Mind Readings: Momentum

In this episode, and please note I'm parked for safety reasons, um, let's talk about momentum. So, momentum is one of those things when it comes to marketing that is very, very difficult to obtain and it's extremely difficult to keep. When we talk about momentum, we're talking about the ability for us to garner attention and hold attention, hold attention uh of people. So, one of the things that I learned in public relations when I was working in that industry was that when you get any kind of attention, you have to ladder up on it, uh leverage it uh in some ways. So if you get a a placement in a uh a relatively small publication, maybe somebody's blog, somebody's podcasts, you then use that to pitch to the next tier of of coverage.

Maybe it's a trade publication or an industry publication, and then as you get more and more attention to uh that you can lever up to uh regional publications, maybe even national publications or international publications. It's very difficult to do that because the story has to be uh one that is newsworthy enough that um it would be worth providing uh to these publications. And at least in the context of PR, an awful lot of public relations is paid, uh not the PR people, but the journalists, the publications themselves, are paid on things like page views and views and watches, because they're all ad-driven businesses. So your story, your pitch, your idea has to be something that's gonna generate traffic that will pay the bills. When something takes off, when you get a lot of eyeballs on something, you will get more and more coverage because everybody wants a piece of that pie.

Everybody wants the idea uh in their publication so that they can get traffic as well. They can earn traffic, particularly from new sources. Like if you are um writing about uh say marketing automation normally, and a new thing on chat GPT comes out. Well, of course you want that in your publication to attract audiences that are interested in chat GPT, but not necessarily marketing automation. You try and leverage that.

Here's the challenge. News cycles are very, very short and getting shorter as we get to more and more disposable content. This is something I heard on uh uh an industry podcast. Um, one content creator was saying, Yeah, TikTok really introduced the concept of disposable content. You watch the video, you like it, you chat about it for like two seconds, and it's gone and gone to the next thing.

And we've known that's been the case in marketing for a really long time, but it's more prevalent now. So something that captures people's imagination and holds it for any amount of time, people lock in on that because they're we're it's like you know, leaping from story to story, trying to catch attention as you can, like a bad video game character. The challenge is if you're more than just a flash in the pan, you've got to do something with that momentum and try to hold on to as much of it as you can. This is where the concept of the repeatable reliable reach audience comes in. This is why things like email marketing and text messaging marketing are so important.

Um, Discord communities, Slack communities, any place where you can capture an audience and um so that you have reliable reach is something you desperately need to do as soon as possible. The moment you start getting attention, you roll out an email newsletter, you roll out a Discord community, you roll out something where people can sign up and and be a part of that community, and you can hold their attention for just a little bit longer, especially once the initial news story dies down. However big the story is, you've got to capture that audience because in public media, public social media, public mainstream media, it's like squirrels on myth, right? A new story pops up, a new TikTok video pops up, and boom, you're off the front page, you're gone, and no one remembers you. If you have captured that audience when it's coming in, then you can reach them again, right?

You can say, hey, here's something new, here's something that's of more value. If you liked the initial story, here's an add-on, here's uh a new benefit. One of the biggest flaws I have seen in public relations is people expecting that an audience is loyal on a single piece of attention. An audience is interested in a single piece of attention, a single news story, a single social media trend, they're interested, they're not loyal. They only become loyal once you provide them benefit over and over again.

And like in television and books and other forms of entertainment, it's very difficult to one up yourself, right? You do this thing and it and it gets some great coverage, so you do something even more outlandish and even more outlandish. And at some point, you know, either you can't do that anymore, or you implode or explode sometimes very spectacularly. You know, you see in music and in movies and stuff, the uh television seasons, like if you uh I watched the watched um CW's The Flash, and that series just got getting more and more outlandish. They they use up a lot of their best ideas early on to capture that audience, and then they're like, uh, we don't have any really interesting compelling stories to tell World of Warcraft same thing uh the the second expansion uh the Wrath of the Lich King is widely regarded as the best expansion because it was the the apex villain and every expansion since then's been kind of like huh like all these weird crazy storylines trying to come up with bigger and bigger bad guys and at some point you run out right at some point you have to restart and and and figure out where to go so the solution it for momentum is the reliable reach audience and and capturing it early on right because if there's benefit that you're providing in the form of a newsletter in the form of a text messaging update and in the form of um weekly or monthly chats in discord uh or contests or giveaways you can keep that audience's attention and eventually create loyalty because they continue to get good value from you all the time right it doesn't have to be uh a smash hit right every newsletter issue you publish every post you put in the announcements channel in discord they're not all gonna be hits but they all have to be valuable enough that people say yeah I'll stick around another week right and you are constantly re-earning people's loyalty if you don't have that capture mechanism in place then the moment the this your story is out of the news you're done right it's it's game over at that point uh there is not much you can do except find a way to make news again and repeat that process.

You know, the laddering up very, very slowly. So if you want to make use of the attention when you get it, have a capture mechanism in place before you start. Before you start. My friend Laura Gastra Audit calls this Wonder Hell, planning for you know uh wild success, overwhelming success. And that's a great way to think about it.

What does it look like if you succeed beyond your expectations? Do you have mechanisms in place that will scale to let you capture your success while you have it? Because everything is transient, everything is fleeting, and once it's gone, it's very, very difficult to get it back. Think about this. Apple computers had basically like four hit products in 30 years, right?

The Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPhone, um, and the iPad to a to a lesser degree. And yes, they've got revs and versions of these products and stuff, but when you watch their product announcements and things, they're not all newsworthy. A lot of them are just refinements. Um yeah, the Apple Watch, which arguably is is a pretty good success story. So five products in 30 years, right?

Five big hits in 30 years. If a trillion dollar company can manage that, what does that mean for us, the people who are not working at trillion dollar companies? It means that whenever we get any scrap of attention, we've got to be ready to take uh uh take it on and and uh it's a terrible word, but to harvest it uh as much as we can. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next time.

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