Before and After Reading "Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead"

Before

Are you ready for a transformation?

Then read David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan's new book, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History.

After

It's the Content, Stupid

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton's strategist hung a sign on the wall of his candidate's headquarters.

It was meant to constantly remind the campaign workers of their candidate's core message. 

The sign read, "It's the economy, stupid."

Most marketers need a similar sign.

Here's a true story.  A few months ago, I contacted the head of a tres chic social media marketing boutique to offer my service.  I described what I do as "content development."  Her reply: "What, exactly, do you mean by 'content development?'"

The reason so many efforts to capitalize on social media marketing are failing is easy to spot.

Sorry all you technologists (and tech-focused marketers), social media marketing is not about the technology.

The cover story in this month's edition of Wired, "The Web is Dead," makes a compelling argument for that.

Content, in the end, is the only thing customers care about, the article claims.  

Because content, not technology, is what's truly "transformative."

Apple's Steve Jobs has proven that.  He enriched himself not by developing technology alone, but by marrying it with content.  His vast fortune derives not from Apple, but from Pixar and iTunes. 

"Jobs is a mogul straight out of the studio system," the article states.  "Since the dawn of the commercial Web, technology has eclipsed content. The new business model is to try to let the content—the product, as it were—eclipse the technology.  Jobs and [Facebook's Mark] Zuckerberg are trying to do this like old-media moguls, fine-tuning all aspects of their product, providing a more designed, directed, and polished experience. The rising breed of exciting Internet services... also pull us back from the Web.  We are returning to a world that already exists—one in which we chase the transformative effects of music and film instead of our brief (relatively speaking) flirtation with the transformative effects of the Web."

The late founder of Sony, Akio Morita, made the same argument 20 years ago, when the Web wasn't yet born. 

After his company lost a costly wager on consumers' willingness to adopt the Betamax video format (they chose the VHS format instead), Morita realized Sony's future lay not in "gadgets," but in content.  So Sony purchased CBS Records Group and Columbia Pictures Entertainment.

It's the content.

George Orwell's Six Rules for Better Writing

In December 1945, just four months after completing Animal Farm, British novelist and journalist George Orwell wrote "Politics and the English Language," a cautionary essay on the hazards of bad writing.

Bad writing is dangerous, Orwell contends, because it's habit forming.

Like playing too many hours of video games or watching too much TV,
reading too much bad writing threatens our ability to think with care and precision. 

"The slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts," Orwell writes.

But sloppy thinking isn't the cause of most bad writing, Orwell says.  Haste and laziness are.  "The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy."

Fortunately, all writers aren't rushed and lazy.  For the "scrupulous" ones among us, Orwell offers six simple rules to apply "when instinct fails."  They are: 

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If at all possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

"These rules sound elementary, and so they are," writes Orwell, "but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable."

Sixty-five years later things have hardly changed. 

Imagine how much more effective the majority of marketing communications would be, if all writers followed his advice.

First Class: Chris Brogan's New Book on Social Media Marketing

Social media grand master Chris Brogan has written Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online.  It's the best book on the topic I've read.

Like many recent marketing books, Social Media 101 cobbles together blog posts (nearly 90) from the frightfully popular chrisbrogan.com.  

As a result, the book suffers somewhat.  Many parts are uneven and repetitious (although Brogan claims in the introduction that the repetition is intended).

But he more than makes up for those flaws by providing top-drawer technical advice.

And although the title implies the book is a survey for beginners, it's far more insightful than that.  Here are a just a few of the hundreds of gems in the book:

On technology.  "There really aren't many secrets about how things work in social media.  There are skills to learn, and then there are human traits to relearn."

On traffic.  "New communities grow by gently encouraging new immigrants."

On engagement.  "In social media, as in life, listening is twice as important as speaking."

On selling.  "Deliver great content and value, and then make your offer on the other side of it."

On authenticity. "Instead of going the route of old marketing, those who create content with the intent of building business relationships could try going the route of being honest, being genuine, being human. It's no more difficult than the alternative: crafting something that's dishonest, but perhaps shinier."

On strategy.  "Building icebergs that float away isn't the right way to implement social media in the company.  Instead, think about how to use the project as a pilot that might sway everything down the road; build it with an 'over there' flavor to start, and formulate a plan to make it the 'the main thing' and also plan for 'let's bury that mistake.'"

If you're at all reluctant to read Social Media 101, you can sample more of Brogan's writing by visiting his blog.

That should convince you.

New Book Advises Communicators: Watch Your Language

Michael Maslansky, head of a consulting firm founded by conservative pollster Frank Luntz, along with a trio of co-authors has written a handy and thought-provoking book for communicators, The Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics.

It's filled with tips for creating a "language of trust" by revising the words and phrases you use to inform and persuade today's "post-trust" audiences.

Maslansky's advice is research-based (which should comfort most business people) and anchored on the well-proven social theory that the emotional "frames" surrounding any subject ossify people's views on that subject.

Or as the author puts it, "The language of trust is based on a belief that your communication can change people's minds about an issue or product but rarely can you change that person's view of the world."

Maslansky neatly captures four principles communicators should follow if they hope to overcome an audience's skepticism: be personal, plainspoken, positive and plausible.

Of themselves, the four chapters devoted to these principles make the book worth reading.  But there's lots more good stuff inside the book, as well.

But don't trust me.

Read it and see for yourself.