You bet they do.
You might not care a bit about an apostrophe that modify’s the word incorrectly, but lot’s of people care. They care because it is an instantaneous method for determining whether the person writing is facile with the language and/or cares about doing things correctly.
Now that first impressions are as quick as a few letters in a blog post title (sic!) or a sign in a window, every character matters.
A slow week for good posts, largely because I put my back into a week of spasms doing yoga (or as Fred would say: Yo! GAH!!.)
Some of you are already writing me mail, pointing out how great yoga is when done properly. You can stop. I know this. Of course, you are right. Of course it is also right that not all yoga is done properly, and that there is plenty within the canon that should probably be deleted.
What’s interesting is that the worldview of "yoga is good/cool/right/mysterious/worthy/interesting" is quite powerful. It’s ripe for storytelling, because so many people want to believe the stories. It’s a modern archetype, based on faith in a very old idea.
The easiest way to get a reaction is to tell a story that resonates with (for or against) a cherished idea. Change doesn’t always happen slowly. It tends to happen quickly in areas where people don’t care. In the areas where the worldview is widespread and the stories are durable, change is much more difficult.
It’s in Kheri Kalan, an industrial town in India. Fifty street kids use it to learn every afternoon. John Wood and the Room To Read team built it with your Big Moo purchase royalties. Thanks.
Habits are essential to marketing and to profits.
Starbucks in the morning is a habit. So is having your law firm do a trademark search every time you invent a new name. Buying bottled water is a habit, but it didn’t used to be.
Making a habit is a lot easier than breaking one (ask a smoker) and habits often come in surprising ways (ask Jerry, who now has a manicure habit).
If you want to grow, you’re either going to have to get more people to adopt your habit, (which might require breaking a different habit) or somehow increase habitual behavior among your happy customers.
Thanks to Todd and Jack, there are 250 free cereal boxes with your name on it. After that, this special edition of Free Prize Inside is only $5. But only till they’re gone. (Actually, the free ones are here).
Have fun. It’s not X-ray specs, but it does stay crunchy, even in soy milk.
Not many more opportunities to sign up for my all day seminar on June 15.
Because my detail page didn’t do a great job of describing the benefits of the event, here you go:
For less than $667 a person (if you bring two friends) we’ll spend the day in New York City going over the new marketing, how it impacts your organization and what you can do about it. The first few hours of the day includes a very fast-paced overview of ideas from Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside and All Marketers are Liars. The focus will be on laying out a framework that is easy to explain to your peers and your boss.
After that, the agenda is driven by the audience. Each person gets a chance to talk about her business or her website or a particular marketing issue. I address each of them, one by one, and the audience quickly gets the hang of a particular approach to problem solving (that would, ahem, be my approach). The goal is to get the group to the point where it’s really clear what to do before you even hear my riffs.
In the past, seminar attendees have included everyone from major inkjet printer companies to political candidates to non-profits. We’ve had giant companies from Chicago and one-person operations from South Korea. In just about every case, people leave energized–and send me notes a week or a month or even a year later about how their perspective was changed, and how it’s paying off.
The thrill for me is in assembling a group of people who believe they have little in common… and watching everyone in the room gradually "get it", realizing how the new marketing techniques change so many things in their organization. If I can do that, if I can send you home ready and able to grow fast if you want to, then it’s been a good day.
Seats are really limited, so if you want to come, please sign up soon. Not sure when the next one might be. Thanks.
Every day, in almost every office of almost every organization, people are going to get together to make something better.
Making things better is a natural impulse, especially if you want to grow.
Unfortunately, better is not always the right strategy. Better is not always superior to different.
When you make something that works a little better, you’re playing the same game, just keeping up with the status quo. When you make something different, on the other hand, you’re trying to change the game.
The next time your engineers or customer service people want to initiate a project to make something better, challenge them to make something different instead.
What’s the opposite of that? An Overnight failure?
The idea of an overnight success is relatively new. Joan of Arc, Robin Hood and Sarah Bernhardt were not overnight successes. It took media (the old kind, like TV and movies, and especially the new kind, like Google video) to create the overnight success. My friends Pomme and Kelly are overnight successes. So are some of the characters on American Idol.
Along the way, some people have trained themselves to believe that the only kind of success worth having is overnight success. That if you don’t hit #1 the first week, you’ve failed. That if your interface isn’t perfect out of the box, or if you don’t get 5,000 people standing in line at the opening of your new store, you’ve failed.
The Times today reports on Kathleen McGowan, easily considered an overnight failure. She spent years researching and writing a novel. She went to the annual book convention on her own nickel last year, trying to pitch it. Day after day was spent slogging her way to any person willing to look at it. This year, of course, she’s back with a million dollar plus advance, feted by booksellers, the whole drill.
Squidoo is another interesting case. Here’s a look at our daily traffic, courtesy of our Google Analytics package, since January (I removed four weeks in mid-March, mid-April, because of a glitch with search.) Squidoo has more than 27,000 lenses built by 15,000 people in about five months. No, the chart doesn’t look like MySpace or Flickr. What it does look like is the early days of Google and Wikipedia and other overnight failures.
The challenge for observers, investors and partners (like the publisher who took on Kathleen) is to avoid the temptation of buying the media infatuation with the overnight success story (which rarely happens overnight). The challenge for marketers is to figure out what daily progress looks like and obsess about that.
The goal, I think, is to be an overnight failure, but one that persists. Keeping costs low, building a foundation that leads to the right kind of story, the right kind of organic growth. Kathleen wrote a book that she believes in, one that was worth investing years of her life into. And then she painstakingly made progress until she became the next big thing.
"More case studies," they say. Okay, here’s one:
Pete was in a business that’s a real commodity. Moving and storage. Mostly local. Anyone with a truck and some strong men can get in. It’s about price, mostly, plus service and ethics, I guess.
The thing is, most people don’t hire a mover very often. And when they do, they do it with fear and loathing, not excitement. The only thing that can happen is something bad.
So what did Pete do? He built a Purple Cow, one with a real story.
Pete works for Metro North. He sold tickets at the train station in my town. Which means (pre credit card machine) that every single commuter knew him.
Pete got a phone number with a local exchange (478). Only people in town can get that exchange. They’re coveted.
And then he hired some nice guys. Not guys who had to be trained to be nice, but nice guys.
So, you see the trucks. The paint job is neat and clean. The firm’s name (478 PETE) is the phone number is the story is the guarantee. Of course Pete’s not going to rip you off. He’d have to quit his great job at Metro-North to hide from you. Of course he’s local, he’s even got the exchange!
Bingo. Pete’s set for life.
Now, what usually happens at this point is that people say one of two things, "Sure, that was obvious," and "sure, it worked for him… but what about my particular unique one-and-only situation…"
Well, it’s not that obvious. And yes, if Pete can make local moving and storage into a goldmine, odds are you can reinvent your gig as well. None of it would have worked if he had run a standard moving company… the product (the men and the man) is the marketing.
New York City’s DOT website?
We now have a new standard in bad web design from organizations that should know better and can afford to do it right. My expectations would be low, but Mike Bloomberg can do better.
Before you launch your commerce site, compare it to this one.
The list is long, and here are some partial highlights:
So, the new rallying cry of the mediore, "Hey, at least it’s not as bad as the DOT site."
