In this episode, Emily and Robert Sofia, CEO of Snappy Kraken, talk about how to have a unique voice on social media and what that really means.
073 - Mikal Abdullah: Problem Solving With a Jiu Jitsu Master
Mikal Abdullah is an entrepreneur, Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu coach, and competitor, founder of Aces Jiu-Jitsu Club, U.S. Army Veteran, and professional fighter. Mikal’s diverse background makes for some very interesting conversation in this latest episode. Emily and Mikal talked about an array of topics including: entrepreneurship, problem-solving, branding, the military mindset, leadership, and more.
069 - Steve Pratt: Podcasts - Your Brand's Unfair Advantage (VIDEO)
What makes a good podcast? How about a great podcast? In this episode, Emily and Steve discuss the best ways to create a valuable message to grow your podcast audience as well as how companies should be approaching podcasting as a new form of content marketing. They also discuss emerging opportunities with audio content and voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
068 - Perth Tolle: Free People, Strong Markets (VIDEO)
061 - Dr. Daniel Crosby: Boating and Selfies Are Dangerous, Investing Is Not
Do you know the biggest misconception about investing? New York Times best selling author Dr. Daniel Crosby joined Emily Binder to talk about the psychology of money. Many investors are mistaken that success in the markets is about being analytically minded, but it’s actually more about self control.
So yes, C.R.E.A.M., but emotion rules cash. Daniel shares the three legs of effective investing and why education alone isn’t enough to save us from investing mistakes or weight gain. (Yes, the two are linked.)
1-click play this episode wherever you listen
Daniel Crosby, Ph.D is author of The Behavior Investor and host of Standard Deviations
Guest: Dr. Daniel Crosby is an Atlanta based psychologist and behavioral finance expert who helps organizations understand the intersection of mind and markets. A New York Times bestselling author, his most recent book is The Behavioral Investor. Dr. Crosby is Chief Behavioral Officer at Brinker Capital.
Timestamps and topics:
02:00 Daniel’s background: trained in clinical psychology then searched for non-clinical applications of psychology, stumbled on behavioral finance: the intersection of the mind and the markets
02:50 What do people most misunderstand about investing and their money?
03:20 “My business is full of human behavior” -Daniel’s father, a financial advisor for forty years
4:00 Many people think that success in the markets is about being analytically minded… when in reality the most successful investors have one thing in common: being able to control their own emotions. See Buffett.
4:15 It’s quite easy to be okay or good at investing
04:40 Cognitive errors
05:00 Our brain is wired to keep us alive long enough to pass on our genes, not to achieve excellence
05:25 The ways our brains betray us and hurt our investing: Our ego (especially a problem for men: see Consider Firing Your Male Broker by Blair duQuesnay), emotion, conservatism, and attention (tendency to confuse what’s easy to recall vs. what is probable)
Taking selfies is riskier than investing.
06:20 Example of attention leading us astray: People are very afraid of sharks but not of taking selfies, even though the latter has a higher death rate. Attentional bias for the vivid.
07:13 People think investing is risky even though over any given fifteen year period in history you couldn’t have lost money while invested in the general stock market
07:30 Multi-asset class diversified investing is much safer than, for example, taking selfies or boating, but we don’t perceive it this way
Boating is riskier than investing.
08:20 We tend not to answer the complicated question but to substitute: so we ask, “is this enjoyable?” And investing isn’t fun, but boating is fun. So instead of answering “is this risky?” we answer the question “is this enjoyable?” And then boating seems safer than investing.
10:25 It’s more complicated than just having an advisor help you.
The three legs of good investment decision making:
Education: learn about stocks, bonds, accounts
Environment: your portfolio - well-diversified that won’t scare you to death
Encouragement: good advisors to slap the bad decision out of your hand before you make it
11:00 Self-control parallels to diet and exercise: know what to eat, don’t have junk in the pantry, have a trainer or workout buddy to get you in the gym (apply these analogies to investing)
11:20 We added nutrimental information and calorie labels to food but we are actually twice as obese now - behavior change takes much more than just education
12:00 We want to think that we’re rational but information/education is a weak predictor of behavior change (nutrition labels alone don’t change our behavior)
13:25 For the same reasons that we’re fat, we’re poor. It’s complicated information, and it’s just information alone, which is ineffective (see the three legs). There’s a cottage industry of selling complexity.
Our tweet storm - what do people misunderstand about investing?:
14:00 Are people more empowered to manage their money now with technology and more transparency? Are we on a better path to managing our money better now that we’ve gotten away from old school stock brokers dialing for dollars and manipulating our emotions?
15:00 There’s never been a better time to be an individual investor, yet things we think we want like transparency and liquidity can hurt us. E.g. the more you check your account, the more it induces action, panic, and mistakes.
You’ve probably heard of the famous Fidelity study which showed that investors who had forgotten their account passwords performed better than ones who logged in and traded actively.
16:00 Across 19 different countries, the more active people are with trading, the worse their portfolios tend to perform.
17:15 People need financial advisors, but not for the reason they think.
18:00 Emily mentioned this quote from Stephanie Bogan on Patrick Brewer’s podcast, The Model FA: “When people come into your office to talk about their money, they’re never really talking about their money."
19:00 Literally nothing has more excitatory power in the brain than money - not sex, not death, not anything else.
19:40 Daniel has a strong Twitter presence, is great at marketing himself, and at making his ideas accessible: what is his strategy?
20:35 Daniel’s long term plan: put positive messages into the world and study happiness
21:30 Daniel’s podcast recommendations:
Dateline NBC Podcast - listen on Spotify
Ologies Podcast - study of different sciences
The Pitch (“Shark Tank" for your ears”)
Standard Deviations (Daniel’s podcast) - Emily’s favorite episodes:
24:00 Daniel’s book recommendations:
He is writing a book on the meaning of life, so he is reading about this. Best one he read last year: Alchemy by Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy guy) - great book for anyone into marketing. Topic: behavioral economics and applying psychology to marketing.
Connect with Daniel Crosby:
Twitter: @danielcrosby
Interested in business, marketing, and technology? Subscribe free to our minipod, Voice Marketing with Emily Binder. Under 5 minutes twice a week on podcast apps and Alexa:
Follow @beetlemoment on Insta:
053 - Brian Roemmele - The Key to Successful Branding - Voice and Beyond - Pt. 2
Listen to Part 1 - podcast with Brian Roemmele about Alexa hardware and more
Brands have defining points with their customers, as any human relationship does. What makes a brand successful longterm? How does voice play a role?
Subscribe free wherever:
Topics and Timestamps:
02:00 How do we build a relationship in which our customer is the hero? (A la Storybrand framework)
02:53 All products, companies, and brands are a relationship with their consumer.
03:20 Every purchase is an emotional purchase because it is defined by neurological reactions - neuropeptides bombard every cell of our body when you make a purchase
04:00 Every brand has an emotional connection to the people who use their products. Some covet it better than others. This means a narrative is being spun overtly or covertly all the time.
Apple has a powerful brand narrative on a cerebral (higher brain) level
05:45 It took millions of years for apes and chimps to speak and listen: we had to create a new O.S., the neocortex on top of the limbic system in order to communicate
07:15 Neuropeptide release of a transaction or purchase - pleasure in the body, your cells will remember this
08:15 Carl Jung - the twelve archetypes
Archetypes, introduced by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, are models of people, behaviors, or personalities. Jung suggested that archetypes are inborn tendencies that influence behavior.
08:30 Voice has the opportunity unlike any other one (including film) to create a rich deep emotional lifelong connection with the customer. If you do this ethically and build the persona correctly for our brand that resonates with your cohort
09:00 The human agenda is connection
09:45 Brian consults with brands and tell them to understand where the transaction and neuropeptide release occurs
09:55 A voice comes from a person - it’s not a thing - it has a persona (a life, a gender, a background) - we are hardcoded to assign these traits to a voice
10:25 We instantly categorize anything we hear or see anthropomorphically because of flee or flight mechanism
11:05 Your brand has a voice: who is it? Fashion brand example from Brian’s work
11:30 It is impossible to make a persona that caters to everyone: there is no voice of everybody
12:05 You need to assign a Jungian or Myers Briggs archetype to your brand
12:30 Your customer is on their own hero’s journey, along with you (Apple and Patagonia and Tiffany and Starbucks do this or have done this well)
14:00 Why is Alexa female? This could be a smart move by Amazon: female voice = authority on a neurological level! - profoundly important. Google has an androgynous voice - a mistake? Brian would argue yes.
14:15 The voice of authority is and always will be a female. The first voice your hear is your mother. Long before eyesight you have the resolution of identifying your mother - this is a survival mechanism evolution has granted. That is why we are wired for communication and voice.
15:40 We can’t change our hardwiring in our brains - female voice is authoritative, especially one in tune with your mother’s voice (can prove this neurologically)
16:10 Anthropologically and culturally, the wise woman (hence the archetype) was always the leader of the tribe until western culture labeled them witches
17:30 The divine feminine and goddess culture came because women were the voice of authority, which we knew instinctually. Women became the voice of the tribe and holder of wisdom. “Don’t eat that, you will die.” Sounds like mom.
18:40 We are a victim and a success story of our reptilian brain
20:15 If a brand keeps us too reptilian we are probably not going to be longterm fans or customers; jealousy or FOMO pulls at the lizard brain but that is short term thinking. Apple is successful because they get cerebral (higher brain, invoking ideas of fashion)
19:15 There is more to this than throwing out an app, you are building a tapestry to weave between the customer for life. We define our life by our brand relationships to some degree, e.g., “That’s when I owned that car, that’s when I got my first iPhone…”
Thomas the Tank Engine helps children make sense of the world
20:20 It’s not the brand we connect to, it’s the story and its role in our own narrative (e.g. Thomas the Tank Engine helped kids understand the confusion of the world with “The little engine that could.”
21:00 90% of what we do on our computers is trying to make sense of the world, e.g. social media as confirmation that what we did was right
21:15 Brand expression is to attract members of a desired tribe (e.g. why I use Apple)
22:20 When we build voice brands (brands around voice, which are coming) - ask: what does your brand sound like? Who is it? Where did they grow up? This is more than a Hollywood storyboard - and this is why you need experts to help with branding.
CONNECT WITH BRIAN ROEMMELE:
033 - Top Five Tips for a Great Alexa Flash Briefing - Daniel Hill
What makes a great Flash Briefing? Daniel Hill, creator and host of The Instagram Stories Flash Briefing is our guest. Daniel and Emily Binder, creator and host of Voice Marketing - Daily Beetle Moment Flash Briefing discuss the top five tips for creating a popular Flash Briefing.
Why Daniel has the #1 Alexa Skill for search term “Instagram”:
“Others were doing similar things [marketing tips for small businesses] on Instagram, but no one was doing it on Alexa.” -Daniel Hill
Length - 10 seconds, 90 seconds, or 3 minutes? Daniel suggests a longer briefing than Emily. It depends on your content.
Don’t waste time on your intro and outro. Use markers. (Emily uses Pippa - click here for a $25 Amazon Gift Card when you sign up for a year of audio hosting). Include sonic branding - be consistent.
Schedule / cadence - how often to publish your Flash Briefing?
Make a commitment.
How many days per week? 5 weekdays, or all 7 days? Should you publish on weekends? Whatever you do, be consistent and let listeners know what to expect. Listenership for Flash Briefings diminishes on weekends but you may want to post at least one or two weekend posts for the ones who stay engaged (Daniel). Consider a weekend edition (something short and simple).
Survey your listeners: Daniel used a Google Form, created a bit.ly link to it, and announced it on his briefing - and he gave away an Echo to incentivize listeners to take the survey. Batch record - don’t leave this until the night before (Emily). Daniel: Fresh news briefings require recording daily most of the time. Consider recording early after the gym or whenever you feel most energized. Listeners can hear fatigue in your voice.
Content: what to talk about?
Daniel: It has to be newsworthy.
Emily: Don’t be obvious and basic. Don’t make a briefing about something basic.
Add value: “What do I know that other people don’t?” And add your take on the news you share. Example briefing (share news, give take) below or click here.
What to name your Flash Briefing:
Daniel: Look for a name or word people are talking about. Capitalize on popular search terms because this platform is so uncrowded.
Emily: Look at Google Search Trends or Amazon’s list of top product searches. https://twitter.com/emilybinder/status/1117167808851382274.
What’s the point of your briefing?
Emily: Public speaking should make your audience feel something, remember something, and do something. Look at your briefing as a body of work over time. You need a central theme or idea that is the backbone of all your content.
Daniel: Make a Flash Briefing that is niche: example: not just fishing, not just deep sea fishing, but Sustainable Deep Sea Fishing!
About Daniel:
Daniel Hill is obsessed with figuring what grabs people's attention and holds it. What makes someone tap the "like" button or double tap on a picture? What makes someone post the crying emoji or share a post with their private text message group? Daniel currently works at Columbia University Medical Center and runs DanielHillMedia, where he teaches small business owners how to use Instagram. He hosts an Instagram podcast, called "The Instagram Stories", and launched the first Instagram Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing Skill where he gives daily news updates and answers questions. You can find him on Instagram @danielhillmedia.
Connect with Daniel:
The Instagram Stories Flash Briefing
Twitter and Instagram: @DanielHillMedia
027 - How to Make the Voice Assistant Like Your Brand
Hear how the future ubiquitous voice assistant will decide whether to promote your brand.
We spend major ad dollars on the duopoly (Google and Facebook) with Amazon a distant third. Those ad dollars will shift.
Telenav announced that it is integrating Amazon Alexa into its automotive navigation system offering.
1.0:
The voice assistant we know today will be so much smarter tomorrow.
Your shadow, your assistant:
The voice assistant will be every person’s personal assistant, their shadow, their life historian and documentarian. It will mitigate our drudge work for life admin tasks like errands and comparison shopping. It will save us all kinds of time. I hope we use that time well.
What won't change:
We are at the mercy of an algorithm today: many ecommerce retailers live and die by SEO on Google and on Amazon. Tomorrow our brands will be at the AI's mercy. The data will be richer, the algorithm more complex.
Amazon, which is nearing $800 billion in value, is making a noticeable push in advertising products, hoping to grab a piece of Google and Facebook’s duopoly of digital advertising. Voice commerce is estimated to be a $18.3 billion opportunity by 2023.
This idea of the future is not radically different from the game we play with search engines today. You bid to be at the top based on a user’s query, or you work on your content to rank high organically.
The same process will happen but with less screen, and more anticipation of the user’s needs or next purchase.
When the assistant recommends a product, it will try to match to the user’s needs, history, and preferences. Google does this today with search results. Your website gets rewarded for relevancy. Everyone tries to game the SEO algorithm but ultimately if you have great content that solves the searcher’s problems google knows it and ranks you higher. There is no silver bullet.
Up Next:
Tune in next week for episode 28: my upcoming interview with Jon Chu, an expert in voice first ecommerce and retail.
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