If it doesn’t Spread, it’s Dead

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Scott Gould

Want to learn why if you content doesn’t spread it’s dead, and how to make it spread? Read on.

You’ve heard me bang on before about spreadability vs reach. I arrogantly thought that I had come up with the concept, but I found out in the middle of last year that Henry Jenkins and Sam Ford had been using the phrase far longer than I had.

One of the things that Henry wrote about in 2009 that I was re-reading recently was the notion that If it Doesn’t Spread, it’s Dead. I’d advise you take 10 minutes today to read the article. Sam on the other hand has been writing about the difference between sticky media and spreadable media. You can see some of his slides on the subject in this presentation.

Spread me or I’ll die

Certainly Henry and Sam’s thinking is high level but what they are both saying when it comes down to the basics is that if whatever you produce isn’t spreadable, it is dead. You might succeed in getting something to stick with one person, but if they don’t spread it… well.. it’s dead.

I can see a few levels of spreadability here, crossing both offline and online:

An item needs to compel people to spread it in the first place (as Scott Stratten says, people spread awesome)
An item should be simple, because complexity is hard to explain and spread
An item should provide the words for mouth if it expects word of mouth – in other words, give us the words to use when we spread your product
An item should have built-in one-click ways to spread it

So if we took a typical peice of digital content:

It should be awesome. This spans from a Facebook photo that you are tagged in (awesome because it’s personal) to a video that makes you laugh (awesome because it’s very funny) to a blog post that speaks right into a situation you are in (awesome because it’s relevant)
Simplicity for online content mostly means short and simple. But when people get offline, it seems our attention span increases, which is why we shower The King’s Speech and Black Swan with Oscars (both films, interestingly, with a simple premise)
A photo by nature will warrant a description, but a video or blog post should have a title and a description that people repeat
In built spreading means a blog post has a retweet or Facebook like. Facebook’s eco system enables one click posting of any media item to one’s newsfeed, Disqus auto posts comments to feeds, etc. (Unfortunately, Twitter still requires two clicks to share which I think is just plain idiotic)

I would say that each level trumps the level below – so whilst many people adorn their sites with share buttons, you can still see that they’ve only had 5 retweets of a particular blog post. Clearly the content wasn’t compelling, and thus despite having those share buttons, it didn’t spread and now it’s dead.

Of course, I have hundreds of these blog posts, particularly the last 6 months, that just haven’t been shared because the content was not compelling enough.

Seth Godin in Purple Cow praises Hotmail’s use of the inbuilt email signature that was at the bottom of every Hotmail email account inviting others to sign up. They certainly hit level 4 and got millions upon millions of signups because of it. But this was only because the content itself – the email – was compelling and personal in the first place. I can imagine far fewer email accounts would’ve been created of the back of a SPAM email message – which is what people perceive Hotmail to have become.

Be Compelling

Thus your ultimate goal has creators of any media is to make it compelling – compelling because it’s personal, relevant, entertaining, inspiring, and so on. If you do, people will spread it. And if you add ways to make it spreadable, people will spread it more.

Your Leading Thoughts

Your thoughts as a leader are valuable and the driving force of this blog.

Are you hitting those 4 levels with the media content that you are creating?
If we took “compelling”, what are the different parts of that, i.e. personal, relevant, entertaining, etc?

4 Ways To Focus When You Meet People

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Scott Gould

You might not believe it but there was a time when I was really bad with people. In fact, I was so bad with people that I have the nickname ‘Scary Scott’ at the Christian Union because whilst I was on-target with my bible skills, I was wildly off-target with my people skills.

Luckily, I believed that you could learn leadership, that you could learn people skills, and that what one man can do, another can do. So it is that the connected, engaging, Like Minds uniting person you see before you is actually a result of nurture more than nature.

So today I just want to quickly distill HOW for me I learned to become a people’s person, and it’s wrapped up in what are the 4 ways to focus when you meet new people. What that means is this: there are 4 ways that you can focus upon meeting a new face, and each focus is where you put your energy and attention.

As it happens, these 4 lessons are very applicable to our digital selves, and also to brands and businesses:

1. How You Feel About Yourself

This is where many people are when they meet new people – they are so self-consumed that they don’t actually take good notice of the other person. I think we all are here sometimes when we are particularly distracted – perhaps we’re stressed, have received some good or bad news, that type of thing. But some people just live here all the time.

I might add here that online, this is where I think a large number of bloggers and tweeters live. They write from a very condescending perspective, only ever talk and link to their own stuff and so on.

Likewise, a lot of businesses market at this level. They brag about their features and their product without much regard to how others might feel about it.

2. How You Feel About The Other Person

If you’ve ever met someone and immediately there’s something about them that is our of the ordinary – either their appearance, their attitude, something they said – and you couldn’t get it out of your mind, then you’ve experienced this second way to meet people.

You do get some people that continually exist here – they are very much about how they felt about a person and their reactions to meeting someone new are only based on their own feelings. So it logically progresses that anything they say in meeting this person is to change how they feel themselves about this person.

I find that online we get people doing this in comments a lot. They respond to someone based on how they feel about what they said in the comment (normally a criticism, right?) You can spot it a mile off.

I’ll be quite honest with you – I’ve spent a lot of time here and sometimes regress when I face criticism myself. It’s an easy thing to do, and I would continue to do it were it not for my knowledge of these two better ways:

3. How The Other Person Feels About You

I would say that I spent a lot of my life here. I desperately wanted to be valued and so I would be focussing on what others felt about me. You know what this is like: saying things you think they want to hear, making your actions about how they’ll perceive you and so on.

Needless to say, this is a very, very taxing approach. And digitally it causes burnout. I can’t tell you how exhausting is it blogging and tweeting endlessly so that people will perceive you as some kind of Robert Scoble. I remember in July of 2009 and I was desperately trying to get into FriendFeed so that people would perceive me as an expert and hire me. I spent countless hours saying a lot of stuff and got nowhere with it. Why? Because I was all about how people felt about me, and not about:

4. How The Other Person Feels About Themselves

I wrote sometime ago that Social Media 101 was making people feel special. There is a saying in our church that people don’t remember what was said, they remember how they felt, and this is true for life. Scientifically, if you meet someone and make them feel great, they’ll remember you in a great light.

I remember when I learned this principle at 18 or 19 years of age, and it turned my life around. I began to focus on other people when I met them – being interested rather than seeking to be interesting – and it made a world of difference. Not only did it help me meet more people and more quickly connect with them, but it also changed my whole outlook on life. I now no longer try to ‘meet people well’, I just love finding out about them! It’s not a trick, it’s a genuine desire to find out about people!

When we use Social Media in this way – focussing on how people feel about themselves by encouraging them, providing them with utility and things that enhance their life (rather than getting us click throughs) you’ll find that you engagement goes through the roof. Your numbers might not, but then numbers don’t matter so much when you are adding real value to people.

This is something that my friend Robin Dickinson is exceptional at. He has spent hours helping and valuing me, and I have found so much energy and strength from our relationship. I’ve got his back whatever he does! In fact, you can check out his Sharewords post which is the perfect example of how to use social media to focus on others feel about themselves.

Your Leading Thoughts

Where do live on this scale? Where is your focus when you meet new people?
What lessons have you learned that could help the rest of us with meeting new people, either digitally or physically?

The Secret To Writing A Practical, How-To Blog Post

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Scott Gould

We get told to write “how to” posts and “practical” posts, but ever sit and wonder what to do a practical, how to blog post on?

That’s what Mark Dorey asked in one of our conversations this week, and I’ve got to say, it challenged me to think through what the secret is to it – if indeed there is one!

What follows is a padded out version of my reply to Mark in the comments – I trust it’s a practical tip to help you write more practically!

The Secret: What’s Common Sense Is Only What’s Common To Your Senses

Everyone knows the saying that common sense isn’t that common. That’s the trick here – well, kind of. For me, it’s common to use my iPad in a certain way, or common to use Social Media or run events in a certain way, or clean my house or cut my hair a certain way. And this is common sense to me because it’s common to my senses.

And guess what? We don’t write what is common sense because we think it’s common and not that special.

So the secret is to begin rethinking what is common.

Think about the way that YOU use Twitter, the way that YOU are productive everyday, the way that YOU get on with people. All of these things, and many, many more, are great how-to posts in the waiting and add that practical takeaway value that every blog needs because everyone needs it!

Start taking what is common and make it practical!

Your Leading Thoughts

Let’s make this your blog clinic right now: what things could you start writing about right now? Post them here and let’s discuss them together if you need help.
What other ways do you know of to extract that much needed practical knowledge?

Photo courtesy of Notions Capital

5 Things You Need To Blog Every Month

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Scott Gould

I’ve been thinking about how people can better their blogs in 2011, beyond the general “write better content” or “do 5 steps to…” type of advice.

Of all the different types of people who read this blog and the different types of content I post here, one large demographic is people who are in the media / social media space and write blogs to that effect. I read many your blogs – those of you who have commented here at one point or another – and so I feel I have a good idea of what you’re doing and not doing, and thus what would be beneficial to start doing this year.

What follows are 5 things you need to do at least once a month in 2011 to grow your blog, grow your community, and grow your communication skills:

1. Video

You can’t beat video for getting off of the type of a page and into the personality and charisma of an author. Considering that some of you write long blog posts everyday and yet have never done video, your readers are missing out on vital communication that you need to give them.

This video doesn’t have to highly professional – it needs to be a webcam or mobile phone video of you just saying what you’ve already said before – the advantage being that people get to meet with you and your mannerisms that can’t be communicated through written word.

And if you have an issue with how you look on video – get over it – because if you get those speaking gigs that you’re pushing for, then people want to see video!

2. Practical How To Post

At least once a month you need to be turning out a very practical “how to” post that people can use right away. I’m thinking of one person in particular right now who only ever writes theoretical stuff and so I don’t imagine their readership is going to last long, because lets face it, there’s tons of theory out there.

A practical post on a element of what your blog covers is a great way to distinguish yourself and give your readers instant value from your efforts.

3. Repeat The Past

If you scroll through all the past posts you’ve written, you’ve got some real gold that is now buried and gone and you need to bring it back to the fore for both your new readers, and also to refresh the minds of your regulars.

Once a month, find an old post that was a big hit and re-communicate the truth with a new example. Remember that it’s only when you feel you’re making your point too much that people start to get it. You have to get re-iterating your ideas if people are to consider you to be the go-to person for that topic.

4. Ask Others

I’m big on asking questions in blog posts and my stats prove that when I use question marks in titles, I get far more engagement on a post. Make sure that once a month you ask a question that really gives the floor to your readers to participate and flex their muscles.

I also find that too few blogs focus on other people – particular UK writers. There is so much value in interviewing someone else, having someone guest post, shooting a video with a friend who has a great insight, etc. Do this and you’ll grow your readership and create a decent win-win situation.

This also demonstrates that you aren’t that person who needs to hog the blog with your own ideas every week.

5. Paint The Future

I find that too few blogs give me direction for what’s coming – not necessarily next week – but what technology or ideas will help me over the next quarter. If you can be the person who paints this picture for me, then you become the expert in my books.

This expert content also separates you from the scores of bloggers who keep saying the same thing. When you form original insights and ideas you move out of the role of just plain digital commentary.

Who Does This Well

The person that I know who does this best is Ron Edmondson. Subscribe to his RSS and have a look at the mix of his last 20 posts, and you’ll see it’s all there (well, with the exception of video unfortunately, Ron!)

With that type of mix, Ron doesn’t tie himself into one particular style but keeps it varied and interesting. He also occasionally goes into a series (another great idea) or will do something totally different.

And Yours?

If you could add one more thing that you need to do every month on your blog, what would it be?
Which of these are you struggling to do, and why?

Photo courtesy of Mike Rohde

Are You That Person? And What To Do About It

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Scott Gould

I’ll admit it if you will – many times I’ve been the person you don’t want to meet at the cocktail party.

You know, that person, the one who talks at you the whole time about their job, dropping names like they are going out of fashion with an exciting story that always trumps anything anyone else says, and finally topping it off by getting your name wrong, if they are able to remember any of it that is!

Whilst most people who are reading this are now recalling the last experience they had with that person themselves, it might well be the case that – shock, horror – you are that person to those around you at cocktails, and the digital drink that we Twitter.

Are You That Klingon?

As I sit here, I’m watching an episode of Star Trek in which a Klingon is asked to be the first officer on the Enterprise for an intergalactic exchange programme. (It is related – stick with me!) The tension and the moral of the story is that the Klingon assumes that is disciplinarian leadership style is just what the humans on the Enterprise need, and thus struggles to adapt himself in a way that will get the crew behind him. In short, he’s expecting his environment to adapt to him, without any thought to adapting himself to his environment.

So let me make my not so subtle point: when you don’t adapt to your relational environment, you’re that person. Some call it having a low EQ, some low emotional intelligence, others self-consumed, and others just call it anti-social or plain due.

Whether online or offline, when someone disproportionately talks or tweets about themselves it leaves them appearing as self-centered. Yesterday we discussed the “horns and halos principle” in which the tiny sample that someone sees of you in 140 characters or with a handshake is used to ‘fill in the blanks’ and give your horns or halos based on the sample.

Our Self-Centric World

If I try to work out the reasons why I’ve been that person, especially online, it’s because we’re so crowded that we feel we have to beat our chests in order to get heard. And in our content-driven online world, it is the easiest thing to get sucked into the gospel of me, me, me, me.

But when we feel we have to ‘big ourselves up’, what is it we are really trying to achieve? It’s actually an incredible simple human motivation that we all share and is right for us to feel:

How To Really Be Remebered

If we really want to leave an impression – whether it’s a re-visit to our website, another tweet to engage us, or a phone call after you left someone your number – the trick is in engaging the feelings of the beholder.

Making someone feel special is the most powerful way to have someone remember you, and when it comes to making someone feel special, it’s not even necessary to speak a word. I’ll tell you how I’ve learned how to do it:

To make people feel valued, talk to them about themselves.

Use Twitter to ask people questions and find out more about them. Ask people what their interests and passions are rather than just what their jobs are.
Use Facebook to ask questions that people can comment on, allowing people to engage with each other and add to each other’s ideas.
At dinner and cocktail parties, seek to be interested rather than interesting. Hint: people remember you better if they find out what you do by asking you, rather than you volunteering the information yourself.
Use your blog to add value to people rather than just push content. The master of this is Robin Dickinson, whose Sharewords post and the comments that follow are a revelation in actually helping people.

Your Leading Thoughts

I’m keen to hear from you: how have you learnt to not be that person? Do you have any tips to share with the rest of us? (We could all use your help!)

Scott

Why I Don’t Complain On Twitter, And Why You Could

Posted on January 3, 2011 by Scott Gould

It’s hard to resist having a good moan on Twitter, especially when something or someone isn’t doing their job and we hope that our moaning, combined with our perceived influence, will get us special attention.

The trouble is that your complaining, whilst seemingly resolving your current short term frustration, might be causing you long term brand damage.

The reason why lies in understanding how people form impressions of you – both at a first glance, and also over time.

Horns and Halos

In First Impressions (aff link), Ann Demararis and Valerie White discuss the “horns and halos effect”, which is a phenomena related to when people first meet you. A first impression is a retained remembrance of a small sample, a tiny percentage of what a person is really like. However it’s the only sample that someone has and they use to to fill in the blanks and the rest of my life to created this remembrance.

Whilst I have 27 years of life, when I meet someone I might only be able to impart 2 minutes and 27 seconds of who I am – say 5% of who I am – and the psychological fact is that this short representation will be used by the person I am meeting to inform their opinion of the other 95% of my life.

If this 5% contains negative traits – such as being angry, distracted, moody, or a complainer – the person will add “horns” to you and consider those traits to be a small sample of a greater amount that is is present in your life and might take you for someone who is far moody than you are, simply because you, for example, had just heard some bad news. Likewise, if someone encounters positive traits such as appreciation, smiling, encouragement, then they will add “halos” to you and imagine you to be an all round nice person – possible even nicer than you actually are!

Complainers and their Horns

The problem with complainers online is that in just 140 characters they create an impression that they are a complaining person. Even the fact that I am calling them “complainers” now shows that they have put themselves in a category of people who predictably moan about a lot, even though they might have only complained once on Twitter or Facebook.

This is particularly important if you represent a brand. I have tried to hold the conviction myself that I will not be a complainer online because if I do, I am representing Like Minds and therefore make it to be a complaining organisation. I am also quick to ask people not to use the #likeminds hashtag to complain on (of course, if they want to, they will), but through my relationship with everyone I encourage them not to in order to keep our hashtag and thus our brand complainer-free.

Complaining also says “I’m not in control”, a brand value that none of us would want to have associated with us. I’ll be honest, when I see people complain, I normally make a decision to step back from them because complainers are not normally the type of people who solve problems, they are the ones who wallow in them.

The Two Times When Complaining is Human

It’s important to not overlook the fact that there is a side to complaining which is human. There are times when a complaint can benefit your brand. In fact, there are two approaches:

The first is when we are frustrated with a situation that it can endear us to our community because it revelas our wounds and shows we aren’t perfect.

What is essential here is that you must acknowledge the complaint in such a way that you safe proof yourself from being labelled as a complainer. So rather than saying, “OMG Vodafone Network down again. When will they learn #FAIL”, one should rather say “I hate to moan, but Vodafone’s network being done is really delaying me today.”

Someone who does this well is Chris Brogan. If you follow Chris on Facebook (not Twitter) you’ll sometimes see him vent off on a particular struggle, but done in a way that endears his community to him and presents him as a non-complainer who is frustrated at this moment in time and needs help.

The second time when complaining is beneficial for your brand is if you polarize people based on your position. Take my friend Olivier Blanchard who regularly calls people out. When he tweets or writes a blog post that complains about a situation, he does so in a polarising nature that means you love him or hate him, and this means those who follow him do so more vehemently.

The safety catch here is that you must offer solutions to what you are complaining about. Olivier is an incredibly intelligent person and his passion overflows in calling people out – but his intelligence always wins because he paints the picture of how things should be instead. This means he is being objective and offering solutions, this demonstrating his expertise. Be warned however this polarising people is tricky business and not always the best long term strategy.

Your Leading Thoughts

Are you a complainer? Have you ever considered that the digital impression you are leaving is giving your horns rather than halos?
Do you have a brand strategy on complaining and using it to your advantage?

Photo courtesy of B Rosen

Video: Steve Jobs on Apple and Value, in 1997

Posted on January 2, 2011 by Scott Gould

Has your brand lost power in an over-saturated market? With thanks to Trey Pennington, this short little video from Steve Jobs back in 1997 provides exceptional insight into using values in marketing to multiple the power of your brand.

I found it’s been valuable for me to watch this because in some instances when we talk so much about content online we forget about the power that design has. I’m always telling people that design matters but feel I’ve lost a bit of way, so I needed this:

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch directly on YouTube.

This video has reminded me to focus on the gut emotion that people feel when they see the logo of Like Minds or The River Church, or the feeling that they will feel when they hear those words mentioned.

Associating Value

The issue is that it’s noisy, and perhaps we are thinking, “If only I were Apple, I could have time to influence people”, but even Steve doesn’t take this for granted. Steve’s opening paragraph in particular which sets out the dilemma:

“This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world. We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is.”

So surely the process begins with asking, “What are the values that the market associates with our brand name and logo?” I wonder, how many of us know the three values that our brand must communicate? Do we have that kind of crystal clarity and diamond focus about WHY we are and WHO we are?

Likewise, do we know what we are not? When we ran the Like Minds Summit with Visit Finland last year (the tourist board of Finland), in creating their social media strategy we were given their brand book that said what Finland WAS and what Finland WASN’T. It was a great help, and certainly clarified the direction that we must not go in with reagards to a social media strategy. However it lacked the final piece:

Knowing your benefits. I mean, do we really know what value we add? What is the product that people immediately associate with us? (Apple = iPhone, Microsoft = Windows) And do we know how that offering benefits them at the lowest level. I’m not talking about some crazy concoction of “it empowers people to do this and this and realise this”, I mean the once, two word benefit that cuts through the crap. The trouble that we had with Visit Finland was finding what their primary offering is, considering New York = Empire State Building, Paris = Eiffel Tower and so on. Without knowing this, you’re stuffed.

Your Leading Thoughts

So I would say to associate value we need to know 1] what values we are, 2] what values we are not, and 3] what benefits we offer.

Can you answer all three for your brand? Or where are you stuck so that we can help?
Alternatively, can unwrap more of how you have learnt to associate value?