Seth Godin's Blog, page 234

Three things clients and customers want

Not just the first one.

And not all three.

But you really need at least one.

1. Results. If you can offer a return on investment, an engineering solution, more sales, no tax audits, a cute haircut, the fastest rollercoaster, a pristine beach, reliable insurance payouts at the best price, peace of mind, productive consulting or any other measurable result, this is a great place to start.

2. Thrills. More difficult to quantify but often as important, partners and customers respond to heroism. We are amazed and drawn to over the top effort, incredible risk taking on our behalf, the blood, sweat and tears that (rarely) comes from a great partner. A smart person working harder on your behalf than you'd be willing to work--that's pretty compelling.

3. Ego. Is it nice to feel important? You bet. When you greet us at the door with a glass of white wine, put our name in the lobby of the hotel, actually treat us better than anyone else does (not just promise it, but do it)... This can get old really fast if you industrialize and systemize it, though.

This explains why the local branch of the big insurance company has trouble growing. It's hard for them to outdeliver the other guys when it comes to the cost effectiveness of their policy (#1). They are unsuited from a personality and organizational point of view to do #2. And they just can't scale the third.

Put just about any business with partners into this matrix and you see how it works. Book publishing, for sure. Hairdressers. Spas. Even real estate.

The Ritz Carlton is all about #3, ego, right? And on a good day, there's a perception that the guys at Apple are hellbent on amazing us yet again, delivering on #2, taking huge career and corporate risks on our behalf. As soon as they stop doing that, the tribe will get bored.

(There's a variation of ego, #3, that comes from being in good company. This is what gets people to sign up for Davos, or to choose ICM as their agent. Your ego is stroked by knowing that only people as cool as you are part of this gig. Sort of the anti-Groucho opportunity. Nice position, if you can get it, because it scales.).

It's tempting, particularly for a small business, to obsess about the first—results—to spend all its time trying to prove that the ROI is higher, the brownies are tastier and the coaching is more effective. You'd be amazed at how far you can go with the other two, if you commit to doing it, not merely talking about it.

Dig yourself a hole

Make big promises.

Burn your boats.

Set yourself up in a place where you have few options and the stakes are high.

Focused energy and serious intent will push you to do your best work. You have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. (Better than the alternative).

The inevitable outcome of marketing fear

Years ago, the authorities decided that a key weapon in the war on terror (sic) would be to make people more afraid.

Two reasons for this: if you make potential bad guys afraid, they might not move up and graduate to become actual bad guys, and second, if something does go wrong (and of course, things always go wrong), at least it looks like you were trying.

And so an infrastructure is built in which photographers are detained, in which expensive scanners that don't work are installed and in which people believe they are doing their job when they engage in the fear mongering part of the work without paying attention to the actual inspecting and crime fighting part.

At the airport on Thursday, a colleague of mine was detained by two armed police officers because he took a picture (out the observation window!) of a sunset. And when I politely declined to go through the magic scanner, I was put through the regular (inferior?) scanner, detained, carefully searched and basically encourged not to do it again.

Of course, the hard-working folks doing the detaining feel like they're doing their job. It's easy to measure. It's in the manual. It feels like progress. It's actually a cargo cult, though, the sort of thing an organization does to simulate progress when it's actually distracting itself from the mission at hand.

Fear can be used as a tactic, but it's almost never the end goal of marketing. The problem with using it as a tactic is that it's so easy to do, organizations almost always forget the real point of the exercise.

The filter hierarchy

There's more information, provocations, riffs, causes, meetings, opportunities, viral videos, technologies and policies coming at you than ever.

So, how do you rank the incoming? How do you decide what to expose yourself to next?

Email from your boss

Personal note from a good friend

Three or four recommendations from trusted colleagues, each with the same link

A trending topic on Twitter

The latest on Reddit

Phone call from your mom

File on the intranet you're supposed to read before the end of the week

Spam email from a stranger

Tenth note from Eddie Bauer, this one to an email address you haven't used in a year

Post on Google + from a friend of a friend

Facebook update from someone you haven't seen in ten years

Angry tweet from someone you've never met

Commercial on the radio that's playing softly in the background

Email from someone who had your back one day when it really and truly mattered

!!!urgent marked email from the HR department about the TPS reports

Text message on your phone from your husband

Phone message from the kid's principal

Tweet from the handler of a celebrity who is pretending to be the celebrity

Story that's repeated endlessly on cable news because a producer thought it would get good ratings

Handwritten love note from a current crush

New review in the Times of a restaurant you happen to be going to tonight

Obviously bulk snail mail from a charity you donated to three years ago

Latest volley in a flame war

Blank sheet of paper quietly waiting for your next big innovation

Comment on a blog post you wrote three days ago

New post by your favorite blogger, delivered via RSS

Book in the bookstore, next to the cash register

Newest negative review of your business on Yelp

Movie playing across town

TV commercial on a show you've got on your DVR

Book on the back shelf of a bookstore, newly put there yesterday by the manager, who doesn't know what you like

Tweet from someone who really, really wants you (and everyone else) to follow her

Rebecca Black's new video

Sales pitch on your voicemail

Which of these are required reading for a productive member of society or a good employee or an informed citizen? Which do you do out of habit? Are you assuming that your habits are the norm, and that others have an obligation to pay attention to what you pay attention to? Should there be symmetry--is it logical to only engage with people who prioritize their filters the same way you do?

Wasting time is not a waste

In fact, wasting time is a key part of our lives.

Wasting time poorly is a sin, because not only are you forgoing the productivity, generosity and art that comes from work, but you're also giving up the downtime, experimentation and joy that comes from wasting time.

If you're going to waste time (and I hope you will) the least you can do is do it well.

Herbie Hancock is not a Pip

I need to clarify this morning's post. In my glib attempt to make a point, I wasn't as clear as I wanted to be.

When Miles Davis made records with John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock, they weren't easily replaceable, invisible sidemen. No one who went to hear them would have been satisfied if they had been subbed out. By my definition, then, they did in fact have a relationship with the customer... they did work that was unique, that was hard to replace.

Yes, we need teams, no doubt about. The MGs without Steve Cropper could never have been such an amazing house band, and we're all lucky that some people will take their craft that far. Marshall Grant didn't merely perform Johnny Cash's bass sound... he invented it.

Does the world need anonymous, replaceable cogs, people who work for the front man and put in a day's work but that's all? Sure, but it doesn't have to be you. The goal, I think, is to find out how to do your work in a way that makes the team and the product in a way that matters.

PS a fun video from Todd makes my point...

Avoiding the pips (and the MGs)

What would have happened if Gladys Knight had fired one of the Pips? Or if Booker had had a falling out with one of the MGs?

I think Gladys would have found another way to get to Georgia.

The problem with being a sideman is that you make it (or not) at the whim of the front man. In exchange for the intellectual comfort of being handed a chart, you give up control and your ability to lead.

Most of all, instead of having a relationship with the audience, you merely have a relationship with the front man.

Can and should

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

The end of the industrial era is opening countless doors. So many doors, in fact, that it's easy to become paralyzed. Without a clear understanding of what you want, it's harder than ever to get it.

Most of the time, we treat our careers like a buffet. "Show me what's available and then I'll decide..."

With the revolution going on all around us, there's so much on the buffet you're likely to just grab something convenient. Better, I think, to decide what matters first, and go do that.

R&D in public

Companies do research and development, particularly large ones. This is an investment, one that fails often but is essential to future growth.

The web is R&D in public. So are apps. Not just for tech companies. For any company that is trying to figure out how its customers think and what they want.

We shouldn't be so quick to excoriate those companies that launch interactive tools that fail. In fact, we should be critical of those that don't.

Consumers and creators

Fifty years ago, the ratio was a million to one.

For every person on the news or on primetime, there were a million viewers.

The explosion of magazines brought the ratio to 100,000:1. If you wrote for a major magazine, you were going to impact a lot of people. Most of us were consumers, not creators.

Cable TV and zines made it 10,000 to one. You could have a show about underwater spearfishing or you could teach people to make hamburgers on donuts. The little star is born.

And now of course, when it's easy to have a blog, or an Youtube account or to push your ideas to the world through social media, the ratio might be 100:1. For every person who sells on Etsy, there are a hundred buyers. For every person who actively tweets, there are a hundred people who mostly consume those tweets. For every hundred visitors to Squidoo, there is one new person building pages.

What does the world look like when we get to the next zero?