1, 2, 3: Strategy is operations; quantity or quality; and more

Hi team

This space is evolving. Let's change it up a bit. Here you will find, each edition, short and sharp:

1-2-3

• 1 Opinion: Me, on something.
• 2 Ideas: Notable things that might or might not be useful.
• 3 Stories: Headlines that caught my eye from the last week.

Topics will include: Digital communications and marketing, entrepreneurship and building a company, life hacks I have tried, ramblings of a middle aged man, random polls. Let me know what you might like me to include.

This week:

1 Opinion

Operations is strategy

2 Ideas

Stuff that Matters

Quality or quantity?

3 Stories

So much Musk; Data is the new sand; Shipwrecked synth sounds.

Let's dive in, as they say.

1 Opinion: Operations is strategy

I work in the business of fast moving digital communications. I talk to organizational digital communicators all the time. And there is a misconception. Many look to "strategy" to save them. It won't.

Don't get me wrong, you need strategy.

• What impact do we want? What does success look like?
• What are our resources? What are our opportunities?
• What are we going to do and when? Who is going to do it?
• How will we know we are winning? What will we do when we are not?

If you know the answers to these questions. You have a strategy.

Challenge is, as any sports coach knows, strategy doesn't win the match. Players win the match. Skills win the match. Decision-making under pressure wins the match. Fitness wins the match. Teamwork wins the match.

Strategy gets you not even half the way there. Also, strategy is built on a snapshot in time, and digital communications is amongst the fastest moving operating environments in human history.

My view: Operations is the most important aspect of your strategy. A deep understanding of who does what, when and how, and how well they do it—honed over long periods of teamwork and engagement—will determine your success on the battlefield.

How do you think of strategy in your digital communications? How well do you think you do it?

2 Ideas

2 (a) Stuff that matters

Earlier this year, our company, The Content Engine, evolved its mission:

To combine creativity & technology for communication about stuff that matters

"Stuff that matters". We put that there because as a team of people we want to contribute to a better tomorrow, and feel we provide a valuable enough outcomes for our customers that our growth can be directed towards communication about that better tomorrow.

One the one hand, as a growth-focussed CEO, I don't want to limit the customers that we can work with, or be turning away potentially exciting partnerships. We are also not an agency that specifically specialises in sustainability. We communicate about more than that.

On the other, as a person, I don't want the company to be partnering with organisations that are contributing to climate change, greater inequality, the water crisis , or any number of other issues that really do matter.

And so our potential customers go through a screening of the top leadership, and we have a deep discussion on whether the messaging matters. We recently declined the opportunity to work with a fossil fuel lobbying organisation. That was an easy one. Others will be harder.

We used to say: "We work with organisations that are committed to achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals."

There are 17 of these and they are quite broadly defined.

I like "stuff that matters" more.

What do you think?

2 (b) Quantity or Quality?

If you have a limited budget for digital communications, (and who doesn't?), should you focus on quantity (posting a lot of content) or quality (posting less, and investing more in each post)?

It is an eternal question and one which comes up in customer conversations all the time. In the blog post on this link, Malcolm Gladwell is established as a purveyor of quality, Gary Vaynerchuk fights in the quantity corner.

In my experience, it is the wrong question. The conceptual (and budget, and strategic, and operational) challenge is that there is no dichotomy—if you want to succeed in digital communications, you have to do both. You have to publish frequently, because we live in a world awash in messaging, people have short memories and if you are not in front of them, you don't exist. And you have to publish well, because your channels are your brand.?

As I have been known to say, digital communications is like feeding the kids, it is not enough that you did it last week. You have to do it again today: 3 times in fact. And tomorrow. And the day after that.

And the only way to quality is through quantity: you cannot know what is good, what your audience responds to, what cuts through, unless you publish. A lot.

You gotta do both. Here's Gary:

Quantity or Quality? What do you think?

3 Stories you may have missed

1. My feed is all Elon this week. I hate it, and (my idea of) him, and still I click. A book by celebrity biographer Walter Isaacson is about to drop, and on this link (WSJ) he tells the story of how Musk bought Twitter, including a ruthless double cross at the end of the transaction. So fun. In the same vein, listen to this podcast to learn how he dominated Tesla. About a month ago there was this in depth profile by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker. We are all living in Musk's simulation.
2. As soon as newspapers learned that ChatGPT announced it has a web crawler, they started blocking it. In this essay on AI and copyright, Benedict Evans shows that it doesn't matter, not one jot. Read to find out how data is sand, not oil.
3. Here's Space Echo, a fun album of spacey African beats, out of Cape Verde, an archipelago about 400 miles off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. It's space-age syntho exists because a shipment of electric organs and synthesisers was shipwrecked on one of Cape Verde's Islands, and its cargo was distributed to every school on the archipelago.

And that's it from me for this week.

Let me know what you think about the new format, please do share with your networks.

Mike