Are you an addict? You might be. Let me explain. We all enjoy a bit of what behavioural economists call confirmation bias. We gravitate towards articles, or commentators whose world view corresponds with ours. We do this because we are addicts. When we find opinions that validate our experience, the brain releases a tiny dose of dopamine, a feel-good chemical that gives us a sense of wellbeing, that all is good with the world. It’s why we return constantly to the newspapers,

Brace yourselves. Artificial intelligence is ganging up on content professionals again. At least according to this story from the Content Marketing Institute yesterday. Like most AI stories these days it comes complete with an ‘end of days’ headline and a warning that an army of robots is ‘creating’ content – hundreds of thousands of stories every year. It’s that word ‘creating’ that is most troublesome. Read the article and it’s clear there’s a huge gap between these data dr

I don’t play golf. But a friend of mine tells the story of a game, early in his career, which pushed him over the edge. After multiple shanks, chunks, and fluffs, culminating in a triple bogey on the eleventh green, he snatched the bag of clubs from his caddie, stormed to the edge of a nearby lake, and threw the lot – woods, irons, putters and all – into the water. Fortunately, it was a second-hand set so he was only down by about £75. But he never went back to the fairways.

After recovering from injury, I’m back in long-distance training for a couple of marathons this year. At the same time, I’m stepping up my writing, helping to tell great stories across all our digital channels, including social media. Writing and running? More in common than you might think. Here are 10 reasons why. Go ahead and add your own in the comments below. 1. It takes 40 minutes to warm up. You can have a rotten first few miles, the introductory paragraphs may be tort

You may remember that at the start of the year I purged my Twitter diet of scheduling tools, curating apps and any form of automation. I even abandoned lists for Tweet’s sake. The goal was to consume, share and engage with other users using only my home stream. So how did this experiment in Clean Tweeting go? Like any detox, it was tough to begin with. My social media schedule went out the window. Without Buffer and Pocket, I was spending more than an hour a day dipping in an

Everyone’s a writer these days. From tweets to LinkedIn posts, from blogs to white papers, writing skills are high up the menu for anyone working in a business that relies on content for digital marketing. But even when you’ve got a great idea for a blog, for example, there are plenty of obstacles between that cranial light-bulb moment and a good first draft. And many of them fall under that dreaded condition, writers’ block. Normally experienced at the start of the drafting