One of my favorite parts of the Buzzfeed CMS is Mega Lists.  Mega Lists are long scrolling lists of images, text snippets, or just about anything in long scrollable sequence.  Most are actually 100 images that load on a single page.  We’ve found anecdotally that users vastly prefer to scroll and share a long list versus page through a slideshow.  (Among many [...]

I woke up in the middle of the night with one sentence: “the difference between great versus good customer service is anticipation versus asking.” I wrote it down and woke up to it this morning. It doesn’t make complete sense on a standalone basis so let me unpack it. When you anticipate and proactively reach out to your customers to [...]

I hadn’t traveled to Europe in a few years prior to the business trip I returned from yesterday.  I was concerned that the time change, being 6 hours ahead of New York, would result in me being totally behind.  This was fortunately not the case.  For those on a managers schedule, there is a need to exist in two worlds, [...]

I live in my slide decks and financial models. I view these  materials as living documents that I tweak in real time, certainly weekly and sometimes every few days. I’ve blogged extensively about my pitch decks but haven’t written about financial forecasting. The de facto way to budget is to create a forecasted income statement and cash flow and track [...]

Network effects are poorly understood. In most cases, networks tend to merge and interconnect. One network may become dominant, but even the dominant player tends to interconnect at some point, as opposed to try and simply kill off competitors. I believe that iMessage will eventually interconnect with other mobile instant messing apps. Despite the large share of iOS, keeping it [...]

Branded Content I was on a panel earlier in the week and used it as an opportunity to talk about the historic roots of branded content. I used some of my favorite ads from Ogilvy and Doyle Dane. I believe strongly that branded content is old and proven, not new. In most ways, branded content is just good advertising, advertising [...]

I finished reading the Madoff book this week.  I was struck by how many times over the years, Madoff would have been caught, had a regulator just followed up with a source or made a phone call.  Single phone calls would have shown that Madoff was holding no securities on behalf of his ponzi scheme victims.  In many cases, regulators [...]