The web has billions of pages. You’ll see so few of them over your lifetime that the percentage is almost unmeasurable.
Your web, on the other hand, is well-traveled and familiar to you. It’s the one you travel daily.
Facebook and sites like it are changing the world because they’re becoming, for millions of people, "My web." Just as it’s possible to do an entire day’s work using nothing but email, it’s now possible to live all day with your social network on Facebook. The new launch of open widgets makes that even more likely. I just discovered ztail, (which I haven’t tested) which is an automatic process to let you create and then promote your auctions via your Facebook page.
It’s not for every seller–it doesn’t help you reach strangers, it doesn’t help you teach people about who you are or what you do. But for those that are building their web around their social network, it’s an inkling of what’s to come. (hat tip to Fred for his insights on Facebook).
June 7, 2007
About thirty years ago, three companies dreamed up logos that have become so powerful, I don’t even have to show you the images to get them to pop up in your head. A sneaker company paid a few hundred dollars for an abstract, upside down wave, a coffee company picked a half-naked mermaid (is there any other kind) that cost them nothing, and a computer company picked [hired a PR firm that picked] a piece of fruit with a bite out of it.
What the images had in common: nothing. They range from abstract to woodcut to groovy. The art of picking a logo, even one for the Olympics, has almost nothing to do with taste or back story. A great logo doesn’t mean anything until the brand makes it worth something.
That’s why spending $800,000 for a logo is ridiculous. And it’s why you can’t (I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here) draw the logo of any Olympic games since 1898. The Olympics have trouble creating new logos of value because each Olympics already has an image that sticks with people… and that’s the image of the city where the games take place. Putting an abstract picture on top of something that already has a picture doesn’t work.
[and of course, the original Olympics logo meant nothing much when they started, but now provides a great shorthand to remind us of a whole bunch of attributes (youth, sportsmanship, spirit of the games, yadda yadda) that would be very hard to visualize without it.]
The iPod didn’t need a logo, where a pair of sneakers or a cup of coffee do.
If you’re given the task of finding a logo for an organization, your first task should be to try to get someone else to do it. If you fail at that, find an abstract image that is clean and simple and carries very little meaning–until your brand adds that meaning. It’s not a popularity contest. Or a job for a committee. It’s not something where you should run it by a focus group. It’s just a placeholder, a label waiting to earn some meaning.
Anyone want to join me for a cup of mermaid? No sugar in mine.
June 6, 2007
Mike sends us this help wanted photo. (All ages encouraged to apply… minimum age 16).
It’s easy to snicker at this sign. It only has three lines, and two of them are in direct contradiction to each other.
But then, if you think about it, you might realize a few things:
a. it’s a restaurant, not a literary agency, so the fact that they are poor at putting together sentences doesn’t hurt their branding so much, and
b. you thought about it.
By creating this error (and there’s no doubt in my mind it was an accident) they called attention to the fact that seniors and 16 and 17 years olds are welcome to work there. They’ve dramatically increased the size of the potential worker base. Stupid sure, but not so dumb.
June 5, 2007
The UK games have unveiled the Olympic logo for 2012. If you were an ordinary person, you’d describe it as a slightly jarring, very bright piece of abstraction. Of course, you’re not an ordinary person, you’re a marketer, in which case you might understand this:
"This is the vision at the very heart of our brand," said London 2012 organising committee chairman Seb Coe.
"It
will define the venues we build and the Games we hold and act as a
reminder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire everyone
and reach out to young people around the world.
"It is an invitation to take part and be involved."
If you are paying money to someone who talks like this, may I suggest you stop? And if you work for someone who talks like this, time to look for a new gig.
June 4, 2007
Not sure why that matters, but it does.
Most great books never make the Times. Plenty of lousy books do. Still, the Dip made the business bestseller list in today’s paper, and will be #5 on the very tough-to-crack Hardcover advice list next week.
True story: When the Times switched from 10 books on the Hardcover list, they created a list of 15 Hardcovers and a list of 5 Advice, How To and Miscellaneous titles. I wrote in and asked the editor why they only had 5 titles on this list and 15 on the others. She wrote back and said,
"Because we don’t want people to read those books."
June 3, 2007
Saul Hansell writes what will certainly be the most-linked article in this week’s Times: Inside the Black Box.
The big takeaway for me is that there are [x] number of people, where x is a large number, working in a secret building at Google constantly changing the algorithms that they use to rank sites.
Being first in the Google rankings is more important than it ever was. And getting there is now more straightforward (but not easier) than ever.
It seems to me that in the SEO arms race, shortcuts have a shorter shelf-life than ever before. Building 43 is obsessed with them, and they outnumber whoever you might hire to beat the system. Organic success, on the other hand, is a clear path. If you want to be on the front page of matches for "White Plains Lawyer", then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Not just boilerplate information you stole from a legal website, but really useful stuff about you, the local courts, the forms people need… the things you’d want to find if you were doing that search.
Once you’ve done everything you can… once you’ve built a web of information and once you’ve given the ability to do this to your best clients and your partners and colleagues, then by all means apply the best SEO thinking in the world to your efforts. Hire the best consultants and use the resources you’ve got left to be sure you’re playing by the right rules.
Betting against Building 43 doesn’t seem nearly as smart as betting on them.
The recycled newspapers in Grand Central Station are kept in cages more appropriate for pythons. It is apparently against the law to reuse a paper and read an old copy.
Perhaps the newspaper folks felt that it would hurt their circulation if passalong went up. This is stupid, of course, since people willing to fish a paper out of the recycling bin aren’t your typical pay-a-dollar sort of readers.
Perhaps the janitors thought it would be too much trouble to clean up.
It’s certain, though, that the people who decided to do this weren’t marketers.
June 2, 2007
My dad likes to say, "Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then."
The thing is, acorns are getting a lot better at hiding.
I was in the local family-owned stationery store yesterday. A young man, perhaps 18, walked in and said to the foreign-born owner, who was busy behind the counter, "You don’t have any summer jobs, do you?" It was clear that he had never been to the store before, and from his dress (ripped shorts, sandals) that he wasn’t too serious, either.
You can probably guess the answer. The seeker thanked him and walked out, headed across the street to more rejection at the drug store.
This squirrel can stumble all he wants, but he’s unlikely to find a job, never mind a good one.
Even a summer job is 400 or more hours of work. I wonder why he didn’t bother to invest three hours in advance, looking for a job worth doing?
Actually, marketers do precisely the same thing all the time. Until it’s imminent, an emergency, it’s not high enough on the priority list. Which means that the effort (when we finally decide to allocate the time) is greater and the results are worse.
June 1, 2007
There are four kinds of marketing situations, and the approach to each is radically different. Yet most of the time, we lump them together as just plain ‘marketing’.
If you are trying to sell a house or fill a job, you only need to persuade one person.
If you want to make your book sell a bunch of copies, your restaurant to be filled on Saturday night or your coaching practice to have a full schedule, you need to sell a few people.
On the other hand, viral bestsellers, killer websites and essential conferences hit their stride when most people in a marketplace have been converted. You can’t get elected President (most years, anyway) without persuading most of the people who vote.
Lastly, when the market is defined right, there are situation in which you need to persuade all of the people involved. If you need 51 Senators to agree with you on a bill, or if you need the purchasing committee at a big company to buy your software, then you need a unanimous decision.
This four-way distinction is important for two reasons. First, because you often have a choice. You can choose which approach your venture will take on its way to accomplishing its goals. Gandhi didn’t need most of the people to change India, he instead relied on a smaller few, but with more passion than most politicians are able to generate.
You could, for example, plan a business that works once almost everyone adopts it (like eBay) or you could alter the business so it works just fine if a much smaller universe of people embrace it (like threadless). Worth noting that neither business would work if just a few people showed up. 37Signals has done a great job of designing web products that only need to be sold to a few people, and then those people do the hard work of getting everyone in their organization to use them.
Here’s a quick list of how the four differ:
ONE: You’re a needle, the market is a haystack. Make your needle as sharp as you can, put it in as many haystacks as you can afford. Alternatively, you’ve already decided on your one (the date for the prom or the perfect job). In that case, throw the haystack out and engage in a custom, one-on-one patient effort to tell your story to the person who needs to hear it.
A FEW: Being exceptional matters most. Stand out, don’t fit in. Shun the non-believers.
MOST: Amplify the excitement of the few and make it easy for them to spread the story to the caring majority.
ALL: Compromise. You need to be many things to many people, embraced by the passionate but not offensive to the masses. Sooner or later, the issue for the reluctant part of the buyer community is that it becomes more expensive/risky to stand in the way of the group than it is to go along.
Blogs, for now, are almost always about the few. Google and Starbucks and the iPod are exciting stories because they’ve moved from the few to the most. The most important industry trade shows make huge profits because they’ve transitioned to the all.
Choose wisely, and realize that as you succeed, the game will change.
May 31, 2007
About the dip and the haystack and getting found. Ina did it.
May 30, 2007
