Happy October 🍁🍎🌅

Here is everything I read, watched, and liked last month -- and what I'm looking forward to this month

Oct 05, 2020

I share a weekly update on ways to be a better marketer, brand-maker, team-builder, and person. If you enjoy this, you can share some love by hitting the Substack heart button above or below.

Hi there 👋

Thank you to those who wrote in about last week’s remote marketing jobs board. Glad it was useful! I’ll continue updating it and maintaining it (this week, I’ve added Kinsta). And as always, let me know if I can ever help with your job hunt. 🤗

For this week’s email, I’ve recapped some of the things I’ve been reading, watching, and learning over the past month. I’ll try to do one of these each month from now on. Let me know if there’s ever anything you want to see more of (or less of) — I’d love for this email to be as valuable as possible for you.

Wishing you a great October,
Kevan

~ Simone Weil

Here are 5 books I enjoyed in September

How Not to be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg. Smart, interesting essays about how we should apply math to our everyday thinking.

They Can’t Kill Us All by Wesley Lowery. Written by a Washington Post journalist who was on the ground in Ferguson, this book tells stories and adds history and context to today’s anti-racism movement.

Boys & Sex by Peggy Orenstein. Deeply-researched look into how teenage boys view sex today: the pressures, the expectations, etc.

Memoirs and Misinformation by Jim Carrey. Super weird book about being a celebrity. Part autobiographical, but mostly fantasy / sci-fi. (And yes, written by that Jim Carrey.)

The Outsiders by William Thorndike. A business book about the CEOs and leaders who outperform their peers by thinking differently.

These are 6 cool things I bookmarked in September

1 - Skribbl.io & BuzzFeed Quiz Party. Fun stuff for your Zoom meetings.

2 - AllCall — Socially-distanced vacation planning. People who know all the best getaway spots during the pandemic and will plan a trip for you.

3 - Moat. See all the display ads that a brand has made (here’s an example of Harry’s razors)

4 - Fat Bear Week. Ends on Tuesday! 🐻

5 - This mixtape of awesome songs from 1990 👇

6 - Forget the Funnel. A huge library of resources and events that teach SaaS marketing from a holistic, effective, not-icky perspective.

One thing on my mind …

We are entering the age of post-social

(found via Sari’s newsletter)

The post-social concept was created by the crew at Co—Matter, a brand and community consultancy. The concept touches on a number of different shifts we’ve observed at Buffer, too. In particular:

Trust over growth
Responsibility over neutrality
Privacy over data

This is especially relevant as we begin 2021 planning at Buffer. The social media jobs we built Buffer to serve five years ago are vastly different than the jobs are today. For that matter, the jobs of nine months ago are vastly different today.

Some things we’re mulling:

What related-to-social jobs can we help customers solve? (Possibly content creation?)

Which aspects of social media truly drive community? Hypothesis: engaging in the comments, for one.

What analytics data matters most? Less about follower size, more about stories completion rate.

I’ll be happy to share more as further thoughts come together. In the meantime, I’d love to hear if this resonates with the way you use social media yourself or for your business.

And just for fun … 2020 Drone Photography Contest winners

(Alexa … add a drone to my Amazon shopping list.) 😁

Thanks so much for reading. Have a great week!

— Kevan

P.S. If you liked this email and have a quick moment, could you click the heart button below? It’d mean a ton to me and might help surface this newsletter for others. Thank you!