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Almost Timely News, 24 April 2022: Set up for Success, Incrementality, Talkwalker Interview - read the full article about seo updates april 2022, Search engine optimization and from Christopher Penn on Qualified.One
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This is the almost timely newsletter for the week of April 24th.
2022.
Whats on my mind this week set up for success.
One of the cliches Ive heard most in business, especially the last decade, is expression.
You set someone up for success.
Lets set this person up for success.
My old boss at the agency I used to work at, she used to say this about like nearly every new hire and every promotion.
Any time a person was taking on a new task lets set them up for success.
It was like her favorite expression and how we all had to help set this person up for success.
And that got me thinking what does that phrase actually mean? Like, how? How do you set someone up for success? I actually asked her out on Twitter and and folks gave a couple of, I thought, pretty good responses.
Aaron Hockley said, Give them whatever resources, tools or knowledge you have so that theyre going to be going into this situation as best prepared as possible.
Andy Robinson said Give them the tools they need to do a good job themselves.
While I dont disagree that giving somebody resources, tools and knowledge is a critical part of helping them succeed, I think theres a different angle we should consider.
In the martial arts class.
I was taken to my, uh, my teacher school.
We were working on the opposite of setting somewhat for success, using positioning and timing and knowledge of psychology.
Probably We performed techniques designed to set someone up an aggressor, set him up to fail.
No matter what your antagonist does, they dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole until victory of any kind is impossible for them. How? By taking away their options you position your yourself on one side of their body so that theyre inclined to punch a certain way, ruling out other kinds of strikes.
Place your hand in a guarding position.
At an angle where they kind of got to work around it.
Making their their next moves predictable and you time your defense so that each attack they throw puts them off balance and vulnerable to counterattack.
Now, think about it for a second.
You just stand in front of someone.
Square on right when your hands are down and stuff.
They have limitless ways to attack you.
Any angle of their choosing, any target of their choosing.
You know, they can punch you, they can kick you, throw squirrels at you, whatever.
When you position yourself proper with distance and timing, you take away their options.
Right. You hit the wrong distance to be kicked.
Youre in a strange angle to be jabbed.
Theres a guard in place after work around that they have to step through or cross or do something that maybe wasnt in their plan.
Right. Maybe it wasnt the way they were going to do it.
By taking away their options, their choices, you set them up to fail.
Because you know whats probably going to happen and the fight occurs on your terms, not theirs, but you lead them to the inevitable conclusion you want them to to go to their defeat.
Right? The inability to cause you serious harm.
They may have to run away or retreat or theyre incapacitated and they cant fight anymore.
If your life is on the line, maybe you have to take theirs.
But either way, theyre out of the game.
You have set them up to fail.
So what if we flip that around? Instead of leading somebody to failure, we lead them to success.
How do we do that? The same way? By taking away their options.
But instead of taking away avenues of success. You know, the examples I was giving you provide only key avenues of success.
You take away the things that are likely to cause them to fail.
You prevent them, you block them, you.
You maneuver them. You.
You cycle energy and probability and your deep subject matter.
Expertize.
You know whats going to fail.
You know whats going to go wrong.
And you take those options away.
So what does that look like? Well, youve probably seen this in action, right? If youve ever if you ever been to or seen a little kids bowling party at a bowling alley, you know, of like a birthday party or whatever.
I mean, even for some of the little kids, Ive seen some adults do this, particularly if theres a bar at the bowling alley.
What the bowling alleys do they put up with those metal rails or the inflatable bumpers? Right.
So that the players, the kids, they cant throw a gutter ball.
Its physically impossible for them to throw a gutter bomb.
I mean, they might hit one pin, but they always score at least something, right.
And the kids are cheering and stuff and and the parents are nodding sagely.
And, you know, so the pants like I probably couldnt do any better.
But you take away their ability to fail by taking away options, by taking away choices.
Right.
Theres a whole 12 inches on either side of the alley thats no longer available.
Suppose you have like a novice chef on the line.
You know, somebody just graduated from culinary school.
How do you help them succeed? You take away options. You focus them on one thing.
You new person chop these carrots in quarter lunch slices on Tobias using a six inch chef knife and this wooden board right up to what Aaron and Andy said.
You give them a decent knife, right? Youll give them like a shingle a good cutting board, give them carrots that are fresh.
Show them exactly how you want it done.
And you take away every other distraction so they can only do whats asked of them.
And success is simple.
Its achievable. Its clear, and theres no other choice but to succeed.
I guess like stacks on the stab themselves or something.
But for the most part, well see if you went to culinary school.
You would know how to not do that.
But thats an example of setting somebody elses up for success.
If you want to set someone up for success, what can you take away so that they only have one path to follow? One way to go the way to success.
What options can you reduce? What focus can you give them? Think about it in like a marketing analytics context.
Right.
We always talk about setting up a Google Analytics account for success.
When were doing audits for clients.
A lot of its taking options away, right? A lot of its were going to configure all these settings so that you dont because we know what they do and well set them up properly.
Right. You take away choices. They dont have to think.
Do I accept this? You know, GDPR notification? Should I turn on Google Signals? You know, how do I configure channel groupings? Take that away.
You take away those choices, and in doing so, you create opportunities for success.
So perhaps setting someone up for success is just about as much about what you take away as what you give.
Maybe even its more about what you take away so that you dont have things getting in the way of success.
Something to think about and other things in this newsletter this week besides the new search console.
Of course, Im relentlessly promoting.
Sorry, not sorry.
I did a piece this week on incrementality.
Its a measurement that a lot of the C-suite asks for.
Not a lot of us know how to deliver it.
The C-suite sometimes doesnt actually know what it means.
They think they just read it in a magazine somewhere, but its a walk through of different ways to measure incrementality.
Thats some great fireside chats.
Got to do fireside chats this week, one with Christy Hiler.
Up until you own it and Manxig Du from Talkwalker, which is a fantastic interview.
She was walking through a lot of the challenges in bias and A.I.
and natural language processing and how companies like Talkwalker look at data and process it for things like social listening and media monitoring.
So be sure to check that out.
Got the usual batch of courses and classes.
Im actually working on a new class on Google Analytics 4 so if you watch this video and it sounds like a class youd want to take, let me know. Just hit reply and then jobs this week.
Gap Senior Account Manager, Web Mechanics Marketing Manager, Tribal Vision Content Specialist, AGC, lots of good stuff there.
The usual ads.
Special thanks to Onalytica this week for featuring me on the interview and their stuff and everything is measurable in marketing piece in martech.
Lets see.
In terms of what Im reading this week, Instagram asking people not to copy TikToks to our TikTok Copycat.
Yeah, whatever.
Um, do what you want on there.
How do to use agile marketing for a more productive content team? Can I perform SEO with some folks doing some experiments with GPT-3, which I think is pretty interesting and dealing with extremely large data sets machine learning in an SEO.
So I think theres a lot of stuff going on there.
Oh, and one other piece I thought was interesting.
Google says in Universal Analytics, the latency issues with real time, theyre not going to fix it, but theyve made it pretty clear that you must be using Google Analytics for thats where their focuses.
Thats what they want us all using.
And you know, when things go wrong in Google Analytics 3, aka Universal Analytics, Googles like, Yeah, were not going to fix that.
So Id say its pretty clear where it were supposed to be going in ads this week.
Of course, the Google search console course and the Trust Insights Newsletter.
Please check those things out and events coming up.
Ill be at the Spark Me Social Conference in Montenegro in June.
The MarTech Conference may con the marketing conference in August in Cleveland and the marketing class B2B Forum conference here in Boston in October.
So Im looking forward to those events.
If youre going to be at them, stop by and say hi, Id love to to chat with you and see whats going on with you.
Thanks for tuning in for this week.
Ill talk to you soon. Take care.
Christopher Penn: Almost Timely News, 24 April 2022: Set up for Success, Incrementality, Talkwalker Interview - Search engine optimization