Seth's Blog

The Long Tail and the Dip

When you launch a new product or service, you have a choice.

It's tempting to go for the bestseller list, to create a mass market hit. This is the box labeled 1 on the tail above. Everyone wants to be here. It's where ego meets profit. A home run. Pixar lives in box 1.

In order to have a bestseller, you must reach the unreachable. Most of the people who buy a bestselling book buy no other book that month, or even that year. The very nature of the top of the list is that you're reaching not just the frequent purchasers and the passionate, but those that only show up for the hits.

The second pocket is labeled, conveniently, #2 (not because it's second best, merely because it's the second one I'm mentioning). This is the profitable, successful niche product. Roger Corman's horror movies, say, or Vandersteen's $3,000 stereo speakers. Not a product for everyone, certainly, but among those that care and are choosing to pay attention, a fantastic choice.

The reason you can make money in the niche pocket is that it costs far less to compete here. First, because there's less competition and the competition is less fierce, and second because it's cheaper and easier to reach your target market because they're choosing to pay attention.

There's a spectacular amount of overhead associated with a mass market hit. You need to buy shelf space and hype and promotion and noise in order to momentarily have a shot at stardom. If you don't push your way into this arena, you'll be ignored.

The third pocket is to own the long tail, to make a small royalty on a huge range of products. That's CDbaby and iTunes and the Garrett Wade tool catalog.

And The Dip? The Dip really kicks in when you're comparing the first pocket to the second.

If you want to compete with all of those folks shortsighted enough to shoot for the big win, you need to invest a great deal of time and money. And very few make it through the Dip... there are far more movies like Speed Racer than Iron Man. Speed Racer got stuck in the trough. It wasn't the best in the world, it wasn't the one the masses chose to see, it lost. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent, but not enough time or talent invested to get through the Dip.

When the masses went to see a movie in June of 08, they had a choice. Naturally, they chose to see the movie that was the best available, the one they wanted to see the most. If you're the third best choice, you lose.

The alternative? The makers of Speed Racer could have spent less money and made a movie aimed at pocket 2, a niche movie where they could have easily made it through the Dip, easily overwhelmed competition for that niche, easily become the best in that world.

Bruce Lee wasn't the best movie star in history. But he was the best kung fu star in history. Different dip.

The most common misconception about Long Tail thinking is that if you don't succeed at pocket 1, don't worry, because the tail will take care of your product and you'll just end up in #2. That's not true. #2 isn't a consolation prize for mass market losers. Mass market losers are still losers. In order to become a mass market star you make choices about features and pricing and quality--and if you lose that game, there's no reason to believe that those choices are going to pay off for a different market.

The long tail doesn't offer a consolation prize. Instead, the wide selection (in every market, not just digital ones) is a collection of smaller long tails, each with its own dip, each with its own winners (and losers). Pick the biggest market you can successfully dominate, the biggest slice where you can get through the Dip and be seen as the best in that world.

There it is again

Chris Anderson of Wired had the insight and guts to discover one of the two most important natural laws of the Net, give it a name, explain it and teach it to the rest of us. The Long Tail is a natural law, the sort of thing that just keeps showing up. Every time I crunch a set of numbers, every time I examine something happening online, I see it again.

(The other one? Metcalfe's Law, which explains the network effect. It's sort of like the long tail, but flipped in the mirror. The more people who connect to a network, the more it's worth--squared. Facebook and fax machines are both network effect businesses).

A lot of people don't seem to understand a key implication of the long tail: Given the choice, it's better to make a hit.

If you have a choice of cutting a top 10 record or making a track of Jamaican polka music for iTunes, go for the hit.

If you have a choice between being on page 30 of the Google results for "Bolivian sushi" or the number one match for "buy life insurance", go for the latter. No brainer.

The problem, of course, is that you don't have a choice. You can give the hit a shot, but it's awfully crowded at that end of the curve.

The implications of the long tail have nothing to do with this false choice. What it explains in a powerful but subtle way is:

1. Collecting many many products among the tail permits you to amalgamate a market that may be just as big or bigger than the short head. But you need a lot of them. Squidoo is my proof--a profitable site with no real short head. So are eBay and YouTube and dozens of other places. Which is going to be worth more in ten years: the leaky boat of a network TV franchise or the relentlessly growing collection of long tail video at YouTube?
2. Within the long tail, there are micro long tails. The long tail permits entirely new micro-markets to emerge (exercise clothing, for example) and within that market there are hits and then the tail. It's sort of a fractal curve of new markets living within markets. (Simple example: Amazon enabled an entire eco-system of books on presentations and graphics to emerge).

Aside: In the last few weeks, I've gotten a ton of email about an article in the Harvard Business Review and a companion slash piece in Slate about the Tail. A professor tried to poke some holes, and in my opinion, missed the entire point. The long tail is so clearly a force that the real work is in refining the definitions and expectations of those that are affected by it.

If you don't want to get email

...don't send email.

If you send a note to 100 or 1000 customers/clients/prospects/shippers/parents (whatever), be sure to give people a way to reply! I think this is especially important for small organizations or small subsets of lists... Amazon and eBay and others get a bit of a pass.

If it's important enough for you to send to me, it may be important enough for me to write back.

I know it's horribly expensive and inconvenient to work your way through the replies, but aren't the replies exactly what you need to see? What an opportunity.

Email is medium all onto itself. It's the only medium where the human voice appears the same whether it's 'live' or 'recorded' and where there's an expectation that all interactions are two-way.

Here's what you do:

1. Send the email to your permission list, an announcement that's anticipated, personal and relevant.

2. Set up a "reply to" that's a different address.

3. In the email, at the bottom, give people a web address where they can go to give feedback, or give them an email they can write to that will be read by a real person.

4. If they hit reply, the replyto will automatically send the note to the right person.

Getting rigorous about viral video

Mike has a fascinating post categorizing many of the most viral videos of our time.

When a field gains steam, it seems as though everything is sort of random or magical (what does McDonald's have in common with Delmonico's? Not much). While Mike's categories might not resonate with you, I think it's a fascinating place to start the analysis.

Should small businesses whine?

I bought some clothes from a merchant via Amazon. The company that I ordered from shipped the wrong item. I sent it back and was told it will take three or four weeks to process my return. A month!

I wrote back, asking why it would take so long. The response, "Thank you for your inquiry. To answer your question we are NOT an big company like Amazon we are actually a small company, That is why it does take us a little longer than others."

Of course, you'd think a small company could be faster. More important, you'd think the company would realize that I couldn't care a whit about how small they are... I just want good service.

If your small company can't deliver a better experience (in areas people care about) than a big one, why on Earth should someone do business with you? I'm not saying you must have faster service, a bigger website, lower prices and twenty-four hour a day phone support. I'm saying that for some of your customers, you have to be monstrously, demonstrably, better.

The web is a great equalizer. A tiny business can have a better website than a huge one. A tiny business can do better customer support than a big one. A tiny business can write a better newsletter than a big one. Maybe not for everyone, but everyone is for the big companies. The passionate minority is happy to embrace the small company. As long as they focus and don't whine about it.

Small is a weapon, not an excuse.

Scarcity

One day, you may be lucky enough to have a scarcity problem. A product or a service or even a job that's in such high demand that people are clamoring for more than you can make.

We can learn a lot from the abysmal performance of Apple this weekend. They took a hot product and totally botched the launch because of a misunderstanding of the benefits and uses of scarcity.

First, understand that scarcity is a choice. If you raise your price, scarcity goes away. If your product is going to be scarce, it's either because you benefit from that or because your organization is forbidden to use price as a demand-adjustment tool. I'm going to assume the former. (But I riff a bit on the latter toward the end)

Why be scarce?

• Scarcity creates fashion. People want something that others can't have.
• Lines create demand. People want something that others want.
• Scarcity also creates word of mouth, because people talk about lines and shortages and hot products.
• And finally, scarcity drives your product to the true believers, the ones most likely to spread the word and ignite the ideavirus. Because they expended effort to acquire your product or service, they're not only more likely to talk about it, but they've self-selected as the sort of person likely to talk about it.

The danger is that you can kill long-term loyalty. You can annoy your best customers. You can spread negative word of mouth. You can train people to hate your scarcity strategy (Apple did all four this weekend).

Take a look at the guy in the photo. That's the goal. He feels great. He's a hero, at least for a moment, all because he stood in line all night. He gets to talk about it and others (not everyone, but enough) aspire to be him next time. You reward the tribe and you build the tribe at the same time.

The problem is that our kneejerk way of dealing with scarcity is to treat everyone the same and to have people 'pay' by spending time to indicate their desire.

Waiting in line is a very old-school way of dealing with scarcity. And treating new customers like old customers, treating unknown customers the same as high-value customers is painful and unnecessary.

Principle 1: Use the internet to form a queue. If you have a scarce product, you almost certainly know it's scarce in advance. Instead of taxing customers by wasting their time, reward the early shoppers by taking orders online. A month before sale date, for example, tell them it's coming. If you sell out before ship date, that's great, because next time people will be even quicker to order when they hear about what you've got. (And you can do this in the real world, too--postcards with numbers or even playing cards work just fine.)

A hot band that regularly sells out on the road, for example, could put a VIP serial number inside every CD or t-shirt they sell. Use that to pre-order your tix.

Principle 2: Give the early adopters a reward. In the case of Apple, I would have made the first 100,000 phones a different color. Then, instead of the buyer being a hero for ten seconds, he gets to be a hero for a year.

Principle 3: Treat different customers differently. Apple, for example, knows how to contact every single existing customer. Why not offer VIP status to big spenders? Or to those that make a lot of calls? Let them cut the line. It's not fair? What's fair mean? I can't think of anything more fair than treating the people who treat you well, better.

Principle 4: When things happen in real time, you're way more likely to screw up. One of the giant advantages of the Net is that you can fix things before the whole world notices. Try to do your rollout in small sections, so you can fix mistakes before you hurt the very people you're trying to embrace.

Principle 5: Give your early adopters a forum to celebrate. A place to brag or demonstrate or show off or share insights and ideas. Amplify the heroes, which is far better than amplifying the pain of standing in line.

Imagine what the Apple and AT&T stores would have been like this weekend if they were filled with happy customers who had pre-paid, pre-registered and were just dropping in for three minutes to pick up their (very coveted) phones, walking up the VIP line, past all the others just waiting for a chance to buy one...

Hot restaurants in New York violate all five of these principles on a regular basis. So do sports teams and stores that have lines out front in the middle of winter. What a waste.

Even colleges do it. They pretend they've got a meritocracy, but in practice, it's a high-pressure lottery with enormous financial and stress overhead involved.

Yes, there are times when scarcity is mandated (the TSA at airports, for example, or food rations at an emergency site). I know that there are plenty of ways to deal with this scarcity as well. Ways to treat your customers (and yes, they are customers) with more respect, to communicate the situation more clearly and to architect the environment so that people are grateful, not stressed out.

Smart marketers understand that scarcity (intentional or not) is a tool, one that can be used to enhance the story, not detract from it.

What do you do when your systems break?

If you want to enrage customers, just sit idle while they rage against a broken system at your organization.

Someone shipped me a package from Indiana more than two weeks ago. UPS shipped it to my old address, mis-sorted it, shipped it back to Indiana, mis-sorted it before returning it, shipped it back to NY, mis-sorted it, shipped it back to Indiana, mis-sorted it, shipped it back to NY (I'm not making this up and I'm not exaggerating) and yes, it's now on it's way back to Indiana. Maybe.

There have been a dozen phone calls by the shipper and myself to UPS. And every time, the agent and the supervisor insist that there is nothing they can do and that all the correct buttons have been pushed. When pressed, they acknowledge that something appears broken, but "my hands are tied."

Stuff happens in every organization that has a system. You can't eliminate it. The question is: what do your people do when they see 'broken.' What do you encourage/permit them to do?

I'd install a BROKEN button. When you hit it, you can do anything and everything to fix the problem. Train people when to hit the button and then trust them to do the right thing.

Worth a click

A terrific post on how to write stuff worth reading.

A nicely laid out (always use landscape for ebooks) ebook about ideas that spread.

A different way to do pricing online, starting to realize the vision that the Internet is not just an expensive cash register.

A different way to think about your site's help page.

And finally, a clever idea about interacting with customers, particularly for b2b sellers.

Bar graphs vs. Pie charts

Compare!

The bar graph is read left to right and seems to imply something about the declining relevance of Billygoats (even though close inspection shows that we expect high growth in billygoats next year). There's data here, but no information.

The pie chart contains far less data, but the point is obvious: Trolls are where we should focus our energy.

That's why you use it. It makes an obvious point and leaves no real room for discussion. I think discussions are great, but that's not why you are doing a presentation.

I stepped on the toes of many data presentation purists yesterday, so let me reiterate my point to make it crystal clear: In a presentation to non-scientists (or to bored scientists), the purpose of a chart or graph is to make one point, vividly. Tell a story and move on. If you can't be both vivid and truthful, it doesn't belong in your presentation. (I can think of dozens of good uses of bar graphs... they're not forbidden, they're just overused and misused).

The three laws of great graphs

If you use graphs in your Powerpoint presentations, I hope you'll follow these three simple principles.

1. One Story
2. No Bar Charts
3. Motion

ONE STORY
The only reason (did I mention only) to use a chart in a presentation is to make a point. If you want to prove some deep insight or give people textured data to draw their own conclusions, DON'T put it in a presentation. Put it in a handout. Give them a URL with a spreadsheet at the other end.

No, the reason you put a chart in a presentation is to tell a story. A single story, one story per chart. "Oh," the attendee says, "our costs are going through the roof!" Or, in the case of the picture here, "Oh boy LA and Florida are in big big trouble."

There is no room for nuance here. You don't have nuance in the other parts of your presentation, and it doesn't belong here.

If the facts demand nuance, don't use a graph, because you won't get nuance, you'll get confusion.

NO BAR CHARTS
Bar charts are dramatically overrated, primarily because they're the first choice in many graphing programs.

The problem with bar charts is that they should either be line/area charts (when graphing a change over time, like unemployment rates) or they should be a simple pie chart (when comparing two or three items at the same scale).

[I know full well that pie charts are not rigorous and often misused. My point is that if you need to show slight differences or many bits of data, you probably don't want a chart at all.]

The correct use of a bar chart is to show how several items change over a period of time. This, of course, demands nuance.

MOTION
Here's the surprising one: You should animate your charts.

It's simple: create two slides. The first one shows where the data used to be, the second one, on the same axes, shows where it is or where it's going. Motion.

Establish the first slide. Make your point about your source and its validity. Then press the advance button. Boom.

There are 314 principles for good graphs and charts. But these three laws will take you far.

The limits of meta

Blogging about blogging, writing about writing, documentaries about documentaries, songs about songwriting...

It's tempting to use a medium to write about the medium.

It works for a while, but there's a limit. Pretty quickly, you hit a natural ceiling and you won't be able to go any further. The most obvious trap online: websites that make money by teaching you about making money by using the web.

How to make everyone happy

Greg sent me an article about a bridge in Folsom. $117 million spent, it needs a name.

How about "Johnny Cash"? He's famous, he made Folsom famous, he's dead, his daughter said yes, he has fans, they need tourists... you get the idea.

City Council votes 4 to 1 against.

The two key money quotes:

“Why would we promote a prison? We are known for a lot more things than the prison.”

and my favorite:

In regards to the Folsom Lake Crossing name, King said “just about everybody I’ve talked to is happy.”

Here's the takeaway: If you are willing to satisfy people with good enough, you can make just about everybody happy. If you delight people and create change that lasts, you're going to offend those that hate change in all its forms. Your choice.

Let me see

Mark Brooks had a Kindle idea which got me thinking:

1. Let me see the percentage of people who have bought a book and actually finished reading it. (The Kindle knows, right?) Even better, let me see Kindle books that are finished by people who finish books that I finish!
2. Let me see a map of my town with the location of pedestrian accidents highlighted by color.
3. Give me a listing of all the houses in my city sorted by (value of house/taxes paid). That would go a long way to bringing equity to the assessment system.
4. Sort restaurants on Open Table by the percentage of reservations booked by returning diners.
5. Sort Facebook invitations in order of how many times someone has been unfriended.
6. Sort credit card offers based on data from Mint or Wesabe... show me the credit cards with the fewest bankruptcies/financial troubles among recipients first.
7. Sort corporate email by how many people in my company have indicated that a sender is important.
8. Let me see stocks ranked in order of recent purchases by successful investors.
9. Let me review bids from builders ranked in order of complaints filed or the length of time between first application for a building permit and finished building.
10. Let me see potential online dates sorted by how frequently (or infrequently) the person goes on first dates.
11. Sort car models by crash and repair data.
12. Let me see my salesforce ranked by closing rate or cold call rate or customer satisfaction.
13. Let me see my inbound call data by hour, sorted by number of rings before answer, or by percentage of calls unanswered.
14. Let me sort my customer service requests by customer value. (Including loyalty, purchases and referrals).
15. Let me choose a doctor by malpractice suit rate.
16. When I watch TV online, recognize the pundit and flash historical accuracy rates on the screen while she talks.
17. Blank out comments on posts that agree with my point of view.
18. Highlight the floor of the trade show and let me see which paths are walked the most. Or give me glasses that let me follow in the footsteps of people I admire. Or let me walk on paths no one else is walking on.

I guess I'm talking about passive contributions of public behavior information to traditionally-sorted data.

Wikipedia gets fictional

The biography of George Costanza is five times as long as that of Tim O'Reilly.

As Wikipedia matures, there are hard decisions to be made about depth and breadth. Shouldn't Tim's entry be many pages long? He's one of the great thinkers of our time. If IBM and Jones Soda get entries, why not your brand (or my old summer camp, which was ruthlessly deleted)?

Most serious web users realize that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. Above the echelon of casual editors are more serious volunteers who set standards, delete articles and argue with each other about what belongs and what doesn't. There's an entire cadre of deletionists who want fewer articles of higher quality, while there are others that would choose to embrace the long tail and create a freeer environment. The seeswaw arguments make for entertaining discussion but it can be hard to predict what will happen on any given day.

SEO rewards Wikipedia, and well it should. Most searchers who end up there are pretty happy with that result. But as we get further and further into Googleworld, who decides what's worthy?

A consistent rule on Wikipedia has been to rely on edited print publications (the mainstream media) as well as physical or unchanging materials (like the DVD of a TV show). This made sense five years ago, but as the world abandons print reference (which Wikipedia largely relies on for verification), are we biasing the entries in favor of Abraham Lincoln (plenty of printed facts available) and TV series characters (we can prove that George worked for Vandalay Industries)?

Another rule has been a taboo on self-promotion (which is smart), but it runs headlong into the issue of completeness and relevance. If you know or like Tim (or me or your company), you're more likely to invest the effort to write about him. And you're certainly more likely to have access to the interesting and relevant facts. This rule gets bent all the time, but again, it's rarely made crystal clear.

There's no right answer, of course. But "no answer" isn't an answer either. Not for a site with this much power and this much potential. [I re-edited this post for clarity].

Two seconds

Sometimes, busy people need to remind themselves (and us) how busy they are by shaving off the last two seconds of what would otherwise be a pleasant interaction.

At a restaurant yesterday, the maitre d, who is paid to be busy, looked up our name in the reservations book and then said, "over there against the wall," while he pointed. He repeated this approach with at least three other parties.

How much longer to say, "Welcome, we'll be ready for you in just a second. Would you mind waiting over there please?" Amazingly, saying that while smiling takes precisely the same amount of time.

I know you're busy, so I'll keep this short... if you're going to interact, spend a few extra beats to be calm and gracious. It's hard to overstate how much better everyone will feel and how much more productive you'll become as a result.

Joining the luck parade

Some businesses seem to be really lucky. Some careers, too.

They have good things happen, things that push them along, that change the game in a positive way.

If you think about parades, one thing that's clear is that marching bands get invited to parades a lot more often than chiropractors do.

Bear with me for a second.

If your goal is to be invited to a parade, it sure helps to be in a marching band. Your chiropractic firm might, just might, be invited to be the grand marshal or something, but in general, it helps to be in a parade-friendly line of work.

Well, just like parades for July 4th or Flag Day, there's a luck parade. And some organizations are just better suited for this opportunity than others. If your business plan includes the phrase, "and then we luck out," or "and then we become fashionable" or "and then the market embraces this idea," I sure hope you're organized for that.

There used to be a luck parade in Hollywood, but then too many people showed up and the odds plummeted. A few years ago, there was a luck parade in Silicon Valley, because Sand Hill Road was so eager to hand out venture funding. Today, good fortune seems to be smiling on quirky visions and those willing to self-publish.

Luck isn't predictable, but it tends to come in packs.

Two simple web businesses

The world needs fixed-price web podiatrists.

Podiatrists, not doctors.

Doctors do surgery and prescribe expensive drugs and stuff. Podiatrists can just make it easier to get around.

So, a pretty smart web-savvy person could have a checklist of fifty items and work her way through a corporate website. She could come back with a simple, easy to execute list of things worth changing:
--put USA above Afghanistan on your country pull down list
--make it so clicking on your logo takes me back to your home page
--the font is too small on this page and it's hard to read
etc.

Low hanging fruit, stuff that doesn't need approval from the CEO to fix. Maddening idiosyncracies, worth the few minutes it takes to fix them.

Second gig: Web analytics pro. Someone who can, for a generous hourly fee, set up analytics for a website and do weekly reports (by email) that are actually useful and actionable.

$200 an hour is totally reasonable for work like this. It's worth ten times that when it's done right. We're talking about optimizing an AdWords campaign that returns millions of dollars in profit.

Of course there are people who already know how to do this. The question is: can it be marketed as an easy thing, a simple sale, a matter of course...

Neither will make you rich. Either might open doors for your next step in life.

Who vs. how many

Scoble has a great post about a 14 year old kid with 45 million viewers on YouTube.

45 million! He wins. You lose. You won't have more traffic than he will. Ever.

And what about your ads? Are you busy sponsoring sites that have less traffic than he does? Sure you are. Why? I thought it was all about reaching the masses...

Well, since you're over that now, since you realize that "how many" is not nearly as valuable as "who", why not put that into practice?

Just because something is easy to measure doesn't mean it's important.

The statesman, the lawyer and the marketer

There aren't so many statesmen. People who speak truth to power. Leaders who describe what they see, whether or not it serves their short-term interests. They say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done, as long as it serves the long-term needs of their constituents. No wonder we like them so much.

Lawyers are sworn to be advocates. It's their duty. They take a side and they argue it. They're not supposed to tell the truth, they're supposed to argue a point of view.

Guess who has a better reputation?

Which leads us to marketers. Have you noticed that most of us act like lawyers?

Perhaps, just perhaps, someone would be better off with a competitor's product instead of yours. Or perhaps the world doesn't really need what your factory just rolled out. If you're a lobbyist, it's hard to act like a statesman and keep your job. Or if you're a pharmaceutical sales rep. Or a PR firm. Or a brand manager at a software company.

Marketing culture has become a culture of lawyers. Apparently, marketers are now advocates sworn to argue on behalf of a client.

This attitude leads to spam (hey, it's not against the law and it helps my client) and to dicey product claims and to awful side effects like obesity, shoddy products and massive debt. If your job is to represent a product and ensure its short-term sales, that's exactly what you're sworn to do.

I believe that anyone, regardless of situation, deserves the best possible lawyer. Our advocacy-based justice system depends on it. But does every product, service and organization deserve the best possible marketer?

What happens when marketers stop arguing on behalf of their corporate or organizational client and start arguing on behalf of the customer instead? What happens when marketers become statesmen?

This is a very practical hypothetical question I'm asking.

When a sales rep says, "You know, after hearing your situation, I think you'd be a lot better off with my competitor's product instead, here's her number," it actually creates positive word of mouth and long-term growth. When a brand manager says to the product development people, "I'm not proud of this design, we're not going to market it, so you better make something else," it actually creates market share growth. And when a CEO says to Congress, "Our industry relies on chemical X and we're going to keep using it as long as our competitors do, so please ban it," she creates a long-term path to stability and growth.

The lawyer works with constituents who fully expect him to be an advocate. The judge, the clients and the jury (hopefully) understand that he is making a case, not telling the truth.

Marketers work in a different world. As marketing has transformed from a specialized subset of business to a ubiquitous element of society, marketers still have the chance to be believed. But trust belongs to statesmen, not lawyers. People don't say, "I trust her, she's the lawyer for the other side."

The real question, I guess, is this: who's your client?

When you least expect it

I sent in a t-shirt order to customink a few weeks ago.

Three days later, I got a note from someone named Lori that said,

"Hi Seth,

I noticed that you have designed shirts that appear to be for a charity event. If that’s the case, CustomInk would love to make a small donation to your team or to the charity itself on your behalf.

Please let me know if your order is for one of these events. If you would like us to pitch in and support your cause, please include information about your charity event, a link if you have one or the organization’s name if there is no link to a team web page."

That's it. No policy, no standard operating procedure, no promise in advance. Just plain generosity.

It turns out that customink does this as a matter of course, regardless of whether the customer has a blog or not. They don't do it as an inducement, they just do it.

Formula: The value of a perk is inversely related to the expectation of that perk.

Bravery and Wall-e

At every turn, Pixar messed up the marketing of their new movie. It has a hard to spell name, no furry characters, not nearly enough dialogue (the first 45 minutes is almost silent), no nasty (but ultimately ridiculous) bad guy, hardly any violence and very little slapstick. Wall-e didn't get a huge Hollywood PR campaign or even a lot of promotion, it doesn't feature any hot stars and as far as I can tell, the merchandising options are quite limited.

Can you imagine the meetings?

Can you imagine the yelling?

Pixar, recently purchased by Disney, could crank out multi-billion dollar confections. They know all the moves, they have the chops to create merchandising powerhouses. And with just one movie a year, they certainly must have been under huge pressure to do just that.

And yet, instead, they make a great movie. A movie for the ages. A film, not 90 minutes of commerce.

The irony, of course, is that they'll make plenty of money. Bravery often pays off, even if paying off is not your goal. Especially if that's not your goal.

Marketing isn't always about pandering to the masses and shooting for the quick payoff. Often, the best marketing doesn't feel like marketing at all.

The magic of low-hanging fruit

Imagine that half the cars in the US get 10 miles per gallon. And half get 40 miles per gallon. Further stipulate that all cars are driven the same number of miles per year.

Now, you get one wish. You can give every low-mileage car a new set of spark plugs that will increase fuel efficiency by 5 mpg, up to 15. Or you can replace every 40 mpg car with a car that gets 75 mpg, an increase of 35 miles for every gallon driven.

Which is better?

It turns out that the 5 mpg increase is far better for overall mileage than the 35 mpg increase, even though it's smaller both as a percentage and absolutely. That's because the 10 mpg hogs use up so much gas. They're the low-hanging fruit, not just easy to fix, but worth fixing.

As marketers, we're tempted to tweak the already tweaked, to turn the 100 to 101, to optimize for the peak performances. That long tail is very long, though, and if there's a way you can raise the floor (instead of just focusing on the ceiling) you may be surprised to discover that it can have a huge impact.

Simple example: It's way more profitable to encourage each of your existing customers to spend $3 than it is to get a stranger to spend $300. It's also more effective to get the 80% of your customer service people that are average to be a little better than it is to get the amazing ones to be better still.

How to organize the room

One more post about conferences. (Except it's really about any meeting).

Easily overlooked, but incredibly important: the way you arrange the room where people speak.

The venue owner (hotel/convention center) wants something easy. Your boss wants something cheap. You want something tried and true so you don't get blamed. The end result? Mediocrity. Boring sameness. What a wasted opportunity.

In the scheme of things, a great room at a conference is a bargain. Spending what it takes to make it work has a huge payoff. That said, here are some thoughts:

"What does this remind me of?"

That's the subliminal question that people ask themselves as soon as they walk into a room. If it reminds us of a high school cafeteria, we know how to act. If it's a bunch of round tables set for a chicken dinner, we know how to act. And if there are row upon row of hotel-type chairs in straight lines, we know how to sit and act glazed.

If it's a place where we're used to saying 'no', we're likely to say no. If it's a place where we're used to good news or important news or just paying attention, we'll do that.

You can use this Pavlovian reaction to your advantage, or you can be a victim of it. A non-traditional arrangement can make people sit up and take notice. A rock concert feel is going to raise the energy level of even the skeptics. A circle with no tables makes people feel naked. These are tools, and you get to choose.

If you have to serve lunch, serve lunch. Big round tables, lots of talking. Then have people stand up and go hear the speaker. In a different room, with a different setting, one that works. No one ever heard a speech that changed their lives when sitting around a round table having just eaten a lousy lunch. Mixing the settings serves no purpose, wastes time in the long run and saves very little money.

Do you see that this is just more marketing? You tell a story with where you put the chairs.

If you could do one thing, make one choice, it should be this: make the room too small. Standing room only. People hanging into the hall. Watch what happens to your energy level.

If you're speaking TO people as opposed to encouraging a wide ranging discourse, put the stage along the narrow wall of the room. (in a 30 by 80 room, that means the 30 side). Making the room narrow and long is far better than wide, because it puts the audience in the plane of the speaker.

This also makes it far easier for the audience to see the speaker and the slides/screens at the same time. This is critical. I can't tell you how many times I've watched people stare at the screen and avoid the speaker, or find themselves bouncing back and forth.

iMag: That's the projection of the speaker on the screen. This is pretty expensive, but for groups over 500, it's almost mandatory in our 1984esque world. If you want to get far more bang for your buck, hire a second cameraman, with a hand held camera. When you switch from one view to the other, you add enormous action to the event.

Screens: Big screens are a lot more reasonable than they used to be. Get the absolute biggest and brightest you can afford. Bigger! Big screens, near the speaker. Really close to the speaker. That's a big help for the audience and for your energy.

VGA cables: Have more than one. Switchers are cheap. Nothing worse than having speakers stumbling around swapping laptops. And put the cables and the laptops up front, not in back to be controlled by a tech guy who doesn't care quite as much as you (or the speaker) does.

Music: Every time you introduce a speaker, play loud and inspiring pop music. Not for long, but enough to cue people to remember the way they feel at the Oscars and stuff. After all, those memes are there waiting for you to leverage them.

Marching bands: Yes, they're cheap. No, people don't like them particularly. I've seen this done a number of times, and people are more amazed and aghast than impressed.

Aisles: Watch a room fill up. People always sit on the aisle, don't they? Don't do rows of 40 or 50 chairs with no aisle. Have lots of aisles. Every ten chairs or so. Why not? Makes it faster to get in and to get out, and doesn't hurt your density so much.

Lights: Make it dark in the audience. Make it light on stage. This works every time. Practice the lighting in advance, even for a smaller group.

Q&A: For large groups, don't do Q&A. It sucks all the energy out of the room and stilts the end, "Well, if there are no more questions..." Instead, solicit questions from key people in advance, write them on index cards and have someone raring and ready to go with a microphone and a finite list of questions, bang, bang, bang. It's not a press conference, it's a speech.

Small groups: Even groups of two--don't go along with a lousy setting just because that's what is offered to you. Why would you pitch yourself or your project in a noisy restaurant, seated on a banquette, with one person on your left and two on your right? Don't do it.

If you are using a laptop for a small group, get one with a big screen. Get a simple USB remote. Don't use live web access if at all possible. And make sure that the right person sees the screen (and you) at the same time. If you can't do these things, don't use the laptop.

If you're willing to travel to meet with someone, put in the extra effort to do it in a setting that works. Befriend the admin, befriend the maitre d, even from 1,000 miles away. Both you and the person you're meeting with benefit when you create a room that works.

Five easy pieces

You really don't understand a concept until you know what it's made of. The taxonomy of marketing (filled with a bazillion tactics) is murky at best. The tactics are so numerous, expensive and sometimes emotional that we easily focus on the urgent instead of the important. Perhaps we could try a different approach:

Never mind the "P"s. Marketing has five elements:
Data
Stories
Products (services)
Interactions
Connection

DATA is observational. What do people actually do? Wal-Mart uses data to decide if an end cap is working. Google Adwords advertisers use data to decide which copy delivers clicks and sales. The library can use data to decide which books to buy (and not to buy). Paco Underhill uses data to turbo charge retail. Data is powerful, overlooked and sometimes mistaken for boring. You don't have to understand the why, you merely need to know the what.

STORIES define everything you say and do. The product has a myth, the service has a legend. Marketing applies to every person, every job, every service and every organization. That's because all we can work with as humans is stories. I want to argue that data and stories are the two key building blocks of marketing--the other three are built on these two.

PRODUCTS (and services) are physical manifestations of the story. If your story is that you are cutting edge and faster/newer/better, then your products better be. Average products for average people is a common story, but not one that spreads. When in doubt, re-imagine the product. Push it to be the story, to live the story, to create a myth.

INTERACTIONS are all the tactics the marketer uses to actually touch the prospect or customer. Interactions range from spam to billboards, from the way you answer the phone to the approach you take to an overdue bill. Interactions are the hero of marketing, because there are so many and most of them are cheap. Unfortunately, all lazy marketers can do is buy ads or spam people. Which creates an interaction that belies your story, right?

CONNECTION is the highest level of enlightenment, the end goal. Connection between you and the customer, surely, but mostly connection between customers. Great marketers create bands of brothers, tribes of people who wish each other well and want to belong. Get the first four steps right and you may get a shot at this one.

Some questions marketers must ask: Does this interaction lead to connections? Do our products support our story? Is the story pulling in numbers that demonstrate that it's working?

In that light, what are you working on? If it's not one of these five, not going to seriously change the dynamic of your marketing, why exactly are you bothering?

My guess is that your organization spends almost all of its time on the interactions. Once you see the world through the prism of the five pieces, you can get in balance. Or, you could be Jack.

Learning from frustration

I'm moving this week (new mailing address: Box 305, Irvington, NY 10533).

That meant a grueling marathon with the single worst voice routing VR system the world has ever known: Verizon.

Rants online can be good for the soul, but it's way more interesting as a marketer to learn from what's not working.

Most often, a frustrating situation is frustrating not because the tactics were broken, but because the strategy is fundamentally flawed. In this case, Verizon is acting like a monopoly (they're not, at least not any more) and they are viewing customer interactions as an expense, not an investment.

If you view calls from paying customers as expensive, then your goal will be to cut the cost of these interactions. That means fewer hours, more voice recognition and more wasted time by your customers. Once you've gone down that road, everything else seems like a soft-hearted, expensive compromise.

So, I start by flipping this on its head. Verizon spends a fortune on advertising and outbound marketing. How much of that budget would they have to allocate/invest in order to turn their customer service into a discussion-worthy best in the world? Or at least enough to keep people from switching in disgust? Not much, it turns out.

This leads quite easily to the first conceptual breakthrough: waste your time, not mine! Be open 24 hours a day, because, after all, the amount of customer service you need to do doesn't decrease if you work fewer hours. In other words, spread your people around so they can talk when your customers want to talk.

Wait, you say, we can't afford to have our trained engineers working at night, or they won't work those hours.

No problem. Instead of using a VR system, just route the calls to a different time zone, to alert, kind, English-speaking folks who will carefully enter every detail into a database,  including the return contact info and the best time to call back.

Now, when I call, I spend less than a minute or two with you. The phone is answered on the first ring. Someone sympathetic gets every single detail. Magically, using the best technologies of telemarketing, my cell phone rings at the appointed hour and the right person with the right expertise and the right file in front of them is sitting at the other end, just waiting to talk with me! Instead of wasting my energy with six (yes, I had six, and that was just today) people who couldn't help me, I get to talk to one who can. In fact, this process actually saves Verizon money.

Wait, there's more.

We need deadend safeguards, too. That means after someone has been on hold for more than xx minutes, the call automatically gets escalated to a more powerful person who can take action right then, right there. (Can you agree that this should happen after 4 hours? What about 40 minutes?)

It means that you don't ask me to type in my phone number or account number, but if you insist, then at the very least you make sure that the person who eventually gets my call doesn't ask me for my number again! Getting this wrong for three years in a row is not an error. It's arrogance.

If you have to put me on hold, don't play bad 1980s music. Play me Bill Cosby or Steven Wright. Or why not give me a choice of 100 songs/audiobooks to choose from?

Here's the big lesson, I think: The person calling in is a person, a customer, potentially a blogger, potentially the CEO of a company you might want to sell to tomorrow, and yes, the person you've spent all that time and money marketing to.

It's not about technology. A small firm could accomplish all this with a decent Radio Shack answering machine and a better attitude.