The Closet of Shame w/Bill Petrie

Even wondered what happens when shit goes wrong?

Ours is a traveling trade show industry. When you’re spending months of your life on the road, traveling from city to city to visit with the same people on a recurring basis, it becomes necessary to learn how to tell stories.

These are the stories we tell one another at the hotel bar after a day and a half on the show floor. These are the tales we share with each other as we renew our love for the industry each January in Las Vegas.

MY closet holds a cautionary tale about leaving too many variables in play when managing a sophisticated buyer with a young account team and a disconnected supply chain and what to do when a situation like that one spirals out of control. (Clink on Picture to Link to Episode)

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Delivering Marketing Joy – PromoCares and Purpose as the 5th P of Marketing

There is goodness all around you. If you’re willing to look past all the messages meant to harden your heart, you’ll find stories filled with acts of kindness, where the heroes of the day work to make the world a better place.

We’ve found them. @PromoCares lives to tell those stories. If you’re seeking inspiration in the journey’s others have taken, this video will speak to you. If you want to bring more goodness into your business and your business relationships, #PromoCares will be a valuable resource and community.

This Episode (my 5th) with good friend and #gogiver @KirbyHasseman gives me the chance to explain where the #PromoCares movement has progressed and what’s in store for the future. (link to interview in picture below)

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Regional Association Challenge IGNITE Session October 2018

Binge watching Netflix and Amazon has forever changed the way we consume content.

We released the PromoCares concept at PPAI EXPO 2018 to much interest. We weren’t ready with whatever we should have done to be ready when you touch on a lightning rod. We weren’t then, but, in launching the Regional Association Challenge, we do so with some aces up our sleeve and we come to this moment saying, we have a path for differentiation for Regional Associations to offer members and especially non-members should we have success using the PromoCares Regional Association Challenge as it’s intended, which is to create a case study around the effectiveness of promotional products as a medium in comparison to other ways non-profits currently budget for marketing.

Here’s how I positioned the challenge to the group attending the IGNITE session at LDW this year. Many thanks to PPAI for live streaming this. Bill Petrie will come to love or loathe this video. Not sure where we’ll settle on that, but give it a listen for some perspective.

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2018 PPAI Regional Association Council Volunteer of the Year Introduction and Acceptance

If you know what that alphabet soup of acronyms is in the headline of this post, you’ll want to hear what I had to say in response to being awarded this great honor along with a mentor, role model in volunteerism and good friend in Steven Meyer, MAS.

I never thought I’d have a moment to speak to a group of people thankful for my service, and in the presence of family, I decided to say a few things.

https://www.facebook.com/melisa.burnett/videos/2313822248632206/

Closing Remarks

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PromoCares Regional Association Challenge 2018

My LinkedIn Bio reads:

The robots are coming. There will always be ways to show value, prosper and thrive. I seek otherspresenting the case for purpose as the 5th P of Marketing. If you’re in business as a means to helpmore people, I want to know more about you.

I’ve been involved as a volunteer for the trade associations responsible for protecting our marketplace almost since the beginning of my time in the industry, and my learning curve was shortened dramatically given the wealth of knowledge and advice I was (and am still) provided by interested and caring members of our marketplace. The value of community and seeing your marketplace from a big picture perspective is smart business in my mind, but not everyone shares that opinion.

Commerce retains a dramatically human element, but it’s an element under constant attack in the name of efficiency and driving cost out of the entirety of any industry’s supply chain. There’s a race going on and each of us has a responsibility to bring greater levels of value to that which you do to survive. Trade Associations and other protectionist organizations are increasingly more necessary (FastCompany article, Capital One campaign) and yet support and investment in ensuring strong organizations doing important advocacy work in the cross hairs of the tariff battle are lukewarm at best.

Our industry takes care of ourselves, we take care of our communities, and we play a role in helping communities recover in the wake of the disaster of the day, be it man-made or at the hands of forces outside our control. We struggle to express to the world the true value of what we do when we do it best, but given the opportunity to show you what we’ve got, we deliver the goods time and time again.

So, I’ve presented to this community a challenge. A challenge to change how our medium is seen in the eyes of those most in need of our help in the community, non-profits.

This series of information is dedicated to offering an evolving explanation of what is going on behind the scenes at PromoCares, and the ways our engagement with the Regional Trade Association community will play a key role in determining our collective impact in the calendar year 2019.

Follow along for insights, sneak peaks and listens, pictures and other insider baseball reserved only for the most passionate about what’s going on with PromoCares

 

 

So, You’re in Sales? Episode 34 Antonio Centeno = 2 MILLION YouTube Subscribers. Learn How.

We step outside the Promotional Marketing industry for a discussion with a former Marine turned YouTube star. Antonio joins me for a discussion about the ways content marketing has changed over the years, shares insider hacks to stand out in a crowded and noisy content marketplace and offers his thoughts on the Personal Brand stack, including the production of a conference dedicated to his subscriber base

So, You’re in Sales? Episode 33 David Shultz on The Technology Arms Race

Technology is core to David Shultz’s everyday activities. In this Episode, we talk about the ways shifts in the industry’s composition are being affected by technology, the ways technology is forcing some of those shifts, the importance of humanity in the value chain and thoughts behind his decision making in leaving Distributor Central after 18 years to join commonsku

So, You’re in Sales? Episode 32 Charity Gibson Sell Better, Sell More, Use Social

Charity Gibson joins me on the Anniversary of the podcast becoming a twice monthly broadcast for a discussion regarding her observations as a digital marketer from both the supplier as well as the distributor perspective and the expert ways members of our industry are capturing market share employing social media tactics and strategies designed to create inter-personal relationships using these broadcast channels