Author: themshow

Doing Business in Asia

Here’s the discussion with Derek Sivers, if you’d rather listen you can get the podcast here.

John: Hello, everyone. We have a great interview today with Derek Sivers, author of a number of books on doing business in the Far East. You may know him as the man behind CD Baby. He was on last in 2011 when he had done a book for The Domino Project called “Anything You Want.” We had discussed what went into that project, but he’s had a whole bunch of stuff since we talked to him last.

Derek, welcome aboard. Thanks for talking with us.

Derek: Thanks, John. I can’t believe it was 2011. It feels like it was maybe a year ago. You’re right. It’s been a while now.

John: The great thing is that your blog is active. You have a ton of people who follow you and everything over there, so I was able to go in and read what’s been going on. First, let’s get you caught up before we jump into the Wooden Egg Project and what this is all about.

When we last talked, you were in Singapore and now you’re in New Zealand. I’ll have a link to the post you have about that, but tell us a little about how that all came about.

Derek: Sure. To back up a bit, I’m so American. I was born in California and I’ve lived in California, Chicago, Boston, New York City, Woodstock, Portland, Santa Monica, and I almost moved to Texas until I realized that America had become kind of like my glass jar – like I was a fly bouncing around inside the jar and I needed to lift off the lid and go out into the rest of the world.

That was a few years ago when I gave myself a personal challenge to live outside of the U.S. for the next 40 years because it was around my 40th birthday. I figured I’d spent the first 40 years of my life inside the U.S., so I’d challenge myself to spend my next 40 outside the U.S. That’s about the time I met my wife. We got married and went around the world to look for a new country to call home. We landed in Singapore and really loved it. We filled out a ton of paperwork – visa and immigration stuff – and I became a permanent resident of Singapore.

I really thought we were going to spend the rest of our lives there, but then we had a baby. Singapore is an awesome city. I love it, but for a baby, I still have this thing where I think babies/kids should grow up outside in nature. That’s one of the few things that Singapore lacks, so instead we picked another place on the map and moved to New Zealand, mostly just as a good place to raise a kid, and I also realized that I needed a lot more time to focus internally instead of externally, if you know what I mean.

John: Right. With this Wooden Egg Project that you’re doing, you came out with a series of 16 books back in 2013 covering a whole ton of countries over in that part of the world, and now in 2014, all of them have been updated. They’re massive books. I look at this pile and I think, “Why the hell did you drop 16 books at once?” So tell us about this. Give us the sketch here.

Derek: Imagine you moved to a part world that you knew nothing about. I never lived in Asia before. Here I am living in Singapore. I really know nothing about it. I know nothing about Indonesia and I’m right next to it. I could literally see Indonesia out of my window of my apartment, but I knew nothing about it. I’m a one-hour drive away from Malaysia, but I know nothing about Malaysia. I’m a 30-minute flight away from Thailand, but I know nothing about Thailand.

I just wanted to understand this part of the world more. I wanted to get to know my new neighborhood, in a way. At first, I was kind of haphazardly taking little trips and walking around looking at temples and talking to random people who I bumped into. But I was learning very slowly, and I wanted to learn in a more intense and concentrated way. They say that the best way to learn something is to teach it. This is part of why you do these podcasts, right?

John: Sure.

Derek: It’s that same motivation. I wanted to really understand my new neighborhood, so I decided to start writing 16 books per year about 16 countries in Asia. The big idea that I think your audience will find interesting because I think it applies to a lot of projects they do was to get over that paralysis of launching something. I decided up front that these books were not going to be very good at first. The first year, I wanted to put them out, even if they weren’t good. But then I’d come back and do them all again the following year, and then they’d be pretty good. And then I’d do them all again and they’d be very good. Maybe by the fourth of fifth year, I’d be able to call them great or even amazing.
It’s interesting to take this upfront commitment to improving something every year and just having to humbly accept that it’s not going to start out very good, but you’re just going to begin.

John: It’s funny. That’s become a little more vogue. I think people are more understanding of how, when you create something from scratch, it’s going to be very rough-hewn the first time through. But with each iteration it gets stronger and faster.

Just to give everybody an idea, let me go down the list. It’s Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
They’re all e-books available for under $10 through Leanpub, Amazon, and Apple iBooks. They’re all there. This year, you’ve done this massive book of nearly 5000 pages – you’ve bundled all 16 into one shot if people want to go on some incredible learning adventure.

Talk a little bit about the process. You have a post about how you farmed a ton of this work out and how you changed the process a couple times with that.

Derek: Now imagine that you’re me sitting in a hotel room in Indonesia and you’ve decided to write 16 books a year about 16 countries. The first thought I had – of course, like any of us – is that I was just going to do it all myself. That’s always our first impulse. I thought, “Okay, 16 books per year. There are 52 weeks in a year, and let’s say I spend three weeks each in 16 countries. That’s 48 weeks, and I’ll take a few weeks off at the end of the year.” At first I thought that my next few years were going to be spent just constantly traveling 16 countries for three weeks each, writing everything I learned in those three weeks and going onto the next country. But my wife was pregnant at the time, so that idea lasted about a minute.

The next idea was that I was going to have 16 different authors from these 16 countries write the books. That idea lasted a few months. A few of the people did a really good job, but the guy from Indonesia just flaked out and disappeared, so partway through I realized that this was still too fragile of a process. I’m really into that E-Myth-style repeatable process: making little systems so that if any one person drops out, the whole process doesn’t collapse. On that note, you realize how fragile the idea of making a book can be if it’s just dependent on an author. If that author disappears or something happens, then there’s no book.

But I really wanted the book to exist, no matter what.
Then I had to go back to all of the wisdom I’ve read from all of these books over the years, like crowdsourcing – including books like “The Wisdom of Crowds” and “Wikinomics.” I decided to put a lot of those lessons to work. I made this system where I came up with 200 questions that, as an entrepreneur, I wanted to know about each of these countries. Then I applied the same 200 questions to all 16 countries, and then I went onto Elance and oDesk and hired three business researchers per country to answer the same 200 questions over and over again, so that now, for every question, I would have three different answers per question. The big idea was getting it from one local native person, one foreigner/expat who had been living there awhile, and then one other person. This way, the book represents a broad spectrum of looking at things, instead of just one person’s opinion.

Lastly, I just had to hire a writer who would take those three different answers and combine them into one essay per question. And that became my little book factory process.

John: That’s great. That’s very interesting. Give us an idea of the scope of this, now that you’ve done this. For these 16 countries, is it as if you were writing 16 books on individual U.S. states? Is it like 80% is similar and 20% is different, or is this as broad as it could get, as if you were writing about England, Canada, and Mexico? Where does it fall on that spectrum?

Derek: It’s more like your England, Canada, Mexico analogy. That’s a pretty good comparison because there are some countries that are pretty similar, like Indonesia and Malaysia. Thailand and Cambodia have a lot in common.

But then there’s some where the authors are asking me how I could even include them in the same series, such as Mongolia. I had no idea, until I went there two years ago, that Mongolia is a lot more Russian in its influence. The Mongolian writing is the Russian alphabet, and Mongolians don’t really consider themselves part of this East Asian culture so much. Even though they’re physically connected to China, they’re enemies with China, and they like to probably differentiate themselves from China. So Mongolia feels more like Kazakhstan.

Japan is also kind of an outlier in Asia, where people in Asia see Japan as the rich, advanced, more-Western culture. They don’t really fit in with the rest of Asia in many ways. On the other hand, China is its own thing, and India is its own thing.
It’s vastly different. I thought there would be more similarities, but many times there are a lot of questions in the books about comparing cultures, asking things like, “What are the cultural differences between people from India and Vietnam?” and the answers were like, “What are the cultural similarities?” There are almost none. Yes, technically we’re in Asia, but – to use the European comparison – think about what people from Greece and Iceland have in common. They’re technically both part of Europe, but you look at their similarities and they’d probably shrug and say, “Well, we eat fish.”

John: Yeah. There is literally nothing in common as far as that kind of spread there.

Derek: I have a great story for you. Getting back on track with Marketing and Coffee and such, this is actually the point that I wish I would have kicked off this phone call with. This is what I should have started with because to me, this is the most fascinating story that directly applies to everyone.
When I first started this project, I knew this French businessman who grew up in France and had been living in Asia for the last 15 years. He lived five years each in Korea, Japan, and China, so he knew a lot of this Pan-Asian culture thing. I was there in Singapore interviewing him and I said, “I’m starting this book series. I’d like to interview you first. Can you tell me something about doing business in Asia?” He told me something that blew my mind that I think will be really interesting to everyone. He said, “In Asia, people use English as the common business language (it’s the common shared language between these countries and for foreigners coming in to do business) but the thing is, even though we’re all using English, the meaning of words is completely different, depending on the culture.

For example, if I say the word ‘quality,’ what does that mean to you?

John: That usually means making sure you have accuracy in your process; that all your widgets are shaped the same.

Derek: Yeah. To me, I think it’s almost like that little “made in the U.S.A.” flag that represents quality. It’s well-built and it’s going to last. It’s solid and it works.

When I said, “It works,” he beamed a big smile and said, “Guess what? I knew you were going to say that because you’re American. You have to understand that that’s the American answer for what quality is. If I were to ask the same question in Korea, everybody knows that ‘quality’ means – it’s brand-new. It’s all culturally understood that when you say quality what you mean is: this is the newest, brand newest thing. That’s what quality means in Korea. Therefore, if you’re planning on doing business in Korea, don’t go in there with your marketing trying to emphasize the timeless quality or the legacy aspect of your product. That’s not quality. Quality means it’s the newest thing.”

He said, “On the other hand, in Japan, when you say ‘quality,’ everybody understands that means ‘perfection.’ Japan is obsessed with perfection, so ‘quality’ means ‘zero defects.’ It’s perfect. It has no flaws. That’s what quality means in Japan. This matters because, for example, I’ve heard instances where somebody is shipping products into Japan, and if the shipping container has a dent in it, even if the product inside is flawless, it’s not longer considered a quality shipment because it’s no longer perfect.”

He said, “On the other hand, in China, when you say ‘quality,’ everybody understands that that means it gives you status. It’s all about social status. It doesn’t matter whether the product itself is well-built or if it’s going to fall apart in a week or last at all – if it gives you social status, it’s quality.”

We’re using the same words, but it’s a vastly different meaning in every culture.

John: That is fascinating. So it’s really about being able to fit into the local culture and understanding what all those different cultural meanings are just so that you can even function.

Derek: Exactly. When I first moved to Singapore three years ago, the thing that I missed most was Amazon, where in the U.S. I’d gotten so accustomed to, anytime I wanted to buy anything like noise-canceling headphones or whatever. You just go to Amazon, search it, instantly look at this product if it has a ton of five-star reviews and is best-selling, and within one minute, you click “Add to Cart” and it shows up at your door.
But in Singapore, even though it’s very high-tech and everyone is online, there is no online shopping. It totally blew my mind. At first, I thought, “Hey, this is a big opportunity. Let’s start a new company. Let’s set up e-commerce in Singapore. I can’t believe they hadn’t thought of that yet.”

But it turns out that, of course, they’ve thought of it, but culturally in Singapore, shopping is seen as something you go out and do with your friends. It’s a social activity. So the idea of saying, “Now you can shop online at home in your underwear” is almost like somebody trying to market a product in America saying, “You no longer need to go out to a bar drinking with your friends. Now you can sit at home drinking in your underwear.” That’s kind of sad. That product wouldn’t go over very well. That’s how it feels when people try to market online shopping in Singapore; culturally, it just doesn’t fit.

I just find all this fascinating. We hear all these stories, especially in America, about the rise of Asia, with China being the new biggest market in the world, and there being billions of people in India, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. This is the new market that we almost pay attention to, but it’s fascinating to realize that you can’t just take your good idea from America and go make it happen there. It has to fit in culturally.

John: This is one thing that, as an American I can speak to and say that I have lived, is thinking our way of doing things is superior, like we should force this process on the rest of the world, in spite of the fact that there are more guns and obesity here than anywhere else in the world. That’s just a side effect of our great commerce engine.

Derek: Right. I think that even the last time you and I spoke I was still in that mindset that my American/Silicon Valley/California/entrepreneur/founder of everything kind of mentality was the right way to be. I felt that this is how everyone should be. Everyone should start a company.

I’d only been in Singapore for a month or two when they asked me to come speak to a class at the local business school. I went and spoke to this class. Imagine this. It’s 40 business school students. I’m speaking to this room and start out my talking asking, “Who here would like to start their own company someday? Raise your hand.” No hands went up. I thought, “Okay, maybe they’re just shy.” I said, “Come one, sometime ever in your life, who would ever like to start your own company someday?” One reluctant hand went up.

I pointed to a person who didn’t raise his hand – because I thought they were just shy and would actually like to start their own business – and said, “You. Why don’t why you want to start your own company someday?” He said, “Why would I take the risk? I’m spending all this money on business school so I can get a nice, steady job.”

I said, “Okay,” and I pointed to somebody else and asked, “Why don’t you want to start your own company someday?” They said, “I don’t have any ideas.” I pointed to somebody else and asked them and they said, “My parents took the risk. My parents had a little shop. It was very difficult for them, but they did it for years to save money so that I could have a secure future. So why would I risk that?”

Then I realized that our American way of doing things is not the center of the universe, despite what the media that we’re surrounded with makes you feel in America, like America is everything. All of the movies are set here. All the TV shows are set here. Yes, there are some other little countries you can go vacation in, but come on, America is the center of the world.

John: Right. The aliens always land here.

Derek: Exactly. They always go for the White House. They’re not landing in Dubai. I realized Americans are kind of off on one far extreme end of things. It’s a very individualistic, cowboy-kind of “I’ll do it all myself. I’m going to start my own thing.” Then I realized it’s not that they’re wrong, but that it’s a different way of thinking. It takes a while to accept that there’s the American way of looking at this and there’s the Asian way of looking at it, and the Indian way of looking at it, and the Japanese way of looking at it. They’re all just from different perspectives.

John: That’s excellent. Thanks for speaking with us. Everyone can check out the Wood Egg series of books wherever fine e-books are sold.
Derek, is there anything else you’d like to say in closing? Do you have travel coming up or other stuff you’d like to talk about?

Derek: No. I really admire what you’re doing here in this show. You’re constantly on your blog putting out everything you’re learning all the time. I had a personal tragedy happen a few weeks ago where one of my best friends – one of the smartest people I know – was just out riding his bike in the bike lane on a Sunday afternoon and a car accidentally swerved into the bike lane and killed him instantly. It really bummed me out for the usual reasons, but I also wish that he would have taken the time to share what he knew. He never really did. If you hung out with him in person, he’d have fascinating little bits of wisdom and insight on life that he would share with you conversationally. But he never took the time to create like you do this weekly podcast, or write books or articles. He didn’t do that and I wish he would have. After a tragedy, we all take out from it what we do, and for me it was just a reminder of how important it is for all of us to share what we’re learning and put it out there so that it lives on. I really love what you’re doing and I’d love to do more of the same, too.

John: Thank you. I appreciate that. We will keep cranking it out here. We appreciate everybody taking the time to listen. We will catch up with you next week. Until then, enjoy the coffee!

Derek: Thanks.

Geek Stuff

Migrating to Air

Two weeks before Christmas it finally happened. I wanted to edit some video and could no longer stand the thought of doing it on my PC. I drove over hill and dale to the Albany Apple Store just in front of the lunch holiday shopper rush and brought home a new MacBook Air.

The great migration began more than 6 years ago as I got sick of doing anti-virus updates and Windows reinstalls. As most geeks can relate, I am the family CIO, and getting married doubled my workload. As we started to spend a lot more on computers and other Apple devices, my maintenance time and expense fell far enough to put me ahead in spite of the increased workload and everyone else started having less trouble with their use.

My Dad noticed that a lot of email attachments from his buddy Koz no longer opened. Primary family virus source identified.

I considered buying a Mac in 2010 but the company I was with ran on ThinkPads and I had over 15 years of software and tools on the PC side. The deathblow for the last PC standing came when the next company I worked for gave me a Macbook Pro and the Palm Smartphone platform breathed its final gasp.

So! Who cares about the details? Nobody. Who cares about specs and workflow? We do!

Of course the SSD is blazingly fast, I already knew this having been an SSD fan since 2006, however my photo and iTunes libraries were too big and I wasn’t about to drop a grand on a 1TB SSD so it was all about Western Digital Black Caviar drives.

I decided to migrate the iTunes library to an external drive to make up for going from 1TB down to 500GB, and it seems to work quite well given the USB 3.0 ports. I have my second monitor on the Thunderbolt port, nice that Mac recognizes the exact model number, no drives required.

On the audio front I picked up an Apogee One that allows me to plug in my “real” microphones instead of using a USB mic. It seems great so far, and better looking and easier to use than my Mobile Pre USB.

Trade Show technology master GadgetBoy clued me into this Ethernet Port and 3 USB 3.0 hub. I actually had to download a driver to get the Ethernet to work, the horror! My Logitech HD cam was Plug and Play as were my Microsoft Natural Keyboard and Explorer Trackball, which is now a highly valued antique – if you didn’t click that, it shows what was an $80 trackball now going for $500 if you have one new in box (or NIB for you eBay hooligans).

An Anker USB 3.0 Drive enclosure and a WD 1TB drive made migration simple enough and leave me set with Time Machine Backup. I need some kind of case, I’m looking at a Dodo Case kind of sleeve.

For software I’m running VMWare Fusion so I could move my Quicken data there and run Goldwave for audio but I’m going to start trying GarageBand and Audacity for my Podcast workflow. We had a copy of Office for Mac 2008 lying around and I’ve decided to take the Adobe Cloud suite for a test run which has impressed me so far. iPhoto has blown me away. I upgraded to Mavericks so I could download Keynote, Pages and Numbers, I’ll give them a try.

Another interesting point. I was always complaining about the quality of our internet connections, drops during Skype calls or Webinars. Guess what? New machine, suddenly I’m not having drops…

So now I’m in that headache phase of enjoying the step up, but at the same time running into the occasional snag of “Oh, how do I do this now?” Overall I’m incredibly happy, starting at the moment I picked up my travel bag and it was 10 pounds lighter.

Anything else I need to know? Advice on hardware or workflow appreciated!

Brain Buster

What is Growth Hacking?

Ryan Holiday is the author of Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising. This month he stopped in to Marketing Over Coffee (if you’d prefer to listen to the audio) to talk about his new book and his previous book, Trust Me, I’m Lying.

John: Give us the elevator pitch on growth hacking. What’s the idea here?

Ryan: The idea was one morning I was going about my day as a traditional marketer and I sit down, I read this article and the headline is, “Growth Hackers are the New VPs of Marketing.” I’m a VP of Marketing. I’m director of Marketing at American Apparel and I’ve never heard of a growth hacker. I have no idea what it is. But I look at the companies that growth hackers are responsible for – Groupon, Airbnb, DropBox, Facebook, Twitter – a handful of billion dollar brands that were built right in front of us in the last five years, and they didn’t do any traditional marketing. They used a strategy they call growth hacking.

I thought, “What does it mean that these people build billion dollar brands using none of the services that I provide or I pride myself in being good at? Maybe they’re better marketers than me.” I sat down to study what growth hacking is and how it works. The book is a result of those interviews, that research, and trying it myself.

John: One interesting point – I was talking more about what it isn’t than what it is. Like you said, you were doing VP of Marketing so you have the book of business that you provided, but really it came down to stuff that was testable, tractable, scalable. That was a big three that you threw out there. Basically, the case studies, everything that you’re talking about in the book are people that have taken this minimalist approach. Is that right?

Ryan: I think so. What growth hacking is at its essence is, let’s say you’re an engineer in the Silicon Valley. Your whole life is designed around rules and languages, and “what you see is what you get” sort of coding mentality – this right brain mentality. Don Draper is not a hero to them. That’s the opposite of what they do, but they still have things they have to promote and they still have to launch startups and get millions of users.

What I think they did right in front of us is basically re-invent marketing because they didn’t like the things that marketing held to be dear, and it turns out that the way of doing it that they came up with may in fact be more effective, more tractable, more efficient, and better than what people like me were trained to do.

John: That’s true. I noticed at the front of the book you quoted David Ogilvy. For folks that are into marketing, I’m sure that they get that whole idea. Even Ogilvy back in the day was like, “It’s all about sales and it’s about driving the numbers.” He was so huge on direct marketing as being where the future was. I think that’s because like everyone else, he had no idea of what was going to happen with the web and the fact that we’d be applying all this stuff in e-mail and where we go there. You really focus the argument because I think myself – and like yourself as a VP of Marketing – when we hear this growth hacking phrase we think it’s a buzz word. Finally, you put your finger right on it, which is the fact that it ties into product marketing because you have to have product fit for it to work.

The buzz word and the hatred came from the fact that I’ve seen all these people saying, “Oh yeah, what we really need is a growth hacker.” But you know with these companies, they’re never going to change the product. In fact, they would never be doing some of the stunts you talk about especially in “Trust Me, I’m Lying” of setting up fake profiles or really getting to the edge of marketing. They’re just way too conservative for that. It has a stigma and a buzz around it, but again, like I said, by hitting on product marketing you grab me immediately as you were right on the mark with that. So talk about that a little bit, about product fit and how that gets into it.

Ryan: I think marketers see themselves as being only responsible for marketing. My job is to take your product once it’s finished and get attention for it. That’s how the relationship works. But growth hacking – often case, the designer who made the product is now responsible for launching it. That’s sort of the startup mentality.

There’s no job title. Everyone works. Everyone tries to make this thing a success. They came to it from the other side of the table and I think they were able to realize something that I experienced over the course of my marketing career too many times which is: you can’t market a broken product, and that often times the best marketing decision that you can make is a product development decision.
Instagram is an amazing example of this. It launches as a social network on a geolocation social network called Burbn that you happen to be able to add some photos with filters to. It turned out that that one tiny feature got the overwhelming response.

It wasn’t the social network that anyone liked. They liked this feature, and so they pivoted. They changed the entire company to zoom in on this one feature and that’s what made them a billion dollar company, not what their marketers did.
I think what a growth hacker does is instead of trying to do all this external stuff, what if the best marketing we can do is change, improve, and iterate our product until it has that explosive potential.

John: You start with a product fit right there. In the book, you jumped to “step two is finding the growth hack,” which is what you’re talking about – finding the thing that makes it spark.

So there is no recipe for this. It’s interesting in that in the past you could just get a marketing professional and you’d be all set, whereas now you need somebody that understands the product and the audience and maybe can code around what needs to be done. It seems like it’s a lot more difficult to find people who can do this now, maybe you can talk about that.

Ryan: I would say the old model was make a thing, hire a marketer or publicist to get attention for that thing, hope that it’s successful. Rinse and repeat until it is. But the growth hacker mindset I go through these steps in the book, it’s tweak and iterate your product until it has explosive potential. Instead of some major blow-the-doors-off blockbuster launch, it’s “How can we find the core early adopters for this product?”

Uber is a great example of a company that said, “We’re not going to launch nationwide. Let’s start small. Let’s start in San Francisco. Let’s launch it at south by southwest where we brand our core customers.” It’s, “how do you find a small contained group of people or a platform that you can use to bring those people in?”

Another great example of this is PayPal. They didn’t say, “How can we replace credit cards or become the dominant online payments platform?” They said, “A lot of people are using eBay to sell things. What if we insert ourselves into that transaction and add value?” They took advantage of that platform.

Upworthy is another great startup that’s doing millions and millions of pages because they figured out how to master Facebook and the Facebook feed. It’s all about figuring out the platform or the initial trick. By trick I don’t mean deceive people; I just mean the unexpected or unusual way to bring people through the front door.
From there, with your other things – if you’ve built in viral features like a good referral program – you have a way that encourages the network effect. So if your product is better, the more people use it. If you bring in people through a growth hack, then the product is going to get bigger virally because those people are going to want to bring more people in.

The final step that I talk about in the book is the idea of focus on retention rather than acquisition. It’s like saying, “I brought in 1000 people but only 100 of them signed up and became customers. What’s wrong with my landing page? What’s wrong with my product? Why are my users leaving? How do you improve or iterate and tweak the product until that problem goes away?” That four-step cycle is the way that growth hackers think about the world, and I think that’s so much more effective and efficient than just hoping that an article in the New York Times makes you a success, or hoping that ten New York articles in the New York Times will finally make you a success.

John: They’re going to land TechCrunch and they’ll be great for the first month, and then dry up and go. It’s like any technology shift that people feel is threatening, but the reality is that if you’re doing this right now it’s going to tie you right into both customer service and product marketing and sales. It actually makes you a lot more valuable as a marketer in the mix here.

One question, a throwback. You were talking about at a certain scale, awareness and brand building makes sense, but the first year or two it’s a waste of money. I think there was a quote that was in the book talking about how it’s all about this acquisition and making that happen as a repeatable process. But do you ever feel now that there’s a point where brand awareness does make sense?

Ryan: Yes, of course. I guess what I’m saying is so much of the marketing advice that people get and study is for whatever reason designed for really big companies. You read something like “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,” which is a fantastic book and I definitely recommend it, it’s like giving you advice on how one airline beat out another airline. But that’s so far from the reality of where most of us live.
Even in my first book I’m talking about getting attention in doing marketing stunts. For a company that did $700 million in sales and has stores all over the world, it’s not hard for us to be newsworthy because we’re a big company.

But growth hacking is designed for a startup to go from zero users to 10 users to 100 to 100,000. It’s designed to take a project from nothing to something and that’s so much more similar, or more like the situation that most people come in to marketing are in. We’re trying to launch a restaurant, or a podcast, or a blog, or a book, or a startup. We’re trying to just get more attention for ourselves or our personal brand or whatever. We’re trying to go from nothing to something just like these startups are, although the startups try to do it on a much larger scale than we do, but I think their lessons and their innovations are what we should focus on because there’s a lot of value there.

John: That’s funny. I’ve often said that the biggest mistake a lot of companies make is trying to ape Coca Cola or, like you said, an airline. That’s perfect. Those are not the decisions you need to be making. You’re playing in a different arena completely.

Ryan: It’s totally apples and oranges, and yet I’m trying to launch this book or do this project and the thinking of the person that’s giving me advice was how to make Visa sales 2% larger, or how Johnson & Johnson can spin off one brand into another brand or whatever. It’s not like they think, “They spent $10 million. I should spend $10,000.” It’s not a matter of scale; it’s a fundamentally different approach. Whereas the startups think, “We’ve got to get people in the door. We didn’t exist yesterday and now we’re open for business. How do I get people to come?”

That’s what I wanted to write this book for. I wanted to take their lessons because look, Facebook went from zero users when it launched in 2004 or 2005, to a billion users in less than ten years. A billion users! That’s insane. And they did it without a marketing team. They had a growth team instead. I wanted this book to be the lessons from those growers and those growth teams. Growth hacking is the philosophy that came out of those experiments.

John: It’s interesting, too. It’s a Penguin imprint. It’s actually a shorter book, a 50-page read. Is the book itself an experiment? Are you trying anything different with the marketing of this? How’s it all going?

Ryan: My first book and actually I have another book with Penguin that comes out in May, both of those were sort of the traditionally published book. They’re 300 pages, they took a year to write, and then they took a year to publish after that. That’s how traditional book publishing is done.
But I didn’t want to sit down and write a book about growth hacking which is this thing that’s changing all the time, improving, new factors are introduced, and whatever. I didn’t want to go out into the woods for a year working on this thing. I wanted to get something out quickly. I wanted it to be short. I wanted people to be able to receive it digitally and not have to wait for a printer to spit back many tens of thousands of copies. So what we did with the book was we kept it short. We priced it cheaply, it’s $3. We got it out there fast. Hopefully, if we do do a paperback or if I do an expanded edition or something, I can improve based on their feedback and based on that reader feedback. That is very much the growth hacker mindset, for sure.

John: That’s cool. Of course, we get the bonus that you were talking about “Trust Me, I’m Lying,” which had come out earlier. We’ve talked for years on this podcast about the way you make arguments, and the shades of meaning, and talking about the difference between persuasion versus manipulation, and that’s a very big deal. But basically, with this book, you just went right to the other side and said, “There’s a whole realm of dirty tricks and interesting things going on here,” and you’ve explained everything that goes on. It’s amazing to read some of the stuff that you’ve done.

The crazy part is I remember seeing some of that stuff that you did in American Apparel go down and now you get the back story on how it all happened and everything that went into that. But set it up for us first. Tell us where that book came from and what it’s done for you.

Ryan: What I wanted to do in that book is being a marketer for a big, successful company and then a handful of other really controversial clients, that tends to be who I represent, I felt like I was not so much given access, but maybe when I wasn’t supposed to peek behind the curtain and I really saw how the media works, I saw how vicious, competitive, and unscrupulous it really was.

I’m not going to lie. The book is about how I took advantage of that system, thinking that all is fair in love and war, and how I benefited my clients accordingly, but it’s also understanding what the costs are of a media system that will print anything and publish anything and doesn’t care if they’re incorrect, where this self-interest rules the day rather than ethics or the truth.

The book is a very blunt, honest guide to operating in that environment. I wanted it to be a tell-all. I didn’t hold any of my secrets back. Anything that I had done that I thought other people could do or might want to do, I showed exactly how to do it. It was a tell-all, for sure. Naturally that was a big controversey both with marketers who didn’t want me to disclose this information and the media who is fairly embarrassed by a lot of the disclosures that I made.

John: You never look at the Huffington Post the same way again.

Ryan: The reality is I haven’t looked at the Huffington Post or Gawker or Business Insider the right way in many years because I’ve seen this stuff before. I just realized “Why am I the only one who was worrying about this? Why am I carrying this burden alone?” I wanted everyone to see it and I hoped that exposing this stuff would lead to some change. I’m not sure that that’s happened, but I feel like I did my duty blowing that whistle.

John: I would agree. It’s just required reading for anybody in marketing if you’re dealing with a press rumor. You may never want to even be involved in any of this kind of stuff but you’ll greatly benefit from understanding what’s going on behind the scenes and why you are ignored, to be honest. That’s what you’re going to learn from that.
So that’s the books. How about what’s up in the future? What’s in your radar now that you’re looking at and what’s coming next?

Ryan: I have a marketing company that represents authors and brands. We just worked with Marc Ecko who did a book and IBS Complex Media who we may be advising. I represent a variety of really interesting people that are eager to try new things. It’s going great.

I have another book with Penguin that comes out in May 2014 that will actually be about stoicism, the Roman philosophy. I try to write every day. I write for my site at www.RyanHoliday.net. I’m the media columnist for the New York Observer and I write for Thought Catalog. Those are all places you can check out my stuff if you want. I look forward to talking to everyone.

John: That sounds great. Again, the book “Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising” is available on Amazon. And of course, “Trust Me, I’m Lying,” you can check that out there also. Ryan, thanks for stopping by and talking to us today.

Ryan: Thanks for having me. This was great.

SalesForce.com

Marketer’s Dream Schedule for Dreamforce 2013

Post author By themshow
Post date November 11, 2013
1 Comment on Marketer’s Dream Schedule for Dreamforce 2013

This weekend I poured through the sessions for Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce.com event starting November 18 in San Francisco. Between the website and the iPhone App I was able to put together this schedule that takes into mind all the topics I think will be hot, what sessions are already full, and some value judgments when there were conflicts. If marketing is your thing, this list might save you a ton of time on your first view of the schedule. Of the 314 marketing sessions I reviewed…

Monday

Cloud2Car – Force.com and the Internet of things 1:00pm

The Magic of Force.com + Heroku – Mon 2:30 (Full)

Unifying SF & Physical Devices: An Internet of Things Customer Study – Mon 3:00

Marc Benioff on Dropbox 3:30

Integrate Salesforce and Google Apps with Cirrus Insight – Mon 4:30

Marketing Alliance Party 5:30

Tuesday

Hands-on Training: Build a Website using Site.com – Tue 7:30am

Opening Keynote 8:30

Parker Harris 11:00

Marketing Cloud – Cross-Channel Strategy – The ET 4D Framework Tue 2:00

BCA Podcast 2:00

Benioff Press Q&A 3:00

3 Insider Tricks of How the Best Marketers Use Salesforce – Tue 3:30

Sales Cloud for Marketing? Get Out of Here! – Tues. 4:30

Benioff and Mayer 5:00

Blogger Event 5:30

Wednesday

SalesCloud or Chatter Keynote 9:00

Driving the Internet of Things – Wed 9:45

Developer Social Apps Keynote 10:30

Learn How GoodData Analytics Can Make You Into a Customer Company – Wed 11:30

Marketing Cloud Keynote – Noon

BCA Podcast 1pm

Press w Scott Dorsey 1:30

SMB Keynote – 2:00

Press wine tasting 3:00

Data.com Keynote 3:30

Benioff and Sandberg 5:00

Thursday

Fastest Path to Pipeline – Best Practices for Inside Sales Teams – Thur 8:30

Hands-on Training: Utilize ExactTarget Email Data– Thur 10:00 (Already have sildes)

BCA Podcast 11am

Intenet of Things: 5 Ways Connected Products will Transform – Thur 12:30

Q&A Benioff and Harris – Full

MarketingProfs Party 5:30

Unable to Schedule

Pardot New Features & Roadmap – Wed 10:30 (Full) Conflicts w SMB Keynote

Roadmap Sneak Peek – The Future of Salesforce Analytics – 1 each day, all full

That’s where I stand today, be sure to link up to me on the Dreamforce App if you’re going to be there!

SalesForce.com

Dreamforce 2013 for Marketers

Post author By themshow
Post date November 4, 2013
No Comments on Dreamforce 2013 for Marketers

Marketing nerd summer camp is now only 2 weeks away. I have my flight and room ready for Dreamforce (Nov. 18-22 at the Moscone in San Francisco).

Last year we did Marketing Over Coffee live from the Expo Floor (following up after Tony Robbins!), and this year I’ll be doing even more coverage for MarketingCloud. For anyone that’s going to be at the show feel free to tell me what you are up to on twitter @johnjwall as I’ll be looking for all the coolest products and biggest stories.

On my to-do list so far:

Stop by to visit Todd at InsideSales.com they do over 1,000 demos, if you are looking for best practices, talk to him (and be sure to tell him I sent you).

Vocus is on my list since they’ve added email to their product mix for full marketing automation, and of course Marketo always has a huge presence.

InsightSquared has been doing a lot of interesting stuff. If you are into Marketing Dashboards you have to check them out.

Catching up with Mike Gerholdt of the Button Click Admin Podcast. Also looking forward to whatever David Spark has going on as brand journalist. Isaac and Lauren from Tinderbox will also be there.

Very interested to see what Xively is all about (if you are into “The Internet of Things” or “Commercial Internet”), thanks Ben Heyman for reaching out on Twitter.

To wrap it up on Thursday there’s the MarketingProfs Happy Hour, so if you’re around to wind down after walking 50 miles in 4 days, sign up and say hi!

Ok, enough with the link bait, if you’re in, tell me so!

Here’s the clip from last year, the only MoC in glorious HD!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpHGS-cjm8Y[/youtube]

Daily Life

2011 Interview with Steven Pressfield

Post author By themshow
Post date September 29, 2013
No Comments on 2011 Interview with Steven Pressfield

Two years ago I had a chance to speak to a key player on The Domino Project, Ishita Gupta, and one of the authors involved, Steven Pressfield.

When Steven’s next book came out the email I had for him had been shut down. I contacted his admin about an interview for the new book and was told there wouldn’t be any. We get plenty of books in for review so I moved on to the next one, but was disappointed because I like his work and really enjoyed speaking with him. My bruised ego thought “I’m sure if Oprah called they’d find some time on the calendar.”

Well, guess who showed up on Oprah today? When I heard about this earlier in the week I grabbed this interview from the archives (click here if you’d rather listen to us) and sent it to transcription. No reason for me not to take advantage of a probable search boost from Steven getting an hour with the greatest name in TV.

John: Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. Today we have a special interview with Ishita Gupta and Steven Pressfield.

We have two special guests with us today. Ishita Gupta works on The Domino Project, a series of books and some new ideas on book marketing. She also works on a number of projects with Seth Godin, whose book “Poke the Box” was the first book in The Domino Project. Ishita, thanks for talking to us today.

Ishita: Thank you for having us on.

John: Also joining us is Steven Pressfield, the author of “Do the Work,” the recently released second book in The Domino Project. His previous books include “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” which in 2001 was made into a movie with Will Smith, Matt Damon, and Chalize Theron and readers of military books will surely recognize him as the author of “Gates of Fire” which is regarded as one of the best books on the Battle of Thermopolyae. Steven, thanks for joining us.

Steven: It’s my pleasure, John. Thanks for having us.

John: Ishita, tell us a little bit about The Domino Project to get started.

Ishita: The Domino Project is a new publishing venture started by Seth Godin, who you just mentioned, and powered by Amazon. I think the biggest thing that I like to talk about when I think about Domino is it’s changing publishing in a way that’s not thinking that publishing is dead, but it’s just taking publishing to the next level of what it can be.

We work really closely with authors like Seth and Steve and try to publish books that have impact and send things out to the market and to the world that our readers will value. It’s a lot of thinking about what readers will want and how to get that to the market as quick as possible and in a way that will delight both the authors that we’re working with and ourselves and the people who ultimately will get these books.

John: From the first two books that we’ve seen, it seems like a core concept is that these are kind of books to motivate, not just the regular “Here’s the concept, here’s a bunch of tired case studies.” What’s your guiding principle on choosing books for this project?

Ishita: The things that we publish are all about initiation. That’s what Poke the Box’s main theme was – and Steve will speak better to this about “Do the Work” – it’s really about taking action.

We want to compel people to change the way that they’re doing things. If you’re feeling stuck or you’re feeling like you’re in a place that you want to change, these are the books for you. Most business books that we see out there are very long and filled with statistics, which is great for a certain kind of reader but these aren’t the books that we’re publishing. I think what we think about a lot at Domino is what is going to change a conversation that someone has with their peer, with their colleague, with their family. What is going to make them want to spread something, and ultimately, what is going to compel them to change?

You’re right. It’s a lot of topics on initiating, on honesty, on courage, on biting the bullet, and doing work that you think matters.

Steven: Ishita, let me ask you a question because I was thinking about this last night. I know that Seth defines the books for The Domino Project as “manifestos.” How would you define that? What does manifesto mean to Seth and to you and The Domino Project?

Ishita: When I hear the term “manifesto” I inherently think that there’s a call-to-action. A manifesto is something that you read, and after reading it, something changes within you. Whether it’s the next action that you’re going to take or a thought that you had about something, some paradigm will shift. I don’t think we use the word manifesto lightly. That is our central goal. That is the central focus in the books that we publish, and I think also the books that we read as individuals.

Our team is composed of about eight people all with very different backgrounds and creative outlets, ideals, and thoughts and it’s really about what makes us want to go out and do meaningful work, change the way we think about things, and I ultimately think that’s why we decided on the term manifesto.

These are “books” that are short, that are compelling, and are really built to spread. A manifesto in and of itself is something designed to speak to a lot of people is universal in its theme. That, to me, is why we’re using the term manifesto.

Steven: Basically, I’m a novelist, so when I first saw The Domino Project and what Seth was doing with Amazon, my first thought was, “Can we do this with novels?” Maybe in the future in some way maybe; I don’t know.

Like Ishita says, these Domino Project books are maybe 100 pages long, something like that –something you can actually read in one sitting – so I don’t think it does fit for a novel. More’s the pity from my point of view, but certainly it is a new paradigm being only with Amazon, not in a bookstore, not at any other online place. A very interesting new product that doesn’t exist I don’t think in any other place.

John: One thing with “Do the Work” is it does serve up a lot of the concepts from your book “War of Art.” Are you looking at this as a lead in? By making this book spread far and fast, it will entice people to get into the rest of your work, or do you consider it more free standing?

Steven: I consider it free standing, but of course any book you hold will bring readers to your other books. But this one, like Ishita says, was really more of call-to-action in a manifesto the way Ishita defines it. Do the work rather than war of art.

The way it came about in a way was that a young guy wrote to me. He sent me an e-mail and said, “I’m stuck in the middle of this screenplay. I have to deliver it in two weeks for a class I’m taking. Help!”

Normally, I would never respond to something like that because I don’t want to be anybody’s guru or anything like that, but just for the hell of it I thought, “Okay, I’ll give him a little assignment.” I did, and it seemed to work.

That’s where, from my point of view, the idea of “Do the Work” came out where it’s much more of a “Take this step, take that step, take this step” rather than being as theoretical as the “War of Art” was. So it fit perfect into Seth’s concept, or The Domino Project’s concept, of the manifesto.

Ishita: I just want to jump in here quickly and say that I have both sitting on my desk right now. I have a copy of the “War of Art” and then I have a copy of “Do the Work.” To me, they fit very perfectly together, but at the same time, the concept of resistance I feel like you introduced in “War of Art” whereas in “Do the Work” it’s more about how you battle the resistance. Both are very actionable. But when I think about “Do the Work” all I have to do is look at it and I’m compelled to get over the resistance and do my work or start my blog or what have you.

I think it almost does take it a step further. Both are amazing books, but for action, I’m looking at them both right now and I’m thinking, “Alright, let me just do the work.”

John: That’s an excellent jump on point there, too. Steven, for the folks who aren’t familiar with your work, tell us a bit about the resistance and how the book revolves around that.

Steven: Resistance with a capital R is a name that I gave for myself to all the forces of self-sabotage. Procrastination, self-doubt, fear, all of those things that stop us – from a writer’s point of view – from facing the blank page. But from an entrepreneur’s point of view it will stop you from starting a new business or taking some step that you know you need to do.

Resistance in my experience always kicks in when you’re trying to move from a lower level to a higher level or to identify with a braver part of yourself or your higher nature. So it’s that negative repelling force. It’s kind of the dragon that we have to slay every day if we’re artists or entrepreneurs.

John: You’re talking about definitely getting started. I think another key point, too ,that people miss is the idea of losing to the inner critic, if you could talk about that and how that fits into this.

Steven: The inner critic is just resistance par excellence. It’s that voice that comes from – and we all know – our parents, our childhood, our teachers, or maybe from previous lives for all I know. But that is resistance par excellence. Resistance really takes the shape, for me, in voices in my head telling me why I can’t do something or why I should put it off for another day, procrastinate for another day. “Don’t do it, do something else. Do something that’s easier” or “I’m not good enough,” “I’m too young,” “I’m too old,” “I’m too, whatever.” It is that inner critic voice. That’s really exactly what we’re talking about.

John: Another big point that hit home quickly was talking about how screenwriters pitch as far as framing your story and then filling in the pieces. Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Steven: That’s one of the first steps in “Do the Work.” This may give your listeners a sense of what the book’s about. As far as starting a project is what I call the foolscap method of starting a project that I learned from my beloved mentor Norm Stall. Basically, what he said to me once when we’re talking about writing books – we had a piece of yellow foolscap, a pad of foolscap – and he said, “Steve, God created a sheet of yellow foolscap to be exactly the right length for the entire outline of a novel.” That has been an enormous help to me.

The bottom line of that technique is whatever your project is – if it’s a new business, if it’s a philanthropic venture, if it’s a book, a screenplay, whatever it is – step one is get it all down on one page. That was step one in getting something rolling.

The next question is: what do you put down on the one page? How do you do it?

A great trick that I learned having worked as a screenwriter for many years, the way screenwriters work, is they break the project down into three-act structure: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. I think that is a great way to break down any project, whether it’s a new business or anything at all. Just put down the numbers one, two, and three – start, middle, end. That’s a great way to organize a project in your mind without thinking too much about it.

John: We talked about getting rolling and getting started. There’s a section in the book that talks about “the belly of the beast” when you’re facing darkness. Maybe your first real failure is eminent or possible. If you can talk about that, what does that mean – belly of the beast? What do you do with that?

Steven: One thing I’ve found in any project is almost universally about three quarters of the way through – or maybe a little father, maybe seventh eighths on the way through – any project will explode. It’s like that point in running a marathon where you hit the wall. It seems to me it always happens. I don’t know why it does, but it does. The real point at that juncture is, first of all, be ready for it so it doesn’t completely throw you. Secondly, not to take it personally, not to take it as personal failure that happened to you.

In fact, this just happened. I was working on a novel called “The Profession” which I’ve been working on for more than two years. I thought I was done and the exact same thing happened. It just blew up on me. I gave it to friends I really valued and colleagues, and they hated it. They were right.

So I found myself three quarters of the way through having to go back to square one. It really threw me. I made a couple of terrible mistakes and taking it too personally, over identifying with it. It took me months to thrash my way out of this. If I had only listened to my own advice.

The problem I’ve always discovered in my own work when this kind of thing happens when you hit the wall is there’s almost always a reason. You’ve almost always made a mistake in the initial conception of the project. You misapprehended something or you thought something would work and now you’re three quarters on the way through and you see that it doesn’t work.

The answer is, in the Marine Corps they have a way of working that they call “work the problem.” That’s kind of what I do. To remember that the problem is the problem. It’s not you. It’s not any personal failing of yours. It’s just a mistake that you’ve made, a misapprehension that you’ve allowed. It’s like a virus you’ve allowed to get into something and you just have to go back to square one, painstakingly, laboriously and figure out what went wrong. What did I leave out or what did I put in I shouldn’t have put in here? Just solve the problem like a mechanic would solve a problem in an automobile.

That’s the area that I call “the belly of the beast” in “Do the Work”. I think anybody that has done any long project knows that that moment always comes when the project just hits the wall and they have to go back to square one.

John: Ishita, it’s funny. You’re in the throes of this project now. Two questions for you. One is, how is the measurement going? Is it doing what you wanted it to do? Second, what’s next for it? Where are you going with this?

Ishita: It’s doing exactly what we want it to do. Just going from “Poke the Box” which was Seth’s first book, we have measurements for that. It’s interesting because we think that digital isn’t spreading and people aren’t reading on e-devices and things like that just from a marketing and book publishing standpoint. On Amazon’s side, Kindles are now outselling regular traditional hard covers by two to one, or even three to one in some instances. That, for us, was a really big learning.

Operating in the digital space has always something Seth has been in the mix with, but for the team at Domino it was a really big learning experience to see where and how people were actually reading. To touch on “Do the Work” it’s been incredible to see how many vast numbers of people are reading now digitally on the Kindle. Just today, I think, Steve, we had sent an e-mail back and forth about “Do the Work” being number one on the Kindle as a bestseller, which is amazing. It’s been only two days since launch.

To me, those are all really heartening things that are coming out of the way that we’re choosing to operate. There was a really big sponsorship for “Do the Work” which was GE, which I think is interesting because not a lot of publishers are open to looking at businesses as potential partners. There’s some maybe either fear or hesitation there, but that was something that really took us over the hump, I guess you could say, in terms of getting this book out to as many people as possible.

I’m really pleased. I know our team is always trying to think about how else we can spread these books that are really important to us and to our readers. I think having Amazon as a partner and having them do what they do best which is targeted marketing, which is insane distribution, that’s something that’s a fantastic partnership because now we can do what we do best which is curating and working with authors like Steve and getting really great books out there. And we can let Amazon do what they do best which is reaching tons of people and helping us fulfill and do that. So I’m really pleased with where we’re at.

John: In the future, what’s next?

Ishita: It’s interesting because this is a new space for us. Everything that we’re doing is testing and experimenting. But we are working with authors coming in the pipeline for the next six or seven months. We have content lined up. We have great authors who were pitching to work with us, who have agreed to work with us. There’s a constant edge that we’re on to try to do (A) what we’re doing better and (B) figure out what it is we’re doing. Everything that we’ve tried I think with “Do the Work,” Steve, you could tell that we were learning just as much as your team was throughout this whole thing.

Steven: You covered it up pretty good, Ishita. It looked like you knew exactly what you were doing, to me.

Ishita: It’s a learning for us. I think our next move is to still take our content just as seriously as our marketing techniques and figuring out our distribution. It’s just a matter of who we want to work with and what ideas we want to send out there. I know the people on our team are totally innovative and everyone comes from a totally different background. It’s interesting to see what ideas we come to the table with.

The future is going to be maybe ten books this year. We’re thinking about 10-15 books. Seth is probably going to only write one or two this year. But just bringing on a bunch of really great authors.

John: That’s great. “Do the Work” is available only at Amazon.com. Ishita, thanks for telling us about The Domino Project. That’s pretty interesting new marketing techniques for publishing. We’re interested to see where this goes.

Steven, I’ve noticed that you had the artist on campaign scheduled for October 2011 release. Can you tell us anything about that or is that still on the wraps?

Steven: It’s sort of a full-fledged follow-up to the “War of Art.” That’s about as much as I want to say at the moment. But thanks for asking, John. It will be out October.

John: That sounds great. That will do it for us!

Great Marketing

Jay Baer on Youtility

Jay Baer is an acclaimed keynote speaker, New York Times best selling author, entrepreneur, technology investor, and social media and digital marketing consultant. His latest book is Youtility, and I had a chance to chat with him on Marketing Over Coffee (click if you prefer audio).

John: Today, we have a special episode. We have the author of Youtility, Jay Baer, with us. Jay, Welcome to the show.

Jay: Thanks very much. Time will tell whether I am a special guest or not.

John: We’ll be watching the numbers, and I think given the Jay Bayer freight train that has been accelerating over the past couple of months, I’d put money on you.

Jay: Thanks.

John: So, you’ve written NOW Revolution with Amber Naslund a while back. Your latest book is Youtility. It’s made the New York Times Best Seller List. Congratulations. Tell me a little bit about the book. Let’s give everybody the elevator pitch. What is Youtility about?

Jay: The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters make all the difference. If you sell something, you could make a customer today. But if you help someone, you can make a customer for life. And the way you do that is by creating something that is so useful, people will pay for. It’s marketing that is truly and inherently valuable. It has intrinsic value. If you do that, you will win in the end.

John: Right. You’ve got a bunch of great case studies in there, too. It’s a perfect example of a strong business book. You’ve got a big idea, and then you’ve got a bunch of great examples. I have to give you credit for that because so many of these books, I can only hear so many times about Zappos before I’m all set. You definitely rocked a bunch of case studies here.

Getting to the bigger part of this, at the core of it, you’re doing something helpful. You’re doing some marketing activities that are not directly related to the product. You talked about the psychological front here, where the people in the company expect an immediate return. How do you address that? How do you tell people to take this leap of faith?

Jay: No doubt, it is a leap of faith because what Youtility really requires is for you to take a longer approach to the marketing success horizon. I will paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuck who says, “One of the problems with marketing today is that everybody wants to be a hunter and nobody wants to be a farmer.” And that’s exactly right.

Youtility is almost a playbook for becoming a marketing farmer. For building lifetime customer value through useful information and useful things that will yield attention and sales, and loyalty and advocacy, but over a longer period of time than what we customarily have been trained to think about.

Marketing has for 5,000 years, since the caveman tried to sell a rock to another caveman, has always been about buy now, not buy eventually. But since consumers are in control now, both with the messages they receive and how they receive them. You have to do something different, and I think that the thing that you need to do different is Youtility.

John: I love that hunter-farmer analogy because that fits perfectly. You talk about frame of mind awareness where like you said, it’s hunting. It’s hoping that the day you show up that somebody there is ready and willing to buy – and that’s really getting to be more and more challenging.

There’s the classic study about saying that 60% of the buying decision is made before the trigger gets pulled, which is just basically the death of enterprise software as far as Oracle yachts and all that kind of stuff.

You had Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Warby Parker, a few other case studies. Give us one case study of somebody that’s doing something on the Youtility front that is working well and fits your mold.

Jay: You bet. And thanks very much for mentioning earlier the variety of case studies that are in the book. That was very much curated and calculated in that I have read a lot of business books that had case studies, but they are of a particular type. I wanted to make sure that whether you’re B2B or B2C, small business, big business, anything in between, that you can see yourself in the stories that are contained in Youtility. So far the feedback has been that is the case, and I’m really very delighted about that. I’ll give you a couple of examples, just because I think that they epitomize what we are talking about a moment ago quite well with the psychological redirection.

One of my favorite examples in the book is from Columbia Sportswear. Columbia, of course, makes outdoor gear and jackets and pants and hats and stuff. They have a mobile application called What Knot to Do in the Greater Outdoors, and it actually shows you how to tie knots. It’s like “Hey, here’s how you tie a whatever, a fisherman’s knot, or a half hitch.” There’s dozens and dozens of knots. If you’re camping or hanging off the side of a cliff, that is massively useful information. If you’re recording a podcast, less so. I’m not tying any knots right now but maybe in a bit.

What’s interesting, though, is that Columbia Sportswear doesn’t sell rope. They’re not in the rope business. So the obvious marketing place – the old school marketing mentality for them – would have been, “We need a mobile app. Let’s create a jacket finder or a jacket configurator, where you decide are you fishing, or are you skiing? We’ll recommend a jacket to you.” That’s modestly interesting, and you’re going to use that one time, at best.

But instead, Columbia went the extra mile. They surveyed their customers and determined that, indeed, the vast majority of outdoors enthusiasts have their smartphones with them when they’re outdoors, both for safety and GPS purposes, and they said, “Oh, well let’s try and give them information that has greater value and over a longer period of time.” So, they created the knot app, which allows them to market sideways instead of marketing head-on, and now introduces their brand in their customers’ lives in ways that transcend the transactional.

In many cases with Youtility, that’s a really key concept, providing value in ways that transcend the transactional. Sometimes your products and services don’t have to be the star of the show. Sometimes information can be the star, and the products and services follow. We’re so eager to both lead customers to water and to make them drink. Maybe we should just lead them to water and they can figure out whether to drink themselves.

John: Right. You’ve got an interesting concept there: superior knowledge of your customer. Because as I said, basically anybody that’s really interested in knots, that’s probably somebody that could be buying Columbia stuff. Someone who’s not an Avid Indoorsman.

Jay: Right. Actually, I have the Avid Indoorsman domain name. Someday I’m going to do something with that.

John: That sounds like a merit badge. It would just have a picture of a couch on it.

Jay: I love it.

John: There’s a related point to this too, which is because this is not head-on marketing like you were talking about, you do have to market your marketing, which is a phrase that you use. Tell us about that.

Jay: Many companies are starting to embrace content marketing, which is fantastic. And one of the reasons that I wrote Youtility is that you see all of these companies starting to make content, but most of them don’t really know why they’re making content. They’re just making it to make it. It’s like making sandwiches. Youtility really is a strategic scaffolding for why to do content marketing.

But what I find – and I’m sure you’ve seen this, John – is that a lot of times companies, even good companies, smart companies, good marketers, put together some sort of a thing. It’s a blog, it’s a podcast, it’s an e-book, it’s an infographic, it’s a series of videos, it’s a new vine campaign or whatever, and it goes nowhere. It just falls flat. It’s not always – in fact, not often –because of the quality of the thing. It’s because the thing got no support. You have to create a marketing plan for your marketing assets.

You mentioned the Phoenix Children’s Hospital application, another mobile app. It’s a hospital in Phoenix obviously. They’ve got this app that’s very simple, that shows you how to pick out the best possible car seat. They have a two-person marketing team. For that introduction of just that very simple app, they had a 60-day launch plan with all kinds of different facets to it.

If you’re going to go through the trouble of using Youtility, use your corporate voice to actually promote that. Not only does that make sure that your utility will actually get more attention, it’s actually what people want.

This is why I say “content is fire, and social media is gasoline”. All companies would be better off using their social media to promote their very useful utilities than they are to promote themselves one 140-character press release at a time.

John: Yeah. I have to give you a shout out for pointing out Tom Fishburne’s cartoons. He’s got some marketing cartoons and there’s a great one talking about social media strategy. Basically the light grab, or the broadcast – these one-shot wasted campaigns that litter the corporate social media landscape. It’s everywhere.

Jay: Tom is so fantastic. Have you ever had him on the show?

John: No. This is like the classic new reality of business. Here’s somebody who is ridiculously awesome and has been doing their thing for five years and I’ve just never run across them because they’re in a total other world.

Jay: You’ve got to go through his archives. The hardest thing I had to do with Tom Fishburne is figure out which of his cartoons I wanted to license for the book. I started with 15 that I pulled up. I can’t have 15 of the same guy’s cartoons in the book. That’s going to look a little weird. It would be a graphic novel at that point, so I had to narrow it down to a couple. But he is just terrific. He’s so spot-on.

John: Are you going to be at the Profs B2B in October? Is that on your list, normally, of shows to head to?

Jay: Normally, yes. Unfortunately, I am otherwise detained this year. It is a little fast and furious with the book release and the unofficial book tour, if you will. I think I have 30 conferences between now and Thanksgiving. So unfortunately, I couldn’t get that one done this time.

John: You’re definitely in the burning a lot of fuel section of the book.

Jay: I fly on every airline, but because there’s no hub in Indianapolis, none with any concentration – and this is a true story, ladies and gents: I am Silver on 10 different American airlines.

John: I was going to say, this is one of my favorite stock travel tips for people that don’t know. Once you crack that nut with a single airline, you can just go to the other airlines and say “Hey, I’ve got status here. Give it to me. Otherwise, they’ll never fly you”. Most of the time they will say, “Okay. Just fax us your paperwork to prove it, and we’ll let you in.”

Jay: Interesting. I’m going to take you up on that because that could change my life considerably. I can’t even get TSA Pre because I’m not Gold on anybody, even though I’m at the airport almost every day, because nobody will let me in the program.

John: No kidding, to crack through security. Keep going back to Fishburne – he has that great article of the guy being by TSA and then over on the sign they’ve got the poster “Like us on Facebook.”

Jay: And that’s true. They actually do have those posters in some airports. I actually did a blog post once. They had a QR code in the TSA line that you could shoot to download a video of what to put in your carry-on. I’m thinking, “All right. This is a little bit technology for technology sake”.

John: Right. Where to find a quart-size bags.

Jay: I prefer the guy randomly screaming. You know how they do that? Every once in a while, you get the screamer guy at the front of the line like, “Make sure you take your laptops out, and take off your shoes.” But not all of them do it. It’s almost like at the ballpark where you’ve got some guys who sell popcorn who sell one way, and other guys have the red licorice and they’re like, “Red licorice!” It’s the same thing with TSA. You get some guys who are the screamers who have to go through every single regulation in case nobody’s ever flown before.

John: Right. And then there’s still 30% of the folks in line who will get to the front and they will have no clue of what the hell the guy was talking about.

Jay: No idea.

John: Shoes still tied, and a bushel of food that they’re wheeling through.

Jay: Five jackets. I feel bad for people who clearly don’t travel much, who have to dump something of value, and it happens all the time. Yeah, you should read instructions and you should pay attention and have some situational awareness, but it does make me sad to see somebody like, “Well, I can’t take this back to check it, so I’m going to have to leave my expensive wine,” or whatever the deal is.

John: Grandpa’s pocket knife and they have a 55-gallon drum of pocket knives in the back there.

Jay: Actually, there’s a blog about that I’ve seen, and it’s unreal. They get some crazy number just in loose change that’s left in the bins, they use it to partially fund TSA. No joke, John. It’s like $200,000 a year or something just of loose change. It’s great.

John: Yeah, I know. You just don’t respect the volume of the thousands of flights out of every single airport every day. It’s insane. So yes, GoToMeeting, why the hell are you not sponsoring this podcast? I guess that’s the question I have to ask about that.

Getting back to the book, you had another neat stat in there that I had never seen talking about IBM training their employees at social media, and the fact that in the classroom setting, one in eleven would succeed whereas employees trained one-on-one would hit three out of four. That blew me away. Have you got logic behind that?

Jay: Yeah. We weren’t involved in that program, but that kind of employee activation in social and training is some of the work that we do at Convince and Convert for corporate clients. We see those same kind of results all the time. It’s not so much about knowledge of social and understanding. It’s having that support group – somebody who is in the company who can give advice in the moment, who can cajole, who can advise.

This idea that what companies need to do is train their employees in social is not really true. They have to train, activate them, and support. It’s really a day to day hand-holding exercise. And when you do that, when you staff that, when you put the effort into that, the results are fantastic. But if you just say, “Well, you went through the webinar, good luck to you,” which is how most people do it, your results are mitigated.

John: Jumping over to mobile, too. There’s a section of the book where you talk about customer location-based stuff as far as being useful in location, their situation, and then taking advantage of seasonality or external factors. Talk a little bit more about that. How does that fit into Youtility?

Jay: Well, because the premise of Youtility is to provide things that are fantastically useful, one of the easiest and best ways to do that is to do so in a mobile environment because mobile, by definition, gives you information about what people are doing. Therefore, you can more easily add relevance that becomes useful. There’s lots of examples in the book on not only mobile apps, but sort of the mobile future that allows you to say, “Look, we know where you are from a location perspective, or we know what you’re doing, or we know what context you’re currently operating in, and we can deliver value to you in the moment.”

One of the things that I like as a mobile data opportunity is Cloth. Cloth is an application that formerly allowed you to organize your closet. You would get dressed, and then take pictures of what you were wearing and store those in a mobile app so that you could know what it is that you own and also what combination of outfits you particularly like, etc. (A) I’m a dude and (B) I’m middle-aged, so that use case didn’t resonate with me. It kind of seems like first-world problems, like “I’ve got to organize my closet on my iPhone.”

But then, what Cloth did was they added some additional data that is location aware. They have a real-time weather feed, and it knows where you are because your phone has got location services turned on. Using that real-time weather feed, Cloth now recommends to you based what’s in your closet, what you should wear that day based on the weather forecast. So now, it went from something I’m kind of like “eh” to something that is actually terrifically useful based on the fact that they can tap in to location data via mobile.

John: That’s great. It’s funny. As I was reading, I thought the same thing. Middle-aged guy, two kids under five years old. I really need a vomit detector. That would be the only thing that I could use for my wardrobe.

Jay: Which t-shirt could I wear unless I’m in a video webinar?

John: Right. You got the white collared shirt to pull down when the camera’s on. But otherwise, I’m pulling a Chris Berman in my Hawaiian shorts here. The joy of podcasting – theatre of the mind.

You had a part in the book here that flipped a light for me. We talked about showrooming a number of times on Marketing Over Coffee, and the death of the big stores, people price-comparing on site and all of that. But you had a great point with these big box stores. If you’re just a vending machine, that’s it. You’re out of luck. The vending machine thing kind of hit me. That’s exactly what’s going on. You literally put in your money and walk away and there’s no other value. Do you see this as the death of big box stores? Are they basically on the path to extinction, or is there a way around that for them?

Jay: There is a way around it, but it’s very difficult. Is there a way around it that will work economically? I’m uncertain. What you have to do is compete on something other than price. You have to make the experience of being in a store, being in a physical environment demonstrably better than buying something from your phone. If it’s not, you will eventually be gone. I think book stores are perhaps a better case than electronics stores, at least at this point.

I went to Barnes and Noble recently. I’m not picking on those guys. It’s just the reality. I went to Barnes and Nobles to find my own book, and it took me a long time to find the business section, and then is this organized by author’s last name? Is it organized by topic? If so, what topic would I be in? Social media or marketing or something else? There’s nobody there to help you and there’s all this other craziness going on. I’m thinking, unless I’m just browsing around and I want to be inspired by what books are available and I’m just sort of hoping for lightening to strike me in the book sense, I just couldn’t fathom a reason why that would be an easier way to shop, because it’s not.

But if you actually created an environment in an electronics circumstance or a book circumstance where it really was a better place to shop, and where you see that is in your independent book retailers who purposely have very much curated their offering. They’re like, “Look, we don’t have every book, but every book we have, we know is awesome. And we have a very high staff-to-customer ratio so we will proactively see if you need anything, and we will recommend books to you, and we’re going to have author signings, and we’re going to have readings, and we’re going to have free coffee, and we’re going to have comfy chairs, and we encourage you to browse instead of scolding you for browsing.”

If you create a better customer experience, you can win. But so far, very few of these big chains have been able to or willing to create a better experience because they’ve always won on price and now they can’t. There are some examples in the book of retailers that are trying to do that. They’re trying to make the shopping experience an experience.

John: Before we wind down, I did notice from your bio that you are a tequila and barbeque fan. Is that correct?

Jay: That is true. Sometimes simultaneously, but not always. I live in Indiana now, but I grew up in and was in Arizona forever. Subsequently, tequila is certainly a terrific beverage of choice and a maligned cocktail in most places because everybody has their bad college tequila story. But it is one of my goals to educate the public about the wonders of tequila. I have a party every year where we do a whole tasting and things like that to bring people into the fold.

I’m actually a certified barbeque judge at the Kansas City Barbeque Society and do that on occasion, go to competitions and judge. I’m actually having about 20 people over on Sunday, and doing a bunch of pork shoulder and six racks of ribs and all kinds of stuff.

John: You’re going to town. That’s great. As far as tequila, I always counsel, much like any alcohol, if your college stories involve a version that comes in a plastic bottle, don’t hold that against us. You get what you pay for.

Jay: Right. Don’t hold that against the spirit. You got what you deserved. That’s why I don’t drink gin. I have that college story about gin, and so it’s just not on my radar.

John: Now and then, we’ll go for a Bombay Sapphire or something like that. I was going to ask you, my friend, Chris Hart, a former co-worker of mine, has done a book, “Wicked Good Barbeque”. Have you checked that out? Have you seen it?

Jay: No, I have not. I will do that right now.

John: I’ll hook you up.

Jay: I will go down to Barnes and Nobles and I will look for it.

John: Yeah right – and not find it. I’ll talk to him, and I’ll get you a copy. When we get off, I’ll get your snail mail.

Jay: I’d appreciate that. That’d be great.

John: So the book is Youtility on Amazon.com. It’s climbing the charts over there, so you should have no trouble. Instead of just wandering aimlessly around your big box bookstore, you can just search for Jay Baer or Youtility.

Jay: The best place to buy it, if somebody wants to buy it, buy it at an airport because I can get some more airport copies sold this month, they will keep it in the airports. So, if you’re traveling, buy it at an airport.

John: It’s all about airport frontage, isn’t it? Just like the spare change, those copies just fly away of their own accord. That’s the place to be.

Jay: That’s right.

John: Good deal. That will do it for this week. Jay, thanks for stopping by.

Jay: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Great Marketing

David Spark on Brand Journalism

Post author By themshow
Post date August 26, 2013
No Comments on David Spark on Brand Journalism

David Spark is an 18 year veteran of tech marketing and journalism. He’s been in over 40 media outlets in print, radio, TV, and online, has been involved in podcasting, video, and came on to talk about Brand Journalism.

John: Give us your elevator pitch. What do you do and how do you do it?

David: I own a company called Spark Media Solutions. We are brand journalists, which means we create media for companies to increase their thought leadership in this space. The angle that we’ve been really successful with is building influencer relations through content. That is, I think, the best way to make a friend with somebody: to create content or interview them. If you want to be their best bud, that’s probably the best way to do it. I don’t think I’ve failed at that yet.

John: You were just quoted recently in Forbes. They had a whole article about content marketing. There are a lot of ways to fail at content marketing. You can’t just jump into this and assume that because you are doing what everybody is doing it’s going to be right. Talk a little bit more about that. Where do people screw this up and what do we have to look at?

David: I should say I despise the term “content marketing” because I think it’s insidious. I think to say to someone, “Here is some content.” But it’s also marketing. It’s like someone would want to drop it like a hot potato: “Ah! I don’t want this! Who wants this crap?”

The industry uses content marketing for their own selves and understands, “We’re generating this content to ultimately sell product.” But if it’s delivered to someone as marketing material, even though it’s “subtle,” as this writer described in the Forbes article, it’s still not good.

This is the big thing, especially if you have a very complicated product: Most people are not morons, although I get a lot of arguments like, “Everybody is an idiot. You can easily sell them to whatever.” Most people are not morons, and if you are trying to soft sell something or sell something insidiously, they’re going to pick that up. They’re going to sniff that out. If you can sniff it out, they can sniff it out as well.

We have a big thing about doing everything above board, like it’s really clear what we’re doing. We’re just generating content with these people and we’re trying to build our brand and build our thought leadership through this. But if you try to do something weasily, it’s going to slap you in the face. It may work short term, but it’s not going to work long term.

John: I definitely agree with that. That whole duplicitous nature, that kind of like “baiting the trap”, is the feel that I get with some of this stuff.

David: It’s all how you approach it. If you make it clear what you’re doing, then everyone’s above board. They had this whole thing about, “Oh, never do a fake blog. Don’t do a fake blog.” If you’re trying to pull a fast one on your audience, don’t do a fake blog. But there have been fake blogs like the fake Steve Jobs thing that have been hugely successful because they are above board on what they’re doing.

When Wal-Mart – the very famous case – hired someone to blog for them and try to do it all clandestine, now you are not being above board. They refer to this as transparency. But I like to stay above board, saying “Hey, we’re all on the same page here on what’s going on.” That’s really what I’m trying to get through. As long as you are doing that and you are true to your nature, then you’ll be fine. It all depends on if the audience wants this kind of stuff. That gets into a deeper discussion of building your editorial voice.

John: I agree with you. One thing that’s been oversold is the idea of transparency – the fact that you should show customers and prospects everything that’s going on in your business. That’s not it at all. It’s about remaining above board, being honest with what’s going on – not telling them everything that’s going on.

David: Right. But again, you can create something fake as long as it’s clear, “This is a joke. This is fake,” and say who is in on the joke. There are examples of this that work really well. You can create fiction, too, and that can work really well as well.

John: I know you have some stand-up comedy experience. I’ve noticed a recurring theme in a lot of stuff. You have an article I’ve linked to about getting Twitter hashtags to run. All that stuff is built around humor and kind of being clever. Talk a little bit more about that. How does that fit into the mix? How do you make it work?

David: If you look at the top trending hashtags at any given time – and I’ll start with the Twitter thing – you will notice half of them are memes, and they’re usually issues that people want to talk about or people come up with.

Coming up with a great punch line is not the trick. It’s coming up with a great setup. I’ll give you a perfect example. There’s the classic “Why did the chicken cross the road?” There are actually about a thousand punch lines to that joke or saying. I used to have a whole bit in my routine. There’s an old joke of, “You like your women like you like your coffee: hot and black.” That’s an old, old line. It’s an old joke. I used to do a whole series of variations on it. I think the brilliance was, “I like my women like I like my coffee,” and then I came up with 100 punch lines to it. They would be like “sitting in a mug that says: I love Mondays,” or “pounded into a brick, or concealing the smell of smuggled heroine”. These are variations on that.

Similar to these Twitter hashtags, I think the brilliance comes from – and maybe brilliance is overselling it – but the success of the viral nature of them comes from how can I come up with that “Why did the chicken cross the road” or the “I like my women like I like my coffee” setup that people want to write 100 punch lines to?

You’ll notice that’s essentially what those meme hashtags are. They’re just great setups for other people to write punch lines for. That’s kind of the trick to succeeding in a meme-generated trending hashtag. Not all of them have to be that. The meat of that article about how to trend on Twitter is all based on live events, actually. I think that’s really where you can actually get a lot of success – in live events.

Going back to comedy in general, we do a lot of this in video stuff. Again, it all depends on what the client wants and if it’s appropriate to their brand to put in comedy. Some don’t want it and some do. It just all depends on what they want.

John: Let’s talk a little bit more about brand journalism. One of the big problems I see everywhere is classic marketing people – advertising people – have viewed social media and all these things as another channel to force the same garbage down. “Check out our product and buy it.” Brand journalism is a different approach. I feel it’s the way that these channels are actually meant to be used. Talk more about what you do on that front and contrast that to the garbage that’s gone before.

David: People have been hyper complicating this and I’m going to make it really simple. Forget about brand journalism all together. Just think about how any

media outlet becomes successful. They become successful by writing content, creating videos, producing radio shows and whatnot. The more they produce of good quality content that the audience wants and gets the interviews with the key people in the industry, the higher their stature raises in the industry. Therefore, the editorial outlet becomes very, very popular. By also maintaining their editorial integrity, they become very popular and they gain an audience through that.

Take that same exact concept on how any editorial media outlet operates and just apply it to your brand. Do nothing different. Do that exact same thing, because that’s exactly what you are shooting for.

Think about it. Wouldn’t you love to have the brand equity of a Time Magazine, of an ABC, of any media outlet that’s out there? Wouldn’t that be awesome? Well, start behaving like them.

True, it’s not as easy to all of a sudden amass a whole editorial team as big as that, but you can do something small, especially if you are in a very niche market. It’s very possible to do. Just speak to what your audience cares about.

John: How do you combat the idea that these brand journalists are just marketers in disguise?

David: Here’s my whole saying about that. There are good doctors and bad doctors. There are good lawyers and bad lawyers. There are good journalists and bad journalists. There are good brand journalists and bad brand journalists. I can’t speak for all the brand journalists out there. I can only speak for what we do.

If someone else is going to do crap, which it happens, and unfortunately, it hurts my reputation as well, because whenever that happens it puts a mark on the industry and puts a mark on me. Ask any other professional anytime bad news comes out about another lawyer or about another doctor. It hurts them as well. They don’t like seeing it either. For those who choose to keep doing the marketing, you’re just hurting the industry and you are hurting yourselves. That’s really all I can say on that.

As I said before, we try to stay above board. We have in our contracts that myself and my whole company is completely transparent about what we do and what we create. We refuse to do ghostwriting because we know it would damage our brand and inevitably damage our client’s brand as well. It’s very important to maintain your editorial integrity.

While other people are doing their thing, I can’t control it. It’s not going to help you if you keep doing it. If you want to be a pure marketer, go be a pure marketer. That’s fine. But don’t be a marketer that claims you are also a brand journalist and you’re not actually keeping the ethos of brand journalism.

John: Right. Talk a little bit more about the ghostwriting thing you just mentioned. That was interesting. I haven’t heard somebody lay that out.

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David: The only way that we will agree to do “ghostwriting” (and it’s not really ghostwriting) is we’ll create content and not put anybody’s name on it. Therefore, no one labeling in it at all. We’ve had situations where clients come to us and ask, “Will you ghostwrite and put our CEO’s name on the thing?”

We know that’s going to be damaging because it will somehow come out that the CEO didn’t write this and find out that Spark Media Solutions wrote it or something. That hurts our brand and it hurts our client’s brand. It’s going to do nobody any good.

What we suggest in a situation like that where they say, “Well, the CEO doesn’t have time to write,” I say, “That’s fine. Let me interview the CEO and I will publish an interview with the CEO.” I’ve got no problem with that. That’s fine. Then the CEO gets his voice out there.

There are ways to do what you want to do without ghostwriting and trying to pull a fast one on the audience. This just goes back to if you do that, you’re not being above board. You’re trying to pull a fast one on your audience. It’s a slippery slope to even worse behavior. I will say that.

John: That kind of begs the question: You’re talking with somebody about ghostwriting on behalf of the CEO. You say, “No. We can’t do that.” So what happens at that point? Does every company have to have somebody that can do this role and be the spokesman in blogs, or videos, or whatever? Somebody’s got to step up then?

David: I always think it’s critical that the people within the company can speak for themselves, their own voice. We would love to take on all the responsibility and create all the content for all clients we work with. We’d be crazy, crazy busy. It would be fantastic, but that’s not going to do you good in building your own thought leadership.

One of the things we do know and the reason we’re hired is creating content can be super-duper expensive if you don’t know what you are doing. You can also waste a ton of time and money doing this as well. That’s why we’re hired. We streamline the editorial and production process for our clients, for that matter.

But if people are not on board on creating content within the company themselves, if you’re not a good writer, there are other ways to do this. Are you good on camera? Are you good just talking in an interview? Maybe you’re not good overall, so we’ll have to heavily edit the interview. Maybe you don’t have a good speaking voice and we’ll just have written content. There are still ways to do this and get that out and get it from your voice.

Look, if nobody in the company can speak intelligently about the company and about the industry, I’m surprised you are still in business. Someone there has to be able to do it. If you don’t think it’s valuable, that’s what I find really foolish. You’re communicating with people anyway, so why not do it in a more public way so you’re not spinning your wheels having 100 of the same conversation with people?

This is one of the arguments I hear constantly: “I have no time to blog.” But my whole attitude is you should blog because it’s going to ease up all your other communications as well.

John: Getting back to timeframe, this is another thing that is a big deal. You talked about how people always underestimate how much time it takes to create content. What do you prescribe when you start working with a client? Unfortunately, we’ve got people that are hooked on AdWords, where, in six hours they’re going to know whether stuff is working or not. What kind of time do they need to get a brand journalism program going?

David: There are both short-term and long-term goals that you can set up. We actually focus a lot of our efforts around conferences and trade shows. Getting back to the time and cost situation, it the cheapest, most cost-efficient way to create a ton of content in a very brief period of time. That’s step number one.

Also, if you go through a live event, you can get a lot of attention in just a period of a week or two weeks – or a day or two as well.

But if you don’t commit to it, that’s the other thing. You’re committing to everything else. You’re committing to your advertising. You’re committing to your business. You’re committing to your products. This is just something you need to commit to. But you can create little short-term plays and measure it. You can do traditional things like measuring traffic and measuring shares and stuff like that.

Many of our clients are in the B2B space. That’s the place that we roll the best. They have long-term goals. They have sales cycles that take six months to two years sometimes. What’s really, really key in those issues is relationship building, especially with the influencers in the space.

If you start branding your company as having relationships with these influencers and creating content through these influencers and the influencers know you, anytime you have a little fun content project they’re happy and eager to participate in it and they love your content projects – if you’re really selling to the influencers in terms of their participants and they like your content – then everything else trickles into place, because they end up sharing it with their audience and you get access to the entire audience you want to get access to. We have learned that’s been the most successful. I try to measure success with my clients on how many relationships with influencers we’re getting.

John: Obviously, leverage is a big part of this. The fact that you guys create content all the time and you’re doing audio, video, blogging and all that stuff, you’ve learned all the hard lessons. Just ballpark: if you were looking at trying to do this from scratch yourself versus the content that you guys can create, how much more could you get done in the same time? How much is a lift there between having to spend time?

David: I’ll just give you an idea. Here’s a perfect example. One of our old clients is a company called The CMO Club. They bring 50-100 CMOs into a single room to engage and talk about marketing issues. It’s a great event. I am physically arm’s reach away from all these CMOs. In a single event, I can produce 20 videos and articles with these key CMOs.

If I was not at that event, here’s what would have to happen. “David, I need you to get 20 interviews with CMOs of various companies.” I have to call the companies. I have to then go to the media relations department. I have to then fly to all these places, probably with a crew or book a crew in the location. I have to clear all the questions with the media relations department, and they’re going to probably want to see the end product as well. Now we’re getting into crazy six figures. It’s going to be super crazy expensive.

Alternatively, for a lot, lot less money, you just go to an event and I’m physically there, I’ve got camera equipment, and I’m standing two feet away from you and I say, “Hey, I’m shooting this video for The CMO Club (or for this other blog, or for this other event). Can I ask you a question about what you just talked about on stage or what we’re all taking about at this event?” My success rate is in the 90^th percentile and higher using that technique. We just go with the technique that works the best and is the most successful, and costs less for the client, too.

It’s a really powerful, powerful statement when you go to an event and you put 15-20 influencers’ faces and names on your blog with your branding around them as well. I’ll have a microphone that has the company’s logo on the mic flag. That’s hugely powerful. It’s a series of implied endorsements even though they’re not talking about your company.

John: That’s a great point, the fact that it extends beyond the event. You’ve done all this work to build a great event and get all these great speakers. To be able to stretch that into content that you can use the rest of the year is a huge plus.

David: I should also mention that’s if you’re producing the event. A lot of times – almost always – we go to events that our clients aren’t producing, sometimes not even sponsoring for that matter. We just go purely as press and create a ton of content. The event producers love us as well because we’re creating a ton of content and recognition for their event as well.

John: Yeah. Even just having a video crew on the floor attracts attention as the kind of hype people want.

David: The number of times people take photos of me holding the microphone interviewing somebody with the camera equipment or the mic flag, which has the logo of the company on it, gets tweeted out, Instagrammed out, or Facebooked. That’s a nice little side benefit I never really expected.

John: How about virtual events and things like that then? Obviously, that doesn’t kind of play into this model. Do you have clients that try and do stuff around those events? The bigger question is we’ve heard a lot over the past couple years about live events kind of declining and dying off, do you just say that that’s wrong that people need these personal connections or can we work in the virtual world?

David: I’m in the San Francisco Bay area. I was just at an event that was packed to the gills last night. There may be industries where they’re falling apart, but I mostly roll in the tech industries and I have not seen a slide at all. I know running an event and producing an event and trying to get people to your event is extraordinarily hard. I wouldn’t want to do it full-time. We actually do produce some events. That can be extraordinarily stressful. But, man, I keep going to events and they’re packed – tons and tons of events. People still come out to it. They still see the value in it.

I should also mention I think the reason for that is I think the quality presentations have gone up dramatically. I used to go to events and think all the presentations were horrible. I think now since we have TED Talks and SlideShare where people can put presentations, they’ve jumped dramatically. I was at this one conference just a few weeks ago – Velocity Conference – and I thought all the presenters were phenomenal. You’ve probably seen this at conferences, too. You go to a conference and the person presenting is horrible – just God awful. What happens to the Twitter stream? People are just slamming this person left and right. You want that?

It used to be before Twitter, if you had a horrible presentation, you had a horrible presentation and that was the end of it. Nobody knew about it, except the people in the room. But now if you do a horrible presentation, everyone around the world knows it.

John: The back channel is a fierce judge. That’s for sure. Anything else you want to tell us about as far as what you guys do or is there anything we missed here?

David: We create tons of great content. We build thought leadership. The focus of content building to influence relations has been hugely successful for us. Check out all our fun videos on our site. The ones that I’m most proud of lately were we went to the RSA conference. If you don’t know, it’s a big information security conference. It’s a huge, huge conference. Tons of security professionals. For the last two years I’ve been roaming around the floor asking all these security pros to just tell me what their password is. As you might imagine, I get some rather funny reactions out of that. The first year I did it I actually got some people telling me their password on camera, which I thought was really strange. But they did.

John: We’ve been tracking over the past couple shows people using Google Glass wearable technology. I wanted you to check in on that. What’s your opinion on Google Glass? Are you pro, con, or looking forward to getting a set or never buy a set?

David: I love the idea. I think it’s really cool. It is a little unnerving, a lot of people think. But you know what? Facebook is a little unnerving as well. The thing is we’ve seen all these demos of virtual reality type things and being layered on top of our real world. But it requires one to hold up a cell phone in front of their face and walk around, which people just don’t do, so they’ve been more kind of demo type things.

But the Google Glass thing is kind of amazing. I think where it’s going to be monstrously powerful is in facial recognition. I can go to an event and I can literally scan the room, and if you can identify you are John Wall, then immediately I can get access to things like your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn, etc. and have all this info. I can scan the room and also do searches, like “Who in this room is doing this kind of work?” I can immediately pinpoint those people and go directly to them. That, I think, is powerful. It’s also going to be powerful I think in dating. Who is available? Who is single in this room? I think that’s going to be pretty powerful as well.

You constantly hear people complaining, “Well, what about privacy and what about security?” But every time they complain about it, when they start to see what this can do, they’re like, “Well, I’ll give up my privacy and security for that because that’s damn cool!” I think this is just going to be a continuation of that.

The EFF and the ACLU are going to fight it tooth and nail because they see what’s happening to it, but people give up personal and privacy information for more capabilities than they have before. And it will just continue to happen. That’s why I see Google Glass will just continue on. But I think that will be the big power, is once you get facial recognition. That will be huge.

John: That sounds good. David Spark, thanks for joining us today. We appreciate having you on.

David: Thanks for having me.

Podcasting

Podcast Player Test

Marketing Over Coffee is available on Stitcher if you listen to podcasts on a mobile device. I wanted to test out their player:

The Marketeer

Always More Complicated

Lying with statistics is a topic that comes up all the time on Marketing Over Coffee and you’d think it would get old, but the latest crazes of dashboards, infographics and the like just continue to fuel the fire.

Point #1: Statistics that show you a pie chart to make you feel better are misleading you and hiding a bunch of thorny questions. For better or worse, every time I’ve dug into the numbers I’ve found questions that are difficult to answer and force you to ask even more difficult questions.

Over the 4th I found an interesting article on the fact that many flags and patriotic clothes are not made in the United States. That article claims only 2% of the apparel sold in the US is made here. Wearing clothing that celebrates America that wasn’t made here is an interesting issue, it then gets pushed much farther by talking about U.S. flags being used on caskets for our military and proposed legislation to require that they be made in the United States (the majority are made in China). This is the “digging deep gets complicated” phenomenon, clothes being made outside the U.S. seems like not a big deal on the surface, 4th of July items being imported feels strange, our tax dollars for flags for those who made the ultimate sacrifice paid to a nation that’s not that big on freedom feels like a crime.

The article then cites research from Consumer Reports (a favorite publication of mine): “Given a choice between a product made in the U.S. and an identical one made abroad, 78 percent of Americans would rather buy the American product”. This brings to light three more important points:

Point #2: Creating a survey question that is not biased takes a lot of work.

Biased questions gets right to the point of why we joke on Marketing Over Coffee about most surveys sucking. A question like “Are you an ungrateful non-patriot that wouldn’t want to buy clothes made in the US?” will probably cause some problems with your survey.

Point #3: People lie in surveys.

Saying people lie is just me being sensationalist (after all, this is a blog). People don’t intentionally deceive, but they answer with their hearts and often don’t want to disappoint the person asking the questions in the survey for any number of reasons. Proving point #1 in action – if 78% of Americans really want American products you’ve got a hard time explaining the 2% apparel stat.

Point #4: Apathy rules.

In the 2% apparel case we might explain the gap with apathy: Maybe 8 out of 10 people really do want to buy American first, but it’s not high enough on their priority list to check a label every time they buy clothes. As a parent with 2 young children I have first hand knowledge of shopping and getting home with no real clue or understanding what’s in the bags I’ve brought home.

That leads us to the real lesson:

Point #5: It’s About Seeing the Complications.

It’s not about stats to create graphs, it’s about digging in to ask more questions to understand what forces are at work. Are you losing business because of the economy or because a better product has come along? Are people not buying American because of price or a lack of knowledge about the economic impact of where products come from? Are prospects not smart enough for your product, or is it that your product is so boring that nobody cares?

I’m sorry to say that many times I’ve dug in and not been satisfied with the answers I’ve found. I can say that I’ve almost always come out with a better understanding of what’s really happening.

P.S. If you’re tired of shaky statistics that are generating worthless discussion and not having any impact on the bottom line you might want to read more from Avinash Kaushik. Tom Webster also knows something about surveys. They both write clearly about avoiding bias and getting actionable information out of the questions you are asking.