Cautionary Tales

Here’s a sad but predictable story about the perils of robot-generated writing. A business owner in Maryland was hiring for a tech position. One applicant rose to the top after exchanging several well-written emails with the owner. Then came the interview. The applicant could barely spit out a complete sentence. It was so bad, the…

I watched the Chiefs-Eagles game while in Mexico on Sunday so I didn’t see most of the US television ads…  …until this week when I saw the endless parade of “Best Ad” lists and “Lessons Learned…” analyses.  This Squarespace ad, starring Adam Driver, made some of the lists.  Here it is… And what does this…

I bumped into a business owner this week who refuses to market with email… …because she doesn’t like getting email.  “I have 74 million marketing emails in my inbox,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”  Yeah, I get lots of emails I can’t stand, too. But I still send emails — lots of them… …because…

Here’s a story oozing with irony… …about robotic marketing gone wrong.  In December, I hosted a LinkedIn event called “Human vs. Machine Marketing.” One of the lessons we promised in the event description:  “Why set-it-and-forget it robotic marketing backfires.”  Fast forward to yesterday when – two months after the event ended – a LinkedIn member…

Wrap your head around this story… A business owner delegates LinkedIn to an assistant.  The assistant gets an AI-powered robot to help him.  He gives the robot the URL of a LinkedIn post. The robot “reads” the content. Then the robot composes and submits a comment under the owner’s name.  The marketing assistant loves the…

This was one of those mornings when I woke with an empty brain. Not a single email idea buzzing about. So I fired up Notion.so (highly recommended) and opened my “Email Stories” idea file. I came across  a note titled:  “Bad Email” The note contained an email that landed in my spam folder on December 22, 2021.…

Here’s a cautionary tale for you to tuck in your “how-not-to-network” file. The saga began last week, when Barry sent me a LinkedIn message asking to meet. Barry used to run an agency in St. Louis that competed with the email marketing firm I founded and ran, MarketVolt. We crossed paths occasionally back then so…

Yesterday, I showed up on Zoom to lead a complimentary strategy session and discovered, instead, that I was attending an unsolicited pitch-fest. Dan scheduled the strategy session a few weeks ago during a presentation I delivered at an online summit. I invited my audience to sign up for a free one-on-one session… …if they were…

The mouse was mocking me. He crawled from his hiding place under the dishwasher, skittered toward the fridge, and then paused to stare at me – as if to pose.  I could have sworn I heard him squeak,  “Look at me, sucker!Catch me if you can. Ha! Ha! Ha!”  And then, cool as a cuke, he…