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Technology

The Myth of Solid Ground

chrisbrogan · September 12, 2018 ·

https://www.flickr.com/photos/perspective/26160548319 Robots already vacuum the floors in lots of people’s homes. They mow lawns. They deliver things in some cities. It looks weird and futuristic until it somehow looks normal and commonplace. We rarely see the “future” when it’s already here.

We Make the Future Invisible Because We Want Solid Ground

I’ve spent a lot of my career on the other side of the hill from where most people are doing business. When people were just getting comfortable with fax orders, I was seeing that this web thing might be more important. When people built their first websites, I saw that tools like Twitter would be a powerful opportunity to reach out and connect with people in a better way. It’s not at ALL that I’m smarter. It’s that I’m willing (maybe even primed) to see how to slot “what’s next” into “what we do right now.” In some ways, that’s because I’m willing to throw away what I have right now in any aspect of my business.

The Myth of Solid Ground

The number one professional “complaint” I hear right now when advocating for a new strategy or the adoption of a new technology is this: “But I just got good at doing X.” It’s at this moment as a business advisor that I often have to gently say, “Doing X isn’t your core business. It’s a tool to earn you more customers. Be willing to throw it out.”

Ooh that bugs people.

We humans love to absorb something new, process it, and then forget about it. We love to master skills and then do nothing more with that skill. It’s like there’s a yellow “unprocessed” status, then a “green” status when we figure something out, and then we set it to “grey” and “this is how it will always be” status. Does that resonate with you? But, that’s the challenge.

Everything changes. That’s the big issue. The definition for “LIFE” even says “…including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.”

Continual change IS PART OF THE DEFINITION OF LIFE!

Movement is Life. Nothing is Permanent. There is No Solid Ground.

Accept that robots are here. Accept that people are shifting from desktops to laptops to mobile to possibly “computerless” interactions. (Things like Alexa, Google Home, etc.)

Be open to the perception that almost every job that exists today might likely shift with the advent of artificial intelligence, and before that, simply from changes that technology and tools bring to the world around us.

Self-driving cars mean that people won’t make as many impulse stops, but it also means they’ll increase their browsing/screen/entertainment/learning/shopping time even more than now (which is at 6 hours a day).

Hold Onto ONLY The “Thing”

Whatever it is that constitutes your primary pursuit, that’s how you need to keep aligning your business efforts. The “how” of this will likely change a lot. Even the “what.” If anything, focus mostly on the “who.” Who are you serving? What do they need right now? What else do they need? What’s coming along that will make what I do for them unnecessary? Is there something else I can learn to do to replace that?

It’s not scary, the lack of solid ground. It’s just we need a shift in YOUR efforts. From “mastery” to “continual learning.” People will need people for quite some time to come. You have a role in helping others. It’s just the mechanics and other details that will likely change a lot in the coming years. (It’s already happening, but change is so hard to perceive until it’s fully in place.)

Where are you holding on a little too tightly to your “solid ground?”

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And thanks so much for your support.

–Chris…

Business, How To, Social Media, Strategy, Technology

How to Earn More Customers

chrisbrogan · September 5, 2018 ·

As I plow through the writing for my tenth book, Be Where They Are. Go Where They’re Going, what I’m most concerned with doing is helping you best understand what customers want these days when it comes to content marketing and customer experience overall. Companies must evolve and adapt from the past few years of lobbing content into various channels and hoping to reach prospective customers. Instead, they have to develop material and touchpoints that show the customer that you’re ready to serve a customer at their point of need.

Part of this involves changing how you build out content marketing.

How to Earn More Customers

Busy customers want to find something that helps them move their story along and they want to know that you’re ready to serve their needs. They also need everything delivered in bite-sized pieces. As most everyone consumes content and marketing materials via a mobile device these days, gone is your opportunity to create rambling and wandering text posts filled to the top with unnecessary words and blather. And finally, every piece of content has to offer the opportunity to connect and/or move forward. Police have the motto “protect and serve.” You need to adopt the motto: “Connect and Serve.”

Story Support

A customer’s first experience with your brand should be what I’ve labeled story support. This means that whatever content you create has to match what they’re seeking along the way. This requires thinking about (or knowing about) your various customer types.

Let’s say you sell digital cameras. Maybe one of your markets are aspiring YouTubers. (If I sold cameras, this would definitely be one customer type I’d pursue.) Build content that helps them improve their game. Here are some sample topics:

  • Inexpensive Lighting Solutions for a Starting YouTuber
  • Conducting Interviews for Your YouTube Channel
  • How to Shoot Fancy Shots with Affordable Cameras

In all cases, the story goes beyond your technology but incorporates it. You’re gently asking for the sale and/or making it clear you’re there. But you’re also providing something of value with or without a purchase.

And where would you put this content? YouTube in this case, silly. And also your site. But this post isn’t about that.

Bite-Sized Engagement Opportunities

This post will top out at around 600 words. That’s not exactly bite-sized. But it’s better than 2000+ words. Plus, if I wanted, I could pull out little tidbits and do something different with them. Like here’s a quick video, for instance:

At every turn, make your content modular, small, dispersed to where people might need it, and ALWAYS with an opportunity to connect.

Be As Specific As Possible

My last piece of advice for today is to speak directly to one group at a time, if at all possible. Build your content and materials such that it reaches out to a very specific group at any given time. If you serve multiple potential customer audiences, that’s fine. Just speak to one group at a time. Obviously, this works better if you speak to your biggest groups first, but don’t be afraid to get very drilled down, too.

Ask for the Sale

Content marketing is marketing, which is part of sales. It’s never a bad time to ask for a next step from the people you hope to serve. Just make sure it fits into the context of the interactions and/or that it matches a potential point of need for your customer base. For instance, if you like this article, it’s a great time to grab my newsletter to get the BEST of what I do weekly.

See? Like that.

Finally, Be Where THEY Are

People ask me about which site, which social platform, which whatever. That’s not the question. The question is: in which context would someone likely take a next step with the material I’m offering, and how does this help the customer? That’s always the mindset. Always.

I hope this was useful. Like I said, feel free to keep this interaction going. And if I can help you in any way, I’m here to customize this process for YOUR business and help you earn more customers.

Business, Content Marketing, How To, Marketing, Technology

Make Me Feel Smart

chrisbrogan · May 15, 2018 ·

It’s amazing how many opportunities we get as buyers to feel dumb. Imagine you need a new laptop and maybe it’s been a while since you last purchased one. What would you look for? You’d probably glance at things like processor speed and storage capacity and hope you got what you needed. But a company could make you feel smarter if they said, “This is a great laptop for most people’s business needs.” Or “If you’re doing any video editing or want to play games, this would be the best laptop for you.”

Make Me Feel Smart

It’s not any one technology that helps us feel smart. An airport with lots of great signage can help us feel smart because we can navigate ourselves through the process. When you order food at a restaurant, if the menu describes any uncommon words, you’ll feel better about knowing what you’re thinking of getting. An air conditioning and heating expert can sell the right sized unit and services for a company by walking the prospective facilities management team through the sizing and provisioning process in a simple calculation spreadsheet.

This is a choice, not a technology. Think through the paths that lead someone through their experience with your product or service and find ways to make that person feel smart. Build them. Create them. Engineer ways to make your buyer feel smart, served, and supported.

No one will ever be mad at you for helping them feel smart.

Small disclaimer: if you ever patronize people, THAT will make them mad at you.

Business, Technology

It's Time to Rethink What People Need to Learn

chrisbrogan · May 6, 2018 ·

Sandra told me that her cousin shared an article about how schools were no longer teaching analog time telling in school. Wait. They were until now? Why?

We Really Have to Crash the Whole Platform

Whether we’re talking about kids in school or grown ups in the workplace, it feels like the majority of what people are learning comes from old and outdated premises.

We forget that a lot of learning is tied to technology because it’s now OLD technology:

  • Analog clocks – because we didn’t have other ways to visualize time
  • Cursive writing – because we didn’t have keyboards and phones with predictive typing and speech-to-text
  • Classic literature – because this was a tool for teaching important life lessons
  • It’s not that literature is bad. It might be that classic literature is a very slow and dense delivery system for a lesson that could be taught better and through different media. Moby Dick is around 600 pages. The lesson? You could pick them up in much simpler, shorter, easier-to-consume forms.

    The same way we don’t all live on farms and raise sheep and cows to get our food, we somehow think the “old days” of learning is sacred. But is it? Do we need to learn what you/we THINK we need to learn?

    Think About That Defensive Feeling

    Somewhere in your belly, you might be feeling a lot of resistance. “Oh, but having a solid foundation is vital for learning.” I never said a single thing about NOT having a solid foundation for learning. But there’s a vast difference between ‘You have to eat’ and ‘You might want to eat more plants and fewer animal proteins.’ Right?

    Why do we “dress up” at work? Because that’s how it was always done? Why do we work together in offices? For management, mostly. Sure, collaboration is easier in person, but beyond that, how much of your work would be better suited to silence and privacy?

    Do we need to own a house? No we need a place to sleep, to eat, to keep our stuff if we have any.

    We’re Not Preparing People for Reality

    The last few years and the next 10-15 years will find you hearing (or saying): “Robots won’t replace MY job.” I hate to break it to you (no, I don’t). Robots *can* do most everything you can do, and most of it better.

    But that’s not really the story. Because the goal isn’t to preserve JOBS. The goal is to do work that matters. To work in service of those people we most want to help.

    The story is this: nothing is sacred when it comes to breaking apart and then rebuilding what we need to learn for skills and capabilities.

    20 years ago, it was smart to learn HTML. Even ten. Even five. Now, it’s a waste of time, unless you want to be part of something esoteric. I can pop a site together with zero coding skill whatsoever. 25 years ago, no one was learning HTML.

    Why are we teaching spelling? “Because you never know when you won’t have a phone with spell check nearby.” Who cares?

    Teach communication. That’s VERY different than spelling. Teach comprehension. Teach structure. Teach proper journalistic method and reporting and storytelling.

    But spelling? Who cares? (And I’m really good at spelling.)

    Why Isn’t There a YouTube/Twitch Streamer Star Course in High School?

    Some people might read that and think “Oh, how cute” or “There goes the neighborhood” but there are plenty of people in the NEW entertainment industry that can edit the heck out of something with Final Cut but who don’t know how to structure a sponsorship deal.

    There are more people watching esports and live streaming channels made by amateurs than are watching most professional US sports right now. And yet, we still discount this as a potential job our kids might have (or that we might want).

    Where are the AI courses?

    With all the shifts in technology, why aren’t we prepping people to learn how to interact, how to query, how to do all that will be required to link together and interpret and sift through all this information?

    Someday is Now

    If you’ve been “thinking about” learning something new, now’s the time. Do it. But check first. Is it something that’s not all that important to learn in the first place? Believe me when I say there are plenty of things NOT to learn.

    But we need better skills. You. Me. Kids. Everyone. And what’s out there isn’t really going to work for the most part. Not for long.

How To, Storytelling, Technology

Customers Don't Want Content – They Want a Better Path

chrisbrogan · April 26, 2018 ·

I’m in the business of helping companies use tech to drive better customer interactions. I help companies earn more customers. The most common way people employ me is to help them build content marketing projects, expand their existing ones, or in general, turn their marketing, sales, and communications efforts into something more effective.

Well guess what?

Customer’s Don’t Want Content – They Want a Better Path

The reason I’m so bullish on AI, blockchain, chatbots, IoT, and video media for the future of business is that in all cases, these technologies can be applied to improve the success of a customer’s journey from prospect to so-happy-they-refer-people levels.

Here’s a simple one. Parking lots. The Logan Airport central parking lot in Boston is a zoo. It’s really hard to find a space, even when you pay extra for “Logan Express.” And yet, my son and I went to a sensor-filled parking lot in Braintree that told me at every level how many spaces I might find. This was updated in real time. How? Sensors. Easy. A few dollars per sensor and maybe $100,000 total for the project, including the software. (That sounds like a lot, but if it improves commerce and satisfaction, isn’t it worth it?)

That project isn’t content. It’s really grindy-basic technology. And yet, a customer would be MUCH happier with something like that installed.

Content is Useful Only When It’s Useful

I’m typing this at a Dunkin Donuts at the airport. I wondered to myself which content a customer would actually want in association with coffee, donuts, and whatever else they sell. My thoughts were “A guide to sneaking in Dunkins while you’re on a diet.” I figured that would be fun. Video plus a downloadable PDF would be fun. Right?

But sometimes, a customer doesn’t need content. They need a solution. They need something to work better/faster/clearer. They OFTEN need more communication. They OFTEN need more support. They OFTEN need a better sense of how to navigate something unnatural to them.

Content is JUST ONE of the Marketing Tools a Company Needs

I do think there’s a benefit to content. But I think there’s a massive opportunity to make the customer experience so much better with content *AND* some of these emerging technologies. A really well executed chatbot could change customer interactions immensely. Voice interface is here whether or not you’re using it, and it opens up a lot of new potential use cases for you. Blockchain mixed with the Internet of Things and all those delicious sensors means that you can build some amazing new customer interactions that are fast, with less friction, and that serve everyone involved in better ways.

Sure, make a great piece of content that turns someone on and educates them and makes them feel smarter. But the time is now to look beyond content marketing, digital marketing, social media marketing, and *just* marketing as a way to drive more sales and retain more customers.

What’s next is here now, and it’s your job to make it work. Dig in and start learning, start drawing your customer experience paths, and you know, if you get stuck, drop me a line. I can help.

Business, Content Marketing, How To, Internet, Marketing, Social Media, Technology

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