dangerouslyawesome

Lifted with attribution to Hugh MacLeod. These are his ideas, not mine. I just happend to dig on most of them.

1. Everything takes three times longer than it should. Especially the money part.
2. The best way to get approval is not to need it.
3. People want what they can’t have. In fact, that’s pretty much all they do want.
4. Once you become an entrepreneur, you find the company of non-entrepreneurs a lot harder to be around. You’ve seen things they haven’t; the wavelengths alter, it’s that simple.
5. In a world of over-supply and commodification, you are no longer paid to supply. You’re being paid to deliver something else. What that is exactly, is not always obvious.
6. Word of mouth is the best advertising medium of all. The best word of mouth comes from disrupting markets.
7. People buy your product because it helps fill in the narrative gaps in their lives.
8. You can either be cheapest or the best. I know which one I prefer.
9. Some people think that once they secure venture funding, their problems will be over. Wrong. That’s when your problems REALLY begin.
10. It’s better to be underfunded than overfunded.
11. If an average guy in a bar can understand what you do for a living, chances are you’re halfway to becoming a commodity.
12. It’s easier to turn an ally into a customer than vice versa.
13. If you’re happy in your career before the age of thirty, you’re probably doing something wrong. Heck, if you’re happy in your career before the age of seventy, you’re probably doing something wrong.
14. Smart, young, artistic people are always asking me which is a better career path, “Creativity” or “Money”. I always answer that it doesn’t matter. What matters is “Effective” and/or “Ineffective”.
15. Write the following on a piece of paper, have it framed, and stick it on your office wall: “Have you hugged your customer today?”
16. People will always, always be in the market for a story that resonates with them. Your product will either have this quality or it won’t. If your product fails this test, quit your job and go find something else. Just making the product incrementally cheaper or better won’t help you.
17. Products are idea amplifiers. The molecules and/or bytes are secondary.
18. People remember the quality long after they’ve forgotten the price. Unless you try to rip them off.
19. Markets serve entrepreneurs better if the latter can keep the former undersupplied. Oversupply is the kiss of death.
20. I personally know a former CEO who, once he attained control of the company, ran an EXTREMELY profitable business into the ground in less than two years. From a market cap of $100 million to ZERO, just like that. Why? Short answer: He loved being “The” CEO, but he didn’t much care for being “a” CEO.
21. In terms of becoming an entrepreneur, probably the most useful thing I learned in the last twenty years was how to enjoy my own company for long stretches of time.
22. One successful entrepreneur I know well has a wonderful quality, namely that he never, ever compares himself to other people. He just does his own thing, which actually serves him rather well. Just because his competitor has bought himself a bigger motor boat, doesn’t mean he feels the need have a bigger motor boat. This quality helps him to build his business the way he sees fit, not the way the motor boat people see fit.
23. Running a startup is full of extreme ups and downs. Which is why so many successful and happy entrepreneurs I know lead such normal, stable, unglamorous, “boring”, family-centered lives. Somehow they need the latter in order to balance out the former. Extra-curricular drama looks great in the tabloids, but that’s all it’s ultimately good for.
24. MBAs are conditioned to use their brains in much the same way as sex workers are conditioned to use their genitals. Nice work if you can get it.
25. Bill Gates may have a million times more money than me, but he isn’t going to live a million times longer than me, watch a million times more sunsets than me, make love to a million times more women than me, drink a million times more fine wines than me, listen to a million times more Beethoven String Quartets than me, nor sire a million times more children than me. Human beings don’t scale.
26. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” F. Scott was a drunkard and a fool.

I’m always “preaching” about finding and having higher purpose in everything you do, especially work. It’s something I learned back in 2006 from Chris Messina and Tara Hunt when they started Citizen Agency…it was a core tenant of what they helped their clients do.

One of my side ventures is as the business manager for Two Guys on Beer. Johnny, Dave, Joe, and I have been producing this show together for almost 2 years now…Joe and I officially on the team for a bit over a year now. We’ve had some really incredible successes under our belt, not the least of which is a syndication on Philly.com’s beer page, participating in Philly Beer Week last year that resulted in interviews with beer legends Sam Calagione and Jim Koch, BeerCamp – a homebrewers summit attended by 200+ homebrew fans, fantastic relationships with a number of breweries & restaurants, and of course over 130 episodes in the bag.

The team works hard for a project that we’ve been slowly…slowly….turning into what we believe can be a profitable venture. We joke that we’re at the point where people send us beer, and that’s awesome…but the real goal is to make money drinking beer. The truth is, we have a higher purpose based on 4 core values that we think will help us make that a reality:

• Advocate Beer
• Grow the Craft Beer Community
• Make Knowledge Available
• Build Beer Relationships

Even with these core values, things get tough…especially with a project that is a passion project for the whole team right now. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, “why are we doing this again!?!”.

Then, you get e-mails like this:

TGOB:

You guys are AWESOME! I love experimenting with different beers, but I can’t find good beer while the US Army has me stationed here in Korea. I download your podcasts onto my Zune and watch them as I drink some malty Philipino beers (the only thing decent you can find here), and your show makes me feel like I’m home. Keep the shows coming; you keep me from feeling homesick. You guys rock.

2LT Vandergraff

6-52 AMD, 35th ADA BDE, South Korea

Wow. That’s the kind of thing that really puts things into perspective, and how important having core values can be.

Without our core values, the product that Two Guys on Beer produces wouldn’t be what it is today, and the team probably wouldn’t keep pouring our time and hearts into the show. But most importantly, 2Lt Todd Vandergraff wouldn’t be able to enjoy beer as a way to stay connected to home.

Via http://zygote.egg-co.com/social-media-roi/

I snagged this slide from one of the most valuable presentations about social media I’ve read online. Read it. Right now. It’s long-ish, but worth it. Thanks to Dave McClure for sharing it.

Here’s the deal: teaching people how to tweet on twitter.com, blog on blogger.com, or belch on belcher.com, makes not an effective social media campaign.

There is no silver bullet.

You need to evaluate business problems.

You have to know the right solutions to solve those problems, relevantly to the business in question.

And you need to design and execute against metrics to measure the success of your decisions.

It’s not simple. It’s not quick.

Which is why I find it so hard to believe how many “social media experts” are out there.

My sincere hope it that people read at this really well constructed deck and presentation content, and take it to heart, and put their “social media consultant” cards in a drawer for a day when you actually can provide value to the people paying them money. (And maybe use those spare “SEO consultant” cards you’ve got laying around in the mean time so you don’t have to waste money on new ones).

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #30: Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

Brand loyalty. An interesting concept in itself, considering all along I’ve been purporting that people don’t identify with companies, they identify with other people.

Since we’re talking about companies here, and companies really suck at having relationships with their customers, I’d argue that a large portion of the “brand loyalty” in the marketplace has nothing to do with relationships at all.

I think that brand loyalty, however it’s being formed, really boils down to one thing:

Habit.

We’re human, we’re creatures of habit. The path of least resistance is always saught, and habit is often a contributor to that behavior. When companies are trying to build brand loyalty, they’re instantiating themselves as part of their customers’ habits.

But the path of least resistance has changed. It’s foolish for a company to become a part of a person’s habits, and then simply rest on their laurels. There needs to be regular reinforcement. Networked markets are constantly informing each other of new habits, and the perceived cost of changing habits is the only thing in their way.

Fighting this battle gets time consuming and costly for the companies, and to some customers…it’s irritating.

When a company is willing to embrace the forms of communication we’ve been talking about all along, and empower it’s customers and employees to interact like humans, that’s when brand loyalty starts to feel more like going steady.

There are emotions at stake. “Changing partners” has a high perceived emotional cost.

Is your brand a habit, or are we going steady?

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #29: Elvis said it best: “We can’t go on together with suspicious minds.”

We’re caught in a trap I can’t walk out Because I love you too much baby Why can’t you see What you’re doing to me When you don’t believe a word I say? We can’t go on together With suspicious minds And we can’t build our dreams On suspicious minds So, if an old friend I know Drops by to say hello Would I still see suspicion in your eyes? Here we go again Asking where I’ve been You can’t see these tears are real I’m crying We can’t go on together With suspicious minds And be can’t build our dreams On suspicious minds Oh let our love survive Or dry the tears from your eyes Let’s don’t let a good thing die When honey, you know I’ve never lied to you Mmm yeah, yeah

Be it a relationship between Elvis and a lover, or between a company and it’s customer, relationships aren’t sustainable if you’re always wondering if the other’s been lying to you.

Trust is hard to earn, and even harder to earn back. Don’t make me suspicious, or I will walk out.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #28: Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what’s really going on inside the company.

Why is it that so many marketing initatives are designed around carefully constructed and controlled channels of communication?

Because everybody knows what everybody else is up to, thanks to the web. And worse: everybody thinks they know what everybody else is up to, thanks to the web.

Marketing and PR should not be damage control (that’s legal’s job, right?).

If something is going on inside your company that you’re worried about your customers knowing about, it shouldn’t be marketing’s job to keep that from spreading by obscuring it with a smiley marketing project.

Instead…maybe the company should stop doing that thing they don’t want their customers to know about?

I did not forget about this series, I swear. Going offline for 9 days has taken a bit harder toll on my workflow than expected, so I’m a few days behind.

My promise to you is to be back on track before the end of this week, hell or high water.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #18: Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

Changes and Opportunities

The internet has developed as an agent of change unparalleled in human history. The near-instant communication it provides to people all over the world is a more important change than even the Industrial Revolution. The internet is tearing down walls faster and faster every day:

• Citizen Journalism is reporting news faster and more honestly than the legacy organizations
• Consumer advocacy groups are creating online communities to discuss products and services
• E-mail communications can transmit a single message to millions in moments
• Amateur videographers are creating entertainment that reaches niche markets – or tens of thousands
• People are connecting in like-minded groups to pursue social agendas, commercial concerns, and education.

Consider the new tools

Twitter and its “private” counterpart, Yammer, enable a stream of instant chat, or “Tweets”. These tweets are snippets of information – what you are doing right now. Or what you are thinking about. Or sharing a link to something that you think is interesting.

In the previous post we discussed how Twitter became the focal point for the Motrin-mom fiasco. Twitter also became the clearinghouse for information about the “miracle on the Hudson”, with the very first photo made available online at TwitPic.

[via cnet] The rapid-fire spread of a close-up photo of the US Airways plane that crashed in the Hudson River Thursday resulted in the service that hosted the picture going down.

This photo, of the US Airways jet that crashed into the Hudson River Thursday, brought so much traffic to TwitPic that the site, which allows users of several mobile phones to post pictures to Twitter, saw its servers get overloaded.

(Credit: Janis Krums) TwitPic, an application that allows users to take pictures from their mobile phones and append them to Twitter posts, went down after at least 7,000 people attempted to view the photo of the airplane taken from a commuter ferry by Sarasota, Fla., resident Janis Krums. According to Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic, who still runs the service by himself, after the photo of the plane was re-tweeted by a large number of people and then picked up by several news sites, including Silicon Alley Insider, the resulting traffic was too much for the site’s servers.

Many of the most internet-savvy, and a large number of young people, are turning to social media for their news. As Mack Collier expressed just the other day:

Which of course led to a heated debate. A debate that is likely going on in the boardrooms of collapsing newspapers across the United States.

What do we do about these customers talking to each other?

The short answer is, “You need to get out there and talk to them, too.“

The long answer has a lot more to do with how you engage these customers, in order to gain their trust. As Searls and Weinberger wrote in Cluetrain Chapter 4: Markets are Conversations:

For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.

For a long time – nearly two generations – the sellers were in control of the conversation. The idea of a “spokesperson” came into being, that is, a person who spoke what the sellers wanted them to say. TV, radio, newspapers – all designed to push messages out to the buyers. Broad-based messages that told you, in effect, that you needed this product or service so that you could be just like everyone else. This was the seller’s ultimate goal: to create a market of uniform buyers that could be manipulated, whose behavior could be predicted, and whose money could be harvested.

Then the internet showed up and threw a monkey wrench into the mechanism.

What Marketing Departments need to know

Here are some thoughts on understanding the changes in methods of conversation:

1. Buyers want to talk to other buyers in order to share in the experience of your product or service. This is market research of the purest kind, the most valuable and the most unpredictable.
2. Sellers must learn to join in these conversations without coming across as bullies, or smarmy salesmen. Partners, parties to the discussion.
3. Sellers now have an opportunity to do something that has never been available before: to find and build a real relationship with their best buyers and advocates.

Don’t waste it.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #17: Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on TV are kidding themselves.

This thesis was true when it was written 10 years ago but for different reasons than it is today. The evolution of the marketspace is the biggest change in the worlds of (“big M”) Marketing and PR since the invention of television. The ubiquity of the internet generates the pre-condition for markets (read customers) to talk to each other for free. Once separated by geography, marketspaces are now connected in multiple ways in online communities.

Unsolicited feedback is the rule, not the exception

Corporations are still spending vast amounts of money on research, polling and “focus groups” but the thought-leaders are inviting their markets to provide this information, or better information, for free. On the other hand, as the “Motrin” and “The other white milk” episodes prove, companies can get vociferous and very public feedback whether they want it or not. (We will re-visit these social media firestorms again with Thesis #19)

The Social Media transformation continues

The marketspace is changing, the markets are changing, the customers have already changed. And changed again. Stay-at-home-moms used to be a special sort of target market, ripe for the broadly-cast TV advertising messages. They used to be bored and lonely. Today they represent a purchasing powerhouse that is one of the most interconnected groups in America. Social networking sites report that the SAHM groups are among the most active and most frequent users of the services. The SAHM groups, once isolated, are now spending a lot of time talking, sharing, and comparing information on every product and service available.

For more on this fascinating evolution, I recommend also reading a book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” . You can find out more about the book at the Groundswell blog. What Marketing Departments need to know

Here are the “secrets” to understanding the changes in marketspace:

1. Your market can now talk back, and to each other, in a way that was impossible during the TV era. 2. Your market is going to talk about your company, its products and services and policies, whether you like it or not – and you cannot control this discussion from the outside. 3. Your market wants a place to gather, to talk and ask questions and share answers. Give them that place or they will build their own.

As Alex wrote in Thesis #11:

…they trust each other WAY more than they trust your marketing department.

In my next post we will explore Thesis #18: how markets are now marketspaces, interconnected person-to-person virtual networks and the impact this has on Marketing.

I’ve spent the last 3 weeks working from Cluetrain theses to explain how online communities are conversing, with and without the companies they are conversing about.

While doing some more research for case studies, I came across a research report by the Online Community Research Network from March 2008. Less than a year old, I think it’s still relevant and extremely telling about the effects of the themes we’ve been discussing. Furthermore, like the Cluetrain Manifesto before it, it’s a quantitative prediction based on historical trends of things to come. I cannot tell from their website if they have more current reports than this one available, I’d love to see the results of the year to change.

Anyway, some relevant results from the report that relate directly to the Cluetrain.

One of the questions in the survey was: What were the 1-2 compelling sources of value from your community or social media efforts that you constantly communicate? The answers followed the themes below, which also include direct pull quotes from the survey responses. There’s some solid stuff in here.

1. Community helps problem solve faster and more efficiently than Customer Support, saving our company time and money: • “Customers are able to get faster response and answers to their problem utilizing the community over contacting Customer Support.” • “Knowledge share, and hence problem solving, is more efficient due to the community model.” • “The ROI on employee time devoted to the forums far exceeds the returns on the usual support methods.” 2. Availability of information and content for specific areas of interest: • “Niche communities, focused on specific areas of interest. Market leaders on-line and in print with high cross over traffic.” • “You won’t find this content anywhere else – written by our members to raise best practice within vendors.” 3. Increases site traffic / more engaged relationship with us: • “The more we invest into community, the more organic traffic we get.” • “Our community sites get more than 3 times the engagement for solutions, capabilities and use case content than our traditional sites.” • “Views of photo albums remain the most popular area of the community. Members may not wish to participate in discussions, but they do want to see photos of their events.” • “An online discussion moderated by subject matter experts that followed an in-person event with the same moderators achieved the most participation of any attempts to engage our users.” 4. Idea Creation / What we learn from members of the community: • “We will have the opportunity to get first hand feedback on products and ideas for improvements and enhancements.” • “We discovered some problem areas in usage and service adoption that caused us to change our materials and strategy.” 5. Lead Generation / Conversion: • “Converting contacts, acquaintances, and other informal relationships into donor relationships.” • “Converting contacts into activists and issue leaders.” • “When we enlist our community members to represent us physically or virtually, our reach and conversion metrics dramatically increase.” 6. People are saving time / building skills by using our site: • “People creating and building productive relationships with people that help them improve their practice or do their work better.” • “Our community members credit participation in our community with their increased skills in using our products.” 7. Build customer loyalty: • “Community members are more likely to volunteer their time, services, advice, and financial support than non-members.” • “Employees who belong to the community almost never ‘turn over’. They are consistently the best performers out in the stores.” • “Offering a community to your clients where they can speak to you and each other significantly increases customer loyalty.” • “More connected members spread the word and come back frequently.” • “If you want to understand your stakeholders and develop the relationships, you have to think in communities.” • “Online dialogue creates a more open environment that deepens trust and team work throughout the organization.” • “Research shows that customers in a community can have a sense of involvement with the company as long as we make sure they are heard and that involvement can lead to great loyalty.” • “Our community members are actively engaged with the brand and don’t hesitate to tell us what they like, and don’t like. They feel a real sense of ownership of the brand.” • “Our ability to personally communicate with future users of our product substantially influences their perception of our company.” 8. Online community is growing our membership base: • “Our blog has increased community participation by 80% over the past year.” • “We have doubled the size of our community membership in the last 6 months. 2 years ago, only 34% of our Company’s upsells and renewals were also members of the Community. In 2007, 75% of our upsells and renewals were Community members.”

So ROI is alive and well in Social Media…

And we see a solid reinforcement that Cluetrain theses are a driving force behind the value being noted.

For more details on this report, see Bill Johnston’s blog post.