Marketing Dissector

Steven Parker passed away July 13, 2011. His family thanks you for your interest in his work.

The Tao of Twitter [review]

If you're a B2B marketer, and you're not following Mark Schaefer's {Grow} blog and community, you should. Likewise, if you're active on Twitter and are wondering how to make all that time you're spending not only fun but productive, then grab a copy of Schaefer's new book The Tao of Twitter. You'll be glad you did.

Tao is an appropriate term for what Schaefer gives us in this book. It could have been "gestalt," but tao is probably more familiar to a wider audience. I like to think of Tao as the Twitter guidebook. The author literally walks us through his Twitter experience over the past few years: getting on, learning the basics, experimenting, sorting out unanswered questions, trying to keep up with changes, thinking through implications and discovering the meaning and lessons of this new way of communicating. Throughout the book, Schaefer continually asks, "what does this mean for marketers?" and gives his assessment.

Rather than lecturing, finger-wagging or boasting, he reports on his Twitter experiences casually and informally, like you would conversing with a friend. He exposes his goofs and hesitancies and offers sage advice based on learning by doing. Twitter is "learn-as-you-go" for everyone, but Schaefer's book tells us how he did it. If I'd had this book in '09, it would have greatly reduced my "time-to-effectiveness" as I fumbled around on Twitter.

As with his blog, which has gathered a big following in a short time, his writing is concise and clear. It makes for a quick and engaging read. Not only that, it's an accessible read. In my case I read the Kindle version. On my Droid. Mostly during down times at my daughter's soccer games and kung fu lessons. I love printed books--they take up enormous space in my office--but the mobile format allowed me to read Tao during a period when I really had no time at all to read a book.

Here are a few key takeaways from Tao for engaging with people on Twitter in ways that may help you develop your business:

• The 3 key elements of business benefit are targeted connections, meaningful content and authentic helpfulness (the latter being the secret sauce of Twitter)
• Being helpful fuels business serendipity. (How about "good deeds lead to good leads"?)
• Twitter is fundamentally a person-to-person medium (not broadcast)
• Start out small, and focus--a little effort goes a long way over time
• Choose your followers just as carefully as who you follow
• Be patient, plant seeds and allow them to grow (or should I say "{Grow}?)
• Where else can you, in effect, "pre-populate business relationships"?
• Once you get the hang of it, Twitter can be an amazing business networking tool, almost like no other

Anyone who has been active on Twitter for a while will recognize the paths Schaefer goes down and identify with his story. By its nature this book may be most valuable for Twitter newbies who are just getting started. (It's best to hire your sherpa at the beginning of your journey vs. three-quarters of the way through.) But even for very experienced veterans, there are insights and tips here that may be quite helpful--especially for marketers. Regardless of your Twitter skill level, most readers will find at least a half dozen insights and tips that are fresh and new and make it well worth reading.

As Schaefer says, on Twitter "There is a majestic random synergy that holds the potential to impact your life daily ... if you know what you're doing." So what are you waiting for?

The Double-on-Sax Effect: my secret formula for creative collaboration

My friend Tony and I have worked together for years. During this time he’s worn many creative hats: researcher, copywriter, content advisor, video producer, event stager and of course story teller. For the most challenging and subjective creative assignments, like naming a company or product, we’ve learned that we always produce better results if we collaborate. I always assumed it was a simple case of “two heads are better than one.” But recently Tony shared an insight with me about our collaboration that made a light bulb go on.

His insight was about the strengths we each bring to our creative “odd couple.” He is primarily creative and secondarily analytical, and I am the opposite. This was news to me. But as soon as I realized he was right, I began to wonder, “What is the advantage?” Is there an insight here that helps explain how much better we are as a team than as individuals?

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EVEN A PRESIDENT can double on sax (right). President Clinton at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1993. Photo Courtesy of William J. Clinton Presidential Library.

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As a result, I developed a theory I call the "Double-on-Sax Effect," which is a way to think about creative collaboration. (“Double-on-sax” is musician-speak for being able to play one or more instruments in addition to your primary one.) The idea is that if two people collaborate on a creative task, they may produce far better results if each has a secondary skill that complements the other’s primary skill. In effect, the skills are amplified. Here’s a simple way to look at it. Imagine the creative task expressed as distance. Say the distance from problem to satisfactory solution is 50 feet. If each of the collaborators is capable of advancing 30 feet, you quickly know two things. First, neither can reach the goal alone, but second, by working together, they just might succeed.

A possible lesson from this is somewhat paradoxical. Collaborating with someone fundamentally similar to yourself might still yield a better outcome than not—so long as there are some ways that you differ—even if the differences seem secondary or unimportant.

Our experience suggests that tight pairings or small groups of people tag-teaming a creative problem may produce better outcomes than say, the crowd-sourcing approach. With crowd-sourcing there’s a feeling of collaboration, but in reality you're still picking a winner Darwin-style from individual contributions. This is distinct from the wisdom of crowds concept, in which the crowd’s individual contributions are aggregated into a collective judgment in the form of a group rating, review or decision.

 

Among tech start-ups there's a common practice of naming the company or product by getting all the engineers together to brainstorm over cold pizza and diet cherry coke. In my experience, it always generates good vibes and but never a good name.  HR win, marketing fail.  (For more on this, here's an interesting post by @ProfessorGary.) Part of the reason might be because instead of collaborators with different, complementary views, you have lots of people with essentially the same mindset.  That doesn’t expand the consideration set.

If you're interested, there's a great book that leaves my amateur theorizing behind and delves into the science: "Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration," by Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, a professor at Washington University. In it there are examples of the power of collaborating in small groups, including the story of how "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" were not so much the result of authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis working alone in their lofts, but of the weekly bull sessions they participated in at Oxford in the 1920s. They were more like collaborators and strongly influenced each other’s work.

It’s always difficult and subjective to judge a piece of creative work, whether it’s art or commerce, and whether it was the product of one person or a team.  But there are plenty of examples, in many fields, of outstanding collaborations.  A great recent example is this TED performance of Halvorsen’s “Passacaglia” by violinist Robert Gupta and cellist Joshua Roman (embedded video).  Listening to their performance makes it easy to understand how, despite their great individual talents, a solo by either would be so much less than the duet.

So take a look at your team. Or your extended team. And if you find anyone who "doubles on sax," whose skills or experience or viewpoint complements your own, why not try your own experiment in creative brainstorming? You might be in for a pleasant surprise.

When is ignorance bliss? When it helps you ask the right questions.

One day, while writing a press release announcing a new software product, I learned that lack of knowledge made me the most qualified for the job.

This was many moons ago while working for a hot software startup. The product was an assembly language utility (or “assembler”) that translates code to give hardware-level instructions to the microprocessor. 

You practically had to wear an Intel bunny suit just to think about this stuff. It made your brain hurt.

I was interviewing the product manager and struggling with the subject. I wasn’t a coder at any level, beyond playing with a few lines of Basic.  I couldn’t visualize how the process worked or what the software did for you.  In the middle of this interview the product manager said something that stunned and educated me about what I was attempting to do. 

He said, “Steve, you’re worried that you don’t know anything about assembly.  But that’s what makes you qualified to write the release.”

To which I replied, “Huh????”

He repeated.  “That’s what makes you qualified.”

On further investigation, I discovered what he knew that I didn’t.  This guy was very smart.  Before joining my software company, he taught English as a second language to Taiwanese students. In Taiwan!  Here’s how he saw it:

• He knew about assembler and about the product (obviously since he was the product manager);
• He knew a great deal about translation, which, as it turns out, is what assemblers do (and also why someone with his background was hired for the job);
• He knew I had no prior knowledge or experience with assembly language programming;
• He knew the trade press editors I was writing for also rarely had hands-on knowledge or experience with assembly language;
• He knew I had basic journalistic skills and experience to ask questions and capture information and report it coherently IF I understood it;
• He surmised that my lack of knowledge would cause me to ask just the right type of questions to act as a surrogate for my audience;
• Being a decent writer himself, he knew that my asking the right questions was the key factor in gaining the kind of information I needed; and,
• He reasoned that I would probably present the product information in ways the editors would understand better than anyone else at the company, who all knew more about it (and therefore wouldn’t ask the right questions). 

So those were my “qualifications” for the writing assignment.  What looked like none actually were some.  I couldn’t see it until he pointed it out with clever irony.

I’ve learned a lot from some great product managers over the years.  But this had a big impact on me.  I never thought lack of knowledge could be an asset.  But it can.  Anything that helps you ask the right questions, capture the information you need and tell the story in a way that makes sense in context to your intended audience is a very important asset for content marketers.

That’s what makes it fundamental.