Seth | Big Marketers

Engaging with criticism

If you need to find out how your audience is receiving your work, it’s worth considering how you’ve structured the interactions around criticism. Sometimes a customer has a one-off problem, a situation that is unique and a concern that has to be extinguished on the spot. More often, though, that feedback you’re getting represents the [...]

As seen on: "Seth"

The map has been replaced by the compass

The map keeps getting redrawn, because it’s cheaper than ever to go offroad, to develop and innovate and remake what we thought was going to be next. Technology keeps changing the routes we take to get our projects from here to there. It doesn’t pay to memorize the route, because it’s going to change soon. [...]

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Too far from the center?

The action used to happen at court. In France, if you wanted to get ahead, you put on your outfit, called in favors and hung out near the King, because proximity was all. If you’re in Kibera, are you too far from Silicon Valley to write an app? If you live in New Zealand, are [...]

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"How’d it work out?"

It turns out that the light fixtures a builder used in my kitchen a few years ago have all begun to fail. One by one, each one stops working. My guess is that he has no idea, and continues to confidently install these fixtures, his go-to choice for kitchen lighting. And why not? He doesn’t [...]

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Transparent or translucent?

There’s an argument for transparency. If you make it easy for people to see right through you, the thinking goes, you are easier to trust. The market, though, often seeks out the translucent. Things that glow. We’re drawn to the glow, to the illumination and warm feeling it brings. We’d like our tools and our [...]

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The illusion of privacy (and what we actually care about)

You probably have very little privacy at all, giving it up a long time ago. If you’ve got a charge card, the card company already knows what you do, where you go, how you spend your money, what your debt is like. If you use a cell phone or a computer, someone upstream already has [...]

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We can handle information density

Memo to search engines: we’re smart enough to look at more than five search results above the fold. As the web has gotten more crowded, sites regularly expose us to dashboards crammed with information. Sometimes there are more than a hundred links or cues on a page, and we are getting very good at scanning [...]

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The fifth Beatle

It’s an insult. If someone (who isn’t John, Paul, George or Ringo) calls you a fifth Beatle, they’re not being nice. For fifty years, people have been proclaiming that they’re intimates, part of the story, a key component of the success of the Beatles… Just as there are people who would like you to believe [...]

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Time doesn’t scale

But bravery does. The challenge of work-life balance is a relatively new one, and it is an artifact of a world where you get paid for showing up, paid for hours spent, paid for working. In that world, it’s clearly an advantage to have a team that spends more time than the competition. One way [...]

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Meeting vs. making

As I was scurrying to meet someone coming in on the 11 am train, I realized that there’s a huge difference between meeting a train and making one. If you’re rushing to make a train, you have to be there before the last moment. Five seconds too late is too late. The cost of error [...]

As seen on: "Seth"