Well to be honest. SaulColt.com hasn't moved but rather it has been redirected to Saul.is
*Please Note* I have launched a new home for my blog at http://saul.is/ I will keep cross posting here for a little while but please update your bookmarks or click on the link an subscribe to the new rss feed.
So I hope you have noticed the new look here at Saul.is (and I will write about that in the next blog post) but there is something pretty special that you may have not noticed yet…and I expect to be copied.
The thing that is so special, imho, is the url. Ya see I went with a “.is” extention (from Iceland if you are keeping score) so I could create blog posts like this one with the url www.saul.is/a-genius or even better full pages of this site that are as clear as day to what they are like www.saul.is/speaking (for my speaking career) or www.saul.is/consulting (for my side projects) and I have plans to add hundreds of pages of things that will entertain and amaze.
Pretty clever huh? Now imagine what a big brand could do with this? www.wwe.is/protecting-the-environment or www.bmw.is/the-ultimate-driving-machine or even www.coke.is/it The possibilites are endless and with the number of .com’s getting almost impossible to find I would not be surprised if this becomes more popular…so please just remember where you saw it first!
You may have noticed that I haven't posted anything here in a few weeks.
One of my favorite podcasts is Creative ScreenWriting Magazine because every week they interview a writer and begin each discussion with "breaking in" stories.
I am a nice person.
On July 20th in NYC I will be delivering a talk on "How to create brilliant Word of Mouth with no budget". You can see I'm excited to be speaking at the Word of Mouth SuperGenius conference and as a way to get the word out (using no budget) I asked one of the neighbourhood moms to let me take a picture of her in a partially wet shirt designed by Hugh Macleod (@gapingvoid on twitter).
When I worked at FreshBooks the thing I got asked most was "What exactly do you do there?"
The reason people were unsure was because when they met me they would see my title was "Head of Magic" and that was an immediate conversation starter. I've explained my role there 100 different ways but the core message included "a convergence of Social Media, Marketing, Customer Service and PR."
People are always debating the point of where Social Media falls between Marketing, Customer Service or PR and I am here to tell you that if you are doing it really well it will falls into all of them...or even better it's a new category all together and can be run beside traditional marketing departments because when you combine them all, Social Media becomes about one thing and one thing only.
I am fascinated by Social Media influence. I find it interesting that a lot of people assume just because you have a lot of followers it makes you influential in some way, or if because you get re-tweets a lot you are a celebrity of some sort.
Normally this would be the part of the blog post where I shoot down this theory and make a pop culture reference that will evoke a smile and then send you on your way so we can all go back to doing whatever else is on the schedule but instead I am going to agree with an asterisk and explain why these social media folks are "celebrities" but like most celebs they have very little influence outside of their small area of expertise and here is why.
O.J. Simpson is a celebrity.
No one ran like O.J and by all accounts he was a super nice guy but I would never ask for advice on architecture from "The Juice" because that is not something he is an expert on. Now if I was needing advice on how to kill someone, get away with it and tour the country playing golf before getting thrown in jail for something really stupid then that is something I would totally trust OJ to advise me on.
What I am getting at is that Celebrities do have influence but not for things they know nothing about. I got to thinking about this after a talk Scott Stratten gave a few weeks back. Before I show you this I should point out that I have nothing against Scott, I have written about him a few times on my blog because he has a different viewpoint then I do on some things and inspires me to write about my side of a discussion. I do wish him well, think he is a very entertaining speaker and think you all should buy his book and continue to make him a celebrity and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE realize that I am not comparing Scott to OJ in any way...I just used OJ as an example cause, well OJ is funny to me.
In a talk he was explaining to a group of Financial Advisers how influential he was online and said [notice the quotes] "I have more influence over the Canadian Financial Advisers then you do" This statement couldn't be farther from the truth (my opinion) because no one in Scott's network is going to trust him with their retirement plans or money in general to invest on their behalf. You see just like OJ, Scott's expertise is in Social Media and the tools etc and while he can (and I assume) does consult to all sorts of industries on how to do what he does best but we as Social Media folks can't assume that our influence will cross over to anywhere we want it to go and our followers will blindly follow us no matter where we try to take them...and to take this a little further we must realize that whatever influence we do have over people comes from trust and proving over and over we know what we are talking about in our little slice of expertise.
Influence isn't all encompassing. I don't buy into celebrity endorsements but will listen to celebrities talk about their craft for hours. When people rank influence there needs to be a clearer explanation on what the folks are being judged on. I imagine there are folks on Twitter with a few hundred followers but own a lot of trust in a sub culture like a genre of music or a style of art that have those few hundred people hanging on every word and are equally influential to them as any of the Twitter Celebrities.
There are a few valuable and different lessons in here but...am I right? Honestly, I want you to use your own judgment and not use my influence over you to make you agree with me.
Not a day goes by that my phone doesn't ring and someone asks me for a solution of some kind.
Somewhere along the way in my travels I picked up a reputation of being an "anti-roi" guy and I am here today to tell you that you got me all wrong.
It is late, dark and quiet. A beautiful woman sits alone on a red leather couch wearing only a tank top and a pair of short shorts. Her hair is in a pony tail and Letterman is on in the background but she barely notices it because she is lost in her computer. Every few minutes Tweetdeck chirps and she is follows a new stream of ideas and conversations.
Without warning there is a loud crash followed by a scream and then crying. The woman springs to her feet and runs up the stairs of her home two at a time until she is in the dark doorway of a bedroom…looking down she sees the source of the tears, her son is on the floor.
The woman sweeps up the boy in her arms and consoles him by lying down beside him in bed and gently rubbing his head. As the child begins to settle down he looks at his mother, eyes still a little wet and asks her to tell him a story, but not just any story, he wants to hear the same story he has asked to hear every night for the last year.
“Mommy, Can you tell me the story of when you increased sales 25% by launching your company blog?”
…and just like all the times before, the woman gently ran her fingers through her son's hair and shared her story she likes to call "Best Practices"
I was at the Canadian Marketing Association National Conference yesterday and found it interesting how many people still in this day and age ask for and rely on Best Practices. Now before I get into what may be perceived as a mini rant I want to say that the Conference was very well put together and I got a lot out of it so please don't take my observation as a criticism of the event.
Best Practices are an old way of looking at things and should be called "Things that worked for someone at some time but probably won't work for you because your goals, situations or conditions will all be different."
I am always for blazing new trails and not following others but even I realize the importance of understanding what works but please also understand that conditions change daily and things like geography or change in economy or where your company is in the brand development stage (and about 100 other things) all contribute to how ideas are received and accepted so if you are going to invest time in reading Best Practices please treat them as fairy tales and allow them to inspire you not influence you.
What says you?
I love net promoter scores. They are cute, make people feel good about themselves and most importantly they mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.
For those not exactly sure what a "Net Promoter Scores" are, it is a rating companies obtain by asking customers a single question on a 0 to 10 rating scale:
At last count there are exactly 763418 ways to attract customers and build brand loyalty. I'm not going to list them all but I am going to focus (for this post at least) on one of my favorite ways.Advocacy Marketing.
Advocacy Marketing is basically picking a cause that directly affects your industry or customers and fighting on their behalf...and just so we are clear, this is not picking a charity and donating to them (that is a good thing as well) but rather picking an issue that people that rally around and if you win the fight you will have made your small part of the world a better place.
There are a lot of great examples of this but my favorite right now Is the fight against spec work being led by Upstack. You see they are a service that matches people looking for creative work with amazingly creative people. Their business relies on having a full roster of happy designers to fulfill their brand promise so this makes sense to fight on behalf of the designers who work with them but more then that (and this is the impressive part) they made their advocacy stand one of the differentiators in their business while a majority of their competitors have based their model on the spec work/contest model.
Wes Wilson, the guy behind Upstack is a friend and I am helping with some of the idea generation for this (that's how I know so much about it) because he and I share the same passion for this cause.
The interesting thing about advocacy marketing is that it doesn't apply to every business or situation but if it did and you had the choice between marketing to your customers or starting a movement (maybe revolution is a better word) what would you choose?
I speak at a lot of conferences and I like to think I am being invited because my talks are a mix of interesting and informative with just a dash of southern charm that you only get from being Canadian.
Have you ever heard the expression "Man Plans, God Laughs"?
I think there is a lot of truth in this saying, well maybe not the part about God getting involved because she is obviously too busy helping professional athletes make winning plays to notice small business folks but rather the part about planning and over planning.
I got to thinking about this last week while I was in Halifax delivering the closing keynote at the Aim Conference because it was there that I met Heather Ritchie and learned about the start up she works at called Lymbix.com. Heather is in full on planning mode to launch her product and being the "helpful sort of guy" type I offered some possibly "bad advice" about how to not over plan for her launch. I have no idea if she will take any of my advice because she is no "Damsel in Distress" and knows what she is doing on her own but here is the advice I gave her and you can decide if there is anything you can take from it for yourself.
When sitting down to write a Marketing Plan figure out what you want to do to launch and get you through the first six months. On top of that, figure out where you want to be in 3 years and nothing else. The 6 month plan should be thorough and complete but in my experience you will find that so many things will change or you will have a much fuller understanding of your business and the possible opportunities at the six month mark that no plan you wrote at day one will be as targeted as you thought it would be when you wrote it. Once you are here you could write a new plan or just start working towards your three year goal.
What I mean by this is once you actually understand your business you can make real decisions and it is at this point you should be thinking about the 3 year goal. With every opportunity that comes up you ask yourself "Is this getting me closer to [the 3 year goal]". If it isn't then it isn't an immediate priority and should be put aside until it is. This doesn't mean these opportunities can't be secondary priorities and acted on but things with the fuller impact should be acted on first if so you are always working towards your goals.
Heather rewarded me for all my free advice by personally driving me to the airport. I just can't decide if she did it as a thank you or to just make sure I actually left and stopped poking my nose in her business, either way I appreciated the lift and the inspiration for this post.
Some days I feel a lot like Lester Bangs.
Lester Bangs is the legendary music writer/critic featured in the film Almost Famous (and played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and in the film he says the following
I am lucky because I get invited to speak at conferences all over North America. I speak on a couple topics (Entrepreneurship, Customer Service, and Social Media) but my favorite is always creating Word of Mouth Marketing. Here is a little talk I gave at the Word of Mouth SuperGenius Conference brought to you by the good folks at Gaspedal.
How to Create Offline Word of Mouth -- presented by Saul Colt from GasPedal on Vimeo.
My dad has given me some interesting advice in my lifetime.
Things ranging from "Always look at people's shoes, even in wheelchairs because that is how you can tell if they are faking" to "Date who you want...your Mother will be fine". But the most helpful advice came from my days making comic books, you see my Dad used to come with me to comic book conventions and help me sell my books. At one of these shows he explained to me that to really make a sale you need to make a connection with the prospective buyer and try to gain their trust...he then proceeded to catch the eye of an older man wearing a Hello Kitty shirt and proceeded to ask "So you like little girls huh?"
Needless to say he didn't get the sale but the advice was good.
I started thinking about this because of a blog post over at BLOGTO.com about the Death of High End Sneaker Shops in Toronto. While I am saddened by the fact that these shops are disappearing (I collect sneakers and and buy as many as 20-30 pairs a year) but I can't say I am surprised...ok I am surprised a little but not shocked and here is why.
As someone who is the absolute 100% target market for these products, when I do frequent these shops no one will help me, or talk to me or treat me special at all...and by special I don't mean kiss my ass, I mean take a look at my feet (I usually wear something special to shoe shop in) and notice I am a customer and treat me as such.
I can buy shoes online but choose to do so in real life so I can actually talk with like minded folks who share a same interest as me but always end up feeling like I am bothering people and am a burden. To me retail is less about selling merchandise and more about offering and selling an experience...and the experience you are selling shouldn't be one of exclusion.
So if you own a specialty store, especially a shoe store follow my dad's advice and "Always look at people's shoes, even in wheelchairs" because knowing if someone if a possible customer is half of the battle.
...and if you are a sneaker store and want some business I am searching high and low for these shoes in a size 12. Not looking for a freebie, just someone with a pair I can buy.
I tend to notice things that others may not.
I always have and I can't really explain it. For example for years when I am in New York I always look for Dan Smith posters because to me, he is part of the New York experience.
I love everything about his posters because:
1- They tend to be everywhere...or at least everywhere I am going.
2- They are simple and to the point. (he wants to teach you guitar)
3-They leave me with the perception that he is serious about his craft and is dedicated to passing his knowledge over to you. (I can see it in his eyes)
Inspired by Dan I have decided to experiment with a similar idea and am going to have 1000 of my own flyers distributed and posted around the NYC area. They going to be advertising this here blog and I'm curious to see if anyone notices or has an impact...I'm sure they will cause the poster design is fresh and new.
I'll keep you posted!
