how to motivate, instruct and market
March 28, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
IMO, Seth Godin’s You should write an ebook post (partial below) is a gold-standard example of how to move clients from ideas to action while increasing the potential for additional business.
These are my 7 reasons:
- He creates trust, making the audience (client) believe that it’s smart, and it can do what he can do.
- He overcomes resistance upfront, assuring the audience (client), that it’s technically easy.
- He 100% backs up that claim, providing the few, necessary, step-by-step bulleted how-to’s.
- He’s upfront about the obvious challenge: “Write something worth reading!” but doesn’t preach, or arrogantly belabor the point to the audience (client).
- He sets expectations by telling his own (brief) success story, for the sole purpose of sharing learning and metrics (not promising anything) with the audience (client).
- He anticipates and reframes the “how much $ will I make?” question into an “it costs nothing” win-win, no-brainer.
- He “markets without marketing” to the audience (client) by making recommended applications, (Squidoo and Changethis), integral components of “how he helps them out”.
From a big picture perspective, its an example of what I call a no boundary model (influenced and inspired by CPU): what’s good for you, is good for your business, and is good for your clients.
I’m serious. Smart people with good ideas worth sharing can get a lot out of this exercise.
To help you out, I wrote a lens about the simple details of how to do it.
It’s technically easy and when it works, your idea will spread far and wide. Even better, the act of writing your idea in a cogent, organized way will make the idea better. You can write an ebook about your travel destination, your consulting philosophy or an amazing job you’d like to fill.
A Google search finds more than 200,000 matches for the word ‘ideavirus’, which I made up. Some will ask, ‘how much money did you make?’ And I think a better question is, ‘how much did it cost you?’ How much did it cost you to write the most popular ebook ever and to reach those millions of people and to do a promotion that drove an expensive hardcover to #5 on Amazon and #4 in Japan and led to translation deals in dozens of countries and plenty of speaking gigs?
It cost nothing.
Changethis, which I dreamed up in a moment of weakness a few years ago, is still going strong under better management now. It’s the epicenter of ebook distribution, but there are plenty of places just dying to host your content. And your blog is the best place to launch your idea. The biggest challenge is that there are no barriers. If you want to do it, go do it. Ideas worth spreading, spread.
(Via Seth’s Blog.)
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being fun
March 27, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · 1 Comment
When the blogosphere tone is a bummer, or worse, it helps to look elsewhere for inspiration: spiritual teachers, classics, popular culture and people on the street. Often, a pattern will emerge and provide a pointer to something new, or to a part of you that you’ve been avoiding, denying or neglecting.
Recently, I was riding the Boston subway during rush hour on an extremely frigid day. It was a packed car, with everyone looking relieved to be sharing body heat and out of the “the almighty hawk”, the cold wind that the great Lou Rawls sings about in his classic Dead End Street. The college-age girl sitting next to me was giggling, then chuckling, then doing everything she could to stifle full, ribald belly laughs. 
I peeked over and saw that she was reading a book of comics. Her laughter was so infectious that I caught it, and the effect stayed with me for hours.
Later, stuff that I would normally take seriously cracked me up.
For example, this video “The A-List works harder than you do.”, is not meant to be funny, but I found it hilarious.
Another day, I reviewed some of Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind teachings to prepare myself for some development work I’m beginning. But the inner voice that I was interested in accessing was not Big Mind, but the voice he calls The Great Fool: the joker, the trickster, the one who has freedom to be wild and to be anything, including, quoting Genpo Roshi, a shit-stick!
I think the wild ideas come from the Great Fool in us. Mine is: an app or service that will convert bloggers’ podcast-type videos to animated comic (manga?)-style videos with fictionalized characters, Gorillaz style.
Another option is to just shift the energy now and then and be fun. People like that, especially clients.
Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc.
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Gorillaz
structure
March 23, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Here’s an exercise: think back on the many planning, visioning and goals-setting sessions you’ve attended in your past personal and professional life (and don’t forget B-school!). If you’re like me, most of it was exercise in futility and a waste of time.
If you are just starting out, or are in the early stage of creating your own professional service firm (psf), I request the following of you: please don’t stuck there again. Structure isn’t a linear process, its iterative. Its not about plan and act, its about test and learn. Its not a static target, its moving. It doesn’t come from will and work, it comes from belief, awareness and enjoyment.
Let the right brain rule!
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the right mix
March 23, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Like the Stones song, “Time Waits for No One”, the blogosphere did not wait for me while I took a break. There was a heated debate going on about blog stratification and the advantages (or not) of being an “a-list” blogger. Clearly, passions run high on the topic. Although I found it interesting, the subject is not a hot button per se for me. But it did get me thinking again about influence, inspiration and how they intersect.
A few weeks back, I followed an impulse to cut down my blogroll to a half-dozen. Its not best practice, but I wanted to include only those blogs that always influence and inspire me, without turning me off. I want to be that kind of blogger, and that kind of professional service firm.
A-list Epilogue: Just So We’re Clear — Its Not About Being A Better Blogger: “
(Via Deep Jive Interests.)
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open mindedness
March 19, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I’ve been mostly negative about the social network phenomena but I’ve continued to follow the trend. I’m glad I did. My personal preferences were clouding my objectivity and I wasn’t aware of it. Since I’m interested in trends and bridging generations, it serves me, my (p.s.f.)business, and my clients that I be open-minded and insightful about change, even if (especially if!) its change I don’t much like.
I’d never heard of Twitter until today, after reading a great essay by Kathy Sierra and a good overview in the SF Gate: What are people ‘twittering’ about? I’m glad I took the time to read the comments to Kathy’s post. If not, I would’ve 100% agreed with her impression and not added my insight, because, like her, I’m not in the target audience for Twitter and it has zero appeal for me. As always, she provides a balanced and insightful analysis of the behavioral and cognitive impact. But the comments that followed, further broadened my perspective about Twitter, the incredibly bright and talented people who create these communities, and social media phenomena in general.
So the question I’m attempting to answer is: how do we live balanced, happy and purposeful lives in a cognitive-overload world?
My response is: by integrating awareness of states, and moments of stillness, and attention to how we are feeling, into our daily personal and work activities.
Also, I added some renegade insight on the Twitter business model described here.
Perhaps the greatest challenge will be finding a business model for Twitter. Obvious doesn’t have one yet, but Williams isn’t worried. He said he prefers to make sure he’s built a great user experience first, and the business model will follow. “There’s going to be some value if we can do it really well,” he said.
Scoble concurred. “The world has taught me, if you have an audience, a business model will show up. Google demonstrated that. It was in business for four years before it found a business model,” and now it’s a multibillion-dollar company.
The model could be advertising, it could be selling Twitter as a service to companies, and it could find something else entirely.
(Via Creating Passionate Users.)
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hype
March 17, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · 2 Comments
Are you an existing small, independent, possibly solo, maybe home-based, professional service provider, practitioner or firm? If not, are you transitioning to, dreaming about, planning to start up anything like that?
If your answer is yes, are you aware of what a huge and lucrative market you are, especially to marketers who want to sell you products and services to help you market? Are you finding the marketers of marketing increasingly compelling with their smart copy and beautiful web sites and blogs and books and ebooks and columns and podcasts and conferences?
Is your admiration tinged with some envy and anxiety and you can’t help thinking ‘if I just knew how to do that, or get in with them, or know what they know, or have the connections and visibility, or the right niche, target, subject, copy, then…..’
Then what? Would you then “be enough?”
This is what I’ve learned, the hard way: if it makes you feel that “you are not enough”, its not worthy of your attention.
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its a thin line between retention and taking hostages
March 16, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
A few months back, my son and I were talking about the iPhone and would we get in on the launch, or wait for a later version. Unlike me, he changes plans and phones a lot. He decided he couldn’t wait for the iPhone and was all excited to get the new Motorola Razr with a Verizon wireless plan. But every time he’d use it, I noticed he looked unhappy. Yes, he’s a grown guy with kids of his own, but heck, he’s my only kid and I still get a charge out of seeing him excited with a new toy.
A couple weeks ago I saw the happy face again. With online help, he’d figured out how to hack the phone to remove all the Verizon software and replace it with the Alltel interface. It took him most of a Sunday, and voided his warranty, but he was a happy guy saying that now he could actually use and enjoy the Razr’s features and performance, most of which had been totally disabled or severely compromised by the Verizon software. He couldn’t live with the phone the way it was, so his options were eating the penalty for breaking the contract, or voiding the warranty.
It all sounded so insane that I had to verify the story so I Googled “verizon razr alltel hack” and got 189,000 results.
Not only does this make me afraid of Verizon Wireless, it makes me avoid buying a new cellphone. I don’t care about features if I have to give up choice and control of my experience. I’d rather stay with old, bare bones, no contracts. If I really want something new, I’ll experiment with innovative services.
Bottom line for me: contracts turn me off and make me suspicious. If there’s a contract involved, its unlikely I’ll take a chance. I’m vowing to remember that clients likely feel the same way.
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rhythm
March 15, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
The ice on the Charles River is melting so here’s my first of many rowing 
metaphors. We spend most of the winter at our boat club training on the erg. The truly obsessive, strongest, and bravest of the brave compete at the C.R.A.S.H.-B Sprints World Indoor Rowing Championship held here in Boston. The strongest men and women are called hammers. Winners in their CRASH-B event receive a hammer instead of a trophy.
Coaches love hammers for their power, but often spend a good portion of May and June trying to undo some of the bad habits rowers pick up over the winter on the erg. Its a machine, after all, and will respond well to brute strength and force. I’ve envied hammers for their tolerance for pain and determination to win. But my body has never synched with my hammer envy no matter how hard I push.
This week, going into my 9th season in this sport, my workouts seemed to take on a life of their own. My erging became more rhythmic, had more flow, and I enjoyed it more (which is saying a lot because it hurts bad and really sucks!). What surprised me, is that it happened spontaneously, like my mind and body are responding instinctively to the changing season, nature and river.
It got me thinking that force of muscle and force of will are not all that different and need to be balanced with rhythm and flow. We can no more hammer a successful business or relationship then we can hammer a boat down the river. Even if we do cross the line first, its just not as much fun if we’re doing it only through force.
Synchronicities like this one, are subtle pats on the back from the universe, letting us know that everything is exactly as it should be and that force of will will only get in the way.
In my example:
- I trust myself more
- I’m more aware of my strengths and less concerned about my weaknesses
- I’m not interested in competition without enjoyment
- I’ve stopped equating “hard” with “good”
Here’s a video of one women’s event and I’m happy to hear my favorite coxswain/announcer commenting on the winner’s amazing rhythm.
CRASH-B 2007 Senior Women Video
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from information to insight
March 13, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I’m interested in generations and I’ve been getting a sense of increasing “us against them” tones in the media. I see contradiction everywhere which makes me wonder about causation and generations. I’m playing around with a question like: what does a generation believe to be true about itself and does it believe it is the cause or effect of that truth? I bookmarked recent articles that struck me as meaningful in some way.
Sure, there’s tons of great information and expert research out there on generations. That’s part of the problem - there’s too much. Clients need intelligence on “now”. This is an example of how I start that process, using this particular topic. Its more than a newsletter; its more of a ‘trendletter’. The value is the juxtaposition of the different pieces of information that I pull out. I think of this kind of research as more of an art than a science and supplemental or complementary to what the big research firms do.
My next step on this topic might be a mind map.
Baby Boomers
The looming labor shortage: why aren’t you worried?
Industry experts are painting a grim picture for American businesses in the years after the baby boomers start to retire. Some say companies will experience a labor shortage unlike anything in history, while others speculate commerce and industry will crash, because there won’t be enough workers to sustain our nation’s growing businesses.When the boomers retire, will all of their know-how, relationships, wisdom, and expertise walk out the door with them?
ADVERTISING; For Some Aging Actors, Self-Mockery Sells
In a trend perhaps also inspired by the popular 1980 movie ”Airplane!,” agencies are hiring venerable actors, once known for serious straight roles, to display cleverly self-mocking sides of their personalities in campaigns aimed at younger as well as older consumers. do these long-shining stars who parody their own images work so well?
”They are making use of the peripheral rather than the central route to persuasion,” said Rod A. Martin, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario and the author of ”The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach.”
It is ”difficult to make a compelling, logical, rational argument for these products’ superiority over their rivals,” Mr. Martin said, so advertisers need to ”evoke positive associations with the product in the minds of the viewers without encouraging them to think too much about it.”
Is Looking Your Age Now Taboo?
“Women have always been under pressure to look good, but that has increased recently because we have become so used to seeing perfect, unwrinkled faces,” Ms. Burke said. “Now when you see someone who looks like a raisin or a prune, it seems so unusual that you are almost repulsed.”
Are wrinkles to become a thing of the past for the self-selected few, like crooked teeth after the advent of modern orthodontics? At the very least, wrinkles are being repositioned as the new gray hair — another means to judge attractiveness, romantic viability, professional competitiveness and social status.
These cosmetic technologies are also changing the way pop culture perceives the aging face. Once a biological fact of life like kneecaps or navels, wrinkles now appear to be optional for those who can afford to smooth them.
By now the disdain for them is ingrained in the culture. This month even the magazine of the AARP, a group dedicated to fighting ageism, published a cover line exhorting readers to “Look Younger Now: Erase Ten Years (Or More)” — effectively canonizing the notion that a face that telegraphs its age is out of date.
One reason for the pressure is increasing life spans. As Americans live longer, middle age has shifted to 60 from 40, with 40 recast as a youthful stage. That leaves some women grappling with the idea of what 60 looks like.
Retirement community rift pits Baby Boomers against the elderly
At first it sounds hilarious. A generation gap at the retirement village between the 60-year-old Baby Boomers and the 80-plus old timers?
What’s the conflict? Frank Zappa versus Frank Sinatra?
But beneath the surface a nasty little battle of demographics is brewing. Sprawling retirement communities are attempting to spruce up facilities to appeal to the onslaught of Baby Boomers, while the longtime residents worry that they are subtly being nudged out the gate.
Generation X
Some economists worry that the concentration of income in high-achieving two-earner homes is aggravating the wealth gap. Some evolutionary psychologists say that pumping up certain kids’ genes for intelligence will increase the achievement gap (by creating supersmart kids with an even more unfair advantage than their smart parents had).
This is all speculation. For our family, though, the message is clear: if Emilie persists in her declared career path of being “a artist,” she isn’t likely to be swept off her feet by an investment banker and to spend her life working within the velvet bondage of having him pay her Bergdorf’s bills. She’s more likely to marry a guy she meets in art school, whose economic prospects will be as dim as her own.
Julia plans to spend her life swimming with dolphins. It just goes to show: if you’re going to marry your soul mate, better beware of the content of your soul.
Women see less need for ol’ ball and chain
Coontz says the new trends for women — college education, financial independence and less pressure from society — have changed the rules. One of the most important changes, she says, is knowing that you don’t have to depend on your husband for a living and “if it doesn’t work out, you could leave.”
But that’s just the tip of the husband-free trend. According to a New York Times analysis of census data, not only are women marrying later, they also are less likely to remarry right away if widowed or divorced. “It’s a different generation,” says San Mateo’s Lorri Lee Lown, the founder of Velo Girls, a women’s cycling club. “My mother couldn’t have bought a house by herself. But I can.”OK then, men say, what are we supposed to be doing?
“That’s the million-dollar question,” says Noland, 33. “It’s becoming more of a challenge. As guys, we are going to have to come up with some other measures of success for our relationships.”
Are guys getting the message? Oh, who cares, women say. They are moving on regardless.
Consider Sheila Moon, a San Francisco fashion designer, who is a single woman in her 40s.Moon worked in the fashion industry for years, doing “contemporary sportswear, suity-stuff.” But four years ago, she saw this trend of “encouraging women to enter activities that are usually more male-dominated,” and decided to design a line of women-only cycling clothes.
Generation Y (Next)
“We have envisioned this as the first fragrance for the technosexual generation,” said Mr. Murry, using a term the company made up to describe its intended audience of thumb-texting young people whose romantic lives are defined in part by the casual hookup.Last year, the company went so far as to trademark “technosexual,” anticipating it could become a buzzword for marketing to millennials, the roughly 80 million Americans born from 1982 to 1995. A typical line from the press materials for CK in2u goes like this: “She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right now.”
Everything from how this fragrance is going to be marketed to how it is bottled to what it is called makes me dry heave. According to the Times article, Calvin Klein did their research and found this to be the case — 20-somethings want no part of the corporate machine. So it seems I am totally in tune with my generation when I say that I don’t want to be marketed to and I don’t buy into big-corporate trends manufactured in a little room with no windows by 40-something balding men with no taste or sense of who I am.
TECHNOSEXUALS.Reading this word made my skin crawl.
All of these problems and I haven’t even mentioned the name of the fragrance yet. Calvin Klein’s new fragrance is going to be called CK in2u — a poor attempt at connecting with the millennial generation and our love of text messaging.
So what is special about Gen Nexters? Don’t count on them to capture their own quintessence. “The words and phrases they used varied widely,” the Pew researchers noted, “ranging from ‘lazy’ to ‘crazy’ to ‘fun.’ ” But if you look closely, what makes Gen Nexters sui generis — and perhaps more mysterious than their elders appreciate — are their views on two divisive social topics, abortion and gay marriage. Americans, it turns out, are unexpectedly conservative on abortion but notably liberal on gay marriage.
Youth
Teen Content Creators and Consumers
Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.
Are today’s parents enabling their kids to be self-centered?
With a new study last week showing that today’s college students are the most narcissistic and self-centered in decades, a small chorus of professionals is offering a bold response: We have no one to blame but ourselves.
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Outer purpose: 4%, Inner purpose: 96%
March 12, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Photo credit: NASA/ESA/HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM (STSCI)
Consider this. All mankind’s knowledge about the universe is about form - 4%. The rest is formless and not knowable.
Smoot’s and Perlmutter’s work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be — the material that makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest — 96 percent of the universe — is … who knows?
“Dark,” cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not “dark” as in distant or invisible. This is “dark” as in unknown for now, and possibly forever.
If so, such a development would presumably not be without philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as “the ultimate Copernican revolution”: not only are we not at the center of anything; we’re not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything. “We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. “If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We’re completely irrelevant.”
My reactions:
It seems insane to focus 100% of intention on the 4% that is form, or what is known.
Consciousness is alignment with the 97% formless and its insane to try to define it or know it or sell it as a “Secret“.
I love this old song by Kansas - Dust in the Wind.
Out There: “Dark energy, an invisible, undetectable force that seems to break all the rules of physics, may be about to redefine the universe.”
(Via NYT > Magazine.)
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