September 19, 2010
random…
So you write something down in some random blog post. Next thing you know it’s been quoted in an equally random desk calendar. Ummm….
[Thanks to Lee for the pointer.]
Hugh MacLeod
I'm a cartoonist.
I sell limited-edition prints.
I wrote a book.
I'm CEO of Stormhoek USA, which markets South African wine in the States.
I also draw private commissions.
Prints |
Opening | Current |
|---|---|---|
NY NY |
$275 |
September 19, 2010
the idea amplifier
On Friday I was talking to Peter Sissons, gapingvoid’s new client, the guy behind Toktumi and Line2.
We were talking about “The Cocktail Party Rule”- what’s true at cocktail parties is also true in marketing i.e. If you want to be boring, talk about yourself. If you want to be interesting, talk about something else.
Luckily, Peter concurs…
The way I see it, a product is an “Idea Amplifier”. You have an idea about something- phones or whatever- and you build a product as an expression of that idea.
For example, Zappos‘ central idea is not really about shoes per se, it’s about company culture and customer service- “Delivering Happiness”, as its CEO, Tony Hsieh calls it.
Similarly, with Line2 the central idea is not about an iPhone app, it’s about, and I’m quoting Peter here, “What phones could be”.
And what can a phone be? I’m curious to find out. I think we all are.
September 17, 2010
smarter conversations: psfk.com
I’m a huge fan of PSFK.com. I’ve been following Piers and his team for years. Recently I’ve even started publishing weekly cartoons on PSFK, for no other reason than I think it’s a very groovy crowd to be part of.
PSFK is a well-known strategy, trends and ideas blog, focusing mostly on advertising and design. In the early days Piers mostly wrote it all himself, but these days he has this vast army of volunteers writing guest posts on PSFK’s behalf.
The point of PSFK is to give its readers a constant stream of inspiration and new ideas, stuff they can use to inform their own work.
And it works. Close to three quarters of a million people read it a month, mostly from the ad and design community. In that space, it’s extremely well known [For an industry niche blog, trust me, three quarters of a million people is A LOT].
So how does PSFK make money? Hint: It’s not by selling advertising, like a lot of the big blogs out there.
The thing is, PSFK’s primary business is not publishing blogs. Its main revenue stream is as consultants in the advertising business. They’ve got a small handful of clients and a small staff of super smart advertising futurists, who get paid top dollar to share their brain power with large, global brands.
The blog is just a way to get the PSFK name out, to get their name on the radar screen of potential clients.
Basically, the PSFK blog is just an advertisement for the PSFK consultancy, even if on the blog there’s hardly any mention of the latter.
A “Smarter Conversation”, a smarter way of talking to potential clients, than say, just buying advertising space in one of the big trade publications.
Would this kind of model work for your business? If not, wouldn’t it be great if it did? Just askin’…
September 17, 2010
to be “incredible beings” in the very early days of a revolution
["Losing Our Touch", the latest cartoon I did for PSFK.]
Like I said in my last post (and I am by no means the first person to say this), we are in the early days of the largest communication revolution in the history of the planet.
Which basically means, it has never been easier to start a Smarter Conversation.
Nor has it ever been more essential.
And like I also said more than once, we’re incredible beings.
To be “incredible beings” in the very early days of this revolution, to not want to do something about it, to not want to go out there and take full advantage of the situation…
I just don’t get why some people would prefer to pass the opportunity up. You?
September 17, 2010
new gapingvoid client: line2 voip
gapingvoid has landed itself a new client. Line2, the new VoIP app from Toktumi. Hurrah!
To find out more about them, Techcrunch wrote a really good piece about them last year.
“The Apple/Google Voice fiasco just got more interesting. Toktumi
, a startup that lets small businesses build office-caliber phone systems with their mobile phones and computers, just had its application Line2 approved by Apple — nearly three months after it was originally submitted. The powerful service allows business employees to assign two phone numbers to their iPhone: one that they can give to family and friends, and another that can be given to business contacts, with features that allow for call filtering and a professional-grade voicemail system. But it’s also notable for its many similarities to Google Voice, an application that Apple has kept out of the App Store for months now.
“The story so far: late last July, Apple abruptly pulled all third party Google Voice applications from the App Store, explaining that they somehow were duplicating the iPhone’s native functionality. Later that day, we broke the news that Google’s official Google Voice client had been barred from the App Store, sparking a media storm and a FCC inquiry into Apple’s rationale for the ban.”
It’s basically a second line for your phone- your iPhone, in particular.
I’ve never been much of a VoIP geek, so why did I get involved?
It was a simple little factoid that got my interest:
The Line2 service costs $14.95 per month. Not a huge amount, but costly enough when you consider that Google Voice is free. Line2 has a first month trial offer, which allows you to try it out for free. After that, they start charging. Fair enough.
So how many people start signing on at $14.95, once their free trial expires? Five percent? Ten percent? That’s what I was guessing…
Nope. Thirty percent.
Thirty percent! I thought that was huge. They must be doing something right etc.
The second reason is purely intellectual. As many bloggers have been spouting on for a while now (including me), we are in the early days of the largest communication revolution in the history of the planet. VOIP is in the forefront of this revolution, so getting involved should give me a front row seat. And we cartoonists need interesting stuff to keep our brains occupied etc.
I have no idea where this is going; I’m just along for the ride. Hopefully a Smarter Conversation will come out of it in the end. Watch this space. Rock on.
[Bonus link: Last March, Mashable did a good piece on Line2 as well, including the video interview above.]
September 17, 2010
hni & ‘change the game’
Late last year, Mike Natalizio, President & CEO of HNI (a medium sized insurance brokerage out of the Midwest) commissioned me to draw some “Cube Grenade” cartoons for the company.
It was a nice wee cartoon project; it went well.
We kept on talking, after that… we’ve been helping them with what a Smarter Conversation might mean for their business.
HNI’s corporate tagline is “Change The Game”.
The insurance business is generally known as a fairly staid affair- it’s relatively conservative game- no surprises there.
“Change The Game”. I like the premise, it gets me thinking:
- What part of the game does it want to change?
- What can it actually change?
- What needs to be changed, anyway?
And at what cost, personal or otherwise?
What needs to happen?
Let’s find out…
September 10, 2010
i’m not publishing new cartoons on the blog any more
["Pardon Me", which I sent out on the newsletter last Spring. You can buy the print here etc.]
In case you don’t know this already, I’m not publishing new cartoons on the blog any more, except maybe occasionally. Yep, to see the new ones, you have to subscribe to the newsletter. That’s been true for a while now…
Looking forward to seeing you there. Thanks!
[NB- I'm leaving this post at the top of the homepage for a while, to give the news time to sink in. New content is below, Thanks Again!]
September 3, 2010
smarter conversations: “how do i want to change the way i talk to people?”
[The "Life Is Too Short" print...]
I first started playing with the idea of “Smarter-Conversations” way back in 2004, the same year gapingvoid really started getting traction in the blogopsphere.
Though not something I talk about day-in-day-out, it’s always been there somewhere in the background, informing everything I work on. Here are some notes:
1. In the seminal book, “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, the great Doc Searls famously declared, “Markets are conversations”. If you buy that premise (and I do, wholeheartedly), then quod erat demonstratum, if you want your marketing to be smarter (i.e. more effective), you need to be having a “Smarter Conversation”.
2. “Conversation” is a metaphor. Making your product sleek, elegant and graceful while all your other competitors make their product look cheap, plastic and clunky is a smarter conversation. Not all conversations need words.
3. It’s not just what you say, its how you say it. Calling it the “iPod” is a smarter conversation than say, the “MZT-2300-B Electronic Portable MP3 Digital Hand Device”.
4. Smarter Conversations scale. That’s what I really like about it. Anyone can have a smarter conversation- from a mom n’ pop pizza joint to a Fortune 500 company. It can happen in a Superbowl ad or on printed on the back of a paper napkin. You can start one on a blog today, for free. Or on Twitter or Facebook. The tools don’t necessarily have to change, the way you talk to people has to change.
5. Deciding to have a smarter conversation isn’t a business decision, it’s a moral decision. Like I said in the last point, the barriers to entry are zero. While your competition treats their customers like idiots, you treat your customers like intelligent human beings. You don’t do that because your accountant told you to, you do that because that’s who you are.
6. The Smarter Conversation’s value comes from, I believe, not by yet more increased business efficiencies, but by its humanity. For example, take two well-known airlines. They both perform a useful service. They both deliver value. They both cost about the same to fly to New York or Hong Kong. Both have nice Boeings and Airbuses. Both serve peanuts and drinks. Both serve “airline food”. Both use the same airports. But one airline has friendly people working for them, the other airline has surly people working for them. One airline has a sense of fun and adventure about it, one has a tired, jaded business-commuter vibe about it. Guess which one takes the human dimension of their business more seriously than the other? Guess which one still will be around in twenty years? Guess which one will lose billions of dollars worth of shareholder value over the next twenty years? What parallels do you see in your own industry? In your own company?
7. If Smarter Conversations work, it’s because they help humanize the company. I wrote about this years ago in an article I called “The Porous Membrane”. To paraphrase: Ideally, you want the conversation between customers [the external market] to be as identical as the conversation between yourselves [the internal market]. The things that your customer is passionate about, you should also be passionate about. This we call “alignment”. A good example would be Apple. The people at Apple think the iPod is cool, and so do their customers. They are aligned. When you are no longer aligned with your customers is when the company starts getting into trouble. When you start saying your gizmo is great and your customers are telling everybody it sucks, then you have serious misalignment. So how do you keep misalignment from happening? The answer lies the cultural membrane that separates you from them. The more porous the membrane, the easier it is for conversations between you and them, the internal and external, to happen. The easier for the conversations on both sides to adjust to the other, to become like the other. And nothing pokes holes in the membrane better than blogging.
8. Social Media is not about reaching a mass audience. Social Media is not about creating yet another sales channel. Social Media is about allowing the Smarter Conversation to happen. That’s all. Why do some companies lose, while other companies win? Because the latter has a smarter “conversation” with its customers. Zappos had a smarter conversation about the power of customer service and the power of company culture. Peet’s Coffee came along 20 years ago and began a smarter conversation about coffee with millions of people within a very short space of time. Target’s recent massive success started from a smarter conversation about good design. Savile Row tailor, Thomas Mahon came along and, with his blog, had a smarter conversation about $4000 English bespoke suits. Lucky’s Juice Joint had a smarter conversation about fresh-squeezed. Big companies, medium companies and tiny companies, whatever- it was never about size, it was never about the choice of media (social or otherwise), it was all about language.
9. Social Media allows you to cheaply and quickly begin a smarter conversation. And once you get it going, that conversation starts bleeding out into all other areas of your business- including advertising, PR and corporate communications.
10. Ask not what tools you want to use, ask how you want to change how you talk to people. All evolutions in marketing are evolutions in language. Those who can raise the level of conversation in any market, win.
11. Start today. It’s never too late to begin a Smarter Conversation. Like I said, money or time is not the issue. Making the decision is the issue, and only you can do that.
September 3, 2010
how to have a “smarter conversation”
[Originally posted August, 2004. Some of it is a bit dated but there's still a lot there worth chewing on etc.]
How to have smarter conversations.
Somewhere along the the line I decided that embracing “Smarter Conversations” was preferable to prematurely consigning my career to the dustbin of history. I just wrote down some random thoughts:
1. Understand why what you’re offering to do for other people is interesting, important, meaningful etc then start telling people about it.
Think about this one. Hard. If you don’t know, then how will other people know? Exactly. They won’t.
2. Live like you know the difference between remarkable and unremarkable, like it matters to you.
The more “remarkable” matters to you, the more likely that it will appear in the product you’re selling. The more likely other people will notice it.
3. Seek out the exceptional minds.
This is my basic mantra. It’s a good one to have. Not everybody gets it. Their loss.
4. Start a blog.
Blogs are funny things. Say something smart, people pay attention. Say something dumb, you’re ignored. We big media folk just can’t seem to get our heads around that concept, for some reason. Regular blogging can help train you to better discern between smart and dumb. Makes it easier to extend this to the rest of one’s business.
5. Ruthlessly avoid working for companies that “don’t get it”.
Yeah, you may have to turn down a few gigs, and that can really hurt when the rent is due. Still, anything that’s easy to get isn’t worth having.
6. Ruthlessly avoid working for companies that think they know better than you.
Luckily, if you get the whole “smarter conversations” thing, their “Yes, Buts” will just seem rather empty. Making them easier to “toss out like old furniture”.
7. Be nice.
Smarter conversations are fuelled by goodwill. Lose it and die.
8. Be honest.
Again, smarter conversations are fuelled by goodwill etc.
9. Karma is key.
But you already know that. Or you’re stupid. No middle ground on this one, sorry.
10. Listen.
Tongues are dumber than brains, brains are dumber than ears etc.
September 3, 2010
“smarter conversations” is a moral decision
[Originally posted September, 2005]
An offline discussion I’ve been having a lot recently:
1. If you want to become an authority in whatever industry you are in, you must engage in what I call “Smarter Conversations”.
2. Deciding to do so is not a business decision. It’s a moral decision.
Your call.
