Welcome to Fresh van Root newsletter #77.
Two things I fail to mention often: First, thanks to everyone who posts/shares about the content in this newsletter. That keeps me going and motivated. Second, as we are heading into the busy season, don’t forget to take breaks. Stay fresh! Rolf
Hello to 78 new subscribers. Here’s what this newsletter is about: We are exploring content and apps at the intersection of marketing, productivity, tech, content creation, and social media – for curious minds. This bi-weekly newsletter is a summary of that exploration.
🧠 Hand-Picked Content
Report On Influencer Marketing (Article, 20min)
This report (based on surveying 500 US-based marketers) starts with a basic introduction to the creator economy and why brands work with influencers. Two nuggets I found interesting: The preferred content formats marketers partner on (Story formats leading) and the average creator compensation per post type (starting from $100 for a tweet to $500 for a video). More
How To Make Better Business Decisions (Article, 10min)
“Move fast and break things” might be a great phrase to get people to action, but it’s not helpful in decision-making processes. There are three common myths about decision-making:
- Make decisions fast to move fast.
- Brainstorming is helpful.
- Asking more people to help to decide leads to a better decision.
This article debunks those myths and links several articles on improving your decision-making process. More
Is TikTok Search The New Google Search? (Blog, 10min)
No, but users flock to TikTok for non-factual search queries. Examples: Cooking pasta, gardening tips, improving my backhand swing. On TikTok, you get immediate social proof (views, likes, comments). And users also use Google to search for Tiktok videos. Millions of topic pages from TikTok are indexed on Google, and TikTok videos are shown directly on the search engine results page. In short: marketers should change their thinking about SEO – it is now omnichannel—an enlightening article, especially for readers who are not on TikTok. More
AI-Powered Video Creation (Video, 1min)
Creating images by writing text prompts is cool, but have you tried making a video by typing text? Watch this demo to see what’s coming next. More
🛠️ Tools & Apps & Services
Create Slide Decks Like Docs
The typical slide deck creation process looks like this: You start with notes, structure your thoughts in a doc, and then create the slide deck. What if you could generate slide decks like documents? Gamma solves that. Instead of slides, you create cards, and a card does not have a fixed size, meaning it could be a bunch of text-heavy paragraphs or one GIF. The block-based content editing experience is also refreshing to use. Example | More
AI Writing Assistant
Are you tired of answering the same recurring questions in emails? Paragraph AI is a Chrome extension/iOS app you can use to write email replies, paragraphs, or lists. Tools like this can help you get fresh input in your writing and speed up your day2day communication. I like this tool that provides text snippets / short-form text more than others because of its more focused use cases. Most AI-powered text tools claim to solve all your writing issues and give you ready-to-publish content – Paragraph AI does not do that. More
Website Builder For About Me Pages
With Popsy.co, you can build your personal website in an hour. You can choose a template as a starting point and customize from. An attractive option if you need to fire up an about me page quickly. More
Email Aliases For Your Privacy
Shroud email is a service to create email aliases that forward to your actual email. It claims to remove the trackers in the forwarded emails during the process. One use case: If you want to subscribe to your competitors’ email newsletters without letting them know. More
📣 Fresh van Root
Project Showcase
One of the projects I am proud of this year is launching the Instagram account for our client ERSTE Foundation. This video shows how we tackled the project. Watch it on LinkedIn or Twitter.
🏞️ Your Next Wallpaper?
🔗 One More Link
The Follower (Art project)
An artist recorded footage from open cameras, then compared Instagram posts with the recordings and published the results. A project that makes you think what an intelligence service with access to *all* cameras could do. More