Slow Fail, Quick Fix, Overnight Success

Garth Beyer

All organizations are prone to fail slowly, although it may not seem like it at times.

Just like the overnight success of Amanda Palmer, which is anything but an overnight success (it was a consistency of getting the little things right over a long period of time), failures appear to happen fast. One day the restaurant is there, the next day it’s not. One day the business manager is in charge of 20 employees, the next day it’s just him. But, truly, you and I know failure and success don’t happen that fast.

All agencies, organizations, businesses are bound to be cut and bruised just as we are. Are you treating the wounds of your business as you would a wound on your body? Or are you waiting (like so many now-failed businesses) until it’s time to patch the wound with a giant band-aid, a redesigned website, a new PR campaign, a new motto or “about us” page? It may seem logical to care for all wounds at once, but it’s not.

A drop in office productivity, a minor employee-client clash, one regretful tweet are cuts that need mending immediately. Even more importantly, we must view the boring things of business just as wounds that need our immediate attention.

When we begin ignoring the little things, we set ourselves up for a fail: a slow fail until the day it hits you.

You can certainly jump ahead success-wise with a broad stroke, a bold move, but to stop a slow and painful death that every organization, every person in business is susceptible to, we must make the little things a little more remarkable, we must apply, not just quick-fixes, but improvements to the banal, to the cumbersome, to the “not my problem” problems of our business.

Don’t just think “how can we fix this?” think “how can we fix this in a way that leaves a positive impression?” If we ask and answer this enough, we may just find ourselves getting referred to as an overnight success.

 

Stay Positive & Turn The Little Things Into Big Things

Problem With Many Marketers’ Mindsets

Garth Beyer

Marketers Mindset

As marketers, we often have a big ego when it comes to our industry. We see things. We notice trends. We can (or at lest we often always try to) answer why? Why X appeals to target Y. Why a restaurant would have revolving doors. Why a business is using a particular hashtag.

It should go without saying that we often know what’s best. After all, we’ve studied the industry for years, read thousands of articles, talked to hundreds of people to know why things are they way they are. Yet, this mindset gets marketers in trouble over and over again.

We think if a particular ad appeals to us, it will also appeal to our target audience. (We have high standards, you know? So if it works on us, won’t it work on anyone? Heh.) Our mindset can be simplified to we know what’s best for others based on our own reactions of an ad or PR strategy. All the while, we forget that we are not the target market.

The best way to break the mold is to see every opportunity as an opportunity to learn, not to prove or show we’re right. Michael E. Gerber wrote it perfectly,

“Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.”

As long as we retain the mindset of wanting to know more, needing to know, being humble enough to know that we don’t know it all, we can evade the mental trap so many marketers are caught by.

 

Stay Positive & Now You Know

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Assorted Links

Garth Beyer

1) How three simple (but powerful) words can put you on the path to happiness (read) If you’re a goal setter, you’ll want to read this and understand how important it is you look at your goals in terms of adjectives. No one likes being unhappy when they get what they want.

2) How to turn small talk into smart conversation (read) I made these mistakes at a meet up just the other week. I was struggling to get through the 30 minutes we had planned to chat. Originally I thought she was just introverted. Then I read this and realized I was asking all the wrong questions.

3) Newcastle Brown Ale tries to sneak into Doritos commercial contest (watch/read) Clever advertising. Period.

4) The evolution of pop culture (read) We, as marketers, often spend too much time on the hype part of a product or service or business and less on creating what the market has asked for, creating something that’s worth talking about, finding those who are looking for what we have.

5)  Use this link and get a free month of Skillshare. (learn) I’ve learned so much from Skillshare classes. I suggest you check out the community. You don’t have to stay or pay if you don’t like it.

They Will Be Pleased, Regardless

Garth Beyer

Don't Appeal To The Mass

When you make an effort to reach the masses, to please the majority, to advertise to all, you are inevitably creating a bitter experience for some.

You see this with retail stores quite often. Owners spend their time outside of the store trying to reach the masses, and in doing so, they neglect and devalue those already in it. It’s better of them to treat and please the customers already in their store if they wish for more newcomers.

We need to recognize people will want us to build an experience for the mass. The thought process of most is that one event that calls out to a majority is better than five events that call out to smaller groups.

Writing a book that is safe, that anyone walking around the bookstore will want to pick up, seems to be the most logical thing to do, but it’s not. It’s better to write five shorter books that target a specific tribe.

You may win the lottery, you may have a successful large event, but all who attended, all who bought your book will revert back to their search for the one that makes them feel most valued, most part of a tribe.

They will eventually be pleased, regardless of the decision you make because it’s our natural inclination to find a place where we have a consistent pleasurable experience, one that connects us with like-minded people, one that all who attend or purchase can give the same answer to “People like us ______.”

We can’t please everyone at once, so why bother?

But we can please everyone over a period of time/a series of events/a number of books by recognizing the tribes people are part of and creating a remarkable experience for each of them.

Thing is, you may find out that pleasing one tribe is all you need to do. Stephen King doesn’t need to write a book specific to a bunch of tribes. All he needs is one group to please.

Anyway, if one were to measure effort, I’d say it takes about the same to appeal to the mass as it does to appeal to smaller tribes. The results, however, are different… very different.

 

Stay Positive & Different Is What You Want

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Short Stack Opportunity

Garth Beyer

Short Stack Eats

Breakfast joint Short Stack Eats in Madison has a weekly blind special. If you ask them what’s in it, they charge you $12.95. If you order on good faith, it’s only $6.95.

The real perk of going to Short Stack Eats is if you ask once, you can always be braver next time since the special changes each week.

Think about that for a moment.

Is it an opportunity or a risk? Will we be braver next week? Can we change the way we see something from risk to opportunity?

We can certainly afford the risk of a breakfast, but if we have the mindset of risk instead of opportunity about something as simple as breakfast, do we wear those glasses when we look at larger decisions regarding entrepreneurship, leadership or creativity?

Can we afford to have that mindset?

Thing is, with decisions that matter, we can’t pay extra to know whether something will work for us or not. We may not have the chance to be braver next week in the same capacity. And in the real world if we end up getting something we don’t like, it’s not as easy to find someone else who will take it off our plate (pun intended).

Seems to me the only way to look at big decisions and blind specials is as opportunities.

 

Stay Positive & Be Brave

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Why I Fricken’ Love Public Relations

Garth Beyer

Can you define public relations?

What about the definition of marketing?

How about “brand,” can you define that?

Let’s see… how about the definition of customer service?

Essentially, the definitions are the same: all rational and emotional perceptions about a product, service or company that are created through communications and experience.

Within that, you discover the definition of marketing, the definition of customer service and the definition of public relations.

“You know someone is in PR when you ask them what they do and they respond with ‘I am X (or Y or Z), but I do a bit of everything.'”

I love PR because it’s not just one thing, it’s not just crisis communications, not just brand management, not just interacting with press outlets, not just social media, not just newsletters or call centers; it’s everything.

It’s collecting and analyzing data collected on rational and emotional perceptions people have about a product as well as people themselves and their worldviews, then communicating a particular feeling and experience to them that shares your story and connects them to a community of people just like them.

Public relations is knowing how to create a big picture. And I love that.

The key action, then, for you, me and everyone looking to be awesome at PR is to constantly seek out our weak links and focus on them until they’re up to par.

 

Stay Positive & Better Get Going, PR Is A Long Haul

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HT 37signals, Kennedy Communications, and Dave Florin

What It Takes For Ideas To Spread

Garth Beyer

Ideas That Spread

As I’m ironing out speech ideas and book ideas, I’m ruminating on the difficulty of introducing an idea that spreads.

We no longer need a book or a speech or a consultation to tell us how to solve a problem we have. Google and YouTube is there for that. If you’re searching for a “How to,” the Internet is your friend.

But the “Why do” …that might be worthy of print media or a Ted talk or a podcast.

Instead of producing something that shares a solution to someone’s problem, we have the opportunity to share something we are passionate about with someone who might not know they had a problem with their “why,” which, may in turn alter the “how to” they seek.

Our goal, then, ought to be to find those who don’t know they need help and proceed to inspire them with an idea worth spreading.

For a spreadable idea, you few things must fall into place:

1) You must be passionate about an idea that is, at minimum, different from what has been done before. The cue here is often the saying, “We’re doing things just a bit different.” For an idea to spread, there must be both a sense of security (doing things that we know already works) and a little adventure (but doing them a bit differently).

2) The audience must understand the basics of your idea, which you typically don’t need to go in depth about. Recall, Google has you covered as well as bookstores when it comes to the basics. Ideas that spread aren’t sent out to beginners, they are given as a gift to those who 1) understand the foundation of your idea already and 2) trust you. Which leads us to the third and final variable.

3) Ideas spread as quickly as the path established for them allows; that is, the relationship you have, the connection you have built determines the speed at which an idea can spread. The stronger the relationship, the easier it is for an idea to go viral. This goes further than just making a connection between you and someone in your target audience; it requires you to connect your target audience to each other, ultimately creating multiple pathways for the idea to spread.

Lastly, ideas don’t spread simply by throwing them out there. Ideas spread when they are remarkable, as in, worth making remarks about, worth talking to others about, worth sharing.

For an idea to resonate, the idea must focus on the part of doing or thinking about things differently.

 

Stay Positive & Go Spread Something Remarkable

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