Blogs on danecarlson.com

Mark Cuban Doesn't Get It: Today in Content Marketing

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 05:48:53 PST

This infographic is full of advertising predictions for 2015. Will they come true? Only time will tell.

Goodbye salesmen: Time Inc. is now selling print ads programmatically.

One man (or woman) can do more: how to increase content creation without hiring more people.

You don’t say: Mark Cuban doesn’t get content marketing. Good content marketing lowers your conversion rate.

I’ve been doing it for fourteen years, but these tips would have been great earlier: how to curate data into great content.

Case study: How Quirky created a truly original content operation.

Is there a science to online B2B Marketing? Yes, there is.

Good advice: ditching social media automation.

Optimize, optimize, optimize: How BuzzFeed, R29, and other top publishers optimize their headlines and images.

Marketing is about building pillars.

Your biggest content marketing problem: you don’t create enough content.

How to: 3 steps to building buyer personas.

Rethinking the Homepage: Today in Content Marketing

Tue, 10 Feb 2015 05:46:06 PST

Comedian John Cleese to headline the 2015 Content Marketing World conference.

7 Myths Uncovered: there are right ways, wrong ways, innovative ways and copycat ways of doing everything- and with this, various myths and half-truths are born.

Sorry, John Oliver: Native ads aren’t going anywhere: Marketers are expected to spend $4.3 billion on this form of integrated branded content in 2015—an increase of 34 percent over 2014.

Will brands grow or buy the pineapple? Farming is hard work, especially when you’re growing content.

SEO is on the decline: organic search is the #2 referrer.

Look out: the tweets are coming to Google.

Most interesting thing I’ve read all day: 64 new ways to think about a news homepage.

Why did everyone do the Harlem Shake?

Sun, 08 Feb 2015 08:18:24 PST

When the Harlem Shake destroyed the internet in early 2014, it had nothing to do with the “hive mind” of the internet. It wasn’t an uncordinated meme that accidentally went viral. It was content marketing.

Tetris and Tomatoes

Sat, 30 Aug 2014 16:06:17 -0800

If you’ve ever played Tetris (or any video game, really) for long periods of time, you’ve probably discovered that afterwards, as you’re drifting off to sleep, the imagery from the game dominates your imagination. This phenomenon been termed the “Tetris effect” by scientists who study such things (and make up fun sounding names for their discoveries so that they’ll be mentioned by the morning talk shows.)

Tetris actually seems to change the way the brain works, and how memories are created and stored. In one study on the phenomenon, volunteers were shown a traumatic video full of graphic imagery of real blood and guts. (Think of the drivers’ ed scare films you might have seen as a teen, or in traffic school, only with more gore, and more real blood.)

Afterwards, half the volunteers were allowed to play Tetris for 30 minutes, while the other half were forced to stay in their seats and do nothing.

Later, the subjects recorded the number of “flashbacks” they experienced over the following week. The volunteers who’d played Tetris reported significantly fewer than the control group, while the control group had so many bad dreams that they regretted signing up for the study.

So, the next time your spouse is mad at you for doing something stupid, recommend that they play Tetris for half and hour. (And then duck!)

I haven’t been playing Tetris, but I have been cutting tomatoes. When I close my eyes, I see tomatoes.

The Skunk

Wed, 27 Aug 2014 16:01:07 -0800

All is not well in the Carlson household today.

Last night, the dogs cornered a skunk outside our bedroom door.

At midnight, the telltale odor of the disturbed creature, and the bark of the dogs, alerted us from our slumber that all was not calm outside. After sleep walking through the process of shutting all of the windows, I was able to drift back to sleep, content in the knowledge that our fortress of wood, stucco and fiberglass would hold up to whatever artillery barrage the animal could deliver, confident in the tactics of our canine infantry to drive him off.

But, with a crash we came awake at 2 AM! Chairs and all manner of outdoor patio paraphernalia were tossed and clobbered. The battle was no longer out there, in some unknowable distant darkness, but immediately outside of our bedroom. Groggy still, I flipped on the light, and pulled back the curtains.

The creature was right outside our door – with it’s tail raised and it’s glands exposed right against the window! I screamed like a girl. Angie did too, but she could be excused on account of her gender.

Our house came alive like a firehouse full of untrained recruits during their first three alarm fire. Thankfully after much coaxing and screaming, I was able to command the dogs (through the living room window) to move away from the animal. No matter how much their nature might have wanted to bark and give chase, their domesticity cried out for someone to take control and relieve them of the torment of the noxious assaults to their noses, and the blindings to their eyes.

The immature little skunk found himself “trapped” between a sliding glass door, two chairs, and a pair of Franklin’s swim trunks. He was repeatedly startled by his own reflection in the glass, and the chairs, though still spaced far enough apart that he could have departed in a march, continuously brushed against his tail and turned him back. The swim trunks, well, their gaudy designed both frightened and enticed him enough that he dared not approach them too closely, and yet they continued to beckon to him in a way that only an adolescent would understand.

After an hour of trying our best to convince him that rationally it was in his best interest to depart, we were rewarded with only a skunk stained slider and the lingering smell of insanity in our mouthes. The glass door obviously muffled the logic of our arguments.

Thankfully, Franklin was on an overnight visit with his grandmother, and so we (Angie, Emerson, Greyson and I) made a cautious retreat and fell down together into the three boys’ beds. Lumpy, cold and narrow, they allowed us a fitful sleep, and by morning, the creature had departed into the dawn’s early light. Was it real, we asked? The camera showed only a white stripe in the darkness, but the lingering taste in our mouthes, and smell on everything, convinced us that it was, and that we had lost the battle.

If only there wasn’t a week’s harvest of tomatoes ripening in the kitchen. Would they go to salsa, or to the bathtub?