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Showing posts from June, 2024

What to do if you have too many meetings

Overwhelmed by meetings? Sick of ‘getting stuck’ in meetings — emerging hours later and having your whole day derailed?  If so, the latest episode of the Marketing Mentor Podcast is for you! Of almost everyone I know, I’m one of the few who loves meetings. It seems like with vague agendas, too many talkers, and people who don’t pay attention to the clock, meetings can go down the drain and take creatives’ spirits with them. But as one of my clients (and fellow meeting fans) said, “A meeting can be a much more efficient and complete way to get your questions answered, instead of exchanging a bunch of emails back and forth.”  The truth is, I love meetings. And I’m hopeful that you can too. I want everyone to get the good from meetings — connecting and learning something new — and leave the bad behind. And as always, I have quite a few suggestions on how to do that (with the language to go along with it)! First, get some clarity.  Have you ever actually looked at how many meeting

Need Higher-Quality Clients? Try This AI Prompt...

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One of my favorite authors on AI, Ethan Mollick (read his book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI ) appeared on one of my favorite podcasts, The Ezra Klein Show , to talk about how to practically use AI in your work. In the episode, Mollick says that, when he’s talked with the people developing AI, “There is no list of how you should use this as a writer or as a marketer or as an educator. They don’t even know what the capabilities of these systems are.” And so, just as we treat our businesses as a laboratory for personal and professional growth, we can do the same with AI… and make it up as we go! Which is exactly what I’ve been doing. My focus is on developing prompts – and more important, the creative prompting mindset – that you can use to find more high-quality clients. Of course, “quality” is subjective. It’s different for everyone! To get an AI to find you clients that fit you, you have to tell it what you mean by quality. That will allow the AI to find the p

The Mother of All Content Marketing

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Creative Content Marketing Creative content marketing can be wonderful, complicated, difficult, and rewarding – like many of our relationships with mothers or mother-like figures. They can all certainly be challenging! Ilise Benun challenged us, after the May Office Hours meeting, to write about our mothers for Mother’s Day and use it as marketing content. I saw a lot of doubt and discomfort. For many of us, sharing about our mothers is a peek into our most private selves. Still, many decided to go for it, and I know I don’t regret the decision.  Eleven of us wrote our little hearts out, and the results have been wide-ranging. Best of all, they connected us to our audience through relatable stories. The heart of all connection is relatability and I connected to all of these in one way or another. Laura Simmons, Simmons Creative Communication Laura Simmons shared a short, impactful post about her mother, whom she had a difficult relationship with. It was that challenge that

X Is ‘Making Likes Private for Everyone’

Social media platform X announced that it is making Like private for everyone, a feature that was previously only available to X Premium accounts. X previously made hiding Likes a feature of its X Premium subscriptions. The company’s engineering team revealed that it is now making the feature available for everyone. This week we’re making Likes private for everyone to better protect your privacy. – You will still be able to see posts you have liked (but others cannot). – Like count and other metrics for your own posts will still show up under notifications. – You will no longer see who… — Engineering (@XEng) June 11, 2024 Elon Musk said the change will help protect individuals from being attacked for liking posts others may not agree with. Important to allow people to like posts without getting attacked for doing so! https://t.co/3O1bG7wIGe — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 11, 2024 * This article was originally published here

The Throughline in 3 Creative Careers with Loren Sherman

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Have you ever thought about how you might look back on what you’re doing in your business today? Will you be full of regret or grateful and satisfied? Or something else?  On the day he sold Inovabed , his 23-year-old contract furniture business, I talked with my good friend, Loren Sherman -- set designer turned inventor turned therapy dog handler -- about, among other things, what he’d learned in the laboratory of his 3 careers. We turned that conversation into 2 episodes for the Marketing Mentor Podcast :  #501 The Throughline in 3 Creative Careers In Part 1, Loren articulated the throughline of his 3 creative careers (so far, that is). He started as a set designer on Broadway, became an inventor and furniture designer and now he is a therapy dog handler with the lovely Lina.  We also talked about what I think of as “business baggage” – that stuff we drag from childhood into our adult life and that gets worked out (or not) in business. That’s often what I mean when I talk abou