Greetings from the frozen tundra of NYC where all the members of our office are bundled AF. Especially Charlie, who can’t understand why we can’t turn the heat up outside when it’s time for his walk.
LHC has some massive news this week, which is that we bought a mini fridge, and not just any mini fridge—this one is RED. Not only that but because we are a woke workplace we've pledged to stock it with rosé and San Pellegrino so as to combat any bro culture creep.
Besides that exciting tidbit, our corporate overlords are on a mission to grow the newsletter! So if you like what you're reading (and really, even if you don't), please send this link to all your homies. If you’re feeling really jazzed and generous, give us a tweet or a Facebook mention while you’re at it :)
On to the #content:
The most meaningless metric
Last week, without warning, our Linkedin page was flooded with messages from seemingly random people from our past. It was, we later discovered, Lighthouse Creative's first birthday—or in Linkedinspeak, we were celebrating a work anniversary—the fact of which the robots that run the LI newsfeed thoughtfully saw fit to inform the world about. YAY FOR ENGAGEMENT!!!
We wise Thought Leaders love to talk about how engagement is the best measure of audience interest. In a digital world where everyone is competing for a finite amount of attention, it's sort of logical that content effectiveness would be best measured by level of audience interaction. Or, as some idiot once wrote:
"Effective engagement measures three things: reach, engagement, and influence. In short, how many people saw your content, how long they spent with it, and how they reacted to it."
Makes sense right? But turns out that engagement itself is not that effective. In fact in most cases the content that’s the most engaging is also the most meaningless.
Have a birthday on Facebook and watch the well wishes flood in from people you don't care about. Sunset pic on Insta? Likes galore. Retweet if you like summer! Happy work anniversary! These are the kinds of things that people "engage" with, because it turns out people are kind of basic.
And since engagement is the key metric that brand marketers, media execs, and Linkedin product managers are judged by, we find ourselves in a spiraling whirlpool of mayonnaise content whose banality whose is only matched by its depressing predictability.
Things are happening
Twitter is cleaning up Twitter (for publishers). Regular humans will still be subject to the usual rape threats, abuse, and racism.
Our friends and part-time landlords at Codeword are now part of Seattle-based WE Communications. No word on whether that means they have to start dressing in flannel and only playing grunge in the office.
The Fyre festival documentaries are more than just great water cooler conversation–they’re also raising valid ethical questions about the role of influencers in modern marketing. Friend of LHC (and Fohr CEO) James Nord said influencers are taking extra care to vet the companies they’re working with, making sure the product is legit.
Black women are the least likely demographic to receive venture capital funding, but a growing wave of black female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley is fighting to change that.
DMX is free!! The rapper was released from prison after serving a one-year sentence for bail violations and tax evasion. We can’t wait til he hosts S&L!
Blue Point has released L-train shutdown flavored beer, because somebody in New York had to. Okay, so it might not actually taste like the shutdown (what would that taste like, exactly? Frustration and tears? Rat feces?), but it’s inspired by the on again, off again promise of Brooklynites getting screwed. We can’t wait to order a case for our mini fridge.