Musicadium Blog

Friday 24 October, 2008.

Leadership is now the strongest marketing strategy

Yelling with gusto used to be the best way to advertise your wares. There was plenty of media and if you had plenty of money, you were set.

Today, of course, yelling doesn’t work so well.

What works is leading. Leading a (relatively) small group of people. Taking them somewhere they’d like to go. Connecting them to one another.

I say relatively because there are few products that need everyone in order to succeed. A tiny sliver of the market is enough. It’s enough if the tribe you lead knows about you and cares about you and wants to follow you. It’s enough if your leadership changes things, galvanizes the audience and puts the status quo under stress. And it’s enough if the leadership you provide makes a difference.

Go down the list of online success stories. The big winners are organizations that give tribes of people a platform to connect.

It’s so tempting to believe that we are merely broadcasters, putting together a play list and hurtling it out to the rest of the world. Louder is better. But we’re not. Now we’re leaders.

People want to connect. They want you to do the connecting.

-Seth Godin

Friday, 10 October 2008.

Making it real by making it closer - Items in the future are closer than they appear.

“If you’re going across town, you’re very specific: “188 Fifth Avenue, on the east side of the street please.”

On the other hand, when you go on vacation, you tell people “I’m going to Paris,” not “we’re going to 8 rue du Cherche-Midi.” And if you’re going even farther than that, you skip the city and country altogether and just say “we’re going to Africa.” One day, Richard Branson will take you all the way to Mars–all you get is the name of the planet.

This makes sense, of course. We don’t need to know which crater you’re going to, just that it’s far away.

Marketers spend a lot of time describing a future and making it real. The more general you are in describing it, the farther away people imagine it is. “We’re going to launch a new product next year” sounds a lot more distant than handing someone a prototype and saying “this launches on January 3rd at 2 pm at CES.”

Short version: If you want people to embrace your version of the future, talk about it like it’s right around the corner, not on another planet.”

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

“Your difficult boss, customer, prospect, voter, student… probably not stupid, probably just uninformed. There’s a huge difference.

Every person makes decisions based on their worldview and the data at hand.

The easiest way to grow is to sell to people who share a worldview that endorses your position. The most effective way to grow bigger than that is to inform those that disagree with your position–more data in a palatable form. And, unfortunately, it turns out that the best way to change the world is to open the closed-minded.”

- Seth Godin

“Many musicians have understood that all they need to make a (very good) living is to have 10,000 fans. 10,000 people who look forward to the next record, who are willing to trek out to the next concert. Add 7 fans a day and you’re done in 5 years. Set for life. A life making music for your fans, not finding fans for your music.

The opportunity of digital distribution is this:

When you can distribute something digitally, for free, it will spread (if it’s good). If it spreads, you can use it as a vehicle to allow people to come back to you and register, to sign up, to give you permission to interact and to keep them in the loop.”

- Seth Godin