Some things are better when they're not free.
If Craigslist charged a dollar for every listing, what would happen?
Well, the number of bogus listings and repetitive listings would plummet, making the site far easier to use.
The number of scam artists using the site would go down, because it's more difficult to be anonymous when money changes hands.
The revenue of the site would soar, which means that the people running the site could get (far) richer, or fund digital journalism or change the economy of an emerging nation.
Money creates a sort of friction. In the digital economy, magical things can happen when there is no friction. You can scale to infinity. On the other hand, sometimes you want friction.
If you lead a group that allows anyone to join, for free, your group might be large, but it's not tight, it's not organized to make important change. Commitment slows things down in the short run, but ultimately aligns interests.
September 29, 2009
Of course, it's not true.
The record business, for example, is fundamentally altered by easily sharable, zero-incremental-cost digital files. It's not just vinyl but shiny.
Your industry has been completely and permanently altered by the connections offered by the internet. Your non-profit, your political campaign, your service business. Not a little different, not just email enabled or website marketed, but overhauled.
Unfortunately, that's hard to embrace. But it's still true. What are you going to do about it? If you were starting your business today, knowing what you know now, how would you do things (very) differently?
September 28, 2009
It's not difficult to throw something over the transom. That's not the problem.
The problem is it's a waste.
The internet has made it so easy to wrap your idea/proposal around a brick and throw it that we forget sometimes that just because you can, it doesn't mean you should.
What sort of proposal should you write to be sure that someone who gets it over the transom will read it? You shouldn't.
Instead, spend the time earning the right to make the proposal. Spend the time building a presence that gets you an invitation, or, at the very least, earns you the credibility to walk in the front door. If you want to pitch a great business development idea to a big company you don't already work with, allocate three to six months of focused, patient effort to earn the right to make the presentation in the first place.
AND! If you are an organization that has a transom, how can you make it easier for great ideas to arrive? How about publishing your org chart so people can find the right person to contact? How about publishing a list of others you've worked with and what you've done with them so others can see what you're interested in? How about appointing someone (an agency? a bureau? an individual?) to act as a filter for you so you're not randomly fishing through the slush pile now and then?
A few years ago, Joi Ito used to use his tribe to review business plans. You posted your plan, they (the motivated volunteers) would mark it up and Joi would look at the best ones. It's not clear to me that opening the transom wider brings you more crackpots. In fact, it may very well shed light on great opportunities you've been missing.
September 27, 2009
I gave a talk the other day, and at the end a woman sheepishly asked, "when you talk about an asset, what do you mean?"
It's a fair question.
For a marketer, an asset is a tool or a platform, something you can use over and over without using it up. In fact, it's something that gets better the more you invest.
Running an ad is an expense. Building a brand people trust is an asset.
Buying a trade show booth is an expense. Having a permission marketing list of people who want to get anticipated, personal and relevant emails from you is an asset.
What are Amazon's assets? Well, they have a few warehouses and some fancy software, but they primarily have two: a brand that people trust, and a one-click shopping relationship with 50 million people. On top of that, they have an archive of information about those people, what they like and what they don't, that makes it hard for someone to switch to another store easily. All those assets together comprise most of what Amazon has built over the last decade or two.
If you're an unknown freelancer, you don't have much in the way of marketing assets. If you're Harley Davidson, you've got plenty.
The challenge in growing a business is in building assets daily, and doing it for less money than those assets end up being worth. Your expenses should generate assets.
September 26, 2009
Two days ago, I posted about Brands in Public.
The response from the brands we've shared it with has been terrific, but other people didn't like elements of it. And they were direct in letting me know.
The goal of the program is to invite brands into the conversation that's already going on around the web, to make it easy for them to do it on their terms. I talked with a brand manager yesterday who explained that this is exactly what he's been trying to do for his company, but the corporate website systems make that difficult for him. We want to open the door and to permit large brands a way to get started without having to roll their own solution.
One way we tried to encourage that was to build 200 sample pages, pages brands could adopt. Alas, some people felt that this was inappropriate, so we've recalibrated and we'll take those pages down before the end of the day.
When a brand wants a page, we'll build it, they'll run it and we'll both have achieved our goals.
Part of the magic of the web is that you can adjust as you go, particularly if you're willing to listen.
I apologize if anyone was confused by my original post, and we're looking forward to having major brands and non-profits using this tool the way we intended–to join in to the conversation that's already happening all around us. Thanks as always for reading.
September 25, 2009
It's very easy to underrate the value of cultural wisdom, otherwise known as sophistication.
Walk into a doctor's office and the paneling is wrong, the carpeting is wrong and it feels dated. Instant lack of trust.
Meet a salesperson in your office. She doesn't shake hands, she's fumbling with an old Filofax, she mispronounces Steve Jobs' name and doesn't make eye contact.
Visit a website for a vendor and it looks like one of those long-letter opportunity seeker type sites.
In each case, the reason you wrote someone off had nothing to do with their product and everything to do with their lack of cultural wisdom.
We place a high value on sophistication, because we've been trained to seek it out as a cue for what lies ahead. We figure that if someone is too clueless to understand our norms, they probably don't understand how to make us a product or service that we'll like.
This is even more interesting because different cultures have different norms, so there isn't one right answer. It's an ever changing, complex task. Cultural wisdom is important precisely because it's difficult.
And yet…
Who's in charge of cultural norms at your organization? Does someone hire or train or review to make sure you and your people are getting it right? At Vogue magazine, of course, that's all they do. If they lost it, even for a minute, they'd be toast.
It's funny that we assume that all sorts of complex but ultimately unimportant elements need experts and committees and review, but the most important element of marketing–demonstrating cultural wisdom–shouldn't even be discussed.
This might be the most subtle yet important shift that marketers face as they deal with the reality of new media. Marketers aren't renters, now they own.
For generations, marketers were trained to buy (actually rent) eyeballs.
A media company assembled a large amount of attention. A TV network or a magazine or even a billboard company found a place you can put an ad, and they sold you a shot at reaching their audience.
You, the marketer, don't care about the long-term value of this audience. It's like a rental car. You want it to be clean and shiny when you get it, you want to avoid getting in trouble when you return it, but hey, it's a rental.
And so when we buy ads, we ask, "how big an audience" and then we design an ad with our brand in mind, not with the well-being of the media company or its audience in mind. And if we get a .1% or even a 1% response rate, we celebrate.
A trade show booth is an example of eyeball thinking. The trade show organizer assembles attendees and your job at the booth is to grab as many as you can.
Old media was not the same as old branding. Media companies built audiences and then brands rented those audiences.
Suddenly the new media comes along and the rules are different. You're not renting an audience, you're building one. You're not exhibiting at a trade show, you're starting your own trade show.
If you still ask, "how much traffic is there," or "what's the CPM?" you're not getting it. Are you buying momentary attention or are you investing in a long term asset?
Now, when you buy something (that thing you used to call 'media'), you're not paying for eyeballs, you're paying for a platform. A platform you can use to build your own audience, one that you can nurture, educate and ultimately convert. You'll take care of this audience differently, measure them differently and have a different sales cycle. This isn't natural, but it works.
Two steps: buy a platform and then fill it with people. Some examples:
Authors have traditionally relied on publishers to bring them readers. The author gives up the majority of the income and the publisher brings them the readers. But then you see someone like Frank at Post Secret who builds his own audience for his (sometimes nsfw) content. He owns a platform, it's not something he rents. Now, using a publisher is a choice, not a necessity. Just about every successful author going forward (except for the lucky exceptions like Dan Brown) will own her own media channel. Not just authors, of course…
Consider the local real estate agent. She can spend to run ads every week in the local paper, or she can use the same money to start a legitimate media channel, a digital magazine, say, one that cheers on the school and gives the local paper a run for its money. And oh yes, the only houses listed for sale are hers. It might take a lot of work and even some money. But what does she get? A platform forever.
Traditionally, a clothing brand has to give up income and control to a retailer, since the retailer has the eyeballs. The web allows a brand like Little Miss Matched to build their own platform, their own audience and thus bypass all those gatekeepers. They invested in a product that told a story instead of investing in giving Walmart a cut. Boring products can't do this.
Or consider the local chiropractor. He can spend money on a yellow pages ad or he can invest in a platform, creating a local running club and doing coaching for its members.
(Compare these examples with McDonald's, a company that continues to rent eyeballs for a high price and has no real platform to speak of.)
Or consider the acquisition of Omniture by Adobe. What did Adobe pay for? I'd argue it was direct access to the right people at the leading advertisers and websites around the world. Technology isn't so hard to copy. Permission to connect is almost impossible to achieve.
Compared to the cost of renting eyeballs, buying a platform is cheap. Filling it with people eager to hear from you… that's the expensive part. But if you don't invest in the platform, you'll be at a disadvantage, now and forever. The smart way to build a brand today is to invest in the elements of the platform… the product, the technology, the websites (plural) and the systems you need to make it easy for people to show up at your very own trade show. And then embrace these people and shoot for 90% conversion, not .5%.
Like most good investments, it's expensive and worth more than it costs.
September 24, 2009
The Washington Post recently laid off a columnist because his blog posts didn't get enough web traffic.
Of course, in the old days, the newspaper had no real way to tell which columns got read and which ones didn't. So journalists were lulled into the sense that it didn't really matter. The Times quotes Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, “It’s an unusual public rationale for serious newspaper people, that’s for sure.”
Wrong tense. It's not going to be unusual for long.
In fact, in a digital world where everything can be measured, we all work on commission. And why not? If you do great work and it works, you should get rewarded. And if you don't, it's hard to see why a rational organization would keep you on.
You don't have to like the coming era of hyper-measurement, but that doesn't mean it's not here.
September 23, 2009
I was talking with a senior marketer at one of the most famous brands in the world last week. She said, "executives keep coming to me with stuff they find on the internet, stuff they find on YouTube about us, and say, 'take it down!' Of course, I have to explain that I can't take it down. No one can."
If your brand has any traction at all, people are talking about you. Of course, they've always talked about you, but now they're doing it in writing, in video and in public.
Today, Squidoo (a company I founded) is launching Brands in Public. It's a neat idea and I wanted to give you an overview and a first look.
You can't control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.
But how?
Over the last few months, we've seen big brands (like Amazon and Maytag) get caught in a twitterstorm. An idea (one that's negative to the brand) starts and spreads, and absent a response, it just spirals. Of course, Amazon can't respond on their home page (they're busy running a store) and they don't have an active corporate blog that I could find, so where? How?
Enter Brands In Public.
[see update at the bottom] Squidoo has built several hundred pages, each one about a major brand. More are on the way. We'll keep going until we have thousands of important brands, each on its own page (and we'll happily add one for you if you like). Each page collects tweets, blog posts, news stories, images, videos and comments about a brand. All of these feeds are algorithmic… the good and the bad show up, all collated and easy to find.
Of course, these comments and conversations are already going on, all over the web. What we've done is bring them together in one place. And then we've made it easy for the brand to chime in.
If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month. And once [we build] the page, the left hand column belongs to you. You can post responses, highlight blog posts, run contests or quizzes. You can publicly have your say right next to the constant stream of information about your brand (information that's currently all over the web–and information you can't "take down" or censor). You can respond, lead and organize. If a crisis hits, your page will be there, ready for you to speak up. If your fans are delighted, your page makes it easy for them to chime in and speak up on sites around the web.
If you have the tools and wherewithal to build a page like this on your own site, you should consider that. The challenge is getting it done, regardless of where the page lives.
There are already monitoring tools online (like Radian6) that allow big brands to watch from behind the scenes. That's great, but what are you doing in front of your audience? Is there a low-cost, easy way to let one of your non-technical marketing people lead and engage with people who are already in the conversation?
We have beta-testers like Allstate and Molson and Home Depot that see the value of showing up where the conversation is happening. My guess is that other significant brands will discover that they can't just rely on a static home page, nor is it sufficient to post an ephemeral response in a feed somewhere. Brands in Public isn't the first, nor will it be the last place brands need to be to coordinate and organize the conversation. People (your customers) will find these pages, point to them, link to them and talk about them, creating a new circle of interest online. If you know a brand that needs to hear about this, there's a short ebook (download) about the project.
It's worth saying that we care a lot about keeping this simple for your organization. A Brands in Public page for your brand requires no development team, no ad buys and no deep pockets. While you control the left-hand column and can pepper it with good stuff, it's still part of a larger site, not "your" page. That means that the number of meetings you need to go to for approvals and permissions is going to decrease. It means that it's not behind your firewall and not something that has to fit into the larger über-corporate strategy. More like a tradeshow and less like your home page. It's in public. It's simply a place for your brand to see and be seen, to organize and to respond.
I'm guessing that big brands are going to need to be in dozens of places like this going forward, because media has shifted from top down, "here's what we say, we're putting on a show, watch us!" to, "oh, you're here, you're talking, hi."
The first 100 brands that sign up will benefit from a share of the $500,000 in house ads Squidoo will run across the site promoting the service and the first partnering brands. Sales are handled by BzzAgent, so you'll be in good hands–please give them a call if you have any questions about the service. If you've got a brand that people are talking about, I hope you'll give it a try.
[UPDATE: We're now offering free pages to chosen charities. If your non-profit organization is interested, please fill out this form. We'll choose a bunch each month, set them up and then the page belongs to you.]
[UPDATE: Our intent in building sample pages and letting brands see
them in action was misunderstood by many people, and I can understand
why. As a result, to clear the air, we're going to be taking these 200
sample pages down today. The only pages that we'll be posting are those
from our sponsors, we won't be building any others. Thanks to those
that let me know about their concerns, and I'm sorry for the confusion.]
Does it really matter if you're right?
Given the choice between acknowledging that your customer is upset or proving to her that she is wrong, which will you choose?
You can be right or you can have empathy.
You can't do both.
It's not the nature of capitalism to need to teach people a lesson, it's the nature of being a human, we just blame it on capitalism. In fact, smart marketers understand that the word 'right' in "The customer is always right" doesn't mean that they'd win in court or a debate. It means, "If you want the customer to remain a customer, you need to permit him to believe he's right."
If someone thinks they're unhappy, then you know what? They are.
Trying say this to yourself: I have no problem acknowledging that you're unhappy, upset or even angry. Next time, I'd prefer to organize our interaction so you don't end up feeling that way, and I probably could have done it this time, too. You have my attention and my empathy and I value you. Thanks for being here.
If you can't be happy with that, then sure, go ahead and fire the customer, cause they're going to leave anyway.
September 22, 2009
