Information marketing tip #something.
Always like for ways to disrupt patterns. People start paying attention when things are slightly off kilter. Slightly different than they expect.
If you go too far, they’ll be over-saturated and won’t be able to relate. If you don’t go far enough, they will be bored to tears and screen you out.
More marketing points.
“It’s not the quantity or the quality that determines influence, it’s the context.” In other words, it matters a lot less how many people look at your stuff or how hood it is as compared to the situation in which it’s made and distributed.
Let’s take a look.
I have a certain number of people who pay attention to me across the dozen or so Social Networks I belong to. This number is much small than an Internet celebrity like iJustine and much, much smaller than say…Lady Gaga.
Does that mean that if I switched out my readers for either of there fans it would automatically increase my clout?
Not likely and a little bit of applied intuition will tell you why.
Do people who happen to be interested in a Pop Star like Gaga also share a passion for esoteric ramblings about information culture? Maybe but not a whole lot of them. At best, a few people might be confused enough by a post title to click through, but they would pretty quickly realize that something had gone horribly wrong.
You could play this mixing and matching between one person’s fans and anothers all day and it would be rare indeed when you would come out with a combination that would actually help you reach a wider audience.
It’s not enough to have a lot of people puttering around your network, it’s not even enough to give them some kind of objectively “good” content to look at, the secret is to have the right people and show them the right content when they are ready to consume it.
Next to biases, the closest thing to a silver bullet a marketer can have is a profound understanding of self-interest.
If you understand what makes us make all the little selfish decisions that we ignore every day of our lives, you can find a way to get your product into the hearts and minds of your users.
Always be on the lookout for biases. Whether it is yours, your users or your societies. People feed on biases and they will devote vast blocks of their time to things that feed into them. This is probably some of the best and saddest information marketing advice I can give you.
A much shorter version of the last screed goes something like this:
Your willingness to try often, take chances, accept criticism and blaze your own trail is worth a Hell of a lot more in a world of me-to copies and content pollution than any half-cocked market analysis.
Fear of digression is core feature of modern man. We hate going “off topic,” because we think it’s not efficient and everyone knows that efficiency is really the only reason we should be communicating in the first place.
Marketers and Strategists, like myself, don’t help matters much. It’s our job to create neat little boxes out of intellectual chaos so that our clients can at least say something. What we’ve ended up doing is creating a world where people assume good, successful work can only exist if it exists within one of these boxes. It’s six sigma or bust in content town and if you want to argue about it I’ll be sure to throw you some bread crusts in the food stamp line.
As you may have been able to divine, this line of reasoning is a monumental load of bull hooey. Every really memorable piece of content, every interesting business, every successful creator has done well not because of how closely he has managed to match existing forms but because fundamentally he didn’t care one way or another about what anyone else was doing.
Successful creators aren’t the jaded artist types trying to recreate every tiny detail of the world in their own image, but they also aren’t the starched suit, pleated skirt corporate types who drone on about market size and value propositions. The people who end up truly changing things are those who understand the rules, why they are there, and when they should be used but aren’t so hamstrung by them that they aren’t willing to do something interesting and different.
They put themselves out there and leave it to the world to judge them.
I’m working on a project for Crossing Gaps (93 Studios), and it’s teaching me something about Twitter profiles. I’m looking for interesting people with a story to tell, and that means sorting through the thousands and thousands of potentially interesting people I follow around on Twitter.
What I’ve learned is that I have a deep, visceral distaste for certain kinds of Twitter bios, a reaction that I think a lot of people in my business share.
As it turns out if you have the words “Social Media Expert,” “SEO Pro,” or “Internet Marketer” without any other more personal descriptor I immediately, subconsciously lose interest.
“But why Steve?”
I know a lot of Search Engine Professionals, Affiliate Marketers, Social media people, and Internet Marketers and each and every one of the good ones knows that keywords describing your profession does not an effective bio make. There are thousands of marketers on Twitter, and while it’s nice to know what you do — if I don’t know why I should care about you in particular, I am going to move onto someone who makes that more clear to me.
Look at it this way, Twitter gives you 140 characters to describe who you are, get rid of anything I could read somewhere else.
I’m not one to give out marketing secrets because I don’t believe they exist. 97.56% of the hype around structured marketing tactics is just so much navel-gazing.
There is something that will help you market your product and I would put 2 to 1 that you know about it but haven’t put enough effort into making it a conscious part of your marketing efforts. It’s what helps people like Gary V, Chris Brogan, Jason Goldberg and just about everyone else who has stepped onto the web’s center stage.
It’s finding what you do, whatever that is, and doing it over and over again until the people you know, respect and want to reach can put words to it.
It’s why picking a place, setting up a soapbox and then being yourself outloud is the only bit of marketing advice I can stand behind 100%.
This point is relevant not only for marketers but for product designers of all stripes. You have to be epic, you have to do the “hard thing,” that someone else can’t or won’t do.
Your products are predictable. Your insights are recycled. You don’t bring surprise with you when you enter a room.
That’s why people are ignoring you.
Which used to be fine, because you could just buy attention for your brand or your company or your sales efforts. But that half-price sale on attention is now over.
