Insiders know what it is, but it’s a new term to many.
Here’s what you do:
Put a picture on your website. Something novel but still recognizable.
Or something really useful.
Then, put lots of links to various websites within the image.
Or, if you want, make it something remarkably honest or confessional or provocative.
Or make it a top 10 or top 41 list.
Then, tell the people you’re linking to about it.
They link back to you because it’s funny or new or makes them seem smart or just feels sharable.
It gets ranked up high on Digg and the other social networking sites.
You get a TON of visits. Like 250,000 new people.
Sure, only a few will actually click around and interact with you, but still, it’s neat to have it happen and it might very well have ancillary benefits in your search results.
But mostly, do it because you can.
The web has been doing this forever, and it’s likely we still will. It’s a fine hobby, but I sure wouldn’t want to build a business around it.
Here’s today’s example.
January 31, 2008
Brand management is so 1999.
Brand management was top down, internally focused, political and money based. It involved an MBA managing the brand, the ads, the shelf space, etc. The MBA argued with product development and manufacturing to get decent stuff, and with the CFO to get more cash to spend on ads.
Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world.
It starts with permission, the understanding that the real asset most organizations can build isn’t an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.
It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.
And of course, since this is so important, product development and manufacturing and the CFO work for the tribal manager. Everything the organization does is to feed and grow and satisfy the tribe.
Instead of looking for customers for your products, you seek out products (and services) for the tribe. Jerry Garcia understood this. Do you?
Who does this work for? Try record companies and bloggers, real estate agents and recruiters, book publishers and insurance companies. It works for Andrew Weil and for Rickie Lee Jones and for Rupert at the WSJ… But it also works for a small web development firm or a venture capitalist.
People form tribes with or without us. The challenge is to work for the tribe and make it something even better.
January 30, 2008
A few readers have written in, asking me about a recent article in Fast Company about Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point and new research by Duncan Watts. (Cory’s take on it is here). Full disclosure: Duncan is brilliant, and so is Malcolm. Which is my point, I guess. Duncan’s work does nothing at all to discredit the importance of what Gladwell is saying in the Tipping Point. Mostly, I think it’s a provocative headline designed to get clicks for the magazine…
As I understand it, people are influenced by the people around them. That we act, like buffalo, in a herd. The idea that a single influential individual (even a blogger like Guy or a talk show host like Oprah) can individually change the herd is crazy, and I don’t think anyone has argued that.
What should be really clear, though, is that people with big audiences certainly count as one of the people around you. If the guy down the row at work buys a Mac Air, it counts. If Guy buys a Mac Air, it counts just as much (or possibly a bit more). If a kid in school is listening to Ini, it counts. And if you hear HotStepper on a popular radio station, it counts just as much. Since people with big audiences have more ‘friends’ and have more ‘people down the hall’, they have more influence. Not because they count for more, just because they ‘know’ more people. (Forgive the excessive use of single quotation marks, please).
Unleashing the Ideavirus didn’t spread because ‘important’ people endorsed and promoted it. It spread because passionate people did.
One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm’s point all along.
January 29, 2008
If it’s in print, it matters even more. Things in print have a tone and a finality that add an impact that you need to care about.
So, after the lawyers are done, let the marketers make sure it sounds like you. Your signs, your contacts, your fine print… your words don’t just sit there, they shout.
Consider this sign (hidden camera quality, sorry). Here are the highlights:
THERE ARE NO REFUNDS, NO EXCEPTIONS.
THERE ARE NO EXCHANGES ON PLANTS.
ALL LISTED CONDITIONS MUST BE MET IN ORDER TO RECEIVE EQUAL OR LESSER VALUE EXCHANGE. THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS. MANAGER RESERVES THE RIGHT TO MAKE SPECIAL EXCEPTIONS.
At a florist? The people here are uniformly nice. Why are they yelling at me? Why not ditch the capital letters and the rigid rules and say something like,
"At Surroundings, it’s really important to us that you be delighted (not just happy). Please keep your receipt and be sure to bring it with you if there are any problems. We’ll be happy to exchange any cut flowers that aren’t just right–we’ll give you a store credit or any other item in the store of equal or lesser value. Unfortunately, we can’t exchange plants. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask any of us for help."
Same rules, different marketing.
Next time you get an email (copied to all your friends plus people you don’t know) warning you about some horrible computer virus, some sick kid collecting greeting cards or the National Do Not Call List, don’t just blindly follow instructions and then forward to everyone you know.
Instead, go to Google and type in the word "snopes" followed by the gist of the cause or the event or emergency. Snopes will then tell you whether it’s a hoax or not. Save you and your list a whole lot of time.
January 28, 2008
So, why bother everyone with a blog post about iPhone voice mail?
It used to be that marketing to the masses cost a fortune, or sometimes, two fortunes.
With a blog or CraigsList or Squidoo, you can enter your information into the vast online database for free.
No, doing that won’t reach everyone. In fact, it will reach almost no one.
But that’s fine if the few people you do reach are the people who are looking for you. My iPhone post will get seen by the hundred or thousand people who do the precise Google search that turns it up. And they’ll be glad they did.
If you’re using a tool that supports this sort of deep search (this blog is a poor example of that, of course) and you’ve got the time, go ahead and solve very specific problems, realizing that you won’t reach everyone, just the people who care a great deal.
The two tips I have for you:
1. Be sure to really and truly solve the searcher’s problem. Boilerplate and selfish redirection of attention are bogus strategies that don’t pay off. I like this solution to the search for "Michelle Obama pictures," and it’s no surprise it comes up first.
2. Make it a habit. Solve five or ten or fifty problems a day and soon you’ll have thousands of solutions, which ought to be enough.
I discovered a bug with my iphone over the weekend. Due to an update, when using it with Bluetooth, I found that while I could make and receive calls, my voice mail showed up but I couldn’t hear it. AT&T blamed Apple and vice versa. Finally, we discovered that it was sort of sending the sound to Bluetooth, but not really.
We reset everything, including clearing all my voice mail. Nothing worked.
All I had to do (which is a bit of a pain in the neck) is route the audio to the handset manually and …fixed.
If I was in the middle of an email dialogue with you and suddenly I’m not, please check your spam filter. I’ve heard from about six people that my email is starting to show up there instead.
Sorry to interrupt everyone else, but it’s a bit of a catch 22… if the only way to tell you that you’re not getting my email is by email…
If you look at the numbers, you soon realize that a huge portion of the population apparently:
- Has read two books in the last year, Harry Potter and The DaVinci Code
- Uses only two websites, Google and Facebook
- Visits only a few blog posts a day, and every single one of them is on the home page of Digg
- Watches only two or three TV shows, including the Super Bowl
- Eats only at McDonalds
- Watches only incredibly snarky or juvenile videos on YouTube
Mass phenomena are tricky things. It’s true, the typical American reads exactly one book a year. How are you going to predict which of the 75,000 books published are going to be that book? You can’t.
Many bloggers seem to be on a perpetual hunt for the front page of Digg. Sure, it brings you hordes of eyeballs, but then they turn around and leave. What’s the point of that, really?
I think that are plenty of tips you can follow to optimize your offering for this fickle mass group. But it’s still a crap shoot. Doesn’t it make more sense to incrementally earn the attention of a smaller, less glitzy but far more valuable group of people who actually engage with you? And the best part is, your odds of success are a lot better.
January 27, 2008
Don’t let the words get in the way. If you’re writing online, forget everything you were tortured by in high school English class. You’re not trying to win any awards or get an A. You’re just trying to be real, to make a point, to write something worth reading.
So just say it.
January 26, 2008
