The best story ever told to kiwi’s
Put a speights ale house on a freighter
Take it to london
We need 4 blokes to man it
The greatest beer run of all time
120,000 kiwi males applied…. thats 6% or about 1 in 19 of ALL males in new zealand…
Crazy numbers
The story for them is i drank speights all the way to the uk on the greatest beer run of all time…
What a story!
What story can you tell?
Platforms are about opportunity.
Using our platform imagine the possibilities.
Using Fontera (a milk co-operative) as your platform you can suddenly reach unreachable markets.
Using Facebook as a platform you can engage with your customers in new ways.
Using Basecamp as a platform to organise your business from you can suddenly run your business from any location easily.
I have written about Platforms before but I’ve been chewing them over moreso of recent.
How can I turn these resources into a platform for others? How could I modify our systems to provide a platform for others (and operate as a saas)
Some ideas i’ve had is:
Turn my productivity system into a platform for others to use
Turn our research writing systems into a service to other organisations wishing to collate information
Turn our Marketing systems into Software as a Service
Stop and think about your existing systems / services, could you rebundle those into a platform? Maybe you should? or maybe just critically thinking about it will help you manage your existing resources or platforms better.
Big Buck Bunny.
Great video. Check out www.bigbuckbunny.org (stream via vimeo here).
Big Buck Bunny was created to showcase the Blender software.
What better way to sell a product (although as its open source funded by donations not direct selling) than to show us of its capabilities.
Reminds you of classic sales.
Sell the sizzle. The great animations you can make.
Don’t sell (pitch) me. Show me.
Content is king is the oldage saying of Internet Marketing
It still is (we’re still telling stories right)
However is your content scalable?
Have you maximised the opportunity for it to spread?
If not. Your wasting time. Build some systems now for all content.
Make the infinity assumption. My content will be out there for infinity. Surely i should put some systems in now to leverage the time component.
Some ideas:
Patterns are heuristic shortcuts.
Patterns are what experts have. It’s how doctors can sum up a patients state in a glance or how you can make snapshot judgments.
They come from experience and learning.
The are all around us, in our clothing, our behaviour, how we interact.
Identifying patterns helps in creating greater understanding.
Learning something new builds new patterns.
Doing something that makes you uncomfortable or afraid builds new patterns.
You should always be seeking new patterns!
Quite often the same patterns are everywhere.
Now use these patterns in your strategies, they will be more creative and remarkable than you ever thought possible.
(remember innovation is the application of patterns in new contexts)
Thursday evening I threw my 12 hour startup idea at a wall to see if it would stick.
It was at the monthly Auckland, Web Meetup (great event to meet people btw)
We did a 20×20 format. 20 slides, 20 seconds each. So I thought i’d jump up and give it a shot.
12 Hour Startup is a way of bridging the gap between aiding traditional companies to becoming more dynamic.
Building upon my last post really is how to sell key stakeholders on trying this model.
How can you sell this to your management, It’s a marketing decision:
Furthermore:
Need I continue?
Again I am seeking case studies, thanks to those that have given some feedback really appreciated
(have uploaded a copy of my presentation with basic notes, the objective was to get everyone focused on me instead of the slides, which worked)
Marketing after the fact should be consistent.
Case in point.
I recently canceled my storage unit at a local storage firm.
As we held a bond and prepaid a month my account was in debit.
Awesome. At this point in time I was happy with the service, helpfulness of the company. On my recommend list.
6 weeks later my account has still not been settled even after numerous emails. They then post a cheque to my old address (even though i explicitly stated when i finished up my address has been changed).
Now they offer to deposit it into my account. That’s fine.
But
From my perspective. You have wrecked what was otherwise a positive customer experience. Do you think I would recommend them again? Doubt it.
Marketing continues after the exchange, it is in the sizzle consumers receive, do not burn a customer because they have switched brands or ended the relationship. That way they never come back. Or recommend you.
What do you do? what do you offer?
Is this clear? It should be.
You should be taking a stance. This is who we are. This is what we are about.
People love to talk about firms that take a stance. We are all about flowers. We are all about Art.
Take a stance NOW.
[Thanks to Jim Russell of Shag Gallery, New Zealand for inspiration for this. He does awesome art work. Check it out if you are driving past.]
Here in New Zealand we have a (controversial) rule limiting how politicians finance their campaigns.
The idea was to limit wealthy supporters buying elections.
The part I want to focus on is what a private individual can do without having to register.
The Act makes it illegal for anyone to spend more than NZ$12,000 criticising or supporting a political party or taking a position on any political matter, or more than NZ$1,000 criticising or supporting an individual member of parliament, without first registering with a state agency, the Electoral Commission. [Wikipedia]
looks like private individuals have to register if they want to spend more than $12k. So what do they do now? They get creative…..
So what could $11,999 nzd buy you if you wanted to support your political party (or any other cause):
I think you get the idea, being creative and utilising the internet as a platform to spread your story the possibilities are virtually unlimited (even on a tight budget).
Oh and if you were a political party receiving this kind of support, do what Barack did and setup a way of providing micro donations on your website, then your supporters can help push donations through.
(also handy if you provided free graphics, videos, documents for your fans to share online)
Monetising your web service has been a topic I am forever intrigued with and been bouncing around as a blog post for a few weeks now.
Given recent discussions on Twitter I thought I’d grab this out of drafts and post it.
In terms of monetising your service, what options are there?
Freemium
Idea is provide a free service with a premium model where loyal fans pay for extras. The inherent problem is creating enough value in the premium option to swing users to pay (creating status is key).
Ads based
Make money off advertising, default is to use adsense. Problem here is this is based on large volumes to cover your services. No good if your starting out.
Glue ons
Features to your site that are actually of value to your users. I call them glue ons. You glue on a new feature (if your users like it, it sticks, if not it falls off).
Examples include: Job Boards (where people pay to list), Toolbars (which generate revenue help user), Consulting Time/Services, Ebooks/Book…
Long tail of monetisation
There are lots more: donations, blog sponsorship / paid blogging, selling links, cross selling, special one off content, limited edition merchandise
However….
Looking at all of the options think anything that helps your users is likely to help you.
A job board that helps your visitors whom will need a job at one time or another, a paid fan club that gives me extra benefits (and status) that no one else gets, access to special reports that other have to wait 3 months for. Think about what you can glue on.
When I say I work in Marketing people assume I work in Advertising.
Marketing is the communication of stories. The best ones spread.
Marketing is more than advertising.
Advertising is no longer required to deliver your story.
There are far too many communication channels to simply select one of them.
How do you think Contractors, Small Businesses have marketing themselves over time. Most of them cannot afford advertising.
Think:
The answer is in talking to lots of small groups of people and let them decide if your story is worth spreading. If it is they will spread it.
This is just one answer there are many more.
So let advertising rest in peace and get creative.
(Advertising firms? Position yourself as an ideas agency, provide these services)
Here is a freebie strategy I use all the time. Seems obvious but quite often gets overlooked.
This is the most simple way you can increase sales online whilst decreasing costs (over the medium to long term). It’s the Adwords Long Tail Strategy. Simple, quick and effective.
What to do after running your Adwords campaign for a period of time (say 3 months):
Results:
I have increased traffic at organisations whilst decreasing their acquisition cost by up to 75% with this simple strategy.
Take a look at this graph.
Trouble for entrepreneurs is quite often they spend too much time at the left. (suffering from lack of action)
They need to find their sweet spot.
What is the right mix of thought and action? to get the desired results.
Here’s an idea. A free one. Take it and run with it.
Microfunding. Microspends. Micropayments. Whatever you want to call it.
Take the concept of the long tail and apply it to spending online. Imagine the long tail of ‘small purchases’.
You could blow this wide open. Here’s $0.05 for that interesting pdf on your website. $0.10 for the youtube video i loved. $0.25 for that podcast that entertained me for an hour.
Doesn’t sound much does it. But imagine that 1 in 100 of your fans is a loyal fan whom will contribute $0.10/view. Now 10,000 regular visitors translates to: $10/day. Soon adds up.
Current ad rates ~$1cpm. Equates to: $0.001/visitor. If you could convince on average every visitor to contribute $0.01. Increased revenue 10 fold!
Ok.
Now imagine you are the company that facilitates all these micropayments.
How much time do you command?
For example since launching this blog
I have garnered:
59,746 seconds of attention or 991 minutes or 16 and a half hours of focused attention. Wow!
What would you pay for 16 hours of focused attention from the influencers in your industry.
I’ve paid:
1.5 hrs / week
a morning setting up this blog
a few hours preparation.
Maybe 20 hours all up.
Now imagine over the long run as my audience increases. My investment remains relatively flat.
Look at that return on investment vs that fax flyer campaign you just paid for.
Oh, something else, Interaction! I have received 13 comments, 20 or so emails. Compounds things a little.
What is that worth to you?