I made a quick trip to Cebu last week for the 3rd Student Marketing Congress in Cebu. More than 3,000 students (and my biggest crowd yet) can get a tad overwhelming. I was there to talk about effective websites but repurposed my talk to discuss blogging and content because well, it was really more fitting to a crowd of teenagers. That’s me with Boy Abunda, one of the other speakers on celebrity marketing.
Also, I snuck in some diving. Here’s a #Selfie. Boy, what a September.
This month also marks the 1st year anniversary of 8List.ph, a project that I started with the ID8 team. Running this blog for more than six years I wanted to do something that veered away from just technology and since list sites were in, it was a great pattern to follow. Now here’s a photo of food (BonChon saves the day — 633-1818!) during our editorial meetings. Finally, good competition to KFC’s hot shots — the BonChon chicken poppers
Unlike other list sites like Cracked (which I totally admire), Listverse and Buzzfeed which let you scroll down to an almost infinite number of items per list, we stuck with 8. That was the value proposition. Someone at the conference asked why this was so and I told her that 5 was too little and 10 was too many. 8 was just right. And it forced a lot of editorial creativity out of my (super epic) team so that they don’t take content for granted.
I made the allusion of effective content marketing and websites to some of the greatest works in literature. Websites are literature. All great classic works have structure: a sonnet has meter, rhyme structure and ends with a rhyming couplet. A Japanese haiku uses the 5-7-5 syllable structure among many things. 8List was similar because it was abiding by a certain set of rules. I drew that inspiration from one of my favorite webcomics titled ‘Dinosaur Comics’ which uses the same panel over and over again, everyday.
To the students who attended the marketing congress over the weekend, I’d love to hear from you here (I’ve seen lots of comments from Instagram and Twitter but it would be great to see you here too!). To my editorial staff, we should do Bon Chon meetings more often.
Warning: Photos of food to follow!
