Category Archive

business communitations

“Yeah, Totally!”: Don’t confuse interest with commitment

When you’re doing something big and interesting (like, oh, say, organizing an online community) and are looking for people to help, please, for the love of niches and all that matters to you, understand that not all yeah totallys are created equal…

Slacking with the Offbeat Empire: how Slack turned my inbox into the happiest ghost town

Slack is a productivity tool for remote workers. It’s sorta like a chat room, but jacked up on steroids, coming up on of three hits of ecstasy, and wearing one of those hippie utility belts packed with swiss army knives, your favorite kind of gum, chapstick, a wrench, and two-sided tape. I started being like, “Wait, why am I not using this yet?”

SEO guest post inquiries: the best and the worst

Every morning I wake up to several “can I write a guest post for your site?” emails from writers working for SEO companies. See, there’s this whole weird corner of SEO that’s all about barfing out (usually questionable) guest post content for blogs, in exchange for links in the body of the post. It’s not something I ever EVER do (you want links from the Empire, you buy advertising, the end), but the inquiries just keep coming… sometimes as many as 5 or 6 overnight. (It’s always overnight, because the writers are non-US based.)

This morning I had two SEO guest post inquiries, and they illustrate the best and the worst I’ve seen in a long time…

Offbeatdride: How to turn marketing fails into awesome human moments

I spent over ten years in the trenches of corporate marketing, so I have a lot of fist-bumping love for the creatives who find themselves paying the bills with public relations, marketing, and other sales work. That said, maybe having worked in marketing makes me even less patient with marketing mistakes. I’m like a former waiter, who’s both prone to tipping 40% because I remember so clearly the challenges of doing that work… but who’s also extra critical because, look: I know what it’s like, and it’s not that hard.