Happy Memorial Day seems like an oxymoron since it’s supposed to be a solemn day of remembrance for those military members who have lost their lives.
But it’s also a time to revel in those freedoms for which they sacrificed their lives, so go ahead and enjoy the barbecues, the beers or margaritas, the boating, or the relaxing, especially after the past year. Just remember to pause for a moment and give thanks
Today's blog post was originally published two years ago. Memorial Day is coming up in four days this year:
Today's blog post is based on an article on The Art of Manliness.
Since today is Memorial Day, it seemed like a good time to talk about this subject.
16 million Americans served in the Armed Forces during World War II. As of September 2018, there were less than half a million still alive. More than 97% of the veterans of WWII have disappeared from our ranks.
As the number of people who experienced the war on both the battle and home fronts has shrunk, so has the public’s interest in it. An author of books on WWII told me that interest in the war isn’t what it was even a decade ago, and speculated on the reason for that: fewer and fewer among the rising generations have a personal connection to this epic conflict — fewer and fewer had a relative who experienced it firsthand. To them, WWII is an increasingly distant, increasingly abstract, increasingly immaterial event in history. A faded black and white memory with all the dynamism and compelling color of a granite monument
It is a duty of Millennials, we would argue, to bridge this gap. To stand as human wormholes to World War II.
I knew a few people that served in WWII, my father-in-law was one. I know he served in North Africa, and like most of the people who had seen combat, he didn't really want to talk about it. But apparently he got his job with the post office because they needed someone who could handle a machine gun to guard the mail on the post office car on the train. They have one of the cars on display at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.
But what do they mean by human wormholes?
“Human wormhole” is the term blogger Jason Kottke coined for the way an individual with a connection to a past period can collapse the seeming distance between it and the present. To know, for example, that two of the grandsons of John Tyler — who was born in 1790, the year after George Washington became president, and himself became the country’s 10th chief executive — are still living, and that the entire country’s history can nearly be encompassed in just three generations, is to suddenly feel that our nation wasn’t actually birthed all that long ago. As the curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Indians wonderfully put it, to meet an individual like Joseph Medicine Crow, the last surviving war chief of Montana’s Crow Tribe (who died just three years ago), was to feel as if you were “shaking hands with the 19th century.”
When Millennials are as old as the generation who fought in WWII is now, that war will be almost as far away in time as the Civil War is from us presently. But it doesn’t have to feel unapproachably distant, if our generation — the last, as a whole, to have a living relative who experienced WWII firsthand — act as human wormholes throughout the decades to come. If we take our children and grandchildren to museums that memorialize the war, show them photos of our grandparents and share their stories, even have them watch the Band of Brothers miniseries. There will be something salient simply in letting them know that when they hug us, they hug someone, who hugged someone, who heard the news of Pearl Harbor over the radio, stood on the deck of a battleship that fired at the vessels of the Japanese, sat in the cockpit of a plane flying over Nazi Germany.
My grandmother's birthday was December 7th, and she and her family, including my dad who was only 8 years old at the time, were celebrating her birthday at Dimond Park in Oakland when they heard about the attack.
My kids knew both of their grandfathers, although my father not quite as well as my ex's father who lived with us for awhile.
It’s the duty of Millennials to offer a wormhole, via our personal memories of our grandparents, that keeps alive the reality of certain truths: that there are times when the forces of good and evil really do starkly collide, all men must be ready to serve as citizen-soldiers, and mass solidarity and sacrifice is required. And that it’s possible to make such sacrifices and then modestly act as if doing so was really no big deal.
Through these wormholes, young people will hopefully be better able to put the inconveniences of modern life into perspective. To understand how, after the horrors of battles like Peleliu and Okinawa, Marine Private Eugene Sledge “could be sincerely grateful for the rest of his life for clean, dry socks” and struggle to “comprehend people who griped because America wasn’t perfect, or their coffee wasn’t hot enough, or they had to stand in line and wait for a train or bus.” To understand the truth behind the words of Ed Tipper, a member of the 101st Airborne Division’s Easy Company, who realized, after seeing the horrors of Nazi Germany firsthand, that “Freedom isn’t automatic; it has a price.”
Being transported through the human wormholes of our lives will reveal to younger generations that those who worked and fought during WWII — our grandparents, their forebearers — weren’t better than us, in being intrinsically made of exceptional material. Rather it will show that in facing a challenge that could have either drawn out their best qualities or their worst, made them or broke them, they chose to rise to the occasion. Through the portal of our wormhole witness, will be glimpsed a reverent memorial to that eternal possibility in human nature.
World War 2 saw the second highest loss of American lives after the Civil War, where both sides were American. In fact, of the 1.1 million Americans who have died in combat since the beginning of our country 900,000 died in those two wars. And another 90,000 died in Vietnam...the 3rd most deadly war that we've fought. But as the number of people serving in the military declines...from 12% of the population during WWII to less than 1% now, the amount of contact that we have with people who have fought in a war declines.
Although, as I've written about before, the Millennials could be the next "greatest generation" as we approach another great war.
Don't worry, you didn't miss it...it's coming up on Monday, May 31st. But if you've ever wanted to be a web designer, have I got a deal for you!
You may not be aware of it, but SendOutCards has launched 5 new businesses and one of them, Stream Marketing, allows you to build your own websites!
If you want to see how easy it is to design your own webpage, check out this video from the Stream Marketing Facebook page. There are new videos posted every week to help you design your webpages.
It normally costs $87 for the first month and then $47 each additional month and for that price, you can have as many websites as you want. The extra $40 during the first month gives you an hour of time with one of the "Nerds" to help you get setup and get your first page built. But if you sign up during the month of May, I'll send you a $50 American Express gift card (payable after your 5th month), so your first month ends up costing you only $37. You'll still get your hour with the Nerds and unlimited webpages. After the first month, you'll pay $47 to host your websites.
Be sure to check out the video to get an idea of how easy it is! And check out the Stream Marketing webpage to find out more about what we offer.
I came across this article from The Hustle while searching for blog post topics:
On a warm Texas night in 1956, Bette Nesmith — later known as Bette Nesmith Graham — sat in a garage surrounded by buckets of white tempera paint, empty nail polish bottles, and handmade labels.
She didn’t know it then, but she was on the brink of something magical.
The product she would eventually create — Liquid Paper, a white correction fluid used to conceal handwritten or printed typos — would become one of the world’s most popular and enduring office supplies.
Graham wasn’t a chemist or an engineer. She was a single mom from Texas who had a brilliant idea while working a 9-to-5 job as a secretary.
But she was also a budding product marketing genius: Over several decades, she identified a need in the market, organically grew her business, staved off competition, and bootstrapped her way to a $47.5m exit — $173m in today’s money.
And she did it all during a time when women were discouraged from pursuing business ventures.
Making ends meet
Born Bette Clair Murphy near Dallas, Texas, in 1924, Graham was raised to be imaginative, strong-willed, and independent.
Her mother owned a knitting store and taught her to paint from a young age; her father, a manager at an auto parts company, imparted the values of consistency and hard work.
But Graham didn’t care much for traditional education.
At 17, she dropped out of high school, married a soldier named Warren Nesmith, and had a baby boy. When her husband returned home from World War II, the couple got divorced — and Graham was left to single-handedly raise her child.
Graham with her son Michael in 1957 (via newspaper archives)
To make ends meet, she found work as a secretary at Texas Bank and Trust, where she earned $300/month (~$36k/year in today’s money).
As her son Michael later recalled, financial pressures would cause his mother to frequently “burst into tears of panic.”
Though Graham wasn’t a great typist, she eventually rose to the position of executive secretary — then the highest job available to the bank’s female employees.
At the time, IBM had just come out with a new line of electric typewriters that were faster than previous models and used carbon film ribbons.
But as Graham soon learned, the invention had several downsides: The sensitive keypad lent itself to more typographical errors. The carbon ribbons made these errors impossible to erase without leaving smudges all over the paper.
Graham had to find a way to fix her numerous typos. Soon, an idea struck.
She’d previously had a side hustle painting window displays at the bank. “An artist never corrects by erasing but always paints over the error,” she later recalled.
“So I decided to use what artists use.”
A woman using an electric typewriter in the 1950s (Found Image Holdings/Corbis via Getty Images)
After work one day, she went to the library and looked up a recipe for tempera — an age-old, water-based paint.
She whipped up a white-colored liquid in her kitchen blender, poured it into an empty nail polish bottle, and started covertly using it at work to cover up typos on documents.
Despite her best efforts to keep the concoction a secret, word soon got out and fellow secretaries wanted in on the action.
By 1957, Graham was selling 100 bottles per month to her colleagues.
To meet demand, she turned her garage into a mini packing plant, paying her son and his friends $1/hour to fill the little glass bottles and affix them with handwritten labels. She called her product “Mistake Out.”
Graham knew that to expand her reach, she’d need to improve the quality and consistency of her product. With help from her son’s chemistry teacher and an employee at a paint shop, she constantly iterated the formula.
On weekends, she traveled around Texas pitching Mistake Out to wholesalers. When they took a pass, she decided to market it herself.
Zachary Crockett / The Hustle
A placement in a national supply magazine led to her first big score: 500 orders all over the US, including a 400-bottle sale to The General Electric Company.
She poured herself into the business — and her effort soon took a toll.
One day at work, she accidentally signed off a letter “The Mistake Out Company” instead of “Texas Bank and Trust,” and was fired.
For Graham, the parting was a blessing in disguise.
A big break
In 1958, Graham changed the name of her product to “Liquid Paper” and filed for a patent.
Over the next few years, she sought help from a number of industry professionals, including a polymer chemist named Bill Mallow, and further refined her product for a mass market.
As the product spread in popularity, Graham relocated the operation from her garage to a trailer to an office building. She hired a staff of employees to help out with marketing, production, and logistics.
With growth came doubts — but she persisted.
“I think anyone who is making progress faces fear,” she later said in an interview. “Overcoming fear is all there is to success. You have to face fears and doubts constantly. You keep doing it over and over.”
By 1964, the production of Liquid Paper grew 10x, to 5k bottles/week; in 1967, the company notched its first $1m in sales (~$8m today).
Graham spent heavily on advertising, showcasing her product during prime-time TV programs like The Tonight Show and in Glamour and Fortune magazine spreads. Sales grew in tandem with exposure.
In 1975, she moved Liquid Paper into a 35k-square-foot automated facility in Dallas that pumped out 25m bottles/year.
A clip from a commercial for Liquid Paper (YouTube)
Though several competitors, including Wite-Out (1966), attempted to take on Liquid Paper, Graham maintained the lion’s share of the market.
But as her operation took off, the people closest to her tried to take advantage of her success.
Years earlier, in 1962, she’d married a frozen-food salesman named Robert Graham and had given him partial control of Liquid Paper’s business affairs. In 1976, they divorced and he tried to cut Graham out of the company by changing the formula and booting her off the board.
The secretary-turned-business-savant managed to stave off her ex and maintain a 49% stake in her company.
Facing ailing health in 1979, she sold Liquid Paper to Gillette for $47.5m ($173m today), plus royalties on every bottle sold for the next 2 decades.
Just 6 months later, at the age of 56, she suffered a stroke and died.
Her son, Michael — who, as chance would have it, went on to achieve fame as a member of the ’60s pop group, The Monkees — continued to champion his late mother’s legacy, appearing in commercials for her products well into the ’90s.
He continued to receive Liquid Paper royalties from the deal his mother had worked out and used them to launch the music video company PopClips — a predecessor to MTV.
A forgotten legacy
As chronicled by Forbes contributor Tanya Tarr, Graham left behind much more than a fortune.
In a time when corporations didn’t offer much in the way of employee benefits, Liquid Paper was a highly progressive firm. Among its offerings:
On-site child care facilities
An employee-owned credit union
Wheelchair-accessible facilities
Tuition reimbursement
A racially integrated staff that recognized affirmative action policies
During her successful run, Graham also established two philanthropic foundations — one that supported women in the arts, and another that offered assistance to disadvantaged women.
Graham poses for a photo later in life (University of North Texas archives)
Shortly before her death, Graham sat down for an oral history interview at the University of North Texas and ruminated on her success.
“I find it’s such a marvelous period when you’ve been patient and stood your ground and one day you see that growth has been going on around you all the time,” she said.
“It’s like a plant that is rooted in the ground. For a long time, you don’t see much happening, but all the time the plant is developing a stronger root system that reaches out to farther places.”
Today, Liquid Paper is still in production and is owned by Newell Brands — a conglomerate that owns Rubbermaid, Sharpie, and Elmer’s glue.
The plant, as Graham would put it, is still going strong.
I picked this article because I was aware of the relationship between Mike Nesmith and Liquid Paper, as I'm sure many of you were also. But if you didn't know before, you do now!
That was like the biggest show on TV just a few years ago. According to Wikipedia:
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (often informally called Millionaire) is an American television game show based on the same-titled British program and developed for the United States by Michael Davies. The show featuares a quiz competition in which contestants attempt to win a top prize of $1,000,000 by answering a series of multiple-choice questions of increasing difficulty (although, for a time, most of the questions were of random difficulty). The program has endured as one of the longest-running and most successful international variants in the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? franchise.
The original U.S. version aired on ABC from August 16, 1999, to June 27, 2002, and was hosted by Regis Philbin. The daily syndicated version of the show began airing on September 16, 2002, and was hosted for eleven seasons by Meredith Vieira until May 31, 2013. Later hosts included Cedric the Entertainer in the 2013–14 season, Terry Crews in the following season (2014–15), and Chris Harrison, who began hosting on September 14, 2015. On May 17, 2019, it was reported that the syndicated show has been canceled, with a final episode set for May 31, 2019.
As the first U.S. network game show to offer a million-dollar top prize, the show made television history by becoming one of the highest-rated game shows in the history of American television. The U.S. Millionaire has won seven Daytime Emmy Awards, and TV Guide ranked it No. 6 in its 2013 list of the 60 greatest game shows of all time.
There's still time to catch the final episode!
Even though this is really interesting, this post is really about Be a Millionaire Day and to tell you about the Millionaire Money game. From the Days of the Year website:
If you’re an aspiring millionaire, and who isn’t, why not celebrate Be a Millionaire Day by following the advice of the most successful sports performance coaches. Use visualization techniques to see yourself surrounded by luxury, free of monetary concerns, and living your life on your terms. Then get down to business – get financial advice, find extra sources of income, save, live within your means and commit to becoming a millionaire.
"The Millionaire Money Game Will Expand Your Prosperity Consciousness Forever... In just 5 mins a day you'll become more magnetic to money!"
It costs nothing to sign up and you'll receive your first letter from the Universe in about 10 minutes. Each day, for 16 days, you'll receive a new letter from the Universe with increasing amounts of imaginary money. The idea is to pretend to spend that money on something (note...it's just imaginary money, so don't really try to spend it). The first time I played, I went to an outdoor furniture store and picked out some furniture I liked. I wrote the amount down in a checkbook register just for that purpose.
After a few days, I drove down to Scotts Valley and went to an exotic car dealership to "buy" this Jaguar XKE:
Here's what the first letter says:
Dear Rick,
Today's deposit:
____________________________________________ Amount: $1,000 - One Thousand Dollars
Deposited into: Your Account
From: The Bank of The Universe ____________________________________________
Since you are so loved and cherished, we - at the Bank of the Universe - have decided to deposit money into your account for the rest of your life.
This is not a loan and we do not expect this money to be paid back - it is our gift to you, just for being you!
All we ask, is that as you go through your day, you look for ways to spend this money that will give you joy.
You may use this money in any way you desire.
It is preferable that you SPEND the money, rather than saving it for later, because your prosperity is unlimited. We will continue to send you more and more money each week.
It is also preferable that initially you spend this money on yourself - or if it makes you feel better start to pay off some debts - because that's what manifesting and attracting is all about - it's your FEELINGS that create.
Get used to spending on yourself, feel how good it feels to spend on yourself, feel the decadence of spending on yourself - knowing more and more is coming your way.
This is just the beginning. We would advise that you take some time over the next week to keep your eyes open for things that 'make your heart sing'.
When you see something you would like to have, write it down, cut it out, make a note, so that as the money continues to flow to you, you have a list you can easily bring to mind of things to purchase.
You'll receive one of these emails every day for 16 days, with the last email being a deposit of $1,000,000!
So, join me in visualizing being a millionaire by playing the game.
Price is the most delicate element of the marketing mix, and much thought goes into setting prices to nudge us towards spending more.
There’s one particularly cunning type of pricing strategy that marketers use to get you to switch your choice from one option to a more expensive or profitable one.
It’s called the decoy effect.
Imagine you are shopping for a Nutribullet blender. You see two options. The cheaper one, at $89, promotes 900 watts of power and a five-piece accessory kit. The more expensive one, at $149, is 1,200 watts and has 12 accessories.
Which one you choose will depend on some assessment of their relative value for money. It’s not immediately apparent, though, that the more expensive option is better value. It’s slightly less than 35 percent more powerful but costs nearly 70 percent more. It does have more than twice as many plastic accessories, but what are they worth?
Now consider the two in light of a third option.
The article has photos of all of the choices.
This one, for $125, offers 1,000 watts and nine accessories. It enables you to make what feels like a more considered comparison. For $36 more than the cheaper option, you get four more accessories and an extra 100 watts of power. But if you spend just $24 extra, you get a further three accessories and 200 watts more power. Bargain!
You have just experienced the decoy effect.
Asymmetric Dominance
The decoy effect is defined as the phenomenon whereby consumers change their preference between two options when presented with a third option – the “decoy” – that is “asymmetrically dominated”. It is also referred to as the “attraction effect” or “asymmetric dominance effect”.
What asymmetric domination means is the decoy is priced to make one of the other options much more attractive. It is “dominated” in terms of perceived value (quantity, quality, extra features and so on). The decoy is not intended to sell, just to nudge consumers away from the “competitor” and towards the “target” – usually the more expensive or profitable option.
The effect was first described by academics Joel Huber, John Payne and Christopher Puto in a paper presented to a conference in 1981 (and later published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 1982).
They demonstrated the effect through experiments in which participants (university students) were asked to makes choices in scenarios involving beer, cars, restaurants, lottery tickets, films and television sets.
In each product scenario participants first had to choose between two options. Then they were given a third option – a decoy designed to nudge them toward picking the target over the competitor. In every case except the lottery tickets the decoy successfully increased the probability of the target being chosen.
These findings were, in marketing terms, revolutionary. They challenged established doctrines – known as the “ similarity heuristic” and the “ regularity condition” – that a new product will take away market share from an existing product and cannot increase the probability of a customer choosing the original product.
How Decoys Work
When consumers are faced with many alternatives, they often experience choice overload – what psychologist Barry Schwartz has termed the tyranny or paradox of choice. Multiple behavioural experiments have consistently demonstrated that greater choice complexity increases anxiety and hinders decision-making.
In an attempt to reduce this anxiety, consumers tend to simplify the process by selecting only a couple of criteria (say price and quantity) to determine the best value for money.
Through manipulating these key choice attributes, a decoy steers you in a particular direction while giving you the feeling you are making a rational, informed choice.
The decoy effect is thus a form of “ nudging” – defined by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (the pioneers of nudge theory) as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options”. Not all nudging is manipulative, and some argue that even manipulative nudging can be justified if the ends are noble. It has proven useful in social marketing to encourage people to make good decisions such as using less energy, eating healthier or becoming organ donors.
A decade ago behavioural economist Dan Ariely spoke about his fascination with the pricing structure of The Economist and how he tested the options on 100 of his students.
In one scenario the students had a choice of a web-only subscription or a print-only subscription for twice the price; 68 percent chose the cheaper web-only option.
They were given a third option – a web-and-print subscription for the same price as the print-only option. Now just 16 percent chose the cheaper option, with 84 percent opting for the obviously better combined option.
In this second scenario the print-only option had become the decoy and the combined option the target. Even The Economist was intrigued by Ariely’s finding, publishing a story about it entitled “ The importance of irrelevant alternatives”.
Subscription pricing for The Australian today replicates this “irrelevant alternative”, though in a slightly different way to the pricing architecture Ariely examined.
(Again, there are photos in the original article).
Why would you choose the digital-only subscription when you can get the weekend paper delivered for no extra cost?
In this instance, the digital-only option is the decoy and the digital+weekend paper option is the target. The intention appears to be to discourage you from choosing the more expensive six-day paper option. Because that option is not necessarily more profitable for the company. What traditionally made print editions profitable, despite the cost of printing and distribution, was the advertising they carried. That’s no longer the case. It makes sense to encourage subscribers to move online.
Not all decoys are so conspicuous. In fact the decoy effect may be extremely effective by being quite subtle.
Consider the price of drinks at a well-known juice bar: a small (350 ml) size costs $6.10; the medium (450 ml) $7.10; and the large (610 ml) $7.50.
Which would you buy?
If you’re good at doing maths in your head, or committed enough to use a calculator, you might work out that the medium is slightly better value than the small, and the large better value again.
But the pricing of the medium option – $1 more than the small but just 40 cents cheaper than the large – is designed to be asymmetrically dominated, steering you to see the biggest drink as the best value for money.
So have you just made the sensible choice, or been manipulated to spend more on a drink larger than you needed?
This was an interesting article, especially since I'm in marketing...so, I bought the audiobook mentioned in Annie's article on Audible.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. How are you supporting yourself, your family and your teams in mental health?
With the direct and indirect effects of a pandemic, most of us have experienced more stress than we'd ever expected in the last year and a half. Not surprisingly, reports of anxiety have increased over the last year (1).
If you find you're struggling with bouts of anxiety that you haven’t experienced before, you’re not alone. And if you’re in any kind of leadership position—at work, at home, or elsewhere—you’re even more susceptible to anxiety; feeling alone with your thoughts and fears with no one to talk to can create anxiety over time.
Research finds that anxiety is not only mental, but it's a primal, physiological reaction to danger. In fact, the body can be anxious for reasons the mind isn't even aware of—until later. So if you walk into your kitchen to make some toast in the morning and suddenly start to feel anxious, you’re not unusual.
Physical movement can be extremely helpful with anxiety. There are some incredibly simple steps you can take if you find anxiety taking over your body. Here are two you can use immediately:
1) Get present to the present moment—look around you, take some deep breaths, hear the sounds around you, feel the floor beneath your feet and your body in the chair if you’re sitting. The focus on your senses while in a comfortable environment will send a message to your brain that you are safe and calm you down.
2) If you’ve got too much anxious energy and #1 doesn’t help, then get up and walk around the block, or up and down stairs to get rid of the fight-or-flight physical needs. You might even have a short workout: do some push ups, jumping jacks, squats, or a yoga vinyasa to get your heart beating faster. When finished, go back to the first item above.
The answer to anxiety lies in acknowledging it, not ignoring it. While it's best to address anxiety with a licensed therapist, there are tools that you can use when you’re on your own that can help.
The short answer is yes. The long answer is yes...if I work at it.
I'm finally starting the Blue 42 for Life Challenge, which will help me control my appetite and sleep better. Find out how sleep is also important to weight loss here. I'm also starting the 20 Minute Workout course available at Prompting U. This course consists of three 20 day sections, so it's right in line with my 60 day goal.
The plan is to burn off 1,000 more calories per day than I take in. Control from Blue 42 will help with that, as well as drinking 3 liters of water per day. And walking and working out will help burn off more calories.
You can join me on this journey and be eligible to win $100...just ask me how!
Monday - "Why Your First Impression Matters & How to Improve It" From The Art pf Manliness. "A good or bad first impression can mean the difference between landing the job or getting a polite rejection email; getting a first date or getting ghosted via text."
Wednesday - "How to monetize your LinkedIn account" Is your LinkedIn account bringing you customers? "To find out more about Stream VA, as well as Stream Marketing, I will be doing training on both services a week from this Saturday, May 22 at 10:00 AM PDT."
Thursday - "Yesterday was #NuttyFudgeDay #TBT" I got some for my birthday this year! "A key to getting more engagement is to ask a question on each comment...that way you get 2 more comments (your question and their response)."
And yesterday I wrote about #WorldCocktailDay, which is today. But why do I write about these kinds of things? And why do I celebrate them?
Partly, I write about these things because I need something to write about, but mostly to get some engagement from my social media friends.
Yesterday, I shared the blog post with an excerpt that said “What's your favorite cocktail? Is it one of the five presented here? Or is it something different?”. I got a couple of suggestions and I'll probably get more today.
As you can see, I had 2 calls to action on this post...the first was inviting them to see the comments if they wanted some fudge, since there will be a drawing for some free fudge this afternoon, and the second was to click on the link for this blog (which I include on all of my posts for interesting days to celebrate).
I ended up with 6 people signed up for a drawing that will have 3 winners. I'm sure that all six of them will be watching the Facebook Live, along with others I'm sure.
Again, this is all for engagement.
My biggest engagement came with a pumpkin spice caramels giveaway. It was originally going to be a one time drawing but it ended up lasting 9 weeks I think. This particular drawing required action on the part of the entrants. They got a ticket into the drawing for watching a SOC video, sharing the video with others and several other activities. More engagement.
Engagement is the primary purpose of the Interesting days segment. You can use these days to send cards or gifts to clients or prospects. Or you can use them for drawings. Or just for engagement.
Although, I highly recommend checking out the blog every day, since I often cover things that will be of use to business people (such as this post). But if you can't read it every day, then check out Friday and Saturday's posts. Friday's post is a summary of the articles published that week, while Saturday's is a compilation of the interesting days from the current week, the upcoming week, and the same week in the following month. If that's too much, there's a monthly recap published on the first Sunday of every month for the preceding month.
Includes: • LinkedIn social messaging to build your list • Create relationships through celebration (work anniversary, change of position, etc.) • Holiday campaign set-up and sends • Follow up campaign set-up and sends • SendOutCards data management
LinkedIn - New Connection
Includes • LinkedIn targeted messaging to build your list • Create relationships through celebration (work anniversary, change of position, etc.) • Holiday campaign set-up and sends • Follow up campaign set-up and sends • SendOutCards data management
The VA's will check for the work anniversary, change of position, etc. announcements, and reach out to your contacts!
I don't know about you, but I barely pay attention to those announcements, let alone do anything with them...but your VA will handle them for you, as well as helping you gather new connections.
Stream VA will also do similar tasks related to your Facebook friends.
For $197 a month, your VA will take care of LI or FB. For $347 you can have twice as much VA time in either platform, or you can have your VA work in both platforms for you.
You can check out all of the Stream VA features here.
If your LinkedIn profile needs some help (like mine), check out this video.
By building better relationships with your LinkedIn contacts, they'll be more likely to do business with you!
To find out more about Stream VA, as well as Stream Marketing, I will be doing training on both services a week from this Saturday, May 22 at 10:00 AM PDT. Click here to join my Facebook group.
Whether you’ve been dating someone for a short time or been married for years, there’s one question that can remain perennially interesting — did I choose the right partner?
My guest today has some answers to that question that aren’t based on crowd-sourced anecdotes or biased personal hunches, but reams of scientific research. His name is Ty Tashiro and he’s a professor of psychology, a relationship expert, and the author of The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love. We begin our discussion with the difference between loving someone and being in love with them, and how the latter comes down to a combination of like and lust. Ty shares the three elements that go into liking, and how this liking piece is really the foundation of long-lasting relational happiness, even though it tends to get underemphasized. Ty then reveals the surprisingly low ROI of factors like looks and income in relationship happiness, before unpacking the factors that do have an outsized impact in contributing to enduring love. We discuss which personality traits are predictive of relationship stability and satisfaction, which have the opposite effect, and why you need to ask your friends for their assessment of your significant other’s personality, rather than only assessing it yourself. We also get into the importance of your partner’s attachment style, which they learned in childhood, and two red flags to look for in your relationship.
These insights will prove super useful for those in the dating scene, but will also be of interest to those already in long-term relationships, in either affirming the wisdom of your choice of partner, or helping you identify issues that may be sabotaging your relationship and can still be addressed.
Here are the highlights from the program:
The difference between loving someone and being in love with someone
3 factors that contribute to whether you like someone or not
When and why does lust ebb more than like?
How much do looks really matter?
The value of deciding the traits and characteristics that are most important to you
Which personality traits to avoid in a partner
What is “attachment style” and how does it play out in our relationships?
What are some red flags to be on the look out for?
Posts
