Producing Proof

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Scott Gould

My good friend Munya Hoto once told me that we live to produce proof. I like that. It means that we live to produce physical proof of what we believe.

When I started out as a consultant two years ago, I had some proof, but it wasn’t clearly documented. The first thing to do is certainly to produce proof (and once you have, that doesn’t separate you from most), but actually producing that proof in a way that someone get’s it is hard work. Many of us have successes, but still there isn’t the knowledge of those successes that we’d like.

I think the thing with proof is that one man’s proof is not another man’s proof. I was talking to a friend the other day and offering some insights in their business. Whilst they are greatly respected, no one really knows exactly what this person does and therefore doesn’t purchase or promote their services. To him, there was proof, but to others, there wasn’t.

Michael Meyers, my pastor, and I were talking the other day and he made the exceptional observation that everything you say before the event is an intangible. It’s only after the event that you have something tangible. That is sooo good – because don’t just all of us focus on before the event, rather than after the event? “I can do this, we will have this, we have got this going on, I am able to deliver this for you,” etc, etc – but this is all intangible speak. Rather we should be saying “I have produced this. I have done this. We have made this happen. Do you want it too?”

Before the event is intangible, after the event is tangible.

This is why my friend saw they had proof but others hadn’t. He’d seen what he’d done before – the tangible parts – but he couldn’t communicate it in a tangible way.

Michael went on to say two further things which illustrate what you need to do, which I thought were gold:

1. Pick up the proof

After you’ve done it – after the event – you have to pick up the bits that prove you did it. The testimonies, the videos, the reviews, the blogs, the Facebook comments and the best tweets.

I’ll be honest, this is something I’m bad at because I’m exhausted after the event. His tip is to introduce a team of people whose sole responsibility is post-event PR. I’ll be giving it a go over the coming months, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

2. Publish the proof

Once you’ve picked it up, you need to publish it. This is where Social Channels help. Scatter that proof, baby. Have it on YouTube, the blog, the static pages, on Flickr, on Twitter, on Facebook. Make sure every channel has proof – because people are always looking at various channels and might never see the whole picture.

Your Leading Thoughts

I’m bad at producing proof and need to get better. If you are successful at this, what tips can you share?
This does fly in the face of the myth of the over the top digital personal brand, because they often lack proof. How do, however, produce proof without bragging?

Interesting image courtesy of Austin Kleon

The Key To Creating A Compelling Experience

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Scott Gould

Branding used to be all about market differentiation. When I saw your logo, read your brand promise, and used your products, the idea was that I felt different about your offering than I about your competitors offering.

That’s the way it used to be.

Today, we switch on the TV, and it’s often a hard job remembering what goes with what. That car advert that was great, but was it Ford or Citroen? Look online and place two recruitment companies next to each other, and what’s the difference between them, other than the logo? Both promise me work, both claim to be specialists, and both offer me the same service.

Essentially, they are offering the same products and the same services with different wrappers.

As my friend Joe Pine says, the next economic offering is now experiences – a customised service that is so compelling, so unique, so distinct, that the customer cannot help be caught up in the experience of it. This is what consumers want (see the video about it here), because gone are the days of appealing to need, and here are the days of appealing to emotion.

This of course is all well and good but a tad unpractical, because ‘create an experience’ is not the most useful of instructions, not is is obvious what an experience is, not what the word even means for varying industries. It’s easy to know what an experience is in the realm of theme parks, but what about online shopping or publishing?

Creating An Alternate Reality

The key to creating experience is in creating an alternate reality.

The virtue of most experiences is that they are different to our normal life. Most memorable experiences were memorable because they were not regular events. It stands to reason then that if by engaging with you I experience something that is not the norm (in a good way, preferably), then I remember it – and the more compelling, innovative and relevant to me it is, the more of an experience I have.

The way that I do this is figure out what the norm is, or what “the world” is that most people are living in with the particular industry I’m focussing on. Then, I create a world where all the negatives of that don’t exist, or where the positives are accentuated. So, if I wanted to be controversial: “ScottGould.me is a world where blogs have deep discussion, in a world where most blogs have no discussion.”

More examples

Geek Squad: th:e alternate reality that they create is a world where any computer problem is no problem, in world where most computer problems are big problems.
iPod: the alternate reality that it creates is a world where music is anywhere you are, within three clicks, in a world where music is on a CD, in album, on a shelf.
Disney World: the alternate reality that it creates is a world where happiness is everywhere, in a world where happiness is not everywhere.
The River Dream Centre: the alternate reality that we create is a church that you feel at home at, in a world where most church services are alien to people.
Amazon Prime: the alternate reality that it creates is a world where you get any book in the world tomorrow, in a world where you have to wait.

Some of these are experiences that are reliant on you being at that juncture in space, time and matter, and others are not, which is why I added Amazon Prime in. We’ll get into this more in the coming weeks, but remember what we’ve already discussed about the best experiences often being the ones that you don’t experience directly, like the anticipation for a movie or Apple product release.

Next time you reasses your products and services, consider if you shouldn’t start standing out by customising them into an experience that creates an alternate reality.

Your Leading Thoughts

You might well already create alternate experience realities. I’d like to know what they are…
How do you think this translates into social media and mobile technology?

Understanding Value In A Share-Economy

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Scott Gould

We had a discussion recently on sharing and creating content, and I asked the question “are you afraid to give it away?” There were some exceptional comments, but this one from Malcolm Sleath opened up a whole lot of understanding for me on what value really is in a share-economy.

I think share-economy is also the operative term, at least for now. Certainly a large portion of my work, with Like Minds and the River Dream Centre in particular (a community around a conference, and a church, respectively) is about sharing, and I feel the need to better understand what the real value is here.

I trust you’ll start thinking on Malcolm’s thoughts as much as I have. Enjoy:

Scott, I think you have put your finger on something that many people are wrestling with – but my hunch is that much of the agonising is misplaced. If people are clear about their own value, and what they value, then decisions become much more straightforward.

It comes down to understanding where your true added-value lies, understanding the value in sharing, and sharing on the basis of enlightened self-interest and personal values.

1 Understand where your true added-value lies.

For me, the first step in resolving the sharing dilemma was to understand where my true value-added lay. This understanding came from the free exchange of ideas with other people, and the slow realisation of what made my offering different and special. For me, sharing was inseparable from realising my own value.

To those who are reluctant to share, I would say that if your idea is so good that it changes the game it’s probably going to be rejected and not stolen – ask James Dyson. Simplifying slightly, Dyson found that people were reluctant to take up his game changing idea, so he took a huge financial risk and made the idea real – suddenly the idea had value and all the money he had earlier spent on patents proved to be a good investment. As Thomas Edison said, “The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”

In my experience it is really hard to ‘give away’ my true added-value. The value is in enabling people to use my ideas, not in the idea itself. Delivering the process takes know-how, work, resources and mutual commitment.

But, to get to a level of trust where I can begin the process of gaining commitment, I need a way to engage with people, which brings me to the other aspects of sharing.

2 Understand the value in sharing.

Sharing makes it easier to earn a share of mind. My IP is not diminished by suggesting how people can do some small but important thing better in an article that I don’t even get paid for.

In reality, many of the things experts ‘give away’ are intended to educate people in the value of what they do. The other things they offer in the mix keep people interested in them as a source. If only a few people make the transition from passive consumers to active clients, they are still winning. Ideas are seeds. Nature is wasteful. In the end it doesn’t matter because we all return to the earth.

True experts know stuff they don’t even know they know – so there is no way they are going to be able to tell you everything. And anyway, you would have to have achieved a certain level of understanding to make proper use of what they are telling you.

In other words, by helping you they are not losing. They still have their competitive advantage and can afford to be generous. In sharing, they are gaining in reputation and becoming known, liked and trusted. This does not mean that others suddenly want to start sending them dollar bills. There is no place for Twitter followers in the company balance sheet. But the perceived value of their activities earns a bigger share of attention/mind, they become an authority by default, and the value of their brand is enhanced – which means that people are more prepared to pay for their advice and services.

So when I share ideas with others, I am hoping to earn a bigger share of their mind. When, in return, I give others a bigger share of my mind, I am rewarded with access to resources, contacts, ideas, inspiration, and opportunities that I simply did not know about before. My current personal example is the #likeminds club and all that flows from that.

3 Share on the basis of enlightened self-interest and personal values.

Having achieved some confidence in my value, it then becomes relatively easy to decide whether my interest lies in (a) giving away an idea to help others or for mutual benefit (b) sharing it with relatively few people for money, or (c) keeping it to myself and gloating over it.

If you want to give an idea away, then treat the satisfaction of giving as its own reward. Don’t agonise about the selfishness of other people in not giving you credit. It is very hard to predict what others will value and you will become richer emotionally and financially by learning what they do value.

If you are really worried that giving ideas away will affect your financial or commercial well-being, then consult an intellectual property lawyer.

Your Leading Thoughts

Read over Malcom’s points: how do you rank on each of his three points? Where are you in this journey?
Like a trailer is the pitch for a movie, how much do you think sharing value before the sale will increase and become a part of the game in your industry?

Old Spice: Put All The Kids In The Show, and…

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Scott Gould

… and all the parents come to see them perform.

It’s a trick as old as time, and a trick that schools have been using for years. When it comes to getting people to attend the school play, there is no better way than making sure you give every kid a part – because then the whole family comes to watch them.

That’s what Old Spice did with their campaign last month. If you haven’t heard about, to save me writing all about it, you can read this post at ReadWriteWeb. The gist of it is that they created YouTube clips based on what people said on Twitter, in near-realtime fashion. You can see all the videos here. Below is one that they did to celebrity blogger Perez Hilton:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ive3vXv-XRk

According to the guys at We Are Social, the Old Spice videos were watched 11 million times in the space of 48 hours (plus other stats here). I don’t know how much product Old Spice have shipped as a result, but they got more views that Obama’s victory speech in the same span of time, and their PR and awareness goals have no doubt been met and exceeded.

Putting The Kids In The Show

So now everyone asks “How do we do it? What was its success?” John Bell wrote a very good post on the real time nature of the campaign, John Cass wrote on its transparent inauthenticity, and Molly Flatt on the power of brand anthropomorphism. They all agree however that this isn’t something that can be replicated successfully because this is a market that rewards uniqueness just once. A clone won’t get the attention this campaign did.

For me, the takeaway lesson must be in the power of putting all the kids in the show, doing it in a real time fashion that was unique, and targeted key influencers.

Putting the kds in the show is about socialising your content. Consider threadless.com, who are a community who design and rate t-shirts by the community. Each t-shirt is always bound to have at least one customer – the person who designed it. But as their community has grown, and the average level of participation has deepened, more and more of their content has been socially created and incentives of purchasing these items has increased. People buy the t-shirts and support the company because they are emotionally invested in it, because they have co-created it.

This is the same thing I did in 2003 when I started Feedback, a youth organisation that was run by youth, for the youth. When we started out, we found it really hard to fill up our venue. Putting up posters and handing out leaflets was time consuming and largely ineffective. I remember our first event had 35 people, and we slowly increased in numbers until we jumped to 89 in March 2004 when we got a popular band from our college to perform. We jumped then again to 250 when we had our Battle of the Bands later that year.

We quickly learned that the best way to market our event and fill our venue was put people in the show who had existing followings – the same thing that Old Spice did by targeting Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, Lisa Barone, etc.

Skip to Like Minds in October last year, and it was the same tactic with those who we asked to partner with us on the event. By having local companies as partners, they brought in their clients to see them perform.

This is why Social Media is so powerful. You are invested in it, because you’ve co-created it. And because you are invested in, you bring people to see it and you can’t get away from it.

Your Leading Thoughts

When you look at a group photo, which is the first face you look for?
How have you socialised content to put kids in the show?
Where have you seen this tactic NOT work?

Photo courtesy of Brave Heart

My Wife

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Scott Gould

It’s my wife’s birthday today. Happy Birthday my sweetheart – hope you’re enjoying the holiday! (She gets my blog in her email

(BTW you can wish her a happy birthday on her Facebook profile.)

The reason why I bring it up is because she is a woman who supports me unfailingly – the kind of support that I can’t even begin to describe. I don’t mean that she supports me blindly. If you’re looking for the woman is straight and direct with me and doesn’t pull any punches, this is her.

Your Leading Thoughts

I would expect you have people like these in your life too. People who mentor you, support you, speak directly into your heart. Who are they? What are the greatest lessons that they’ve taught you?

Using A Community

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Scott Gould

I’m really enjoying Dan Blank’s blog at the moment. I first caught onto him through my close friend Andrew Davies at idio, and I’ve been following him for a while, but it seems these past few weeks I’ve really caught onto his writing a lot more.

Last week he wrote a post that I knew I’d love the moment I saw the title: “You Don’t Sell To A Community. You Support A Community“. You guys know I love a good strap line, especially when there’s aliteration. The great thing was that the post delivered.

It’s hard to pick a central quote (you can guess what the post was about), as it was one of those almost poetic pieces where each paragraph builds incrementally on the previous one, but perhaps the best part to me is this very accurate description of the latest marketing fad which is “build community”:

A brand should be careful about approaching social media as a sales funnel: to establish connections, build ‘trust,’ encourage a ‘community,’ and then market products and services to them. That’s not a community strategy, that is a marketing plan. And there is a difference.

This really rings home because recently I was having a leadership discussion in a venture that I’m involved in, and the painful point came up that whilst I was trying to explain we needed to build community in order to serve the community, the reality was that we were more interested in building the community in order to serve ourselves.

Turning it around is hard – we’re still in the process of doing it – and I’m learning some key lessons as I go.

Dan goes on to say that “building a community” for business is furthermore a hard and an expensive thing to do. It seems a stock answer at the moment to tell publishers in particular that they should “build community”, but I watch the people who say it and often they have never built one themselves. Dan actually argues that you don’t build them anyway – they already exist, and you help it grow.

My Experience with Community

I’ve nurtured many a community in the last 13 years that I’ve been ‘doing this’, but I think my most pertinent example would come from Like Minds.

I’ve said many times that my original intention for Like Minds was to show the local businesses that I was good at marketing, so that they’d hire me as a consultant. I was desperate to be accepted (many of the people who support me now didn’t back then), and I thought that if I could pull off a good event, they’d see.

After the success of the first Like Minds in October 09, a community – a tribe – was born in a day, but I still in mind saw that as a means to an end for getting work. Sure, I supported the community, but I didn’t see it as being a place that would be my main focus and income. I wasn’t selling to them – it’s important to clarify that – but I did see them as a way for me to secure more consulting.

It wasn’t until April this year that I realised how dearly I loved the community that was growing, and that if I focussed on serving that community, that would be far more fulfilling and rewarding. The irony is since I made that decision to not pursue consulting, consulting work has started to come in, and I turn a lot of it down in order to focus more fully on Like Minds because that’s where I’m seeing people really effected, which has always been my aim in the beginning anyway.

When a community really clicks (which I’ve been a part of many times), you know there’s no way that you can sell to them anyway. The things that they need from you, they’ll get without you blowing your horn, and you won’t given them anything but the things they need anyway, even if it’s not your thing that they need.

Your Experience with Community

Have you been on the receiving end of support and/or selling in a community?
Are you aware of any communities that actually grow based on a ‘selling’ mindset? (I don’t)
If supporting is what you do, how have you monetized that if you are nurturing a community?

Photo of Like Minds 2010 courtesy of Paul Clarke

A Request From Me, To You

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Scott Gould

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiGwPwo5PtU

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

I’m taking a much needed break over the next 3 weeks. My eyes have been very sore and are stressed to the point that I need to wear glasses for a while to ‘reset them’, according to the doctor.

This is the product of working very hard on Like Minds Helsinki, launching the Like Minds Club, doing more and more consulting with Aaron+Gould, doing A LOT with Touch 10 and really raising the media standard at The River Dream Centre, and also putting together the main parts of Like Minds Conference, Autumn 2010.

I’ve done more in the last 4 months than I have in any whole year before and I certainly feel that (with my sincere thanks to Michael Meyers, Drew Ellis and Robin Dickinson in particular), I have sharpened my focus, developed a stronger NO in order to have a stronger YES, and really built things of value.

So it is with joy that I now take a much needed break, but at the same time I know I will miss engaging with you all as much as I usually do.

What I will be doing is posting things here a few times a week that I’ve already lined up, and it is along this line that I have a request for you all, as my friends, peers, influencers, colleagues and brothers and sisters: Connect with each other in these comments.

Let me check in every few days and find that you’ve gotten to know each other more – that those of you who haven’t commented and have come and shared your much valued views – and that those of you who normally only comment on the post and not other’s comments have found new joy in discussing issues with one another.

And finally, let me come back to hear that you’ve scaled the levels of communication – that you’ve emailed, skyped, collaborated and even met up with one another – and created more valuable relationships.

I’ll catch you soon,
Scott.

Ecosystems: Riding on Them, and Creating Them

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Scott Gould

My friend Chris Brogan wrote a thinking peice last month on “Amazon and the Kindle Conspiracy” that many overlooked but I think warrants a deeper leadership discussion.

Chris discusses how Amazon went from book distributor to pretty much anything distributor, and how he suggests that the Kindle could do the same thing. He talks about how the Kindle also isn’t just a phyiscal device. You can have the Kindle on your iPhone, iPad, desktop, etc. It’s a distribution platform that lives on other platforms, something we talked about recently with Your Business, Ubiquitous.

That’s a big discussion there. Then Chris goes deeper into what is my favourite part of the post:

Don’t look at the device. Don’t fret about the device. Think of it as yet another way to gain ground in distribution. Keep your eyes on this, and also think about how this impacts your business. Think further on whether there are ways you could do distribution differently (better, partnered) and what that would give you.

This immediately makes me think of ecosystems. Consider Apple’s App Store and iTunes ecosystem. The devices that they can plug into this are potentially numerous, and as Chris suggests, it’s not really about the device – it’s the distribution of the ecosystem.

The way I see it, ecosystems are about flow of the river, the devices are the boat, and the person is the person. A good ecosystem means that a number of different boats can be on it in order to get people where they need to be. iTunes and the App Store is an ecosystem that allows many boats – the innovator boats, the late majority boats, the home boats, the work boats, etc.

I’m now seeing what were boats now become ecosystems in their own right. Consider Evernote, which is the handy note tool that remembers everything. Evernote created an API, and now with Evernote Trunk, serves as an ecosystem to boats that now ride upon it.

Facebook is an ecosystem, and so is Twitter. They are rivers that boats can flow on. Applications can be built for them. Communities live on them. You get the idea.

Riding on The Wave

The trick for startups and new things now is to use these ecosystems – to ride on their waves – in order to get our users to where they need to be. As Chris said in starting, the Kindle is about distribution. Why create a new ecosystem when a perfectly good ecosystem already exists that can distribute your boats where they need to be?

This is where socialising channels comes into play. Socialising our channels means getting your content to the places where people already are – the water coolers. If Facebook is where your people are, use that. If it’s Amazon, use that. If it’s the Kindle, use that. Ride the wave that gets your content distributed.

Creating Waves

The other option is to be the one building ecosystems – buliding the distribution channels that others can use. I’d be careful here. I’d only build an ecosystem where one doesn’t already exist.

That’s what we’re doing with Like Minds. I’ve noticed that the communities which are the most useful are the ones that become an ecosystem for others to sail on. The community and the events attached to it become enablers for the lives of others.

But the trick here is that we have to do it in a unique way – one of which being the Like Minds Club, something that I don’t know of any other event / community doing. The aim of the working club is to be an enabler for others to ride their boats along – whatever business, endeavour, need, etc, they might have.

I would say therefore, if was trying to define an ecosystem in a digital way, I’d say they are a platform that enable third parties and users to build and live from in a way that enhances their productivity through synergy with other users and shared benefits.

Your Leading Thoughts

As a leading and thinking person, your input here is valued and adds to the discussion and to this blog. Focus in on ecosystems right now, and use these points to help the discussion:

On a smaller scale, are blogs working as ecosystems?
What are the prerequisites for calling something an ecosystem?
What are the ecosystems that you are tied into?

Photo courtesy of Storm Crypt