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BrandingBlog Radio: Shawn Phillips of Full Strength

February 17, 2012 By Dave Young Leave a Comment

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Confession: I never feel more out of my element than when I’m hanging out with athletes.

I met Shawn Phillips a few years ago and have slowly gotten to know him a bit in the last 6 months. I’m one of those “unfit” clueless people who never heard of his brother Bill’s book “Body for Life” back when it was changing the world. I managed to be totally clueless while they grew their EAS supplement company and sold it. I

Yep, that was me, sitting on my ass watching TV while Shawn was changing the shape of the world.

So, why am I interviewing Shawn? Hey, it’s never too late to start paying attention to getting stronger and eating better and growing older with a bit of grace. Is it?

It’s an admittedly awkward interview on my part. It’s half confession, half therapy session.

Shawn’s passion is men’s health in those “middle” years. We’re not young guys any more and we’re not old-timers.

I like his idea of sustainable fitness. I like his Full Strength protein shakes. I like Shawn’s passion for education and his concern for the state of men’s health.

Here’s a chart from his book, Strength For Life, that will help you understand the phases of fitness that he and I discussed. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

BrandingBlog Radio: Roy Williams and The Pendulum

February 10, 2012 By Dave Young 2 Comments

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Wow. I told Roy Williams that I wanted to hear the scary bits about his new book, Pendulum: Where We’ve Been, How We Got There, Where We’re Headed, he reluctantly agreed. He’s traced back the trends of societal change 3,000 years. What he’s found will give you a few reasons for apprehension the next 20 years or so.

Don’t expect many direct applications to advertising and marketing. You won’t find them in this book.

However, he doesn’t want to be known for just ringing the alarm bell and sending us all into hiding. So, he will be following the Pendulum with a new book called Invisible Heros. These are the type of people who can lead us out of whatever mess we find ourselves mired in for the next two decades.

If I were you, I’d have a happy movie ready to play after you listen to this one. You’ll need it.

Filed Under: Books, Current Affairs, Podcasts, Wizard Academy, Wizard of Ads

BrandingBlog Radio: Brett Feinstein – Political Advertising

February 3, 2012 By Dave Young 2 Comments

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Brett Feinstein - no doubt going negative

Brett Feinstein is a partner in the political advertising agency Pound & Feinstein.

He’s one of those guys that you have to get to know to understand. He’s loved and admired by those who take the time. If you know Brett Feinstein only superficially through Facebook or another near anonymous web arena, you probably only think you know him. That’s because he treats Facebook as his own psychology lab; questioning, pushing, shocking and provoking to see what kind of reaction he can get. It can be alarming…if you don’t know Brett.

I’ve known him for almost 10 years now and I always enjoy getting together for a meal when I can catch up with him or on Skype for a podcast interview. We talked for almost 4 hours. Most of it after I shut down the recorder.

I still ended up cutting about 30 minutes out of our official podcast interview just to get it close to an hour.

If you’re a student of marketing and advertising, you’re gonna like this one. We compare and contrast the various strategies used by retailers and candidates. I was surprised, enlightened and entertained through the entire conversation and I hope you will be too.

What I left on the cutting room floor was mostly a conversation about Facebook that got a little personal for a few third parties. So, I decided not to share it.

We did cover campaign strategy, messaging, research, direct mail and the life of a political campaign staffer.

Filed Under: Advertising, Copywriting, Direct Mail, Podcasts, Strategy

BrandingBlog Radio: Chandra Clarke – CEO of Scribendi

January 27, 2012 By Dave Young 1 Comment

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Remember the scene in the movie Pulp Fiction where Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) accidentally create a serious mess of their car by shooting the guy in the back seat? The only solution is to call in an expert…a cleanup guy. Winston Wolfe (brilliantly played by Harvey Keitel) to the rescue. I love the Winston Wolfe character. He knows how to fix a bad situation.

When you’ve got a writing mess (a dog’s breakfast, as my Aussie friends would call it) you need to call in an expert. Scribendi is to bad writing as Winston Wolf is to Jules and Vince.

Scribendi is a professional editing and proofreading company. I did some copywriting work for them a few years ago and reconnected with CEO Chandra Clarke for this podcast.

Chandra and I had a nice rolling conversation about how businesses can utilize her editing and proofreading services and why. I learned that her company has employees in every time zone on the planet and is available for projects 24/7, year round.

A couple of sites that I mentioned in the podcast were www.duhcorp.com and www.huhcorp.com which are fictitious companies on real websites with very creative tongue-in-cheek copy.

In case you’re wondering what kind of mess Vince and Jules have in their car… (If the bad words bother you, don’t play it. Seriously.)

Filed Under: Podcasts, Uncategorized

Soundbites: Fire Fast, Hire Slow

January 25, 2012 By Dave Young Leave a Comment

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This is age old advice in management circles.

Kinda funny how hard it is to do in practice. And it’s one of those topics where you look at business owners and managers and you think, “They really should take this advice.” I really want to talk about the “fire fast” but I’ll just touch briefly on the hire slow, because there are loads and loads of resources on how to hire people. Just remember that the worst thing you can do is hire the first person through the door that you think could probably learn to do the job. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Experience, Leadership, SoundBites, Strategy, Uncategorized Tagged With: fire fast, hire slow, SoundBites

Blog Ghostwriting with no time-sucking Ghost

January 23, 2012 By Dave Young 2 Comments

I know I’ve mentioned Shortcut Blogging to you quite a few times, but we’ve finished our web site and have our infrastructure in place to take on new clients in bigger numbers than onesy-twosies.

Many business owners know that they should be blogging. Why? Because, blogging creates relevant content on your site, gives you increased credibility as an expert and gives people a reason to talk about you in a good way.

Trouble is, most business owners are so time-deprived that they just can’t make writing a priority.

Hiring a ghost writer for your blog won’t save you much time. You’ll have to spend a lot of time with the writer just making sure he/she understands your business and then going over revisions before posting.

We’ve made it simpler. Think about it this way…if the local radio station called you up and asked you to go on the air for 10 minutes to talk about your favorite subject, would you hesitate to say “Yes”? Of course not.

What if you were able to brainstorm a year’s worth of “favorite” topics and then have a weekly interview where you covered each one? Yes, again? Of course!

Paul Boomer and I have taken that idea and made it a service for business owners. We’ll produce weekly interviews, post them as podcasts on your site, create articles based on your spoken words and post them as accompanying blog posts. All you have to do is show up for the interviews…and we’ll batch them in once-a-month recording sessions.

Our guiding mantra has been, “How can we make blogging so easy for a business owner that they will feel like their contribution is really a break in their work instead of something that adds to the load?”

The business owner shows up for the interviews, we do the rest. All of it.

Yes, this is a shameless plug. But, I’ve been telling you to blog for almost 8 years now. Have you done it?

To sweeten the pot, we’ll even buy you a microphone just like the one pictured here. You’re gonna sound like a million bucks.

Filed Under: Blogging, Buzz This, Shortcut Blogging

BrandingBlog Radio: Michele Miller on Sports, Politics and F.A.R.E.

January 20, 2012 By Dave Young Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:21 — 45.0MB) | Embed

Recording this Podcast was a blast. I’ve been working with Michele Miller for 10 years now and being able to share conversations like this is exactly why I started podcasting.

What really made this one fun is that we were face-to-face instead of on Skype. We were both in Palm Springs to have an annual meeting with a client that we’ve worked with almost as long as we’ve been Wizard of Ads partners. This past year our retail client grew 28% over the previous year. That’s a big deal any way you look at it.

In this rambling conversation, we discuss trends in societal change, sports (was it baseball or football?), politics and New Year’s Resolutions, or the lack thereof. You’ll learn about Michele’s F.A.R.E. mantra and my own twist on it.

I hope you enjoy it. I think I managed to maintain my family friendly rating on iTunes. Somehow, turning on the recorder kept us both from flinging f-bombs around the room.

This picture was from her Wonderbranding Class at Wizard Academy on Halloween, 2007. Yes, she taught the class dressed like this.

Filed Under: Customer Experience, Podcasts, Quotable, Rants/Raves, Sports, Wizard Academy, Wizard of Ads

Stupid is as stupid does

January 16, 2012 By Dave Young 1 Comment

This is clever, cute, witty.

Until you have to spell it. Or search for it.

Stoopeed.

Filed Under: Advertising, Quotable

BrandingBlog Radio: Raffy Pendery, Interwebs Genius

January 13, 2012 By Dave Young 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:58 — 38.3MB) | Embed

I love talking to Raffy Pendery. You’ll like him too.

We chatted about 3 of his amazing creations. RealStatistics.com is an online graphing tool that lets you upload all of your business stats and helps you make sense of it all. If you need to keep your training ducks in a row, he’s also developed a platform called RethinkTraining.com for managing your company’s training materials while monitoring your trainees’ progress. Brilliant.

And, if you’re a local business that relies on brick & mortar sales, plus ecommerce, plus email marketing, plus putting your goods out there on Craigslist, all while keeping close tabs on what’s working and what’s not…his team co-developed GreySuitRetail.com. It’ll blow you away.

Raffy is truly one of the good guys on the internet. I met him when he was just starting to grow his empire. (This picture is a very young Raffy at Wizard Academy.)

At the end of the podcast, we talk a bit about Hana-Li, his very talented singer-songwriter wife. Check out Hana-Li on Facebook.

Filed Under: Podcasts Tagged With: ecommerce, training