Category: Books

A seasonal series that profiles recent books in the field.

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Episode 70: See you on the Internet with Avery Swartz

Those of us who work in a marketing role or are marketing our own company can debate how this tactic is better than that tactic. Depending on which conference you attend or article you read, you’ll get a different opinion. But there are a few elements that a company must have to make all of this possible – their web and social properties. These foundational assets are what everything else sits on top of, and though I may be preaching to the choir here, these basics must be properly managed, or it’s all for nought. 

My guest, Avery Swartz, has had her own business for 15 years. She’s seen nearly every problem that can happen, through her experience as a web consultant. 10 years ago, she established CampTech, a company which holds workshops showing the right way to use marketing and website applications. So she knows whereof she speaks. 

Her clear explanations of web technologies earned Avery spots on nationally-airing Canadian TV shows and on the radio. She also writes a tech column in one of Canada’s national newspapers that reaches 6 million people a week.  She’s here today because in 2020 she authored a book covering the fundamentals of managing these pieces. 

Listen as we cover everything from domain registration and maintenance, accessibility, privacy laws, PPC channels like Google Ads, marketing metrics and more.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot.

Check out the new LinkedIn Learning course by Avery

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Episode 69: Digital Pivot with Eric Schwartzman

The act of rotating yourself with one foot anchored is called a pivot. This mechanism our bodies use to face a new direction provides the perfect analogy for how people should think as they move fully into digital marketing. 

Our guest, Eric Schwartzman, is a digital marketing consultant, with over 20-years of experience serving clients such as Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota, the United States Marine Corps, and hundreds of SMBs. In 2021 he published “The Digital Pivot: Secrets of Online Marketing” and he joins me on this episode to talk about digital pivots.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

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Episode 68: Scale at Speed with Felix Velarde

Has this ever happened to you? You’re working as a Marketer, either in-house or as the agency serving another business. You work earnestly to do what leadership asks. You might even be part of the leadership team, directing the marketing efforts. But inside, you’re bugged by a question. While you architect campaigns, answer emails and sit in meetings, the question is there in the back of your head. You wish it had an answer, but that magic bullet keeps eluding you. It’s “How are we going to grow?” 

My guest says that growth can happen, but it’s part of a larger challenge, and not just one that marketing has to tackle. For growth to happen, both marketing (who’s got a pivotal role here) and the whole company have to retool themselves into an entity that can scale.   

Felix Velarde began as an entrepreneur, starting a web design agency in 1994, when websites were just starting to be a thing. He then became a journeyman CEO for a string of digital agencies, eventually moving onto a role where he chaired those businesses. He has also been an adjunct professor at Hult International Business School and UK lead at Vint Cerf’s People-Centered Internet coalition.

In 2014 Felix broadened the advisory role to other companies like tech startups, at which point he boiled the growth principles he’d learned down to a system that any businesses could use. In 2021 he published the playbook of his two-year program that he claims will triple a company’s size, called “Scale at Speed” 

Listen to how instrumental  Felix  considers the role that marketing plays in building the firm’s proposition. Also watch who he says should be in charge of growth; it’s probably not the roles you’d expect to be most effective at it. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot. https://scaleatspeed.com/ assessment (20 questions, under 5 minutes)

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Episode 67: Human Centered Communication, with Ethan Beute

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

Our talk doesn’t start out sounding the way most sales & marketing talks do. That’s because of the alarm being raised by our guest on the forces around us that are polluting our digital environment. Why does this matter? Because this sludge messes with our innate ability as humans to relate to each other, and without that personal  connection, the ability for a buyer to  gain enough trust to put their faith in your business is out of the question.

The book in question is Human-Centered Communication. It was co-authored by Stephen Pacinelli  as well as our guest, Ethan Beute. He is VP of Marketing at BombBomb, a software company in Colorado Springs, CO that helps people create simple video messages. Prior to that: he ran marketing for local television stations on-air and online. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot.

For another take on communicating with video, check out Ep 54 with Tyler Lessard

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Episode 56: Content Inc. with Joe Pulizzi

The book we talk about in this show is #15 on the Amazon Best Seller list for Internet Marketing. Not to take anything away from past guests, but if you only listen to one of the 50 interviews we have done, I hope that you choose this one.  

I think most marketers have heard of the Content Marketing Institute.  The public figure at the centre of CMI, Joe Pulizzi, started it all with a blog post on April 26, 2007 “Why Content Marketing” His hypothesis in 2007 was that companies who put content on the internet would build relationships that blossom into future customers. He then went about literally putting out content that taught others how to do this. Once they came to the CMI site and got this free content, he would sell them everything from newsletters, to magazines, to training, and an annual Content Marketing World event.

For me personally, the story picks up in 2014 when I started listening to Joe’s podcast with  Robert Rose  on the podcast series, This Old Marketing. I found this giving-away-expertise tactic to be quite unorthodox, as I was accustomed to thinking that companies should mainly communicate with their audience through advertising. Listening to them influenced how I’ve come to see content marketing’s value. 

While CMI was evangelizing how to grow a business on content, Joe didn’t keep any secret about how well he was doing with growing his business. Already a bestselling author of several books, he came out in 2015 with Content Inc, that gave out the blueprint he was using. A year after it came out, he sold CMI in 2016 to the International Events company UBI. 

He may have finished with CMI, but over the next few years, he stayed close to both corporate and entrepreneurial content creators. His keen focus on them led him to pitch his publisher on a second edition of the book, which  rounds out the model by sharing the rest of his own journey of monetizing a Content-based business. the second edition that came out this year. I was amazed as I read it; so many new examples, all the updates on marketing channels, it’s a total overhaul from the first edition. 

This is one high-energy conversation. I was already pumped to talk to Joe, I’m not going to lie, and it seems we both got pretty keyed up as we spoke. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Shift away from the Glengarry Glenross revenue-generation model

Episode Reboot

To get another perspective on audience-building, see Kevin Kelly’s post on 1000 true fans