Audience

When Your Audience Is Too Small

Garth Beyer

Usually, so is your impact.

When you’re so motivated to get a big audience, reach the mass, have as many people as you know plus all of their friends to attend an event you’re putting on or even something as simple as following you on a social network, you lose out on leaving the impact the few who show up deserve.

Once they are there. So should you. No point in thinking of how you can get more people to attend the next event during the one some are attending.

This goes for Twitter chats, seminars, book readings, classes, and even get-togethers with friends.

 

Stay Positive & Impact Was Your Intention In The First Place, Right?

Incremental Appreciation, Do You Have it?

Garth Beyer

There’s no tried and true way to reach the massive audience you desire to reach and to have your message effect them equally. There is, however, a tried and true way to reach the massive audience you desire to reach and to have your message effect them all differently. Incremental Appreciation is working on appealing to individual after individual, one by one, person by person.

You’re not going to sell your work to someone. You’re going to sell them a feeling they desire. Once they make an exchange with you (be it money, time, subscription, etc,.), appreciate that moment, but don’t expect an immediate return on investment.

The saying all good things come to those who wait gets misread to mean if you stand by, stay sill, sit silently, what you want will come to you. That is false. The saying implies the good things will not come right after you take an action, place a sale, reach a member of your audience. Instead, they will come later. The idea of “waiting” is perceived as inaction. Again, extremely false.

Incremental appreciation leads to what Malcolm Gladwell calls the tipping point. The moment when a certain number of people are buzzing about you or your product, so much so that a tip occurs and now the mass you felt was impossible to reach at the beginning now wants in.

Incremental appreciation is about stacking blocks, filling a bucket with water (drip by drip), or adding a contact to your rolodex. It’s about appreciating every contact, every sale, every new follower, but not wishing you could reach a thousand at once and not being pissed when you don’t sell as many products as you wanted last month and not giving up when you don’t get the praise you were hoping for within the first week of your startup.

Incremental appreciation implies a sense of some short-term effect. Actually, it’s quite the opposite.

 

Stay Positive & Be In It To Win It, But Be In It To Enjoy Each Increment First

 

There Are More Than You Know

Garth Beyer

I went to a poetry slam tonight. If I had to guess, I would guess few who attended the slam have actually written any poetry. They were all there “to check it out.”

So it goes with poetry slams, the audience judges the poetry using their own perceptions of what’s good and what isn’t. The diverse poetry and diverse audience (along with the fact that few were expert analysts of poetry) made the rating of each slam poem to be fairly objective.

The rating results for all the contestants? Exceptional.

The few low scores the audience gave to the slam poets got boo’d.

It just goes to show, there are more people out there that love your work more than you know.
Stay Positive & Sometimes The More Different You Are, The More People Will Come To Snap Their Fingers

Long Form Vs Short Form

Long Form Vs Short Form

Garth Beyer

Long form

I made a not-so-pretty big mistake when I started my blog. I wrote long form posts, I wrote tall orders, I wrote laundry lists instead of a few bullet points. I wrote posts that would take four minutes or longer to read. That was a mistake.

For any business, a blog is essential, press releases are essential, newsletters and other forms to update people are essential.

Getting the length of them right – even more essential.

Now I can get away with writing a long form post. I couldn’t before because I didn’t have any true fans, no passionate customers, no connected friends to what I was writing about.

Think of the websites that you go on to read, whether it’s for news, fiction or self-help. Now filter through the authors and pick which ones you would read a five-minute post if they wrote it. Your list of authors dwindles, doesn’t it?

When writing anything, knowing how to write to your audience is everything, but knowing how also means knowing how long or how short you can make it so they will read.

New readers, new customers, new fans, new friends, new strangers – none of them will spend their time reading a long form piece from you. 140 characters to 200 words is about all you have to work with.

Let me make something clear. I don’t think the internet has made us incapable of focusing our attention on something longer than two minutes. I simply think that it’s more difficult than ever to have a true and passionate follower.

Well worth the work though.

 

Stay Positive & Tell Me Again Who Your Focus Is On

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What’s Your Speed

Garth Beyer

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Are you a sprinter? A pacer? A walker?

Imagine that you work at a bookstore and someone asks you to help them find a book. You know exactly where it is. How fast do you walk to it?

Walk slow and they perceive you as not caring about what you’re doing. Go too fast and they perceive that they are a nuisance to you. Walk at their pace and they won’t perceive you at all.

The big go getters in life, the real big ones, they don’t make it. I’ve tried each of the paces. I’ve gone too fast and crashed. I’ve gone to slow and disappointed people, including myself. I’ve done things at a mediocre rate and went unnoticed.

I’m writing to tell you that the right pace is different for you than it is me because we’re likely trying to please a different group of people. However, we all have our competition. The right pace can be simplified to slightly faster than your competition, than those trying to please the same group of people as you. We all have our audiences and average pace for pleasing that audience.

The best become so by being slightly better.

Selling, consulting, making people happy. It’s not a race. The quickest don’t win. Those who push themselves just past the average are the ones who win.

And in the world we’re in, winning is everything.

 

Stay Positive & Get Out There, Be Better Than The Rest

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Is Their Attention Worth It?

Garth Beyer

Asking if your attention is worth it is just like asking what you want out of the relationship when you’re the one giving.

Better to ask if their attention is worth it. What are they truly paying when they watch you, buy your product, read your blog? Is it just time? Or are they paying with their child’s college savings? Or are they trading their long-held beliefs and world view for something different that you offer?

There’s a reason why they call it paying attention. Knowing exactly what your audience is giving to get what you offer puts you a step closer at understanding your audience and learning how to tweak the story you’re selling.

 

Stay Positive & Nothing Is Ever Free

Garth E. Beyer

Lost Glove. One Cold Hand.

Garth Beyer

Glove

At least 18 people felt bad today. I counted.

I waited for the bus to pick me up and transport me back to work. I noticed a single glove in the middle of the sidewalk where people get on and off the transit. It appeared not stepped on, stirring me to assume it was recently dropped. Perhaps from someone who loaded on the bus moments before I arrived at the station. Not sure what to do with it, I watched it and noticed something peculiar.

Every person who walked past the glove looked at it, stared at it just long enough to think something like “well, that sucks for someone. I wonder if they figured out they lost it yet.”

Similarly, no one knew what to do with it. They just left it there.

It surprised me to find that Jennifer Gooch tried finding a solution to this problem with onecoldhand.com. The hyperlink goes to a shout out at Carnegie Mellon University (where she attended) and not the actual website because the website no longer exists. (You can see what the website looked like by using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.)

To keep this post short, I’ll keep my argument short.

Jennifer Gooch had the business plan backward.

Today, one person lost one glove. I then watched 18 people empathize until the 19th person actually stepped on the glove, picked it up and handed it to the bus driver. The bus driver shrugged his shoulders and tossed it on the council, certainly to stay there until he decides whether it’s better off being tossed or brought to the transit’s lost and found office. (More likely the former.)

In Pittsburgh, Gooch focused on finding the owner of the one glove, only sometimes relieving it’s owner of the minimal stress of having lost it. Both her and my own’s take is to satisfy one person is, well, satisfying. However, not remarkable.

To satisfy 18+ people in one swoop is remarkable. Instead of creating OneColdHand to meet a demand that isn’t much of a demand (most don’t think, how can I find my glove. They think, when can I go buy a new pair), Gooch could have created OneColdHandTwoWarmOnes – pairing one lost left-handed glove with one lost right-handed glove, then giving them to someone without any.

A reason so many businesses flop when trying to find a niche market is that they go after the wrong long tail. Yes, there are people who use spinoff OneColdHand websites, but there is no profitability in something that is (rarely) at most, satisfying.

Consider when you’re trying to define who you want your audience to be, that although there are people wanting to reunite with their lost glove, there are far more people who have none. The question every entrepreneur or freelancer needs to ask is “who cares more?”

Ask that question enough and you’ll have your target audience. (A profitable one.)

 

Stay Positive & If Mixmatching Socks Is A Thing, Why Not Gloves?

Garth E. Beyer

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