Reading Time: 2 min Yesterday, Google announced that they were shutting down Google Stadia. While I was a big fan of the service, the announcement didn’t surprise me very much, as Stadia just never really caught on. If you’re asking “What was Stadia?”, that pretty much explains what happened. If you saw Google’s official Stadia launch trailer a few […]
Marketing
Social Proof
Reading Time: < 1 min The mental model of Social Proof is used frequently in marketing, but it’s a bit deeper than I’ve often realized. The main concept, as written by Robert Cialdini in his 1984 book “Influence” is that it: maintains that a person who does not know what the proper behavior for a certain situation is, will look […]
Creative Destruction
Reading Time: 2 min Creative destruction is the mental model that markets often churn through companies, with new ideas and processes replacing the old ones. Some companies are able to keep up with these changes, and some cannot. According to Andrew McVagh, the power of creative destruction is to know that it’s coming and not be scared of it. […]
Should people respond to your marketing, or should they react to it?
Reading Time: < 1 min When you put content out into the world, you hope that it connects with other people. If so, it often is in one of two ways: they can respond to it, or they can react to it. Those are very different things. The world of medicine is a perfect example of this: “She is responding […]
Marketing is all of it
Reading Time: < 1 min It’s kind of funny that we refer to our company as (in part) a “marketing firm”, because we don’t really do marketing. We can’t. We help with promotion and advertising, which is a big piece of it, but marketing is really everything that your company does. It’s how you answer the phone. It’s how you […]
I don’t know you, but I know all of you
Reading Time: < 1 min If I walk up to a random person, I don’t know much about what they think or how they act. I likely wouldn’t be able to immediately determine who they voted for in the last election, what their favorite color is, or which baseball team they root hardest for. However, if I was in a […]
The public to public bridge?
Reading Time: 2 min About a year ago, I shared some great thoughts from David Perell about the concept of the public to private bridge. In short, the idea there is to use public channels like social media to drive people back to private assets you fully control (like your blog and email list). Given the volatility of social […]
It’s not moral to steal people’s attention
Reading Time: < 1 min In a recent episode of his Akimbo podcast, Seth Godin dropped a rather profound statement in the middle of talking, but I wanted to pause for a minute and unpack it. He simply said: ‘It’s not moral to steal people’s attention” I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of it, but I think it can go […]
Promotion = interruption
Reading Time: < 1 min I’ve made no secret of how much I hate interruption-based marketing. TV and radio ads are ok, because I accept them as part of the deal. The same with podcast ads; I can choose to pay for the premium ad-free version, or I can choose to listen to the ones with ads. It’s my decision, […]
If we spam you, please be polite to us
Reading Time: 2 min I recently came across a fascinating thread on LinkedIn where salespeople were frustrated by being “ghosted” by potential clients. They’d reach out, and simply get no response. Ghosting someone isn’t generally a nice thing to do, but there was a big difference with this thread — almost everyone in there was sending cold emails (you […]