On December 11, 2020, I spoke at Pardot conference Pardreamin’ about unusual types of content you can put into emails. If you are one of the 88 people who attended: thank you for your time and kind comments!
For a copy of the slide deck, click “download” below:
Because of this system, you sometimes get exposed to some unexpected acts here in Canada. Musicians that never made it big globally.
CanCon Gems
These are songs that I like. In many cases, I’m surprised that these artists aren’t better known around the world.
Honeymoon Suite – Wave Babies
Banger of a tune about wave babies (who doesn’t like a good wave baby amirite? you don’t know what a wave baby is?! pffft I’m not going to explain it to you. I totally know what it is.) Check out their whole eponymous album. These songs are still played quite frequently on the radio. Notable mention: the track “New Girl Now” that has the most Canadian stick-the-knife-in-and-twist-it breakup refrain: “I got a new girl now…. And she’s a lot like you.”
Jacques showed some great examples where marketing data is seen as reliable – but is actually broken. Even the processes used for decision making around marketing data are often broken (ex: split tests and statistical significance)
Because I’m passionate about the topic of marketing data, I’d like to add 2 types of Bad Data to the original list and offer 7 tips for marketers to stay productive despite this issue:
Where a company sells a product in a competitive market at a loss. Though the company loses money for each sale, the company hopes to force other competitors out of the market, after which the company would be free to raise prices for a greater profit.
Ex: I believe this is how Uber and Lyft set their pricing, hoping to drive out traditional taxi services from the market. Once they do this, they’ll either be the only game in town (because nobody can ever start a brand new taxi service ever again, right?), or they’ll have a permanently low cost structure with driverless cars (spoiler: not happening).
Exclusive Dealing
Where a retailer or wholesaler is obliged by contract to only purchase from the contracted supplier.
Price Fixing
Where companies collude to set prices, effectively dismantling the free market.
Refusal to Deal
Two companies agree not to use a certain vendor
Dividing Territories
An agreement by two companies to stay out of each other’s way and reduce competition in the agreed-upon territories.
Limit Pricing
A limit price is a price, or pricing strategy, where products are sold by a supplier at a price low enough to make it unprofitable for other players to enter the market.
Tying
Where products that are not naturally related must be purchased together.
Resale Price Maintenance
Where resellers are not allowed to set prices independently.
Canadian Whack-A-Mole
The practice of creating the illusion of competition in an oligopolistic market, by creating subsidiaries and sub-brands.
Ishmael N. Daro – Canada has an oligopoly problem. This article makes a strong point that having a government-backed player in an oligopolistic market lowers prices for customers. It was interesting to consider that oligoplies exist in media, and that the “public option” CBC is under constant attack. I don’t find ishmael’s points about the big 5 banks convincing – how is that an oligopoly? How are they making life worse for Canadians?
In a situation where you only know a Pardot landing page’s public URL, and you want to open it for editing, here is what you do:
Go to the landing page in your browser (works for forms, too)
add the parameter ?PI_DEBUG_ENABLE=1 to the end of the URL. So https://pardotdomain.yoursite.com/short_url will become https://pardotdomain.yoursite.com/short_url?PI_DEBUG_ENABLE=1
Hit Enter to go to this new URL
A direct link to the Pardot asset will appear on the upper right of the page. Click it to start editing your page/form right away:
Bookmarklet
You can create a button that does the above work for you, as a bookmarklet:
December 2021 update: people who tried this sync commented about problems with this approach. Personally, this flow stopped working for me. I’ve come to the conclusion that the cloud platform of Power Automate is unstable and unreliable. I recommend that you try a different approach to synchronizing your calendars – like one of the paid options on the market.
Summary: getting Outlook events to show up in Google Calendar can be a challenge due to your workplace’s security settings. If you have access to Microsoft Power Automate (aka Flow), then you can use this .zip package to set up an integration.
My personal calendar is in a Google account, and I access it with a Google app on my Android phone. My workplace calendar is in Office 365 Outlook on my work laptop.
I wanted the ability to see work events on my personal calendar/device without having to install the Outlook app on my phone. I did this because it’s a good idea to keep home & work accounts on separate devices. To keep work-time and personal-time fully apart.
Using Microsoft Flow to synch Outlook and Google Calendars
Microsoft Power Automate (aka Flow) is a service that lets you connect different applications and build connections between them. If you’ve heard of IFTTT or Zapier, Flow has the same concept.
Flow was a good option for this sync because it was free and available. The basic free version of Power Automate is already included in Office 365, and apparently allows 750 “runs” a month. This version is good enough for our purposes, although your company may have paid for a more advanced version.
v2 of this flow added on Aug. 7, 2020. It no longer copies the event description to Google Calendar. Long event descriptions were cutting off the important Event ID/Master ID.
v3 of this flow was added on Nov. 17, 2020. It has 1 minute delays between repeated actions, to try and reduce rate limiting problems. Also, changed Outlook settings to look forward only 90 days, instead of 300.
Known issues: the Google Calendar steps error out because they hit rate-limiting limits (“rateLimitExceeded” message). I’ve also encountered lots of problems when making changes to recurring events.If you think of a fix, post it in the comments!
Screenshot of this Microsoft Power Automate Flow that copies Outlook calendar events into Google calendar.
This Flow will copy over new events from Outlook to Google Calendar. It also handles event updates and deletions, as well as supporting recurring events.
Remember, you will need to set up your own Office ID and your own Google Calendar ID within the Flow, in order to make it work with your accounts. Awesome commenter “justme” shows you how to find the Google Calendar ID in the comments below. They say:
If you go to the Settings and Sharing options of your google calendar you should see an ID, that’s a long list of random characters followed by @group.calendar.google.com. Copy that whole thing into the google calendar ID field in your flow.
You might run into an issue where your provided Google Calendar credentials are not automatically used in this Flow’s elements. The account might say the dummy value “your@googlecalendarusername.com”.
If this happens, then plase go through every instance where those credentials are used, and click on the dropdown to change the account to use your actual Google Account. There are currently 5 spots where that change has to be made. The highlighted parts of the Flow below show where to make the changes:
(The date format ended up being “yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss-00:00” in your own time zone)
Thank you Alex!
My customized Flow is different from Alex’s in that it doesn’t require you to have access to an Excel Online / OneDrive account to keep track of event updates. In my organization, I was not able to make proper use of Excel Tables in the way that Alex’s Flow expected.
There are a few other documented ways to bring your Office 365 Outlook events into G Suite/Google Calendar.
One of them could work for you. It all depends on your employer’s security settings. For me, none of these methods worked. Only the Microsoft Flow method I describe above was effective.
At my organization, sharing a calendar with an external contact was blocked by the admins. A message like “Problem: Your organization’s policy does not allow you to share with this recipient.” comes up whenever you try to share your calendar with a Google account.
Publish to WebDAV server
One recommendation you’ll see for Outlook and Google calendar integration is to use the “Publish to WebDAV Server” option. This requires having an intermediary account on a server like iCal Exchange (accounts are free).
Another option for calendar sync is to go to Outlook 365 Online, then go to Settings -> Calendar -> Accounts.
There is a section there that says “To manage all your calendars in one place, connect your personal accounts with your work account. Details of personal events, like title or location, won’t be shown to other people.”.
Unfortunately, this turned out to be only a one-way sync that brings Google Calendar events into Outlook calendar (the opposite of what I wanted). As of now (July 2020) this also seems to be a feature that’s not available to everyone.
This tool will convert a list of HTML elements like a dropdown list of <option> elements, or <li> and <ol>, into plaintext. One item per line. This helps when you’re quickly copying a list of dropdown items (using Developer Tools) into Excel.
Limitation: the current versiont works when each element is on its own line. This isn’t necessarily always going to be the case with valid HTML, though.
Do you need to ensure your iframe’s height is always set to 100% of the height of the content you are embedding? If so, keep on reading.
This page contains freely-usable code for responsive iFrames. iFrame height will adjust based on the height of the content in them. The code works for cross-domain iFrames and does not use any libraries like jQuery.
The problem
As a Marketing Operations professional, I often need to put marketing forms onto webpages. Normally, I would put code like this onto the page so the form appears in an iFrame:
