Not your job title, but your job. What do you do when you're doing your work? What's difficult and important about what you do, what change do you make, what do you do that's hard to live without and worth paying for?
"I change the people who stop at my desk, from visitors to guests."
"I give my boss confidence."
"I close sales."
If your only job is "showing up," time to raise the stakes.
We've spent the last few months working on a new project, and I wanted to share an executive summary with you…
It's called hugdug.
The backstory: So far, hundreds of thousands of people have posted millions of reviews on Amazon.
If you're aggrieved, the negative review makes sense to me. Someone is on Amazon, about to buy something that you don't like, and here's your chance to make a stand, to say your piece…
On the other hand, the positive review, particularly the long, well-written, impassioned review, feels a bit out of place to me. After all, the shopper is already here, finger poised on the Buy It Now button, and has already found the item in question. A simple, "I love it," ought to be sufficient.
But what if there were a third-party site, a place just for rave recommendations, a place where you could help people discover stuff they didn't even know they were looking for? Not just books, but anything sold on Amazon?
What if we can elevate the art of the review, what if we can make what you review a way to tell the world what you care about?
Since we started Squidoo, we've paid our users and their designated charities more than $18,000,000. That's far more than sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, which of course pay those that create content nothing at all.
Hugdug is our new project aimed at spreading positive reviews about great products. And we're earmarking half our profits to good causes.
The design goals for HugDug were to make it mobile, generous and beautiful. We wanted to create a platform that makes it easy to speak up and speak out about products you love, and we wanted to make it easy to connect with people who respect your opinion.
Why charities? Because it's the right thing to do and because it feels good. The Amazon products reviewed don't cost anything more on our site (we get paid an affiliate fee by them) and the idea of giving away half our profit is really powerful. What if every site that used user-generated content did this? By all means, I hope you'll donate as much as you can afford to the causes that you care about. Along the way, though, a commerce and recommendation engine that also generates good feelings and worthy donations is a step in the right direction, no?
The best way to understand HugDug is to give it a try. Perhaps you're interested in:
Wrinkle-free packing,
an executive shaving secret,
a future of work, or even,
the best dog toy ever.
(Here are all of my reviews).
And, if you want to try writing a review about something, here is a list of movies to choose from, or even some of my favorite books…
Thanks for giving it a try and for sharing it. I'll be posting some great reviews by my readers next week, would love to see what you care about.
PS by request, there's a bonus link about presentations added to yesterday's post.
PS several people asked for my bulletless alternative. Here it is, from seven years ago.
It's sort of a silly question. After all, you and your mom can celebrate it whenever you want, not when everyone else tells you to.
My mom never liked it very much. She told us it was a silly commercial exercise. On the other hand, any excuse to express gratitude is a good one.
I published Sarah's book in memory of my mom. I figured today was a good day to remind you of it.
The Grateful Dead had their breakthrough at Ken Kesey's acid test parties.
Superman was raised by George and Martha Kent.
Hewlett Packard started in a garage.
We hear origin stories all the time. They're magnetic enough that we write books and make movies about them.
Here's the thing: The only thing they have in common is that they are all different.
You can't reverse engineer success by researching origin stories. You can't follow the same path as those you admire and expect you'll end up in the same place.
Everything worthwhile has an origin, but those origins aren't the reason that they are worthwhile.
Zipf's law applies to more than just the letters in the alphabet. In just about every system and every market, a power law is in force.
Heavy users make markets work. There are a few people who eat out every night, or go to 30 Broadway shows a year, or send 200 greeting cards annually or buy $100,000 worth of jewelry at a shot. There are people who tweet every three minutes, individuals who work to have tens of thousands of Facebook fans or work overtime to be the top of the heap at door-to-door selling.
This is a given. Your power users will account for a disproportionate amount of your usage and attention.
The question is this: Is your project organized so that it benefits from the power users? (And so it benefits them in return?)
In the case of Broadway shows, not at all. Frequent ticket buyers do nothing at all to help the marketing or impact of a typical show. On the other hand, Twitter is designed from the ground up to grow as their power users push it forward. Wikipedia thrives on the work of just 5,000 power editors. eBay grew because just a few thousand home businesses used it as a platform to bring in millions of buyers.
Power users can pay you more or they can build infrastructure, or they can do outreach for you. The challenge is in finding them, embracing them and giving them tools to accomplish their goals as you reach yours.
How long is your long run? I know people who measure the world in ten second flashes, and they’re happy to do something they call generous for six seconds, as long as they get a payback before the ten seconds are up.
More common and more celebrated are people who play a longer game. They build an asset, earn trust, give before getting, and then, after paying their dues, win.
There’s something else available, though, something James Carse calls an infinite game.
In finite games (short and long) there are players, there are rules and there are winners. The game is designed to end, and it’s based on scarcity.
In the infinite game, though, something completely different is going on. In the infinite game, the point is to keep playing, not to win. In the infinite game, the journey is all there is. And so, players in an infinite game never stop giving so they can take. Players in this game throw a slower pitch so the batter can hit it, because a no-hitter shutout has no real upside.
A good mom, of course, always plays the infinite game. But it turns out that it’s possible to build an organization or even a country that does this as well. Build hospitals and schools instead of forts and barricades…
You certainly know people who play this game, you may well have been touched by them, inspired by them and taught by them. The wrong question to ask is, “but how do they win?” The right way to understand it is, “but is it worth playing?”
Enrich your world by creating value for others.
Enrich your health by walking twenty minutes a day.
Enrich your community by contributing to someone, without keeping score.
Enrich your relationships by saying what needs to be said.
Enrich your standing by trusting someone else.
Enrich your organization by doing more than you're asked.
Enrich your skills by learning something new, something scary.
Enrich your productivity by rejecting false shortcuts.
Enrich your peace of mind by being trusted.
The connection economy pays dividends in ways that the industrial one rarely did.
This actually means, "it wasn't important enough." It wasn't a high priority, fun, distracting, profitable or urgent enough to make it to the top of the list.
Every few days, Twitter and Facebook soak up a billion hours of 'spare' time. Where did that time come from? What did we do before social media was here? Weren't we busy five years ago?
Running out of time is mostly a euphemism, and the smart analyst realizes that it's a message about something else. Time is finite, but, unlike money, time is also replenished every second.
The people you're trying to reach are always recalibrating which meetings they go to, which shows they watch, which books they don't read. The solution has nothing to do with giving people more time (you can't) and everything to do with creating more urgency, more of an itch, more desire.
Spam is commercial, unsolicited, unanticipated, irrelevant messaging, sent in bulk. It's the email you didn't ask to get, the junk in the comments that's selfish and trying to sell something, the robocall on your cell phone from a company pretending to be Google Maps.
Some spammers will tell you that all you need to do is opt out. But of course, the very problem with spam is that it requires action on the part of the recipient, action that can't possibly scale (how many times a day should we have to opt out, communicating with businesses we never asked to hear from in the first place?) People are smart enough to see that once spam becomes professionally and socially acceptable, all open systems fall apart.
Spam is in the eye of the beholder, and so my definition of permission marketing kicks in: If the person you're communicating with would have missed you if you didn't show up, you have permission. On the other hand, just because you know someone's email address or phone number, just because you have figured out how to automate a captcha or hack a discussion board doesn't mean you're welcome there.
What to say to the business person who says, "sure, that's fine, but how do you get permission in the first place? How can I get noticed without spamming people to get started?" The two answers: 1. spend some cash and buy socially acceptable, scalable announcements called advertising. Or 2. Tell ten people.
It's easy to count how many sales you created by spamming a list. Harder, but more important, to count how many people you burned all trust with.
Trust, as we know, is the essence of connection and transaction, and spam is the radioactive antitrust device.
