My Favorite Marketing(ish) Articles

This post is the intersection of a few different things I've been thinking about lately. First is Percolate. Part of the process of introducing the company to new people is frequently recounting the story of where the product came from. James and I have probably sent each other a thousand different articles back and forth and I asked him recently for his list of top articles that really inspired his thinking in the space. The second thing is Robin Sloan's Fish which is all about the difference between liking and loving content. It made me think about the list of the content and marketing-related articles I've read that I come back to frequently. This is that list. Some of these are newer and may not hold the test of time, but most of them are things I've come back to (at least in conversation) about once a month since I've read them (they are distributed over the last 10 years). Without any further ado, here's my list: Stock & Flow Not specifically about marketing, but it's all about content. Stock and flow is how we've taken to thinking about content at Percolate and this is really where that idea came from. I've written a few things inspired by the idea and use it frequently to explain how brands should think about content (and why Percolate exists). Many Lightweight Interactions This is the most recent article of the bunch and comes by way of Paul Adams, who works in the product team at Facebook. It was a really nice way to explain a lot of the stuff I've been thinking and talking about with clients over the last five years. Specifically it talks about how the web (and specifically social) offer brands an opportunity to move from a world of few heavyweight interactions (stock in Robin's parlance) to many lightweight interactions (flow). The one thing I'd add is that I think the real opportunity is to take the many lightweight interactions and use them to understand what works and inform the occasional heavyweight interactions brands need to succeed. Who's the Boss? This was written by a friend of mine 10 years ago. It's short, but the core point is that brand's live in people's heads. This was what inspired Brand Tags and has colored lots of my thinking about how brands behave. Why Gawker is Moving Beyond the Blog Not specifically about marketing, but Denton's explanation of why he's moved from the classic blog format is a great explanation of how content works on the web. How Social Networks Work Another slightly older one, this was the first time I had read someone talked about the idea of social as exhaust data (basically our digital breadcrumbs), which seemed like a really good way to think about it (and helped explain why brands struggled). Lately I've been using this to help explain why brands struggle in social: Exhaust data is a very human thing. You need to consume in order to create this trail and most brands don't do that. How Owned Media Changed the Game From Ted McConnel who used to be head of digital at P&G. I really liked this quote: "Recently, in a room full of advertising brain trustees, one executive said, 'The 'new creative' might be an ecosystem of content.' Brilliant. The brand lives in the connections, the juxtapositions, the inferences, the feeling of reciprocity." This was one of those articles that really wrapped up a bunch of stuff I had been thinking about. It's nice when that happens. That's it for me. What would you add? What am I forgetting?