I posted the sequel (see the post below: Seth’s Blog: The first sequel to Knock Knock) and in three hours sold more copies of my ebook than I had in any single day over the last two weeks.
Obviously, this was an experiment, not a clever tool to sell more ebooks. The fact is that human beings, even human beings who are smart and focused and paying attenion, need (and want) to be reminded of stuff.
I could spend part of every single post hawking my new book (Amazon.com: Books: All Marketers Are Liars)
and no doubt I’d lose readers. I’d also be bored. But, surprisingly
enough, I’d sell more books, books to people who were glad to be
reminded.
The challenge this new medium faces is that no one has figured out the
standard that feels right. On TV it’s 11 minutes of commercials an
hour. On some highways, it’s a billboard every 50 feet. Without an FCC
and with 20,000,000 people experimenting, I wonder if we’ll ever figure
it out.
[interesting statistical aside: I sold more than half of the total sales of my ebook in the five hours after the original post. There’s no other medium in history where that sort of effect is true.] And yes, it’s all an experiment. No animals are injured in the production of my ebooks, but all profits go to charity.
June 9, 2005
Aaron at BRANDPLAY has written a sequel to Knock Knock, my ebook on web sites. And here it is, for free:
Download whosthere.pdf
John Nardini points us to: Ronald McDonald made over.
I don’t think this is going to work. The reason? The entire value of Ronald is as a reminder of what we (boomers) felt like when we were six. Going to McDonald’s is a way of reliving that memory.
If you change Ronald too much, either we’ll ignore him (likely) or reject him.
Yes, McDonald’s could conceivably spend the cash necessary for a reinvention, but why bother? Why not invent someone new, someone for a new generation?
June 8, 2005
Andrew Tonkin points to: Cash-Strapped Airlines Try In-Flight Advertising.
My favorite part is the spokesman who says the flight attendants do it "voluntarily."
Imagine different classes of service–bad ads, bad ads with a loud person sitting next to you shilling, bad ads with smellovision, funny ads, no ads.
June 7, 2005
a few people have written to point out that on p. 68 I make a reference to MS and dopamine.
I’m going to go through my archives for the source, but it appears as though I got the ailment wrong. My apologies to anyone who has a friend (or is personally) suffering with MS. I’m sorry if I caused any concern or false hope.
Thanks for writing and I’ll have this confirmed or changed for the next printing.
vs. treating them like they’re stupid.
Have you ever noticed that marketers repeat themselves a lot? That it’s not unusual to see 50 or 100 billboards for the same brand, or 30 or 50 promos for the same TV show?
Traditional media is filled with repetition. The more they tell us, the theory goes, the more likely we are to take action.
If you think about it, that means the marketer isn’t holding your decision making ability in very high esteem, is she? After all, a "smart" person ought to see an offer, make a decision and then move on. No need to repeat the offer, because he’s already decided.
Don’t interrupt that show to show me another promo for the series finale of Frasier. I mean, you just showed that to me an hour ago. Either I’m going to watch it or not!
Blogs are different. There’s a presumption of informed mature decision making. I come out with a new book, I mention it and then we all move on.
You’re smart. You can handle it.
How, then, do I explain the phenomenon that every time I mention a past post or an ebook or another blog, the traffic and the sales go up! Right away. A lot.
In fact, some of the biggest successes online have come from doing precisely that. AOL sent out more than 500,000,000,000 disks to people to get them join the service over the last decade. This was to an audience that was media-savvy, largely upper income and ostensibly smart.
Did you sign up the first time you got a CD? The second? The tenth?
What is it about (smart) people that makes them succumb to mindless repetition?
There’s a whole bunch of stuff that bloggers want you to do. They want you to buy stuff, read stuff, email about stuff and tell your friends about stuff. They are sorely tempted to use up their permission to talk to you by repeating themselves, because every time they do, the audience (that’s you) does what they are hoping for.
AOL annoyed everyone with their CDs. And then built a company worth many many billions of dollars on the back of that. Is annoying people worth it?
Most blogs have a center well of the "new stuff" and then links and ads along the sides. And it’s pretty sacrosanct that you put the repetitive stuff on the sides, while the center column is for the new, the stuff that people give you permission to say, the stuff that actually gets read.
A blogger in Switzerland reported that while her traffic keeps going up, her revenue from AdWords keeps going down. Why? Because she’s trained people to ignore the ads. The good stuff is in the center column, and we ignore the rest.
It’s only a matter of time before this dynamic gets wrecked. Advertising is insidious, because people are people. And people respond to interruption and repetition. The minute we stop doing that is the minute advertising stops wrecking the editorial process. I’m not going to hold my breath…
[added an hour later: smart and stupid were a poor choice of words. Since that’s my business, double apologies. I should have said alert and asleep.]
What do you do once you realize the power of small? (tiny correction… eBay has more than 8,000 employees! That’s a lot of mouths to feed).
It’s one thing to say, "yep, of course, small is the new big." It’s quite another to actually do anything about it.
For the last six years, I’ve had exactly one employee. Me. This has changed my worklife in ways that I hadn’t predicted. The biggest changes are:
1. the kind of project that’s "interesting" is now very different. It doesn’t have to be strategic or scalable or profitable enough to feed an entire division. It just has to be interesting or fun or good for my audience.
2. the idea of risk is different as well. I can write an ebook and launch it in some crazy way and see what happens. I can build a dot com enterprise with a questionable business model and just see what happens. Because my costs are a whisker compared to a large organization, there’s just no comparison in the way I can approach something (compared to, say, a publisher).
Does this mean that little companies just do little things? Of course not.
Example: My friend Michael Cader (Publishers Lunch) has bootstrapped his tiny business into the single largest, most influential voice in the entire book publishing industry. When he needs help, he outsources it, probably to someone way too good and way too impatient to work for him or his competition. With a staff small enough to fit into a BMW, Cader has a business with a bigger circulation than the huge and fabled Publishers Weekly magazine, owned by a conglomerate.
Is this only for writers and such? What about the solo builder I met who competes with giants by aggressively outsourcing his design and labor?
What about the architect down the street who tripled his income by leaving the huge firm and only taking on the high leverage assignments he actually enjoys?
Or the lawyer who left a giant firm, works half as much and enjoys it for the first time?
A dear friend of ours left her housewares sales firm and is now inventing things, getting them built in factories she doesn’t own and selling to retailers who are dying for innovative stuff that feels risky. She doesn’t take any risk at all… except her time, which is cheap now because she’s on her own.
One of the implications of the Long Tail is that you don’t know what’s going to work. That it’s easy to launch stuff, hard to figure out where it’s going to land. If you don’t have to bet the farm on every launch, you’re way more likely to launch more, and more randomly, which vastly increases your odds.
So, what do you do if you buy this? Quit.
Don’t grow unless it gives you joy.
Dare your employees to become freelancers instead.
Do it on a weekend until it doesn’t scare you quite so much.
It’s no longer about access to cash. Now it’s about choosing the right model and being remarkable.
June 6, 2005
Big used to matter. Big meant economies of scale. (You never hear about “economies of tiny” do you?) People, usually guys, often ex-Marines, wanted to be CEO of a big company. The Fortune 500 is where people went to make… a fortune.
There was a good reason for this. Value was added in ways that big organizations were good at. Value was added with efficient manufacturing, widespread distribution and very large R&D staffs. Value came from hundreds of operators standing by and from nine-figure TV ad budgets. Value came from a huge sales force.
Of course, it’s not just big organizations that added value. Big planes were better than small ones, because they were faster and more efficient. Big buildings were better than small ones because they facilitated communications and used downtown land quite efficiently. Bigger computers could handle more simultaneous users, as well.
Get Big Fast was the motto for startups, because big companies can go public and get more access to capital and use that capital to get even bigger. Big accounting firms were the place to go to get audited if you were a big company, because a big accounting firm could be trusted. Big law firms were the place to find the right lawyer, because big law firms were a one-stop shop.
And then small happened.
Enron (big) got audited by Andersen (big) and failed (big.) The World Trade Center was a target. TV advertising is collapsing so fast you can hear it. American Airlines (big) is getting creamed by Jet Blue (think small). BoingBoing (four people) has a readership growing a hundred times faster than the New Yorker (hundreds of people).
Big computers are silly. They use lots of power and are not nearly as efficient as properly networked Dell boxes (at least that’s the way it works at Yahoo and Google). Big boom boxes are replaced by tiny ipod shuffles. (Yeah, I know big-screen tvs are the big thing. Can’t be right all the time).
I’m writing this on a laptop at a skateboard park… that added wifi for parents. Because they wanted to. It took them a few minutes and $50. No big meetings, corporate policies or feasibility studies. They just did it.
Today, little companies often make more money than big companies. Little churches grow faster than worldwide ones. Little jets are way faster (door to door) than big ones.
Today, Craigslist (18 employees) is the fourth most visited site according to some measures. They are partly owned by eBay (more than 4,000 employees) which hopes to stay in the same league, traffic-wise. They’re certainly not growing nearly as fast.
Small means the founder makes a far greater percentage of the customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them, quickly.
Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.
Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.
Small means that you can answer email from your customers.
Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others, while you keep the power because you invent the remarkable and tell stories to people who want to hear them.
A small law firm or accounting firm or ad agency is succeeding because they’re good, not because they’re big. So smart small companies are happy to hire them.
A small restaurant has an owner who greets you by name.
A small venture fund doesn’t have to fund big bad ideas in order to get capital doing work. They can make small investments in tiny companies with good (big) ideas.
A small church has a minister with the time to visit you in the hospital when you’re sick.
Is it better to be the head of Craigslist or the head of UPS?
Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big.
Don’t wait. Get small. Think big.
[this post is now the title essay of my new book.]
June 5, 2005
July 11. Hugh is nice enough to host: gapingvoid: london marketing soiree, july 11th.
June 4, 2005
…die by the cow.
So, what’s up with Apple? iPod sales are rumored to be flattening and the stock gets hammered. Well of course! And Krispy Kreme? The donut fad fades, and they fire the CEO. Or just about every other example of some cool organization from ten years ago…
The thing is, if you want to play the fashion game, to create a Purple Cow then you must embrace the fact that it won’t last forever. It might not last very long at all.
Organizations are not very good at creating the remarkable. People are. And after a person creates a purple cow, the organization milks that cow, relentlessly, for as long as it can. If the people in the organization don’t have the guts and the energy to ready a new cow, then the organization’s days are numbered.
