• The Medium is the Message

  You don’t do long division by hand. You use excel. To eliminate the possibility of errors and save time.

  You don’t manually send emails to everyone. You use email marketing tools. To errr… reduce the possibility of errors and save time.

  But compare it to your open rate. How much time are you really saving? Designing the template. Rounds of revisions. Approvals. Oops mistakes. Redos. Spam filters. Just to have a handful open it and even fewer respond.

  For a lot of companies, aren’t you better off just sending one offs for a really important message? Unless you have a list in the tens and hundreds of thousands.

  Weight the real cost.

  Now think, “what if I sent them each a customized video?”

  How many would it make sense to send out?

  Can you afford the time?

  Can you afford not to cut through the noise to get this one through?

  The medium is the message.

  If this one is really important, think about how you get it through.

• Dads and grads y’all. Dads and grads.

• Have an Apple Watch? Get Sleep++ and wear it while you sleep. (Charge while getting ready.) You will improve your sleep habits (performance) over time just by awareness of your trends alone.

  

• When this client stopped focusing on a hands-off chatbots only approach and increased the level of care when speaking with people on their website, their goal conversion rate and time on site (shown here from google analytics) overall on the site increased 2X.

  

• Within 6 months, many Enterprise/Business SAAS apps will have native iPad and Mac apps. Within 12 months, those company’s web apps will start to be considered burdensome and slow by users.

• Successssss

  

• I believe they call this Conversion Rate Optimization. #CRO

  

• 🤔 How much company business communication do you think gets done over iMessage or WhatsApp as opposed to email (or even @Slack)?

• perfect

• I found Drogon.
  #gameofthrones

  

• Well, I’m not halfway through my first article of the day and I can’t figure out how to X out your pop up, The New Yorker. So I am afraid for that reason, I must reject your offer, with no qualms!

  

• This is shaping up to be a must-listen episode of The Knowledge Project.

• Dear diary, Went to the Zoo tonight. Met an emu and a few giraffes. Hung with an 80’s hair band and I also saw a gator from a distance.

• Behind every warning sign, there is a story. This one sounds like it was written by David Allan Coe.
  
  (at the dealer service department in Fort Worth, TX.)

  

• So many scary things in the world. But this is way up there… The president is clearly building an email marketing list of scorned people that actively declare extreme views… to whom he can segment by bias/emotion and call to action when he needs, out of public view.

  ➚ The White House launches tool to report censorship on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter - The Verge

  “The tool, which is hosted on Typeform, asks users for screenshots and links of the offending content, and provides a text field where users can describe the enforcement actions taken against them. The user is also asked to choose between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube or “other” as the platform where the offense took place. (Facebook and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

  The tool also collects significant personal information from the user, and near the end invites users to opt into email newsletters from President Trump, “so we can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.” A separate question points users to an extensive user agreement, and makes clear that “you understand this form is for information gathering only.”“

  Read more: White House launches tool to report censorship on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter - The Verge ➚

• ➚ nothing new in the world

  Wisdom in this post by @nickusborne.

  “Most of the “new” copywriting and marketing techniques are little more than old techniques with fresh coats of paint.“

  Read more: How to Keep Your Copywriting Skills Fresh - Copyblogger ➚

• Mark Schaefer on your corporate progress ➚ Being normal is not a point of differentiation

  Great stuff from the Schaef here. No one cares about your ability to not be terrible. As consumers, we expect that to be tablestakes.

  “What we really want is to see you.

  Come into our city. Show up in our meetings, in our neighborhoods, in our celebrations. Make a difference in a way that is tangible and believable.

  Today, you can’t just promote your progress. Show us. Don’t be in our community. Be of our community.“

  Read more: Being normal is not a point of differentiation | Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow} ➚

• The Daily Scorecard.

  A daily report on the inputs and outputs that lead to success.

  I’m making some adjustments to what I’m tracking for my business and it got me thinking.

  I need a personal scorecard too.

  What inputs and outputs would you track?

  

• I’ve been doing a lot more work from my iPad. Keyboard Shortcuts are the key. The biggest ones?

  Cmd-tab to switch apps; space and shift-space to scroll down, and up respectively.

  I will be overjoyed when micro.blog supports scrolling with space bar and some of the others.

• Weston’s first viewing.

  #perfectmovie

  

• The new @WeWork Commerce in #FortWorth opened today and they did a great job. Overlooking Sundance Square, It’s nice to have the studio be downtown funkytown.

  

• ➚ Shane Parrish on How Our Brains Lie Because we love a good story

  Our brains are stubborn…

  “ Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman offers an example of how our brains look for, and assume, causality:

  “After spending a day exploring beautiful sights in the crowded streets of New York, Jane discovered that her wallet was missing.”

  That’s all you get. No background on Jane, or any particulars about where she went. Kahneman presented this miniature story to his test subjects hidden among several other statements. When Kahneman later offered a surprise recall test, “the word pickpocket was more strongly associated with the story than the word sights, even though the latter was actually in the sentence while the former was not.” 1“

  Read more on Farman Street: The Lies We Tell ➚

• What’s the formula to put my 18 month old to sleep?

  Ingredients list: - 1 Son - 1 Dad - 1 Baby Bjorn (laces out) - 1/3 of a Record on the Alexa (Repave by Volcano Choir OR Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd) - 1 Dad Sway (stopping is forbidden)

  Cooking time will vary.

• Data is noise. Information is interesting, Knowledge is power. Insight is invaluable.

• Everyone distracted by streaming services, device share, social dominance, etc.. is forgetting that Bezos now owns their corporate bathroom’s share of wallet too.

  

• What would we do in the world without hosts at restaurants?

  Have you ever been to a restaurant and no one worked the host or hostess stand?

  It seemingly takes forever to get anyone’s attention – because everyone’s running around busy doing their jobs.

  The folks in the restaurant are cooking, serving, working on the expo line, talking with customers, and just generally running the restaurant as it stands today – Serving the current customers, they’re too busy to look up and see the brand new customers waiting at the front of the store.

  How many times have you left in a situation like this where you couldn’t get noticed fast enough. Now think back to the last time you went to a business to business type website. Were you met with a host or were you met with the wall of friction… with the wall of waiting… with a company too busy to look up from what they were doing to give you the time of day – and how many times have you left that experience because you couldn’t get an answer.

  Even the times you pushed through how many times have you not gotten a response either in time (or ever)?

  It’s these considerations we need to make as we design our own customer experiences and it’s time to consider how we can have a better host like experience with every customer interaction.

• How to use emoji like Slack in any app on the Mac

  If you find yourself looking for an easy way to use emoji on your Mac, you owe yourself a few minutes to check this out.

  It makes emoji selection as easy as it is in Slack, but in any app.

  “It’s a lot more convenient than tapping Control+Command+Space and the search works much better to boot.“

  Get it here: Rocket – the best emoji app for Mac ➚

• ➚ inessential: The Under-Appreciated Awesomeness of Apple Events (the Technology)

  In other words, great design…

  the absolute genius was combining that with power-user features by way of progressive disclosure.

  This meant that more power was there, but it wasn’t required in order to use the app well. But, once you needed it, you could find it. And that extra power was as well-designed as the rest of the app, so you could get the most bang for your click.

• Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.2 | WebKit ➚

  This will change how #martech and #adtech for the better. Important read here…

  As of ITP 2.2, persistent cookies set through document.cookie are capped to one day of storage when both of the following conditions are met:

  1. A domain classified with cross-site tracking capabilities was responsible for navigating the user to the current webpage.
  2. The final URL of the navigation mentioned above has a query string and/or a fragment identifier. The rest of this blog post explores this in detail.

• Go out and get it.

• James Holzhauer: Why the ‘Jeopardy!’ Contestant Is Bad TV (Column) – Variety ➚

  James is only the T-1000 of Jeopardy. There will be more T-1000s of many things from “before”.

  “He is simply a more advanced player, a perfect one, seemingly sent from the future to dominate the show, and his personality as a TV character is frustratingly difficult to know, even by the standards of the breezily quick thirty-minute game show. More than most contestants, he is there to complete a mission. (His shout-outs to family and friends, written on each Final Jeopardy card, are the only real glimpses we get of the Holzhauer who existed before he took the “Jeopardy!” stage.)”

• how to get more work done in less time ✅

  Make Do Not Disturb work for you! Watch this #minutetutorial

• How I’ve Been Approaching Podcast Recording

  In this episode, I’ll describe how I’ve been making podcast episodes for both this podcast and the one at dialog.fm.

  The workflows are very different.

  I’ll also describe the equipment and apps that I use.

• I don’t know what this is trying to say, but I do know it is indicative of the decline of the movie theater.

  

• Of course the kids got their photos too…

  

• Her last invitation didn’t have a Google “meet” link, and Bethany didn’t change settings. It has a business feel, and seems to have shown up after the @zoom_us IPO. Google getting nervous?

  

• The True Cost of Customer Response via Seth Godin ➚

  Waiting an extra day to get back to just one person probably costs you more than the entire day’s salary of a customer service salesperson.

• Ending Robocalls. Game changer right here. My phone rings 1/10 of the time now. And I can see who it doesn’t let through. itunes.apple.com

  RoboKiller: Spam Call Blocker by TelTech Systems

  

• In the news of things no one wants:

  Facebook is working on a voice assistant to rival the likes of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and the Google Assistant, according to several people familiar with the matter.

  Facebook is working on a voice assistant to rival Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri

  

• The first three episodes of our new business podcast Dialog . fm have dropped. Check them out and let me know what you think? #conversationalmarketing

  join.dialog.fm/t/how-to-…

  

• Why isn’t Amazon turning Audible into the best podcast app? Half of podcasts feature Audible ads, and/or authors talking about their book. Seems like an easy win.

• #AlbumSunday 1 Real quick though. This is important. volcano choir - repave (2013)

• It’s GoT Time.

  

• Texas. Home.

  

• Wise words from John Bonini on Twitter

  Don’t blog. Write. Don’t promote. Share. Don’t post. Publish. Don’t blast. (Ever.) Don’t sell. Listen/help. Don’t report. Update. The way in which we describe the work matters.

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