Parker Web Partner Show

Narrator 00:02
Welcome to the Parker Web Partner Show, where we find creative solutions for creative agencies.

Darryl Parker 00:10
Welcome to the Parker Web Partner Show. I'm Darryl Parker, founder and owner of Parker Web, found online at parkerweb.com. And with me today is...

Merrill Loechner 00:20
I am Merrill Loechner, founder of Smith Douglass Associates, a creative agency down in New York.

Darryl Parker 00:25
And what we'd like to focus on are creative solutions for creative agencies. And so we run into problems, we see problems in our work that we do for our clients. And we want to provide you with some solutions, some answers, some things that we find when we're out delivering services for our company and what we're seeing out in the marketplace as well.

Darryl Parker 00:48
This week, we are talking about communications and how important they are between client and you the agency, or between client and their end user, their customer. And we want to look at how we manage and how we prepare for those expectations and communications. One of the things that we like to start out with is we like to look at our ticket system, because we handle hundreds of tickets a month that come into our company. We work with small businesses and agencies all over the country, and we get a general feel for what's coming in on a regular basis. We're calling this segment our Developers Desk. With us today is Caleb Parsons, one of our developers at Parker Web. Caleb, what are you seeing coming in on the ticket system?

Caleb Parsons 01:43
Thank you, Darryl. What we've been seeing in the ticket system recently is everyone is talking about Google Analytics. Universal Analytics is being sunset on July 1 of this year. If you've forgotten or haven't gotten that migration process started, it's important to be ready because Universal Analytics will stop processing data on July 1. The good news for many folks is that Google Analytics 4 properties are being created automatically for you. If you had a previous Universal Analytics property by Google, your website will keep tracking data if you haven't acted yet. But it is important to be checking analytics and making sure that things have moved over correctly and migrated to this new property.

Darryl Parker 02:45
So tell me about the experience. I have Google Analytics, I used to have it, or now this transition is happening. What happens when I log in after July 1?

Caleb Parsons 02:54
When you when you log in now, you'll often be prompted with a message saying you have X amount of hours, X amount of days before Universal Analytics is retired, officially. There's a wonderful kind of click-by-click process that can help you get started. It is important, though, that you're checking your site, checking what tags you have on your site. Once you start using the Google Analytics 4 tag, you won't need the Universal Analytics tag, for example. So that can get removed. It's always good to be checking the header of your site, for example, and make sure you don't have lots of unused code there, because it will only slow things down.

Darryl Parker 03:43
So what are some of the clients experiencing when they're trying to do the upgrade themselves when they're in there? And then they have to call us--why is it that they're calling us? What are they running into?

Caleb Parsons 03:52
A lot of it is just sort of making sure that the new property that was automatically created, that that is still processing data, the same way that it was before with this being an event-based property. Some of the ways that Universal Analytics was tracking data, what clients are used to seeing, when they log into analytics, it's changed a little bit. So there are some different places for different parts of the data coming in like events and conversions. It's a lot of it really just has to do with confusion with this new format.

Darryl Parker 04:36
So when these creative folks are installing Google Analytics, do we have any tips that we run into? What are some tips of the trade that we can share with them on doing these installations.

Caleb Parsons 04:46
If you're looking to get the most out of Google Analytics, our recommendation is that you don't just install Google Analytics 4 and the tracking tag through there. But that you start by installing Google Tag Manager, which will allow you to connect your site to Google Analytics. And then also create things like a custom event for when someone clicks on a certain button on your site. And you're really looking to know how many people have been clicking that button. Google Tag Manager makes tracking that sort of data a lot easier.

Darryl Parker 05:34
So the process is you've got a client that's running the old Universal Analytics before and now they want to upgrade it because Google is screaming at them to do this upgrade every time they log in. But we're recommending that you install Tag Manager first, and then install Google Analytics 4. And that's the process that you would go through, is that correct?

Caleb Parsons 05:57
That is absolutely correct. Google Tag Manager is also almost a necessity. If you are an e-commerce site. If your site is a Miva site, for example, Google Tag Manager is critical to the implementation of tracking things for e-commerce.

Darryl Parker 06:20
All right, Caleb, thanks a lot. We appreciate all that good information.

Darryl Parker 06:30
The other thing that I want to get into in this episode, and I'll try to do every episode, is to talk to you, the owner. I'm the owner of Parker Web.

Merrill Loechner 06:38
I'm the owner of Smith Douglass.

Darryl Parker 06:40
We each own our own businesses and we are in this sector right here alongside of you, as the owner of your own creative agency, or digital marketing agency, or technology company, it's owner-to-owner. The three of us are here right now: me and Merrill and you. I want to share, I've been doing this for about 27 years. And I just want to share some of the experiences that I've had in this kind of segment that we're going to do every week called The Corner Office. The big thing I want to jump into this week, in the line of communication is to just share with you a little bit about my story about why we answer the phone. Merrill, what's your favorite thing to do when you call a company?

Merrill Loechner 07:29
Oh, I just love staying on hold and type 1, type 3, type 5...

Darryl Parker 07:36
Sometimes I get on those calls and I try to break the phone tree just to see what I can do to bypass it as quickly as possible.

Merrill Loechner 07:43
How many times can you hit zero and hope to get a real person?

Darryl Parker 07:46
Exactly. So one of the things I decided really early on I when I first opened my business and had I actually had a storefront on a on a main street. It was on West John Street in Matthews, North Carolina. And we had a neon sign in the front window that said: "We put websites to work." This was in the early 2000s. And we had people that just walked in off the street. And someone who just walks in off the street into your office, you can't just ignore him. You have to say hello. And you have to speak to them and you engage with them. And did we get a lot of business that way? No. Honestly, most of the people who walked in, were looking for directions on how to get down to the the Sam's Club or something. They weren't necessarily looking for us.

Darryl Parker 08:30
But the point was, was that we we opened our arms and opened our hospitality. And we wanted to provide a higher level of customer service than what we felt like our competition was doing. So when we did decide to go virtual in 2012, we up until that point had had a receptionist on the desk and that person was responsible for making sure that when the phone rang, it got answered. And we always had this live-person answer policy. And then when we went remote, we were trying to figure out, well, how do we do it? It's so hard. Do we have someone call because then, even though it was 11 years ago that we went fully remote, even then the technology wasn't super advanced on how to handle that. So we used a call center initially so that when you called in you did get a live person. But what did we run into really quickly? We ran into the fact they didn't know what they were talking about. And when a live person calls, they're investing in you, too, right? There in saying, "Hey, I'm willing to call. I've gone to the effort to pick up the phone and try to get a hold of somebody." And at that instance, I'd almost rather get a hold of the machine. If I'm only going to get a hold of someone who can't help me.

Merrill Loechner 09:46
You don't want to tell the whole story. "I'm having a problem with this. How do I do this? How do I do this?"...and you get a "Hold on one moment, please. Let me forward you to someone who can help." I have to tell that whole thing again?

Darryl Parker 09:58
Right, exactly. There's just like, "I'm just trying to take all these notes, and I can't get it all onto the email." And so it definitely felt like an answering service. And we started getting feedback almost immediately that we had lost some connection with our client. Because even existing clients were used to just being able to call in and get access to whomever might be doing the work. And so then we started testing different systems and saying, how can we get it so that when they call in, it will go to a certain phone number, and then that person can answer the phone. So we did that. That was our immediate solution to the call-in service that we were using. I probably used that almost a year before I cancelled it, because we were just in a transition. And we were trying to figure out what to do. I didn't really have the staffing at that time to make an adjustment.

Merrill Loechner 10:52
And also, the problem is...you program it in and this person calls, "Oh, let's switch it to that person's phone." They're out they're on vacation, they're at lunch. It's still not a live person answering the call,

Darryl Parker 10:52
Right. You get voicemails more than you don't get, and we're not achieving our goal, we're not achieving the goal of answering the phone with a live person. And we just felt like that was so important that we had to continue to invest and try to figure this out. So we didn't route it to the person; we ran into those problems. And then ultimately, what we were able to sort out was a phone system that allowed us to ring, through the computer and through our mobile devices, all of us at the same time. So it's Grasshopper. I'll talk a little bit more about that coming up. But the idea was, was that when it rings to the company, it rings everybody. And so we had to be sure that we were hiring for people that could be on the phone. And that's different, right?

Merrill Loechner 12:03
Oh, absolutely. And it's, it also puts the ball in your employees' court, because every single person in your company is responsible for customer service. It's not "Oh, that's the customer service department. That's not our thing." Every human being in your firm is responsible for customer service. This is also: Every single person in your firm is responsible for your brand. They are answering the phone; they may be first point of contact for your brand, what your company is about. So that definitely needs full employee buy-in, which can be hard.

Darryl Parker 12:43
Well, especially in the tech world, right? When you have, mostly, I have a company full of developers who aren't really known for their personability. And so we did establish that as a requirement for the work that we do and we want to work with. Because of the type work that we do, we felt like it was very important that when someone called in for support, that they were able to get that from someone who was customer service oriented. So I often like to say, we are a customer service company first, and we just happened to work in the web space. So, we very much want to focus on that customer service. Then once we have the system, then we set some KPIs in place, key performance indicators. So one of those KPIs that we set in place is that we wanted that all calls answered during business hours, as close to 100% of the time as possible. Our system, Grasshopper, allowed us to be able to track what calls went to voicemail, what calls didn't get answered, and what ring the call was answered on, so how long did it ring. We also set another KPI that the phone needed to be answered by the third ring. So just setting those two KPIs in place shaped a culture in our organization of: we answer the phone, and we answer the phone expecting to deliver customer service, and our clients love it.

Merrill Loechner 14:09
Now were you able to measure who was answering how fast, because you're always going to get somebody going, "I'm going to get every call," and you're going to get somebody going, "Somebody else will get that; I'm busy."

Darryl Parker 14:22
Obviously, our developer team is a billing team, right? So we did have a layer in place for reception, right? So our business administration would catch the calls first, but if that person was out of the room or on another call, everyone else understood that if it got to the third ring, somebody had better pick up. And so that's just a way that we kind of balanced it out. Because the developers are...time is money. We want to be sure that we're billing and that we're not interrupting work and whatnot. But there's always this expectation that yes, we're going to have to handle that call when it comes in.

Darryl Parker 14:58
So, does this work on scale--if we had 100 developers? Probably not. But we will have, even if I have 100 developers, they'll all have access to a telephone, and they'll all be working in, or they will all have the customer service capacity to be able to work with the customer in live time, in real time, one-on-one. And that's just a fundamental philosophy with how we work. And I get a little frustrated when I go to technology companies or I go to creative agency companies and their phone number is nowhere on the website. There's an email form. And I'm like, "Okay, well, how many hoops am I going to have to jump through to talk to a person here?"

Merrill Loechner 15:38
Oh, absolutely. There's whole websites who are like, "You really need to get to Microsoft? This is the super-secret phone number that you need to call." Yeah, absolutely. It's "Well, we'll give you customer service if you pay extra for it." No, if you have, if you're selling me a product, if you want me to buy that product, I want to be able to speak to a human being. Yes, I can look at your chatbots. Yes, I can deal with your FAQ's and your fill-out-the-forms. If there's a problem I need to fix in a timely manner, don't make it hard.

Darryl Parker 16:13
Right? I honestly think that the ability to answer the phone and be present for your customer when they walk through your front door, so to speak, is a competitive advantage. A lot of bigger companies like your Microsofts and whatnot, they can't, they just can't. They can't do it. And a lot of times customers are buying from local agencies and local companies like mine, because they get a person to talk to. So you need to work toward those advantages and those differentiators in the market.

Merrill Loechner 16:41
Yeah, absolutely. And even if you're a bigger agency, and you can't have everyone answer the phone, the people in accounting are not going to answer the phones, you still need to have that responsibility for everyone in this company is responsible for branding. Everyone in this company is responsible for customer service. There is no such thing as, "That's not my job." If you work for this agency, you are a walking talking billboard for this agency. And you have the creatives and whatnot, they need to be able to answer the phone and need to be able to handle calls. Yeah, if I'm a creative and someone's having a billing problem, I'm like, "Oh, you poor thing. That must be so frustrating. I know just the person you should speak to. I'm going to walk right over and make sure he gets your call." I'm going to feel thrilled, as opposed to "I got the wrong person. Yeah, not my problem, I'm going to send it over to somewhere." Especially if someone's upset, they just want to be heard. They want to know someone is listening, someone is empathetic, even if they can't directly help, they're going to go out of the way to find you the help. And that is such a powerful thing.

Darryl Parker 18:04
Well, that's taking responsibility for the customer. We're going to be talking with Patrick in just a minute about responsibility, and how creatives have a responsibility to provide, in this scenario, in this case, customer service. Take that information, and I hope that it's useful to you. And I'll share some more. If you have any other questions or comments, please be sure to post them. And I will try to answer questions when we get those.

Darryl Parker 18:40
All right, so in today's roundtable, we're going to be speaking with Patrick McLean from Reinforcements. You can find him online at sendreinforcements.com. Patrick, I was reading one of your articles just this past week about how you believe, and I'd like you to fill us in on this, about how creativity is not just about freedom, or isn't about freedom at all, and it's more about responsibility.

Patrick McLean 19:07
Okay, well, I think there are two things that come to mind when I wrote the article and I was thinking about responsibility and creativity. One is if you expect someone to give you their attention and their time, as fragmented as things are now, you have a responsibility to reward it. For example, if I write a lead magnet, I have a responsibility to make that thing valuable, and make it match up to what they thought they were going to get. If you write a movie, you have a responsibility to entertain the audience in a specific way. If you don't take those responsibilities seriously, the end product is not very good. Bad things happen business-wise, bad things happen personally, I think, if you phone something in.

Patrick McLean 19:56
The second way that responsibility matters is if you're given a problem to solve, you really have to be responsible in solving the problem. And I think that one of the things that I've gotten tripped up with over the years and I've finally gotten clear about is that nobody, the way I put it in the post is, nobody wants a shovel. What they want is a hole. And in many parts of the world, like when I was just a copywriter, I could get frustrated that I was providing this script, or I was providing this copy for a website, or even--if I can date myself--a brochure. That feels like it's my final output. That's not a final output for anybody. The final output for those things is maybe sales or conversions, or creating a feeling in an audience. And that's the thing that I think, as a creative, once you start to take responsibility for those things, then the work goes up, better things happen. If you listen to any interviews, about anybody who really makes a good film and takes a lot of craft, everybody on the film will tell you that they have a responsibility to tell the story: the lighting guy, the actor, we're just all here to have a responsibility to the story.

Darryl Parker 21:15
How do you think you get clarity around, like when you're working with a client, how do you get clarity around that responsibility? Where you don't get in your own way, from a creative standpoint?

Patrick McLean 21:24
You have to define an outcome, what somebody wants on the other side, and I was thinking in preparation for this: People would probably do web design for free if all they had to put in there was, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet." Right? Because it's cool, and it's fun, and you get to use these tools, you get to make a beautiful website. And it's great. And then you really get proficiency at this set of tools. And you can make things quickly. The problem is, what's the thing supposed to say? How's it supposed to work? And getting that information out of a client is the eternal problem, right?

Darryl Parker 22:08
Like, why are they doing a website anyway? Right, Merrill?

Merrill Loechner 22:11
I'm just saying, that was going to be one of my questions. You know you have that responsibility. You know that the end result, especially if you're working for a client, is sales or branding. How do you get that with a client who's just saying, "Oh, no, no, we just need some words." And you're trying to get them, like, why are you in business? Who are you trying to reach? And they're like, Oh, no, just write something up."

Patrick McLean 22:38
Well, I mean, I have I have a process for that. Like, I've been doing that for a long time. And I can have conversations, but what I would say about creative responsibility is that even if somebody's like, "Yeah, I don't care what you put on the website," I still have a responsibility to think it through. And mostly what I make now is videos, and I have a responsibility to think through what would make this a good video both not wasting the viewers' time, rewarding them for watching it, being entertaining, or quirky, or that kind of a useful... And then what is it going to do for the business? So I've had a couple of clients, a client that I worked with over the years, and they their sales organization. And I don't know if they if they even have a CRM now. Right? And they didn't really measure anything, and they just kind of wanted these videos that were really funny. I guess about 10 or 15 years ago it was high leverage for them just to send a video rather than to be like, "Hey, did you see the game last night?" I called it the "sales candy" way to open these things; they didn't measure anything. And I asked, "I want to put together a case study; how well do these things work for you?" And initially, they worked great. They had some measurements, but they didn't track it through sales and whatever. But I still feel like it makes the work better if you take responsibility for that.

Merrill Loechner 24:00
As a creative, it's not your job to guess. You want to see the results of what you do. I always jokingly called it throwing a rock in the well and wanting to hear the splash.

Patrick McLean 24:14
Yeah, well, that's a great analogy. That's so good, because every time, especially a deep thing, you throw it in there, like how deep is it going to be? Yes, it's a great analogy.

Darryl Parker 24:22
Even the Washington Post came out with an article, I think it was earlier this week, about a writer who had been completely replaced by Chat GPT. So he was writing mostly small blurbs about products, doing small blog posts, and doing social media posts. 9 of his 10 clients had decided that they were going to use Chat GPT instead of him. Obviously, there was some misunderstanding about the value that the writer was providing in this scenario. So, how would you advise this guy in this type of scenario or where could he have taken more responsibility in getting the "why" to the customer?

Patrick McLean 25:06
Well, there's there's a couple of things to unpack in there. One is, it may in fact be, and I don't think this is the case--I think maybe they'll be back for reasons I'll get to--it may be the fact that the guy wasn't a very good writer, and Chat GPT was better or good enough for the things that were being written. And there is that you have to be better than Chat GPT or Bard, or, whatever, which I don't think is as much of a challenge as some people think. It's not the end of the world. They tested GPT for a number of standardized tests, the ACT, the LSAT, the SAT, a bunch of AP exams, and it got 5s on a lot of AP exams. The ones it didn't pass, it got 2s on, were the Literature and Composition and the Language and Composition tests. I took both of those and I got a 5 and I placed out of having to do those basic English level classes in college. And you really have to think deeply about and be human to write the essays for those; you have to think deeply about literature. So I think that for personality list things.

Patrick McLean 26:22
But the reason that I think that those clients are probably going to be back at some point is that maybe a lot of people think that they can just have this vanilla GPT spam. There is just a wave of it coming, which, for me, means that people have to be more original in their communications. Somebody joked that there was going to be a Turing test for whether or not you were dealing with Chat GPT, which is if you can get it to say something truly awful. It's got all this "Is this a real thing? Can you say this? Would you just swear a lot for me?" or whatever, but we're going to be looking for that weirdness. Like the article that I wrote about creative responsibility and creative freedom? I don't think I could prompt an AI to write that.

Patrick McLean 26:23
What is the client's misunderstanding about outcome that makes GPT appealing versus someone who has the capacity to do that compositional and conceptual writing?

Merrill Loechner 27:26
Well, for one thing, it's always the value of the writer, which has always been a thing, because it's the "Why do I have to hire a professional? I can write stuff." And writing good stuff...

Patrick McLean 27:38
"I have a keyboard!"

Merrill Loechner 27:40
Exactly. And I'm actually looking at this Chat GPT and seeing the wave, as you said, of vanilla mediocrity. That's going to make us writers more valuable. You have seen the garbage out there. I'm working on videos for one of my clients who said, "Oh, we could just use one of those AI voices." And I gave him a whole bunch of AI voices. And he's like, "Do you know any humans who can do this?" So just this morning, we hired a professional VO actor, because we just couldn't get the warmth of humanity. He's a lawyer; he didn't want to sound fake. His brand is authenticity. The last thing you want to do if your brand is authenticity, is to sound fake.

Patrick McLean 28:26
I go to some pains to shoot videos with the actual people who work at the companies. There's a lot of coaching involved, but the way I say it is: "Nobody else can be authentic for you," right? So it's always kind of better, and you always want the humanity and the imperfections. But I think it's an evolutionary thing, right? What you're saying about is right now, it may be the case that Chat GPT is good enough. But when everybody uses Chat GPT and a lot of these AI tools to generate a lot of pretty crappy content, there's just a tsunami of awful content coming, which I think you're right, I think it makes people who can make better content more valuable. This is going to be a transition period, though.

Merrill Loechner 29:09
Oh, yeah.

Darryl Parker 29:12
Play with the new toys, right? They're just out there seeing what they can do.

Patrick McLean 29:16
It makes me more powerful.

Darryl Parker 29:18
Patrick, explain that. How do you mean?

Patrick McLean 29:22
Well, I can summarize it. I can take inputs and I can say, "Can you clean this up?" It's like having a junior writer or for me what the fastest thing is, because the stuff I'm not dealing in volumes and volumes of text like writng a novel, but what it's really useful for is I have to get up to speed on something quickly. It's really good to ask questions. I think people underestimate the value of having having AI as a tutor in any subject. because it's endlessly patient.

Darryl Parker 30:03
And you're hitting right on Marc Andreessen's point, also, a post that he put out this week about how AI could save us. And it's because when we move into that augmentary role, instead of the leading role, it makes us more human, and it makes us more productive and more able to fulfill. So while we may, in the short term, view it as a threat, just like this guy in the Washington Post did, in the long term, it might make us better.

Patrick McLean 30:34
Yeah, of course, and more productive, as the tools that allow me as a creator, to make an end product are just going to be better and I'm going to have more power and control over those things. But the analogy that I use is, what a writer really does, I think, is they model and other person or other people in their heads. When you write fiction, you model characters and you see what happens. When you write marketing, you're trying to empathize and understand someone else's position, and give them what they need. I think that's the best way to look at it. I know some people are manipulative, I think that's a fool's errand. But AI doesn't have the input for that. And I use an analogy for fiction, which is: You can train AI on all of mythology. You can train it on languages, you can train it on literature before 1900, all of it, world literature. But what you can't do is you can't send it to war, you can't have it lose its three best friends in a week, you can't have it see the way the world was destroyed. So you don't get the writers of the Lost Generation. And in particular, you don't get JRR Tolkien inventing an entirely new genre of fantasy. Because what he was doing was he was dealing with the very deep feelings and the agonies and the suffering, and who's processing that into a work of art, which we all respond to. There's no dataset for that input of "I feel nervous about losing my hair; how should I write this thing about, hair regrowth products?", or whatever, like, there's no data set for that.

Darryl Parker 32:20
To bring it kind of full circle, AI has the ultimate freedom, right? But does it have the responsibility for this final output that's needed with the emotion and the responsibility to the customer, the responsibility to the client and the client's customer. So it's a tool, but it's a tool that has to be used in such a way responsibly.

Patrick McLean 32:47
Yeah, I think you could say that. I think the other way to talk about freedom in the creative process is that I need to...generally, I spend a lot of time talking to my clients and encouraging them: Do they have more freedom than they realize? Because right now there's sort of a very narrow window, everybody sort of does the same thing and says the same thing. And it has become more and more corporate, especially in publicly held companies, right? It's the same damn Anthem spot that everybody sees that saying the same thing. The problem is that no one will pay attention to it; they'll ignore it, because it's just like everything else. And I think that AI is a tipping point for that. So you have to throw elbows, even in initial meetings. One of the things I'll say is, when they kill an idea because they say, "We could never do that." I don't want to be like: "Look, it might get killed, but we're not the people who are going to kill it. And for the next 15 minutes, let's just pretend we're totally free." And then it opens things up. And there was a great creative director who said that the way to do the best work is you come up with an idea and everybody laughs and says, "That's great, but we could never do it." And then you figure out a way to do it.

Darryl Parker 33:58
That's awesome. And I think that's a great differentiator when creatives are talking to their clients. That's how we're different than the tools that are out there. And that's how we bring the human layer to the work that we do. Well, thank you very much for joining us here today. What a great conversation about responsibility and communicating with clients and understanding a lot of the tools that are showing up in the marketplace.

Darryl Parker 34:23
One of the ways we like to wrap up is we'd like to jump into some tools that we like to use. And one of the tools, going back to what I was talking about earlier in the show, that I want to talk about it in communications, is Grasshopper, so it's a great voice over IP phone system. We use it internally at Parker Web, and it allows us to ring all the desks for our developers to fulfill on our promise to have a live person answering the phone. So I encourage everyone to check out grasshopper.com. It can work on your mobile phone; it can work on your desktops. Caleb, what do you think? What's a good tool for you?

Caleb Parsons 35:07
Well, to connect to something that I was talking about, or possibly I will be talking about, to connect to a previous conversation, I'm often checking client sites for Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, and the Universal Analytics sunsetting on July 1, there's lots of people looking to either migrate over to GA 4 or they're looking to just kind of make sure that everything is set up already. And there's a wonderful extension for Google Chrome called Tag Assistant Legacy. And using that and refreshing the page, I can quickly check to see what kinds of tags are installed on a website. It's not perfect; sometimes you have to do kind of a deeper look into how the tags are installed. But it's a great way to check to see has someone kept up to date or do we need to do some additional work.

Darryl Parker 36:28
Yeah, quick way to get an overview. That's awesome. Merrill, what do you have for a tool that you want to leave us with today?

Merrill Loechner 36:34
Sure. I've been a published author since I was 9. I love writing. I'm also dyslexic, so the spelling thing was always a bit of a challenge. God bless Grammarly, because not only does it make sure I'm spelling it right and using the right word, some of the autofills it also has makes me realize that sometimes I use the same phrase over and over again. And so it will autofill a phrase it expects me to type and that's like: "Oh, yeah, I use that phrase a lot. Let me reword this another way." So it's a way to slow down my writing a bit and make me really think about what I'm trying to say, as opposed to just hurry up and get the thoughts on the page. So I use Grammarly on everything.

Darryl Parker 37:21
Perfect, perfect. Patrick, bring us home.

Patrick McLean 37:24
Ahh, this is tough, I'm honest. I haven't thought about this. So it's a tool you use for to enhance communication?

Darryl Parker 37:35
Or what's a tool that you use normally in your practice as a writer or videographer that you'd like to share with other agencies, and the problem that it solves?

Patrick McLean 37:46
I use Keynote a lot, but I used to prototype things. And I think a lot of people do this, but it is the quickest and dirtiest tool I can use to comp something up or badly put it together. Actually, you know what? I have a better tool. I have a better tool; I use it all the time. I use Dropbox Paper as my project management thing.

Darryl Parker 38:12
So what's the difference between that and just the regular Dropbox?

Patrick McLean 38:15
Well, Dropbox Paper is a page and you can throw any links or anything on there. It provides a chat interface. And it's just deceptively simple. But any link or file you throw in there, it'll deal with it. It'll keep track of communications with a whole bunch of people and has some simple timeline stuff. And it's just enough of a tool for me. It solves the nightmare of my working life that is that I have to click over to an email and then have to look at a text message or a chat over here or something over here. It would be something in Slack. Where is...is it a Google Doc? Is it on Dropbox? I just want everything in one place. So I don't have to context switch because that just drains all your energy.

Darryl Parker 38:57
I've got to check that out. Especially if you're doing like the research on doing writing, right? I mean, it's just a place to kind of put everything, it sounds like...as you're doing all that.

Patrick McLean 39:05
And keep everybody coordinated. For note apps, I would say I've used all of them. I use Bear on my phone because I'm in that Mac ecosystem and it works great. And I also use Ulysses to keep longer texts and longer things together. So it's a really nice writing app.

Darryl Parker 39:28
We will put links to all of these apps; we are not paid endorsements at all. We don't get paid for any of this. But if Grammarly wants to pay us, or Grasshopper or those folks, we'll take their money, but we just like to talk about the tools that worked well for us. Well, thanks for joining us today, Patrick. How can folks reach you if they want to talk to you?

Patrick McLean 39:49
There's contact information at sendreinforcements.com And then that article is posted; I have a newsletter where I talk about all this kind of stuff, which is reinforcements@substack.com. Yeah, that those would be the easiest ways.

Merrill Loechner 40:04
We'll put the links in the show notes.

Darryl Parker 40:07
Yeah, absolutely.

Merrill Loechner 40:14
Thank you for listening to today's episode where we spoke a lot about both communication and responsibility.

Darryl Parker 40:22
Caleb talked about how we want to be sure that we are bringing knowledgeable solutions to our customers and considering all the factors when we're giving information to them. So it's not just an upgrade to Google Analytics 4; there's a piece that needs to be in there. I touched on how incorporating customer service philosophies into your business can be super important in not only framing customer expectations, and joy and delight from your customer, but also in framing and helping your employees understand where their roles are with the customer. And then we jumped right into a great conversation with Patrick McLean from sendreinforcements.com where we got into the responsibility of being a creative in this space today. So thank you very much for joining us, and we look forward to talking to you again.

Merrill Loechner 41:12
If you have any questions or would like to see us cover a particular topic about your creative agency, send an email to Darryl at darryl@parkerweb.com.

Darryl Parker 41:23
And I'll answer your email.

Merrill Loechner 41:26
Thank you for joining us.

Narrator 41:36
You've been listening to the Parker Web Partner Show. If you need help in this ever-changing digital world, reach out to us at 877-321-2251 or visit our website at parkerweb.com.