Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I’ve had the privilege of my writing being published on Forbes, Mashable, TechCrunch, Time, Fast Company, VentureBeat, Entrepreneur, and several other publications, and if you aspire to see your writing in mainstream publications like these, perhaps there is something in my story that will help you get there.

The writing I’ve had published has brought me speaking opportunities, a book deal, and more than 1000% growth for my business. I’ve been able to interview and network with my marketing and business heroes, all in the last two and a half years. Prior to that, my writing had never appeared in a mainstream publication. I was just a guy nobody had heard of, posting here and there on my blog, with a small handful of readers. This is the story of how everything changed. ...

I was haunted by the sentiment expressed by a young blogger who said he is sick of people in the social media business holding him down. This video is my response. It’s not fancy, but then … neither am I.

The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is "cognitively unnatural." For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You can't see your readers' facial expressions. They can't ask for clarification. Often, you don't know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this?

Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach "joint attention". Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else's attention to something visible. 

Be quotable. Make your point. It’s kind of like a tag line. Sum it up in eight words or less.

Sound bites have typically been associated with political speeches and the subsequent ‘confusion’ (allegedly) created by reporters who have irresponsibly taken things out of context

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A sound bite or quote is the short tight combination of words that hits your message home....

Today, we depend on sound bites because of the dwindling attention span of our society. Too often, 140 characters are too many.

Below are five ways to recognize valuable snippets and sound bites so your communication pops:...

Do Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace qualify, and if not, why not?...

Perhaps the most eloquent consideration of this question is Italo Calvino’s essay, “Why Read the Classics?,” in which he defines a classic as “a book that has never finished saying what it has to say,” among a list of other qualities. But as wondrous as that sounds, it could also describe some books we read today — “Infinite Jest,” for example — books that most of our contemporaries would deem too recent for classic status. I also love Calvino’s effort to capture the imaginative quality of a great literary work — “a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans” — but suspect that the following is more accurate: “The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through.”...

In observance of National Word Nerd Day, we offer an array of symptoms that indicate your affinity for correct grammar, usage, syntax, punctuation, and spelling run deeper than that of others.

It was just more than a year ago that Ev Williams and Biz Stone created the publishing platform Medium....

At the heart of Medium is a sense of connectedness between those who create words and those who consume them, and the site’s future looks promising to technology experts like Warren.“

As a platform, I envision Medium becoming a curated magazine of sorts that lives digitally,” she wrote via email. “I think with a strong tablet app that is able to curate Medium’s content flipboard-style, the platform could actually also be a publication in its own right.”

For now, the site continues to guide readers through a consumptive experience unlike any other — and meanwhile, the writers are responsible for building up Medium’s content and shaping the site, post by post. “We want to optimize for great interactions between writers and readers,” Davies wrote via email....

As soon as you start to try to write, everything freezes up.

How can you fix this?

Don’t write.

Instead, answer questions.

Think about it like this:

If my wife asks me “Bryan, why do you think most people never act on their ideas?”

I would answer in less than 5 seconds with at least 3 minutes worth of dialogue....

For some, New Year’s resolutions can represent theincunabula of sweeping life changes. This word means "the earliest stages or first traces of anything." Used in a different context, however, incunabulacan refer to copies of books produced before 1501 from movable type.....

We’ve all experienced content like this. But do we know how to create it? That’s the question. Because consistently creating remarkable content over time is what it’s all about.

You’re aiming to create content that makes people pay attention, think, and feel.

I believe that remarkable content takes a three-step journey.

And as content creators, if we keep this journey in mind, we can craft an experience that will have a profound effect on our readers.