There is famous and there is famous to the family. Cousin Aaron is famous to my family. Or, to be less literal, the family of people like us might understand that Satya the milliner or perhaps Sarma Melngailis or Peter Olotka are famous.
And famous to the family is precisely the goal of just about all marketing now. You don't need to be Nike or Apple or GE. You need to be famous to the small circle of people you are hoping will admire and trust you. Your shoe store needs to be famous to the 300 shoe shoppers in your town. Your retail consulting practice needs to be famous to 100 people at ten major corporations. Your WordPress consulting practice needs to be famous to 650 veterinarians or chiropractors. Famous the way George Clooney and George Washington are famous, but to fewer people.
By famous, I means admired, trusted, given the benefit of the doubt. By famous, I mean seen as irreplaceable or best in the world.
Here's how to tell if you're famous: If I ask someone in your community to name the person who is known for X, will they name you? If I ask about which store or freelancer is the best place, hands down, to get Y, will they name you? If we played 20 questions, could I guess you?
Being famous to the family is far more efficient than being famous to everyone. It takes focus, though.
Famous to the family (of boardgame fans) is the key to making my friend Peter's Cosmic Encounter Kickstarter hit its goal. Or Ramon Ray's new magazine getting traction. Famous to the family is what this IndieGogo needs in order to change kids' lives. And failing to be famous to the family is precisely why most Kickstarters fail.
[HT to me, I wrote something about this three and a half years ago, but I forgot, and so did most people I talk about this with, so here it is again.]
October 18, 2014
If you say that in a meeting, you've failed. You've abdicated responsibility and just multiplied the time wasted by the number of people in the room.
When we go around the room, everyone in the room spends the entire time before their turn thinking about what to say, and working to say something fairly unmemorable. And of course, this endless litany of 'saying' leads to little in the way of listening or response or interaction or action of any kind.
The worst example I ever saw of this was when Barry Diller did it in a meeting with 220 attendees. More than two hours later, everyone in the room was bleeding from their ears in boredom.
Leaders of meetings can do better. Call on people. Shape the conversation. Do your homework in advance and figure out who has something to say, and work hard to create interactions. Either that or just send a memo and cancel the whole thing. It's easier and probably more effective.
October 17, 2014
In a world that lacks so many traditional gatekeepers, there are fewer people than ever to say no to your project, your idea, your song. If you want to put it out there, go ahead.
On the other hand, that also means that there are fewer people who can say yes. That’s now your job too.
If you work in an organization, the underlying rule is simple: People are not afraid of failure, they’re afraid of blame.
Avoid looking in the mirror and saying no. More challenging: practice looking in the mirror and saying yes.
October 16, 2014
Wrap it in a bow
Serve it on ice
What’s worth more, the frame or the poster? It turns out that a well-framed bit of graphics is often transformed, at least in the eyes of the person engaging with it. It might be the very same beautiful object that was thumbtacked to the wall, but it sure feels different.
And an unwrapped piece of jewelry is worth far less without the blue box, isn’t it?
The wrapper isn’t everything, it might not even be the point. But it matters.
“How should I judge this,” is something we ask ourselves all the time. When you make the effort to give us a hint, we’ll often take the hint.
October 15, 2014
There's a relationship that's easy to imagine but actually incorrect: We often come to the conclusion that in order to make something magical, we'll need magical events to occur to get there.
Building a startup is hard. Publishing a great book successfully is quite difficult. Launching a non-profit that matters is a Herculean task. I hope you will do all three, and more, often.
But while your intent is pure and your goal is to create magic, the most common mistake is to believe that the marketplace will agree with your good intent and support you. More specifically, that media intermediaries will clearly, loudly and accurately tell your story, that this story will be heard by an eager and interested public and that the public will take action (three strikes).
Or, more tempting, that ten people will tell ten people to the eighth power, leading to truly exponential growth (some day). Because right now, you've told ten people and they have told no one.
Or, possibly, that you will call on businesses and offer them a solution so powerful that they will pay you at that very first meeting, generating enough cash flow that you will be able to immediately hire more (and better) salespeople to grow your organization exponentially.
All great organizations make change. Change is hard. Change takes time. In markets that matter (meaning not gossip, not snark, not spectator sports), people rarely tell dozens of other people about what they've discovered. And action is taken, sometimes, but not as much as you deserve.
No, you'll need to work hard to create something magical, and a big part of that hard work is relentlessly eliminating all magical thinking from your projections and your expectations of how the market will react.
Only count on things that have happened before, a funnel you can buy and time you can afford to invest. Anything more than that is a nice bonus.
[HT, worth reading: Aaron]
October 14, 2014
On Wednesday, November 5, 2014, I'll be doing a small group master class in San Francisco for tech startups.
I'll also be part of a fascinating series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on December 1.
If you can't make it, some free lectures and podcasts that might come in handy:
The startup school, a 15-session free course, recorded live (forgive the occasional audio difficulties). This one has really resonated with many of the entrepreneurs and freelancers that have listened to it. Also…
With Chris Taylor
With Grant Spanier
With Mark Guay
With Brian Koppelman
Also! Please consider this 1,000 smiles campaign.
October 13, 2014
The most urgent jobs tend to be line jobs. Profit and loss. Schedules to be drawn and honored. Projects to deliver.
The line manager initiates. The line manager delivers.
Staff jobs are important, no doubt about it. The staff keeps the lights on, provides resources on demand and is standing by ready to help the line manager. But the staff person doesn't get to say yes and doesn't get to say go.
In fact, the best staff people get that way by acting like they're on the line.
When you can, take responsibility. Say go.
It's tragic but not surprising to watch the marketing of another epidemic unfold.
It starts with, "We" don't have Ebola, "they" do. They live somewhere else, or look different or speak another language. Our kneejerk reaction is that "they" need to be isolated from us (more than 55% of Americans favor a travel ban for everyone, not just the sick). Even fifty years ago, a travel ban was difficult, now it's impossible. The world is porous, there are more connections than ever, and we've seen this before.
Tuberculosis. Polio. AIDS. Fear runs rampant, amplified by the media, a rising cycle of misinformation, demonization and panic. Fear of the other. Pushing us apart and paralyzing us.
The thing is:
We are they.
They are us.
Education—clear, fact-based and actionable education—is the single most effective thing we can do during the early stages of a contagion. Diseases (and ideas) spread because of the social structures we have created, and we can re-engineer those interactions to dramatically change the R0 of a virus. Ebola doesn't 'know' that large funerals are traditional, but it certainly takes advantage of them to spread. Ideas don't 'know' that bad news travels fast, and that the internet makes ideas travel faster, but they take advantage of this to spread.
Cable TV voices that induce panic to make their ratings go up are directly complicit in amplifying the very reactions that magnify the impact of the virus. Attention-seeking media voices take us down. All of us.
It's tempting to panic, or to turn away, or to lock up or isolate everyone who makes us nervous. But we can (and must) do better than that. Panic, like terror, is also a virus, one that spreads.
We have an urgent and tragic medical problem, no doubt, but we also have a marketing problem.
October 12, 2014
It's possible to bend language to your will, to invest extraordinary amounts of effort and care to make words do what you want them to do.
Our culture celebrates athletes that shape their bodies, and chieftains who build organizations. Lesser known, but more available, is the ability to work on our words until they succeed in transmitting our ideas and causing action.
Here's the thing: you may not have the resources or the physique or the connections that people who do other sorts of work have. But you do have precisely the same keyboard as everyone else. It's the most level playing field we've got.
The first step is to say it poorly. And then say it again and again and again until you're able to edit your words into something that works.
But mostly, you need to decide that it matters.[HT: Shawn]
October 11, 2014
One list highlights the lucky breaks, the advantages, the good feedback, your trusted network. It talks about the accident of being born in the right time and the right place, your health, your freedom. It features your education, your connection to the marketplace and just about every nice thing someone has said about you in the last week or month.
The other list is the flipside. It contains the obstacles you've got to deal with regularly, the defects in your family situation, the criticisms your work has received lately. It is a list of people who have better luck than you and moments you've been shafted and misunderstood.
The thing is, at every juncture, during every crisis, in every moment of doubt, you have a choice. You will pull out one (virtual) list or the other. You'll read and reread it, and rely on it to decide how to proceed.
Up to you.
October 10, 2014
