Over Thanksgiving I sat down with a guy looking to create a blog to build his consulting business. On the flight back from Colorado I put together some suggestions on how his team could get a blog started and generating results over the next two months.
In putting this together, I thought there might be some value for other business folks looking to dip their feet in the blogging waters. First, it should be said that my blog is not one to follow for inspiration - it is what Seth Godin calls a "cat blog" - a place first and foremost to get thoughts out, not generate business. I break a lot of my own rules here, but that's okay - as long as you know what you're building your blog to do you'll make out fine.
I believe that it's possible to get a successful blog going within two months in about 5 hours a week, tops. These suggestions aren't comprehensive - you might find things you agree with, things you disagree with, things I left out. Feel free to add or change anything you like - hopefully you find it valuable in some way.
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Seth points out an article today in Media Life Magazine about neophilia, an overwhelming, compulsive love of all things new. Seth rightly points out that this phenomena can easily be found on our coasts and in the tech community, but one would be hard-pressed to find evidence of such an afflicition in, say, Lena, Illionois.
This phenomena and the overall culture of consumerism in America has been wreaking havoc on my conscience of late. As a marketing major in college, I soaked up any book I could find on how to effectively persuade folks to buy. Night after night was spent in bookstores and libraries learning about action words and scarcity and the subliminal effect of guarantees and planned obsolescence.
But in the past few years, my exuberance for the marketing machine has waned considerably. It's not that I don't enjoy new things or nice things. It's not that I don't appreciate being able to instantly discover a dozen different solutions to any problem I may have. It's not that I don't find myself often a victim of neophilia - quite the opposite. But I wonder if all this psychological manipulation in the interest of consumption is going to have a bad impact on our lives in the long run.
I'm concerned because we're learning how to become increasingly fat, lazy people with entitlement complexes. I'm concerned because we live in an increasingly more competitive world with decreasing resources, and we don't know anything about hardship. I'm concerned because while I'm shopping there are hundreds of thousands of men and women in China and India who are patiently training and learning to mop the floor with me in the global economy.
More importantly, I'm worried about how much my identity, our identities are tied up in the things we own. We've moved from "those new ice boxes are fancy" to "It'd be great to have a Camero like that" to "I need a new game system" to "I deserve that Blackberry and the $250 pair of jeans."
We've had a marketing machine around for a few decades, and it has blasted into our brains that our lives are somehow less fun, less meaningful if we don't have the newest and best. We're obsessed. Genetic or not, it has truly become an addiction. We work and live to buy and own.
We always joke about the yokels in the midwest who don't have a clue. When our standard of living changes (which I'm almost certain it will,) I wonder who will look like the smart one - the guy who's happy with his beat up F-150 and his blissful ignorance about Bluetooth and Web 2.0....or me and my New York apartment and Motorola PEBL and Google Calendar and keeping up with the Jones and envy because that guy has a really nice suit and why don't I have one like that because we all know that I'm entitled to it.
Seth Godin wrote a good piece today about one of the main excuses people give for not marketing - that they don't have the time:
"Once an organization is up and running, it's almost impossible to carve out the time to find the marketing vision that will make all the difference."
Marketing is so often thought of as something you 'tack on' at the end. Back in college I took a class on business planning. The big project was to develop a plan and present it to potential investors. I remember the one thing that students consistently did in their proposals was treat marketing as an afterthought. Even then, the marketing plan consisted of the obligatory biased focus group (which of course always had a positive result) and a breakdown of the amount of money they were going to throw into various advertising channels.
The idea that you have a company, and that one of the company's functions or departments is marketing is a flawed one. The marketing comes first, whether you realize it or not.
I've come to believe (and as usual, I'm probably wrong) that there are only two marketing 'plans' that work. One is to have a product that is revolutionary, appealing, perfect at meeting people's needs or wants. If you have a product like that, the marketing will be built into every experience the customer has with it. Telling others about the product will be painless, because the story is compelling. Writing copy about what makes it different is cake, because it's plainly obvious why it's different and beneficial.
The other way, if you don't have a product like that, is to build in systems and processes that let you deliver the product or service in an incredible way. By giving each customer a 'wow' experience every single time, you compel them to tell others without having to ask. And when the time comes for them to purchase again, you've demonstrated that you're the only option for them.
Neither of these have to involve a cent of traditional advertising, although they can. Neither of these require the marketer to come up with some gimick of gargantuan proportions. Marketing becomes easy. Suddenly you have all the time in the world to market, because everything your company does is the plan.
Love him or hate him, you gotta hand it to him - Mel Gibson is a pretty fantastic marketer.
His new movie, Apocalypto, may or may end up being good - it's hard to tell from the trailer. But I'm willing to bet that millions of people will see the trailer in the next few weeks.
Why? Because in the middle of the trailer (about 1:46 in, to be exact) he has spliced in a single frame of himself.
Simple trick, and I doubt it will ever work again. But if you want to get a bunch of people to see the preview for your movie (and perhaps the movie itself,) something like this is a great way to do it.
Who wants to bet Mel is actually Jewish...
Seth Godin certainly caused a ruckus with his post on stamps.
The premise of electronic stamps is to begin charging people for the privledge of sending email, theory being that spammers would be significantly deterred if they were charged for sending unsolicited mail.
This is a complicated issue. At first glance it seems like a no-brainer - your inbox is cleaner, spam goes down, ISPs make boatloads of cash in the deal as the de facto conduits between parties.
But a number of questions come to my mind. NOTE: When considering the merits of the following questions, keep in mind I'm an idiot.:
- I've yet to use an email tool that knows when an email is coming from a company and when it's coming from a person. There are numerous implications there - sending personal emails (I can think of dozens of old friends and new friendships that were cultivated are rediscovered via email) to schools sending messages to their students at their email address of preference (hint: not the school's email account) to notifications from free services like Friendster. These would either become paid transactions (introducing the same friction that keeps me from sending letters to people,) or be relegated to a folder that is collated with all my other junk (forcing me to wade through all the spam anyway.)
- Spammers have an enormous bag of tricks they can employ to send email - spammers who use an unknowing man or woman's account to send out messages could potentially be making someone financially responsible for the activity. The need for email fraud litigation or some form of recourse on the part of the victim is now necessary - costs ISPs will now have to take into account.
- Making a move to RSS would make segmentation and targeting difficult. One of the big tenets of Permission Marketing is for messages be as targeted, personalized and relevant as possible. With email and a simple sign-up form, I have the ability to market to as granular a population as I wish - something the subscriber appreciates and leads to greater revenue opportunities for me. RSS has a ways to go before it can provide the marketer with this power.
- Are there price controls? AOL, Yahoo! and the like may publish well-known, publicly available information regarding price. But outside of the major mail services, how do I found out what ISP is behind some corporate email address and what their prices are? Wouldn't I have to essentially 'opt-in' to each service? Competitors will certainly be hot on GoodMail's footsteps, likely with different pricing models, etc. How does regulation of this work?
- Most importantly - will there be commemerative Elvis birthday e-stamps I can use?
In spite of these drawbacks, I wonder if there's a happy medium here. The practice of e-postage would undoubtedly decrease spam, but it should be a hoop restricted to businesses. Perhaps tracking IP addresses or domains by volume would help - if a particular domain or IP address/range sends mail that exceeds a certain quota, the ISP begins to charge for it. Just a thought.
A complicated problem, and a viable attempt at solving it. But not without problems of its own.
A little over a year ago, I burned a business into the ground.
People tend to look at me funny when I talk about failing in business. They seem to still believe what we're all taught in school - that failing in work or in a relationship or in a business means that the person failing is a failure themselves. However, I was fortunate enough to grow up with family and loved ones that didn't believe this. They taught me that failure is simply a step on the way to success.
It was with that in mind that I decided to dig through the ash of my business and condense the lessons into the presentation I gave last week. Being surrounded by people who were all much smarter than me, I was worried it'd be a waste of everyone's time. But much to my surprise, it actually went over fairly well - even got voted third best presentation of the conference. A couple folks suggested I talk about my lessons here as well, for the benefit of all (and by all they meant my two readers.)
This is the first in a series of posts about my hard-earned lessons in entrepreneurship. It's about the thrills and pitfalls of starting a new venture. It's not about the 'business plan + venture capital = success' formula that you often learn in school, but rather the 'group of guys get together, pool their savings, and proceed to live off of Kraft Mac & Cheese for the next 6 months trying to build something worthwhile' formula. It's the formula that most people end up needing to pursue, and frankly, the only formula I know anything about.
I hope you find this at least marginally useful, and I'd love to hear about your own adventures.
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Ryan Carson talked sales over at the SvN blog. Lots of good stuff, particularly about networking.
I dedicated a whole chapter to this in A Bright Red Package - networking represents the number one way to get a job, generate sales, find a vendor or look for employees. The business world is entirely about people, and those who know how to network have a decided advantage against those who don't.
When I left Colorado for Seattle two years ago, I did so without a job, without any interviews, without anything. But I did have my mentor from college - a former chair of the American Advertising Federation - and his confidence in me. I managed to sit down with the head of every major advertising agency in the city within a month, and it had nothing to do with me - his name and his recommendation did all the heavy lifting for me.
I'm convinced the only reason he was so willing to go to bat for me was because I broke the rules of traditional networking. I didn't approach it looking for anything. My mentor from the year before (hint - build yourself a whole slew of mentors!) had mentioned him, and I just asked if I could meet him. One phone call later and we set up lunch. I learned a lot from him - he had been a professor, a managing director at a top 5 New York agency and an entrepreneur - but I didn't ask for anything. Just thanked him, sent him a card, and stayed in touch. The relationship blossomed over time on his terms, not mine. The end result was an internship, and eventually a tap into any advertising agency I wanted.
Networking is not about reaping at all - it's about sowing. It's about looking for as many opportunities to help people as possible. It's about saying thank you whenever someone does anything for you, regardless how small it is. It's about keeping in touch with them, letting them know you still care about them. It's about doing all these things, whether you think the potential exists for a profitable business relationship or not.
You'll find that it comes back to you - in terms of business, but also in terms of a healthy, happy life. You'll get referrals from the most unlikely of places. You'll discover that the best doctor in town is just a phone call away when you most need it. You'll discover that people love to help those who are generous with their time and energy. Call it karma, call it a psychological need on the part of humanity to practice reciprocity. Whatever it is, it will work in your favor to improve your business and your life.
Some quick tips for those looking to get started:
- Join LinkedIn, create a profile, and begin tracking down long lost contacts. Coworkers, classmates, whatever. If they're not using LinkedIn yet, invite them. You'll quickly discover who knows who and what these people are looking for. (If you're reading this, feel free to connect with me - would be happy to help you. Email is sean dot johnson at gmail dot com.)
- Start helping people! Is someone looking for a job in banking? Introduce them to your buddy who works for Chase! Someone hoping to get involved in an NGO in Africa, and you remember having a friend who served a stint in Ghana? Hook them up.
- Join a professional organization in your community, and get involved. They're always looking for talented, hard-working people (I managed to get a temporary position with the Seattle Ad club in my first 10 days in the city.)
- Have an enormous stack of thank you notes. Mail out at least one a day.
- Before boarding you plane, pick up a few magazines. Rip out interesting articles, put them in envelopes and mail them to someone you haven't talked to in a while who might be interested. Include a note telling them that you miss them and hope to see them soon.
- Remember birthdays.
- Most important, never keep score. That's not the point.
Who can you reconnect with right now?
Seth Godin had a very introspective moment yesterday as questioned what exactly blogs are. He has historically prided himself on using his blog to inform and excite its readership - not to contstantly push his books, businesses and other endeavors at us. Interestingly, he views his books as the beginning of a conversation - he's writing about topics and ideas that he admits he hasn't fully thought out yet, and the point is to start a dialogue where we hopefully all learn from each other.
If these books represent the starting point, the beginning of conversations which he hopes to continue (with his blog serving as a big tool for such dialogue to take place,) then would it be prudent of him to make sure as many new folks are reading his books as possible? Otherwise, the risk is that they join a conversation taking place midsentence - lacking the context that the books are meant to provide.
I wonder how often that's truly the case though. I think one of the things that makes Godin's work unique is his effectiveness at getting the mind to work. It's difficult to read his books or his blog and not immediately be compelled to find out more. I imagine that most people who stumble upon his blog are infected by the Godin ideavirus and promptly begin seeking out more info. It seems the Seth Godins and Tom Peters of the world are effective and compelling on the web because they focus on being remarkable, not on selling their products. As a result, people read what they have to say, become interested, and end up investing significantly more time and energy digesting the ideas they present. Their message is one of authenticity, and I think people appreciate that.
So, while one could make the argument that there are more people who would conceivably be compelled to buy books or go to seminars if one were to use their blog as a marketing medium, I think it comes back to the old ideas about what works in marketing, many of which were made mainstream by Seth himself.
- Never lose focus on making something worth talking about.
- Make your idea easy to spread (via blog posts and handy books one can take on the train or give as a gift.
- Obsessively cultivate influencers or 'sneezers' to spread the word for you in a way no marketing plug could.
- Spend time to milk your current success, but focus much more time on the next remarkable innovation so you avoid getting stuck.
- Remember that current customers are 8 times more likely to buy from you than newbies.
- Most importantly, be true to yourself and what you value. If it's important to you that you be an idea person who makes people think, don't worry about the fact that you're losing out on a few sales.
I'm a marketer by background, but I realized a while ago that I buy from people who aren't busy trying to market at me. How about you?
Got promoted last week - I'm no longer the ambiguous 'Director of User Experience' but a full-fledged Creative Director. It's a pretty cool feeling - since college, I knew that if I were going to bite the bullet and work for someone else, this would be the kind of position I'd want.
Whatever creative faculties I possess will have to wait to be flexed temporarily, however - the downside of being a growing company with an ever increasing client base is that someone has to produce all that work - and I'm now the lucky gent managing the guys who make that happen. The fact that they're able to create over 200 sites a year is pretty amazing stuff - my job is to make that process even more efficient, and to push the proverbial envelope of what we do even further. A pretty daunting task - but I've never been one to back down from a challenge. We'll see what happens.
As an aside - if you're an amazing designer looking to add some unversity clients to your portfolio, feel free to email me at sean DOT johnson AT gmail DOT com. As the great Tom Peters says, it's always the right time to look for great talent.
November 27, 2005
Google just keeps it coming. In the coming weeks you might start seeing little telephones next to sponsored ads on Google pages. It's called 'click-to'call' and it allows you to call the company directly from your computer - likely leveraging the technology they've implemented in Google Talk. Google apparently pays for the telephone charges, and the advertiser pays a fee for every call they receive.
I wonder how that will pan out given the pseudo-anonymous nature of the web. While it's compelling to think that a user is a click away from calling you, what are the odds they're going to do so based on your ad? Getting me to click on to your website or landing page is one thing - getting me to have a conversation with you over the phone is another entirely.
November 26, 2005
The extremely talented Andy Rutledge weighed in on the home page design for auction mega-giant eBay earlier today. His analysis was pretty thorough, and he managed to take a page that was extremely cluttered and hone in on what he felt were the most important pieces.
Andy does a great job of focusing on creating a "usable" site - reducing the number of competing elements, being consistent with links, etc. But while he does quite a bit to create a page that adheres to the guidelines put forth by the many usability experts in the marketplace, the focus on structural usability leads to a site that ignores some other factors that can lead to a good experience.
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November 22, 2005
I'm famous.
If you haven't read this book yet, you should - it's hard not to read the pieces without feeling compelled to do something immediately to change your organization and/or your life. Pick up a few copies for your friends as well - it's a worthy cause. In fact, I know what a few people are getting for Christmas...
Thanks Seth...
November 14, 2005
Good stuff. Back in my premarketing days this was the kind of stuff I'd stress contstantly - it really doesn't take much to leave a strong positive impression on your customers. In fact, I would submit that the little touches like these are often the most important thing that should be on your company's agenda for the day.
November 13, 2005
It looks like Sony has gotten caught with its hand in an enormous cookie jar. If you're a nerd, you'll find this stuff fascinating (how smart are these guys for figuring out what Sony's up to! And how likely would I be to see them at a party?) If you're not a nerd, you should still be interested as the implications on intellectual property, privacy and the rights of companies to modify your system hardware begin to bubble to the surface.
Via a different Sean who's much smarter than I am.
