Every company must balance its efforts between creating useful products or services and promoting and marketing those offerings. The same is true for individuals like me (consultants, authors, influencers, “thought leaders”). We can spend time building and stoking our audience, or we can spend time developing insights and serving customers with them. Having published a…
Social media is addictive and harmful to children. There’s plenty of evidence for that. As a result, surgeon general Vivek Murthy has recommended that Congress require a warning label on social media. Let’s be real. A warning label would do little. The problem’s in the algorithms. And that’s where the solutions, if any should come…
Yesterday, I told the story of how LeafFilter failed to show up for three appointments — and never called me — when scheduled to perform service at my house in Maine. I described the events from November 1 to December 9, when I’d finally had it with the company and was prepared to tell the…
Sometimes a company doesn’t live up to what it has promised you. That can make you angry. What should you do about it? This post is about what happened when a company called LeafFilter disappointed me, and what I did about it. My father’s mirror I want to start by talking about my father. The…
When it comes to book sales, does a social media following guarantee sales? Of course not. That’s what’s behind the New York Times piece, “Millions of Followers? For Book Sales, ‘It’s Unreliable.’ ,” a naive and oversimplified take on what it takes to sell books. How books sell In the olden days — before COVID…
Twitter announced yesterday that it would allow people to remove unwanted photos or video of themselves. But there are lots of ill-defined exceptions, and the policy as a whole will be unwieldy to enforce. Analyzing the new policy changes Twitter already bans posting of people’s private information (“doxing”). Here’s the start of the blog post…
As Mark Zuckerberg announced, Facebook, the company, is now “Meta.” Meta is the parent company of the applications Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Many have seen this as an attempt to get out from under the flood of terrible publicity that the company is suffering since the leak of the Facebook papers. In this vein,…
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified in Congress yesterday. And Mark Zuckerberg was mystified. He was surely thinking, “Can’t they see that we’re out to help humanity?” Today I deconstruct his sincere statement to employees after all the negative news about Facebook in the past month. If you read this critically and with the right perspective,…
We now know that Frances Haugen, Facebook’s former civic integrity product manager, is the whistleblower who leaked Facebook’s internal documents to the Wall Street Journal. She was just interviewed on “60 Minutes.” And after listening to her, I no longer trust anything Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook’s communications team has to say. On “60 Minutes,” Haugen…