So, a few times a day, I hear from a reader who wants my advice on how to be Google. Or Reddit. Or Scoble.
There is a good place to be. There is traffic and attention and influence and profitability. Here, on the other hand, is nothing special.
If I could only get to there, people sigh, then everything would be fine.
Check out this chart of the traffic of fotolog.com. They’re now 33 in the world. What’s neat is that the progression from one place to another was pretty linear. No miracles, no interventions, no tipping point or inflections.
The reason is simple and one that’s worth understanding:
At every point, fotolog worked. It worked when it had one user and it works with millions of users. One user found it convenient and helpful and yes, remarkable. It was worth sharing. So it got shared.
The mistake bloggers often make (actually, all marketers make sooner or later) is the believe that being popular is its own reward. That once every one does their line dance or visits their restaurant or wears their fashion or reads their blog, then it will be popular for being popular.
Stated so baldly, it’s pretty obvious this doesn’t work, mostly because you can no longer afford to prime the pump. So, instead, we’re left with bloggers like Hugh, who got to the top of the list by creating a blog that people wanted to read, regardless of who else was reading it. Not only that, but they wanted to share it as well.
November 3, 2006
[UPDATE: You’ll find my favorite WILL IT BLEND video by clicking here.
The magic of the Internet is this… more people end up (via Google) on this blog post than any other of my 2,000 plus posts. That’s because "will it blend" is a popular google search term and this post managed to make the front page. If you are possibly (though it’s unlikely) interested in my riffs on marketing–which is how I discovered the videos so early–feel free to click on the archives to the left. Thanks for visiting.]
Michael sends us this YouTube ad.
This is exactly the sort of thing we’ve been expecting. If it’s worth watching, people will watch it.
PS my friend Michael Cader gave me one of these blenders. They rock.
November 2, 2006
People who want to do a good job are more likely to follow instructions that they know they can successfully accomplish, while they’ll often ignore the ‘softer’ tasks if they can.
If you’re marketing a product or an idea to a group of people and you juxtapose two ideas–one obvious and simple while the other is challenging and subtle, you can bet the mass of people will grab the first one (if they don’t ignore you altogether).
Example: it’s easy to get people to wake up early on the day after Thanksgiving if you offer them a TV at a discount, the way Wal-Mart does every year. It’s a lot trickier to challenge consumers to figure out which one of the eighteen refrigerators you offer is likely to offer the best price/performance ratio.
The first task requires nothing much but effort and that effort is likely to be rewarded. The second task takes judgment, and the opportunity for failure is much higher.
If you’re a teacher and you give your third graders instructions for an essay, the motivated ones will listen. If you ask them for vivid, creative writing, and also let them know it must be five sentences long, in blue ink and with not one word outside that little red line that marks the margin, guess what sort of work you’ll get back? Writing in your format is easy. Being vivid is hard. It’s easy to focus on the achievable, the measurable and the simple.
I thought of this as I braved the insanity of JFK for a quick JetBlue flight. The instructions to the TSA folks probably fill several looseleaf notebooks, but I imagine that they can be summarized as follows:
Volume 1: Identify suspicious people and be on the lookout for bad people and new and unimagined threats.
Volume 2: Stop anyone with liquid in their bag.
Guess which volume got read?
The guy in front of me got busted (aggressively) for having a 4 ounce can of shaving cream. Isn’t it OBVIOUS that the limit is 3 ounces? I could hear the TSA thinking, What’s going on here!! At the same time that scores of expensive, trained teams of inspectors were focusing on interdicting the forbidden liquids, no one cared very much about ID or travel history or what that item on the x-ray actually was.
The same thing happens on your website every day. Sure, if I work my way through the sitemap and pay attention to your carefully crafted copy, I’ll probably find exactly what I need. But it’s way more likely I’ll just click on that cute picture or leave the site altogether.
People want to feel successful, but they’re often unwilling to invest the time in doing something that might not pay off. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it works.
Normally, people just show up. They show up at work, or at a conference. They show up on vacation or even sometimes they show up at home.
They aren’t doing anything special, they’re just doing.
Well, I spent the day with several hundred enthusiastic people.
This group, led by Jennifer Young, didn’t just show up. They arrived. They were purposeful and positive and prepared and in a hurry… but in a good way.
It didn’t cost anything. It didn’t take any more effort (in fact, it probably ended up being less of an effort.) They got more out of me, more out of each other, more out of the day.
Enthusiasm has a lot to be said for it.
November 1, 2006
For some reason, people think I know who they ought to hire. In the last week, Corey and Will each asked me for a recommendation. I figured it would be neat to build a place where freelancers could find work.
Publicists, here’s a group for you.
and Designers, here’s one for you.
Go ahead and build a lens about what you do and what you know. Point to your site and your blog and your favorite ideas, books or competitors. The lens will automatically link to the group and people who are looking for you might find you.
October 31, 2006
Robert DeNiro called me today. Or as his friends call him, Bobby.
Of course, I don’t call him Bobby because I’m not his friend. We’ve never met. He was calling to promote a politician. And it wasn’t really him, it was a tape. And I don’t know which politician because I hung up.
I’ve gotten dozens of phone calls over the last few weeks, including one just now from an eager fundraiser named Barbara. She explained that she’d even read my books, including Permission Marketing. "Even the part about spam?" I asked. I don’t think she got the point.
The point, folks, is that with all these strangers calling me, interrupting my day, giving me unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant come-ons, not one person I know personally has called me. And not one of the callers has tried to enlist me to call my friends.
One call from a friend is worth 100 calls from an Academy-Award winner on tape.
The mistake politicians, like most marketers, make is that they think that what they are doing is way too important. Too important to leave to citizens. Too important to leave to ordinary people who happen to be big fans with organic, authentic networks of trusted friends. Too important to respect social boundaries.
If you’re in too much of a hurry to build a real network, you’re probably in too much of a hurry to get elected.
Tower Records is gone. I used to go there almost every day when I lived in Greenwich Village. I haven’t been in more than five years–pretty much since I started buying just about everything at Amazon. Obviously, I won’t miss it.
I haven’t been inside a bank in nearly as long. Why would I? The ATM is closer, faster and easier.
I haven’t read the classified ads in the paper in five years either.
None of these three activities were ever particularly emotionally heartwarming. And now that they’re gone, I don’t miss them.
So, here’s the question: When you’re gone, will they miss what you do? It’s not too late to change the answer…
October 30, 2006
This, of course, is the opposite of "no substitutions".
I had lunch at the Pump in NY today. The Pump is about 350 square feet (total) and it’s a money factory. They have nearly 50 ingredients, all healthy stuff, and offer them in precisely 41,000,000 combinations. So, you can have whole wheat pita with egg whites, chicken breast and hot sauce, no onions. Or no pita, double egg whites, double hot sauce and brown rice.
People who care about what they eat go somewhere on purpose. People who don’t care, go close or cheap.
There’s a line out the door of the Pump every day at lunch. Why? Because people who love substitutions (the picky ones) go blocks out of their way to eat here. Is there anyone clamoring to get into the "no substitutions" place?
There’s been a lot of angry mail about my mention of mmmzr the other day. "It’s a ponzi scheme!" several people say.
Actually, no, it’s not. It’s a pyramid scheme. They’re different, and it’s part of a spectrum, one worth understanding.
A Ponzi scheme is a simple scam in which a bankrolled, charismatic individual persuades some people to invest money in a financial instrument. The investors do nothing but wait for a return. Soon, they get paid off! The buzz is incredible. New investors come in. The scammer now uses the new money to give more returns to the original money. This increasing return further increases buzz, which leads to ever more money coming in, which he uses to pay off newer investors, and so on, until finally there’s a lot of money coming in and the scammer leaves town.
Everyone hates a Ponzi scheme. The only people who fall for it are the ones who don’t know what’s actually happening.
A pyramid scheme is different. That’s a scheme where the investors actually have to do something. There was a classic pyramid scheme floating around twenty years ago. You started as a ‘passenger’ and invested $1,000. Your job was to find five new passengers, which made you a ‘flight attendant’ and then a ‘co pilot’ and finally a ‘pilot’. I forget the specifics, but I think pilots ended up with $100,000 or so. Obviously, this can’t last forever, but if you can recruit diligent passengers, you can make it work (for a while).
Most people shy away from pyramid schemes. They seem too calculated and unfair and risky.
The next kind of pyramid scheme is certain kinds of MLM (vitamins, often) and yes, mmmzr. In this case, in addition to having the attributes of a pyramid scheme (the investors have to work), there’s also an attractive side benefit. You get the energy bars or the web traffic or the perfume or the herbs. The product often hides the underlying structure of the business, but in particularly loud versions, it’s pretty clear it’s just a pyramid scheme.
Once again, most people don’t like this. You cringe when your sister-in-law brings it up. You hide in the conference room when your co-worker takes out his sample case. It feels wrong, and it largely is. It is because the motivation of the seller is primarily selfish.
Selfish because she’s trying to build her downline. Selfish because the entire focus of the enterprise is to make the enterprise bigger.
I contrast this to more subtle projects like Tupperware or Avon, or various religions or things like Digg (when it’s used right). In those cases, the ‘side benefits’ are actually the real benefits. The commissions are just a side light. The word of mouth feels a lot more real, because the person you’re working with is obviously impassioned for the right reason.
Great real estate brokers already have enough money to retire. They’re not selling you a house just to make a few percentage points. They’re doing it because it actually gives them joy to get you into a better house.
Human kindness has always been in short supply. For millenia, you needed to worry when someone offered to do something nice for you. You needed to wonder what the ulterior motive was, what’s in it for them. As a result, we’re innately suspicious whenever we get sold something.
I had an interesting dilemma before I posted on mmmzr. I had a hunch it would work, especially if I pointed to it on my blog. Should I buy a bunch of boxes for some charities I support? After all, it would generate traffic for the charity, and probably pay off with money I could turn around and donate. But if I did, if I did that, then my newer readers would say, "hey, I knew it! You pointed that out because there was something in it for you…" So I didn’t.
Word of Mouth is a really fragile entity. Someone asked me at a recent engagement what I thought about various agencies that are paying people to shill for their products. I said something like, "Well, for a long time the oldest profession has taken money for what other people do for free. How do you feel about the difference between the two transactions? Which kind of person did you marry?"
At some level, at a very major level in fact, the way we feel about a transaction is more important than the transaction itself. Some people like a sporting event more if they got the ticket from a scalper, other if they got the ticket for free from their boss. Some people need to feel like they’ve taken the system (whatever the system is) for everything it’s worth. Others need to pay retail (especially on a wedding dress, cemetery plot or flu shot).
Marketers are working hard to corrupt the way we feel about our friends and the people we respect. I think, in the end, it’s not going to work. We’re hardwired to respect real authenticity, and at some level, that means trusting the motives of the person we’re listening to.
Bottom line: just because the net makes it much easier to measure things, share things, create downlines and hierarchies and yes, scams, doesn’t mean its the best way to make something that lasts.
October 29, 2006
If you live in part of the world where people change clocks, today would be a good day to do that.
October 28, 2006
