Seth Godin’s ‘Poke The Box’…

April 9, 2011 By 1 Comment

I’ve been lucky enough to get a free copy of the new book, ‘Poke The Box’ by Seth Godin (I’m doing well at the moment after also getting a copy of Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Enchantment’ earlier this year). I’m going to try to look at the book itself seperately from The Domino Project – Godin’s attempt to disrupt the publishing model with support from Amazon and a team of very nice people. It’s a project that I wholeheartedly support as an example of someone going out to do something different and disruptive, rather than just talking about it…

'Poke The Box' by Seth Godin

My review of Poke the Box by Seth Godin:

Like most people with any interest in digital marketing, I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s books and blog as a fan for several years now. It’s safe to say that he’s been a significant inspiration and influence on a lot of the practitioners and commentators on the future of marketing, business innovation, and the disruption of the traditional way of doing business – and it’s also been interesting to see how he’s used social networking as a tool. For instance, he’s avoided Twitter for various reasons and disabled comments on his blog, but was actively involved in a closed social network created for purchases of his Tribes book, for example.

Poke The Box is the first ‘manifesto’ published via The Domino Project, and like most Godin books, it’s fairly short, punchy and aims to provoke and inspire you to action with a mixture of examples and prompts. Running at 85 pages, it’s true to the Godin style of proposing an idea or statement, backing it up with an example or anecdote and then moving onto the next idea in pretty short order, and concenrates on inspiration rather than prescribing practical applications – which is a logical approach given that it’s aimed at getting you ff your backside and producing something. It’s a book you could get through in a couple of hours, and then follow the instructions at the end to pass it on to colleagues and friends.

Whether or not I’d recommend you purchasing it really depends on whether or not you’ve read the last couple of Godin books, Tribes and Linchpin. At just £5.49 for the hardcover (also available for Kindle and in audio editions), it’s a very affordable espresso shot of inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs, or those wanting to innovate within larger companies. But at the same time, I have to admit I didn’t see a lot which hasn’t already been covered to some extent by Tribes and Linchpin. Both of those books dug deeper into becoming someone who initiates and delivers on change, and although some of the examples are new in Poke The Box, many of the suggestions, and the overarching ideas, are pretty much the same.

Where it succeeds is as an introduction to those ideas – if it had preceded the earlier two books, or if you’re looking for an inspirational, idea-generating primer, then it’s a good choice. Or if you want to inspire a friend or colleague, and suspect that the other books are a little too lengthy, then it’s a great choice.

Having browsed through the fairly exensive Godin section on my bookshelf, if you’re looking for something more in-depth in marketing, then I’m a big fan of Unleashing The Ideavirus (There’s something very odd with one of those Amazon listings – as much as I like the book, and know Seth often does very special editions and offers, I’m not sure the paperback listed at £114 is right). The Big Red Fez is also a good choice for the specifically digital marketer. And in terms of innovation, disruption and changing your personal circumstances, the aforementioned Tribes and Linchpin are definitely worthwile. I’d actually say either of them make a good accompaniment to Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment - Seth inspires you to not only start making changes but to deliver on them, and Guy provides some more detail examples about how you might become the type of person who can engage and enchant the people you will be interacting with to make it happen.

And rather than following up with books that aim to tell you exactly what you should do to create a Facebook page or a Twitter account (If you really want people to give you a supposed recipe for success, you’ll find countless blog posts via Google with the same info), I’d complete the set with some practical guides to either the mechanics of business, or the mechanics of measuring and analysing what you’re doing to allow you to work out quickly and effectively what you’re doing (Start with Web Analytics an Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik).

I said that I’d try to seperate The Domino Project from reviewing Poke The Box, but it’ll be really interesting to see the second manifesto appear, which is entitled ‘Do The Work’ by Stephen Pressfield, who previously wrote ‘The War of Art‘. The electronic version is actually available to pre-order for free for a limited time, if you don’t mind downloading the Amazon Kindle software for your device (If you don’t already own a Kindle/Kindle App). It’ll be interesting to see how other authors adapt to the manifesto length and format.

 

Filed Under: Books, Inspiration, Recommended Books Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Lessons to learn from Blekko and T-Shirt marketing

April 8, 2011 By 1 Comment

You may or may not have heard about a relatively new search engine named Blekko – and fortunately it doesn’t matter hugely in the context of this post. If you’re interested in playing around with data and search, then it’s definitely worth checking out, but the important thing for this article is in the picture:

Free T-Shirt sent by Blekko

It’s a picture of a T-Shirt sent to me by Blekko. I can’t remember where I first saw their offer mentioned (Possibly Reddit), but if you emailed them via an address listed on their blog, they offered to send a T-Shirt and a cool little trading cards booklet which I can’t find to photograph right now. And shortly afterwards, they created Blekkogear, which continues to offer shirts and trading cards to anyone that emails them.

How lovely and fluffy right?

Isn’t that lovely? A nice free T-shirt – and they’re one of those rare companies that actually sends things outside of the U.S as well! But it’s not really marketing is it – it’s not like a homepage advert on a big website or investing thousands in a PPC campaign.

Wait a minute – there’s ROI here:

Now the team at Blekko might just think it’s a nice thing to send out shirts, or they might be doing it because they realise there’s a lot of value in it – or it might be a mixture of the two. Either way, it’s worth considering what costs and returns they might be getting. In terms of costs, the T-shirt design may have been an internal thing, or it might have cost them some cash, say $500 for the sake of this exercise. And each T-shirt with the image would be say, $20 on average using print-on-demand to avoid overstock, with say $10 for shipping each time (I have no idea of postage costs in the U.S, but in the UK, I’d guess it’d be probably £2 for a domestic parcel).

And let’s imagine that as Blekko, the Blekko blog, and the places it was shared are quite techy, they get 200 people enquiring about a shirt.

So that’s:

  • Design: $500
  • Shirts: $4000
  • Shipping: $2000

Total spend $6500.

That seems like a lot of dough for 200 T-shirts doesn’t it?

But wait a second…

They’ve let the offer percolate amongst a techy crowd, which is exactly the core market for Blekko – if it’s going to go mainstream, it’s most likely going to do it with the earlier adopters actively advocating and teaching others about it, as it will have to battle some change intertia to move people away from Google or even Bing, which have a ‘traditional’ search engine and also lots of brand recognition/advertising budget.

Say 25% of the T-shirt recipients are like me and have a blog. They’re not necessarily A-list bloggers, and they’re chuffed enough to post an article with a link to Blekko and Blekko gear. That’s 50 blog posts, and links – depending on the site, paid links can be somewhere between $50 and $200 judging by the going rate on various sponsored post and linkbuying services and the enquiries I regular see being pitched to a variety of bloggers (And in sponsored posts etc, those links are meant to be ‘nofollowed’ – the voluntary ones to Blekko are ‘Dofollowed’, which is handy). So that’s potentially about $10,000 worth of links.

I’m not a heavyweight tech blogger, and tend to be somewhere above average on most of the ranking services I’m registered on – e.g. AdAge, Technorati, Wikio, PostRank etc, etc. So knocking a little off my average article views, you’re probably looking at circa 10,000 page views targetted at the tech/marketing audience Blekko want to reach. Put that at a CPM of say $10, and that’s another $100, before we look at how the offer has spread via social networks, social sharing sites, and other word-of-mouth routes.

Then there’s the offline impact. I hang out with a lot of people involved in digital businesses, and I’m quite likely to be wearing the Blekko shirt on some of those occasions – if people haven’t heard of the name, like any normal geek, they’ll ask about it, and not only see the name, but get my quick take on what it is and does. And odds are, they’ll decide not to just take my word for it and have a look themselves. Coincidentally, the T-Shirt has arrived just before the Digital People in Peterborough Curry Night, so that’s 16-20 geeks.

And then there’s the fact that although I’ve heard the name and taken a quick look at some reviews of Blekko (and spend a quick bit of time playing), I still ahven’t really sat down and worked out exactly what it could do for me. But having received the T-shirt, I may not consciously think of it as a bribe, but it’s made me think nicely of the company, and every time I see it, I’ve got a visual reminder that I saved a load of Blekko information and intended to sit down and work through how I could utilise it effectively. With limited time in the day and countless startups appearing in my RSS feed that get filed for the mythical ‘when I get some spare time’, that visual reminder makes all the difference. I don’t know what the lifetime value is of a new user for Blekko, but say it’s $20. Out of the initial 200 T-shirts, they’re likely to convest a fair amount – say 20%, or 40 people. And from online and offline interactions, those people will probably spread the word to say 100 people (Average number of Facebook friends is 150 as an example). That’s 4000 additional people, and if 5% like Blekko, that’s another 200. Without going to the next degree of Kevin Bacon, we’ll say that’s 240 new users with a lifetime value of $4800.

So quick maths time:

Remember the costs?

  • Design: $500
  • Shirts: $4000
  • Shipping: $2000
  • Total spend $6500.

And the benefits?

  • Linkbuilding: $10,000.
  • Equivalent CPM ads: $100
  • User lifetime value: $4800
  • Offline recommendations: How much would you value someone’s friend recommending your product?
  • Total: $14,900.

$8400 of benefits already, so why aren’t more companies doing it?

Really rough calculations without getting into Blekko’s business model, accurately looking at social media sharing and recommendation values etc, but you probably get the message, and I save the calculations to decimal places for paying clients… But that not only leaves the question of why more companies don’t allow for offers like this, and limit their giveaways to conferences, trade shows or to members of the traditional press (Conference freebies end up as noise unless they’re really special – and traditional mainstream press still appreciate free schwag but are a bit more jaded than most people).

Even worse – how have I managed to work with a load of brands that have somewhat iconic status amongst their fans, to the point where fans are potentially willing to pay to advertise that company, and yet the opportunity isn’t taken because no-one ever gets around to it? And that’s ignoring the concerns about the brand identity, and what happens in someone undesirable wears our logo etc.

If you’re trying to be ultra-exclusive and maintain your desirability that way, then you might not want to be letting just anyone into your branded shirts or other merchandise. But even then, letting the availability spread via word-of-mouth means you get that same benefit until such a time as your making enough mainstream cash not to care.

And I’m not suggesting you should stop all your other branding, marketing and advertising and bung it all into T-shirts, but when you’re spreading your budget between SEO, Social Media, Display etc, it’s worth allocating some to something which might serve as a social object if you’re lucky.

And the best bit of this whole argument?

If it works, I’m hoping I can renew my wardrobe… And the last time I got a free shirt and modelled it (SocialMedian back in January 2009), it roughly coincided with the company being acquired for $7.5 million. It’s the T-shirts that did it…

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing, Promotions Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The stopping power of simple and effective marketing

April 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Before you click on the video below, which shows a very literal example of being simple and effective, I should point out that it does contain a very small amount of violence, that I know it’s from the film ‘Never Back Down’, and I also know it’s not an accurate reflection of the effectiveness of Capoeira as a martial art.

But still…

I’m not going to suggest that business strategy, marketing or writing are related to fighting or violence, although I do know that to excel in martial arts or any endeavour requires similar levels of focus, dedication and perseverance. What I wanted to point out is that the most effective route to a solution is quite often the simplest, and that’s something easily overlooked in a digital world which tends towards information overload and constant hype cycles around the latest startup and innovation.

 

The thing of it:

I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t experiment, innovate and impress. But these should always come after your core business and marketing ideas. The hardest bit is often stripping back everything to the simplest expression of what you do and why you do it. In fact, you can often find business people will try to delay answering or avoid the question altogether, and I imagine that’s because they fear that actually there’s nothing there.

That’s never been true in my experience.

It’s simply about digging deeper and asking the right questions to find the one core element that will really resonate. Even the dullest business you can possibly imagine, which may have been set up purely to make a profit, will have something of interest in it, whether that’s something in the story of the founders or workforce, or in the history of the business, or in future ambitions. The trick is to find it, and this is something which is potentially a lot easier for someone like me to discover as an ‘outsider’ working on a freelance basis, who can take an overall honest view and then ask potentially career limiting questions if you were putting them to your boss.

I recently had an epiphany when trying to simplify the brand idea for a client, after losing myself in all the great functionality of their product, and struggling to explain a lot of detailed technical terms. I’d succumbed to selling the features, rather than the benefits. But looking at it from the angle of their potential consumers, I suddenly realised that the one key benefit was incredibly simple, and could be summed up in 6 words. Now that’s got potential as a strapline, message, brand idea and identity etc.

Image courtesy funtik.cat on Flickr (CC Licence)

 

It’s about simple messages:

Particularly in the early stages of a business, it’s about getting who you are, and what you do, across in the simplest, most comprehensible ways.

People are great at passing on information. They’re not always great at taking information in, processing it, and repeating it all accurately, and that diminishes as the amount gets bigger.

Imagine you’re at a party, and you’re introducing an old friend to someone. Would you tell them absolutely everything that you know about your lifelong friendship? Or would you be more likely to say ‘Here’s Dave, he works in marketing and I’ve known him since I was five.’

One of my favourite tricks when it comes to simple messaging is to think about the classic game know as ‘Telephone‘ in the U.S, and without wishing to cause offence, ‘Chinese Whispers’ in the UK. If your message isn’t simple enough to pass from the CEO of the company down to the receptionist without the basic gist of it remaining, then it isn’t simple enough.

Or just think about the companies and slogans you remember off the top of your head. There are plenty of examples which not only function as a simple and effective strapline, but go further in explaining what it is you do, e.g.

Making collaboration productive and enjoyable for people every day. 37Signals

That goes a bit further than the classic strapline. And if it passes down the line and comes out as ‘they make working together more fun’, then it still works.

And there’s another reason why it’s more important than ever:

If you’ve ever come across Gary Vaynerchuck, you’ll already known why ‘passions,hustle, wine and business’ is a great 4 word summary. Generally SEO advice is always about ranking for keywords, but that site description is what converts people to following up on the search results. And as search and social become more and more intertwined, then memorable and sharable become even more important.

Oh, and if you can keep it under 140 characters, that’s even better:

 

Practising what I preach:

Along with a lot of bloggers and commentators, I can often fall into the trap of talking a great game about other people, and failing to do it for myself.

That’s particularly true when I’ve spent a lot of time working on client projects – part of the reason I took up blogging was to have an outlet for writing which didn’t follow a traditional news structure (At the time I was writing a lot of online news). That probably explains why I tend to write lengthy posts whenever I get the chance.

But now that TheWayoftheWeb is increasingly a lead generator for my marketing and content business (which is continuing to grow and may well expand in the future), and I’m also responsible for the marketing and lead generation side of Jodanma design and development, I’m going to be able to show more of the process that goes into that simplicity. The current Jodanma holding page will be replaced by the full website shortly, and the initial attempt at conveying what we do isn’t anywhere close to what it should be.

So here begins a real journey to apply what I do for clients to my own two businesses, and explain what goes into it along the way…

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Content Marketing, marketing, social media marketing, strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Musical serendipity in a digital world….

April 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

My former Absolute Radio colleague Adam Bowie recently wrote about serendipity in music and books, and it’s been stuck in my head like a particularly determined earworm for a while. I’ll wait here while you go and read it.

'The Record Shop' courtesy Nicoze on Flickr (CC Licence)

Adam’s experience is that record and book shops provide an element of serendipity missing in online retailers, and this is also a familiar comment on news services, and information via social networks which connect you with friends likely to share your world view.

It’s interesting because of a crossover – Adam is fairly adept and accustomed with technology in various forms, and is certainly a user of most new tools for music and audio-visual entertainment. He’s also a very keen photographer, which itself is an interest rooted in technology and gadgets.

At the same time, I’ve had the type of trainspotter passion for music which was celebrated by the likes of Nick Hornby, with records and cds filling rooms, filed in alphabetical and chronological order. Music magazines ranging from the NME to Guitarist filled my teenage bedroom, the ‘Evening Session’ was required listening, and the hint of a good band appearing on a TV music show would require sitting through the other 27 minutes of tedium in barely-contained excitement. And 10+ years after I’d programme the family video recorder to tape ‘Raw Power‘ in the early hours of the morning, I couldn’t stop myself mentioning to my friends that I’d shared a lift with presenter and then Mojo Editor-in-Chief Phil Alexander.

'Serendipity' courtesy Tojosan on Flickr (CC Licence)

So how does musical serendipity work without record shops?

So how has digital serendipity led to a time when long train journeys to London just to visit Berwick Street record shops (and possibly get served by Martin Belam years before we ever met), transform me into someone who didn’t buy any records during 18 months actually working round the corner at a radio station and yet has such a surplus of music to hear that it probably isn’t achieveable in my lifetime?

No Media – websites, blogs, radio, TV, books:

Strangely, despite the huge wealth of niche blogs and websites available, I rarely read them. Mainly because there’s already an overwhelming amount of tech and marketing stuff to read, plus a huge surplus of books recommended by bloggers and friends. The exception is when they appear as a result of a search for someone I’ve heard about but haven’t been able to locate. I do occasionally read and re-read books about artists and genres, and search out records mentioned – the majority of which are at the back of the highly recommended Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guralnick.

Instead, the Related Artist rabbit hole:

I’ve often tweted about the fact I’ve fallen foul of the biggest risk when working from home – falling into the Related Artist rabbit hole on Spotify. Although it tends to be flawed when dealing with big mainstream acts, the old rule of six degrees tends to mean you can soon start finding songs and artists you haven’t encountered, or hadn’t yet listed to. The Spotify inventory is still a bit patchy, particularly when you get into more obscure and niche genres, but I’ve had some pleasant discoveries, including some slightly esoteric research into Peruvian punk music, or moving from punk through to psychobilly and punk/country crossovers.

And when Spotify fails, there’s the backup of Last.fm, which I’ve long held to be the musical Wikipedia, more than any type of online radio service. There’s a far wider range of the genres I tend to end up exploring, and enough of a sample of most to let me know whether to search further. Even if autoscrobbling can lead to embarrassment when I end up playing songs for my partner or son and they end up recorded forever on my profile because I never remember to delete them. Plus, despite it’s abject failure as a social network, Myspace is still pretty useful for finding a huge number of bands.

New services:

I occasionally use Blip.fm, which provides extreme randomness in the manner of a crowdsourced electronic John Peel. I’ve occasionally get some mileage from Soundcloud. But it’s actually Mixcloud, which for me might as well be renamed ‘HeavySoulBrutha radio‘.

Digital + People:

Like most people, I’ve got at least a few friends who are heavily into their music (@mattcharge happens to be an excellent DJ for example, and @pjeedai may be the whitest expert on obscure British hiphop before you stray into Tim Westwood territory). Only recently I discovered a very professional and respectable journalist I’ve known for years happens to have an obsession with Scandinavian Death Metal, whilst one chat with a marketing agency descended into an hour of the merits of hair metal.

And all of these people distributed geographically and professionally are able to share their recommendations with me regardless of whether they can be bothered to send me a C90 tape recorded from the radio, or want to risk their prized blue label Stax 45s in the mail.

But the funniest thing has been impromptu sound-offs. Recent Jodanma meetings were disrupted by my suggestion of an official Jodanma entrepreneurial soundtrack (available here on Spotify – add your own suggestions), and two days in client offices have involved ‘name that movie theme’ and ‘cheesiest rock’ competitions. Everyone in each situation was able to pull up their streaming service of choice, their digital music collection, or a quick Youtube video and jump in.

The prospect of DRM was long feared as ending the ability to share music. Despite the fact that some artists chose to allow their music to be distributed via Creative Commons, the other result was an ‘iPod sharing/swapping’ trend in playgrounds around the world.

'Mother & Daughter Flashmobsters' courtesy drewleavy on Flickr (CC Licence)

And retailers?:

I’ve occasionally had recommendations from particular record shop experts, or spotted something interesting when browsing, but I’m not sure the actual amount of discoveries has been much different to seeing the various related items on any ecommerce site. Adam’s right that the personal recommendations are based on previous purchases, so aren’t going to recommend something from an unconnected genre, but those tend to come from the sources mentioned above.

Considering I’ve had record shop assistants express disbelief at my seemingly random selection of CDs – “No, none of them are presents, and yes, I can enjoy thrash metal, Irish folk music and obscure 70′s funk”, I’m not sure an algorhythm could ever hope to cope.

Which is probably why the serendipity of music in the digital age has to come from the same place it always has – from other people exposing you to their music and sharing it. Whether it was mixtapes and bootleg cassettes with photocopied inlays being swapped around, or a friend’s dad enforcing a course of Pink Floyd indoctrination every time he gave us a lift to school, that method remains the same, but the potential pool of influencers is much enlarged, just as every aspect of our social circle is enlarged.

Footnote:

None of this means that I don’t still enjoy browsing record stores, although my sole purchases these days tend to be particularly obscure vinyl. By the same token, I still have an addition to visiting the likes of Foyles and far more esoteric bookshops, such as one devoted solely to motoring books. But the serendipity effect of a generic mainstream retailer such as HMV or Waterstones has been completely replaced by digital encounters for me, and judging by sales figures and the precarious state of most of them, the end of the mainstream High Street entertainment shop probably isn’t far away.

Filed Under: Digital Audio, Digital Culture, ecommerce, traditional media Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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