Offline, your bubble is the city you live in, your place of worship, your school, your workplace.
You have an online bubble too. You have a profile on Facebook and Myspace, but not Friendster. For every blog you comment on, there are 100,000 you don’t. You have been IMing the same people since highschool.
Online bubbles are bigger and more accessible than offline bubbles, but their purpose is the same - to be in a network of like-minded people.
Get outside your bubble.
There are millions of niches all over the web. You could click on a stray link and wander into a blog about good meatloaf, or into a forum about the best dog toys. It doesn’t matter if you don’t cook and you have no pets.
When you surround yourself with like-minded people, it’s easy to forget that not everyone is exactly like you. Get some perspective by wandering.
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If you don’t have a personal brand, you have to sell yourself twice. Having a personal brand answers the “who” question in a new situation and allows you to get right to the “why” and what you can do for someone.
I’ve written about personal brands before. Andy’s is a great explanation of why you should care about your personal brand, but it goes even further than that.
If you have a personal brand, people seek you out to ask what you can do for them. Without a personal brand, you’re the one doing all of the seeking.
This video is clever, fun and entertaining, but in no way helps me solve my problems. We only watch TV for entertainment, so TV advertising has to be entertaining (not informative and helpful).
That’s why TV ads suck; to reach your audience, your call to action has to be “sit on your ass and chuckle.” Let the shows handle that part, they do it better.
Instead, communicate online. People surfing the web are seeking entertainment, but switch to learning, shopping, and problem solving modes instantaneously (or simultaneously).
Your messages should be entertaining, helpful, and lead the audience to actually do something.
Steve discussed some smart thoughts about the usefulness of data and proof, but I don’t think it’s the whole story.
Spending time perfecting metrics and building models from past data is a great way to succeed within the box. By it’s nature, data analysis will lead you to doing the best thing for the past situation under which the data was generated.
This isn’t a bad way to start new things. It will undoubtedly lead to more successes than great ideas that don’t have a set of historical data.
But the scale of your successes, and the degree of innovation, will be greater if you build metrics to measure the data you generate yourself.
For big organizations that have a lot to lose, measure and tread carefully (maybe). For the rest of us, don’t worry so much about whether you have the proof yet.
Spend more time making the data than analyzing it. Follow history too closely and you’ll start thinking the future looks the same.
Receiving too many messages makes it difficult to pick which ones to allow past our noise filter. We only have a certain amount of mental bandwidth devoted to accepting new ideas, so we block the low quality messages that don’t help us.
The size of those messages also matters, especially for the ideas we choose to continue spreading. The less I have to do to spread a message that I support, the more likely I am to tell everyone I know.
It occurred to me that one of my favorite companies (Apple) badly violates one of my favorite business practices (being transparent).
Steve Jobs is the face of Apple, but the rest of the company is behind the iron curtain. Jobs even plants false information to ferret out leaks.
How does such a closed company enjoy so much love from fans?
David suggested it’s because they sell crack.* I actually buy that; Apple’s products make their customers feel so good, it doesn’t matter that Apple isn’t transparent. Steve Jobs had to change the world before people felt this way about Apple. And he did it 3 times.
So if your crack is good enough (you’ve got a brand as powerful as Apple) don’t worry about the minor details of humanizing your company.
But if you’ve only got the weak stuff, concentrate on having more personal relationships with your customers.
* Sorry I can’t link to David’s comment, at least not until we figure out how to tag offline conversations.
We love our cellphones, but we hate cell phone service providers. All of them.
It irks me when I hear about how “our network has less dropped calls” when they drop my calls. They mock “can you hear me now?” as if I don’t actually have to say that.
It’s never a good idea to make your claim to fame, “I’m relatively less sucky than the competition”, especially if you’re still absolutely and totally sucky.
In the last 5 years, cell phone providers have inched forward. They’ve incrementally bested each other with cheaper plans, more minutes, better coverage, subsidized phones, and so on.
What a screw up. Any one of those companies has had the opportunity to blast the competition out of the water by skipping the incremental and jumping the curve.
What if there was a cell phone provider that had given us what we have today, but 5 years ago? They’d own the market, we’d love them, and we’d be much closer to a consumer-friendly marketplace today.
Same technology. Same infrastructure. Stupid business decisions.
My friend Noah, a self-styled philosopher king, wasn’t happy writing his academic works as a part of the establishment. There wasn’t a field he fit in.
So he left his graduate program and skipped the middle man to create his own niche, releasing works on his website.
It’s always a good choice to dominate a market that no one else knows about.
I’ve said before that perfectionism is paralyzing. Don’t spend too much time planning, because then you never do.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t test for what worked and what didn’t. Don’t blindly plow forward. Learn from your mistakes (and successes). That’s the whole point of starting now.
There are thousands of marketing messages that hit us every day, so we’ve gotten really good at ignoring them. It’s like standing in a crowded room where everyone else is having a conversation. You just tune it out.
Lots of smart people talk about effective marketing being about cutting through that noise, but I don’t think that’s good enough.
It reminds me of the scene in Anchor Man where the guys are yelling, so Steve Carell’s character screams “LOUD NOISES!”
TV commercials are noise, so we ignore them. Some TV commercials are really loud, like during the Superbowl, so we watch those, but only out of a morbid curiosity about their inappropriateness. We’d still rather just go back to watching the football game.
Really interesting TV commercials cut through the noise, so we rewind the Tivo to watch. Not because they’re loud, but because they’re not noise.
