September 2015 - Sam Harrelson

Marketing Plan Tips

“Without a solid marketing plan, too much is left to chance. When you rely on “hope based marketing” you’re at very high risk of losing money, time, and traction, because nothing is strategic and everything is reactive.”

Source: How to Write a Marketing Plan — Ecommerce Marketing Blog – Ecommerce News, Online Store Tips & More by Shopify

Shopify has a blog that’s always worthwhile read for small business owners (Shopify is a content management system that excels at allowing for the easy setup of a site for selling products). This pretty extensive walk through of some basic marketing plan tips is worth your read if you’re a business owner (or want to be one) and need some guidelines for marketing.

As always, get in touch if you need more help with your marketing plan or next steps!

Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards

“The U.S. Web Design Standards are the U.S. government’s very own set of common UI components and visual styles for websites. It’s a resource designed to make things easier for government designers and developers, while raising the bar on what the American people can expect from their digital experiences.”

Source: 18F — Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards

Interesting move by our government, and definitely something that needed to be done. The four goals they worked towards are fairly close to the ones I lay out with clients when we’re working on a new site design or build as well:

Make the best thing, the easiest thing. We believe that making tools that align with the values and needs of digital workers in the federal government will drive adoption.

Be accessible out of the box. We created tools that seamlessly meet the standards of 508 accessibility, from colors to code.

Design for flexibility. We aim to give the American people a sense of familiarity when using government services, while allowing agencies to customize these tools to fit their unique needs.

Reuse, reuse, reuse. We reviewed, tested, evaluated, and repurposed existing patterns, code, and designs from dozens of government and private sector style guides to make use of tried-and-true best practices.

Add “Your tastes are not everyone’s tastes (i.e. the client is not always right)” and that’s pretty much my approach.

Why All Podcasts Sound the Same

One of the things Thomas and I try to do with Thinking Religion, as well as Elisabeth and Merianna on Thinking Out Loud (and all of our Thinking.FM podcasts) is sound different by sounding like ourselves.

“My Wife Quit Her Job podcaster Steve Chou is, like Nick Loper, another savvy online marketer who realizes the algorithm might be his most important audience member. Subscribers are another key piece of landing in the iTunes New & Noteworthy section, and without it, a podcast might fall off the radar.”

Source: Why podcasts have such terrible ads – Vox

I never want to do a podcast where we have to beg for ratings or use the same 5 generic ads that every other podcast uses.

However, I’ll be the first to tell you that’s not a very lucrative way to do podcasting. It’s definitely a losing proposition when you consider time, hosting costs, bandwidth etc. But, I think we’ll stick to our donation model for now (despite its poor performance in terms of actual revenue). As the hosts of No Agenda frequently remind us, “Value for Value” is a much more authentic and enjoyable stream of revenue for a medium such as podcasting.

Joe Maddon doesn’t care and neither should your business, church, or organization.

“Maddon doesn’t care what you think of his lineup. He doesn’t care what you think of where or when he plays his veterans and rookies. He doesn’t care that your uncle was buried having never witnessed a Cubs World Series championship.

It’s a trait we rarely see in Cubs managers.”

Source: Cure for Cubs? Joe Maddon doesn’t care

Stop caring what you think others will think and take your team to the post-season.

Episode 1: Thinking Out Loud 83: Putting Characters In Their Place – Thinking.FM

Elisabeth and Merianna talk about developing the place as you write a manuscript and the dilemma of floating characters. They also discuss the stalling or need to take a break that comes after pressing send and how to overcome that and continue to write!

Show Notes

What Elisabeth and Merianna are Reading

The post Thinking Out Loud 83: Putting Characters In Their Place appeared first on Thinking.FM.

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The United States’ Poor Record on LTE

“Conversely some of the earliest adopters of LTE — like the U.S., Japan, Sweden and Germany — are starting to fall behind in terms of data performance. In part, these older networks are suffering from their own success. In the U.S., for instance, LTE’s introduction in 2010 resulted in a huge base of LTE subscribers in the country today. Those subscribers are all competing for the same network resources, slowing down average speeds. In comparison, newer networks in South America and Europe are more lightly loaded. But the U.S. has also failed to keep up with the rest world in both spectrum and technology. All of the four major U.S. operators have been expanding into more frequency bands, but none have been able to match the capacity countries like South Korea and Singapore have plowed into their networks. The U.S. has also been much slower in moving to LTE-Advanced.”

Source: The State of LTE September 2015 – OpenSignal

During my first few weeks at Wofford College in the Fall of 1996, I stumped the campus IT team by asking for the TCP / IP details or a way to get an internet connection in my dorm room. “Why do you want to have the internet in your dorm room?” one of the IT team asked me. Two years later, the whole campus had a high speed fiber connection.

We’re undergoing a transition from laptops to mobile devices as a primary mode of computing for many people, young and old. However, as Thomas Whitley and I talked about on Thinking Religion yesterday, the transition is happening quickly on university campuses.

I’ve talked to young people who said that mobile service was a factor in where they wanted or decided to go to college. It wasn’t a primary factor, but it did make into the equation. I hear the same from businesses and clients I work with today when deciding on where to have meetings (“We can’t meet in that part of town…the Verizon coverage is terrible.”).

I wonder when / if we’ll, as a country, insist on investing in more development of LTE and mobile in both urban and rural parts of our country as the mobile revolution continues? Or has our political mood changed so much in twenty years that the government stepping in and working with an industry to improve what is potentially seen as a necessary service an impossibility?

“We’re here to tell you we believe that in rural North Carolina and in rural America, Internet access ought to be just as likely as telephone access…You ought to be able to use it in the fastest possible way…And if you can, it’ll mean more jobs, more businesses, higher incomes and more opportunity.”

President Bill Clinton
Wednesday, April 26, 2000

Americans Don’t Understand What it Means to Be Pastoral

We too easily understand the differences between “conservative” and “progressive” but our churches have taught us very little about what being “pastoral” actually means…

“Americans are often tempted to read Francis as a “progressive” pope who has tossed out the conservative playbook of Church leaders past. After all, he’s thrown down scathing critiques of global capitalism, pushed for radical reform on climate change, and shifted the Church’s tone on issues like homosexuality, divorce, and abortion. So as pundits map his views, many conclude that he’s pushing the church into uncharted territory. But as a 15th-century Vatican cartographer might have put it: hic sunt dracones.”

Source: When Does Pope Francis Arrive in the United States, Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia? – The Atlantic

Essential reading as Pope Francis lands in the United States today to begin his tour of the country.

On Invoking Galileo and Columbus in Your Arguments

“If you are arguing against climate change, vaccines, evolution, etc. you do not get to invoke Galileo because in any accurate analogy, you are the religious fanatics (or the astronomers who blindly clung to Aristotle).”

Source: No one thought that Galileo was crazy, and everyone in Columbus’s day knew that the earth was round | The Logic of Science

If only I had a dime for every time I’ve encountered the “Yeah? Well, everyone thought Columbus was nuts too!” or “Yeah? Well, Galileo was right despite what all the scientists of his day said!” in a conversation.

Small Business and Church Unwillingness to Be Personal

‘”We believe the new bars will inspire people to not only quickly identify their own symptoms and satisfy their hunger, but give them a new, fun way to call-out friends and family on who they become when they’re hungry, too,” says Snickers brand director Allison Miazga-Bedrick.”

Source: Snickers Swaps Out Its Brand Name for Hunger Symptoms on Painfully Honest Packaging | Adweek

“Brand apathy” is a very real and serious issue for both large and small businesses, nonprofits, and churches looking to make a connection with varieties of demographics, community, consumers, and people.

It has been interesting to see Coca-Cola roll out their “Share a Coke with…” campaign and the various amounts of reception it has generated. I’d love to see those internal metrics on which names, which zip codes, and which demographics perform the best.

Motorola, Nutella, M&M’s, and Kleenex are among the larger companies that have jumped on the idea of using personalized packaging to increase brand engagement. Smaller companies, such as those in the wedding and service industry, have long used personalization as a marekting tool.

However, beyond using a first name and last name scheme on an email newsletter or a “personalized” letter in an offline mailing, many small businesses have yet to use the tools available to do more personalization despite the potential benefits.

I’m always surprised by clients or potential clients who are so strongly insistent on their brand identity (whether it be a logo or a particular style of packaging) that they are simply unwilling to even consider a form of personalization despite the metrics and data.

“Consumers” in 2015 and beyond are accustomed to the idea of personalization, partly because of large brands such as Coca-Cola, but mainly because of the web. If you’ve spent any time at all browsing, surfing, or buying online (and who hasn’t), you’ve certainly noticed personalized ads that follow you from Amazon to Facebook to Google to Huffington Post and back again. While we’re currently debating ad blocking and tracking in the nerdy sectors of the internet, there’s no doubt that the web has become full of trackers because they work. Granted, adtech hasn’t been the best steward of these tools, but there’s real benefit to using them ethically.

So why aren’t small businesses, churches, or nonprofits making more use of personalization online and offline?

I’d say it mostly has to do with the psychology of their leaders and an unwillingness to do better marketing through exploration.

“Talk, don’t listen … decide, don’t engage” sums up that mindset. That’s a mindset that will lead to organizational death. The Cluetrain Manifesto is old in web years, but still very applicable.

Delusions of Grandeur by @jason

“There are too many Padawans right now and not enough teachers. The Galaxy is flooded with people who think they can do what founders do in their lives: sacrifice everything.”

Source: You don’t have what it takes | Calacanis.com

Good points from Jason on the startup myth with a nod to the Jedi myth. I know I’ve been there and felt the sting before succeeding.

“There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.“

18th Century Contextual Advertising

Does this advertisement from the May 10, 1764 issue of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette make you want to pick up some Benjamin Jackson Mustard and Chocolate?

Source: 18th Century Advertising, When Brevity Wasn’t Key | Rag Linen | Online Museum of Historic Newspapers

We complain about ads on the web (or Facebook) today, but the convention is nothing new. Our ability to contextualize ads, and ignore them, are interesting developments in our own own structural literacies.

What is new is the ability of advertisers to “track” our digital selves on and off the web and our ability to actually block ads on the web with ad blockers.

How will the web “disrupt” humanity’s second oldest profession?

BTW, this ad totally makes me want to go to Philadelphia and buy some of this mustard.

Margaret Atwood: Double-Plus Unfree

Though our digital technologies have made life super-convenient for us – just tap and it’s yours, whatever it is – maybe it’s time for us to recapture some of the territory we’ve ceded. Time to pull the blinds, exclude the snoops, recapture the notion of privacy. Go offline.

Any volunteers? Right. I thought not. It won’t be easy.

Source: Margaret Atwood: we are double-plus unfree | Books | The Guardian

Part of my daily tension as someone who loves my whirring gadgets and gizmos and on demand lifestyle-thru-technology.

“…let him declare what he seeth…” or Apple vs the Web

“And with iOS 9 and content blockers, what you’re seeing is Apple’s attempt to fully drive the knife into Google’s revenue platform. iOS 9 includes a refined search that auto-suggests content and that can search inside apps, pulling content away from Google and users away from the web, it allows users to block ads, and it offers publishers salvation in the form of Apple News, inside of which Apple will happily display (unblockable!) ads, and even sell them on publishers’ behalf for just a 30 percent cut.

Oh, and if you’re not happy with Apple News, you can always turn to Facebook’s Instant Articles, which will also track the shit out of you and serve unblockable ads inside of the Facebook app, but from Apple’s perspective it’s a win as long as the money’s not going to Google.”

Source: Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web | The Verge

As I get older, I keep reminding myself that, after all, you can’t go home again. When I got to college, I was exposed to Plato in the Greek and remember reading πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει” καὶ “δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης for the first time. My Greek isn’t what it used to be, but the translation is:

“Everything changes and nothing remains still and you cannot step twice into the same stream.”

When I think about the evolution of the web from when I started using it (1994) through all of my experience with Mosaic and Netscape and CompuServe and Prodigy and AOL to the glory days of a web without a center (post AOL crash), I look back with fondness. The web has been a constant source of challenge, fulfillment, joy, sadness, and especially income for me over these last twenty years.

In my mind’s eye, the “glory days” of the web were sometime around 2004 or so with the advent of Firefox as a capable replacement for Internet Explorer and just shortly before Facebook at the digital world. Things were exciting. GMail was new and in high demand. We all wondered what other wizard toys Google would unveil to us in their wonky way of doing such things. Web design was flush with new energy having been set free of IE, and web protocols were blooming (well, before the dark times of Flash). It felt as if the world would be transformed by this open information system. There were ads, for sure, but the ads were there to pay for the content and the experience (even the “punch the monkey” ads). We used MySpace, but no one spent all day there. It was a tool, not a roach motel. Then came Twitter in 2006 and we web nerds just knew it was the information backbone protocol we had been hoping for. Surely, Twitter would be handed over to the open source community. They had a very open API, after all.

Then came Facebook. But it wasn’t so bad at first. It was a prettier MySpace, that’s all.

Ze Frank had his shows and we all were excited about web2.0 and the promises of what new web tech like AJAX would mean for interfaces and capabilities. I was using Writely in 2004 and loved the idea of being able to use a fairly capable word processor in a browser. Then, Google bought Writely and it became Google Docs.

That’s ok, we still had our RSS feeds and the Mac fan-people had Net News Wire. FeedDemon wasn’t so bad on the desktop and we always had Bloglines and Feedgator on the web. RSS was going to transform the way we consumed content. I just knew it.

Then came Google Reader.

I’m being too nostalgic. The web was never that rosey and free and vibrant and promising as I remember. After all, I was in the web marketing business from 2003 onward. In reality, it didn’t change all that much throughout the web2.0 boom from 2006-2008 or the social media boom from 2009-2013.

However, the web marketing business is changing rapidly now in the Age of the Platform (or App). I would call it The Mobile Age, but “mobiles” is becoming a silly name for the pocket devices we carry with us at all times and perform more and more of our daily business and life through. They’re not “mobile phones” now. They are our computers.

The Age of the Platform was ushered in quickly by Steve Jobs and Apple. Pushing cell tower and mobile device technology with ever increasingly progressive iPhones and then iPads caused a fundamental shift in how we do computing (and marketing). I sometimes wonder if Jobs knew that he was going to go directly after the jugular of Google’s revenue business when he was on stage doing the first iPhone demo? Remember, the first iPhone did not have an app store and only included the native apps. Jobs was insistent that developers could use the Safari Mobile Browser to give users access to “app environments” through HTML 5. That didn’t last long.

Apps have changed everything on the web. They’ll continue to redefine conventions we’ve long held to be self-evident about everything from marketing to banking to security to communication. With its clever play to encourage ad blocking on Mobile Safari (still the only browser environment allowed on their omnipresent iDevices) and ultimately push users into their new News app (this blog is included in their collection… yay?), Apple is moving Safari off the main page and into one of the folders where you put the Compass, Tips, and Game Center apps (at least I do). Apple is breaking up with the web.

There’s no functionality for a browser or webkit on the new Apple TV. Can you imagine the possibilities? However, it’s not needed. We have apps.

Look Homeward, Angel.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t think we can segregate movements like this into “good” or “bad” categories. Tech is agnostic morally, and we decide to do with it what we will. For those of us who reminisce on the ideals of an open and federated web where the market decides what ad formats or sites get exposure… well, we can have our idealism and try to keep blogging (though without ads).

Twitter … Facebook … Google, Apple, or Microsoft ecosystems … I look at all of these things as negatives (personally). Lock in is never good. Reach, engagement, user bases … all those metrics I deal with daily in my job working in web marketing are important variables to consider. However, we are too eager to throw ourselves into a binary decision of being an Apple fanboy or Android fangirl without pondering what we’re exchanging in this transaction.

When I think about how the web has evolved and how it might evolve further in the future, I think of Atticus Finch teaching Scout how to read.

“What was even the point of websites, certain people will find themselves wondering. Were they just weird slow apps with nobody in them?? Why? A bunch of publications will go out of business and a bunch of others will survive the transition and a few will become app content GIANTS with news teams filing to Facebook and their very own Vine stars and thriving Snapchat channels and a Viber bureau and embedded Yakkers and hundreds of people uploading videos in every direction and brands and brands and brands and brands and brands, the end. Welcome to 201…..7?”

Source: The Next Internet is TV | The Awl

I think of how Scout comes home after the first day of First Grade and is completely disillusioned. Her teacher was surprised at Scout’s reading ability and told Scout that her father mustn’t read to her anymore because he “didn’t know how to teach.” Atticus, being the archetype and lawyer that he is, calms Scout and makes a deal with her (and keeps reading to her).

We rely so much on our own perceptions of the past experiences we have to make assumptions about the future. We project based on (presumed) lived out reality. Our brains deceive us, though. When we come home, sometimes things have changed and our memories don’t hold up to the exposure to daylight. We need Atticus to tell us that it’s going to be ok, and we do know how to read properly, and he will continue reading to us at bedtime.

In the marketing business, I walk a fine line between intuition and metrics on an hourly basis. My clients trust me, but they have their own perceptions of taste, design, and ethics that I must navigate and counsel as well. My background in religion and teaching suits me well, but I’m constantly aware of the notion of Πάντα ρει (“everything flows”) that Plato channeled through Heraclitus. Everything flows. Perceptions, marketing techniques, web technologies, app platforms.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Rather than believing the teacher that tells me that I don’t know how to read properly because my father is not a real teacher, I should realize the utterly unfathomable trajectory that issues such as ad blockers, advertising, and definitions of the web present for humanity. Since the advent of hyperlinks in the early 90’s, we’ve seen the development of a technology that has changed or shifted how we do most everything from reading to producing to consuming to being treated for our over-consumption.

The web’s not dead.

Everything flows.

Now back to my marketing spreadsheets.

“We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it.”

“We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it.”

Source: Lincoln – David Herbert Donald – Google Books

A little reminder of what’s good about the United States on this night of shameful performances at the GOP Debate on the question of Supreme Court litmus tests.

Wofford College to host presidential forum in October

The school will host the Commander-in-Chief Presidential Forum, featuring Republican presidential candidates, from 7 to 9 p.m. on Oct. 15 in Leonard Auditorium. All major Republican candidates have been invited to participate in the event, part of the Hipp Lecture Series on International Affairs and National Security. The event is co-sponsored by the S.C. Republican Party, and will be moderated by former S.C. Gov. David Beasley. It will be free and open to the public.

Source: Wofford College to host presidential forum in October | GoUpstate.com

Go Wofford!

I’m tired of apologizing because I’m a baptist.

“I am tired of apologizing! As much as I know I should just listen to the Frozen soundtrack and just Let It Go!, there comes a time when letting it go is consent! No more! Mike Huckabee, if you want to claim to be a Baptist, a minister, even a Christian, please take some time to read the Bible!”

Source: I’m Tired of Saying “I’m Sorry!” | Didn’t Make the Sermon

Amen. It’s time for us to stand up and (re)claim what it means to be a baptist.

Of Mice and Men

“The eighteen minutes that Joe Biden spoke with Stephen Colbert produced the most public and painful demonstration of emotional honesty by any politician in months, if not years. Biden could never speak in a campaign quite the way that he spoke on Colbert. But a version of that would be powerful, and it was impossible not to see, in the Biden interview, a rebuttal to Trump’s moment in America—to the notion of self-promotion as success, of cruelty as candor, of empathy as weakness.”

Source: Biden, Alone in a Crowd – The New Yorker

“I fully think apologizing is a great thing,” the famously self-assured Trump replied before winning the studio audience’s applause by adding: “But you have to be WRONG. … I will absolutely apologize sometime in the hopefully distant future if I’m ever wrong.”

Source: Donald Trump gets rich with his humorous ‘Tonight Show’ turn

Run, Joe.

Apple’s Creepy Event

“They were all being ‘authentic’ by wearing the same thing and telling us that we were ‘revolutionary’ by consuming their products. It’s the same line used by the guy at the mall who sells Anarchy T-shirts for $20. Soon, these words lose their meaning: authentic people dressed alike, humans wearing machines to supposedly make them more human, freedom by buying more products. Do they believe this stuff themselves?”

Source: Apple’s Launch Event was Creepy as Hell—The Alpha Pages

Sounds like a few churches I know.

“The Computers Kept Crashing”

“And then when we tried to send it to the network,” continued Colbert, “so they could show it to you on the air, the computers kept crashing.”

Source: Stephen Colbert Reveals His Inaugural ‘Late Show’ Almost Didn’t Make It on the Air – Speakeasy – WSJ

Details (and computers) matter.

Hire good consultants 🙂

U.S. Poverty Shifts Since 1960

“Since President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty 50 years ago, the characteristics of the nation’s poor have changed: A larger share of poor Americans today are in their prime working years and fewer are elderly. In addition, those in poverty are disproportionately children and people of any age who are black, Hispanic or both.

But perhaps just as striking is that the geographic distribution of the poor has changed dramatically, too. A new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data finds that the South continues to be home to many of America’s poor, though to a lesser degree than a half-century ago. In 1960, half (49%) of impoverished Americans lived in the South. By 2010, that share had dropped to 41%.”

Source: How the geography of U.S. poverty has shifted since 1960 | Pew Research Center

I just threw up in my mouth.

“After 127 years under the ownership of the not-for-profit National Geographic Society, one of the world’s best-known media brands will be handed over to 21st Century Fox.”

Source: Rupert Murdoch Is Buying National Geographic – BuzzFeed News

This magazine was my childhood and expanded my worldview beyond Mullins, SC.

Ugh.

“The Question of What Come Next”

The author of Big Magic speaks with the writer, comedian, and prolific podcaster John Hodgman about the boredom of mastery and the thrill of self-reinvention. This is an installment of Magic Lessons by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Source: Ep. #10: John Hodgman on “The Question of What Come Next” — Magic Lessons — Overcast

Beautiful and short podcast on mastery, boredom, risk, and self-reinvention.

Those of us who have taken the leap know the exhilarating highs and the devastating lows involved in reinvention but also continuing to push yourself to be open to new paths to explore and thrive.

Make the leap.

Thanks for the share, Merianna.