Having mutual friends doesn’t justify a connection

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

While I consider LinkedIn to be my favorite social network these days, it also tends to have the largest amount of spam. If you can filter out the spam requests the core feed is quite good, but the effort to filter out junk is slowly getting heavier all the time. Part of this is the fault of LinkedIn themselves, who promote paid features to help you spam more people more often.

For the side of spammers (or “cold marketers” if you want), finding excuses to reach out to new leads is an art that they continue to refine. Here are some I’ve received recently:

  • I wanted to reach out and discuss the potential for a collaborative partnership.
  • Hey Mickey, just saw your profile because of a mutual connection…
  • Hey Mickey, I’m looking for mature marketing businesses…
  • Hi Mickey, Are you open to use external partners for your software…
  • Hey Mickey, I’m inspired to see your expertise in Digital Marketing…
  • Hello Mickey , I came across your profile and was instantly drawn…

At the end of the day, you might think you have the greatest solution ever but that doesn’t justify cold outreach, mostly because everyone thinks they have the greatest solution. This leads to the old quote from Seth Godin says “how many times a day should we have to opt out, communicating with businesses we never asked to hear from in the first place?“.

Related is this quote from David Berkowitz:

I bristle at all of those LinkedIn requests that say, “I see we have ## connections in common. Let’s connect here too!” By that logic, you’d connect with everyone, and then it means you provide value to and get value from no one.

If you don’t have an existing connection with someone, cold outreach is simply unacceptable. The minute you say “sure, but in this case it’s ok”, you can multiply that by the other 100M marketers online and it’s chaos. As Seth said in his blog post this morning, don’t make the exception for your own spam.

If you have mutual friends with someone you’d like to connect to, great! Use those friends as a conduit to a warm introduction or an invite to a future event, rather than a thinly-veiled excuse to spam more people.

Threads is starting to replace X/Twitter

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The launch of the social network Threads has been interesting to watch. It gained huge traction initially, then dropped off sharply, and now is climbing again. While I don’t have access to the real numbers, it feels a lot like going through the “Gartner Hype Cycle”, seen here:

It had the quick rise, the quick fall, and now it’s working up the “Slope of Enlightenment”.

David Berkowitz

Much of my opinion on that comes from a recent article from David Berkowitz where he said about his decision to move to Threads (@dberkowitz):

“It’s only been the past week where I started to be comfortable calling the platform X. “It’ll always be Twitter to me,” thought I. But then, I accepted that it isn’t Twitter anymore. Twitter had to feel like an ex before I could call it X”

Walt Mossberg

Walt Mossberg also has left X/Twitter for Threads (@mossbergwalt), with this reasoning:

”The reason to quit Twitter (X) isn’t that it’s apparently collapsing financially, or killing important features. It’s a moral and ethical issue. Not only are Nazis, racists, antisemites, misogynists, liars and conspiracy theorists being welcomed back, but the owner seems to be actively supporting this. I gave up a 16-year account with over 800,000 followers because I couldn’t associate myself with this haven for hate and lies. You should too.”

Peter Shankman

Lastly is Peter Shankman, who shares this on his X/Twitter bio:

“I’m not here anymore. Musk poisoned Twitter and it’s useless now. Find me on Threads. https://threads.net/@petershankman.”

It’s hard to know where the next few years will go, but those are three well-known, active and respected people to follow. I suspect we’ll see Threads continue to rise for at least the next few years and we’ll see what happens after that.

If you’re on there, find me @mickmel and I’d be happy to connect.

Tell your story yourself

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

We’re at an amazing point in history where gatekeepers no longer matter. While it can still be beneficial to get your company highlighted in the news (in a positive light, hopefully), that’s not something we all need to chase after.

  • You don’t need to get signed to a record label to become a famous musician.
  • You don’t need your video to get picked for “America’s Funniest Home Videos” to be seen by millions.
  • You don’t need a publisher to believe in you in order to publish and sell your book.

In a recent podcast interview with Gary Vaynerchuk, Danny Meyer (the famous restaurateur featured in the book “Unreasonable Hospitality“) simply asked this question:

“How do we tell our story as opposed to asking others to tell it for us?”

Danny still looks for customers to leave great reviews of his restaurants, and wants the food critics of the New York Times to recommend them to their readers, but he knows he doesn’t need to rely on that. With the web, and social media in particular, they can tell their own story — and they do, very well.

Let others help you when you can, but if you’re “waiting for the big break” you can stop waiting and go chase after it yourself.

Readwise at the end

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

As I’ve mentioned a few times on here, I have a handful of tools that I use every day. I mentioned some like Anki and Feedly last year, but now I’m adding Readwise to the mix because it has a great small feature that not many people notice.

My main goal for each day is to still get Anki and Feedly to zero, and I generally am able to accomplish that. When they’re done, though, they’re done. They have a fixed end, and you’ve hit zero. You can “study ahead” in Anki a bit, but it’s not a great thing to do on a regular basis.

Often when I’m done with those and have some time to kill (waiting for the doctor, before a football game starts, etc) I’ll drift into social media. That’s an easy way to go and I’ll still often do it. However, I’m now trying to use the Readwise “Daily Review” tool a bit more.

Readwise

I work hard to remember content from the books I’ve read. I have this blog, we have a monthly virtual book club, and a podcast that shares knowledge from them. I’m always looking for ways to refresh my memory from those books, and Readwise is a big help.

Readwise has a lot of tools, but the main one is to automatically pull in your highlights from Kindle. From there, you can visit your Readwise Daily Review page and it will show you five of your highlights to review. They show up one at a time, like this:

You’ll notice four icons below the quote that it pulled.

  • Discard: Don’t show me this again. It won’t remove the highlight itself, but will hide it from showing up in future daily reviews.
  • Master: This allows you to select some words to be hidden the next time it comes up so that you’ll have to fill in the blanks and learn a bit more.
  • Feedback: You can tell it to show this quote again “Never”, “Soon”, “Later”, or “Someday” to adjust the pace.
  • Keep: Just the default for “yep, good quote, show it again some other time”

They’ll also sometimes show additional quotes (“A supplemental highlight from a book you’ve read”) or recommendations from new books based on what you’ve read, like this:

I have Readwise set up to email me a reminder every morning, so I’ll at least do one set of five quotes per day.

When I have extra time beyond that everything else, I’m trying to make Readwise reviews the default. I’ll still spend some time poking around social media as well, particularly if my brain is shot, but this is a great tool to add to the list.

Thought leaders are everywhere

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Depending on your marketing goals, one approach might be to reach “thought leaders” so that they can spread the word about your product to their audience. It sounds good in theory, but determining who a thought leader is can be nearly impossible.

There are well-known authors and celebrities, for sure, but the people that others trust the most are often hidden from our view.

In his classic book “Ogilvy on Advertising“, David Ogilvy shares this insight:

“Many corporations have told me that they need only reach ‘thought-leaders’ – the people who influence other people. This sounds sensible, and not too expensive. The problem is that nobody really knows who the thought-leaders are. Bishops? Bartenders? Political busybodies? Garrulous taxi-drivers? Thought-leaders are spread throughout the population.”

I see this a lot on social media. While it’s generally wise for companies to be active on social media and stay in the minds of their potential customers, the greatest value in social media is in areas that are hidden from those companies.

When my wife is trying to find a plumber to solve an issue at our house, she’ll likely Google for some, but she’ll also pose the questions to her friends on Facebook. The responses from those people outweigh any other areas where she might come across potential solutions. In this case, her friends are the thought leaders that matter.

If you can get a well-known thought leader to speak highly of your product, that’s fantastic, but remember that there are thousands (millions?) of smaller thought leaders that will have a much bigger impact on decisions being made.

You’ll have no good way to directly shape their decisions, other than to be a company worth recommending. It’s similar to what I shared last month with the idea of “If you want to be seen as a trustworthy company, then be a trustworthy company”, and then hopefully the thought leaders will see you that way too.

Let people quietly follow you online

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

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.

Generative AI is better for input than for output

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

AI is all the rage these days, particularly “generative AI”, or AI that can create new content. This could be new text output, new images, or even new videos. The power is amazing, but I see two very different sides to it.

Input

I love the thought of how IA can help with input. I can have it summarize podcast episodes, dig through my notes, or boil a complex topic down into terms that I can understand. It can help a lot in education, and there are huge implications everywhere.

Google has some new tools coming soon that can take notes for you on video calls and summarize long email threads, and I think both of those sound very compelling and likely quite beneficial to all.

Output

The other side is output, and people using AI to generate new content for others. There are certainly cases where this could be beneficial, but most cases lean more toward spam.

You have things like the new IFTTT tools I mentioned a few days ago, and part of Google’s new update is to allow AI to craft emails for you.

Of course, you can’t have one without the other; if AI is powerful enough to summarize data for me, it can certainly do the same with other content and just tweet “new” content all day long.

I suspect both the input and output scenarios will continue to grow in the coming years, but I’m holding out hope that the benefits of AI-powered input will heavily outweigh the faux social media and blogging that’s likely to come from the output of a generative AI system.

The bad side of AI

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We all knew it was coming, and the first taste of it is here — people using AI in social media to try to reach more people more quickly.

I recently shared a post that featured Gary Vaynerchuk and his thoughts on how to build a business for the future. On LinkedIn, this is a comment that I received:

If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI writing tools very much, you’ll recognize elements of this right away as this was clearly an AI-generated response, not something personal from this man. Looking through his other comments, most are along the same line.

Therein lies the problem — these are all responses that are at least semi-relevant to the topic at hand, and 100% unique so that you can’t easily find proof that it’s fake. Right now it’s easy enough to notice when things are AI-generated, but that’s changing quickly.

Tools like IFTTT are adding more AI magic to them, which is likely to create a deluge of this kind of content. Thus far it can’t auto-comment like the example above, but that’s certainly coming very soon. For now, you can:

  • Set up RSS feeds for content that you want to follow.
  • Have IFTTT pull in those feeds and summarize them.
  • Take those summaries and auto-publish them on your various social channels.

There are also tools like the new “LinkedIn GPT Assistant by Dex” that help make this kind of thing very easy, where it can automate all of your comments for you.

Using those you can be very “active” on social media, sharing ideas and links from sources you trust, with literally zero effort. The degree to which social media is going to be bot-driven in the coming years makes me sad, as traditional social networks may not have much life left in them and I’m not sure what the next evolution of “social” spaces for humans will look like.

What did you have for breakfast?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

One of the common complaints about social media has been the huge influx of personal information that “nobody cares about”, but that’s not necessarily true. Those trite little posts that you see on social media can actually have a big impact on your connections to those around you.

Mónica Guzmán, from her book “I Never Thought of It That Way“:

I remember one thing people used to say when they railed against social media in the early days: “No one wants to know what you had for breakfast!” The funny thing is, seemingly little things like knowing what you had for breakfast, along with whether you watched that show last night, or how you felt about the traffic this morning, help people relate. Everyone has breakfast. Hearing about yours makes me think about mine, and though it isn’t breaking news or anything, knowing that I have Multi Grain Cheerios with almond milk every morning tells you something about me, even if it’s a little, tiny something. It also helps remind those of us trading words on screens online that there are human beings behind them.

It goes back to seeing people as actual humans, not as “those others”. People you disagree with still have full, rich lives, and generally have great reasons for believing what they believe.

It also goes back to the idea of disagreeing without dehumanizing. The more you know about the people around you, the more likely you are to respect their opinions.

I don’t share my breakfast on social media very often, but enjoy when others share small pieces of their lives so that I can get to know them just a little bit better.

Open sharing helps more in the long run

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve shared many times that your content usually shouldn’t be vapor. There are times when a quick story can come and go, but most your content should be available for years.

Related, I’m continuing to refine my use of RSS to make it more about people. With most folks that I meet, I try to find their blog and RSS feed to add to my collection. Only perhaps 1 in 10 actually have that, but I’m suddenly way more connected with those folks.

Lastly, your content should be open and easily accessible. You can find the full content of this post (and all of my others) in a wide variety of places, as I’m more interested in people reading my content than I am on pageviews on my site.

You can have both.

While short-term it kind of makes sense to force people back to your site in order to pump up your pageviews, the act of forcing readers there will hurt your long-term impact. A great example of that was the “like” post I recently shared from Brandie.

When I met her at an event last year, I added her blog to my RSS reader. She doesn’t post super frequently, perhaps once a month, but that’s the beauty of RSS — it doesn’t matter. When she posts, I see it, and when she doesn’t, I don’t need to waste time looking. In her case, she tends to write rather robust posts, so her monthly cadence is about right.

She also posts full-text RSS feeds, meaning the entire post shows up in my reader. When she publishes, I get the full post in my RSS reader and I’m not forced to click through to read it all. As a consequence, I can read the full post immediately and I’m more likely to be drawn into it. In her case, this has generated a few backlinks from this site to hers, which will help her rank a bit higher in the search results.

This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s really not.

  • Write solid content.
  • Publish it somewhere that it’ll last.
  • Make it easy for people to consume.

Be like Chris. Be like Tim. Be like Brandie. Be easily found, and let your content thrive for years to come.