Alpha Mind Blog

Brett Favre today held a press conference to clear up the misconception that his signing with the Minnesota Vikings is “a done deal.”

“No,” said Favre, “There’s still an important condition to be met. I’d like the Vikings management to demonstrate that, if I play on their team, their fans will spell my name correctly when they discuss me on the Internet.”

“I loved playing for Green Bay, really I did,” Favre went on. “Those were great years. And I almost got used to my fans not knowing how to spell Favre. It’s a tough name, you know. I understand that. But when the morons wouldn’t even learn my first name, mother—” (Rest of quote redacted.)

P.S. Brett’s right not to expect Minnesotans to get Favre right. The world at large can’t seem to do it. Note Twitter’s trending topics from this morning:

What kind of legacy can you have if nobody will teach their kids where to look you up in the record books?

Twitter hashtag chats are wonderful. A little overstimulating, but hey.

Problem is, when a chat is really lively and brisk, serious untruths can fly by and not get corrected.

Example: in Beth Harte’s #pr20chat of August 5, @brandingexpert inserted this tweet:

Don’t EVER forget that branding is purely about generating more revenue, no matter what any “guru” preaches.

I’m not a guru, much less a “guru,” so I suppose I could have avoided getting on this guy’s wrong side just by keeping quiet.

But he’s wrong.Very emphatic, he is. And wrong.

Branding is about effectiveness.

Branding is about effectiveness. No matter what any “expert” preaches.

First, not every entity which (or who) might develop a brand is a for-profit entity. While it’s true that Amnesty International is very effective at fund-raising because of its brand equity, funds are only a part of what it gathers in order to be effective. AI can collect thousands of signatures on a petition in very short order because of its brand. The persons saved from disappearance and torture are the measure of AI’s effectiveness, and its brand leads to that effectiveness.

Ralph Nader is a brand. He developed his brand equity by doing exactly what he wanted to do and doing it well. Like AI, he can mobilize vast support for a cause. That he’s done pretty well financially is perhaps a side effect; it’s not his primary aim. If he made it his primary aim, his brand equity would help him achieve it. In short, his brand can help him be effective at anything that doesn’t contradict his positioning.

Of course, most participants in #pr20chat do most of their work for for-profit companies, so the above might seem a minor quibble. But @brandingexpert’s dictum is untrue for those companies as well.

Choking on revenue.

I believe the following is true although it’s seldom talked about:

When Congress set out in the early 70s to restrict cigarette advertising, the tobacco companies protested. On the principle that they needed to protest anything that challenged their freedom of action. But the legislation was passed that forbade TV advertising. Big tobacco lost that battle. And on that day, in the privacy of their boardrooms and C-suites, they were all grins.

Why? Because they’d been engaged in rent-dissipating advertising wars. Rent dissipation: that’s the economists’ schmancy term for throwing away profits. And all those squandered profits had been lost because the players had been brand-building in pursuit of revenues. And they kept doing it despite the huge portions of those revenues that were required to keep them on the brand-war treadmill.

They were in a bind. With little real product differentiation, their branding was driven and defined by advertising, and with lots of competitors, they had to pour major resources into branding. But they weren’t really happy about it. Not nearly as happy as they’d be after their hands were tied and their profits soared.

Other companies aren’t necessarily in the same bind. They can squander profit not because they’re forced to, but simply because they’re naive enough to believe “experts” who tell them branding is about revenue. They can take their eyes off profit long enough to lose a good deal of it.

How to correct while agreeing

Two people retweeted @brandingexpert’s tweet. I assume that means they agreed. Most interesting, though, was a tweet from Kathy Moore (@kathy_moore), to whom @brandingexpert had directed his wisdom. She corrected him even while seeming to agree:

@brandingexpert righto! good branding should ultimately deliver bottom line results

So [scratches head], does Kathy actually think that revenue and bottom-line-results are the same thing? Or was she correcting brandingexpert, knowingly and slyly?

Life is full of enigmas. In the twitterverse, they fly by so fast one might not even notice they’re enigmas. It takes a pretty fat fast canary to catch them.

If a public apology to Christopher Penn and John Wall is necessary, this is it.

Chris Penn has written a good response to my last post. John Wall (in a comment on both Chris’s post and mine—same comment both places), has gotten a little defensive, but then perhaps I was a little offensive.

Look, folks, these guys are not Nazis, or neo-Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers, or anything of the kind. They’re marketing gurus of the first rank. And one of them got a little careless in how he worded a recommendation—the same recommendation I would make—that we understand fear-mongering in its worst form.

Most of the impetus for my post was simply how weird it was that Chris Penn mentioned Goebbels the same day I recorded a podcast that talked about both Chris Penn and Nazism.  (Not to mention that I listened to his podcast within 24 hours of reading Drucker’s scary book on totalitarianism.)

In addition to Chris’s post, he and John devote a goodly chunk of this week’s Marketing Over Coffee podcast to discussing the importance of understanding Goebbels, not so we can emulate him, but so we can see through those who do. Chris definitely gets it.

It’s almost as if some spy went and told Seth Godin and Christopher Penn what I was saying about them when I recorded Episode -2 last week. Each of them seems to have gone out of their way to underscore my point.

Seth talks about the importance of standing for something.

And Chris recommends Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels as a marketing guru.

In Seth’s case… his post aligns with what I said fairly neatly. When he writes about standing for something, he doesn’t talk about being ethically upstanding, merely consistent. But the simple fact is that the kind of consistency he recommends is a hallmark of the ethically mature. And the extreme of inconsistency is the mark of the shyster.

And as I said in the podcast, Seth doesn’t make his point as if from a position atop some “Mr. Ethics” pedestal. But this particular post is perfectly consistent with the theme of respect for the customer, a leitmotif running through all Seth’s work.

Then there’s Chris Penn.

Oy!

My point about Chris in the podcast was that I don’t see in him the sort of broad concern for the human condition that I detect in Godin and see epitomized in Drucker.

And Chris didn’t merely reinforce my point, but almost parodied it, recommending Goebbels as “your go-to guy” for how to do fear marketing.

Here are Chris and John Wall in last week’s Marketing Over Coffee:

Chris: …it’s one of those things in the marketing world people really really really don’t like to talk about, because it’s almost taboo, but if you go and read the works of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, and stuff like that and stuff like that, and go back and read what he did and how he did it and stuff like that, he’s basically the almost the father of fear marketing. In the sense that you know you need to pick, you need to artificially divide people into groups, you need to pit those groups against each other, you need to have a villain and a scapegoat of some kind so that you get these archetypes of drama that work incredibly well for motivating people to do what you want them to do. And if you’ve decided that’s part of your marketing strategy, Goebbels is the go-to guy if you really want to take those tactics on. If you obviously if it comes out that you’ve been using Nazi propaganda books as the—

John: —foundation of your marketing strategy—

Chris: —exactly, you may have some backlash there. But—

John: —that’s the kind of information your competitors will get about you and so—

Chris: Exactly.

John: —as part of their campaign.

Chris: Best to keep those books at home, guys.

John: Or read them at the library when, and don’t check them out. These days I think there’s no security left on that… once it makes your list it’s on the list.

Chris: exactly…

To his credit, Chris has responded to an email he received from someone who had the same concern about all this that I have. But sadly, his response doesn’t convince me he understands the gravity of recommending Goebbels. In particular, both the podcast and Chris’s response suggest that John and Chris fail to see the distinction between marketing segmentation and the “artificially dividing people into groups” that was the linchpin of Goebbels’s work. Distinguishing between cost-conscious and style-conscious consumers is hardly the same as dividing humankind into a master race and a people worthy to be stuffed into ovens.

Somehow four or five days elapsed between recording last week’s episode and uploading it, which happened only a few minutes ago. (The delay was mostly due to a lot of experimentation with post-production techniques, and some Vista hassles.)

In Episode minus 2, I introduce Peter Drucker as a guiding light of the Alpha Mind Podcast. I also introduce the alternating-episodes approach I’ll be taking in the ‘cast, modeled after Drucker’s career-long alternation of management books with ones on broader social issues.

I also compare Seth Godin and Christopher Penn to Drucker, and one of them comes out looking pretty good.

Drucker was passionate about management because he cared deeply about the human family. He had also seen (up close, very close) that perfectionist political systems were deadly. He believed that the organizations that make up a free and pluralist society can do much to further human happiness—if run well. And so he loved teaching us how to run them well.

When I started the Alpha Mind blog over three years ago, my goal was to have a podcast join the blog within a few months. In reality, my service to the church and some other constraints kept me from launching the podcast.

Now, I find myself ready to do it, and am counting down the 4 weeks until launch.

I’m not just counting, though. I’m making preliminary and somewhat experimental episodes. There will be 4 of them, numbered from -3 (minus 3) up to 0 (zero). After that, of course, comes Ep. 1 and the real launch of the podcast.

Episode -3 is about the Galveston Flood of 1900, and about how the city got its present seawall, but got it a bit late, after 6 to 8 thousand people died in the 1900 hurricane.

The episode also mentions the Pig War, the last armed conflict between the U.S.A and Great Britain, and without doubt the jolliest, happiest, shiniest war in American history.

And amid all that compulsive story-telling, there really is a how-to lesson in being a thought leader, which goes something like this:

If you’re going to influence people, and they’re going to make important decisions, it helps to be right. History will be nicer to you that way.

Seth Godin in an unusually arch rant about an editor’s work on his manuscript:

Just got some work back from a new copyeditor hired by my publisher. She did a flawless job. She also wrecked my work. Totally wrecked it.

By sanding off every edge, removing every idiom, making each and every fact literally correct, she made it boring and dry and mechanical.

It reminds me of Kathy Sierra’s excellent post—one of her classics, I think—called “Keep the sharp edges!” Kathy’s post focuses mostly on how committees are incapable of producing the remarkable, because groupthink is naturally a process by which rough edges and sharp corners are sanded smooth. In product markets, she goes on to say, product become more and more alike through this process.

Seth is writing about a single person’s effect on his work, but he acknowledges it’s a matter of corporate (i.e. shared) responsibility.

I need to be really clear. She’s not at fault. She did exactly what she was supposed to do. The fault lies in the job description, not the job.

When I buy a book by Seth Godin, I want it to sound like Seth Godin, not like Seth strained through several layers of bleached muslin.

It’s a lesson that is hard-won in my own life. I’m a reasonably facile writer, but a long period of my life, my first 30 years in fact, was one great writer’s block. What broke me out of it was to learn that while knowing proper English is a very good thing, when one writes, propriety had better not be the goal, you need to go for effectiveness.

I can be more concrete. I used to fuss over poetry manuscripts, because I couldn’t find a way to say what I wanted to say in a way that was both stylistically powerful and grammatically perfect. The revelation for me was when I was listening for the zillionth time to “Fun Fun Fun” by the beach boys. And I suddenly realized that the first two lines are both abominable English and a work of rare genius.

Let me remind you.

Well she got her daddy’s car and she cruised to the hamburger stand now.

See she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now.

That second line is purt-near unparseable. It’s also perfect, absolutely perfect. A gem, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It captures the late 50s in a drop of clearest amber.

A dear friend of mine in Berkeley recently pointed out that I’m the only person she’s heard use the word “bodacious” since 1982 or so. I think she might have meant it as a criticism. I can only smile. I don’t use the word often, but when I think about excising it from my vocabulary, the prospect strikes me much the same as if somebody at Coke pointed out they could use a tiny bit less syrup in the drink and nobody would notice. Brand dilution.

Dowsing for clients: Seth, B. L. Ochman, and my business card

Seth Godin has everything to do with why I spent almost 50 hours creating my latest business card.

In case you went and looked at that post but didn’t read B.L. Ochman’s comment, I’ll repeat it here:

…when I had my own PR firm, in another life, I used to do something very similar to your new card. But frankly, i think there are more simple ways to make the point.

B. L. misses something important: My card is not just a way for me to tell something, but, and just as importantly, to learn.

When somebody phones me on the basis of that card, I know they’re already, in a very important way, a qualified prospect. They’re somebody I’ll be able to work with.

That card puts me on probation before I ever even talk to the prospect. And if I’ve passed that probation, the prospect has as well. Lots of people will toss that card, seeing me as a weirdo. The ones who call will be see me as their kind of weirdo. And in working together, that will make all the difference.

I’m dowsing not for clients but for the kind of clients I want to work for. If I don’t find them, I’ll just keep writing what I want to write, record some podcasts and preach the gospel, and earn the right to do those things by digging ditches if that’s what it takes.

A fine, quick lesson in persuasion from Andrew Cline at Rhetorica. Worth checking out even if only to learn the spiffy word “enthymeme.” Say it over and over. What a great word!

A bit more about Rodrigo Sepulveda’s little problem with Facebook:

Last week, through PRobecast, I learned about the 2-word pitch. Very simply, it’s a pitch consisting of “‘Google’ + [one other word]“. Of course, you can only use it if you ensure that the second word is a search term which, when entered into Google, will bring up your site.

It may be a solution for over-zealous scanning algorithms on over-yenta social media sites that don’t want you ever to send one of their users out to another domain. Rodrigo is probably right that Facebook, like YouTube, scans messages and disallows URLs (although YouTube practices prior restraint–it scans as soon as you hit the “post” button, and disallows the comment if it contains a URL).

The solution, of course, is not to use the URL, but to tell your friends what to Google. And of course, it doesn’t have to be a single word. If your site contains a unique combination of terms (remember GoogleWhacking?), Google will bring folks to your site. And YT and FB will probably let you do it without whinging.

Scoble says Facebook still sucks. His evidence: The eviction of Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda from the social site’s hallowed halls.

Herewith a continuation of what will surely be a series about how and why technology doesn’t work. Why so SO SO much of technology doesn’t work.

Soon, I hope, I’ll start writing about why everything’s busted. For this post, though, in addition to the above links, I’ll only note that after Lee Hopkins asked his readers how to manage personal information, and the comments ran 3 to 0 in favor of low-tech, he has gone with the new flow and shopped for the proper configuration of pen and paper.