I’m doing something a little different than our normal briefing post today.
First of all, going through the alerts and subscriptions and publications that we have I didn’t find enough that was interesting that I’d want to put in a briefing today … which brought me to thinking about posting this note and letting you know exactly what I do here.
In the past, I’ve owned real-world magazines some were Canadian some were international and I use a lot of the same thinking that I developed and learned while working for magazines before I owned my own. One Degree Briefing that I put out Monday to Friday … I tested. Some of you have been longtime readers and you know how this happened where I would drop in a briefing in amongst regular articles and test them. Since putting the strategy in place for these the hits and visits and uniques and downloads, well, you name it, have gone up and up and up. It’s just terrific! I’ve never been one for strictly chasing numbers or popularity it’s strictly about putting out a great product.
Years ago I worked in a consulting capacity and had the chance to do a bunch of work with Bruno Leps who is one of the pioneers in digital in Canada and in one of our discussions over many hours working together we had the idea – wouldn’t it be great to put together some sort of a company or a product that we would call EIS!
Now we all know what MIS means – management information systems EIS to us was Executive Information System and as a thumbnail sketch our idea was to serve up every morning a digestible document for C-suite executives giving stock quotes; latest news; industry bits and bites; factoids; and all sorts of wonderful stuff that if you are an executive and because you’re busy, perhaps this concise let’s call it a “one-pager” would be a great way to start your day.
The One Degree Briefings are not EIS – I would need staff and more resources than I have to sort all that out and to research and to interview and to be the type of mini-media that I would like to produce. Regardless of what I’m doing with One Degree, I am serving up content as I did with my real-world magazines.
What I publish is what I would like to see every day and what I would be very interested in during the week. The weekends are for family!
I was an executive, a President of a public company a Creative Director and GM of a couple of very large ad agencies, a Past President of the Direct Marketing Association of Canada and a generalist at heart! So what you see served up in the One Degree Briefings is what I find really interesting right up to the minute before posting the briefing a little after midnight of that day. Because stale information ceases to be relevant information!
I have about 50 Google Alerts probably a dozen business subscriptions, seventy or more publications in my newsreader which is News Explorer and want to give a shout-out to them because it is a wonderful program. I also get my Google news early every day so this is good for me as I am retired and I read all of it – this keeps me informed! And if there’s something that I like and I think would interest someone like me if I was the customer – I post it!
I pick about 10 items daily and whittle them down to four or five for the posting. I also have a lot of activity on Twitter with One Degree and my personal social media accounts (You can get all that in the About US) so I am extremely happy to serve this up for you! It brings me back to the glory days of owning magazines which was a lot of fun.
I had Food Store Magazine which was a trade publication for the Canadian especially food industry, The Grenada Entertainer which was the contract publishing magazine for Granada – the folks that used to rent you TVs – and Food From Britain which was a special magazine published under the auspices of the British government. There were a few other magazines that we tested that did not see the light of day at that time and a couple that I declined.
One of note was to publish Roger’s (Then Cantel’s) in-house magazine for all his customers. It might have been a great venture but we never got the initial partnerships ironed out.
I simply enjoy great work and serving up great work and hope people enjoy it too!
It is my pleasure to bring you One Degree – the regular Daily Briefing will be back tomorrow, Thursday the 7th.
So, stay safe as we work our way out of this Covid mess!
mose