Check out the graph on the left. The curves represent different ideas and different starting points. If you start with 10,000 fans and have an idea that on average nets .8 new people per generation, that means that 10,000 people will pass it on to 8000 people, and then 6400 people, etc. That’s yellow on the graph. Pretty soon, it dies out.
On the other hand, if you start with 100 people (99% less!) and the idea is twice as good (1.5 net passalong) it doesn’t take long before you overtake the other plan. (the green). That’s not even including the compounding of new people getting you people.
But wait! If your idea is just a little more viral, a 1.7 passalong, wow, huge results. Infinity, here we come. That’s the purple (of course.)
I like free content as much as anyone else on the web … but this is perhaps a price too high to pay.
. . .
. . .
Note: you can minimize the ad – I understand. But by default it wasn’t. This is definitely interruption marketing.
(I was going to link to this permission marketing story as well, but there’s a 10-second interstitial ad.) I guess I did link to it after all … but consider yourself warned.)
I have been reinvigorated lately by following Hugh McLeod, the Limey-turned-Texan artist, idea vendor, marketer, and self-described CDF (CrazyDerangedFool).
In this economy and in the overwhelming crush of ideas and messaging, you have to be a little crazy, you have to be a little off-the-wall … you have to STAND OUT from the deafening crowd in order earn the attention necessary to tell your story.
That’s why this recent cartoon of his really speaks to me. George’s first plan better be to re-name himself, jump out of line, change clothes, and break out of the ordinary. But – here’s the key – George’s new George needs to not be another mask marketers wear, but a return to what makes George unique. This level of authenticity, coupled with a real eccentricity, gives George a chance.
Perhaps the crazy ideas are better just because they’re crazy. Perhaps the ordinary plans and ordinary ideas will die just because they’re ordinary. As Seth Godin said a week or so ago, the problem is that you are boring. I am boring – we’re all boring … when we’re simply repeating the party line, doing the standard thing, following the company protocol, going through the motions.
What’s going to make people sit up? Pay attention? Work with us? Hire us?
Here’s a big clue: it won’t be boring. It won’t be standard. It won’t be average. It won’t be a commodity, and it won’t be something you can buy at Wal-Mart.
Whether you’re an individual, brand, or company, it’s good to know when people are talking about you. It’s even better to know what they’re saying.
The last thing you want is to find out that there’s a firestorm of negativity about your latest post, product, or brand when a forest of media microphones are thrust in your face and the media trucks are camping out just off your property. Instead, you want to be in tune with what people are thinking and saying, and you want to be able to enter the conversation with your perspective.
Here are 8 quick, simple, free tools for listening online:
Best and easiest:Google Alerts
Set up an alert. Set it to be emailed to you at the frequency of your choice. Wait for the messages to hit your inbox. Could it possibly be simpler?
Most immediate and fun:Twitter search via RSS
Enter your search items. Grab the RSS feed. Save it in your RSS Reader (Google Reader, or any offline reader). Watch the items get pushed to you every 15 minutes – or however often your reader updates.
Web 2.0 old-skool:Technorati
The fact is, Technorati is not what it once was. But it can still be a useful tool to electronically eavesdrop on what millions of bloggers are blathering about. Go, search, subscribe to the RSS feed. Simple.
Comment search:backtype
Pretty much the same as above, except this search engine focuses on what opinionated people – the 5-10% who comment on blog posts – are saying. Visit, enter your search terms, and get email alerts.
Reviews, etc.:Omgili
This can be particularly helpful if you’re in packaged goods or electronics and you want to check out how you’re being reviewed (example: Panasonic TV). But you can just visit the home page for generic search and cast a wider net.
Really old school:Google, Yahoo!, perhaps Live
Maybe, if you want to know what people are saying about you, you should just search the web. What a thought! Alas, you actually have to do it yourself, although you can set up some automated searches too … but it’s a good idea to do it weekly or so.
Social media ear to the ground:Facebook, MySpace, Friendfeed, etc.
More and more people are joining social networks, meaning a lot of the web’s conversation happens behind closed doors. But you can get in … perhaps with your own profile, perhaps just with judicious searching, perhaps by joining conversations … and hear what’s going on that’s important to you.
Yes, discussion boards still exist:BoardTracker
Online discussion boards still exist, despite their low profile in the web2.0 era. Even though they’re one of the oldest forms of online community, they are in some cases still growing. BoardTracker is a good way to search these often thinly sliced vertical niche sites. And yes, you can set up alerts to come to you,
So … that’s 8 ways of listening to your clients and your community that won’t cost you a dime, and in most cases not even much time.
Seth Godin posted an article on really bad branding a couple of days ago, pointing out some company names that don’t differentiate companies very well:
Jewelry Central is a really bad brand name. So are Party Land, Computer World, Modem Village, House of Socks and Toupee Town.
It’s a bad brand name because Central or Land or World are meaningless. They add absolutely no value to your story, they mean nothing and they are interchangeable.
Why is differentiation such a key marketing strategy?
It’s simple – you only truly succeed as a brand, and as a business, by being top-of-mind in your targeted clients’ minds. And you can only be top-of-mind in your clients’ minds by having a clear, identifiable, distinguishable identity … ideally an unique identity with a story.
The name is a piece of it – an important piece. The image is an important piece. The story is an important piece. The products you choose to create and market are important pieces. The successes you build are important pieces. The customers that you enable are important pieces.
Put them all together, you’ve got a brand.
But if it’s not differentiated … if a client can’t distinguish your name, image, story, products, and successes from competitors … all of it is meaningless.
Because that client will open up the yellow pages (in other words, Google), search, find you and your competitor, and go eeny meany miny mo. Which means that all your hard work and all your investments in marketing mean nothing. Differentiation, which needs to start before your marketing, and even before your product development, is an effort to ensure this doesn’t happen.
This is all obvious. So why are so many companies not differentiated?
Here’s why: differentiation requires discrimination. If you want to be differentiated, you must say no. There must be certain products you won’t build. Certain markets you won’t pursue. Certain clients you don’t want. These are all clear and undeniable corollaries of choosing certain products that you will invest in, certain markets that you will pursue, and certain clients that you definitely do want.
However, many companies can’t say no.
They fail to see that in saying no, they gain increased capability to say a very focused, powerful yes.
I love this sign I saw in a art dealer’s window in New Orleans last week:
I still can’t decide if it’s hilarious (that someone who had a “big sale” essentially typed something in Word and printed it from their computer, and pasted a – dirty – 8.5×11 sheet of paper in their window).
Or is it pure genius (simple, clear, obvious, and impossible to miss because it’s exactly where the Open/Closed sign would be in many other small stores).
I simply cannot believe how some vitamin companies continue to create deceptive packaging. Essentially, they’re lying with their bottles.
In this case, here’s a bottle of Jaimieson vitamin D that my wife picked up this week. I opened it today, shook one pill into my hand, and then looked inside.
I had to look deep to catch a glimpse of the small pile of lonely pills at the extreme bottom of the bottle.
The discrepancy between the size of the bottle and the amount of vitamin inside it was so large I took them all out, put them beside the bottle on a side table, and took a picture. Click on the picture to see a larger version.
A couple of thoughts:
this is a waste of packaging – there’s more plastic in the bottle than required
which results in a waste of fuel in shipping, as Jaimieson ships a lot of air all over the world (which appears to contravene their environmental standards)
and it’s essentially a lie … a bottle that looks a certain size as you’re buying it, but delivers a fraction of that amount of product.
I think we all understand these days that packaging sells. I think we also have a right to assume that packaging does not also magically make 100 tablets look like 1000.
Companies that fail this test deserve an F for truthfulness, and an F for integrity.
Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO)’s second-biggest investor urged Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) to raise its $42 billion bid for the Web pioneer and warned Yahoo it has few options left, raising the pressure on them to seal a deal.
Isn’t it somewhat hard to argue both of those positions at the same time? Wouldn’t that almost be like talking out of both sides of your mouth?
There’s a reason why SMS is a hundred billion dollar industry … and it’s simply that phones companies are unbelievably greedy.
Note: the three examples cited are, respectively: from your internet service provider via high-speed modem, over standard text messaging systems, and snail mail via the United States Postal Service. All are assuming that data is transmitted digitally (in the case of the snail mail, the bits are written on paper.)
COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:
TCP/IP: $1
TCP/SMS: $61,356,851.20
USPS: $307,072.00 (Bits written out on paper)
So getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.
What exactly justifies making SMS messages sixty one million times more expensive than ISP data and 200x more expensive than TCP/USPS? How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.
(I originally saw this at Slashdot. As noted at Digg, here seems to be a technical issue with that page – if you don’t see the article at that link, try the home page. It should be the top story there for a while.)
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
