All brands and businesses make promises. They promise low prices, fast service, or no hassles. Sometimes they fail to deliver on those promises. Customer service failure is about broken promises. When people get upset, it’s not because products or services are objectively bad. They get upset because of broken promises. Parents who buy their kids a $3.99…
Responding to several requests, here’s a follow-up: one viral post on writing tips has made my blog more popular, improved my search rankings, and given me the confidence to take the next step in my journey. Here’s what I learned. Viral blog posts taper slowly. Here’s a chart of the traffic on my blog for the last…
For all my talk about writing, I’ve found that there’s only one way to get better. Practice. Write. Get feedback. Rewrite. Then write something else. Repeat as frequently as possible.
Mary Meeker’s latest 197-slide Internet Trends report is not bullshit. While some of the stats on the slides are questionable, overall it’s a pretty interesting, international grab-bag of facts. My issue is with what comes next — media and analyst cliché predictions based on those facts. In the tech world, predictions are predictable. There’s a cliché for each stage of technology…
After two months on my own, I’ve finally figured out what I’m doing. My purpose is to give you the courage to say what you mean. I wasn’t sure what kinds of people my ideas would resonate with. I haven’t pushed consulting, because I wasn’t sure who needed a writing counselor obsessed with rooting out bullshit. Here’s who asked about my services….
Crappy writing springs from crappy planning. Like an architect, plan before you build. On a project that takes weeks or months to write, spend at least one day on planning. Follow these planning tips to maximize your chance to create something great. In this post, I show you how to lay the groundwork for a writing project like…
You’re going to read a lot about this cable merger. Most of it will be bullshit. Here is the truth (based on more than a decade of closely watching the cable and TV industries): These cable operators will tell regulators that the efficiencies in this merger will enable them to improve customer service. But customer service…
Elections and bullshit go together. That’s why I was intrigued to get several suggestions to analyze Philadelphia Magazine’s “No Bullshit Mayoral Election Guide.” Sadly, I think bullshit is an essential element of all election guides, including this one. Patrick Kerkstra, writing in Philadelphia Magazine, describes his guide this way: … [W]e’ve put together this bottom-line assessment of the…
Writing in the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo decries “A Tech Boom Aimed at the Few, Instead of the World.” But he ignores the history of how successful tech adoption inevitably spreads experiences to everyone. According to Manjoo: The tech industry used to think big. . . . These were dreams of vast breadth: The founders of…