What service do you offer?

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Between our business mail service and returning Amazon orders, I visit our local UPS Store quite a lot. They’re great!

A few doors down from them I often see a few trucks for Sluss+Padgett, a company that does… something? Here are their trucks:

I appreciate a nice clean design, but their “See the difference” tagline brings me 0% closer to having any idea what they do. The ladder indicates likely some kind of construction, but it’s not clear at all.

I’m sure they thought long and hard about that tagline, but they went for “short and clever” over clarity. I still love Blake Howard’s quote that “It’s a mistake to sacrifice clarity on the altar of distinction“, which is exactly what happened here.

For the purpose of writing this post, I snapped that photo above and then dug into their website a bit. While the website helps, clarity is still lacking as it takes a lot of words for them to try to explain what they do. It varies a bit depending on screen size, but they have so much text in their main headline that it cuts off on my screen:

This post isn’t intended to pick on Sluss+Padgett specifically, as they may be a great company. However, they’re likely missing great opportunities to be a bit more well-known in the area if they’d just focus a bit more on “clear” over “cute”.

Despite driving past their trucks for months, if someone had asked me if I knew of a good commercial HVAC company I would have never thought of them, because I had no clue that’s what they do.

Clarity always wins.

Produce more, because so much of it should be trashed

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It’s difficult to create high-quality content. Whether we’re talking about words, art, video or any other medium, there is a lot of scrap that needs to be created before you get to the good stuff.

In “Excellent Advice for Living“, author Kevin Kelly shares it like this:

The main reason to produce something every day is that you must throw away a lot of good work to reach the great stuff. To let it all go easily you need to be convinced that there is “more where that came from.” You get that in steady production.

This is largely why I publish a post every day — if I do it enough times, a combination of increasing skill and a lot sheer luck means that some good stuff is likely to find its way on here.

This blog is largely written for myself, but if I was writing this for a greater goal (SEO, paid work, etc) I’d take a different approach. I’d likely still write very often, but I’d throw away the bad stuff so that only the good gets shown. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, and it’s ideal in many circumstances, but sharing the bad posts (and you can decide what those are) is how I’ve chosen to do this.

It’s like the analogy of making more pots; you’ll do better work if you keep on practicing rather than just focusing on a single, perfect piece. Keep going, and the good stuff will show up.

We are impossible to imitate

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Over the years, an interesting thing we’ve done at GreenMellen is to literally give all of our “secrets” away. Across dozens of podcast episodes, hundreds of Meetup events, and thousands of blog posts, we don’t hold anything back. I often joke that our Meetups are when our competition all visit and we tell them all of our secrets. Of course, they share their secrets as well and we all leave the room smarter than when we arrived.

In her book “Radical Candor“, author Kim Scott shares a similar idea:

For context, I circulated an article from Harvard Business Review that explained how a culture that captures thousands of “small” innovations can create benefits for customers that are impossible for competitors to imitate. One big idea is pretty easy to copy, but thousands of tweaks are impossible to see from the outside, let alone imitate.

We do four things very well: Branding, Content Strategy, Website Design, and Digital Marketing. Those links share how we do them, and you can dig into our resources to see exactly how we make them happen.

That’s kind of the point of what Kim shared in the quote above. Our big ideas are easy to copy, but the little tweaks aren’t even visible. A great example is the messaging strategy that we work through as part of the “Written Branding” for every client. Here is a step-by-step guide to show how we do it, and here is an example of the finished product.

Even with that, most people can’t duplicate it. In this case, it’s the hours and years that Robert has put into perfecting his craft, and the tiny little things he does along the way while creating one of those. I know the method as well as anyone, and I assure you that I could not create a messaging strategy as effective as Robert can.

Your business is likely the same. There are no secrets to do what you do, but the tiny innovations and techniques that you’ve worked on over the years are what makes your output special. Feel free to share your ideas and educate those around you, knowing that the core of what you do can never be sufficiently imitated.

Let people quietly follow you online

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I’m one of those people that rarely removes any connections on social media. Sure, if someone is acting wildly inappropriate I’ll cut them loose, but I have hundreds of connections on various sites that I’ve not spoken with in years. I should work to solve that at some point, but that’s not what this is about.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a handful of people tell me that they enjoy reading my posts on LinkedIn, and I had no idea. They don’t comment, they don’t even “like” them, but they see them and that’s impacted how they view me.

There are certainly some types of social content that you should restrict a bit (photos of your children, for example), but I encourage you to keep most of it as open as possible. You never know who might be reading it and when that might be the best thing for them to see at that moment.

The first one

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Starting a healthy habit can be difficult. It could be a regular workout schedule, eating better, reading frequently, or blogging daily. As with many things, the first one can be the most difficult.

My friend Laurie expressed this beautifully earlier this year with her first blog post on January 15. Her first post talks about the challenges of just getting started, and she lays it out very well. She’s written a half-dozen more since then, and she seems to be on a great pace now. If you know Laurie at all, you know that her blog is going to be a gift for all of us, so I’m very excited that she’s started this habit.

She references a lot of inspiration that helped her get started, including a very short blog post from Seth Godin. Here it is, in its entirety:

Start small, start now
This is much better than, “start big, start later.”
One advantage is that you don’t have to start perfect.
You can merely start.

I’ve been doing this daily for nearly three years and I’m no where near perfect, and never will be. However, I’m getting a little better every day, and that only works if you start.

Today is the perfect day to start. If you do, please drop me a note so I can follow you on your journey and be sure to follow Laurie’s blog to see what she has in store for us.

Empathetic Marketing

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The single best thing you can do with your marketing is to always keep the end user in mind. When we build websites for our customers, we frequently remind them that the site is not for them — it’s for their customers.

A common joke among web designers is that clients always seem to want their logo bigger. If you’re able to get a client to see the true end user of their website, that problem goes away.

“Hey client, how does making your logo bigger help your customer?“

QR Codes

I see this in other ways too, such as with QR codes. QR codes are fantastic because they’re open-source by design. They don’t require a central database, so no one can control the content of them or shut them down or anything. They’re great!

However, the rise of QR codes has led to a rise in misuse of them. As a general rule, QR codes should only be used on printed pieces to help guide people to a digital product. If you see a QR code on a website or app, it’s likely doing more harm than good.

I recently had a friend write a post on LinkedIn promoting his event, and simply had “for more details scan this QR code”. No link to click, just the QR code. This meant one of two things:

  • I was on my computer, so this means I needed to scan it with my phone, open the page, copy the URL, save it in Google Keep on my phone, then open Google Keep on my computer, copy the link in browser and then run it from there.
  • If I was on my phone it’d be even worse, because you can’t really scan your own phone. For that, I’d probably have my wife scan my phone, pull up the link, copy it, text it to me, and then I could click her text and open it.

Or, you know, they could have just included a link with the post and I could have just clicked that.

This is a clear lack of seeing the world from the perspective of the consumer. Sure, the QR code will take people to the event page, but how exactly would that process work?

If this had been a flier on a bulletin board, or a paper invitation in my mailbox, a QR code would have been perfect. For a post on LinkedIn, it was incredibly short-sighted.

Next Service –>

This particular person also has a similarly misguided feature on their website, which is also failing to see marketing through the eyes of their consumer. As a business they are fantastic, and I’d hire them in a heartbeat if needed, but their marketing is too self-centered.

Their website include a list of about 15 services they offer, each on a separate page — that’s excellent! However, the bottom of each service page includes a very strange call-to-action. Rather than “learn more about our team” or “reach out today”, they instead have “<- Previous” and “Next ->” buttons so you can browse through their other services. There is almost certainly no one clicking those buttons.

Nearly every visitor to their site will come with a specific need, and hopefully find the page that addresses their need. I can’t fathom that someone (other than their own staff) will sit back and say “oh neat, let’s click through the services and check them out!”. I’d argue that’s even less likely than someone kicking back to watch all of the slides on your home page (which isn’t going to happen either).

Who?

Who is your marketing for? Who is coming to your website? You should be able to tell me that “it’s often women in their mid-30s with children, they’re struggling with this problem, and we offer this solution”. Once you have that, everything should be focused toward serving them, and you should look at everything you publish through their eyes.

I doubt a bigger logo or a digital QR code is likely something that will benefit them.

Don’t freak out about AI just yet

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I’ve shared a few times on here some concerns I have with AI. There are good things coming, but probably some bad things too. You’d be wise to spend time with AI tools and start learning how they work, but it’s not time to freak out over it yet.

Napster

Back in 1999, the record labels were freaking out. Napster was the cause of it, and perhaps rightfully so, but the labels let their fear spread into weird areas.

With Napster, the record labels essentially did nothing other than try to stop it. No innovation, no new ideas, just lawsuits. Fortunately for them, Apple and Pandora (and later Spotify and others) found ways to make them money in the new world.

OLGA

Around the time that this was going, there was a site growing in popularity known as OLGA: The OnLine Guitar Archive. It was huge database of guitar chords so you could learn to play your favorite songs. While their use of lyrics on the site was indeed illegal, it was a weird fight for the record labels to make, since it wasn’t competing with a paid alternative. The labels chose to fight anyhow, and they got OLGA shut down.

Around the same time, I ran a very popular Christian music guitar site with similar content (lyrics + chords to popular songs) and faced the same issues from record labels. I sold the site years ago, and it finally shut down last year (2022).

From this first-hand view, three interesting things happened while running that site during the Napster days:

  1. In speaking with a record exec on the phone once, he admitted that our site was good for their business. Churches pay license fees for contemporary music on Sunday mornings, and we were feeding into that and helping their bottom line. Still, he said he “just couldn’t let us keep showing the lyrics”, but with no reason why.
  2. I also would sometimes showcase new music on the site that I enjoyed. I wouldn’t share the music itself, but just talk about an album and show a photo of the album cover with a link for people to go buy the CD. With around 25,000 daily users, it likely sold a good number of albums for them. I was told to remove the pictures of the album covers because they were under copyright. 100% legal for them to do that, but mind-numbingly foolish.
  3. In terms of lyric issues, I simply removed the lyrics from the songs on the site, which made them 100% legal but 99% less useful. Instead of seeing which chords to play as the song went on, you’d just see “This song is mostly D – G -Em – C.

Because the record labels were scared of MP3s and Napster, they just went around trying to stop everything, even if it was to their detriment.

Cameras

Around that time, another interesting thing happened — concert venues disallowed cameras. I would often take photos at shows and share them on the site (thus sharing this artist with thousands of new users), but they decided that was a bad thing. Again, no good reason why, but just a decision that it must be stopped.

Of course, that ban ended a few years later when literally everyone was walking around with a camera in their pocket.

AI is feeling the same

While AI is a very different situation in a lot of ways, reactions are quite similar.

People are scared of what it might mean.

People are scared for their jobs.

Schools are banning it.

Like the rise of MP3s, AI can’t be stopped. It’s coming, so get educated and learn how to use it for good. Record labels freaked out over MP3s but did literally nothing to try to harness the power of them. They got lucky that Apple bailed them out with iTunes, but your industry might not be so lucky.

Are you worried that your job might be taken by AI? Do better.

Not “do better at your current job”, because you can’t outrun AI forever. Instead, “do better at what your job will become” by harnessing AI to multiply your skills and output in a way that can’t be replaced.

If you’re not sure how to “do better”, I recently heard a great tip — replace Google with ChatGPT for a week. All of the things you might ask Google, ask ChatGPT instead. Some answers will be better, some will be worse, but you’ll learn a lot along the way and have a much better idea of how these new tools can benefit you.

Homework for life

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In reading Matthew Dicks’ book “Storyworthy“, he introduced a practice that he started years ago, and I’m giving a shot as well. Matthew calls it “homework for life”, but I actually first discovered it in a video from Ryan Kelly; the video was all about his reMarkable 2, but he briefly mentioned it while calling it his “story of the day”.

Whatever you want to call it, the practice is pretty simple. Every evening, write down a very brief story from your day. That’s it. You can write down a few stories if you’d like, but never zero. It’s intended to be just a very brief statement that brings you back into that moment. One way Matthew likes to frame it is by asking “what was different today from other days?”.

Here is Matthew’s TEDx talk from a few years ago where he explains it more in-depth:

As Matthew explains, it can take a little while to get in a rhythm. If you do it consistently, you’ll begin to notice more of these stories during the day, similar to a photographer on a photo walk. Not only does that help with your “homework” but it helps you recognize the stories as they’re happening, which is the real goal.

You can also jot down old stories that came to mind today. In my Homework For Life today, I actually wrote down two quick stories; one from today, and one from 20 years ago that came to mind.

As with many things like this, the technical “how-to” is nearly irrelevant. Matthew does it in a giant Excel document, Ryan does it in his reMarkable, and I do it in Obsidian. You may have a different place to keep them, so just put them wherever it makes the most sense.

It’s a habit that I’m still working to build, but I can see the benefits of it. Storytelling is a powerful way to capture attention, so being more aware of stories in my life can only be of benefit going forward.

As automation speeds up, relationships will reign

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I recently shared a glimpse into the “bad side of AI“, where I’m starting to get some automated comments on social media and it’s likely to get much worse.

The side I fear a bit more is the coming glut of AI-personalized email spam, at huge scale. Microsoft has unveiled Viva Sales and Salesforce announced Einstein GPT, both of which use generative AI to help further automate the sales process via email.

Salesforce isn’t even pretending it’s something else, as one of the features they tout is that “Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers“. Horrible.

As I’ve shared before, cold outreach is the domain of spammers. It’ll be a little trickier to detect, as these AI-generated emails will probably become quite convincing, but it’s unsolicited spam no matter how you try to spin it. Building relationships, which have always been the key to solid partnerships, will reign.

As Gary Vaynerchuk recently said, “the advantage becomes the things that are not automated… that are human-based, and this will be accelerated dramatically with AI“.

AI can still help

I’m still excited for how AI can help in these conversations and I see a few great ways to incorporate it:

  • Automated note-taking. Google has tools coming soon that will help take notes during video calls; taking that off my plate will allow me to be even more invested in the conversation and not have to worry about capturing everything myself.
  • Prior to meetings, AI can help summarize those notes can get me up to speed. We’ve already seen a tiny peek at that, and much bigger things are coming in the next few years.

That said, the amount of semi-personal spam that I get today is already wildly unacceptable, and it’s going to get worse. However, as it gets worse for everyone, the effectiveness will continue to drop. The replacement will be tighter relationships with those around you, which has always been the ideal way to do business.

Thank you for your time

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If someone invests time with you, whether it’s to help with a project, move a sofa, or just go to the movies, it’s appropriate to thank them for their time. They willingly gave of themselves, and deserve a bit of thanks for it.

What if you steal their time, though? Can you still thank them for something they didn’t mean to give you?

Stealing apples

Suppose you’re at a farmer’s market and see some amazing apples. You could, if you chose to, walk up and take one of the apples and shout a “thanks for the apple” back to the seller as you walk away. It sounds like something a bully would do in cheesy movies from the 90’s.

I’m finding this in some cold emails that I get, too, and I interpret it the same way. Simply the act of opening the email is an unearned theft of my time, so a “thank you for your time” doesn’t make it any better.

Here’s an example of one I recently received:

They have the “unsubscribe” info at the footer, but you should never find yourself in a situation needing to unsubscribe from something that you didn’t subscribe to in the first place. Seth Godin summed that up perfectly in a post from almost a decade ago:

Some spammers will tell you that all you need to do is opt out. But of course, the very problem with spam is that it requires action on the part of the recipient, action that can’t possibly scale (how many times a day should we have to opt out, communicating with businesses we never asked to hear from in the first place?) People are smart enough to see that once spam becomes professionally and socially acceptable, all open systems fall apart.

This is similar to spammers that want to become a “trusted partner” after starting the relationship with spam, and it’s just such a pitiful way to try to begin a relationship.

You should absolutely include unsubscribe links in bulk emails that you send, you should thank people for their time, and you should work to be trusted partners with those you serve. These are all good things, but only in the right context, and none of them make a cold email any less annoying and spammy than it already is.