There's no doubt that it's easier to start an organization (or a project) around specific.
The more specific the better. When you have a handful of ideal potential clients and a solution that is customized and perfect for them, it's far easier to get started than when you offer everything to everyone.
Not only that, but the specific makes it easier to be remarkable, to overdeliver and to create conversations, because you know precisely what will delight the user.
Once you master your specific, you can do the work to become general, because you have cash flow and reputation and experience.
The flipside of this is interesting: if you have somehow, against all odds, managed to succeed in the general, the move to specific is almost effortless. If you can change your reflex action that consistently pushes you to mass, the market you've chosen will embrace the fact that you, the general one, are now truly focused on them, the specifics.
September 24, 2012
There's a huge chasm in most markets: People who want to be isolated from the consequences of their actions, and those that are focused (sometimes too much) on those consequences.
For years, Paula Dean sold cooking shows to an audience that refused to care about what would happen if they regularly ate what she cooked.
Rep. Anthony Weiner wasn't open to buying warnings about what would happen to his photos and tweets.
At the same time, there's the audience of new moms that are overeager to baby-proof their home (just in case), the conscientious recycler who doesn't want to know about the actual costs of picking up that bin out front, and the passionate teacher who sacrifices every day so his students can thrive a decade from now.
If you are selling tomorrow, be very careful not to pitch people who are only interested in buying things that are about today. It's virtually impossible to sell financial planning or safety or the long-term impacts of the environment to a consumer or a voter who is relentlessly focused on what might be fun right now.
Before a marketer or organization can sell something that works in the future, she must sell the market on the very notion that the future matters. The cultural schism is deep, and it's not clear that simple marketing techniques are going to do much to change it.
September 23, 2012
If you take a group of people, a subgroup of the larger population, and expose them to focused messages again and again, you will start to change their point of view. If you augment those messages with exposure to other members of the group, the messages will begin to have ever more impact.
If the group becomes aligned, and it starts acting like a tribe, those messages will become self-reinforcing. And finally, if you anoint and reward leaders of this tribe, single them out for positive attention because of the way your message resonated with them, it will become fully baked in.
That's a lot of power. Probably too much for the selfish marketer, lobbyist or demagogue to have at his disposal.
September 22, 2012
Avoid it at your peril. The cat's not even sick. (HT to C. J. Cherryh)
If you don't know how it works, find out.
If you're not sure if it will work, try it.
If it doesn't make sense, play with it until it does.
If it's not broken, break it.
If it might not be true, find out.
And most of all, if someone says it is none of your business, prove them wrong.
…is a clock that's wrong. Randomly fast or slow.
If we know exactly how much it's wrong, then it's not so bad.
If there's no clock, we go seeking the right time. But a wrong clock? We're going to be tempted to accept what it tells us.
What are you measuring? Keeping track of the wrong data, or reading it wrong is worse than not keeping track at all.
September 21, 2012
If you don't have time to do it right, how will you find time to do it over?
(In Swahili: Haraka Haraka haina Baraka….)
PS stalling is even worse than hurrying.
September 20, 2012
There are at least 200 working days a year. If you commit to doing a simple marketing item just once each day, at the end of the year you've built a mountain. Here are some things you might try (don't do them all, just one of these once a day would change things for you):
- Send a handwritten and personal thank you note to a customer
- Write a blog post about how someone is using your product or service
- Research and post a short article about how something in your industry works
- Introduce one colleague to another in a significant way that benefits both of them
- Read the first three chapters of a business or other how-to book
- Record a video that teaches your customers how to do something
- Teach at least one of your employees a new skill
- Go for a ten minute walk and come back with at least five written ideas on how to improve what you offer the world
- Change something on your website and record how it changes interactions
- Help a non-profit in a signficant way (make a fundraising call, do outreach)
- Write or substiantially edit a Wikipedia article
- Find out something you didn't know about one of your employees or customers or co-workers
Enough molehills is all you need to have a mountain.
September 19, 2012
The application deadline for my free non-profit session is Friday morning. Also, only 13 early bird tickets left for the weekend seminar. Thanks.
September 18, 2012
This is one of the nicest things you can say to someone who just got good news.
"Congratulations" is fine for winning the lottery, but "well deserved" is reserved for people who put in the effort and the time and took the risk to get somewhere.
The interesting thing is that we get to choose what sort of prizes we're in line for. It seems to me that vying for the ones that come with "well deserved" makes more sense than merely spinning the wheel over and over.
Maybe I'm not listening to your pitch because the 100 people who came before you abused my trust, stole my time and disrespected my attention.
Perhaps I'm not buying from you because the last time someone like you earned my trust, he broke my heart.
People are never irrational. They often act on memories and pressures that you're unaware of, though.
September 17, 2012
