Is Anybody Out There? (or How Do We Get Them to Promote You?)

Staying on top of technology changes is hard work.  Understanding how to apply those changes is even harder.

I had a conversation recently with a totally unscientific sampling of middle school, high school and college students, all of whom use smart phones as constant companions.  I asked a simple question.  Whom do you connect with?

The answer was unanimous.  Friends.  

Then I asked what they share with their friends and the answer, also unanimous, was pictures.  After a brief pause, a few added, videos, too.  In fact, a favorite pastime seems to be trolling for fun pictures and videos to share in the hope of getting comments back.

This is the medium of communication for this generation.  Forget texting, and emails are so old school!  Pictures and short (really short) videos are in.  (Does anyone say something is in anymore?)

So what is a marketer to do?  If the growing market of digitally savvy consumers has created micro-network circles of communication, and they only communicate with pictures and videos, how do we get a message to them?

The answer may be that we don't.  

In order to get our message to be picked up and go viral through their networks, we need to have them find us and get infected.

One way to do this is to turn our message into an event, the way one of our client's did.  Her message on teaching children to share was originally aimed at parents.  As a family therapist, that makes sense, but the break-away thinking here works much more elegantly.

Jeanne Rollins created a character, Gracie, who feels she has to do everything herself.  In the musical, and the accompanying children's book, Gracie learns the hard way that being "Greedy" with the tasks of throwing a birthday party for her friend Gina can have dire consequences.

The musical, "Greedy Gracie Shares the Happy," premiered in November, just before Thanksgiving at the Westchester Sandbox Theater and parents and kids left each performance humming and singing the tunes, carrying the message in the lyrics.

True to form, Jeanne followed her own advice.  The production was a totally shared event.  While Jeanne wrote the story and the lyrics to the songs, she relied on the amazing talents of Marshall Toppo for the music and Jason Summers for direction and choreography.  The book was also a collaboration with illustrations by Kathleen Jordan.

What Jeanne has done with Gracie is to shift her strategy.  She doesn't wait for people to find her.  She finds ways to go to them.

The other thing that Jeanne is doing that helps her grow her following is to put her message everywhere she can imagine, including her website, Facebook pages, Twitter, even on local store shelves with her line of note cards.  

So, you might say all this is hard work and you would be right.  Fun, but exhausting at times.  Ask Jeanne.  But she loves what she does and that makes it all worthwhile.  She never stops.

The lessons we can take away from this are:

• Stay on top of what is changing in the market and in technology.
• Discover how your market audience communicates.
• Focus your resources on the right strategies.
• Don't be afraid to try multiple strategies.
• Never give up.

Is anybody out there?

Yes!  But they may not be looking for you, so you need to go out and find them!

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Image Copyright: vukvuk / 123RF Stock Photo

How to Unleash Success by Unfocusing (A Greedy Example)

One of the principles of DIY Marketing is this: Paint your mural without a frame.

For most of us, our talents, abilities, hobbies and passions could fill a wall.  What we tend to do, though is put a frame around that part of the picture that we are either most comfortable with or have had prior success with.  A resume or CV is like that frame.  At best, it contains the work-related examples of our talent, not all of it.

If we step back and look at the whole picture, what do we see?  

It may be more like a collage for some while others may see the Crayola nightmare of a kid's room.  In either case, there are strokes of genius in those scribbles if we know how to use them.  The scenes don't have to make sense together to be valuable, and it is important to think of the overall picture as a work-in-progress rather than a finished work.

One example of how to unleash success by looking away from the point of focus is Jeanne Rollins' Greedy Gracie.

Jeanne has a huge amount of energy and passion for what she does and it shows.  When you meet her, she is bubbly and excited, eager to talk about giving.  Her dream is to expand the conversation about giving to the whole world, and I believe she will do it.

What's the big deal about giving?

Well, that's the thing that intrigued me.  Jeanne doesn't just talk about giving; she tells us that some of us are greedy about it, doing all the good ourselves and shutting others out of the fun of giving.

When Jeanne started talking about this, she developed a whole vocabulary of terms and catch phrases that were designed to create interest.  Being a Greedy Giver is one of them.  But people found it hard to understand them and remember them.  They wanted examples to make these ideas "sticky".

As a family therapist, Jeanne couldn't tell stories about real people, and she knew people wouldn't value generalities, facts and figures, so she had to ditch the frame and look at the whole picture.

What she came up with was a character, Gracie, a lovable, giving character drawn from Jeanne's own experiences as a greedy giver.

Now, this is the part that takes a great idea and unleashes it.  Jeanne needed Gracie to come to life, so she teamed up with Kathleen Jordan, the artistic talent that was missing from Jeanne's wall.

The musical

Kathy and Jeanne working together became a force to be reckoned with, and in less than a year, the duo have created a world that people can understand and a language that is changing behavior in a truly fun way.

You can check it out on GreedyGracie.com or Facebook and most likely in a card store near you.  There is also a musical!

What is the secret?

The cliche of thinking outside the box doesn't begin to explain how we can trust our hidden talents, but removing the frame from the wall might be a better way to look at it.  That's the first step, opening us up to possibilities that may seem too small to be practical.

What Jeanne did, though, was go one step further down that road of possibilities, and on that road she found Kathy.  Joining two murals together makes a bigger and more interesting picture.

Oh, and it also creates new small corners of possibility that may be the roads they take in the future.

Good luck, ladies.  You're on a roll.