Preaching to the Converted?

You might have the feeling if you’re using Social Media that you’re preaching to the converted. I often do. Question:

  • How many more case studies can we read?
  • How many more times can the same common sense be reinterpreted in 5 different points?
  • How many more summarises and digest emails can we look through for the same content packaged in new ways?
  • How many more comments can you leave saying “Great post”?
  • How many more events can you attend?

Lessons from Church

I’m an assistant pastor at my church. We have similar issues: How many sermons can you sit through? How many times can you come to church and hear the same basic principles (change, love, give, help) said in different ways?

There comes a point when you realise you are preaching to the converted. At this point you realise that it’s no longer about what you say, it’s about what they do.

Check out the diagram below. I’ve adapted it from Purpose Driven Church by Rick Warren (affiliate link) so that the language is more business orientated.

Preaching to the Converted?

It’s pretty obvious, but let’s break it down.

  • The Crowd are the people in your general vicinity. This could be your city. In Social Media this used to be everyone on Twitter. But now that people follow so many other people, your crowd is probably those that either you follow or who follow you – people that you are linked to, but don’t engage with. These often are not aware of you.
  • The Community are those who in my case use the #likeminds hashtag and attended the last Like Minds Conference. You may speak with them occasionally. They are aware of you.
  • The Connected are the ones that you speak with semi-regularly to regularly. You comment on and subscribe to their blogs. Sometimes you collaborate with them. They are engaged with you.
  • The Committed are those you speak, discuss, update, collaborate and work with regularly. They are builders with you.
  • The Core are those with whom your life is share. They lead with you.

You see the change here. At the crowd level, you aren’t aware of each other. At the core level, you are leading with each other. The difference is action.

The tipping point is going from community to connected.

If you feel you are preaching to the converted

Then stop preaching. Instead, start working with them.

A few ideas for you to turn community into connections.

  • Schedule a skype call and get talking about your passions.
  • Agree to work together on a small project
  • Go out of your way to refer or make an opportunity for them
  • Do something extraordinarily special for them
  • Meet them

How about you? Are you preaching to the converted?

WOM UK: Spreadability beats Reach

I have the pleasure of speaking at WOM UK‘s next espresso briefing on Thursday 25th March, where I’ll be with Drew Ellis discussing two things from a very likeminded angle:

1. How spreadability is beating reach. How did the music industry get punk’d by a hacked up Facebook gathering? How did a conference get international attention without any marketing spend? We’ll look at how neither had direct reach, but both had spreadability.

2. How teams of people are beating factories of employees. How are we changing in the way that we work to move from mutual benefit to shared benefit? How do businesses begin to think socially about their staff and their customers?

WOM UK (Word of Mouth UK Association) is the elite squad of forward thinkers who are basically spearheading the Social Communications movement in the UK. They are partnered with WOMMA in the US (whose president is John Bell, one of our Like Minds alumni and MD of Ogilvy’s PR wing), and their UK council is headed by another Like Minds alumni in the form of Molly Flatt from 1000heads.

It’s on Thursday 25th March, from 8:30am to 10:30am. We’ll be at Peter Novelli, 31 St Petersburgh Place, London, W2 4LA. More details from WOM UK’s site is available here.

Best of all: It’s FREE, breakfast is included, and it will be attended by people you want to meet. Make sure you come and say hi to me before or after.

Developing Social Media Strategy

I’m speaking at Like Minds Immersive on Thursday 18th March in London on the subject of “Developing Social Media Strategy“, with one of the stars from Like Minds 2010, James Whatley.

It’s an afternoon training event with only 12 places (of which most are gone) which is designed to literally ‘immerse’ the participants into a learning environment where each person comes away with some serious knowledge and serious points to action. You can read more about it and book yourself in on the Immersive site, but I just wanted to share a few thoughts on why this is needed.

There are few people who understand strategy when it comes to Social Media. The fact that many keep insisting “there are no experts” while others insist that there are experts, but you need to beware of the “social media snake oil” is a result of a lot of fake, misunderstood and plain rubbish that does exist online. And because Social Media uses itself to talk mostly about itself, we have an echo-chamber effect that creates a lot of content, a lot of confusion, but also a lot of expertise.

The fact that Social Media so often gets associated with the tools also creates a mist that makes otherwise smart people a little bit weary and ignorant. We have an overload of specialist terminology, a whole bunch of spammers and those who just oversell, and then people in the middle trying to make their way by learning what they can by trial and error.

Out of those that do understand strategy, those who make it happen are fewer. It’s funny – everyone wants to hire the famous bloggers, but they don’t even know what successes they’ve had, other than a successful blog.

What we’ve done with Immersive is try to address these issues. First, we get an industry expert to speak – hence James Whatley. He’s working with Nokia, Cancer Research, Canon, and other clients at 1000heads. He’s behind some campaigns that you know, and others that you don’t.

Next, we provide clear models and frameworks for Social Media strategy. The biggest compliment I had last year was after our Immersive in December in Exeter, when one attendee (Adam Stone, if you want to fact-check) said that he used the content to win business shortly after.

What will we be discussing at this Immersive?

  • Models for key strategies and their according levels of participation
  • Frameworks for growing a Social Media campaign through it’s various stages
  • The different types of Social Media presence, and how to run them
  • Understanding igniting word of mouth in the Social Media context

If you are in or near London, then I’d recommend you get along – if only for the networking with the people who have already booked in, it’s well worth £350 for the afternoon. Lunch is also on us, served by our hosts One Alfred Place.

You get directions, more info and book online at the Immersive site.

A Better Way For Event Sponsorship: Partnership

soccer practiceI talked a little with Amber Naslund (Director of Community at Radian6) at the end of last week on a new way to look at event sponsorship, after she sent our a rather wistful tweet, saying she was looking for a “better way.”

I agree with her. Let’s put ourselves in Amber’s shoes (and indeed the shoes of many companies) – as the figurehead of Radian6 she has conferences asking her all the time to sponsor their event. This means Radian6 give them cash, and the conference organiser slaps the logo on their website, plus gives them a few mentions on the day.

On one side the sponsor is wondering whether they are really getting the exposure they are paying for, whilst many event organisers are in the tricky situation of being new on the scene and struggling to get the sponsorship they need, even when they have a create line up.

This gives birth to two evils that Amber and I discussed that affect both sponsors and organisers, as well as their delegates:

  1. Pay to play. Sponsors are made to pay for speaking slots.
  2. Fake sponsors. Event organisers are made to lie about ‘sponsors’ they have onboard in order to secure actual sponsors.

Amber’s thought was that there must be a better way to go about this – on both sides – and I think there is. Continue reading

Scaling The Levels Of Social Communication

smsIf a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a tweet worth?

One of the things I persistently tell my staff is “get on the phone!” When trying to get information, sort something out, or close the loop on a contract or task, I really do hate it when people leave things to email when they could so easily pick up and phone and do it right there.

Even when my wife says to me “I’ll text them” I say to her, “why text and wait for an answer when you can get one right away if you call!” The other day I even had someone say to me that they hoped so-and-so got their tweet about their meeting. My answer again was, “Phone?”

We seem to have forgotten sometimes that our mobile phone does indeed make phone calls on top of email and tweeting! Continue reading

Broadcasting Hypocrisy

Proof that thebrandbuilder does occasionally read my blog I think Seth Godin is reading my blog. Yesterday he wrote on ‘Losing Andrew Carnegie‘ and talked about investing in people over parts. Anyone who has been reading here a while knows I’ve been talking about this a lot since October, and gaining new levels of growth by getting free what I call ‘Factory thinking‘. The idea is that parts in a factory will break, but if you lead people, they can develop and grow.

Of course I know Seth isn’t reading my blog, nor is the idea mine to begin with – we’re just standing on the soliders of giants who’ve been discussing this since the beginning of time.

However it is an opportunity to discuss something that’s really on my mind right now and will require me to be painfully honest.

Are We Really Focussing On People In Social Media, Really?

So confession time. Claiming that Seth Godin is reading my blog is attention seeking. My blog is getting less comments and retweets and I find myself at times wondering what the point is. I’ve been doing things like writing blog titles like this, trying to promote my own stuff as if it’s someone else’s. All the dirty tricks.

But then I catch myself: this is factory thinking. It’s treating my blog is a machine that has outputs – rather than a place to serve and lead people.

What really shook me up was spending a bit of time with Chris Brogan at Like Minds. I don’t want to play the name game, but I was profoundly impacted by the time I spent with Chris. I’m pretty good with people and good with names – but Chris was on a whole other level.

I saw him meet people in the morning, meet a tonne of people during the day, and then call that person by name in the evening. Every person he spoke to I watched him converse with genuine interest, and never flip open his phone or excuse himself like I know I so often do.

When I asked Chris what his secret was, he gave me the simplest, yet most painful answer: “I just have an insane passion for humans

Are We Broadcasting Social Media?

I wonder how many of us are broadcasting the message of discussion? The whole idea of Social Media is that it is two, three, four way communication, yet I know my behaviour of late has been one of broadcast.

What hypocrisy!

One of my friends is Robin Dickinson. He and I talked a few months ago about a comment-driven blog, a place where the blogger was actually a facilitator – and rather than forcing his readers to read his content, he instead used the blog as a place to draw comments to form the content.

Well Robin went away and did it. What he has going on right now at RADSmarts is something I’ve never seen before – a community that is commenting on each others comments based on a short, 50 word blog ‘question’ with a picture.

I’ve got no point to round this up on, and to be honest I’ve lost the expectation of getting an discussion going below. But that doesn’t matter. This isn’t a machine that I’m churning – it’s a place to lead people. And if what I’ve seen last week with Like Minds is anything to go by, leading people will build far bigger things than managing machines ever will.

My thought now is, how much of what I thought was ‘discussion’ and ‘social’ was just broadcast?

You’ve Got A Heart, A Wallet, And Contacts – So Use Them

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8D_Ll6VrSU

Last week Matt Young presented the Have A Heart Appeal as one of our Endeavours at Like Minds.

The aim is simple: to raise £1,000 for the Starlight Children’s Foundation, whose aim is to basically grant the wishes of terminally ill children.

I’m not asking you to have a heart because I know you have one. I’m just asking you to do two things:

1. Give to the appeal if you haven’t already.
2. Pull your contacts to see how we can not only smash through £1,000, but use our connections to help make some wishes come true. Put what you can do in the comments below.

So, to give to Have A Heart, click here.

I know we can do a lot of good for the local community with this – and do things that really matter.

What can we do with our collective Like Minds?

In a world where many are caught in a Catch 22, you have to wonder, what can we do with our collective Like Minds?

If we could convert our community into connections, I bet we’d find ourselves accomplishing things we never thought possible. I know that’s where I’m finding myself at the moment.

- What change could we make in the local community?
- What differences could we make for those living with tragically poor quality of life?
- What opportunities could we open for those who have none?
- What people could we connect together who could change the world?

So the question is, how are you leading the way with the connections you’ve made?

Photo courtesy of the stellar Benjamin Ellis.

Local Charities Doing Good – With Social Media

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4aIj0rp5rM

If you can’t see the video click here. You can watch the video on YouTube here.

I was taking a break on Dartmoor this week when I started seing lots of collection boxes for Devon Air Ambulance Trust (DAAT) in practically every shop, hotel or restaurant that I went to. The woman at this shop told me that everyone in the town (Chagford in this instance) had at the very least a family member who had been directly helped by DAAT.

So I flipped out my camera and started rolling. It was a moment of synchronicity – let me tell you why:

We had Heléna Holt on the first panel at Like Minds last week, who is the CEO of Devon Air Ambulance Trust, and I know the campaigning that she and many others do through Social Media to not only get funds but to also increase awareness. Having Heléna on the panel was another local person who we had in the diverse mix of people speaking. I hear people talk about ‘local’ in Social Media, but few do it.

The local goodness doesn’t stop there. In fact this whole thing is a local affair – because it’s our local partners Optix Solutions who developed Devon Air Ambulance’s website and Social Media campaign. In fact having ‘local partners’ is something that just isn’t really being done by conferences that have a global voice. Anyway, moving on…

Heléna sat on the panel that Jonathan Akwue from Digital Public had keynoted on minutes before – the very keynote where Jon boldly said that “Social Media saves lives.” The Guardian were there and concured with Jon, and thus ran the first of two articles on Like Minds, titled ‘Like Minds: Social Media can save lives‘. You can see the interview with Jon and how they reduced teenage pregnancies using Social Media here and then the keynote here.

And there’s one more thing: before Like Minds, not too many people knew about Jon – something he blogged about quite openly here. But his opening keynote has been praised over and over. We knew that he had something to give, even if he didn’t shout about it.

There are plenty of examples of local charities doing good with Social Media. But more often than not they are behind the scenes rather than jumping to get attention. Take our like minded endeavours for example – I never knew any of them were functioning at such a level.

Let me hear from you – what local charities do you know of using Social Media to do good that we should be promoting?

Wax On, Wax Off: Headfake Marketing, Without Marketing

Wax on....Wax offJim offers a great idea. He knows it’s good, but unfortunately a lot of people just don’t quite get it and therefore aren’t buying it. Jim is frustrated day after day when he sees how his ideas could be used by people in his community, but because he can’t communicate it, and because the community aren’t sure of him, his idea isn’t selling.

One day, Jim decides to stop trying to market his idea, and instead decides to show his idea in action. Rather than trying to promote his idea, he lets uses his idea to promote an entirely different idea altogether. The result is that in doing so, people got to see Jim’s idea in action.

Ok, so Jim is Me.

In fact, Jim is a lot of people. Headfake marketing – the method of using one thing to teach another thing – is as old as, well, the Karate Kid. Remember Mr. Miyagi teaching his young student to ‘wax on, wax off’? By teaching him how to clean windows, Daniel actually learns to block punches. We can use the same techniques today when articulating the ideas that we have.

This mechanism is used a lot in sales. When people ‘sell through’ rather than ‘sell to’, they are pulling a mild form of this (you know, the old “You might know someone who needs this”, rather than saying “You need this” trick.) Or how about getting kids to eat food by pretending it’s a plane flying into a tunnel?

The headfake above means you are selling to someone while giving them a safe way to exit, which is generally more pleasant. But there’s more to it than that.

How To Wax On, Wax Off

The reason why you have to pull a headfake is because, unfortunately, when people are too familiar with you they often won’t learn from you. That’s why Jim (and the rest of us) get annoyed when people suddenly ‘get it’ when someone says what we’ve been saying for ages already. So here’s how to start going about it:

  1. You need to create some kind of distance, or magic curtain. You can’t let people see how you put it together, because that breaks the transformational effect when they see what you’ve done that finally shocks people into admiring what you do. Remember when Daniel realises that ‘Wax On, Wax Off’ was the actual moves? Thats the transformation you want.
  2. Transfer your passion into the headfake. If you’ve ever visited HSBCreviews.com, you’ve seen the headfake in action. The lesson we learn from thrudigital here is that the headfake needs to be around a passion or a pain in order to provoke emotion. It can’t be bland, else people don’t get it, and don’t want it.
  3. Make the headfake a mindshift. Do it to such a high standard that people are hungry for the next thing you have. You can do this most powerfully by making mantra and creating a phrase that people start using. If everyone in your proximity is using your language, then you are the master of that language, and can do with it as you will (just don’t abuse it.)
  4. Tell stories. This makes it memorable. People forget what was said but they remember what they felt, and stories create feeling because we use our imagination to put ourselves in the story, rather than passively just listening.
  5. Followup with by packaging the idea to take home. After the headfake (if you do it well), people will want you idea. You need to have a simple, clear packaged idea that they can take home with them. After you’ve worked so hard to make your idea clear, don’t make it unclear again with your amorphous mist of services. Present a clear, packaged productised idea for taking home.
  6. Convert it. You have to master it, close the deal, and convert the headfake into your idea. This can be uncomfortable, but people are hungry for it. If people are complimenting you, then you need to just decide to have the confidence and go – stop worrying over whether people will buy into your idea or not – and stop waiting for people to come to you.

A Living Example

Randy Pausch carries out his famous last lecture here on the subject of “Achieving your Childhood Dreams.” What follows is an hour discussion on headfakes, before the final revelation that the whole talk is a headfake itself. It has passion, the magic curtain, stories, mindshifts, language and wholly converts the headfake into the idea.

Watch it here.

Your Headfakes

I want to hear about the headfakes that you’ve pulled, and the best ones that you know of. Let’s get a list going in the comments.

Photo with thanks to tico24.