I'm a lawn guy now

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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

So I’m trying to become a Lawn Guy. Not because of any intrinsic motivation—my environmentally conscious sister has already lectured me on the drawbacks of a perfectly green lawn—but because of societal pressure.

When we moved into our house last year, nearly every passerby commented that the previous owners never took care of their lawn. Note taken.

And yes, you called it: this is going to be a convoluted analogy about the pressure to use automation and AI.

Important to the analogy: My home has an automated sprinkler system. I was assured it once worked, but it needs repairing. We tried to troubleshoot it ourselves once, but gave up after a few hours. Not worth the effort or cost, I thought.

10 months later, I still haven’t gotten the sprinklers fixed. It felt like too big a project. Going from a patch of dead dirt to a fully automated sprinkler system with thriving green grass was too big a mental hurdle.

This week, I finally summoned up the motivation to water the grass by hand. Every night, I’ve been out there with a hose, spraying the front and backyard for over an hour.

It gave me a lot of time to think. Partly about lawn-AI analogies, partly about the oddities of suburban life, and partly about how long it takes to water the g.d. lawn.

After five nights of lawn watering and seeing some progress, having spent 10+ hours of my week on a job that an automated system could do, I finally valued that automated system I had been neglecting. I finally called the sprinkler repair company. They’re coming next week.

Okay, here’s a little legend for the analogy:

When my frame of reference was “use the sprinkler system because my neighbours wanted me to have a nice lawn,” I gave up immediately. I was not internally motivated to use the sprinkler system, and it was too much of a jump from point A to point B.

This is a lot of folks’ experience with AI in the workplace. They feel pressure from their boss or future job prospects to “use AI,” so they bite off a big, new project that’s more than they can chew. It’s too big a mental hill to climb, so they give up.

A few things happened when the nightly watering started:

At that point, using the sprinkler system was reframed in my mind from “use this complicated, unfamiliar system to achieve a big, abstract goal” to “save yourself time from doing this simple task you already value.” Now I’m bought in.

Whenever folks in Superpath ask, “How do I get started with automation/AI?” My answer is always “automate a small, repetitive task you already do.”

I’ve noticed a tendency to start with AI by building new things or taking on new projects—and maybe that works for some people.

My advice is to use AI to automate tasks that you’re already doing without adding any value—like copying files from folder X to folder Y for every project—rather than trying to build a fully formed content marketing bot from day 1.

Automate the easy work you already know how to do, then use all that free time to take on new projects (but please don’t spend it watering the lawn).

Cheers,

- Eric

PS. I’m just realizing how on-the-nose the water-usage environmental dilemma is to this analogy, but I assure you that I’m not nearly clever enough for that to be on purpose.

PPS. Jimmy wrote a great blog about his time as a product marketer. Don’t miss that if you’re PMM-curious. 👇

✍ New on the Blog: What I Learned in My Three Glorious Months as a Product Marketer from Jimmy Daly

Here’s the intro to Jimmy’s article, in his own words:

Late last summer, I landed a marketing role at Reforge. I was over the moon because I’d followed Reforge for a long time. I'd heard great things about the product itself, but I had been reading founder and CEO Brian Balfour's blog going back to probably 2014. I felt that he and Reforge had made a deep commitment to content, and I really respected that. I was thrilled to be part of it.

I spent my first few months there working on thought leadership content, but Reforge was making a serious pivot towards SaaS, and product marketing emerged as an immediate need. After a conversation with Brian, we agreed that I would work on product marketing in the near-term. This lasted a few wonderful months and then Reforge was acquired by Miro, and I'm now back to working on content marketing. Frankly, I feel more at home working on content but my brief stint as a product marketer was a fantastic learning experience.

In that role, my primary goal was to run product and feature launches, which typically went out once per week. I’d work with the PMs and engineers to make sure I understood the feature and value prop, create all the marketing materials (blog posts, email blasts, tutorial videos and social posts) and then coordinate all the marketing on launch day. 

I learned a ton, which I’ll distill into a few key lessons…

📧Posts Report in beehiiv – There are a bunch of great ways to slice and dice data in beehiiv, but I really like this one dashboard.  These gauge charts are particularly helpful for context on our open rate (great!) and our click rate (not great, but also not really what we’re optimizing for in this newsletter). - Alex

BTW, do the top link you clicked last month?
That’s right. It was the link Eric shared on the couple whose cruise got re-routed from Bermuda to Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Was I one of those clicks? Also, yes.

Want to try beehiiv? Use SUPERPATH30 for 30% off

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🎙 New on Content, Briefly: Treat Social Like an Actual Content Channel (Because It Is), with Deedi Brown

This episode is part of The Art of Content series hosted by Rachel Bicha.

Long-time Superpath community member Deedi Brown joined Rachel to talk about her recent post, Your Social Media Person Belongs on the Content Team.

Deedi Brown is Head of Content at Bubble, where she runs a team that includes social media, video, editorial, and product enablement.

Her argument: social media is a content channel now, not a distribution one. Platforms punish outbound links, and the old model of chopping a blog post into social captions stopped working a while ago.

Their chat got into:

Listen here.

💬 Great Slack Threads This Week

Here are some great questions members asked in Superpath Pro this week:

📙 The Reading List

Here are some thought-provoking articles shared in the Superpath Slack community this week:

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"Superpath is hands down the best community for content marketers. It's one of the only communities I log in to daily because there's so much to learn from the conversations. Being a fly on the wall is itself worth the price of admission. Don't think twice about joining Superpath—it's a serious career accelerant."

— Tanaaz Khan, Content Strategist