Seth Godin's Blog, page 194

Long-term manipulation is extremely difficult

In the short run, it's easy.

It's easy to fool someone or lie to them or give them what they think they want. It's easy to write a great block of copy, to sell on credit, to grab the attention of the mob.

Not so easy: to build mutually profitable long-term relationships that lead to satisfaction, trust and work worth doing.

Lincoln was right about fooling people, but along the way we often forget that while trickery is easy, the longer path of keeping your promises is far more satisfying and stable.

There isn't one shark

Happy Days is famous for jumping the shark. In an episode near the end of their run, the writers ran out of ideas and went so far to please the masses that they wrote a script in which Fonzie, wearing a leather jacket, rode water skis up a ramp and over a shark.

Since then, the kind of people who like to say, "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded," are happy to point out when a popular organization jumps the shark.

The thing is, there isn't one shark. There's your shark, my shark and their shark. The masses have a different shark than the early adopters do.

For some, Apple has already jumped the shark. A new upgrade or a new TV commercial might be a step too far, and they walk away, sad that yet another cutting edge organization has succumbed to mass mediocrity. For others, they're just feeling safe enough to take a shot, and the shark is nowhere in sight.

The insight is to have the empathy not to confuse your shark with the shark of the kind of person you're hoping to delight. Choose your customers, choose their shark.

Time frames

The giant multinational can start a project knowing that it will take years to pay off.

The struggling freelancer might be willing to invest a few days.

Venture capital, particularly for web companies, mostly changes the time horizon. It means that the bootstrapping entrepreneur can make longer term investments, building assets that scale instead of cashing them in daily.

Goverments do some of their best work when they take on projects with time horizons that would frighten away even large companies. You're going to wait how long for that bridge to pay off?

One interesting side effect of going public is that companies that use venture capital to lengthen their time horizon suddenly (in just one day) have to switch gears to a time horizon that's measured in days or quarters.

And one useful note: if you're having trouble selling/working with or for an organization, it might be because you don't understand each other's time frame.

The difficult challenge of media alignment

Viewers are not the customer of the TV networks—advertisers are.

For a long time, those two groups had similar goals, though. Advertisers wanted lots of viewers and viewers wanted shows that lots of them wanted to watch. So the TV networks used ratings as a proxy for advertiser happiness and there wasn't much of a problem.

The same thing was true for newspapers. More local readers meant local advertisers were happy.

Both newspapers and TV networks suffer when mass starts to disappear. Viewers seek out what they want to watch, as opposed to what the masses want, and advertisers are left to scramble for eyeballs.

HBO turns this upside down. The viewers ARE the customer. HBO can program with confidence, because there's no question about who they are working for.

Search engine advertising works because the search engine knows the searcher is going to leave the site no matter what. They don't care if you leave to click on an organic link or a paid one, as long as you come back often. And the advertiser is paying by the click, so he cares about having the right people click, not everyone. Fairly aligned goals among all three parties.

Which leads to the conundrum faced by Twitter as they try to monetize sufficiently to justify the expectations of their investors.

If they relentlessly sell the attention of their users, they will have a misalignment as they maximize profit. The advertisers will want ever more attention, and the users will want to avoid those interruptions the advertisers are paying for. Tension will keep rising as users feel trapped by a medium with few substitutes that begins to charge an ever higher tax in the form of attention wasted.

My suggestion: Twitter has the opportunity to become extraordinarily aligned with their best users. Offer the top users the opportunity to pay $10 a month. For that fee, they can get an ever-growing list of features, including analytics, verification, 160 characters, who knows...

10,000,000 users choosing to pay $10 a month means that the service turns a profit (!) of more than a billion dollars a year. And because the company is in alignment with their most powerful and evangelical users, that number grows over time. Every decision proposed will have to answer just one question: what makes our users happier?

Free is a great idea, until free leads to a conflict between those contributing attention and those contributing cash.

This or that?

Don’t follow, lead.
Don’t copy, create.
Don’t start, finish.

or even,

Don't sit still, move.
Don't fit in, stand out.
Don't sit quietly, speak up.

Not all the time, sure, but more often.

"But first I'll try to make you feel really bad"

Here's one strategy for handling returns from unhappy customers:

Let them know you don't accept returns. Explain that it must be a user error. Explain that the customer must have lacked care or intelligence or ethics. Explain that you're willing to accept a return, but just this one time. And finally, explain that you're now going to put the person on a list, and you'll never sell to him ever again.

Do all this in one continuous statement, without pausing for a response.

This has happened to me more than once.

What puzzles me is this: if you're going to give the customer a refund, why not make them delighted by the process? Why not create an aura of goodwill? At the very least, both of you will have a better day. Even better, perhaps one day someone will mention your company to this former customer--I wonder what he'll say?

One tip: if you say your meta-goal out loud (or jot it down) before you start an interaction, you're more likely to consistently create the outcome you seek, not the one you hyperventilate yourself into.

"But first I'll try to make you feel really badly"

Here's one strategy for handling returns from unhappy customers:

Let them know you don't accept returns. Explain that it must be a user error. Explain that the customer must have lacked care or intelligence or ethics. Explain that you're willing to accept a return, but just this one time. And finally, explain that you're now going to put the person on a list, and you'll never sell to him ever again.

Do all this in one continuous statement, without pausing for a response.

This has happened to me more than once.

What puzzles me is this: if you're going to give the customer a refund, why not make them delighted by the process? Why not create an aura of goodwill? At the very least, both of you will have a better day. Even better, perhaps one day someone will mention your company to this former customer--I wonder what he'll say?

One tip: if you say your meta-goal out loud (or jot it down) before you start an interaction, you're more likely to consistently create the outcome you seek, not the one you hyperventilate yourself into.

It's a long story

Isn't it always?

Actually, the long stories are the good ones. About how you found that great job, or discovered this amazing partner or managed to get that innovation approved.

If long stories are so great, how come we spend all our lives working for the short ones? The very act of seeking out the shortcut and the quick win might very well be the reason you don't have enough successful long stories to share.

It could be one of two things

It might be that your audience isn't smart enough, caring enough, attentive enough, with-it enough or generous enough to understand and appreciate you.

Or it might be that you're not good enough (yet).

If you're in the habit of assuming one of these, try out the other one for a while.

The theater of the mind

The most effective marketing story isn't the one you tell to someone in your audience, it's the one the person tells himself.

Consider this no parking sign. Instead of stating the fine, the signmaker states the range of the fine. At this point, it's up to the observer to have a conversation with himself. "Well, maybe I'll just get a $50 fine. Hmmm, why would that happen? With my luck, it'll be the maximum... I'll just park somewhere else."

It's not an announcement, it's an invitation to a little internal drama.

Too often, we don't give people a chance to fill in the blanks.