Set clearer Instagram goals, streamline planning, and create a consistent visual tone with this practical content calendar guide and free downloadable template.
The post How To Create Your Instagram Content Plan (With Free Template) appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Set clearer Instagram goals, streamline planning, and create a consistent visual tone with this practical content calendar guide and free downloadable template.
The post How To Create Your Instagram Content Plan (With Free Template) appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google updates iOS App Install campaigns with new ad formats, smarter bidding, and privacy-first measurement. Here’s what it means and how marketers can adapt.
The post Google Expands iOS App Marketing Capabilities appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Where does hope come from?
It’s probably hard-wired, the result of an evolutionary process. A creature with hope is less likely to give up and more likely to raise offspring, thus passing down an ability to find resilience in the face of change.
Disenchanted has come to mean something different from its original usage.
Today, we’re “disenchanted” when we’ve fallen out of love with a person, product or situation. Marketers seek to create customer delight, and when they fail, customers become disenchanted and fade away.
But that’s not what Max Weber meant when he wrote about Descartes.
Until just recently almost everything that happened was enchanted. Magical spirits kept us alive, kept the sun rising and falling and gave rise to the voice in our head.
When we didn’t understand, hope drove us to imagine enchantment all around us. And that hard to measure spirit force responded by giving us hope.
As neuroscientists and philosophers began to explore the idea of consciousness and that voice in our head, they helped us understand that the brain, like everything else in our knowable world, is mechanical.
The refrigerator isn’t magic. Electricity, pumps and gasses keep things cold. And our brain runs on neurons, not magic.
We’ve disenchanted just about everything that’s worth taking a hard look at.
For many people, this has stripped away much needed hope.
Perhaps disenchantment (and the desire for hope) is primarily responsible for the rise in make-believe ideas about how the world works, nonsensical medical interventions and the diminished role of facts in decision making.
When we allow others to manipulate us with their magical stories, though, we’re often setting ourselves up for a collision with reality.
More than ten years ago, we broke records with my previous Kickstarter. Now I’m back with a suite of AI-powered cards.
For the last five months, I’ve been in full sprint mode, and this is what I’ve been building.
We launched the Mentor Deck in beta two weeks ago, and I was thrilled and delighted to see how deeply it resonated with people. And now the Mentor Deck is updated, and joined by two other decks that are fun, inspiring and surprising. I think they’ll make great gifts, but they’re also worth keeping a set for yourself as well.
It takes a long time to print a deck of cards, and we’re timing this launch so we can get the decks to everyone in time for the winter holidays–and we want to make sure to print enough. Early birds save a bundle, and folks who were in the beta group can get a special deal.
How the decks work:
The most famous AI platform is chatGPT, but my daily favorite is Claude, from Anthropic. Anthropic recently launched a platform they call artifacts. An artifact is an elegant, complex, pre-written prompt that can be shared with others. I ended up building 150 of them…
Each of the cards in the three decks has a QR code on it. Scan that and it launches an artifact that you can interact with. I used the tactile, analog power of playing cards to create juxtapositions and combinations that bring delight to our very human interactions with the AI.
While it was complex to build, it’s really easy to use. And the combination of cards and AI is pure magic.
The Infinite Adventure Deck lets you choose your own text adventure. There are fifty worlds to explore–Alice in Wonderland, Cyberpunk, Noir PIs and even Al Capone.
The Modern Divination Deck unlocks fifty kinds of ancient and modern soothsaying. Our future is not pre-written, it’s up to us. This neo-tarot deck leads to deep conversations and insights about taking responsibility and taking action in creating a future we’d like to be part of.
And the Mentor Deck is a series of focused prompts that create a coaching conversation. Each coach has ‘read’ what Claude knows about an idea or author and then talks you through your issues, your challenges and your potential. You’re not talking to the person who coined the ideas, but to a coach who understands them.
All three decks are designed to amplify our humanity. Instead of pushing ourselves to be nothing but a more productive cog, these sorts of open-ended conversations can push us to stop waiting for instructions and start taking responsibility instead.
You can try a sample Mentor conversation here. In addition, there are three samples from the Infinite deck on the Kickstarter page (at the bottom).
PS If you’re around Wednesday, I’ll be doing a live Q&A with Oriana Leckert, the head of publishing at Kickstarter. We’ll be taking your questions about how Kickstarter has evolved and how it might help you with your project. Register in advance if you can.
There’s a FAQ and regular updates and more information at promptdecks.com
Also… beta supporters of the Mentor Deck should check the free bonus page for details on the private link for the extra decks. You’ll need the password that came with your deck.
“Who’s it for?” is not simply a question about your target customer.
Milton Friedman offered to let us off the hook–the only thing the work is for is to maximize shareholder value, he said. Nothing else is worth measuring.
I’ve never met anyone who consistently believed this. There are folks who find it easy to allow money to make their decisions for them, but at some point, all of us move away from this empty path.
Work is an expression of ourselves, and a chance to find meaning as we make a difference and earn a living.
When we choose to serve our customers, we find a more reliable compass instead of only following the money. The customers are right there in front of us, and we can see and feel the results of our work every day. This is the doctor who spends a few extra minutes with a patient in need, or the staff member with a boss who rewards a customer-centric approach, even (especially) if it’s more expensive in the short run.
But how about artists who choose to produce paintings they love instead of those that will easily sell? This is a different sort of success, one that’s not measured in how many customers one has, but in our pride and satisfaction with the work we create.
Some symphony orchestras wrestle with the journey of finding a unified definition of success. There are musicians who have paid their dues, twenty or thirty years of practice and dedication. Many of them want to play challenging work, with time to hone their craft. The purpose of the work is to allow them to follow their creative path, the audience is just a way to achieve that. Others are eager to play crowd-pleasing programs, discovering that audience success rewards them even more than their own definition of artistry.
The conflict, in any organization, is a challenge. We’d like our team members to use their best judgment, to find the satisfaction they seek in their work. But what happens when these definitions of success don’t align?
Too often, management simply conceals what they really seek, or lies about it. If “employees are our most important asset” then why not act that way?
Let’s be clear about who it’s for and what it’s for. It makes decision making more productive and communication and measurement far more effective.
Uncertainty and volatility are prominent features of the 2025 media landscape. Major shifts in the last year, including reporter layoffs and shrinking newsrooms, […]
The post 2025 Media Relations Trends: The Future of Earned Media Coverage appeared first on Bliss.
Google’s John Mueller offered his opinion about a reported Core Web Vitals poisoning attack
The post Google Answers Question About Core Web Vitals “Poisoning” appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Katz’s Deli in New York City is the best in the world in my opinion, continually selling the best pastrami anywhere since 1888. Recently, we received a delivery that wasn’t at all up to their standards. I politely mentioned that via email, never expecting a response. Instead, a woman wrote me asking, what was the issue (tough meat), and then said they’ll send a pound of pastrami and a pound of corned beef as compensation!
Moral of the story: There is no greater opportunity for good will and future business than addressing problems positively. When Bank of America complained to me when I ran a San Francisco office that someone on my team had done a poor job running a workshop, I insisted on seeing the buyer, told him that we’d run another for free, and when he resisted (fearing another bad experience), I told him to get his best people and I’d run it personally.
It was a huge success and BofA became along-term client, which was certainly better (for them and for me) than simply getting their money back.
