Month: January 2018

  • The Human Backlash Against AI is Coming

    Artificial intelligence promises – and continues to deliver on – increased productivity, reduced costs, faster time-to-market, and boosted revenue. From completing healthcare datasets to predicting marketing outcomes, AI and machine learning will play a role in the future of nearly every successful business. However, not everyone will want to deal with machines all the time.…

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  • The Purpose of Modern Marketing

    The purpose of modern marketing is to fuel our referral engine. Referrals – word of mouth recommendations – are what truly power a business. Our best new customers come from… our best current customers. If the referral engine isn’t generating new business for us, then our product or service isn’t good enough to generate word…

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  • 3 Markets You Need to Know

    We use the term marketing often, but we rarely talk about markets, the groups of people we market to. What does our market look like? Who’s in our market? If we don’t know who our market is, we’ll spend hours and dollars in vain, failing to generate results. On the other hand, if we know exactly…

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  • Friday Fun: Lockpicking

    As I recently posted on Instagram, I bought my family a lockpicking training set. Lockpicking is an essential skill that every child and parent should know. From accidentally locking your keys in the house to ensuring our children have the skills to escape a bad situation, lockpicking literally opens doors. Obviously, some folks are uncomfortable…

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  • How To Get Your Next Marketing Job

    Ishmael asked, … I see people with no experience get jobs at the top agencies whereas I am struggling. For example, recently I got denied a job due to the fact that I wore a suit and the agency didn’t like that. Do you have an advice as to how I should approach interviews and…

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  • The Golden Rule of Sales

    The secret to successful sales is found in the Jewish Midrash, circa 600 CE: “If speech is silvern, then silence is golden”. Your chances of winning a sale are directly proportional to how much the prospective customer speaks. The more they speak, the more likely you’ll win. The more you speak, the less likely you’ll…

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  • A Video Tour of the New Google Search Console Beta

    Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is undergoing an interface refresh. Much has changed – new reports and reporting capabilities, new visibility into sitemap errors, and lots of missing stuff that hasn’t been ported from the old version of the software. In this video tour, join me as I walk through what’s…

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  • The Power of Small AI and Small Data

    AI is touted as the solution to problems beyond the scope and scale of what humanity could solve on its own in a timely manner. From finding needles in haystacks such as one face in a billion photos to coordinating fleets of autonomous vehicles, AI will likely fulfill many of the promises made on its…

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  • Owned Media Options for Facebook Marketers

    I’ve said for years that you own nothing in social media – and that social networks WILL change the rules of the game to their benefit, not yours. In the wake of changes in Facebook’s algorithm, suppressing unpaid brand posts, some marketers are asking, “what options do we have?”. Facebook – and other social networking…

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  • Friday Foodblogging: My Favorite Coffees

    I love coffee. It’s one of my favorite beverages along with sparkling water, and as vices go, it’s relatively harmless. The best coffee is coffee that’s made properly, and the Italians have a great expression for that, which Alton Brown covered on a fabulous Good Eats episode back in the day: La Miscela La Macinazione…

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