Posts from: September 30, 2009

Published on September 30, 2009 by Scott Gould

PR 2010

First I said this, then, I said this. Now, this:

If you’ve arrived at reading my blog for the first time, or the first time this week, then you’ve come in the middle of a discussion on what I’m currently calling New PR, probably until a far buzzier word gets made up. This diagram above is how I see New PR working in 2010. Let me explain.

Metrics: Spreadability and Relevance

We all know that word of mouth is a not a marketing technique, because you can’t create it. You can only create the environment for it – by giving words for mouth, making something remarkable, etc. Spreadability therefore replaces reach, because as the volume of channels increase, the volume per channel decreases, and we therefore need more than ‘reach’ in a channel at one given time, we need spreadability over time and across channels. In many ways, this is value over volume.

Relevance is the difference between personal relationship and public relations. The former is dynamic (as per yesterday’s post), the latter is static. The former is homemade, the latter is manufactured, or factory made. What this also means is public relations is mass distribution, whereas personal relationship gains uniqueness through mass customisation – by being personal, it is unique and not one-size-fits-all.

Two Sides Of The Same Triangle

We don’t want to sacrifice the old wine for the new (again, see yesterday). We want to preserve static, whilst adopting dynamic.

The right side of the triangle is traditional public relations – it is centrally governed. This means the message is sent out via a press release, onto TV, onto radio, but at every point the message is governed, entrusted to editors, camera men and reporters to use what has been provided, make their edit, and then we approve. In TV, for instance – and I have been on the TV sets – everything is checked to ensure it is in line with the message, i.e. governed.

The left side of the triangle is personal relationship, which is centrally guided. The message is put out, but all along the way, like a chinese whisper, the message is adapted, changed, retold, updated, and a whole host of other synonymous activity. This change is guided, not governed. You cannot control it, only guide it. Therefore the ability for the message to preserve its original intention is determined by how clear the message is. Continually, the conversation is guided through the beauty of realtime media. But note again, it is guided, not governed. Think: retweeting, posting on walls, reblogging, trackbacks, pings, etc – all of this is adaptation of the message.

Working The Triangle

By the very nature of governance (the right side), the message is restricted to safe and controllable channels. This is a hands on approach. Take TV as an example. The production team produce something that is within the guidelines, according to a script, with roles that are cast. The programme is televised on a fixed channel that can’t be shared or retweeted, commented on, except when the programme is discussed using those digital forums, or even through a ‘did you see this last night’ conversation. But none of this is real time – production, airing, and review are all asynchronous.

This form – traditional TV – as far as I am concerned, is the most spreadable static medium because of widespread adoption – i.e., who doesn’t own a TV. No static medium has more spread, and in order to gain more spread, TV has to become more dynamic, hence this capped corner in the triangle.

TV that is aired live, with phone in interviews, etc, begins to move from the static to the dynamic – such as reality TV that envoke mass public hysteria and text-votes. However, even then, to see the programme one must be watching their TV device, and that particular TV channel – at the exclusion of other TV channels being watching simultaneously.

TV has now gain increased spreadability by becoming more dynamic and personal through the likes of YouTube and the iPlayer. It breaks the governance of channel, device and time by becoming on-demand. Better yet, the spreadability of YouTube through the left-hand channels of Facebook, Twitter and email enables the programme to swiftly move past thousands, millions, and hundreds of millions of eyes, as in the case of Susan Boyle and all the others. No surprise that the news today, then, from Brand Republic is online spending is now greater than traditional TV spending.

In order to progress up the left side – centrally guided – one must take a hands off approach and allow users to edit, adapt, mash and spread the message through the channels and in the methods that they please. You simply cannot have your hands on the message. As long as you do, it is yours, and it can’t become personal to the user, and homemade. To be personal to another, you must give it, or share it at least. The reward is far larger spreadability because the message has become personal, not public – this of course is basic community building, where the cause has to become personal to the individual – they have to make it theirs.

Taking Your Hands Off

How does the New PR consultant, who desires to guide personal relationship (not govern public relations) do this? In fact, take a step back – how does the company / brand / business muster the courage to relinquish their governance, in the fear of mis-guided efforts? This article on Social Media Today lists the Top Six Reasons Companies Are Still Scared Of Social Media – a pertinent reminder of what the fears are. However, when I talked through the social media strategy that the board of a charity had paid me to lead, I found the same fears. It was both interesting and striking to see how many of their concerns were either ignorance, or imaging worst case scenarios. Petty things like ‘Can we moderate comments’, were both almost insulting and hilarious – ‘Of course?!?!’ was my response.

Our aim then must be to remove ignorance, and prove the rarity of worst case scenario by proving the abundance of good and even great scenarios.

Having worked through those fears and tried to think it through from the other side, I’ve worked on a framework that can be reproduced for yourselves or your clients. As with the above model, this is a draft, so feedback is appreciated.

Voice. Establish the core of your message, and in turn, your market differentiation. This is pretty much a branding concern. This must be potent to your audience, and your voice strong enough to be heard even when others have mashed your message up. However your message may be edited, adapted and redistributed along the left side, your voice is still heard because it is that distinguishable to your audience.
Listen. This helps you identify the advocates who will help spread the message, as well as identify the needs of the market, enabling to you to build a far more accurate:
PRE. All copy, images, tweets, comments, blogs, discussions must be personal, relational, and show your expertise in your market. This means, practically, that you create a 140 character PRE bio. You have a PRE paragraph, PRE about copy, a PRE avatar, and a full understanding of PRE is to your market, written down, for those who are later going to PRE tweet.
PRE will also determine what is Not-PRE – the non negotiable things that you do not do, based on impressions that you do not want to create.
Multi-touch strategy. ‘Users are stupid’ is a useful thought to keep in mind (no offence, BTW). They use odd search queries, they often don’t think with initiative, so a multi-touch strategy takes your message to them, or at least has your message in the place that they will find it. Practically, it means creating a Facebook page/event/group, LinkedIn company/event/group, Twitter account (keep it PRE – a person, not a business), having a blog that has share buttons, etc. These must all be synchronised – use Facebook notes to import your blog, use Twitterfeed or Twitter Tools for blog to Tweet publishing, etc. These also build better SEO.
All these social media outposts (thanks, Chris Brogan), use the 140 PRE bio, the PRE paragraph, the PRE avatar. And again – use personal names who represent the company or brand.
Multi-sense strategy. Different people have different prominent sense. Therefore you need video, audio, micro-media, blogging, events, and yes, press releases. All your social media outposts above should clearly link to all your content, making it simple for anyone to access anything you are producing, from any channel that they access it. Easily said and very obvious, but seldom done right.

PAUSE. Up until this point, this is already performed, in large or in small, by existing marketers, PR consultants, etc. Setting this up should therefore be easy, as you are working with what is mostly already existing content, but re-expressing it through PRE. Therefore, this is still somewhat goverened as opposed to guided.

What comes after here is guidance. In the same way paid production staff, under an employed director, edit and produce governed content that is ‘signed off’, guided content is mashed up by unpaid users, under an influential socialiser, and the content is ‘handed off’.

New PR creates the role, not of consultant, advisor or ‘contact’, but the role of a socialiser, who here after guides personal relationship. So;

Inject and Infect. I completely agree with Seth Godin’s Idea Virus and I’ve successfully used it for years. Here you must inject your ‘idea virus’ (the message) into sneezers (advocates) who infect whole hives of people on your behalf. You have to know who the opinion leaders are, and infect them first. They will then do a bulk of your marketing work for you due to the influence they have.
Add. As everyone mashes up your content and message, the best thing you can do is add to it, not subtract. The socialiser guides the spreading by adding value through PRE.
Escalate by Sharing Your Voice. As new mashups, and new influencers come to the fore, you must escalate the level of relationship with these influencers, and also escalate the mashups by linking to them on your blog. You must share your voice with those who identify with it in return for their support. Remember, these are the people that are informing others’ with their reviews and opinions.
These people are easily identifiable: they comment, they retweet, they blog, they use your language, they initiate contact.
Measure. It is too easy for social media, and will be even easier with its successors, to lose track of time and not measure your effectiveness. Combat this by measuring social media return on investment and measuring your metrics bi-weekly. To learn how to do this, visit Olivier Blanchard‘s http://smroi.net, or attend Like Minds next month.
Review, Adapt, Extend. Adaptation happens almost daily, but you must also adapt and extend your strategy from a higher level than the way you write your tweets. This reviewing looks at new markets, new channels, new methods, and even changing this framework.

How To Get The Boss Or Client To Go With It

If you are either a social media savvy person in an organisation, or an agency trying to get clients to look at social media, then my advice is thus: Use a small, containable project, and ask for a small part of the research and development budget, to use the above to create a proof of concept. Document it fully, review each step and then provide a review to the powers that be on the return on investment.

Phew!

Its taken me a long time to thinking this through, develop a diagram, and write it up – and I’m fully aware that this is not comprehensive, has holes, and needs to be reworked. Leave your comments, please, as I’m very interested to know what ya’ll think.

Now, with all that thinking and writing, it’s time for lunch.

Published on September 29, 2009 by Scott Gould

PR, Static Wine and Dynamic Wineskins

So The Good Book says you don’t put old wine in new wineskins. You put in the old wine in the old wine skin, and the new wine in the new wine skin, and then that way, both old and new are preserved.

Yesterday I started a little fire, on the subject of New PR. We all agree that social media (Facebook, Twitter, the mobile web, and the concepts behind them) is bringing about change in marketing, PR, advertising, etc, and amongst much hyperbole my point was, and I quote;

Companies are no longer able to procure their voice through paying an agency to write distant, removed press releases and expect them to connect and engage with their customers. Why? Because the press doesn’t form opinion anymore.

What followed was some great discussion, mostly contrary to my point, which you can read here. Today is part 2, which is in part a response to the comments, and in another part it’s that uncomfortable middle movie in a trilogy. Oh well.

Static and Dynamic

It is the case that the world is full of innovation. Something is created, and is fresh and new. But over time, thinking happens, abilities increase, and a new thing is made, that eventually over takes the old thing. Note that it doesn’t necessarily replace it, but it becomes more prominent. Think radio and TV. Think horses and cars. Think caves and houses. Think paper and computers. And if you’re Gen Y, think writing and typing.

It is also often the case that the first innovation, if it is a breakthrough, creates its own language that even outlasts its own life. The printing press gave birth to ‘The Press’ and ‘Copy’, language that remains despite its antiquity. Even ‘Script’ which predates the press has outlasted all its predecessors.

It is my observation that this innovative process also follows a pattern of increasing dynamic. Each new innovation grants new flexibility, new dexterity and new adaptability that renders the old thing somewhat static. And what fresher example to illustrate that the advent of social media. Static webpages give way to dynamic blogs and posts. Static updates give way to instant messaging and status updates. I’m sure you can fill in the gaps, which allows us to skip right to this:

Press is static. Social media is dynamic.

And you don’t put static press releases into dynamic wineskins.

All agreed. None of yesterday’s commentors would disagree. It’s obvious, right? Then why oh why are PR agencies, and other companies and firms, literally filling blogs with press releases? And why are the blogs they maintain devoid of names, and their Twitter accounts lacking faces, initials, or anything relationally accountable? Why are faces absent from their websites, their content lacking any differentiation or hint of personality?

Why is the dynamic being filled with the static?

The answer: they believe that social media equals public relations.

But it does not. Social media is the next curve. In mobile technology, it is the merging of offline and online, that will eradicate the difference between them. Everything is becoming connected – dynamic. Truly dynamic digital. As marketing, advertising, PR, new media, all begin to merge and the lines become blurred – this dynamic digital is not a successor, but a whole new innovation with new guidelines.

The New PR, the one that will become more prominent than the old PR, is personal relationship. In some ways, we’re not there yet. But in many ways, we’re certainly already there. Dynamic, personal interactions, like this example from Sarah Gilbert, or another on LinkedIn from Exeter’s own Sophy Norris.

Practitioners must begin to divide between the static and the dynamic, and the wineskins that they belong in. And I can tell you right away that social media is not a static wineskin. As we begin to divide the two, we can preserve the press release, and not muddy the blog.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss a framework that we can run this through.

Blogging, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
pr
17 comments
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Published on September 28, 2009 by Scott Gould

The New PR

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE&fmt=18

In case you didn’t know, PR is changing. Companies are no longer able to procure their voice through paying an agency to write distant, removed press releases and expect them to connect and engage with their customers. Why? Because the press doesn’t form opinion anymore. Because customers have taken matters into their own hands, and found a way to get their reviews and opinions from real people with real experience.

Personally, I find it insane and insulting that companies think they can connect with me through cold and calculated statements that I might happen to read. PR needs to be reborn. Press Releases are antiquated remnants of a broadcast age and printed media. We need a rebirth for the engagement age of social media and beyond.

Allow me to introduce you to the New PR: Personal Relationship.

Say it to yourself, let the saliva flow. Let every rip-off PR agent quake in their boots. Let the Removed CEO‘s blood run cold. Because it is true. Personal Relationship. The public has no interest in a lifeless press release. PR is dead. Long Live PR.

Now breath. Let newness of life fill those lungs. And let it dawn upon you: the customer wants a personal relationship. Not quite a back-slapping relationship. Maybe not a share your lip gloss relationship. But they do want a relationship, and they want it to be personal.

In Case You May Have Forgotten

Whilst enjoying the booms of profit and becoming more and more distant from your customer, you may have forgotten how to be personal and have a relationship. So I’ll help you out.

First of all you have commonality. That’s what started your relationship with the customer friend in the first place. Remind yourself what you have in common, and build on that. Perhaps through your commonality, you and your friend will find more common ground, or even adapt to be more like each other. But it starts with commonality.
It takes more than things to be friends, and sooner rather then later you’ll need to contribute to the relationship. One sided friendship is abuse.
To earn trust, you will need to be consistent. Consistency is the foundation of trust. People who continually change can’t be trusted.
At this point, if you haven’t already, you care deeply for your friend. Emotions can go up and down, but after you have contributed and been consistent, this care transcends emotional whims and gets to the deeper parts of the heart. At this point, both friends in the relationship are prepared to put up with a certain degree of crap, every now and then – why? – because you care for each other. My friend, Apple, sure has let me down enough times. But I care for them.
For the relationship to truly last, as any married couple knows, you need communication. And any married couple knows that not all communication is a press release verbal. Remember, up to 93% of communication is non-verbal, according to our good friend Professor Mehrabian.

Personal Relationship. Simultaneously the simplest human instinct yet the most complex. Today I’ve discussed the change. Tomorrow, we’ll look at how we do this.

Published on September 22, 2009 by Scott Gould

Keeping You In The Loop

Well, it’s finally happened. After 50 or so posts, I am writing my first ‘keeping you in the loop post’, in other words, a post about not posting.

I’ve agonised over leaving the blog blank while I get my thoughts into gear, or whether to throw out an update, but in realising that I myself go on and on about social media being relational, I can’t not practise what I preach. So, here goes with my first ‘keeping you in the loop’.

Of course, I’m not embarrassed or ashamed about this. In actual fact I’ve received loads of support from you all on my latest projects:

1. He Saved The Day – our church’s first men’s conference, from Friday 9th to Sunday 11th October. I’ve helped run loads of women’s conferences but this is the first mens’ one, so it is hard work really thinking through what it is that men want and need to get out of a conference.

2. Like Minds – my first social media conference, a week after He Saved The Day, on Friday 16th October. This is really stretching me beyond what started out as a small idea and has become an international event. The thrill on this is going from an event that existed in concept, to one that now has great speakers, great sponsors, and great buzz.

I’ve also had the pleasure of writing two guest posts, the first on ‘Brand Experience: Real Differentiation‘ for Exeter’s Alder and Alder, and then a post on ‘Innovation Over Tradition‘ for Josh Chandler.

On top of that, I’ve got a few other things brewing, as well as some serious business thought with help from Jim and Robin, as I documented the other week, meaning in all, I’m quite a busy boy.

And, on top of that, I have the unfortunate confession that whilst my GTD system has held up under intense pressure before, these last two weeks since being back from holiday have been a hard slog and my system has not quite kept it together, and has become (in my English understatement) a little bit overgrown.

What I’m realising in all of this is how vital it is to deliver the basics well. And in times like this, you need good disciplines to help you focus on delivering those basics well, and not get caught up into the hype of activity and buzz without being firm in your foundations.

And I’m also realising that you really do need strong convictions that have become actions to set daily routines that help keep you focussed, on target, and performing the necessary tasks with excellence.

I do have some really great things to write about this week, so do keep in touch. And if you’re a reader and have never commented, then do me a big favour, and make me feel loved.

Published on September 17, 2009 by Scott Gould

Copy and Paste

In setting the context for today’s post, it helps if I take a moment to shamelessly promote the good work a bunch of us have started with Like Minds. Last week I went from having a great idea, commitments from some speakers, and the help of a really great co-founder (Drew Ellis, take a bow) – to having a kicking website, paying sponsors, expert panelists, and best of all, actual paid bookings. It’s been a momentous seven days or so, but it would’ve been impossible if I wasn’t standing on the shoulders of giants.

You see this past week I’ve written copy, created press releases, and masterminded panels, but none of this thinking has been original on my part. It has been a case of finding those who’ve already done it, and copying and pasting. (Thank you, Media140.)

Of course this isn’t a secret. In any industry, you first find your voice by listening to the others around you, finding out how you are similar to them, and then once you have some confidence, establishing how you are different to them. In the digital industry this just happens far faster, and the advent of social media has made this ‘adaptation’ way of working quite the norm as long as your attribute the original author.

There is, for some people though, something unsettling about this, and I want to uncover it. In my mind, it’s about this:

The Truth and Lie of Experience

There is an understanding that the person with experience is not at the mercy of the person without it. I agree. Experience certainly trumps theory, and my first year of business has all been about gainly costly wisdom where there was once just mere knowledge.

Yet a lack of experience does not mean that we are left without any clue. The whole point of parenting is to guide the child’s decision making by providing ‘inside knowledge’ of life. Fast forward twenty or thirty years, put yourself around some great mentors, and it’s the same thing – you are getting insider knowledge.

The amount of pain I’ve avoided, mistakes I’ve sidestepped, etc etc has been reduced by copying and pasting the experience of others. Sure, I’ve had my fair share of failures, and I’m glad I have – but I often wonder how far I would’ve gone without the luxury of borrowing others’ experience.

In turn, providing others with your experience is then what blogging is largely about. That’s what wikis are about. That’s what church and the Bible is about. Knowledge share. Experience share. Copy and paste.

The question, then, is two fold:

Are you copying? If so, from where? If not: find people who you not only respect, but want to mimic in a small way. This means in person, through social media, through books and biographies, through documentaries, etc.
Are you pasting? If so, to where? If not: begin taking time out to think. Map out your life and see where you could be pasting in advice and experience from others.

What I’m thrilled about is in addition to the mentors in my life, I’m also copy and pasting from wonderful people who’re commenting on this blog. In particular, Robin Dickinson and Jim Connolly. You guys are great.

Building, Character, Innovation, Leadership
decisions, people
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Published on September 15, 2009 by Scott Gould

Patrick Swayze

I opened BBC News this morning to read the sad announcement that Patrick Swayze has passed away, no less than 20 months after being told he had only weeks to live. I remember thinking months ago that it would be a sad day when this day did indeed come, and now that it is here, I feel I must say something about this man.

I’m not one for celebrity. Hence I have no problem writing about Patrick Swayze – because he isn’t one of these new celebrities that clog up newspaper stands and gossips columns across the world. Personally I think glossy magazines are soul destroying material that promote fake lifestyles that no one can ever attain to, and spur a culture of ‘me me me’ rather than ‘we we we’.

Even in this photo above, on his face there is a smile of satisfaction – not a vain pout of pride. There is a distinct lack of gloss, and a notable presence of genuine joy. On his arm is a wife – his companion and life partner – whose hand he holds like the treasure she is to him.

Patrick was the antithesis of everything about celebrity that I despise and rather stood for what a man should stand for:

He was a man of hard graft
A man who used his talents and pursued his dream, despite the bullies who mocked his ballet dancing
A man of character who stayed faithful to his wife of 30 years – who didn’t need a divorce to order to gain new publicity
A family man, who raising his kids with morality, a sense of responsibility to society – not as brats with too much money and no little sense
A man who made mistakes and had issues, but overcame them, rather than wallowed in them
A fighter, who fought that ugly thing called cancer for 20 months

Today I genuinely morn his death, because there is now one less of those quality men in our world.

I just hope that in reading, this inspires someone, somewhere, to take his place.

Published on September 14, 2009 by Scott Gould

Life, Not Lifestyle

I saw this on the interwebs recently. It’s one of those pictures that speaks more than a thousand words. On first glance, one chuckles at the commitment of this person to a movement. Perhaps it’s fashion gone too far. But then you realise this movement is in actual fact a brand: a compelling brand with exceptional strength, that stands for more than fashion or fads.

As you look at the ink that has pigmented the skin – creating quite literally a brand, a permanent mark – it dawns on you that this person is not likely just a follower or imitator. This person is more than likely a survivor. And they identify with these words on a level deeper than mimicry or fascination. The story of one person so strongly resonates with another, that they find strength through it – such strength that this brand is a constant reminder, a continual prompt. No doubt it is these two words that kept them going when they wanted to give up, kept them comforted in the midnight hour, and now, that they have come through the worst, to live in such a manner that they will do all that is within their strength to never go back.

This brand is about life. Not lifestyle, like the car I drive or phone I use – no, no – this is about the bottom line of life, or death.

As I look I realise I have a choice. I can spend 18 hours a day labouring hard, providing for a family, creating exceptional things and doing remarkable work. But at the end of those hours I need to know I have done more than cater for lifestyle – I need to have supported life.

Thinking about this photo again I realise the technology, the innovations, that have enabled it to be. The medical equipment, the factories creating bands, the media that has spread this story across the world. I realise how many passionate, driven people have told these stories over and over – each one helping the word spread to another and another. Some, perhaps, have been in this story for profit – and others have been in it for change. I’m not naive to think everyday its waking up in a bed of roses and doing good to all and sundry, but at the end of the day, I do want to know I’ve moved something forward.

I want to be a part of a story like this.

Published on September 10, 2009 by Scott Gould

Thinking Outside Of The Bin

Coincidence. Sometimes wonderful. Other times, darn right annoying.

Yesterday was the soft launch of Like Minds, a gathering of like minded people around creativity, technology and fresh thinking. The slogan sums it up best: Collaboration over Innovation.

So around midday yesterday, I send the tweet that Like Minds is now open, and ready for registrations to attend our first conference in Exeter on the 16th October. So I’m expecting a nice bunch of in-the-buzz-of-it registrations to come in over the following hours, right? Guess again. Eventbrite, the service we’re using to take all registrations, decides to one of those days that is plagued by intermittent service. It’s not until late last night that the first (get that: first) registration comes through.

That’s pretty bad, right? Guess again.

The beloved feed service Feedburner (the way blogs get into people’s inboxes and RSS readers) also decides to have a day off. So all the momentum I had built through my blog dissipates in one beautiful and inglorious moment. Fortunately some people visited my blog by tweet or by routine – but all my wonderful readers who are signed up the easy way, didn’t get the message.

It all ended ok though because as we all know, Google are great on customer service and this was all resolved last night, right?

Guess again.

Feedburner still hasn’t picked up my feed, meaning this blog post probably won’t make it to more than a precious few. (Of course, you can help out by retweeting this article using the button at the end of the post – thanks!)

Coincidence. Not my favouite word right now.

Yet coincidence is, as I’ve pointed out, much of how marketing apparently works. I wrote about casting your bread on the social media waters and the fact that very often when people tell me how they heard about me it was through a series of events I had never predicted, anticipated, or even planned for. What then do you do when coincidence conspires against you?

These last 48 hours I’ve learnt to think outside of the bin. Forget the luxury of even having a box with which to think outside of – thinking outside of the bin is survival mode – the kind of thinking you need when you are scratching the ground as you are descending into a pit of FAIL.

Here’s my survival kit for thinking outside of the bin, courtesy of ‘coincidence’:

Fix the problem. Easier said than done. The rule here is that if you can’t fix it immediately, get someone on it, and while they’re trying to figure it out, you can:
Have a contingency plan. When emotions get the better of you, you need a framework with which to stick to, that you’ve planned in advance. This helps keep your head cool while everyone else is loosing theirs. Failing this:
Use multiple channels. In the absence of my auto-posting, auto-emailing, auto-feed-reading, auto-marketing system, I’ve become best friends with Facebook walls and events, old Ning profiles and good ol’ texting. Failing this:
Ask your friends to help. It takes a good dose of humility to ask for help – but if you’re doing business personally, then you understand that friends in business help each other out. So, hopefully you’ve built good relationships with others who can reach some of your audience for you. Hopefully. Failing this:
Prepare to bounce back. Convert the stress of ‘it isn’t working and what on earth are we going to do?’ into preparation for a huge bounce back. Write a great press release. Make the website better. Write your contingency plan while it’s fresh in your mind. Again: convert stress into preparation. Failing this:
Watch The Office.

My descent last night actually went one step further. Failing owning the office, I embarked on the most fruitless of excercises: trawling through Google Groups to find a Google employee who could help. Yes, I went to bed late last night.

So anyway, I hope this helps. It’s fresh thinking, that’s for sure.

And one other thing is certain, this is the most peculiar blog post for announcing a new event ever. (Unless someone can find something even more off the wall?) Hopefully Feedburner will have me back up and running soon, but in the meantime, I want to thank you for being a loyal reader who visits my site. As you know, I really appreciate you, even more so today. You’re a like mind :-)

Yours, most truly,
Scott

P.S Don’t forget to click the magic share buttons below – I normally wouldn’t ask, but I really need it!

Published on September 9, 2009 by Scott Gould

Making It Personal

Last month, as part of Aaron+Gould’s first birthday, we gave away 3 experience consultancy sessions. On Monday, I had the opportunity of spending one of those sessions with Rick Timmis, and hear all about what he’s doing with making Customer Relationship Management (CRM) more personal and more friendly.

Other than the Exeter Tweetup I held in August, this is the only other time I’ve met Rick, but thanks to social media, we were able to build upon the conversation that we’d been having online for months and get straight into things. I don’t want to divulge the details of the consultation, as in short, we built a plan for Rick to take over the world, but I do want to harp on the one thing that we kept coming back round to: making it personal.

A shift is upon us, as we as enter the two-thousand-and-teenies, from the brand machine to people. In other words, people are despising the great awe and wonder and distance that big companies have, that once upon a time were considered the marks of success. This old school thinking went along the lines of “The more people between the CEO and the customer, the bigger, and therefore better, the company is.”

Not anymore.

Now, the more people between the CEO and the customer, the more bureaucratic and out-of-touch the company is. CEOs are tweeting and brands are becoming ‘Olivia at Coca-Cola’, ‘Rick at Abazander’ and ‘Michael Hyatt at Thomas Nelson’. Personal doesn’t just mean you give me your name – it means I can contact you personally. Hear that? I can contact you personally. In other words, the relationship is no longer you telling me what do to. It is about you and me having a conversation. You listen to what I have to say, take it on board, and I in turn listen to you, and when you are unable to deliver on something I’m fine with it – because we have a relationship.

Relationship. The beginning of business. Adam Stone was telling me yesterday about a keynote he had attended by behavioural economist Roger Martin-Fagg, who was boiling business down from economic grandeur to the level where it began: relationship, tribes, identity, and felt need.

When you begin to talk about getting personal, many businesses step away. They are afraid of personal, either because the people in their organisation are money hungry wolves with no care for the well being of the customers, or because they don’t want to make mistakes, or both. Me, I have no time to work with these companies, nor these people. I’m onto more relevant things than money. Businesses that invest in being personal will win in the future – they will help more people, make the world better, and yes, they’ll increase their revenue because their customers will be telling their friends just how much this company cares.

Of course, this won’t be mainstream for years to come. But do yourself a favour and think innovatively for a moment. My predictions:

The wise utility companies (Phone, Gas, etc) will start having personal reps. No longer does John from Vodafone call me but I can’t call John back and am instead stuck with Sally. In the years to come, I will become a client of John, my rep for Vodafone, just as much as I am of Vodafone.
The wise high streets store will start cultivating personal name based relationship with their customers, as opposed to only the few that currently do like independent retailers and the innovative Gap and Starbucks.
‘Removed’, as a mark of stature, will be replaced by ‘In Touch’. The ‘In Touch’ CEO will nurture a more emotionally connecting brand, and will command greater respect than the ‘Removed’ CEO.
Mobile Phone numbers on websites will no longer be a mark of being ‘shoddy and can’t afford a landline’, but be an expected way to directly get hold of the person you need to talk to.
Websites, then, without the names of the people who are running it and the people you want to speak to, will become essentially worthless. Average Joe loads the webpage, can’t find the person he needs to speak to, and figures ‘why bother?’ I don’t know about you, but business websites without names make me think they’re fake.
Company Twitter accounts, unless they are brands that have thousands of followers, will make you look small because why follow the company when you can follow the CEO? Hence, Company Twitter accounts will become CEO Twitter accounts.
Twitter, social media and realtime personal customer care – i.e. ubiquitous business – will boom as people flock to their mobiles for the internet. A quarter of Facebook’s 250 million users are mobile, for example. Decisions can finally be made in a moment – by checking on your mobile.
An extension of the above, reviews and rating of products and service has become real time and will continue to become more intuitive. For instance, HSBCreviews.com is a realtime monitoring of HSBC tweets, creating an overall rating of how good / bad they are.
The current clumsy nature of getting train time updates, for example, will be replaced by digital personal assistants – a merger of the Google voice activated iPhone app and ReQall – only far faster. If I had the capital, I’d be investing in this technology. It’s Star Trek in action.
Mass personal customisation – a hallmark of the experience economy – will become increasingly more mainstream. Think about the personal card greeting market that is increasing, and then imagine it across over markets and products.

Is all of this new? Not at all. As our friend Roger Martin-Fagg points out, it all goes back to year-dot behaviour, just with modern technology. Hairdressers, shopping in upmarket stores, small businesses and coffee houses, as well as others, have been doing relational, personal business for years. It is now time that the big companies scale down and get personal. Big used to be an advantage, but now, consumers are wanting names – and the companies that are flexible enough to offer them will win.

Fast forward to Tuesday night as I’m putting the final touches on this post and talking to Dave Thomas over the phone. Dave was telling a story of contacting his clients and receiving referrals from them. The point was, that unlike the ‘Removed CEO’, Dave had built relationships with his clients, was in touch with them, and could personally ask for a referral without the fear of embarrassment – because, hey, friends ask each other for favours, don’t they? This takes me to the final punch for making business personal…

The old method of doing business – the one that’s currently struggling to survive in the face of the social media revolution – is based on fear. I, the customer, fears the business. The IT agency knows all, and I fear their knowledge. The web host mysteriously holds all my files, and I fear they’ll switch my hosting off. British Gas serves my utilities, and I fear their bills when they don’t reflect our monthly arrangement. I fear the big successful CEOs and Creative Directors, especially compared to my small budget. It’s all fear.

Making it personal means trading fear for friendship. I don’t fear the IT company who are friends with me (and incidentally, that’s Dave’s company down to a T). I don’t fear the big CEO because through Twitter, I’ve made friends with her. Sure, I’m not inviting the CEO over for dinner, but there is friendship and relationship in the place of fear and the unknown. Alistair Banks (@banksy6 ) put it like this:

People buy people and that is so important – without being personal you simply don’t get that.

The ball is in our court. As innovators, Executives, Directors, Pastors and thinkers, we’ve got to take the first step of friendship towards our customers. I know full well that if you went onto the high street and asked people if they wanted their mobile phone company becoming all personal with them, they’d say ‘no’. But what I gleaned from Steve Jobs and Henry Ford is this: you need to tell people what they want. If Henry Ford had made what people wanted, he’s just have tried to make horses faster. Thankfully, he saw beyond what others saw. And that’s the point. People are so used to customer sacrifice that talk of customer surprise seems alien to them. (BTW, for a great slideshow on this subject, check out this.)

The challenge, then, is for business to grow some kahunas and be the first to do it. Because second place just sucks.

Published on September 7, 2009 by Scott Gould

Give Yourself To The Season

Let me begin by saying that this post will share with you something that has become very close to my heart. My story pertains mostly to church life, however, now in my mid-twenties I face similar lessons in business – and I am certain this post will be applicable to most people in most life situations.

As everyone knows, our childhood is spent wanting to be older. And as the more ambitious and aspirational of you will know, it often doesn’t stop after teens but continues throughout every stage of life. At some point, the pointer tips the other way, and our desire turns to a longing to be younger. Whether it’s a different age, location or station in life that we desire, it seems to be a dissatisfaction, either big or small, with the current season that we are in.

When I was 16 and beginning to discover my desire to be a pastor and a preacher, I was disillusioned with visions of grandeur – of being a world class preacher, with a giant church and miracles following me everywhere – all within a few weeks. My latter teenage years were filled with the continual frustration of never being where I wanted to be – always looking away to a future where I was fulfilling all my dreams – and not understanding why I wasn’t fulfilling them now. This frustration could’ve been useful and productive if it spurred me on to study harder, to help people more, to seek advice more, yet I found it was detrimental, for it only discouraged me. Rather than preparing, I’d spend my time agonising over the ‘why nots’ and reasons that my dreams were not being actualised immediately.

Of course, I wasn’t completely stifled. Perhaps I exaggerate when I say “it only discouraged me” – but we all know what it is like to be distracted by the future and not focus on the present. And I found that day to day it wasn’t a problem, but there would be particular times, particular pressures, particular issues, that would bring out this behaviour.

After a good while my Pastor, Michael, sat me down and gave what has been one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received or even heard. It went like this:

Scott, you are in a season of preparation and planning for the future. Give yourself to the season.

I don’t even know if he knew the weight of what he’s said, but it rang true in my ears the moment those words left his lips, and instantly I had a change of mind.

Give yourself to the season. You are never a teenager at high school again – don’t wish those years away but enjoy the life with little responsibility. You are unlikely to be at college and university again, and certainly not again in the strength of your teens and early twenties – so maximise your studying, suck the marrow out of the educational environment you are in, thrive in learning. As my wife and I celebrated our fourth anniversary in June this year I was reminded again that the season of marriage without children will soon end, and we will no longer have the dexterity and flexibility of time to give to business, church and spare-of-the-moment whims.

I recently celebrated the first anniversary of Aaron+Gould, yet amidst the joy of successfully navigating a start-up in the midst of a recession, again there was the frustration of not being where I want the agency to be. Yes, it’s good to have vision, drive and a good sense of ambition, but my reminder to myself, despite how much I’ve learned about ‘faking it till you make it’, I have to tell myself to give myself to the season of start-up – not the season of award-winning agency.

Also, the advice wasn’t just enjoy the season or make it through the season; it was give yourself to it. Dedicate yourself to fulfilling the requirements, getting the right outcomes, to gain from this season what needs to be gained in order to move on the next one, and not have to waste time by returning to it.

As I said in starting, this is close to my heart, but this is only my experience over 25 years. I’m keen to know how you’ve found this to be true, if not, whether you disagree and why, and if you have any tips on giving yourself to the season.

Photo courtesy of ViaMoi

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