Getting Sacked, Van Halen, M & M's and Better Digital Marketing Decisions
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Humans dont really like to make decisions. Decisions are tough. There is often too much at stake. Humans make bad decisions all the time. But not making a decision at all is even worse. At the latest Drink Digital meetup I looked at how I had used the WRAP framework to make better decisions at work and how we are passing on the good decisions that we make around the team. When individuals are making better decisions at work and sharing them with team mate to make their life easier then the whole business is making better decisions. Make better decisions, easier and across the board.
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Getting Sacked, Van Halen, M & M's and Better Digital Marketing Decisions
- 2. Getting Sacked, Van Halen, M & M’s and Better Digital Marketing Decisions
- 5. Meet Jon-Jon
- 6. Good Decisions Are Hard To Make
- 7. What Happens When You Don’t Make Them?
- 8. Nothing
- 9. And That’s Shit… It’s Worse
- 10. It All Goes Pear-Shaped • Things pile up • You panic • You make mistakes • But you have procrastinated so long there is no time to learn from them • And you start to loop
- 11. So… Make A Decision
- 12. WRAP
- 17. Meet Jon-Jon
- 18. This Is Good For Individuals https://unsplash.com/@joaoferrao
- 19. Make Better Digital Marketing Decisions https://unsplash.com/@pagsa_
- 20. Google Penalties
- 21. Google Penalties
- 22. Google Penalties
- 23. To Disavow Or Not To Disavow?
- 24. To Disavow Or Not To Disavow?
- 25. To Disavow Or Not To Disavow?
- 26. Apply To All The Things • Whether to make content or not? • Blog posts or infographics? • PPC or SEO? • Lager or Bitter? • And so on…
- 27. What About Your Team? https://unsplash.com/@akeenster
- 28. Pass On Your Good Decisions
- 29. Rock Music and M&M’s
- 31. Actually… Sort Of True
- 32. What About Your Team? https://unsplash.com/@akeenster
- 33. Make It Easier For Them…
- 35. Processes
- 36. What Can You Use Them For? • Telephone etiquette • Booking holidays • Calling in sick • Expenses • Petty cash • Folder organisation • Locking the office
- 37. What To Use
- 38. What To Use
- 39. What To Use
- 40. Checklists
- 41. What Can You Use Them For • Content launches • Site migrations • Technical SEO audits • New site launches • Going HTTPs • Keyword research • Tool processes
- 42. What To Use
- 43. What To Use
- 44. What To Use
- 45. What To Use
- 46. What To Use
- 47. What To Use
- 48. What To Use
- 49. Frameworks
- 50. What Can You Use Them For • Design principles • Coming up with creative ideas • Spot-checking • Guidance • Outreach • Even making decisions!!!
- 51. What To Use
- 52. What To Use
- 53. What To Use
- 54. Avoid Death By PowerPoint
- 55. I’ll Make It Easier For You
- 56. You Will Share This Presentation
- 57. You Will Link To The Post I Write
- 58. You Will Buy Me A Drink
- 59. It’s Not Always Black or White
- 61. I Stole This And Adapted It
- 63. Buy This Book >
- 64. Don’t Sack Jon-Jon Just Cos He’s A Hipster
- 68. If All Else Fails…
- 69. Thanks!
Editor's Notes
- So happy new year to you all. Hope that 2017 is going to be a good one and we can put behind all the crap from last year. Of course new years come with resolutions. Ive decided to give up drinking and put less slides in presentations. You can see that I have already failed on one and and am about to fail on another. But its not just personal resolutions there are often business ones as well. It's a new year. The boos man or lady is pumped up. We need to get our shit together. We need to make the business more profitable. We need to trim one area of the business that isn't as profitable as another. You know we are doing well but sometimes we just need to clean up the house a bit. The quick answer.
- This is Jon-Jon. Jon-Jon is so cool he doesn’t use an H in his name, and does that twice. Lets say Jon-Jon works at Boom Online. I have obscured his face so you don’t know who he is. So Jon-Jon is okay at his job. You know, not great. He consistently late and takes a lot of fag breaks. He’s overly critical in company meetings. He’s delivered a lot of work late. Its okay, in fact some of its pretty good. But it’s late; every time. Should I ask him or not? That’s the question.
- I'm not going to make you raise your hands but I’m pretty sure you have all made your mind up at this point. You have all decided something. Yeah let’s sack him – or let’s give him another chance. Whether it was a good decision or not is a bit tougher to tell. It was A decision.
- The other side of the coin is when we make no decision as at all. What happens when we make no decision?
- Nothing
- It’s worse than making an okay decision – or even a bad decision. Because if we never allow ourselves to be wrong or fail then we never learn.
- At the point of not making decisions things can go really wrong.
- I have mentioned frameworks before. The steal like an artist or the SUCCESS or KISS frameworks that I have mentioned in other presentations. All of them are variable on your friendly Boom blog. This is the one that got me thinking last year. This is the one that started us down a path at Boom that is part of the big plan for this year. So lets look at WRAP and how it can help us make better decisions.
- Widen your options. We often have very narrow framing. Business people often have a very narrow frame – whether to do this thing or this other thing. Teenagers are narrow minded. Look for new options. Look for “and” instead of “or”. Coming back to Jon-Jon – should I sack him or not? It's a bit narrow. Look for new options. Should I sack him, or should I help him get better at the parts of the job that he isn’t so good at? Should I find out why he is so critical? Is that something we can help address? Widen your options – no THIS or THAT
- Reality-test your assumptions. We tend to collect information that support our own thoughts. Test things. This works particularly well with SEO and PPC! Don’t assume that what Randy Fishcake wrote on the Moz blog is gospel. By the same token don’t assume that what Spamela Anderson wrote on blackhat world is the wrong way to go. Come back to Jon-Jon - We asked the narrow question of whether we should sack him or not. It was also based on what we knew. Not what we others knew about him. Ask the people he works with every day. Go back to his original application and his CV. Ask him how he's getting on with something in particular. Collect data. Reality test your assumptions.
- Attain distance before deciding Short term emotion can lead to making bad decisions. Again short term wins are very common in business and the world of digital in particular. I touched on it last time we were here. The consultant offers short term wins, the exec who is there for only a year offers short term wins over strategy before moving on the next thing. We definitely still see it in SEO – it isn't sustainable. You need to step back. So back to Jon-Jon. Yeah it’s a new year and the boss wants us to clamp down. But take your time. Think about it, take in the data you have collected. Allow yourself the time to ruminate on what to do. So bringing back to Jon-Jon. We decided that we needed to crack down for 2017 and get things moving. We had a narrow mind set and we only thought about it from our own point of view. And also we did this all really quickly. Step back – take a breather.
- Prepare to be wrong We all have egos. We all think we know what the future will hold. We all know how Google works right? Wrong. We haven't got the foggiest. Any SEO who yells you otherwise is a talking out of their bum. We may have an idea. We may have run test5s that help us understand it better. We may have collective knowledge. But we don’t know. Drop the Ego and we make better decisions. So what about Jon-Jon? When we consider the W R A and then drop the ego when can make better decisions.
- So back to Jon-Jon. Earlier we were thinking about sacking him for poor performance. You know, he’s not great. He consistently late and takes a lot of fag breaks. He’s overly critical in company meetings. He’s delivered a lot of work late. But when we used WRAP we found out from his team mates that outwardly he had been critical but in private he had been very supportive with several members of staff – often going above and beyond to help them out with their problems. Often not completing his work because of the amount of time he was spending helping others. It also turns out that he had been very helpful with some clients and their issues as well and he has a great phone manner. People are saying he's great at helping people get their stuff done even if it means he struggles organising his own. It turns out as well that others didn’t see his criticism in meetings as bad – that was something that I had projected on to him. Oh, he's giving up smoking as well. We had him working on little projects on his own – in reality his strengths lay elsewhere. What about instead of sacking or not sacking him that we see if we can find a belter fit for him on our organisation? And lets get him some productivity and prioritisation training. We’ve now made a better decision this THIS or THAT.
- WRAP is good for individuals.
- So form now on I am going to use actual real life examples that we have worked on.
- Widen your options – semrush, sistrix, awr, panguin Reality-test your assumptions – get feedback from other team mates, see if there are other stories out there Attain distance before deciding – take it all in, don’t disavow all your links tomorrow Prepare to be wrong – remember to check your ego at the door
- Widen your options – SEMrush, sistrix, awr, panguin Reality-test your assumptions – get feedback from other team mates, see if there are other stories out there Attain distance before deciding – take it all in, don’t disavow all your links tomorrow, don’t delete landing pages that ‘appear’ not be performing Prepare to be wrong – remember to check your ego at the door
- Widen your options – don’t just use one tool, use your own brain – its better Reality-test your assumptions – ask for opinions form other team mates, from people who don’t even know what penguin is Attain distance before deciding – take your time Prepare to be wrong – quite a bit on this one – not that you will ever know
- This is all very well. But not everyone works in the same way. I might be able to apply these things short term. But what about everyone else? And that got me thinking.
- I promised m and m’s in the title so I best deliver those.
- You may have heard Del Preston in Wayne's World 2 talking about how he had to fill in brandy glass with a 1000 brown m and m’s otherwise Ozzy wouldn't go on stage. Not quite true.
- It was actually David Lee Roth form Van Halen. Whilst they are renowned for their rock’n’roll antics there was actually some sound business going on behind the scenes. It was Dave Lee Roth that was responsible for a lot of that. In the contract is stated that there should be m and m’s in a bowl backstage at every city. But no brown ones. They had to be taken out. And people just thought he was a bit of dick. In reality they were one of the first bands to take their entire high tech stage show on tour. They couldn’t oversee everything but were concerned that everything should stay safe for the band, the crew and the fans. So they added the m and m’s clause as a tripwire. When they arrived at a new city they looked for the m and m’s. Then they looked for brown ones. If enough attention hadn't been paid to the contact there would be brown m and m’s or no m and m’s. Either way that threw into doubt whether they would have paid enough attention to the rest of the contract. Whether it’s the greatest idea or not is up for debate. But what’s interesting is how they took something complicated and added one factor to create the alert. They made it a lot easier for themselves.
- People find it hard to make decisions. People don’t have time to make decisions. People are worried about making decisions. Take the good decisions that we have all made (and there's gonna be more with WRAP!!) and spread them around the rest of the team.
- So this is how we are looking to deal with it at Boom. Its not easy. It takes a lot of work and certainly there is no onesize fits all solution. Processes, checklists and frameworks are all very different.
- What is a process? “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end” This is the driest of all the things that we are currently undertaking. Less digital marketing and more business based. The least sexy.
- All the boring stuff. I won’t go into too much detail. It not only saves people having to think and save time. It also conserves brain power for making real decisions!
- What are checklists? “a list of items required, things to be done, or points to be considered, used as a reminder” So these are less constrictive and it is the point “to be considered” that is key here. There may be underlying processes but there more unknowns. Things can be changed. Sometimes you need to change. Some things might not be relevant for particular projects. Things that should be considered.
- So this is an actual checklist that we have in Process Street for adding links we have built to Buzzstream. You don’t have to think about what you should do or how to go about it. You don’t even have to ask.
- What are frameworks? “a basic structure underlying a system, concept, or text”
- Turn your presentations into blog posts and then add them to the processes, checklists and frameworks. Spread the good decisions around. Make it easy.
- Nothing is Original
- Apply the WRAP framework to your decision making.
- Take the good decisions that you make, document them somehow and share them with your team mates.
- Make it easy for you and make it easy for them. Cos when more things become easier, its easier to make good decisions more often.
- Learn hypnosis. Its easy to convince everyone that every decision you have ever made is a good one.