January 24th, 2012
I am fully committed to traveling light but this is ridiculous! Still, if you have a spare $250 burning a hole in your pocket how can you travel without them? Oh yeah, you’ll need shirts with French cuffs.
Polished Silver Oval WIFI and 2 GB USB Combination Cufflinks feature a 2GB of storage for all your must-have documents and presentations and a WiFi Hotspot, which opens your WiFi to multiple devices.
If you want a set, click HERE.
September 6th, 2011
When I started my business my father called my action “the confidence of ignorance.” I didn’t really know what I didn’t know so I held my nose and jumped right in. And with some long hours, perseverance, the hard work of lots of great people, and some good luck it turned out pretty well. Yet almost thirty years later it’s finally dawned on me that my dad was right – I often have no idea what I’m doing.
Do you?
Social media has become a critical part of our agency’s branding and marketing. I’m promoting my ad agency, my speaking, and my books on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and whatever new technology has emerged since I wrote this post. But I have no idea what I’m doing.
I blog about branding and marketing and my own personal opinion about what’s going on in those worlds. I post it all online and send it out to my mailing list and try to promote it on all the social media sites that’ll have me. But I have no idea what I’m doing.
I travel around the world speaking at conferences and corporate meetings and attend acting classes and speaking workshops to try to make my platform skills better. Even with all the time spent and experienced gained, I still have no idea what I’m doing.
I’m starting to shoot videos and produce podcasts about branding and marketing and post them on YouTube. I’m taking videos of speeches I’ve given and learning how to edit them in Apple’s Final Cut and sending them out online and on CDs. But I have no idea what I’m doing.
I wrote a couple books on branding and produced them with traditional publishers. Then I self-published the latest book and we distributed it ourselves. Finally, I wrote a novel called The Mouth of the South and didn’t even self-publish it, just uploaded it to Amazon as a Kindle book. But I have no idea what I’m doing.
We’re creating a new website, trying to make it as interactive, mobile-friendly and user-friendly as possible and all at the same time. But I have no idea what I’m doing.
When people ask me if they should promote themselves or their companies on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn; if they should blog, tweet, email or send handwritten letters; if they should shoot videos, record podcasts, write books, or speak at conferences; if they should offer discounts on couponing sites, or run ads on TV, radio, newspapers or billboards, my answer is a resounding “yes.” When they tell me they don’t know how to do it, I say, “don’t worry, I have no idea what I’m doing either.”
I’m not smart enough to figure out SEO and SEM. I don’t have enough time to respond to all the tweets I receive. I don’t like Facebook enough to really want to dive into it. I think I only use about 11% of the capabilities of Final Cut. And not one of my books has become a bestseller regardless of how much time, effort, and money I’ve spent on them.
Why not? Could it be because I have no idea what I’m doing?
My marathon times aren’t dropping, my harmonica playing’s not getting much better, and the TV show I’m trying to create isn’t rushing itself into production. You already know the reasons why. It’s because I have no idea what I’m doing.
Are you starting to see a pattern here? Have you gotten the message? As much as I’d love to use this page to brag about all the brilliant things I’m trying to accomplish I have no idea what I’m doing.
Do you?
I think that my feeling is the true zeitgeist of what’s going on today in the world of online marketing, new entrepreneurship, and personal development. Of course we can listen to the experts pontificate about whatever it is they know about, but just like the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, what they know and talk about is just a small portion of what’s really out there.
What I have in common with those experts is that they don’t have any idea what they’re doing anymore than I do.
They just do it anyway. And so do I. And, truth be told, so should you.
The key, as Nike taught us, is to “Just Do It.” Microsoft has built an enormous company around the notion of implementing first and perfecting later. Or as my dad also used to say, “There’s never time to do it right but there’s always time to do it over.”
So blog, post, tweet, self-publish, promote, and sell, to your heart’s content. And don’t worry if you don’t quite know what you’re doing. Why not? Because I have no idea what I’m doing, either.
June 13th, 2011
I was a kid back in the dark ages of transistor radios. If a friend told me about a cool new song, I’d tune in to WQAM and wait until they played what I was waiting for. Usually it would take an hour or more if the song was hot. While I waited I’d get my cassette recorder plugged in and loaded so I could tape the song. Invariably, I’d miss the beginning and inadvertently record my mom calling me for dinner over one of the verses.
Sometimes I had a little allowance money burning a hole in my pocket and wanted to order something from the ads on the back of my comic books – sea monkeys, say, or X-ray specs. I’d get my mom to write a check, put it in an envelope and root around for a stamp. Then I’d drop it in the mailbox and wait the four to six weeks the small print warned me about. I’d religiously check the mailbox every day after school but that didn’t make the package arrive any sooner.
Things are different today. When my daughter gets a text message about a great new band she has to hear, an MP4 file of the actual song usually accompanies the SMS. If not, she can go to YouTube or the iTunes store, download the song to her phone and listen to it right away.
If my son wants to buy something, he can simply order it online and have it Fed-Ex’d to him in a day or two. And while he waits he can track his package as it wings its way across the country. No one over 45 actually cares where the package is until it arrives in their hot little hands but younger consumers need to know when it’s in Tulsa, when it’s in Memphis, and when it’s on the delivery truck.
Of course if it’s a book he wants, he can just one-click order it on Amazon and have it transmitted to a Kindle, iPad, or laptop in less than 60 seconds.
These buyers are labeled by a lot of names these days, – Generation X, Generation Y, Echo Boomers, Millennials – demographic titles based on when they were born. But I think it would be more accurate to name them psychographically, based on the trait they all share: their instant gratification addiction. My genius friend David calls them The Instant On Generation – the hordes of people who have grown up with the “what have you done for me next” demands of digital technology and don’t know how to function in an analog environment.
Unfortunately for them, world events are conspiring to make things very difficult for Instant-ons. Thanks to the combined effects of a burgeoning world population, expanded financial opportunity in the under-developed world and the democratization of technology, there are more people on airplanes, more people in restaurants, more people consuming natural and man made resources, and more people traveling around the world than ever before. And while Instant-ons are perfectly happy to zoom along in their digital environments, finding their friends on FourSquare, making reservations on OpenTable, and communicating with each other 24/7 across Facebook and Twitter, the sheer number of people expecting immediate service in the carbon universe is an unscalable mess that slows everything down.
Before you start pining for the good old days, remember that things weren’t that fast before. It’s just that there were far fewer people clamoring for service and those people were way more willing to wait their turn. But older consumers didn’t grow up with the instant reward and response of videos games. They didn’t grow up with the instant gratification of flash frozen prepared foods heated in a microwave. And they didn’t grow up with a 24/7 communication device glowing greedily in their pocket.
Tomorrow’s consumer did, and tomorrow’s marketer is going to have to figure out how to successfully service people who live the lyrics to the Queen song: “I want it all and I want it now.”
Talking about today’s sped up world, Steven Wright said, “If you put instant coffee in a microwave you almost go back in time.” Funny thing is I don’t smell coffee. I smell opportunity. Specifically, how to make Instant-ons happy? An improved customer experience is one way: think Disney World’s line management techniques or the TSA security experience at Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport. Here in Miami, wealthy wannabe American Instant-ons can even hire people to stand in line for them at immigration.
But all of these solutions are just Band-Aids. The true moneymakers will be the ones who figure out how to reconcile Instant-ons’ digital expectations with analog reality.
March 28th, 2011
We’ve all heard the lies:
“The Mercedes is paid for.”
“I’ll call you in the morning.”
“I’m from the IRS and I’m here to help.”
“You may already be a winner.”
But lately, thanks to the brave new world of online marketing, I’ve heard five new ones that are worth considering before we fall for them.
1. The fundamentals don’t matter anymore.
2. The best pricing strategy is free.
3. To be successful, pursue your passion.
4. If you build it, they will come.
5. Content is king.
1. The fundamentals don’t matter anymore.
It seems like each time there’s a new boom, whether it’s real estate, IPOs or online businesses, this old trope gets rolled out. People think the fundamentals don’t matter because they’re looking at something revolutionary and how could something so new be predicted and controlled by something as old (and boring) as fundamentals?
Of course, while technology and opportunities are changing at lighting speed, what doesn’t change is how people react to these new phenomena. And so the same issues and problems resurface time and time again.
Bottom line? The fundamentals DO matter; that’s why they’re called fundamentals.
2. The best pricing strategy is free.
This lie is so counterintuitive that books have been written about it. And the strategy is so seductively simple: give things away to attract attention, build relationships and sell products. Unfortunately, what the authors of the “Free” books forget is that the people who take their advice actually need to earn revenue to survive. Like the World War I flying aces whose planes were shot at and spiraled gracefully down towards the ground where they inevitably crashed, the race to win the low price war finally ends with prices being so low that the sellers go out of business.
The ironic proof that this concept is hogwash? One of the first evangelists for this axiom, Chris Anderson, wrote the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. It lists for $26.99.
3. To be successful, pursue your passion.
This lie is not only untrue; it’s also cruel. But thanks to its siren call, lots of college students study subjects they have no chance of turning into careers and lots of professionals abandon their careers in order to pursue activities from which they have no chance of earning a living.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a design degree and I think it’s great to study the history of comparative religion or the modal chants of the Renaissance. I just don’t think it’s a particularly profitable endeavor. The ugly truth of many “passion” industries – music, art, filmmaking, etc. – is that you may make a fortune but you can’t make a living. Mike Rowe, the host of Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs presented a wonderful speech at TED on this very subject. You can watch it HERE.
The simple truth? If you want to be successful, don’t pursue your passion; pursue your customers’ passion.
4 . If you build it, they will come.
Way back when, in the nascent years of the Internet, posting a site was about all you needed to do to generate viewership. Every site was new and every concept was exciting. And the developers who incorporated viral recruiting, like the guys who built the site HOTorNOT.com, were able to attract millions of users and enormous valuations.
But today the web is crawling with websites. According to the Netcraft Web Server Survey, there were 266,848,493 sites as of December 2010. Over the last few months there has been an increase of 47 million host names and 7 million active websites, and we’re quickly closing in on over 300 million sites.
It’s not much better in the publishing world. Amazon alone offers almost 810,000 ebook titles to browse through. And as you know if you read my blog post last week, I added my own ebook to the list (as of Monday, March 28th, Mouth of the South has sold a whopping 21 copies, by the way), which will really put the count over the top.
Woody Allen might have said that “70% of success in life is showing up” but it’ll take a whole lot more effort than that to be successful these days.
5. Content is king.
Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, wrote a wonderfully prescient book titled Being Digital. Although it was published almost 20 years ago, it’s still a go-to guide for people who want to understand the online world.
One of Negroponte’s key points is that content is worth considerably more than distribution. As Negroponte points out, “the valuation of a bit is determined in large part by its ability to be used over and over again.” So Mickey Mouse is valuable because it can be produced in movies, printed on comic books, screened onto tee shirts, stamped onto lunch boxes and even formed into lollipops. Accordingly, way back in 1994 when Being Digital was written, “the market value of Disney was $2 billion greater than that of Bell Atlantic, in spite of Bell Atlantic’s sales being 50 percent greater and (its) profits being double.”
What Negroponte may not have thought about —back then in the dark ages of the Internet — is the incredible volume of content that’s been created, posted and repurposed across the ‘Net. And so his apocryphal line “Content is king,” is only true if it’s qualified that that content better be good, unique or compelling.
These lies are popular because they are grammatically symmetrical, comfortably instructive and because they appeal to our personal self interests. And thanks to today’s 24/7 news cycle hungry for endless bits information to report on, the lies are continuously repeated until they enter our collective consciousness.
Oh, and by the way, you know that money I owe you? Don’t worry, the check’s in the mail.
November 22nd, 2010
Each week that I post these articles I’m careful to include embedded links to the different subjects I talk about, so that while you read the blog posts you can click on the links (highlighted in blue) to learn more about the individual people or companies mentioned. While I have metrics that show how many people open my emails and how long they stay open, I have no idea how many of you actually click on the links.
To get the most out of this post, though, you really need to open the links, at least the first one that says, “click HERE.” Perhaps it’ll seem like a bother and take a little longer than usual but I promise the interactive exercise will be worth the effort.
Fellow art director Steve Saley turned me onto a terrific three-minute film called The Porcelain Unicorn. The film is the brainchild of American director and producer, Keegan Wilcox, the winner of the Tell It Your Way short film contest sponsored by Philips. To watch this wonderful film, click HERE. I’ll see you again in a few minutes. No, don’t worry about me, I’ll wait.
Welcome back. Was the film as good as I promised it would be? Besides being moved by the touching script and great storytelling, did you notice how beautiful the high-definition footage was? While Wilcox is clearly very talented, this filmmaker also had the benefit of great actors, lighting technicians, musicians, editors and prohibitively expensive professional equipment, right?
Not exactly.
The entire film was shot on the new Canon 35mm SLR with HD video, a $1,600 camera that looks exactly like the camera you carry on vacation! You can learn more about the camera by clicking HERE. You can even buy one at Amazon by clicking HERE.
This line of new Canons has been revolutionizing the filmmaking business. A slightly more expensive model, the 5D Mark II, was used to shoot the entire House season finale (and yes, you can read more about that HERE). As they say in the article, “May 17 (the date the finale airs), [is] the date when the grumpy doctor you wish you were and the snazzy camera you wish you owned will join forces on American network television.”
To quote late-night television, “But wait, there’s more…” This same Canon 5D was used to film behind the scenes at this year’s Emmy intro with Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Betty White, Jon Hamm and Kate Gosselin (to watch the sneak peak, click HERE). Not only that, but the segment was edited on a MacBook Pro with Final Cut Pro, the same type of laptop that this blog post was written on.
Moore’s law, first published in Electronics Magazine on April 19, 1965, states that technology (specifically semi-conductors installed on silicone chips) will double in power and halve in price every two years. Think about what this means for the future of creativity. Equipment expense, once a barrier for all but the most well heeled creative types, will no longer be a consideration. Soon, the next Bergmans and wannabe Hitchcocks will be able to create their visions with equipment that they might already have at home. And because Internet sites such as YouTube and Vimeo eliminate distribution expense, the process of creating and sharing high-quality content will become entirely democratic and open to all.
That means that the future started yesterday and the brave new world is already here. Creative expression is available to everyone at a very low cost and that everyone includes you. The time has come for you to write your great American novel, shoot your movie, produce your album or express yourself anyway you like. When you do, send me a link and I’ll post it right here for everyone to enjoy.
