via @cocreatr

Who would have thought that you could do this with water?

My guess is, it’s the water who told the designer that this was possible. My guess is, the designer had already done/seen/experienced something similar – however small it may have been – which, by paying attention to it, grew into this fantastic idea.

That’s what I believe about people as well. The great stuff, it’s already there. You’ve already shown some of it along the way but chances are you haven’t noticed yet. Pay attention to them and something beautiful is about to happen.

If you’d ask me what solution focused coaching is about, then I might say it’s about paying attention. It’s about discovering your own greatness and ability to deal with life’s challenges. It’s about caring for your own success.

It’s about planting the seeds and allowing them to turn into trees. It’s about water. And allowing it to become a creative waterfall.

Yes, I kid you not. This poster by Sam Dickson has won this year’s edition of the Greenpeace Design Award. Great winner if you ask me, although I might be slightly biased :).

Congratulations Sam Dickson. If anyone knows where I can find his website, please let me know so I can link to it.

“The goal should not be to ad to the unwantedness, but to create deliberate and appreciate value” (Helge Tenno)

What is it that people want most? That depends on the context, but in general what people want most is what is the least available.

So take this to the advertising clutter and what do you get?

Silence.

Consumers don’t want more messages nor more mumbo-jumbo trying to reach them at every possible time in every possible way.

What consumers really want is a message that creates time and space for them to relax and to listen to something which

a) removes the clutter
b) gives them air to breath (physically and mentally)
c) adds something valuable to their lives

What does this imply?

It means you should take a new approach to your campaign.

It means that you should pay as much attention to creating context as you’re paying to delivering and designing the message in itself.

Create clutterfree context and you’ll be able to add more weight to your message.

In a sense it’s about shifting from the medium is the message to …

… your message contains the medium for the message.

Don’t let anybody fool you (including me):

You’ll never be able to read people.

The only thing you can do is second guess them.

The more I interact with people, the more I discover that I know a lot about people but I never know as much about these people as they do.

The world’s greatest authority on knowledge about who’s sitting in front of you is … most likely the person who’s sitting in front of you.

I believe that nobody knows yourself better than you do. And that this is true for most of us.

(Just before you let out the narcicist in you, keep the following in mind: no matter how well you are acquinted with yourself, you may always discover something new about yourself thanks to somebody else.)

As a marketeer and advertiser (or listener) it’s tempting to forget that. After all aren’t we the ones who are supposed to know what people need?

Yes we are, but in order to know, we have to ask them, don’t we?

But what if we have asked them? What if I have done my research?

Then we usually come up with models and segmentations.

Now don’t these contradict what I’ve said about knowing a lot about people but still not knowing as much as they do about themselves?

It tells you something about how these models and segmentations can be approached. You should use your research as a way to define who you should talk to and where, when and how you can approach these people.

But once you have done that then you’re barely halfway. Once you’ve reached them, it’s time for you to engage.

If you want to engage then that’s when you’re really going to find out what sets these people apart from everybody else. That’s when you’re going to discover whether you really know something about people and what I mean by writing “I never know as much about these people as they do”.

If you value and respect these people’s personal authority, chances are they’ll respect and value your knowledge and experience as well. Chances are they’ll reward you for your research since it may add something to that particular thing they are most familiar with, themselves.

And if it doesn’t, so be it. But by showing what you have in common – call it mutual understanding if you like – , you’ve nevertheless given them a strong reason to connect with you. You’ve proven that ‘we’ know what we are talking about.

So what’s with the headline then? You tell me. ;-)

Picture: “Body Language @ Nomad Gallery #5885.jpg” © amayzun

(c) Man met bril

This post by Seth Godin got me thinking about one of the most important resources we have and how we are wasting it: time / attention.

No time to waste?

It seems like in our business (communications, marketing) we’re all so eloquent when it comes to explaining how precious the time / attention of the targeted customers is. They are swamped with information, they get pushed and pulled around but the days of interuption marketing are over. Customers don’t take that anymore (although I rather think that most of them have numbed themselves instead of getting emancipated).

Individual swamping

Yet instead of leaving these customers alone and treating them and their time and attention with respect we encourage our clients to swamp them again.

Not with the classic swamping techniques from the interruption marketing era but with all kinds of one-to-one-experience-viralisting-guerrilla-ambient-mouth-to-mouth mumbo jumbo.

And it gets even worse.

Because we even encourage our customers to swamp each other for the sake of (     ) (fill out the blank). We do so by pretending we are refraining from influencing them. We do so by pretending they are just unleashing ideaviruses by being powerful sneezers.

We encourage our customers to disrespect other customers’ time and attention. How do we ever think they’ll ever respect us trying to get their full time and attention?

Seems like today everybody’s sneezing the hell out of themselves these days because it’s supposed to be an affirmation of their status as an independent customer.

Give me (and yourself) a break, will you.

Listen, learn and save snot

First of all: if you want people to be real powerful sneezers and real influential and independent customers you don’t just encourage them to sneeze whenever they are happy.

You encourage them to listen.

That’s right: listen.

Great listeners know when and why and how they can sneeze in order to add something meaningful to somebody else’s lives. They do so because they are so good at listening that in the end people ask them to sneeze.

How on earth is that possible?

How to get asked to sneeze in somebody else’s face

Great listeners ask questions. They do so to help other people to understand what their true needs are. If you ever come accross a great listener you’ll know. By the end of the conversation you’ll probably have expressed very clearly what it is that you really want and how that makes you feel. Once you know that, you’ll be able to make a specific request in order to solve your problem or satisfy your need(s).

Now here’s the thing: you’ll probably ask that question to the person who helped you understand what your basic needs are. Because that’s the person who apparantly seems to know you well since he/she made you realize what you really feel and want (although you’ve done much of the hard work yourself). So he/she must be the person who has the expertise to help you right away or at least point you in the right direction.

That’s how powerful sneezing truly works. It starts with powerful listening. Not with blowing your nose into everybody’s face as hard as you can while hoping you’ll infect a lot of people.

Addendum for real sneezers
In case you don’t care about listening because you simply need to blow your nose: here’s some good advice to help you out with that as well: “How to blow your nose”

PS: Seth’s ideas on unleashing the ideavirus still make sense to me. What doesn’t make sense is the idea that we should now try and turn everybody into a sneezer by focussing on the sneezing only. Great marketeers have always been great listeners. Same goes for great sneezers. Hey, I even believe a sneezer can infect someone by not sneezing him or her. Suppose you feel someone isn’t interested in your ideas and you can completely respect that. Chances are you’ll be perceived as a respectful, professional person. Your friend might even send people to you who he believe need what you are selling. He/she will do so because you’ve built trust. You’ve become a reference even without selling something to the referrer.

This is a Manifesto about spreading ideas in the 21st century. It’s a long post. But I promise you, your effort will be rewarded.

Spreading ideas is all about probability. So are creativity, leading, marketing. The thing is, you just can’t manage life. That’s to say: micromanagment is out of the question. Forget about controlling all the details. When you learn how to settle with probability then life becomes one big opportunity. Then you can become a great leader, a great creative, a great marketeer, a great spreader of ideas.

Here come the Herds

“Here we outline an alternative model of how things spread: one rooted in the contemporary behavioural sciences and which we have already successfully applied in practice. It is remarkably simple, useful in describing the spread of all kinds of behaviours, and rooted in our species’ scientifically demonstrated social – or ‘Herd’ nature.” (Dr Alex Bentley & Mark Earls)

Ideas spread through herd-like copying. It sounds like the premise of Tribes, Seth Godin’s new book. Turns out it’s the key notion in a new scientific model on how ideas spread.

In their article “Forget influentials, herd-like copying is how brands spread” Mark Earls and Dr Alex Bentley use behavioural science to explain why marketing should radically change its course if it doesn’t want to make itself completely useless over the next decade.

What does Herd-like marketing look like?

1. New networks are not classic media-channels with a new shape. You can’t use networks the way you’ve used other one-way communication channels.
2. Forget about the push. We can’t shove things down peoples throats anymore. Networks spread ideas because of the pull mechanism of the idea, not because of the pushing of marketeers.
3. Copying is what life is all about. We’re not at all independent thinkers. We copy because it’s the safest choice we can make.
4. Forget about influence, forget about persuasion. Behaviour spreads through ordinary folk rather than when it gets broadcasted by special friendships. Again: no pushing. And: everyone is a potential puller.
5. Understand the tides. This will show you what is copied and how. Ride the waves, don’t swim against them.
6. Mapping the landscape is impossible, understanding it isn’t. The right model of how a network looks can help you understand how to approach the network and how the copy mechanisms work.
7. Use a cascade approach rather than an insurgent one. Or as the authors put it: “start lots of fires in lots of promising places.”

Apart from my skepticism towards the use of the term new – this model/behaviour has been around for ages, it simply hasn’t been captured in this particular narrative form – , Dr Alex Bentley and Mark Earls present a pretty accurate image of how marketing could and should help spread ideas in the 21st century.

Tribes and Herds, similar but not the same

The similarities as well as the differences between the ideas of Berkley and Earls on one side and the ideas of Seth Godin on the other are interesting.

Seth has been talking and writing about permission marketing for years now. He has travelled the world and was invited by the brightest minds and companies of our time to explain his ideas and to encourage people to work with them. So saying the pull is more important than the push is not that new at all in the marketing world.

Seth also talks about tribes as the main metaphor for where the real idea-spreading-action happens. They also agree on the idea that everyone belongs and wants to belong to several herds.

• Don’t follow the leader?

Yet Seth’s narrative focusses on leadership and how strong leadership is important for tribes and spreading ideas. Whereas Berkley and Earls focus on the copying mechanism and denounce the notion of followers copying behaviour of a leader.

“What most data show, however, is behaviour spreading through ordinary folk rather than ‘broadcast’ by special individuals.  (…) If we view the influentials phenomenon as a special case of directed copying, then usually it is we who decide to copy an individual, creating their perceived influence in the process.” (Bentley & Earls)

Is Seth missing the point here? Not really.

• The hindsight theory

Seth talks about two important things which Earls and Berkley don’t mention. First Seth emphasizes the importance of small steps. A leader goes her own way but her influence spreads through small steps, through connection with her friends and with surrounding people who like her ideas.

Nowhere does Seth say that ideas spread because you’ve engaged with powerful people. In hindsight, these people might have proven to be a powerful catalist in the spreading of your ideas, but that’s only in hindsight. You can’t possibly know this for sure at forehand.

In fact, leaders are mostly recongised as such in hindsight as well. At the point they manifest them as leaders or are recognized as such, they were already leading for a long time. And when people become aware of their ideas and how they spread they actually aren’t copying their leader’s behaviour anymore, but the behaviour of the first-generation followers who are already copying their leader’s behaviour long before he became known as one.

This is a key notion lacking from Earls’ and Berkley’s article. Because if you believe what Earls and Berkley write, then the whole idea of powerful sneezers (best explained in Seth’s ideavirus) would become obsolete.

• Small fires and the apparent lack of strategy

Also, Earls and Berkley advise marketeers to “start lots of fires in lots of promising places” which clearly is a complete turnaround looking from the perspective of marketeers who still believe that a grand unified strategy or campaign will do the trick. This unified stragegy-perception is primarily based on the misconception that we will all copy the leader if she has something interesting to say. Period.

We copy because others have copied. But change also happens because other people make certain choices and start to lead –long before they are know to do so. Sure, the copying mechanism is important, but so is the idea of leadership.

• Forget about control and conquer: imagine, have faith and rule

Some marketeers will always wonder how they can combine and control the two. These people see marketing as a religion, as a set of rules which you can master and which will help you bend and control reality (Earls and Berkley use the term “shoehorning”). These marketeers prefer the shorttime approach based on tactics rather than on strategy. These marketeers crave for predictability. They want to know for sure (or their clients demand them to pretend they are).

But that’s impossible, something both Seth and Earls and Berkley agree on.

It’s only when you look at the world with a more holistic perspective that impossibilities can become probabilities. And probability is something we can deal with.

In fact: probability is all we get to work with in life.

How to make probability work?

Look at Google. Mastering these Petabytes of information and turning it into something useful is impossible, as long as you presume that in order to turn use this vast amount of information you need to understand every bit of it. Not possible since there’s always more and more information added to the weg.

Yet Google has managed to translate this mass into useful answers.

How? Through faith, imagination and through a good sense of how probability works.

To get something working in real life, you need to imagine it first, then pursue your dream, take the first step and have faith. Work it out, have it challenged, maybe even abandon it. But as long as you don’t put it into practice it is wrong anyway. So at Google, they put their idea, their approach to probability into practice. They didn’t treat it as a second-hand, handicapped way of dealing with reality.

They understood that this is the way we handle life.

And we’re good at it. Not perfect, but good, really good.

And for all we know, we just might become better by simply keeping on doing it.

If only we have faith.

If only we can imagine.

If only we believe we can.

Great starting points for your personal quest:

• Herd: the hidden truth … (Mark Earls’ blog)
• Forget influentials, herd-like copying is how brands spread (pdf)
• Seth Godin
• Tribes (Godin’s last book)
• Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely’s stunning book on behavioural economics, just to understand why we’re not really independent thinkers after all)
• Chris Anderson: The End of Theory

What you want is not always what you like.

You see, when clients tell us what they want, we usually assume that is what they like.

But these two are fundamentally different. You can create something which according to the briefing fits all requirements perfectly. Which should be something your client should like.

Yet then comes the final verdict: “I don’t like it.” And how hard you try there is nothing you can do to change his or her mind.

Going over the briefing won’t reveil anything but the fact that you did everything according to plan and still failed to satisfy your client.

This kind of misunderstandings is very common in the communication and marketing business. Why? Because while receiving the briefing we usually assume that what is briefed is what is desired and will be liked as such by your client.

Then ask yourself: “Is it?” And do yourself and your client a favour ask it aloud. Do not start creating before you get an answer.

You see, your client can and will understand that there can be a difference between what he/she wants and what he/she likes.

If he/she knows in advance they won’t feel bribed when you offer them something they do not like at first sight. And they will be more reluctant to listen to your arguments when defending your creation.

Why? Because first of all you really listened to what your client wanted, not only to what your client wanted to brief you. Secondly you have created a base for trust early on in the process which will make it easier for your client to trust your expertise.

Do you serve your client when you agree to replace a good piece of work with something less but more acceptable?

One of the first things I’ve read about advertising was this: “The client always pays you to say no.”

But that’s only half the story.

A client has the right to reject your work. But when he does so, you don’t just have to take no for an answer.

Digging deeper is one thing you can and should do.

But sticking to your standards is another. If no means you have to come up with a piece of work that doesn’t meet your standards, than dare to say no yourself and explain why.

When you say no, it’s because you care too much for your work. And the fact that you do is what creates value for your client.

When you say no, it’s because you know that it’s not about you creating stuff for your client, but because you know it’s you creating stuff together for your client’s cause.

It’s not you against them, it’s not even you for them, it’s you and them for their cause.

If you say no, say no against ’sit-back’ thinking. Say no to people who just tell you about their problem and then sit back presuming the problem is now yours. It’s not. It’s ours, because they shared it. Which means, solving will take efforts of both of us.

If you always take the blame yourself for your client’s no, you will get frustrated. Learn from each other. Talk and say no when sit-backs occur.

“Tell me, I may listen. Teach me, I may remember. Involve me, I will do it.”
– Chinese Proverb