Robert Middleton has an excellent post on the potential role of marketing, and independent professionals, to do something really big in terms of turning the tide.

“What if you were the coach or consultant to someone who invented a battery that could run a car for a week? What if your support helped them develop it twice as fast?”

Link here.

Bookmark to:

I was pointed to this site by a post by “Church of the Customer Blog”http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/the_facebook_le.html, contrasting Threadless with Facebook, who made a blunder that aliented thousands of fan-users by not listening to them in the development of their site.

Threadless sells T-shirts. They don’t produce anything without getting positive feedback from their users. They never have a flop. At the top of their home page, the most prominent thing is a big “PARTICIPATE”. You can go on and rate the T-shirts.

You can submit entries to be made into T-shirts. If you own an T-shirt of theirs and you don’t yet have a photo of you up there wearing that T-shirt, you can get a $1.50 credit for uploading a photo of you in the shirt.

Each shirt has its own, cool-looking page. One page I saw had a song about the shirt on the page (an mp3 you could play)!

You can rate the designs.

There are currently 42,669 photos of people wearning their shirts on the site!

These guys are really thinking about what works; what’s fun; what is visually appealing, but also useful.

Bookmark to:

Ya know, the agricultural analogies are pretty useful, eh?

A friend and I were going to get together. She called me and said, she realized she needed to focus on giving herself more oxygen, before she could supply it to anyone else in the cabin (that’s how she put it).

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ve been realizing that I’ve spent so much time sowing seeds for future, wonderful projects, that I have had almost no attention on picking the fruit that’s harvestable right now.”

After this analogy dropped into my head (maybe it’s all the rain we’ve been having), I realized how apt it is, and how often I forget it. You can have the greatest seeds in the world—the seeds of your greatest, truest, magical dream. But if they’re not ready for harvest, you can’t eat them. As animals, we needs to eat—every day. That meanst we need enough harvestable fruits to surive every day. And even if the fruit was from some old project that we now feel we’re done with—you feel sick of that work, and you don’t want to give anything more to it—if that’s all the fruit you’ve got to eat, you’d better harvest it.

In the past, I’ve walked away from fields of such easily-pickable fruits, only to come rushing back to them, to eat a little more—and in the process, forgotten to tend to the seedlings of new projects—which, typically, began to wither and droop in the sun, and often simply die of neglect.

So I guess the moral of this story is, if you want to make a transition to some other kind of work—and you don’t have some extra source of income (a spouse, a parent, a loan, etc.), you’d better remember to tend to that harvestable fruit (or you’ll starve), and you’d better really take time to nurture those seedlings and encourage them to grow (or you’ll get discouraged, lose faith, and perhaps steel yourself against future disappointment by never trying again).

Bookmark to:

White space creates an empty vessel that allows one’s attention to settle in and focus.

Take Google. They have to have had a great deal of self-discipline to resist the temptation of increasing the demands for attention on their home page for short-term gain.

Remember when Yahoo! was really, really simple? After the dot-com crash of 2000, they caved in and added more and more stuff. That was when I switched to Google.

Apple is another example. Lots and lots of white space. Your attention can easily focus on the one, simple message. It feels clean, clear, high. It respects your attention.

And Craigslist. Craig turned down numerous requests to buy him out for lots of money. Because he felt he had a commitment to provide something to the community—a space they could make their own, that was free of the annoying barrage of advertising almost everywhere else. The design is very 1995—practically no design at all. A blank slate for you to fill with whatever you want.

Designers are always telling us to use white space. So are public speaking instructors and marketing coaches. The mind wants to fill up every space with as much stuff as possible, and sees this as the best option. And when we encounter a space that is already filled up, the habitual reaction is to shout louder.

It dilutes the message and clutters the mind. Something in our mind wants to fill up every space in our lives—with thoughts, with drama, with clutter that makes us feel busy.

People become obsessed with being busy, and miss the main point of their lives (whatever it may be).

Public speakers who speak slowly, simply, and clearly give off an air of power, while those who try to rush through their speech sound weak.

Realize the difference between creating white space around what you have to say, and not having enough to say. Clarify your main point, and cut out everything.

Respect other people’s attention (and your own), and make something good.

Bookmark to:

I have been meaning to post these for a very long time. I really like the blog thing… but I have to find a way to carve out small chunks of time in which to create the entries.

***

Your uniqueness = True power = Influence to the good

The most powerful leverege you can ever have to really affect the world, in a positive way, is to be found through nourishing your spark and bringing it into the world in service.

Treat everyone you market to with the honesty, care, and compassion you would give to your best friend, your mothner, or your child. If that raises issues, deal with them! They’re red flags of something you need to integrate about what you’re doing.

Honesty, transparency, integrity. People can smell pretens4e a mile away. The more they’re bombarded with it, the more important realness becomes. You have to get beyond people’s cynicism and mistrust. And the waay to do this isn’t by feigning realness, or putting together a very real presentation—it’s by being real… Which leads me to another emerging principle…

No Separation

Old Paradigm: Parts… units… broken pieces… working for the weekend/retirement… different standards of honesty for friends, partners, co-workers, customers… living life through show/focus on appearances as a measure of worth… create something, then market it… using “tricks”… m oney above all else… the pretense of honesty because it’ll get you what you want… complexity, schemes, manpulation.

New Paradigm: Harder to make simple statements, because everything is connected… but the truths themselves are more real/whole, in feel… honesty = wholeness = realness = why someone would bother giving you their attention = that is actually who you are being anyway = the realness that brings you happiness, fulfillment, and free attention = what you’re here to do anyway = who you really are. You see how simple it gets?

Bookmark to:

Flower for sister, originally uploaded by mbauhs.

I was thinking about how to express the exuberance, life, joy that is at the heart of what I am encouraging people (including me!) to go for in their lives. This is it.

Bookmark to:

Maybe this is obvious to the seasoned professionals out there, but I thought this was really cool.

I was reading DuctTapeMarketing’s page on getting found by local search enginges. One of his example pages was for a biz in Kansas City called Schloegel Design Remodel. At the top of the little profile, along with contact info, etc., was the phrase (linked): “Jake Schloegel answers remodeling questions”.

Again, pretty obvious – but powerful. Jake is willing to give away free advice, and he’s willing to put it right at the front of his thing, not hide it on some buried part of the site. The effect is that I am immediately interested in Jake though I didn’t think I had any remodeling questions, etc.

Being willing to put your free information right out there in front—and not just some generic tips, but being willing to answer actual questions people have—will grab people’s attention, instantly make them appreciate you, feel grateful for your time, and put you first in their mind. Immediately, you’ve gotten three or five steps further along the decision chain, by putting yourself right out there in the open. What’s more, by being open to actual, random questions, you’ll get a great sense of what a cross-section of your audience (the people who are actually looking you up) are actually thinking about.

And on Jake’s site, the main page is actually a blog, where each post is a question from someone, with Jake’s answer. So, the site gradually becomes a knowledge base of pertinent information about remodeling.

Bookmark to:

I realized that I often go to a web site, and start to browse around. And if I like the look of it, the feel of it, the energy behind what they are saying… I start feeling like “Hey! These are real people, and it sounds like they like what they’re doing.” The next thing I do is scan to see if I can detect anyting about the people behind the business… “yeah, that’s nice that they’re excellent, etc.,” but who are they?

And that is often when I click on the About Us link. Sometimes it gives me personal information about who the people are, that starts to let me feel connected to the real people behind the site. That is a very good thing. Other times, it doesn’t—say who the people are, what they’re like, or even where they are located!

My point is, if people like you and like what you’re doing, the more they’re going to want to know who you are, and have some kind of information about who you are as a person… what makes you tick. Please give it to them.

Bookmark to:

I don’t know enough to know whether it is “uncool” to link to old (but relevant) posts. But the purpose of this blog is to provide useful tips and perspectives to my clients, and others like them.

http://www.horsepigcow.com/2006/01/marketing-in-post-cluetrain-era.html

Bookmark to:

These are some of the ideas that are emerging for me about radical honesty and marketing.

Total transparency. There is nothing to hide. At the higher modes of consciousness, you start to notice that lying is impossible. As society evolves, we each become a little more genuine and honest. And the more we are not trying to pretend ourselves, the more we are going to notice pretense in others.

I have a feeling that’s part of why there’s such a strong backlash people often feel when the hear the word “marketing”—we were all made to many promises about the benefits of the right soap powder to our success in life when we were children watching television. And now, we’re starting to wake up to our own, and others’, dishonesty.

When we first realize that we can’t hide anything, we might be very nervous, because we’ve been hiding things for so long. And what we keep as secret, we’re identified with. But when we start to get a little more honest, and widen out beyond it, we can see it all with a little more lightheartedness, and move on.

What is the quality that makes you really love a business? My guess is, that it has a lot to do with the degree of sincerity, realness, openness. Of course, that has to be combined with a wholehearted emphasis on being in service, and genuinely tuning into you, your needs, and how to serve them. And I guess the third quality is the feeling that they are tuning into their own passion and spark, their own zest for life.

Bookmark to: