Author: Fabrizio

The benefits of one day

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When you deviate from your path to take a shortcut, you must be aware that you are probably going to waste twice the energy. Merely because the demotivation deriving from the realization that the shortcut is not working (it very rarely does) is going to throw you a long way back from the starting point.

Most things that matter require time and dedication.

Wanting to get there faster is natural, but the time we make and take to actually achieve what we set out to achieve is precious.

It prepares us for the outcome, it makes us stronger, it builds resilience, and often it gives us the opportunity to understand if the pin we are moving towards is the real destination we have envisioned and hoped for. It trains us.

If students expend one day’s effort, they will reap the benefits of one day. After many days and months one will naturally reach the goal.

Yang Ch’eng Fu

Safe in the drawer

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It is terrifying to show the work you’ve done.

They might not like it. It might be they think I am a fraud. What if there’s a typo I have missed? I have absolutely no authority to do that. Probably better if I give it another review. I can always publish it tomorrow. Everyone is so busy. Nobody is probably going to read it. After all, who cares? Is it really something important that I have to say? I might get fired for that. I look dumb in the video, I need another take. It’s not my best job. The concept I am trying to express is too weak. I am not a graphic designer, and the presentation looks dull. I’m not a native speaker, they’ll find out right away. They are crazy if they think I am going to do that.

And the most horrible of them all.

What if somebody likes it, and I have to continue …

On the other hand though, what good is it to keep that manuscript, that video, that drawing, that blog post, that article, that idea, that question safe in the drawer?

If it’s numbers you want …

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When marketing is in total and complete service of sales, it is very easy to fall into traps.

You get what you reward, after all. And if it is numbers you are after, you will find somebody who can sell them to you, or somebody who can induce you to believe in a new made up trend, or again somebody going rogue who will ask you for a ransom to get back what is yours in the first place.

I have written about this before, but the intensity of this collective allucination is baffling. Marketing is about experience and relationships, and the only way you can build a great relationship is by continuosly looking at quantitative and qualitative data combined.

When is the last time you have talked to one of your customers?
When did you spend half a day skimming through reviews?
When have you done something that does not scale, just to impress one single member of your audience?
When did you use Voice of Customer to make an important decision about your next campaign?

We all get to measure [success] differently. You know how many people in here are all about math, conversion, and quantity? You know what that’s called? That’s called salespeople. Marketing and branding doesn’t get measured by the hour. For me, how I measure it is “how do I feel about where I am positioned?”, “how well is my company doing?”, “how well is my speaking requests coming in?”, “how many people are watching my stuff?”. But I don’t measure it on a tactical day-to-day, it’s an overall feeling of a vibe, intuition, and some baseline metrics. Many people are into landing page optimisation, and by the way that shit works, but that’s sales. People did not come here to see me speak because I cookie them, and target them with my message. It’s because I give them value, and they hope to get even more value from seeing me speaking live. This is branding.

Gary Vaynerchuk, see also this article

Important and not

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Can you listen to an argument you do not support without interrupting?

Can you accept someone speaking at a public event near you about a topic that is sensitive and towards which you have a strong opinion, without mounting a protest and demanding the event cancelled?

Can you survive your favourite TV show being cancelled, or ending, or going through a disappointing season, without getting in touch with fellow fans and coming up with displays of affections towards the show that almost cross the limit of aggression?

Can you continue on your path when your community is led by a person you vividly dislike and disagree with, without being sucked up into the cult of that person and discuss what they do, say, tweet at every occasion, in disdain and disgust?

Some things are important, and worth figthing for.

The vast majority are not.

At some point along the road, we have lost the capacity to distinguish between the two. Everything upsets us, makes us mad, forces us to take unprecedented measures, promotes us to paladins of moral enlightment and rightfulness. We do not realize that even just by doing that, we flatten a multitude of interesting topics, solid arguments, and valid positions into an ocean of noise, resentment and, eventually, irrelevance. And that, slowly, happens also to us.

“Distraction” is a very appropriate way to describe all this. It’s a form of resistance that prevents us from persistently doing the work that eventually will lead to actual change.

Here is what we do

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When you go on a first date, you are not expected to discuss the most intimate recesses of your mind, nor your most embarassing habits. At the same time, if after being married to a person for few years you would find it difficult to open up and you would refuse to discuss yours and your partner’s feelings, that would sound strange.

Yet, more often than not, when a company approaches its customers, there’s one level to the conversation: here is what we do.

For awareness: (since you don’t know) here is what we do.
For acquisition: here is what we do (we know you are interested).
For activation: here is (a taste of) what we do.
For retention: here is (more of) what we do.
For revenue: here is (how much) what we do (costs).
For referral: here is what we do (tell others, pretty please!).

This is a strategy that would not work in any kind of relationships under the sun. And we expect it to work in a business setting, because for some reasons people are extremely more rational when they wear a suit than when they are in their pijamas. If we only get the chance to tell them once more about what we do, they’ll certainly be convinced!

How broken is this?