All the Way

The standard B2B marketing tactics are obsolete, says Evy Wilkins, VP of Account Based Marketing at Traackr.

Disruptors like ad blockers and email filters have outmoded them.

Thank goodness there's influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing works, Wilkins says, because most customers rely on expert opinions  to make buying decisions. 

They find the opinions on social media. 

When you win the love of opinion leaders (who'll parrot your sales-talk on social media), you can again begin to romance customers.

But it takes a change of heart.

"For decades, marketers have been in a rhythm of campaign-based activities," Wilkins says; but "influencer marketing is about long-term relationships that don’t go up and down with budget levels."

Influencer marketing, Wilkins says, is "always on."

You can't woo an influencer, for example, to love your brand for eight weeks, targeting only 30-year-old English-speaking males who work in greater San Francisco.

It doesn't work that way—even when you pay the influencer.

Insider Trading

Don't get too excited about the "virability" of Twitter, if you hope to change minds.

Although six in 10 users get their news from Twitter, a new study shows retweeting is insular.

A group of psychologists at NYU analyzed 560 thousand tweets about three polarizing topics: gun control, same-sex marriage, and climate change.

They found that, while tweets which include fiery "moral and emotional language" go viral, they're rarely traded outside users' in-groups. Sharing occurs almost exclusively among users in the same ideological camps.

"The expression of emotion is key for the spread of moral and political ideas in online social networks," the study's authors say.

But emotion doesn't make an idea worth spreading.

"While using this type of language may help content proliferate within your own social or ideological group, it may find little currency among those who have a different world view,” lead researcher William Brady says.

The Great Rule of Foresight

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

— Linus Pauling

Most ventures, products and ads fail. Mind-blindness, tone-deafness and overoptimism are the chief reasons why.

Nothing's fail-proof, but you can look positively clairvoyant—especially when no one's sure which direction to take—by presenting lots of ideas.

When asked, for example, to name a new product, create a campaign, or write a major headline, I strive to present clients at least 10 ideas.

I try not to fall in love with any one, but to think of all as straws in the wind.

"Throw straws in the air to test the wind," said the 17th century Jesuit Baltasar Gracian.

"By finding out how things will be perceived—especially from those whose reception or success is doubtful—you can determine a great deal about their chances of turning out well, and decide whether you should proceed in earnest or withdraw entirely.

"By trying people’s intentions in this way, the wise person knows on what ground he stands. This is the great rule of foresight in asking, in desiring, and in ruling."

Right to Life

If Las Vegas doesn't cause you to question unchecked gun rights, what will?

Conservatives gaze at enemies and insist the Constitution assures our right to bear arms, because it's "a way that the weak can protect themselves against the strong."

Liberals gaze at young people's corpses and insist the Constitution assures "our right to a happy life."

There seems to be no room in conservatives' minds for equality, fairness, reasonableness, or real-life experience; there's room only for the endless fairy tale of "the weak" vanquishing "the strong."

In Stephen Paddock, they've found their perfect spokesman.

In defense of fairness, philosopher John Rawls once asked students to imagine themselves behind a "veil of ignorance."

Forget, for a moment, your personal situation (your wants and needs; your race and sex; your religion and education; your social and economic class; and so forth).

Then ask yourself: Without those privileges (or disadvantages), what kind of world would you want to be born into?

You'd be forced to conclude you want a world governed by fairness, where everyone is equal—and deserves equally to live.

Google: Popups Will be Penalized

If you value SEO, remove popups from your website.

Google doesn't love them anymore.

This January, its bots began to penalize sites that include them.

“Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible,” Google's engineers proclaim.

Your site is toast if it displays a popup that covers content after the user lands on a page, or that appears while he's viewing it. 

You get doubly burned if the user has to kill the popup to view the content.

The only allowances Google makes are for helpful popups, like those seeking age verification or informing visitors about cookies.