Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Cal Newport Common wisdom suggests that if you love what you do you'll do just fine. I've found that while passion for your chosen line of work is certainly important - if you don't get good and what you do and people don't value what you do - money will not necessarily follow. My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, Cal Newport author of So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, takes this even farther to suggest that skill, not passion, is the key to successfully finding work your love. The problem with “Follow your passion” it that it assumes you have preexisting passion and that if you match this passion to your job you’ll enjoy that job. Newport advocates cultivating your passion as a more realistic approach. “Cultivate” implies that you work toward building passion for your job. It requires you to approach your work like a crafstman. Honing your ability, and then leveraging your value, once good, to shape your working life toward the type of lifestyle that resonates with you. Cultivating a passion requires you to try new things in order to discover what you're good at and then take the time to get so good you come to enjoy it. This approach is a lot like starting a business. In the beginning you have an idea about who you want to serve and what you want the business to become, but quite often as you experiment with how to build it you find that it naturally evolves into something very different.

Marketing Podcast with Kim McDonald Some people learn by reading, some by doing and some by seeing. And yet, a great deal of planning and process developed by organizations comes in the form of the dry written word only. I happen to be one of those visual learners. If given the choice between a map and set of directions, I'll take the map every time. If given the choice between a story to illustrate a point and an explanation, I'll take the story every time. My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Kim McDonald, author of Storytelling4 Entrepreneurs Workbook. Storytelling4 is an innovative, creative approach to planning and communicating your business strategy. The Storytelling4 Entrepreneurs Workbook is a visual planning guide for today’s fast-paced, “no-time-to-read” business environment. As the name implies the workbook helps entrepreneurs turn strategy into stories and pictures. Stories captivate and images often simplify - simple, captivating strategy is often the missing piece for business owners. Use this workbook to create your elevator pitch, sales presentation, ad message and overall strategy in the language that attracts customers and employees alike. She even shows you how to turn the numbers into a story. McDonald's approach is one that should appeal to entrepreneurs of all stripes.

Podcasting saw a huge renaissance in 2013 as major content producers woke up to the ease or production and portability afforded the spoken word. It didn't hurt that Apple made the podcast app a default app of the iPhone IOS either. I've been podcasting since some time in 2006 and I still find it one of the best ways to gain access to people of influence. In continuing my year end wrap up I present the most popular podcast episodes throughout 2013. These were judged most popular by virtue of the number of downloads each received. 1. People Don’t Share Brochures, They Share Stories - In this August episode author Jonah Berger talks about what makes something go viral - Contagious: Why Things Catch On 2. Reboot Your Business and Your Life - For this May show I spoke with Mitch Joel about the future of business - Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends 3. How I Podcast and Why I Think You Should - In May I did a solo show talking about how I do my show and why I think others should podcast - great tool for though leadership and sales! (You can hear a replay of this one by clicking the playing above.) 4. Nobody Talks About Boring Businesses - For this March show I spoke with Bernadette Jiwa about how to make your ideas stand out - Make Your Idea Matter: Stand out with a better story 5. How to Play More and Work and Why You Must - For this March show I spoke with Jonathan Fields - check out his The Good Life Project for some real inspiration. You can find the entire year of podcasts here. So, who would you love to hear me interview in 2014?

Marketing podcast with Jason Fried My youngest daughter works for a tech start-up based in San Francisco. Only thing is, she's never been to San Francisco. She lives in Spokane Washington and arrived home for Christmas this year to spend a full three weeks hanging out with her parents. Oh, and she's busy working for that San Francisco start-up right now in the other room. That's the new world of work we live in and I for one think it's an amazing time. My dad still gives me a puzzling look when I quip that my office is anywhere I can get an Internet connection, but the reality is major, major businesses are being build on the backs of a remote workforce. My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 Signals (makers of Basecamp) and author of Remote: Office Not Required. Fried and his business partner David Heinemeier Hansson have built a wildly successful company with offices in Chicago, but workers strewn about several continents. According to Fried work doesn't happen at work in the traditional office setting and far too often organizations constrained by geographical hiring must compromise on the talent they can attract. It's pretty funny to see people who trek to coffee shops and libraries to get "real" work done because the interruption of meetings and availability in the office make it impossible to actually think about a project of any scope. Of course, remote work requires a shift in culture, a new set of tools and more than anything, sharp focus. You've got to work harder at staying connected with remote workers. You've got to work harder at reinforcing the culture of remote work and remote productivity. Fried talks about developing the ability to pick up when something isn't quite right with a staff member from the tone of email. Buffer, a social media start-up with a number of remote workers, posted this great advice on tools for remote work. Zapier, an API integration provider, also with a mostly remote workforce, chronicled their best practices for managing remote teams here. The office of today just might not be an office at all. I for one would be fine with that little cabin in the Colorado foothills!

Marketing podcast with Jeffrey K. Rohrs Click here to view a transcript of the podcast interview.  Audio file transcribed by Rev.com I was recently asked to help a mid sized software company devise a marketing plan. This organization claims they just don’t get marketing, and no one at the organization really owns it, so they struggle. Of course struggle is a relative concept. They have a head of sales, head of service and head of product – all of whom do marketing. In fact, I believe that’s the tricky part these days – it’s harder to determine where marketing lives because it’s really everyone’s job. This organization, as you may have picked up, does not have a head of marketing and that’s an issue that’s starting to cause them some heartburn. I don’t believe I’ll recommend they create a CMO position, however. They actually have many core marketing functions successfully distributed across the organization. What they don’t have though, is what I might call a head of audience development. They don’t have anyone driving their CEO’s incredible thought leadership. They don’t have anyone in charge of owned, paid and earned media assets. They don’t have anyone who’s primary concern is building an audience drawn to their unique approach to addressing the challenges of a rapidly evolving industry. My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Jeffrey K. Rohrs. He is the Vice President of Marketing Insights for ExactTarget, a salesforce.com company, and author of AUDIENCE: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers In Audience, Rohrs boldly claims states that, “proprietary audience development is now a core marketing responsibility,” and I concur. An engaged audience is an essential driver of value. Organizations that build, nurture and serve an audience will outflank and outprofit their competitors every time. Your clients will likely come from your audience but so will your referrals, partners, shares, mentions and permission to pitch your goods. An audience can elevate an organization’s brand by pushing their message through industry influencers. An audience can pull business through channels by clamoring for goods and services in social media. Of course, Rohrs is also quick to point out that an audience is a gift and unless you treat it as such you will lose it. “We don’t own our audiences. They can leave at any time. We cannot force them to engage in our content. They’ve given us a great gift… we must be sure to thank them every day with epic content marketing.” Every marketer today must understand this significant shift in thinking and embrace community and audience building as a significant initiative – or perhaps even elevate audience development to a stand alone function.

Marketing Podcast with Tom Rath By now you've read or heard one or more of the reports about the negative health impact of sitting hunched over a computer all day. No? Here's one from the Mayo Clinic and here's another from Lifehacker. While many...

Marketing podcast with Tony Stubblebine The subject of habits is something I've written about often. In past shows with Charles Duhrigg, author of The Power of Habit and Tom Asacker, author of The Business of Belief we hit this topic pretty hard. There's a reason I talk about the impact of habits on a small business blog - I think to a large degree habits determine the direction and destination of your business. Everyone uses habits as an operating mechanism. Drug dealers and millionaires are both guided by habits - they're just different habits. Habits either guide us in a positive direction or they hold us back. The key to success then in pretty much any area of business and life is to simply identify and adopt the most positive habits possible. No matter what your goal, there's a direct correlation between habits and routines and the behavior change they instill and achieving your goals. My guest for today's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Tony Stubblebine, Founder of a new community called Lift.do. Why did Tony start Lift? "The genesis of Lift was the realization that we could all be super human if we could make willpower obsolete. I dropped everything else I was doing to follow this idea." Lift.do is a self improvement community featuring "plans" designed to help you change your habits in just about any area of life - health, productivity, mindfullness, communication. You simply sign up, create goals, pick a related plan and track your progress either online or through the iPhone or Android app. You can also choose to get support and encouragement from friends or the Lift community at large based on your progress. Habits are hard to form and hard to break, but in order to make progress towards our goals we often have to shake up our routine and get out doing the same things without though. Using tools like Lift.do and support of like-minded friends is a powerful way to started down the path to establishing behavior that will serve your business and your life in the long run. Want to thank Tony for being my guest? Click here to say thanks on Twitter. (Stole that idea from Pat Flynn because it's such a good one.)

Marketing interview with Alexis Ohanian Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman founded the social bookmarking site reddit shortly after graduating from the University of Virginia. They sold it a year later to media giant Condé Nast. You've seen the movie, that's kind of how Facebook got started as well. So, to answer the question posed in my title today - yes, college is very important as a vehicle for entrepreneurship, but not because the case studies used in Marketing 101 teach anyone how to launch a product. College for the entrepreneur has always been more about community and connections and learning how to try stuff out. That's why coworking spaces, startup villages, mentoring programs and incubators make so much sense for the aspiring entrepreneur. For this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast I spent some time with Ohanian to talk about his recent book - Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed. Ohanian has become a bit of a poster child for the under 30 entrepreneur set. In less than a decade his business accomplishments would make up a pretty solid career. What I like most about his story though is that he's thrown himself head first into causes that excite him (Stop SOPA and Mister Splashy Pants) along the way. That, I think, is the real promise of no permission needed. In fact, he describes himself as a start up guy with the aim of making the world suck less! He's currently on something like a 150 stop tour that includes a great number of stops at colleges where he is spreading a message of hope and inspiration and advice for how to take advantage of the opportunities present right now. Today, anyone with an idea and some timing can disrupt an entire industry. Today, anyone can sit at a keyboard or draw stick like figures that incite a movement or create a business where nothing previously existed. Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void takes on the lunacy of work through what some might call doodles and millions join his community. Allie Brosh shares her simple drawings and amazingly dry sense of humor at Hyperbole and a Half and writes about very real things like her very real battle with depression and routinely draws thousands of comments with each submission. Her book Hyperbole and a Half was an instant best seller! Like so many other institutions the higher education system in this country is under assault. The same permissionless innovation that allowed Ohanian and Huffman to create reddit is poised to tear down any industry that won't tear itself down and embrace the fundamental shift in the way people learn, create, build and grow. I believe we are headed into a generation where entrepreneurship will be the defining attribute of society.

Marketing Podcast with Jeff Korhan See, I still get asked that kind of question pretty much every day. "You know, that social media stuff is important, just no one in my industry is using it." I stopped being geeked up about social media some years ago, but that's because about then I realized social media had firmly become a behavior instead of a tool or a tactic. It's no longer what you do, it's part of how you do everything. I for one don't think you have to concede that social media is hip and important and all that, but you can't really build a business today without employing it. Let me restate that not for emphasis, but for clarity. A great deal of what goes on in social media is silly, pointless and wasteful and yet you can't survive without it. Oh I guess you can survive, but is that really the point? Your customers need you to use social media to serve them, figure out how to deliver what they need and communicate in real time. Your employees need you to use social media to connect them, keep them informed and allow them to participate in building the brand. Search engines need you to use social media to demonstrate authority, network, share and  attract links so they can figure out where and how to index your content. This week I visited with Jeff Korhan, author of Built In Social about how social media use has evolved to the point where it's not something you consider as part of your marketing or business plan it's something that just is - it's like the oil in the engine - you must add it in, the only consideration is the weight and the maker. When you look at social media as a tool to do what you're already doing, better, faster and in a way that benefits the customer, I think it's pretty clear how important it is in the process of building a business. Once you can move past the hype, move past the resistance and move past the tool of the week thinking, you can begin to bake social media behavior into your marketing and business building in ways that simply serve the customer. Do that and you'll come to realize you cannot live without social.

Marketing podcast with Scott Stratten So here's the money question really. Have we gotten more stupider or has social media just made it seem so? I think it's the latter. People, and by that I mean me too, have always done silly things in the name of marketing, but now they do silly things, get caught and are subject to global public humiliation at the hands of YouTubers and Twits. One person who has dedicated some portion of his life to cataloging many a really bad idea gone worse is Scott Stratten. Stratten is my guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. He is the founder of the Toronto based firm Unmarketing and author of the book by the same name. Scott and I chatted about his most recent book - QR Codes Kill Kittens: How to Alienate Customers, Dishearten Employees, and Drive Your Business into the Ground. Stratten spends most of his time these days presenting his findings before audiences of marketers and social media addicts. His presentations come off more like stand up comedy than your traditional business presentation although the message is real and useful. He blends is personal ability to add humor to material you really couldn't make up even if you tried. In QR Codes Stratten highlights how many businesses get online marketing so very wrong, mostly by trying to do something that no one, not even the perpetrator's mother, would approve of. I think that's the greatest lesson contained in studying how people abuse marketing. Much of what works and what does not work is common sense, good manners and reasonable taste. Where people often cross out of bounds is when they forget that any form of marketing must be useful in some way for the customer or prospect or it will miss the mark. Your marketing must inform, provide insight, entertain and educate. It must not boast, criticize, self-congratulate, shout or kill kittens. It's not really that hard, although sometimes we make it seem so. Reader note: Get Scott's book and prepare to laugh out loud while being reminded just how fragile our seemingly good marketing ideas might be. I read a lot of books on my Kindle but this is one I would suggest you invest in the paper.

Marketing podcast with Dan Schawbel When it comes to hiring business owners want to find people with the skills they need to do the job. In that regard there are many positions where a set of predetermined skills are generally accepted as the “natural fit.” If you need a technical position filled you look for someone with coding or math. If you need a sales person you look for that outgoing type and so on. While an aptitude for the job is an obvious consideration, there are so many other harder to find skills that are perhaps more important. I had a coworker years ago that was painfully shy, very quite and almost non existent in many discussions. But then, towards the end of a long, drawn out meeting she would say something and the entire room would change. She would usually start off with, “I don’t know, but seems like we should just . . . ” More times than not, it was the profound solution to what we had all been wrestling with. On the surface this individual seemed to lack some of the skills many people look for, but what she possessed was an incredible knack of leadership and strategic thinking. These are skills that are hard to teach and even harder to find. These, what some might call soft skills, are what makes an employee valuable to your organization and they are the skills you need to look for in those you hire. In Re-Imagine, Tom Peters famously coined the term “hire freaks” to highlight the notion of finding people with the kind of innate skills that bring much more to a situation than the traditional profile of, say, a salesperson or customer service person. My coworker certainly fit the notion of freak – she was socially awkward, seemingly misplaced and completely full of the kind of insight sorely lacking in most organizations. You need leaders, people who can make the right decisions on their own, people who can communicate complex ideas in simple ways and people who can build relationships. For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visited with Dan Schawbel, author of Promote Yourself, The New Rules For Career Success. Dan has made a name for himself helping his generation (Gen Y) understand how to get ahead in their careers. At the same time he’s established himself as an expert on the generation for those business leaders seeking to understand how to work with and retain workers under 30. In Promote Yourself, he spends a great deal of time outlining the virtues of soft skills for those who want to get noticed and promoted. Obviously the book is written for the person looking to boost their career, but employers would be wise to read it for the lessons it contains in hiring people with the right stuff. Non-traditional behavior of freaks Want to hire someone with the skills needed to add value in today’s business world. Look for individuals who: Come with customer service backgrounds and a demonstrated desire to create better customer experiences Come with social media strategy backgrounds and get how to engage customers with content Come with an analytics background and revel in the role of playing mad scientist with the reams of data every business can produce and uncover You must look for, test for and screen for these natural behaviors in the quest to find your best salespeople, service people and project people no matter if you are hiring consultants or plumbers.

Marketing Podcast with Dan Zarrella Twitter has been with us for a while now - about a century in Internet years. While it has changed and grown and evolved into a staple of the media landscape, many marketers have grown to effectively tap Twitter in a handful of useful ways as well. I know, blogging about Twitter? How 2007 of me. (Just for fun have a look back at an eBook I wrote on Twitter in 2009 - Twitter for Business - lots of services no longer exist but the content is still mostly relevant.) Like most Internet tools and social networks things change and there are always new and better ways to use them meet your objectives. Now, mind you I didn't say right and wrong ways because, frankly, there is no right or wrong way, only the way that serves your unique objectives. For my view some Twitter best practices look like this. Consider objectives The first thing you must do in order to use Twitter effectively is to clearly state and understand why you're using it at all. For me, it's a tool to amplify my own content, filter and aggregate other people's content and network for links and conversations. I always share content I've written, content and ideas I'm wrestling with and eight to ten pieces of content from others that I think is useful. Share routinely There are two primary reasons I share on Twitter. 1) - my hope is that people that follow me on Twitter appreciate that I find good marketing related content for them and save them the work of rooting it out themselves 2) - my other hope is that some of the people who's content I share will at least consider whether my content is worth sharing. Networking in this manner is simply one form of the new link building. However, it's still networking and will fail if the only goal is reciprocation. Think value and links will come. List wisely Go out today and put your customers, competitors, partners and media sources on Twitter lists so it's easy to keep up on what they are doing, asking, sharing and requiring on Twitter. Employ 3rd party tools At the very least get a Hootsuite account so you can follow your lists easily. Also get a Buffer account to make sharing content buffered out through the day a snap. Use an RSS reader like ReederApp to make it easier to scan for sharable content. Head on over to Topsy and keep tabs on popular content others are sharing on Twitter. For this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I also sat down and chatted with Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella about some of his most recent findings on the finer points of Twitter use. Zarrella spends more time than anyone I know trying to get at what creates followers and engagement in social networks in a scientific way. His book The Science of Marketing delves into things like when and what to tweet. He's created an interesting little tool called ReTweetLab that lets you analyze any Twitter account and discover what works best, when and how to tweet and what calls to action generate the highest engagement. Dan's work across all networks is shared in his latest book - The Science of Marketing.

Marketing podcast with Ken Blanchard I feel like I'm reaching this funny crossroads in my business life. See, I've owned my own business for over 25 years and during the course of that span I've benefited from the inspiration of many mentors. I was always struck by the fact that the people I chose as mentors seemed to understand the responsibility and maybe even sense of duty that came with the fact that I elevated them to such a high level of trust. As I reflected on this post it became clear that my very first mentor was my father. I suppose most parents are viewed this way at some point whether they know it or not. As I watch him now fumble to even get his shoes laced, I know I still have something to learn from him. When I started my business, people like Peter Drucker, Harvey MacKay, Tom Peters and Ken Blanchard shaped my thinking and that of my generation in so many ways. Most are still alive but not actively mentoring the next generation. And that's the crossroads part I guess - as I look behind me I no longer see the legions of mentors who helped me get ahead and as I look forward I don't fully understand my role in doing the same for the next and the next. Today, people like Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson and Dan Pink have stepped into the shoes of the trusted minds for the next generation, but I wonder if they see themselves as mentors? I wonder if I see myself as a mentor, if I've done the things to earn that kind of trust from those that read my words and hear me speak? Do you consider yourself a mentor? Do you consider the fleeting value of trust each and every day? I don't have many answers today, just some things to think about. For this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I had the chance to interview one of my mentors - one who certainly fits into the class of someone who could be slowing down but shows little sign of it (actually a lesson in itself.) Ken Blanchard is the author of over 50 books, including the One Minute Manager and most recently, Trust Works!: Four Keys to Building Lasting Relationships, written with Cynthia Olmstead and Martha Lawrence. So, two question today I guess: 1) Who are your mentors and why? 2) Who are you mentoring and why?

Marketing podcast with Jonah Berger We don't always think of something that's contagious as such a good thing. When it comes to marketing these days, however, it's a very good thing. Getting something catch on or "go viral" is one of the most powerf...

Marketing podcast with John Gerzema Sheryl Sandberg's runaway best seller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead has really caused some interesting discussions and debates about women in the workplace. It's funny to see how the divide on the book has a significant age curve - younger gen woman don't seem to think along the Lean In lines - but I digress. Shortly after Lean In came out another fascinating book by John Gerzema, a pioneer in the use of data to identify social change, called The Athena Doctrine: How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future was published and in my opinion hits more fruitful issues with regard to gender and the workplace. Gerzema and I sat down to discuss his work on this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. In some ways I wish the extensive research and writing of this book had been done by a woman, but the point that Gerzema is making is that it's traits that are generally attributed to women that leaders must understand and embrace - that feminine values can solve our toughest problems and build a more prosperous future. So, instead of "acting more like a man" to get ahead, as some suggest Sandberg is promoting, Gerzema suggests we should all "act more like the positive traits of women." And, I for one, couldn't agree more! Below is a talk Gerzema delivered on his findings and implications of these findings in politics, business and social reform.