Category: culture

Legacy

Fabrizio3 Comments

What is your predominant status?

Anger. “You can’t, you shan’t”. This is the status of fear, of control, of walls to be built, of closed doors and burnt down bridges, of punishment, of arrogance, of self-blindness, of others as a tool to achieve your goals.

Regret. “I could, I should”. This is the status of incompleteness, of insatisfaction, of “if only”, of constant research of something you have already achieved, of blaming the circumstances, of not going beyond because you don’t know what’s behind.

Judgement. “They could’ve, they should’ve”. This is the status of gossip, of spreading mean words, of thinking ourselves better than others, of looking outside rather than inside, of being stuck, of never getting along with anybody.

Empowerement. “We can, we shall”. This is the status of leaders, of knowing about the possibilities, of not letting go to desperation even if you do not know the path, of getting other together around a dream, of looking where others can go and not where they are now.

All are possible, and different circumstances might make us prefer one or the other. Yet eventually you’ll have to start thinking about your legacy, and double down on what you want to leave behind.

Permission marketing

Fabrizio1 Comment

Permission Marketing is a book (and an idea) by Seth Godin that is 20 years old this year. And yet, its message is still so powerful and actual.

Permission is the opposite of interruption.

With traditional media, people’s attention is constantly interrupted with an advertisement, that basically asks them to focus on something they did not want to focus on in the first place. It is an invasive form of doing marketing, and the customer is powerless as the choice is little: whether you are watching television, listening to the radio, driving home after work, your entertainment and train of thoughts is subjected to messages that are short, catchy and completely not requested.

With the Internet and the multiplication of information (and of promotional messages), Godin argues that there is a new possible way to do marketing. A way that aims at establishing a long term relationship with your target audience. A way that is respectful of and empowering for the customer. A way that is possible because, after all, the Internet is not a mass media, but a niche media, “the biggest direct marketing platform that ever exhisted”.

This is permission marketing. Instead of running ads to the mass, you seek to craft a message that resonates with some people (your audience), so that they consent to hear from you again. Permission marketing has three key characteristics.

  • It is anticipated, as people long for it, they want more. They ask “what happened?” if you stop sending them messages.
  • It is personal, or at least it reflects a need for self-identification, and as such it resonates deeply with the wanted identity of the receiver.
  • It is relevant, as it is supposed to be just what the receiver was looking for.

The message is still relevant, as the way we use the Internet today as marketers is much more similar to the way you would use a mass media.

Our inherent laziness makes us believe that by running ads, everywhere, to everyone, and by scaling them when our budget increases, we can actually be successful. And sometimes, that is the case. Yet more often than not, we end up being ignored.

The ironic thing is that marketers have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they’re interrupting us even more!

Seth Godin

Permission marketing is a long-term effort (Godin compares it to dating to find a life-time partner, while interruption marketing would be more like clubbing) and it consumes one of the scarcest resources in a world that lives at the speed of life: patience. The final result, though, is the creation of a tribe, a passionate relationship with our people that can last forever. Or at least, until we end up betraying the trust we have been given.

 

 

Out of fear

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I was enjoying some of the early Spring (“early” for Finnish standards) with my daugther yesterday, as she was playing on the trampoline. She was jumping amazingly, doing flips I had never seen her doing before. She was gaining confidence, until she miscalculated and slightly hit her head on the rubber surface of the trampoline. Nothing too painful, yet it suddenly made me realize how dangerous what she was doing felt.

She tried to repeat the flips a couple of times, and I was way too scared to let that continue. I only had terrible images of terrible things happening to her in my mind. Eventually, I told her to stop, as it was too dangerous and she could get hurt. After that, she continued jumping more safely and certainly less enjoyably on the trampoline, and I could perceive she had lost part of the confidence that she had so bravely conquered.

The point is, when we are in a position of power, our words and behaviours have an immense impact on the people that look up to us. We can pretend that is not true, that it does not matter, that after all we are just sharing our opinion, and that we are no different from the people we lead. This is a trap I see many flat-organization hands-off managers and leaders do. And still words and behaviours are the major determinant of what we will get from our people.

I am not sharing this to give the impression that overanalyzing or beating ourselves up for our faults is a good option. If we do keep awareness on this power, there are plenty of ways we can correct our mistakes.

“I am sorry I asked you to stop, I was acting out of fear.”
“There is really no reason why you should not apply for that internal position, I am just panicking at the idea to lose such a valid team member.“
“Please, go ahead and do as you were suggesting yesterday. My initial reaction has not been one of the best, and it is because we have never tried that before and honestly I have no idea if that could work or not.“

If we do not maintain awareness, on the other hands, all we get is compliance and bottlenecks that have blossomed out of our own fears and self-doubts.

Against denigration and disregard

Fabrizio5 Comments

We attach labels to people and groups of people, partly because we try to make sense of what we do not understand, and partly to reinforce our identity and belonging to a different group.

“People that are born in that period are weak.”
“People that work in that team are lazy.”
“People that come from that geographical area are dishonest.”

Even if we assume that these types of labels have some truth behind them (they usually do not and are more of a reflection of our internal insecurities, yet humor me for the sake of the argument), the best and more effective approach would be to first understand the deeper level of the manifestation that inititated the labelling, and then try to imagine and build an environment in which the deeper reason can either be leveraged or addressed.

So, for example, if we believe that a group of people is particularly weak, on a deeper level this might mean that they are better in touch with their own feelings and emotions. As a reaction, we could try to figure out a way to make sure that their improved understanding of their selves could be employed and put to good use.

If we assert that a certain team or department is lazy, it might be because they do not have the tools necessary to effectively do their job, or because their team lead is not sufficiently motivating. As a reaction, we might want to try to facilitate their tasks and work in any possible way, or look for another manager.

This happens very seldom. The easiest and most common reaction to labelling is either denigration or disregard. Denigration is where every form of extremism is born: we reinforce the labelling by supporting it with every evidence we might find, and we feed it to the public forum every time it is possible. Disregard is instead working around the group and their characteristics, building walls to keep them out, pretending they do not exist.

It takes a great deal of awareness and courage to act differently when we catch ourselves in lazy labelling.

There is no such thing as a free social media platform

Fabrizio1 Comment

We are hitting our heads against a wall.

For years, we have believed in the myth of “free”. Listening to music was free, watching a video was free, posting your piece of content was free. Whether you were an individual or a company, you could get in front of a fairly wide audience with a very small investment of energy and time, and essentially without spending any money. And of course, as we were getting blinded by the allure of “free”, we forgot about a very important fundamental.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Even when things appear to be free, they are not.

While we have not paid a dime to publish and distribute our content for the past decade or so, we have most likely contributed to the impoverishment of our society and to the extremization of the public discourse.

Furthermore, as marketers we keep banging our heads against the wall every time a platform curbs our potential to reach our audience (current or wanted). We might just understand and accept that those platforms do not exist to allow us to spread our message to whoever we want. And instead we first spend weeks over weeks complaining about how our posts used to get 1000 and now gets 200. Then, we try to game the algorithms, we hack a bit further to try to squeeze more, we ask strangers of dubious reputation to publish or click on links just to try to increase our content’s rank, we use shortcuts to boost metrics that have absolutely no business relevance.

The basics of marketing have been the same for decades, and if we manage to stop our head just for a second, we can see that is what still matters nowadays.

  1. Understand who your audience is.
  2. Ask what they need help with.
  3. Match your product or service to the help needed.

The rest is noise. It distracts us from achieving things that matter and from delivering meaningful change.