Chris Handy

I was listening to a podcast recently, and I heard Simon Sinek say something that everyone needs to hear.

I jotted it down on Twitter so I wouldn’t forget it:

twitter.com/handythin…

I, like you, still struggle with it all the time. We wait. “It’s not ready.”

Nothing is ever perfect. No one is judging us so harshly as we judge ourselves.

When I started podcasting, I was really uncomfortable with the sound of my own voice, especially when wearing monitoring headphones while recording. (You do this to make sure you are capturing the sound properly.)

It took a while for me to get used to hearing my voice inside my head like that.  It sounded weird. We are used to hearing what our voice sounds like from the inside. But, with practice, I got more comfortable with it over time.

Now, I don’t mind at all. Bethany might even tell you that I am “fond of the sound of my voice” at this point. ?

I didn’t get there overnight. It took lots of reps of just putting my stuff out there. I learned to create an environment where I felt comfortable with the outcomes of what I had produced, and I let it fly.

I knew that it might not be perfect, but that I had made something that day. This furthered my mission.

I haven’t gotten it all figured out, but I am less likely to polish my content before shipping it in hopes of it being perfect.

I can’t stress enough how many times remembering that this is “a fool’s game” has helped me.

That’s bullshit and we know it. If it’s 80% there we need to get it out into the world and see what sticks. Seth Godin tells us to “Ship it.”

I hope this post inspires you to do the same. Because you have important things to do in the world, and if you hold back your work in hopes that it will be perfect someday… it will never get launched, and ideas will die on the vine.

?

In case you missed Simon’s Ted Talk. Spend a few minutes (18 of the most important minutes) watching this. It could change your life.

https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en

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The hardest thing to do in content marketing is stay on track with a publishing schedule.

The important thing is to pick something and start with it to see how it goes. Experiment once you have a control group. A status quo other than “nothing” or “occasionally”

If you don’t have a current editorial strategy for each week. I’ll give you one here… and it’s worthy of the Fonz.

Sunday, Monday, Happy Days,

Tuesday, Wednesday, Happy Days,

Thursday, Friday, Happy Days

Saturday, what a day

Groovin' all week with you

Your Weekly Editorial Calendar

Publish Sunday, promote Monday, discuss as long as its hot.

Publish Tuesday, promote Wednesday, discuss as long as its hot.

Publish Thursday, promote Friday, discuss as long as its hot.

Email Saturday.

Happy Days.

Publish

We will cover what to publish in another post.

Publish is paired with a link share on real time social platforms.

Example: blog post goes up; employees (and company page) share link with a quick note on Twitter or LinkedIn. “New post on the blog: “The Happy Days Content Marketing Calendar” LINK

Promote

Promote means writing a bite-sized “commercial” for your post, to be used as a native update/post on other platforms.

You can drop these out on successive days if it makes sense.

Email

Email is a roundup newsletter of the weeks posts or a call to action to check them out.

This can be automated or you can do it manually. I suggest you automate it if you think you may not follow through every week at the same time.

Reply as long as you get responses and engagement.

Discuss

When people comment or reply to you, you should comment or reply back.

Most folks don’t comment because they are somewhat timid in putting themselves out there.

You should encourage them and never make them feel like their comment fell on deaf ears.

Conclusion

You don’t have to do the above, but do something, and stick to it.

Feel free to time-shift the above Days and make it work for your audience. The truth is there is no perfect day or time to do/send/publish anything.

I was speaking with a client last week about when to send an email, and whether or not Friday afternoon was a good idea. I asked that we consider the audience. I suggested against it as it was a high value email that included a video.

My first thought was that the target audience wouldn’t make time to sit down and watch it on the way out of work. But, you never know until you try. The audience might be open to an email on Friday afternoon. I do think we should test it.

So get started with something. Stick to it for a while. Then start experimenting with the style and order of things when you get a solid rhythm.

Just don’t jump the shark.

Are you and your customers on a different planet?

I’m always amazed at how folks refer to their own stuff in so much jargon. But I forget that I have done the same for a long time.

Its hard to get out of our own headspace.

It is always important to understand how your customers see your stuff.

Use their words, not yours.

Apple just made some changes to how they describe emoji.

Apple shows us here that they can avoid this trap by listening to the customer and just asking them what they see when they look at emoji.

? Person With Folded Hands is now Hands Pressed Together in the Apple’s new Mac OS Sierra.

Here are some more examples of the old version of the emoji name -> to the new version from an article I recently read.

• ? Man With Gua Pi Mao -> Man With Chinese Cap
• ? Smiling Face With Open Mouth and Smiling Eyes -> Grinning Face With Squinting Eyes
• ? Face With Look of Triumph -> Huffing With Anger Face
• ? Father Christmas -> Santa Claus
• ? Imp -> Sad Face With Horns

To the emoji user in the US, these emotions, names, and words make more colloquial sense. Unless you watch Game of Thrones, in which case you hear the word imp quite a bit. ?

So listen to how your customers speak, and how they perceive your offerings. Or winter will be coming sooner than you think. ☃️

emoji name switches found via via Unicode Names Replaced in macOS Sierra.

To understand others, you must understand yourself.

One of most overlooked factors I see when I look at company website and messaging is bias.

You’ll want to dig into consumer behavior (bias being just a small component) if you want to better understand why your own marketing works or doesn’t work.

Bias either drives or stifles demand for your product or service.

What preconceived notions does your prospect have when they first visit your site? Are you addressing them head on? Most companies don’t even really know what that means.

I’ll often hear VP’s of Sales say things like this to their marketing peers: “Just get me in front of them. That’s all I need you to do“

Today, you can no longer rely on that connection being made in the first place. The CEB shows that 57% of the buying decision is already made before the prospect ever reaches out in the first place.

This makes it an especially difficult problem to detect. How are you to deal with biased prospects who never speak up?

Address their bias!

You have to overcome objections and address bias before it comes up in a conversation. Otherwise, these conversations are never likely to start at all.

Understanding bias can revolutionize your connection with the customer in the vital time before they decided reach out to speak with you.

Buster Benson one-upped Wikipedia with his Medium post on Cognitive Bias.

He explains a part of his process on unpacking the complex psychological subject of bias here:

I started with the raw list of the 175 biases and added them all to a spreadsheet, then took another pass removing duplicates, and grouping similar biases (like bizarreness effect and humor effect) or complementary biases (like optimism bias and pessimism bias). The list came down to about 20 unique biased mental strategies that we use for very specific reasons.

Read Buster’s article: https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18#.lqnfv2c4r

Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea. There was no directive to ‘go forth and invent e-mail.

— Ray Tomlinson, answering a question about why he invented e-mail

Source: The History of Email – Eager Blog

In a recent report to marketers, Forrester gave tips on how to engage with customers in direct messaging platforms.

With chat apps on the rise (and chatbots providing real-time help with big brands) you need to stay up to date in consumer expectations.

One of Forrester's recommendations stood out to me as a great place to start:

• “Be human, helpful, and handy.” This, the report says, is in contrast with marketers’ traditional role of pushing “their offers in a traditional broadcast.” Instead, focus on two-way conversations that embody your brand’s value.

But don't just do this in chat apps. Make this your default way of being when communicating with anyone as a brand.

Forrester: Here are some ways marketers can adapt to messaging apps

Does the academic adage apply to business?

If I asked you if you consider yourself a decent business communicator, what would you say?

There’s communicating internally and externally. Most folks are capable of communicating with their peers within their company in a constructive way.

You are likely one of those people. But, how would you rate yourself on communicating with the public?

Many people cite a fear of public speaking.

www.youtube.com/watch

Is this you?

Would you rather be in the casket, than doing the eulogy?

You’d better be prepared to be edged out by competitors (internal and external) that are getting more comfortable with publishing content in a public forum.

According to Wikipedia:

"Publish or perish" is a phrase coined to describe the pressure in academia to rapidly and continually publish academic work to sustain or further one's career.

I think it's time to recognize that this applies now to the business world as well.

I’m not the only one who feels this way…

In an amazingly succinct article from David Meerman Scott, you can learn a whole lot about marketing communications in the connected age.

He asks:

What are you?

If you’re creating great content, it means you’re great!

If you’re creating crappy content, it means you’re crappy.

And if you’re not creating anything, buyers won’t even find you.

Read more from David Meerman Scott on LinkedIn: You Are What You Publish

[caption id=“attachment_92” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Images in this post via Dan Scivoletti[/caption]

You learn something new every day.

I've accidentally hit the connect button on my phone many times and cringed, knowing the request wouldn't be personalized.

Many people will tell you they delete non-personalized LinkedIn connection requests.

In an INC article (link below), a solution is offered.

I went ahead and took some screenshots and added them below to add value to your day.

On a desktop, it's easy to customize the connection request. You can go to the person's profile page and use the "connect" feature.

While I don't think this is the only factor in that decision, it does come off as lazy when you get one without a note.

However, when you visit a person's profile on the mobile app and hit the same "connect" button, it automatically sends the default text invite. What most mobile app users don't know is before you hit "connect" in a person's profile in the app, you need to hit the three tiny dots in the upper right corner of your phone screen...

which produces a set of options that includes customizing the connection request.

This little-known feature could help you dramatically increase your connections requests when using the app.

There's more in the original article. Check it out.

Original article:

The Huge Mistake People Make On LinkedIn's Mobile App | Inc.com

The following is an excerpt from an article from Pete Caputa of HubSpot:

Hopefully, your company prioritizes the publication of case studies. (HubSpot produces new case studies on a regular basis. Our top reps can recite the facts and quotes from many of them.) If your marketing team doesn’t do this for you, follow seasoned sales and marketing expert Todd Hockenberry’s advice:

"Smart salespeople will stop waiting for their marketing teams to create case studies for them. They’ll take things into their own hands. Salespeople will more consistently ask up front for the right to create a case study when they deliver the value promised to their client. Then they'll interview and help craft the case study story, making it about the value delivered to their client in the client's own words.”

Read the rest of the article here:

http://blog.hubspot.com/sales/the-first-sales-call-conundrum

Ogilvy’s advice to the copywriter below is extremely important for anyone who communicates. Especially marketers, copywriters, and salespeople.

“Do not, however, address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client. One human being to another, second person singular.” - David Ogilvy

Think about how that can apply to written, audio, and video content. Create for an audience of one.

Thanks to Dave Gerhardt from Drift for surfacing this quote on his recent post:

Here Are All Of The Emails We Send At Drift

A lesson in communication from B-school.

Re: Some general tips on PowerPoint presentations. 

That was the subject line of the email I got today from a professor in my MBA program.

I thought it was incredibly simple and practical advice and I’d hate to see it only live in an email to just a few folks.

I’m reprinting the advice here as a reminder to myself of what to do in the future.

Many of these things, I’d like to think I’ve learned and picked up along the way. But I haven’t codified them as has my 68-year old professor.

So, this email came in the context of a group presentation that is coming up next week:

Re: Some general tips on PowerPoint presentations.

15 minutes time--keep it pretty close to that. 

Use a sans serif font such as Arial or Tahoma--those are easier to read on slides. 

Keep color contrast strong--dark background with white or light colored print--if colors too similar, can be hard to read. Some templates have colored swirls in them that can distract from text. 

Pictures and graphs are good as they add interest to the slides. 

Font should be relatively large--usually 28 to 36 point. Small stuff is too hard to read. 

Don't crowd too much on a slide (like I did last night). 

It’s pretty amazing advice for anyone in business to remember, and I hope it is useful for you in the future as I’m sure it has been for my professor’s students over the years.

I love you so much, Harper.

Stay silly.

You’ll want to read this article about the marketing lessons from the game theory discoveries of John Nash (A Beautiful Mind).

Here are a couple of choice samples.

If you’re not analyzing your competitors’ choices, you’re probably going to lose. If this sounds obvious, consider how much time and effort marketers spend these days on the trending topic of customer experience (CX).

But how often does the question come up: “how are my competition’s strategic choices affecting my customers’ perceptions?”

Source: Marketing Lessons from Dr. Nash – Andrew Frank

Stop polishing your rock. Hit publish.

I did it again. I published something on the internet. This time I happened to do it from my phone. Last night I was reading a post on Medium called What Does the Future of Content Marketing Look Like? I got a little worried by its contents.It was a well thought out post regarding the future of content marketing and trends and all that. But here was my reply:

For the person considering content marketing for their business:

Ask a lawyer why they use legalese in contracts. If they are honest, it’s to protect the barrier to entry of the profession. I think this post may scare someone away from getting started if they look at it the wrong way and think they have to have the perfect [expletive redacted] post to publish anything.

The problem is they already think that. You have to write your first post to get to your second. And third. And only your hundredth will be any good.

If you are a business person and you are reading this. Just go write. Don’t let the incumbents like us scare you. You’ll get better. And someday, we will see you achieve greater heights than we ever thought possible; and I’ll scream out, “Get off my lawn!” As you laugh your way to the post-content marketing bank.

Stop polishing your rock. Hit publish. The diamond won’t be squeezed out until the thousandth post.

Source: For the person considering content marketing for their business:

Harper doing her best Keanu