Making mountains out of molehills
Making mountains out of molehills is an old idiom that refers specifically to someone blowing an issue far out of proportion. In cognitive psychology, this is known as magnification. It’s such a common psychological phenomenon that we’ve had cultural idioms for centuries describing it, such as Shakespeare’s play, Much Ado About Nothing.
Magnification works based on a simple principle, the feedback loop. For example, someone who makes mountains out of molehills would take a bad grade on an exam and repeat the event over in his head repeatedly until it became so magnified that he leaped to the conclusion he would fail college. In this case, magnification serves a harmful outcome.
Suppose, however, you wanted to use magnification for a more productive end, such as marketing? What makes it work?
First and foremost, magnification hooks onto one or two key points that get repeated in your mind over and over again. Rarely does anyone magnify a complex thought pattern, because the thought pattern needs to be able to loop quickly in your mind.
Second, magnification has to create a derived future outcome. Rarely do we conclude that the original event is the outcome; in the example above, the bad grade wasn’t the focused outcome – failing out of college was. In order to get your mind to create a derived outcome, there has to be some element of predictive language at work. Fail an exam becomes magnified to fail out of college.
Third, magnification has to be able to synergize with itself to create a large distortion. In the case above of the bad exam grade, every repeat of the loop adds additional energy to the original negative feeling. If a situation or consequence doesn’t compound itself, you won’t magnify it in your head. Conversely, if you’re out to create a positive feeling, the feeling must amplify itself with every iteration of thought. Every time your prospective customer repeats the positive feeling, it should build on itself.
Let’s examine a case of magnification done really well: the marketing around Apple’s iPad. First, it’s a simple campaign: a magical device at an unbelievable price. There are only two hooks to grab onto, so the marketing of it is kept simple.
Second, it creates a derived future outcome. The key there is how we treat the word magical. Everyone’s interpretation of magic is different, but the general future outcomes are relatively similar: things just happen. Thus, if you view the iPad as magical, you can create outcomes in your mind that are specific to you but are aligned with the idea of magic.
Compare that to how many Android tablets are marketed, emphasizing faster graphics or dual-core processors, and it’s quite clear that much of the Android tablet marketing can’t help you create a future outcome in your head. Old sales professionals will recognize this clearly as marketing the benefit vs. the feature. This takes benefit a step further and emphasizes open-ended future benefits beyond something very specific.
Third, repeating that derived future outcome in your head synergizes with itself. Every time you imagine the magical outcomes you could create (if only you owned the product), you amplify and build it up. You add new positive outcomes or grow the ones already in your mind. The appeal of magic inspires you to want to repeat the message in your mind again – who doesn’t want the easy, magical solution? Again, if you emphasize a specific feature or benefit, you close off the mind from wanting to go back and explore other related outcomes.
Take your own marketing messages and examine them for simplicity, derived future outcomes, and repetition synergy, then rework your messages so that they are more likely to be made into mountains by your prospective and current customers.
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New Year’s Resolutions 30 Day Trial
It’s nearly December 1, which means that in just over a month, everyone and their cousin will be trying to change their ways for the better with New Year’s resolutions.
Resolutions are a tricky thing. On the one hand, significant dates on the calendar are a great excuse to make changes you might not otherwise be motivated to make, and lots of other people will be seeking to make change as well. On the other hand, attempting significant change normally requires some level of planning, which most people don’t do after the ball drops and the clocks change; the result is usually rapid failure.
So how do you take advantage of the energy of change without the associated planning failure? Here’s a simple suggestion: use the month of December to do a 30 day trial of your upcoming resolutions. Want to lose weight, quit smoking, etc.? Try it out in December and “debug” your resolution, so that you can work out all of the operational issues in advance.
For example, say you want to lose weight. The 30 day trial period will let you figure out how that goal will impact your finances and daily schedule. When during the average day will you have time to work out? What foods will you have to remove from your regimen, and what foods will you have to add? Try things out and see what works and what doesn’t for you, so that when resolutions season kicks off, you’ll be far less discouraged by bumps in the road than in previous years.
By doing the resolution trial run in December, you’ll also know it’s durable. After all, if a resolution of any kind can survive Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, Ashura, and a variety of other occasions, then you know it’s going to survive the rest of the year.
The 30 day trial period is also a great time to do your research. For example, let’s say in the weight loss example above that finances are an issue, and you can’t afford a gym membership. Instead of that killing your resolution outright (as it often does in the early days of January), you can go Googling for fitness workouts that don’t require equipment beyond common everyday objects, then try them out.
Here’s the only rule of the 30 day trial period: you must pick one resolution and commit to debugging it for all 30 days. If you decide that in 2012 one of your key changes will be weight loss, then you must find a working methodology for yourself in December. You’re not allowed to change on December 12 to a different resolution, because you won’t be giving yourself nearly enough time to research and work around roadblocks.
Take today and tomorrow to make up your mind about the one thing that must change about you in 2012 and then on December 1, begin your 30 day trial and debugging period!
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A flash of lightning
Have you ever had a glimpse of the greater you?
Maybe you reacted in an emergency with greater speed, confidence, or strength than you thought possible.
Maybe one day you were forced by a sense of needing to pause, only to be confronted with an amazing sunset or the perfect evening breeze.
Maybe in a rare crisis something woke up inside you, compelling you to lead, to take charge.
Maybe in a stressful situation you reached inside yourself and found more will to win than you ever knew was there.
Some of these moments may be recent. Some of them may be years or even decades ago, but they were so profound that you can’t forget about them. They recur in dreams and memories, dates and places etched in your mind as firmly as if they were carved in granite.
I remember one moment in the spring of 1999 in my little apartment in Allston, Massachusetts. It wasn’t the best or worst apartment, but it did have a nice front room that faced the morning sun. At that moment, laying on my futon couch, the sun washing in the windows created a moment that was pure magic. I felt completely free of everything, a part of the light and the light a part of me. I don’t remember how long I was in that space. It could have been a moment or an hour. But it was a moment when I learned that true peace lived inside of me, if I had the ability to quiet everything and find it. It was a moment of perfect beauty.
These moments in your life are not accidental. They are not random. Above all else, they are not exceptions to the rule. They reflect the times when circumstances, energy, and our will align to let us tap into our fullest power, our fullest potential. They are the moments of living proof that we can be far more than we think, that life can be far more wonderful and rich than we usually see.
The wonderful secret is this: they’re happening all around you, every day, like flashes of lightning briefly showing the world around you in the dark. These moments of clarity aren’t isolated instances or lucky chances in life because they’re not supposed to be. They are how your life should be the majority of your days. All that you need to do – and it’s simple, but certainly not easy – is look for them.
Take a deep breath, pause for the moment, and ask yourself this: of what is around me right now, what can I truly enjoy? Of what is around me right now, what can I truly act on? Of what is around me, what must I remove from my life?
Do this inventory as many times per day as you can remember, and before long, your life will be composed of these moments, strung together like jewels in a necklace.
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Informational snacking might kill you (or your career)
In the world of nutrition, what does a diet of constant snacking get you? How healthy is the end result of little snacks all the time, especially when the snacks are of dubious quality?
One of the most popular formats for writing content nowadays is the “snack-sized” content. 5 tips for this, 8 ideas for that, all in as few words as possible because attention spans are supposedly shorter. Twitter, of course, is the ultimate informational snacking tool, with everything compressed to 140 characters (a bit like those profoundly unhealthy 100 calorie snack packs).
These informational snacks are as profitable for content creators as the physical goods are for food manufacturers – and the health effects are about the same. Create less content, package it well, and sell it at a premium price in the attention economy. Coast on brand and reputation. Pack less nutrition, less quality, and less value in them, and as long as you’re selling what people think they want, you’ll do fine.
Want to see the difference? Take a look at your favorite bloggers of today and dig around in their archives. Look back before they were Internet famous and see if their content has changed. I’d bet you in a random sampling of 10 popular bloggers that you’d see some who have stayed the course of serving full, nutritious meals and others who have switched to snack packs almost exclusively.
How do you avoid falling into a snacking only mentality? As a content consumer, take some time (especially over the next month or so as you have some down time to celebrate holidays) to prioritize content creators based on the value they give you. Share and retweet the really good stuff liberally, because attention is the currency of the information economy. Just as it’s vital to support food manufacturers that are aligned with your values with your wallet, so it’s important to support content creators aligned with your values with your attention. The informational equivalent of a doctor telling you to stop snacking and eat properly or you’ll die of a heart attack is an employer who says that your knowledge isn’t valuable any more and lets you go.
As a content creator, acknowledge that while snack packs are great marketing and powerful short-term profit boosts, ultimately you need to provide longer-term benefit to your audience or they’ll mentally starve – or shop somewhere else. Every time you step up to your content creation toolkit, ask if you have the time and the will to create something of value, and if you don’t, step away and come back later when you do. You can absolutely create healthy 100 calorie snacks and you can absolutely create healthy informational snacks, but as with all things, quality takes time and effort.
Ultimately, you have to decide how much informational nutrition you need in your life. If you’re content to live on snacks, that’s fine – but don’t expect to be able to outperform a digital marathon runner. In an economy where job creation is still lackluster at best, you might find that an all snack diet lets everyone else beat you to the finish line.
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Do you have a Golden Social Rolodex?
Are you familiar with the Golden Rolodex?
It’s a sales expression as well as a human resources expression. The Golden Rolodex is your personal database, your personal set of connections and relationships that you’ve built over your career. When companies are looking to hire top talent in sales and executive functions, very often the Golden Rolodex is an implied but strong hiring factor. The moment that, say, a top salesman comes aboard, it’s implied that he’ll tap his Golden Rolodex on behalf of his new employer and bring in some easy wins.
While the Golden Rolodex has been powerful for decades, it’s never been more powerful than today. Today, the Golden Rolodex (your network) is mandatory for your success. Today we have the Golden Social Rolodex, the Golden Audience, the people who travel with talent from place to place. As long as the talent consistently provides value to his or her audience, the audience comes along for the ride no matter what the company and title on the business card says. Do companies value this? You bet. There wouldn’t be as much debate and angst about personal brand vs. corporate brand if things like the Golden Social Rolodex didn’t matter.
Friend and serial connector Jeff Pulver often says that we live or die on our database. He’s not talking about a platform or a set of SQL tables. He’s talking about your network, the network you’ll use to bring your Golden Audience to whatever you’re working on now.
How do you build your Golden Audience? As always, the answer is simple. You need to isolate the unique quality that you bring to the table no matter where you work, no matter what you do, and be able to express that quality to your audience and to yourself. Your audience will ultimately prize you for that quality and for your ability to help them and provide value to them based on how you work with that quality.
For example, one of my essential qualities is bridge building. I’m good at understanding marketing and technology as a whole and being able to speak to practitioners of either discipline to help them work together. I can see more possibilities than the average marketer because I understand the technology that powers so much of our marketing today. When I worked in financial services, I spoke that language plus what was effectively PR 2.0.
Here’s the important part: many of the people who got to know me then are still friends with me now, even though my business card says something very different. Why? That same essential quality continues to provide them with value.
Here’s another example. CC Chapman, now a published author, was originally one of the web guys at Babson College when I first met him. In every aspect of the stuff he did at the college, he managed to get people energized and passionate. When he moved to a digital marketing agency, founded his own, got acquired, etc. he brought that same essential quality, the ability to inspire passion in others, to all of his work. When you pick up his new book, Content Rules (affiliate link), do you think it’s reasonable to assume that same passion will infuse his writing?
His audience has followed him from one company to the next, from one podcast to another digital venture, on a wild ride over the years because he has remained true to that essential quality. They’re remained a part of his Golden Audience because they value his ability to inspire them.
Look over your own experiences, look over your own background and what you’re doing today, and ask yourself what’s in common. What did people value about you ten years ago? Five years ago? Today? If you’ve managed to build an audience, even a small one, talk to them and ask them why they’re with you, what they value about you. Take the recent tip from my newsletter about plugging all of your recommendations into Wordle to see how people describe you. Take a tip from DJ Waldow and start saving public testimonials about you on Twitter and other social outlets so that you have ready access to them.
Look at how you behave in different contexts and see what’s similar in all of them. I definitely have different friends in the martial arts world than I do in the World of Warcraft universe, but those friends I’ve attracted in both worlds value me for many of the same attributes. The audience I’ve attracted in social media (you, and thank you for being here) perceive the same values and qualities that my employer, Blue Sky Factory email marketing, values as well. What do your friends in your different circles value about you?
You can’t be anything to anyone. That’s a recipe for being nothing to everyone. Instead, take the time to investigate what people value about you and distill it. The faster you do it, the faster you’ll be able to create the value that powers your Golden Audience that will propel you no matter what you choose to do.
Footnote: For the under-30 crowd, a Rolodex is your Facebook friends page made of paper.
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Game mechanics for non-profits
A while ago on Marketing Over Coffee and other places we discussed the SCVNGR game mechanics deck, a deck of cards with different mechanisms that stimulate human behavioral patterns. While marketers are more than happy to jump all over these methods, it’s well worth considering for marketing more useful things, like non-profit donations.
Let’s take a look at just a few mechanics and how a non-profit might be able to make use of them.
Progression Dynamics. Non-profits for a long time have had statuses such as donor levels, but they’re uncreatively used. At best, a donor level is listed in a brochure or program guide, and maybe the top achievers (donors) get a shout-out at an organizational event. This is the age of social! Make those levels public and spreadable! Imagine how simple it would be for an organization to post as a Facebook status or tweet every donation (for those who didn’t want to remain anonymous) along with thanks and donation level.
Example: “Thanks @cspenn for donating! You’ve reached donor level 23! Only $230 left until level 24!”
Badges. Coupled with progression levels, badges (from locations earned in Foursquare to Achievements in WoW) are an equally potent way to recognize people. Most organizations recognize large donors or longtime donors and stop there. Get creative! Badges don’t cost you a thing – make as many as you can and hand them out with great frequency, very publicly, to take advantage of the habit that people tend to collect damn near anything you put in front of them.
Example: “Congrats @cspenn for earning the Fastest Donor badge! You donated within 60 seconds of our tweet!”
Leaderboards. The only thing better than being in a progression guild in Warcraft is being listed in a progression guild in all the major guild leaderboards. People love to show off their status. Take advantage of this simple social mechanic in your community and publish a leaderboard, and make leaderboards for more than just one mechanic. For example, you have top donors, which is of course useful, but what about top social sharers, folks who might have more time than money? What about top referrals to your web site? What about top networkers who bring new people to your Facebook page? Find ways to implement leaderboards for all the metrics that matter to you and publish them to encourage people to compete!
Example: “Hey @cspenn! You just reached #23 in the Social Leaderboard! Keep telling people about us!”
Groups. Farmville would be fairly boring without other people. Warcraft would be equally flat without guilds to join of like-minded players. Do you encourage your constituents to network just with you, or do you help them network with each other? Create reasons for teams, guilds, groups, or other gatherings virtually or in real life of people who might gain something from each other, and have them compete for the above listed progressions, badges, and leaderboards as groups.
Example: “Hey @cspenn! Your guild, Unifying Force, is now in the top 20 donor guilds! Congrats!”
Take a look at the SCVNGR deck and figure out how you can work one or more game mechanics into your non-profit organization’s structure. Most of the mechanics will require little or no money and can encourage exactly the kind of behavior you want from your audience – and let them have some fun at it, too.
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