Work

I work in marketing. Specifically, organic discoverability for software companies: search, the tools a company publishes, and the question of what gets quoted when someone asks a machine instead of typing a query.

This is one page because it is a profession, not a thesis. The rest of the site is the thesis. If you came here from a search result about SEO, this page is probably the only one you want, and the honest version of it is short.

01 · The job

What the work actually is

Most of it is architecture rather than output. Deciding what a company should be findable for, what it should publish in order to be findable for it, and what it should stop publishing. The writing and the building follow from that, and they are the easy part.

Four areas take up nearly all of the time.

Topical architecture
What a company can credibly claim to know, mapped as a structure rather than a keyword list, so that each piece supports the next instead of competing with it.
Utilities as assets
Small free tools that do one useful thing. They are harder to copy than an article and they are used rather than read, which changes what happens to them afterwards.
Citation surface
Being quoted by an answer engine is a different problem from ranking in a list of links. It rewards structure, specificity and sourcing more than volume.
Measurement
Deciding what a number is actually evidence of before reporting it, and being willing to say that a result is not attributable to anything we did.
02 · Method

Four things I keep coming back to

None of these are original. They are just the ones I have been made to relearn most often.

01
A system beats a campaign, and takes longer to look like anything
Things built once and maintained tend to outperform things launched repeatedly. The cost is that the first six months look worse than a campaign would, which is the real reason most companies do not do it.
02
Tools earn what articles rent
A ranking is a tenancy. It holds until someone publishes something fresher or the ranking model shifts underneath it. Something people actually use is harder to displace, because displacing it requires building it.
03
Measuring a thing changes the thing
This is mundane and it is everywhere. Name a metric as the target and behaviour reorganises around it, usually within a quarter, usually without anyone deciding to. Choosing what to measure is therefore a strategic act, not a reporting one.
04
Say what is not known
Attribution is weaker than any dashboard implies, benchmark tables are usually someone else’s sample presented as a law, and a good quarter often has causes nobody involved can identify. Saying so costs a little credibility in the room and saves a lot of it later.
03 · The overlap

Why this page sits next to the physics

The rest of this site is about possibility, observation and the way a fear can produce the thing it fears. Someone will reasonably ask what that has to do with a marketing page, so here is the honest answer, which is smaller than it sounds.

Three habits of mind carry over. The first is treating an outcome as a distribution rather than a single certain thing, and resisting the urge to narrate it as inevitable once it has happened. The second is noticing that observation is a form of participation: measure a team and the team changes, exactly as principle three above describes. The third is that a stated expectation shapes the behaviour of the people who hold it, in a relationship and in a quarterly plan alike.

That is the whole of the connection. It is an analogy about how to think, and analogies are allowed to be useful without being true. So, in the same terms the books use:

WHAT IS CLAIMED
  • That certain habits of reasoning transfer between physics, philosophy and commercial work.
  • That measurement changes behaviour in organisations, which is an observed and unremarkable fact about people.
  • That treating outcomes as uncertain produces better decisions than treating them as determined.
WHAT IS NOT CLAIMED
  • That quantum mechanics operates at the scale of a marketing team, a market, or a person.
  • That the observer effect in physics is the same phenomenon as a team responding to a target. The words coincide; the mechanisms do not.
  • That any of this constitutes a scientific basis for a marketing method. It is a vocabulary, not a mechanism.
04 · Elsewhere

Where the professional side lives now

The services, the tools and the writing about the craft have moved to a separate site. That was a deliberate split rather than a rebrand: two audiences that were never really the same one, each getting a place where it does not have to skim past the other.

THE WORKING SITE
fullstackdigitalmarketer.com
Services, free tools, and the long-form marketing writing, including everything that used to sit under the old services and tools sections of this domain.
Go to fullstackdigitalmarketer.com

The rest of it

If you got here for the marketing, that is the end of the marketing. Everything else on this site is about relationships, time, and what physics does and does not license us to say about either.