Tag Archives: scatter

What Farmers Can Teach Us About Social Media

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I wrote a guest post over at Search Engine People last week on “What Farmers Can Teach Us About Social Media.” It’s looking at what we can learn from how a farmer scatters seed and how we should scatter our message, whatever it might be.

Part of it is from the manuscript I’m working on called “Social”, so there’s a sneak preview of some of my thinking in this post. Here’s an excerpt:

Of course, with all this talk of going from “push to pull” and “interruption to permission” and “search to social”, there is one little problem: it all starts with an initial push and an initial interruption. How can someone give you permission to talk to them if they haven’t already met you? How can someone search and find you if they don’t already know something about what their problem is? How can you pull someone to you without them first coming into your remit?

Jump over to Search Engine People to read.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • We talk about volume vs value – how do you make the first step towards value?

Audio: Scatter, Gather, Matter – A Marketing Lesson From The Bible

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Field educationI’ve always maintained that you can find everything about marketing and social media in the bible. Why? Because it’s all about human behaviour at the end of the day and the bible is a fantastic documentation of human behaviour whether you agree with it’s conclusion or not!

My ultimate framework for Social is based on ‘Scatter, Gather, Matter’, a three step proces to becoming more and more social by socialising channels (scatter), then content (gather), and then culture (matter). These are the three social strategies that I consider exist today.

What you might not know is that this framework comes from Mark 4, something that I spoke about at The River Church, Exeter earlier this year. You can listen to the podcast episode on iTunes by following this link.

Scatter

In this podcast I go through the Parable of the Sower in Mark 4, which Jesus tells as an analogy for how the gospel message is spread and also received. Scattering is the act of spreading your message without discrimination. Some seed will be eaten up, some won’t take root, and other seed will be chocked by thorns, but some seed will take root and grow, and the point is that it is dangerous to custom pick which seed you sow in which location because you don’t know what will prosper.

Most people when it comes to spreading a message like to carefully plant their seeds. They narrowly define who they want and focus on a very small number of people (normally people just like them) but expecting their message to get mass attention. It’s like fishing with a fishing rod, carefully planning which fish you want and how you want them, but then expecting to pull in a boat load.

We’ve all had times when the ones we thought who would come through for us didn’t, and the ones we didn’t expect did. In fact, this isn’t just some of the time, it’s all of the time. We have to continually readjust our expectations.

Gather

Seed becomes wheat that needs to be harvested else it will dry up, and this the act of gathering. When, out of the seed that you’ve scattered, some begins to participate back with you and bare fruit, you have to draw it to yourself.

The key here very much is to participate at the level to which you are being participated with. This is where volume becomes value. The volume play is in scattering the seed, in not limiting who follows you, in posting your content in various places, in putting your marketing where people are, in getting your organisations message slogan to become a mantra that everyone shares. The value play is then participating with those who participate with you – gathering.

The trick of gathering is that you don’t draw them to you as much as you respond to their first step towards you. You must provide a place for people to gather.

Gathering means you know who you have, and provides a way for you to increase your relationship with those people. In church we have many “gathering points” and these serve to increase the involvement of someone in church and increase their spiritual life.

Matter

What do you do with the harvest? What happens with the seed that is planted in the ground? A harvest feeds people and a tree bear fruits that feeds poeple.

The whole aim of this is tied up in mattering to people, because people matter. It’s not enough to say “add value”, we must matter to people by helping them matter for others. This is the two folds of the point – mattering to people, in order for them to matter to others. Thus the crux of this third and final stage is empowerment.

I had a very valuable conversation with Catherine White and others over the weekend about social media campaigns. It appears the end of many is just awareness. They would get far more long term return if instead they focussed on empowerment. What use is an aware person if they do not build upon that awareness and become empowered? Then, they can help themselves and help others.

Listen to this

Again, You can listen to the podcast episode for FREE on iTunes by following this link.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • How can you apply the Scatter, Gather, Matter framework to your projects?

Photo courtesy of Pandiyan

Gather what you Scatter

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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?