The United States may never recover from the warped use of propaganda by the Trump Administration. In many ways, Donald Trump is the modern equivalent of Nazi communications savant Joseph Goebbels, who used propaganda to trick Germans.

Eighty years later, Trump deployed a modern combination of reality TV and social media influencer tactics with reflexive control misinformation strategies to polarize the nation and seize power. His communications savvy consolidated power and literally built an alternative reality accepted by tens of millions of Americans.

Fortunately, Trump is pretty incompetent in every other way, causing him to lose the 2020 election and…

Sometimes creating a path for the future requires reconciling the past. The passing of mother earlier this year and a series of life events (COVID included) has triggered such an exercise. The following four mistakes

These mistakes are ordered in a manner that hopefully provides a coherent and interesting read. If there is one take-away, consider Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet: “To thine own self be true.” If you let others become your career guide, you may lose your path.

1) The Sound of My Silence

Social media wrought a sea change in the journalism industry, changing form, delivery mechanism, and content style. To survive, many mastheads transformed into social media and digital outlets, creating new provocative content to foster engagement online and generate revenue. The end result has been polarizing, less factual, and in general, toxic for our society.

Many traditional print newspapers did not adapt in time and shuttered their doors, a process that continues to this day. Surviving mastheads adapted to the social format.

To do that, social network algorithms must be triggered to serve content, in turn causing content that’s engineered to…

Social media finds itself mired with polarized communities filled with distrust, hate, troll armies, fake media, relentless stalkerish ads, and government tracking of conversations, to name a few things. How did this happen?

People fell for the promise of connections via conversations with their peers and to a lesser extent the brands we love. Adrenalized by new social recognition, communities formed and engaged with each other. News stories broke, change movements arose, and newfound relationships happened.

When web 2.0 was booming with blogs and Twitter and Facebook were taking the technology world by storm, words like authenticity, two-way dialogue, and…

Looking back at the past five years in marketing, perhaps the greatest mistake I have repeatedly made was simply coasting, going about each task the way I always have. Instead, I should have constantly sought out new tools that might help.

Machine learning advances in marketing technology have produced an app that can help or assist just about every task in my worklife. In essence, if you have a need, an AI-enabled app probably exists for that. …

Interviewing really bright people about their perspective of the business has to be my favorite part of writing a book. For Welcome to the Machine, I decided to reach out to Allyson Kapin, Co-Founder of Rad Campaign and Founder of Women Who Tech, to discuss how AI will impact social media marketing. Here are her answers to my questions.

GL: What value does AI offer the social media world?

AK: One of the biggest opportunities AI offers the social media world is that it can tailor content based on what people search, like, and purchase in real-time. …