Author: Brittany Crockett

Love making content around here for our clients and for ourselves at Adelsberg Marketing. Today, we want to think about how to generate that content. We also like to think about things in 90 days or one quarter timelines to work towards success. So let’s talk about how to make a plan for 90 days worth of content. So where do we start? Three keys to being successful. One, someone specifically assigned the responsibility of generating and distributing the content. How do having accountability for these things matters? Number two, a plan to succeed made ahead of time so that you can be ahead of the curve when you’re trying to make things. And then three, making it a priority by putting things on the schedule, on the calendar, to take time to make things and make reminders to post those things as well. So for this podcast, every Monday afternoon, I have a dedicated time set out to come in and recording this podcast. When we think about the particular pieces of content, we’re going to talk through the process that we would want you to think about when you’re making one piece of content. And you can repeat that process many times in almost like a Mad Lib type format.

The first step to think about is what makes you or your business unique. We love Post it Note exercises, and if you’re familiar with those, this is a great time to use one. But if not, think about the following. Number one, what competitive advantages do you have over others? For example, do you have access to certain products that other people don’t? Or do you have a specific expertise? Number two, does any of our people have a great personality online? So is there someone in your company who is super comfortable being online? And maybe it’s funny, which is obviously not the case with me. And then three, do you have any processes that are interesting to the general public? We have video shoots all the time, and behind the scenes shots are generally interesting to people. So this is also a great time to think about your brand personality. Is your brand very professional? Then setting a funny guy loose without any restrictions might be a problem. So keep that in mind as we move further down the path. Using notes from that list above, we can then start to look at how that interacts with our customers’ wants and needs.

So one, what do your customers care about? It’s that old sizzle or stake situation. Are the customers really buying this from you or are they wanting something else? Are they wanting the sizzle or are they wanting the stake? What do your customers need to know? What information do you want them to know about your business? So you have to balance both of those factors. And then three, what’s the customer’s level of awareness about your business? Do they know that you exist and they know that you need your product and they just need a reminder? Or they are at the very top of the funnel and they don’t know that you exist and they don’t know that they need your product. This will help determine what type of content you create. Because if someone doesn’t know anything about you, you have to take a different approach to it than if they are already familiar with your customer. This will help determine what type of content you create. This will help determine what type of content you create. If a customer doesn’t know who you are, they require a different set of information if they’re already familiar with you.

Now, let’s combine some of these things. Let’s take one, what makes us special, and one, our customer needs, and one, our customer awareness level. And then let’s add some content structures to make the ideas work. What emotions are we wanting to evoke? Happy, sad, angry, cool, shocked, or intrigued? And then maybe pick a content structure. So, like, announcement, community generated content, expert opinion, get to know you content, guides, holiday relevant things, how to, listicles. A listicle is a list plus an article. Memes, polls, questions to the community, quizzes, specials or discounts, or testimonials. So then let’s pick a content medium. So maybe it’s animation, maybe it’s audio, maybe it’s a PDF document that they can download, or a graphic, some interactive device or quiz, live video, photography, stories, text, or video. So combining the types of information we want to convey with different types of structures and mediums, we can create an amalgamation that will help our customers be more aware of us. Now, do this a bunch of times. I would recommend two to three times a week to get started and have that ready. Have a list of those, so let’s say 30 of them over a 90 day time period.

And then here’s where it gets really challenging is plot these out on a calendar. To help you be successful, plot these out starting far enough out that you have time to make the first couple before the deadline arrives. When you’re ahead of the gun on this, when you’re ahead of the curve on this, it’s going to allow you to actually be successful in doing this and helping you stay ahead of what you need to be doing. Now, this is totally an exercise you can do on yourself. But if you’re a larger organization, we can be hired to come in and do a content idea generation session with our entire team. So feel free to reach out if you’re interested in that. If you found this helpful or you might have a friend who would find this helpful, shoot them a text, let them know about it. It helps us get the word out and helps us make more episodes. So thank you for your time. I hope you enjoyed the Content Machine podcast. We’ll be back very soon with more awesome content.

Jocko Willinik must be one of the baddest dudes alive. He became a Navy Seal, and then later led his own unit of Seals, and then became a Seal instructor. He served in the Navy for 20 years. Then he became a black belt in Jutsu. Then he also started his own consulting company, Echelon Front, and now has manufacturing operations in Maine, making clothing, boots, merch, and he has his own energy drink. Jaco has an amazing track record of success and all of that with an English degree. So shout out to all of our friends with English degrees. So when Jaco talks about leadership, I think it’s worth listening to. I remember years ago hearing Jaco at a leader cast event and have been seeing him in various places since then, including a great episode of the Case of the C Neistat V log. My friends know how much I love Casey Neistat. My f andom for Jaco took another step, however, when I read the Extreme Ownership Book. It’s a fantastic book. What I love about this book is that it explains each point three times. One, as a concept from leadership, just a generic concept. Two, as a story from the battlefield from Jacko’s experiences.

And one is a story from the corporate world. This combines the repetition of a good leader, but then also with a storytelling element that makes it easier to remember and more relevant to the leader. So a couple of points that I think are worth mentioning when you think about extreme ownership. Extreme ownership is the concept that as a leader, you are responsible for everything. Blaming other people is not helpful. You are responsible for success or failure, and the desire to blame others must be deterred. When you are responsible for the outcome, act like you are responsible for the outcome. You will need to work harder and double check things, but you also want to instill the same sense of responsibility throughout your team. So the second concept is leading up and down the chain of command. Leadership doesn’t just flow down the chain of command, but up as well. This is not something people usually think about. They usually think about leading top down. But in the midst of piles of paperwork in the fog of war, Leif Babin, the Echelon Front co founder and co writer of Extreme Ownership, is having a conversation with Jocko.

And Jaco points out that Leif has the opportunity to lead those above him in the organizational chain. Instead of just complaining about the leadership requirements coming in from above, reshape the thinking of those above and think about, Well, what do we need to do better? What can we do better to help them make those decisions or endorse our decisions? It takes a lot of respect for those above you and motivation internally to approach things that way. Leading down can be simply done through the power of your position. We all know that, but that’s not the best way to accomplish things. Leadership is more than just positional authority. Being able to lead up the chain of command requires you to build trust in your abilities and those above you, and working to understand what your immediate supervisor is looking for or has to show to their superiors. Then also having the humility to understand that they might have different priorities than you do to push you in another direction and then being able to accept that. Can you enable leaders to take a different approach? These two concepts can be really valuable across many aspects of our lives, from work to home to church to civic groups that you engage in.

Understanding how to take ownership can affect a positive change in your world. So I would encourage you to read about that in Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willingham, but thank you for listening to the Content Machine podcast. Subscribe to get more episodes in your podcast player. The only one that I really was messed.

So at Adels Burger Marketing, we love new technology that makes our lives better. And I’ve been using a remarkable tablet for over two years now, and I wanted to share some of my observations about the technology. Why did I get one? I had noticed some bad habits that I’d been unable to kick. In meetings, I would go in and use my laptop for taking notes. And while there’s some efficiency here, so my notes would be easy to copy and paste, or me and my team could be in the same notes document at the same time, there were some drawbacks for me. However, I am easily distractible. Maybe I would have forgotten to close Slack before I started the meeting and notifications were continuing to stream in, or I would flip over to email real quick and get sucked into a thread that looked like I needed to respond to it. In short, it was controlling my focus too much. Alternatively, I had tried to use paper notebooks for all of my active clients. Paper eliminated many of the distractions, but there were also some problems. There was a major redundancy issue. If I were to misplace one of those notebooks, I would be in trouble.

Or if I got confused on which notebook to bring to a meeting, I would also be in trouble. Also, what happens to my old notes when I fill a notebook? They get stacked on a shelf and now I have a finding old info problem and a storage problem. I wanted a solution that would combine the two things. I had seen ads for remarkable, but it seemed a bit too good to be true to me. I think this is a product you have to try it to see how good it really is. Because I’d tried writing on an iPad before and that experience was terrible. So it seemed unrealistic to me that this was going to be that great of experience. Fortunately, it turned out that Alex Russell and our team had one of the first generation remarkables and allowed me to try it out. The handwriting was amazing. And that was the final test, the final straw. I knew that I needed to go buy one. So here’s what I love about the remarkable. One, it’s great for note taking. The handwriting is amazingly fast and accurate, and it feels very similar to paper when you’re writing on it.

And unlike an iPad, it’s super responsive. I can put my hand on it and write just like paper. And it was super fast. There was almost no discernible time delay from writing it to it being on the screen. The second thing, there’s no distractions. The remarkable is limited in its abilities. You can’t surf the internet. You can’t go watch YouTube. But I love its lack of abilities. It gives me no reason to get distracted from the task at hand. But it also has the storage tools and redundancy tools. So unlike my paper notebooks, the remarkable backs itself up to the cloud so that if I were to break one or lose one, which I have a history of, the data would be backed up and reloaded onto a new remarkable or available from download on the app. I can upload my own templates, so I was able to put together my daily micro scheduling page that I had on paper into a PDF and upload it, and I use that every day on my remarkable. I have significantly cut the cost of and wasted amount of paper in my life because of the remarkable. Screen sharing on the remarkable plus Zoom allows me to show my team ideas in real time and keep a copy of them in the remarkable.

I can live write on a document that is broadcast on my computer screen that I can then share through Zoom. It’s a pretty neat capability. So a few tips if you’re going to get started with remarkable. Number one, organize your files from the start. With its file structure being like a computer with folders and hierarchy like that, and it not being possible to search through handwriting like text for a searchable database, file structure is key to finding things in the long run. So start with good file structure. Buy the nicer pen. It’s a couple of extra dollars more, but it has an eraser on the top, and having an eraser on the top feels like it would feel like if you were writing with paper. And it helps you stay in the workflow and keeps you from having to switch your pen to the eraser tool on the sidebar. And then buy a nice case. The design of the remarkable is really solid, feels really good in your hands, except for one point. It’s very weak around where the button is that turns the device on and off. I dropped one in its case that came from the company and the button jammed and the device was bricked.

So my advice is to get a good case. I’ve dropped my remarkable times after that and had no other issues except for this one time. I actually commissioned one from Ricky Santos on our team who does amazing leather work. So go check him out on Instagram, Ricky Santos. He does great leather work. The remarkable has been a great addition to my workflow. If you have any questions about the remarkable, let me know. But thank you for listening to another episode of the Content Machine Podcast. Subscribe and let us know what you thought about this episode.

Here’s part two of our interview with nick Hall, the general manager of the Fredericksburg Nationals baseball team. So have you had things that you’ve seen that maybe bring the attendance above what your average attendance would be for that night? What are some of the things that have just been super home runs that have really bucked any attendance trends?

I mean, it’s definitely, and this is not a secret in the minor League baseball world. It’s fireworks. Fireworks. People come out for fireworks from all over. That’s not necessarily a secret. If you go to any market that has a minor League baseball team, there is one night a week that odds are they’re shooting fireworks. I would be willing to bet that’s their highest attended game for that week. That’s for sure. I think that was the same back in Jackson. That wasn’t Jackson inventing the wheel or anything like that. That is just the nature of it. We are human and we love to watch stuff blow up. It’s just you know.

No argument here. You mentioned your mascot a minute ago. I did want to bring him up because it’s an oddball mascot. I don’t know if does he predate Gritty?

He does, statistically, yeah. Our mascot is Gus. Gus is George Washington’s childhood imaginary friend. Gus has been here the whole time. When George went off to fight for our independence in the Revolutionary War, he did bring Gus with him. Gus was there the whole time. If you zoom in enough at the painting of George Washington sailing across the Delaware and you hold it up, you know, like national treasure, you’re not going to need the lemon, all that stuff, and you do all of that, you’re going to see Gus standing right there behind him. Gus was there. Gus, naturally, naturally. Gus was there the whole time. Gus was there the whole time.

We’ll put a picture of Gus up on the screen here or something because Gus is an odd looking character. Gus is what.

We call in the industry nightmare fuel.

Well, I originally wrote in this question your horrifying mascot, but I changed it to oddball mascot. And my kids walked in when I was getting prepped for this episode, and I had a picture of Gritty on the screen. And Gritty from the Philadelphia Flyers is obviously… They’re in the same mold together.

It would be going away from Gus’s back story. Gritty is a huge part of the inspiration of Gus. There’s no doubt about that.

And it’s just so stereotype shattering. What was the thought process? And then how do you guys use Gus in a regular basis to help promote the team?

For sure. The thought process of Gus was twofold. For the longest amount of time, everybody figured that George Washington was going to be our mascot for obvious reasons, George is from here. But let me tell you, when we really did a deep dive on this, this was brought up to me and I just sat there and I was like, We’re flirting with disaster by doing that. Because let me point out some things. What are the funniest things that a mascot does? One of them is dancing.

Yeah, they’re self deprecating generally.

Yeah, self deprecating. What would we have done when George Washington got up and shook his booty at the crowd?

Yeah. You had a George Washington mascot twerking.

Yes, it’s over.

Like you might be on the front page of Fox News.

100 % because people around here, everybody knows George Washington. People out around here eat, breathe, and sleep George Washington, though. He means so much to this community. It’s the branded throughout this community. So if we do one thing that’s not… I mean, not even talking inappropriate. Well, let’s go one thing that’s not historically accurate that George Washington himself wouldn’t have done. You’re talking about knocking over a kid’s Pop corn. Well, not George Washington. He would never stoop that low. You see what I’m saying? That was the first thing, this realization that, Hey, the most obvious thing is probably our absolute worst thing that we could do for this community is make George Washington an actual character that’s out here. Now, he is a character that’s out here because him and his mother, both being from this area, we do a race every single day, every single game, and it is a mother son race, relay race. They come out for that, and then they send autographs, and then George is put away. For the exact reasons that I just mentioned, you have to be careful with that image. The next thing is, well, what are we going to do?

We looked around all of sports to find the perfect mascot, and gritty was a big part of that, and so was Blue from the Indianapolis Colts.

If you ever get a chance to look at him. He’s a horse, though.

Blue’s a horse. He’s a horse. And for a while, when we first came up with the idea, it was going to be George Washington’s horse. Until we found out the literal mascot that we thought up is currently being used by the Indianapolis Colts. So that also brought on another layer. Gus gets the cut of his shirt from Winnie the Pooh. We thought it was funny to make the mascot show off that belly even more. The tail of Gus, if you notice, looks like a little dinosaur tail. The reason for that, which you might not know, is about 30 minutes from here, the largest dinosaur fossil in the United States was found. Kind of neat. So we’re like, Yeah, let’s make him a dinosaur. But then we realized, He’s got to have a bullet. Why? Well, that actually has no significance to the area. We just feel as though Gus would want a bullet. It’s awesome stuff like that to be able to help us out and make that work. After going through the process, we ended up with Gus. There was some definite hesitation, but the great thing about him being so crazy is that everybody immediately was like, Okay, that’s pretty awesome.

Because the other thing, when opening up, one of the criticisms that we got as an organization is the creativity that went into the naming of the team. And what I mean by that is, minor league baseball is known for zany names. I came from Amarillo, just talked about Amarillo. We’re the sod poodles.

I drove past the trash Panda stadium on Friday.

Trash pandas. Absolutely. Akron is the rubber ducks. So when you have these great, great brand names that are like off the wall. But yet we went with the Fredericksburg Nationals. That is two full 45 minutes away from Washington. That means a lot to our fans. There’s so much pride in being an affiliate of the Nationals. When we first opened, we were coming off of a World Series victory. So there was so much pride in that. It was so important to keep that branding. So we had to set ourselves up for, if you will, that weird and zaniness. We had to bring that in other ways other than with the actual baseline brand. And so we were able to do that with Gus. And honestly, it’s been such a tremendous success. He is definitely the wild card of the stadium.

Well, if you do rebrand, the Fredericksburg Imaginary Friends sounds like a pretty fun minor League team name.

I love that.

I love that. So let’s talk about marketing and sales real quick. So a lot of your career has been built on selling sponsorships and partnerships. C an you talk about your thought process when you come to that?

Yeah, for sure. So I think when we talk about partnerships, talk about corporate sponsorships, we are talking about marketing inside of a baseball stadium. The number one thing that I love to talk about is sponsoring and partnering with live events. I could talk for hours about what it could do for your business, but when it boils down to it, you have a captive audience. You have them for three hours, hopefully now two and a half, shout out to the pitch clock, but you have a captive audience for two and a half hours. There is no muting, there’s no rewinding, fast forwarding, there’s no pausing. That message is there. It’s so important, though, you can’t have a commercial. You have to find a way to creatively brand what we are doing from an entertainment standpoint so that you link that brand subconsciously. You’re linking your brand with having a good time. If we were to just run commercials, it’s just going to fade into the background. But it’s important to be able to link something so important to a community, to link a having a great time and link your brand and your messaging all together. You mix those three things together, your brand’s image throughout a community or wherever that may be is immediately changing in a positive way.

And so that is essentially my entire career up until this point is based off of those partnerships and creating those subconscious links to a brand and what we do and how we are able to serve.

Our communities. Can you talk about some of the hottest partnerships that you’ve done? W hat’s something that’s turned out just a weird connection or a weird thing that they wanted to sponsor?

Oh, I have so many. And yeah, there’s been a lot, and there’s some that I’ve had to say that I have had to turn down as well. For instance, you do have to remember there’s still baseball going on. So depending on what’s going on, there are some lines that can’t be toed, such as, I have had people want to sponsor the other team when they get hit by a pitch. I can’t handle that. The injury lawyer. And although funny and great, there is a chance when that happens, somebody could get hurt.

On the field.

And that now makes you the bad guy. So you know what I’m saying? So you have to be able to think about those things. That is one of the ones that I think… That was one of my favorites. One of my favorites that I have done I’m going to go all the way back to Jackson. And it was Bird & Bird Associates, a law firm in Tennessee. We did a Bird Mobile water delivery to umpires once a game. We got an intern to dress as a giant chicken and drive out in a little VW remote control child’s car. This chicken is three times the size of this car. He just rode this little bird and we call it the Bird Mobile. The Bird Mobile would ride out to an umpire and he’d handle a bottle of water and then he’d ride off on this little bird. It was just hysterical. There was quite literally one time that it did… I mean, it was probably rated for what, 50, 75 pounds, something like that. And this 150 pound gentleman was riding in this thing, and there was one time that it just broke on the way back, and we did not know what to do.

And four of the promotional squad folks sprinted out there, and this was not scripted, and it was the funniest thing I’ve ever been a part of. And each of them picked up both the bird and the Mobile at the same time and carted it off like it was a stretcher. It’s that stuff. It’s trying to find, can you find a way to link your brand in a way that furthers the entertainment that the stadium is providing? I could probably talk for an hour on some of the weirdest things that we’ve done. I’ve had a funeral home sponsor the visiting team’s lineup announcement. The catchphrase was, The Fred Nats will beat them and we’ll bury them. It’s funny stuff like that. It’s coming up with that creativity to link the two. It just becomes everybody’s favorite.

Now, you’re in a leadership role. You’ve been in a leadership role for a long time. Can you talk about the process of going from selling those things directly to having a team of people selling those things directly?

I can’t lie and say that that was the hardest part because when you are concentrated in one avenue, it becomes your baby. It becomes your baby. So to give up control over that is a difficult avenue to be in. But at the same time, then you have everybody else’s department is now starting to come to you. There’s just this realization that you’re just not going to be able to hyperfocus on that one thing. It would be a lie to say, Oh, you know, that’s just the hat that you put on, and it’s an easy transition. It takes some time to be able to really be able to do that. I will definitely say that there’s plenty of times where I miss just being able to concentrate on one avenue. Oh, my goodness, there’s so many times that I would love to give up 90 % of what I do and just go back to that for a whole week. But I would be lying to say that it was easy to do to make that transition, but it is a transition that if you’re able to do, it’s so positive. It’s so very positive. Part of that is having trust in the person you’re giving it up to.

That’s a huge piece of it. You have to make sure that you have the right person in place to be able to take the reins from whatever that was.

Thinking about that thought continued is like, how do you approach leading that organization then?

You’re talking about leading it from the whole organization standpoint? Yeah. For me, I like to think this, too, because one cool thing about working for so many different managers is that you learn what you’d like to work for, but you probably also had a few times where you learned… I’m going to vow if I’m ever in that spot not to do that one thing. Sure. It’s all obvious things, but when you’re at the other end of it, sometimes you really learn like, Hey, that really does make you feel bad. The intent wasn’t there to make you feel bad. I can almost guarantee the intent wasn’t malicious, but that doesn’t feel great doing that. One thing that I like to do is, for better or for worse, I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I pretty much tell people, Look, if you are coming to me with an issue and don’t have a solution, I want you to know that to me means you are handing your problem over to me wholly, or communicate it that you need a little bit of help or whatever that may be. I love when somebody comes to me, they’ll describe an entire problem, and a lot of times I’ll just say it and be like, Hey, okay, great.

Present a solution to me by tomorrow at five o’clock and let’s make a decision. They just look at you and I’m like, I can’t solve that for you right now, but you can. I think that is my biggest strength, I think, is that I really love to be able to give people the ability to come up with their own solutions and execute those solutions. I think a big reason for that is one of the calling cards of a successful organization, and this is not just baseball or sports, this is anything, is buy in. Buy in towards the vision. One way to get that buy in is to actually give your staff the ability and the feel that this is theirs, that this is fully theirs. That to me was the thing that I learned when I was given that and I wasn’t in the leadership role yet. It moved the needle for me in my career when I felt as though, Oh, man, I have to make this work because they let me do it exactly how I wanted to do it. So I can’t let it fail now. Yeah, it’s on me. I get it because now it’s on me.

I don’t have anybody else to blame, so therefore, I can’t let this fail. When I realized that and then got into management role, I was like, You know what? I didn’t know if they meant to do that, but that was genius. And so that’s one of the things that I like to do is if you have a department under me, I’m going to ask you, Okay, well, how do you want to do it? I know what I want the results to be, but how do you want to get there? I like to think that that’s a strength of mine that I let everybody come up with their own plans and present them.

All right. Well, nick, thank you so much for joining us. If someone is in the Virginia DC area, your season runs along with MLB season?

Exactly with it. Our opening day is April seventh. Okay.

Well, thank you for taking the time, nick. It’s nice to talk to you again. And good luck with this season of The Nationals.

Absolutely. Thank you, Kevin, so much. Thank you for having me.

Thank you all for checking out the Content Machine podcast. If you found this helpful, please be sure to subscribe. And if you are a baseball fan, make your way to Fredericksburg to check out a game at the Fredericksburg Nationals.

There have only been a few books that have a big direct impact in my world as I am reading them. Deep Work by Cal Newport is one of them. 

I can sometimes struggle with focus. This is a trait that I have always had but that can be worsened by the environment created in running a small business. My phone rings regularly, friends, family, and customers try to reach out to me through text messages, my email box is constantly adding new messages, slack is loud and demands my attention, not to mention the pull of social media to catch up on what is happening in the world. I simultaneously have to do work and have to give my team members feedback so they can keep moving forward on project. 

I noticed this was taking a toll on me even more as my work has moved to from more action based work (i.e. edit this video, design this graphic) to more thought based work and planning (i.e. where are we going as a company, how do we grow well). So at the beginning of this year I set out to read Deep Work by Cal Newport. The general point of this book is that distractions are killing our ability to do good work. 

Here is the Thesis as Newport writes it: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

Embracing these thoughts, Cal has put out a prodigious amount of research. This book explores the why and how he has gone so counter cultural here. 

But here is how it has worked out here: 

Since this book here are some changes I have made: 

1. I have given my team and myself to close Slack for a bit of time while working on a project. This helps keep the noise down but then gives us the chance to check back in and see how we can help. 
2. I have severely restricted my social media access. I’ll check it briefly in the morning to make sure I am up to date, and again late in the afternoon. At first this was difficult, but now I have trained my mind to not need it as much. 
3. When in work cycles, I keep my phone away from me. My phone is largely on so it does not disturb me except for close family and my team, but even then, my urge to pick it up and stare at it is strong. I will check every hour or two to make sure I have not missed anything urgent. 
4. I have hidden, as best I can, the unread numbers on my email inbox, and hidden my inbox till I’m ready to work on it. In gmail you can do this with the Unread first format for inboxes. There is also a plugin I tried out called: Inbox when ready, but I worked around the need to subscribe with other crutches. 
5. I work to block time together to work on the schedule so I have time to do the deep work I need to be successful. 

This has not been easy. It requires a bit of training for your brain to be ok without seeing your inbox all the time, you never know what fires have been started. But I would say my quality of work, thought, and life have improved since getting these things more in control.