Category: Books

Episode 186

Increasingly, many Marketing teams have been forced to transform their own teams, or the Business as a whole has had to start transforming itself. 

But no matter how technically sophisticated they are, no matter how many consultants they have or how many Project management meetings they hold, most companies struggle through these transformations. At best, when transformations succeed, they leave heart-ache and sore feelings 

Most of them revert to the status quo they tried so hard to shake. Those leading the initiative end up demoralized, marginalized or downsized.

People who say they can make transformations successful are treated with skepticism. But when that someone has skills that are so multifaceted and has pulled off this feat in multiple industries, you ought to lean in & hear them out.

Susan Odle is someone whose life’s journey and heritage spans three continents. Born to Guyanese parents moved first to London England, then to Toronto, Canada where she went to high school; it happened to be the same school where I went. Anyway, she moved to Ottawa to study music at University. The musician in her has been strong from then until now, evidenced by a solo project she released in 2017.

Our paths crossed again years later when I moved to Ottawa. In the interim Susan had been holding pivotal roles in high tech firms, leading channel & direct sales, professional services, and ops which helped several to successful exits. Susan was honored In 2020 as one of the top 50 women in SaaS by the Software Report. She’s also owned several businesses as well. Currently, Susan specializes in operationalizing change through her consultancy, 8020CS. She’s taken her understanding of navigating successful change and literally wrote the book on it. “Successful Change,” was released in 2023.

Chapters & Timestamps

00:00:00 – Intro

00:02:47 – Welcome Susan

00:06:46 – The chaos that comes with transformation

00:11:50 – The 8020CS Blueprint

00:21:46 – Break change down into four dimensions

00:29:38 – PSA

00:30:32 – Moving through ‘gates’ toward successful change

00:48:59 – Overcoming resistance

00:53:45 – Susan’s coordinate and other resources

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Today’s episode looks at how pervasive voice technology is, and how marketers can make better use of it. 

After spending over twenty years in marketing agencies, Susan Westwater became cofounder and CEO of Pragmatic Digital. Susan has talked and written on the role voice & conversational AI plays in marketing and business strategy. 

Susan is coauthor of Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences. Recently, she co-authored the book “Voice Marketing” 

Chapters & Timestamps

0:00 Intro

2:30 About Voice marketing

27:15 PSA

28:00 Susan’s process for enabling voice technology in your marketing 

59:30 Where to find Susan and the book

 

 

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People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Susan contributes to the industry site: https://voicebot.ai/

Susan’s company is Pragmatic.digital

Book can be found at VoiceMarketingbook.ai

Susan is on X and on LinkedIn

Morgan Freeman

UTM Parameter Builder

Intro was made with the help of https://ttsmaker.com/

Episode 175

There were a lot of books  covered on the podcast in 2023 – 44% of this year’s shows were with book authors. Combined with previous years’ book episodes, we have reached the 60-book mark on this podcast – you can sift through them all on our site by clicking on the “books” category on the right-hand menu. 

But I’ve had the chance to read books outside of these, and found even more I’d like to feature. I’m not saying all all biz books that come out are good.  To be honest – a decent portion of them are aren’t good at all. But since I set out once per year to make a special show, I felt it time to review some of the business books that shouldn’t slip by unnoticed. 

After you hear brief reviews of these 6 books, you’ll hopefully put one or two on your To-be-read pile.

Shownotes:

Friction, by Soon Yu 

“Sell The Way You Buy” by David Priemer

Impromptu :: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI

The Attention Merchants, by Tim Wu

The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur by John Jantsch 

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

Chapters:

0:00 – Intro

02:08 – Friction, Soon Yu

08:40 – Sell the Way you Buy, David Priemer

17:12 – Impromptu, Reid Hoffman

24:52 – The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu

30:40 – The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur, John Jantsch

35:30 – The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman

Episode 169

You did everything just the way you were told. 

You took the tags the free tools gave you and installed them on your site, you configured platforms and poured over their reports, you connected the systems and even hired developers to hook everything up to a database. And yet, you have little value to show for all the work you’ve put into your company’s analytics 

You feel the analytics platforms are backing away from their responsibility to streamline all this. Instead, the answer from the largest of the bunch, Google, is they’ll hold onto your data if you use their newest tool, BigQuery, and pay them money to store your data …or is it their data… on it. 

The bad news is summed up in a 2023 book whose euphemistic name is “You’re data is flawed”– don’t want to get an explicit rating for using the actual name 

It was written by someone who empathizes with our situation and who lays out in the book the steps needed to generate positive financial returns for our analytics investment.    

Our guest Mark McKenzie started his career in London, but moved in 2014 to sunny New Zealand to work for a data-focused digital agency. That led to him founding and growing an analytics firm that served clients locally and in the UK, Australia, and the US. Following the sale of that firm in 2022, he moved with his family back to the not-so-sunny UK.  where he’s consulting with  on digital analytics

His focus on analytics can be seen through his volunteering at events such as ‘MeasureCamp’ and ‘Web Analytics Wednesdays.’ Let’s talk with Mark McKenzie.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Mark’s MckTui consultancy

Avinash Kaushik

Cambridge Analytica

The Circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno

With Federated IDs, a company personalizes an experience for someone using digital data that was sourced (but not shared with the company)  from multiple external systems.

The DIKW Pyramid of Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom

https://www.cardinalpath.com/blog/digita-analytics-immaturity

Tom Triscari

Chapters & Timestamps

146.879456 146.879456 Admitting our data is f*%#ed
622.046944 622.046944 prior to fixing data, must treat it as an asset
2369.560249 2369.560249 Fixing data we keep internally
3287.677599 3287.677599 Book and Mark’s contact info