Grow The Dream Show | Podcast Archive

In this episode, we recount the story of Grow The Dream Show and invite you into the conversation to help shape its future!

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In-store conversions come to Facebook Ads, which add a whole new dimension to your ability to track ad performance if you have a retail location. We also talk about some updates and tricks for Snapchat. Today’s main story, however, is about why many businesses fail to get good media coverage for their businesses. We dissect a great Medium post originally written for startups, and glean insights you can use to be more effective in your efforts to communicate with the press. We also discuss the grammatical structure known as the “in-fix,” the pros and cons of getting a college education, and… time-sucks. This is painful, but all of us have time-sucks in our life. So a time management tool can be very effective in identifying where your time is going. And a little depressing, maybe.

News

* Previously, we talked about Google adding “store visit conversions” to Google Adwords. Well, it turns out Facebook also helps track store visits and it may work better than Google’s product for retail locations that don’t have enormous geographic footprints the way that big box stores and massive car dealerships do. Facebook also has an API that allows point-of-sale (POS) systems to communicate transaction data back, which could allow for highly detailed measurement of ROI on Facebook ads.

* Not long ago, Snapchat added “Memories,” which allows you to go back and find some of your previous posts.  And, just for fun, we talk about some Snapchat tips & tricks, including how to “stack” filters. We also discuss on-demand Geofilters for Snapchat, which can be purchased for very specific geographic locations to promote your brand, event, or whatever else you can dream up!

Show Notes

After talking about The Great Courses on Audible—particularly The Secret Life of Words from Professor Anne Curzan, Ph.D., English professor at the University of Michigan—we talk about the importance and value of a college education in today’s world, the ROI, and other facets of how having the college experience and getting degree may affect your life.

Josh brought us a Medium post from Dave Gerhardt on Why Most Startups Suck at PR, which focuses on the human element of your approach to PR. Most startups and, really, others are just bad at getting publicity. They aim too high or use the wrong pitch about themselves. Both of these are setups for failure.

The keys are to go after media that is relevant to the audience you are after — including podcasts, bloggers, even speaking engagements — and then pitch your authentic self and story. And look for news pegs in trends. Make it useful for the media audience you are trying to convince.

Tool of the Day

Rod brings us ATracker from Wonder Apps. This iOS app makes the process of logging your time significantly easier. Use it to identify the places in your day where you’re losing time to unproductive activities without realizing it. Rod reports that the setup process is relatively easy and the reporting is quite powerful.

Facebook has announced some coming changes that will drastically affect the visibility of posts from Pages of all kinds. The fact that they bothered to announce this in advance is in itself worthy of note. We discuss the implications of the announcement, and look at ways to ensure your content still gets distributed to Facebook users. We also look at a fantastic content marketing campaign being steadily implemented old-school-style by a Chiropractor — his approach puts some great ones to shame! You’ll be certain to pick up a thing or two you can use,

In the news, we have a surprising tidbit about Brexit, a scary court ruling about the FBI and your computer, plus a great tool of the day!

News

* It turns out that some of the major architects behind the media & publicity for the “Leave” campaign in the UK were none other than Washington D.C. PR firm Goddard Gunster, who were credited for huge social media visibility, among other things.

* A US District Judge has ruled that the FBI does not need a warrant to hack your computer. The case in question was a despicable child pornography case, but what sort of precedent do cases like this one set? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) issued a scathing response which, in part, said that, “…the decision underscores a broader trend in these cases: courts across the country, faced with unfamiliar technology and unsympathetic defendants, are issuing decisions that threaten everyone’s rights.”

* An estimated 69.8 million Americans will be using ad blockers by the end of 2016, more than 25% of US internet users.

Show Notes

Is this local chiropractor better at content marketing (offline) than most digital marketers and entrepreneurs? We discuss his fantastic method for reaching a highly targeted audience of potential patients, and break down why it works so you can steal, adapt, and otherwise use his ideas.

A few weeks ago, Facebook made a big announcement about what will be happening shortly with the organic reach of Facebook Pages. The change no doubt comes as a result of Facebook’s efforts to try to reverse the decline in personal sharing and continue to keep its users as engaged as possible. The bottom line: the organic reach of posts from your Facebook Page will likely be trivial unless those posts are shared.

The New York Times take on the same announcement? You won’t see much “news” in your news feed.

Aside: Radiolab episode, The Trust Engineers, examines the work of and goes behind the scenes with some of Facebook’s data scientists.

Tools of the Week

Even though he wasn’t with us this week, Josh provided us a great tool of the week: The Effin Amazing UTM Builder. This is an extension for Google Chrome that makes creating UTM links much easier.

A federal Appeals Court ruled 2-1 that the Federal Communications Commission can regulate the internet like it does your local utility. The idea is to keep quasi-monopoly internet companies from offering different speeds to different providers based on their willingness to pay for it. Basic capitalism, in one sense, but giving the “big guys” an advantage over the “little guys,” in another sense. The big risk is that this opens up the internet to more and more intrusion on any number of issues by government regulators. Bottom line: Looks good on this ruling, but much risk down the road.

We also discuss the results of a data study by ahrefs.com suggesting at least a very high correlative relationship between backlinks and referring domains and SEO results. In fact, those relationships are in the neighborhood of five times higher than domain names and titles. This is connected to the concept of latent semantic keywords. Bottom line: Write good content for human beings.

News

* Live streaming is everywhere… and Facebook announced at VidCon last month that they will be experimenting with placing ads in Facebook Live videos.

* YouTube is adding live streaming to their mobile apps, to supplement their existing live streaming support, which has been in place since 2011

* Facebook is paying some users to use Facebook Live video

* More than 25% of internet users will be blocking ads this year.

Show Notes

Net Neutrality & Government Regulation of the Internet

A federal appeals court ruled that internet service providers will be treated like utilities, subjecting them to government regulation. Much of the narrative about this case was focused on net neutrality, as the lower court had ruled that “…Internet providers such as Verizon and Comcast to obey federal regulations that ban the blocking or slowing of Internet traffic to consumers,” as reported by the Washington Post.

Should some big players be allowed to pay for “fast lanes” so their content is delivered more rapidly than other companies who can’t afford to pay for faster speeds? How would this affect small websites?

Another big question: should the government be allowed to regulate the internet at all?

On-Page SEO Factors, Latent Semantic Indexing, & Keyword Research

A recent study published by ahrefs originally featured the title, “On-Page SEO is Dead.” While they backed away from the click-bait title, the results of their study are pretty interesting. Exact-match keyword usage in many of the recommended “on-page SEO” tactics may not produce as much benefit as certain other factors, including good backlinks.

The study did not evaluate latent semantic indexing and the presence of keywords other than “exact match” keywords in the sites that they evaluated.

All of which brings us back around to the simple fact that we need to serve our readers (“customers” for our content) well. On that note, The Sales Lion published a great article on how to do keyword research without any keyword tools which helps ...

Great leadership skills start with relationships. That may seem obvious, but executive coach and founder of Transforming Leadership Steve Steff says that too many companies’ hiring processes and management tactics seem to totally exclude the relationship. If you are managing a team or a company, you need to relate to your team or employees.

Brew of the Day

Josh shares his pick for the day: Cafe Don Pablo Gourmet Coffee

News

In one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time, Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion in cash last week. We discuss the reasons behind the purchase—and the valuation. What does it mean for LinkedIn’s 430 million users?

About Steve Steff

Founder and President of Transforming Leadership, Dr. Steve Steff has served as consultant, counselor, and coach to executives from various companies for over two decades. Today, he and his team are dedicated to helping good leaders become great leaders.

Author of the powerful book The Business Card, Dr. Steff has helped transform the lives and leadership skills of countless leaders inside businesses from large to small.

Follow Dr. Steve Steff on Twitter

Show Notes

Often we are not aware that our business even has a culture—especially within smaller companies and organizations. But the behaviors we engage in and reward from day-to-day actually do create a culture.

Dr. Steff explores some of the ways that we can intentionally transform culture, including practical examples from some of the most important areas of our businesses (such as the hiring process). Along the way, he also shares powerful insights about the nature of leadership, the art of cultivating leadership skills, and other practical takeaways that you can put to use in your business right away.

Tools of the Day

Josh brings us some useful variations on a classic: the calendar app. With the “sunset” of the calendaring app, Sunrise, Josh wrote a post to explore some possible options, and shares them with us on today’s show.

* Microsoft Outlook

* Fantastical

* Plan

* Google Calendar

* Rolo Calendar

 

Today we’re thrilled to have back with us Dr. Jonah Berger, bestselling author and marketing professor at Wharton, talking about his brand new book, Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior. Based upon over 15 years of research, this new book explores how the individual, personal choices we make are often driven by others — and we’re completely unaware of it. With far-reaching application in business (and not just in marketing & sales, but in how you conduct meetings!), this interview will be one you’ll want to listen to more than once!

About Jonah Berger

Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Dr. Berger has spent over 15 years studying how social influence works and how it drives products and ideas to catch on. He’s published dozens of articles in top-tier academic journals, consulted for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, and popular outlets like the New York Times and Harvard Business Review often cover his work.

For more on Jonah:

* Visit his website

* Follow him on Twitter

* Check out our previous interview with him on Episode 21: The Science of Word of Mouth

Invisible Influence

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior releases today (June 14, 2016) and is available from your favorite bookseller.

Why do we make the choices we make? Why do we drive the car that we drive? Why do we fall in love with a certain person? What about the careers we choose? Or the foods we eat?

Often, it’s easy for us to see how other people’s choices might be influenced by the behavior of others, but we manage to be completely blind to how we ourselves are affected—whether in the things we’re drawn to or repelled from.

Jonah Berger does it again… combining research and data with a clear writing style that provokes thought and challenges assumptions.

And what does he have to say about conducting more effective meetings? Love at first sight? You’ll just have to listen! (Better yet: listen… and get the book!)

News

* Is Google secretly working to get Hillary Clinton elected President of the United States? Wikileaks founder Julian Assange claims (International Business Times) that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has founded a company with the purpose of doing exactly that, in addition to working closely with the Pentagon.

* At the very least, something fishy has been going on with the “autocomplete” function when Google searches for “Hillary Clinton criminal investigation” are run. While the search results do not appear to be affected, the autocomplete function does not seem to reflect the activity in Google trends, which shows that people are searching in large numbers for a phrase that has not been appearing in the “autocomplete” options.

* A fun tidbit from Small Business Trends: the 30 top cities for small businesses in the US:

Tools of the Week

* Jonah mentioned Stickk, which uses social influence and accountability to help you stick to the goals that you set and achieve them.

Well, we’ve never done this before. Seriously. Spent almost the entire episode discussing the interactions of generations and the implications of the big social media companies submitting to European Union rules on “hate speech” and committing to take down such speech within 24 hours. Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google all agreed to censor speech involving: “public incitement to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin.”

Can. Of. Worms.

News

* Amazon is now suing companies who pay for fake product reviews.

* Data is beautiful: where in the US are most people from out of state?

* Are there really 10 million Moms missing from the workplace? Is this a problem?

Show Notes

Where we got derailed was in a discussion of The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy — What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny by William Strauss and Neil Howe.

David originally brought this up to reflect upon the different social dynamics at play that worked to bring about the widely differing viewpoints held—at the macro level—by Millenials, as distinguished from those held by Gen Xers and Boomers.

Strauss & Howe, celebrated authors on generational topics prior to their collaboration, posited the theory that there are 4 generational archetypes which repeat themselves throughout the history of Western civilization, and which are likely to continue to repeat themselves due to the cycles of history which act upon and react against these 4 archetypes.

Even if the ideas in the book aren’t 100% accurate (it was written in 1997 and was looking forward), it’s worth a read for any marketer trying to understand the dynamics of these generations. For a summary, check out the Wikipedia article on the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory.

As a consequence of these cyclical characteristics, Millenials, though much aligned by Boomers and Xers, have a set of strengths that (David theorized) are uniquely suited to provide leadership in the days to come. Rod, of course, needs to see more evidence. Josh, on the other hand, has started to embrace his own status as a Millenial, and seems to have appreciated the efforts at defending his generation.

We got derailed on this topic for a while. Once we got back on track, Rod brought up this story about tech companies agreeing to censorship in the EU.

Tools of the Week

Need a press kit? Press Kit Hero to the rescue!

Emoji are no problem… when you’re on a mobile device. What about from your computer? If you’re on a Mac, Ctrl+Cmd+Spacebar allows you to pull up an emoji dialogue that you can use, but that might not be the most efficient. A new tool allows you to use Cmd+Spacebar and type emoji shortcuts. To use it, you need Alfred (paid) and the Alfred Emoji Pack (free). Meanwhile… David located the

Google revealed last week that AdWords can now track conversion to brick-and-mortar stores from an original online search.The implications could be a tidal wave for digital marketers. Google uses location history to see if, after clicking on an ad, you then walked into that store. Of course, Google does this using the phone’s GPS data. So we can now make ad comparisons to see which ads and types of ads and keywords will actually drive potential customers into a store. And we laugh with Chewbacca Mom, like the rest of the world, and cover news and Tools of the Week!

News

* Chewbacca Mom hits 150M views in just about one week.

* Facebook Live Video is now available for Facebook Pages via the Page Manager app.

* Josh got Instant Articles working on ThePitch.fm

* Google is phasing out support for Flash within Google Chrome (Fortune)

Show Notes

Google recently held its annual “Google Performance Summit” event, at which they made a number of announcements related to Google AdWords and Analytics. As a Google Partner, David was invited to view the live stream, and provides some insight into the event on this episode. Against a backdrop of data and intent, Google reiterated just how uniquely positioned they are to provide big value to businesses trying increase sales—both online and at brick and mortar.

Among the pronouncements made by Google:

* 1/3 of all mobile searches are related to location

* Local searches are growing 50% faster than searches overall

* The mobile evolution is no more. It’s now the mobile revolution… oh, and it already happened.

* Google has been in beta testing with its “Store Visits” metric in AdWords for 2 years. They have already measured over 1 billion store visits.

* Beta customers for this program include Target, where 97% of its customers shop digitally. 3/4 of Target shoppers begin online. (The vast majority of shoppers today begin on mobile… so their experience starts on a 5″ screen.) Target experienced that 1/3 of customers who clicked on a mobile ad came in for a store visit.

* Over 1 billion people are now using Google Maps. Google is testing ways to refine the location data within Google Maps so that accuracy increases beyond what is available from the device’s GPS unit. This includes Wi-Fi networks, beacons, and surveys.

* AdWords advertisers have an array of new options being made available to them. We’ll cover most of these on an upcoming show, but Larry Kim already published a reasonably thorough piece on the top 5 big changes.

Tools

Hemingboard is a keyboard for iOS—and now Mac (Android & Windows are in development)—that provides you synonyms, rhymes and puns while you type. Fun stuff!

ModernApp.co is back for another visit to the Tool of the Day segment. We’ve talked about them before, but now they have a Facebook chat bubble, which allows visitors to your site to message your Facebook Page via Facebook Messenger—just like a chat head from Facebook Messenger on mobile. If you answer later (after the visitor leaves your site), you’re in a real Facebook Messenger conversation.

So it turns out that Facebook’s Trending News minions have been tipping the scales of “newsworthy based” on their personal political biases. Being from Silicon Valley, they were monolithically liberal. This upset the conservative sphere. But then Mark Zuckerberg and others invite leading conservatives to a meeting to hear their concerns — an extraordinary event and evidence that Zuck and his team rightly view Facebook as a global information provider that has a responsibility to all of it users.

News

* On the heels of news that Chromebooks outsold Macs in the first quarter, making ChromeOS the 2nd desktop OS behind only Microsoft Windows, Google announced that the Google Play Store will be coming Chromebooks later this year!

* Waverly Labs announced a new in-ear device that provides real-time translation. It’s a Babel Fish! This week’s show is being released on Towel Day, which makes everything fit. (Also, David is now 42.)

* A bill was introduced in the House of Representatives a couple of months ago which would put an end to anonymous purchases of prepaid cell phones and SIM cards. H. R. 4886: Closing the Pre-Paid Mobile Device Security Gap Act of 2016 would require lots of identification and verification when these devices are purchased.

Show Notes

In a Medium piece entitled “Numbers Don’t Matter, Influence Does,” Gary Vaynerchuck explains why he focused all of the efforts around his new book entirely on Instagram users whose accounts show signs of engagement. Gary V argues that their actual follower count was less important than their “influence.” David recalls the 1000 True Fans article by Kevin Kelly from 2008.

Getting the perfect Instagram shot: Bros on Instagram from AwesomenessTV (video)

When will Virtual Reality play a role in your business? Josh shares the story of Magic Leap, a Florida startup that has raised more than $1.4 Billion so far.

 

Influencer marketing is a growing thing for the basic reason that it works and it is affordable. Sara Ware at Markerly wrote a blog using data to show the dollar return on micro influencer marketing where specific audiences are targeted. The smaller the influencer, the higher the rate of percentage. Ware then gives the example of how Dixie products created a modest $10,000 marketing campaign for Dixie’s QuickTakes and ended up earning $1 million in media value with a reach of 77 million, and is still growing.

We also discuss the decision by Twitter to stop Dataminr from providing services to U.S. intelligence agencies trying to sniff out the next terrorist attack and whether there are any parallels with the FBI trying to force Apple to break its iOS system to get data from the San Bernardino attackers.

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News

* On US Android devices, Snapchat now has more users than Twitter (Entrepreneur)

* Instagram rolls out a brand new visual identity and an update to its UI. Here’s the Medium post announcing the changes.

* Dropbox makes a change to the way that shared links work. Here’s the announcement… hosted on Dropbox, of course!

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Show Notes

Should you consider using “micro influencers” instead of trying to work only with those who have enormous followings? Sarah Ware from Markerly shares data collected during their efforts with micro influencers and reveals some compelling reasons why you might actually prefer working with influencers who have smaller followings.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Twitter has cut off US intelligence agencies from access to insights collected by Dataminr. Reactions include outrage that Twitter might be enabling terrorists while simultaneously harming efforts to combat them. Twitter claims that it has “never authorized” the sale of its data to government intelligence agencies, although according to TechCrunch, Dataminr was in an unpaid pilot with US intelligence agencies when the announce...