Michael Pollock is a liar
He came through and bought a nose. You can too: Link: Seth’s Blog: You too can be famous!.
and find Michael here: smallbusinessbranding – Small Business Strategies and Ideas for Savvy Solopreneurs.
Fundable… a next big thing?
Anders Abrahamsson points us to Fundable, a new open source venture. Welcome to Fundable — Fundable.
I post it because
a. the site is beautiful and clear and is a great example of the sort of Knock Knock website we need more of.
b. more important, I think it represents a neat opportunity for marketers of content.
Example: Rickie Lee Jones says, "If 5,000 people agree to buy a new live album from me $10 a copy as an MP3, I’ll go ahead and make it." She then promotes the sale and points people to Fundable.
If she doesn’t get 5,000, everyone gets a refund, automatically. If she does, she sends out the album and something good has happened.
What’s neat about this is that it creates a fundamentally different sort of buying mechanism. That hasn’t happened in a long, long time.
I actually don’t think that this is going to be a truly next big thing… it’s too much work to do the promotion and to make something worth buying. (Imagine chartering a big jet to Las Vegas for a convention…) But it’s a cool idea.
Whatever happened to ChangeThis?
A year ago today, I started work on ChangeThis. The idea was to have a mechanism that would help thoughtful ideas spread. Far too lazy to do something this difficult on my own, I assembled a team of summer interns who did the entire thing.
It succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. We featured authors as diverse as Tom Peters, Amnesty International, Chris Anderson, Hugh Macleod, George Lakoff and Guy Kawaski. We distributed manifestos on the evil of juice and the joys of blogging. Millions and millions of copies of our pdf files were distributed far and wide.
ChangeThis, paradoxically, was too successful. As the bar was raised and the standards increased, the amount of work necessary to keep up the quality kept rising. Starting at the end of last year, I entered into a very long negotiation with a major web company about passing the reins on to them. Alas, as often happens with long negotiations with major corporations, it crashed and burned at the very end. One side effect is that ChangeThis has been relatively bereft of new content since February or so.
The good news?
a. next week I hope to be able to tell you about a new team taking over–no money is changing hands, just a team of folks who want to do the hard work to make it fly…
and
b. we learned a lot. We learned a lot building it and launching it, and we learned a lot in watching what spread (and what didn’t spread). And, I think, our millions of readers learned a lot.
So, think hard about the next generation of manifestos. Challenge yourself to write something that’s important, and that will spread. More next week. Thanks for reading.
Visualizing your story
Thanks to Rod Brant for the link to the Tombstone Generator.
What will be on your tombstone
So, every single article about podcasting mentions Adam Curry (which makes sense, since it was his idea). And every article ever written about Adam Curry mentions that he was once an MTV VJ. For no good reason. (We’re talking almost 100,000 google matches).
AND, every single article about Google (until recently) included the phrase, "And employees eat lunch in a cafeteria where the food is prepared by a former chef for the Grateful Dead." For no good reason. (We’re talking 25,600 matches).
Breaking news: SiliconBeat: Google’s famed chef leaving. Thanks John Battelle for the link…
What’s they have in common is pretty obvious: oxymorons. It’s a safe piece of trivia that no one expects but then it’s pretty easy to remember. Oxymorons make it easy to tell stories. Do you have one?
More downgrading
A few weeks ago, I talked about the gradual descent of music from live to a mere memory of that: Seth’s Blog: REAL–Compared to what? The Pale Imitation.
I thought about that when I was yelling on the cell phone today, because the connection was far worse than the way the phone in my house sounded in 1971.
And the typesetting on my blog doesn’t compare to that in my books.
And my digital pictures in iphoto, though there are a lot of them, really don’t look as sharp as these snapshots from my high school graduation (and I had more hair).
It’s not just traditional media, either. An email doesn’t communicate as much information as a meeting, and a voice mail is really hard to file. A Powerbar may have plenty of vitamins and stuff, but it’s just not as good as a real meal, is it?
Which leaves a big opportunity. The opportunity to provide sensory richness. To deliver experiences that don’t pale in comparison to the old stuff. It’s not just baby boomer nostalgia (though that helps)–it’s a human desire for texture.
Stagnation is easy, change is hard
They want to make the supermarket near my house better. Add free parking for all the people who want to shop in the village (where there is no free parking). Add more fresh produce and organic foods, as well as an enhanced deli/prepared food section. They also want to take over an abandoned lot where a car dealership stood abandoned for years, and eliminate a little-used street that messes up the traffic.
The town is up in arms!
There are petitions everywhere. People are outraged. Shocked. It’ll ruin everything.
It seems as though it’s easy to be against change.
There’s a toxic waste dump in my town, crowned by an old, rusting, abandoned water tower. There’s actually a committee to protect the water tower, given that it signifies an important part of our (toxic) heritage.
One more:
New York State fought for years (and spent millions on legal work) to keep a law that is patently ridiculous–that only in-state wineries could sell online and by mail. Somehow, I guess, the in-state wineries would avoid selling to minors, but not the ones from, say, California.
One day after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law, our esteemed governor said that he was in favor of changing it anyway. No big deal. The world did not end.
Why is it so easy to protect the status quo, even when the status quo isn’t so great?
It has to do with a discontinuity on the curve of gain and loss. Think about it this way:
How much would you pay for a long long shot chance to win $100 million? Odds of a billion to one. Probably a dollar. They call it a lottery ticket.
Now, how much would you SELL a long long shot (at even better odds) where if a certain number came up, you’d have to give away every single item you owned?
Figure you’d lose a million dollars worth of assets. Now, before you answer, remember that this is just 1% of what you were willing to pay a dollar to win. The rational mathematical answer is no more than one penny. Of course, no one would sell this ticket for a penny. Most people wouldn’t sell it for a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars for a 100,000 to one shot you’ll go bankrupt? No way.
The fear of loss is way, way higher than the desire for gain. Unless it’s carefully hidden inside a story, that’s the way we feel. We’re humans, not Vulcans.
If I ran the Stop & Shop supermarket near my house, I’d bluff. I’d pull bulldozers and wrecking balls into town and tell everyone I was going to demolish my no longer profitable store and then leave the parking lot filled with bricks so no one could park there and jog over the wine store while using my parking lot.
The outrage would be so profound I’d have no trouble at all selling the town on a small upgrade.
All change isn’t good. Not at all. But the knee jerk irrational opposition to change is less good. Marketing is all about making change. More often than not, a good way to sell that change is not with the promise for gain. It’s with the fear of loss. Sad but true.
Who do you trust?
Ian Daley at Virid.com.au points us to the list of Australia’s most trusted professions. Link: LHMU: Queensland News: Ambos voted our most trusted professionals – 07 June 2004.
Here’s the list: 1 Ambulance officers
2 Fire fighters
3 Pilots
4 Nurses
5 Pharmacists
6 Doctors
7 Police officers
8 Dentists
9 Teachers
10 Architects
11 Plumbers
12 Accountants
13 Social workers
14 Religious ministers / priests
15 Auto mechanics
16 Bartenders
17 Builders
18 Financial advisers
19 Taxi drivers
20 Psychologists
21 Lawyers
22 Journalists
23 CEOs
24 Real estate agents
25 Car salesmen
26 Politicians
Worth noting that marketers don’t even come out ahead of politicians.
Welcome back!
Every month or two, I drop an email note to my long-time e-subscribers. These are the many people who have kept in touch with my writing for five years or more… email is more quaint than RSS, but, hey, it still works.
So, if you’re just joining us, here are the most vital links from the last few weeks. I hope daily readers will forgive the repetition.
Link: My new ebook and how to get it for free.
Link: Dozens of new posts about All Marketers are Liars.
Link: Seth’s Blog: On Critics, Criticism and Remarkability.
Tom filters…
…so you don’t have to.
sort of a pre-built RSS reader for change junkies. Link: TP Wire Service.