Is Your Tactic Remarkable, or Just a Gimmick?

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identical easter eggsPutting a dollar bill in your direct mail advertising was a great gimmick when people started doing it. There’s a lot of energy in physical money, and for awhile it was a terrific way to attract attention. Some marketers even used $20 bills for certain highly targeted campaigns. One high roller is reputed to have used $100 bills, sent via FedEx, in a mailing to CEOs.

$100 bills probably still work. (And if you have the perfect message for the perfect list, it might be worth it.) But at this point, $1 bills tell your prospects "this is junk mail." They pry the bill loose and the rest of your piece goes into the recycling bin. $1 isn’t enough to make a piece of mail remarkable any more. On to the next gimmick.

Are gimmicks intrinsically wrong? I don’t think they are. Gimmicks are used to get our attention, and in the world of information superclutter, a good gimmick is not to be despised.

Seth Godin has a nice quick post about the difference between something remarkable and something that’s just a gimmick. Godin says that "if a product or service adds value for the consumer, it’s not a gimmick," although I might have edited that to say "it’s not only a gimmick."

Cool stuff vs. cheap tricks
I was at a copywriting workshop last night (I realize I have a weird idea of fun) and the presenter was going through a stack of large-format postcards he’s received from real estate agents. I don’t know who the vendor is who provided them, but they all looked pretty well exactly the same. Front of the card, large format stock image with some kind of an attention-grabbing point. Back of card, photo of agent with contact info and maybe a tag line.

The presenter ran through the stack, evaluating whether the front was interesting enough to cause you to turn the card over, and then whether there was anything on the back that conveyed benefits to the reader. Fair enough.

But the larger point is, when you see one or two of the same postcard every day, it turns into wallpaper pretty quickly. It barely matters how good the gimmick is on the front of the card. If you use the identical tactic everyone else does (because the vendor did a marathon telemarketing campaign to you and your competitors last month, or bought your name on a list with 50,000 other people in your line of work), there’s no talk value.

A purple cow isn’t remarkable if it’s in a purple herd
If marketing sin #1 is "don’t be boring" (I’d probably put it at #2 or #3, but it’s right up there), then a boring gimmick must be the greatest sin of all. Cheap tricks need to be interesting or they’re just cheap.

A remarkable gimmick, if there can be such a thing, is relevant, useful, and interesting. If you’re spending dollars on materials that don’t live up to that standard, Quit.

Filed Under: common sense, marketing, remarkable, small business Tagged With: , ,

Relationship Marketing Series #3: Come Out of the Closet

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fancy-chihuahuaA young blogger recently came out of the closet. Her long-term relationship had just fallen apart, she was heartbroken, and she just didn’t want to keep up any more pretenses.

The interesting part wasn’t coming out about her sexual orientation. Anyone who still cares about that is someone you can definitively do without. (Not counting your parents, that part is still pretty hard.) The interesting part was her coming out about her hatred of long-form squeeze pages, autoresponder sequences and FaceBook.

She was a dutiful student of a high-profile Internet marketing program that fed all of these things to their students. She repeated them like a good girl on her blog, and carefully let her readers know about her progress. She researched her niches and keywords and worked on her backlinks.

Finally, when she was too heartbroken to give a damn, she confessed that all this stuff seemed spammy, pointless and gross.

Aha, now that is interesting.

You’ll never be remarkable dancing to someone else’s song

Our heartbroken young blogger was pretty good at the paint-by-numbers routine. She stood out on the forums, she got herself noticed, she built a little following. She was doing perfectly OK.

But that little jolt of authenticity woke her readers up and made them really pay attention. A lot of them admitted they hate that stuff too. Telling the truth opened up a space for real connection, for real passion. Her little band of followers noticed, and told her so. She’d found something real, and the value in that was palpable.

I don’t know if she’ll take advantage of that opportunity to create a new niche for herself. Maybe she’ll market to the legion of folks who don’t much like hideous squeeze pages and spam tactics. Maybe (hopefully) she’ll use that energy to come up with something really unpredictable. If she’s going to find real success, that’s the right place to look.

Some of the step-by-step Internet marketing programs look a lot like factory work to me. Take part A, connect it to part B like you were shown how to do, repeat until someone gives you new instructions.

Nobody buys it anyway

It’s interesting how hard it is to pull off being something you’re not. No one actually believes that your business is bigger than it is (and anyway, we all know Small is the New Big). No one is willing to read through the pile of verbiage you’re using to describe your leveraged dynamic synergies.

Most of all, no one gives a rat’s ass about the huge investment of energy you spend trying to be like everyone else.

Most of us (maybe not Pema Chodron or the Dalai Lama, but the rest of us) spend most of our time and energy carefully cultivating our masks. And those masks are almost universally a) laughably transparent, and/or b) boring.

It seems simple, and it is, but it’s also hard. Being remarkable means being different. “Different” is not actually all that far from “weird.”

The great thing about the Internet is you can now find all the people in the entire world who are weird in the same way you are. (That’s the only definition you really need for the Long Tail.) It’s your own cheap, portable New York City. Everything is here–and you get to make a connection with the other weirdos who value your precious, unique brand of freakiness.

One of the great cornerstones of marketing (note to self, must add this to the marketing tool kit for my newsletter) is differentiation. You’ll also see it called the unique value proposition or unique selling proposition. You need to find out, and communicate, what makes you unlike all of your customers’ other options. What makes you uniquely valuable. What makes you interesting. What makes you remarkable.

What makes you weird.

It turns out your mom was right. Just be yourself, and someone will love you exactly as you are.

When I was a young adult, it never, ever occurred to me that I might be passionate about business–or, even worse, marketing. I grew up in a solidly lefty household and majored in the hardest liberal arts subject I could find and lived in Berkeley. We just didn’t think about these things. Coming out of the closet for me meant actually acknowledging my interest in (gasp) how corporations work and (gasp) how to convince people to buy things.

Since I finally figured out my own orientation (with a little denial and shame along the way), things have started to come together for me. I’m finding work I think is deeply cool. I’m making connections with smart people I admire. And I can pay the mortgage by doing interesting stuff, which is always very nice.

Just don’t tell my dad. He’s cool about a lot of things, but he’d never understand this one.

The Relationship Marketing Series

Filed Under: connection, marketing, remarkable Tagged With: , , ,

10 Resolutions for the Remarkable

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(Photo: Luo Shaoyang)

I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I won’t commit to myself. Here are my resolutions for 2008.

(Incidentally, here as always, “customers” just means “people you want to persuade to take action.” When you read these, think of the folks you want to convince to pay for your service, donate to your nonprofit, volunteer for your project, attend your church, whatever.

  1. Quit spending so much energy trying to bullshit yourself and everyone else. Be what you are–glorious, dorky, embarrassed, proud, miraculous. The world’s wisest people agree on one thing: you are fundamentally good. Quit hiding and start celebrating.
  2. Put your customers ahead of yourself. Ask yourself every day what they need from you, how they benefit from you, what you can do for them that no one else can. Take a minute right now to calendar a regular appointment: on the 7th of every month, come up with a new way to create surprising value for your customers. Don’t just think about it, do it.
  3. Don’t be boring.
  4. Speak clearly. Write clearly. Think clearly.
  5. Ask for what you need.
  6. Decide what promise your brand makes. Then bring everything you do into alignment with that. How you answer the phone. (In fact, whether you answer the phone.) Your email address. Your Web site. Your haircut. Your reading habits. Your television habits. Live the promise that you make. Get rid of all the false distinctions between who you are and what you do.
  7. Commit to joy.
  8. You have a tremendous amount to be grateful for. Think about and express gratitude daily.
  9. Help someone much worse off than you are. I’m terribly grateful that in 2007, I was able to make donations that repaired cleft palates for 5 children. I also started sponsoring a five-year-old boy in Lesotho through World Vision. Next year, I commit to do the same again at least. You truly don’t have to give a lot. A little bit of latte money can turn a desperate, helpless life into a productive one–and it will bring you more pleasure than anything else you’re spending your dough on now, honest.
  10. Live by my friend Krissie’s motto: Fuck Doubt. Press On. Copy it out in your favorite pen and put it somewhere you can see it every day.

Made any resolutions this year? Have some ideas about how to become more remarkable, or how to communicate with other people in a more remarkable way? Leave a comment and let us know!

Filed Under: compassion, connection, eclectic, remarkable Tagged With: , , ,

Be Happy, Make Money, Help Others

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Istock_000003602212xsmall
Maureen reminded me that it’s really hard for many nonprofit organizations to get over their unhelpful mindset around money. Nonprofit workers often have limited (or hostile) ideas about wealth that get in the way of their goals to mobilize a lot of resources and help a lot of people.

I’ve been working on some materials to try and help people get over what I’m calling "financial anorexia," or a damaging and unhealthy fear of financial success. (It’s not limited to nonprofits–plenty of small-business owners and hopeful entrepreneurs have the same problem.)

I’ll let you know how that project is coming along, but in the mean time, Boing Boing has pointed us to a terrific post about working for success in a nonprofit setting.

Here’s my favorite quote (because this is out of context, I added some italics for clarity or emphasis):

You have to get as passionate about talking to the people with as you are
talking to the people without. Because we need each other, and you’re the bridge
person. If you were just desperate and needing of services and help, you
wouldn’t be working at a not-for-profit. If you were a gazillionaire, you
probably also wouldn’t be working at a non-profit. So you are the person whose
job it is to bring the haves and the have-nots together. And you have to be
passionate about that. Yeah, somebody will say "You self promote! You’re
self-promoting!" Fine, and proudly so! Get that out of your mind as a barrier,
and look at the service you can provide . . .

If you can overlook the really unfortunate term "she-roes" (feminine of heroes, oh dear), this is a kickass post about how to get over yourself and help more people.

The art of happiness
While I’m at it, in honor of Boxing Day and the other solstice-ish holidays we’re celebrating, I give you this link on happiness. I debated posting it, but the more I work with small businesses (and large ones, for that matter), the more I realize that getting smart about how to be happy makes everything else work better. The article is written from a Buddhist point of view, but the concept of Little Me is unbelievably useful no matter what your belief system.

And thanks also to Senia for pointing me in the direction of a terrific book, Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar. It’s all about the serious research that’s been done on chasing the unicorn of happiness. I’ve been reading and re-reading it all month and I have a lot of new ideas for integrating the science of happiness with the art of business. Very cool stuff.

Filed Under: compassion, connection, marketing, remarkable Tagged With: , , , ,

It’s Time to Get off our Ass and Save the World

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Istock_000003374582xsmall Seth Godin directed our attention this morning to an organization called Room to Read, a nonprofit group that builds schools and libraries for children in some of the world’s poorest rural communities.

Here are some stats from their site. In the past seven years, they’ve built 287 schools, established more than 3,700 libraries, published 146 new local-language children’s book titles (with a more than 1.3 million total print run), provided 1.4 million English-language titles, funded 3,448 long-term scholarships for girls, and established 136 computer and learning labs.

Total number of children provided with access to books so far? 1.3 million. And they’re not even thinking about slowing down.

Their founder is a guy named John Wood, who learned how to move fast and aggressively (and to think huge) as a senior marketing and biz dev exec for Microsoft.

He’s shown an impressive immunity to being overwhelmed. His response to the challenge of lifting 10 million children out of illiteracy, in a 2002 interview with Fast Company, was "Why is that not possible? Microsoft doubled every year in its early days. Cisco more than doubled every year. I worked in a lot of different organizations at Microsoft that doubled year to year, and none of us thought it was incredible."

Welcome to the new philanthropy
Organizations like The Acumen Fund, Kiva, and of course The Gates Foundation are taking their tactics from the big-picture, big-action dotcom culture–and it’s working.

There are a lot of reasons Room to Read has been successful. One that interested me is that Wood and the organization he runs aren’t at all shy about asking for large sums of money. One aspect of their model essentially "sells" a school to a donor for $5,000. Woods has the experience to know that for his audience, $5,000 is a puny amount of money balanced against the satisfaction of seeing a school built and hundreds of children’s lives changed forever. He knows his market, he knows what drives them, and he knows that price is pretty elastic.

In simple marketing terms, Wood has the right message and the right offer. He has a strong, benefits-oriented tag line ("World change starts with educated children.") He has a good hook (impoverished local communities co-fund the schools, providing exceptional local accountability and buy-in) that speaks to the language and concerns of his customers. His value proposition–a package that presents the problem, the solution, the price tag, and the tracking that guarantees accountability–is sound.

His campaign has all the ingredients of any intelligently-run marketing campaign. His product just happens to be saving the world.

Traditional nonprofits are often run by folks who think "ethical marketing" is a contradiction in terms. They’re extremely smart about real life stuff like helping people in need, but often not so smart about the business and marketing that could help them accomplish that. Their staff and volunteers have a strong tendency to hate and fear the rich, and it’s never a good idea to communicate with anyone you hate and fear. And career nonprofit types are sufficiently accustomed to living on ramen and good luck that they have a hard time saying, "The best part is, it only costs $5,000."

Those organizations are still doing incredible things and alleviating suffering, and I mean them no ill will or disrespect. But sooner rather than later, their work will be overshadowed by this new model. And since the new model has the potential to work incredibly well, I celebrate that.

It’s time to quit making excuses and save the world, already
It’s easy to lose sight of it in the depressing information clutter after 9/11, but we actually have a shot at ending extreme poverty on this abused little planet. Not just in my two-year-old’s lifetime, but in my lifetime.

The technology of making stuff has gotten so good that we can make enough stuff for everyone (if we figure out the energy thing, which we will). New tools and new business models let us think on a global scale and act accordingly. A fractured status quo provides a lot of air and light for revolutionary ideas. Massive action is tricky to take in any context, and a lot of excuses have always been made about third-world inefficiencies, but the new players are looking at factors–cheap labor, social cohesion, powerful aspirations–that can make third-world projects workable on surprising scale.

My challenge to the bright, wired oddballs who read this blog is to get out there and find a way to help out. Together we and our bright, wired oddball kin are smart and obsessed enough to do this thing.

In the words of John Wood back in 2002,"We’ve helped 100,000 kids gain access to books so far. That is one one-hundredth of 1% of the illiterate people on this earth. So congratulations. Get your ass back to work."

Related reading:
An End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs
Fast Company’s 2002 interview with John Wood
How evil is Bill Gates?
Room to Read’s Web site
We are not powerless
The WILD Foundation and the Umzi Wethu project

Filed Under: compassion, marketing, remarkable Tagged With: , ,

A Manual for the Odd and Lonesome

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Istock_000004325126xsmall Tonight I offer you a lovely post by Shane of Shane and Peter about the process of learning to connect with other people.

I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of folks who read this blog (certainly the person who writes it) can identify with the gawky, geeky boy who didn’t know how on earth to meet all of those other humans milling around him.

I’d tell you what I’ve spent on clothes over the years in an attempt to cloak how hideously freaked out I am at "networking opportunities," but then I’d have to kill you.

(See my Armani and fear me! Grrr!)

It makes me think of the vain little rose in The Little Prince, waving her thorns to show how very very fierce she is. We do an awful lot of dumb stuff–in business, in life–to make ourselves seem fierce and prickly, instead of doing the simple things that would connect us and make things better.

Make eye contact. Smile. Say hi. Then shut up. No thorns required, after all.

Filed Under: connection, remarkable Tagged With: ,

In Praise of Crazy Shit

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Hugh McLeod announces that after the distraction of well-paid, interesting, rewarding work that’s burning him out, he’s going to refocus his attention on his cartoon blog, for which he makes basically peanuts.

So he’ll be scaling back what’s probably a gigantically sweet deal with Microsoft. Scaling back the sexy, rewarding and highly visible work with Stormhoek. Scaling back the consulting gigs that a lot of us would kill baby harp seals for.

(I am just kidding. Baby harp seals are very cute with lovely dark eyes and I would never kill one, or even hurt its feelings. Please do not send hate email.)

One nice thing about doing truly crazy shit is that it’s almost never wrong. If your gut is so insistent on picking the path that doesn’t make "practical" sense, it’s generally also kind enough to give you a massive whomp of energy to go open about a zillion new doors.

This is not an argument to do dumb shit. This is not "leap and the net will appear." Anyone who’s been around awhile can tell you that sometimes it’s "leap and the bottom of the ravine will appear." If you need a net, don’t leap.

But when you just can’t sleep thinking about that wild hair, your curious monkey mind usually kicks into supergear to figure out how you can make it work. New connections, new business models, new points of intersection. Maybe you can move to Tibet and become a lama. Maybe you can go spend 10 years taking care of AIDS orphans in Lesotho.

Dumb shit, nah. Anyone can do dumb shit, it’s an oversaturated market. But crazy shit can sometimes be the exact right thing.

Filed Under: remarkable Tagged With: , , , ,

Nanomarketing

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Istock_000003104982xsmall_2 The always interesting Hugh McLeod, also known as Gaping Void, has some thoughts on micromarketing. He’s found that the smaller the "events" he organizes for Stormhoek (the small winery he promotes), the more he gets out of it.

One way to make an impression is to throw a schmoozy, boozy meat market, invite Paris Hilton to show up for 20 minutes and pose glassy-eyed with a few guests, and turn the music up too loud for anyone to notice how little fun they’re having. By about 8:00, everyone is too bored and/or smashed to remember the name of the brand currently pimping itself.

The next morning, you’ve got 500 hungover, jaded event-goers who’ll haul themselves to someone else’s boozefest the next night.

McLeod’s throwing that idea out in favor of tiny gestures like sending a bottle or two to a passionate wine geek to share at a dinner party of 6 or 7 other passionate wine geeks. It’s not a sampling campaign–it’s a relationship campaign and a storytelling campaign. He’s creating a community seven or eight people at a time, each with a tiny, gentle story to tell.

"From trying to connect with people on a much more intimate and human level, we have far more stable and stronger building blocks to create a community around our brand."

Devote the same amount of resources–money, time, and energy–that you’d use on the boozefest, and logic suggests you’ll end up with wildly more remarkable results.

More interesting for scrappy little companies and solo providers, use one-tenth the resources, or one-fiftieth, and you’ll still end up with something worth doing.

It works because it’s not what people expect, and because it fosters connection. Copying McLeod’s technique wholesale might work for your gig, or it might not. Coming up with your own riff has some pretty good odds, though.

Twitter and the nanomarketer
Stormhoek is also using Twitter to give away free bottles to UK residents of legal age. I don’t pretend to actually get Twitter yet–I’m trying to. I even created a Squidoo lens on it. That’s apparently what I do now when I’m trying to puzzle my way through something–create a lens.

(Come on over and vote for or add some "must-read" Twitters. Feel free to leave a comment explaining just how completely I’m missing the point–you may well run out of space.)

So far, I see Twitter as an RSS feed for those of us who are so distracted it’s reached the point of brain damage. And, you know, on that level it’s working for me. But there’s an opportunity there to make lots of tiny connections on a mass scale. I haven’t seen it done exactly right yet, but I’m still looking.

Experimenting with some nanomarketing? Leave a comment, tell us how it’s going.

Filed Under: connection, marketing, remarkable

Can Anything Remarkable Survive Your Approval Process?

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Istock_000003223247xsmall_2 When you’re creating content for customers, it’s smart to put it in front of a few people before you distribute it widely. But a common and serious pitfall in professional communications is letting everyone and her Aunt Mary look over materials, each feeling free to add a critique.

The VP of marketing doesn’t think it’s sexy enough. The accountant thinks the word plethora would sound better than many. (There’s a reason he’s an accountant.) The lawyers think you might be promising more than you can deliver if your company happened to get hit by a 7.0 earthquake the same week of an economy-crippling stock market crash. The CEO wants to see her name in bigger letters. The founder wants to see his name in bigger letters. The top salesman wants to see his name in bigger letters.

You get the point.

When you make all of these people happy, you end up with mush. Mashed potatoes are a nice side dish. They don’t make for a very satisfying dinner.

Who should control your content?
Prune your approvals list down to no more than three people:

  • Your strongest writer.
  • The person who owns customer experience (that person might need some education about the benefits of transparency, setting realistic expectations, and avoiding hype).
  • Maybe your lawyer, but don’t accept her first take on every point.

(As a side note, when your lawyer tries to keep you from doing something that you think is a good idea, ask why. Don’t quit asking until you fully understand the answer. This is a good time to be a pain in the ass.)

If those three people are happy, you have a good piece. Send it through a fanatic proofreader, release it to print, and move on.

Homework: List everyone on your approval list for customer communications. Does the list strike you as insane at all?

Filed Under: copywriting, marketing, remarkable Tagged With: ,

The Absence of Fear is not Courage. The Absence of Fear is Mental Illness.

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Istock_000002165252xsmall I am awfully pleased for my friend Naomi, who made the front page of Digg yesterday with this post: What to do when you’re scared sh*tless. (Sphinn censored the name by dropping the last word, respectful asterisk and all. How sad is that? It’s also a study in what differentiates a great headline from a mediocre one.)

For those who will read anything that tells you how to get on the front page of Digg, she walks you through that too. She left out several instructions, however. Be smart, funny, relevant and fearless weren’t part of it. Add that stuff and you should have no trouble reproducing her results. Also, put a naughty word in the title. No one can resist that.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably scared shitless about something. You’re starting a new business. You’re starting a big project. You’re juggling a day job and a new business and a big project or two, plus a two-year-old. (Oh, wait, that would be me.) You need to make more connections than you’re making. You need more customers and you need those customers to spend more money, and it would be helpful if they were less of a pain in the ass.

It’s possible you also just like stock photography of monkeys.

Being scared is part of the price of admission. If you aren’t scared, you probably should crawl a little further out on that limb. Everything worth doing will scare the shit out of you.

One nice thing about not being 20 any more is I can look at all that fear and say, Oh, right, that’s just fear. It goes away. It may not be comfortable (actually it may feel a lot like being eaten by fire ants), but it does, in fact, go away.

Being remarkable is deeply scary. That’s why big dumb companies do such a crappy job at it. There are too many people involved who have to be willing to tolerate that discomfort, to feel their pulse pounding in their ears and that strange feeling in your scalp that suggests your hair might be starting to fall out.

So what are you doing lately that scares the crap out of you? Drop me a comment, we’ll cheer you on.

Filed Under: connection, eclectic, remarkable, small business Tagged With: , , ,
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