Earlier this year, the team at Basecamp released a new email client called HEY. There are alot of innovative features and a lot of features that will strike fear into marketers. I believe the impact will be similar to when Google stopped providing search terms in Google Analytics. They are making the internet better and…
The terms favorite, best, and popular seem similar but they are actually quite different. Favorite is completely subjective. If someone’s favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla, there is no debating because that is their personal view. Best can be a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity. It will still be primarily opinion based, but someone could…
You’re probably familiar with this video but if not, take a minute to watch it before proceeding to the rest of this post The good news is that our brains are really good at focusing on a task. If we want to look for something specific and filter out all other noise, we can do…
Dave had a beautiful home. He had a meticulously landscaped yard with large trees on a lot overlooking the bay. One day someone bought the lot in the field across the street. As the house was being built, Dave noticed it was bigger than his and he didn’t like it. He decided to build an…
Few things bring such fear and insecurity to marketers as the unsubscribe link. I however, love it. Making unsubscribe easy is one of the best things marketers can do to ensure they are sending the right message to the right people. We should want to email people that want to receive our message and not…
One of my all time favorite albums is 40oz. to Freedom by Sublime. It was their first album and was released under a made up label that was used because in the 1990’s, venue owners would only have bands signed to record labels. The album is rough. The first song starts out with a dog…
Don’t bury the lede. This is the single most important writing advice I have received. That’s it. You can stop reading now. If you made it this far it’s because you may want to learn more about why I find this to be the most important piece of writing advice. I read a lot of…
There is a song by Jack Johnson titled It’s All Understood. I think about the song a lot and how it pertains to social media, brands, and influencers. The first verse and chorus are: Everyone laughed at her joke As if they’d never even heard it before And maybe they were truly amused But every…
While watching my seven year old daughter play soccer last summer I realized that the kids were behaving like brands. Most of them would flock to where the ball is and the ball wouldn’t go anywhere and they would just keep kicking each other’s shins. Eventually, the ball would come out of the scrum and…
A few years ago, the company I was working for was creating some industry trends and guides for a campaign we were launching. The pieces were beautiful and insightful. These pieces would be offered as “free lead magnets” for social and display ads. I told our Marketing Director we should charge $50 for them. She…
I’m sure most of us are familiar with Newton’s first law of motion which states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. While that is meant to apply to the…
Marketers love numbers – especially vanity numbers. So easy to manipulate. So easy to report. “We added 50 new followers on social last week”. “Our database has 200,000 people”. I’ve even seen some companies publicly congratulate themselves on the nth like to their page. There’s just one problem, these numbers aren’t real. I’m not talking…
Here’s my website redesign advice for many small businesses: don’t do it. Years ago, I worked for a web design agency. When I would meet with a potential client to find out what they were looking for, the most common response was that they just wanted to update their website because the old one was…
I love reading sales books. I was never very good at sales but I always found the process interesting and have mad respect for salespeople. My favorite sales book of all time is Gap Selling by Keenan. It’s a bit of a misnomer though because it should actually be called Gap Living. The concepts in…
Well that’s a depressing headline (and probably clickbait). Or is it? In my opinion, it is very empowering and something I think about daily. It is the realization that we can choose what to focus on and that not everything is important. In fact, if everything is important then nothing is important. So far, Vilfredo…