Time for A Coffee Break

John Wall
we’ve got you back in the shop here you were traveling we had two weeks off without you normally where every other week but now you were traveling for Social Media Marketing World just as this Coronavirus COVID thing was just starting to take off in the States. So what’s the latest what’s been going on?

Christopher Penn
There’s so much to say. I’ve actually been publishing daily Facebook updates on my personal Facebook profile of stuff I’m reading. So for clarity, Coronavirus is the family of viruses this virus isn’t the virus name itself is SARS-CoV-2. The disease is called COVID-19. In the same way that the virus there’s a virus called HIV which causes the disease aids so people understand what it is. People are gonna call it Coronavirus because that’s the easiest thing. Then remember it? It sounds like a beer that some people drinks. Yeah, the latest. And here’s the thing, at least for for those of us in marketing, public health officials are saying any conference of any size, no go. If you are planning on having a conference in the next, you know, two to three months, you’re not, don’t plan and there was a really great piece by Mitch Jackson who was an attorney who said that now that states of emergency haven’t declared now that there’s a clear and present danger. If you have a conference, you are legally liable for any illness, injury or death that results from people being exposed to pathogen because you knew better you knew better and you did even with the precautions that you know, people will take it, you know, regular competence, hand sanitizer and stuff. It’s not enough you can be held liable. So there is a mad Stampede. Certainly I see this in you know, the best public speaking groups. I see a mad Stampede to go into virtual events, virtual conferences, if you want to do one you had better get up in Running as soon as possible because it’s about to get super crowded super quick, with people trying to recoup what they can. That’s really gonna be tough for paid events because so many businesses are going to be going to, you know, okay, attend our free virtual conferences like okay, well, there’s a whole bunch of free ones. And then there’s the one It costs money, which which are people going to take on?

John Wall
Yeah, totally squeezing these live events because it is so much cheaper. And in fact, you were looking at IBM thank and that’s gone. Totally virtual. I heard I mean, that used to be huge dollars to do that show, not just travel to actually attending.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, no, it went from 20 $700 per ticket to zero though, think virtual experience is going to be zero dollars, because they want as many people in the door as possible to make up for the fact that you know, they won’t be the live experience. It’s gonna be interesting. The thing that I think is probably more important for a lot of folks in marketing, think about the overall economic impact. The folks over at Johns Hopkins at the Center for Health Security, did a simulation last year. fall before anybody knew that this was a thing of Coronavirus pandemic. And there’s, you know, these are not like crackpot conspiracy theorists. So, you know, like Karen from Facebook like these are actual experts and their simulation show that in year one of a pandemic minus 11%, GDP planet wide in year to minus 25%, because it was difficult to contain the thing and it made a much more vicious swing the second time around. So, we know that means that there’s gonna be, you know, belt tightening and stuff across the board. If you are not already doing aggressive ROI assessments of all your marketing, you’re going to be asked for it and it’s probably going to be sooner rather than later. So now is the time to get your analytics in order. Get your data together, and start putting together your ROI assessments and proactively starting to trim the fat you know, hey, this isn’t working. It’s not great. Okay? out the door. It goes before the boss comes knocking and says, Hey, you know, we got a, you know, the C suite just told us we got a minus 25% budget. For this next quarter,

John Wall
right, yeah, have to come up with it yourself as far as how you’re going to, you know, come up with that extra cash as things get tougher and tight down. The first big one South by Southwest, getting canceled. That was just, you know, that’s kind of such a huge show and such a huge event that was surprising to see. But then also some interesting press now with Amazon and Microsoft, both up in Washington, which was hit early, doing support for local businesses and supporting hourly employees that are not going to be able to come into the office. It’s been interesting to see the corporate world step up a little bit.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, the corporate is going to have to and governments are going to have to the New York City announced that they are offering grants to small businesses with fewer than five employees. They’ll cover 40% of payroll for a business with fewer than five employees for the next I think one to two months just to help businesses keep being able to pay employees so that they can survive.

John Wall
All right, well, we’ll have links to a bunch of different topics on that and of course you can you get your daily Facebook numbers that are interesting that comes from Johns Hopkins. They have Have a dashboard. That’s great visualization that you can check out what’s going on so we can share that up. Okay, an interesting article brands paying to trend on Reddit. I was surprised to see that the Adweek article said 70% of users welcome brands. I think they’re leaving unsaid that then the remaining 30% are willing to come to your house to kill you from I don’t know Am I off base on that? Or

Christopher Penn
I you know, it’s funny because also the targeting on Reddit is interesting. You know, there is retargeting is all sophisticated stuff, but

Unknown Speaker
Reddit

Christopher Penn
has at you know, and props to them for keeping this open, not unlike what Tumblr did when they got taken over by Yahoo Reddit has a tremendous amount of not safe for work material, you know, different subreddits and things and brands seem to not have done their targeting homework. so and so’s you know, SaaS security appliance and you’re like in the such and such not safe for work. We’d be like whoa, do you want to be

John Wall
Exactly right because that is Reddit as always had the reputation as kind of like gloves off and no, you know, no topic off the table. So there’s Yeah, definitely all kinds of, quote unquote interesting stuff up there.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, it is funny and you’re right the other. Reddit is also known for lighting people on fire like metaphorically like if your brand does something even if your ad is terrible, like just the comments and some of the ads like wow, you couldn’t have been, you know, phrases at any any worse. Could you?

John Wall
Yeah, no, it makes YouTube look like you know, school ground taunts compared to real fighting, it’s it’s absolutely something to watch. But and again, it can be endlessly entertaining to depending on your ability to stomach that stuff. Or we have to pause for a moment we want to thank h refs for their support of marketing over coffee. It’s the SEO tool that we use for a bunch of different stuff. It’s got great reports right out of the box, if you’re not even sure what the heck you’re doing with SEO, and goes all the way up to were able to export data for further analysis. Even if you want to go beyond the tool. It works well for us. To the stuff that we do, it makes competitive analysis easy. There tool show you how your competitors are getting traffic from Google and why you can see the pages and content that send them the most search traffic. Find out the exact keywords they’re ranking for, in which backlinks are helping them rank. From there you can replicate or improve on their strategies. If you’re not getting significant search traffic interest tools also help find topics worth creating pages or content on you can easily see estimated search volumes and gauge traffic potential with our keywords explorer tool. And if you are already getting traffic, you can use their top pages report to break down which of your pages are bringing the most traffic and figure out how to replicate the success across the board. We’ve got an article about everything unique that h refs does. You can check that out over in the show notes. Yeah, we’ve been doing a lot of research. We did some stuff on post length and social impact on SEO that we have pulled straight out of H refs, but that’s h refs, it’s spelled h r e f s.com but the a silent href comm you can check out the link in the show notes for a seven day trial to take it for a test spin it Yeah, I don’t know anything on the SEO front that you’ve been playing with lately.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, so we just started doing term colocation on headlights, which sounds like a whole bunch of words that may or may not mean anything. I saw at a presentation a social media marketer with Andy quest to do a study of like, you know, the top phrases that drove traffic. But the his study was like two years old at this point, like, there’s got to be a way to do this. So I went into href. And I pulled in the top 30,000 headlines from February and looked at, you know, buy organic traffic, what articles got the traffic, and then took the top 25% of that and ran it through this tool that we built that essentially looks at words that always go together. And so in terms of headlines when you’re writing headlines, here are the top ones from February 2020. That’s everything you need to know or what you need to know, the best places in or the best free, how do I or how to install and how to get how to watch Or how to make. So these are the called try grams, or n grams, that if you’re writing headlines for email for social posts for blog posts for anything that’s any kind of outreach, these are the types of terms that you want to be using in your headlines so that you get the maximum amount of juice out of them. So make sure that as you’re as you’re creating content, you use this data. And again, that’s something we took out of hrs because their data export is phenomenal. And then put it in our own processing tools to find these things and want to see people using that to get some juice.

John Wall
Okay, cool. Yeah. And that was part of the Trust Insights, email newsletter, so you can check that out and we haven’t put in a link for a while for the slacker analytics for marketers, if you want to join that up there. We’ve got topics going everyday talking about stuff in this space. You can find it very interesting and get your questions answered, of course, which is a perfect place to jump in. On other tech stuff. I had BMI BMI, I guess I haven’t even heard of this. So some people saying this is D Mark 2.0 for email, but how To get your logo in the subject line of emails to fight fraud, you know, so much of the phishing we see out there is just people pretending to be brands. So the idea is that by setting up this dummy protocol and having everything in order, it’ll be easier for you to get your stuff recognized as authentic in the email box, I’ve got a link to it from marketing land that you can check that out. It has this been on your radar. And although

Christopher Penn
this didn’t make it onto my radar until you brought it over, and it’s interesting, I reading through it, you need to have SPF dcam and demark already pre configured. So you need the existing three deliverability protocols turned on and demark policy has to be at enforcement mode, either quarantine or reject, not monitor only, which is what a lot of us have it set to and then you have to add the BMI record to your DNS and all that stuff. It’s interesting, it really is interesting, because it’s like a fourth and there’s actually technically a fifth protocol within that verified Mark certificate that I think some of this is gonna be tough to implement. For people who don’t know their way around the servers are sending from I don’t know how many marketing automation software packages support this out of the box right now, I would hope that like, you know, the big ones like Salesforce Marketing Cloud would support it. But I don’t know, I have not seen any announcements or any of the tools that we use things like, you know, maybe sport now add it in for whatever.

John Wall
Yeah. And then of course, there’s the a big part of this is actually proving that you own that logo and getting a verified mark. So it’s going to be interesting to see how that works and how that scales

Christopher Penn
and how much it costs.

John Wall
Yeah, right. It would, that would probably strike me as the, as you say, assuredly expensive, because it just seems to be the kind of thing that they would want to make it really difficult to get into and get rolling.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, but for sure, even if you don’t take advantage of it, you know, because the prerequisites are SPF dcam and demark. You need to get that set up in your in your email DNS service for your for your mail, email marketing. So if you haven’t done that for about six years late, but go do that.

John Wall
Never too late never too late, you can jump in and get that guy. I had just another one from Adweek Amazon offering other retailers to go cashier less with their just walk out technology. Yeah, even the note, the article itself said that, you know, they don’t talk about how it works. And it collects quotes, only the data needed to provide an accurate receipt, which, as far as I understand is your entire purchase history. And analysts advise partners to read the fine print. So yeah, I don’t know. This is when we file under, you know, what could go wrong? I’m sure letting Amazon have all the data of your store, you know, couldn’t end poorly, but the article at least was good and they said that actually, this could be a real opportunity for the competition anybody doing trying to do cashier list stuff, but where are you sitting on cashier list right now kind of what are you thinking about it?

Christopher Penn
You know, what do you think about what the the biggest expense for almost every company is? It’s always the people right and the cashier job is an incredible repetitive, not particularly creative position, you don’t want people getting creative with the cash register them to follow process. Exactly. And so it would not surprise me that we’re trying to automate this because it really is. It’s one of those units hasker jobs, right, like, you know, like the being the copy person or the male person, you know, within, within a company where you just push the cart around, you put pieces of mail, that is not something that requires any level of creative thinking. And any job that is essentially one task that is repetitive is 100% on the table for automation. So I think there’s a there is tremendous opportunity for businesses and there is tremendous challenge for people who are in those lower skilled jobs where Yeah, machines will take that over because it’s it’s an easy position to replace, you got to find a way to add value and what do you think

John Wall
I do see some resistance and people just not wanting to make the change, but we see that with every technology, you know, people don’t want to do it and I think as long as it ends up being faster, or more accurate than suddenly you’ll you’ll see it Take on. But I don’t know if I would go to Amazon for help for that for my store, that’s for sure. That would seems like you’re just throwing your the rest of your time as brick and mortar under the gears to get crowned to death. There’s no easy answer with the displaced employees. I think there is a weird gap in that, you know, they still worry about shrinkage, you know, most expensive stuff can easily, you know, just surprisingly, somebody forgot about those five Gillette razor cartridges at the bottom of the grocery bag. And you know, you’re walking out with 150 bucks worth of stuff. So I think there’s challenges there to do. But yeah, I think the overall benefit as far as being able to cut back on payroll is just too big for retailers to not let it go by without trying something.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, it’d be interesting to see though if it Amazon then starts to offer. You know, these brick and mortar stores the opportunity to add other products to inventory though Amazon certified works with this system. So like if you’re like the local corner store, right? And Amazon comes to and says, Hey, do you want to also offer this You know, you’ll get the you know, you will take care of the shipping to your store, you get it as a distribution channel and you get like, you know, 7% on the purchase. So, basically not much more than the affiliate program, right. But in exchange you other than the labor to put it on the shelf, there’s not a whole lot of extra work for you. And if this the cashless system is handling it, then you don’t have to worry about stocking inventory levels and things like that. You just take the 7% from Amazon and then go on with your day.

John Wall
Yeah, there’s actually a bunch of things that’s interesting triggered a few ideas for me. But before we get into that, I want to thank ExpressVPN for their support of marketing over coffee. We’ve talked about VPNs a few times on the show. But if you’re not familiar, the idea is that you route your internet traffic through a virtual private network VPN. That’s where we get that from. And this protects both your privacy and security online. ExpressVPN protects your IP address and lets you control where you want sites to think you’re located. You can choose from almost 100 different countries. And besides just protecting yourself, there are tons of applications for ExpressVPN for your marketing programs, monitoring competitors, even those that are Trying to block your corporate IP addresses. checking on campaigns outside of your geographic area, like confirming your internationalization projects that they’re on track and content looks like it’s supposed to and other countries, I use VPN Express because it’s very easy to use other VPN have been a struggle to set up. With ExpressVPN. You just download the app, press one button, you’re ready to connect. They’ve been rated number one by wired tech radar, The Verge and more. Using ExpressVPN to watch shows and streaming videos is ridiculously fast. There’s never any buffering or lag and you can stream hd content, no problem across all devices to your phone, media consoles, smart TVs and more. So you can watch what you want when you want on the go or on the big screen, wherever you are. If you visit our special link right now expressvpn.com slash MRC. You can extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. You can support the show watch what you want and protect yourself at Express VPN comm slash MRC. And we thank them for their support of the show.

Christopher Penn
You know the one of the things they forgot to mention is I travel with a VPN all the time. Because it’s really easy to compromise devices on the same network as you, but B, there are a lot of networks that restrict certain ports. So when I’m on an airplane, airplane, Wi Fi is heavily restricted, just a few different ports. And sometimes I need to be able to log into one of my servers by SSH by Secure Shell in order to, you know, do things like send out a newsletter or run some scripts, those are all blocked on like all the in flight Wi Fi when you turn on your VPN, because it can route over available ports, it routes and then allows you to use those things again, so I can get actual work done, and get around the stupid restrictions that airlines put on the web. I get why they do that, because they don’t want you watching YouTube and sucking up all the bandwidth and the tiny little straw that is available, but being able to log into your servers and stuff. If you’re an IT professional and you’re not using a VPN. You’re not actually an IT professional.

John Wall
That sounds good. Well, here’s your chance to step it up again expressvpn.com slash MMC and get rolling. Yeah, it’s a useful tool to have and it’s just like you’d mentioned there, you know when you’re on a network Especially when you’re at the airport, you see some sketchy networks. I can’t believe people log into, you know, Joe’s Wi Fi and things like that. It seems like you might as well just send them your password file and call it a day. But yeah, and going back to that, so it is interesting to see if this cashier list technology takes on. Yeah, Amazon is poised to offer so much more data information than just the average cash register company that it could be very interesting to see, you know, the retailers that do jump on board. I mean, what you just mentioned about jumping into a whole Amazon supply chain, I mean, that could of course, nuke all of your distributors, and everybody’s supplying you right now. But, you know, if there’s a company that knows how to do distribution, it’s obviously Amazon is the distribution monster that they are so yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out. Have you been into one of their four star stores? I haven’t even been into one of those yet.

Christopher Penn
I have not. I have not seen one in my travels quite yet. I’m sure I will. At some point. They all went once business travel resumes, after the pandemic. Yeah, as we get.

John Wall
Well if you’ve checked out the stores hit us up on social, we’d love to hear if you’ve been in one of them. And yeah, because I’m, I don’t know, it just seems fun to see what goes on with inventory there. I mean, if anybody has an interesting idea about what should be in inventory, and how much of it and the daily churn and all that stuff, you think Amazon would be, you know, miles ahead of the competition on that. So we’ll have to see what’s going on. With that over there. Katie thrown over a link to opt out tools. This is just interesting, a real time social monitoring device. So basically, you can put in keywords and things you don’t want to hear about in your social stream and dial them down. So I’ll be taking that for a test spin, but it just, she had pulled it in from one of the groups that she was following. And we’re going to take that for a test run to see how that goes. I’ve tried some other tools in that space that have not worked that well. So I’m interested to see how that goes and what we’ll run with that. All right, and before we wrap just because there’s so much going on with pandemic right now, what are some of the things that you would throw out there shortlist like where should you start as far as being prepped and ready to go?

Christopher Penn
short list if you are a business and you do not have a business line of credit, you need to get one now. The market is going in the wrong direction. We know that and credit will tighten up, though. Here’s the thing, if you don’t have a lot of gray hair, find somebody at your company who does right and ask them what they did to get through the Great Recession, you know, from Oh, wait two to 2011. What were the practices? What happened? One of the things happened back then credit vanished, right? Credit has dried up, you couldn’t get a loan for anything, even if you were, you know, a cart full of gold bars. So if you don’t have a business line of credit, you should get one as soon as possible. Again, it’s one of those things where you don’t pay until you use it. It’s like a credit card, but have that available so that if you have to, you know, make payroll and this drags on longer than we think you’ve got a firewall we’ve got a backstop from the marketing’s perspective. Everyone there is going to be jumping into these virtual events. Our strategy is going to be it has been all around building our list. How can we grow the list so that you know whether it’s our event or somebody else’s event we participate in, we want to be able to drive an audience in the direction that we go and for all of us get real good at you know audio and video technology get real good at videos conference. Thanks because for the next three months you’re going to be working from from from your camera.

John Wall
Yeah no that’s true it’ll be all virtual all the time we’ll see what rises this dude is that there’s a ton of opportunities out there for a lot of conferencing companies like you said making quality virtual content and yeah, it’s just funny i’ve you know us at Trust Insights working out of our house has just been a way of life forever. So I kind of underestimate the impact other people who do still do the daily commute it’s a whole different thing.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, and we homeschool so it’s like okay, literally nothing changes. We don’t see any human beings anywhere. Don’t miss

Unknown Speaker
sealed

John Wall
compound and that’s exactly

Christopher Penn
I got the bread machine going making today’s loaf of bread and stuff. It’s a it’s it’s something but no in all seriousness, the other thing is, this is a great time to catch up on podcasts, you know, because you won’t have the commute for a little while. This is a great time to catch up and videos. If you are Not if you have a colleague who’s not subscribed to marketing over coffee, please make sure that you know get them to like, hey, you’re gonna have an extra 20 minutes each day, not in the car on the bus. You know, try listen to this podcast instead.

John Wall
That sounds great. You can of course sign up for the newsletter powered by digital over at marketing over coffee calm so we’ll push links out to you. And that’s gonna do it for us for today. So everybody stay healthy. Don’t panic, and we will catch up with you next week. Until next week, enjoy the coffee.

Christopher Penn
Enjoy the coffee, don’t drink it through a mask.

Unknown Speaker
You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at Christopher s pen.com. Read more from john Jay wall at jw 51 fifty.com. The marketing over coffee theme song is called mellow g by funk masters. And you can find it at musicality from vo or follow the link in our show notes.