Second book I have read by the author, concentrating on general principles that can be applied regardless of the technology used.
This is a unique time. It’s a time when ideas can spread, maybe for the first time ever, based not on who created them and how important or rich that person is but instead on how good the idea is. A quote, a meme, or a strong emotion can pass through a network of people faster, effecting political change, creating art, or even making people feel closer than ever before. Ideas can help people change the world, and now anyone can become powerful enough to be a catalyst for what matters to them.Read more at location 120
Refining your ideas is a key part of the equation. So is building a platform and working on the human aspect. At any time, if you are wondering what you should be doing with your work or how you should be improving it, our general answer is that only these three aspects of marketing matter in the world of media. They are everything and they will direct you toward what you should work on.Read more at location 319
The reality is that this transformation in media is happening. It’s happening now, and it is a moment in time that will never repeat itself—not in the same way it’s happening now. If you are among the first to know how to leverage it, you can go places and have advantages you never could have imagined before.Read more at location 379
It seems like there must be easier ways to build influence and create impact. Strike “easier” from your repertoire. Nothing worth doing is easy. Simple, sometimes. Easy? Never.Read more at location 423
The problem, such as it is, is that everyone has a whatever account. Everyone is using social media. At the time of this writing, over eight hundred million people use Facebook. That’s more than one in eleven humans on the planet. So just being there isn’t enough. If you build it, they won’t come. Definitely not right away, but in this day and age, possibly never.Read more at location 458
ACTION: GET YOUR GAME FACE ON Want to start thinking about leveling up and games? What most real-world systems are missing is any kind of meaningful scoring and feedback system (among other traits). For instance, most employees get an annual review. Do you really have to wait a year to know how you’re doing? A month is probably too long, right? Make your own metrics. We’ll talk about it throughout the book in different ways, but it’s important to realize this: Your path is your path, and that has nothing to do with your current “job.” It has everything to do with your goals. So get your game face on. 1. Pick a metric for everything you’re doing that matters. If you want to be a better marketer, make your metric the number of subscribers on your e-mail list (or whatever). If you want to be healthy, pick a metric like “consecutive days of thirty minutes or more of activity.” Simple. Pick simple metrics. Where everyone goes wrong in this is in looking for too many numbers. 2. Level up. If your goal is to earn a million dollars next year, break that into monthly revenue (around $84,000) and make your daily grind include something to move that number. Even if you get to 10 percent of that by year-end, you’re doing great. 3. Take a wild swing. This is variable. It might mean seeking an introduction to someone above your “pay grade.” It might mean applying for a job you’re not qualified for. Try something bigger than what should be next in a natural progression. There’s risk, but the rewards are big too. 4. Play new games. Once you’re feeling fairly comfortable with the game you’re playing, look for a new way to mix it up. A few years back, Julien took on MovNat and CrossFit and many other fitness challenges to see just what he was capable of accomplishing. As we’re writing this book, Chris is relaunching his music studies for a project with Jacqueline Carly about blending ancient Indian chanting music with modern digital effects and tools. The moment you get too eased into the game you’re playing is the moment you’ll miss the chance to level up.Read more at location 515
We all have excuses. There are obstacles in everyone’s way. But if you’re going to make your ideas happen and learn about impact, you’re going to have to accept your excuses and flaws and obstacles and do it anyway. That’s that dividing line we talked about earlier. Actors don’t let excuses get in the way. And again, we don’t mean Hollywood actors. We mean participants. We mean you.Read more at location 576
For instance, if you introduce two people from your community and they’re able to do business (without your asking for anything in the transaction), that kind of effort gets remembered. In Trust Agents, we called this being at the elbow of every deal.Read more at location 632
As the environment for our ideas gets more competitive and cluttered, these are no longer trivial subjects. Our friend Alistair Croll once told us that an environment with excess information devours the one thing that information truly demands: attention. Attention is becoming scarce, so we have to use it wisely when we get it.Read more at location 730
Differentiation, however, isn’t that simple. If your offering is too similar to the remainder of your category, you are of course invisible, leading you to compete increasingly on price, creating low margins and reducing the value of what you do. However, if you are too dissimilar, you become a radical, making you so vastly different from your competitors that you either offend or repel customers.Read more at location 864
This is really about letting the audience decide what is good or bad and curating less. It is a shotgun approach, or as publishers are fond of saying, “Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.” Some publishers have even started to act like this, and Lord knows some of the greatest companies of our time have too.Read more at location 1001
You can think of Contrast in lots of ways. Look at what competitors say, along with others in your space. Avoid almost all of the words they use. You might use a few specific phrases so search engines find you more easily, but beyond that, don’t do it. If your competitors all say, “We value our customer,” don’t ever say that. If they say, “We are next-generation technology,” strike it from yourRead more at location 1055
Realize that in life and business, it’s always what stands out that gets remembered. If everyone competes on price, but you are the only one raging about your incredible customer service, then that’s what we’ll remember.Read more at location 1067
presentations and wrote blog posts and launched projects, the more we recognized that information has no impact on people’s reactions. Instead of information, people largely react to emotion, and they feel an emotion when they are presented with something different and surprising.Read more at location 1155
1. Judge the value proposition(s) of the space you are playing in. Consider the blogs you compete against or the products that are above and below you in sales or price. What are they doing for their clients? What offerings define the space? 2. Pan out. Is your value information or emotion? Is it entertainment or education? Pan out to ten thousand feet and ask yourself whether you’re really in the lug-nut business. But don’t go so high up that you begin to see yourself as a “business solutions” company, unless you’re IBM or something. At which point you may not need this book. 3. Where must you compete, and what is critical in this space in order to maintain position? If you lost an entire arm of your products, would you go bankrupt? Whatever offers are critical to your space must stay or, at the very minimum, must be identified. 4. What can be diminished? You panned out; now do the opposite. Focus on each value. What really matters to the audience you are targeting? Do they really care about a given product, or is it a vestigial part of your business? Has your business moved beyond it? What if it were forced to? What’s the worst that could happen? Consider this with each product you offer. 5. What can be eliminated? It’s time to make hard decisions. The values you serve up are not equal to all of your customers, and for some they don’t even matter. Is a circus without animals still a circus? Cirque du Soleil (and others) think so. In fact, they remove animals and more people want to attend. They can drive ticket prices up by closing in on what really matters to their clients. Of course, none of this can happen unless you are serious about Contrast. Anyone can differentiate themselves through any offering they have or anything they refuse to offer that their competitors do without thinking. In other words, what you are creating and what you are competing on is really up to you. You decide what business you’re in, how you’re going to make a living, and where your profits will come from. It’s a strange thought, but it’s true. You decide, and you can change anytime you want.Read more at location 1241
One of our favorite Web sites, http://two.sentenc.es/, focuses on this concept by asking senders of all e-mail to restrict themselves to text message–like lengths. When concepts don’t fit into this structure, they can be addressed in a phone conversation, a blog post, or some other form of media. But the larger point is that format should be dictated by need, and restrictions can actually help you become better with your message.Read more at location 1359
Was your subject line obvious and actionable? Could the recipient answer based almost entirely on it? Did you put the most important part of the e-mail in the first paragraph? Did you end the e-mail with the one question that was most important? Was there one “ask” in that e-mail or more than one? Was the e-mail HTML formatted and sent via a “donotreply@” e-mail address? (That is, was it a newsletter?) Had you messaged the recipient recently (within a few months) without making an ask? Was the e-mail fewer than three hundred words? Could the recipient read it in under thirty seconds?Read more at location 1515
If you can’t simplify words, lines, and syntax and make your writing clearer for people to respond to, you are doomed.Read more at location 1544
There are people who are really good at painting portraits or quirky street art, but there’s a reason people talk about being a “starving artist.” Art either sells remarkably well or it doesn’t. And you don’t have time to sell posthumously.Read more at location 1596
Chuck Frey’s Web site (http://www.innovationtools.com/), as he’s the leading authority on all things mind mapping and our go-to person for learning what’s new and interesting in that world.Read more at location 1654
In every case where you seek to get a point across, brevity is a core selling point. It will get you much further than trying to paint with words.Read more at location 1754
Oh, and if you haven’t read The Alchemist, pick it up. It may change your life.Read more at location 1926
Reaching people does nothing unless you provide them with enough value to make them stop what they’re doing, either now or later, and participate in your media. So a blog post must be well written enough or compel with its story enough that it will cause the reader to think a. this is an interesting new voice; b. I’ve been thinking this forever; finally someone is saying it; or c. I’ve never thought about this before! The most significant absence from this list is the reader’s reaction to an attempt to convert him into a customer, get him to pay for information, or extract value from him in some other way. You are not at this stage yet—whatRead more at location 1976
(Before you discount the idea that there are bloggers already talking about your space, swing by alltop.com and see if you can find people writing about your industry.)Read more at location 2042
In almost every case, the purpose of our outreach to someone influential has been first and foremost to help them. The side benefit is the social proof that clearly we have something of value to offer, because we are afforded time by people of standing.Read more at location 2060
But again, let us stress: It’s important that you connect with people to serve them first. This delivers the best value and impact for everyone involved. Coming to someone with your hand out for help is always far less attractive than creating something of value for the person you’re hoping to connect with.Read more at location 2062
Here’s how to tell if your content is hype, or if it really matters. This distinction is vitally important, especially if you are trying to build a lasting audience. Are you connecting with people over the long term, or are you distracting them in an attempt to give yourself a chance? Figuring this out is key. So here’s a quick checklist. Your material is something someone would be delighted to come across. You, your department, your company, or your clients look forward to what you send them. Your content is like a television show (not an advertisement).Read more at location 2209
posts. Commenting and replying, it turns out, are much more valuable than posting your own original content, as far as engagement and response metrics indicate. On social networks, posting less frequently reduces the rate at which new people follow you, but it doesn’t often translate to a drop-off in subscribers.Read more at location 2266
1. If you blog daily, your number of subscribers will go up (almost without fail, but with some kind of cutoff at the higher numbers if your posts are crap). 2. If you blog twice or more daily, your number of subscribers will go up even more. 3. If you blog weekly, you won’t necessarily lose subscribers. 4. If you blog monthly, you might lose subscribers, or you might not. 5. Sunday is a kind of magical day for releasing a blog post, because it appears that people take a break at some point during that day to catch up on nonhome matters, and they comment just a bit longer, visit just a bit longer, and more. Why? No idea. But every time we post on Sunday, the results are pretty good. 6. There’s no magical time of day to post a blog. Chris likes to post by 4:30 a.m. Eastern time, but he has some readers in India and the UK, in addition to those in the United States. It’s always at a weird time somewhere in the system. That said, posting around anyone’s 5:00 p.m. on a Friday isn’t a good idea.Read more at location 2285
Jeremiah Owyang did this a long time ago while working for Hitachi Data Systems. He created a very useful wiki site for all the various large storage companies, who were promoting competing products, along with his own products. People knew that Jeremiah represented Hitachi, but they found his site so useful that they considered his products alongside the other companies’ products and sometimes bought his, simply because they appreciated all his hard work in covering the space.Read more at location 2339
Simplify e-mails to a single call to action, and lead with a sentence that explains the most important point you’re trying to make. People read the first line or two of your e-mail and decide whether or not to reply. You have about twenty-five words to hook someone into taking action. Choose wisely.Read more at location 2423
You might look at this example and say, “So what? Anyone can do that.” Here’s the hint: Anyone can do that. Rachel is getting buyers because she does do it.Read more at location 2600
“3 Tiny Habits.” We came across B. J. Fogg’s method of habit creation only recently, but his theory is that creating effective habits is itself a habit, and that you can get good at it. To get the full benefit, check out TinyHabits.com, but to start out, find the smallest possible behavior change you can, such as “write one word,” and do it immediately after something you already do (such as finishing dinner).Read more at location 2888
1. Distill your message. Whittle it down to the tightest, sharpest thing possible. And we don’t mean something like “Google Panda is making it harder for small Web sites to get and keep high search-engine rankings.” If this is what you’re delivering, and it’s relevant to your audience, that’s fine—but deliver a punchier message as well. Use your tone, your words, and everything else to deliver a message that means more to your audience. For example, the message above might become “Big guys are making it hard for little guys to compete.” Then your message is more like an eighties movie and less like a horrible PowerPoint presentation. Think ten thousand feet. Think big. Big is emotional, and Google SERPs are not. 2. Discover the core emotion behind the message. For example, for years we used “Don’t be afraid to try new things” as the overarching message of our social-media presentations. Once you have your larger, blurrier, ten-thousand-foot message, you can think about how a message like this is supposed to make people feel. Since there are only a few core emotions, you can basicallyRead more at location 3135
take your pick, either here or from Wikipedia: hope, gratitude, joy, pride, etc. But remember that a message that doesn’t connect with the right emotion can create a kind of emotional dissonance that leaves people feeling not quite right, perhaps even manipulated. 3. Deliver this feeling over and over again from multiple angles. Begin with real subtlety. Create wonder as you talk about how others have dealt with problem X or how great, unexpected successes occurred when person Y was in trouble and did thing Z. Act as if you were telling one of the great stories of mankind through your simple blog post, presentation, or video. Think about building one thing on top of another, not throwing it all out at once. 4. Combine number 3 with detailed examples of how it happened. Don’t make the mistake of providing only motivational speaker–type inspirational talk and expect it to consistently work. Your audience needs to feel like there’s some grounding in what you’re saying. Go from high to low, from general to very specific, and then up and down again. Using examples provides a strong foundation for your subject, and it will help people come along for the ride. 5. Practice … a lot. A ton of work is necessary to get seriously good at inspiring any audience, whether online or in person. This is because you need to both anticipate and feel out your audience’s emotional state, an ability that comes only with significant experience. So attempting to inspire weekly, if not daily, in different ways will help you understand what works and what doesn’t. There is no substitute.Read more at location 3144
If you want one of our best and most secret magic tricks, it’s this: Reply. That’s it. We know it doesn’t look like much, but it’s magic. Julien is better at this in e-mail than Chris is. Chris does rather well in responding to people via his blog and social networks like Twitter. But both of us value replying to people, and it’s abundantly clear that when someone receives a reply, they are almost always amazed, for lack of a better term.Read more at location 3194
answer, but when they get one, they love you. People know that e-mails and tweets take time. They are small sacrifices that imply you took a moment out of your day. They are the opposite of auto-responders that say, “Sorry, I get lots of e-mail.” Instead, a reply, even a short one says, “Yes, I am busy, but I actually give a damn.” This is important.Read more at location 3216
Chris talks about the fact that we all keep our phones really close to our heads when we go to bed, as if we might get a very important call in the middle of the night. It’s as if we were surgeons or superheroes, which clearly we are not. This often raises a nervous and resonating giggle. He then strokes his phone as if he’s Gollum from The Lord of the Rings and says, “My preciousssssss,” as people bark out laughter, because they know the feeling.Read more at location 3271
Do I make people feel comfortable? Can I look people in the eyes? Do I talk about myself or about others? Am I relatable? Do I let myself be vulnerable around others? Do I seem relaxed or tense? These are the measures by which you might judge your success in the land of Echo.Read more at location 3355
