Before I pause posting for a few days, I wanted to reflect on what posting five articles a week for more than nine months achieved (including starting to grow organically a long-form newsletter discussing our tools and sharing market analysis) and what's next. Keep in mind that besides tracking the engagement on the newsletter, I don't use Google or any other service to track the blog audience.
This engagement navigates between 70 and 85%, which is amazing. We're still below the 1,000 subscribers mark but will probably get there in 2023. Interestingly enough, most of the subscribers come from #1 organic search and #2 Linkedin. Twitter is a distant #5.
Many of our customers, even from years ago, are active subscribers, which is neat as it creates an excellent way of keeping in touch, and... sparks new missions. I didn't do the maths rigorously, but I'd say that 50% of my missions in 2022 started with a blog post.
One specific blog article alone led to a +€50K mission, which for our boutique agency is quite respectable for a single shot. This is a call-out to a September article where I discussed wide vs. deep market strategies (we go deep, not wide, in case you have doubts).
Not checking other metrics, given how it spiked on Linkedin, that our most read (non-newsletter) article of 2022 was from June on the war for tech talents. This article, albeit certainly interesting, was just a comment on a shocking stat that took me about 10 min to write.
The newsletter articles I was the most interested in sharing were the series on innovation portfolio and the one on the magic spot. One of our customers whom we have worked with for many years and know these tools and their potential impact very well told me, "I was very generous to share all this 😱" (I added the emoji to contextualize better what he meant). And yes, we share a lot. That's the point. It's also a way to circumvent that most of our missions are under strict NDA wrap as they genuinely address critical junctures of Fortune 500 companies or large administrations. But beyond that, I always thought that potential customers should be able to see "the goods" before buying. And again, because we go deep (not wide), it works very well for us.
In relation to this, I'm also happy that this year despite still a lot of Covid issues and travel bans, we worked with customers in Shanghai and Tokyo absolutely smoothly. I say, in relation to this, as some articles were instrumental assets to give clear arguments for these customers to explain what they were doing (or wanted to do) with us to their executive committee.
I also registered more and more interests in my network around the theme that innovation should be addressed at a European level and that when Berlin tries to outcompete Paris, Barcelona, or even worse, Frankfurt, everyone loses. And don't even start me on copying Silicon Valley. I don't know yet if this will go somewhere, but I'd be interested in getting involved in something impactful that could start to address this issue. Soon.
We also put a lot of effort into developing asynchronous/synchronous online trainings with our webschool. I wrote about it yesterday, and it's another way of making our tools and know-how accessible to a larger community of like-minded professionals. We really had tremendous feedback and, most importantly, results with this tool. We'll see what new modules will be introduced in 2023 (we have quite a few ideas for sure).
And to this subject, after more than 14 years of giving MBA classes on business model innovation (and other classes on innovation for design and engineering schools), I've decided to pause and shift gears in 2023. Not sure yet what I want to do next, but despite having been consistently one of the best-rated professors/guest lecturers on these topics for many years, I want to mix things up. If you have ideas/needs, you know what to do... 😇
Lastly, and as an end-of-year gift for my readers, I'll open up for free for three months of one of our webschool training. The offer is for the first 12 of you who will poke me on Linkedin or send me a mail. HO HO HO, I guess? 😎
Meanwhile, if you want to share what article you enjoyed the most this year on Linkedin, or share it with one of your contacts, rest assured that it's always a tremendous support of what we do.
Enjoy these last days of 2022 (what a bloody chaotic year that was!), and we'll talk soon 👋
