Seth Godin's Blog, page 170

"You've got ping, but they've got no pong"

It's almost impossible to have fun playing ping pong with someone who doesn't care, won't try or isn't any good.

The same thing is true of just about anything that matters in the connection economy. A consultation with a surgeon, creating a new conference or working in partnership with an ad agency... If you're going to create something worth building, it's going to be because there's an infinite game going on, not merely blind obedience and tired conformity.

You can take a great deal of responsibility for creating this mutual enthusiasm, and you can put the effort into creating an environment and a story where it's likely to happen.

Connection requires energy and insight and enthusiasm from both sides, and if your partner isn't responding, look hard at why. Of course, if you can't bring your half, stay home.

Choose your customers first

It seems obvious, doesn't it? Each cohort of customers has a particular worldview, a set of problems, a small possible set of solutions available. Each cohort has a price they're willing to pay, a story they're willing to hear, a period of time they're willing to invest.

And yet...

And yet too often, we pick the product or service first, deciding that it's perfect and then rushing to market, sure that the audience will sort itself out. Too often, though, we end up with nothing.

Examples:

The real estate broker ought to pick which sort of buyer before she goes out to buy business cards, rent an office or get listings. 

The bowling alley investor ought to pick whether he's hoping for serious league players or girls-night-out partiers before he buys a building or uniforms.

The yoga instructor, the corporate coach, the app developer--in every case, first figure out who you'd like to do business with, then go make something just for them. The more specific the better...

The moment of highest leverage

It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, don’t waste it.

You’ve already won (or you’ve already lost). Right now, you can choose to do what’s in your heart, you can bring your real work to the world, instead of a lesser version, a version you think the market wants. After all, what do you have to lose?

When it feels like it’s hopeless or when it appears to be a lock, why not?

So you bring your true self to the work, your unadulterated effort, without negative self-talk and the sanding off of the interesting edges. Instead of compromise, you bring us vision.

Of course, when we see that reality, the kamiwaza of what you’re able to do when you’re not second guessing or giving up, the odds of transformation go way up. In fact, you haven't already lost, because your magical, vulnerable work changes everything.

You won’t get this chance again soon (unless you choose to). So go.

Never enough

There's never enough time to be as patient as we need to be. Not enough slack to focus on the long-term, too much urgency in the now to take the time and to plan ahead. That urgent sign post just ahead demands all of our intention (and attention), and we decide to invest in, "down the road," down the road.

It's not only more urgent, but it's easier to run to the urgent meeting than it is to sit down with a colleague and figure out the truth of what matters and the why of what's before us.

And there's never enough money to easily make the investments that matter. Not enough surplus in the budget to take care of those that need our help, too much on our plate to be generous right now. The short term bills make it easy to ignore the long-term opportunities.

Of course, the organizations that get around the universal and insurmountable problems of not enough time and not enough money are able to create innovations, find resources to be generous and prepare for a tomorrow that's better than today. It's not easy, not at all, but probably (okay, certainly) worth it.

We're going to spend our entire future living in tomorrow—investing now, when it's difficult, is the single best moment.

Connected, portable or aware

There's a little bit of a rush to bring content into app form. It's so easy to make an ebook and cram it with videos, or to turn your how-to guide into something that looks slick on an iPad. I think of these electronic projects as the new coffee table books. Beautiful, but unfortunately, not widely read.

The problem is this: when you turn this work into an app or augmented ebook, you're not moving to a less crowded market, not moving to a place where you will earn more attention from strangers. In fact, unless your app is connected, portable and/or aware, the only people who are likely to use it are people who were already your fans. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's your goal.)

Connected: the app works better when other people are also using it. Like the fax machine (what did the first owner of a fax do with it?), these apps have a hurdle at first, but get more and more appealing as the word spreads. Instagram and Twitter are connected.

Portable: sure, PDFs and paper books are portable, but there are certain forms of content where having the content in your pocket is really useful. I'd put frequently updated, timely content (like the weather) or content I'll need to refer to again and again on this list.

Aware: Our mobile devices know where we are, and in some cases, know what we've just done. Telematics opens the door to a huge number of breakthroughs, only a few of which we've seen exploited to date.

Slick is not the goal. I know that apps are shiny and new and sexy, but if your goal is impact, you'll need at least one of these three elements--or you're better off in a different format. More than a decade later, email and free-to-share digital text and video remain killer apps if you're trying to spread the word.

What's now?

When I was starting out in the software business in 1983 (gasp), our home computer of choice was the Commodore 64. I vividly remember one day in the playtesting lab when the overworked floppy disk drive burst into flames. The surprising thing was that none of us were surprised. The entire infrastructure of the time just barely worked.

Twelve years later, on a sales call at Levi's ad agency in San Francisco, in the middle of a presentation, my PC laptop started spewing smoke. I didn't miss a beat. I shrugged, closed the cover and dropped it into a trash can.

Today, nothing is starting on fire. Today, a well-designed app looks fabulous, polished and stable, even though it was built by one person, in a garage. Today, email gets through. Today, we have a platform that (almost always) does what it says it will. We're all on the same OS (the internet). We can expect that any person we'd like to do business with, anywhere in the world, has a device we can use to reliably communicate with them...

If you've been waiting for the next big thing before you dive in, it's here.

No longer do we need to wonder, "what's next?" No, I think it's better to take a long look at, "what's now?"

Macro trends don't matter so much

How many people will be using the internet in 2016?

Are women more likely than men to choose the brand of potato chip the family buys?

What percentage of the world's population will speak Spanish in a decade?

Everyone's talking about mobile, it's the next big thing...

If you're General Electric or Yahoo or a presidential candidate, long term trends might matter. If you need not just a majority but a plurality to make your numbers, then by all means, pay attention to these tectonic shifts.

But most organizations need a dozen or a hundred or a thousand new customers, not thirty million. Most non-profits don't need every new foundation or big donor, they just need a few.

When you pay attention to the big trends, you're playing a numbers game and treating the market as an amorphous mass of interchangeable parts. But that's not what your market is. The trend, for example, is for people to buy and read virtually no books each year. As an author, that doesn't matter one bit to you, of course. What matters are the 100,000 people who might make your book one of the most popular of the year (that's only one out of every 3,000 people in the country).

Micro trends matter more than macro ones, but most of all, people matter. Individual human beings with names and wants and interests.

De-escalation

Marketers want commitment. They want the big finish, the closed sale, the new customer. Buy Now!

The goal then is to create tension, to escalate need, to amplify conflict until action is taken. Escalation causes us to commit to our original need, by reinforcing it.

It goes beyond the retail store, of course... it's deep within our culture. Noir novels show the hero goading the guy in the bar until a small dispute escalates into a beat down. Movies create drama (and entertainment) by escalating the small-time heist into the next world war. And commercials, retailers and demagogues take every opportunity to find the smallest thread of disclocation and amplify it into real commitment to action.

But what happens when we do the opposite? If we think about connection instead of power, if we think about abundance instead of scarcity, we can turn this on its head.

What if we de-escalate conflict?

What if we don't try to turn shopping desire into a fever pitch? What if later is just as good, or better, than now?

What if we back off occasionally instead of pressing forward?

What if playing the game starts to become at least as important as winning it?

De-escalation creates connection, not commitment to previously made choices. It trades the short-term battle for the long-term relationship.

Taking our time and letting air in (and heat to escape) might be precisely the best way to build the relationships we need for the long run. It leads to better decisions, less shrapnel and work that truly matters, without regret.

The worst feedback is indifference

We armor ourselves against the cutting remark, the ad hominem attack, the person who just doesn't like our stuff.

But all of this is the feedback we get when we touch a nerve and are doing work that matters enough to care about.

No, the worst sort of feedback is no feedback at all. That means we've created nothing but banality.

Understanding local media

Local media was an essential business for a century, largely for three reasons:

1. Broadcast signals and newspaper trucks could only travel so far, so 'local' was the natural category.

2. Commerce (and thus advertising) was local.

3. Interests tended to align locally as well.

Today, of course, the signal travels around the world, so newspapers, radio stations and TV have no incentive to limit themselves.

Commerce too.

And finally, we're discovering that when given the chance, people are a lot more interested in what they're interested in, as opposed to what their physical neighbors are doing.

Going forward, then, the real kings of media will be local in a totally different sense. They will be the narrators and arbiters of interest for groups that actually have aligned interests. The daily newspaper for families wrestling with juvenile diabetes, or bi-weekly email op ed for the pop music industry. If one of those categories happens to be, "lives in zip code 10706," that's just fine, but it's an exception, not the default.

Many of these categories are in flux, available to an adroit, remarkable, generous media mini-mogul who wants to lead.