Matthew T Grant

As usual, I’ve been thinking about ontology a lot lately (I mean, who hasn’t?) and specifically what distinguishes some-thing from no-thing.

While I strongly lean to the nihilist perspective, which leads me to believe that nothing, after all, exists, I’m really a physicist in the sense that I define “thing-ness” in terms of the physical. For something to be, it must physically be in the universe and we know something to be physically there when we can measure it.

Nevertheless, I’m at times ill at ease with this notion – Can it really be true that the immeasurable does not exist? Can love be measured? The soul? God? – and was reminded of my malaise by this micro-post from Todd Defren which pointed the latter’s followers to some words from Seth Godin on the “coming era of hyper-measurement.”

Among the Godin One’s words, which took as their leaping-off point news that the Washington Post may have laid off a columnist for lagging blog traffic, I found these, “…in a digital world where everything can be measured…,” and then I wept.

Well, “wept” is a strong word, but I did “think” (which often leads to weeping with me as it did my patron pre-Socratic saint) and my thoughts issued into this question: Can “everything” truly be measured in this or any digital world?

Certainly, one can measure many things, including blog traffic, and such traffic may be important if your business model ties ad revenue to number of views or even click-throughs, but can you measure something like the meaning of a writer’s words or the traces they leave in the thoughts and feelings of a given reader? Can you measure the quality of writing? It’s originality? It’s humor?

And if you can’t measure those things in any meaningful way, does it mean that they do not exist and don’t, in a very literal sense, matter?

Image Courtesy of hoyasmeg.

For a long time it’s kind of stuck in my craw that marketing “thought leaders” seem less like marketing professionals than preachy proselytizers of the human potential movement.

I was thinking specifically of Seth Godin and was grumbling that I would have to dig through his blog to find an example of the aforementioned proselytizing preachiness when, lo and behold, a random Twitter followee pointed me to a post he wrote for JobDig’s What Would Dad Say.

To whit, in a piece entitled, “Don’t Try to Get a Job,” His Seth-ship admonishes us with the following: “Don’t you dare. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that the act of trying to get a job corrupts you. It pushes you to be average, to fit in and to do what you’re told.”

Aside from the problem of telling people what to do (or what not to do, as the case may be) while criticizing a “do what you’re told” mentality, the word that jumped out at me was “corrupts.” Specifically, how did we move from the pragmatic issue of looking for work to the moral peril of falling from purity to corruption?

I understand that, upon our exile from Eden, we were cursed to toil by the sweat of our brow and that, since that dark day, work has been stigmatized as a punishment. I understand also that, in petit bourgeois dreams of small business success, telling people what to do is a mark of honor and indication of membership among the Elect. Nevertheless, I would like to offer an opposing, even dissenting, view.

When we work for someone, we are providing them a service and must of necessity, and within reason, bend our wills to theirs. This is the case whether we are tasked with specific duties within a larger enterprise or whether we are attempting to sell the fruits of our self-directed labor on the open market.

In the latter circumstance as in the first, if not exactly “doing what we are told,” we must at least “do what others want,” and if a source of corruption nests in the one, than it must assuredly be just as at home in the other.

In other words: don’t hate the player (the job seeker), Seth, hate the game (the system in which everybody needs a source of money if they want food, shelter, healthcare, etc.).

Or, to quote the late, great Curtis Mayfield: “If there’s a Hell below/We’re all gonna go.”

Image Courtesy of geraintwn.

Speaking with my friend, Rando Calrissian, about a woman who used to work for him, quoth he, “One great thing about her was, if she had something to do, she always did it right away.”

I often think of Rando, and this lady, whenever I’ve got stuff on my plate and I have the option of putting it off or just doing it. The sad truth is that, if I don’t do it now (whenever that may be), there is a strong chance that it won’t get done at all.

If you have made this same experience or are in any way like me in this regard, I strongly urge you to DO IT NOW! RIGHT NOW! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR???? C’MON! IT’S NOT GOING TO DO ITSELF!!!!

Got me?

Be yourself; it’s the perfect disguise. – M.L. Grim

I got reprimanded on Twitter the other day for equating transparency with invisibility.

For the record, I understand that “transparent” means “you can see through it,” not ” you can’t see it at all,” but that wasn’t exactly my point (though, as any bird who’s ever flown into a plate glass window will tell you, transparent objects can sometimes be devilishly hard to see at all).

Instead, I wanted to draw attention to the fact that calls for transparency in government and business, by relying on the common association of transparency with open, guileless communication, actually overlook the possibility that transparency can and often does serve as it’s opposite.

Take for example Jeremiah Owyang’s  twitteration from back in April, “Do you think corporate America will ever be as transparent as the Obama administration?” I responded that I understood transparency to be a plank in Obama’s platform and an important element of his branding, intended to differentiate his administration from the blatant secrecy of Cheney’s, but I expect and encourage him to mobilize  opacity whenever political or strategic necessity demands it.

Governments and corporations are not in the business of sharing their inner workings, plans, or intentions. Rather, they are all pursuing particular interests in a competitive environment where an unconditional openness would be foolhardy at best and suicidal at worst.

At the same time, game theory tells us that a measured openness, one that builds trust and facilitates alliances, can indeed be advantageous – so long as this openness is not seen as a “move,” in other words, an act which has as its conscious but obscured purpose self-interested gain, which it of course is.

Naturally, if the field is dominated by calls for transparency and everyone is rushing to “out-transparent” each other, an unapologetic secrecy becomes a legitimate, differentiating option, as we see in the case of Apple (though said secrecy is not without it’s own troubling consequences). Indeed, by clearly highlighting the extreme levels of secrecy maintained by your organization, governmental or corporate, you ultimately fulfill the new transparency imperative by being open about your closedness.

For my part, I do not place an absolute value on transparency and am immediately suspicious of anyone who wears their transparency on their sleeve. I can’t help but think, “They’re sharing so much with me. What are they hiding?

Image Courtesy of Arenamontanus.

Kyla Cullinane interviewed me during MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum last month. The topic was “How to Make your Online Content Stand Out.”

Briefly stated, I believe that your content will stand out if it is useful in and of itself (not just as marketing copy for your company). Of course, when you focus on “usefulness” you begin to move away from the notion of content as “words on a page” and begin to think of it in terms of tools, applications, and ideas. That is, as Shakespeare used to say, “the rub.”

If you don’t have two minutes and thirty odd seconds to spend on this video but you want something to think about, consider this: What question is your product or service the answer to?

Now let that question guide you in developing content that is meaningful, pertinent, and, above all, useful to the people who matter most: your customers.

If on the other hand you do have the time to watch, what do you think?

Actually, the answer to that question is fairly simple: I don’t know.

I realize that answer might not be very helpful, but at least it’s honest.

Fact is, you can only figure out if you need those things, and what you’ll do with them once you got ’em, after you’ve decided what it is you want to do.

In other words, I would prefer to answer that question with this question: What do you want to do or get other people to do?

Last week on Twitter, Lewis Green asked if anyone was interested in writing a guest post for his blog, bizsolutionsplus. I said I’d been playing around with the idea of content as a process, not a product, and he encouraged me to write something on that topic. What I came up with was, “Content Is Still King (It’s Just Not What You Think It Is),” which was inspired in part by Mack Collier’s provocative assertion that “content is king” is “total bullshit.”

My main point was that stand alone content (whether in the form of a blog post, a white paper, an eBook, or whatever), no matter how well written, had certainly been dethroned, but that it’s place on the throne had been taken by all the content created by members of an organization in the course of their numerous, ongoing, continually evolving online activities. (This point is not dissimilar from Mack’s that your activites off your blog are what make your content interesting, relevant, and attractive.)

Now it is certainly easier to manage a collection of discrete, set pieces than it is to manage an unpredictable range of actions undertaken by a constantly shifting and sometimes loosely defined group of people, and yet that is the challenge facing anyone interested in developing and executing a meaningful content-based marketing strategy today.

What makes the shift from content as product to content as process particularly challenging is that it forces marketers to involve themselves in business operations to an unprecedented degree because, at the end of the day, an organization’s people are rapidly becoming its most active and vital communications channel.

At the same time, these people – their attitudes, their personality, their style, their abilities, and their actions – serve as more than a channel; they constitute in themselves a company’s most meaningful and influential content.

My question on Lewis’ blog and here is: Are marketers ready to engage the rest of their organization as intensively as the rest of the organization is engaging current and prospective customers day to day and minute by minute?

Image Courtesy of miuenski.

I spent Monday and Tuesday at MarketingProfs B2B Forum where I moderated a panel on “creating robust content to engage customers and prospects.” The panelists – Phil Juliano of Novell, Valeria Maltoni (the Conversation Agent), Chris Penn of the Student Loan Network, and Mike O’Toole of PJA – were all smart, funny, articulate and great to work with. It was a privilege to be associated with these folks.

While I hope that our panel discussion, which Valeria recapped on her blog and which Mike and I previewed on MarketingProfs DailyFix, provided attendees with a useful framework and practical advice for advancing their content-based marketing initiatives, I know for a fact that I learned a lot from the sessions I visited and the numerous people I met at this conference. To whit:

• More and more B2B marketers are feeling the need to leverage social media but are not sure where to start.
• Even when they are producing interesting content, organizations are not taking advantage of the many available distribution channels nor are they thoughtfully or aggressively re-purposing this content.
• Even though marketing department budgets and staff have been cut drastically, companies still need to market their products and services, which seems to offer a lot of opportunities for independent consultants and agencies.
• Companies don’t realize the importance of integrating their SEO efforts with the full range of marketing, advertising, and, most importantly, IT initiatives.
• As a corollary, the lines of communication and collaboration between IT and Marketing seem to be broken, which is a problem because the state of marketing today calls for increasing and ongoing integration with IT.
• Finally, the individuals on your sales force are your most important channel in the B2B space, so your marketing efforts need to be geared at educating, enabling, and empowering them.

I have more to say on each of these topics but am actually more curious to hear what you have to say about them. This stuff sound right? Wrong? Whatever?

Image Courtesy of Bob Collins. Thanks, Bob!

I first posted this back in August 2008 but think that it’s as true (or false) today as it was then. – Matt

Talking with a friend yesterday, he noted that my wife was a writer and then asked if I was a writer as well. I said I was, but explained I was in marketing. “So, you write lies,” he said with a smile.

As every hip marketer knows, thanks to the ever-wise words of the all-knowing Godin-one, all marketers are liars. With his semi-snide snarkiness, my friend was merely echoing the folk wisdom that that holds marketers and marketing more generally in contempt, a subject about which I’ve written before.

Godin playfully invokes this contempt in his “provocative” title, though he was careful to avoid the the liar paradox through use of the modifier “all.” To whit: If Godin is a marketer (albeit one who has achieved “guru” status), then, if his statement is true, we must assume that he may be a liar, in which case his statement may also be a lie. If it’s a lie, however, then it is not true that all marketers are liars. If I remember anything from the “Intro to Logic” course I took as a freshman, the negation of “all marketers are liars” is not “no marketers are liars,” but, “some marketers are liars.”

Proclaiming the undeniable truth that “some marketers are liars,” of course, would not have gotten Godin much attention. Instead, he fans the flames of virulent anti-marketing-ism and tars “all” marketers with the same mendacious brush. Although I wouldn’t accuse Godin of lying with his claim that “all marketers are liars,” I would say that he was “willfully misrepresenting the truth,” and not just about the marketing profession.

If you read the book, or at least the five free pages I linked to above, you discover that he is primarily accusing marketers of “telling stories,” a common parenting euphemism for “lying,” as we all know. Though I agree with him that the goal of marketing is to tell stories, I resist his equation of “stories” with “lies.” Stories may be fabrications and fictions, but that doesn’t make them “lies.” That being said, the problem with Godin’s title isn’t that it’s a lie, the problem is that it’s false (remember that a lie is not simply or necessarily “incorrect”).

But would the book have been so popular if he had called it, “All Marketers Are Wrong”? Is the one thing going for this alternate title the possibility that it could actually be true?

I wrote this about a year ago but still think it’s relevant and true. What do you think? – Matt

On Twitter the other day talking with the Conversation Agent about the Associated Press’ decision to go after sites that quote too much of their content — they had called out the “Drudge Retort” (not to be confused with the “Drudge Report,” – though some confusion is undoubtedly intended by the author of the former) for quotations ranging in length from 39 to 79 words — I got to thinking.

I’m no lawyer but I learned about “fair use” as a graduate student and always assumed that, if you were using a quotation in certain expository contexts, that the copyright holders would just have to grin and bear it. I can see there being a problem with populating your blog or website with entire articles penned by someone else – but even then, if you have given proper credit and linked back to the original location of the text, is that really so wrong/bad?

Though I tend to lean in this direction, I’m not saying that all content should be free or that copyright doesn’t mean anything. I am saying, however, that trying to control where your content shows up on the web goes against the tide of history as well as the essence of the web an sich, as the Germans would say.

On the “tide of history” front, “give it away” is the order of the day. I’ve referred elsewhere in these pages to an essay by John Perry Barlow on the power of giving away “content,” and my ideas have not changed on the subject. Specifically, every business should focus on their absolutely unique, inimitable, and irreplaceable offering, and deploy their “content” to sell that.

Barlow uses the example of the Grateful Dead allowing taping at their shows because they realized that circulating bootlegs increased interest in their music and, more importantly, promoted attendance at their shows which were always one of a kind. As the bumper stickers used to say, “There’s Nothing Like A Grateful Dead Concert,” which is why concert revenue was the core of their business.

Apply this to your business and ask yourself, “What is my live-in-concert moment and how can I use my content to get people through the proverbial door?”