I don’t know about you, but I’m getting plenty of emails asking for more money for various political campaigns.
That’s because the systems in place are good at asking for money, and that’s what they measure. They’re willing to burn out permission, person by person, just to squeeze out the last few bucks.
What a shame. What a waste.
Businesses do this all the time. So do non-profits. They get in a habit of doing one thing (pay, pay, pay!) and they forget that this has a real cost. Ask enough times and people will shut you out. And once they shut you out, you’re out forever.
My local radio station is once again drilling us with their pledge drive. Hey, if five days are good, why not twenty or fifty? Sooner or later, you just move on.
If I ran a campaign, I would immediately stop asking for money. I’d ask for ideas for what to do if I got elected. I’d ask for a house party to listen in on a conference call. I’d ask for names of possible voters or I’d look for volunteers to drive to the polls. I’d get petitions signed or ask people to prioritize six ideas for the rest of the campaign or for things to work on after I got elected.
Attention can be worth more than money. Enthusiasm is priceless.
October 21, 2008
One secret of being a large financial institution is that you can take huge risks because you’re too big to fail. If you hit craps and lose it all, don’t worry, because you’ll get bailed out.
One secret of ‘small is the new big‘ thinking is that you won’t fail and you can’t fail and you don’t need to worry about a bailout. Not because you’re small in headcount or assets, but because you act small.
A small acting bank would never have invested in tens of thousands of loans that they hadn’t looked at. And a small acting startup wouldn’t hire dozens of people before they had a business model… and then have to lay off a third of them just because their VC firm showed them a scary PowerPoint.
I’ve always been frightened by big-firm accounting. The sort of financial legerdemain in which skilled accountants work hard to make the numbers look the way the CEO wants, instead of making them clear. Cash accounting run on a simple bookkeeping system is the small way to do it… even if your company is huge. That’s because sooner or later, management has to know what’s actually happening as opposed to what they can pretend is happening.
Big-thinking companies lose customers all the time because big-thinking companies isolate the decision makers from the outside world. Angry customers who are leaving don’t get heard… that news is heard by the poor shlub reading a script at the call center. 90% of the angry customer mail that people forward to me (I have enough for a lifetime, thanks) is angry because the (former) customer is tired of being ignored.
If you act small and think big, you are too small to fail. You won’t need a bailout because your business makes sense each and every day. You won’t need a bailout because your flat organization (no matter how large it is) knows about problems long before they’re too big to deal with.
The media and the tech blogs glamorize businesses that act big. They write about the big checks VCs hand out and they lionize the organizations that make a splash. The untold story is in the organizations that are close to the customer, close to the product and close to each other. Acting small always pays off.
(Thanks to Howard for the phrase that inspired this post)
- How long after getting a big promotion does it take for an executive to get antsy?
- Why does a powerful senator take small bribes and risk his entire career?
- Why do Amazon customers, with a choice of every book, delivered overnight, for free, whine about their customer service going downhill?
- Why do customers at a truly great 4 star restaurants often feel a little bit of a let down after the last course is served?
- Why do Facebook users (a free service that they used to love) complain so vehemently about a change in layout?
- Why do the very same Apple lovers who waited in line for days now scoff at incremental (free) improvements in their iPhone?
"Is that it?"
This state of ennui explains why we’ll never run out of remarkable, why consumers are restless, why successful people keep working and taking risks. It explains the self-centered, whiny attitude of some bloggers who can never get enough from the world, and it explains why a rich country like the US could almost bankrupt itself in search of ever more.
I’m not saying that consumers don’t deserve respect and quality in exchange for their attention. I’m pointing out that we make ourselves unhappy just for the sport of it.
Marketers have played into this attitude and certainly amplified it. It helps them to gain share, of course, but also raises the bar on what they’re going to have to do next.
As a marketer or a leader, you have two choices:
The first is to realize that people will never ever be satisfied with you, they’ll even whine when you give away something for free. Embrace the whining and realize that this attitude gives you an opportunity to answer the question with, "no! Wait, there’s more!"
The second is to understand that a hug and a smile from a true friend is it. Along the way, marketers of stuff have tried to offer that stuff as a replacement to the thing that children/consumers/employees/customers/spouses really seek, which is connection and meaning and belonging and love.
October 20, 2008
Your career is not a boat. Neither is your business.
A boat with even a small leak is going to sink. You, on the other hand, don’t need to be perfect to succeed. Imagine that you have a 4 x 4 grid to fill with assets. If it’s a business, it might be location, reputation, staff, offerings that are in high demand and a sector that’s robust… if you’re doing it for yourself, it might include your resume, your network, your skill set, etc.
When someone chooses you or your products, they’re considering everything you have to offer. Whether you’re looking for a job or trying to make a sale, there is rarely only one thing that makes the difference.
That’s why human nature is so enraging. When something is going wrong, when the economy is out of sync, we panic. We obsess about just one of the sixteen boxes and ignore the others. We talk ourselves into hysteria about how, "none of our customers have any money," or, "in this bleak economy, we’ll never make a sale." Instead of using the relative downtime to build up the other 15 boxes, we just sit in the corner, keening, worrying about that one box that’s out of whack.
By focusing on the red box, the sore one, and ignoring the other elements of what makes our product or career worth marketing, we cause two problems. First, our attention does no good at all on the problem at hand, and second, the other boxes suffer.
The problem with whining is this: human beings like to be right. If you persuade yourself and your friends that times are really tough and that you’re bound to fail, you’ll probably do the things you need to do to make that true in the long run.
October 19, 2008
My reading of Tribes is now available on iTunes as a three hour audio book for less than a dollar. (update: now the bestselling audio book in the world. Price matters, apparently). [You missed it! It seems as though it’s now $6. Still a bargain…]
Or, if that’s too much, Audible is using the audio book as a freebie promotion, but I think you need to register.
The souvenir, dead tree, printed hardcover edition is easier to take to the beach (B&N). A Kindle edition just launched. More versions than one could ever hope for.
October 18, 2008
As always, the truth lies in the cliches.
"Having the best of both worlds" is something that marketers shoot for all the time. They want the traffic that a community site will give them, but they also want the control they get by only having authorized employees participating. They shoot for their favorite parts, and get nothing. Always nothing.
Instead, perhaps it’s worth hoping for the best of one world.
Compromise, by its nature, means giving up part of one thing to get part of something else. So you end up with a little of this and a little of that. The low fat of prunes and the shelf appeal of a cupcake. Sounds good on paper, but when given the choice, the diet conscious will pick a real prune and the gluttons will pick a real cupcake. And you’re left with an overstock situation.
When in doubt, maximize.
Yelling with gusto used to be the best way to advertise your wares. There was plenty of media and if you had plenty of money, you were set.
Today, of course, yelling doesn’t work so well.
What works is leading. Leading a (relatively) small group of people. Taking them somewhere they’d like to go. Connecting them to one another.
I say relatively because there are few products that need everyone in order to succeed. A tiny sliver of the market is enough. Bill Niman used to run Niman Ranch, a cooperative raising meat for fancy restaurants and markets. That was already a sliver of the huge huge market for meat. He moved on to start BN, a 1000 acre farm raising goats for a subset of that subset. It’s enough.
It’s enough if the tribe you lead knows about you and cares about you and wants to follow you. It’s enough if your leadership changes things, galvanizes the audience and puts the status quo under stress. And it’s enough if the leadership you provide makes a difference.
Go down the list of online success stories. The big winners are organizations that give tribes of people a platform to connect.
Go down the list of fashion businesses or business to business organizations. Same thing. Charities, too. Churches, certainly.
It’s so tempting to believe that we are merely broadcasters, putting together a play list and hurtling it out to the rest of the world. Louder is better. But we’re not. Now we’re leaders.
People want to connect. They want you to do the connecting.
October 17, 2008
Hand selling
Mass marketing
-Billboards
-Newspaper ads
-Radio ads
-TV ads
-Banner ads
Direct marketing
-Direct mail
-Coupons
-Spam
Viral marketing
Permission marketing
-email
-relevant text ads
Is there a pattern here? Marketing had an arc, one that started with personal, local interactions between real people and rapidly morphed into very corporate anonymous actions aimed at the unwilling masses. Charlie the Tuna is humorous, but he only existed to sell tuna, not to improve our lives.
Mass marketing created an angry, selfish beast, a hungry one, one that demanded to be fed. So marketers fed it, they fed it with any ads they could find. And when they couldn’t find ads, they spammed us. All in the name of commerce, all because they’re doing their job.
If this blog had existed twenty years ago, every single marketer reading it would have been a mass marketer, a direct marketer or a spammer. All day, every day. In the last ten years, the arc switched its trajectory and the selfish nature of marketing started to unravel.
The web led to permission marketing, which throws a monkey wrench into the selfish rationalization of marketers. Ads that went to people who wanted them outperformed (50:1) ads aimed at strangers. Suddenly, respect becomes profitable.
Wait! What about reaching new people? What about growth? Enter the ideavirus. Viral marketing, remarkable products, word of mouth online… all of these tactics are part of the same strategy: ideas that spread, win. If the internet is a giant meme machine, spreading ideas further and faster than ever before, the winners are those organizations that make things worth talking about. A purple cow isn’t a fancy gimmick, or something you slap on to last year’s item. A purple cow is a remarkable story, a story that spreads.
Social media’s growth in the last three years, though, gives marketers an inkling that there may be something else going on. Sure, they can run spam ads on Facebook, but they don’t work. Social media, it turns out, isn’t about aggregating audiences so you can yell at them about the junk you want to sell. Social media, in fact, is a basic human need, revealed digitally online. We want to be connected, to make a difference, to matter, to be missed. We want to belong, and yes, we want to be led.
My new book is called Tribes and it comes out today. I started to write a leadership book but discovered that I was actually writing a marketing book. (Either that, or I started to write a marketing book and ended up writing about leadership, I can’t remember). Either way, what I discovered in writing it is this: The next frontier of marketing is in leading groups of people who are working together to get somewhere.
As someone who was buying millions of dollars of magazine ads just 24 years ago, this is a lot of change to swallow. And it’s also the biggest opportunity for good/meaning/success that I can imagine. More details are here.
Things have changed, far more dramatically than most people realize. Not just what marketers buy, but what the media does all day, and what marketers build, and what we get paid to do and what and where we pay attention…
Here’s the wager: A year from now, 10/16/09, will you be leading a tribe of people? Will you be creating stories, connecting people, giving them a platform and making things better for people who care about each other? I’m betting you will.
October 16, 2008
In honor of today’s publication of my new book, Tribes, I asked the people who joined the online triiibe group to write an ebook.
And they did. It’s more than 240 pages long, and it’s free.
Download CurrentTribesCasebook.pdf
You can get it from the link above. Feel free to share it or post it or print it, but please don’t sell it.
Context: Three months ago, I posted just once about joining a private online group (it’s on Ning… sort of like Facebook, but by invitation only). Well, quite a few people joined in, and about 10% became seriously active. On good days, there’s a new post every minute or two. There are hundreds of groups, thousands of discussions and a lot of energy. The triiibe taught me a great deal about the dynamics of a group, and they’ve been a terrific resource, not just for me, but for each other. This ebook represents some of their thinking. The group remains closed, but feel free to start one of your own.
PS the photos on the inside flap of the book are not just the people in the triiibe. They are every photo I could squeeze in that got sent to me by readers in May. I have to confess I’m inspired every time I see it.
The thing is, it’s far easier than ever before to surface your ideas. Far easier to have someone notice your art or your writing or your photography. Which means that people who might have hidden their talents are now finding them noticed…
That blog you’ve built, the one with a lot of traffic… perhaps it can’t be monetized.
That non-profit you work with, the one where you are able to change lives… perhaps turning it into a career will ruin it.
That passion you have for art… perhaps making your painting commercial enough to sell will squeeze the joy out of it.
When what you do is what you love, you’re able to invest more effort and care and time. That means you’re more likely to win, to gain share, to profit. On the other hand, poets don’t get paid. Even worse, poets that try to get paid end up writing jingles and failing and hating it at the same time.
Today, there are more ways than ever to share your talents and hobbies in public. And if you’re driven, talented and focused, you may discover that the market loves what you do. That people read your blog or click on your cartoons or listen to your mp3s. But, alas, that doesn’t mean you can monetize it, quit your day job and spend all day writing songs.
The pitfalls:
1. In order to monetize your work, you’ll probably corrupt it, taking out the magic in search of dollars
and
2. Attention doesn’t always equal significant cash flow.
I think it makes sense to make your art your art, to give yourself over to it without regard for commerce.
Doing what you love is as important as ever, but if you’re going to make a living at it, it helps to find a niche where money flows as a regular consequence of the success of your idea. Loving what you do is almost as important as doing what you love, especially if you need to make a living at it. Go find a job you can commit to, a career or a business you can fall in love with.
A friend who loved music, who wanted to spend his life doing it, got a job doing PR for a record label. He hated doing PR, realized that just because he was in the record business didn’t mean he had anything at all to do with music. Instead of finding a job he could love, he ended up being in proximity to, but nowhere involved with, something he cared about. I wish he had become a committed school teacher instead, spending every minute of his spare time making music and sharing it online for free. Instead, he’s a frazzled publicity hound working twice as many hours for less money and doing no music at all.
Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love (at least what you love right now). But I bet you can figure out how to love what you do to make money (if you choose wisely).
Do your art. But don’t wreck your art if it doesn’t lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy.
(And the twist, because there is always a twist, is that as soon as you focus on your art and leave the money behind, you may just discover that this focus turns out to be the secret of actually breaking through and making money.)
October 15, 2008
