There's a grand total of 68 of you on this intimate little tinyletter now. Perhaps I can win the award for slowest growing email newsletter of 2017? That said I value each and every one of you so thank you for sticking around and thank you for the thoughtful replies and emails and high fives.
So I've been busy...! Hence the slow newsletter and slow blog. But the advantage to being busy is that I've been able to use my work to inform my writing. Projects on the go right now:
- A community strategy for an enterprise company that is building a brand new community from scratch. After my initial chat with them it was clear the team didn't have a strong sense of how community works online and so I started looking around for a "beginner's guide to community building". After a tweet I got some great responses - everything from the beginner's guide I was looking for up to some esoteric theory. I collected up the links and published them here: The Beginner's Guide to Community Building.
- Two separate clients are undergoing re-brands. They're both content-first businesses and so I'm thinking through a lot of the nuance of what branding means for a content business. Unlike a vertically integrated product company a horizontal content company is wide, and the content is the product. So how do you brand the site? How do you brand every interaction? I jotted some notes down here: Branding in the Age of Content. Of course, my buddy Elan who is a *real* brand strategist came along and summed up the post in one line: Every page is the "about page" when users discover your content via search. Smart guy that Elan.
What are you working on? What are your thoughts on community, content and brands? Send me a note, comment on a post or drop me a tweet!
See you in a few months. xo.
Tom
tomcritchlow.com