Well I thought I would slide one last post under the door before saying goodbye to 2009. It’s been a hectic year, but in some ways a great one for solidifying thoughts, testing theories, falling flat on my face, dusting off and most importantly meeting some amazing people. People, in my view, are beacons. They may not always be switched on, but when they are they can do amazing things. They guide, they warn, they show the way. Sometimes they’re in lonely places, but that’s part of the price when your job is to shine.
Look at another beacon, a lighthouse: It stands out from the shoreline, jutting up from the rocks, clearly different from the surrounding landscape. It’s context gives it meaning – put the same building in a city skyline and it becomes lost and unable to function. Move it to the middle of a field and it loses purpose. And what is that brilliant beam that emanates from the beacon? It is focused energy – energy with purpose, a purpose clearly understood by all, but for some an absolute necessity.
Understand the beacon principles and you understand the essential questions you need to ask yourself to build your brand:
1) How are you different? Difference is the soul of branding. Where you’re different your competitor can’t touch you. Different is what makes you memorable and can even make you indispensable!
2) What’s your context? Context is what gives meaning to your difference. Context is understanding that your difference might be irrelevant to some, but essential to others. Identify the core market, the defining context that makes you essential!
3) What’s your focus? Focus has two faces: where you put your energy and where you put your audience’s attention. Emphasize your strengths and be conscious of the expectations you set – they are the criteria by which your brand will be judged. Do what you’re good at and get help with the rest. Start a fire by hyper-focusing your energy – once you have ignition you can spread the flame, but you’ll never catch fire if you don’t begin with focus.
As you tuck 2009 to bed and begin to the live the excitement and promise of a new year, I hope you will ask yourself the beacon questions: How am I different? What’s my context? What’s my focus? I hope you will be a guide.
I know you will shine.
Happy 2010 everybody!
I4U Newsletter Ends – Sign of Things to Come or a Last Gasp?
Like many of you out there, I have a bit of technolust. I like gadgets. I own a modest collection of tech gear, and I have a drawer full of retired power cords and adapters, but more to the point, I like to be in the know about the new stuff. The gizmos and thingamajigs that push the envelope or hint at cool features that might just become mainstream. Of course most don’t, but that is part of what makes it interesting. So for these reasons one of the few newsletter that I used to look forward to appearing in my email inbox was the eye-jolting green missive put together by Luigi Lugmayr & company over at I4U. It was a newsletter that did a great job of sticking to their mission – they brought you the new stuff. It felt more informative than sales-y. Like I might actually have the jump on other nerdy friends when it came to discussion of cool new laptops or innovative portable electronics. Well imagine my surprise when instead of their usual array of thumbnails of interesting gadgets I received this note:
I mean what’s going on here? The company is continuing on, but the newsletter is going away? Is this a sign of new marketing truths from a progressive company that has always had it’s eye on the future? Or is this a last gasp of a failed campaign? Perhaps they got the reach, but couldn’t convert the readers, or maybe the readers simply stopped opening it because we’re all so flooded these days with a zillion more newsletters than ever before.
So why do I care, and why should you? It’s not because I thought that this newsletter was cool – that’s too subjective. It’s the mystery that gets me. It doesn’t cost much to put out an e-newsletter, especially if you’re already aggregating the content for other purposes, which is exactly what I4U does. So it’s cheap to produce, and VERY measurable. That’s something we like in the marketing department. That’s why there is such a glut of newsletters heading your way everyday. We get to measure what happens: we know what gets opened, we know if you click, and if we’ve planned our landing pages right we know if that click led to a conversion. These things make a marketer get up early in the morning with a big smile, because what you measure you can tune.
But I4U is throwing in the towel on its newsletter contender. How low does the threshold of response have to dip to make the superior measurement ability not worth the effort? Have they found equal or better measurement through Twitter and RSS? I want to know and unless you’ve got unlimited time and resources for your marketing department, you should want to know too.