Posts Tagged: value

Published on January 2, 2011 by Scott Gould

Video: Steve Jobs on Apple and Value, in 1997

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?
Published on December 5, 2010 by Scott Gould

The 4 Values of Leaders

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grJZRVnzn8Y

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?
Published on October 21, 2010 by Scott Gould

Slides: The Friend’s Thoughts On Consistently Getting A Dozen Comments

We had a discussion the other week about consistently getting a dozen comments per post, which I used to form a talk I gave at London Blog Club this week.

These are the slides that I put together to help get the points across. Enjoy – you co-created them!

[slideshare id=5502328&doc=howtoconsistentlygetadozencommentsperpost-101020064626-phpapp01]

Your Leading Thoughts

  • What is the number one thing that you get out of this presentation?
Published on October 7, 2010 by Scott Gould

Making Our Blogs Conversation Corners In One, Limitless Building

CornerI love our blog. We had a wonderful discussion this week about the reformation of this blog into “Scott Gould and Friends” as a place of collaboration, where comments and equal to blog posts, and where regular contributors can have a voice.

One of my thoughts around this is that this blog is only part of the conversation. If I’m on James Poulter’s blog, I’ll be discussing the recommendation economy, whereas if I’m on Jeff Hurt’s blog, I’m discussing event design. It’s one big conversation that I’m having with similar people, but the topics at Scott Gould and Friends are different to the topics elsewhere.

If I think like this, then I realise this is just one a many corners for conversation. But the best most blogs come to realising this fact is a blog roll or aggregating posts – neither of which are a particularly meaningful way to join conversations together.

In the comments on Tuesday, Robin said so truly that “the currently available blog templates are designed around the self-centric web-logging.” That means we need to address how our blogs work from a design standpoint if we want to adopt the idea that conversations are happening across multiple blogs, not just in one place.

What I Want

I want to provide every regular contributor here, every Friend, a profile on the WordPress installation. Then they could have a profile so you can find out about the main people adding to the conversation here. That would also mean that their posts are pulled into this site (but linking to their sites), meaning that the homepage on this blog is more about showing the best conversations across multiple places.

It would mean that these Friends can also write posts for this site and add to the conversation. This would go hand in hand with a new way to display comments, ideally, as just as important as posts themselves, with the ability to tag those posts.

This is just the beginning, but I think it gets in moving in the right direction towards the future of blogging – collaboration and sharing.

I then like the idea of having a digital book club, whereby we have conversations about a particular book say every Friday, where people can read up before hand and come to the conversation prepared. This could subsequently ooze into video interviews and such.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. What do you want here on your blog? Speak up and be bold.
  2. Where do you think the future of blogging lies?

Photo credit

Published on August 17, 2010 by Scott Gould

Understanding Value In A Share-Economy

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?
Published on August 6, 2010 by Scott Gould

Are You Afraid To Give It Away?

TemptationI don’t know who first said it, but the idea of an open platform and being an active authority is that by equipping people with the best resources that aren’t your own – by sending them away – you get them back.

This is the premise that most of the digitalls on Twitter follow. They share links all day long, because by being active in their area and telling you where to go, the idea is that you’ll look to them as the authority. Beyond that, there’s a bit play in open innovation with co-creation too.

An Open World

It does, however, go a lot deeper than this. The idea of open platforms is one of open source, of creative commons, of open innovation. This isn’t giving information away in such a context that people can directly see where the source was – like a ReTweet – it’s a place where you are giving people to take your work and use it, and there’s no guarantee people won’t use it for their own gain without attributing you as the source.

It’s one thing sharing someone else’s content and then getting a kick back if someone likes the link. It’s another sharing your own content for free and not knowing what’ll happen with it.

I can tell a story from both sides of this fence. Being honest with you, I’ve been the one who has ripped the work off of others (back in my HTML days), and I’ve also been the one who has been too afraid to share my creations for fear of it being ripped off.

Last Saturday, on our discussion of “Together“, a friend I made in Helsinki, Johanna Kotipelto, made an exceptional statement with regards to people being too afraid to collaborate together. Joanna said, in what I think is a highly quotable phrase, “Sharing is still a threat: it’s like taking a Mona Lisa to an exhibition – unsigned.”

Johanna wrote more about it in her post on Man 2.0 where she examines some of these themes more – it’s well worth a read.

The thing is – do I agree? Do I believe that sharing is a threat?

The Fear is Laziness and Ego

I think the ultimate display of this fear (in the blogging world at least) is when bloggers never link to other blogs but there own (or rarely do it), and keep writing about their experience, their ideas, and never our experience or our ideas.

I consider this fear to actually be laziness and ego. When I read a feed for a few weeks and find they never link out and talk about anyone but themselves, I think that they are too lazy and too self consumed to actually focus on others and curate conversation for others.

This same laziness and ego, in my opinion, is also what stops people from sharing – because you know what – if you talked about what you consider to be your intelectual property enough, you’d be generating so much discussion about it that people would know you’re the source. I’ve started to see, for example, a lot of the ideas that we’ve discussed here talked about on blogs I’ve never heard of and from people I don’t know – but they know where the source is, and the conversation keeps coming back here. (Also, we need to loosen up a little – we often think our ideas are better than they actually are!)

And I think the people on the other side of the fence – who take other people’s work and pawn it off as their own – it’s laziness and ego on their own side, but it says I’m too lazy and too good to work hard and get this myself.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. First of all – which side of the fence are you on? Where do you sit on this issue?
  2. What is the FIRST example that you think of where ‘giving it away’ has caused a win? (Mine currently is Guardian’s Open Platform)

Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk

Published on July 31, 2010 by Scott Gould

Together

Wall Of Peace - MoscowIt’s a concern of mine that despite all our social media, people still don’t do things together.

Words like community, team, collaboration, relational, participatory, social – they are all over Twitter, but then when you share these links or comment on these posts, do you get a reply? When you ask people not what they say about social media, but if they are doing social media, how many are building connections and really collaborating?

The truth is that working together is hard.

It’s hard because we grow up today in a such a me-focussed world and live such me-focussed lives that the preference of others and putting others first that is required for team work doesn’t come easily.

Case in point: communication. Every Sunday at church, we have a team who handle the sound, the lighting and the audio/video content. They all link into each other, yet when Sunday comes and they are working together, I was rarely hearing them talk to each other, and as such, the whole Sunday experienced suffered.

Why was this? Because they were used to living in their own minds and focussing on their own angle, that they were almost unaware of the others around who needed their support and communication. Now that I’m teaching them communication and helping them see the need for the big picture and to give of themselves to each other, they are working far more powerfully as a team.

Malcolm Gladwell writes some very interesting stuff about this – particular in the area of focus – in his book Blink (affiliate link.) With focus, we tend to close off what’s going around and zoom in onto one thing. And I think that technology has heightened this ability within us – for good and for bad. Think about the hundreds of millions of knowledge workers who spend all day with computers, not uttering a world as they live inside their head and shift digital paper. What they are getting better at is having a tight focus. What they are getting worse at is looking up.

In order to get on together we need to look up. We need to prefer one another. Valuing the person in front of us. I’m shocked by how much ego I still see – people clamoring for the attention, to give their point of view, to ensure they are heard and that they get the credit. You know what I decided? I’m going to give the credit rather than get the credit.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. When did you learn to really work together? What was the time that switch you from being me-focussed to we-focussed?
  2. If you could give one tip to people that would help them become team players, what would it be?

Photo courtesy of Jeff Bauche

Published on July 22, 2010 by Scott Gould

Case Study: Value-Based Blogging

Today I want to open up the guts of this blog and show you with stats, number and benchmarks the return of a value-based approach to blogging. My hope is that my transparency and openness will inspire you to go away and stop competing for retweets in the volume-based game and grasp what rich relationship and real return awaits you if you can get away from vanity and into community.

The image below is a screen shot of the last 7 posts on this blog in PostRank’s Analytics platform. We’ll discuss this tool a bit more in a moment, but the main features are that it tracks the number of engagements per post – most pertinently, the number of Tweets, Google Buzzes, Delicious Bookmarks and other social networks, in addition to unique visitors, reading time, etc.

Look and see how many comments this post gets, compared to how many tweets:

This isn’t just a trend over the last week. Almost every post I write has more comments than tweets. Also look at the reading times. I’ve highlighted the highest ones. This average time means people are reading the posts and reading the comments.

This means that my RSS subscribers are the real source of engagement for me. According to Feedburner, I have 148 people subscribed in Google Reader, and 48 who have subscribed to this blog in email.

So, time for some analysis:

Value Analysis 1: Keep Your Retweeets

A value based blog doesn’t need lots of retweets to get engagement. I want you and need you to understand right now that whilst more tweets about your posts will get it more coverage, lots of retweets are not necessary for and do not guarantee engagement.

If you were to ask me for my number one metric of success on my blog, I’d tell you instantly it’s comments. It’s the number of the them, and it’s the depth of them – because it means we actually have participation, not just blind retweeting.

Value Analysis 2: Backwards Engagement

According to PostRank, “80% of the conversations about your content happen off-site” (link.) Well, PostRank tels me that for my blog, 60% of the conversations about my content happen on-site. Value-based blogged is totally contradictory to standard volume-based blogging. The engagement is totally the other way around.

I don’t know of any top blog that gets more comments than retweets. In fact that only other blog that I can find that does is Robin Dickinson’s blog.

There are sometimes when admittedly, I wish I had more retweets. Sometimes it annoys me to see how many shallow blogs get so much coverage. But I will tell you this:  no blog post that has received lots of retweets on my blog has ever had lots of comments.

80% engagement off your site is … well … worthless in my opinion.

Value Analysis 3: It Works

It’s one thing talking about a value-based blog if in actual fact it didn’t work. But it does. On an average of 10 tweets per post and 15 comments per post, this blog:

  1. This is the 5th ranked blog on leadership on PostRank (last week I was #3)
  2. This is the 2nd ranked blog on social business on PostRank and 9th ranked for social media marketing.
  3. This is 185th ranked marketing blog on the AdAge Power150 (I would be higher if more people linked here. My InLink score is very low.)

For 10 tweets, this is very good. Most of the blogs on AdAge get a very high number of tweets per post. My AdAge rank is lower, as it takes PostRank (which focusses on engagement), and also considers other measurement platforms that track InLinks, volume of tweets, etc.

But more than these stats, the proof it works is that Like Minds works and engages hundreds of people because of the discussions we have here. It works because someone saw this blog and was so warmly invited when they commented that they saw a link to the Like Minds Club and bought membership right away. It’s also got me a lot of recognition and love.

It works because authors have found the ideas here (that we formed together through the comments), and put them in their books (they tell me so!) It works because the thing that we discuss have changed lives.

Your Leading Thoughts

I know I’ve kind of preached us full here – but there is room for a very important discussion here. Many of you guys are likely discouraged, distracted by wanting to get your content recognised with retweets and such. I’m keen to know

  1. If you’ve been blogging for 6 months and over, what are your statistics on engagement?
  2. Be honest – how much are tweets and ‘attention’ a motivator for you?
  3. Where on the web do you enjoy engaging in value-based blogs?
Published on July 13, 2010 by Scott Gould

Gather what you Scatter

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?
Published on July 9, 2010 by Scott Gould

The Value of a Value Approach

You all know that I am sold out on having a value-based approach to, well, just about everything.

A value based approach is about giving more of you to people and developing deeper relationships, rather than having your thumbs in 101 pies. By not giving lots of little, but less of more, you can build relationships that have a great yield – in pretty much whatever you do.

I wanted to show you some of the returns, the value if you will, of a value-based approach that I’ve experienced this week. I’ve had a shower of love and recognition from a range of people recently, all as a direct result of this value-based approach.

1. First of all, I received a much appreciated link from Like Minds Alum Joanne Jacobs writing about the trough of disillusionment for social media strategies. Joanne has spoken at the last two Like Minds events, and I was thrilled to hear from her that since her keynote in February, she has received continual work from people who have watched the video or referred someone based on watching it.

How I built value: This is an instance right here of me getting to know someone and actually help someone who is greatly respected and I’d never think would be in the need of my need. It’s my honour and privilege to be associated with her – and it’s all because of value.

2. Secondly, there was quite a humbly moment for me when I discovered on this post from James Gordon that I am among the UK’s Top Marketing Blogs. I’ve been blogging now for a year, and to get that kind of recognition was really, really humbling – mostly because I haven’t focussed on getting blog recognition.

How I built value: I don’t focus on retweets and traffic but just engaging you wonderful people who spend time regularly commenting here. Together, we make ideas reality, and that is what is being recognised. To regularly get an average of 15 comments per post for a blog that might occasionally hit 200 uniques a day is pretty good engagement – and I’m only keen for it to become more!

3. Thirdly, I had a bittersweet moment when my latest intern Jonny Rose left the Aaron+Gould flock to fly to London’s shores to focus on his Masters. Jonny wrote this very loving peice on the time he spent with me, poetically entitled As Good As Gould. He is a person of unquestionable character, of sincere and genuine motives, and of incredible comic genius. I’m glad to say he’ll be blogging with Like Minds, so you can enjoy his unique style there and on his blog.

How I built value: Jonny has worked with us for the last two months, and it has been my pleasure to impart some of my experiences and insights to him. Every day that he worked, we talked about what he was learning, the bigger lessons, and about nurturing his skill set.

4. Finally, a fall-of-my-seat moment happened for me on Wednesday when Molly Flatt, James Whatley and my other friends at 1000heads named me as one of their 10 WoM Thought Leaders. To be recognised by my friends Molly and James (and I do mean friends) is a wonderful thing in itself – but then to see who I was named next to was just a whole other deal. Right next to friends and heros like Joe Pine, Chris Brogan, Joanne Jacobs, John Bell (who I’ve all met now!), as well as James Gilmore and Emanuel Rosen – I was ecstatic.

How I built value: Well, the whole story is here actually. All I did was give exposure to people I believed in, however small the exposure that I could give was.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • I know you’re all building value relationships. I’m keen to know which ones. Tell me who you’re building value with.
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