Preparation
Swedish maxim:
There is no bad weather, just bad clothing.
How to be Cory Doctorow
Everybody wants to be the cofounder of Boingboing. At least everyone I know.
You write something and boom, millions of people hear it and react. It’s a great gig.
I sat next to Cory at a conference today. It was like playing basketball next to Michael Jordan. Cory was looking at more than 30 screens a minute. He was bouncing from his mail to his calendar to a travel site and then back. His fingers were a blur as he processed inbound mail, visiting more than a dozen sites in the amount of time it took for my neck to cramp up. I’m very fast, but Cory is in a different league entirely. Rereading this, I can see I’m not doing it justice. I wish I had a video…
This was never a skill before. I mean, maybe if you were an air traffic controller, but for most of us, most of the time, this data overload skill and the ability to make snap judgments is not taught or rewarded.
As the world welcomes more real-time editors working hard in low-overhead organizations, I think it’s going to be a skill in very high demand.
The Cycle of Choice
Most markets are busted open by one successful leader. Burton in snowboards, Henry Ford in cars, the iPod in mp3 players.
It sure seems, for a while, that the leader can do no wrong. Market share is high, the market grows, and then, oof, the leader fades.
It looks a bit like this:
The leader attracts newcomers to the market. Both new users and new competitors. The competitors offer new choices, alternative pricing and distribution models and just plain old choice. Unless there is a significant external barrier to change (like the iTunes store or the Windows distribution monopoly), then the leader appears to fade. At one point, there were more than 2,000 car companies in the US.
There are several lessons available for marketers here. First, if you bust open a market, don’t expect to own it forever. Second, if you can, invest heavily in some sort of external effect that creates a natural monopoly and gives people a really good reason to stick (beyond the fact that you’re the leader). And third, if you’re not the leader, realize that: a. you’re not going to replace them and b. being just like them isn’t the way to grow. As a market grows, the ‘scraps’ left over from the leader can add up to a huge piece of market share. And then, over time, a new leader may emerge.
The law school for underachievers
…who have a proBlem with CapiTalization but are sticklers for the truth. Why settle for being the best when you can be sixteenth? ThankS Lawrence for the link…
Online Activism
Part 1: Micah sends us to this report, just out a few moments ago: Pew: 14 Million Online Political Activists in U.S. Today | Personal Democracy Forum.
23% of campaign internet users has either posted their own political
commentary to the web via a blog, site or newsgroup (8%); forwarded or
posted someone else’s commentary (13%); created political audio or
video (1%); forwarded someone else’s audio or video (8%). "That
translates into about 14 million people who were using the ‘read-write
Web’ to contribute to political discussion and activity," the study’s
authors Lee Rainie and John Horrigan write.
Part 2: Jill is inviting a few dozen non profits to a non-profit only seminar I’m doing in February. We’ve already got confirmed reservations from 5 of the top 30 orgs in the US, including executive directors from a couple of them. If you’d like to be considered, please drop Jill a note and tell her why.
Adults are the new kids
Three experiences this morning:
Grocery store. (apparently) Single adult buying: Sprite, oreos, white bread, Jif, Welch’s, Fritos. Grabbed a $6 chocolate bar at the register.
Hardware store. Fifty year old man doing card tricks for the clerk.
In the street: dozens of cars all costing more than $65,000.
They’re kids. But with (even more) money.
Org 2.0
If you manage, work for or just root for a non-profit, I hope you’ll take a look at THE 59 SMARTEST ORGS ONLINE.
We worked with NetSquared and GetActive and came up with a list that highlights 59 really smart non-profits and what they’re doing online.
And yes, you can learn from these tactics even if you’re a for-profit organization… we’re now seeing great marketing ideas that move in a direction we’re not used to.
Here’s a preview of the top five (you can vote if you click through). It’s not a popularity contest, of course, because everyone is doing really good work. Feel free to vote for any cause that has a technique or approach you’d like to highlight.
plex4388
Mañana
If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?
Most of us live programmed lives. Tomorrow is set, finished, done, and you haven’t even started it yet.
And we accept that as part of the deal in setting goals and reaching them.
But what about the tomorrow thirty days from now? Or a year?
If you could do those over, would you? How?
On becoming the
The article in the Times didn’t set out to say something vitally important about marketing, but it did. In starting off a profile it says,
"For the past couple of years Jun Kaneko, the ceramic artist…"
It didn’t say "a ceramic artist." No. It said, "the ceramic artist".
The entire tone of the piece changes. It’s so much better to be a ‘the’ not an ‘a’.
Which are you?
I don’t think it’s a trivial distinction. In fact, I’d argue that it’s worth an enormous amount of your time and your budget to focus on becoming the.
Enormity
The Fedex woman stopped by my office on Friday. She wanted to know if we were going to be open on Monday.
I explained that our hours really never make sense, but that my team and I would be thinking of Dr. King and his work all day, regardless of what we were doing.
She sighed deeply and said, "Every year, we’re supposed to ask if offices are going to be open, and last year it made me so sad, I had to stop asking. I even got written up for not doing it." It turns out that most people either said, "what holiday?" or "oh, we don’t celebrate that…"
I’ve written a lot about worldview, about the instincts and biases and outlooks that shape our lives. It’s very difficult to change a worldview as a marketer… but one thing that changes a worldview, not just forever but often for generations, is a truly horrific event.
Why is it so easy and fun for a politician to make fun of French people (the French are arrogant and don’t bathe was the joke on the radio on Saturday), but a non-starter to take on rape victims? There are no skits on Saturday Night Live about Darfur. Why does it make us squirm when someone misuses the idea of a lynching for their own selfish motives? If you’ve been misjudged and mistreated your entire life, of course it has an effect on the way you see the world.
Slavery was the greatest crime of the millenium. Why does it surprise marketers (politicians and otherwise) when so many people have a worldview that has been permanently altered by the legacy of abuse? It’s a worldview that doesn’t ask for charity for the individual, but one that demands respect.
The lesson of diversity is a simple one, a compelling one, one that’s been demonstrated over and over again. Diverse populations solve problems better and faster than homogenous ones. But the selfish value of treating people of all backgrounds in the same way is just part of the Reverend’s message. The other part, the part that’s easy to forget, is that when confronted with enormity, worldviews change. And if you want to engage with someone, you have no choice but to understand that. You don’t have to experience the emotion in order to be able to respect someone who has.