gather | Scott GouldScott Gould

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.

Note: this is a bit of conceptual peice today, based on things we’ve been discussing on this blog for a while. If you don’t quite get it, read the posts that I’ve linked to and you’ll get the full picture.

I’ve written a bit over the last months about spreadability being the way that people are marketing today. Spreadability vs Reach is in fact something I speak a lot about at events (you can see the slides here.)

One of the things we said in particular was that spreadability is like scattering seeds, in so much as every bit of your message that you put out, no matter how big or small, has a only a certain degree of predictability to it as far as a return on your investment goes.

Scattering is a volume game, and we play the volume game because we don’t know who is of value out there. We don’t know which relationships will end up returning the greatest to us, which tweets return the deals, which bits of marketing make the biggest difference – and trying to carefully plant our seeds rather than scatter them neglects all the potential relationships that we could have, that we’d never normally pick.

You can watch a video of me sharing a great recent example of that from Like Minds Conversation Helsinki.

What we can’t do is live in the volume game. This creates burnout, and means we have width but no depth, and it is in a deep, valuable relationship that we really begin building.

The conundrum is this: how do we go from a volume approach to a value approach? How do we filter all that we scatter, and know what relationships or opportunities to begin investing in with greater value?

The way that we go from the volume game to the value game is to go from scattering to gathering.

What do I mean? I mean that if I scatter my message by sending out a tweet, then those who are valuable to me are the ones that respond – they participate. I then begin the process of gathering those people to me at the level at which they are participating.

The best way that I can explain this is this: if a farmer scatters his seed, and some of that seed begins to yield fruit, then he doesn’t just leave the fruit out there – he gathers it.

If you want to read excellent insights into this, I advise you read this post on the subject last week, and in particular, the comments from Robin Dickinson on how he only follows those who he had a value-based relationship with. It is inspiring stuff.

Your Leading Thoughts

I’ve got a lot formed in my mind about this, but I want to get your feedback on it to balance it out.

Do you agree with scattering and then gathering? Can you see truth to this?
How do you go from volume to value?