The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

You think your job sucks. I swear, I keep looking for an Onion byline on this story. The more I read, the more whiskey-tango-foxtrot it gets:

PROVO, Utah — No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the “team-building exercise,” that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.”

Yes, you read that right. In an attempt to spur the sales team into making more sales, this company waterboarded one of their own guys as a motivational exercise!

What makes this even more surreal (I would say funnier, but this is so far past funny and into downright disturbing that if my eyebrows go any higher, I’m going to end up with a permanent Klingon forehead crest) is that the company in question is a coaching company (warning, annoying flash intro) that makes success and leadership products.

And what makes it scarier is the sheer level of cluelessness involved. Because, see, the exercise wasn’t actually based on the waterboarding-as-torture, but was rather a misbegotten re-creation of student abuse perpetrated by Socrates. Now, I’m not even sure what part of holding someone’s head underwater as a motivational exercise made sense to the old Greek pederast himself, even allowing for differing cultural realities. But it’s unfathomable how anyone in this day and age of waterboarding scandal perma-reporting can look at Socrates’ actions and think, “Brilliant! Smithers, fetch me a bucket! It’s time for a little team building.”

Again, this would be frikkin hilarious…if it were a parody. The fact that it really happened is just…hell, I don’t even have the words for what it is. Terrifying. Sick. Twisted. Mind-boggling. Another nail in the coffin of my desire to never, ever work for anyone else, certainly, and yet another reason to avoiding any activity that smacks of team building.

What is funny, though, is reading the company’s About Us statement in light of the above “team-building” activity:

Prosper, Inc. provides executive-level coaching for individuals. Our mission is to provide our students with the education and hands-on experiences they need to achieve their personal and professional goals. We strive to make the road to personal achievement meaningful, rewarding, and enjoyable.

By understanding our business and by becoming sensitive to our world, we position ourselves to help others become leaders in an ever-changing marketplace. Our products and services are based on proven principles that, when applied, produce positive results in the lives of individuals and families.

Kinda like those games where you add “…under the bed” to the end of hymn titles. Heh, hands on experiences - in waterboarding! D’oh!

Seriously, Onion. Did you guys write this? C’mon, fess up. I won’t tell, I promise!

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Business by Soni Pitts
No Comments »

Inside CRM has a great article, 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site.

Some ideas:

1. Tell readers why they should perform a task. If your site is full of passive suggestions, toughen it up. People are trained to follow a request, as long as you give them a good reason to do it.

14. Make an offer that visitors can’t refuse. Check out your site to make sure that you’re giving your visitors a reason to pick your company out of an overcrowded field.

24. Never ask for more information than you need. If you’re currently asking for excessive information, rethink your data-mining tendencies. When you get greedy for data, you’ll turn off some visitors.

46. Take off the black hat. If you’ve used tactics like keyword stuffing, remove them from your site. They may be working now, but in the long run, they’ll only hurt.

58. Remove text from images. Using image text will make it difficult for those using screen readers to read text.

82. Ditch frames. If your site uses frames, you need to move on to another method, like CSS or SSI (Server-Side Includes).

87. Ditch crazy fonts. If you’re using a ransom-note font, it’s time to switch to something simpler. Chances are, your visitors’ browsers are rendering it as Times New Roman anyway.

100. Store a Web site cache. Keep a copy of your site handy in case of copyright disputes or loss.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Copywriting, Internet Marketing by Soni Pitts
No Comments »

My current favorite author, John Scalzi (of whom I am an obsessive fan, if not yet financially a True Fan), has a thoughtful and well-reasoned argument against Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans concept that I wrote about last week.

The Problem With 1,000 True Fans

…it’s not impossible to get 1,000 “true fans.” It can be done. The problem is that Kevin Kelly, in his enthusiasm, wants to make it seem that getting 1,000 people to give you $100 is no great trick. What I am telling you is that it actually is — it’s a pretty damn neat trick, in point of fact. Even if you manage it, the financial reward is not likely to be anything close to what you had hoped for, nor will it likely be as permanent as Kelly seems to imply.

John’s an exceptionally smart and well-educated man with a very popular blog (30,000-40,000 hits a day), several earned-out novels (meaning, they’ve sold well enough to pay out the advance and earn him royalties, which is the novelists’ holy grail), several current and past paying gigs for media corps like AOL and the Chicago Sun-Times and has a backlist of fiction, non-fiction and commercial work that takes up a respectable chunk of a webpage to list. In short, he knows whereof he speaks, and I always find it instructive and entertaining to pay attention when he does.

If you read 1000 True Fans and are considering that approach to making a living, it’s only smart to give the Devil’s Advocate at least as much attention - if only to make sure you’re armed with all the enemy intelligence you need to plan your ambushes. And John’s a smart a DA as you’re likely to find out there.

Oh, and don’t skip the comments section. John’s readership is every bit as whip-smart and well-spoken as he is, so at least half the shiny of any post he puts up sits below the comments cut (which is saying a lot, considering his posts are usually quite shiny enough all by themselves).

Tags: Business, Conversation Economy, Customers, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
No Comments »

Since a not-insignificant portion of my peeps and potential clients are organ grinders of the artistic sort, I thought I’s pass along Kevin Kelly’s thought-provoking article on making a living as an artist in the 21st century, 1000 True Fans.

According to Kelly,

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

[snip]

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Kelly’s formula is at once breathtakingly simple and yet compellingly feasible:

First, create 1000 True Fans. According to Kelly, this involves finding and converting 1000 regular fans to True Fans by connecting with them personally and directly, which is an imminently rational goal and one that any artist worth their salt should be able to do, given access to such basic resources as an Internet connection, some basic marketing smarts and a salable product or service.

Second, Kelly estimates that a True Fan will spend an average of one day’s income per year on a favorite artist, although of course some will spend more and others less. For easy math, he rounds this sum out to $100 per True Fan. At this rate (which is, you have to admit, an entirely realistic reflection of what many of us spend on our own favorite artists in a year’s time) 1000 True Fans + $100/year = $100,000.00 per year gross, a nifty living by any artist’s standards.

The key, he points out, rests on that personal contact. You’ll need to nurture, connect with and personally involve these True Fans. Of course, for the average artist, this isn’t a problem. You want to reach out and touch people personally and profoundly. You want to enter into a conversation with them and hear their responses to your work. You want to learn about them and geek out over mutual interests and so on. That connection is a vital part of what makes your art worth doing. It’s fun. And it’s one of the reasons why you sing/paint/play/film/photograph in the first place. (For those who don’t, however, he suggests that an intermediary or manager can handle this task perfectly well.)

Obviously, as Kelly himself points out, the requirement of 1000 True Fans applies best to the solo artist. Bands, comedy troupes, painter’s collectives and other groups would have to increase their effort to achieve enough True Fans per member to scale the formula. But nonetheless, it does scale relatively easily. Also, the number of fans varies depending on the type of media, price of the work, costs and so on, although not by so much that it upsets the formula in very many cases. Finally, Kelly notes that this formula only applies when the fan support is direct (people go to your site and buy a download) rather than indirect (people buy your book or click on a blog ad, which spreads the money out over a wide variety of middlemen). Indirect income means you’ll need far more True Fans to support you in a reasonable manner.

There are several interesting case studies mentioned in the article, including an author that funded his novel through direction donations and a musician who is paying for the production costs of her next CD through a truly creative, tiered level of direct support ranging from…

…$10 “unpolished rock,” which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it’s made, to the $10,000 “weapons-grade plutonium level,” where she promises “you get to come and sing on my CD. Don’t worry if you can’t sing - we can fix that on our end.

Wrapping up, Kelly has this to say:

The usual alternative to making a living based on True Fans is poverty…I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don’t know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Conversation Economy, Customers, Social Media by Soni Pitts
No Comments »

Wired’s lastest issue is all about “free”, specifically, FREE, the book by editor Chris Anderson (coming out in 2009) that is bound to get more than a few economists’ knickers in a twist.

I highly recommend that anyone who plans on doing business in the next decade or so go read the article, paying special attention to the scenarios (in gray boxes) and other supplementary resources they’ve decorated the article with (including the video - it’s just a few minutes long and worth the click.)

In the video, Chris Anderson notes:

“The difference between one penny and free is the difference between having to make a conscious decision to purchase a product and to just do it.”

And while that seems to be a subtle difference, when you actually think about it it’s actually quite a significant gap. Crossing that gap requires a decision. And anytime your customer has to make a decision, the answer could always be “no.” Take that decision away, and the answer is almost always “yes.” Now, if the cost of production, distribution and materials is essentially nil, why risk “no” when you could virtually guarantee “yes” by eating that almost non-existent cost?¹

A few quotes from the article:

From the consumer’s perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of “free” is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.

[snip]

Surely economics has something to say about that?

It does. The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we’ve always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The “attention economy” and “reputation economy” are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there’s something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

In short, it’s very possible that free will be the basis of trade and commerce for the foreseeable future. And yet, as Anderson points out, all of the biggest vendors of free services - Yahoo, Google, etc - are filthy rich and increasingly raking it in hand over fist. So yes, it’s possible to get rich on free.

But you have to embrace it, rather than fearing and avoiding it, or trying to take it on in baby steps. The first response will simply keep you in the realm of the buying decision (i.e. trying to work around “no”). The second will simply ensure you’re left slugging it out for customers and memespace as those who embrace free wholeheartedly get all the buzz (and all the crowd momentum).

1. In most cases, it’s greed, ego, habit and confusion, in that order. Greed operates at the “Even a penny is better than nothing” level, which is patently untrue anymore. Also, any time you hear any argument against free that includes the term “stakeholder value,” you’re probably looking at greed and, not insignificantly, the primary stakeholder the speaker probably has in mind. Ego is concerned with the “appearance” of giving things away equated with lack of quality, and the “I don’t have to give it away, because I’m so good” argument…again, neither are relevant here. Habit is just that - business as usual making it hard to envision business as it’s becoming and hard to get out of the rut of the way it’s always been done. And confusion is simply a matter of doing what you’ve always done, because it’s easier than figuring out how to make the new ways work. [↩]

Tags: Business, Changing the World, Conversation Economy, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
No Comments »

Ah, the plaintive cry of the spam-hounded netizen (that quote was nabbed from a comments thread about bulletin board spambots). No doubt you, yourself, have bitched or moaned something similar in response to a particularly annoying or persistent ad. Remember that feeling? Great, now turn it around…

What does that frame of mind mean for you, as a business owner?

Simply this:

1. Make it dead easy to find you.
2. Don’t give me any reasons to click away when I do find you.*
3. Make it easy to complete the transaction that I want to complete, and make it worthwhile and fun for me to do so.
4. Stay in touch whenever it’s in my benefit for you to do so, not yours.
5. Leave me alone when none of the above are happening.

I see some of you out there nodding your heads. Now contrast those rules with the rules for Business As Usual:

1. Get in their face as often as you can, wherever you can, however you can, and as loudly as you can.
2. Do things your way, regardless of what the rabble wants. What do they know, anyway? (Or, alternately, “Who’s the professional here?” God, I just can’t get enough of that…)
3. Proprietary code that only functions on one specific browser and build, unnavigable Flash, impenetrable navigation schemes, unfindable goods, pop-ups, unholy web design, redirects, etc…it’s all good. So what if it makes things a little harder to use? We paid good money for that website/software/technology. If they want it bad enough, they’ll slog through it. And make sure they only buy what we want them to buy, in the packages we want them to buy it and under whatever conditions we happen to set. While you’re at it, make sure you don’t give away any more than you have to for the money. Man, I’m telling you…if you don’t keep an eye on them, those customers will rip you off to the bone!
4. Keep hounding them until they buy something. Then take note who bought and really turn up the burner underneath those “valued customers.” 7 touches is just the start!
5. GOTO 1
   DO NOT END

If you recognize yourself or your business strategy in any of these last 5 rules, you have some work to do. Time to get busy…

*Note that on number 2 of the first list, I DID NOT say “Give me a reason to click through or to stay once I find you.” These days, you start with “NO” and earn “YES,” not the other way around. Remember that.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Conversation Economy, Internet Marketing, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
No Comments »

That’s a quote from Rabbi Pinny Gniwisch, speaking on a podcast with Hugh McLeod about marketing and “Influencers.” They discuss a lot more, and the conversation goes in some very interesting areas, so you might want to give it a listen.

But the primary reason I stopped by to blog was to lay out some righteous honesty for you, from a marketer who hates to hype:

The reality is, you can have the best copy, the coolest widget, the best demographic targeting, the shiniest website and the most bitchin’ marketing plan this side of Eden’s apple and your product launch can still completely and utterly fail. As in no sales, no interest and no money. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Why?

Luck. Happenstance. Random acts of wtf.

Maybe you just happened to launch at the same time as someone else did and they got all the juice. They don’t even have to be superior to win, just first. Or loudest. Or luckiest. (Remember the Betamax/VHS tech race, now being replayed between HD-DVD/Blue-Ray tech.)

Maybe your launch got overshadowed and out-shouted by world events, local news or just the latest, greatest Internet meme hitting the feeds at the same time.

Maybe, despite all your careful research, quality control and expensive design, no one gets it. Or wants to. Why? Don’t ask me. You’d think that in this day and age, those teeny-tiny gas-sipping mini-cars that the British are so fond of would be all the rage over here in the States. But they’re not. Why? Many reasons, few of which have anything to do with the quality, utility or value of the vehicles. Mostly it’s just cultural machismo bullshit.

Maybe a partner firm or even an unrelated company, in the same business or a completely different one is going down in flames, and for some reason people are associating you and your products with them and the nasty taste in their mouths that the company left behind. This happens completely at random as often as it makes any sense. Several specific toys made in China are discovered to be contaminated with lead. Your toys are made in Japan, or Poland. Now no one will touch them with a ten-foot pole. Why? Mass hysteria bleed-over, that’s why. Foreign toys = death on a stick, no matter what the facts really are.

Mostly, though, success is just a matter of nearly pure luck, thinly plated with a veneer of wisdom, experience, skill and confidence.

And that’s something that marketers don’t always want to admit - the reality that with all of our fancy tricks, our secret handshakes, our specialized knowledge, our dark and eldrich incantations and so on, the best we can do is give you a reasonable chance of taking advantage of whatever luck comes your way.

We can’t guarantee results. We can’t say you’ll make more sales. We can’t promise you the world. We’d love to, trust me, we would. But we can’t. Or at least the honest one’s can’t. Because your luck (or mine) can change on a dime and give you back 8 cents change. And the best copywriting, marketing or advertising can’t do a damned thing about it.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Copywriting, Ethics and Business, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
2 Comments »

Subtitled: If You Don’t Get That Flyer Out of My Face, I’m Going to Strangle You With Your Own Spam Thread

[This is crossposted from a response I wrote on an a Google group in reaction to a bit of spam trying to sell a video full of “Google Smashing” techniques to get you to #1 on Google overnight, or some such crap.]

Here’s my question:

There are all kinds of tricks, tips and tools for getting your website, your ebook, your telecourse or your blog into the top spot at Google. And some of them even work, no question about it.

But (and that rustling sound you hear is me dusting off and donning my coaching hat), let’s reframe this issue for just a second and ask:

Does your content actually DESERVE to be #1?

Is it, really, the most relevant information on the topic a person could find if they went searching for those keywords and phrases? Is your product, site or blog really what they’re hoping to find?

Or, by putting yourself at #1, are you simply acting like one of those annoying campaigners standing outside of the voting hall that won’t let you through their ranks to vote for who you have already decided to vote for without listening to their spiel first and, probably, taking a piece of brightly colored and expensively printed landfill with you?

Are you helping, really, or are you simply getting in the way?

Google and other search engine rankings are supposed to be an indicator of relevance, not your 133t algorithm-hacking skillzzzoorzz. If you can’t get to the number one spot, or at least on the front page, simply by being the most relevant, the most interesting and the most current information, product or service specific to that keyword or search term, then really…you *shouldn’t* be there. (Yes, I’m simplifying a lot. The principle remains the same.)

What is it about being in business that changes us, the minute we get behind our desks, from thinking, caring and empathetic members of the human community into single-minded, blindered profit-makers with bottom-line eyes and a “sell-sell-sell” one-track mind? (Of course, I’m sure that none of you guys are like that. It’s all those other people. I’m using the generalized “royal we” here. Humor me for a minute.)

We stop thinking about how we would like to be treated, and start thinking about what we can do to make the next sale, regardless of how we respond to those exact same tactics when we’re back to our normal “just folks” selves (where most likely we’d spot it for the commercial pitch it is and either ignore it at best or be annoyed with it to the point of fissile combustion at worst).

We stop acting like people who like and are trying to help other people, and start acting like hunters on the prowl, loading up with the latest and greatest take-down weaponry, deceptive camouflage and covert maneuvers we can get our grease-painted, doe-scented fingers on.

In short, we quit being people and start being businesses.

“But the whole point of being in business is to make money…isn’t it?” I hear from the peanut gallery.

Look, I’ve got no beef with anyone making any amount of money, provided they do it legitimately and ethically. Go on, get rich. Roll around naked in a pile of shiny gold coins if it makes you happy (although…ouch). I couldn’t care less.

That’s not my point.

What I’m saying is…hell, you’ve been out there. You’ve been on the net looking for something you needed. You’ve bought stuff from people. You shop.

The times, they are a changing. People these days not only don’t want to be sold (they never did want that), but they’re savvier, smarter and have more recourse to avoid you if you try to sell them stuff.

Business is beginning to be viewed (at least by the customers, which includes you some of the time) as less of a commercial activity separate from and outside the sphere of the rest of human interaction and more of a stewardship of valuable goods from there to here. We the people expect to be able to find what we’re looking for and have it delivered to us with concerned attention to our needs, without having to wade through sidewalk squatters on the way in, or a gauntlet of ads, emails, harangues and other annoyances on the way out. And if we can’t get that, we’ll change laws, we’ll change technology and we’ll change the nature of commerce itself until we can.

Be an ass, and don’t be surprised if your assholery gets blogged, Tubed, Boinged, Dugg and Redd for all the world to see. And act on.

But some people in business just don’t get it. They see anyone who’s buying anything from anyone other than them (or even just looking) as someone who has just proven they have cash in their wallet, regardless of the fact that said wallet-bearing primate has demonstrated NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER IN THEIR CONTENT, PRODUCT OR SERVICE.

Trying to buy something online during this time of transition is a lot like trying to buy something in a big, open-air market in a third-world country. You spend the entire shopping trip fending off repeated, endless offers of guides and personal shoppers, ambulatory sellers trying to interest you in their wares and people whose uncle is selling the very thing you’re looking for, if you’ll just come this way, sirrah (even when they haven’t a clue as to what you’re interested in).

And God save you if you actually buy anything, because suddenly you’re the picnic at the ant Olympics. You’re immediately swarmed by a thronging mass of these same “helpers,” plus a veritable river of beggars and pickpockets that appears to pour forth from the very walls of the market itself. If you can make it back to your hotel room with all of your limbs, possessions and coins intact, you count yourself very, very lucky.

By participating in “Google smashing” techniques, by engaging in marketing and advertising strategies that would annoy or inflame you if you had to deal with them, by spending more time tweaking your SEO than your content, and by positioning yourself in front of what someone really wants in the hopes of catching some of that traffic (or, likewise, thronging around them on the way out of the store after they’ve bought), you just become part of that crowd of beggars and commercial mercenaries. You’ve become the problem, instead of the solution.

But don’t these tactics make money? Uh, yeah, they do. Quite a bit, actually. I won’t deny it. But they do so at the expense of our humanity, by turning other people into prey and turning us into people who see other people as prey.

And that, as far as I’m concerned, is not who I ever want to be. Not for any amount of shiny gold coins.

Just something to consider, the next time you see an ad for something that promises to get you to the top of Google, or the next time you’re considering just how intensively you want to market your next product or service offering.

I’ve got no beef with good business practices. And I think people who actually have something of value are ethically and morally required to do their best to get it into the hands of those who can benefit from it. But this isn’t that. And if you can’t tell the difference between the two, or if the glare from those shiny coins tends to blind you to such subtleties, then IMHO you really have no business being in business in the first place.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Business, Ethics and Business, Internet Marketing, Society and Culture, Success by Soni Pitts
4 Comments »

In the comments section of yesterday’s post on making love, not war, with your customers, reader Dina writes:

I think this is a complete misinterpretation of the old cliche. I’m pretty sure that whoever out there is calling business “war” is referring to the competition and not the customer.

In my reply, I said:

A decade or so ago, I would have agreed with you. These days, though….well, apparently you haven’t seen some of the marketing training literature I have. A lot of it does act as if the customer (or prospect) is, if not the enemy, then something akin to prey.

Based on this exchange, I thought I’d expand on this a little today to illustrate what I mean. (Yes, I do have lots of work to do - I’m using this as a brain warm-up)

Although there was, and undoubtedly still is, a blood-tinged atmosphere of war between competitors in the world of business, these days that war is spilling over from the competition front and on to the customer front. But it didn’t used to be that way.

The main reason for this is that back when we (the customers) were all behaving like good sheeple and tuning in to watch tv or listen to the radio like we were told to, there was no need for warlike tactics. We were a captive audience; if we wanted to be entertained or informed, there was nowhere for us to go. We had to watch their commercials and listen to their spin, or go without.

Things have changed.

These days, it’s every man, woman and child quite literally for themselves. You can build personalized, eternal music playlists, rent all your movies, watch entertaining video shows and read up on the news all day long and never see or hear one single ad or commercial, if you so choose. Oh, sure, a few businesses are still trying, putting up banner ads and inserting text-link hovers like commercial landmines in a field of information. But a few simple ad-blocking plugins usually suffices to render all that expensive advertising completely invisible. At the same time, the field of competition has gone from just those who can afford the cover charge of big business to anyone who can set up a point-and-click website. And these changes are creating an unsustainable starvation ecosystem for those on the business end of things.

The end result is that these days, the customer isn’t a sheep to be led, they’re prey to be hunted. As such, tactics have changed.

And the language of the copywriting, advertising and marketing information I’ve seen reflects this change. I tend to avoid the worst of it, but it’s not unusual to see copy like, “how to manipulate customers” and “shooting fish in a barrel.” They talk about using holidays to “break down a customer’s barriers to sales,” and about hitting customers with up-sell promotions when they’re “vulnerable” to buying more. There’s even a software product called Marketing War Room, for crying out loud.

Also, it’s no secret that corporations have big, expensive lobbies to make sure legislation stays on their side. But what most people know (but don’t really think about) is how much of that is spent battling offenses by the very customers these companies “serve.” Whether they’re protecting themselves from being legislated out of using tainted or sub-quality meat, false advertising or deceptive business practices (has anyone ever signed up for a cell phone service and actually gotten the price on the poster, or been able to cancel a subscription service without being sent on a months-long runaround?), businesses are making it clear that while they are indeed still fighting a war with competitors, their opposites aren’t the only enemies on the playing field. Anyone who can negatively impact the bottom line is on their shit list. And that includes their own customers.

And then there’s the ubiquitous phrase, “targeting prospective buyers/customers/the market.” I don’t know about you, but I have never “targeted” someone I loved for any reason. I may focus on them, pay attention to them, look at them, listen to them, think about them and try to figure out ways to make them happy. But I don’t target them. That’s what you do to prey, or other stuff you intend to shoot.

This change is also the origin of web tricks like using onLoad and setTimeout calls that prevent a user from leaving your page by hitting the back button (hitting the back button just reloads the page they’re on). I know I’ve fallen afoul of this annoying practice, and no doubt so have you. It’s also the reason for the innumerable popups, popovers, popunders, floating pop-windows and many other pops designed to make your life hell if you don’t pay attention to what I, the site owner, want you to pay attention to. No deluded site owner is saying to himself, “I bet my customers just loooove popups. Let’s add a few!” No, the conversation is more like, “How can I force them to see this ad?” and, “How can I hold them hostage long enough to squeeze an email address out of them?” And sites that sell these devises or tricks don’t promote the positive reaction of customers. They tout their “unblockable” code and “unavoidable” visibility.

And if you think the “attacks” on customers are solely relegated to web hacks, legislation and annoying advertising, you’re sadly mistaken. They don’t just want control of your wallet, they want control of your mind. Marketing and advertising firms pour millions (it’s probably billions, by now) into psychological and neurobiological research (called neuromarketing) in a quest to track down the marketer’s Holy Grail - the Buy Button. This so-far theoretical “buy button” is a response in the brain so strong and so deeply embedded that we won’t be physically able to resist saying “yes” (most neuromarketing research in this arena is now focusing on the science of addiction, a potent and promising field). The hope is that if the scientists can find it, all advertisers will have to do is poke the button and we’ll buy whatever they put in front of us. It’s a serious enough subject that in 2003, a watchdog group called Commercial Alert actually sent a letter to Emory University pleading with it to halt neuromarketing research, calling it unethical and claiming that it promotes human misery and suffering.

So far, though, researchers haven’t been able to find a specific buy button, although they have found a “don’t buy” button, at least for impulse purchases. This is useful knowledge as well, since it tells advertisers what to avoid. But they are uncovering more and more about how our brain works and the results they have uncovered are continually being tailored for and used by advertisers and marketers, not to gain insight into the human mind so they can better serve customers or create better products, but so they can develop better and better ways of manipulating our responses and thoughts, with or without our awareness or permission.

And I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot more like psyops (military psychological operations) than love to me.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Copywriting, Customers, Ethics and Business by Soni Pitts
No Comments »

Kevin Kelly has a great new essay out on his blog The Technicum, called Better Than Free. In it, he discusses how the cost of things that can be copied - which is pretty much anything tangible - is quickly approaching free. And yet, he says, it is still possible to make a living, and in some instances a fortune, in this giveaway economy.

How is this possible? As Kelly puts it:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

So, what can’t be copied? Kelly suggests that in the land of FREE, making a living becomes less about the thing, and more about the qualities of that thing, particularly what he calls “generative values.”

These generative values are concepts like Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage and Findability. These and similar qualities surround the free core with a layer of value for which people are willing to pay sometimes great sums of money.

For example, Kelly has this to say about Accessibility:

Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them…The fact that most of this material will be available free, if we want to tend it, back it up, keep adding to it, and organize it, will be less and less appealing as time goes on.

There is a huge backlash going on right now in the realm of traditional business against this economy of free. This is most memorably embodied in the litigious flounderings of the music recording industry, who have adopted what can only be perceived as insane business model of suing their customer. To those industries, all this brouhaha appears to be a simple attempt to “protect their interests.” To everyone else, however, it is seen for what it really is: the death throes of a creature who’s to stupid to realize it’s already dead.

Here’s the important take-away from this discussion: Your product is worthless.

Not worthless as in devoid of value, mind you. But worthless in that somewhere, somehow, someone who cares enough can get it for free. And the more people who bother to do so, the more free versions there are. After a while (and usually this happens very, very quickly if your product is even remotely desirable) there are enough free versions on the market that getting one of those is even easier than going to your site or store and simply paying for it.

It’s pointless to fight this. It will only cost you more time, more money and more energy than you have to spare, and in the end you can only hope to accomplish one of two undesirable alternatives:

You could lose, in which case you’ll find yourself right back where you started and all that time, money and effort might as well have been dropped into a black hole for all the effect it will have.

Or you could win, and in doing so make your product harder to get and more expensive than everyone else’s and permeated by such negative public opinion that only those who have no other choice will buy it (and then complain about having to do so prolifically and vociferously to anyone who’ll listen). And as soon as any other reasonable choice presents itself, you can bet that what few customers you do retain will scatter like rats fleeing a burning building.

Your only real option, therefore, is to accept that your product is, in and of itself, a commodity of little or no monetary value and learn to leverage with qualities and values that people are willing to pay for. The downside is that this is all still pretty new, so only a few people have figured out how to make it work for them. The upside is that this is all still pretty new, so the field’s still wide open and there’s lots of room for innovation, creativity and fun.

So go play. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Tags: Business, Changing the World, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
No Comments »