I like when the light in a photograph helps your other senses experience the scene. Like the light here makes me think of an evening towards the end of summer, with a light breeze, and the smell in the air that only comes about when the seasons are on the cusp.
And the woman in the yellow dress is just fun.
By Joseph Holmes via 20×200, $20.
Trust is easily bamboozled.
Like in social media, all you have to do is start a blog and write a lot of content– it doesn’t even have to be original or even good. Next, find partners and create alliances where you tweet, digg and stumble each other’s content. Abuse whuffie to make crowd-sourcing work for you. Mass follow everyone on Twitter, import them into FriendFeed to inflate your subscriber numbers, and then unfollow everyone but twenty on your list. Spam people. Promote under the guise of community. Push. Pull. Publish.
Give your efforts a few months in the oven, and then… voila! You’re an influencer.
Congrats! And don’t worry. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually putting out interesting, new or relevant ideas into the world. Pure hustle, as Gary Vaynerchuk so aptly explains, will do the trick.
These are the mostly unspoken rules of social media. And in a medium that is supposed to be revolutionary, it’s disappointing that not much has changed from the status quo, despite claims that PR and traditional marketing is dead.
“The old way was to create safe, ordinary products and combine them with mass marketing,” Alex Bogusky and John Winsor explain in the little spark of a book, Baked In. We’re repeating the same inefficiencies in social media, however, where the focus on accumulating mass numbers is doing a great disservice to the possibilities.
Indeed, in my own outreach efforts with Alice, I’ve found that individuals with smaller numbers – whether it be traffic or subscribers – often have just as much influence, if not more than those with large badges on display. Bogusky and Winsor agree, reporting on a study that found “news travels as readily through ordinary people as influential ones. Interpersonal networks are democratic.”
We’ve supposedly learned from the likes of traditional advertising that worshiped a spray and pray approach, and yet we still pay credence to only the large influencers. Such an approach could be even more flawed than mass marketing, because social media numbers mean nothing. They’re often so inflated and distorted, that in trying to boost our influencer status, we’ve leapt back into the untargeted and interruptive advertising pool where relevancy and effectiveness drops drastically.
While the smaller scale of social media hides such issues right now – for most Fortune 500 companies, the medium is still emerging – it will soon come out that while the tool is different, the habits are the same.
What we need then, is not an improvement upon or even a replacement of the traditional PR and advertising model, but a complete market shift. “The new way,” Bogusky and Winsor explain, is to “create truly innovative products and build the marketing right into them.”
That, in a nutshell, is why my job at Alice is so enjoyable. We better connect manufacturers and consumers in the giant consumer packaged goods (CPG) market. And in disrupting the traditional retail market, Alice has made it possible to buy all your household essentials online with competitive prices and get it delivered to your door with free shipping. Toilet paper is all of a sudden revolutionary.
And in the few short months since our launch, the service has spread. While that doesn’t surprise me, the ease with which it has done so and continues to (knock on wood) does. Good spreads. Something I didn’t fully believe in until this job.
When good spreads you don’t need all the superfluous advertising and marketing campaigns. You don’t need traditional posturing, marketing gloss, fluff and trickery. Good has the promotion baked in. Creating products that market themselves means tearing down the walls between the company and consumer. No longer do you have to spray over the ledge, but you’re able to join them on the other side.
“In the same amount of time it takes to create an advertising campaign – it’s possible to take all that consumer insight and actually bake it right into a new product. A product designed with a mission. A product with a story to tell. A product with the ability to sell itself,” argue Bogusky and Winsor.
A product with integrity. That is the future of marketing.
What do you think? Does good spread or do you need to give it a promotional push?
Some good follow-ups to my women in the workplace post last week –
AGREE: Since I stopped gossiping and positioned myself as a neutral person people can vent to and trust their venting won’t leave my lips, I have a lot more respect for myself and from other people, @dbirdy
AGREE: Are VCs sexist?, @bussgang
AGREE: Stay fully engaged, take on new and interesting challenges, and do so until you have a child, @sherylsandberg (via @nishachittal)
I currently have this photograph set up as my desktop background on my computer because I can’t afford to hang it on my wall. But it would be perfect for the wall above the dining table. The artist is Leigh Beisch, who I discovered via Modish: “They’re like fading memories or tiny semblances of a dream when you can’t quite remember all the details but you remember the lay of the land, the colors that stood out, the feel of the sun on your face, the sound of the waves or wind through the trees…”
Yes.
Via Beholder, $1000.
I love these prints that take modern, wishful stories and make them into whimsical portraits of two people who have never met.
Via Missed Connections. Buy on Etsy, $40.
This was a gift from Ryan recently; it’s a wine tube and I loooove it. Let me tell you why. First off, I’ve been lusting after this wine tube for more than a year. I actually tried to buy it from a discount online retailer, only to learn that the store was fake and they had stolen my money (shame on them!), but that didn’t dissuade me from going to a real store, The Century House, every couple weekends to lust after it in person. When it was finally in my hands, I was delighted to say the least.
But let me tell you, this thing was hell to attach to the wall. I have never used profanity on this blog, but trust me, it is needed in this case. First of all, you have to use wall plugs, which you may already know are a huge pain to push – no, pound – into drywall, in order to attach the thing securely. Which I did after a copious amount of energy. I was feeling pretty good about my work and stepped back to admire it, except, what? Is this thing crooked?! Why, yes, it is. Crap. (Except I used a far harsher expletive).
So I had to take this thing off the wall, try to get one of the plugs out of the wall successsfully – plugs that are designed to stay in the wall once they’re there – and start completely over. I very nearly broke completely down. You have no idea.
But see the pretty photo above? Success! And I even got some more wine to display and enjoy. Because I deserve this wine tube. A lot.
Ryan and I recently celebrated one year of dating officially. What makes this more impressive is that we’re both extremely career-oriented. Even more extraordinary is the fact that we’re not married with babies.
There’s a lot of pressure to settle down, never mind the fact that I don’t feel anywhere near ready to have children. And while I can imagine my life with Ryan, I don’t see the rush. With previous boyfriends, things could have ended at any moment. Now I have time.
In the Midwest, however, I do not. Twenty-six years of age is starting to get old and the female role models to dispel such rumors are few and far between. I can’t, in fact, think of a single woman in Madison that I look up to and follow for her career. Perhaps because the women I know in leadership roles exemplify negative stereotypes, and perhaps because there are simply more men than women leading business here.
It’s difficult, yes. When I graduated college and entered the real world, I had no idea how difficult it would be. Even in the start-up world, women are barely a consideration. When it comes to founding successful companies, apparently old guys rule. Young guys have a shot too. But women aren’t even part of the equation.
And while I love my job and am lucky to have been given opportunities I wasn’t afforded in previous positions, the patterns, however unintentional, are still there. It’s predominately male in our office and women are predictably relegated to the customer service and marketing departments.
The same pattern is propagated throughout society. For instance, Nisha Chittal reports on a study from Media Matters for America that shows on average, Sunday Morning show guests are 80 percent male (on shows like Chris Matthews, Fox News Sunday, Face the Nation, and Meet the Press).
And yet women do seem to make great strides career-wise. Ernst & Young went so far as to say that the world needs more female bosses. “Investing in women to drive economic growth is not simply about morality or fairness. It’s about honing a competitive edge,” Ernst & Young chairman and CEO Lou Pagnutti said. “Women have contributed more to global GDP growth than have either new technology or the new giants, China and India.”
But the Midwest seems to be particularly fond of holding onto the old formula of success for women: meet, marry, opt-out. This is purely anecdotal of course. The newest Census study shows it’s actually a myth that privileged, well-educated women are opting-out. Even when broken down by geographic location, the Midwest has drastically more married couples with children and both parents in the labor force, compared to say, California or New York (see page 15 in the report).
Which makes me think we’re not telling the right stories.
I recently broke down to Ryan, “I don’t want to be like the young couples we sit with at weddings or the rich ones we meet at events. Their eyes are so vacant. So disappointed. They’re stunned or seemingly regretful. It scares me.”
“Rebecca,” he replied, “do you think we’re anything like those couples?”
I sniffled and agreed, maybe he was right. But I need women to be stronger role models and more outspoken – whatever path they choose. I don’t want to be afraid of motherhood. And I don’t want to be afraid of missed opportunity either.
There are some enthralling stories about the beautiful complexity that is marriage and motherhood. But these stories just don’t exist about being a woman in the workplace. We need to start telling those. Now. Not just recognizing powerful career women, say on a list or with an award, but telling the stories that infuse society. I need to hear more stories with women that inform my consciousness each morning. And I need to hear them right here in Wisconsin.
Pumpernickel and onion pretzel sticks and tomato basil cheese curds. Hmmm… cheese curds.
I have a dream book. Not the kind where you put your sleepy, bleary-eyed memories of the night before under shut-eye, but the kind where you sprint to write down all the excitement in your chest before it escapes you forever. The kind where you write down how, exactly, you plan to change the world.
I’ve had this dream book since Christmas of 1998, a gift from my mother. I read it over the other day, and smiled at this entry –
“I want my generation, the time that I live, to be great and remarkable and groundbreaking. I want my generation to be the one with the first black and woman presidents.”
This was before Obama and Hillary declared their intention to run for President of course, and before I knew how close my dream would soon be a reality. And as I read those words, I got goosebumps that something that I desired so badly had come true.
Most of the dreams laid forth in the book aren’t as grand though. They’re more to do with me, less to do with the world. And yet, for eleven years, the same themes keep popping up. Keep returning and haunting the page. For eleven years, I’ve wanted to change the world in the same ways, and for eleven years, I haven’t.
Now, to be fair, I’ve done quite a bit. And an outsider would probably say that my involvement in changing the world, while not extraordinary by any means, is passable for the average human. I’ve made a difference. And that’s good.
But in my dream book, the one where it’s quite visible that my mind is racing faster than my pen can keep up, I don’t want to be average. I want to inspire and empower and make change. Like in education. And equality in design. And the environment. And public art. Things that connect people and community and show our common humanity.
And at the end of my life, I hope it’s goosebump city from so many of my dreams coming true. Today though, I’m going to stop writing in my dream book, because there are enough words. Now it’s time for action.
This was originally posted on Akhila Kolisetty’s Be the Change series. Go ahead, take a peek, and share your comments over there.
