Every 18 months for the last decade, the world has doubled the data it pushes to you.
Twice as much email, twice as many friend requests, twice as many sites to check, twice as many devices.
When does your mind lose the ability to keep up? Then what happens? Is it already happening?
Episode #205 of Six Pixels of Separation – The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.
Joseph Jaffe is widely regarded as one of the top Marketing Bloggers (Jaffe Juice) and Podcasters (both Jaffe Juice in audio and Jaffe Juice TV in video). He is the author of three excellent books (Life After The 30-Second Spot,Join The Conversation and the newly minted, Flip The Funnel). Along with that, he is currently one of the chiefs over at the Social Media Marketing agency,Powered. A long time friend (and one of the main inspirations behind the Six Pixels of Separation Blog and Podcast), we’ve decided to hold monthly conversations, debates and back-and-forths that will dive a little deeper into the Digital Marketing and Social Media landscape. This is our fifth conversation (or, as I like to affectionately call it, Across The Sound 5.20), and it focuses on Personal Branding. Does the term still hold meaning? What’s our world like when everyone is broadcasting their personal brand to the world and what are the implications for Marketers? How do you figure out the signal from the noise? Enjoy the conversation…
You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation – The Twist Image Podcast #205.
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One of the best ways to stay up-to-date and informed is to ensure that the content you “must see” is always front and center. (Author Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation)
In April 2009, I asked, what is your homepage?, and in thinking about how Sunday tends to be one of those days where people actually have the time to deep-dive into some of the meatier content of the day, I’m curious what are the spaces, sites and environments that you have to see the second you click on your browser?
Here are the tabs that always up when I start Google Chrome (my current web browser of choice):
What does your homepage and tabs look like?
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Yes, I know you’re a master of the web, that you’ve visited every website written in English, that you’ve been going to SXSW for ten years, that you were one of the first bloggers, you used Foursquare before it was cool and you can code in HTML in your sleep. Yes, I know that you sit in the back of the room tweeting clever ripostes when speakers are up front failing on a panel and that you had a LOLcat published before they stopped being funny.
But what have you shipped?
What have you done with your connection skills that has been worthy of criticism, that moved the dial and that changed the world?
Go, do that.
Your business has a core, a goal, a challenge and a deliverable. There is probably one thing that would transform your project, one
success that changes things, one hurdle that’s tougher than the others. What’s difficult, what would respond to
overwhelming attention? That’s the core.
Getting from here to there involves making sales, delivering on promises, overcoming the Dip and shipping.
Along the way, there are supporting tasks you can engage in, things you can do to make the goal easier to achieve.
A popular blog might gain attention and then trust and ultimately help you sell more widgets.
A lot of followers online might give you permission to tell a story that gets you better employees.
A vibrant party at SXSW can create buzz that gives your salespeople entree to important meetings.
These aren’t trivial activities. In fact, they’re part of what marketing means today. But…
But if they give you and your team an outlet to avoid the difficult work of achieving your goal (“I can’t go to that sales call, I’m busy uploading pictures of last night’s party to the blog and then tweeting out the url”) then you’re not building, you’re hiding. Rich calls this playing with turtles. The thing is, the turtles are alive, and they’re going to demand a lot from you.
There’s a huge downside here: once your side activity gets going, it will lead to crises (we have an urgent email we have to answer), to feelings of abandonment (hey, you haven’t been on the forum lately!), to irresistible offers to have the CEO speak or get people involved. There will always be a feeling of sunk cost, of opportunities missed and of things on the verge because these are human movements, not paid ads.
Two choices: 1. find a way to make your goal completely aligned with the tactics you use to achieve it. What’s good for your blog is good for your business. or 2. Now that these approaches are working, and working incredibly well, it’s time to come up with boundaries so the tail doesn’t end up wagging the dog.
We often forget that everything we do is Marketing.
Even if we don’t like the term “marketing.” Even if it doesn’t have the word “marketing” on your business card or in your job description… you’re in marketing.
It sometimes takes the wise words of someone who is super-successful and doesn’t consider themselves a “Marketer” to make that type of realization. I had a pretty cool week. The Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) held their National Convention in Toronto (and I was honored to be the Co-Chair of the event). In helping to put together the stellar line-up of speakers, we scored Howie Mandel (comedian, actor and host of Deal Or No Deal and this season’s America’s Got Talent). Beyond his on-screen public persona, he’s also an author (Here’s The Deal: Don’t Touch Me), producer and manages many different angles of the entertainment and content business. He’s funny… and he’s razor sharp when it comes to business. In thinking aloud as to why he was invited to be the closing keynote speaker for the second day of this Marketing conference, he suggested that everything we do, all of the time is marketing.
"Life is Marketing," said Mandel… and he’s right.
From trying to get an idea across in a meeting to closing a deal to going out on a Friday night to meet someone, we all spend our days trying to market ourselves, our ideas and the work we do. Don’t believe me (or Howie Mandel)? Think about the last time you had to fight for a promotion or a raise? What were you really doing? You were marketing yourself. Think about the last time you tried to get an idea across in a meeting. What were you really doing? You were marketing the idea to your peers.
So, should everyone be on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TV, in books, etc…?
According to Howie… yes! (while I might argue that one should have a strategy in place before simply diving in). Howie’s take is this: in a world where there are so many choices – from a multitude of channels and books to millions of people creating and sharing content online – that brands need to not only be where the people are, but to be doing things in enough places that they get noticed.
It’s a little bit of a mass media concept, but it makes a lot of sense.
Depending on the type of brand you have and how you need it to connect to your consumers, Mandel is spot on: the more findable you are and the more valuable the content that you are creating is, the more likelihood you will have of building a strong and vibrant brand. The brands that stick to one thing (and that includes TV and/or the Internet) are the ones, according to Howie, that are not paying attention to "what’s going ‘out there’" and being open to new and, potentially, life-changing opportunities.
And that’s no joke.
"Life is Marketing"… it feels nice to say that.
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Take a look at just about any industry with many competitors–colleges, hotels, sedans, accounting firms (especially accounting firms)…
The websites bend over backwards to be just like all the others. You can’t identify one hotel website from another if you delete the name of the hotel (unless there’s a beach or a snow-capped mountain in the background).
Sometimes, we try so hard to fit in we give consumers no choice but to seek out the cheapest. After all, if everything is the same, why not buy what’s cheap and close?
How about a site that says, “Here’s why we’re different.” And means it.
(Easy to read this and nod your head, but… what’s your resume look like?)
Mark Frauenfelder, a leading voice of the post-industrial age, has a new book out today.
It’s not what you expect, and it provoked quite a few thoughts.
This book won’t resonate with everyone, but Mark’s honest retelling of his repeated failures to be brilliant at all times made me smile, and his relentless and joyous embrace of actually making things was an inspiration.
Do you buy in bulk?
When most people think of buying in bulk, they think about Costco. They think about saving a handful of shekels by buying a six-litre jug of Italian salad dressing. Either that, or they think about buying enough AA batteries to the point that there’s not enough room for the butter on the upper inside door of the refrigerator. Buying in bulk doesn’t have to look so sloth-like anymore, and there’s a whole other side to buying in bulk that has nothing to do with 10-pound bags of Doritos.
One of the main promises of the Internet and Web-based technology was/is the ability for the collective to come together, collaborate and be more organized and efficient in how we do things … and there’s no reason why saving a few dollars shouldn’t be a part of that equation.
During the dot-com boom, there were many start-ups (that got millions of dollars in venture capital) to figure out how to find masses of people and get them interested in buying the same thing for a better price (remember websites like MobShop and Mercato?). Think about it this way: you’re looking to buy a top-of-the-line bicycle, wouldn’t it be great to find nine other people who were looking for the same brand, model and make? This way, you could approach the company and ask them if they would be interested in offering a discount for the 10 purchases? If the brand isn’t interested in your business, you can put out a message on the Internet and see which brands might be?
There were many issues with this model: It was always hard to find the right number of people to know when a company would be willing to give a discount, if the people all lived in different parts of the world, and if the shipping and duty would be different. Then there’s the small issue of letting both individuals and brands know that these platforms exist and that they should be monitoring them (remember, this was all pre-online social networking with channels like Facebook, Twitter and blogs for individuals to reach out to their social graphs).
Things have changed since the mid-’90s, and the Internet has evolved to the point where these types of transactions are a little bit more practical and realistic.
It has also been the very successful business model that has made Groupon one of the newer (and hottest) Internet darlings. The company launched in November 2008 and stays true to its ethos, which is this:
How’s that for a fascinating business model? One product/service only.
There is no catalogue. They are no product skus to deal with it. It is something that Groupon, personally, does not hold inventory on. It is driven, entirely, by the consumers’ desire to buy and get their friends to buy along with them. The biggest difference in the Groupon model (and this is the key part) is that the website is offered in a variety of cities across the United States and Canada). It is location-specific and not open to anyone, anywhere online.
That is where the new Internet is able to beat the old Internet.
We now have more than enough people online (approaching the 2-billion mark) and many of them are actively looking for products and services at the local level (just ask the Yellow Pages Group). If that doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, check out this quote from an April 12, 2010, news item on TechCrunch (Groupon Raises Huge New Round at $1.2 Billion Valuation): "Fast-growing Groupon, fresh off a $30-million round of financing that valued the company at around $250 million, is back raising new money. They have closed or are in the process of closing new venture money at a $1.2-billion valuation, say multiple sources (one source says that’s not exactly correct, but close). … The site has accumulated 3 million subscribers and currently manages roughly 40 markets. Three million ‘groupons’ have been purchased since November 2008, says the company."
The success of the Groupon model is also something that has not fallen on deaf ears.
There have been multiple companies that have tried to replicate the Groupon model both on a local level (in cities and countries where Groupon presently does not have a presence or to compete with them directly) and based on a specific category of product. Gary Vaynerchuk, the founder of Wine Library TV (a video Podcast about wine), used his growing Internet celebrity status to convert his 850,000+ Twitter followers and fans into a best-selling business book, Crush It, and beyond. His latest venture, Cinderella Wine, is a Groupon-like e-commerce site where he has one amazing wine offer every day until the inventory runs dry (so to speak) – granted, the deal happens by simply making the purchase, which is unlike Groupon, where enough people have to join the specific "groupon" to make the deal a reality.
Woot! is another similar site that offers one product for one day only (or until it runs out). Woot! has been around long before Groupon and has always focused not just on getting the one product out to as many people as possible, but also on the community side of engaging their consumers on blogs and podcasts as well as on platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
The Groupon, Cinderella Wine and Woot! commerce model seems ridiculous (and, if it does, please re-read that TechCrunch quote above).
While most retailers focus on diversifying their product lines and maximizing the cost-savings to their consumers, Groupon (and companies like it) are rewriting the retail rules by leveraging everything from technology and social media to consumer empowerment and the local angle to create a win-win for both paying customers and businesses. Could you ever have imagined a company selling one product, for one day only at a heavily discounted price being worth billions of dollars?
Welcome to the new world of retail.
The above posting is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business – Six Pixels of Separation. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:
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Here’s an app that pays for 12 iPads the very first time you use it. Buy one iPad for every single chair in your meeting room… like the projector and the table, it’s part of the room.
I recently sat through a 17 hour meeting with 40 people in it (there were actually 40 people, but it only felt like 17 hours.). That’s a huge waste of attention and resources.
Here’s what the app does (I hope someone will build it): (I know some of these features require a lot of work, and some might require preparation before the meeting. Great! Perhaps then the only meetings we have will be meetings worth having, meetings with an intent to produce an outcome). I can dream…
1. There’s an agenda, distributed by the host, visible to everyone, with time of start and stop, and it updates as the meeting progresses.
2. There’s a timer, keeping things moving because it sits next to the agenda.
3. The host or presenter can push an image or spreadsheet to each device whenever she chooses.
4. There’s an internal back channel that the host can turn on, permitting people in the room to chat privately with each other. (And the whole thing works on internal wifi, so no internet surfing to distract!)
5. There’s a big red ‘bored’ button that each attendee can push anonymously. The presenter can see how many red lights are lighting up at any give time.
6. There’s a bigger green ‘GO!’ button that each attendee can push anonymously. It lets the host or presenter see areas where more depth is wanted.
7. There’s a queue for asking questions, so they just don’t go to the loudest, bravest or most powerful.
8. There’s a voting mechanism.
9. There’s a whiteboard so anyone can draw an idea and push it to the group.
10. There’s a written record of all activity created, so at the end, everyone who attended can get an email digest of what just occurred. Hey, it could even include who participated the most, who asked questions that others thought were useful, who got the most ‘boring’ button presses while speaking…
11. There’s even a way the host can see who isn‘t using it actively.
Can you imagine how an hour flies by when everyone has one of these in a meeting? How focused and exhausting it would all be?
$500 each, you’ll sell 50,000…
PS no one built the first one yet. Sigh.
