Marketing Dissector

Dissecting the risk inversion dud

One of my tweeps posted a link to Seth Godin's recent blog post--a replay of an 8-year-old post of his actually--about making choices in college and how "safe is risky."  Now Seth is a master at using witty syllogisms like "small is the new big" to grab our attention and try to teach us something. But occasionally, as in the case of "safe is risky," he lays an egg. If I'm going to call myself the Dissector, then let's get dissecting.

His statement assumes that we all agree that up to now, safe was safe and risky was risky, but that safe was not risky and risky was not safe. OK so far. On that premise, his assertion that safe is now risky introduces the idea that some radical change has occurred, so that safe now means its polar opposite.

Logically, this assertion fails two different ways. One renders it meaningless and the other generates a false conclusion. First, since safe and risky are opposites, then "everything" more or less falls under one or the other (and parsing it by degree doesn't alter this). As a result the practical meaning of Seth's assertion becomes "everything is risky." As such it fails to shock or instruct us. It's banal but harmless.

The second way may not be harmless. If you take away from his statement the corollary that "risky is safe" is also true, then you've reached what can only be seen as a false conclusion. It may be true in rare circumstances, but is it generally true--most of the time? No.

So my complaint with "safe is risky" is, it either a) says nothing or b) leads you to believe the falsehood that therefore risky is safe (or if you prefer, "safer"). Verdict? A dud on both counts. I don't know about you, but I have higher standards for words to live by.

People who actually take big risks for a living (and are successful at it) have no such cavalier attitude toward risk taking. They are expert at measuring it with exact precision. To them, the idea of taking a risk that was avoidable represents failure--not success. The suggestion that they ignore risk because they're so superior is pure hero-worship BS. If the pros take risk assessment seriously, what do you suppose amateurs and first-timers should do? Blindly take every risk you can, feeling safe and cozy in the warm glow of your favorite business guru? Wear your love of risk as a badge of honor to prove you're cool?

If you're going to take big risks--and there are plenty of good reasons to do so--you need to do it with your eyes open. You need to make the effort to understand, if not mitigate, the probable consequences. Failure to deal appropriately with risks does not make you a hero. It only makes you a dummy. The kind of dummy who dives into an empty swimming pool or drives the economy into a ditch dreaming up phony mortgage instruments based on bad loans. In the end, there's no glory in that.

Wait wait--don't get rid of your messages!

In service to the art and value of conversation, it's become common for writers, bloggers, social media experts and digital consultants to advise B2B marketers to ditch their messages.  Nuke 'em.  Give them the old heave-ho.  Set those nasty old things on fire, because it's much easier than fixing them. Etc.

While well-intentioned, this is really bad advice. Messages have really important uses other than the ill-advised spraying of interruptions from the message machine gun. 

Messages are the most useful tool for deciding what you want to say and how to say it. Even the most gifted speaker benefits from going through a messaging exercise.  The purpose is not to write a speech (though it sure helps if you need to do that).  The purpose is to prepare yourself to have the best conversation you can with your customer or prospect. And provide tools that help you present your story, ideas and supporting evidence in the most effective way. That includes deciding how to organize your ideas and also make them memorable for you to help you deliver them.

Most people don't have much experience with message-driven, preparation-guided conversation.  I'm not talking about verbatim scripting or reading prepared speeches. It's about being well-prepared to talk extemporaneously. Very few ever argue a case before the Supreme Court, but there are other, more common examples. Job interviews. Court testimony. Tax audits.Yes, the Big Sales Pitch too--but only if it's a dialogue and not a monologue.

What you actually want to do is teach your messages how to talk.  They need to learn how to carry on a conversation.  They must not be static or anti-social.  They can't be rigid, or bumper stickers. They must be messages that are organized around themes, premises, sub-plots, useful tangents and side trips, anecdotes, little human interest stories, parables and the like. They must be flexible and adaptable and dynamic, so they can fit into a variety of conversational settings and contexts. They must have memorable little hooks or trigger points, that help remind you when to trot out each, and why, and which "flavor" to use in which contexts.

In other words, messages as the stuff of conversations.

Once you discover a way of presenting your story in conversation that's effective, you ought not abandon it.  Messages can provide a meaningful framework that helps you repeat that conversational success.

Don't get rid of your messages.  Send them to conversation school.

Under the surface of Twitter permission issues

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If you repeat a tweet, and no one receives it more than once, is it still spam?

It’s time to take a closer look at Twitter spam. How is Twitter currently defining spam? Setting aside account hacks and DM spam that are clearly more about security than permission, the major area Twitter has chosen to regulate is repeat tweets. Violating Twitter’s spam policy can get you banned. In October they issued a statement clarifying the repeat/recurring tweet ban that said,

“We don’t want to see any duplicate tweets whatsoever … They pollute Twitter.” 

But there are many times in which a Twitter user might consider a repeat tweet not only non-offensive, but welcome.  Twitter policy fails to acknowledge this or any exceptions or nuances. Apparently they’ve decided to deal with it on a case-by-case basis—at least for now.

Marketers using Twitter, both for ourselves and/or our clients, face a bit of uncertainty when we try to parse best practices vs. common ones vs. Twitter policy. We could do with a bit more specificity as to what is prohibited and why and a lot more discussion, user input and guidance in the gray areas.

Twitter's policies raise a number of questions that are left unanswered. You can read the questions we've raised, and our conclusions, in this guest post at B2Bbloggers.com.

Fresh from the content pastures

NYU Professor Jay Rosen posted a fascinating interview yesterday at Read Write Web with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt.  The subject was, of course, "content farms" and the question of whether or not they in general or Demand Media in particular are filling up the Internet with crap content. Rosen's questions were pointed but fair (he avoided using the term "Demonic")--and Rosenblatt's answers were surprisingly plausible as he defended his company.

It went something like this (100% paraphrased):

Q:    "Word has it you run a sweat shop and abuse the cows."

A.    "Not true. Our content cows are contented.

Q:    "Word has it you sells lots of flavors of milk.

A.    "That's right. We research what flavors people want and then produce them."

Q.    "Is your milk safe? Word has it you cut corners in the production process. What does that do to the quality?"

A.    "We only sell safe milk. We only produce milk that people want AND that can be produced within our low cost structure. And we have a lot of QA and quality control measures in place."

Q.    "Word has it your milk business is a slave to the search engines."

A.    "No. Our milk can be found by search, but also by individual human referrals (like Bit.ly) and social search as well."

Q.    "Any interest in getting into the news business?"

A.    "No, there's too much competition--too many news farms. Plus we haven't figured out a way to produce news within our low cost structure."

Given our previous post ("The abundance of scarcity"), we think the interview is a must-read. (Thanks to @ConversationAge for tweeting this.)

Washed up? Isn't that what Waves do?

In the few weeks since my post on Google Wave and the difficulty of achieving success in the collaboration space, the blogosphere has really started throwing Google Wave under the bus.  Although my own invite didn't arrive until a week ago, some of the digerati and early testers who've been thrashing about Wave for months are complaining about the steep learning curve and the lack of use cases. They're openly calling it a failure.

Writing today, Jolie O'Dell at Read Write Web minced no words in listing Google Wave first among her Top 10 Failures of 2009:

"Google Wave sucked. ... we started thinking about use cases. And the more we struggled to understand and use this product, the more frustrated and bored we became. Blame it on the steep learning curve. Blame it on our misunderstanding the product. Mount whatever feeble defense you like, but techies know Wave was a flop."

Richard Darell, writing last week at BitRebels, offered a much more detailed assessment in his post, "How Google is failing the launch of Google Wave."  But the conclusions were about the same:

"In the demoing that Google held it was apparent that the application was no where near completed and almost not up to public beta either. The many failures during the demo proved this ... somewhere along the line Google missed the opportunity to impress us. Somewhere along the line they stopped thinking about what was beneficial for us using this new and free service. 

...Google is failing miserably launching this quite potentially powerful application. And the reason why is due to the fact that they don’t seem to be able to see where the potential lies. They specifically announced that they want the community to develop 3rd party tie-ins for Google Wave but wouldn’t it be a good idea to solve the “un-syncing” problem first then? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to work a little more on the actually engine to prevent fall outs and lag?

...If Google doesn’t look at their strategy one more time and closely this time I am afraid the “Golden Time Frame” will just pass them by where people see the unique and ultimately cool features and possibilities of Google Wave."

If it's any consolation at the Googleplex, O'Dell was equally scathing in her critique of Twitter in 2009, ostensibly for "failing to innovate" and buy up start-ups, but in the end mainly for allowing the Fail Whale to wear out its tenuous welcome. She wrote, "worst of all, we are still consistently experiencing downtime at a level that is unacceptable for any major web app. Google couldn't get away with this kind of failure; why should Twitter be allowed to do so?"  Why indeed.

[NOTE: Update to old mantra, the Revolution will not be televised. Neither, apparently, will it be hosted--unless somebody can manage to keep some data centers up and running. Bulletin to all would-be revolutionaries and game-changing innovators: remember that you'll most certainly fail if you can't keep the trains running on time.]