Reading Time: 2 min I find the “Barnum Effect” to be a fascinating concept. It’s the idea that you can publish a description of someone that seems very precise and descriptive, but it is really vague enough that it applies to most everyone. Some examples might be: You have a great need for other people to like and admire […]
Trust
Problems come from ignored complaints
Reading Time: < 1 min Businesses hate to see complaints, and we all know that. You work hard to put something out into the world, and then someone reaches out to explain why they don’t like it. As bad as a complaint may feel, though, ignoring it could be far worse. As Nico De Bruyn said in We’re All Marketers: […]
Facial recognition and encryption can’t be put back in the bottle
Reading Time: < 1 min There are two topics that I hear come up repeatedly with groups trying to stop them, but I think it’s too late for both. First you have facial recognition technology, which privacy advocates are trying to stop. It’s a noble cause, for sure, but it’s likely to impossible to stop at this point. There are […]
The news doesn’t reflect the world
Reading Time: < 1 min With this title I’m not referring to “fake news” or political leanings (though those are important topics), but more to the fact that what you see in the news is based on what draws eyeballs, not what’s really going on. As I’ve shared before from Darrell Huff’s excellent book How To Lie With Statistics: It […]
“Designed by” is a big red flag
Reading Time: 2 min It’s generally not a good idea for a web designer to put a “designed by” link in the footer of websites that they create, and they usually know it too. The main reason is Google; putting that link down there will hurt the site that it’s on. It’s a tiny amount, but it’ll still hurt. […]
How Slack Builds Trust
Reading Time: < 1 min A few weeks ago, I mentioned a few companies that I tend to trust. In all of those cases, it was the humans at the companies that helped build that trust. However, Slack (the chat app that we use) does something automatic that I think is brilliant. If you add more users, they automatically charge […]
Who do you trust?
Reading Time: < 1 min I was at a business event last year (pre-COVID) and an interesting thing happened. A few of us were chatting, when a woman came up to us with a great idea: “Let’s pass our business cards around, take photos of them, and share them on our social media accounts!“ While I’m happy to recommend businesses […]
The WordPress Community
Reading Time: < 1 min There’s something unique about the community of people that work with WordPress, and I absolutely love it. When explaining our Meetup to people, I generally say something like “We stand up and give away all of our secrets to our competition, and they stand up and give theirs away too“. We all leave the meeting […]
Don’t fake it if you don’t have to
Reading Time: < 1 min One of the iconic scenes in movie history is Michael J. Fox playing “Johnny B. Goode” in Back to the Future. If you’ve not seen it before, here’s the clip: Beyond the obvious reasons why it’s great, there’s a small treasure near the beginning. Around the 20 second mark, you see some hands play the […]
Good salespeople have good return policies behind them
Reading Time: 2 min My wife just picked up a new pair of running shoes from Big Peach Running Co recently, and she commented how the salespeople there are always so helpful and never put pressure to buy. Without really thinking, I said “Yep, it’s because they have such a good return policy.“ After taking a few minutes to […]