but you don’t know them know them like someone could ask you what the capital of Uruguay is and you’d go shit shit hold on then they’d say Montevideo and you’d go I knew that. And you did know it too you just couldn’t access it. Death is the capital of Uruguay is the point."
— Luke O'Neil's Welcome to Hell World, Oct 11, 2020
When I lived in DC I was a fellow for the Georgetown Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, a long name to say we did a lot of talking and examining the withering hegemony of America. I wrote my application essay on consultancies like IDEO and Frog Design entering Asian markets, which was cute in retrospect, but then you enter diplomacy and realize design thinking isn't quite as mesmerizing as, idk, North Korean missiles.
And so yes, maybe this year I'll write about SEO but also SEO is language and behavior and it's hard to change behavior like two lofty people in a room, the worlds in their hands, testing which words will unlock the other into admission, into treaties to bring riches at scale, all through the dance of language, test and deploy the troops I mean keywords, and so SEO is geopolitics.
Don't ask me how SEO contributes to climate change but I'm sure ChatGPT could give you a good answer.
Tools for ambiguity
"A person can convince you that they know what they are talking about, that you can and should learn from them. To come to that conclusion after interacting with ChatGPT would be to fundamentally misunderstand it, or to surrender to a deeply impoverished understanding of “knowledge.”
But who knows? Maybe it will become too practical to take ChatGPT-like models at their word. Once upon a time, people were skeptical that Wikipedia could be relied upon to provide accurate information, but most people pretty much accept it as being accurate enough in most instances now, despite a methodology that can’t guarantee truth." (emphasis mine)
"Prompt windows" from Rob Horning (previously of Real Life Mag)
With every new LinkedIn slideshow and think tank article and grand posturing tweet on machine generated content I only wonder where do y'all even find the time to test all these tools.
Feel free to dispute me, but: those on the forefront of integrating emerging technology are those with the means to. I may be a target user for AI content generators due to my discipline, but I've been putting it off because I don't have the mental energy or time to calibrate them to my needs.
But of course, it's time to make the time, so I'm testing AI writers to help with scaling content output for work. Last year I was our primary writer for over 200 content pieces and 20 campaigns, which is unsustainable over time for most orgs on a VC backed track. My 2022 writing visualized below - each color a different project, with thickness determined by volume of content needs. That's a lot of context switching.
Initial success with an AI writer would probably look like it delivering a skeleton for me to stylize. Breathe life into its bones. Infuse the brand tone of voice, strip out the buzzwords and replace them with interestingwords, switch up the syntax so you actually want to read the next sentence.
That said, depending on how much training and editing it requires - I wouldn’t expect it to contribute more than 5% of our content needs for now, and even that feels optimistic. This might change once I dive deeper but truthfully I would rather coach a person to intuit and make sense of the right words forward, rather than figure how out to articulate every ounce of my needs to a machine. It’s less about the utility of the tool and more about - where is my time more richly spent in this short breath of air we call life?
Outside of my day work, especially outside B2B, there would likely be no meaningful use case for AI writers in my life. Business writing is about clarity; literature is about ambiguity. Do tools for ambiguity exist?
Adult creativity is repressed enough. When was the last time we sat and just - thinked really hard? Reeled the truth out of ourselves rather than have someone/thing else feed a hollow version to us?
In the words of friend Kyle Paoletta: Come up with a sentence. Write it down; frown at it; write it again. Let's not forget how to do this.
Anyhow if someone makes a thing that can bottle up and spit out James Cameron's dreams that I would invest in.
I'm hiring! and thoughts on research
I guess now we're talking about work I will say there is an interesting vantage point to selling B2B research. We serve all the big brands - here's a Figma design hiring report and McKinsey metaverse report based on our data.
Which brings us to - say you're TikTok or Instagram or Snapshot looking to attract next gen creators. Or Microsoft or Tableau or Google looking to build the go to business intelligence tool. Or Airtable or Notion or Asana looking to design cloud collaboration software powering the next billion dollar companies.
Ultimately, you're getting comparable insights to your competitors. What do users want, what are our competitors doing, where are the customers we're not yet talking to? The extra talented researchers may get extra creative with research design, but success rides on what happens after strategy absorbs it. Good research demands strategic teams that have the confidence to make still-prescient decisions unbiased by the storylines the data might tell, a comfort in the je ne sais quoi, knowing you're all looking at the same data anyways. (Of course, assuming you're getting high quality data as opposed to the garbage that has traditionally flooded the B2B research industry.)
Anyhow this was all an unsneaky lead in for my hiring plug: I'm looking for a full time designer and freelance copywriter for our NewtonX brand marketing team. Ping me if you apply / know someone who applies / want more details on the writer role.
To read
I just started Hilton Als's White Girls with the good cover design, also the good words, namely naming the the toxic trait of maybe writers, not speaking from experience.
"Her attraction to men who had language was profound." (p. 50)
Look for it at your local bookstore!
Dear god save me from myself
Paid subscribers, read on for nyc stories, 2022 learnings, 2023 (anti-)ambitions, and more illos.