Tom Fishburne: this one time at Brand Camp

influencer stalking

I doubt there's a marketing plan in the world nowadays without some form of influencer marketing focus.  Reaching influencers is part of every agency pitch. With mainstream media becoming less effective over time and widespread recognition that influencers play a big role in buying decisions, the influencer hunt is on.

The challenge is how to do it right.  How do you identify who is really an influencer?  How do you reach them?  And with everyone else targeting influencers, how do you break through the clutter?

Many brands apply the same heavy-handed approach to influencer marketing that they do with mainstream marketing.  They shout.  

Somehow I ended up on agency influencer lists this last year, and I now receive dozens of emails a week, asking me to write about some piece of news or another. Aside from the fact that these emails are unsolicited, they are usually badly targeted, often lacking any news that is even moderately relevant to what I cover.  The other problem is that they usually arrive in an impersonal press release format with "for immediate release" marked at the top. One recent note was addressed to "Dear <first name> <last name>" because their email mail merge didn't work.

It's a common pitfall to assume that influencer marketing is just the same old marketing, only targeted more finely. If whatever you're trying to share is mediocre from the start, it's simply not going to spread, no matter how loudly you shout it or how many people you put on your shouting list. It doesn't matter if they're influential or not.

One of my favorite (albeit 5-year old) examples of a bootstrapped influencer marketing program is the Stormhoek winery 100 Blogging Dinners in 100 Days, developed by Hugh MacLeod. The winery credits this event for doubling their sales in 12 months. They sent out a free pre-release bottle of wine to any blogger who was interested (with no obligation to write about it), along with a great manifesto about wine and blogging.  It didn't shout.  It started an intriguing conversation and talked to bloggers as people, not as press contacts or direct marketing targets.  

I like this quote from Hugh after the event: "Blogging as a marketing tool is easier when you think of it as a chemical catalyst, not as a hammer and nail."  I think that "chemical catalyst" is a good description of influencer marketing in general too.

communication etiquette

I was struck by a recent Joel Spolsky column in Inc. magazine on dysfunctional communication in growing companies.

“What used to work with three people in a garage all talking to one another about everything just doesn’t work when your head count reaches 10 or 20 people. Everybody who doesn’t need to be in that meeting is killing productivity.”

Joel goes further by describing Brook’s Law: “Adding people to a late project tends to make it run later still.”

This counter-intuitive observation highlights a serious business problem: well-intended over-communication. Each additional person needed to keep in the loop exponentially slows down progress.

I’ve struggled with this exact dilemma. Three years ago, I arrived in the UK to help launch the method brand there. At the start, there were three: a sales guy, a supply chain guy, and me. We all knew everything about the business and could practically finish each others’ sentences. Here we are in our first day in the office (we didn’t have a printer yet, hence the sideways laptop).

As we grew the team to 10 people and needed to coordinate more with the home office in the US, the lines of communication were stressed. We could no longer have everyone involved in every decision. But, those who weren’t involved felt excluded. We were damned if we did, and damned if we didn’t.

We ultimately realized that democracy in the workplace doesn’t scale. Not everyone can have a voice on every decision. To even try to accommodate everyone results in peace treaties. They slow you down and ultimately sand the edges of what you’re trying to create.

Joel recommends addressing this problem head on: “as the boss, you need to design ways to reduce communications paths.”

This sounds harsh, because it runs counter to etiquette. We intrinsically feel that we need to communicate more to have a healthy office culture. To restrict communication feels impersonal.

Yet, there’s a fine line between etiquette and habit. The accepted code of behavior can actually be what is slowing you down. As you evolve, it’s good to question all of your conventions and decide whether you’re still well-served by what served you before.

Even J&J periodically questions their famous “credo”. CEO James Burke once instructed his executives to either recommit to the company credo or “tear it off the wall”.

It's a good discipline to continually challenge ourselves what etiquette is making us more successful and what should be torn off the wall.

definition of insanity

I’ve always liked the Albert Einstein quote, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." 

I recently started following the witting observations of @MeetingBoy ("Say or do something stupid in a meeting and I'll tweet it").  He's putting out a 2010 MeetingBoy calendar in the next week or so and asked if I'd create a cartoon to illustrate one of his tweets. So, this cartoon is based on one that I liked the most: “Definition of insanity: holding the same meeting with the same people every week and expecting different results.” 

Last year I heard Seth Godin speak in London. After his talk, someone in the audience asked Seth how he found enough hours in the day to be so prolific. Seth answered that he never had to go to meetings. This gave him an extra four hours a day than those in the audience who did. 

A month later, Seth wrote a great post called, "Getting serious about your meeting problem."  He squarely addresses the dysfunctional meeting habits that most businesses have and offers a few suggestions to break the cycle of meeting insanity, including these nuggets:

"Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?

Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don't, kick them out.

Remove all the chairs from the conference room. I'm serious."

First thing this week, I'm going to question all of the recurring meetings on my calendar, see which ones I can overhaul and which ones I can remove entirely.  Probably the best new year's work resolution I can make.

idea camouflage

I think that how you share ideas is just as important as the idea itself.  The most revolutionary idea, poorly articulated, will come across as mediocre and humdrum.

I've been playing around with this theme lately.  I think that many businesses struggle with how to share ideas.  We've all found ourselves in the audience in this cartoon, completely uninspired by one bullet-pointed slide after another.  Boredom is almost the conventional expectation when a speaker loads a PowerPoint presentation.

It struck me that this approach is like camouflage for ideas.  Ideas start to look alike when they're presented in the exact same format.  Rather than making the ideas stronger by presenting them consistently, they make them weaker.

The most successful presentation I ever gave was when I debuted a new product at a conference for sales brokers.  They had just seen one PowerPoint after another filled with positioning, benefit summaries, and competitive statements. 

My new product was a mop kit that was designed to take on the monopoly of P&G's Swiffer through design and sustainability.

I came onto the stage dressed like Jimi Hendrix playing air guitar to his song "Killing Floor" with a mop on a guitar strap.  Projected behind me was a Photoshopped image of Jimi setting the Swiffer on fire.  Wearing an afro wig and psychedelic shirt, I went through a discussion of why this innovation was as disruptive as Jimi's reinvention of "Pop" at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

This wasn't all theatrics.  I shared all the details and support points, but they were almost irrelevant.  The audience remembered the metaphor, not the details.  In the break, the brokers all wanted to talk about the mop.  My presentation scored the highest results in the broker conference poll, and I didn't use a single bullet point.

Now more than ever, the world desperately needs remarkable ideas.  But, the ideas need to be shared in a way that is just as remarkable.

As Jimi Hendrix once sang, "wave your freak flag high."

gallery of management consulting

I've been thinking about presentation style lately.  I'm gearing up for a big customer meeting and trying to avoid the "death by PowerPoint" trap.  Fortunately, I have a few cartoons up my sleeve.

Somehow the preparation reminded me of management consulting.  In business school, I was first blown away by the technical skill of ex-consultants who had been using PowerPoint as an extra appendage for years.  I felt inadequate when I saw some of their slides diagnosing a problem.

And then I realized that the same slides were being used over and over again.  They stopped being remarkable the more they were used.  They seemed less insightful. 

PowerPoint can be a persuasive tool when used in a way that tells a remarkable story.  But, far too often, they become just more clutter and filler.  Or worse, a crutch to cover up when there's no interesting story to tell.

So, I drew this cartoon as a personal reminder to avoid the two-by-two matrix and think outside of the deck.  I always find this Seth Godin Really Bad PowerPoint post useful. 

(On a related note, I'm excited to see Seth live on Tuesday when he gives a talk on his latest book in London.  Should be interesting, and I plan to post what I learn.)

Lastly, I've always enjoyed making fun of management consultants.  Here's one of my very first cartoons, from my business school series.