B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 👋🏼 Hello!
Happy Friday, if you’re still in the office!
We relaunched the Storythings website last week, to better reflect our positioning and how we create value for our clients. Here’s Anajli explaining what we’ve done - let me know what you think!
Also, could you help us out by filling in a short, multiple choice survey about friction in creative workflows? We launched it on Attention Matters a few weeks ago, and the data so far is super insightful. So please fill it out (it’ll take about 5 mins) and share it with your networks. Thanks!
💻 DATA POINT: Thanks to Maya for sharing the LinkedIn post (and dizzying infographic) below about why email is still captures most of our attention. Gmail gets twice as much web time as Facebook, and the four biggest web email services capture nearly 25% of all time on web. We would obviously agree, and if you’re reading these words now, that’s proof!
📕The Short Story
Why Email Is Still The Most Important Channel (3-min read)
How Buffer Built a Team Of Employee Creators (4-min read)
OASIS: Open Source AI Tools For Non-Profits (repository of tools)
What’s Your AI Environmental Footprint? (calculator tool)
What Happened to TheNumbers.com Should Worry Us All (8-min read)
Awesome Newsletter About Overlooked Details (newsletter subscription)
EYE CANDY - A Creative Resource For Filmmakers (online resource)
How To Use AI Agents To Actually Deliver Results (excellent downloadable report)
📣 New Creative Crush Episode: Paul Afshar, CMO of Paybis, on Song Of Achilles (26-min listen) 📣
What breaks first are the things built for the old internet. The open web was built on assumptions such as that visitors are mostly human, that traffic roughly tracks readership, and that the cost of serving your site is related to the value you get from serving it. Every one of those assumptions is now out of date.
📚 The Long Story
Why Email Is Still The Most Important Channel (3-min read) Josh Nelson from Civic Shout, a platform for progressive causes, shares Adam Singer’s infographic about how important email still is for attention. Despite the rise of short video, we still read words online, and email is where we like to do that.
How Buffer Built a Team Of Employee Creators (4-min read)
When Anjali and I were at SXSW last year, we saw a great panel with Alex from StoryArb about B2B creators. This is something we’re starting to see in our client work, and this is a great case study from Buffer about how you can support your employees as a creator network.
OASIS: Open Source AI Tools For Non-Profits (repository of tools)
Anjali shared this brilliant network from our friends at Frontier Tech Hub. It’s a repository of the AI tools they’ve built to support their work in international development. We’re seeing a lot of ‘AI for good’ projects lately, and this is a great example.
What’s Your AI Environmental Footprint? (calculator tool)
But we still need to mindful of the ethical risk of AI. The copyright cases are working their way through the courts (Anthropic settled a publisher class action this week) but the most noise right now is around data centers and environmental risk. This great tool from Dan Taylor-Watt helps you get that into perspective - the risk is real, but it may not be as much as you think, and is way less than many other everyday activities.
What Happened to TheNumbers.com Should Worry Us All (8-min read)
When I wrote the newsletter a couple of weeks ago I included a link into how Spotify was being gamed to tip bets on prediction markets. This is another example of how ‘arbitrage’ culture is damaging the open web - a long-standing box office data site was taken offline after prediction market betters tried to hack into data before it was publicly released.
Awesome Newsletter About Overlooked Details (newsletter subscription)
I lost the source that drove me to this newsletter (ping me if it was you!) but I love it - a regular rabbit-hole dive into overlooked manufacturing details. I’d already included this in the newsletter when I got today’s edition - about font irregularities in Washington street signs. That’s right up my street (sorry).
5 Things We Can Learn From Pixar About Seeing Creative Friction (5-min read)
This week in Attention Matters I wrote about one of my favourite books about creative leadership - Creativity Inc by Pixar founder Ed Catmull. As mentioned above, we’re running a survey about creative friction, and Catmull points out that the biggest problem we have as creative leaders is we sometimes don’t see the creative friction. Realising this gave him a new role and purpose - to be the first person to spot the friction.
EYE CANDY - A Creative Resource For Filmmakers (online resource)
I had to check with the team that we hadn’t already included this in the newsletter, as it’s the kind of thing we LOVE at Storythings. Just a simple resource sharing hundreds of clips for creative film making inspo. I went to a great talk with three cinematographers in Hove last night, and they all said that they are magpies, constantly collecting images and fragments that they can then use in their work.
How To Use AI Agents To Actually Deliver Results (excellent downloadable report)
Yes, it’s Aboard, but I make no apologies for including a link from them again. This time it’s a really simple, clear and practical guide to how to use AI agents. No bullsh*t, no hype, just the facts.
📣 New Creative Crush Episode: Paul Afshar, CMO of Paybis, on Song Of Achilles (26-min listen) 📣
It’s been a busy week for publishing new stuff at Storythings, including a really fascinating new episode of our B2B CMO podcast Creative Crush. This time, Paul Afshar from Paybis talks about the influence of Madeline Miller’s book Song of Achilles. I’m really loving the passion we’re getting from every contributor on Creative Crush - no matter who you are or what you work on, we’re all nerdy about something. If you want to come on the podcast and tell us, hit reply and let me know!
💌 GODS of LinkedIn
Hugh dropped this in the Storythings slack, and I had to include it in our usual ‘Humans of LinkedIn’ slot. But I had to upgrade it to GODS of LinkedIn, as this is one and only Bootsy Collins, one of the founding fathers of funk, telling us how important it is to keep it on the one. It made me dig out my picture disc version of Parliament’s Motor Booty Affair showing Bootsy in full cowboy outfit using two dolphins as water skis…
GET ON THE ONE HERE>
Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!
Have a great weekend!
Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team
B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
