Yes, the poos are tiny on their own, but together they make a mountain of poop and stain the landscape around them. So go make poop. Make poop that can be seen from space!
Update:
A better way to say it is that if you get enough people to do one small thing, the result will be unmissable. (thanks James, for cleaning up my metaphor)
If you’re the sort of person that reads this blog (just a wild guess) then you’re probably also the sort of person that couldn’t fail to hear about BBH’s Homeless Hotspots initiative in Austin. It’s been covered by, well, everyone.
It’s been fascinating to read all the articles and comments around it but if you have to pick one read this, as it gives a good balanced account.
When you read all this stuff it becomes clear that it is in the details where things go wrong. No one has a problem with the concept of homeless people being given the opportunity to ‘run a business’. It’s how it’s pulled off that makes people uncomfortable. In fact, it can symbolically be whittled down to this:
“the shirt doesn’t say, ‘I have a 4G hotspot,’” ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell points out. “It says, ‘I am a 4G hotspot.’”
I came to the same conclusion, within a couple of milliseconds of hearing the idea. (I also think the name doesn’t help — it places more value on catchiness than on tone)
To aptly adopt the language of the ad industry, you could say: well, that’s just the execution – the intention was good. The problem is that words like ‘execution’ don’t exist in the real world. Everything communicates. And the smallest gesture can convey the values of a deeper-rooted intention. Those small details become bigger than the ‘big idea’ itself, because they congeal in the hive brain of thousands of people, who duly amplify their message.
I’m not going to debate whether this was an altruistic or cynical stunt, but it’s a good reminder that the nuances of execution are more than mere details. We make marketing out of cultural building blocks and they must be handled with extreme care. Use blunt tools and you’ll make a blunt mark.
Saying sorry is tricky for businesses. Some people will tell you not to apologise too much, because it puts you in a weaker position, open to more criticism. Others will do that yucky, over-the-top fake-apologising that they think social media wants them to do. Smileys everywhere. You can be too chummy, too cold, not professional enough and so on. Tricky stuff indeed.
I got an email from Dreamhost today. And I think it’s a great example of getting the tone right. It admits failure without looking incapable, it is frank without being cold, it shows humanity, empathy and finishes with a positive, pro-active tone.
This is of course subjective. You could also argue that no tone of voice can resolve dented confidence – especially regarding security issues – but I still think there are lessons here in the broadest sense. Here’s the first part of the email:
Holy crap guys and girls.
Holy crap.
“NightmareHost” is a term that’s been thrown around by upset customers since the very beginning. Pick a name like DreamHost and you’re pretty much asking for it.
Sticks and stones, right? Not this time. This is the first month where we feel like we’ve actually earned the title. And we’re just as… nonplussed about it as you are.
January was a perfect storm of software deployment issues, critical networking hardware failures, and a security situation that prompted a large-scale password reset.
If you’d like to relive the magic of the last 30 days, January’s troubles were documented in great detail as-they-happened over on our system status blog:
This should not come as much of a surprise – even if you didn’t notice any problems with your site in January, the email we sent out to all our customers was hard to miss.
We let you down – of that we are acutely aware. All I can say is we’re sorry beyond words and we’re working on fixing things – a lot of things. We’re hopeful that once we come out on the other side we’ll again be that gleaming paragon of hosting excellence that you were supposed to be thinking of us as all along.
There’s really nothing funny about January. Sorry.
The good news is we’ve got lots to announce this month, so let’s get this show on the road.
Tina (Swiss Miss) talks about the importance of side projects.
I am completely with her and always have a side project or two going on myself (biting my lip to not talk about the next one to launch). One of the things I like about side projects is that you end up dealing with more of the creative/production process than you might in your day job (making the assumption that many of you work at agencies).
In my current side project, I am being a designer and a ‘community manager’ and content curator, and writer. I’m not brilliant at all these things, but you learn a lot trying. And you end up respecting the real experts more too.
It’s a question millions of marketers bore the hell out of each other with every day: How do we use social media to build up a community/following? Especially if we’re not a high-interest product.
Enter Shippam’s Paste. Their Twitter account proclaims to be the voice of their ‘social media EXECUTIVE [capitals] intern’. It’s juvenile, it’s riddled with bad grammar and its devoid of punctuation. And you know what, I find it quite hilarious, as do 6,237 people and counting.
Here’s an example of some of their recent tweets:
And the below tweet – which, by the way is a direct product-based call to action – received over 100 retweets.
Am I saying all brands should try to be irreverent in the hope that it gains followers? No. Because ‘brands’ don’t do things, people do. And it’s hard finding funny people that are capable of making others interested in them. Not to mention that not all brands would benefit from irreverence in the first place.
What I am saying is that this is clearly creating value for the brand (I’ve now heard of it) and yet this would never have been created off the back of any logical conversation. No formula, theory or rationale can ensure this kind of result – more likely it will kill it. No, it comes from creativity, braveness, imagination and an intimate understanding of the culture of social tools.
It frustrates me when people get seduced by shiny new stuff and ignore the important things. One of the biggest dangers in the digital age is the allure of perpetual novelty. There will never be another day when you can’t do something new. That’s exciting but also distracting.
This thought is captured nicely in a couple of quotes in Rework by the 37 Signals guys. This first one concerns companies’ unhealthy interest in change:
The things that don’t change are people and their motivations; feelings and spirit. Although I’ve never labelled myself such, I’ve always considered myself a ‘brand strategist’ of sorts — Sorry if you hate the word brand — A brand strategist in the sense that I’m interested primarily in finding a company’s soul and then living out its values in whichever forms feel appropriate.
Which is why I enjoyed this other quote from the book:
You can use all the fancy technology you want. But your tone needs to come from you. Technology won’t find your tone or your company’s soul. It might play some important roles in expressing and realising it, but the tone is in your fingers.
I bloody love words.
Sometimes a good writer (a proper one) can capture concepts better than anyone. I’ve found myself highlighting passages from books (fiction; novels) that ring true with my professional work/interests. I do this on my much-loved Kindle, which makes them easy to share. Which I’ll do now.
The below are from Terry Pratchett’s Lords & Ladies, which has nothing to do with marketing or brands and everything to do with elves, dwarfs and witches. But there are some beauties…
This first paragraph describes a witch’s inability to inhabit the collective mind of a swarm of bees. It reminded me of what it feels like to try and predict the group-action of a large audience:
“Bees were her one failure. There wasn’t a mind in Lancre she couldn’t Borrow. She could even see the world through the eyes of earthworms. But a swarm, a mind made up of thousands of mobile parts, was beyond her. It was the toughest test of all. She’d tried over and over again to ride on one, to see the world through ten thousand pairs of multi-faceted eyes all at once, and all she’d ever got was a migraine and an inclination to make love to flowers.”
On having the humility and empathy to work with the flow of others:
“When you’re a cork in someone else’s stream of consciousness, all you can do is spin and bob in the eddies.”
On the danger of ‘intelligence’ – in this case of a wizard with some cognitive flaws:
“He had quite a powerful intellect, but it was powerful like a locomotive, and ran on rails and was therefore almost impossible to steer.”
A very short highwayman reminds us how important it is to frame things in the most positive way for people:
‘I wouldn’t like you to think of this as a robbery,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to think of it more as a colourful anecdote you might enjoy telling your grandchildren about.’
On semantics and the danger of accepting old definitions:
“The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake – if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.”
I quite enjoy doing this. You may hear more of these from other books.
Last week we posted a playful recruitment ad for a copywriter and we’ve been blown away by the response. (15,000 search results and 792 tweets in just a few days) I won’t bang on about it because it’s unattractive, but in social media terms it ‘went mental’.
When things ‘go mental’, they energise you and I’m excited to read the entries (we have 35 already), but it could have been a very different story.
When we found out Laura was leaving us, it totally demotivated us. It had taken ages to find her. We had already created and built a bespoke ad, gone through 30 applications and interviewed 8 people (two of them twice). And then she left after about 5 weeks.
The idea of going through all that again destroyed us. Or almost did.
I’m a firm believer that the smartest way to deal with negatives is to turn them into positives and this experience has cemented that belief. Negative energy is still energy. The question is what do you do with it. It reminds me of improv comedy. The cardinal rule is to keep things moving forward. No matter what happens around you, you have to go with it (if someone tells you you’re a transvestite who is sexually aroused by ice cream, then you are!) If you fight against it you arrive at a standstill. And standstills are the most demotivating of all.
Instead we find ourselves energised by the enthusiasm people have shown and we will interview the next batch of copywriters invigorated and excited.
This is the best thing I’ve read that explains why you can’t predict the results of your marketing campaign or ‘branded utility’:
“You cannot even reliably predict the next move in a chess game. Why? Because the ‘system’ involves more than the rules of the game.”
Your campaign is a tight, finite system (involving motivations, interactions, ‘channels’ etc) but it overlaps with many other systems (mechanical and social). Your little ‘chess game’ does not describe the edges of the playing field. All you can do is create a game compelling enough to feed into – and from – greater, more meaningful systems and relationships.
I’m reading Alone Together. Mainly because I saw Russell was reading it. And anything that feeds his mighty brain must be worth a squizz. (Is that creepy?)
Anyway, I’m half way through, and squizz-worthy it is. My favourite bit so far is the below. The two quotes are describing teenagers’ usage of social networks. But it perfectly describes how brands are dealing with the social space too. Have a read and think about your brand or company. In fact, I’ll even bastardise the words to help:
“These young people [companies] are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection: always on, and always on them. [...] They nurture friendships on social-networking sites and then wonder if they are among friends. They are connected all day but are not sure if they have communicated.”
It gets better:
“Their digitized friendships—so often predicated on rapid response rather than reflection—may prepare them, at times through nothing more than their superficiality, for relationships that could bring superficiality to a higher power.”
Boom. ‘Bring superficiality to a higher power’. Let that be a warning. A superficial approach to engagement does not become less superficial just because it lives in a potentially more intimate environment. ‘Connection’ does not equate to meaningful affiliation. Which also means more data does not (necessarily) equate to more meaningful measurement.
