All right, welcome to video number four in the five part get email marketing clients video series. In this video we're gonna talk about how to close deals on the phone like a boss even if you have zero sales experience. Okay, so we've covered a few things by now. We talked about the freelance copywriting model, explain why it's a great place to start. We talked about your dream client, the criteria that I use and how to get them. We talked about in the last video how to reach out to clients without feeling like a sleazeball. And in this video we're gonna talk about how to close deals on the phone like a boss even if you have zero experience. So once someone says yes when you're reaching out, I'd like to learn more. We'll talk about how to turn them into an actual client from a lead to a client. In the next week in the last video we'll talk about three ways that you can scale to a hundred K year in profits using email copywriting. Let's get to what we're covering today in this video. We'll first talk about the flow of a sales call, the structure of it. We'll talk about how to take payment if a client says yes, what do you do from there? I'll show you some of the tools that we use. How to not frick up or mess up the call, some tips and tricks on that. And then lastly, seven money mindset and sales tips to keep you focused and encouraged as you're going through and doing this. Okay, let's talk about first the flow of a sales call. So I'm gonna break this down into different parts and it starts off with the intro and some very short light small talk. So you can ask about the weather, ask them where they're calling in from. And what this is doing is you're building rapport and it reduces tension. So I like to keep this short.  Keep this short so that you can stay on track, right? Be respectful of both your and your prospect's time. Number two, you're gonna set the frame. So, and don't worry, I'll talk about some questions that I like to ask as we're going through the call in the next slide, but you're setting the frame for the call and you're taking control. So you might say something like, okay, Sean, so how these calls usually go is, I'd like to learn a little bit more about your business, see if it can actually help you. So I'll ask questions about you and where you're currently at. And if it sounds like I can help you, I'll tell you more about what we have to offer at the end. Does that sound good, right? So you're setting the frame, you're establishing authority, you're taking the reins and control of the call or you're guiding the call. So from there, you're gonna start asking questions, right? So you're gonna ask questions to understand the person's current situation. You're asking questions to understand their business, their current challenges and their pain points in relation to what you have to offer, which in this case is email marketing, right? So you're gonna be asking questions about their sales, their leads, their conversions, what they're currently doing with email, how big their list is, right? So those are examples of questions about their current situation, where they're currently at when you are talking to them before using your service. From there, you're gonna go into desired situation, right? So now you're gonna try to figure out you're asking questions to understand where they want to go. What does success look like to them, right? What does a good outcome look like to that prospect? Okay, so you're gonna be out, again, I'll show you examples of these questions on a slide from now, okay? From there, you're gonna give them reassurance, right? So you're gonna make them feel like they are in good hands and that you're the right person to help them. So you can do that by sharing any track record that you have. If you don't have a track record or client wins, you can share your experience or samples of your work. The important thing is that you don't lie here, right? Don't say that you've generated a million dollars if you have never written an email before or worked with a client before, right? Don't lie. So just be upfront. If this is your first client that you are looking to get, be upfront about that, right? Just tell them you've been practicing and you've been honing your skills and you'd like to help a business increase their sales with what you've learned so far, okay? From there, you're gonna repeat back to them, okay? And this is one of the most powerful, I learned this in a book called Never Split the Difference. It's a negotiation book. And what the author talks about is his name is Chris Voss. He says to repeat the clients, whatever they said back to them, right? So if they're gonna tell you about their current and desired situation and you're gonna repeat that back to them, right? So you should have been mentally noting or physically taking notes on what they're saying during this call. And you are just gonna say what they said right back to them. So you're here, you said you're here, you said you wanna get to here. This is what success looks like to you. You're struggling with X and you're looking for someone to help you with Y. Am I getting this right? So they're gonna be, if you're actually taking notes and you're repeating back to them, they're gonna be like, yeah, that is exactly what I'm looking for, right? Even if you're just saying their words back to them. So you are, throughout this whole process, you need to be paying attention, you need to be listening, taking notes if you can. And when we get to this step six here, you are just repeating back to them what they've just told you, okay? Very powerful stuff here. Now, seven is the close. So you're gonna tell them what you're offering, tell them how it's gonna help them achieve your desired result, use numbers as much as possible, doing the math for them. You're gonna state the price and then you need to shut up, right? Don't talk yourself out of a sale, right? So as soon as you state all this stuff here, you tell them what you're offering, tell them how it's gonna help them. You tell them numbers if you can, how it's gonna help them go from A to B.  Sometimes they'll take a while to say something back to you. They're gonna be thinking about, okay? So, some examples, here are some examples of questions that I might ask during a call. Here, the first question here is what I might ask when I am just starting the call. After I've set the frame and I'm trying to figure out what are their current challenges, their pain points, what are they dealing with that got them to schedule this call? So very simple, what got you interested in taking this call with me today? And some prospects, they'll just open up and start telling you everything about their challenges, their pain points, why they scheduled a call, right? So this is a very powerful question. It's an open-ended question. It puts the ball in there, the prospects court and some people will come back with short answers but sometimes you'll get the gold and they'll just expand upon everything that they're struggling with, right? So that's the first example. You might ask, could you tell me a bit more about your current email marketing strategy? What's been working or not working for you? So again, we're diving into their current situation. We're trying to see what they've done so far and what has or hasn't worked. What's your vision for your company over the next six to 12 months in terms of revenue growth? So now we're trying to see where are they trying to go, right? What, how much money are they trying to make in their business so that we know what we're shooting for with their email campaigns? How big is your email list currently? What strategies are you using to grow your list? So this is kind of a current situation question mixed with a qualification question. If the person says here, oh, I don't actually have an email list, then we know we can't help them, right? So this is kind of like a qualifier and a current situation question in one. And how big is your email list currently? We want to see how big their email list is. That kind of gives us an idea of how big the company is and if we can help them. And we want to know what they're doing to grow their list. We want to know that they're actively growing their list, okay? So if they say something like, oh, I don't have a list or I'm not growing my list, that's a red flag, right? If we're offering email as a service because it means that we can't help them. What's your current conversion rate of leads into paying customers? Now this question, I don't always ask this, but a lot of people don't know their numbers, right? That's just the truth. A lot of business owners, they don't know their numbers, they don't know the conversion rates. So a lot of them might say, I don't know. I like to ask this to see if they'll give me an answer there, so I at least know if I can help improve upon that, okay? If we're having this conversation in six months from now and you were looking back on the previous six months, what would have needed to happen for you to be happy with your business? So this is a desired situation question, right? So now we're trying to figure out what success looks like to them. If you were to look back six months from now, what would need to happen for this to be a success, right? Working together to be a success, okay? Do you think emailing once per weekday instead of once per month would help to increase sales? So now we're just trying to figure out, this question's a little, it's kind of a curve ball here, but we're trying to figure out if they're going to actually sign on with what we do, right? This is an example for a daily email service. So if they say no, I don't think that's gonna work, I think that's actually pretty spammy, I don't wanna do that at all, then we know that they're not gonna wanna agree to a daily email service, right? So this question's another one of those filtering qualification questions. Do you think that emailing once per weekday instead of once per month would help you to increase your sales? If they say, if they're like totally against that, that's kind of a red flag for me as well, like I don't wanna have to force or educate them on why they should be emailing more, okay? So what I try to do here is I try to ask open-ended questions to learn more about, as much as possible about their business, their products, the problems related to what I have to offer, annual revenue, profit margin, average customer value, target customer, I try to get all these things as much information as possible, anything that will help me understand if I can get a result for them, okay? So these are just some of the questions here. This is not all inclusive, this is not the only questions I ask, but this just gives me an idea of the flow of some of the questions I ask in a sales conversation. So if they say no, you wanna make note of any objections so that you can address them in your marketing messaging and in future calls, right? So there's gonna be objections that come up when people say no on a sales call. You wanna take a note of all those objections because those are, that's gold right there, that's stuff that you can use in making your copy, your messaging, and your sales process a lot stronger in the future. Now, what you also wanna do is see if you can offer better payment terms or a down sell to get them in the door. So an example, offer a trial, like if you're trying to offer a daily email package for like two, $3,000 and they're not up for it, offer a trial email for $100 to send to their list and if it goes well, then you can sign on for a longer term relationship from there, right? So that's an example of a down sell, like a trial email, 100 bucks or so to send out just one email to their list, see how it does, if they like it, then you can sign on for a longer term monthly deal, okay? So if they do say yes, if you have gone through the closing process and they say yes, I'd like to move forward, you're almost there, right? A lot of people will say yes and fall off from there. You need to seal the deal by taking their payment. So I never consider a client closed unless I see the money coming in through my account. So let's talk about how to take payment, the different steps and tools that we use for that. So step number one is send an agreement for the person to sign. And we use a tool called Panda Dock. I don't know how much it costs right now, I'm on an annual plan, but it allows you to send service agreements for your clients to sign. So we send that out whenever someone says yes and it states the work that's gonna be done, you don't have to make it super complicated. It tells them the pricing, the terms and conditions and no, people ask me all the time, can I have a copy of it? No, I don't give this out unless you're a private student or a client. So please don't ask in the YouTube comments, there are legal terms and conditions in there. So I don't wanna just throw that out online and have everybody use that, okay? Number two, send them a payment link. So you can set up a simple stripe or PayPal payment processing account, then use a tool like PayFunnels to send over a payment link. So what PayFunnels does is it hooks up to your stripe account and it allows you to just send a one-click link that a client can click on and it takes them to a page where they can pay their invoice and you can set up recurring billing or one-time billing, okay? So step three, once they pay, your work begins.  Now you begin work on the project, right? Now you begin writing their emails. So never start writing their emails no matter what the client says until you receive that payment. I've made that mistake before where I've started doing work for a client and they didn't pay me and they didn't end up becoming a client because they didn't end up paying me. So you don't wanna get into that situation, right? Always get the payment first upfront before work begins. Now let's talk about some tips how to not frick up or mess up the sales call. Number one, you wanna listen more and talk less, okay? There's this common misconception about sales that it's about who is like talking the most and who is the most extroverted and out there which you should really be doing is listening more, talking less, taking notes, being attentive, right? And then you're gonna be repeating whatever they said back to them, right? So you should be asking questions to open and guide the conversation but the prospect should be the one doing most of the talking and you should be doing most of the listening, right? So you should be trying to talk over them and trying to give your spiel about your product or your service. You should be the one asking questions, guiding the conversation but they should be doing 80% of the talking.  Show up on the dot and be in a quiet place and this really annoys me for like being both on the receiving end and the person that's booking the call. I have people who will book calls with me all the time and not show up or they'll show up like 10 minutes late that just really annoys me. So it doesn't matter what side you're on whether you're the one scheduling the call and you're guiding it or you're the one showing up to the call. Always be professional. Show up on the dot, be in a quiet place, don't have like kids crying in the background or whatever, be a damn professional, okay? Number three, avoid neediness. So people can smell neediness from a mile away. If you go into a call with the mentality of I need this client to pay my bills, even if you do, right? They can feel it. People can always feel that. They can feel that desperation and they won't close. No one wants to work with needy or desperate people, okay? So don't be needy on the call, like don't go into the call thinking I need to close this client to pay my bills even if you do, they will always be able to feel that on the receiving end. Number four, have a sales script. Yes, you should have a sales script to follow. Like a mechanic has as wrench, the script is like a sales person's tool, right? So this does not make you robotic. It makes you efficient. It keeps the sales conversation on track. So you don't need to read like word for word, like a sales conversation.   Step five, do your research. So you should know the basics about your prospect and their company before the call. If you show up to the call and ask them what company they work for, you will sound like an amateur, right? And I've had this happen when I've, there's been like software and products and services that I've tried to sign up for. And they didn't even know my name. They didn't know my company. They didn't do any research. And you can probably guess I didn't end up becoming a customer because it seemed amateurish, right? So you wanna do your research beforehand, do research into the person, the prospect and their company. And you should have all this information when they schedule a call with you. Number six, know your market. So you should know your market and how your offer helps them get a desired result. And you should be able to speak in their language, meaning you should know what terms they use, what kind of words they use, if there's any slang that they use to explain certain pains and problems and things that they want. You should know all that stuff, right? You're not gonna be perfect at the beginning, but you should be learning as you go and taking note of those things. So know what your market wants and how your offer helps them to get it and the language that they use when talking about their problems and the things that they want. So, seven money mindset and sales tips. And these are things that will help you going and help you push forward even when things get tough. And they will get tough, especially if you have no experience in sales, this is gonna feel uncomfortable, especially in the beginning. So here are seven tips to help you going, your mindset and sales tips to keep you going even when things do get tough and getting comfortable. Number one, always have this mentality, right? If you are an email copywriter, you can help people to generate sales, they need you more than you need them. Most businesses want more sales, they need it to stay afloat. If you have a skill to help them do that, they need you, right? You have a skill that they need to keep them in business. So always go in there knowing that you have something that they need that is very useful to them. Number two, every no gets you closer to a yes. So when I first got started, I needed nine no's to get one yes, right? Which is basically a 10% close rate. So every time I'd get a no, I counted up a no as one step closer to a yes. So I'd get one no, two no's, three no's. I said, okay, I only need six more no's and I'll get one paid client, right? So you wanna flip it, right? Don't get so discouraged about getting rejected or getting those no's in the beginning. Think of it like every no gets you closer to that yes, that person who wants to sign on with you has a paying client. Number three, yes, volume matters. Especially in the beginning, right? There's some, a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their head around this. Volume does matter in the beginning if you have no track record, no case studies, no previous clients, especially volume matters, okay?  People always give up before they've, they've sent out enough messages and enough volume. It's part of the game and volume means more chances at that. So the person who sends out, I mean, given if you watch my previous video, make sure that the outreach messages are good. The person who sends out a thousand messages versus a hundred, the person who sends out a thousand has always been to have more chances at getting a client because he's sending out more volume, right? It's just simple math here, right? So as long as you're sending out good messages and if you watch my previous video, you'd know how to do that, the more messages that you send out, the more outreach messages, the more chances that you have at getting that paying client. So yes, volume does matter. Yes, you will feel like an imposter. So this happens to everyone, especially at the beginning. I don't think it actually ever goes away a hundred percent. Like when I get on sales calls, I still get nervous. I still get butterflies in my stomach. But as long as you're honest and ethical, you have nothing to worry about, right? So don't, again, don't lie about your track record. Don't lie about having a ton of clients if you don't. Don't lie about having worked with clients if you haven't before. Be honest, be ethical. You have nothing to worry about, right? Some people will find that refreshing, that you are being upfront about maybe not working with clients in the past.  Number five, money is attracted to speed. You will never have everything perfect. Money loves speed and the faster that you can go out to the market and start making valuable offers to your marketplace, the faster you're gonna see money rolling into your bank account, okay? So money is attracted to speed. Don't focus on getting your website and all your content and everything up and going before you have your first client. Just start creating your outreach messages, finding the right prospects and reaching out to them based on the dream client criteria I think that's video number two. And making offers, right? Trying to get on the phone with as many people as possible to see if you can turn them into clients. Number six, selling isn't sleazy. Everyone thinks that selling is this slimy tactic. They always think of those infomercial guys that are pitching those shamwows or whatever, like back in the day pitching those shady products. But if you have something that can actually help people improve their life in some way, selling is the most noble thing that you can do, right?  If you have something that can actually help somebody, not sleazy in any way, it's one of the most noble things it can do is getting them to actually invest in it so that they can improve their lives in some way, okay? And number seven, simple but not easy, right? The process, sales in itself, it's a very simple process. You basically pick a market, ask them if they want help getting more sales or with the thing that you help with, help those who say yes. The steps are simple but not easy. You have to be consistent with it.  You're gonna have to get better over time and tune your script and your messaging. But if you follow through with the steps and you're consistent with it, eventually you're gonna lock down that first, second, third, fourth, fifth client if you're consistent with this, okay? So recap of what we covered. We talked about the flow of a sales call, how to take payment if a client says yes, and also what to do if a client says no. Make sure you're taking notes of all those objections and using it in your future messaging. We talked about how to not frick up and mess up the call and seven money mindset and sales tips to keep you going even if things get tough. So next week we're gonna talk about three ways that you can scale to 100K a year in profits using email copywriting. And if you wanna learn more about email and stay in touch with me and see my daily emails as well, go to email rainmaker.com. That'll take you to my free Facebook group on email marketing. And I'm gonna be sharing a lot more trainings, tips, tricks, and insights on email in that group. So that's it for this video. If you guys have any questions, comment below. If you guys liked this video, give it a thumbs up and I will see you next week.


Coming up on DTNS, Al Salvador wants to take you down to the Bitcoin City powered by a volcano. Did Adele get Spotify to turn off shuffle? No. We'll tell you what actually happened. Plus, Robert Herron is here to help you navigate buying a new television. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 22, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us co-host of AVXL, Robert Herron. Welcome back. Hey, thank you so much. It's good to see you guys. We were just chatting about the fact that we almost forgot it was Thanksgiving this week here in the United States. That's all part of Good Day Internet. Get that at patreon.com slash DTNS. Also big thanks to our top patrons, including Tim Deputy, Brandon Brooks, and Hector Bones. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Ford CEO Jim Farley announced the automaker will no longer work with Rivian to jointly develop Ford branded EVs. The company still plans to produce 600,000 EVs per year by the end of 2023. Farley cited the complexities of machine hardware and software between the two as part of the reason to end development. Ford invested $500 million in Rivian back in 2019. Meta's head of safety, Antigone Davis, said the company doesn't plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023. Now, Meta had previously said the encryption rollout could happen as early as 2022, could, but it's not. Meta's WhatsApp already uses end-to-end encryption, as do voice and video calls on Messenger, but they were going to bring it to Instagram and stuff like that. Android users texting with iPhone owners know that Google Messages doesn't support iMessage reactions, like displaying a separate message that somebody liked an image, for example. Google is really not an update to this, too, Google Messages, and will now show iMessage reactions the same way that it handles emoji reactions sent by RCS. So, when someone using iOS sends a heart tap back in reply to your Android message, for example, you won't just get the text, Sarah responded with a heart emoji in plain text. You'll actually see the heart emoji, so we're making progress. Yeah, just adopt RCS, Apple, come on. UK Health Secretary Sajid Javed announced a review of all medical devices for racial and gender bias, saying that these may have contributed to the overall higher death rates in black and south Asian people in the United Kingdom during COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, University of Michigan researchers found that pulse oximeters are more likely to miss low levels of oxygen in black patients than white patients. Medical algorithms were not specifically named in this review, but they could be included. Javed also said he's working with counterparts in the United States and other nations to develop international standards for medical devices. XDA developer sources say that Qualcomm has an exclusivity deal for windows on arm that is set to expire soon. Microsoft has said publicly anybody who wants to can build a windows on arm chip, so company may be expiring sooner than later. However, the deal might also explain why Apple's M1 chip won't run windows either. Yeah, maybe when that deal expires that will. They could bring Bootcamp to M1. That'd be kind of crazy. All right, let's talk about the Bitcoin city, which I'm just going to say upfront.  El Salvador's president Naib Boukele announced the country plans to build the first Bitcoin city in the eastern region of La Union. It's a Bitcoin city in more than one way, too. First, the building of the city itself will be funded by issuing Bitcoin backed bonds, but that's not all. It also plans to use geothermal power from the nearby Conchagua volcano to generate power for the city, which of course would be used for sustainable Bitcoin mining and to encourage people to actually live in the city after they build it. The only tax in the city will be value added tax, no income tax, no payroll, no capital gains, no property tax. And of course, the layout of the city will be coin shaped, which frankly just means it's going to be a circle, which lots of cities are, but feeds into the whole thing. There's no timeline for the actual creation of the city, but there is one for the raising of the money for the issuing of the bonds. $1 billion US in bonds will be issued with half of that used for building power and mining infrastructure, which to me, that's what this is for. This is a way to build power and mining infrastructure, and the city is a way to get people to talk about it. The rest of the money, half for power and mining, the rest of the money will be used to buy Bitcoin, buy digital currency, and the bonds will pay 6.5% initially, and after five years, the country is going to sell the crypto holdings it bought and then issue dividends to bondholders, the expectation being those will appreciate it a lot. They're talking crazy, like above 100% return for bondholders, but who knows? The bond will be developed by Blockstream on the Liquid Network and Bitfinex Securities is expected to get the license to actually issue the bonds themselves. But there's some reality to this, not a lot, a lot of it's marketing, a lot of it might or might not become reality. I don't know about y'all, but to me, Sarah, the most interesting thing about this is the geothermal power. If they actually build that, I think that will be kind of the coolest thing about it. Oh, it's not the fact that the layout of the city will be coin-shaped. Coin-shaped? Yeah, I know. Yeah, as you mentioned, certainly a way to drum up money, this particular administration has not shied away from the idea of crypto being part of the way that the future looks. And it, I don't know, could be a model for other cities in the future. There are certainly a lot of people who say this particular administration is not the proper one to do this sort of thing. And I'm, we'll keep that conversation out of this for now, but I do think that you got to hand it to El Salvador for saying, we're going to try something. And we want our citizens to benefit from this directly, whether or not they're going to get the returns that are promised very questionable. But returns on some level still could be worth it. Robert, what do you think? I like the idea of, you know, El Salvador is effectively going all in. And if they can actually pull off some power production from this project, funding it with bitcoins the risk. Yeah. If it all plummets to zero, then, you know, how is that going to be paid for? And otherwise, damn, it's just, it's neat. And I agree with your comments regarding how just getting more people talking about it, more people using it, more people getting comfortable with it. We'll see how it goes as far as a government backs. Basically, they're using that coin for everything now. And the country seems to be adopting it. And I just, I would love to hear more about people on the ground in their day-to-day life in terms of how this affects them, in terms of usage, being able to send money to one another or pay for goods and services. If it's all going great, it's great as long as the coin maintains value or goes up, it's going to be win-win. But if it doesn't, then it becomes kind of questionable about how suddenly, maybe you've socked the country with a power production system that can't be paid for and you're then suddenly throwing everything into debt. Well, the good news is, as long as they get people willing to buy the bonds, they get money to build the power plant. The person, the people who get built is the people buying the bonds that the cryptocurrency does not appreciate in value over the five years. Or if the company, if the country can't pay the 6.5% that they promised because the cryptocurrency has died. Well, I mean, you know, Bitcoin is only one example of a cryptocurrency that is highly volatile. And to say like, listen, in five years it's going to appreciate and we're all going to be better off is a great way to look at this. But I would be extremely wary if I was directly affected by this proposition. Yeah. I mean, most people won't be directly affected unless they buy a bond. But maybe that's a good reason not to buy one of the bonds, but I bet they'll get enough bonds. I bet they'll get enough people diving in. Cryptocurrency has got enough fans out there. And it sounds like then they will build a geothermal power plant and they will build some mines. And so whoever runs those will benefit and get those, whether they end up building the city around it or not. It's a whole different question. But yeah, it's as if Elon Musk ran a country is kind of what it looks what it seems like to me. All right. It may Twitter rolled out a new warning screen. You may you may have run across this. You may not. If it detects that English language users, you write something in English and you're about to send something the system considers might be harmful or offensive or inconsiderate. It'll give you a warning. It won't block you from replying, but it'll ask you to reconsider it. And Twitter's testing of that feature ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, it found that 34% of users edited or deleted the reply with 11% less likely to tweet something that would trigger the system going forward. That we already knew. That was last year's news. Twitter still has this in place. Scientists at New York University Center for Social Media and Politics, however, wanted to find out what if you're telling people don't be mean outside of when they're actually composing the tweet. So they published a study examining the effectiveness of warnings given at other times, not at the time of posting. The study focused on users who had been suspended, had more than 50 followers, and at least seven followers who had also used hateful language and posts. They ended up with a list of 27 users that fit that definition, but they didn't target the messages at them. They studied the 4,327 people who followed those 27 users. The researchers divided those users into six groups and one control. They then sent messages from Twitter accounts with names like hate suspension and expert on hate. They created three types of messages to send to those six groups. One that emphasized what could be lost by using hateful speech, hey, if you do this kind of stuff, this is what could happen. One that emphasized legitimacy and respectfulness was like, hey, we respect you, but you know what? Maybe this is going to make you less believed. And then there was one that positioned the sender as an expert. Like, I'm an expert on hate stuff, and here's why you shouldn't do it. Those messages were then varied into high and low intensity wording. So you had three messages, three with high, three with low. You had six messages, went to the six groups, and then you had the control group that didn't receive any of these messages. The study found that a single message reduced hate speech the following week by 10%. All six, just one message would reduce hate speech by 10% within the following week. The politely worded message, the legitimacy message, the one that said, hey, people, you know, I'm being polite here and being respectful, but people may not believe you anymore. That was the most effective, resulting in a 15 to 20% reduction a week later. The researchers didn't see users responding with even more hateful language. In other words, they didn't get the message and be like, I'll show you. But they acknowledged that this is an outsider message. They don't know if it would have the same effectiveness or not if it came officially from Twitter when you talk about whether you would implement this policy or not. And Twitter said it's reviewing the findings of the study to see if there's anything that they want to implement from it. That's pretty cool. A reminder, yeah. Respecting other people's opinions and not simply throwing kerosene on a conversation that could easily go sideways are good things to follow. And I really hope Twitter will pull out some of the useful information from the study simply to take a look at not only what they're doing currently by looking at a potential message that could be flagged or become inflammatory, so to speak, but also just providing people with a tool that says, hey, you know what, I don't know if this would work per se, but if you could just remind someone that if you could word this a slightly different way, get a different response from it and either for good or bad, I mean, people could twist this right around and say, oh, what's the most inflammatory thing I could say, but generally, though, it's like why waste your time like that when, you know, a couple of well-chosen words will get the point right across.  I think you're not going to get the reaction that you're looking for. Perhaps lighten it up a little bit. That is, that's a tricky thing. And Twitter, having done this research, I think is on the road to becoming, to understand more, okay, how do we get healthy discourse to just be less hateful and upset everybody? You know, so that we all have conversations on shows like this talking about like, oh, it's a cesspool, you know, Twitter's the worst. I think that, I think Twitter is doing all the right things. I think that trying to, to your point, Robert, trying to convince somebody, hey, you're going to get a better reaction. You're going to get more likes. You're going to get more retweets. You're going to get, you know, more quote tweets, all of that stuff. If you act right is something that people on Twitter aren't really used to right now. They're almost used to the opposite. Yeah, that's the key here. And to be clear, Twitter didn't do this research. New York University scientists did. But Twitter's looking at the research. And I think maybe Twitter doesn't need to use this research, except to maybe provide guidance to others to say, hey, if somebody's out there being hateful, don't attack them. That just makes them angry. Don't ignore them. That lets them think what they're doing is okay. What you want to do is say, hey, that user account you followed was suspended. And I suspect that was because of hateful language. Your tweets bother me. You should stop using hate speech to avoid suspension. That's an example of the legitimacy, low intensity message that they sent. Like that kind of stuff may seem a little forceful, but it's like being respectful and saying, hey, you might not want to do that sort of thing. And if I don't know if it's up to all of us to do, but if there was an organization that could, you know, assemble and maybe a nonprofit, Rich Travolino who helped produce today's show suggested that, that could just go out and say like, hey folks, there's a better way of doing things. That's that bystander saying something polite, respectful, but kind of helping nudge people towards not doing something that is going to ultimately hurt them too. Totally. I think also just providing a second chance or a second set of eyes just to quickly review something. I do that for myself with my email client. I send a message and it's got about, I have about 30 seconds to hit an undo button. And that sometimes is enough for myself, but for social media and for people who may not think about these things all the time, I have no problem with it occasionally popping up, questioning me about my usage of this service and potential harm that could be caused. Well, if you're a Spotify user, you might already be familiar with the fact that Spotify used to show you a shuffle icon inside the play button. If you wanted to play some music by default on albums. So basically shuffle was the default. You weren't necessarily going to listen to an album front to back, had to work a little harder at it. You had to choose to play an album in the release track order if you wanted to do that exact thing. Spotify has changed that, however. Now a play button is the default from premium users, premium users, different than for users. You can still shuffle album tracks. You just have to make a conscious choice to do so by toggling shuffle on when you're viewing an individual track on the album. Now you might say, huh, why the about face? Spotify has been doing this for years. Artist Adele, you may have heard of her, thanked Spotify for the change. She tweeted, this was the only request I had in our ever changing industry. We don't create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our story should be listened to as we intended. Thank you, Spotify, for listening. Spotify replied, anything for you. Adele's new album 30 dropped on streaming services, including Spotify on November 19th. Her first single, Easy on Me, broke the Spotify record for the most global listens in a single day. So one would think Adele's thoughts carry some weight here, but I am not a Spotify user. I'm an Apple Music user. I always kind of say they're the same, right? You just choose to give your $10 to one company or the other. Did not realize this was a thing that people were dealing with. Yeah, and this is getting reported as Adele gets Spotify to turn off shuffle on albums. And the fact is, no, she got Spotify to change the behavior of the play button on an album, which frankly, we had a really hard time finding someone who had played an album recently on Spotify. Intentionally to get the album. Most people just play songs or they make playlists or they go to playlists. Nobody really listens to albums. I'm sorry to say that, Adele. I totally disagree. Again, I use Apple Music, but when a new, I don't know, an artist that I like a lot, drops a new album. I listen to it front to back.  Oh, sure. I don't think you disagree that we had a hard time finding people who listened to albums on Spotify. We did. We were going around. There are people who listened to albums. I'm not trying to dispute that they don't exist. I'm just saying it was not something that I think people noticed, frankly. Well, I think, and I was pulling some of my Spotify friend users all the same way. And the Spotify premium people were like, I don't even know what you're talking about. And the Spotify free people were like, well, I don't know, I just, it's free. You know, we're just used to it that way. And free is still shuffle because everything free is shuffle, at least except on the web. My free web account was playing the album in track order. But, but yeah, it's, it's something which I think Spotify probably realized like, oh, most people aren't playing albums and the people who are would probably prefer to hear them in track order as well. You know, because if you're choosing to listen to an album, why would you want to shuffle it? I've just, I've never, and again, maybe I'm a little out of the loop because I haven't used Spotify rather than, yeah, I have an account, but you know, I use it just kind of for testing purposes for the purposes of the show. But why anybody would play songs on shuffle when they're trying to listen to an album. It's just super counterintuitive. It surprises me that another artist hadn't, hadn't made a stink before, now, or maybe they had, but you know, it wasn't reported on. Yeah. My guess is Spotify just had shuffle on when they engineered it for everything and didn't want to, and hadn't bothered to change the code to be like, oh, we should make, we should change that on, on the album view because probably people enjoy shuffle in lots of other places and they just hadn't, and got to it yet. I'm curious about one thing though, even with an album, like say Adele's album, for example, if you played it back on Spotify Service right now, aren't you just playing back a series of independent tracks? Yeah. And is it anything even close to like, say a gapless audio track system where it is the album playback experience where maybe two songs bump right up against each other or maybe there is a 30 second pause that you normally wouldn't even hear anyway. It's like, can you even get an original album experience from a streaming service? Sure. That's an interesting question. Do they respect that kind of stuff? Like the true album aficionados know like, oh yeah, those tracks run right into each other on the vinyl, right? And those have a longer, you know, track time between them. Tim in our Discord points out Moody Blues albums would be a mess in shuffle mode. Absolutely true. And would enter a mess if you don't respect the track separation as well. Hey, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? You can let us know in our subreddit. We love getting those ideas and incorporating them into the episodes. Submit your stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, even with the supply chain issues out there, people, they're still going to buy TVs. They're still looking for a 4K television during those Black Friday sales in the US and Europe and just in advance of the holidays, asking for, hoping to get, buying themselves a TV as a gift. Absolutely. Robert Herron has a lot of great shopping tips and recommendations when you hunt for your next TV. There are way too many models out there, Robert. So how do you narrow down what you're looking for? I would say, number one, start with the actual size of the screen it is that will work best for you. Literally get some painter's tape or even cut out a piece of cardboard in the size of a TV model you're actually thinking of. It's easy enough if you have a specific set in mind to look up its characteristics for its actual physical size and get a good idea if that's something that will work for you. Often I find people undersizing their TVs, whereas they're looking for something well under, say, 50 inches, when what they really would be best off with is something, say, the 55 to 65 inch range. Either way, though, that is one place to start right there. All right, figure out how much TV you can fit and will work for you. Makes sense. Totally. And if 55 and 65 inch screen sizes are what you would consider large, realize that today they're quickly moving and transitioning towards 70 and 80 inch screen sizes, becoming the new normal plus size you could say for that. Regardless, though, if you can come up with the specific model you have in mind, do some price research. Immediately go out and check out and find out what the sales price is today. So if you're out shopping either online or in person and you come across that product at a price that says, you know what? That's a good price. You can jump on those deals easier that way. For specific brands, I still am a big fan of TCL for value and performance. They're six series or above, if you can swing it, really deliver some of the most impactful picture quality and color and feature performance. That said, if you absolutely have to get a smaller size screen, TCL has three and four series TVs that can fit those characteristics quite well. However, it is just about all but impossible to find a TV out there today that isn't at least say 55 inches big that will give you an impressive and eye-pleasing HDR experience or Dolby Vision experience. Those TVs require to pump out some pretty good light in addition to just beautifully saturated color and that's where you'll see the value TVs suffer compared to the more premium models out there. But if you want 55 inch or more if you want the best HDR, is that right? Generally speaking, it doesn't matter if you're going with LCD or OLED. Now OLED does make screen sizes down to 48 inches currently. They've also mentioned a 42 inch screen. That is going to be an eye-pleasing piece of candy. But if you're looking for something big like say above 70 inches, Samsung and Sony LCDs are generally going to be your good values there. LCD televisions will produce far more light than an OLED television can. Not all LCDs but your premium ones do significantly greater light output and usually better screen material surfaces to help mitigate things like room light reflections and things like that. So if you are dealing with a bright room consider something like a high performance LCD to help make that a more pleasing viewing experience. However, if you do have good light controlled environments or maybe you're a gamer OLEDs are some of the best right now and I'll just point out the LG C1 series that gives you every feature built right into it that you would want including 4K 120 with Dolby Vision for the gamers in addition to the feature support built right in for those formats like HDR Dolby Vision etc. And you get that perfect black level infinite contrast in a picture where you also have a much wider viewing area in terms of who can enjoy that picture and get the pristine image quality out of it. It's absolutely one of my favorites of all time when it comes to display technologies and coming up at CES we'll hopefully see some good competition regarding that as well but also for just short sweet tips I would point to Sony. Any of Sony's OLEDs or their premium LCD televisions are really perfect for cine files or video files if you are into just seeing things as accurately as possible without a lot of fuss Sony makes that fantastic and they also have generally above average audio. You do pay a premium I think for some of their premium models of course but it's a fantastic piece of kit if you can swing it. Oh and as I mentioned TCL is one of my favorite value performance brands. If you can't find that at the particular price point you're looking at look at their license and their U8 G and their U7G I believe they are. The U8G in particular is that perfect balance between like holy cow I see TVs costing two or three times as much doing the equivalent and the price points are great. The feature performance is there in terms of oh I want to make sure I have good light output saturated color gaming support Dolby Vision HDR10 it's all built right in and if a new TV is just not in the books maybe you're happy with what you have consider doing a little upgrade maybe a soundbar or an other audio upgrade for the living room or the bedroom or whatever you're thinking or if your TV is getting a little long in the performance wise with the built in apps that you're still using consider adding a 4k streaming product that is one of the best ways to put a kick in the pants so to speak to an older TV that otherwise works just fine maybe the apps aren't being updated anymore an outdated platform or the performance of those apps within that platform just you know it was never great to begin with that's where I love having a standalone product be it an Apple TV or a Roku or whatever your preferred streaming device of choices that really doesn't matter and then a final just quick tip for the holidays there's usually a lot of family and kids around TV safety if you can't actually wall mount your TV and get it out of the way and secure it to a wall at least spend the 10 or $15 for a kit that will allow you to fix that TV to a wall or the say dresser or whatever furniture it's on the last thing you ever want to do is see one of these flip off or let alone catching the the toddler climbing up the front of a cabinet and the whole thing starting to go that's a nightmare scenario that's easily preventable Robert I had for for years now especially over many courses of your time with us here on DTNS I I'm still yet to pull the trigger on menu TV I have the 55 inch Samsung circa 2012 it's old but it works fine you know it could be a lot better you know but but I try to I try to keep up on what the latest is because at some point I am going to get a new TV whatever size is you know I want it to be the best possible is there any sort of marketing mumbo jumbo that that that gets you when you know researching all of these where you kind of go like this is the thing to stay away from when you're trying to figure out what TV to buy number one it would be managing expectations if you're buying the most value screen out there or like I said if it's not at least about the image quality with HDR content and Dolby vision in particular is simply not going to be as compelling and impressive as you might want it to be typically with the lower cost TVs the first thing they'll cut is the absolute light output how bright that TV can even get and I'll be honest with you there's a lot of 4k HDR Dolby vision TVs out there that really are no brighter than probably your 2012 circa 2012 TV and that's the one thing if you're going to do the upgrade one either go for some sick contrast performance be it with an extremely bright screen or one that can make black look inky and dark and the color should be a no brainer you need a wider color valid for HDR and Dolby vision so that's where I kind of draw the line it's like if you're going to go value small just stick with that and go for a good value where you can then spend your money on other gifts but you are going for something that's just eye candy that's where you really want to pay attention to those features check out reviews all the TVs I've mentioned I would recommend in a heartbeat for anyone looking to do an upgrade at just about any price point that high sense U8G I mentioned I believe it's like under $800 for a 65 inch screen that competes with what I said was like TVs two or three times the cost I will always go back to like an OLED for my absolute favorite in terms of just picture performance being able to have that perfect black and all the features built in but those are premium displays and there are some less expensive OLED options appearing now that's one place you might want to be careful with if you are focused on specific features like I need a TV that can accept 4k 120 input for gaming or I want the TV that has a minimum of a certain refresh rate or color palette that's where you really want to stick with something that's kind of known and well reviewed and well respected and for that it's just a there's so many good options out there and literally at prices anybody can swing so to speak well thank you so much Rob that is always good information especially going into the holidays you know you got some black Friday deals you got to go in with all the information that you can possibly have to get the best television or home theater product that's right for you if you have ideas on maybe maybe you bought a television recently want to tell everybody about it if you have feedback on anything that we talk about on this show please do send it our way feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we also want to thank a brand new boss and that brand new boss's name is Gary Moon Gary just started backing us on Patreon thank you Gary oh yeah sorry Gary almost got it Thomas was so struck by how excited he was you're our moon Gary you really are you are you are our moon our sun and stars thanks also to Robert Aaron also our moon sun and stars let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work hey you can catch our weekly podcast called AVXL at AVXL.com I'm also on twitter at Robert Aaron or you can visit me at heronfidelity.com if you'd like to look at more of my doings on the side so to speak and or calibration information well you do good work so thanks for being with us on the show today come back soon reminders of folks we're live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. eastern 21 30 UTC you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with our guest Nika Monfort talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this program


So, we're going to talk about an article you wrote for EDUCAUS review called Higher Ed in Motion, the Digital and Cultural Transformation Ahead. In that, you talked about debunking myths. And one of the myths or one of the possible things you talk about in terms of debunking myths is the speed in which higher education can change. And I know the pandemic has had a role in that. Could you talk a little bit about how higher education has changed in that? Have we truly changed and why? I'm an English teacher from way back, and so I think that change in higher ed has been like change in language, you know, it takes a really long time. I mean, I have this vivid and pretty shameful memory in teaching English in 1980, something, and explaining to a student who was challenging me why we used the he pronoun when it could be a group of both men and women, and that was, and then now think of now, you know, it took a decade and a half or whatever for us to start to rethink pronouns. And now, just in the last few years, this explosion of how we use language and pronouns. And so, I mean, I think we've experienced that first really slow moving in higher ed, and I think now we're moving into a phase where things could change much faster. But they're the stories we tell ourselves that are in some ways the most pernicious. Higher ed has told itself for as long as I can remember that we just can't move with agility. We cannot move quickly under any circumstances whatsoever. And in fact, it's probably a point of pride for higher ed. You think these are institutions that can be dated back to the 11th century, and you know, we, these are institutions that teach timeless things, and that are they themselves timeless, they withstand governments that come and go, but universities have been there for hundreds in some cases longer. So I think we've been telling ourselves that for so long, and then COVID came along, and suddenly we proved to ourselves that we could move quickly when we needed to. And I just don't think we can unsee that. I don't think we can sit around meeting tables and blithely nod and say, oh, we can't do that, or we could never move that quickly because we know we can. And so probably the most important myth to go is this higher ed can only move at one speed, and that speed is glacial. But there's more myths that I think can and have been debunked, and one of them is, you know, again, silos. And again, it goes back to the history of higher ed, you know, has been shaped by silos. We call them disciplines, and then to a broader degree, colleges within larger universities. And we love our silos. In fact, I gave a talk at, I don't even remember where it was, but gave a talk and was talking about silo busting. And someone came up to me afterwards and says, John, we don't call them silos. We call them cylinders of excellence. So we love our silos. But again, I think the last few years have just made it totally clear that the way we move forward is not going. That what we need to infuse into our work is working across divisions, across disciplines, across silos. And that that's the future. So I'm less convinced that that myth is totally debunked, but I think we're giving it a run for its money. And then there's a trickier myth, and I'm not sure I could say this badly, but I think there's a myth in higher ed that we will prevail, no matter what. I mean, so I've been working for decades, and we've been talking about the demise of higher education for so long. Actually, that's where the title comes from of the article is higher ed in motion. So there was a period of time when a whole series of books came out, all saying that higher ed is doomed, it was this chorus of doom, but Janet Napolitano said higher education isn't in crisis. She said higher education is in motion, and it always has been. And I love that, that rethinking in a more positive way, not so much deficit thinking, but thinking that we're in motion. And I just think that I can think of how many recessions I've experienced, and yet we always prevail. And we have a recession and enrollments go up, except for now. And so I think this idea that somehow we're going to survive without making really substantive changes. And that's why we start talking, we're not rocky, we're not going to just run up the stairs every time. We may have to actually make some structural changes, some transformational changes if we're really going to prevail. But that's so I think myths are great, myths teach us who we are and give us confidence in the world around us. But I think everything has been shaken to its core in the last few years. And the one good thing to come out of it would be to open up the universe a little bit. So I think that's happening. What is CX? And what do you see happening in higher education today? That is related to DX and CX? Well, we kind of, I don't know if we coined DX, but we certainly took it to be shorthand for digital transformation. And I think what's happened is, along with this DX, digital transformation is what I'm calling somewhat playfully CX. And that is a cultural transformation. And on campuses, this is not news. It's all about students. It's about these gaps that have turned into chasms over the last two years, where students are the digital divide times a hundred, the basic needs, housing insecurity, mental health and wellness needs. I mean, everything off the charts and on campuses, there's this incredible transformational focus on putting students in the center and also giving attention to mental health and wellness at a level that has honestly never been experienced before. And, you know, we can add energy, speed and amplification to something by giving it a name and by calling it out and talking about it. And so that's what I tried to do in the article is just to say, yeah, we know this transformation, but there's this other one that is also really important and to shine a light on it and absolutely not saying campuses didn't care before. Any more than I would say we didn't do digital until somebody came up with the phrase digital transformation. The whole idea of a transformation, whether it's digital or cultural, is going from sort of pockets of excellence and ad hoc innovation to something else that's something broader and more comprehensive and that has buy-in from the top and energy from the masses and crosses silos and moves with agility. So you can see how I'm tying it in with, I think that hopefully the elimination or lessening of some of these myths creates space for a transformational change, continuing what we've seen really with DX, but now really starting to look at this cultural change that's certainly bigger than technology, but really, really important.