Seems the squad at Copyblogger has been inspired by David Ogilvy’s (and William Maynard’s) infamous quote again. “‘Most good copywriters…fall into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end.’ If you are both killer and poet, you get rich.”

In their plans for what to write and teach in the new year, Sonia and Brian Clark considered these two words, “killer” and “poet.” According to these content pros, it’s the marriage of these two mentalities that create the best marketers, ones that can master the 3 skills presented in today’s Listen.

Amazing insights in this one — jump to 02:00 to get started.

• (03:10) How Ogilvy’s quote captures what makes a commercial writer actually succeed (04:00) Writing as the core of Content Marketing
• (04:40) Why writing created by a purely “killer” mentality is so “horrible”
• (05:10) Why it’s a silly (and expensive) mistake to try to promote a business with cheap, crummy content
• (05:15) Why no one wants to read “killer”-based writing
• (06:35) What it means to be a “poet” today  
• (06:55) Why Sonia and Brian think 2018 will be the year of the Word Nerd
• (07:15) Most important quality of a “poet”
• (09:05) The best way to stand out from all the crappy content
• (09:45) 3 killer skills to master
• (10:25) #1: Copy strategy. Find the right words for the right person at the right time… Guide people through the buying journey/prompt their behavior
• (11:25) #2: Analytics. Discovering, interpreting, and communicating meaningful patterns (11:55) How (and why) to get over your fear of analytics
• (12:40) #3: Marketing technology
• (12:50) Why a technology-first approach can actually kill your content strategy.
• (13:10) Why you must use such tools to enhance the experience, not lead the experience.
• (13:30) How the move toward personalized website experiences is a huge opportunity for writers
• (14:20) The rise of “hybrid” marketers

We’re doing some fact-checking today. Enough with the fake social media news. You’ve probably heard something along these lines over the past few months: using 3rd-party tools to share your content on social media hurts your organic reach.

Let’s be honest, it makes sense that social media platforms would limit the organic reach of posts shared by 3rd-party apps. They’d obviously rather have you on their platforms sharing things natively.

Sooo…do those 3rd-party tools hurt? Buffer decided to do a serious study to find out. After all, if 3rd-party apps were being handicapped by The Big Three, Buffer would probably wanna know about it.

And because Buffer is Buffer, they went all in and used three different 3rd-party social media tools for their experiment. The three they used were: Buffer, Hootsuite, and CoSchedule.

So what was their final answer?

No, The Big Three don’t limit the organic reach of content shared from 3rd-party social media tools. ::Phew, wipes sweat off brow::

Here’s the actual data broken down by platform:

Facebook:

• 3rd-Party Tools: 9 posts / 81,639 total reach / 8,515 per post
• Native Posting: 9 posts / 79,380 total reach / 8,820 per post
• Advantage: 3rd-Party

Twitter:

• 3rd-Party Tools: 45 posts / 949,890 total impressions / 21,108 per post
• Native Posting: 45 posts / 975,223 total impressions / 21,671 per post
• Advantage: Native

LinkedIn:

• 3rd-Party Tools: 9 posts / 63,221 total reach / 7,024 per post
• Native Posting: 9 posts / 54,646 total reach / 6,071 per post
• Advantage: 3rd-Party

The other important data point that they uncovered in all of this was that video performs so much better on Facebook and Twitter than any other type of post. We’ve heard that said a billion times, but it’s nice to see actual data behind that.

Moral of the story? Keep using those 3rd-party tools for posting on social media if it makes your life easier.

In their latest ad, Tinder chronicles the history of dating, going all the way back to cavemen. One can’t help but think of those old Geico commercials, except it’s “Dating so easy even a caveman can do it.”

That’s kind of what Tinder is getting at in this beautifully-animated timeline. Dating and love were simpler back then before history began imposing rules based on class, culture, gender, etc. The animated story takes the audience through all of these perils of love as we see people kept apart or forced together.

Flash forward to today with Tinder aiming to make dating easy again. The brand spot also strives to shed a new light on the app, highlighting togetherness and love for all. 

Consider us head over heels for the creative in this one.