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Episode 114: Why Privacy Is Good For Marketing, with Jodi Daniels

We don’t have the right to retain our visitors’ information just because it’s possible on the internet. 

Complying with data privacy laws can be a confusing, stressful process. We help businesses embrace a new way of working with data, going beyond compliance to create a privacy-friendly strategy that builds trust with customers.

Jodi Daniels is a privacy consultant. She founded Red Clover Advisors in 2017, and through it, she assists companies to create privacy programs, build customer trust and achieve privacy law compliance. Jodi also serves as a Fractional Chief Privacy Officer to small and medium companies. Through frequent speaking appearances and her own podcast, she shares practical tips so companies can carrying on marketing, but in a way that’s compliant and ethical.

She holds a BBA and an MBA from Emory University, and lives with her family in Atlanta.

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Episode Reboot.

Take the How Data Compliant is Your Business Quiz

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Episode 113: Website Survival, with Patrick Villemaire 

Designing Websites involves dealing with Domain Registrars, Hosting Providers, CMSs, Page templates and scripts that run forms. We haven’t even mentioned the things visitors see like text, images and audiovisual assets. It’s a lot. 

My guest has set out to take the complexity out of all this. Knowing that we learn best when we’re absorbed in a story, he rolled all his principles into a book geared for anyone who’s been handed the keys to a website or work with a web designer.  

Patrick Villemaire is the founder of Blue Eclipse Inc, a Canadian web agency. His passion is making the web a better place and he has been building websites for over 20 years.

Patrick is a graduate of McMaster University with a double major in Multimedia and Communications, and a minor in English. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, son and a barking dog. Outside of building websites, he likes to listen to music and play the occasional game of hockey.

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Episode Reboot

Download this sample of the book, used with permission.

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Episode 112: Owning the Story, with Melanie Coulson

People focus too much on posting content and not enough on asking what content they should post. We can easily get on a treadmill, writing about topic after topic. This results in treating everything as a fluff-piece, overlooking the power of content. And though this hyperactivity may look good on our status reports, and please the search engines, is that who really matters in this endeavour?  

I’m reminded of the movie Jurassic Park,  as financier John Hammond briefs mathematician Ian Malcolm on how they made the dinosaurs. Malcolm scolds him for tinkering with the building blocks of  life.

In the same way, we should think about the person consuming our content, pausing not only to ask if we can create a piece of content for them, but to ask if we should create it. 

Judging what content gets made is a time-honoured skill. News media and the publishing industry have formalized it into the role of the editor.  Today we’ll talk with someone with an editorial background, to learn how they think, so we can judge our content just like they do. 

My guest spent 16 years as senior-level journalist and editor at top Canadian newsrooms, such as The Globe and Mail, CBC.ca and the Ottawa Citizen. Melanie then directed the content for non-profits and organizations like Export Development Corporation. 

She’s happy to share what she’s learned about Digital Communications on the stage at TEDx, or as a lecturer at Carleton University, where she originally received her journalism degree. 

She has now moved into creating content under her own banner as Owner of Big Stride Media. She lives in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata, with her husband and two sons.

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Episode 111: Obviously Awesome, with April Dunford

There is a lot at stake when Companies develop some technological or physical product. But they face an equally high risk in getting the product positioning right. Weak positioning can mean the difference between success or failure.

When we don’t have our positioning nailed, it’s as if we’re talking to someone who doesn’t speak our language. And when they don’t acknowledge us, we repeat the same message even louder, as if that will get our point across. For those who remember John Cusack 80s films, you might be familiar with the movie Better Off Dead’s scene with a French foreign exchange student having dinner with her American host family.

Shouting doesn’t work when you’re using the wrong language, and it doesn’t work with the wrong positioning either. Luckily, someone has come up with the process for finding the best positioning for our product, saving our market from being subjected to random jargon. 

April Dunford was a startup executive, running sales, marketing and product at seven B2B technology startups over the course of 25 years. She is now a consultant who has had the privilege of bringing her positioning expertise to more than 100 companies. She codified her process in the 2019 book “Obviously Awesome,” which makes these ideas about positioning accessible to any company 

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Episode 110: Making Numbers Count, with Karla Starr

We humans are good at dealing with small numbers. So good, scientists have coined the word “Subitizing” to describe how we know small numbers as well as the back of our hand. The opposite is also true. We can’t differentiate big numbers. We know that 10 to the power of 10 is bigger than 10 to the power of 9, but how much bigger? Even on hearing that they differ by a factor of billions, we stumble to gauge that kind of scale. 

This puts those of us who present numbers in a pickle. Historical greats like Florence Nightingale had a terrible time presenting her data to government leaders. She broke with convention, framing everything in terms of soldiers not statistics, to argue how to prevent needless deaths in military hospitals.  The book in today’s show explains methods used by her & others to convey numbers that the brain has a hard time grasping.

Knowing tactics that worked for Florence,  should at the very least help us convince management to approve our marketing initiatives. 

Since graduating with a BA in Psychology and Philosophy from NYU, Karla Starr has written columns for Medium  and appeared on NPR and CBS Sunday Morning. She has also written for many magazines and won an award for the Best Science/Health story from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Her first book was Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others. We’re talking today about the second book  Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, with Chip Heath 

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