Greetings from the West Coast. where we've been busy weaseling our way into the hearts and minds of Seattle's Croatians:
Though we were disappointed in the World Cup outcome, we were exceptionally pleased with the quality of service in the local weed industry. We'd also be remiss not to give a shoutout to Norm's, Seattle’s most dog-friendly establishment:
It's been a minute since we last graced your inbox (yes, we know, you've been counting the days), so let’s get on down to it.
You'll Miss (Almost) Everything
AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky was recently quoted talking about the ephemerality of feed-based content, and it got us thinking back to this wonderful NPR article from 2011, about how almost all the good stuff is going to pass us by.
"Surrender is the moment when you say, "I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I'm supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn't get to."
The simple truth is this: there are more books, films, shows, and songs than we’ll ever be able to consume, and that's before we even get into all the tweets, pins, blogs, gifs, webinars, magazines and 37 other formats of the “content is king” age—much of which is crap, but some of which is actually pretty good! The sheer volume of stuff we'll never get to is overwhelming.
For those of us in the storytelling business (which, by the way, is everyone who works in marketing or advertising or comms), the impossibility of anyone noticing what we have to say gives us a feeling of existential dread on the level of Brandon Douglas singing “let my Cameron go” at the beginning of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. What the internet giveth (unimaginable scale; infinitesimal distribution costs), the internet taketh away (any possibility of getting noticed in the content hurricane). And yet, all’s not lost.
If we never read what could have been our favorite book, we can still pick up every new novel with the hope that it will be the one. Same goes for albums, or prestige TV shows, or even (and stay with us here) branded content. The lesson (there’s always a lesson): when it comes to content, brands need to embrace consistency rather than trying to write the Great American Novel every time they hit publish. With regularity comes both ability and credibility, and as those things increase so too does the chance that the people you’re trying to reach will discover what you’re trying to say.
Which is all to say that, rather than lamenting all the things we will miss and all the people who will unfortunately never subscribe to this mailing list, we’ll be here writing our newsletters and hoping that someone, somewhere decides that this right here is the paragon of literary achievement. And then hires us to do the same for them.
Lesser (but still important) news
1) Speaking of the existential ephemerality of the news feed, BuzzSumo has an excellent report on how Facebook’s latest algorithm changes have affected content creators. Spoiler alert: thoughtful, longer-form storytelling wins (it always does).
2) Big shoutout to our homies at NewsWhip who (along with three others) became the first platform with access to Snapchat social data. This means that NewsWhip users can real-time what kinds of content is on the app (we can only hope it's not all photos of people's junk).
4) If anyone knows the owner of this domain please let them know we’d like to buy it from them.
5) 100 useful things is a look at the items that cool people use the most. Although an alarmingly high percentage of the useful things are bikes (which we guess are pretty useful so it makes sense).