Categories
Daily Life

2011 Interview with Steven Pressfield

Two years ago I had a chance to speak to a key player on The Domino Project, Ishita Gupta, and one of the authors involved, Steven Pressfield.

When Steven’s next book came out the email I had for him had been shut down. I contacted his admin about an interview for the new book and was told there wouldn’t be any. We get plenty of books in for review so I moved on to the next one, but was disappointed because I like his work and really enjoyed speaking with him. My bruised ego thought “I’m sure if Oprah called they’d find some time on the calendar.”

Well, guess who showed up on Oprah today? When I heard about this earlier in the week I grabbed this interview from the archives (click here if you’d rather listen to us) and sent it to transcription. No reason for me not to take advantage of a probable search boost from Steven getting an hour with the greatest name in TV.

John:  Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. Today we have a special interview with Ishita Gupta and Steven Pressfield.

We have two special guests with us today. Ishita Gupta works on The Domino Project, a series of books and some new ideas on book marketing. She also works on a number of projects with Seth Godin, whose book “Poke the Box” was the first book in The Domino Project. Ishita, thanks for talking to us today.

Ishita:  Thank you for having us on.

John:  Also joining us is Steven Pressfield, the author of “Do the Work,” the recently released second book in The Domino Project. His previous books include “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” which in 2001 was made into a movie with Will Smith, Matt Damon, and Chalize Theron and readers of military books will surely recognize him as the author of “Gates of Fire” which is regarded as one of the best books on the Battle of Thermopolyae. Steven, thanks for joining us.

Steven:  It’s my pleasure, John. Thanks for having us.

John:  Ishita, tell us a little bit about The Domino Project to get started.

Ishita:  The Domino Project is a new publishing venture started by Seth Godin, who you just mentioned, and powered by Amazon. I think the biggest thing that I like to talk about when I think about Domino is it’s changing publishing in a way that’s not thinking that publishing is dead, but it’s just taking publishing to the next level of what it can be.

We work really closely with authors like Seth and Steve and try to publish books that have impact and send things out to the market and to the world that our readers will value. It’s a lot of thinking about what readers will want and how to get that to the market as quick as possible and in a way that will delight both the authors that we’re working with and ourselves and the people who ultimately will get these books.

John:  From the first two books that we’ve seen, it seems like a core concept is that these are kind of books to motivate, not just the regular “Here’s the concept, here’s a bunch of tired case studies.” What’s your guiding principle on choosing books for this project?

Ishita:  The things that we publish are all about initiation. That’s what Poke the Box’s main theme was – and Steve will speak better to this about “Do the Work” – it’s really about taking action.

We want to compel people to change the way that they’re doing things. If you’re feeling stuck or you’re feeling like you’re in a place that you want to change, these are the books for you. Most business books that we see out there are very long and filled with statistics, which is great for a certain kind of reader but these aren’t the books that we’re publishing. I think what we think about a lot at Domino is what is going to change a conversation that someone has with their peer, with their colleague, with their family. What is going to make them want to spread something, and ultimately, what is going to compel them to change?

You’re right. It’s a lot of topics on initiating, on honesty, on courage, on biting the bullet, and doing work that you think matters.

Steven:  Ishita, let me ask you a question because I was thinking about this last night. I know that Seth defines the books for The Domino Project as “manifestos.” How would you define that? What does manifesto mean to Seth and to you and The Domino Project?

Ishita:  When I hear the term “manifesto” I inherently think that there’s a call-to-action. A manifesto is something that you read, and after reading it, something changes within you. Whether it’s the next action that you’re going to take or a thought that you had about something, some paradigm will shift. I don’t think we use the word manifesto lightly.  That is our central goal. That is the central focus in the books that we publish, and I think also the books that we read as individuals.

Our team is composed of about eight people all with very different backgrounds and creative outlets, ideals, and thoughts and it’s really about what makes us want to go out and do meaningful work, change the way we think about things, and I ultimately think that’s why we decided on the term manifesto.

These are “books” that are short, that are compelling, and are really built to spread. A manifesto in and of itself is something designed to speak to a lot of people is universal in its theme. That, to me, is why we’re using the term manifesto.

Steven:  Basically, I’m a novelist, so when I first saw The Domino Project and what Seth was doing with Amazon, my first thought was, “Can we do this with novels?” Maybe in the future in some way maybe; I don’t know.

Like Ishita says, these Domino Project books are maybe 100 pages long, something like that –something you can actually read in one sitting – so I don’t think it does fit for a novel. More’s the pity from my point of view, but certainly it is a new paradigm being only with Amazon, not in a bookstore, not at any other online place. A very interesting new product that doesn’t exist I don’t think in any other place.

John:  One thing with “Do the Work” is it does serve up a lot of the concepts from your book “War of Art.” Are you looking at this as a lead in? By making this book spread far and fast, it will entice people to get into the rest of your work, or do you consider it more free standing?

Steven:  I consider it free standing, but of course any book you hold will bring readers to your other books. But this one, like Ishita says, was really more of call-to-action in a manifesto the way Ishita defines it. Do the work rather than war of art.

The way it came about in a way was that a young guy wrote to me. He sent me an e-mail and said, “I’m stuck in the middle of this screenplay. I have to deliver it in two weeks for a class I’m taking. Help!”

Normally, I would never respond to something like that because I don’t want to be anybody’s guru or anything like that, but just for the hell of it I thought, “Okay, I’ll give him a little assignment.” I did, and it seemed to work.

That’s where, from my point of view, the idea of “Do the Work” came out where it’s much more of a “Take this step, take that step, take this step” rather than being as theoretical as the “War of Art” was. So it fit perfect into Seth’s concept, or The Domino Project’s concept, of the manifesto.

Ishita:  I just want to jump in here quickly and say that I have both sitting on my desk right now. I have a copy of the “War of Art” and then I have a copy of “Do the Work.” To me, they fit very perfectly together, but at the same time, the concept of resistance I feel like you introduced in “War of Art” whereas in “Do the Work” it’s more about how you battle the resistance. Both are very actionable. But when I think about “Do the Work” all I have to do is look at it and I’m compelled to get over the resistance and do my work or start my blog or what have you.

I think it almost does take it a step further. Both are amazing books, but for action, I’m looking at them both right now and I’m thinking, “Alright, let me just do the work.”

John:  That’s an excellent jump on point there, too. Steven, for the folks who aren’t familiar with your work, tell us a bit about the resistance and how the book revolves around that.

Steven:  Resistance with a capital R is a name that I gave for myself to all the forces of self-sabotage. Procrastination, self-doubt, fear, all of those things that stop us – from a writer’s point of view – from facing the blank page. But from an entrepreneur’s point of view it will stop you from starting a new business or taking some step that you know you need to do.

Resistance in my experience always kicks in when you’re trying to move from a lower level to a higher level or to identify with a braver part of yourself or your higher nature. So it’s that negative repelling force. It’s kind of the dragon that we have to slay every day if we’re artists or entrepreneurs.

John:  You’re talking about definitely getting started. I think another key point, too ,that people miss is the idea of losing to the inner critic, if you could talk about that and how that fits into this.

Steven:  The inner critic is just resistance par excellence. It’s that voice that comes from – and we all know – our parents, our childhood, our teachers, or maybe from previous lives for all I know. But that is resistance par excellence. Resistance really takes the shape, for me, in voices in my head telling me why I can’t do something or why I should put it off for another day, procrastinate for another day. “Don’t do it, do something else. Do something that’s easier” or “I’m not good enough,” “I’m too young,” “I’m too old,” “I’m too, whatever.” It is that inner critic voice. That’s really exactly what we’re talking about.

John:  Another big point that hit home quickly was talking about how screenwriters pitch as far as framing your story and then filling in the pieces. Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Steven:  That’s one of the first steps in “Do the Work.” This may give your listeners a sense of what the book’s about. As far as starting a project is what I call the foolscap method of starting a project that I learned from my beloved mentor Norm Stall. Basically, what he said to me once when we’re talking about writing books – we had a piece of yellow foolscap, a pad of foolscap – and he said, “Steve, God created a sheet of yellow foolscap to be exactly the right length for the entire outline of a novel.” That has been an enormous help to me.

The bottom line of that technique is whatever your project is – if it’s a new business, if it’s a philanthropic venture, if it’s a book, a screenplay, whatever it is – step one is get it all down on one page. That was step one in getting something rolling.

The next question is: what do you put down on the one page? How do you do it?

A great trick that I learned having worked as a screenwriter for many years, the way screenwriters work, is they break the project down into three-act structure: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. I think that is a great way to break down any project, whether it’s a new business or anything at all. Just put down the numbers one, two, and three – start, middle, end. That’s a great way to organize a project in your mind without thinking too much about it.

John:  We talked about getting rolling and getting started. There’s a section in the book that talks about “the belly of the beast” when you’re facing darkness. Maybe your first real failure is eminent or possible. If you can talk about that, what does that mean – belly of the beast? What do you do with that?

Steven:  One thing I’ve found in any project is almost universally about three quarters of the way through – or maybe a little father, maybe seventh eighths on the way through – any project will explode. It’s like that point in running a marathon where you hit the wall. It seems to me it always happens. I don’t know why it does, but it does. The real point at that juncture is, first of all, be ready for it so it doesn’t completely throw you. Secondly, not to take it personally, not to take it as personal failure that happened to you.

In fact, this just happened. I was working on a novel called “The Profession” which I’ve been working on for more than two years. I thought I was done and the exact same thing happened. It just blew up on me. I gave it to friends I really valued and colleagues, and they hated it. They were right.

So I found myself three quarters of the way through having to go back to square one. It really threw me. I made a couple of terrible mistakes and taking it too personally, over identifying with it. It took me months to thrash my way out of this. If I had only listened to my own advice.

The problem I’ve always discovered in my own work when this kind of thing happens when you hit the wall is there’s almost always a reason. You’ve almost always made a mistake in the initial conception of the project. You misapprehended something or you thought something would work and now you’re three quarters on the way through and you see that it doesn’t work.

The answer is, in the Marine Corps they have a way of working that they call “work the problem.” That’s kind of what I do. To remember that the problem is the problem. It’s not you. It’s not any personal failing of yours. It’s just a mistake that you’ve made, a misapprehension that you’ve allowed. It’s like a virus you’ve allowed to get into something and you just have to go back to square one, painstakingly, laboriously and figure out what went wrong. What did I leave out or what did I put in I shouldn’t have put in here? Just solve the problem like a mechanic would solve a problem in an automobile.

That’s the area that I call “the belly of the beast” in “Do the Work”. I think anybody that has done any long project knows that that moment always comes when the project just hits the wall and they have to go back to square one.

John:  Ishita, it’s funny. You’re in the throes of this project now. Two questions for you. One is, how is the measurement going? Is it doing what you wanted it to do? Second, what’s next for it? Where are you going with this?

Ishita:  It’s doing exactly what we want it to do. Just going from “Poke the Box” which was Seth’s first book, we have measurements for that. It’s interesting because we think that digital isn’t spreading and people aren’t reading on e-devices and things like that just from a marketing and book publishing standpoint. On Amazon’s side, Kindles are now outselling regular traditional hard covers by two to one, or even three to one in some instances. That, for us, was a really big learning.

Operating in the digital space has always something Seth has been in the mix with, but for the team at Domino it was a really big learning experience to see where and how people were actually reading. To touch on “Do the Work” it’s been incredible to see how many vast numbers of people are reading now digitally on the Kindle. Just today, I think, Steve, we had sent an e-mail back and forth about “Do the Work” being number one on the Kindle as a bestseller, which is amazing. It’s been only two days since launch.

To me, those are all really heartening things that are coming out of the way that we’re choosing to operate. There was a really big sponsorship for “Do the Work” which was GE, which I think is interesting because not a lot of publishers are open to looking at businesses as potential partners. There’s some maybe either fear or hesitation there, but that was something that really took us over the hump, I guess you could say, in terms of getting this book out to as many people as possible.

I’m really pleased. I know our team is always trying to think about how else we can spread these books that are really important to us and to our readers. I think having Amazon as a partner and having them do what they do best which is targeted marketing, which is insane  distribution, that’s something that’s a fantastic partnership because now we can do what we do best which is curating and working with authors like Steve and getting really great books out there. And we can let Amazon do what they do best which is reaching tons of people and helping us fulfill and do that. So I’m really pleased with where we’re at.

John:  In the future, what’s next?

Ishita:  It’s interesting because this is a new space for us. Everything that we’re doing is testing and experimenting. But we are working with authors coming in the pipeline for the next six or seven months. We have content lined up. We have great authors who were pitching to work with us, who have agreed to work with us. There’s a constant edge that we’re on to try to do (A) what we’re doing better and (B) figure out what it is we’re doing. Everything that we’ve tried I think with “Do the Work,” Steve, you could tell that we were learning just as much as your team was throughout this whole thing.

Steven:  You covered it up pretty good, Ishita. It looked like you knew exactly what you were doing, to me.

Ishita:  It’s a learning for us. I think our next move is to still take our content just as seriously as our marketing techniques and figuring out our distribution. It’s just a matter of who we want to work with and what ideas we want to send out there. I know the people on our team are totally innovative and everyone comes from a totally different background. It’s interesting to see what ideas we come to the table with.

The future is going to be maybe ten books this year. We’re thinking about 10-15 books. Seth is probably going to only write one or two this year. But just bringing on a bunch of really great authors.

John:  That’s great. “Do the Work” is available only at Amazon.com. Ishita, thanks for telling us about The Domino Project. That’s pretty interesting new marketing techniques for publishing. We’re interested to see where this goes.

Steven, I’ve noticed that you had the artist on campaign scheduled for October 2011 release. Can you tell us anything about that or is that still on the wraps?

Steven:  It’s sort of a full-fledged follow-up to the “War of Art.” That’s about as much as I want to say at the moment. But thanks for asking, John. It will be out October.

John:  That sounds great. That will do it for us!

Categories
Great Marketing

Jay Baer on Youtility

Jay Baer is an acclaimed keynote speaker, New York Times best selling author, entrepreneur, technology investor, and social media and digital marketing consultant. His latest book is Youtility, and I had a chance to chat with him on Marketing Over Coffee (click if you prefer audio).

John:  Today, we have a special episode. We have the author of Youtility, Jay Baer, with us. Jay, Welcome to the show.

Jay:  Thanks very much. Time will tell whether I am a special guest or not.

John:  We’ll be watching the numbers, and I think given the Jay Bayer freight train that has been accelerating over the past couple of months, I’d put money on you.

Jay:  Thanks.

John:  So, you’ve written NOW Revolution with Amber Naslund a while back. Your latest book is Youtility. It’s made the New York Times Best Seller List. Congratulations. Tell me a little bit about the book. Let’s give everybody the elevator pitch. What is Youtility about?

Jay:  The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters make all the difference. If you sell something, you could make a customer today. But if you help someone, you can make a customer for life. And the way you do that is by creating something that is so useful, people will pay for. It’s marketing that is truly and inherently valuable. It has intrinsic value. If you do that, you will win in the end.

John:  Right. You’ve got a bunch of great case studies in there, too. It’s a perfect example of a strong business book. You’ve got a big idea, and then you’ve got a bunch of great examples. I have to give you credit for that because so many of these books, I can only hear so many times about Zappos before I’m all set. You definitely rocked a bunch of case studies here.

Getting to the bigger part of this, at the core of it, you’re doing something helpful. You’re doing some marketing activities that are not directly related to the product. You talked about the psychological front here, where the people in the company expect an immediate return. How do you address that? How do you tell people to take this leap of faith?

Jay:  No doubt, it is a leap of faith because what Youtility really requires is for you to take a longer approach to the marketing success horizon. I will paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuck who says, “One of the problems with marketing today is that everybody wants to be a hunter and nobody wants to be a farmer.” And that’s exactly right.

Youtility is almost a playbook for becoming a marketing farmer. For building lifetime customer value through useful information and useful things that will yield attention and sales, and loyalty and advocacy, but over a longer period of time than what we customarily have been trained to think about.

Marketing has for 5,000 years, since the caveman tried to sell a rock to another caveman, has always been about buy now, not buy eventually. But since consumers are in control now, both with the messages they receive and how they receive them. You have to do something different, and I think that the thing that you need to do different is Youtility.

John:  I love that hunter-farmer analogy because that fits perfectly. You talk about frame of mind awareness where like you said, it’s hunting. It’s hoping that the day you show up that somebody there is ready and willing to buy – and that’s really getting to be more and more challenging.

There’s the classic study about saying that 60% of the buying decision is made before the trigger gets pulled, which is just basically the death of enterprise software as far as Oracle yachts and all that kind of stuff.

You had Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Warby Parker, a few other case studies. Give us one case study of somebody that’s doing something on the Youtility front that is working well and fits your mold.

Jay:  You bet. And thanks very much for mentioning earlier the variety of case studies that are in the book. That was very much curated and calculated in that I have read a lot of business books that had case studies, but they are of a particular type. I wanted to make sure that whether you’re B2B or B2C, small business, big business, anything in between, that you can see yourself in the stories that are contained in Youtility. So far the feedback has been that is the case, and I’m really very delighted about that. I’ll give you a couple of examples, just because I think that they epitomize what we are talking about a moment ago quite well with the psychological redirection.

One of my favorite examples in the book is from Columbia Sportswear. Columbia, of course, makes outdoor gear and jackets and pants and hats and stuff. They have a mobile application called What Knot to Do in the Greater Outdoors, and it actually shows you how to tie knots. It’s like “Hey, here’s how you tie a whatever, a fisherman’s knot, or a half hitch.” There’s dozens and dozens of knots. If you’re camping or hanging off the side of a cliff, that is massively useful information. If you’re recording a podcast, less so. I’m not tying any knots right now but maybe in a bit.

What’s interesting, though, is that Columbia Sportswear doesn’t sell rope. They’re not in the rope business. So the obvious marketing place – the old school marketing mentality for them – would have been, “We need a mobile app. Let’s create a jacket finder or a jacket configurator, where you decide are you fishing, or are you skiing? We’ll recommend a jacket to you.” That’s modestly interesting, and you’re going to use that one time, at best.

But instead, Columbia went the extra mile. They surveyed their customers and determined that, indeed, the vast majority of outdoors enthusiasts have their smartphones with them when they’re outdoors, both for safety and GPS purposes, and they said, “Oh, well let’s try and give them information that has greater value and over a longer period of time.” So, they created the knot app, which allows them to market sideways instead of marketing head-on, and now introduces their brand in their customers’ lives in ways that transcend the transactional.

In many cases with Youtility, that’s a really key concept, providing value in ways that transcend the transactional. Sometimes your products and services don’t have to be the star of the show. Sometimes information can be the star, and the products and services follow. We’re so eager to both lead customers to water and to make them drink. Maybe we should just lead them to water and they can figure out whether to drink themselves.

John:  Right. You’ve got an interesting concept there: superior knowledge of your customer. Because as I said,  basically anybody that’s really interested in knots, that’s probably somebody that could be buying Columbia stuff. Someone who’s not an Avid Indoorsman.

Jay:  Right. Actually, I have the Avid Indoorsman domain name. Someday I’m going to do something with that.

John:  That sounds like a merit badge. It would just have a picture of a couch on it.

Jay:  I love it.

John:  There’s a related point to this too, which is because this is not head-on marketing like you were talking about, you do have to market your marketing, which is a phrase that you use. Tell us about that.

Jay:  Many companies are starting to embrace content marketing, which is fantastic. And one of the reasons that I wrote Youtility is that you see all of these companies starting to make content, but most of them don’t really know why they’re making content. They’re just making it to make it. It’s like making sandwiches. Youtility really is a strategic scaffolding for why to do content marketing.

But what I find – and I’m sure you’ve seen this, John – is that a lot of times companies, even good companies, smart companies, good marketers, put together some sort of a thing. It’s a blog, it’s a podcast, it’s an e-book, it’s an infographic, it’s a series of videos, it’s a new vine campaign or whatever, and it goes nowhere. It just falls flat. It’s not always – in fact, not often –because of the quality of the thing. It’s because the thing got no support. You have to create a marketing plan for your marketing assets.

You mentioned the Phoenix Children’s Hospital application, another mobile app. It’s a hospital in Phoenix obviously. They’ve got this app that’s very simple, that shows you how to pick out the best possible car seat. They have a two-person marketing team. For that introduction of just that very simple app, they had a 60-day launch plan with all kinds of different facets to it.

If you’re going to go through the trouble of using Youtility, use your corporate voice to actually promote that. Not only does that make sure that your utility will actually get more attention, it’s actually what people want.

This is why I say “content is fire, and social media is gasoline”. All companies would be better off using their social media to promote their very useful utilities than they are to promote themselves one 140-character press release at a time.

John:  Yeah. I have to give you a shout out for pointing out Tom Fishburne’s cartoons. He’s got some marketing cartoons and there’s a great one talking about social media strategy. Basically the light grab, or the broadcast – these one-shot wasted campaigns that litter the corporate social media landscape. It’s everywhere.

Jay:  Tom is so fantastic. Have you ever had him on the show?

John:  No. This is like the classic new reality of business. Here’s somebody who is ridiculously awesome and has been doing their thing for five years and I’ve just never run across them because they’re in a total other world.

Jay:  You’ve got to go through his archives. The hardest thing I had to do with Tom Fishburne is figure out which of his cartoons I wanted to license for the book. I started with 15 that I pulled up. I can’t have 15 of the same guy’s cartoons in the book. That’s going to look a little weird. It would be a graphic novel at that point, so I had to narrow it down to a couple. But he is just terrific. He’s so spot-on.

John:  Are you going to be at the Profs B2B in October? Is that on your list, normally, of shows to head to?

Jay:  Normally, yes. Unfortunately, I am otherwise detained this year. It is a little fast and furious with the book release and the unofficial book tour, if you will. I think I have 30 conferences between now and Thanksgiving. So unfortunately, I couldn’t get that one done this time.

John:  You’re definitely in the burning a lot of fuel section of the book.

Jay:  I fly on every airline, but because there’s no hub in Indianapolis, none with any concentration – and this is a true story, ladies and gents: I am Silver on 10 different American airlines.

John:  I was going to say, this is one of my favorite stock travel tips for people that don’t know. Once you crack that nut with a single airline, you can just go to the other airlines and say “Hey, I’ve got status here. Give it to me. Otherwise, they’ll never fly you”. Most of the time they will say, “Okay. Just fax us your paperwork to prove it, and we’ll let you in.”

Jay:  Interesting. I’m going to take you up on that because that could change my life considerably. I can’t even get TSA Pre because I’m not Gold on anybody, even though I’m at the airport almost every day, because nobody will let me in the program.

John:  No kidding, to crack through security. Keep going back to Fishburne – he has that great article of the guy being by TSA and then over on the sign they’ve got the poster “Like us on Facebook.”

Jay:  And that’s true. They actually do have those posters in some airports. I actually did a blog post once. They had a QR code in the TSA line that you could shoot to download a video of what to put in your carry-on. I’m thinking, “All right. This is a little bit technology for technology sake”.

John:  Right. Where to find a quart-size bags.

Jay:  I prefer the guy randomly screaming. You know how they do that? Every once in a while, you get the screamer guy at the front of the line like, “Make sure you take your laptops out, and take off your shoes.” But not all of them do it. It’s almost like at the ballpark where you’ve got some guys who sell popcorn who sell one way, and other guys have the red licorice and they’re like, “Red licorice!” It’s the same thing with TSA. You get some guys who are the screamers who have to go through every single regulation in case nobody’s ever flown before.

John:  Right. And then there’s still 30% of the folks in line who will get to the front and they will have no clue of what the hell the guy was talking about.

Jay:  No idea.

John:  Shoes still tied, and a bushel of food that they’re wheeling through.

Jay:  Five jackets. I feel bad for people who clearly don’t travel much, who have to dump something of value, and it happens all the time. Yeah, you should read instructions and you should pay attention and have some situational awareness, but it does make me sad to see somebody like, “Well, I can’t take this back to check it, so I’m going to have to leave my expensive wine,” or whatever the deal is.

John:  Grandpa’s pocket knife and they have a 55-gallon drum of pocket knives in the back there.

Jay:  Actually, there’s a blog about that I’ve seen, and it’s unreal. They get some crazy number just in loose change that’s left in the bins, they use it to partially fund TSA. No joke, John. It’s like $200,000 a year or something just of loose change. It’s great.

John:  Yeah, I know. You just don’t respect the volume of the thousands of flights out of every single airport every day. It’s insane. So yes, GoToMeeting, why the hell are you not sponsoring this podcast? I guess that’s the question I have to ask about that.

Getting back to the book, you had another neat stat in there that I had never seen talking about IBM training their employees at social media, and the fact that in the classroom setting, one in eleven would succeed whereas employees trained one-on-one would hit three out of four. That blew me away. Have you got logic behind that?

Jay:  Yeah. We weren’t involved in that program, but that kind of employee activation in social and training is some of the work that we do at Convince and Convert for corporate clients. We see those same kind of results all the time. It’s not so much about knowledge of social and understanding. It’s having that support group – somebody who is in the company who can give advice in the moment, who can cajole, who can advise.

This idea that what companies need to do is train their employees in social is not really true. They have to train, activate them, and support. It’s really a day to day hand-holding exercise. And when you do that, when you staff that, when you put the effort into that, the results are fantastic. But if you just say, “Well, you went through the webinar, good luck to you,” which is how most people do it, your results are mitigated.

John:  Jumping over to mobile, too. There’s a section of the book where you talk about customer location-based stuff as far as being useful in location, their situation, and then taking advantage of seasonality or external factors. Talk a little bit more about that. How does that fit into Youtility?

Jay:  Well, because the premise of Youtility is to provide things that are fantastically useful, one of the easiest and best ways to do that is to do so in a mobile environment because mobile, by definition, gives you information about what people are doing. Therefore, you can more easily add relevance that becomes useful. There’s lots of examples in the book on not only mobile apps, but sort of the mobile future that allows you to say, “Look, we know where you are from a location perspective, or we know what you’re doing, or we know what context you’re currently operating in, and we can deliver value to you in the moment.”

One of the things that I like as a mobile data opportunity is Cloth. Cloth is an application that formerly allowed you to organize your closet. You would get dressed, and then take pictures of what you were wearing and store those in a mobile app so that you could know what it is that you own and also what combination of outfits you particularly like, etc. (A) I’m a dude and (B) I’m middle-aged, so that use case didn’t resonate with me. It kind of seems like first-world problems, like “I’ve got to organize my closet on my iPhone.”

But then, what Cloth did was they added some additional data that is location aware. They have a real-time weather feed, and it knows where you are because your phone has got location services turned on. Using that real-time weather feed, Cloth now recommends to you based what’s in your closet, what you should wear that day based on the weather forecast. So now, it went from something I’m kind of like “eh” to something that is actually terrifically useful based on the fact that they can tap in to location data via mobile.

John:  That’s great. It’s funny. As I was reading, I thought the same thing. Middle-aged guy, two kids under five years old. I really need a vomit detector. That would be the only thing that I could use for my wardrobe.

Jay:  Which t-shirt could I wear unless I’m in a video webinar?

John:  Right. You got the white collared shirt to pull down when the camera’s on. But otherwise, I’m pulling a Chris Berman in my Hawaiian shorts here. The joy of podcasting – theatre of the mind.

You had a part in the book here that flipped a light for me. We talked about showrooming a number of times on Marketing Over Coffee, and the death of the big stores, people price-comparing on site and all of that. But you had a great point with these big box stores. If you’re just a vending machine, that’s it. You’re out of luck. The vending machine thing kind of hit me. That’s exactly what’s going on. You literally put in your money and walk away and there’s no other value. Do you see this as the death of big box stores? Are they basically on the path to extinction, or is there a way around that for them?

Jay:  There is a way around it, but it’s very difficult. Is there a way around it that will work economically? I’m uncertain. What you have to do is compete on something other than price. You have to make the experience of being in a store, being in a physical environment demonstrably better than buying something from your phone. If it’s not, you will eventually be gone. I think book stores are perhaps a better case than electronics stores, at least at this point.

I went to Barnes and Noble recently. I’m not picking on those guys. It’s just the reality. I went to Barnes and Nobles to find my own book, and it took me a long time to find the business section, and then is this organized by author’s last name? Is it organized by topic? If so, what topic would I be in? Social media or marketing or something else? There’s nobody there to help you and there’s all this other craziness going on. I’m thinking, unless I’m just browsing around and I want to be inspired by what books are available and I’m just sort of hoping for lightening to strike me in the book sense, I just couldn’t fathom a reason why that would be an easier way to shop, because it’s not.

But if you actually created an environment in an electronics circumstance or a book circumstance where it really was a better place to shop, and where you see that is in your independent book retailers who purposely have very much curated their offering. They’re like, “Look, we don’t have every book, but every book we have, we know is awesome. And we have a very high staff-to-customer ratio so we will proactively see if you need anything, and we will recommend books to you, and we’re going to have author signings, and we’re going to have readings, and we’re going to have free coffee, and we’re going to have comfy chairs, and we encourage you to browse instead of scolding you for browsing.”

If you create a better customer experience, you can win. But so far, very few of these big chains have been able to or willing to create a better experience because they’ve always won on price and now they can’t. There are some examples in the book of retailers that are trying to do that. They’re trying to make the shopping experience an experience.

John:  Before we wind down, I did notice from your bio that you are a tequila and barbeque fan. Is that correct?

Jay:  That is true. Sometimes simultaneously, but not always. I live in Indiana now, but I grew up in and was in Arizona forever. Subsequently, tequila is certainly a terrific beverage of choice and a maligned cocktail in most places because everybody has their bad college tequila story. But it is one of my goals to educate the public about the wonders of tequila. I have a party every year where we do a whole tasting and things like that to bring people into the fold.

I’m actually a certified barbeque judge at the Kansas City Barbeque Society and do that on occasion, go to competitions and judge. I’m actually having about 20 people over on Sunday, and doing a bunch of pork shoulder and six racks of ribs and all kinds of stuff.

John:  You’re going to town. That’s great. As far as tequila, I always counsel, much like any alcohol, if your college stories involve a version that comes in a plastic bottle, don’t hold that against us. You get what you pay for.

Jay:  Right. Don’t hold that against the spirit. You got what you deserved. That’s why I don’t drink gin. I have that college story about gin, and so it’s just not on my radar.

John:  Now and then, we’ll go for a Bombay Sapphire or something like that. I was going to ask you, my friend, Chris Hart, a former co-worker of mine, has done a book, “Wicked Good Barbeque”. Have you checked that out? Have you seen it?

Jay:  No, I have not. I will do that right now.

John:  I’ll hook you up.

Jay:  I will go down to Barnes and Nobles and I will look for it.

John:  Yeah right – and not find it. I’ll talk to him, and I’ll get you a copy. When we get off, I’ll get your snail mail.

Jay:  I’d appreciate that. That’d be great.

John:  So the book is Youtility on Amazon.com. It’s climbing the charts over there, so you should have no trouble. Instead of just wandering aimlessly around your big box bookstore, you can just search for Jay Baer or Youtility.

Jay:  The best place to buy it, if somebody wants to buy it, buy it at an airport because I can get some more airport copies sold this month, they will keep it in the airports. So, if you’re traveling, buy it at an airport.

John:  It’s all about airport frontage, isn’t it? Just like the spare change, those copies just fly away of their own accord. That’s the place to be.

Jay:  That’s right.

John:  Good deal. That will do it for this week. Jay, thanks for stopping by.

Jay:  Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Categories
Great Marketing

David Spark on Brand Journalism

David Spark is an 18 year veteran of tech marketing and journalism. He’s been in over 40 media outlets in print, radio, TV, and online, has been involved in podcasting, video, and came on to talk about Brand Journalism.

John:  Give us your elevator pitch. What do you do and how do you do it?

David: I own a company called Spark Media Solutions. We are brand journalists, which means we create media for companies to increase their thought leadership in this space. The angle that we’ve been really successful with is building influencer relations through content. That is, I think, the best way to make a friend with somebody: to create content or interview them. If you want to be their best bud, that’s probably the best way to do it. I don’t think I’ve failed at that yet.

John: You were just quoted recently in Forbes. They had a whole article about content marketing. There are a lot of ways to fail at content marketing. You can’t just jump into this and assume that because you are doing what everybody is doing it’s going to be right.  Talk a little bit more about that. Where do people screw this up and what do we have to look at?

David: I should say I despise the term “content marketing” because I think it’s insidious. I think to say to someone, “Here is some content.” But it’s also marketing. It’s like someone would want to drop it like a hot potato: “Ah! I don’t want this! Who wants this crap?”

The industry uses content marketing for their own selves and understands, “We’re generating this content to ultimately sell product.” But if it’s delivered to someone as marketing material, even though it’s “subtle,” as this writer described in the Forbes article, it’s still not good.

This is the big thing, especially if you have a very complicated product: Most people are not morons, although I get a lot of arguments like, “Everybody is an idiot. You can easily sell them to whatever.” Most people are not morons, and if you are trying to soft sell something or sell something insidiously, they’re going to pick that up. They’re going to sniff that out. If you can sniff it out, they can sniff it out as well.

We have a big thing about doing everything above board, like it’s really clear what we’re doing. We’re just generating content with these people and we’re trying to build our brand and build our thought leadership through this. But if you try to do something weasily, it’s going to slap you in the face. It may work short term, but it’s not going to work long term.

John:  I definitely agree with that. That whole duplicitous nature, that kind of like “baiting the trap”, is the feel that I get with some of this stuff.

David:  It’s all how you approach it. If you make it clear what you’re doing, then everyone’s above board. They had this whole thing about, “Oh, never do a fake blog. Don’t do a fake blog.” If you’re trying to pull a fast one on your audience, don’t do a fake blog. But there have been fake blogs like the fake Steve Jobs thing that have been hugely successful because they are above board on what they’re doing.

When Wal-Mart – the very famous case – hired someone to blog for them and try to do it all clandestine, now you are not being above board. They refer to this as transparency. But I like to stay above board, saying “Hey, we’re all on the same page here on what’s going on.” That’s really what I’m trying to get through. As long as you are doing that and you are true to your nature, then you’ll be fine. It all depends on if the audience wants this kind of stuff. That gets into a deeper discussion of building your editorial voice.

John:  I agree with you. One thing that’s been oversold is the idea of transparency – the fact that you should show customers and prospects everything that’s going on in your business. That’s not it at all. It’s about remaining above board, being honest with what’s going on – not telling them everything that’s going on.

David:  Right. But again, you can create something fake as long as it’s clear, “This is a joke. This is fake,” and say who is in on the joke. There are examples of this that work really well. You can create fiction, too, and that can work really well as well.

John:  I know you have some stand-up comedy experience. I’ve noticed a recurring theme in a lot of stuff. You have an article I’ve linked to about getting Twitter hashtags to run. All that stuff is built around humor and kind of being clever. Talk a little bit more about that. How does that fit into the mix? How do you make it work?

David:  If you look at the top trending hashtags at any given time – and I’ll start with the Twitter thing – you will notice half of them are memes, and they’re usually issues that people want to talk about or people come up with.

Coming up with a great punch line is not the trick. It’s coming up with a great setup.  I’ll give you a perfect example. There’s the classic “Why did the chicken cross the road?” There are actually about a thousand punch lines to that joke or saying. I used to have a whole bit in my routine. There’s an old joke of, “You like your women like you like your coffee: hot and black.” That’s an old, old line. It’s an old joke. I used to do a whole series of variations on it. I think the brilliance was, “I like my women like I like my coffee,” and then I came up with 100 punch lines to it. They would be like “sitting in a mug that says: I love Mondays,” or “pounded into a brick, or concealing the smell of smuggled heroine”. These are variations on that.

Similar to these Twitter hashtags, I think the brilliance comes from – and maybe brilliance is overselling it – but the success of the viral nature of them comes from how can I come up with that “Why did the chicken cross the road” or the “I like my women like I like my coffee” setup that people want to write 100 punch lines to?

You’ll notice that’s essentially what those meme hashtags are. They’re just great setups for other people to write punch lines for. That’s kind of the trick to succeeding in a meme-generated trending hashtag. Not all of them have to be that. The meat of that article about how to trend on Twitter is all based on live events, actually. I think that’s really where you can actually get a lot of success – in live events.

Going back to comedy in general, we do a lot of this in video stuff. Again, it all depends on what the client wants and if it’s appropriate to their brand to put in comedy. Some don’t want it and some do. It just all depends on what they want.

John: Let’s talk a little bit more about brand journalism. One of the big problems I see everywhere is classic marketing people – advertising people – have viewed social media and all these things as another channel to force the same garbage down. “Check out our product and buy it.” Brand journalism is a different approach. I feel it’s the way that these channels are actually meant to be used. Talk more about what you do on that front and contrast that to the garbage that’s gone before.

David:  People have been hyper complicating this and I’m going to make it really simple. Forget about brand journalism all together. Just think about how any 

media outlet becomes successful. They become successful by writing content, creating videos, producing radio shows and whatnot. The more they produce of good quality content that the audience wants and gets the interviews with the key people in the industry, the higher their stature raises in the industry. Therefore, the editorial outlet becomes very, very popular. By also maintaining their editorial integrity, they become very popular and they gain an audience through that.

Take that same exact concept on how any editorial media outlet operates and just apply it to your brand. Do nothing different. Do that exact same thing, because that’s exactly what you are shooting for.

Think about it. Wouldn’t you love to have the brand equity of a Time Magazine, of an ABC, of any media outlet that’s out there? Wouldn’t that be awesome? Well, start behaving like them.

True, it’s not as easy to all of a sudden amass a whole editorial team as big as that, but you can do something small, especially if you are in a very niche market. It’s very possible to do. Just speak to what your audience cares about.

John:  How do you combat the idea that these brand journalists are just marketers in disguise?

David:  Here’s my whole saying about that. There are good doctors and bad doctors. There are good lawyers and bad lawyers. There are good journalists and bad journalists. There are good brand journalists and bad brand journalists. I can’t speak for all the brand journalists out there. I can only speak for what we do.

If someone else is going to do crap, which it happens, and unfortunately, it hurts my reputation as well, because whenever that happens it puts a mark on the industry and puts a mark on me. Ask any other professional anytime bad news comes out about another lawyer or about another doctor. It hurts them as well. They don’t like seeing it either. For those who choose to keep doing the marketing, you’re just hurting the industry and you are hurting yourselves. That’s really all I can say on that.

As I said before, we try to stay above board. We have in our contracts that myself and my whole company is completely transparent about what we do and what we create. We refuse to do ghostwriting because we know it would damage our brand and inevitably damage our client’s brand as well. It’s very important to maintain your editorial integrity.

While other people are doing their thing, I can’t control it. It’s not going to help you if you keep doing it. If you want to be a pure marketer, go be a pure marketer. That’s fine. But don’t be a marketer that claims you are also a brand journalist and you’re not actually keeping the ethos of brand journalism.

John:  Right. Talk a little bit more about the ghostwriting thing you just mentioned. That was interesting. I haven’t heard somebody lay that out.

dspark-350x250

David:  The only way that we will agree to do “ghostwriting” (and it’s not really ghostwriting) is we’ll create content and not put anybody’s name on it. Therefore, no one labeling in it at all. We’ve had situations where clients come to us and ask, “Will you ghostwrite and put our CEO’s name on the thing?”

We know that’s going to be damaging because it will somehow come out that the CEO didn’t write this and find out that Spark Media Solutions wrote it or something. That hurts our brand and it hurts our client’s brand. It’s going to do nobody any good.

What we suggest in a situation like that where they say, “Well, the CEO doesn’t have time to write,” I say, “That’s fine. Let me interview the CEO and I will publish an interview with the CEO.” I’ve got no problem with that. That’s fine. Then the CEO gets his voice out there.

There are ways to do what you want to do without ghostwriting and trying to pull a fast one on the audience. This just goes back to if you do that, you’re not being above board. You’re trying to pull a fast one on your audience. It’s a slippery slope to even worse behavior. I will say that.

John:  That kind of begs the question: You’re talking with somebody about ghostwriting on behalf of the CEO. You say, “No. We can’t do that.” So what happens at that point? Does every company have to have somebody that can do this role and be the spokesman in blogs, or videos, or whatever? Somebody’s got to step up then?

David:  I always think it’s critical that the people within the company can speak for themselves, their own voice. We would love to take on all the responsibility and create all the content for all clients we work with. We’d be crazy, crazy busy. It would be fantastic, but that’s not going to do you good in building your own thought leadership.

One of the things we do know and the reason we’re hired is creating content can be super-duper expensive if you don’t know what you are doing. You can also waste a ton of time and money doing this as well. That’s why we’re hired. We streamline the editorial and production process for our clients, for that matter.

But if people are not on board on creating content within the company themselves, if you’re not a good writer, there are other ways to do this. Are you good on camera? Are you good just talking in an interview? Maybe you’re not good overall, so we’ll have to heavily edit the interview. Maybe you don’t have a good speaking voice and we’ll just have written content. There are still ways to do this and get that out and get it from your voice.

Look, if nobody in the company can speak intelligently about the company and about the industry, I’m surprised you are still in business. Someone there has to be able to do it. If you don’t think it’s valuable, that’s what I find really foolish. You’re communicating with people anyway, so why not do it in a more public way so you’re not spinning your wheels having 100 of the same conversation with people?

This is one of the arguments I hear constantly: “I have no time to blog.” But my whole attitude is you should blog because it’s going to ease up all your other communications as well.

John: Getting back to timeframe, this is another thing that is a big deal. You talked about how people always underestimate how much time it takes to create content. What do you prescribe when you start working with a client? Unfortunately, we’ve got people that are hooked on AdWords, where, in six hours they’re going to know whether stuff is working or not. What kind of time do they need to get a brand journalism program going?

David:  There are both short-term and long-term goals that you can set up. We actually focus a lot of our efforts around conferences and trade shows. Getting back to the time and cost situation, it the cheapest, most cost-efficient way to create a ton of content in a very brief period of time. That’s step number one.

Also, if you go through a live event, you can get a lot of attention in just a period of a week or two weeks – or a day or two as well.

But if you don’t commit to it, that’s the other thing. You’re committing to everything else. You’re committing to your advertising. You’re committing to your business. You’re committing to your products. This is just something you need to commit to. But you can create little short-term plays and measure it. You can do traditional things like measuring traffic and measuring shares and stuff like that.

Many of our clients are in the B2B space. That’s the place that we roll the best. They have long-term goals. They have sales cycles that take six months to two years sometimes. What’s really, really key in those issues is relationship building, especially with the influencers in the space.

If you start branding your company as having relationships with these influencers and creating content through these influencers and the influencers know you, anytime you have a little fun content project they’re happy and eager to participate in it and they love your content projects – if you’re really selling to the influencers in terms of their participants and they like your content – then everything else trickles into place, because they end up  sharing it with their audience and you get access to the entire audience you want to get access to. We have learned that’s been the most successful. I try to measure success with my clients on how many relationships with influencers we’re getting.

John:  Obviously, leverage is a big part of this. The fact that you guys create content all the time and you’re doing audio, video, blogging and all that stuff, you’ve learned all the hard lessons. Just ballpark: if you were looking at trying to do this from scratch yourself versus the content that you guys can create, how much more could you get done in the same time? How much is a lift there between having to spend time?

David:  I’ll just give you an idea. Here’s a perfect example. One of our old clients is a company called The CMO Club. They bring 50-100 CMOs into a single room to engage and talk about marketing issues. It’s a great event. I am physically arm’s reach away from all these CMOs. In a single event, I can produce 20 videos and articles with these key CMOs.

If I was not at that event, here’s what would have to happen. “David, I need you to get 20 interviews with CMOs of various companies.” I have to call the companies. I have to then go to the media relations department. I have to then fly to all these places, probably with a crew or book a crew in the location. I have to clear all the questions with the media relations department, and they’re going to probably want to see the end product as well. Now we’re getting into crazy six figures. It’s going to be super crazy expensive.

Alternatively, for a lot, lot less money, you just go to an event and I’m physically there, I’ve got camera equipment, and I’m standing two feet away from you and I say, “Hey, I’m shooting this video for The CMO Club (or for this other blog, or for this other event). Can I ask you a question about what you just talked about on stage or what we’re all taking about at this event?” My success rate is in the 90th percentile and higher using that technique. We just go with the technique that works the best and is the most successful, and costs less for the client, too.

It’s a really powerful, powerful statement when you go to an event and you put 15-20 influencers’ faces and names on your blog with your branding around them as well. I’ll have a microphone that has the company’s logo on the mic flag. That’s hugely powerful. It’s a series of implied endorsements even though they’re not talking about your company.

John: That’s a great point, the fact that it extends beyond the event. You’ve done all this work to build a great event and get all these great speakers. To be able to stretch that into content that you can use the rest of the year is a huge plus.

David: I should also mention that’s if you’re producing the event. A lot of times – almost always – we go to events that our clients aren’t producing, sometimes not even sponsoring for that matter. We just go purely as press and create a ton of content. The event producers love us as well because we’re creating a ton of content and recognition for their event as well.

John: Yeah. Even just having a video crew on the floor attracts attention as the kind of hype people want.

David:  The number of times people take photos of me holding the microphone interviewing somebody with the camera equipment or the mic flag, which has the logo of the company on it, gets tweeted out, Instagrammed out, or Facebooked. That’s a nice little side benefit I never really expected.

John:  How about virtual events and things like that then? Obviously, that doesn’t kind of play into this model. Do you have clients that try and do stuff around those events? The bigger question is we’ve heard a lot over the past couple years about live events kind of declining and dying off, do you just say that that’s wrong that people need these personal connections or can we work in the virtual world?

David:  I’m in the San Francisco Bay area. I was just at an event that was packed to the gills last night. There may be industries where they’re falling apart, but I mostly roll in the tech industries and I have not seen a slide at all. I know running an event and producing an event and trying to get people to your event is extraordinarily hard. I wouldn’t want to do it full-time. We actually do produce some events. That can be extraordinarily stressful. But, man, I keep going to events and they’re packed – tons and tons of events. People still come out to it. They still see the value in it.

I should also mention I think the reason for that is I think the quality presentations have gone up dramatically. I used to go to events and think all the presentations were horrible. I think now since we have TED Talks and SlideShare where people can put presentations, they’ve jumped dramatically. I was at this one conference just a few weeks ago – Velocity Conference – and I thought all the presenters were phenomenal. You’ve probably seen this at conferences, too. You go to a conference and the person presenting is horrible – just God awful. What happens to the Twitter stream? People are just slamming this person left and right. You want that?

It used to be before Twitter, if you had a horrible presentation, you had a horrible presentation and that was the end of it. Nobody knew about it, except the people in the room. But now if you do a horrible presentation, everyone around the world knows it.

John:  The back channel is a fierce judge. That’s for sure. Anything else you want to tell us about as far as what you guys do or is there anything we missed here?

David:  We create tons of great content. We build thought leadership. The focus of content building to influence relations has been hugely successful for us. Check out all our fun videos on our site. The ones that I’m most proud of lately were we went to the RSA conference. If you don’t know, it’s a big information security conference. It’s a huge, huge conference. Tons of security professionals. For the last two years I’ve been roaming around the floor asking all these security pros to just tell me what their password is. As you might imagine, I get some rather funny reactions out of that. The first year I did it I actually got some people telling me their password on camera, which I thought was really strange.  But they did.

John:  We’ve been tracking over the past couple shows people using Google Glass wearable technology. I wanted you to check in on that. What’s your opinion on Google Glass? Are you pro, con, or looking forward to getting a set or never buy a set?

David: I love the idea. I think it’s really cool. It is a little unnerving, a lot of people think. But you know what? Facebook is a little unnerving as well. The thing is we’ve seen all these demos of virtual reality type things and being layered on top of our real world. But it requires one to hold up a cell phone in front of their face and walk around, which people just don’t do, so they’ve been more kind of demo type things.

But the Google Glass thing is kind of amazing. I think where it’s going to be monstrously powerful is in facial recognition. I can go to an event and I can literally scan the room, and if you can identify you are John Wall, then immediately I can get access to things like your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn, etc. and have all this info. I can scan the room and also do searches, like “Who in this room is doing this kind of work?” I can immediately pinpoint those people and go directly to them. That, I think, is powerful. It’s also going to be powerful I think in dating. Who is available? Who is single in this room?  I think that’s going to be pretty powerful as well.

You constantly hear people complaining, “Well, what about privacy and what about security?” But every time they complain about it, when they start to see what this can do, they’re like, “Well, I’ll give up my privacy and security for that because that’s damn cool!” I think this is just going to be a continuation of that.

The EFF and the ACLU are going to fight it tooth and nail because they see what’s happening to it, but people give up personal and privacy information for more capabilities than they have before. And it will just continue to happen. That’s why I see Google Glass will just continue on. But I think that will be the big power, is once you get facial recognition. That will be huge.

John: That sounds good. David Spark, thanks for joining us today. We appreciate having you on.

David: Thanks for having me.

Categories
Podcasting

Podcast Player Test

Marketing Over Coffee is available on Stitcher if you listen to podcasts on a mobile device. I wanted to test out their player:

Categories
The Marketeer

Always More Complicated

Lying with statistics is a topic that comes up all the time on Marketing Over Coffee and you’d think it would get old, but the latest crazes of dashboards, infographics and the like just continue to fuel the fire.

Point #1: Statistics that show you a pie chart to make you feel better are misleading you and hiding a bunch of thorny questions. For better or worse, every time I’ve dug into the numbers I’ve found questions that are difficult to answer and force you to ask even more difficult questions.

Over the 4th I found an interesting article on the fact that many flags and patriotic clothes are not made in the United States. That article claims only 2% of the apparel sold in the US is made here. Wearing clothing that celebrates America that wasn’t made here is an interesting issue, it then gets pushed much farther by talking about U.S. flags being used on caskets for our military and proposed legislation to require that they be made in the United States (the majority are made in China). This is the “digging deep gets complicated” phenomenon, clothes being made outside the U.S. seems like not a big deal on the surface, 4th of July items being imported feels strange, our tax dollars for flags for those who made the ultimate sacrifice paid to a nation that’s not that big on freedom feels like a crime.

The article then cites research from Consumer Reports (a favorite publication of mine): “Given a choice between a product made in the U.S. and an identical one made abroad, 78 percent of Americans would rather buy the American product”. This brings to light three more important points:

Point #2: Creating a survey question that is not biased takes a lot of work.

Biased questions gets right to the point of why we joke on Marketing Over Coffee about most surveys sucking. A question like “Are you an ungrateful non-patriot that wouldn’t want to buy clothes made in the US?” will probably cause some problems with your survey.

Point #3: People lie in surveys.

Saying people lie is just me being sensationalist (after all, this is a blog). People don’t intentionally deceive, but they answer with their hearts and often don’t want to disappoint the person asking the questions in the survey for any number of reasons. Proving point #1 in action – if 78% of Americans really want American products you’ve got a hard time explaining the 2% apparel stat.

Point #4: Apathy rules.

In the 2% apparel case we might explain the gap with apathy: Maybe 8 out of 10 people really do want to buy American first, but it’s not high enough on their priority list to check a label every time they buy clothes. As a parent with 2 young children I have first hand knowledge of shopping and getting home with no real clue or understanding what’s in the bags I’ve brought home.complicated

That leads us to the real lesson:

Point #5: It’s About Seeing the Complications.

It’s not about stats to create graphs, it’s about digging in to ask more questions to understand what forces are at work. Are you losing business because of the economy or because a better product has come along? Are people not buying American because of price or a lack of knowledge about the economic impact of where products come from? Are prospects not smart enough for your product, or is it that your product is so boring that nobody cares?

I’m sorry to say that many times I’ve dug in and not been satisfied with the answers I’ve found. I can say that I’ve almost always come out with  a better understanding of what’s really happening.

 

P.S. If you’re tired of shaky statistics that are generating worthless discussion and not having any impact on the bottom line you might want to read more from Avinash Kaushik. Tom Webster also knows something about surveys.  They both write clearly about avoiding bias and getting actionable information out of the questions you are asking.

Categories
SalesForce.com

Advance Campaign Management

The reporting suite in Salesforce.com is sort of like the $100 tool kit you get at Home Depot. It has all the standard stuff (screwdrivers, sockets, wrenches, pliers in a stylish red box of some kind), and if you know what you’re doing it will work for most everything, and for more advanced stuff you could make it work, although if you are a pro you’ll want more power tools.

As part of a webinar I did with Salesforce we started to discuss one of the big problems with campaign measurement – the fact that your data is only as relevant as the number of closed deals you have. I had done a presentation on this a few years back and had some requests for it and found that it was the classic “Consultant’s Powerpoint” – lots of pictures, and useless unless you know the story.

So here’s the story. In a perfect world you’d measure how many closed deals came from your campaigns, have a simple dashboard showing the dollars generated and go home a hero. In reality, odds are you’re going to start tracking and measuring, right to the point of reallocating budget prior to the first deals closing – a classic “Fire, Aim, Fire.”

The first thing to confirm is that you are getting a primary campaign source for every opportunity. This is one of the more recent adds to marketing tracking and it’s the closest thing you’ll get to a silver bullet. Doing an initial pass and confirming that every opportunity has a primary campaign (even if it’s “Unknown”) allows you to run some interesting reports and start to get a picture of where the deals and inbound leads are coming from. For most cleanup like this I’ve found that the Salesforce Excel Connector is your cordless electric drill – a killer power tool. It’s kind of a hassle to set up, between finding a copy of Excel 97 and learning how the macros work, it takes some elbow grease, but it pays for itself quickly – imagine being able to find all opportunities from the past month, be able to match them to all the contacts and leads from a specific company and update these fields in Excel directly rather than pulling them up in SF or having to use the bulk loader. I’m also a bit surprised there’s nothing better out there, if you know of anything else like it, please share.

Now that you have an idea of what programs are working here are some common factors to examine:

  • Any specific type of program better than others (Webinars vs. Whitepapers, Live Events)
  • Region and/or Account Manager – this can get into management of the sales team
  • If PPC is productive
  • Does training drive adoption and increase retention?
  • Isolate and report on telemarketing or other lead qualification

One topic that would require a post of its own (or maybe even a whole book, which might be the most boring book ever) is what to do with deals that close from multiple campaigns. Campaign weighting is not trivial (saying the white paper is 20% responsible for the win, 80% of it goes to the demo). Although it gets complicated quickly there are two reasons to do it: one is to try multivariable testing – do any combinations of campaigns do considerably better than others? The other is to give your reporting credibility. By default most reports that show a closed deal that went through multiple campaigns will assign all the dollars to each campaign. In other words, a $40,000 deal that went through 4 campaigns makes it look like your 4 programs generated $160,000 in sales. These kind of reports are just the kind of thing the CEO is looking for so you can take his place picking up trash in an orange jumpsuit when the tax auditors come calling.

Fight Chart
Use the USA Today Effect to your advantage

Depending on your market you’ll probably also want to add fields at the opportunity level to track both competitors, and incumbents. It’s very common to find that you will be more effective against certain competitors. You may also find that certain incumbents may indicate that you’ll never get budget for the project. I’ve found a bubble chart like the one in this post can give you an interesting view of your forecast, showing both aging, percentage to close, and competitors.

Another area that requires a lot of planning is both lead status and campaign member status. You’ll want anything showing movement in the funnel as lead status, anything showing progression through a program as campaign member status and these have to be mapped. You may have to do some automation to have the lead status updated as campaign status changes. These also make great triggers for marketing automation efforts…

For more complicated graphs you can go across multiple objects (contacts and opportunities for example), which limits some of your graphing options if you were to use Excel, but I’ve always found that being able to schedule reports and show them in dashboards is the only real route to adoption. People only get into the excel graphs when the quarterly board of directors meeting is coming together, which may be all you need it for.

If you’ve run any interesting reports or have found other tools you like, please share, there are a lot of new solutions as this space is evolving quickly.

 

 

Categories
The Marketeer

The Next Thing

For those not chronically addicted to LinkedIn, I’m no longer with Glance Networks. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what’s next and as it usually happens, things have been coming up on their own. Thanks to all of the listeners of Marketing Over Coffee I’ve been able to talk to many people, and I’IMG_5578m so thankful for having a great network of friends keeping an eye out for me.

While catching up with everyone that I haven’t had time to talk to over the past year I’ve had a number of people ask if I’d be interested in doing some contract projects. Some consulting, some all the way through to execution, and all with companies I’m very interested in. Although I’m not thrilled about figuring out my own healthcare and payroll (at least the M Show Productions LLC that was set up for Marketing Over Coffee is already in place), I’m very excited to have a chance to work with different organizations rather than just parachuting into a single project. The big question will be if I will eventually turn all the time towards a single company if things work out, or if I find out that I can make an agency of some kind work.

I’m very excited for this next step, it’s a big leap!

Categories
Prognostication

Mitch Joel on CTRL-ALT-DEL

I had a chance to talk with Mitch about his new book for Marketing Over Coffee, if you’re an audio kind of person check it out at the website, or on iTunes or Stitcher. If you’re the kind of person that prefers to read, well, here’s the copy:

Of course you can get CTRL-ALT-DEL from Amazon.

John:  This is your second book. The first one ran like wildfire. Take us from when we talked to you last. The book did well. You did the speaking thing. When did you realize you needed to write something else and what did you come up with for a big idea?

Mitch:  “Six Pixels” came out in 2009 (I wrote it in 2008) and I really felt it was a book where I was explaining how, as a small agency – a very small shop under a handful of people – we leveraged these ways in which we connect. I don’t want to lump it all under social media because I didn’t think “Six Pixels” was just a social media book, but how we leveraged it to really build attention, build clients, and use it as a springboard to what we can do, which is very different from the way traditionally you would think you would grow an agency and market it.

I was already latched onto the blogging bug, and for sure, the podcasting bug had bit hard, too. You go through the process and wonder, “Do I need to really write another book? I’m still blogging every day. I’m podcasting every week. I write for the Harvard Business Review one week, and the opposite week I write for Huffington Post. Magazine offers and newspaper stuff.” Life is sort of good.

I just came to the point in my life, professionally, where I realized it was sort of like, “What now?” moment. What now? So what? So everyone has a mobile phone. So everyone is creating videos and texts and images and audio and Twitter – but so what? What now? What do we do as a business to truly make this stuff matter, make it count, and not do the stuff we used to do in this very, very new and different channel?

In my conversations with C-level executives, in my conversations with marketing practitioners, I do about 60-70 speaking events every single year, it became abundantly clear to me that there were several things that have happened that have fundamentally changed business forever, and yet most brands were doing nothing about it.

I looked at it and kept modeling it and having the conversations and the speeches I was doing, and it really came into these five areas. To me, it was about: how do you reboot business? To me, rebooting business is about these five areas in terms of today.

But then I started realizing, what does that mean to me and you? You have to still get up and go to work every day. You have to still do what you have to do. Does this make you employable in the next five years? How do you stay employable in the next five years?

That became the catalyst for the second part of the book, which is called, “Reboot You.” I call them triggers, but it’s posture you need to have to make sure that you, in and of yourself, are a viable entity within this very, very different business system. When those two roles collided, John, it was the classic story. I was in the shower when I had the epiphany. It was my holiday break and I was like, “Wow, this is it.”

I have to tell you, from book proposal to speaking to my agent to all that, it was literally a function of a couple of weeks. I always had the title “Ctrl-Alt-Delete” in my brain as a potential for the second book, but there was this moment of crystallization. It really is a labor of love. It’s not a book where I’m talking about how I did something or why you should, too. It was more an exploratory book in these five regions and these different triggers, and for me, it was such a pleasure to pull it together in a much richer depth than I can go into on my blog.

John:  The thing that got me is, right out of the gate, you’re talking about sounding the alarm – the classic look to your left and right, and one of those guys aren’t going to be there in a couple years. It could be you, too, if you don’t have your act together. Do you really think it’s that severe – the shift that we’re facing that we’ve got in front of us now with all these tools coming into bear?

Mitch:  Whenever you put a provocation out like that, most people are like, “Well, hell yeah!” I’m Canadian, so I think, “Oh, I don’t know. It sort of makes me edgy.” It’s a line that I have been using on audiences for a while. For me, the real reason why I started with that is because I think about my agency – Twist Image – we started in 2000 and I joined in 2002, so I’ve been at it now for eleven years just here, not talking about the fact that I got into digital in 1993, so it’s been like 20 years of being in digital.

I think about how we have evolved, what services we offer and how we connect brands. We work with B2B, B2C, small impulse buys, we work with products that take long sales cycles; and you come to realize that I’m actually employing people currently in job titles that didn’t exist when I started this shop in departments that didn’t exist in the industry. It’s this whole new wave of vocation that has fundamentally changed.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete
Don’t try this while you read this

Then I meet with my peers who are in, let’s say, traditional media and they’re not really struggling in terms of managing growth. They’re struggling and figuring out how to cut things so it looks like there’s revenue there. And yes, I do think the foundational digitization of society is profound and I think it’s even most profound now because we’ve come past this shiny object thing.

We’re at a point where technology has removed the technology from technology. Think about the iPad; think about a smartphone. If you pivot on that idea, you start realizing that these are real shifts that have happened – they’ve already taken place – and we need to act. I do think that even five years might be a little long just based off of the exponential growth curve that we’re in.

John:  Yeah, and how it comes around. I like the way you’ve framed that as far as pulling the complexity out of the technology. There’s a classic Bill Gates line saying we always overestimate these technologies in the first year, but then we underestimate ten years from now what they’re going to do because they do finally deliver on all the hype and promise as time goes by.

Mitch:  The squishing of the time has also been much more compressed. Even when I first spoke about it in“Six Pixels of Separation,” I talked about that compression of how a message goes from ideation to publishing. Blogging fundamentally changed that. It became instant. Now you think about that just in terms of the world. I have to always remind people three-and-a-half years ago, we didn’t have an iPad. It’s not a long time.

John:  Literally, you’re talking about not even 1,000 days since that’s come up and around. Yet another angle that I like a lot is you talk about “no direct relationships, no future”. I like that idea because so often people have thought about these new channels and using them to promote and push, but it’s kind of flipping it around and saying, “No, you’re not getting it. If you don’t get those relationships, you’re at the end of the road.” Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Mitch:  Anybody can sell anybody now. You and I grew up in a day and age where if you bought a pair of Sony headphones, you did not buy it at the Sony store. You probably bought it Target, Wal-Mart, or wherever. If you were mad about it, you just went back to the store and complained. It never really filtered up to Sony. On the occasional poor customer issue, you would write a letter to them and they would maybe respond or maybe pretend like they never got the mail and it would wind up in someone’s file cabinet and that was the end of it.

If you think about what that relationship from the consumer perspective is today, it’s very, very different. Sony, Target, Wal-Mart – “like us on Facebook, follow us and do all this stuff.” This is a lot of marketing messaging. Just think about that food chain. Sony is telling me to like them on Facebook and Target is telling me to like them on Facebook, and it’s happening on Facebook.

Who owns the direct relationship? Is it Facebook that owns the direct relationship with Mitch Joel? Is it Target? Is it Sony? I try and make the argument that you can pick one if you want, John, but it doesn’t matter. Every single one is trying to have the direct relationship, because that’s what we have at the end of the day. All we have as a brand is that powerful direct relationship.

You might say, “No kidding. That’s not a new movement.” I would argue it is a new movement when you look at the food chain I’ve just described. Before, it was: you’re in the fight with the competitor for the direct relationship. Now if you look at your food chain from your product, you’re actually in a battle with each and every person on the food chain because they’re telling you to like them, follow them, and do all this stuff as well. Everybody’s hustling into that direct relationship.

I do think the perspective that most brands bring to that component of the relationship, they’re sorely missing and they’re letting that relationship go to not a competitor, but someone else in the actual food chain.

John:  The whole section that talks about the 7 Steps of Utilitarian Marketing, tell us a little bit more about that. I like the way that all fit together.

Mitch:  I found myself one day in New York City needing a bathroom really badly, turning on my iPhone and seeing the app “Sit or Squat.” You turn this app on and it knows where you are by GPS location and it tells you which are the cleanest bathrooms in the closest vicinity, literally rated from 1-5 stars. It’s based off of a wiki platform. Anybody can edit it. They can add as many stars as they want. They can add comments. They can add new bathrooms and request a bathroom be removed. It’s this amazing app brought to you by the good people at Charmin.

You tend to think about if Charmin was doing mobile, it would be, “Here are mobile coupons,” and “Here’s are double-quilted thing,” or “It’s a game with the bears from the TV and you get to pick the little piece of toilet paper off their butts,” or whatever it might be. It’s ridiculous that in a day and age where anybody can create anything and send it to consumers that what we’re actually doing is mostly bad advertising or bad iterations of advertising when you can create utility.

I think “Sit or Squat” was one of those bellwether examples where I realized it could be complementary. It could be an extension of a brand narrative. It could tell a bigger and more profound story and connect people more to the brand by providing them with something they would like to use. We live in a world where the home screen of our phone is the new real estate. It’s the same reason why a big store would open up on a specific corner and a specific city. They’re looking for foot traffic.  Well, that new real estate – that new foot traffic – is the home screen of the smartphone.

People recoil and think, “Well, what is it, one-quarter of all branded apps get downloaded, used once and never again?” All that data is wrong because they’re talking about apps that suck. You and I always use apps that provide utility – that added value – and I don’t know how many brands have taken the step back to say beyond the advertising schema that you can have in these platforms and channels, “Why don’t we actually create something that is of value?”

Pushing that further to the blackest of black belts, it would be, “Could you get it to the point where somebody would pay for it because it’s so valuable and useful to them?” I do think we’re at this amazing moment in the history of marketing and communications and the history of business where you can actually do that without traditional gatekeepers. That is massive.

I understand why brands haven’t done it, because maybe they haven’t been illuminated to the idea, but what an amazing opportunity for anyone.

John:  You have a whole chapter that talks about sex with data and nailing down the linear. Aside from just being provocative, it is all about the data. Of course we’ve seen the big data tidal wave wash over us here. What’s your take on this? What do you see us doing with all this data in front of us now?

Mitch:  I was talking recently, and I know you present as well, and sometimes when you speak you say something and it comes out of your mouth and you don’t know where it came from. Sometimes you wish you could grab it back and shove it back down your throat. There are other moments where you’re like, “Oh, that was funny; I should remember it.”

I remember saying something along the lines of, “I think everybody is overly-excited about big data and that’s really interesting in a world where most people suck at small data.”Where I was going with that is we have a lot of linear information that we take – e-mail addresses, advertising, direct marketing, etc. We have this new world on the right-hand side which is that circular gate. It’s the semantics stuff. It’s not data that you’re really capturing, but it’s data that individual consumer are willfully putting out there (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc.).

Looking at that and thinking about our world of dashboards, and everybody in data analytics is all excited about dashboards, I say beyond dashboards, what are with really talking about here? I think what we’re talking about is the intersection of that linear data going into that circular data. That’s where the good stuff happens. That’s where the sex happens.

Suddenly it’s not just about demographics and psychographics that are helping you as a brand connect information in a way that would be more relevant to music consumer, but suddenly you have a more 360-degree perspective of not just what Mitch Joel has done, but who he is. When you think about that at a macro level, you can just imagine a world where information, advertising, sharing, building relationships becomes that much more powerful.

When I say you can imagine a world, I say that because you can do it today – you can do it right now – it’s just brands don’t have the intestinal fortitude to do it. They’re not putting the time and effort into figuring out what it takes to make that happen.

When I talk like that, I realize everybody says, “Well, that sounds creepy. It sounds like an invasion of privacy.” I’m the immediate past chairman of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Marketing Association. I sat on the board of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Privacy is a massive issue for me. Privacy is a massive issue for me because a lot of marketers screwed it up to the point where we need to have lawyers involved and government involved. That’s crazy.

I believe that what I see when I talk about sex with data is the ability to do things for consumers that are not breaching any form of privacy, but at the same time, creating a level of personalization that makes them just want it more.

Case in point would be Amazon. It’s so hyper-personalized that if you were to see Amazon as a brand new customer, it would be very overwhelming and probably very boring to you. But they do that personalization so well. They leverage that linear data with what they know about you in terms of your personal habits that it makes you yearn for more of it.  We don’t ever think, “Amazon is really breaching my privacy.” We think, “Wow, Amazon. Keep at it, because I’m buying more stuff and I like this.”

John:  You said the first chapter of the book talks about the corporate approach – things the whole organization has to worry about. But in part two, you get into the more personal level about what you personally need to do for your career to keep things moving. One thing you talk about is rebooting yourself and finding your blend, if you could tell us about that.

Mitch:  Blend is a really interesting concept that I wish I had created. It’s one of those things that you realize you’re doing, and then someone gives you a name for it. I’m at this really cool event and I get a chance to be introduced to Patrick Pichette, who is the CFO of a little company called Google. Can you imagine meeting the CFO of Google, by the way? What a gig.

John:  Yeah, tough life!

Mitch:  I don’t even know if you remember, in the news they had that thing where – I think it was for Google+ or something – where they rented a wave machine so people can surf at mountain-view. He was telling me, “I’ve got this purchase order” I asked, “What is this for?”

“Oh, we’re renting an ocean to go wave surfing.” And I guess that’s what happens when you have billions of dollars in a war chest.

I’m standing with Patrick and he happened to be here in Montreal. Patrick is a former Montrealer who was working for Bell Company, most people here know it. There were a couple of his old Bell buddies who were at this event. One of the guys is standing there next to him and I’m just a fly on the wall. They say to him, “Hey, Patrick, how’s your work-life balance now?”

It was awesome. Patrick looks this guy right in the eye – doesn’t miss a beat – and goes, “You don’t take this job for work-life balance.”

You would think most people would say, “Oh, I get the weekends,” or whatever. You don’t take the CFO gig at Google if you want work-life balance. You’re all in. I remember thinking it’s those super-execs who have great punch lines.

We sit down for dinner, and again, just magic of magic, Patrick sits right next to me, which is awesome, so I get to chat him up. I said, “I was really taken by your comment about work-life balance.” He said, “When you work as people like us work – and I include you and myself – in this connected world with e-mail and smartphones, this idea that work falls outside of life is somewhat erroneous.”

It’s so true. I’m really dedicated to the growth of Twist Image. I’m dedicated to the content I create and the speeches I give and all those things. At the same time, I don’t like putting it outside of life. I think it’s life. You have 24 hours in a day and you’re making it work.

He talked about this notion of blend, this idea that he had this crazy meeting in London, so he flew his wife in and they spent three days in London, but then he was gone for another two days or down in the office; then he did something with his kids. I’m not trying to make it sound like he’s neglecting his kids and he doesn’t come home for supper with his family – that’s not the scenario. It was more of him constructing his day around the blend and flow.

I don’t know about you, but I have found there are days where I’m looking at my computer and my agenda and I close the computer and go play with the kids in the park. I can jump back online at 9:00pm and catch up on the extra e-mails or whatever it is, or I can have this call on the way home in the car. We have very different lives.

I always worry, “Oh, dear Lord, I’m a workaholic and I’m going to have a heart attack.” That whole thing where I stress myself out about the fact that I’m not stressed out. I really started looking at my life realizing that I have a really healthy blend. Blend, to me, in terms of how I look at life is it’s a stool and the stool has three legs. One leg is my family and friends; one leg is my professional work; and the third one is my community work. Like any proper stool, if you don’t have the exact balance in all three, it will tip over.

When I have those moments where I feel it’s tipping over, I look to the three and I figure out: where is the blend missing?

John:  You’re talking about the way the market is changing, things are ramping up and an employee really needs to take more of a startup mindset, if you could talk about the components of that and how that protects you, makes you future-proof.

Mitch:  I know both you and I both have a huge love for all things Seth Godin. Whenever I’m doing something in work – and I consider a lot of my work very, very entrepreneurial – I think about that aphorism he always shares, which is, “The riskiest thing you can do is be safe, and the safest thing you can do is be risky.”

It’s a nice thing to say. It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do when you’re looking at the construct of what your day-to-day life is – “I’ve got to pay rent, make the mortgage, take care of family and all that sort of stuff.”

What is it about the sort of work that we do? You’ve always heard terms like be an entrepreneur, be an intrapreneur, etc. But there has been this startup movement that has come into the fray. We’ve had startups for a long time, but I think now because technology has become that much more easy, obvious and intuitive for people to at least try their own thing, I was wondering, what would happen if we brought that type of startup spirit?

If we looked at the things that are so beautifully written in “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries, if we actually took that mentality – that startup mentality – of testing, being iterative, learning, optimizing and applied it, one, to the work we do, and two, to us as individuals, what would it look like?

Not a day doesn’t go by that I don’t try and do one little test. It might just be a simple e-mail question to someone or whatever it might be, but the more and more I get into that idea of being that startup, – that constant iterative place – the more comfortable it makes me.

I think people who even come to work for our agency are somewhat surprised being 100+ people for 13 years that we really have that startup mentality, not just in the physical way we look and operate, but in just how we think. It’s always about we’re the underdogs and we have to really go for it. I think it’s a valuable lesson to think about in terms of your own personal development.

John:  As you’ve gone through the process of writing things – you’ve put this all together – has it changed the way you’re doing business daily now? You obviously had the idea when you began. By the time you finished, had it changed the direction you were moving in? Has it done anything different for you now today?

Mitch:  In terms of the whole book, you mean?

John:  A lot of times, the writing process makes things gel for you. By the time you’re done, you look at the idea differently than when you started. Has it metamorphosed at all or were you dead on from day one?

Mitch:  It’s a weird world when you’re between my two ears. During the writing process of the book – and it took a significant amount of time – I didn’t miss a blog post and I didn’t miss a podcast. You can imagine that if I blog every single day (365 posts a year, and take away one a week because I do a podcast on Sunday), I’m accumulating books and books as the book is being written. I think as you’re writing the book, other things that fall off or become inspiration lead into blog posts, articles, or what have you. With that, I’ve been talking about the concepts live in front of an audience for about a year, because you want to test the content and see if it resonates or not.

What I’ve learned is the book is the place where I go to really expand upon a lot of those ideas, whether they be in a blog post or an article or speaking, and then it takes you down other avenues and it becomes this beginning, middle and end. I know that the book retains that.

But definitely, if I look back to the fact that I finished writing it in May of last year and did the final edits up until January/February of 2013, I was updating things and moving things.

I think about one of the anchor stories that I tell in the beginning of the book, which is about Marco Arment, who is the former dude from Tumblr who went on to start Instapaper. This guy starts this business. He’s running it out of his appointment in New York. It’s worth millions and millions of dollars and nobody even knows because he’s self-funded, he did it by himself, and it’s this massive success. It got sold to Betaworks the other week.

You look at that and say, “Isn’t that the problem? How do you write a book and it’s already out of date?” I was thinking about it and it actually completely validates everything I’m talking about in the book. What does that tell you? It tells you that you can have a multi-million dollar exit in the time a book is written. That is complete purgatory. That is complete mode for reboot. That is a complete model for “Ctrl+Alt+Delete.”

It’s interesting to see how the dynamics change for sure, but the five movements are very, very real. How we’re bringing it to work is still very, very real. My real love is now that it’s written and it’s coming out, I can just really expand on some of it even more if I want – or update it – in the platforms I have.

It’s sort of an organic thing. The book can’t be the only thing. I think if anyone reads it and likes it, they’ll do what they did last time, which is latch onto the podcast, listen to this, follow me on Twitter, read my columns in HBR and hopefully what they’ll do is come with me on this journey – because it’s a journey. All of anything I ever do is a function of me working out what is going on in my brain in terms of trying to come to answer that has a business solution to it. It’s playing. I think that the book is a great anchor in terms of bringing together a much deeper breadth and depth to that thinking.

John:  That’s good. Let’s talk about more entertaining stuff as we wind down. I have on my list comparing Iron Man 3 versus Google Glass. Which do you fall under if you had to pick?

Mitch:  That’s crazy, John, that you say that. I was in Toronto for two days working and I had finished a client dinner. It was about 8:00pm. On the way to my hotel from my office, there was actually one of those Megaplex movie things. I was walking by and I thought, “I’m going to see Iron Man 3,” and I walked in and it was so busy. I was like, “I can’t do it. I’ll come when it’s quieter,” and I left. So, I haven’t seen Iron Man 3.

But I will tell you that I have used Google Glass and it is very, very transformative. All of the discourse I’m seeing online, I have to say, it’s just fundamentally wrong. The first thing is everybody you’re reading about Google Glass right now are the exact same things we said about cell phones: “You look like such an idiot when you talk on the phone in a restaurant,” “It’s so rude that you’re walking down the street talking,” “I can’t believe you’re talking in your car.” We said all these exact same things.

What people don’t get about it – and the transformative part about it – is this. Every time you access your keyboard, your computer, it’s about your hands and your fingers and touching and moving and your smartphones and all this. Think about moving all of that interaction that you have to your eyes for motion and your voice for control. That’s the profoundness of Google Glass. It’s not perfect. It’s going to be refined. But that alleviation of stumbling into your pocket, pulling something out, touching it and all of that just going away, and suddenly, the world is very clear.

There is a screen in the top-right corner. You can’t see it unless you look at the screen, so it doesn’t obstruct any view. It’s on a heads-up display. The ability to use your voice and your eyes to engage in that content is absolutely as enlightening as it was the first time I used a web browser.

John:  That’s a ringing endorsement then. We’ll put you on the side of being transformative and the next big thing.

Mitch:  On the beta list.

John:  How about if folks want to learn more about the book or more about you? We hit a bunch of the points, but where do you suggest they purchase the book? We don’t want to go through the regular channels if you’ve got someplace special they can pick it up.

Mitch:  It’s a massive publisher. I’m with Grand Central Publishing, which is part of Hachette Book Group. They’re the largest book publisher in the world. Anywhere you purchase books whether you do it in physical, digital or audio, it should be available. Hopefully you will buy many copious copies for yourself and everyone you know, because I have children that need to eat.

John:  That sounds good. We’ll have to come up with a package deal. Maybe we can throw Chris and I’s book in the fire and make it a 3-for-one deal.

Mitch:  Let’s do it.

John:  Mitch Joel, thanks for stopping by. We appreciate having you on the show. Any last exit comments before we wrap up?

Mitch:  I love you guys. You know that. It’s one of those weird things where we don’t talk often enough, but I think about you guys daily – both you and Chris (or as I call him, Ninja).

It’s amazing. I think back to: is this stuff real and does it make sense? People talk about the web all the time and Twitter. Is it useful? I think about you guys a lot because we met in Boston coming up to seven or eight years ago – real relationships, real interactions, real people, family stuff, friend stuff. I think people dismiss that. They dismiss the value of it and they don’t necessarily take into all the great things this digital stuff does. I would have never met you had it not been for podcasting. I’m all for podcasting.

John:  That sounds great. It’s the same here. It’s been fun to be able to watch you before the first book, before everything started. The whole PodCamp thing was crazy. David Meerman Scott got things going there.

Mitch:  You can go through it. It’s Chris Brogan, Julien Smith, John Wall, Chris Penn, David Meerman Scott. We could literally keep going for days on this. It’s insane. Pulver.

John:  Yeah, Jeff Pulver. And then Rocketboom was when they were on fire.

Mitch:  Scott Monty, Joe Jaffe.

John:  C.C. Chapman. You could really go on and on.

Mitch:  Hey, what about our friends at GALACTICAST? Same thing. All PodCamp.

John:  I’ve seen those guys in Pittsburgh at PodCamp. iJustine was down there for the first one. It was crazy, everybody on that wave. We definitely have moved on to other stuff, too, but it is great that everybody has been able to stay in touch and being able to work on different projects now and keep things going.

Mitch:  Life is good.

John:  That will do it for today. Thanks, Mitch. And to everybody out there, enjoy the coffee.

Categories
Productivity Booster

Top 7 Confessions

B2B-MC-EmailThis month I’ll be talking about some of the info in B2B Marketing Confessions in a webinar with MarketingProfs! Reg info to follow…

Of course you could free yourself from the calendar and just get a copy of the book for yourself!

Lastly, this week’s edition of Marketing Over Coffee is now available.

Bonus: As mentioned in the session, here’s the chapter on Email for free!

 

Categories
Daily Life

Prayer for Martin Richard

Martin Richard, 8 years old, was taken from his family and friends at the Boston Marathon on Monday. I was crushed when I heard about him. He came to celebrate the race, the place where we stop for a day and a huge crowd of over 15,000 take a bold leap. Courage, fear and heart on display for all to see. His loss hits me personally because of my love for this race, and here’s why:

I’ve already written at length about running the Boston Marathon, and what it meant to me. I can’t stop thinking about the tragedy there this week.

As I went through my 20’s sources of inspiration began drying up. The church, mired in scandal, and a symbol of pain. Fictional characters were recognized as just that, people that weren’t real. I began to run more often just because it was too difficult to try and find anyone left that played tennis, and there were no trails for rollerblading like there were back in the Bay Area (does anyone rollerblade anymore?)

The first race I ran was a 5k in Cambridge and I won first place in my division (Fat Bastard) by cracking 7:30 miles, a pace I haven’t seen in years. In the finish chute a guy behind me was lamenting how he was in better shape when he had run the marathon. This was a spark – I had outrun somebody that was able to run the marathon.

The next step was to go to the finish to see what it’s all about. The first time I went late in the day. The winners tear across the line in a split second. The true drama is to see the people coming in as the clock climbs to 4, 5 and even 6 hours. It’s difficult to put into words the range of emotions you see and feel watching the finishers. The tears, the limping, bleeding, the dazed and confused. All reaching deep within to accomplish their goal, many for the first time, or for charity once the 4 hour mark has passed (if you can’t make the qualifying time of around 3 hours, depending on your age, you can still get a number for the race if you raise money for charity, usually more than $2,000). It’s overwhelming to see people in the last hundred yards of their own 26.2 mile personal hell.  I hate having to drive 26 miles, never mind running it.

The more you follow it, the more inspiring it becomes. Seeing Team Hoyt, a familiar site at all the big races. The hundreds of runners raising money for charitable causes. The man pushing himself backwards in his wheelchair. For any runner that gets drawn to it, it quickly takes on mythic proportion. It’s an audacious goal to set for yourself, and it requires such a commitment that you can’t help but create a bunch of your own stories as your adventure unfolds.

My college friend Tony Ong got me  running with the Nike Running Club on Wednesday nights, a group led by Shane O’Hara (I was relieved to find this article about him and hear that he was ok). Shane would eventually leave Nike and become the Manager of Marathon Sports, the store at the finish line, you can see it in most of the pictures. Tony is fit enough that he can just jump in and run, and was thankful that he didn’t train this year otherwise he would have been closer to the trouble. He and his family got out of town with no problem. Soon enough I was signed on to run as a fundraiser for the Franciscan Hospital for Children.

What makes the Boston Marathon unique is that mere mortals like myself will never know what it’s like to throw or catch a touchdown in the Super Bowl, to step up to the plate to swing for a home run in October, or hear “GOOOOOOAL” as the ENTIRE WORLD watches you during the World Cup; but anyone with enough heart can get to the start behind some of the world’s greatest athletes (way behind in my case) in what many consider to be the world’s premier marathon.

Like many, my training did not go well. During the last week when you are supposed to taper down and have a huge surge in energy (many complain about getting very little sleep in the week prior to the race), I was sleeping 8-10 hours and sluggish all the time. Though I plodded along, I did manage to finish before the course was closed, I would not have been that lucky this year. My brother jumped in in the last half mile and crossed the finish line with me. The photo is martin-richardhere with me in my office to see every day.

It causes me great pain that the devices were set to 4:09. If the intent was getting the most media it would have gone off around the 2 hour mark when the elite athletes would finish. The 4 hour mark is when one of the largest packs come in. This was a strike not at the runners with world class talent, but those running on heart.

And yet those responsible are not only cowards but fools. The group that runs on heart knows they can’t win this race. They know at best it will be exhausting, if not painful. Giving enough sweat to feel the salt on your skin is certain, blood and tears probable. They will run in the dark, in single digit weather, on the ice for the chance to run in April where yes, it can be 80 degrees, or it can snow, or rain, or anything between. This event makes no sense. It exists only because people have the courage to try it, and others come to cheer and be inspired (and well, yes, the college kids party hard and cheer really loud, that’s their job). More adversity just makes the stories of the heroes more impressive, more motivating and likely for the next group to catch the spark.

Martin Richard, I never knew you but I can never forget you. In his memory PLEASE DO SOMETHING, even if it’s just an extra hug to your kids or the 10 seconds it takes to give to a worthy charity. If what do makes you a little bit uncomfortable, perhaps makes you afraid because you may fail, and inspires you to take a chance; that’s even better.