“Somebody” is somebody else

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In an emergency, the phenomenon of “diffusion of responsibility” can be a huge problem. The short definition is that when an accident occurs and many people are around, everyone assumes someone else will take care of it. When a person yells “somebody call 911”, everyone often assumes that “somebody” means “somebody else”.

The same can happen in marketing. A few years back, I mentioned meeting an insurance salesman that sold literally every kind of insurance. As a consequence, I didn’t know what his real expertise was and had no idea what a good referral for him might look like. He was just looking for “somebody”.

In the book “The 1-Page Marketing Plan“, author Allan Dib shares a great example from a similar event:

Then, the IT guy stands up and says, “If you know somebody who needs help upgrading their computer system, please send them my way.” Who’s “somebody”? It’s somebody else; that’s who “somebody” is.

Specifics matter. There are a lot of people that need IT help, but it’s not generically “upgrading their computer system”. It’s more likely:

  • Moving to a more accessible email platform.
  • Making the file storage more secure.
  • Connecting remote staff with cameras and tools for remote work.
  • Making it easier for Janet to print the monthly reports without her computer crashing.

If I hear a person say “We are experts in migrating companies from outdated on-site file servers to secure cloud storage to help people work more efficiently“, I get it. When I hear of a person with a need like that, that’s the person I’ll call.

Everybody wants “somebody”, but the more often you can turn “somebody” into “that specific person” it’ll be a win for everyone.

Keep it simple: Sonder to Empathy, or Experience to Work

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I’ve written a few times on here about the goal of keeping things simple, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t fall prey to overly-exotic words sometimes. Two examples showcase that.

Sonder

First is the idea of sonder, which I wrote about a few years ago. While many people may not know the word, reading that post helps to explain it. After I wrote that, I created a category on the blog focused on “sonder”. The idea was solid, but most people hadn’t read that most and therefore it wasn’t a clear name. I changed that category name to “empathy”, which is largely the same idea but is something that more people understand.

Experience

As part of the redesign of the GreenMellen website a few years ago, we included a tab at the top called “experience”. People could click on it to see work we’ve done in a variety of ways, and it was a great way to get to know us better. However, people didn’t know what to expect from “experience”, so it rarely got clicked. Instead of being the most popular tab in our navigation, as it likely should have been for someone that wanted to see our work, it was the least clicked. Here’s a heatmap of it, showing the relative lack of clicks:

We made a small change, rewording it from “experience” to simply “work”, with the clarity of “if you want to see our work, there it is”. The results have been fantastic, and that section now gets the appropriate amount of traffic.

As I shared recently, distinction can be good, but clarity is better.

Use paper to assist thinking, but store everything digitally

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For about three years now, I’ve been loosely following the Zettelkasten method of taking notes (here’s what that is) and I’m quite pleased with how it’s going. I’m finding that having everything in one system (daily notes, book notes, meeting notes, church notes, other ideas, etc) is amazingly valuable. I’m currently using Tana for that, but there’s likely a dozen different solutions that could do the job for you.

Two things came up in the past week that tie together in interesting ways.

Book notes

I’ve heard from a few people that they prefer to take notes literally inside of the books they read. That’s great! The act of doing that can help you remember the content better, and is a good way to go. I’ve even written before about how I work through physical books.

The problem, at least in the cases of these few people, is that the notes stay in the book. They can always grab the book off the shelf and find the old notes, but they’re never put into a system that might surface them again in the future to tie into other ideas.

Paper to assist thinking

In a recent post on the Zettelkasten.de blog, they covered this concept. For the author, she previously had some notes on paper and some digitally, but found it helpful to make them all digital. Here is what she said:

I did end up migrating away from doing paper and digital Zettels, because who has the time to sustain that? Apparently, not me. I’ve been operating 100% digital for a long time now and have zero regrets. It’s so much easier to find what I’m looking for by using the search function in Archive.

A user named Sascha followed up with a concise response to her:

This is a recurring experience. My personal recommendation is to use paper to assist thinking and store everything digital.

Granted, this takes a good bit of effort. I wrote earlier this year about post-processing and how valuable it is, but it certainly takes some time. I still enjoy writing by hand, whether on paper or like on tools such as the Kindle Scribe, but all of that content needs to end up in my digital note system or it’s of little long-term value to me.

Using paper to assist with your thinking is excellent, but migrating it into a digital system is where you’ll really find the long-term gains.

Merry Christmas

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If you celebrate Christmas, I wish you a wonderful day full of presents and friends.

If you don’t celebrate Christmas, I wish you an excellent day of quiet and rest.

Our body and mind tend to recharge when unplugged (the opposite of our devices), so may all of your batteries be full today.

Distinction is good. Clarity is better.

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When marketing your product, you always want to stand out and be memorable. In an effort to be memorable, though, you can run dangerously close to simply being unclear.

I talked about this a few months ago with the death of Google Stadia. Their main commercial for the service was bonkers, and simply being clear about their offering would have worked far better.

In his book “Radically Relevant“, author Blake Howard puts it this way:

“It’s a mistake to sacrifice clarity on the altar of distinction.”

Or, as Donald Miller has said repeatedly over the years:

“The answer to confusion is always no.”

Of course, this is much easier said than done. Crafting a message that is both clear and compelling takes some work. This is something we do quite a bit of at GreenMellen, and we can certainly help you if you need it.

To DIY it, though, start with the books from the two gentlemen quoted above, with Blake’s “Radically Relevant” and Miller’s timeless “Building a StoryBrand“. Simply taking the time to explore that kind of content will quickly get your clarity into the top 10% of businesses in your market, and it can only get better from there.

Success is a lousy teacher

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If you become successful, whether in business or athletics or somewhere else, you undoubtedly had some luck along the way, which is easy to forget about.

Bill Gates and Kent Evans are great examples of that. Kent Evans? When he was 17, he was best friends with Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, but tragically died in a mountain climbing accident.

As shared in the book “The Psychology of Money“, Gates struck it rich with 1-in-a-million shot with Microsoft, while Kent faced a 1-in-a-million chance the other way. From the book:

Bill Gates experienced one in a million luck by ending up at Lakeside. Kent Evans experienced one in a million risk by never getting to finish what he and Gates set out to achieve. The same force, the same magnitude, working in opposite directions.

Gates is a brilliant guy that worked hard and succeeded, but it took a lot of chance to get there. When people reach the top of their profession and fail to see the part that chance took in getting them there, things can go a bit sideways. Also from the book:

Bill Gates once said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

We see this a lot in big companies where the founder is sure that he or she can’t lose. They can.

You can learn a lot from the success that you worked for, but never use that as an excuse to rest on your laurels.

ChatGPT Everywhere

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About a week ago I published a post talking about ChatGPT and what it might eventually bring. If you aren’t familiar with what ChatGPT is, I encourage you to check out that post first and then come back here.

In the week since then, usage of ChatGPT has continued to skyrocket, but now we’re also starting to see a handful of great applications taking advantage of that technology. Here are a few of my favorites so far, all of which are simple browser extensions for Chrome.

ChatGPT for Google

One of the big thoughts around ChatGPT is wondering how it will affect Google in the future. Why dig into a list of links from Google when you can just get the full answer from ChatGPT? It’s not there yet, but it’s not too far off either. For now, you can just do both at the same time with this extension! Once loaded, every time you run a search on Google, it’ll run the same query through ChatGPT and give you those results as well.

ChatGPT Chrome Extension

This one is a bit simpler. Rather than going to the ChatGPT site to run your queries, it just puts a little icon in your toolbar that will pop up a small window for quick searches.

Ellie AI

This is based on the core GPT-3 model (not on ChatGPT specifically), but it’s a neat integration with your email. As you reply to people, it will learn your style and you can have it write replies for you. I’m not sure I want to use that yet, but it could be helpful depending on your role. Also, while the above ChatGPT extensions are free (at least for now), Ellie only gives you two emails per day before you have to pay $20-30/mo for it.

Have you found any related extensions that are particularly useful?

Be Radically Relevant with your own name

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I recently finished Blake Howard’s new book “Radically Relevant“, I encourage you to pick up a copy. I easily consider Matchstic, the company he cofounded, to be one of the top branding companies in the country. Anything that comes from Blake is bound to be fantastic, and this book is no exception.

The book is a bit pricy at $35 for a fairly small paperback, but it’s by far the best-designed book I’ve ever read (no surprise there). You can’t get this on Kindle or anywhere else — you can only get the real book directly from Matchstic.

Matchstic

Beyond the overall branding direction and inspiration that Blake provided in the book, I noticed that he didn’t shy away from directly referencing Matchstic. It was always done in a tasteful and helpful way, generally giving some context to a point that he was making, but it seems that writers often shy away from directly referencing their own company.

We’ve all certainly seen it done poorly, in a spammy fashion, but it seems quite often people will only make vague references to their own company in books that they write. I’ve not been shy about referencing GreenMellen on here when appropriate, but at times I still wondered if I should. The fact that Blake so freely (yet carefully) referenced Matchstic in his book made me feel better about that direction.

If you have any interest in branding, whether it’s for your own company or something that you do for others, I highly recommend checking out his book.

Building in anticipation of new technology

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As I’ve been migrating my notes over to Tana, I’ve noticed that I’m doing some things that Tana doesn’t support yet, but I’m hoping they will. For those that are curious, Tana doesn’t yet let you filter backlinks in a note, but I’m tagging all of my items with things like “#meeting” and “#call” in anticipation of being able to filter those out at some point in the future.

That feature may or may not ever arrive, but I’m preparing for it nonetheless.

AI video

I’ve also been having discussions with people about what the world will look like when you can create realistic AI-generated videos in seconds. The technology and the power isn’t quite there yet, but it’s coming.

When I talk with folks about this, we’re literally discussing a technology that doesn’t really exist yet and the implications it will have.

Electric Cars

Getting closer to home for some of you, I think electric cars kind of fit this view. While they’re a perfect fit for some people, for most they’re having to manage some workarounds for now (often involving range and charge times), in anticipation of advancing technologies in the coming years.

With electric cars, it’s like my post last year comparing them to early digital cameras. The cars are still imperfect, but the technology is improving rapidly and those that are using them now are helping to pave the future for the rest of us.

I don’t know if Tana will build the feature I need or not, nor do I know for sure what the implications of AI-generated video will be. For now, though, I enjoy speculating about them and trying to prepare for the possibility of each and we’ll see how things change in the next couple of years.

At least there will be peace in my time

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A recent episode of the 2Bobs podcast was talking about promotions and management, and the type of people that should be promoted to manager. It was a great episode (go check it out here), and David made an excellent point about something that we might overlook. He tried to reference a passage from the Bible and didn’t know the location offhand, but he was trying to point to 2 Kings 20:19, which ends with:

For he thought, “Is it not good, if there will be peace and security in my days?”

For Hezekiah, it might have been good to focus on peace during his time, but for a manager that can be a bad thing. Keeping the peace is a great thing, of course, but you may often hold back in the interest of short-term peace versus long-term peace.

For example, if you have trouble with an employee, it might be easier now to cover for them and keep the status quo. Long-term, firing them now and solving the problem may be a better move.

Sharks vs Deer

Seth Godin’s “Akimbo” podcast had a similar theme this week in contrasting sharks vs deer.

In our lives, we tend to be afraid of “sharks”; things that are very scary, but quite rare, such as your home in the suburbs getting robbed.

Conversely, we aren’t afraid “deer”, but those are what’s likely to kill us, like fast food.

It’s just like real sharks and deer. Most people have a fear of sharks at the beach, even though they only kill around 5 people each year. Conversely, deer seem less threatening but kill roughly 200 people each year (mostly from car accidents). Irrational fears lead to irrational behavior.

Some leaders will set up big barriers to stop the sharks and make things look good now, but great leaders will focus more on the deer and keep their organization healthy for the long run. Spotting the difference between the two is difficult, but crucial.