#the5 for the week ending November 4, 2010

Posted by on Nov 6, 2010 in Blogging, Twitter | 0 comments

I tweet out #the5 regularly on weekday mornings. Folks have asked in the past if they could somehow get these tweets in another fashion, but every Twitter/Wordpress plugin I’ve seen makes a mangled, annoying mess of processing the Twitterstream, so until there’s a better option, I’ll just throw out this digest. If you’d like to get these before the summary, just follow me on Twitter.

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Simple is not easy

Posted by on Nov 5, 2010 in Awakening | 5 comments

Simple is not easy. An amazing number of people confuse the two, believing they are synonyms. They are not; in fact, we can make a case that they’re antonyms.

Easy is easy. Easy is a minimum amount of effort to produce a result. Easy is no strain, no effort, no investment, no commitment. Easy is something many, many people desire. Easy work, where pay is disproportionate to effort. Easy intimacy, where your investment in another person is minimal. Easy life, where challenge is significantly less important than victory, where growth matters less than achievement, even if the achievement isn’t particularly important.

Simple is very hard. Simple is the removal of everything except what matters. Simple is the carving away of marble until the statue of David appears. Simple is minimalism; simple is removing complexity and distilling down things to their core essence. Simple is extremely hard to do well. It may seem easy at first, because there’s always some easy stuff to remove in the beginning, but as you carve away more and more, more and more skill and mastery is required, because you don’t want to remove needed things, nor do you want to remove the wrong things.

Still unclear? Easy is getting a digital camera, whipping it out, and taking pictures with it randomly. No skill or investment is required – it’s really easy! Simple is learning how to take photographs so that the essence of what you’re trying to convey shines through with nothing else getting in the way.

Steve and Mindy Penn's Wedding 2010

By this point, you may be thinking about eschewing easy, deriding it as something only the lazy value and vowing to ban it from your vocabulary and your life. You’d be making a horrible mistake. Easy is a momentum builder. Easy gets you those early, low-risk victories that you need in order to encourage you to keep going. Easy is what gets the customer to walk in the door and make their first purchase. Easy is what gets you to buy the digital camera in the first place and helps you take that first photo. Easy gets the ball rolling.

Once you’ve got that momentum, then focusing on simplicity and simplifying takes precedence. Removing all of the preconceptions, all of the obstacles to success, removing all the unneeded and unwanted, that absolutely becomes essential. But you’ll never get to the building of skill and achievement of mastery if you don’t see some easy wins at the beginning, will you?

Capture in your mind the difference between simple and easy and know the place for each in everything that you do. It’s easy at first, and then it’s simple, right?

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What your dinner can teach you about marketing methods

Posted by on Nov 3, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics | 2 comments

Salty.
Sour.
Sweet.
Bitter.
Flavorful.

What’s similar about all of these?

ETC2010

They’re all powerful tastes we are biologically wired to respond to. We love foods with these different flavors. A seared steak with cracked peppercorns and salt. A warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream on the side. A plate of buttery salmon sushi with wasabi on the side. Whatever the food, whatever the cuisine, there’s something that makes you happy.

Now ask yourself this: when was the last time you put a spoonful of salt in your mouth? When was the last time you ate straight sugar? When was the last time you served your dinner guests a small bowl of MSG and nothing else? I’d wager never, certainly not for dining purposes unless you wanted to make sure those guests never came by the house again. We don’t like pure flavors very much. Flavors need to intermingle, flavors need the complexities of foods that have lots of secondary and subtle interactions.

So why, in the world of marketing, do we pursue purity so much? “We need an SEO strategy!” “We are going to market just with social media, it’s the future!” “We don’t advertise anywhere except pay per click!” Why do we insist on pure flavors when the customer we work with every day enjoy and demand complex meals of content, interaction, engagement, brand, and persuasion?

Part of the answer lies in metrics. In our quest to measure everything, the faster we can get to pure flavors, the faster and easier we can get to measuring our work. If you served nothing but a bowl of salt to dinner guests, it would be trivial to measure how much sodium was in the meal, doubly so after everyone left without eating. Measuring how much sodium is in a Thanksgiving dinner is much more difficult, isn’t it? Yet few would argue that a delicious full dinner is more satisfying than a bowl of salt.

Just as we don’t serve pure flavors at a meal, neither should we serve our customers and prospective customers with an insistence on marketing purity. Measure what you can, sure, but serve them with the best and most practical integrated marketing strategy that you can. Have content out there. Have social media interaction. Go to trade shows, speak at conferences, make interesting videos, do your SEO, send plenty of email, maybe even consider billboards or flyers if you’re a local business.

At the heart of this is acknowledging the complexity of an integrated marketing strategy and understanding that you can’t measure all of the interactions in a customer’s mind. A prospect might become a customer because they first met you at a trade show but a blog post reinforced to them that you knew your stuff. A prospect might become a customer because they first saw a YouTube video, then chatted with you, then read your eBook, then followed you on Twitter, and finally was convinced by an unsolicited testimonial of a friend of a friend on Facebook.

To the best of your ability, to the practical limits of your budget, serve a multi-course dinner as often as you can instead of bowls of single flavors. Your metrics will suffer to some degree, but you and your guests will be much more satisfied with you after it’s all over, won’t they?

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Vote!

Posted by on Nov 2, 2010 in Politics | 0 comments

Regardless of what you think of (party) or (candidate) or (incumbent), regardless of how badly broken you think (political body) is or how corrupt (government process) is, go vote. Not sure who to vote for?

  • Vote for people who support the things you support.
  • If you like things more or less how they are now, the people who are marked Incumbent on your ballots are in part responsible for that. Vote for them.
  • If you don’t like things how they are now, vote for someone who doesn’t have Incumbent next to their name.
  • Vote for people who participate in the communities you care about – local communities or digital ones.
  • Virtually every politician out there is running a Twitter account now. @reply to the ones on your ballot and see who responds. If they’re not listening now, they won’t be listening in office either. Let that guide your vote a tiny little bit.

Whatever your methodology, whatever your choices, exercise them. Unless you’re a wealthy old white male landowner, chances are once upon a time in this nation you would not have had the right to vote. You do now. Use it.

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Five #30better things you can do

Posted by on Nov 1, 2010 in Awakening | 3 comments

Five #30better things you can do

Over the weekend, I suggested that you start out doing one thing a day that will make a change in your life for the better over the next 30 days.

Fire in the fireplace

Pick one thing and do it consistently over the next 30 days. So that you get an idea of the scope of what I’m talking about, here are some suggestions you can use for #30better:

1. Get a half gallon jug/bottle and fill it with plain water at the start of every day. By the end of the day, make sure you’ve consumed it all.

2. Start every day with one minute of meditation. Nothing special, nothing fancy. Just sit at home, in your parked car, or at work (ideally before anyone gets there) where you can have a guaranteed minute, a full 60 seconds, of silence. Use a countdown timer on a watch or mobile phone, and for just a minute, practice just closing your eyes, keeping your back straight, and breathing deeply. If you need words to say in order to give your brain something to do, on every deep breath in, mentally say the word HERE. On every deep breath out, mentally say the word NOW.

3. Before you leave the office, on the commute home, or whatever you do to make the transition from the day to home life (whatever that may be), find one piece of audio or video content that makes you laugh out loud and watch/listen to it. Make it a goal every day for 30 days to make the transition into non-working time with a laugh and a smile. It’s tougher than you think.

4. Go for a walk for 5 minutes every day, perhaps after lunch.

5. Pick a new person every single day at random from your social networks and spend 5 minutes learning about them. Dig into their profile, their blog, what they do, and really learn about who’s in this so-called social network of yours.

The secret to #30better (and to all life change) isn’t picking something big and unsustainably splashy. It’s picking something achievable that you can and will commit to and doing it. All of the suggestions above are things that take minimal time and effort, but can potentially improve your life, health, or power. Most of them are things you can do at the last minute, so if it’s 11:55 at night and you’ve forgotten, you can still go for a walk or drink a whole lot of water.

Don’t skip around, either. Pick one and stick with it. Make that promise to yourself, keep it, and see how much it changes your sense of self-discipline and self-perspective.

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