Mandatory viewing, especially if you’re thinking at all about education and how badly we’re failing the generations of students now in school. Read more at TED.com.
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One of the enduring misconceptions in marketing is that it takes a long time, a lot of work, and a lot of resources to truly empower a brand, to make it stick in your head, and to eventually be a part of your mental calculus when you go to buy something later on.
That misconception is still wrong. Brand, empowered by story and emotion, can smack you in the face with a 2×4 and instantly become powerful and memorable, if you do it right.
Here’s an example of doing it right. Watch this short video for just two minutes.
Do you remember it? Do you know what Love 146 is about? Can you remember the story and the emotion behind it, the emotions it evoked in you?
This was one of the most powerful stories I’d heard at the Optimization Summit. Love 146 was created by Rob Morris and this particularly excellent story example was created by Geno Church as part of Brains on Fire’s work to help Love 146 tell its mesmerizing story.
Ze Frank once quipped that a brand is an emotional aftertaste from a set of experiences, and that’s never been more true. What does your brand evoke emotionally? Does it evoke anything emotionally at all? What aftertaste do you leave in the brains of your customers and prospects?
If your customers and prospects feel nothing when they interact with you, then you’re a utility. You’re a commodity. You’re instantly replaceable because there’s no compelling emotional reason that keeps others – your friends, your employer, your customers – engaged.
How hard can your story, your brand, and you hit?
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Watch this short 3 minute video to learn how to tie together Twiangulate, TweepML, and a text editor for maximum Twitter fun and power. Want to boost your following with people who have interesting things to say? Want to find new insights? Try out this method. It’s in HD, so full screen should give you the best results.
Please leave your comments below.
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Well, let me tell you…
Yep, to Blue Sky Factory, an email marketing provider, as Vice President of Strategy and Innovation.
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Here’s a recording of a financial literacy presentation I did for the Massachusetts Association of Student FInancial Aid Administrators. Please watch this with a friend or colleague present and do the exercises together for maximum benefit!
Video
Slides
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If you missed it earlier this year, I presented at the Inbound Marketing Summit on the ROI of social media. Here’s the session video. Enjoy!
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Ever heard of the marketing problem known as museum syndrome? Probably not since I just made that up. Museum syndrome is simply this: an individual masterpiece in an art museum is a wonder to behold. When you place a masterpiece against a wall with dozens of other masterpieces, your ability to appreciate that one piece becomes more difficult. Consumers have a finite amount of attention they can spend at any one time and place, and if you’re fortunate enough to be the recipient of that attention (fleeting thought it is), you need to help the consumer appreciate what’s in front of them.
One of the biggest mistakes marketers make – myself included – is the error of putting a buffet in front of someone who wants a snack. The sheer amount of choice can be staggering, but more importantly, every offering is diminished, no matter how good it is. Every offering is diminished because that finite amount of time and attention is divided among the number of offerings.
That’s why sites like Woot.com, for example, are incredibly popular. Instead of asking consumers for their attention at a million different products at once, Woot slaps one product up and says, here, pay attention to this only. It’s the equivalent of a museum curator locking the rest of the museum up and placing one masterpiece on a podium in the lobby with a spotlight on it only.
Marketers face this problem writ incredibly large in the digital age, when media is so available and abundant that the consumer’s attention is always being split. There’s the DVR in the living room, the iPod on your hip, the smart phone in your pocket, the endless depths of the Web on a browser near you, social media conversations flying by, books both analog and digital piled up on the nightstand – media everywhere, all begging for a slice of your attention. How, as a marketer, can you present what you’ve got in such a way that you beat museum syndrome? How, as a marketer, can you create that masterpiece experience for your product or service?
I’ve been thinking about this a great deal as I get ready to revamp the FAFSA application guide site I run, FAFSAonline.com. This topic, more than any other in the world of financial aid, is bewildering to consumers and especially to those who don’t have a good head for numbers. More students lose financial aid each year from issues and errors on the FAFSA than pretty much anything else except not bothering to apply for scholarships. So my challenge in the next few months as I get ready for the 2010 FAFSA season to start is to figure out how to beat museum syndrome in the world of financial aid.
Why? Here’s what’s at stake: if I can beat museum syndrome on this topic, it may mean that thousands of kids will go to college that in previous years would have been defeated by the FAFSA process. Big stakes, big chance to make a difference.
How will we make this happen? I’m looking around constantly for more examples of ways people have beaten museum syndrome. Woot.com is one. Another that’s been working is the way I have the homepage of the Financial Aid Podcast set up, with a single video that introduces the user to the site, focusing attention and eyeballs on the visually compelling cue of a video.
What ways are you beating museum syndrome in your marketing?
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A great TED talk that’s worth your 18 minutes. Let it inspire you and make you laugh!
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The crash in Qazvin, Iran (July 15, 2009):
Flight 93, Pennsylvania (September 11, 2001):
Bear in mind the plane that crashed in Iran was a TU-154, roughly the same size as a Boeing 727 (slightly larger). 157ft long, MTOW 220,000 lbs.
The Boeing 757 is is 155ft long, MTOW 255,000 lbs.
Shouldn’t the Flight 93 impact site show roughly similar characteristics as the TU-154 site? Anyone with aerospace engineering credentials, please comment.
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Podcasters Across Borders 2009 has wrapped up and the team of Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche threw yet another impressive event. This year’s PAB theme was ostensibly bringing outside knowledge into the podcasting world, but the general subject of many of the presentations was on story more than anything – ways to more effectively communicate your story from Six String Nation to a Hollywood career. There were some spectacular new tools and techniques debuted which I look forward to integrating into my shows, the Financial Aid Podcast and Marketing Over Coffee, ideas that I think will, if they work well, bring things up a notch. Also picked up some great new photography techniques I’ll be trying out soon.
Along the way, I presented an 18 minute talk on monetization and why it’s vital to new media. Longtime readers of this blog will find many of the themes to be as familiar as old friends.
I also did my usual Sunday morning semi-improv presentation, My Top 20 Social Media Tools. Unlike the other presentation, I’m not publishing this presentation in any context, and here’s why: you had to be there and ready.
The Sunday morning presentation is always a tough one for people to make. It’s at 8 AM, which, after a night of partying, only the hardcore attendees can usually make. Delivering a super-tight, all-meat presentation that many have expressed a desire to see is my way of thanking them for making that extra effort to show up.
It’s also part of a martial arts lesson my teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, is constantly reinforcing with us. Very often in the black belt class, he’ll show a technique only once as a way of helping us train our minds to capture and catch as much information as possible, to be vigilant about paying attention.
Social media in some ways makes us reliant on the crowd, reliant on the tools, reliant on waiting for someone to retweet or blog or podcast an important event. That laziness – and it is mental laziness – softens our ability to capture vitally important things that happen which may never happen again. Think about your own life. Have you ever had the experience of missing a child’s first important event, missing a news story break on the street right in front of you, missing a key piece of information at a conference? I know I’ve missed information, especially in the dojo, because of a lack of focus. I know I’ve missed some terrific photos due to inattentiveness.
Thus, that presentation will never happen again, at least not like that. The slides won’t be posted, the video won’t be uploaded, the information never shown again. If you were there – fully and wholly there, meaning you were paying attention and not twittering, blogging, chatting, etc. – then you got some information I hope you find useful. If you weren’t there, then please make the effort to actually show up at events like Podcasters Across Borders or PodCamp rather than hoping someone will live stream/live tweet/live be there for you. You’ll find that there are many more gems from the weekend which will probably not be published from other presenters and attendees as well.
Also, big shout outs to all of the longtime friends and fabulous conversations from the weekend, from Marko Kulik’s photo advice to intense debates about the future of media with Whitney Hoffman, Tod Maffin, and Julien Smith, to the many other great conversations over the weekend.
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