The reporting suite in Salesforce.com is sort of like the $100 tool kit you get at Home Depot. It has all the standard stuff (screwdrivers, sockets, wrenches, pliers in a stylish red box of some kind), and if you know what you’re doing it will work for most everything, and for more advanced stuff you could make it work, although if you are a pro you’ll want more power tools.
As part of a webinar I did with Salesforce we started to discuss one of the big problems with campaign measurement – the fact that your data is only as relevant as the number of closed deals you have. I had done a presentation on this a few years back and had some requests for it and found that it was the classic “Consultant’s Powerpoint” – lots of pictures, and useless unless you know the story.
So here’s the story. In a perfect world you’d measure how many closed deals came from your campaigns, have a simple dashboard showing the dollars generated and go home a hero. In reality, odds are you’re going to start tracking and measuring, right to the point of reallocating budget prior to the first deals closing – a classic “Fire, Aim, Fire.”
The first thing to confirm is that you are getting a primary campaign source for every opportunity. This is one of the more recent adds to marketing tracking and it’s the closest thing you’ll get to a silver bullet. Doing an initial pass and confirming that every opportunity has a primary campaign (even if it’s “Unknown”) allows you to run some interesting reports and start to get a picture of where the deals and inbound leads are coming from. For most cleanup like this I’ve found that the Salesforce Excel Connector is your cordless electric drill – a killer power tool. It’s kind of a hassle to set up, between finding a copy of Excel 97 and learning how the macros work, it takes some elbow grease, but it pays for itself quickly – imagine being able to find all opportunities from the past month, be able to match them to all the contacts and leads from a specific company and update these fields in Excel directly rather than pulling them up in SF or having to use the bulk loader. I’m also a bit surprised there’s nothing better out there, if you know of anything else like it, please share.
Now that you have an idea of what programs are working here are some common factors to examine:
Any specific type of program better than others (Webinars vs. Whitepapers, Live Events)
Region and/or Account Manager – this can get into management of the sales team
If PPC is productive
Does training drive adoption and increase retention?
Isolate and report on telemarketing or other lead qualification
One topic that would require a post of its own (or maybe even a whole book, which might be the most boring book ever) is what to do with deals that close from multiple campaigns. Campaign weighting is not trivial (saying the white paper is 20% responsible for the win, 80% of it goes to the demo). Although it gets complicated quickly there are two reasons to do it: one is to try multivariable testing – do any combinations of campaigns do considerably better than others? The other is to give your reporting credibility. By default most reports that show a closed deal that went through multiple campaigns will assign all the dollars to each campaign. In other words, a $40,000 deal that went through 4 campaigns makes it look like your 4 programs generated $160,000 in sales. These kind of reports are just the kind of thing the CEO is looking for so you can take his place picking up trash in an orange jumpsuit when the tax auditors come calling.
Use the USA Today Effect to your advantage
Depending on your market you’ll probably also want to add fields at the opportunity level to track both competitors, and incumbents. It’s very common to find that you will be more effective against certain competitors. You may also find that certain incumbents may indicate that you’ll never get budget for the project. I’ve found a bubble chart like the one in this post can give you an interesting view of your forecast, showing both aging, percentage to close, and competitors.
Another area that requires a lot of planning is both lead status and campaign member status. You’ll want anything showing movement in the funnel as lead status, anything showing progression through a program as campaign member status and these have to be mapped. You may have to do some automation to have the lead status updated as campaign status changes. These also make great triggers for marketing automation efforts…
For more complicated graphs you can go across multiple objects (contacts and opportunities for example), which limits some of your graphing options if you were to use Excel, but I’ve always found that being able to schedule reports and show them in dashboards is the only real route to adoption. People only get into the excel graphs when the quarterly board of directors meeting is coming together, which may be all you need it for.
If you’ve run any interesting reports or have found other tools you like, please share, there are a lot of new solutions as this space is evolving quickly.
For those not chronically addicted to LinkedIn, I’m no longer with Glance Networks. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what’s next and as it usually happens, things have been coming up on their own. Thanks to all of the listeners of Marketing Over Coffee I’ve been able to talk to many people, and I’m so thankful for having a great network of friends keeping an eye out for me.
While catching up with everyone that I haven’t had time to talk to over the past year I’ve had a number of people ask if I’d be interested in doing some contract projects. Some consulting, some all the way through to execution, and all with companies I’m very interested in. Although I’m not thrilled about figuring out my own healthcare and payroll (at least the M Show Productions LLC that was set up for Marketing Over Coffee is already in place), I’m very excited to have a chance to work with different organizations rather than just parachuting into a single project. The big question will be if I will eventually turn all the time towards a single company if things work out, or if I find out that I can make an agency of some kind work.
I’m very excited for this next step, it’s a big leap!
John: This is your second book. The first one ran like wildfire. Take us from when we talked to you last. The book did well. You did the speaking thing. When did you realize you needed to write something else and what did you come up with for a big idea?
Mitch: “Six Pixels” came out in 2009 (I wrote it in 2008) and I really felt it was a book where I was explaining how, as a small agency – a very small shop under a handful of people – we leveraged these ways in which we connect. I don’t want to lump it all under social media because I didn’t think “Six Pixels” was just a social media book, but how we leveraged it to really build attention, build clients, and use it as a springboard to what we can do, which is very different from the way traditionally you would think you would grow an agency and market it.
I was already latched onto the blogging bug, and for sure, the podcasting bug had bit hard, too. You go through the process and wonder, “Do I need to really write another book? I’m still blogging every day. I’m podcasting every week. I write for the Harvard Business Review one week, and the opposite week I write for Huffington Post. Magazine offers and newspaper stuff.” Life is sort of good.
I just came to the point in my life, professionally, where I realized it was sort of like, “What now?” moment. What now? So what? So everyone has a mobile phone. So everyone is creating videos and texts and images and audio and Twitter – but so what? What now? What do we do as a business to truly make this stuff matter, make it count, and not do the stuff we used to do in this very, very new and different channel?
In my conversations with C-level executives, in my conversations with marketing practitioners, I do about 60-70 speaking events every single year, it became abundantly clear to me that there were several things that have happened that have fundamentally changed business forever, and yet most brands were doing nothing about it.
I looked at it and kept modeling it and having the conversations and the speeches I was doing, and it really came into these five areas. To me, it was about: how do you reboot business? To me, rebooting business is about these five areas in terms of today.
But then I started realizing, what does that mean to me and you? You have to still get up and go to work every day. You have to still do what you have to do. Does this make you employable in the next five years? How do you stay employable in the next five years?
That became the catalyst for the second part of the book, which is called, “Reboot You.” I call them triggers, but it’s posture you need to have to make sure that you, in and of yourself, are a viable entity within this very, very different business system. When those two roles collided, John, it was the classic story. I was in the shower when I had the epiphany. It was my holiday break and I was like, “Wow, this is it.”
I have to tell you, from book proposal to speaking to my agent to all that, it was literally a function of a couple of weeks. I always had the title “Ctrl-Alt-Delete” in my brain as a potential for the second book, but there was this moment of crystallization. It really is a labor of love. It’s not a book where I’m talking about how I did something or why you should, too. It was more an exploratory book in these five regions and these different triggers, and for me, it was such a pleasure to pull it together in a much richer depth than I can go into on my blog.
John: The thing that got me is, right out of the gate, you’re talking about sounding the alarm – the classic look to your left and right, and one of those guys aren’t going to be there in a couple years. It could be you, too, if you don’t have your act together. Do you really think it’s that severe – the shift that we’re facing that we’ve got in front of us now with all these tools coming into bear?
Mitch: Whenever you put a provocation out like that, most people are like, “Well, hell yeah!” I’m Canadian, so I think, “Oh, I don’t know. It sort of makes me edgy.” It’s a line that I have been using on audiences for a while. For me, the real reason why I started with that is because I think about my agency – Twist Image – we started in 2000 and I joined in 2002, so I’ve been at it now for eleven years just here, not talking about the fact that I got into digital in 1993, so it’s been like 20 years of being in digital.
I think about how we have evolved, what services we offer and how we connect brands. We work with B2B, B2C, small impulse buys, we work with products that take long sales cycles; and you come to realize that I’m actually employing people currently in job titles that didn’t exist when I started this shop in departments that didn’t exist in the industry. It’s this whole new wave of vocation that has fundamentally changed.
Don’t try this while you read this
Then I meet with my peers who are in, let’s say, traditional media and they’re not really struggling in terms of managing growth. They’re struggling and figuring out how to cut things so it looks like there’s revenue there. And yes, I do think the foundational digitization of society is profound and I think it’s even most profound now because we’ve come past this shiny object thing.
We’re at a point where technology has removed the technology from technology. Think about the iPad; think about a smartphone. If you pivot on that idea, you start realizing that these are real shifts that have happened – they’ve already taken place – and we need to act. I do think that even five years might be a little long just based off of the exponential growth curve that we’re in.
John: Yeah, and how it comes around. I like the way you’ve framed that as far as pulling the complexity out of the technology. There’s a classic Bill Gates line saying we always overestimate these technologies in the first year, but then we underestimate ten years from now what they’re going to do because they do finally deliver on all the hype and promise as time goes by.
Mitch: The squishing of the time has also been much more compressed. Even when I first spoke about it in“Six Pixels of Separation,” I talked about that compression of how a message goes from ideation to publishing. Blogging fundamentally changed that. It became instant. Now you think about that just in terms of the world. I have to always remind people three-and-a-half years ago, we didn’t have an iPad. It’s not a long time.
John: Literally, you’re talking about not even 1,000 days since that’s come up and around. Yet another angle that I like a lot is you talk about “no direct relationships, no future”. I like that idea because so often people have thought about these new channels and using them to promote and push, but it’s kind of flipping it around and saying, “No, you’re not getting it. If you don’t get those relationships, you’re at the end of the road.” Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Mitch: Anybody can sell anybody now. You and I grew up in a day and age where if you bought a pair of Sony headphones, you did not buy it at the Sony store. You probably bought it Target, Wal-Mart, or wherever. If you were mad about it, you just went back to the store and complained. It never really filtered up to Sony. On the occasional poor customer issue, you would write a letter to them and they would maybe respond or maybe pretend like they never got the mail and it would wind up in someone’s file cabinet and that was the end of it.
If you think about what that relationship from the consumer perspective is today, it’s very, very different. Sony, Target, Wal-Mart – “like us on Facebook, follow us and do all this stuff.” This is a lot of marketing messaging. Just think about that food chain. Sony is telling me to like them on Facebook and Target is telling me to like them on Facebook, and it’s happening on Facebook.
Who owns the direct relationship? Is it Facebook that owns the direct relationship with Mitch Joel? Is it Target? Is it Sony? I try and make the argument that you can pick one if you want, John, but it doesn’t matter. Every single one is trying to have the direct relationship, because that’s what we have at the end of the day. All we have as a brand is that powerful direct relationship.
You might say, “No kidding. That’s not a new movement.” I would argue it is a new movement when you look at the food chain I’ve just described. Before, it was: you’re in the fight with the competitor for the direct relationship. Now if you look at your food chain from your product, you’re actually in a battle with each and every person on the food chain because they’re telling you to like them, follow them, and do all this stuff as well. Everybody’s hustling into that direct relationship.
I do think the perspective that most brands bring to that component of the relationship, they’re sorely missing and they’re letting that relationship go to not a competitor, but someone else in the actual food chain.
John: The whole section that talks about the 7 Steps of Utilitarian Marketing, tell us a little bit more about that. I like the way that all fit together.
Mitch: I found myself one day in New York City needing a bathroom really badly, turning on my iPhone and seeing the app “Sit or Squat.” You turn this app on and it knows where you are by GPS location and it tells you which are the cleanest bathrooms in the closest vicinity, literally rated from 1-5 stars. It’s based off of a wiki platform. Anybody can edit it. They can add as many stars as they want. They can add comments. They can add new bathrooms and request a bathroom be removed. It’s this amazing app brought to you by the good people at Charmin.
You tend to think about if Charmin was doing mobile, it would be, “Here are mobile coupons,” and “Here’s are double-quilted thing,” or “It’s a game with the bears from the TV and you get to pick the little piece of toilet paper off their butts,” or whatever it might be. It’s ridiculous that in a day and age where anybody can create anything and send it to consumers that what we’re actually doing is mostly bad advertising or bad iterations of advertising when you can create utility.
I think “Sit or Squat” was one of those bellwether examples where I realized it could be complementary. It could be an extension of a brand narrative. It could tell a bigger and more profound story and connect people more to the brand by providing them with something they would like to use. We live in a world where the home screen of our phone is the new real estate. It’s the same reason why a big store would open up on a specific corner and a specific city. They’re looking for foot traffic. Well, that new real estate – that new foot traffic – is the home screen of the smartphone.
People recoil and think, “Well, what is it, one-quarter of all branded apps get downloaded, used once and never again?” All that data is wrong because they’re talking about apps that suck. You and I always use apps that provide utility – that added value – and I don’t know how many brands have taken the step back to say beyond the advertising schema that you can have in these platforms and channels, “Why don’t we actually create something that is of value?”
Pushing that further to the blackest of black belts, it would be, “Could you get it to the point where somebody would pay for it because it’s so valuable and useful to them?” I do think we’re at this amazing moment in the history of marketing and communications and the history of business where you can actually do that without traditional gatekeepers. That is massive.
I understand why brands haven’t done it, because maybe they haven’t been illuminated to the idea, but what an amazing opportunity for anyone.
John: You have a whole chapter that talks about sex with data and nailing down the linear. Aside from just being provocative, it is all about the data. Of course we’ve seen the big data tidal wave wash over us here. What’s your take on this? What do you see us doing with all this data in front of us now?
Mitch: I was talking recently, and I know you present as well, and sometimes when you speak you say something and it comes out of your mouth and you don’t know where it came from. Sometimes you wish you could grab it back and shove it back down your throat. There are other moments where you’re like, “Oh, that was funny; I should remember it.”
I remember saying something along the lines of, “I think everybody is overly-excited about big data and that’s really interesting in a world where most people suck at small data.”Where I was going with that is we have a lot of linear information that we take – e-mail addresses, advertising, direct marketing, etc. We have this new world on the right-hand side which is that circular gate. It’s the semantics stuff. It’s not data that you’re really capturing, but it’s data that individual consumer are willfully putting out there (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc.).
Looking at that and thinking about our world of dashboards, and everybody in data analytics is all excited about dashboards, I say beyond dashboards, what are with really talking about here? I think what we’re talking about is the intersection of that linear data going into that circular data. That’s where the good stuff happens. That’s where the sex happens.
Suddenly it’s not just about demographics and psychographics that are helping you as a brand connect information in a way that would be more relevant to music consumer, but suddenly you have a more 360-degree perspective of not just what Mitch Joel has done, but who he is. When you think about that at a macro level, you can just imagine a world where information, advertising, sharing, building relationships becomes that much more powerful.
When I say you can imagine a world, I say that because you can do it today – you can do it right now – it’s just brands don’t have the intestinal fortitude to do it. They’re not putting the time and effort into figuring out what it takes to make that happen.
When I talk like that, I realize everybody says, “Well, that sounds creepy. It sounds like an invasion of privacy.” I’m the immediate past chairman of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Marketing Association. I sat on the board of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Privacy is a massive issue for me. Privacy is a massive issue for me because a lot of marketers screwed it up to the point where we need to have lawyers involved and government involved. That’s crazy.
I believe that what I see when I talk about sex with data is the ability to do things for consumers that are not breaching any form of privacy, but at the same time, creating a level of personalization that makes them just want it more.
Case in point would be Amazon. It’s so hyper-personalized that if you were to see Amazon as a brand new customer, it would be very overwhelming and probably very boring to you. But they do that personalization so well. They leverage that linear data with what they know about you in terms of your personal habits that it makes you yearn for more of it. We don’t ever think, “Amazon is really breaching my privacy.” We think, “Wow, Amazon. Keep at it, because I’m buying more stuff and I like this.”
John: You said the first chapter of the book talks about the corporate approach – things the whole organization has to worry about. But in part two, you get into the more personal level about what you personally need to do for your career to keep things moving. One thing you talk about is rebooting yourself and finding your blend, if you could tell us about that.
Mitch: Blend is a really interesting concept that I wish I had created. It’s one of those things that you realize you’re doing, and then someone gives you a name for it. I’m at this really cool event and I get a chance to be introduced to Patrick Pichette, who is the CFO of a little company called Google. Can you imagine meeting the CFO of Google, by the way? What a gig.
John: Yeah, tough life!
Mitch: I don’t even know if you remember, in the news they had that thing where – I think it was for Google+ or something – where they rented a wave machine so people can surf at mountain-view. He was telling me, “I’ve got this purchase order” I asked, “What is this for?”
“Oh, we’re renting an ocean to go wave surfing.” And I guess that’s what happens when you have billions of dollars in a war chest.
I’m standing with Patrick and he happened to be here in Montreal. Patrick is a former Montrealer who was working for Bell Company, most people here know it. There were a couple of his old Bell buddies who were at this event. One of the guys is standing there next to him and I’m just a fly on the wall. They say to him, “Hey, Patrick, how’s your work-life balance now?”
It was awesome. Patrick looks this guy right in the eye – doesn’t miss a beat – and goes, “You don’t take this job for work-life balance.”
You would think most people would say, “Oh, I get the weekends,” or whatever. You don’t take the CFO gig at Google if you want work-life balance. You’re all in. I remember thinking it’s those super-execs who have great punch lines.
We sit down for dinner, and again, just magic of magic, Patrick sits right next to me, which is awesome, so I get to chat him up. I said, “I was really taken by your comment about work-life balance.” He said, “When you work as people like us work – and I include you and myself – in this connected world with e-mail and smartphones, this idea that work falls outside of life is somewhat erroneous.”
It’s so true. I’m really dedicated to the growth of Twist Image. I’m dedicated to the content I create and the speeches I give and all those things. At the same time, I don’t like putting it outside of life. I think it’s life. You have 24 hours in a day and you’re making it work.
He talked about this notion of blend, this idea that he had this crazy meeting in London, so he flew his wife in and they spent three days in London, but then he was gone for another two days or down in the office; then he did something with his kids. I’m not trying to make it sound like he’s neglecting his kids and he doesn’t come home for supper with his family – that’s not the scenario. It was more of him constructing his day around the blend and flow.
I don’t know about you, but I have found there are days where I’m looking at my computer and my agenda and I close the computer and go play with the kids in the park. I can jump back online at 9:00pm and catch up on the extra e-mails or whatever it is, or I can have this call on the way home in the car. We have very different lives.
I always worry, “Oh, dear Lord, I’m a workaholic and I’m going to have a heart attack.” That whole thing where I stress myself out about the fact that I’m not stressed out. I really started looking at my life realizing that I have a really healthy blend. Blend, to me, in terms of how I look at life is it’s a stool and the stool has three legs. One leg is my family and friends; one leg is my professional work; and the third one is my community work. Like any proper stool, if you don’t have the exact balance in all three, it will tip over.
When I have those moments where I feel it’s tipping over, I look to the three and I figure out: where is the blend missing?
John: You’re talking about the way the market is changing, things are ramping up and an employee really needs to take more of a startup mindset, if you could talk about the components of that and how that protects you, makes you future-proof.
Mitch: I know both you and I both have a huge love for all things Seth Godin. Whenever I’m doing something in work – and I consider a lot of my work very, very entrepreneurial – I think about that aphorism he always shares, which is, “The riskiest thing you can do is be safe, and the safest thing you can do is be risky.”
It’s a nice thing to say. It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do when you’re looking at the construct of what your day-to-day life is – “I’ve got to pay rent, make the mortgage, take care of family and all that sort of stuff.”
What is it about the sort of work that we do? You’ve always heard terms like be an entrepreneur, be an intrapreneur, etc. But there has been this startup movement that has come into the fray. We’ve had startups for a long time, but I think now because technology has become that much more easy, obvious and intuitive for people to at least try their own thing, I was wondering, what would happen if we brought that type of startup spirit?
If we looked at the things that are so beautifully written in “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries, if we actually took that mentality – that startup mentality – of testing, being iterative, learning, optimizing and applied it, one, to the work we do, and two, to us as individuals, what would it look like?
Not a day doesn’t go by that I don’t try and do one little test. It might just be a simple e-mail question to someone or whatever it might be, but the more and more I get into that idea of being that startup, – that constant iterative place – the more comfortable it makes me.
I think people who even come to work for our agency are somewhat surprised being 100+ people for 13 years that we really have that startup mentality, not just in the physical way we look and operate, but in just how we think. It’s always about we’re the underdogs and we have to really go for it. I think it’s a valuable lesson to think about in terms of your own personal development.
John: As you’ve gone through the process of writing things – you’ve put this all together – has it changed the way you’re doing business daily now? You obviously had the idea when you began. By the time you finished, had it changed the direction you were moving in? Has it done anything different for you now today?
Mitch: In terms of the whole book, you mean?
John: A lot of times, the writing process makes things gel for you. By the time you’re done, you look at the idea differently than when you started. Has it metamorphosed at all or were you dead on from day one?
Mitch: It’s a weird world when you’re between my two ears. During the writing process of the book – and it took a significant amount of time – I didn’t miss a blog post and I didn’t miss a podcast. You can imagine that if I blog every single day (365 posts a year, and take away one a week because I do a podcast on Sunday), I’m accumulating books and books as the book is being written. I think as you’re writing the book, other things that fall off or become inspiration lead into blog posts, articles, or what have you. With that, I’ve been talking about the concepts live in front of an audience for about a year, because you want to test the content and see if it resonates or not.
What I’ve learned is the book is the place where I go to really expand upon a lot of those ideas, whether they be in a blog post or an article or speaking, and then it takes you down other avenues and it becomes this beginning, middle and end. I know that the book retains that.
But definitely, if I look back to the fact that I finished writing it in May of last year and did the final edits up until January/February of 2013, I was updating things and moving things.
I think about one of the anchor stories that I tell in the beginning of the book, which is about Marco Arment, who is the former dude from Tumblr who went on to start Instapaper. This guy starts this business. He’s running it out of his appointment in New York. It’s worth millions and millions of dollars and nobody even knows because he’s self-funded, he did it by himself, and it’s this massive success. It got sold to Betaworks the other week.
You look at that and say, “Isn’t that the problem? How do you write a book and it’s already out of date?” I was thinking about it and it actually completely validates everything I’m talking about in the book. What does that tell you? It tells you that you can have a multi-million dollar exit in the time a book is written. That is complete purgatory. That is complete mode for reboot. That is a complete model for “Ctrl+Alt+Delete.”
It’s interesting to see how the dynamics change for sure, but the five movements are very, very real. How we’re bringing it to work is still very, very real. My real love is now that it’s written and it’s coming out, I can just really expand on some of it even more if I want – or update it – in the platforms I have.
It’s sort of an organic thing. The book can’t be the only thing. I think if anyone reads it and likes it, they’ll do what they did last time, which is latch onto the podcast, listen to this, follow me on Twitter, read my columns in HBR and hopefully what they’ll do is come with me on this journey – because it’s a journey. All of anything I ever do is a function of me working out what is going on in my brain in terms of trying to come to answer that has a business solution to it. It’s playing. I think that the book is a great anchor in terms of bringing together a much deeper breadth and depth to that thinking.
John: That’s good. Let’s talk about more entertaining stuff as we wind down. I have on my list comparing Iron Man 3 versus Google Glass. Which do you fall under if you had to pick?
Mitch: That’s crazy, John, that you say that. I was in Toronto for two days working and I had finished a client dinner. It was about 8:00pm. On the way to my hotel from my office, there was actually one of those Megaplex movie things. I was walking by and I thought, “I’m going to see Iron Man 3,” and I walked in and it was so busy. I was like, “I can’t do it. I’ll come when it’s quieter,” and I left. So, I haven’t seen Iron Man 3.
But I will tell you that I have used Google Glass and it is very, very transformative. All of the discourse I’m seeing online, I have to say, it’s just fundamentally wrong. The first thing is everybody you’re reading about Google Glass right now are the exact same things we said about cell phones: “You look like such an idiot when you talk on the phone in a restaurant,” “It’s so rude that you’re walking down the street talking,” “I can’t believe you’re talking in your car.” We said all these exact same things.
What people don’t get about it – and the transformative part about it – is this. Every time you access your keyboard, your computer, it’s about your hands and your fingers and touching and moving and your smartphones and all this. Think about moving all of that interaction that you have to your eyes for motion and your voice for control. That’s the profoundness of Google Glass. It’s not perfect. It’s going to be refined. But that alleviation of stumbling into your pocket, pulling something out, touching it and all of that just going away, and suddenly, the world is very clear.
There is a screen in the top-right corner. You can’t see it unless you look at the screen, so it doesn’t obstruct any view. It’s on a heads-up display. The ability to use your voice and your eyes to engage in that content is absolutely as enlightening as it was the first time I used a web browser.
John: That’s a ringing endorsement then. We’ll put you on the side of being transformative and the next big thing.
Mitch: On the beta list.
John: How about if folks want to learn more about the book or more about you? We hit a bunch of the points, but where do you suggest they purchase the book? We don’t want to go through the regular channels if you’ve got someplace special they can pick it up.
Mitch: It’s a massive publisher. I’m with Grand Central Publishing, which is part of Hachette Book Group. They’re the largest book publisher in the world. Anywhere you purchase books whether you do it in physical, digital or audio, it should be available. Hopefully you will buy many copious copies for yourself and everyone you know, because I have children that need to eat.
John: That sounds good. We’ll have to come up with a package deal. Maybe we can throw Chris and I’s book in the fire and make it a 3-for-one deal.
Mitch: Let’s do it.
John: Mitch Joel, thanks for stopping by. We appreciate having you on the show. Any last exit comments before we wrap up?
Mitch: I love you guys. You know that. It’s one of those weird things where we don’t talk often enough, but I think about you guys daily – both you and Chris (or as I call him, Ninja).
It’s amazing. I think back to: is this stuff real and does it make sense? People talk about the web all the time and Twitter. Is it useful? I think about you guys a lot because we met in Boston coming up to seven or eight years ago – real relationships, real interactions, real people, family stuff, friend stuff. I think people dismiss that. They dismiss the value of it and they don’t necessarily take into all the great things this digital stuff does. I would have never met you had it not been for podcasting. I’m all for podcasting.
John: That sounds great. It’s the same here. It’s been fun to be able to watch you before the first book, before everything started. The whole PodCamp thing was crazy. David Meerman Scott got things going there.
Mitch: You can go through it. It’s Chris Brogan, Julien Smith, John Wall, Chris Penn, David Meerman Scott. We could literally keep going for days on this. It’s insane. Pulver.
John: Yeah, Jeff Pulver. And then Rocketboom was when they were on fire.
Mitch: Scott Monty, Joe Jaffe.
John: C.C. Chapman. You could really go on and on.
Mitch: Hey, what about our friends at GALACTICAST? Same thing. All PodCamp.
John: I’ve seen those guys in Pittsburgh at PodCamp. iJustine was down there for the first one. It was crazy, everybody on that wave. We definitely have moved on to other stuff, too, but it is great that everybody has been able to stay in touch and being able to work on different projects now and keep things going.
Mitch: Life is good.
John: That will do it for today. Thanks, Mitch. And to everybody out there, enjoy the coffee.
Martin Richard, 8 years old, was taken from his family and friends at the Boston Marathon on Monday. I was crushed when I heard about him. He came to celebrate the race, the place where we stop for a day and a huge crowd of over 15,000 take a bold leap. Courage, fear and heart on display for all to see. His loss hits me personally because of my love for this race, and here’s why:
As I went through my 20’s sources of inspiration began drying up. The church, mired in scandal, and a symbol of pain. Fictional characters were recognized as just that, people that weren’t real. I began to run more often just because it was too difficult to try and find anyone left that played tennis, and there were no trails for rollerblading like there were back in the Bay Area (does anyone rollerblade anymore?)
The first race I ran was a 5k in Cambridge and I won first place in my division (Fat Bastard) by cracking 7:30 miles, a pace I haven’t seen in years. In the finish chute a guy behind me was lamenting how he was in better shape when he had run the marathon. This was a spark – I had outrun somebody that was able to run the marathon.
The next step was to go to the finish to see what it’s all about. The first time I went late in the day. The winners tear across the line in a split second. The true drama is to see the people coming in as the clock climbs to 4, 5 and even 6 hours. It’s difficult to put into words the range of emotions you see and feel watching the finishers. The tears, the limping, bleeding, the dazed and confused. All reaching deep within to accomplish their goal, many for the first time, or for charity once the 4 hour mark has passed (if you can’t make the qualifying time of around 3 hours, depending on your age, you can still get a number for the race if you raise money for charity, usually more than $2,000). It’s overwhelming to see people in the last hundred yards of their own 26.2 mile personal hell. I hate having to drive 26 miles, never mind running it.
The more you follow it, the more inspiring it becomes. Seeing Team Hoyt, a familiar site at all the big races. The hundreds of runners raising money for charitable causes. The man pushing himself backwards in his wheelchair. For any runner that gets drawn to it, it quickly takes on mythic proportion. It’s an audacious goal to set for yourself, and it requires such a commitment that you can’t help but create a bunch of your own stories as your adventure unfolds.
My college friend Tony Ong got me running with the Nike Running Club on Wednesday nights, a group led by Shane O’Hara (I was relieved to find this article about him and hear that he was ok). Shane would eventually leave Nike and become the Manager of Marathon Sports, the store at the finish line, you can see it in most of the pictures. Tony is fit enough that he can just jump in and run, and was thankful that he didn’t train this year otherwise he would have been closer to the trouble. He and his family got out of town with no problem. Soon enough I was signed on to run as a fundraiser for the Franciscan Hospital for Children.
What makes the Boston Marathon unique is that mere mortals like myself will never know what it’s like to throw or catch a touchdown in the Super Bowl, to step up to the plate to swing for a home run in October, or hear “GOOOOOOAL” as the ENTIRE WORLD watches you during the World Cup; but anyone with enough heart can get to the start behind some of the world’s greatest athletes (way behind in my case) in what many consider to be the world’s premier marathon.
Like many, my training did not go well. During the last week when you are supposed to taper down and have a huge surge in energy (many complain about getting very little sleep in the week prior to the race), I was sleeping 8-10 hours and sluggish all the time. Though I plodded along, I did manage to finish before the course was closed, I would not have been that lucky this year. My brother jumped in in the last half mile and crossed the finish line with me. The photo is here with me in my office to see every day.
It causes me great pain that the devices were set to 4:09. If the intent was getting the most media it would have gone off around the 2 hour mark when the elite athletes would finish. The 4 hour mark is when one of the largest packs come in. This was a strike not at the runners with world class talent, but those running on heart.
And yet those responsible are not only cowards but fools. The group that runs on heart knows they can’t win this race. They know at best it will be exhausting, if not painful. Giving enough sweat to feel the salt on your skin is certain, blood and tears probable. They will run in the dark, in single digit weather, on the ice for the chance to run in April where yes, it can be 80 degrees, or it can snow, or rain, or anything between. This event makes no sense. It exists only because people have the courage to try it, and others come to cheer and be inspired (and well, yes, the college kids party hard and cheer really loud, that’s their job). More adversity just makes the stories of the heroes more impressive, more motivating and likely for the next group to catch the spark.
Martin Richard, I never knew you but I can never forget you. In his memory PLEASE DO SOMETHING, even if it’s just an extra hug to your kids or the 10 seconds it takes to give to a worthy charity. If what do makes you a little bit uncomfortable, perhaps makes you afraid because you may fail, and inspires you to take a chance; that’s even better.
The latest updates: My Shure E500’s were traded in when the cable broke on one of them, a common occurrence which they have resolved by now having screw mount cables that are easily replaced. I was able to exchange my 500’s for 530’s, basically an upgrade (but still one model earlier than the replaceable cable). The same thing happened with the Bose QC 2’s that the rest of the family uses, a break at the swivel above the ear, another common problem that was resolved with the QC15 design. So the good news with going higher end is that if they break you can replace them at a discount.
On the running front all the gear has changed – I unloaded the Sennheisers and was using some old school Sony’s until Glance gave us all a set of Bose SIE2i sport earphones. At $150 I never would have bought them for myself, my track record is to ruin sports headphones in about a year or so. The surprise is that they are worth every penny and sound incredible. With the soft rubber loops that retain the ear bud you get great sound but still can hear what’s going on around you. The iPhone and Runkeeper has crushed all competitors on the GPS front, with the ability to serve up music, record data as a heartrate monitor and track your route via GPS it’s the runner’s holy trinity on one device.
I forgot to mention that as part of my relocation I’m no longer able to meet up with Chris on Wednesday mornings at the Dunkin’ Donuts to record Marketing Over Coffee. We’ve settled on Google Hangouts, which actually works pretty well for two reasons – first, it dumps the recording straight over to YouTube so now you can watch the video, and second, if it’s a normal week you can watch it live on Thursday mornings at 7am! Chris posted the show on his blog this week and I realized I should be doing the same!
In this week’s Marketing Over Coffee, we discuss all things Pinterest analytics, Google Reader getting killed off, and much more. Watch it here:
I was fortunate enough to have a chance to interview Seth Godin about his new book, The Icarus Deception, last month. I’ve had the interview transcribed, check it out below. Note: I’m trying out a new transcription service so if you notice anything out of order below please leave me a comment (I’ll send you a copy of my new book)!
JOHN: Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. We have a special holiday gift for you today, a guest we’ve had on the past. He’s written over a dozen books, many of them best sellers, spoken at TED, and is here today to talk about his new book, The Icarus Deception. I’m very happy to welcome Seth Godin. Seth, thanks for coming on today.
SETH: Thank you, sir. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, John.
JOHN: Great. So, the new book is The Icarus Deception. Give us the elevator pitch. What’s the big idea?
SETH: I think it’s a pretty big idea, which is that we all grew up during the Industrial Age. Everyone knows about the Industrial Revolution. It revolutionized the world, invented jobs, created productivity, made us all rich, and now it’s over. And there’s a Post-Industrial Age here now and growing every day. I’m calling it the connection economy. The connection economy is coming to us via the connection revolution.
The important thing to understand is this: we have been brainwashed by eight generations of propaganda into believing things about the world that don’t have to be true. When we start keeping score of things like permission and trust and reputation and connection, many of the things that used to be part of our life—like scarcity, jobs, a career—start to fade and get replaced by something else. That’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. What I wanted to do was, as vividly as I could, paint a picture of the chance of a lifetime, because it’s right here if we want to take advantage of it.
JOHN: Right. You mentioned that the connection economy is at the heart of this. I thought it was interesting. It’s a very human thing. You talked about the assets that matter—trust, permission, remarkability. Is that a major transition point, the fact that it’s more about what you do as a person? Tell us more about the connection economy.
SETH: Well, if you look at it through the lens of industrialization, then what big companies are doing is just say, “Oh, great! I can grab an email address. I can get a Facebook follower. How do I take these tools and go back to making more crap? How do I take advantage of the new marketing to continue making average stuff for average people?”
It goes so much deeper than this. What it’s doing is saying average stuff for average people is no longer a viable marketing strategy. What it’s saying is that slogans and jingles are not a brand. A brand is a set of promises and expectations that an organization needs to keep or it doesn’t keep. It says that owning a building isn’t nearly as important as earning a reputation. When we start keeping score of something different, suddenly the Internet economy makes a lot more sense.
JOHN: Yes. This is a question I want to ask you, something that’s kind of been rattling around in my head. At first, the fear was that this Internet economy was going to destroy everything. You’re making that point pretty clearly. But the thing that’s kind of surprised me, so you have Psy, this artist who’s done this music video and has exploded globally around the world. The question is, there’s all this fear at the beginning of the Internet economy. It was going to blow everything up and it was going to be worse. But is this actually going to be bigger? As this new connection economy grows and all these new opportunities open up, are we actually even more better off? Are we going into an age of prosperity?
SETH: Well, understand that it doesn’t care whether it’s going to be bigger. It just is. We have to start by understanding it doesn’t matter what our opinion is about whether this is good or not. It’s just true.
If you’re a 58-year-old steel worker and you’ve been trained your whole life to do one thing, it’s pretty clear this is bad. If you live in an underprivileged country where, suddenly, you have access to world markets with one click and don’t have to live on $3 a day, it’s pretty clear this is great. There’s going to be a reshuffling. We’re not going to know for 50 years whether this unbalance was something we would have wished for or not.
But the magic here is this: you get to pick about whether you’re going to be defending the status quo in a losing battle, or whether you’re going to jump, shift, and switch sides, that the people who are working at record labels busy suing their biggest fans aren’t going to do as well as Psy is going to do because they’re fighting a rear-guard action that just can’t lead to a happy outcome.
Now, the interesting thing when you bring up Gangnam Style is if his goal is to use this momentary blip to turn around and go back to the old model of selling records, he’s going to fail. What he did was he earned the privilege of talking to a hundred million people. Next time out, what’s he going to do with that? It turns out, if he tries to leverage connection and create abundance through that connection, he can build an entire career on it. But, if he just wants to go back to being this generation’s Monkees, he’s going to fail, because the scarcity that allowed the Monkees to profit for years on television doesn’t exist today.
JOHN: Right, it’s a whole different take. Shifting further, you talked about propaganda and dogma as a big part of this as far as the death of the Industrial Age, that this has been built up around us. You mentioned cottage, cathedral, and castle. Could you talk a little bit about that and propaganda?
SETH: Mythology is the original cultural touchstone. It goes back tens of thousands of years. I took the title “The Icarus Deception” from the story of Icarus. Most of us think we know the story, which is fly too close to the sun and you will get burned, that hubris is a bad thing. But in fact, that’s not what it says if you read the 1850 edition or you go back to what historians said people told each other. In fact, the myth was that Daedalus said to Icarus, “Don’t fly too close to the sun. But also, don’t fly too low. Don’t fly too close to the sea, because if you fly too low, the water in the mist will weigh down your wings and you will surely perish.” Well, that means that someone pushed us to tell our children only half the story. We were pushed to encourage people to fly too low because industrialists want us to fly too low. If the book has only one message that I had to pick, it would be fly closer to the sun.
What we’re doing with the Internet is we’re handing people a microphone. We’re handing them an ability to talk to people who want to be talked to. And yet you’re sitting here doing this generous work of making a podcast, and you’re peers aren’t. They’re just waiting for the phone to ring. And yet, there are 10 million, 20 million active blogs, which means, there are 4 billion people on the Internet who aren’t doing it. And yet, there are millions of people who use Twitter, but the vast majority of Tweeter re-tweets. We’re wasting it. We’re afraid to stand up because we’re afraid that someone’s going to say, “How dare you? What right do you have? What hubris for you to stand up and say you know anything?”
As Brené Brown has talked about, vulnerability then kicks in, which is it is impossible to connect unless you’re open. To be open means being vulnerable to feedback. Vulnerability ignites the enemy of arts and creativity, which is shame. Everyone carries some shame around. We don’t want it activated. We don’t want to be called out for flying too close to the sun. So it’s easier to just hunker down and wait for things to get back to normal.
And so I guess my looping answer to your question is that we need to go back to the original myths, the myths that we passed from one person to another that were basically arguments that we could be like the gods. The only reason myths are interesting to us is that the gods are us. The stories of the gods are stories of what we could do and what we could become.
The Japanese have a term for this, which is “kamiwaza.” “Kamiwaza” means god-like, with no wasted motion, with confidence, and yes, with hubris. And so, when we see a cheetah running through the jungle, we see kamiwaza, because the cheetah could not run any better, any more fluidly, any more perfectly. But when human beings set out to do it, we check ourselves. We hold ourselves back. We imagine that a platform is for other people, not for us, because we haven’t been picked. Oprah didn’t call. Howard Schultz didn’t put us in charge of this steering committee. It turns out that in this new fluid economy, waiting isn’t going to be a particularly productive plan.
JOHN: In the first half of the book, you’re setting up the fact that this opportunity is here. And then you spend a lot of time digging into, okay, so now, what does it take to be an artist and to do this stuff? There’s a whole section talking about grit and what goes into that. It’s kind of funny, I think there’s maybe a generational gap. “Grit” isn’t a term that you hear used as much as maybe a couple of decades back, but I think it’s very relevant. It’s important, especially, talking about perseverance, if you could tell us some more about that.
SETH: Well! You remember that newspaper that they talked about in the comics?
JOHN: Right, exactly! How you could make millions.
SETH: Yes, they never said you could make a lot of money, but they did say, you could get the radio and the radio-controlled airplane and all that other stuff. Grit, it turns out, is something psychologists have been talking about a lot lately. If you do a Google shopping search, you can actually buy grit by the pound. They sell walnut shells that they used for sand blasting and cleaning up stuff. Grit is, yes, that stuff in the spinach, that when you’re eating it gets stuck in your teeth. It is the stuff in carborundum grinding wheels that grinds down the things that are opposed to it.
What we see in successful people is this sort of generous persistence, when we are faced with the initial no, or the third no, or the fifth thing that doesn’t work, people with grit figure out a different way to move forward—not an obnoxious way to move forward but a way to move forward that demonstrates commitment and tenacity. Over and over again, when we hear the stories of the Richard Bransons, the Oprah Winfreys and the less famous people, it’s almost entirely stories of grit.
One of the reasons that lottery winners end up having such miserable lives after they win the lottery is that coming into a whole bunch of money doesn’t give you grit. The money goes away pretty fast because you don’t know what to do when it doesn’t work out the way you hope it will work out.
Grit is a choice. It’s an attitude. It’s not something you’re born with, nor is it something that is given to you. That really excites me because it means that, unlike the Revolution of 1910 or 1880, where it mattered who your father was, it doesn’t matter who you know. It doesn’t matter where you were born if you at least were in a semi-privileged environment. What matters is that you choose to put yourself into this world as a creator, an actor, an artist, a leader. That’s just a choice.
JOHN: You talked about shame and vulnerability. You already touched upon that a bit, because that’s another part of it. But, again, this whole back section of the book is talking about being an artist and how to pursue your craft and put something out there. You have a whole section about 14 real-life stories from artists. In fact, this section is “Think Like an Artist.” Tell us what you’ve learned on that front and what you’re sharing about being an artist.
SETH: I guess later we’re going to talk about the Kickstarter. One of the things I did in the Kickstarter was I wanted to come up with the most absurd level of prize I could. And so I offered five people the chance to not only get all of the loot that I created but to have a paragraph in my book about them.
I didn’t do it because I was craving and trying to raise an extra couple of thousand bucks. I mean, I ended up losing money on the whole Kickstarter anyway. That wasn’t the point. I did it because I wanted to prove that I could take anybody’s story who was successful enough to raise their hand and make it clear that this art is available to all of us. And so I added nine other people to mix in with the five. What you see there, and that was the 14 people, is everyone from the independent software consultant all the way up to people who are running successful enterprises, what they all have in common is that they don’t have anything in common.
That what they have in common is that they have chosen a path as opposed to being told to follow a path. What still happens—and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after 25 years of doing this—I still see the look in people’s eyes, because what they’re really hoping I will give them is a map. What they’re really hoping for are step-by-step instructions that include the word “easy” and “straightforward.” Here I am, showing up on a regular basis saying “fuzzy,” “difficult,” “hard work,” “simple but not easy.” That goes against everything your parents and your schools and your bosses taught you. So I’m not a particularly good marketer because I’m not selling people what they want. But I’m trying very hard to tell people what I think they need to hear.
JOHN: You mentioned the Kickstarter project. I’m astounded to hear that you lost money in this project, so this is going to be great to talk about. It ties into so much of the stuff you talked about already with the book. But to give everybody some background, here are a few things: We’ve talked about Kickstarter on this show once or twice before, but the idea is it’s an open exchange. You actually go to this website, and people are offering projects of all kinds of different types, and it actually gets crowdfunded. People buy certain levels of packages. If it hits a certain level, the project actually gets done. There has been all kinds of stuff in there, a lot of tech gadgets, roller skates you could put on a camera tripod so you could make a dolly. These are things that normally would be 500 to 1,000 bucks, you could get it for 30 bucks, and things like that get funded.
So for Icarus Deception, you put one up there. I saw it with a $40,000-goal, and you brought in $287,000. I have to say, this is the newest kind of marketing campaign that I’ve seen. I mean, everything was a surprise right down to a box from you that weighs 25 pounds filled with all kinds of stuff. Tell us about that. What have you learned from this? What brought this whole idea about?
SETH: The Kickstarter platform can be used in many different ways. The people who founded the company have a vision of it that I disagree with. They’re changing Kickstarter to make it even more difficult to use than it used to be. The way that most people use, both buyers and sellers, is it’s an interesting new kind of store, the way eBay was an interesting new kind of store. The idea was you can pick a price, whether it’s four dollars got you a four-day preview to read my book, then it would disappear online, all the way up to a thousand bucks, where you would get an LP and eight copies of the book and an illustrated thing, and a signed thing, and a poster thing, et cetera, et cetera.
Most of the successful things on Kickstarter have been people shopping for prizes, funding various levels of stuff, and then, if enough people come through with the funding, the maker is obligated to make and ship it to everyone. And so my friend Amanda Palmer did her record this way. She raised $1.2 million. She broke even on it because she’s basically gave away a year of her life. One of the prizes was that she would come to your house and perform a concert with her band for as many of your friends as you want to invite. Well, you could imagine that if, one day you’re in Munich and then next day you’re in Brazil, that’s a lot of traveling.
With mine, every one of my levels was limited, meaning I wasn’t trying to maximize the revenue from this project. What I was trying to do was maximize the connection. I set out to say, “Can I find 4,000 or 5,000 people who want to come with me on this journey so that I can go about—now this is key—making books for my readers instead of finding readers for my books?” So, once I knew that there were people like you and others who were waiting for me to make something for them, it changes the way you write, and it changes what you build.
I committed from the day we finished it. We basically sold out everything in about six days. My job through the summer was going to be to spend as much money as I could and as much time as I could to make the most delightful package of stuff for my backers that I could, the theory being that, if you’ve got 4,000 or 5,000 people who are delighted, connected, trusting, and in alignment, then the revenue will take care of itself, right? Yes, this project will make money because someone is going to go to a bookstore and buy something. It will make money because my publisher will be delighted. But, I didn’t set out to make a profit from John Wall. I set out to make delight for John Wall.
JOHN: Yes, and you definitely have. Like I said, it was just amazing to see this thing arrive and dig it through. In fact, there’s another book in there, a tome of basically everything, a bunch of stuff rolled up from your blog. I mean, literally, this thing is almost 15 pounds. It’s bigger than a baby. That’s gigantic. And one thing — it’s actually a flipbook, and one side is “this might work,” and then the other side is “this might not work.” That was the one thing that I love. You have a bunch of stories in there about things you’ve done that have failed to spectacular explosions. If you could talk about one or two of those, I think that’s kind of the exciting stuff.
SETH: The book is 850 pages long. We maxed out on the width of the bindery. I would’ve put in more things that failed dismally, but I ran out of space.
Some of the stories I tell in there, I don’t know if actually I put all of these in. I invented the first aquarium that ran on your VHS so that the fish would swim back and forth on your TV, and persuaded the American Airlines to let me run a full-page ad in a magazine. This was when I was 25 years old. They let me run the ad for free, but I had to pay them a commission on every one I sold. I made a deal with myself that if I sold 30 of them at 19.95, I would go ahead and make the video, because I hadn’t filmed that yet. I sold 24, so a deal is a deal. So I sent everyone back their money with a nice note telling them I couldn’t do the project, sorry. And then a month after that, I got 20 more, and then the month — and so I kept sending back the money and disappointing everyone, including American Airlines, because I didn’t have enough gumption to keep going.
I also told a story of — our biggest client was AOL when I had my first Internet company. I will skip most of the details, but the punch line is that in the last conversation I had with the vice president there, when I called to apologize for how completely badly we had screwed up everything and offered to get down on the next plane and fly to Vienna, Virginia to apologize to her face, she said, “If you step foot on this campus, I will have you arrested.” That’s the last time I’ve heard from Audrey.
There’s a long history of funny things in the world, whether they’re blog posts that don’t resonate or books that people don’t want to share. I treasure every one of them, because there is no way I would have been able to touch people the way I’ve touched them if I hadn’t had all these failures along the way.
JOHN: And then a few other books too, one was a project you’ve done with Hugh MacLeod, the V for Vulnerable, formatted like a kid’s book but more for adults.
SETH: Right. It’s actually, the last chapter of The Icarus Deception, which — just to clarify, all these books come out on December 31st. The last chapter of The Icarus Deception, and I looked at it, it was an Abecedary, an ABC book. And I said, “Wow! Why don’t I make this into an illustrated kids’ book?” because I loved Dr. Seuss. I loved Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb. The Jungian connection we have with the books that our mom read us is really important. So I’m going to try to undo what we learned at our mom’s knee. Maybe I could use the same tactic and the same tool that started all the propaganda. And so I wrote it and did a sketch of every letter, and then sent it off to Hugh for him to make it magical. What I love about this book is that every person I have handed it to has read the entire book while I was sitting there. It has never happened to me before.
JOHN: Wow! Yes, yes. You’re talking about making it accessible and easy to get into. That’s a great point. Okay. The Icarus Deception is the book, available at Amazon.com. Seth had mentioned earlier to me before we got on that there is a deal at 800 CEO Read. You can get a four-pack of that. Another thing, too, of course, you have the Squidoo project. It’s still going on. I notice you had some kind of view, some holiday picks up there. I wanted to ask: one of the things you show is a DAC, Digital Audio Controller… basically a sound card. My question is: are you an audiophile? Are you into sound to that degree?
SETH: Yes. Today is Squidoo’s 7th anniversary, so thank you for mentioning. It’s been a great ride. As I am talking to you, I’m looking over my shoulder. In my office, I have two of Bob Carver’s new all-tube made in the United States, amplifiers hooked up to a coincident phono preamp, meaning Canada hooked up to a VPI turntable which has Ella and Lewis on it. All of that chain connects to these speakers handmade by a 74-year-old guy in California that are about two feet tall. So, yes, I’m an audiophile, analog in the office, digital at home.
JOHN: Oh, yes. You’re a five star then. I mean, I would presume that you’d be way into it, but yes, you’re goingwhole hog.On that note, then we have to… just a quick remembrance for Dave Brubeck, who passed away just a few days ago.
SETH: Yes. I was listening to Dave last night. I almost missed a conference call because I was listening to it in such volume. The thing that I would say about anyone who’s thinking about being an audiophile is there’s a website called Audiogon, A-U-D-I-O-G-O-N, no E at the end. It’s filled with people who have more money than sense. What they do is they buy the latest stereo stuff. And then, six months later, when they want the new stuff, they have to get rid of the old stuff. They sell it at two-thirds less than it costs. So it’s like an eBay for high-end stuff. If you’re careful and good, you can buy stuff one day and sell it for the same price nine months later. And so you can have a stereo habit for free.
JOHN: Oh, that’s a wonderful tip. Yes, I will definitely take you up on that. I have to check that out. There’s a few other audiophile blogs, I’ll throw in a couple of links when we throw the show notes up there.
Okay. And then one thing, I did notice on Amazon, you also have another book coming out, Watcha Gonna Do with That Duck? Now, I get the impression that there’s a smaller version of this behemoth that’s been dropped on me.
SETH: Yes, smaller is an interesting relative term. It’s still the biggest book I’ve ever sold in a bookstore. It’s 650 pages, but it’s 17 pounds lighter than the book I sent you. It doesn’t have colored illustrations, but it has in it hundreds and hundreds of past blog posts.
The reason that it’s worth mentioning is because of the title blog post, “Watcha Gonna Do With that Duck?” It’s one of my favorites. The post is very short. Basically, it says that you probably know lots of people who spend their day getting all their ducks in a row, which is fine, but what I’m really interested in is what are you going to do with that duck? The thing about your work and the work of other people who have been shining a light online for free about what’s going and what’s happening is many of our readers and listeners are waiting to get all their ducks in a row. We’re only, as we record this, a week or two away from New Year, and I guess it’s time to stop collecting ducks and start shipping art. The thing that I most want from my readers is not for them to go buy a lot of books but for them to go make a ruckus. This is the moment. It’s not going to get any easier. It’s not going to get any more leveraged than it is right now. We need to not have another meeting and not to have another planning committee. We need to actually connect and ship.
JOHN: All right. That’s a great message for folks to kick off for the New Year. Seth Godin, we appreciate you coming to take time to talk us today. Thanks for being on the show.
In my Kickstarter newsletter I learned of the Saturn 5 Relaunch Project and it got me thinking of the long lost days where all I had to worry about was stupid stuff like model rockets. I think anyone that built more than one rocket has a story of catastrophic failure. Hell, it’s like NASCAR, the crashes are the true spectacle. Even more surprising is that you can check out the back catalogs over at the Estes site. I was able to track down my very own Comanche 3. I laughed out loud at the catalogs from the Eighties, many rockets being dead ringers for military munitions, the RPG looking like you could scare the crap out of anyone with it. I had repaired a Big Boy that had a missle paint job and still remember everyone running like hell away from the launch pad as it only went up about 15 feet and then started to do circles towards the rest of the Boy Scout Troop.
The real big dog though was the Comanche 3.This rocket is absurd. Most of the rockets of the time were single stage, and there were some 2 stage. A “D” engine would get rolled out now and then for some of the huge models (engines are rated A-D (or at least were as I remember) with the A being about 2 inches long and about as wide as an extra fat pencil. The D was like a toilet paper roll). This is yet again one of the joys of pre-litigation society, when you could give 12 year old kids toys that spray flame and fly around looking for the nearest eyeball to poke out.
The Comanche takes it to the extreme, a three stage starting with a D and that kicking off a C and a third C. The big kicker is that the big engines were often used for huge models, in this case the rocket was about as small as it could be. It’s like that Darwin award story about the Jet Engine strapped to the car, if you had 3 jet engines on the car.
Unlike the Saturn 5 guys I did not have a catastrophic crash, instead it worked as it should. In a split second it was so far up in the sky that it went from a tiny speck to invisible. I got the first stage back and never found anything else. I have no doubt that if it’s not still in orbit, it did reach escape velocity and I’m waiting for it to return, self aware, calling itself V’ger, or for some alien with a glowing finger to drop it off on my front porch.
Tonight I raise a glass to the model rocket builders and their quest for learning, engineering, and the pure thrill of lighting the fuse and not knowing what’s going to happen next.
From the promotional material:
What’s the Truth About Marketing? Contrary to the popular belief that marketing is advertising, listen to the confessions of an insider to learn how marketing affects every step of the customer life-cycle. From product design, to building awareness, selling, and keeping customers happy, this book covers all the basic principles and gives you tactics, tips and tricks to succeed (including best practices for Salesforce.com)!
With over 20 years in business I’ve seen many things: successes, failures, tragedies and flawless execution. The marketing profession changes so rapidly that every day is an adventure. Having learned many lessons from painful first hand experience I wanted to create something that would help those who are putting together their marketing strategy and tactics. My hope is that by confessing everything I’ve seen you’ll have a guidebook that can help you navigate the ever-changing seas, and increase your odds of success.
This book covers 4 key points:
The first 12 pages give you a basic understanding of Product Marketing
The next 115 cover demand generation including: blogs, email, lead scoring, search engine marketing, trade shows, direct mail, and basic PR
The intersection of sales and marketing covers 35 pages including how to eliminate cold calling and optimizing the sales cycles
The last 20 include customer retention and closing the loop on the customer lifecycle to improve demand generation and the sales process.
If you are tasked with leading the marketing efforts at a growing business or just want to understand how marketing has changed in the past 10 years, this guide is for you!
2016 Update: Samson, a listener of the audiobook edition, asked about the diagrams so I’ve added them here!
Showing how record types overlap in Salesforce.com
Some predictions on tactics agencies might take up by 2019. Some hits, some misses.
Results from a multi-variate, or Taguchi test, although calling it Taguchi seems to be less popular.
