Everything in this book works. You can put it to work, you can hire us to put it to work, and you can use our software for to measure if it’s working — 6-6:
work. There is nothing less motivating than writing blog posts on the Internet for most corporate blogs, because no one ever reads those blog posts. We imagine that the people who work at those blogs start off earnest and chipper. Then they work really hard on posts like “10 Reasons You Should Give Enterprise Software Licenses as Christmas Presents,” only to hear crickets when they hit the publish button. Write multiple posts like this -- posts that don’t influence your company’s sales, exposure, or leads -- and you’ll quickly lose motivation. The default state of the internet is that noonecares. So many articles, videos, and blog posts compete for people’s attention that average work often goes unrecognized. It’s pointless to publish anything that isn’t fantastic, because it will certainly be ignored. We got lucky on two dimensions -- and without this luck, it’s unlikely that the Priceonomics Blog — 13-13:
In organizational theory, there is something called the Effort-Performance-Outcome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectancy_theory) theory: you will only put forth the effort necessary to succeed if you reasonably expect that effort will pay off. This explains why workers slack off once they believe that their output won’t be used for anything important. It also helps explain lots of social phenomena, like why the cycle of poverty is so difficult to escape: if you grow up somewhere where there are no examples of hard work leading to success, there is no case to be made for hard work — 13-13:
your focus should be on making interesting things that also have some benefit for your company — 15-15:
Information, on the other hand, will. It can be data that your company produces, insights you have because of your industry experience, or stories about the people you have access to. — 15-15:
The entirety of Facebook’s motivation can be decoded from this 2011 quote (http://robhof.com/2011/04/20/1014/) by the company’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg: “[Facebookisthe]demandgeneration.We’renotreallydemandfulfillment,whenyou’ve alreadyfigureditoutwhatyou’regoingtobuy–that’ssearch.We’redemandgeneration, beforeyouknowyouwantsomething,beforeyouknowyou’reinterestedinsomething — 47-47:
We knew the report had a good chance of going viral because, before we even started gathering the data, we considered: (1) What is a person expressing by sharing this?, and (2) What can they say about it? — 49-49:
The repeated heartbreak of having a great post flop has taught us to ask the question “Why will someone share this?” before we start writing. Very often, we can’t come up with an answer, so we’ll refine the idea until we do. — 50-50:
There is a secret to minimizing your chances of making a catastrophic mistake: keep the scope of your argument narrow. In every post, we try to make just one really good point, and make sure that we are right about that point. If we write about San Francisco rent prices, we don’t also talk about rent control, the impact of the tech industry, or the city government’s zoning regulations. We just focus on one thing: what’s happening to the price — 59-59:
Then, that story gets shared with the “editor”, the person who will tear the first draft to shreds. First drafts are never great. The editor needs to help improve the organization of the article, offer suggestions for making the writing clear, and, most importantly, aggressively push back on whether everything in the article is correct. — 61-61:
Our goal with a title is twofold: it should honestly convey what the article is about, and it should emphasis the point that we think the reader will share — 63-63:
lot of blood, sweat, and tears goes into making a really good blog post. So, here’s a tip: when you first start, don’t write every day. Spend 40 hours on your first post, and then make it succeed. Do whatever it takes to find the story that’s in the data to make it genuinely interesting. The returns on writing something great are enormous; the returns on writing something average are zero — 66-66:
Still, it’s pretty hard to come up with ideas for articles. So we’ve come up with some “hacks” or tricks for coming up with and implementing good ideas. As we’ve mentioned before, there are three nodes of information we like to focus on: data, industries, and people — 67-67: