Privacy is dead, it’s official. Even when you delete all your data everywhere you know it’s being held, your data will be there until way after your death. It’s like plastic. Tiny little microscopic particles of your data will live on forever.
Well at least until we blow up the earth or it self-destructs into a fireball of internet mayhem.
After watching a 2013 documentary “Terms and Conditions May Apply” on Netflix, realising it was released 5 years ago and probably made a few years earlier then that, I now know without a shadow of doubt that my data, which I so willingly shared with so many websites and organisations, is being used and abused the world over.
The worst thing is I don’t even know how it’s being used and what profits are being made as a result.
I was the Social Media and Internet advocate, I was so excited and delighted when I first discovered it all, so happy that now we could talk to people all over the world and make relationships with strangers we’d never met previously at the drop of a hat. or maybe I should call it the ‘data hat’ or is it ‘data hack’?
Actually who cares, billions of people now adore the internet and in order to use it successfully, we have to give away every tiny bit of data about ourselves.
God regrets sending GDPR emails — Michael & Josh — #weeklycartoon
To date I have received exactly 99 emails on #GDPR and #privacy policies and they are still arriving every day. The biggest mistake is people asking me to opt back in. Of course I’m not going to do that, silly question. It inspired our latest cartoon simply titled ‘God Does PR’, get it? 😂
I have been searching for a cloud CRM for years, one that I would be happy with and I am over the moon to say that I have finally found what I’ve been looking for. I know, I know it sounds corny and I will have no vested interest in promoting Hubspot apart from the fact that I would love for small business owners to have an amazing experience with their CRM too.
I do not pay for Hubspot by the way, they provide a CRM for free, completely for free, let me say that another way, no money leaves my bank account every single month for using Hubspot. Yeah I know, it sounds too good to be true, well it is totally true.
Of course they do have a paid service for sure and that’s not even that expensive either. Let me describe some of the benefits I am getting for using their cloud based CRM system.
Oh I must just say that I do not engage in any email marketing, drip feed campaigning, squeeze page downloads or other spam practices whatsoever. And that’s just as well, because that means I can use the free Hubspot product.
I can add contacts, manually, upload, via email bcc and tag them.
They allow me to IMAP my email, that means when I send email to my contacts, it is synched with my normal email provider, which is Google G-Suite, via Apple Mail. Everything syncs beautifully. This means my conversations with contacts are beautifully kept together on my contact record inside Hubspot. I need this because it means I can develop a closer one to one relationship with my contact. No bulk emails from me, but of course they do it if you pay for it. I highly recommend that you do not use bulk email practices by the way.
Anyway, more benefits, the contact’s domain, if it is a company one, will automatically bring in the company details including the company LinkedIn page. Incredible!
If I send an email to my contact, it allows me to add a follow-up task inside Hubspot really really easily, which means I have no need to add this anywhere else. Really super easy indeed.
Of course then I have a task list, a deals section, lead/contact capture forms, tracking code for my website, even a cookie pop-up for my website.
It just works beautifully and fully integrated, I am really super happy with their solution, can you tell?
They are also completely GDPR compliant and the only company I have come across who actually laid out their stall in connection with GDPR, clearly and showed a roadmap of product updates and releases in order to allow us as users to be fully compliant and they did it all on time as well.
The promise is that it will be free forever, so let’s wait and see if that’s true. I guess they want raving fans, testing out the product and be so impressed with it that one day they will sign up to purchase some of the paid options too.
I’ve tried many CRM systems during my digital career and am now kicking myself for having tried out so many before finding what I am truly happy with. I love it’s simplicity, I see so many that have made it so complicated.
Made a major decision, which is to end my courtship with MailChimp. I’ve flirted with Mailchimp for at least a decade, using it to send newsletters at first, then adding people from capture forms and in the past year adding new connections from LinkedIn and drip feeding them useful and practical information and it actually was. I did carefully think about what to share with my connections and start some engagement and some of it did work.
And I did all of this because the greatest marketers of our world teach us all to build our lists and then provide them with value to convert them into clients. I’ve always felt incongruent and at times very inauthentic with this approach and last year I decided to stop all drip feed practice completely.
My current Mailchimp account — no lists!
I had already stopped email campaigns but when MailChimp released free email automation, I got interested again.
No more, I myself do not like being on the receiving end of any email campaigns, so why would I do this to my contacts. If you’ve ever had one of my automated emails, I sincerely apologise, I was on my learning and growth journey.
Now with GDPR upon us in just a month, I felt it appropriate to divorce MailChimp. It feels amazing!!
