Web Strategist Lab

Cool used to be amazing, strange and unattainable. Why was James dean cool? Or Bob Dylan? Were they just mavericks and that makes them cool? Then why isn’t John McCain cool? Or Tom Cruise?

The idea of cool, pretty much invented out of whole cloth in the sixties to reflect the fire that burned inside disaffected youth growing up in England after the war is old.  The first ones found their own path, and that aura migrated across the pond to America in the shape of fashion and music to combine with Andy Warhol and a clear hatred of the grey-flannel suit /organization man crowd. Thus, rock and roll, hippies, punks, slackers and hipsters.

The second companies realized people in that age group desired cool, it was marketers’ job to make everything appear cool.  Airplane travel, sunglasses, books, German cars, comedy variety hours, jeans, the list goes on.

The end is near

Then Gen X got a whiff of it, cried “bullshit” in their day (remember Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything not wanting to making anything processed or sold) and spend their youth avoiding it.  Their younger siblings learned that yes, all that crap sucked, but that nothing they did was going to change the commercialization of cool, so they might as well dance, so to speak.

This world has entered a phase where Toyota is doing a great job trying to sell Cool Minivans (aka swagger wagons) to grown up gen x-ers now that Dennis Hopper has died selling his kin on income planning and investment.

Cool is dead. It went comatose decades ago, but the marketing world kept it on life support for as long as it could because it had just learned how to leverage cool for their own uses. But we’re pulling the plug.

So what comes after cool? Before cool, there was conformity, before that there was loyalty and patriotism, and before that fear, and before that reckless abandon.

My guess? Freedom.

Freedom

This isn’t just about marketing or capturing a hindsight zeitgeist (like I did two paragraphs ago), but about thinking what will the world (more to the point, my world, the internet and capitalistic worlds) will desire.  It’s not about 40-yo dads at Wilco shows because they are terrified about growing old and uncool, but about looking at a broad sweep of anything and choosing what to believe in and what to enjoy.

Patton Oswalt penned an interesting article in Wired about the death of geekery and pop culture otaku nerdery.  He says the wide horizon of anything and everything being available to you at a moment’s notice to dive into deeply is actually destroying pop culture.  That as he was writing the article, someone was already writing the version of the same article in LOL speak and another as if written by the Hulk and another spoken over a Korean cover of a journey song. That was what was going to ruin pop culture.

Yes, maybe, and, no. His argument relies on cool as the primary currency. You can’t be cool outside of the Lost fan group if you know who Jack’s dad is, but you can’t be cool inside the group if you don’t.  Cool is the currency that determines the value of that knowledge. What if the currency devalues? Who cares if you know or don’t know a factoid. You can google (sure, I’ll just lower-case that word) it, right? If anything is available 24/7, there’s no cache is knowing or not. You’ve printed so much money, no one cares how much you have.

Hacking Is the New Cool

Freedom to choose your life is the new goal.  Look at the rise of hacking culture (not the g33ks in black t-shirts, but the people who are teaching us how to be better eaters, exercisers, workers, thinkers, time managers, completers, anything). Look at Tim Ferriss and his two books that challenge you to rethink everything you know about jobs and health.  Both NYT bestsellers. Or Getting Things Done and the cult that has formed around that. The garage tinkerers who love buying Ikea furniture and turning it into other prices of furniture that better fit their lifestyles.

This isn’t self help, who’s primary goal is to make you feel better, but about being better. The hacker has learned that they can lose weight if they stand at their desk in their day job, but can’t afford a $600-$1,000 standing desk, so they learn how to hack their existing desk for less than $50. They learn how to use existing tools to ditch their cable account and still watch Top Chef. They trade credit score secrets.

Hacking is the first step to understanding freedom. You can’t choose a thing if you can’t build, use, or change a thing.  We value the choices we make more if we have to work a little to make them happen.

Freedom to select your love and your job and your lifestyle is the new cool. It’s the kind of trend that will define the post-post-industrial age more than any other.

Proof: name the Internet meme that captured more awareness than the 2010 Iranian protests. Sure, you can, but there are only a handful, and they are all designed around kids. Turning your twitter icon green got people who don’t care about Bed Intruders to care about something that was happening on the other side of the planet.  Choice and freedom is good, getting more people to feel that choice and freedom is even better. Look at the fury over iPod assemblers having a bizarrely high suicide rate.  Look at the coverage over the Sudan, which, for the first time in a decade, is making the front page of the papers.

Cool is dead. Freedom grows up.

I’m still surprised by the number of people I work with, people in positions where strategy is clearly in their job description (if not their job title) who confuse strategy and tactics.

First, you have a goal. A goal should be tangible and measurable. Hitting a sales target is a goal. Being the #1 whatever (based on market share) is a goal. To be the most dominant force in the XYZ industry is a goal. Starbucks goal is to be the dominant coffee seller in the world (with a sales number attached to it, I would expect). Apple’s goal is to be the dominant seller of high-end personal technology products (and a sales number). Notice that neither of those goals has anything to do with anything. There’s no discussion of product lines, branding, corporate structure, etc. It’s the star that the company sails towards.

Strategy is the way in which you are going to attack those strategies in the broadest of strokes. It’s a focus on an audience, market, demographic, or region. It’s a focus on a new line of products that focus on a new audience. There can be multiple strategies, especially if the company is big. Some of Starbucks’ strategies would be: Getting the consumer to spend more outside retail stores or getting each customer to spend more per visit. Some of Apple’s strategies would be: Fill the niche between smartphone and laptop, or become the number one music retailer online.

Tactics are the actions, projects, programs, product families that support the strategy. For Starbucks, if the goal is to have a customer spend more money at each visit, the tactics might involve new non-coffee products.

If it helps, here’s a breakdown in outline form:

1. Goal
   1. Strategy
      1. Tactic
      2. Tactic
   2. Strategy
      1. Tactic

Starbucks

1. Goal: Become the world largest coffee seller (and sales target)
   1. Strategy: Get the customer to spend money on Starbucks outside of the retail outlet.
      1. Tactic: VIA instant coffee
      2. Tactic: Sell bulk coffee at more retail outlets (grocery stores, et al)
   2. Get each customer to spend more per visit
      1. Tactic: Introduce new egg sandwiches
      2. Tactic: New flavors of coffee
      3. Tactic: More types of mugs and coffee makers

Apple

1. Goal: Become the largest seller of high-end personal technology products
   1. Strategy: Focus on the niche between iPhone and laptop
      1. Tactic: Apple Air
      2. Tactic: iPad
   2. Strategy: become the largest seller of music online
      1. Tactic: Get the Beatles’ catalog on iTunes
      2. Introduce Ping

If you look at these lists, any of these tactics could become a series of projects, each with their own goals, strategies and tactics. Also, these strategies can support other strategies. For example: To support the strategy of becoming the largest online music distributer, the tactic is to get the Beatles. But what you may not know is that Apple doesn’t make much money on selling songs. They sell songs because having access to the world’s largest library of legal music means that more people will choose iPods over Zunes (which is a tactic inside a strategy that’s probably called something like “focus on non-computer products” which is in itself a tactic of a strategy called “How to get people who won’t buy Apple computers because they are too expensive to get a taste of Apple technology”).

In a nutshell, as a rule of thumb, on the back of a napkin, at the end of the day, I would just say that strategies are obvious (meaning, that anyone outside the company can see them and that they don’t surprise anyone) but tactics are where the surprise is. Anyone could have seen a niche between phones and laptops (strategy), but the surprise was a product called iPad.

Thanks Jerry Pollio at CMT Marketing for saying such nice things about The New Rules of Engagement!

His book is any easy read with lots of good, viable and useful search optimization information. By the way, this book helped him land a great position

You can purchase The New Rule of Engagement at Lulu.com.

Meta link: This is a link to Stephen Colbert’s dissection of the new Domino’s ad campaign. It does a perfect job embracing the combination of “Wait, are they idiots for admitting their pizza was disgusting?!” and “Wait, are they geniuses for admitting their pizza used to be disgusting” that came with my first viewing of the ad.

The premise, that Domino’s has listened to the customer and realized that maybe their pizza tastes (kindly) like ketchup-covered cardboard and has made changes to their primary product.

This whole campaign is a perfect prism to view so many changes and issues at play in American business today.  Here’s a sample.

1) A successful business isn’t one with a good product (pizza), but with a well-designed delivery system. (It’s not the product, but the business that we wrap around it that matters).

2) Even ketchup-covered cardboard, properly positioned and marketed, can be a billion-dollar industry (you hear that Twitter-haters who think that they will never make any money?).

3) This is an age of contrition. Financial, automotive and insurance failures have shown us that no one will take you seriously without an act of contrition. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or matters a lick (like driving “regular” cars to DC from Detroit or decreasing year-end bonuses by 10%), if there isn’t a CEO begging for forgiveness for past transgressions, we don’t want to hear it (and they said we couldn’t learn anything from the Japanese!  Though, I would rather we gotten better at manufacturing than at public opinion/political kabuki theater).

4) This is the end (for now) of the 20th-century model of marketing (who’s triumph remains Crazy Eddie’s shouting commercials). Now, marketers have to show how they actually listen to their audience (instead of just shouting at them) before pitching their horrible products at us. This is what the blogoshpere/web 2.0 hath wrought: a nod to the consumer (albeit a small one).

5) This may be the beginning of the end of “Us v. Them” marketing. Think of it. When was the last time you saw a commercial or marketing campaign who’s underlying principle is that the people pitching the product actually use the product? I’m not talking about paid spokespeople or testimonials, which still are designed, filmed and produced by people who never use that product, but about people who really like the product. Do you think that Jeff Bridges drives around California in a Hyundai? Or Kevin Spacey in a Honda? Aside from the Tony Stewart Actually Likes Whoppers campaign, this is the first where I get a sense that these people might actually eat pizza.

And this is how the marketing revolution begins, people. With an end to the lies. Sure, we’ve long ago stopped the bald-faced “Four out of five doctors smoke Lucky Strike” stuff, but we still live in a world of an underlying lie: that “Us” the marketers are different from “Them” the consumer.

In other circles, there’s the idea of rapport, that we build trust with people with whom we feel some connection. In the marketing world, this is quickly turned into “mass rapport” (which is why likable Jeff Bridges tells us about Korean cars made in Alabama and we listen: we liked his movies, so we must like him so let’s listen to what he’s got to say). But we are coming to the end of that idea as we all understand how easily it is to get Florence Henderson and Mr. T and Ewan McGregor and Keira Knightly and even dead John Wayne to say nice things about our products.

What we should be searching for is real rapport: you will like us because we are like you and we like this thing. Not a picture of someone who likes this product and pretends to be like you, but produced and developed by real people with real passion for the Whopper and the Diet Pepsi and SmartCar and Geico insurance. That rapport can only be faked for a little while, so maybe we can find real fans to build these commercials (And hey, the internet is letting people build those commercials for you: go look at youtube!).

Heck, let’s get crazy and actually BE the people who like these products and try telling the world about them.

I know. Crazy, right?

In yesterday’s Wall Street journal, Gary Hamel reveals “Management’s Dirty Little Secret,” that most of the actions a manager takes, even those in pursuit of an engaged workplace, are more likely to stifle enthusiasm than anything. He talks about the amazing new results of a survey to show this.

What this survey reveals is that Mr. Hamel (and, to be fair, most management experts) has never been a real employee. Everyone who has a boss knows that most of their job is to avoid the boss, avoid their wrath, avoid their eyeline, and even to avoid their interest. Most employees know that bosses are like Baby Huey, taking interest for the moment in something shiny (Ooo… an intranet! Ahh… we need a CRM system! Mmmm…  personalized URLs!), turning it into a “PROJECT” that you are now responsible for (and all the requisite administrative burdens therein regardless of intent or return), and wander away to the next shiny thing. Woe unto those who’s bosses are interested in what they are doing.

This, of course, discounts the idea that some employees need that kind of supervision to get things done. But most of the people I’ve ever met in the “creative class” (the survey indicates that as knowledge workers become commoditized, the real value is in those who can be creative in finding solutions) are self-starting, self-motivating people who want to do amazing work, but have to be overly concerned with the interference of their boss.

So maybe Mr. Hamel is just waking up to the fact that employees, the ones on the front lines talking to customers, the ones coming up with new products, or the ones actually doing the work are a valuable part of the process and should be treated as such. Praise onto thee, company who knows how to encourage and respect their employees!

Huh. So this is what happens when you treat every business like every other business (as a money machine who’s only need is growth at any cost)  and not as an idea unto itself.

From The New Republic, “Why can’t Americans make things? Two words: business school.”

A focus on financial instead of manufacturing leads to the commoditization of business itself. A well-run and well-managed company that has a crappy product and horrible service will succeed where a badly-run business selling a kill product will thrive. For example: XEROX, IBM, Digital, and every other company the Tom Peters/Jim Collins crowd talks about as being well-run vs Microsoft and the entire music industry who made money hand over fist despite having horrible management and seeming not to be able tot do anything right for years.

Just because you can take financial management models and replace the money with people doesn’t mean that’s a smart way to run a business.

For all the talk about what makes a good leader, one show is illustrating how hard it is to manage people. The trick of it is, most of its viewers have no idea they are getting crucial lessons on leadership. They think they are watching a “reality show” about hair salons.

Tabitha’s Salon Takeover should be required viewing for every MBA student in the nation. Somehow, in 44 minutes and commercials, someone is able to evaluate a business’ issues (be it personnel, systems, accounting, inventory, or leadership), get their hands dirty by showing what changes need to be made, and comes back weeks later to see if the changes have been successful (and have stuck).

If only business consultants could do as much.

Yes, knowing the industry helps. Yes, having a blonde British vixen show us yanks what fools we are is fun. But time after time, the lesson Tabitha teaches is: be honest and demand accountability. The rest is details.

How many businesses are run into the ground because the owner doesn’t know how to be honest, they don’t realize that choosing favorites creates division (especially when coupled with denials about having a favorite) , are scared to tell an employee that they aren’t doing a good job and then explode, seemingly without cause because those bottled up frustrations get out eventually, setting expectations for employees and holding them accountable for those expectations (and not letting an employee weasel out of a tough conversation with accusations of “I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to do that” or “I’m having a bad day”), and holding themselves accountable to their employees.

Side note. Yes, I was there the day an employee caught surfing naughty pictures online and was allowed to keep their job because they said, “You never said I couldn’t do that!” Oh really? Then why exactly were you trying to hide your actions? I never would have thought to try a trick like that. Not in a million years.

Anyway, there’s Tabitha, telling this employee that she needs more training directly and without equivocation (and there’s the employee’s ostensible boss, shaking with fear behind Tabitha, finally seeing what leadership is all about). And there’s Tabitha, explaining to the owner that not being there was creating a vacuum of power and no on was stepping in to fill it, thus leading the shop to certain doom unless they stepped up. And there’s Tabitha showing the salon employees, who are really self-employed for the most part, learning about marketing, the value of repeat business and up-selling.

No jargon. No bullshit. Just Tabitha saying what’s true and some people freaking out, creating unnecessary drama. Good TV.

Side note. I was working for a software company years ago who sold enterprise flooring software to flooring manufacturers, distributors and retailers. The software pretty much took over every part of the business, from inventory to AR/AP to POS. Well, here we were in LA, installing the software and training everyone (it took a week) on how to use it and on day one, one employee was relentless in voicing their complaints every time they perceived something as wrong. It went on all day and it was easy to see the effect it was having on everyone. At the end of the day, the owner gathered everyone together to thank everyone for their hard work and ended his speech with something along the lines of , “This new system is our future. If you don’t like this software, then you don’t like our future and I invite you to find your own future elsewhere.” The entire time he was looking at the one complaining employee and everyone knew it. The next day, that guy was a tiger, eager to learn everything he could about the new system.

That’s what real leadership is: being honest and demanding accountability from every player in the game.

Tabitha knows it.

Okay, just a short post on what I’ve been reading this year. This list is certainly not comprehensive, but maybe it’ll give you some ideas on what to read next.

Maybe this is the year we start re-writing/re-thinking the laws of marketing and business. Not just because of the economy and the crap that’s been happening the last few years (okay, on second thought, maybe they aren’t unrelated), we’ve started to move beyond the “Four P’s” and “Centralization v. Decentralization” conversations that have dominated the landscape for decades. Let’s get to the business of selling and leading by understanding. Yes, Covey got there first, but he’s a cult leader because he wants you to buy his Covey-branded organizer. This is a broader movement, taken by many in different directions, but under the banner of “Not better marketing, better products because of better understanding of the audience” and “No more ‘Us v. Them’ because we are all ‘Us!’”

Best Book of the Year: The Three Laws of Performance by Steve Zaffron & Dave Logan. Maybe the thing I like best about this book is that it is 200 pages. It doesn’t dawdle. It doesn’t try to impress you with a million examples. It’s not trying to pad the story along. It’s written with the confidence of two people who aren’t trying to curry your favor or win your respect. They know something you don’t and are willing to tell you if you’ve got the ears to listen. I want to send this book to every manager I’ve ever met and say, “No! Really! There is a better way!”

Fierce Leadership by Susan Scott. I know, crazy, right? Managers should stop parsing words and covering their asses, get their hands dirty with the “employees” and show some real candor. Maybe the name of this new era should be called “The End of Ego.”

Brain Audit/Masterclass by Sean D’Souza (psychotactics.com). I can’t tell if this guy is insane or just insanely great. It’s a tough call. Either way, he’s eating his own dog food with a big fork laughing the whole way home.

Tribes by Seth Godin. What else could I say about this book that someone else hasn’t (which is probably the antithesis of the internet, right)?

Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. Google should invent a pop-up application that’s embedded in Google Analytics a la “Clippy” that’s just an animated head of Avinash telling you what to do next. It will be full of chirpy wisdom that sounds like it was recorded by a helium-addled Robin Williams but actually help you. It will tell you to look for your BFFs and study your bounce rate. I will admit that I will repeatedly go to the definition page just to hear him tell me what the definition of a bounce is and crank the speaks up.  This guy is the Oprah of Web Analytics. If you aren’t reading him, you are only pretending to know what you’re talking about.

The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators by Eric T. Peterson. About as “getting your hands dirty with details” as a book can get, but it is full of smart ideas on how (and what) numbers to present.

The 50th Law of Power 50 Cent and Robert Green. I know. I didn’t think it would be any good, either.

Honorable Mentions:

• Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.
• Cult of Analytics by Steve Jackson.
• Same Game New Rules by Bill Caskey (Despite it being from 2003).

Hey! Where the hell is Tom Peters? I miss that maniac.

So, I finally figured what I needed to do to get things rolling (That sentence has been nominated as the “Most Vague Opening Statement (Blog Category, Over-35 Year Old Division)”) and hunker down and get it done. What did I do? I wrote a book.

The New Rule of Engagement: Actionable & Effective Web 2.0 Strategy for Non-Profits is self-published through Lulu.com at the moment. But I’m not planning on making it available just yet. The plan is to give it away to 50 Chicago-based non-profits during the holidays and try and build awareness that all these new ideas floating through mashable.com are not just for the dot-coms and the large enterprises. They can be done effectively (and in many cases better) by a non-profit with a little guts to try something new.

Once I send them out and try and create offline engagement, I’ll probably make it available as an electronic book, but I’ll have to see what my options are.

Not having written anything that substantial in many years, it was nice to see that I still know how to put these sorts of projects. I really love writing, but I tend to get caught up in the “surely someone else has thought of this” internal dialog and shut things down before they happen. And who knows, maybe this thing will die a quiet death and I’ll know that maybe I’m not as good as I think I am and have to take a new approach. But until that happens, if you know anyone in Chicago who needs a great (and published!) web strategist,  send them my way.

Oh, I also “wrote” a book called “The Perfect Notebook” which is a variety on the Muji Chonotebook (“variety” in that it uses some neat ideas it proposes and that it will be available online and not just Tokyo and NYC boutiques).  Once things get settled, I’ll shoot and market that and see what I can make happen.

That just seems like a simple maxim.