Here's a question for you. How does branding differ for a content business than, say, an ecommerce business?

As I mentioned a few newsletters back I'm going through two "brand" projects for clients right now where we're re-thinking the brand and aesthetic from the ground up. Both clients are content-first businesses and the traditional process for thinking of branding isn't quite working. Traditional creative agencies don't get the brief. There's no 30-second TV spot to tell the brand story.

Now, I'm no expert on branding. I'm a student for sure. But I think there are unique challenges for branding a content business that I've not seen talked about.

My friend Sean Blanda just put out a tweetstorm this morning that you should absolutely read.

And I wrote a post called "branding in the age of content" a few weeks back.

Both of those provide a glimpse at the problem but without really offering much in the way of solutions.

So!

I'm still thinking deeply about this problem. I'd love your help. Have you been involved in branding for a content business? Seen anyone doing this well? Any insights into the unique challenges that a content business faces?

Write me back and let's figure this out together! You're all smart folks (all 85 of you!).

Hello to my fellow 73 tinyletter-ers!

Thanks for sticking with me. I put a new post live this morning that I put a lot of effort into. Blogging is a fickle beast. Sometimes they come easy, sometimes you have to wrestle with them. This one was a grade a struggle to pull it out of my head and put it into words!

Here's the piece:

The Consultant's Grain - Why (their) culture eats (your) strategy for breakfast.

Despite the title hopefully it's relevant for all kinds of folks; consultants, agencies, in-house etc. Anyone who is trying to drive change can hopefully relate in some way to the forces of culture and strategy.

Anyway - I'd love to hear what you think about it. What made sense? Which pieces missed the mark? How can we improve our understanding of the (often) implicit culture around us?

Till next tinyletter!

Tom

PS - the title is inspired by a piece by Frank Chimero called the web's grain which is just a beautiful piece.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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

The blinking cursor. The publish button staring me down. Creating content through narrow distribution channels to wide audiences is a unique problem known as Context Collapse.

This idea of writing for everyone and no-one at the same time explains a lot of bad brand content on the internet and I wrote about it here including some ideas on how to fix it:

http://tomcritchlow.com/2017/04/20/context-collapse/

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What else is going on? I'm preparing a piece about strategy consulting. You might have seen me get obsessed with this concept recently with my writing on a fieldguide for independent strategy consultants. Here's some more links on the topic:

* strategy as an unfolding network of connections (pdf) by Stripe Partners
* the Q-lab aka slack consulting from Venkatesh Rao
* small groups and consultancy from Matt Webb

So here's my ask - have you seen anything interesting I should be looking at and referencing as I think about strategy consulting for web businesses?

Just hit reply and start typing.

Till next time,
Tom

Hello to the small gathering of Tinyletterers gathered here. Huddled around the warm CPUs. Telling stories and sharing ideas.

I've been pretty busy since we last spoke! Most recently, I was out in San Diego presenting a talk called The State of Content. It's a new presentation format that I'm trying out where I've gathered a bunch of interesting ideas and threads and pulled them into a (slightly) coherent narrative.

If you're a content enthusiast (and who here on this list isn't?) then you can check out my slides here:

http://tomcritchlow.com/2017/02/24/the-state-of-media/

But! If you're really keen you can access the Google Slides directly at this link. They're open for commenting so please comment away!

So, what's been keeping me busy? Well aside from preparing these 75 slides I've been pretty heads down with the consulting work I do for content companies. A friend of mine was considering heading out on their own as a self-employed consultant and asked for some advice so I wrote up some thoughts here:

http://tomcritchlow.com/2016/12/14/fieldguide-independent-consulting/

Maybe one day when I have more time I'll flesh this out into a book of some kind... For now - if there are any topics that interest you from that brain-dump please reach out! (Any other self-employed consultants on this list? email me!)

What else?

Oh right - I wrote a piece on the importance of side projects (and how 276 lines of Python got me a job at Google). Ironically I've not had much time for side projects recently (does a baby count as a side project?). What are you all working on?

Anyway - enough about me. Hit reply to this email or leave a comment on the disqus on my site. I'm always keen to know who reads these things! There's 53 of you. I could totally make my way through 53 email replies...........(!)

Till next time Tinyletter adventurers.

Much love

Tom

Hello to all 29 of you. This infrequent message is written with freezing fingers in Manhattan. I'm on-site with a client but the client hasn't shown up yet so I'm taking the opportunity to dash this out.

I've been thinking a lot about community recently, and how blogging and Tinyletters can play a role in the modern web. How (and why?) do we carve out these little spaces for ourselves?

Some things I've been writing on that theme:

Every blog takes a village - "But that’s because most people think of blogging as writing at people - when really the key to networked writing is writing for and with people." (oh, so, by the way - you should totally hit reply so we can have a conversation! Not just a one way dialogue...)

On conferences - "Much like blogging has value in networked writing - there’s value in networked talking." Basically - I'm speaking at a conference in San Diego in Feb 2017. But I also really like the words networked talking and I might use them again (headsup!)

Breakfast! - I'm hosting a little meetup this Wed morning at 61 local in Brooklyn for folks curious about content and interested in talking. 8.30 - 10am.

There's lots more to be written on this topic. What's your take on communities? What weird corners of the web do you engage in that aren't Twitter/FB etc? Anyone here still active in (gasp) a forum? Hit reply! Or come to breakfast on Wed and chat!

Over and out for now.
 

Well hello there. What kind of dufus am I that I'm composing an email newsletter to only 6 people?

I'm doing it because it's a valid reminder to myself (and to you!) on the power of starting something. The power of invocations. Every launch has to push through that stage from nothing to something and it's exhilarating to know that maybe this email is the start of something bigger.

This email is also a reminder to stop and build community (something I've been writing about recently) - and that in order to do so you need to create a deeper connection than just shouting into the void. And writing to six people doesn't so much feel like the void as it feels like story time at the local library.

I'm also excited to be here because perhaps emails are truly the future of blogging? It's hard to blog (see my post blogging, not blogging for tips on how to start) but it's easy (we'll see!) to write a newsletter. What do you think? Does this feel more intimate? I think so. And maybe it feels more genuine too - an alternative to the bullshit industrial complex perhaps?

What do you all do? And why did you subscribe? There's only six of you, so perhaps hit reply and say hi!

For more on what I'm up to these days - why I've decided not to launch a brand for my consulting work and also a day in the consultant's life.

Much love,
Tom

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PS - for my all time favorite invocation on beginnings check out Ze Frank's wise words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYlCVwxoL_g