I hear quite a few presentations given at conferences. Approximately 5% of the official welcome speech consists of a litany of thanks. The organizer is busy thanking the committee that handled the arrangements, the sponsors, the executive director, the tireless volunteers. I’ve heard people try hard to read the names superfast, or really slowly, or mumble through them…
Not only is this a total waste of time for most attendees, it doesn’t even satisfy the core objective, which is thanking and rewarding the folks who helped. And it certainly doesn’t encourage others to look forward to helping out.
The list is impossible to remember, said too fast and dull.
The solution is pretty simple, thanks to Powerpoint and digital cameras.
Prepare for the talk by taking pictures of each person. If they’re shy, you can even do photographs in groups of two or three. Good photos, clever photos, funny photos… photos that are interesting are best.
Then, create a new presentation. Put each photo on its own slide, preferably with a well designed ID below it (it should be on a black box, with a nice sans serif font reversed out. Like you see on cable TV news.)
String one after the other. Build a dissolve transition between each one. Program it to put up a new slide every two seconds–don’t go too slow!–and to loop the presentation.
Ten minutes before you’re due to start, while everyone is finding their seats, run the presentation. It’ll cycle 5 or 10 times before you start speaking. When you get up, start your presentation and just dive into the meaty stuff.
Every single person you feature will be famous! "Hey, I saw you in that loop!"
And you won’t have wasted your valuable presentation time.
June 23, 2008
At the next conference you run, allocate an hour for table sessions.
Divide the number of attendees by 10. That’s how many tables of ten you need. Give each table a theme or topic (entrepreneurship, shoe collectors, whining about the economy, whatever). Post the themes online for people to sign up in advance for each table. First come first served, you don’t get to see who’s at the table till you get there.
A month after the conference, do you think people will remember the table where they spent an hour? When you force people through mild social anxiety, they thank you for it later.
[Thanks, Kip, for the germ of this idea].
June 21, 2008
Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.
It’s not true.
You need to increase your value. If people don’t want to pay, it’s because you’re not delivering enough value for the money you’re charging.
You’re not selling a commodity unless you want to.
June 20, 2008
Might be of interest to investors, readers, writers, designers, marketers, etc. Or not…
Two months ago, I got a Kindle. It’s a fascinating device, unlike almost any other launched by a significant tech company. Here’s why:
1. It’s for women and women
are buying it. The bestseller list of Kindle titles is much less
tech-heavy than Amazon’s list was in the early days of the web. An
Oprah book is #1. And the colors and feel of the machine don’t feel
like the current uber-geek tech dream device.
This is a fascinating strategy. It means that typical technology
marketing and adoption strategies aren’t in play, since most tech
devices go after nerdy men. It means a slower start (since paying $400
for technology is a stretch unless it’s your passion) but also possibly
a much bigger finish.
2. I just got rid of 3,000 books in preparation for an office move.
That’s two decades worth of reference books. I realized that most of
the books I bought I didn’t use any more (thanks to wikipedia and
google) and that buying books in anticipation of giving them to someone
else was generous but not actually happening in practice. For the tiny
slice of readers that account for a huge pile of book sales (300 books
a year adds up), moving those purchases to the Kindle is smart for
Amazon and smart for the reader.
3. It changes (at least for me) what it means to buy and own a book.
Delivery is very fast, and I feel a lot less badly about stopping a
book on page 10 if it doesn’t interest me (sunk costs should be
ignored, but that’s hard to do–if a book’s not worth reading, one should stop). As a writer, this raises the bar even
further in terms of keeping people with me past chapter one if they’re
using this device.
4. The Kindle does a fine job of being a book reader, and a horrible
job of actually improving the act of reading a book. This is a surprising
design choice, I think, and a mistake. Here are three simple examples
of how non-fiction books on the Kindle could be better, not just
cheaper and thinner:
–Let me see the best parts of the book as highlighted by thousands of other readers.
–Let me see notes in the margin as voted up, Digg-style, by thousands of other readers.
–Let me interact with hyperlinks and smart connections not just within the book but across books
I can think of ten others, and so can you. Instead of making this a
dead end (like a book) they could have made it a connector (like the
web).
Word processing didn’t work because it was typing but a little
cheaper. It worked because it was better than typing. Email didn’t work
because it was mail but a little faster. It worked because it was
fundamentally better than snail mail…
5. The pricing of books is whacked. $9.95 is a publisher-friendly price, not an author-friendly or reader-friendly price.
My first thought is that every Kindle should ship with $1,000 worth
of free books on it. I offered Amazon rights to as many of my books as
I control if they would just agree to put em free on every Kindle. They
declined. I can think of a hundred authors who would be delighted to
put one or more of their backlist books in front of this book-hungry audience.
Once you have a device that lets you get any book in a few seconds,
one that eliminates both paper and inventory (the two enemies of every
publisher and bookstore) then the marginal cost of a book drops
dramatically. And as we learned at the iTunes store, when something
costs a buck, it’s a fundamentally different purchase than when it
costs $10 or $20.
The funny thing is: I’ve heard from a few publishers about my comment about pricing, and they’ve pointed out that authors would be hurt if the price was lowered, because, they argue, the royalties would go down. This is nuts, of course, because volume would go up, and the author percentage rate would go up as well (no paper costs to pay for). The power stays with the author, because the author is not a commodity.
Some publishers are worried that Amazon would get too much power if the Kindle succeeded. I think the power is going to continue to accrue to authors with direction connections to readers… that’s the real asset. Amazon doesn’t care which author sells, just as long as something sells.
What happens to reading habits when you can buy all the books you
want for $40 a month? What happens to book consumption when books
become social objects, commented upon by you and your participating
friends or network? The conversations surrounding books are often a prime driver behind book sales ("You haven’t read it yet?) and the conversation-enabled Kindle takes that to a whole new level.
How does a classroom or corporate book circle or book group change
when 20 or 50 people each spend a dollar or five dollars to engage in a
spirited device-based/book-based discussion around a big idea?
6. As an author, I won’t write directly for the Kindle until it has
a big audience and it offers more than just a linear reading
experience. When that happens, though, when thousands of writers start
using this portal to reach millions of readers, it becomes a killer
app. Not until then, though.
A lot has been written about how cool the screen is. It is cool. A
lot has been written about the offbeat interface (not so good) and the seamless
downloading (a wonder.) This is all irrelevant to me. What’s worth
commenting on is how close the Kindle comes to revolutionizing the way
ideas are sold and spread, and how short it comes out in the end (for now.) My bet is that this
is just round one. Round five could be/should be powerful indeed.
June 19, 2008
When I first wrote about Little Miss Matched about five years ago, they were an obscure little sock company, selling funky socks to fashionable girls.
The idea was beyond clever. 3 to a box, 133 styles, none of them match. Instead of a strategy built around a consultant’s vision of ‘utility’ or a strategy built around cheap or a strategy built around excessive retail distribution and heavy advertising, they built their strategy around one girl saying to another girl, “wanna see my socks?”
I couldn’t have invented a better Purple Cow story if I had tried.
The company let me know today that they just did a huge deal with Macys and closed a $17 million funding with the folks who financed Build a Bear’s retail rollout. Money isn’t the only point, of course, but if that’s the way you keep score, that’s a long way for a little company to come in five years.
[full disclosure: My feet are sponsored by LMM and I wear their socks every day. I am compensated by the company–they give me 33 free socks a year (not pairs of socks, just 33 socks), worth about $110.] UPDATE: I don’t wear their socks any more. A friend pointed out that I could simply buy adult socks and mismatch them myself. I’ve been doing this consistently for the last twenty years.
And, on the topic of remarkable, but far more important, consider the work that’s happening at Lenny Learning. https://www.lennylearning.org/ and https://www.lennylearning.org/create
They’re using the power of machine learning, combined with a focus on education, to make life better for a whole generation of kids. It’s urgent and important work.
June 18, 2008
Is this the best I can do?
I’ve paid for the rent and the furnishings and the menus and the staff and the insurance… is this plate of food worthy of what went before it?
I’ve flown across the country to visit this museum–a building that cost more than a billion dollars to create and fill and maintain. Is my attention focused enough?
We paid $300 in marketing costs just to get this phone to ring this one time. How shall we answer it?
I’ve had a great education, suffered and scraped and scrounged to get this point… is this diagnosis, this surgery, this prescription, this bedside manner the end that justifies that effort?
We live in a stable democracy, a place where people have lived and died to give us the freedom to speak out… is that talking head or this spinning pundit the best we can do? Or is he just trying to make a profit and air another commercial?
Is cutting corners to make a buck appropriate when you consider what you could have done? What would someone with a bigger vision have done instead?
Is being negative or bitter or selfish within reason in face of how extraordinarily lucky we were to have been been born here and born now?
I take so much for granted. Perhaps you do as well. To be here, in this moment, with these resources. To have not just our health but the knowledge and the tools and the infrastructure. What a waste.
If I hadn’t had those breaks, if there weren’t all those people who had sacrificed or helped or just stayed out of my way… what then? Would I even have had a shot at this?
What if this were my last post? Would this post be worthy?
The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.
June 17, 2008
As part of a promotion we’re doing, I built a Squidoo page about my friend Jacqueline.
It got me thinking about what it takes to make change, particularly change in the way markets respond. Markets are big and slow and often sort of dumb, so a memo isn’t going to be enough to make change happen.
As far as I can tell, there’s no demographic formula for determining who will make a difference. It doesn’t seem to matter where you were born, how much money your parents made or where you went to college. Sure, a head start in those areas makes it more likely that you’ll end up in a position of leverage. But it seems as though that isn’t enough.
Superheroes don’t have a look, but they definitely have an attitude. They’re restless and impatient, but, here’s the cool paradox, they’re also calm and patient. Patient because they realize that change takes a while. Patient because they understand that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth getting through the Dip. Impatient and restless, though, because they refuse to accept the status quo. Most of the time, of course, these can’t co-exist. Most of the time, the impatient flit. They don’t stick it out. Acumen just celebrated their seventh anniversary and this is the year traction is really kicking in.
The more superheroes we can find, the better. If you know one, celebrate them!
June 16, 2008
Dave Balter, an old friend and colleague, has written a new book. It costs $45 on Amazon. But, for my loyal readers…you can get a copy of the ebook (the entire book) for free here.
The way he is bringing his idea to the world is instructive.
First, he wrote a book. You should write a book, too. Publishing a book
is easier than it appears (in some ways, like the typing, typesetting,
printing, and distributing part) but more difficult in others (like the
writing something worth reading part.) Writing a book forces you to be
organized and passionate and persuasive. Isn’t that worth trying?
Second, he rejected the idea of having a ‘real’ publisher publish
it. A real publisher adds time (perhaps six months or a year or two)
and limits many of your options re: pricing, distribution, royalties
and promotion.
Third, he realized that the ideas in a book are different than the
book itself. The ideas are free. Dave made the ideas even easier to
share by putting them into a PDF. If you want the souvenir edition, the
one you can hand to a friend or read on the beach or store on your
shelf, that costs a lot of money, but you don’t mind, because you’ve
already decided you wanted one (no risk, cause you’ve read it!)
Fourth, he figured out a way to use scarcity to create promotion. On
the day a book is released, it’s scarce. Scarce because no one has read
it yet. That scarcity makes it more likely that someone will blog about
it, because it’s a scoop. News. Cooler still, he’s not offering a copy of the book. Instead, he let me and a few other people offer it exclusively.
No, this doesn’t work if you haven’t worked with the blogger for
years, haven’t earned a reputation and most especially, haven’t written
something worth reading. In other words, it takes about six years of
hard work to become an overnight success. So, if you’re going to write
a book in six years, please start now and focus on hard work, breaking
new ground and being a standup guy.
If you follow Dave’s tactics exactly, you’ll certainly fail (at least with me),
because it’s already been done before. But, I have no doubt that variations on this
method are going to get more and more powerful. (You can read my
original free ebook–it was seven (!) years ago–right here. That book was a total homerun for me and for my readers–it has been downloaded, emailed and purchased millions and millions of times. I’m surprised the tactic isn’t more popular.)
Find hundreds of other free ebooks at changethis. I started changethis with some talented interns a few summers ago, and because I’m not involved with it any longer, it’s cooler than ever.
If the best thing you can think of is a bad pun, random capitalization and a weak photo (salt and pepper included!) it’s probably better to do nothing at all.
Nothing at all is actually the biggest difference between professional and amateur marketers. The pros are better at being quiet.
Even if there’s room left on the page, or in the display window or in the blog post…
June 15, 2008
Take a listen to this montage of three songs.
Listen to mp3
Any guesses as to what you just heard? Go ahead, I'll wait.
That's right, it's the Silver Beats, a group of four young men from Japan that have a serious Beatles Otaku. (One of John Lennon's original name for his group was the Silver Beetles.) They mimic each note, each cable, each instrument. I saw them in concert and it was uncanny.
Here's the thing: As far as I know, they don't speak English.
Does that change things? Does it make the song different when you know the singer has no idea what, "I want to hold your hand," means? If every original Beatles song was replaced by an indistinguishable Silver Beats cover, would it matter? What about when a rich guy sings the blues? Or when a heartbreaker song is sung by a happily married man?
The popcorn videos I posted the other day have been seen around the web millions of times. It's now generally assumed that they are fake. Does that make them resonate differently for you?
What about the difference between Jerry Seinfeld (who writes his own material) and someone like David Letterman (who doesn't). Does it change your experience to know that?
How much marketing fakery do you willingly accept, and how much do you want to know about? Does the vegetarian really want to know that they didn't wash the pot at the restaurant and a few molecules of chicken broth are in that soup? How many molecules before it matters? Is it different if it's an accident? Why?
Marketers like to talk about transparency and authenticity. I think for most people, most of the time, we care a lot more about the effect and use of a product or service and less about who made it and why. We chose Converse because they get us a date, and we don't change brands just cause Nike owns them now.
Except for when we do. When we feel deceived or tricked, the game can change, and rapidly.
It's easier than ever to mount ornate hoaxes and fancy subterfuges. And you can get away with it for a while. But often, and at the worst possible moment, the market might change its mind. It might stop enjoying the fakery and switch to scorn and anger instead. I have no clue how to predict when this will happen. How much risk are you willing to take?
June 14, 2008
