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Why Serendipity Shouldn’t Matter

“Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated.” – Wikipedia

I’ll be contrarian to my good friend Chris Brogan in saying that serendipity shouldn’t matter to you. Here’s what I mean. There’s an interesting expression in ninjutsu: banpen fugyo. Literally, change, never surprised. Toshitsugu Takamatsu, the previous headmaster of the Togakure Ryu ninjutsu school, is quoted as saying there’s no such thing as surprise for the ninja.

Stephen K. Hayes, my teacher’s teacher, often says that luck is merely energy that is unchanneled.

If you’re really good – really good – at life, if you’re working towards mastery of all that life has to offer and all the potential you have in life, then surprise and serendipity should be the gravy. They should be the bonuses at best. Why?

At the Web 2.0 Open, one of the exercises I asked people to do (adapted from Stephen K. Hayes’ phenomenal Evocation workshop) is to pick out something in your life that seemed like a lottery ticket sort of experience. Pick out something that was just wow! and good fortune came your way, and tell that story to a friend. During the event, I asked people to talk to the person next to them about their experiences, telling this story of a magical moment in their life when something fortunate happened. I told my story of co-founding PodCamp with Chris Brogan and suddenly finding myself on a jet to Sweden to put on PodCamp Europe at Jeff Pulver’s behest.

Serendipity, right? Good luck, right?

The second half of this particular exercise was to take the exact same story but retell it in a fashion where no luck was involved, where you made it happen and the natural course of events was that your efforts and focus created the outcome of success. I asked people to exaggerate if they needed to, but make the story work. Again, my story was of how hard Chris and I worked to create PodCamp and make it the success it was, and naturally events occurred which led to us being asked to create PodCamp Europe.

Here’s the funny thing: with a significant majority of the room, very little or no exaggeration was needed. Very little. Most people were able to find enough factual evidence in their lottery ticket moment of all the things they had done, all the choices they had made, that led to their good fortune. More than a few spirits perked up as they realized just how much of a hand they had in their “luck”.

This is the power that you have, the power that you give away, the power that you forfeit when you chase serendipity, when you hope for good things to happen just because instead of taking the reins for yourself.

Take charge of your life. Take charge of your destiny. Yes, leave room for hope and serendipity, leave room for good things to happen as bonuses to what you’re already doing, but do not live another day in your already too short life counting on hope when you have the capacity, the capability to take the wheel of the ship for yourself, to make good things happen, and to set the stage for the results you want.

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I’m an avid gold-maker in World of Warcraft. Like real life, the amount of gold you have in the game is a direct measure of how much value you bring. If you quest like mad and rack up thousands of gold, you’ve got the skills and the time to complete lots of quests. That’s value. If you farm materials like in-game consumables, you’re generating value for other players who don’t have to spend their time farming, and the gold pours in. If you play the Auction House, knowing your markets and trends, you can arbitrage items that are sold for unusually low prices by players that don’t know better and resell them at market prices – and the gold pours in.

What I want to highlight today, though, is an important aspect of the gold making game. Take a look at the top 5 items I’ve sold in game recently:

The first and fourth items are rare cloth that can be made only once every 4 days. Scarcity makes them incredibly valuable. The same is true for item 3, the Hat of Wintry Doom, because it’s made from rare items.

The second item is an in-game pet that can only be acquired in a little-loved backwater part of the world that takes ages to get to. People pay a price premium for it because they don’t want to burn up the time and effort it takes to get there.

What’s really important is item 5, wool cloth. For anyone who does not play World of Warcraft, wool cloth is a commodity. Not only is it a commodity, but it’s an especially plentiful commodity that most early players encounter by the bucket before moving onto more challenging parts of the game. If chess pieces wore clothing, pawns would be the ones sporting wool cloth – it’s common.

So why is such a mundane commodity the #5 seller? Two reasons: first, it’s used by several professions in game, which means there’s consistent demand for it. Second, most players run right past the stage of the game where they’d accumulate a significant amount of the cloth in their pursuit for better, shinier objects. Thus, while it’s plentiful, most players forget about it and move on rapidly, long before they accumulate any significant amount of it.

Consistent demand. High potential supply, low actual supply. This is a profit engine.

So what does this have to do with marketing? How many people are searching for the shiny object, the rare, the Ebonweave cloth of marketing? Social media currently holds this crown, though a few years ago it was SEO, and before that it was email. Everyone wants into the new, the shiny, the really glittery with the high potential payoff, and for those few that do succeed in making the Ebonweave of marketing, the payout is handsome.

But.

But there’s more than enough money in the marketing equivalents of wool cloth. In the rush to social media, people forgot search optimization. In the rush to search optimization, people forgot email marketing. All along the way, there are lots of valuable methods that generate real results and real income, and those rushing to reach Grand Master Social Media Marketer are leaving money and opportunity on the table.

Remember your wool cloth. Revisit the things that used to be hot and see, now that they’ve reached maturity, just how quietly profitable they can be. Some things won’t be any more, but some things perceived as a commodity could still be one of your best sellers if you’re good at it and the attention deficit crowd has moved onto whatever new shiny has appeared for the day.

Good luck farming your wool cloth.

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How effective is a web design?

How effective is a photograph?

Here’s an easy way to tell. Load up your web site of choice on a mobile browser. Hold the device at arm’s length. If you can’t immediately pick out the call to action and get a sense for what the site is about, then your web design isn’t amazing.

The same is true of photography. Load up your photos in iPhoto or Picasa or the thumbnail browser of your choice. If at a glance not a single photo stands out, then your photos don’t have the famed Tom Peters’ Wow! factor.

The very best way to test this out is to do it with other people. Load up your sites or photos on the mobile device and ask someone to quickly take a peek. If they’re not getting the message you want, then it’s time to go back and sharpen the pencil.

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I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (WoW) for fun the past couple of weeks or so. It was a fun game in the beginning, but now it’s a useful game, at least in the sense of honing two vitally important skills, arbitrage and information asymmetry. (two skills, I might add, come in handy in today’s economy)

To the right is a screen clip of WarCraft as it appears with a few pricing plugins installed. By itself, the doesn’t look at all like this, only with some plugins. (Auctioneer, if you’re a WoW gamer) Take a look at what’s in there.

Pricing
Median buyout price
Buyout prices at the extremes
3, 7, and 14 day moving averages of prices
Item availability from vendors and pricing
Resale valuation and estimated ROI

Bear in mind, the average player of WoW doesn’t install this add-on software, which means they don’t have access to this information.

What does this have to do with marketing? There are two concepts at work here.

Arbitrage is unequal pricing for equal things. In this example, I can tell what items are good deals and what items aren’t, what items are a bargain, what items are overpriced. Arbitrage extends to marketing and new media as well – concepts that work in proven systems can be adapted to new media, and the result is information arbitrage. I can take a concept like a proven sales letter template and adapt it for a blog.

Information asymmetry is even more important in this case. I have access to information that the average WoW player does not. This allows me to be more effective as a WoW gamer, because I can earn rapid profits from better information, especially competing against players with less information or lower quality information. Marketers in new media have an information asymmetry advantage that marketers outside of new media don’t enjoy. Marketers in new media have access to the Twitter stream, to blogs, RSS, podcasts, and so much more. If you can know what your target market is thinking and saying about your product, service, or industry, you have a massive advantage over marketers who lack that information and either have to compete by spending more or can’t compete as well.

Arbitrage and information asymmetry – all from a fun game.

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BRTC is winding down on the East Coast as a lot of folks pack off to bed. Overall, the results of the campaign were good, especially for a first effort of its class. Could they have been better? Absolutely. Could they have been worse? Absolutely. Here’s some thoughts and initial lessons learned.

First, I would have liked to have had more transparency from the beginning. As I say often, transparency is the currency of trust. While Black Lab was a fine choice for the campaign, I would have liked to have seen more community involvement from the beginning in the selection of the band. However, that’s what I get for coming late to the party. That said, Black Lab was a good choice, and the band was certainly more than generous in their scholarship fund commitment.

Lesson: transparency pays off. The more transparent you are upfront, the less suspicion can be cast.

Second, I have the distinct sensation that podcasting is still inside of an echo chamber of sorts. When you look at the traffic stats from BRTC, you can see that there was a massive push at 9 AM ET, peaking at 10 AM ET, and then declining throughout the day. I had thought there’d be a second spike after work, when people got home, but traffic remained on the decline throughout the day. We got a lot of people to make a great push initially, but we tapped out our reach relatively early on. That tells me that we did a great job of reaching our audience, but our audience may be ourselves – the movement didn’t exhibit any exponential characteristics, as you’d normally see from a chain reaction of word of mouth. I think we would have been more successful by also sharing techniques for building audience.

Lesson: allot more lead time for a campaign like this and share more tools with the community for growing the reach of individual podcaster audiences prior to the campaign. Make the campaign benefit everyone who participates.

Third, time shifting can work against us for a small window. Podcasting and blogging are founded on RSS and the ability to consume content when you, the audience member, wants to consume it, not on the schedule of the content creator. While this is a good thing, it also makes coordinating the reaction of an audience much more difficult in a short period of time. Podcasts and blogs lack the immediacy of email, IM, and Twitter.

Lesson: build a mailing list early and emphasize it throughout the campaign to deliver better results on the day, OR expand the window of time in which action can be taken from a day to a week to better allow people to act on their schedule.

Fourth, we did not anticipate the strength of the global market. BRTC performed the best in countries that frankly, we didn’t expect it to. Looking at the initial returns, BRTC outperformed expectations in the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany, dominating the charts in those countries. It’s all too easy to forget that the Internet truly is global, and our reach might not be as great as we would like right now, but no one can deny its ability to cross borders.

Lesson: plan for the international community to participate and encourage them to do so.

Fifth, I think we had too many incongruent messages. There were essentially three main messages of BRTC – “stick it to the man/RIAA/record labels”, “raise money for charity”, and “show the power of new media”. While I think we did a decent job of tying them all together, in the beginning it was fragmented, and that may have hurt initial acceptance and uptake of the campaign.

Lesson: plan campaigns from the outset. Define a message or even multiple, congruent messages, but agree on what needs to be communicated.

Sixth, one of the things that I think hurt uptake in the more conservative parts of the country was the edgier aspect of the campaign. While the song was quite pleasant, the album art was decidedly not family friendly, and some of the initial language on the Bum Rush the Charts blog was also unquestionably not family friendly and not work safe. Also, the initial message of “kicking old media where it hurts” (albeit in much less friendly language) may have restricted traditional media coverage of the event.

Lesson: to ensure maximum audience participation, plan for family friendly/safe for work from the outset. No need to dive full-on into political correctness, but at least strive to reach the broadest audience possible, old and new media alike.

Now, after reading this, you’re probably thinking, wow, Chris, you must have thought Bum Rush the Charts was a complete failure, a complete disaster. Not so, not so at all. In fact, I think for an effort like this, it was a fantastic success. Consider this. How much does a record label spend to get a new single on the charts in one country? How much would it cost to launch a worldwide campaign to do the same? New media may not have achieved as much reach as I would have liked, but there’s no question that the campaign “moved the needle” and achieved very impressive results across the world.

More importantly, the campaign raised some money. While I’ve said before that you can’t shop your way to a better world, this was clearly a case of piggybacking for a greater good. Mark Nemcoff and Mike Yusi were going to run with Bum Rush the Charts (they are the founders) no matter what, and the fact that they were generous enough to let me piggyback on their event to raise some money for college scholarships speaks volumes to their characters. Even if only one person bought the track, that’d be 45 cents that someone wouldn’t need to take out of their own pockets to pay for college, and for that, whoever we draw for the scholarship will owe a debt of gratitude to Mark and Mike.

Finally, look at the incredible amount of press about the event despite an effective budget of 800 (for two press releases) plus the time and labor of those involved. Worldwide top 100 charts in Rock? Worldwide top 100 charts overall in select countries? For800 plus labor? You can’t beat that return on investment. No, Bum Rush the Charts was a great first experiment to test the reach of new media, and with the lessons learned from our first collective efforts, it’s only going to get better from here on out.

Thank you to everyone who joined in.