Oct
22
6 Business and Marketing Links and 1 Deep Thought
Holy crap, the internet took a day off from sucking today. Many good things to say today.
1. First of all, I shouldn’t even really be saying anything today since it is not a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, as Jonathan Fields rightly points out in 97 Ways To Build Traffic Without Resorting To Dumbass List Posts. As I will be resorting to a dumbass list post myself very soon, I found this fascinating.
While it’s all good, I think my favourite is probably the first line. Delicious.
2. Mark Silver, a man who has single-handedly stopped me from quitting business forever on far more than one occasion, wrote a really beautiful piece called An Ode To Diapers in which he compares business to – wait for it! – a poopy diaper. He tackles the passion issue head on.
What passion issue? It’s that whole What If I Want An Ittybiz But I Can’t Think Of Anything That Makes Me So Excited That It Kind Of Burns A Little When I Pee? question that nobody seems to have a decent stance on. Nobody except Mark, that is.
3. The inimitable (and fellow disturbingly attractive Torontonian marketing professional) Scott Stratten says what everybody in marketing means to say and then forgets. (Or, in my case, we sort of say it and then promptly admit to doing Skype consults topless and everybody else forgets.) He has also assured that I’m staying at the Wynn from now on with The Three Billion Dollar Cleaning Man.
Marketing is not a task.
Marketing is not a department.
Marketing is not a job.
Marketing happens every time you engage (or not) with your past/present/potential customers.
Which I guess means the topless Skype thing can be forgiven as a marketing initiative. Thanks, Scott.
4. I can’t tell you how much it hurts me inside to read a great post on Copyblogger and then find out Johnny Truant wrote it. My mother is going to be devastated. It’s about writing ethical sales copy, and it’s fab, but comments 39 and 40 (left by Daniel the Poet and Johnny, respectively, in case there’s some comment weirdness between now and then) just about did me in.
Johnny, you know all those times I told you I was firing you? For at least the next 24 hours, I take it all back.
5. So, I’m trying to decide if I should go to Charlie’s Work Party but I don’t want to tell him that I’m trying to decide because that might be awkward. And you know that point in the conversation when somebody says they’re trying to decide, and the other person says “how can I help you make your decision?” and you’re like, “well, you could shut the fuck up, for starters”? Yeah, I didn’t want to do that.
Anyway, Colleen’s comment on this page — and the fact that he chose to share it — rocked my moccasins. (Note to self: Ask Megan and Dave why we’re not having Colleen write all of our copy. Also have them ask Charlie how he manages to sell a teleclass about work in a blog post called How Vegas Is Like The Holidays. Only on Charlie’s blog does that sort of thing happen.)
6. Speaking of Colleen, I am never going on Twitter ever again until I can come up with something as good as this.
7. Last, a little story. I was trying to round this post out so there would be seven items. I figured Seth Godin is always good for a quote, so I went to my shiny new Google Chrome address bar and start typing his name. (The suggestion tool is pretty spiffy.)
I start typing s-e-t-h and expect to stop typing because he’ll be in my little drop down list of choices. Nu-uh. I get Seth Rogen and Seth Green. He wasn’t even in the dropdown! It’s hard for me to explain how much this messed me up.
For a brief moment of lucidity, it made me realize how incredibly small this little cyberbiz world really is. Seth is, well, Seth. But according to Google, a person is more likely to be searching for the new Butterfinger spokesperson than Mr. Purple Cow himself.
I was talking to Sonia about this during the election, about this idea that the people we know (or know about) are the only people who are statistically relevant. Like urban democrats who say, “McCain will never win. Every single person I know is voting Obama.”
Well, maybe none of your friends live in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Arizona or Alaska.
(She also noted that most of the people in our little techno-intellectual sphere would be pretty surprised to know that 45% of American adults watched a Nascar event in its entirety in the last year. “But NOBODY watches Nascar!” As long as you don’t count that pesky 100 million, you’re so right.)
How much marketing are you not doing because you think that anybody who’s going to buy from you has already heard of you?
How much of the world doesn’t have a clue who the fuck you are?
Okay, which one was the deep thought?
Seriously. I love that last line. Fabulous. Perfect.
Ah. Perspective, huh? As I wrote my post (which all started because of your post about getting hate mail) on ‘well-behaved women’, I did state that I might see this shift happening just because I know so many fabulous women. (And then I’ve noticed how many people are still talking about women being mean to other women, which I find fascinating because men are mean to other men and the men just walk away and do their own thing and don’t pay too much attention to it. And that’s what I see more women doing, which I think is kind of cool. But I digress…..)
Politics is actually the reason I’m acutely aware of this. My friends are the group saying, “Everyone is voting for Obama.” They’ll also say things like, “Who in the world could actually dig Sarah Palin?” And I’m the one sitting there saying, “You know? I know this whole other group of people….mostly conservative, mostly religious, many in my family, some I went to high school with in Texas…and so on….and they just think she’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.” (Which is something someone from the south would say. ha)
So yeah. Great deep thought there, Naomi.
It’s a big world out there and we tend to live in insulated little bubbles.
Thanks for the reminder!
All the best!
deb
(Side note: I’ve also experienced this a great deal as I’ve been sharing with a few people that I have this thing coming up that Cathie Black is also a part of. I’m surprised how many people don’t know her. Author of ‘Basic Black’, President of Hearst Publishing which, you know, does ‘O’ Magazine. I kind of thought everyone knew who she was because I’ve been following her ground-breaking career for….well, for longer than I’m going to admit to publicly. Thank you very much. HA!)
All the best!
deb
I remember when my mother-in-law asked how business was going and I said that Brian Clark did a review of SEO School. She’s like, huh? And I realized, yeah. 75,000 people read his blog but when compared to, say, the English speaking world, he’s basically a nobody.
Sorry, Brian.
WOW! There have been a lot of great posts from you and others this week. You all need to stop it so I can get my blog posts done!
Madam!
Firstly: I believe you have done your part in making the Internet not suck for one motherf*cking day with your own opening volley.
Secondly: I am so glad I finally got out of my damn Google Reader to check out the new(ish? at all? or is it really, really old by now?) site design. Because it is eleventy-billion times better than the old one, which wasn’t half bad.
As you were, everyone.
Also? Take the class. You’ll feel stupid for the first five minutes, then amazing for the next five days. (You can use that one, too, Charlie.)
You called me Madam. I am delighted.
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to get at. A while back I saw someone say he didn’t understand how marketing could be a full-time job. This was a guy running a one-man software shop, who was convinced he was building the better mousetrap … and when is the damn world going to start beating on his door?
I asked him, “Have you identified each potential user of your application? Not just a general description of the *type* of user, I mean personally identifying information. Do you have their email address? Why not? How do you plan to get it?” ( http://drewkime.blogspot.com/2009/01/have-you-done-all-marketing-you-can-are.html )
We all think everyone we care about knows all the things we know, all the people we know, all the conclusions we know. That just ain’t true.
If there are people in the world who you could help, and you don’t know them, odds are they don’t know you either.
“he didn’t understand how marketing could be a full-time job”… yowza. I mean… yowza. I am seldom this speechless.
Oh honey, you’ve never worked with programmers, have you? “If it weren’t for the code we write, they’d have nothing to sell. They need us more than we need them.”
Amen to that, Drew!
My day job is marketing an it-company.
When I started two years ago, they’d never worked with anyone who didn’t know how to code.
My standard reply to programmers is:
“Of course we can let everybody have af say about the new logo/salesletter/car streamer/color of the carpet in the reception – buy the way, I have some great suggestions for the code behind product XYZ, let’s do it in perl!”
That usually shuts them up for a few days…
- Camilla
Hey, not bad. You spelled “perl” right. :-)
Hey, as a longtime IT hack (programmer, project manager, technical writer, etc.), you have no idea how frustrating it can be to talk to other “tech” folks who think that the product is the important thing. It isn’t. Marketing isn’t even the important thing. Making a g*ddam profit is the important thing. You can make a chrome-plated, diamond-studded mousetrap, market the shit out it, sell it to every living being on the planet, but if you don’t find a way to make it profitable you’ll be out on the street scrounging for old issues of the Wall Street Journal to use as toilet paper.
Oh, and as a conservative, Christian, NASCAR watching denizen of the South, I’m happy to have liberal, Wiccan, independent film watching friends to provide a different perspective. You don’t know what you don’t know until you know someone else who knows it.
Oh, (times two), didn’t you know that the Internet is endlessly self-referential? I looked it up in Google.
@Colleen: Stolen! (Thanks)
@Naomi: At some respectable time tomorrow, I will come ’round and say thank you, but for now, I’m just remaining quiet. :p
Colleen called me Madam. You never call me Madam. I would like my money back now please.
I prefer to stick with Mistress, just so you know. Although plenty of Madams are in fact Mistresses, so I guess I could alternate.
And you’re one to talk about stuff that only happens on particular blogs! Who else can turn a callgirl who specializes in couples into a legitimate marketing lesson?
That said, I often wonder why people put up with what I do over at PF. There are much cooler blogs to read where you don’t have to figure out how completely unrelated things are similar. And then there are the feathers I’ll ruffle today…
I get drawn into conversation every time, and keep forgetting to say thanks. So, yeah, thanks for including the Work Party into the rest of the awesomesauce of this post! :)
This message is for the other Naomi: Take a look at where the “Reply” links are displaying for nested comments. For me they’re *above* the comment, the root comment still has the link below. Very confusing.
Hey Drew,
I’m a little sleepy at the mo, so I don’t really understand what you said about nesting, but I’m going to forward it to the lovelies.
But I didn’t see another Naomi in this thread. Did you mean my other comment?
@Drew – I guess that means me?
They’re that way so that you can reply to each person in the thread individually. You don’t really have an option to reply to the whole thread.
I see what you mean though. I’ll have to think about it.
That last line reminds me of a statistic I once read: If you had all of the people in China walk past you in a single file line at one person per second, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
Aside from being in China, and suggesting a great way to pass time while standing in line, it also points out the never ending market of newbies, that have also never heard of you.
Swear to (insert favorite deity here), I had to read the title of this post twice to catch Deep “Thought”. Imagined you were going Linda Lovelace on us…
If that post = dumbass, go for it. Very nice round up, thank you (and dead-on re: Colleen; her BOULDER anthem is a constant refrain around here.)
I was thinking that same #7 point today. I tell that to my clients all the time, in my field which is not unlike marketing. Thanks for the better examples. UNthanks for making me have to think deep about how basically shallow I am over my own [ embarrassing example goes here.] Shame is useful; good reminder.
Goodness gracious, I didn’t realize how many people seem to be drawn to poopy diapers. I guess we all have ‘em.
But beyond that, I find it such a relief that we’re all such nobodies. It keeps the stage fright away because, statistically, no one cares.
Hi Naomi!
I’ve been following your posts now for the last few weeks. Some truly motivating and inspirational stuff, i love it!
We are putting all of it to good use.
D.
Ah, marketing. The term well know of but most don’t know how to really do it. I have a minor in marketing and an MBA and I can tell you firsthand that marketing can make or break an organization (or blog). Great tips here!
First time, long time. Number 7 was a brilliantly stupid simple point. Very Seth like (not Rogen) in it’s brief spot on precision. Perception is our reality.
A very interesting blog post. What would you say was the most common problem?