Hugh MacLeod has written his first print book, Ignore Everybody and 39 other keys to creativity.
It's going great guns on Amazon (follow @gapingvoid twitter stream for updates).
Being a cunning marketeer as well as a creative cartoonist and uber-blogger, Hugh ran a great pre-launch promotion (sadly in the USA only). He offered a free book to anyone who bought a copy from Amazon.com and emailed him the invoice receipt.
I did this and had it mailed to a mate who sent them both over to me in the UK.
The nice touch was a cartoon signature he'd drawn on the inside flyleaf and a printed letter thanking me for pre-ordering the book.
Anyway, I read it and this is what I thought…. keep on reading tomorrow to find out how to get your hands on my two copies. I'll be giving them away.
There are forty chapters (clue is in the title!) and these are the ones that resonated with me.
8. Keep your day job – the Sex and Cash Theory that you basically have two jobs the one that pays the bills and the one you find sexy and creative. Don't give up one for the other too early. When or if you get the chance for both to intersect (mine are rowing and biz dev) then you're a lucky person.
25. Don't worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually. Hugh's use of business card backs to cartoon on happened because they were the simple tool he had 'to hand' when inspiration hit him for a cartoon idea while he was out and about.
He explains this because "going back to the studio was like drawing from a memory."
Capture your idea as it happens is SO important.
He adds "If you're arranging your life in such a way that you need to make a lot of fuss between feeling the itch and getting to work, you're putting the cart before the horse…. You have to find a way of working that makes it dead easy to take full advantage of your inspired moments. They never hit at a convenient time, nor do they last long."
32. Remain frugal. The less you can live on, the more chance your idea will succeed.
So true – especially in today's change-full world.
So there you go… my small take on Hugh's five years of thinking labours.
Now …. onto the next part.
Tomorrow, at midday UK time 9 am EST I will publish how you can get one
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Chris Heuer Partner, The Conversation Group
Tara Hunt Co-Founder, Citizen Agency
Jeremiah Owyang Forrester
Deborah Schultz Founder/Chief Catalyst, deborahschultz.com
David Parmet Owner, Marketing Begins At Home LLC
Hugh MacLeod Grand Pooh-Bah, gapingvoid.com
How to market into community without appearing totally overbearing?
How do you build the community around what you are doing for your company?
TH – the more I gave away my expertise the more expertise I seemed to get. this giving away stuff led me to give my time to creating new communities (barcamp and co-working). People open up their offices and lives to me when I do this. Social capital – the value of the relationships and your reputation. We are raising our own social capital with what we are doing. online it is about how much you can give away – the best way to get your own stuff you should give more away to help others. You need a patronage model of people in large companies who are prepared to pay for it.
CH – you need a way to sustain your life as well as giving things away free. Tools creating for Web 2.0 is democratising and enabling good to be given back.
HM – STormhoek – sent out 200 bottles of wine to bloggers who asked for it from Hugh's website. And then they sponsored the geek dinners.I never thought of the drinkers as 'the stormhoek community' it was just wine drinkers – but the conversations happening around the wine were interesting. Social gestures beget social objects and these beget social markers. The new N95 and IPhone are territorial demarcations in the phone geek community.
DS – spend your marketing budget by getting out and meeting customers e.g. go to conferences and see what's happening at the fringe. Find the customers who love you and talk to them. In start-ups you have a low ratio of employees: customers don't put up an FAQ, use humans to answer questions. This is smart marketing and customer support. FAQs are for big organisations.
CH – we give it away 'because" we are making it somewhere else. Doc Searle's the 'because' effect.
HM – advertising was all about the message. But online it's all about social gesture. This cannot be faked.
TH – read Blue Ocean Strategies – it's not the brand logo and message but what the product represents.
Questions
Criteria for selecting brand evangelists? JO — it is pretty easy to find your brand advocates because they are talking online in communities, writing, look in customer support forums. there are brand monitoring companies who mine the conversation online who find nodes for your company. DS – Transactions are the by-products of good relationships. When you are in a relationship you give things away for free sometimes and sometimes you pay.
How do you give away things when your product costs a lot? Audi dealerships have free dry cleaning, spa treatments, related products that people you are interacting with value. Or if you are selling something big, can you break it down – do things locally and start bottom up with a local party. Big brands don't have big ideas they have lots of small ideas, doing small things well. Education and knowledge can be given away, be the host of an event, party and failitate the interpersonal communications. JO created an industry-wide wiki about data storage products
Promoting a movie? Put half the movie onto youTube, start a blog. Use partner organisations to promote the story too. Get others to add their stories. THe brands with the best story-tellers win.
How do you rebut the suggestion that giving stuff away reduced the value of your product? DP this is not via an intermediary (journalists, ad buyers) just by going straight to the customers who will actually use it gives you the opportunity for a chatty user to start the conversation. Credible, believable. TH – don't give your products away free all the time, sometimes you should give the things around the product away. Free wifi in a Honda dealership who also brought in free bagels at lunchtime when I happened to be there. But you still need to follow up with these social gestures and create the relationship. Nuanced engagement.
one soundbite – the five steps to building social capital, social objects, passion for people passion in the product, technology changes human behaviour doesn't, nothing replaces listening, people are people.
Is online PR annoying? What you are giving is not a message but a connection to a higher purpose – connect to their feeling. She works for a charity. Have you given people something that they might be interested in rather than what you are interested in. You only talk to people when you need them, this is a problem.
How can I overcome senior management who set unrealistic goals HM – show me where the levers are and how to pull it and I'll write a cheque. this is traditional business. But there are no levers but just people. It takes time to get results online. Get kids who benefit from your programmes on video talking about how they like your playgrounds.
Ethics and marketing is it about profit not goodwill? JO – there is a purpose with marketing. But it's been associated with sales rather than matching the product to customers. PR should be about telling good stories. What's your intenation? Do you intend to take advantage or have ulterior motives.