Marketing and Strategy Consulting
So frustrating. How do people like this climb the ladder to be something like head of AmeriCorps?
“Trump appointee resigns as public face of agency that runs AmeriCorps after KFile review of racist, sexist, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT comments on the radio”
http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/18/politics/kfile-carl-higbie-on-the-radio/index.html
The 20 percent of white evangelicals who did not vote for Trump — many of whom are conservative politically and theologically — now seem to have a lot more in common with mainline Protestants. Some in my own circles have expressed a desire to leave their evangelical churches in search of a more authentic form of Christianity.
Other evangelicals are experiencing a crisis of faith as they look around in their white congregations on Sunday morning and realize that so many fellow Christians were willing to turn a blind eye to all that Trump represents.
via Trump threatens to change the course of American Christianity – The Washington Post
With Amazon’s Prime Day and Chik-Fil-A’s Cow Appreciation Day (dress up like a cow and get a free chicken sandwich… my wife is actually doing this… seriously… I’ll take pics), made-up holidays are all the new marketing rage. In a funny way, this reminds me of those commercials from my childhood in the 80’s and 90’s that car dealers would run (throughout the year, I might add) announcing “Toyota Dealer Holiday!” etc.
Funny how that’s come back around due to the buzz Amazon has created.
Speaking of Prime Day, good read on how to spot fake reviews on Amazon(there are a number of those and will only get better as AI improves).
Good read on “The Magic of AI” here featuring Amy Ingram of x.ai fame. I’m actually a fan of x.ai and if you are a client of mine or ever need to make a calendar appointment with me, you’ll speak with Amy.
She’s very nice.
But persistent.
I like her.
I was able to correct the mistake by emailing this message: “Amy, this is an in-person meeting at my contact’s office. Please use the address from her previous email.” Done! No assistant could have made the change faster, including notifying both parties.
I don’t even know what to say about this:
Here’s my statement and the full email chain
Here is page 4 (which did not post due to space constraints).
It’s hard to get your head around this (at least if you’re me), but I’m guessing it’s an attempt at “controlling the message” before the NYT leaked the emails. I don’t know… astonishing… as is all of 2017 politics.
Android Police has a strong lead on a rumored mockup of the Pixel XL 2 (?) that’s coming this Fall (Octoberish). The Pixel 1 is my daily device and probably one of my favorite mobile devices I’ve ever used (I’ve used a lot). Shut up and take my money.
A friend asked recently what I thought of the Amazon Echo and whether or not I was concerned by privacy issues surrounding the platform. The friend knows we have a number of the devices in our home.
The issue goes along the lines of the the Echo being able to “hear” at all times since it is listening for the wake word (ours is currently set to “Computer” since I’m a Star Trek nerd). As a result, it’s clear that Amazon is taping every sound that is made in our homes and sending directly to law enforcement / the NSA / the CIA / insurance companies / pick your poison.
Obviously, that’s not the case but the line of thinking is definitely circulated regularly on social media and in conversations with people with just enough exposure or information about a product or service to make an uneducated and biased claim.
Sort of like politics, I guess.
The internet promised us democratization of knowledge. It has definitely delivered that. It exposes us to new ideas, thought patterns, technologies, tools, services, images, videos, and music we’d never experience otherwise. I remember relishing my set of World Books as a 12-year-old because they gave me the knowledge and escape.
What the internet hasn’t done is given us a sense of perspective or inquisitiveness. Our limbic system is predicated on our survival, and we often listen to our lizard brain when a new thought technology threatens how we thought we understand this strange concept we call existence.
We need other mechanisms for that perspective and inquisitiveness. Otherwise, the internet can be a powerful sounding board to provide reaffirmation of what we already thought we knew or believed.
Having access to information (textual, visual, video, or audio) does not make one an expert.
Sort of like politics, I guess.
As we transition from fingers to voice as the primary input mechanism for computing it will become even more important to recognize the need for deeper human learning just as we push the boundaries of what deeper machine learning means. Our democracies on the web and in politics depend on it.
We have an Amazon Echo or Amazon Dot in most every room of our house. It’s fantastic technology, and I enjoy the ability to perform both simple and complex computing tasks by using our collection of assistants.
“But Sam,” my friend might say, “sure it’s great that you can turn on your lights or play Bowie or add things to your calendar by just speaking into the void in your den, but what about your privacy?”.
To quote Dylan, “play it loud.“
The top 1 percent in income among American men live 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent; for women, the gap is 10 years. These rich Americans have gained three years of longevity just in this century. They live longer almost without regard to where they live. Poor Americans had very little gain as a whole, with big differences among different places.
Source: The Rich Live Longer Everywhere. For the Poor, Geography Matters. – The New York Times
“The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women. Globally, it is estimated that a total of $7.6tr of individuals’ wealth sits offshore. If tax were paid on the income that this wealth generates, an extra $190 billion would be available to governments every year.”
Source: 62 people own the same as half the world, reveals Oxfam Davos report | Oxfam International
“Art is not like science, it’s not like mathematics… it doesn’t improve. The work that was done in 2000 B.C. is as relevant as art today. And that’s the fascinating thing about art. That’s a conundrum. There is no new invention…This work is valid.”
Early Bronze Age (Iran or Mesopotamia). Head of a ruler, ca. 2300–2000 B.C. Copper alloy. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1947
Beautiful.
https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/emilie_wapnick_why_some_of_us_don_t_have_one_true_calling.html
On a personal note, I had my Ordination Council meeting yesterday. It was an intensely personal time, but it was something that I’ve been working towards for a long time.
I can’t go into specifics, but one of the themes I addressed is “why” I’d want to go through this if I weren’t necessarily going to participate in something like parish ministry (or “being a preacher” as we call it here in South Carolina).
That has to do with my long time intention of finally launching Hunger Initiative.
Between the terrible disaster that has affected South Carolina and my hometown of Columbia over the past week, and my ordination process (being formally ordained this Sunday) … it feels like “things have changed” (to channel Bob Dylan).
That doesn’t mean like I’m putting Harrelson Agency aside (certainly not), but it does mean that it’s time to get Hunger Initiative off the ground. I first started talking about this during my days in Connecticut back in December 2001. It’s time and I’ve been putting this off for too long.
You can follow along at Hunger Iniative‘s site or @endhunger on Twitter … snagged that one early 🙂
Leo Laporte and the TWiT team are doing 24 hours of New Years celebrations with folks Skyping in from time zones around the globe today (started at 6 AM EST with New Zealand and going until Thursday morning at 6 AM with Jarvis Island in the Pacific).
It’s pretty amazing to watch a traditionally tech focused network branch out into music (a gospel band just played), live acts, magicians, etc along with interspersed tech talks.
Tune in throughout the day… it’s pretty amazing and competes with anything else you’ll see on TV:
Email newsletters seem like such a quaint and out-of-date form of marketing, but they are incredibly effective because 1) people still rely on email more than most anything else for relevant info and 2) email has a personal connection in the same way our phones once did.
That doesn’t mean that blasting out emails with no relevancy or context is a successful strategy. Like anything else in the world of marketing, connection matters most.
The NY Times agrees…
With an email, there is a presumption of connection, of something personal, that makes it a good platform for publishers. Newer email newsletter outfits like TinyLetter, which MailChimp owns, are simple, free and easy to use. TinyLetter has over 100,000 users who reach 9.3 million subscribers, and it has had an increase of 15 percent in the number of newsletters sent in the last year.
via For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated – NYTimes.com.
We’re big fans of MailChimp at Harrelson Agency and use their services for a number of our clients. If you want to get your start with email newsletters, they are a good place to start (and understand the power of mobile!).
Building an email newsletter is a fantastic thing for your business. In fact, it’s a must. Email is still a very active and viable channel for marketing and with free/cheap tools such as MailChimp, Constant Contact or Awebber, it’s easier than ever to organize and send email newsletters.
Whether your list size is 50 or 5,000, you need to be segmenting your list. That means splitting it up into various sub-lists based on relevance and groupings.
Even with small business lists of only 50 addresses, we commonly segment those into “leads,” “potential leads,” and “previous customers” with each segment receiving their own variation of the newsletter.
It works.
And here’s some data to back me up…
When I conducted a survey about email marketing, I asked respondents to tell me, in a free-form text field, why they chose to subscribe to emails from some companies. One of the most common responses I received was that they expected the emails were going to be relevant to their interests. 38% of respondents specifically referenced the word “relevance,” and one especially well-worded response indicated that content should be “particularly and specifically” relevant to them.
via New Data Proves Why You Need to Segment Your Email Marketing.
Testing out mobile pics upload with new home theme (will delete!)
Love this place… Despite the mosquito swarm I encountered (tried my best Finn from Adventure Time to no avail).
Now covered in mosquito welps welts (thanks, Elisabeth) but well worth the pain.
http://foursquare.com/v/4bd8aad32e6f0f47c50d0808 via foursquare
http://foursquare.com/v/4b65ccc9f964a52073002be3 via foursquare
It’s insanely interesting to me how quickly people are replacing the “sharing cred” feature that once made Google Reader very valuable with Feedly…
Tips for Google Reader users migrating to feedly | Building Feedly: “When you hover on an article or inline it, you should see a bookmark icon. We call it the save for later icon. It functions similarly to the Google Reader star mechanism.”
When Google Reader was in its prime, one of the most fascinating features was seeing how many times an article had been shared or favorited etc… now Feedly is picking up that slack and it’s really going to take off as a result.
Google missed a huge opportunity by shutting down Reader.
Like a number of others, I couldn’t wait to get a Nexus 4.
As a recent Android convert, I have been jealous of those with stock Android installs on their mobiles. My Samsung Galaxy S3 looks and acts mored like a Samsung phone than a “Google phone,” and rightly so. Samsung is making those devices so that’s their decision. Of course, there are ways to root and flash mods to get a more streamlined and stock Android experience, but as someone fresh from the Apple orchard, I was hoping for a little more ease.
The Nexus 4 is also an unlocked phone. That means I can sign-up with TMobile or ATT here in the US and pop in a sim card without a worry for carrier fees or a 2 year contract.
That’s a scary proposition for most folks. I’d make the correlation between deciding to “cut the cord” with your cable tv and go the route of using an AppleTV or Roku or a laptop or Mac Mini or XBox or PS3 etc as the main source of your entertainment. I “cut the cord” back in 2003 and haven’t looked back. I’ve loved the freedom of using an AppleTV for some content, my beloved Roku for other content, an XBox 360 for some things and finally a laptop with an HDMI connection. I have a state-of-the-art huge TV and it feels right to me (and simpler) to use those boxes to get the shows I want to watch.
The same goes with cutting a connection to a mobile phone carrier. As an experiment with this new Nexus 4, I signed up for a $30 a month pre-paid TMobile 4G plan. I can ramp that up or down as needed. I can go grab an ATT account if I want. There’s no commitment and that’s awesome. I rarely “talk” on my phone so 100 mins for me are probably too many. However, the unlimited texting and unlimited browsing (4G speeds up to first 5 gigs) are the real winners for me. There are more expensive plans, of course. I’m assuming most people need more than 100 minutes of talk time for their phones. However, with Google Voice on my laptops and Skype, I don’t do much in the way of using a phone as a phone.
That takes me to the final part of this transformation… porting my number over to Google Voice. With a $30 a month plan in place that I’m really enjoying, I’ve decided to take the plunge and get away from my Verizon account by porting my number over to Google Voice and using that as my main telephony.
I love Google Voice and have been a long-time user of the service since it was called GrandCentral back in 2005 and not affiliated with Google. When Google did acquire the service in 2007 I was hopeful about it’s future and how Google could reinvent texting and telephony just as it changed email forever with GMail.
It has been a slow progression, but as a steady Google Voice user over the years I’ve been waiting for the right set of circumstances to make the leap to using the service as my full time provider (in a sense) rather than just the extra number that some of my closest friends have.
With this awesome T-Mobile plan, an amazing Nexus 4 device that I’m literally head-over-heels about and the always-there passion to cut the cord to Verizon, now’s the time.
I just started the porting process and will keep updating on how things go.
From 2008:
The vanishing personal site – Jeffrey Zeldman: “Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments.”
From this week in 2012:
The Web We Lost – Anil Dash: “The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we’ve lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.”
We’ve lost a great deal indeed.
Lots to ponder between these last four years and these two complimentary bookends on the handing over of our namespaces and personal sites to venture capital funds, eager stock buyers and corporate silos.
And yes, I miss Technorati as well.
Painful.
I’m noting this here for my own needs as I’ll certainly have to follow this breadcrumb trail again.
If you are looking or have consolidate a bunch of email addresses into one Google Apps account, there’s nothing more sweeter than having that account work just as well on iOS as it does in your browser app (or Apple Mail if you will):
Handling Multiple Email Addresses with Gmail and iOS: “When I started adopting Getting Things Done and Inbox Zero, I decided to consolidate my numerous email accounts. For a few, this meant wrapping them up or forwarding them along, never to think of the account again. For others, like my personal and work email, as well as various customer service and sales email accounts that I monitor, it meant that I needed to find a way to receive everything in one inbox, while sending my replies back from the proper account.”
See also:
Solved: Gmail, iPad, iPhone, and multiple from addresses – Modern Nerd: “After much Googling, dribbling, and head bangering, I’ve managed to get around this in a way that works great on the iPad and iPhone. I thought I’d combine the various hints and tips I’ve discovered to put them in one place, then add some screenshots to make it more useful to others who’ve been driven nuts by the same issue.”
Then:
James’ Ubiquitous Blog – Journal – Making multiple ‘From’ email addresses on iOS my bitch without adding extra accounts: “This all came about because of work. I got a call from a client that we regularly work with asking if it’s possible to consolidate his some 20 email accounts into one of his Google Apps accounts (this also works with regular Gmail accounts too) while still being able to reply and send from the individual addresses. As it turns out this can be quite tricky but I managed to find an article that outlined the steps perfectly, or so I thought to begin with.”
Sounds geeky, but it’s a great 5 min solution to an otherwise incredibly annoying workflow issue for those of us with too many email accounts.
You can’t argue with this type of closure…
Closure « Steve Blank: “Fast forward 15 years. Retired for a year, I ran across an article that said, ‘$35 Million Dollar Supercomputer For Sale for Scrap.’ It was the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Cray Y-MP that had beaten me at Ardent. It was for sale on Ebay.
I bought the Cray.
It took two semi-trailers to deliver it.”
Great story (read the links as well).
So sad… Twitter was once that coral reef service we could all bet on:
LoopInsight: IFTTT to End Twitter Triggers: In an e-mail sent to users, IFTTT’s CEO Linden Tibbets said that the service will be removing all Twitter “Triggers” on September 27, 2012 – a direct result of recently-published changes to how Twitter is allowing third-party developers to work with their service.
As goes selfishness, so goes the web.
Disappointed, but hopefully the Squarespace team will listen to Daniel…
Red Sweater Blog – State Of The Squarespace: “It came as a surprise when Squarespace 6 was released earlier this year, that support for 3rd party editors such as MarsEdit was dropped from the service.”
We use Squarespace (6) for the HarrelsonAgency site and I’m hopeful they’ll follow through on his first suggestion.
A little too much like New Coke.
