Why most blogs miss out on the greatest value they have

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This comment from yesterday from Brian Driggs hit’s the spot on why most blogs miss out on the greatest value they have – their readers – by failing to showcase others rather than themselves:

It’s hard for me to posit why showcasing is so rare, as it’s been at the center of my online activities for 15 months, now. I’d tend to agree with you that it’s an ego thing for many. After all, the essence of the blog is sharing one’s opinions, so if those opinions draw an audience, isn’t that reinforcement of self-worth? Paging Ego to the white courtesy phone!

Our core focus at Gearbox is interviewing others, sharing their stories, publishing their opinions on the issues directly affecting our community. With so many people sharing across social technologies these days, it can be easy for some voices to get lost in the din.

We simply give individuals a moment in the spotlight to introduce themselves, share the high and low points of their journeys, and get their voices heard over the others, one at a time. We’re trying to make responsibility, effort, and “doing it right” more popular, hopefully inspiring conversations surrounding what works, how it works, and why it works, all while gently suggesting we’re all part of a diverse, global community without boundaries.

The things we have in common make it easier for us to accept (even understand) our differences. As gearheads, we generally come together in pursuit of building high performance machines, but our goal at Gearbox is to empower people to build high performance lives.

It’s my life’s work, actually.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Why go most blogs miss out on the greatest value they have?
  • How are you tangible showcasing your community?

Ford with Showcase Strategy

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I have a habit of clipping case studie I find that fit within the Scatter, Gather, Matter framework. You can actually see all of these on my Delicious account.

A recent one that I found that is in the vein of the Old Spice campaign is a set of personalised videos from Ford. Here’s a small sample:

Showcase Strategy

If scattering your message is about pushing it everywhere and anywhere, gathering your message is about uniting people together and pulling them into the same place.

One way to do gather people is quite literally to showcase them – to put them in the show – as it not only gets their interest and participation by the virtue that you have showcased them, but they will also bring their crowd with them to watch them perform.

Reproducing This

We don’t all have a budget to create videos talking to individual people. But we can involve people quite easily in what we do. The most basic form is a tweet about someone else or a blog post highlighting someone else’s work. Taking this deeper, we can actually ask people to contribute to our production. I learnt this when running a youth organization and quickly realising that when I asked bands to play, they brought their fans. Not only that, but when I asked young people to volunteer and be part of the organisation, they brought their friends to watch what they had made.

The trick really is to ask yourself “how can I involve someone else in this?”, from the small parts right up to the big parts. If you sell paper as a B2B business, for instance, you could showcase a business by naming a particular product after them because they buy so much of it, or asking them to demo a new product for a week free of charge and video what they think of it.

Social Media is supposed to be about co-creation, but we regularly find ego takes over and thus the blog becomes about the blogger, the show about the producer, and the church about the preacher. If we can lay down our ego and seek not to be interesting to be interested, then we can begin seeing the fruits of showcasing individuals.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Why is showcasing so rare? Is it that when we showcase one individual we alienate others?
  • How practically do you showcase others?

P.S. I explain Showcase and two other social strategies in this article.

Do Retweets Matter?

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RetweetSometime ago I spoke at London Blog Club about value-based blogging. It’s an approach that values each participation that someone makes on the blog, and seeks to increase that participation by placing value on each person, as opposed to a volume approach that is more about generating large numbers of retweets and likes.

Not surprisingly, there was some crticism. This post from Lucy Hewitt highlights her disagreements, which tend to revolve around the needs of blogs that have low levels of participation but higher levels of just plain consumption.

So my question today to you is: do retweets matter to you?

For me, I can happily have 30 comments on a post and really see valued added to people, with only a handful (say 10) retweets. I see engagement of that kind, and the engagement that I have with many of you away from the blog, as being of far greater long term benefit that a messily click of a retweet mouse.

This isn’t to say that retweets don’t matter for say campaigns that seek to spread their news as far as they want – but that volume approach is just not necessary for me.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Do retweets matter to you? Why?
  • What is the effect of “one click participation” on our internet population?

Photo by Rosaura Ochoa

This Year’s Anti-X-Factor Campaign. Will It Work?

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Perhaps the most fundamental event that marked the power of social media last year was the dethroning of Sim Cowell’s X-Factor by a Facebook campaign that put Rage Against The Machine in the Christmas No. 1 slot and beat the single released by the winner of the competition, Joe McElderry.

As it happens, I wrote the top case study on the event, in which I dissected the statistics and events leading up to Christmas to not only help us understand how it happened, but to get our heads around the two different mindsets that are in play against one another. The headline numbers were astounding:

  1. Reach of an average 13.9 million (peak 19 million) viewers, with over 50 hours of X-Factor programme consumption, purchased 450,000 copies of Joe McElderry’s single.
  2. Spreadability, of not even 1 million locked-in, sharing individuals, leads up who knows how many impressions, purchasing 500,000 copies of Rage’s single.

For me, this campaign demonstrated the power of spreadability and of a value approach over a volume approach, in as much as the volume of 13.9 million were beat by the value of under 1 million.

This Year

Now that Matt Cardle has won and is has released his single “When We Collide”, there are a dozen campaigns to beat this single to number one, but it seems the one with the most legs is a collaboration between a number of celebrities performing their own version of John Cage’s 4’33″, an avant-garde peice in which the record is just the recording of musicians silent in the room, thus being aptly named, “Cage Against The Machine.”

As it says on BBC Entertainment:

An anti-X Factor “supergroup” has recorded its entry in the race for this year’s Christmas number one – the sound of silence. Madness star Suggs and dance acts Orbital and Pendulum were among those who did nothing in a recording studio.

Dozens of musicians were present and the campaign – dubbed Cage Against the Machine – currently has 62,000 Facebook fans.

Guillemots frontman Fyfe Dangerfield, Unkle’s James Lavelle, Scroobius Pip and Dan Le Sac also took part in the unconventional session. They were joined by members of The Kooks and Heaven 17 at Dean Street Studios in London.

For me, this anti-campaign was a failure right from the beginning, and it just won’t work. Why you ask?

Why It Won’t Work

Despite Cage Against The Machine having far wider press circulation because it’s being run by professionals, it lacks the distinct spreadability that last years campaign had. I can see 5 reasons why:

  1. It’s a duplication of last year, not an innovation. Social is innovation and broadcast is duplication. Only a social campaign can beat the X-Facor like last year, and last year it was new. This year, however, it’s just a sad copycat. Even the name, “Cage Against The Machine” is desperately trying to hold onto the glory of last year.
  2. The throne has already been overturned. Last year people finally quenched years of frustration at the cookie cutter Christmas number ones the X-Factor was handing out. But that pent-up frustration was satisfied last year and there no longer exists the same passion and frustration sufficient to pull this off for a second year in a row.
  3. It’s just celebrity vs celebrity. Last year it was the people with rage vs the machine. A perfect fit between the uprising of disgruntled people with a band who also were contraband to mainstream entertainment. But now look at this years line up and all you find are, well, celebrities. And the campaign isn’t being pushed by the people, it’s by the industry. Rage Against The Machine weren’t even involved in last year’s attempt – they were just hapless bystanders who agreed to play a free gig if it got to number one.
  4. There’s no anthem. The words “F*** you I won’t do what you tell me” from last year’s single where pertinent and powerful. Every marketeer knows you need a mantra, a slogan, a vision statment, a raison d’être. But 4 and a half minutes of silence has not such power, and thus lacks any form of potency.
  5. It’s missing a figurehead. The figureheads last year were Rage and they were Jon Morter, the DJ who knows how to get backings and work community. This year I don’t have a clue who is doing what.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Do you agree? What else can you add the list of reasons why it won’t work? (Or do you have reasons why it will work?)
  • Can you spot the fundamental difference between this and last years campaign?

Video: Making It Matter

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I engaged with the participants at IYCF 2010 is Pakistan this week, telling them to Scatter, Gather, Matter. Whilst I’ll be posting a video next week to wrap up my experience of the week, I wanted to bring some understanding to what I mean by “Matter”.

Mattering is about creating platforms that enable and empower people for their lives. A platform is something that we build on top of. For instance, Facebook is a platform that we can build a social presence on. My church and the teaching we provide is a platform that people can live their lives on. Guardian’s Open API is a platform that bloggers and journalists can build their writing on.

Marketing Mattering

Smart organisations have positioned themselves like this for years. It’s nothing new, but before we didn’t really understand what it was that we were doing. It seems now that more and more service providers in particular are releasing that they must therefore market themselves as less of a service provider and more of a life enabler.

So, cue this video that I adore from Vodafone earlier this year:

This is how to market mattering – by showing how your platform enables people to live their lives in a more empowered way. Don’t focus on the platform, focus on the potential for life change. Don’t make it about the features of your platform, make it about the tangible benefits.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • How do you see the change from service provider to life enabler taking place amongst other brands?
  • How would you apply this in your market? (In order to help others learn from your application)

Reflections on Pakistan, Day 1

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Hey all. I’ve had so much support and encouragement from you all that I wanted to share how things are going. It’s late as I write this, so I won’t be typing it up, so enjoy this video:

Photos are on my Posterous and videos on my YouTube.

Tomorrow I’ll be updating you and also getting out the final draft of my participation (not presentation) for final feedback and thoughts.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • What is your perception of Pakistan? Please be honest as this can help me with my participation.

W’re a Top 50 Leadership Blog.

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Great news, friends, we have been recognised as a top 50 leadership blog by Evan Carmichael, particularly in the area of communicating leadership.

Well done to everyone who continually adds and breathes life into this blog through their engagement, whether it be comments, emails, tweet, skypes, phone calls or face to face catchups.

This is our achievement together!

Scott

P.S. Take a moment to also find some other exceptional leadership blogs on the list, and in particular you mist visit Mike Myatt’s N2Growth which wasn’t on the list but is my favourite leadership blog.

The 4 Values of Leaders

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I’ve been writing more and more about leadership as of late, as I in our conversation about participation, media, communication and community, leadership is the vital element that makes it work. If we want to guide rather than govern, that requires strong leadership. Hence this Sunday I want to share another video from John Maxwell on the 4 values of leaders:

John’s 4 points on what the 4 values of a leader are:

  1. Add value to people. The cardinal sin of poor (and evil) leaders is they don’t.
  2. Make yourself more valuable. You can’t give what you don’t have.
  3. Know and relate to what others value. The only way we connect is caring enough to listen.
  4. Do what God values. This is where value first comes from.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Do you share these values? Or do you have a different set?
  • How are you valuing these values?

Gowalla’s Final Act

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Recently we answered the question “Where are Foursquare and Gowalla Going?“, understanding that the future of location-based social networking (or whatever they call it) was really down to a clear reward, most powerful financial.

It’s not enough to have a glossy location gaming product, it needs to actually benefit the consumer. Sure, early adopters will get behind something because it’s the new thing, but for the mainstream to adopt something and for it to stick, there has to be more than the “this is kinda cool” factor.

Gowalla has been loosing the location wars for this reason. Whilst they started before Foursquare, and unlike Foursquare, did not limit users to unlocked cities to begin with, Gowalla made the fundamental mistake of creating easily the coolest and most pretty service, but the least beneficial. On what actually matters for sustained usage, Foursquare beat them on all points:

  1. Foursquare saved you money. Gowalla didn’t.
  2. Foursquare was competitive and therefore an actual game. Gowalla wasn’t – it was more of a treasure hunt, but you couldn’t compare the treasure.
  3. Foursquare gave non-financial status in the form of “Mayor”. Gowalla took too long to.
  4. Foursquare was socially played. Gowalla was always individual.

The latest from Gowalla, as Mashable reports, is that it now is integrated with Facebook Places and with Foursquare, meaning “Gowalla even lets you earn Foursquare badges and Facebook Deals through the iPhone app. As an added bonus, Gowalla also pulls in Foursquare Tips whenever you check in.”

Right App for the Wrong Time

Whilst I admire Gowalla’s move to embrace a “complete rather than compete” position, I think it’s the nail in the coffin as it marks the end of their competitive mindset. Only when the leader in the market goes all open does it work in a organisations favour. Foursquare is still something like 10 times bigger than Gowalla, and Facebook is waaaaay bigger than Foursquare. Why would anyone but the innovating few use Gowalla to do what the Foursquare app that they like already does? And remember, geeks often don’t care much for design as much as I love how Gowalla looks and feels.

Most of all, it’s decision to, as CEO Josh Williams says, be a “socially curated guidebook” is a fundamental misunderstanding of where the market is today. Sure, one day, we will use apps to find new walks and new places to go. But for now, even the most early adopting of us don’t use them to find new places, and neither do the early majority trust an app to follow around someone’s suggested walk or new location to check out. In years to come – maybe. Today – no – unless it saves me money – and then I’d just roll with Fourquare or Facebook.

Josh just didn’t realise that early adopters are time poor and the early majority are trust poor, meaning Gowalla is just going to stay poor.

Gowalla over and out.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Does Foursquare, in your opinion, beat Gowalla on all those points? And is Foursquare also being beaten by Facebook? Why?
  • Forget long term for a second – right now, what is the winning factor for location services that will enable to stick around long enough to think long term?

Coffin photo by Meanest Indian

Not A Presentation, A Participation!

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I had one of those conversations this week with my dear friend Robin Dickinson. You know what I mean. Where your brain gets turned over in your head and the game plan changes in every way possible.

This conversation was about the presentation I’m giving next week at the International Youth Conference Festival in Pakistan. My speaker notes are here. What Robin basically did was take my own medicine and feed it to me. Watch:

So it’s no longer a presentation I’m giving. It’s a participation.

I’ll probably share a rehearsal with you over the weekend so you can see more, but these raising up some interesting points for conversation:

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Why we do default to presenting and not participating?
  • What is the benefit of shifting from one mindset to the other?