Spencer Critchley

Communication and Change

Spencer Critchley

What’s Next for Content Marketing: No Content

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Also published at the Huffington Post. Content marketing is all the rage right now, and for good reason. In a digital world, people’s attention is divided among a nearly infinite range of media choices. That means it’s harder and harder to push a message at them, the way you used to with traditional advertising and PR.

So instead, you pull, by creating compelling content that attracts customers to you — content marketing.

Hence the explosion of publishing activity by businesses, non-profits and other organizations, through email, social media, blogs, image sharing, games and more.

According to a recent report by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs:

“On average, B2B [business to business] marketers are spending 33 percent of their marketing budgets on content marketing, which is up from 26 percent last year. 54 percent plan on increasing content marketing spending next year…

This year, B2B marketers are most challenged with producing enough content, which is different from years past, when the top challenge was producing engaging content.”

There’s just one problem: it isn’t going to work much longer. Although it’s still on the rise, content marketing is already showing signs of becoming the victim of its own success. [Read more…] about What’s Next for Content Marketing: No Content

What’s Next for the NRA: Arming Young Black Males

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According to the NRA, guns are life-savers. The group credits rising gun ownership (albeit among a shrinking share of the population) and the spread of concealed carry laws for the decline of violent crime from its peak in the 1990’s. According to the NRA, there are as many as 2.5 million defensive uses of guns per year.

“An armed society is a polite society,” goes a favorite NRA quotation, borrowed from science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.

To say the least, these assertions are controversial (you can find objective discussions here and here). But let’s accept them for now, if only to see where they lead.

That would be to what surely will become the NRA’s next urgent priority:

Arming young black males.

The NRA’s own principles and policy positions cry out for it:

  1. Americans need to be armed, so they can protect themselves from violent crime. The police can’t be relied upon, especially since they usually show up after an attack has occurred. “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” as NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre says.
  2. Regulating guns is no good. It infringes Second Amendment freedoms, and only law-abiding people will obey the regulations — “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,” as another favorite quote has it.
  3. There are also risks from terrorists, Latin American drug gangs, the deranged and even the imminent breakdown of society, according to LaPierre. Again, only by being armed can citizens defend themselves.

Obviously, the NRA should therefore focus its efforts on those who are most at risk from violence. Who are most at risk? By far, young black males.

Let’s look at the numbers, as collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control.

In 2010, for the first time since 1965, homicide fell off the list of the top 15 causes of death for the US population overall (see here, page 14).

But not if you were a young black male. According to the CDC’s 2009 figures, for you, homicide was the number one cause of death.

For black males aged 15 to 24, half of all deaths were by homicide. Think about that: half.

Here are some comparisons of percentages of deaths by homicide, by age group:

Source: US Centers for Disease Control. Chart: the author.

It’s a horrifying crisis, as many in law enforcement, public health and government have been saying for years.

So, since the NRA believes guns make their owners and others around them safer, I’m sure we can count on the group throwing the bulk of its effort into making sure young black males are carrying guns, ASAP. Subscribe to the Politics email. From Washington to the campaign trail, get the latest politics news.

Hang on a minute, some may say. Some of those young black males were probably criminals. After all, a higher percentage of black people live in poor, urban areas with high rates of violent crime. True, but remember what the NRA teaches us:

  1. The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
  2. We can’t keep guns out of the hands of criminals by regulation, and regulation puts the Second Amendment at risk.
  3. Society is crumbling. According to LaPierre, our violence-plagued cities are a preview of what we can expect.

But hang on another minute. Doesn’t the NRA say we should enforce existing gun laws, which would help reduce gun violence among black Americans, and all Americans? Yes, but also per the NRA, that can’t be allowed to happen if it involves actual enforcement, because then the ATF would take away our freedoms. More research into gun violence is also off-limits.

Now, as it happens the NRA has already begun to reach out to black people. There’s room for it, given the profile of the current membership. March of this year saw the debut at NRANews.com of commentator Colion Noir, an African-American gun rights advocate.

No way this is just a token gesture. Given the critical need, I’m sure we can expect black-oriented gun rights organizing to become the lion’s share of NRA activity any day now.

Second priority will no doubt be given to young Hispanic males, who face the next-highest level of risk.

It can’t be that there are already too many guns flooding high crime minority communities. Remember, guns make people safer — if these particular armed societies are less than polite, obviously, they need to be more heavily armed.

Now perhaps you think I’m being ironic. You may be right.*

But it could be that the joke will be on me: after all, think of the profits being left on the table by the NRA’s clients, the gun-makers. They may want to go for this multicultural outreach stuff, big time.

Because no matter how confusing they may sometimes seem, there’s one simple thing that always makes the NRA’s positions perfectly coherent: the gun industry money behind them.

*Let me emphasize that the targets of my irony are the NRA leadership and its exploitation of fear, in particular xenophobia. I am not saying that all NRA members think of race when they imagine law-abiding Americans defending themselves against criminals, or even that all members buy into the NRA’s vision of an armed citizenry fighting crime and terror. For example, the great majority of NRA members disagree with the group’s leaders on the issue of sensible gun regulations, like universal background checks (which members overwhelmingly favor).

5 Seconds to Better Looking Documents: Get Un-centered

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Also published at the Huffington Post: In five seconds, you will be creating better-looking documents: Five, four, three, two —

Stop centering your text!

— One. There, now your documents look better.

Centered text looks OK for some special uses, such as page titles or formal invitations, but not much else. Here’s why:

Centering creates jagged line edges,
which can make a layout look messy, and
it makes the copy hard to read,
because the eye has to jump around so much
from line to line.

You see it all the time, but that doesn’t make it right.

Centering text comes under the heading of “Just because you can do it, it doesn’t mean you should.”

Paul Ryan is Romney’s Sarah Palin

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Cross-posted at Huffington Post. Of all the obvious blunders Republican leaders didn’t want Mitt Romney to make, it was choosing a Sarah Palin as his candidate for vice president. The possibility scared even Dick Cheney.

But that’s exactly what Romney has done.

What, you say? Paul Ryan, like him or not, is a person of substance, and Sarah Palin is, well, Sarah Palin. But if you look at why Romney chose Ryan, and why John McCain chose Palin, it becomes clear.

McCain was seen by the conservative base as far too impure ideologically, palling around with liberals on bellwether issues like immigration, global warming and campaign finance reform. He was also proving to be a disappointing campaigner: lacking a coherent message, committing gaffes and never really firing up any part of the electorate.

Sound familiar?

McCain chose Palin in a desperate attempt to buy credibility with the base of his own party. Same with Romney and Ryan. Romney, a man who apparently has no core, has attempted to hire one.

But what about Ryan’s intellectual gravitas, as compared with Palin’s anti-gravitas? Ryan’s famous plan, the Roadmap for America’s Future, may be radical and heartless, but as the GOP mantra goes, at least he has a plan.

Gravitas? People, Paul Ryan is a big fan of Ayn Rand. This counts as gravitas?

Only in Washington, as they say, though we shouldn’t overlook Star Trek conventions.

As any psychologist could tell you, if you’re obsessed with escaping someone, you are not free of that someone. In fleeing Sarah Palin, anxiously looking over his shoulder, Mitt Romney has run around in a circle, smack into Paul Ryan.

The World’s Shortest How-To List for Leaders

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If you do a search for advice on leadership, you’ll find a lot of lists:

  • “Top 10 Things All Leaders Must Know”
  • “Leadership Advice from 5 Top Executives”
  • “The 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership,” etc, etc.

I almost always find these lists worth reading. But at the same time, I find that in one sense, they all completely miss the point.

That’s because by the very act of making a list about leading, you are making sure that whoever reads that list will not be thinking like a leader. A list is a formula, an algorithm. And the urge to follow a formula is the very opposite of what makes a leader. [Read more…] about The World’s Shortest How-To List for Leaders