Highlights from “Marketing Made Simple” by Donald Miller

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

If you’re into marketing at all, I would hope you’ve heard of Donald Miller. His StoryBrand framework is amazing, and much of it can be had for free. While he has some high-paid (and high-value) training you can do with him, he also gives away a ton of great information from his books, podcasts, emails, videos and other material. This book, Marketing Made Simple, is a great example of that.

Here is how the book is described:

Every day, brands lose millions of dollars simply because they do not have a clear message that tells consumers who they are and what value they will add to their customers’ lives. To solve this dilemma, Donald Miller wrote Building a StoryBrand, which has become the quintessential guide for anyone looking to craft or strengthen their brand’s message.

Now, Don is taking it a step further with this five-part checklist that helps marketing professionals and business owners apply the StoryBrand messaging framework across key customer touchpoints to effectively develop, strengthen, and communicate their brand’s story to the marketplace.

While the book is hard to break down into small pieces, as it’s essentially one big plan of action for your business, I’ll share some highlights below:

It doesn’t matter what you sell, if you use words to sell your products, a sales funnel will work.

Your Customers Are Not Curious About You, They Are Curious About How You Can Solve Their Problem

I had a conversation today with a client about this. They had earned a new certification to help better serve their clients, and our discussion got into not how to show off the certification, but to show how them having that certification could help make a client’s life better.

The answer to confusion is always no.

Branding affects how a customer feels about your brand, while marketing communicates a specific offer.

Calls to action like “Learn more,” “Find out about us,” “Curious?” or “Our Process” are weak and confusing. What a customer really needs is something to accept or reject.

Looping images (silent film) are terrific on websites but make sure the text that floats over those images is fixed.

We’ve talked for years about how no one is going to sit and watch all of your slides go by on a website, and that’s still true. However, Don adds a bit of nuance to it that I really like.

His thought is that it’s ok to have slides on a website, as long as you have a single message in front of them. Use the slides to reaffirm your message, but don’t use slides to try to squeeze in six different messages that you think are all important.

If you fear asking people for money in exchange for your product or service, you do not believe in your product or service.

Highlights from “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Checklist Manifesto is a book that I’ve been meaning to read for quite a long time. Many have suggested it, and I’ve finally read it.

It wasn’t really what I expected, but it was excellent. The focus of the book was on surgery and airplanes, and how checklists are critical to both.

In building GreenMellen over the past decade, we attribute much of our success to our early (and lucky) decision to put a big focus on processes. It started with our core web development process, which was been refined over the years, but now we have dozens of processes in place to help with all aspects of digital marketing.

We’ve been challenged by some clients over the years to break out of the process “so we’re not confined”, but we’ve been able to show how a solid process allows for 100% creative flexibility, while still making sure that we get the basics right.

Here are some of the highlights I pulled from the book:

To start, regarding the two types of failure…

The first is ignorance—we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works. There are skyscrapers we do not yet know how to build, snowstorms we cannot predict, heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to stop. The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude—because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. This is the skyscraper that is built wrong and collapses, the snowstorm whose signs the meteorologist just plain missed, the stab wound from a weapon the doctors forgot to ask about.

the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.

Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all.

Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.

The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility.

That routine requires balancing a number of virtues: freedom and discipline, craft and protocol, specialized ability and group collaboration. And for checklists to help achieve that balance, they have to take two almost opposing forms. They supply a set of checks to ensure the stupid but critical stuff is not overlooked, and they supply another set of checks to ensure people talk and coordinate and accept responsibility while nonetheless being left the power to manage the nuances and unpredictabilities the best they know how.

Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.

You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off—it’s more like a recipe. So for any new checklist created from scratch, you have to pick the type that makes the most sense for the situation.

The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory.

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And by remaining swift and usable and resolutely modest, they are saving thousands upon thousands of lives.

The fear people have about the idea of adherence to protocol is rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real world in front of them. But what you find, when a checklist is well made, is exactly the opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself with.

That last one is what really brings it home for me and ties in to what I said at the top. A good checklist will help make sure you don’t miss any important steps, but won’t get in your way of making wise and creative decisions as needed.

Highlights from “Friend of a Friend” by David Burkus

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

Something that I’ve found popping up in a lot of my reading lately is the concept of “weak ties” — those people that you somewhat consider to be a friend, but that you don’t know very well. The book “Friend of a Friend” by David Burkus is all about those people.

As I did with my thoughts on How To Take Smart Notes, most of this was compiled using the “Roam Research” tool. Here is a quick video on how I use it.

There were a lot of great highlights that I took from this book, which I’ll share below, mostly without commentary from me.

While we might think of our network as a collection of contact cards in a Rolodex (or more modernly, a collection of names in a contacts app), when (Adam) Rifkin thought about networks, he saw them not as a collection of contacts but as the map of the connections between contacts. “A network is basically a set of people and the connections between those people,”

But what do you get when you combine an understanding that networks and relationships are important with the commonly shared belief that networking activities are awkward and dirty? You get perhaps the most commonly expressed maxim about networking: “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”

it’s about knowing who is a “friend of a friend.” It’s about getting a full picture of the network you already have access to, and learning how to improve it.

Research shows that our biggest opportunities and best sources of new information actually come from our “weak ties” or “dormant ties”—our connections with people we don’t see often or haven’t spoken to in a long time.

Even though the strong ties in our life are more likely to be motivated to help us, it turns out that our weak ties’ access to new sources of information may be more valuable than our strong ties’ motivation.

Weak ties are those colleagues we don’t plan to see, but when we do it’s easy to catch up quickly.

One way I’m hoping to facilitate that is through the partial season tickets I bought for the Atlanta Braves this year. It’ll be a great way to reach out to folks and have a good time at the ballpark (though we’ll see when the baseball season is actually able to start this year…).

The research on dormant ties reveals three main reasons for their strength.

First, like weak ties, dormant ties can hold a wealth of new, different, and unexpected insights.

Second, reaching out to dormant ties specifically for advice is efficient; the contact with them is often much quicker than conversations with current colleagues who might be collaborating on multiple projects.

And third, because many dormant ties, unlike weak ties, were once stronger relationships, their trust and motivation to help are much stronger than is true for current weak ties.

The truth is that we are all one big network, and the people who succeed are not the ones with the best collection but the ones who can see and navigate their network best.

Using the known average size of a human neocortex, Robin Dunbar calculated the upper limit of a human’s information-processing capacity and brainpower to socialize in a network at around 150 contacts. This became known in scientific and popular literature as Dunbar’s number.

As your network grows, as the number of your connections increases, the process of meeting new people becomes easier. Not because you get more practiced at making introductions, but because introductions are more likely to find you. It’s a phenomenon that network scientists call preferential attachment, and it explains why the most connected are most likely to stay that way, but also why building your network will take less and less work over time.

While we may want to categorize people into just work and personal buckets, real social networks do not seem to operate that way. And that is to our benefit. Research shows that not only does multiplexity help us become more aware of real-life opportunities, but it enhances our performance on the job—and can even enhance the performance of an entire organization.

This is why I enjoy things like playing basketball or softball with business colleagues — it helps us to get to know each other in a different way.

If you are looking to grow colleagues into friends, or friends into coworkers, it may be helpful to start by determining whether you’re connected with them on just one service or both—if not, then reach out. If they don’t respond to your friend request, don’t feel bad. Everyone has different rules of thumb for how they categorize relationships. But you’ve done a great deed just by demonstrating your openness.

This seems to encourage you to add many more people to personal networks like Facebook, but I’m still a bit hesitant with that. I’ll add anyone I meet on LinkedIn, but Facebook feels like a different avenue. That said, over the years I’ve connected with a lot of business contacts on Facebook and those tend to be the strongest business relationships that I have.

All in all, this book had a lot of eye-opening ideas, and I encourage you to check it out for yourself!

Highlights from “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sonke Ahrens

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

I just finished reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens. It interested me because over the past month or so I’ve really begun to focus better on my note-taking. This applies to books I’ve read, sermons at church, meetings with clients, videos I watch — any situation where I want to gain knowledge, I’m trying to take better notes.

It’s to the point now where I feel I’ve really missed out on previous experiences, as the knowledge I gained from books I read years ago is simply gone. In the book, Ahrens says:

And more often than not, reading is not accompanied by taking notes, which is, in terms of writing, almost as valuable as not having read at all.

Oops.

As I’ve read about various ways to keep notes, the concept of a “Zettelkasten” kept coming up.

Zettelkasten

I first heard about the idea of a Zettelkasten years ago, but it wasn’t until I was introduced to Roam Research last month that I felt inspired to dig back in.

The basic idea of a Zettelkasten is a system where every idea/note is a separate card in a slip-box, and all of those cards are linked to one another. It was popularized by German sociologist Nicklas Luhmann, who had roughly 90,000 cards in his system when he passed away in 1998.

For a quick read that goes a bit deeper into the Zettelkasten, I encourage you to check out this article by David B. Clear.

Roam Research

As I mentioned above, I’ve been using Roam Research pretty heavily for about a month now, as it’s a pretty solid digital tool to create a Zettelkasten. Here is a quick video overview of how I’m using it:

As I mention in the video, this blog post from Nat Eliason is an excellent overview of Roam Research.

How to Take Smart Notes

So onto Sonke’s book. As a general rule, the book walks very deeply through the concepts behind the Zettelkasten while remaining platform agnostic — he talks a lot about physical cards, but also how they could be used in a digital tool. Here are some of my highlights from his book:

When talking about why most note-taking is so bad, he said:

There is another reason that note-taking flies mostly under the radar: We don’t experience any immediate negative feedback if we do it badly.

Part of the beauty of the Zettelkasten is letting notes find one another, rather than determining some pre-set categories or tags. Here’s why:

They sort their notes by topics and sub-topics, which makes it look less complex, but quickly becomes very complicated. Plus, it reduces the likelihood of building and finding surprising connections between the notes themselves, which means a trade-off between its usability and usefulness.

To the extent possible, you shouldn’t fill your notes with copies of what you hear. You should translate what you hear into your own words, and then save that (with a reference back to the original source, when possible).

Here’s a quick video from Dr. Jordan Peterson that explains that further:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_d7DdNzkLw

In the book, Ahrens breaks the idea of notes into a few types, including “fleeting” notes (quick thoughts on something to do) and “permanent” notes, that should ultimately live in your Zettelkasten. Here’s his key to how to write permanent notes:

Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.

This next thought of his kind of points back to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and only thinking about cat food once.

We also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That’s right: The brain doesn’t distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads.

Another thought on why simply writing down quotes won’t help much:

As well, the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them out of context, even though the words aren’t changed. This is a common beginner mistake, which can only lead to a patchwork of ideas, but never a coherent thought.

A few years back, I wanted to learn more about how the GDPR might affect our clients. To force myself to learn, I posted a Meetup about it that I’d have to prepare for, and it worked well. In creating slides and content for the Meetup, I learned quite a lot about the GDPR. It turns out Richard Feynman had a similar theory:

Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman once said that he could only determine whether he understood something if he could give an introductory lecture on it.

In the end, Ahrens summarized the idea like this:

And that is the very good news at the end. The slip-box is as simple as it gets. Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there. There is no need to start from scratch. Keep doing what you would do anyway: Read, think, write. Just take smart notes along the way.

Read the book, or watch this video

I encourage you to read the book for yourself, but Ahrens has given us a nice shortcut. He often speaks about the book, and those talks are a pretty good overview of what’s in there.

Here’s a talk he gave in 2018 that was a solid look at the concept:

https://vimeo.com/275530205

For me, I’m pouring as much as I can into Roam to help build up my collection of notes, and I’ll likely revisit old books I’ve read with this new mindset to help fill out that collection.

Do you have a system for taking notes?

Highlights from “The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery” by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile

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Reading Time: 8 minutes

As I did last month with This is Marketing, I’ve finished reading this book (after starting it a while ago, and then restarting it this month) and have quite a few notes to share.

The Road Back to You is a great look at the enneagram, which I’ll describe much more below.

If you’re not familiar with the Enneagram, it defines nine personality types that everyone falls into. At GreenMellen, we’ve enjoyed digging into it, as the insights we can learn about one another can be incredibly helpful in our day-to-day interactions.

The book starts with a lot of reasons why you should try to uncover your enneagram type for your own benefit:

“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility,”

“Sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is

“There is one quality that trumps all, evident in virtually every great entrepreneur, manager, and leader. That quality is self-awareness. The best thing leaders can do to improve their effectiveness is to become more aware of what motivates them and their decision-making.”

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better,”

“I don’t want to be pigeonholed or put in a box.” People express this concern to Suzanne and me all the time. Fear not! The Enneagram doesn’t put you in a box. It shows you the box you’re already in and how to get out of it.

On the flip side of that is a great analogy that Ian shares about how this can affect your interactions with others:

Suzanne’s friend Rebecca is a nurse who works with children with profound visual impairment. As part of her job, she leads support groups for parents whose kids have just received a diagnosis. These parents, mostly young mothers, are confused, hurt and sometimes angry, and Rebecca provides guidance about navigating challenges they never suspected life would visit on them.

Apart from the practical advice, the most invaluable part of the workshops comes when Rebecca hands the parents eyeglasses that correlate to each child’s specific disability. Almost always, the parents burst into tears. “I had no idea that this is the way my child sees the world,” they tell her. Once they have the experience of observing through their children’s eyes, they never experience the world in quite the same way again. They may still be angry about the diagnosis, but they’re not frustrated with their child, because even a brief exposure to the reality of how hard life is for these kids inspires in their parents only compassion.

This is the gift of the Enneagram. Sometimes people talk about the Enneagram as a tool that reveals the lens through which people see the world.

While this short post can’t begin to express the depth of each type, I’ll share some quick thoughts on each to help give you an idea of how things are broken down.

It’s important to know there there is no “best type”, or even any type that is better than another. Every type brings amazing things to the world, and every type has tendencies that need to be kept in check for their own well-being (and the well-being of those around them).

Type 1: The Perfectionist

On our team at work, this is Ali and Ashlea, and we have a few clients that fit in here as well.

Famous Ones include Jerry Seinfeld, Nelson Mandela, and Hillary Clinton.

  • Ethical, dedicated and reliable, they are motivated by a desire to live the right way, improve the world, and avoid fault and blame.
  • Healthy Ones are committed to a life of service and integrity. They are balanced and responsible and able to forgive themselves and others for being imperfect. They are principled but patient with the processes that slowly but surely make the world a better place.

I also liked this quote about Ones:

From the time they get up to the time they lie down, Ones perceive a world rife with errors and feel a bounden duty to correct it.

Type 2: The Helper

Personal Twos that I know include my wife Kelly, as well as local WordPress Helper Kathy Drewien. If you know either of them, I think you’ll quickly realize how eerily accurate this system can be!

Famous Twos include Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, and Princess Diana.

  • Warm, caring and giving, they are motivated by a need to be loved and needed, and to avoid acknowledging their own needs.
  • Healthy Twos can often name their own needs and feelings without fear of losing relationships. They are generous in their efforts to love well and care for others. These happy, secure Twos also have appropriate boundaries, knowing what is theirs to do and what is not. They create a comfortable, safe space for others and are often considered to be a friend to many. Loving and lovable, they adapt well to changing circumstances and are aware of the true self that exists beyond their relationships.

This highlight from the chapter also jumped out at me:

Average Twos tell Suzanne and me they have the ability to sense and then fulfill the needs of others. The key word here is sense. You don’t have to tell Twos what you require; they just know. The problem is they assume everyone has the same ability to sense other people’s inner life as well.

Type 3: The Performer

Natalie on our team is a Three, as are a few of the partners that we work with quite often.

Famous Threes include Taylor Swift, Mitt Romney, and Tom Cruise.

  • Success-oriented, image-conscious and wired for productivity, they are motivated by a need to be (or appear to be) successful and to avoid failure.
  • Healthy Threes have transcended the goal of merely looking good and are moving toward being known and loved for who they are, not for what they accomplish. They still love to set goals, rise to challenges and solve problems, but their self-worth is not tied to these things. They try to balance their abundant energy between work, rest and some kind of contemplative practice, recognizing the importance of being instead of doing. They feel valuable, which unleashes a tender benevolence that is focused on the common good.

Type 4: The Romantic

I’m not sure who in my personal life is a Type Four, which is kind of surprising as creative types are often in this group.

Famous Fours include Amy Winehouse, Thomas Merton and Vincent van Gogh.

  • Creative, sensitive and moody, they are motivated by a need to be understood, experience their oversized feelings and avoid being ordinary.
  • Healthy Fours have a considerable emotional range, and they manage it by not speaking or acting on every feeling they have. They know they don’t have to be special to win God’s unconditional love. These Fours have found a way to live, for the most part, outside the pattern of shame and inferiority. They are deeply creative, emotionally honest and connected, and attuned to beauty.

Type 5: The Investigator

Among other people, this is me.

Famous Fives include Stephen Hawking, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Bill Gates.

  • Analytical, detached and private, they are motivated by a need to gain knowledge, conserve energy and avoid relying on others.
  • Healthy Fives have a long view of things. They manage an appropriate balance between participation and observation, engaging with others comfortably and demonstrating true neutrality. These Fives are likely to have depth in knowledge in several areas of their lives, and they willingly share their findings with others. They live in a world of abundance, seeing themselves as part of the whole environment instead of separate from everyone and everything.

This quote struck me as being very accurate to how I often feel:

Fives collect knowledge. Knowledge and information of almost any kind (even the strangest information) provide Fives with a sense of control and a defense against feelings of inadequacy. Fives also collect information or knowledge because they don’t want to appear foolish or uninformed, or be humiliated for not having the correct answer.

Type 6: The Loyalist

Sixes are thought to be the most common number, but I only have a few people that I know of to be in this group.

Famous Sixes include Ellen DeGeneres, Jon Stewart, and Frodo Baggins.

  • Committed, practical and witty, they are worst-case-scenario thinkers who are motivated by fear and the need for security.
  • Healthy Sixes have learned to trust their own experiences of life. They are aware that certainty and accurate predictability are not likely in most situations. They are productive, logical thinkers who almost always organize their thoughts and actions around what would be most advantageous for the common good. Loyal, honest and reliable, healthy Sixes are clear-eyed judges of character. These Sixes have come to believe that in the end everything will be all right.

Type 7: The Enthusiast

I have a handful of friends that are in this group, but none of my immediate family or coworkers are.

Famous Sevens include Robin Williams, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Stephen Colbert.

  • Fun, spontaneous and adventurous, they are motivated by a need to be happy, to plan stimulating experiences and to avoid pain.
  • Healthy Sevens know that often “less is more.” They are aware of the energy they have invested in manufacturing happiness and they know that joy is a gift or grace that can only be received. They have embraced a full range of human emotion and they are growing in their ability to accept life as it is rather than as they want it to be. They are able to incorporate pain and disappointment into the whole of their lives, rather than merely avoiding it. When Enthusiasts are in a healthy space, they are not only fun and adventurous but also spiritually grounded, practical and resilient.

Sevens are fun and often seem fearless, but this quote from the book jumped out at me:

It’s hard to get your head around it, but Sevens are every bit as fearful as Fives and Sixes. Where they differ is in the way they defend themselves against it—Fives ward off fear with knowledge, Sixes with pessimism and Sevens with inexhaustible optimism.

Type 8: The Challenger

On our team, Elena is certainly in this group. I know other creatives that fit in here as well.

Famous Eights include Martin Luther King Jr, Muhammad Ali, and Angela Merkel

  • Commanding, intense and confrontational, they are motivated by a need to be strong and avoid feeling weak or vulnerable.
  • Healthy Eights are great friends, exceptional leaders and champions of those who cannot fight on their own behalf. They have the intelligence, courage and stamina to do what others say can’t be done. They have learned to use power in the right measure at the right times, and they are capable of collaborating and valuing the contributions of others. They understand vulnerability and even embrace it at times.

One quote jumped out at me regarding Eights:

Eights don’t feel like they have to be the person in control—they just don’t want to be controlled.

Type 9: The Peacemaker

On our team, this is Brooke and we’re so glad it is. Interacting daily with many of our clients, her ability to see both sides of every situation helps keep things running smoothly.

Famous Nines include Barack Obama, Bill Murray, and Renee Zellweger.

  • Pleasant, laid back and accommodating, they are motivated by a need to keep the peace, merge with others and avoid conflict.
  • Healthy Nines are natural mediators. They see and value the perspective of other people and can harmonize what seem to be irreconcilable points of view. They are unselfish, flexible and inclusive. These Nines are seldom attached to their own way of seeing and doing things. They’ve learned to make decisions based on the right priorities. They are inspiring, self-actualized people.

What type are you?

If you’ve not dug into the enneagram before, this quick list might have you leaning in one direction or another, but it’ll take some time to know for sure. In my case, I was a few months of waffling between Types 1, 3 and 5. The degree to which I dug in, by itself, leaned heavily toward being a Five. 🙂

If you know your type, please leave a comment below and share it with us.

If you don’t, I encourage you to take a few online quizzes to help narrow it down (there are a lot of them out there), and then read Ian’s book to learn even more.

Highlights from “This is Marketing” by Seth Godin

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Reading Time: 3 minutes

I just finished reading This is Marketing, by Seth Godin, and thought I’d share my takeaways from the book. I highlighted a variety of passages via Kindle along the way, so I’ve shared them below along with some quick thoughts from me. I hope to do this with more books in the future.

Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone.

We all see this. People have great ideas or great products, but they don’t spread. Greatness is a big part of it, but marketing is what helps move things forward.

Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.

If you’re trying to sell something that you don’t believe provides real value and helps solve a problem, you’re not likely to be very successful with it.

The other kind of marketing, the effective kind, is about understanding our customers’ worldview and desires so we can connect with them. It’s focused on being missed when you’re gone, on bringing more than people expect to those who trust us. It seeks volunteers, not victims.

The “being missed when you’re gone” part can be pretty tough. I had a podcast years ago that I thought was doing pretty well, but when I took a break from it no one said a word. That told me all I needed to know.

It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.

This goes back to the old idea of creating a product to fill a need, versus creating a product and then trying to find someone that needs it.

Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

In the book, Seth took this even further. People don’t even really want a quarter-inch hole, they want a bookshelf. Beyond that, though, they don’t even want the bookshelf, but they want the problem that it solves (better aesthetics in your living room, more space for your books, etc). People need to buy the drill bit, but you need to sell the final result.

Everything that we purchase—every investment, every trinket, every experience—is a bargain. That’s why we bought it. Because it was worth more than what we paid for it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t buy it.

This reminds me of the time my family went to the zoo on a scorching hot day and eventually found a little shop selling bottled soft drinks for $5 each. That was seemingly a very high price, but we quickly paid it because we were parched and the value for us at the time made those drinks worth way more than $5 each. $5 was higher than I’ve likely ever seen for bottled soft drinks, but we proved that they weren’t “overpriced”.

If a brand is our mental shorthand for the promise that you make, then a logo is the Post-it reminder of that promise. Without a brand, a logo is meaningless.

We have a presentation at GreenMellen that we give sometimes that showcases some really creative, well-done logos. As it turns out, they’re mostly for brands that no one has heard of because a logo and a brand are two very different things.

If you run an ad on Facebook and count your clicks, and then measure how many of them convert, you’re doing direct marketing. If you put a billboard by the side of the highway, hoping that people will remember your funeral parlor the next time someone dies, you’re doing brand marketing.

If you’ve never understood the difference between direct marketing and brand marketing, this example sums it up quite well.

Facebook and other social platforms seem like a shortcut, because they make it apparently easy to reach new people. But the tradeoff is that you’re a sharecropper. It’s not your land. You don’t have permission to contact people; they do. You don’t own an asset; they do.

This is why email lists and websites will continue to be a huge part of marketing — you need something that you can control. Even if MailChimp closes your account or your web host goes away, you can move those assets elsewhere and keep going 100%. If Facebook or Instagram shut down your account, those connections are simply gone.

It’s a great book and a pretty easy read, and I encourage you to check it out for yourself! Have you read it yet?

Loom vs Dubb vs Soapbox

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A few months ago, I went on the hunt for a new app to help me with video screencasts. I create a lot of screencast videos on my YouTube channel, but at GreenMellen we also make a ton of private screencasts for our clients (talking through proposals, showing how to solve problems, etc).

I’ve used TechSmith’s Snagit for years, and it’s a solid tool, but it had two main problems for me:

  1. It was a desktop application, and major updates always cost more money. I’ve paid to upgrade it three or four times over the years, and that was aggravating.
  2. More importantly, because it was a desktop application I couldn’t use it on my Chromebook. While I do most of my recordings from my desktop, I wanted a seamless experience across every device.

Animated previews

Beyond that, I wanted a way to include animated previews of my videos in email. If we were emailing a solution to a problem to an existing client, they’d open the video every time. For reaching out to leads, though, having that animated preview could make a big difference in whether or not they’d click and watch the video.

As an example, here is a preview of a video that includes my friend Chris; her and I put together a video for a prospective client, and this what they saw in their inbox (along with some other text that we included).

You can’t technically include a video in an email, but this makes it looks awfully close and draws attention!

The options

In my research, I narrowed it down to three options: Loom, Dubb and Soapbox. All three could handle screen recordings mixed with webcam video, all three had a Chrome extension that would work on all of my devices, and all three had the animated previews that I wanted.

They all had quite a few similar features, with some minor issues. In particular, while I really like the interface that Soapbox has, their Chrome extension only allowed you to record the full screen; Loom and Dubb both allowed you to record a single browser tab. I have a pretty large monitor, so recording the full screen often wasn’t ideal.

In addition, Soapbox didn’t automatically create the animated previews for you. They have a slick tool to help create them manually, but you have to do it after you record the video. Futher, that tool only will capture your webcam. That can be a great way to do it, but I often like to show our client’s sites in the preview so that it helps pique their interest a bit more. Here’s an example with our site:

Most everything else was about the same. Dubb had a few more features than the others, but nothing worth switching for. At the end of the day it came down to pricing and there was a clear winner:

Pricing

  • Soapbox: $300/year
  • Dubb: $40/mo (or $384/year)
  • Loom: $10/mo (or $96/year)

It’s not even close. Soapbox and Dubb are great products, but Loom works as well for me as any of them, and is far less expensive. I didn’t think it would have everything I needed, but Brooke got me to take another look at it after our recent Facebook post about it, and I’m glad I did!

I’ve used Snagit for more than 11 years, during which time I created 1299 videos to share with others. I plan to record even more with Loom, so we’ll see if they can do the job for me for the next 11 years.

What app do you use to create screencasts?

Marketing Automation gone bad

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I’m a big fan of marketing automation, when used correctly. We use it at GreenMellen from time to time, and it can be an effective way to send out information.

However, automation doesn’t get you off the hook. People still ask questions and may want responses directly from you — and that’s a good thing! If your marketing automation has people interested in learning more, that’s a win. Make sure you’re listening and you’ve a great thing going.

Car Dealers

Over the years, I’ve seen how car dealerships suffer with technology. In started back in 2010 when Jim Tidwell Ford sent me a bunch of emails from a variety of different people, none of whom were talking to each other. A year later, I showed how car dealers tended to love to show off Twitter badges, but literally didn’t look at the platform. In 2016, I showed how Autonation had implemented some marketing automation, but really didn’t know what they were doing. In 2017, I showed how only one dealership was willing to chat via email (and the others seemingly weren’t) and that won the sale.

Mountain View Ford

So that leads me to now, and the most amazing sequence of automated auto dealer emails I’ve ever seen. It took me a while to figure out the order of everything, since they sent so many different emails. Here you go:

Long story short — email automation can be a good thing, but please don’t take the human part of the interaction out of it.

A different look at 86,400

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There are 86,400 seconds each day, and we’ve all heard the motivational phrases like “If you had $86,400 and someone took $10 from you, would you throw away the rest of it?“. It’s a good way to see things, but I recently heard a slightly different take on this that got me thinking.

It was a recent podcast episode from Duct Tape Marketing that featured Laura Vanderkam (from Before Breakfast). In talking about making the most of your time, Laura said:

“Time continuing to move along… is like the challenge of spending money well, if all our money was burned at the end of every day. It’s very difficult to make use of this extremely limited resource, given that it’s constantly going. So you need to think about your time before you’re actually in it.”

When she puts it that way, the similarities between time and money seem so clear — those that manage their time well are very similar to those that manage their money well.

$846

Let’s imagine that every second in the day is worth a penny, so you get $846 every day, which is $308,790 per year — not bad! Like Laura said, though, the money you don’t spend each day gets burned. How do you spend it?

If you’re not prepared, then you’ll just need to quickly figure out something to do with the money as it comes in and you likely won’t make the best choices on how to spend it. This is like finding a bit of extra time in your day and using it to check Instagram for the 32nd time.

If we all got that same amount of money, over the years you’d find some people were somehow really starting to move ahead. They have a bigger house and nicer cars, but they did it with the same amount of money that you receive daily! The difference is that they thought ahead each day on how to invest it, versus having it show up and then scramble to figure out what to do with it.

Free time

The same is true with your time. Ideally, your calendar has some free time baked into it, though that depends on how much control you have over your calendar. This will often be used by things you didn’t see coming (a meeting running late, a flat tire, a sick child, etc), which is why you should build that free time in there in the first place, but sometimes you’ll end up with actual free time on your hands. How will you use it? Will you scramble to find something to do, or do you have a plan in place?

I’ll admit, I’m certainly not perfect here; I’m on social media more than I should be, I keep a pulse on Reddit, and I’m progressing pretty far in Dr. Mario World. However, I have a solid plan in place for how I ideally take advantage of found time, and I do fairly well with it:

  1. Anki: First, if I still have cards remaining for the day, I’ll work through Anki. All told this takes me about 20 minutes each day, usually split into little pieces as I find time here and there.
  2. Feedly: If Anki is already done for the day, I’ll open Feedly to see what stories are waiting for me. Feedly is intentionally a limited list; there’s no endless scrolling here. I tell it the sources I want to see, it sends me the stories, and eventually I hit the (temporary) end. I tend to have a lot in there, but keep up fairly well.
  3. Kindle: If I hit the end of Feedly, then I open up my Kindle app and read. As I mentioned earlier this year, reading on my phone is not ideal, but it’s a good way to keep making bits of progress on the current book I’m reading. 95% of the reading will happen on my Kindle at home, but that extra 5% here and there helps keep me invested and more likely to continue later that evening at home.
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Another thing Laura says in the podcast is that “time passes whether you think about how you’re spending it or not“. Spend your time intentionally, and you may realize you have more of it than you thought you did.

Busyness vs Clutter

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A few days ago, a friend of Facebook posted a screenshot of their computer desktop and it was total chaos, with hundreds of folders and files filling the screen. She was proud of how busy she was, and I don’t doubt it, but it got me thinking about the intersection of busyness and clutter. I think it works something like this:

Starting on the left, when you don’t have much going on, you tend to not have as much digital clutter. As you get busier, things get worse. I think my friend was at the peak of this chart — as busy as possible, but not nearly fully productive. I’ve been there too.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Michael Hyatt lately, as I find him to be incredibly productive, but with virtually no clutter — he’s likely as far to the right on that chart as anyone I can think of. Part of that is the systems that he uses (and the staff to help him), but it’s not an accident. He’s worked hard to keep things streamlined and running smoothly so he can be as productive as possible. If you have a desktop full of icons and an inbox full of email, you simply are putting yourself at a big disadvantage.

I’m certainly not all the way there yet, but I work on it constantly. I do a good job of keeping my desktop and inbox clean, but I still deal with digital distractions that pop up and should be delegated elsewhere.

I recently picked up Michael’s Full Focus Planner, which is something I didn’t think I’d ever do. Having a paper planner to go alongside all of the digital tools that I use seemed foolish, but I’m beginning to come around. I still expect to use all of my fun digital tools to keep things humming, but spending a bit of time at the beginning of each day (and each week) to sit back and plan things out seems like a great way to go. I’m early in this process, but enjoying it so far.

If you find yourself in the middle of that chart and think “I just can’t push any harder”, you’re probably right. Work on finding ways to clear the clutter so you can focus and get more done, and hopefully you’ll continue to work toward the high productivity / low clutter end of the scale.