Over on the LinkedIn Influencer network, I’ve revealed how I manage my often-overflowing inbox. It’s not exactly rocket science, but enough people have found it interesting that I thought I’d share it in a professional context. If you’re interested in stuff like this, give it a read and let me know what you think. From the post:
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Whenever I hear a friend or colleague complain about how their email inbox is “out of control” I take the opportunity to toss out a humblebrag: I never go to sleep before getting my inbox down to ten or fewer messages. Every so often, I even get it to zero.
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Starting a business is a journey, as any founder will tell you. When I started Federated Media Publishing almost eight years ago, I did my best to collect all the lessons learned from Wired, The Industry Standard, and Web 2 Summit, and apply them to my new venture. One of those lessons was that it’s OK to step away when the time is right. Several years ago, I did just that, becoming an “active Chairman” at FMP and handing the operational reigns over to an accomplished executive, Deanna Brown.
Since making that decision, FMP has grown dramatically, but it’s also had its challenges. Last year, for example, we made the difficult but important decision to rethink the company so as to lean into our two most promising lines of business – content marketing (which we lay claim to inventing as “conversational marketing” some seven years ago) and programmatic marketing (which we invested in heavily last year, after acquiring a very fast growing business in Lijit Networks in Fall of 2011). It meant stepping back from something we had been doing for some time – directly selling standard display banners – but it proved to be the right choice. FMP is having a great first half of 2013, and I couldn’t be more excited about our roadmap and potential for the rest of the year and beyond.
The funny thing is, even as I became “just the Chairman” at FMP over the past two years, I never stopped thinking about the company. It woke me up nearly every night, tugging at my sleeve, asking me questions, demanding my best thinking. Deanna and I would meet every week to talk strategy, review numbers, or just plain chew the fat. Running a company with hundreds of employees, top notch investors, and a big top line revenue number is damn hard, and Deanna not only ran the place, she made it hum. I am in her debt.
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(image Wired) Way back in the day when I was making magazines, I was buried in print. I subscribed to at least twenty periodicals, easily twice that many came my way without my asking. It made for a huge pile of printed material on the end of my desk (stuff I really should read), and it creeped into the horizontal spaces behind me (stuff I think I should read, in case I get the time), or on my shelves (stuff I can’t throw out yet), and the damn things even spilled onto my floor (stuff I probably will never read, but feel too guilty to toss out).
I dubbed this mountain of print The Guilt Pile. Every so often, usually when it was time to move offices, I’d take inventory of the pile, and toss most of it. It always felt so good – a fresh start, a new day, this time, I promise, I’ll not let that pile accumulate again!
Then digital took over my print life, and the pile vanished.
Read MoreMy family has been going to a small island off the coast of Massachussets for my entire life – my grandparents are buried there, my great grandmother moved there around the turn of the century (1900, not 2000!). My mother owns a cottage near the beach, a cottage that my great-grandmother purchased nearly 100 years ago.
Suffice to say, I have a deep history with the place. But with a bevy of kids and friends descending upon us each summer, my family has outgrown the cottage, so we’ve started looking for a larger place to rent. Like most folks these days, we turned to the Internet. We fired up VRBO.com, a popular marketplace for quality vacation rentals. It’s a great site for checking the market, and my wife and I figured we might get lucky and find just the right place.
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Over on the brand spanking new CM Summit website, we’ve announced our initial speaker lineup and progam theme for the 2013 event – Parting the Clouds: Bridging Data and Humanity.
This is the seventh annual CM Summit, the fifth as an anchor conference for New York’s Internet Week. It’s a direct result of nearly a year of work on my book, and inspired by research into the programmatic, data-driven world of advertising technology as well as some very deep roots in brand building and digital media.
Read MoreRead MoreHolding hands at Tilden park http://t.co/MtfO79aJ
— James Buckhouse (@buckhouse) January 24, 2013
This changed today when I got this email:
Sure, it’s a marketing ploy perfectly in line with one of Twitter’s most important advertising segments – entertainment. But Twitter’s Oscars Index is a well executed piece of media. It reminds me of the various executions FM used to do on top of Twitter, back in the day – ExecTweets with Microsoft, ATT’s Title Tweets and CupBuzz, etc. Worth checking out.
