Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Attention is scarce because trust is scarce. And why is trust scarce? Because everyone is out to maneuver people into attention by throwing as much content as possible at them without putting some thought into what their problems might be. Think about it, do you trust your friends to give you thoughtful advice? You probably do and that’s the key. As a brand, ‘friending’ your customers doesn’t mean you got the keys to the castle, it just means you have an opportunity to become a real friend. How you go about doing this is not that tricky…

So how do we go beyond attracting attention to building trust?

By changing from a consumption mindset to a take action mindset. We want people to consume our content (attention) but do we really care if they take action on it (share/implement it)?  To build trust we have to care what they do with our ideas, I think that’s the key. This takes time but then again Rome wasn’t built in a day and real relationships take months to build.

With some much content getting pushed out there we have to be mindful of people’s time, so the question is: are we doing enough to help them solve their problems?

Ask yourself: Would I trust myself?

What say you, are you out there to grab attention or build trust? Which comes first?

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Here are a couple of kids across the border in Tijuana that earn their money by entertaining rather than blowing fire from their mouths or just outright asking for it. If you didn’t already know, wrestling is BIG in Mexico and what you see here is very very good wrestling entertainment from a couple of 12 year old kids who after school go to an intersection near their home and put on a show.

They’re making around $30 – 40/day (dlls not mexican pesos) while only doing this for a couple of hours. Compare that to others who might not even make it to $10 in a week cleaning cars!

A few months back we saw these kids in person and were captivated and inspired by their creativity that to honor them we created the illustration below which is now our main character, he’s the differentiation superhero.

The principle of ‘being different’ is very simple: Think and act like a kid and don’t be afraid to be wrong.

So if you want to partner with us in the future, now you know where we’re coming from. How are you being different?

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So where do you place an idea so it spreads through networks?

There’s some network research from MIT that trumps the notion of the influencer: the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people.

The truth is we don’t really know specifically from where an idea/trend will spread from, we only know that the weakest links (the people we never think of) have higher spreading power than the strongest links and these people are found at the edges of a network.

So what’s a marketer/innovator to do?

Influencers don’t care about you

There are some theories but the one most everyone focuses on is reaching the influencers made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his book the Tipping Point. Well good luck with that because most everyone including your competitors is doing the same thing, the race is on to reach the so called influencers and they can barely keep up with all the ideas they’re being asked to spread.

Imagine being the care taker for the President of the United States and you get all sorts of letters from people who want to say something to the President and your job is to filter out the one’s that are most relevant for him to read and take action on. Well that’s exactly the battle you have to fight when targeting the influencers, everybody knows them so why would your idea come first?

People will ONLY ‘spread an idea’ if they think it’s worth remarking about, not because you paid them for their attention.

The fringe is much more friendly

New ideas and trends come from the fringe, from the edge and not from the mainstream, and spread from the edge to the center and then the process repeats itself. You stand a better chance of catching that ‘fire starter idea’ by going out to the fringe (where nothing is settled) instead of looking for ideas where everyone is looking (the mainstream) and then focus on making your idea take form with people at the edge.

In conclusion here are a few things to remember to help your ideas spread:

1. Go outside the mainstream where things are changing and look for ideas there.
2. Do algorithmic innovation: generate a lot of ideas, figure out ways to try them out cheaply and quickly, and then scale-up the ones that seem most promising.
3. Your idea needs to be buzzworthy. Ask yourself: Would anyone tell a friend about this?
4. Feed it to the fringe.
5. Make the influencers come to you.

What do you think, what’s your experience with making ideas spread?

Collapse theory graphic by BlackCoffee

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What makes people go WOM (word of mouth)? Something that makes them go WOW!

Check out the video above where two young girls do some pretty remarkable things. It’s safe to say that the people who witnessed this event went home with a big smile on their face because they were entertained and now have something interesting to talk about!

The point is that actions speak louder than words and as these young ladies did, they let their actions speak for themselves.

What actions are you taking to make your customers go from WOW to WOM?

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Publish, publish, publish.

Nowadays everyone and anyone can create content and it seems to me like we’re in a race to see who publishes the most stuff without much thought into what happens with it afterwards. The name of the game is to out-publish yourself before your competitors do so, phew! Good luck with that!

Sure most people are trigger happy and look forward to clicking that big bold ‘publish’ button everyday with just about anything to create that habit and keep going, yes their ideas do get refined overtime because of all the practice but sooner than later what they publish has the same sound and voice as their competitors because they’re playing to the same audience and are looking at the same things.

Sound familiar?

Here’s a BIG idea:

It’s not what and how much you publish, it’s what people do with it that counts.

Be strategic and focus on what can distinguish you from others. Be like Picasso and publish things that have your signature all over it!
I’m not saying create art, I’m saying publish ideas that people can use, that can help them do something better than before.

Action not consumption

People have short attention spans, they get hit by thousands as messages that want their attention everyday (and so do you!) and anything that does get their attention better be ‘memorable and useful’ because this is your only chance to get them to share it with someone else and better yet to come back for more.

Seth Godin does this very well, all of his posts have some idea that is entirely obvious. Andy Sernovitz also does this, his posts are short and sweet and most of them have some action you can take immediately. Sean D’Souza from Psychotactics probably does this better than anyone I know, everything he writes has his signature all over it!

If you’ve done your homework and spent time with your customers you’ll have more than enough ideas to publish for them that will make their world a lot more interesting.

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