September 30, 2010
thingsiwishmyphonedid 04
Hugh MacLeod
I’m Hugh MacLeod. I’m a cartoonist. Occasionally I write books. gapingvoid is interested in start-up culture, because changing business for the better is what we’re about; that’s what Social Object Factory is about. We live and breathe it; we help everyone from lone entrepreneurs, to mid-sizers, to Fortune 500’s do the same. Check out our work here.
We create art that helps companies kick ass, end of story.
We also have a daily cartoon newsletter that makes a lot of people happy.
If you just want to say ‘Hello’, feel free to email me, anytime.
If you want to talk business, then it’s probably best to please contact my business partner, gapingvoid CEO Jason Korman, here. We look forward to working with you. Thanks!
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Archive for September, 2010
September 29, 2010
rackspace cube grenade 01
A cube grenade I drew for Rob La Gesse, Scoble’s boss over at Rackspace. [UPDATE: Rob blogs about it here as well.]
[Feel free to download the high-res version here.]
Disclosure: I’m currently doing a wee bit of consulting work for Rackspace. This cartoon was inspired after talking to La Gesse the other day. He tells me that with all their assets– and with over 3,000 employees, they have many– their culture is the thing that they’re collectively most proud of. Rock on.
do more
I just designed this cube grenade for one of my clients, the insurance broker HNI.
As always, it’s basically something to be downloaded [from here], printed out and hung up round the office. A “conversation starter” etc.
Most insurance companies want to sell you a lot of insurance, the more the merrier. One part of HNI’s shtick is, well, “More” is not always the most helpful thing for the client etc.
The guy in the cartoon looks so unhappy simply because the very thought of actually “Doing” something actually frightens a lot of people. Which is why the world is filled with so many clock-watchers.
Though this was designed for HNI, if the message has any value to your business, feel free to print it out as well, thanks.
September 28, 2010
how american family insurance, a $10 billion asset insurer is having a smarter conversation
[NB: This post was written by my business partner, Jason Korman. Expect to hear more of him round here in future etc. –Hugh]
Back in the Spring, we were approached by Troy Janisch, Digital Marketing Manager at American Family Insurance about creating a Cube Grenade that encouraged their 8,000+ employees to participate in their social media program.
Troy said that they wanted their 3,800+ agents to build stronger ties with their communities and also engage other employees who the company want to have a voice and share in the new vision for the business.
AmFam has a very particular market: Local communities in eighteen states in the West and Midwest, selling home and life policies to middle income families. For their local insurance agents, community is everything and the stronger their ties, the better their business– it’s that simple.
With this in mind, the goal was to have 50% of all agents online, using at least Facebook, but hopefully some other tools by year’s end.
If you think about it, its hard to imagine a more elegant use of tools like Facebook for building business.
On our side, Hugh’s goal was to create a ‘conversation starter’ – something that would, on the face of it, explain to the digitally uninitiated (a) why they should make developing online connections, a top priority, and b) remind the reps what building THEIR business is really all about. The solution ultimately was two drawings: “Business is Connectivity” above, and “We’re not in the insurance business, We’re in the Connection Business”, below.
A few weeks ago, I checked back in with Troy to see how things were going. For Troy, he wanted to nudge along a Smarter Conversation on a number of fronts and had a plan that not only called for the organic spread of the Cube Grenades through the business, but also, one that was an overt, front and center challenge to the culture of the business. As Troy said, his goal was to ‘Nudge the culture Forward’ i.e. “To Change the culture from Sales Orientation to one of Customer Orientation,”
After commissioning the Cube Grenade, AmFam, put up an exhibit of about a dozen of Hugh’s more inspiring works. They included: Intoxicated, X,Y,Z and the clean version of “Quality”. The exhibition was put up in a “bold location” in their headquarters in Madison, where it would be seen by all the employees over the period it was up.
While the spread of the Cube Grenades is happening. People are printing them out, and putting them on their email signatures, the art exhibition really got people’s attention, and not in the way that was originally planned.
A lot of attention was focused on the “Quality” image, one of Hugh’s most popular cartoons, and one that was redrawn in a Safe for Work mode for software giant, SAP, earlier this year. It seems that in Madison, Wisconsin, “Fricking”, is not yet quite Safe for Work, so it provoked a lot of ‘discussion’ about the appropriateness of the piece. However, this was the opening that Troy wanted. He turned the conversation into what the idea of “Frickin’ Amazing” means to a company like American Family, and ultimately, he had is objective in the crosshairs: “Customer Service”.
As Troy says “ Nobody starts the day thinking that they will give bad customer service, but it’s the culture that makes the difference as to whether it gets delivered,” he continued, “Everyone says that they have Customer Service, and many do, but Customer Service is not simply top down, it is how everyone actually acts, as opposed to aspires to act.”
And therein lied the rub, and the notion of having a “Smarter Conversation” internally about Customer Service, what’s wrong with it, and how to make it “Totally Frickin’ Amaxing”, and more importantly, how do you create a culture that supports people taking the risks necessary to deliver ‘Totally Fricking Amazing Service”. Creating that internal dialogue is not something that happens by itself, but if the goal is to nudge along the culture of an 8,000 person business, disruption is the order of the day.
We’ll be checking back in with Troy to see how things are progressing. But as Troy says, “The Connectivity Cube Grenade is about reminding people at HQ that the business is out in small communities, which is the heart of their business’ and whether the folks are on the front line, or in the call center in Madison, every voice is part of the brand, and everyone makes a difference.”
September 25, 2010
things i wish my phone did dot com
Things I wish my phone did. Dot com. It’s a website we’re building for our client, Line2.
It should be up in a wee bit… we’re hoping to have a lot of fun with it– an “Idea Amplifier”, as it were.
Re. The cartoon above: No matter how much you love your new state-of-the-art phone, it can’t love you back [For now, that is].
[Food for thought] From Seth Godin, May, 2007:
Now, of course, most blogs are one-person operations. Which means that successful blogs are often run by restless, outward-bound people in a hurry. And a lot of bloggers either have day jobs or passionate sidelines. I think that’s a good thing, even when they fail. It’s frustrating for me to hear, “stick to your blogging,” when people criticize a project created by a blogger – because it’s part of the blogging, part of the learning, part of what’s unfolding. I’d rather read a book that’s informed by the activities (not the reporting) of the writer, and I’d rather read a blog that’s based on the successes (and failures) of the blogger.
Which brings us to Hugh MacLeod and his work for Microsoft. Some critics think he’s selling out. I don’t. I think he’s having a huge impact on an organization –from the outside– at the same time that he demonstrates how just about any large organization can rethink its role in the world. And he’s doing it in front of all of us, without a net.
September 19, 2010
the idea amplifier
On Friday I was talking to Peter Sisson, gapingvoid’s new client, the guy behind Toktumi and Line2.
We were talking about “The Cocktail Party Rule”- what’s true at cocktail parties is also true in marketing i.e. If you want to be boring, talk about yourself. If you want to be interesting, talk about something else.
Luckily, Peter concurs…
The way I see it, a product is an “Idea Amplifier”. You have an idea about something– phones or whatever– and you build a product as an expression of that idea.
For example, Zappos’ central idea is not really about shoes per se, it’s about company culture and customer service– “Delivering Happiness”, as its CEO, Tony Hsieh calls it.
Similarly, with Line2 the central idea is not about an iPhone app, it’s about, and I’m quoting Peter here, “What phones could be”.
And what can a phone be? I’m curious to find out. I think we all are.
September 17, 2010
smarter conversations: psfk.com
I’m a huge fan of PSFK.com. I’ve been following Piers and his team for years. Recently I’ve even started publishing weekly cartoons on PSFK, for no other reason than I think it’s a very groovy crowd to be part of.
PSFK is a well-known strategy, trends and ideas blog, focusing mostly on advertising and design. In the early days Piers mostly wrote it all himself, but these days he has this vast army of volunteers writing guest posts on PSFK’s behalf.
The point of PSFK is to give its readers a constant stream of inspiration and new ideas, stuff they can use to inform their own work.
And it works. Close to three quarters of a million people read it a month, mostly from the ad and design community. In that space, it’s extremely well known [For an industry niche blog, trust me, three quarters of a million people is A LOT].
So how does PSFK make money? Hint: It’s not by selling advertising, like a lot of the big blogs out there.
The thing is, PSFK’s primary business is not publishing blogs. Its main revenue stream is as consultants in the advertising business. They’ve got a small handful of clients and a small staff of super smart advertising futurists, who get paid top dollar to share their brain power with large, global brands.
The blog is just a way to get the PSFK name out, to get their name on the radar screen of potential clients.
Basically, the PSFK blog is just an advertisement for the PSFK consultancy, even if on the blog there’s hardly any mention of the latter.
A “Smarter Conversation”, a smarter way of talking to potential clients, than say, just buying advertising space in one of the big trade publications.
Would this kind of model work for your business? If not, wouldn’t it be great if it did? Just askin’…
to be “incredible beings” in the very early days of a revolution
[“Losing Our Touch”, the latest cartoon I did for PSFK.]
Like I said in my last post (and I am by no means the first person to say this), we are in the early days of the largest communication revolution in the history of the planet.
Which basically means, it has never been easier to start a Smarter Conversation.
Nor has it ever been more essential.
And like I also said more than once, we’re incredible beings.
To be “incredible beings” in the very early days of this revolution, to not want to do something about it, to not want to go out there and take full advantage of the situation…
I just don’t get why some people would prefer to pass the opportunity up. You?
new gapingvoid client: line2 voip
gapingvoid has landed itself a new client. Line2, the new VoIP app from Toktumi. Hurrah!
To find out more about them, Techcrunch wrote a really good piece about them last year.
“The Apple/Google Voice fiasco just got more interesting. Toktumi
, a startup that lets small businesses build office-caliber phone systems with their mobile phones and computers, just had its application Line2 approved by Apple — nearly three months after it was originally submitted. The powerful service allows business employees to assign two phone numbers to their iPhone: one that they can give to family and friends, and another that can be given to business contacts, with features that allow for call filtering and a professional-grade voicemail system. But it’s also notable for its many similarities to Google Voice, an application that Apple has kept out of the App Store for months now.
“The story so far: late last July, Apple abruptly pulled all third party Google Voice applications from the App Store, explaining that they somehow were duplicating the iPhone’s native functionality. Later that day, we broke the news that Google’s official Google Voice client had been barred from the App Store, sparking a media storm and a FCC inquiry into Apple’s rationale for the ban.”
It’s basically a second line for your phone– your iPhone, in particular.
I’ve never been much of a VoIP geek, so why did I get involved?
It was a simple little factoid that got my interest:
The Line2 service costs $14.95 per month. Not a huge amount, but costly enough when you consider that Google Voice is free. Line2 has a first month trial offer, which allows you to try it out for free. After that, they start charging. Fair enough.
So how many people start signing on at $14.95, once their free trial expires? Five percent? Ten percent? That’s what I was guessing…
Nope. Thirty percent.
Thirty percent! I thought that was huge. They must be doing something right etc.
The second reason is purely intellectual. As many bloggers have been spouting on for a while now (including me), we are in the early days of the largest communication revolution in the history of the planet. VOIP is in the forefront of this revolution, so getting involved should give me a front row seat. And we cartoonists need interesting stuff to keep our brains occupied etc.
I have no idea where this is going; I’m just along for the ride. Hopefully a Smarter Conversation will come out of it in the end. Watch this space. Rock on.
[Bonus link: Last March, Mashable did a good piece on Line2 as well, including the video interview above.]
hni & ‘change the game’
Late last year, Mike Natalizio, President & CEO of HNI (a medium sized insurance brokerage out of the Midwest) commissioned me to draw some “Cube Grenade” cartoons for the company.
It was a nice wee cartoon project; it went well.
We kept on talking, after that… we’ve been helping them with what a Smarter Conversation might mean for their business.
HNI’s corporate tagline is “Change The Game”.
The insurance business is generally known as a fairly staid affair– it’s relatively conservative game– no surprises there.
“Change The Game”. I like the premise, it gets me thinking:
- What part of the game does it want to change?
- What can it actually change?
- What needs to be changed, anyway?
And at what cost, personal or otherwise?
What needs to happen?
Let’s find out…
September 10, 2010
i’m not publishing new cartoons on the blog any more
[“Pardon Me”, which I sent out on the newsletter last Spring. You can buy the print here etc.]
In case you don’t know this already, I’m not publishing new cartoons on the blog any more, except maybe occasionally. Yep, to see the new ones, you have to subscribe to the newsletter. That’s been true for a while now…
Looking forward to seeing you there. Thanks!
[NB– I’m leaving this post at the top of the homepage for a while, to give the news time to sink in. New content is below, Thanks Again!]
September 3, 2010
smarter conversations: “how do i want to change the way i talk to people?”
[The “Life Is Too Short” print…]
I first started playing with the idea of “Smarter-Conversations” way back in 2004, the same year gapingvoid really started getting traction in the blogopsphere.
Though not something I talk about day-in-day-out, it’s always been there somewhere in the background, informing everything I work on. Here are some notes:
1. In the seminal book, “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, the great Doc Searls famously declared, “Markets are conversations”. If you buy that premise (and I do, wholeheartedly), then quod erat demonstratum, if you want your marketing to be smarter (i.e. more effective), you need to be having a “Smarter Conversation”.
2. “Conversation” is a metaphor. Making your product sleek, elegant and graceful while all your other competitors make their product look cheap, plastic and clunky is a smarter conversation. Not all conversations need words.
3. It’s not just what you say, its how you say it. Calling it the “iPod” is a smarter conversation than say, the “MZT-2300-B Electronic Portable MP3 Digital Hand Device”.
4. Smarter Conversations scale. That’s what I really like about it. Anyone can have a smarter conversation– from a mom n’ pop pizza joint to a Fortune 500 company. It can happen in a Superbowl ad or on printed on the back of a paper napkin. You can start one on a blog today, for free. Or on Twitter or Facebook. The tools don’t necessarily have to change, the way you talk to people has to change.
5. Deciding to have a smarter conversation isn’t a business decision, it’s a moral decision. Like I said in the last point, the barriers to entry are zero. While your competition treats their customers like idiots, you treat your customers like intelligent human beings. You don’t do that because your accountant told you to, you do that because that’s who you are.
6. The Smarter Conversation’s value comes from, I believe, not by yet more increased business efficiencies, but by its humanity. For example, take two well-known airlines. They both perform a useful service. They both deliver value. They both cost about the same to fly to New York or Hong Kong. Both have nice Boeings and Airbuses. Both serve peanuts and drinks. Both serve “airline food”. Both use the same airports. But one airline has friendly people working for them, the other airline has surly people working for them. One airline has a sense of fun and adventure about it, one has a tired, jaded business-commuter vibe about it. Guess which one takes the human dimension of their business more seriously than the other? Guess which one still will be around in twenty years? Guess which one will lose billions of dollars worth of shareholder value over the next twenty years? What parallels do you see in your own industry? In your own company?
7. If Smarter Conversations work, it’s because they help humanize the company. I wrote about this years ago in an article I called “The Porous Membrane”. To paraphrase: Ideally, you want the conversation between customers [the external market] to be as identical as the conversation between yourselves [the internal market]. The things that your customer is passionate about, you should also be passionate about. This we call “alignment”. A good example would be Apple. The people at Apple think the iPod is cool, and so do their customers. They are aligned. When you are no longer aligned with your customers is when the company starts getting into trouble. When you start saying your gizmo is great and your customers are telling everybody it sucks, then you have serious misalignment. So how do you keep misalignment from happening? The answer lies the cultural membrane that separates you from them. The more porous the membrane, the easier it is for conversations between you and them, the internal and external, to happen. The easier for the conversations on both sides to adjust to the other, to become like the other. And nothing pokes holes in the membrane better than blogging.
8. Social Media is not about reaching a mass audience. Social Media is not about creating yet another sales channel. Social Media is about allowing the Smarter Conversation to happen. That’s all. Why do some companies lose, while other companies win? Because the latter has a smarter “conversation” with its customers. Zappos had a smarter conversation about the power of customer service and the power of company culture. Peet’s Coffee came along 20 years ago and began a smarter conversation about coffee with millions of people within a very short space of time. Target’s recent massive success started from a smarter conversation about good design. Savile Row tailor, Thomas Mahon came along and, with his blog, had a smarter conversation about $4000 English bespoke suits. Lucky’s Juice Joint had a smarter conversation about fresh-squeezed. Big companies, medium companies and tiny companies, whatever– it was never about size, it was never about the choice of media (social or otherwise), it was all about language.
9. Social Media allows you to cheaply and quickly begin a smarter conversation. And once you get it going, that conversation starts bleeding out into all other areas of your business– including advertising, PR and corporate communications.
10. Ask not what tools you want to use, ask how you want to change how you talk to people. All evolutions in marketing are evolutions in language. Those who can raise the level of conversation in any market, win.
11. Start today. It’s never too late to begin a Smarter Conversation. Like I said, money or time is not the issue. Making the decision is the issue, and only you can do that.
how to have a “smarter conversation”
[Originally posted August, 2004. Some of it is a bit dated but there’s still a lot there worth chewing on etc.]
How to have smarter conversations.
Somewhere along the the line I decided that embracing “Smarter Conversations” was preferable to prematurely consigning my career to the dustbin of history. I just wrote down some random thoughts:
1. Understand why what you’re offering to do for other people is interesting, important, meaningful etc then start telling people about it.
Think about this one. Hard. If you don’t know, then how will other people know? Exactly. They won’t.
2. Live like you know the difference between remarkable and unremarkable, like it matters to you.
The more “remarkable” matters to you, the more likely that it will appear in the product you’re selling. The more likely other people will notice it.
3. Seek out the exceptional minds.
This is my basic mantra. It’s a good one to have. Not everybody gets it. Their loss.
4. Start a blog.
Blogs are funny things. Say something smart, people pay attention. Say something dumb, you’re ignored. We big media folk just can’t seem to get our heads around that concept, for some reason. Regular blogging can help train you to better discern between smart and dumb. Makes it easier to extend this to the rest of one’s business.
5. Ruthlessly avoid working for companies that “don’t get it”.
Yeah, you may have to turn down a few gigs, and that can really hurt when the rent is due. Still, anything that’s easy to get isn’t worth having.
6. Ruthlessly avoid working for companies that think they know better than you.
Luckily, if you get the whole “smarter conversations” thing, their “Yes, Buts” will just seem rather empty. Making them easier to “toss out like old furniture”.
7. Be nice.
Smarter conversations are fuelled by goodwill. Lose it and die.
8. Be honest.
Again, smarter conversations are fuelled by goodwill etc.
9. Karma is key.
But you already know that. Or you’re stupid. No middle ground on this one, sorry.
10. Listen.
Tongues are dumber than brains, brains are dumber than ears etc.
“smarter conversations” is a moral decision
[Originally posted September, 2005]
An offline discussion I’ve been having a lot recently:
1. If you want to become an authority in whatever industry you are in, you must engage in what I call “Smarter Conversations”.
2. Deciding to do so is not a business decision. It’s a moral decision.
Your call.
September 2, 2010
“social gestures beget social objects”
[Originally posted November,2007]
Chris Schroeder riffs on my whole “Social Object” marketing schtick with this very salient thought:
If your company wants to succeed, it needs to have a social object marketing plan.
Amen to that. But note what Chris also says:
I don’t know about you, but when somebody walks by with an iPhone, I notice. If I see a kid stroll by me in some limited edition Nikes, that registers with me too.
Therein lies the rub. The Social Object idea is easy to get if your product is highly remarkable, highly sociable. An iPhone or the latest pair of Nike’s are both fine examples of this.
But I can already hear your inner MBA saying, “Yeah, but what if you don’t work for Nike or Apple? What if your product is boring home loans, auto insurance or… [the list of boring products is pretty long].
My standard answer to that is, “Social Gestures beget Social Objects.“
Which is another way of saying, maybe the way you relate to somebody as a human being plays a part in all this. Maybe describing the product as “boring” is just one more bullshit lie we tell ourselves in order to make the world seem less complicated and scary. Hey, my product is inherently dull and boring, therefore I get to be inherently dull and boring, too. Hooray!
Nowadays, thanks to folk like Nike, we think of sneakers as “non-boring” brands. This wasn’t true when I was a kid. Back then sneakers were those bloody awful $3 plimsolls we wore in Phys Ed. But it took companies like Nike and Adidas to come along and by shear force of will, raise the level of conversation in the sneaker department, before sneakers became bona fide global social objects, bona fide global powerhouse brands.
The decision to raise the level of conversation isn’t economic. Nor is it an intellectual decision. It’s a moral decision. But whether you have the stomach for it is up to you.
Like I told Thomas almost 3 years ago re. English bespoke tailoring, “Own the conversation by improving the conversation.” And hey, it worked. His sales went up 300% in 6 months.
It wasn’t the change in product that made Thomas’ suits Social Objects. It was changing the way he talked to people. The same applies to Stormhoek, which 3 years ago was an $8 bottle of South African wine nobody had ever heard of. Conversation. Matters.
So all you corporate MBAs out there, here’s a little tip. When you planning on how to embrace the brave new world of Web 2.0, the first question you ask yourself should not be “What tools do I use?“
Blogs, RSS, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook– it doesn’t matter.
The first question you should REALLY ask yourself is:
“How do I want to change the way I talk to people?“
And hopefully the rest should follow.
Think about it.
[Bonus Link: For a more academic take on social objects, check out this post from Anthropologist, Jyri Engestrom.]
the gapingvoid widget
Have you added the free gapingvoid cartoon widget to your blog or website yet? Just askin’.…
September 1, 2010
all big ideas start life out as small ideas
Back in the mid-90s, when the Internet was still the size of a tadpole and TV was still the Big Kahuna, I was working in a large advertising agency that had many big, blue-chip clients.
We were given a brief to work on, a well-known laundry detergent.
All the other teams went away and came back with ideas for big-production TV commercials. Except me.
I had this idea about using GoCards, those free advertising postcards I started seeing around in all the trendy bars at the time.
It wasn’t rocket science. For pennies on the dollar, I reckoned you could try out a lot of different ideas– dozens of them, literally– and from tallying which cards were being picked up by people and which ones weren’t, you could could easily measure which ideas were working or not. Not unlike today’s Internet, the same way you can tell which blog posts of yours are working from the number of retweets they get. Stuff we all take for granted now.
Secondly, because the client was a laundry detergent, you’d really have to push the envelope to get people’s attention inside these trendy bars. It would force you to work your ideas faster, cheaper, better and harder. It would push you, it would push the client and the brand.
If any the ideas took off, I mean, REALLY took off, then you’d have enough info to go on to scale up the campaign into bigger media– TV, large magazines and whatnot.
Unlike most ad campaigns out there at the time, you’d would already have enough information to know that the campaign– the idea– was WAS ALREADY WORKING BEFORE your dear client had spent any real money.
It was cheap, it was disruptive, and… it was accountable.
The suits didn’t like the idea. My boss didn’t like it, either. Even my art director was a bit grumbly and doubtful. The idea never left the building. The client never saw it. The idea was killed in the first round.
The agency’s perspective was, they didn’t earn its money from “little” ideas. The agency earned its money for “BIG” ideas.… ones that cost lots of money and needed “a cast of thousands” etc. Superbowl ads and whatnot.
They had forgotten that all big ideas start life out as small ideas.
Make of this what you will.
is your business co-dependent on external factors?… or, any startup who thinks success or failure depends on whether techcrunch covers them or not, deserves everything they get.
I just wrote the [very long] blog headline above just to give y’all something to chew on…
I’m guessing most of us here are familiar with Techcrunch, yes?
Like I said earlier, we’re incredible beings. So frickin’ go do something about it. Frickin’ go do something that matters. Exactly.
God Bless…
we’re incredible beings.
[“Awake”, the print I featured in this Monday’s newsletter etc.]
We’re incredible beings. And I want to make and sell art that maybe, just maybe, makes people think, even for a short while, that I’m not wrong, either.
[I can think of worse ways to make a living. Lord knows, we’ve all tried a few of those…]
So yeah, we’re incredible beings. But it’s not enough to believe it; you actually have to live it. Even if you’re going to fail. most of the time. That’s where the REAL work lies.
But hey, at least you tried.
Life is short, People. You’re going to be dead soon. So frickin’ go do something about it. Frickin’ go do something that matters. Seriously.
Thanks for hearing my rant. God Bless…
“content marketing” or, it’s much easier to get paid work out of people if they’re already your fanboy
I don’t know if it was Brian Clark over at Copyblogger who first popularized the term, “Content Marketing”, but it’s he I most associate it with.
Content Marketing is exactly what is sounds like– creating content in order to more effectively market whatever it is you’re selling.
Copyblogger itself is a really good example of content marketing. It’s basically a daily advice column for anyone trying to do content marketing professionally. You get to read it for free, but hey, Brian and his team have other products they sell which are all designed to be interesting, useful and valuable to their core audience.
And Copyblogger rakes it in as a result; it’s now a seven-figure business.
Back in 2003, eons ago in Internet time, I remember talking to Henry Copeland, the founder of Blogads.com. This was well before the huge advertising market emerged for large sites like Techcrunch, Gawker, Mashable and BoingBoing, back when even the largest blogs were far smaller and far more personal than they are today.
We were chatting about potential business models for blogs, short and long-term. This was still very early days, remember…
“As far as I can tell,” said Henry, “the most viable business model for blogging these days is for under-employed consultants to show off how smart they are.”
Consultants showing off how smart they are? Under-employed or over-employed, that is content marketing. Exactly.
You write a blog. You build a dedicated following. You leave a discreet, non-pushy trail of breadcrumbs to what your business actually does for money. If X percent of your readers take the bait and become paying customers, hey, you win.
Like the headline of this post says, it’s much easier to get paid work out of people if they’re already your fanboy.
What I like about this model is that it’s simple. It isn’t rocket science. And perhaps more importantly, it’s free from the tyranny of wanting or needing huge traffic.
[Warning– VERY rough math to follow:] English Cut can only make and sell about 100 hand-tailored Savile Row suits a year. I can only handle a small handful of Cube Grenade clients at one time. Same with James Governor at Redmonk or Piers Fawkes at PSFK. And if say, our blogs can convert one or two percent of our hardcore readers into customers, in theory, the total readership per blog only needs to be fifty or a hundred times that in order to make the business viable. A few hundred people, maybe a couple of thousand– very attainable (and sustainable) numbers.
So if you get it right, you can just do your thing, delighting, thrilling (and selling to) the audience that you already have, without obsessing over which “A-Lister” is linking to you (or not), or how many new Twittter followers you’ve gotten (or haven’t) since last month. Nor do you have sleepless nights fretting over the fact that your blog doesn’t have the same number of readers as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, Wired etc. Or whatever silly, energy-draining neuroses that so many other social media mavens seem to fall prey to.
That’s the good news. The bad news is, effective content marketing requires two things: world-class content and a world-class product. Harder than it looks. Life is unfair.
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