The Cracker Jack box as it appeared during my 1960s childhood (courtesy of Wikipedia)
It didn’t matter that the prize was something worth about 2 cents, something not even worthy of being called a tchochke. It was the thrill of the hunt, searching through all that icky sticky stuff to locate the prize—and the thrill of mystery, never knowing what, umm, “treasure” you’d find. Sometimes it would be something really cool, like a spy decoder ring. But like any other grab-bag item, sometimes it was truly worthless. I knew kids who bought CrackerJack just to get that prize.
At that time, the company was owned by Borden, whose Elsie the Cow was another advertising icon of the period. It’s now owned by Pepsico’s Frito-Lay division
I’m sorry, but that is just not the same. From a branding point of view, I think it’s a huge error. Cracker Jack’s whole brand is built around nostalgia, Americana, baseball, and that unforgettable jingle. Sure, digital natives will redeem their QR codes and not think twice about it. But they won’t know what they’re missing. And those who can’t afford or choose not to use smartphones are left out entirely. Plus, their kids will never hear their parents scream at a bad driver, “Did you get your license in a Cracker Jack box?” A piece of American culture is disappearing.
In Cracker Jack’s earliest days, during a baseball corruption scandal known as the Chicago Black Sox scandal, a fan reportedly went up to the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson and begged, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” Maybe now, we need to say, “Get back on the track, Jack!”
I’m speaking at a conference in beautiful Brattleboro, Vermont—but staying in a motel in the ugliest part of town, sandwiched between a McDonald’s and a Wendy’s. Still, when I got back to my room last night, I was low on exercise for the day so I decided to take a walk. Fortunately, the motel is very close to the Seabees Bridge across the Connecticut River, so I decided to walk to New Hampshire, about ten minutes of strolling in each direction.
It was a very good decision. The Seabees Bridge turns out to be a double span: a new, wide bridge carrying cars, and an older one just south of it, narrower, unlit, and blocked off from vehicles. The newer one closely resembles but doesn’t exactly duplicate the original bridge.
The pedestrian bridge has a number of amenities such as benches and picnic tables. And in the dark, both the double span itself and the river and shorelines below were powerfully evocative. I tried to photographic it, but my phone wasn’t up to the task. CAUTION: I found out the hard way that those amenities are hard to see on an unlit bridge at night, just as I stepped back off the bridge onto the Vermont side. OUCH!
It reminded me of other moments finding magic in strange places. In chronological order:
A moment bicycling through the Bronx as a child of maybe 13, where I suddenly experienced a sense of freedom and joy.
Another Bronx childhood moment, exploring an abandoned railroad track in Van Cortland Park and feeling like I was way out of the country in the time of Tom Sawyer.
A Quaker meeting in the parking lot of a nuclear power plant construction site, in 1977 before 1414 of us took over the site in a protest against this horribly unsafe technology, and were arrested—almost 40 years later, still the most powerful spiritual moment in my memory.
Just last month, another evocative dark bridge over a river—in Beijing, one of the largest cities in the world.
In that Disney trip, I used my powers of observation to notice far more than the habitat. Go back up to #4 and click the link, if you want to see what else I learned, and what business lessons I applied.
If you look at the world with observant eyes, hear with aware ears, touch with sensitized fingers, it’s amazing what you can discover. I remember one more incident that wasn’t magical, but tingled my senses. My wife and I (both writers) were walking through the woods many years ago, discussing ideas. I said that ideas were easy to find, and challenged myself to name (out loud) ten ideas in the next 100 feet of our walk. I stopped around 20. That incident led to a new folder in my crowded file drawer with ideas for books I may write someday: “How to Find Your Next 10,000 Ideas.”
If magic can be found in a parking lot, where else can you find it?
Dar Williams, author of “The Christians and the Pagans”
I love this line from Dar Williams’ song, “The Christians and the Pagans”: “You find magic in your God but we find magic everywhere.”
Bernie Sanders said two things worth noting the other day, at the same event. When asked at a Town Hall meeting how to convince Bernie supporters to vote for Hillary if she’s the nominee, he responded, “it is “incumbent on her” to win over his supporters. Specifically, he pointed out that he doesn’t exercise control over his supporters and nor should he, and that many have a deep suspicion of a candidate with such close ties to Wall Street. He even gave her a road map: endorse his Medicare-for-ALL healthcare plan.
At the same event, he announced that he would do “everything in my power to keep the Republicans out of the White House.”
She still does not get that Bernie is not a politician in charge of a machine in the old style of politics. He finds himself at the forefront of a people’s movement that he does not control. Bernie can endorse and I’m sure will endorse Hillary if she is a nominee, but that doesn’t mean he is able to overcome his supporters’ massive and justified skepticism of her belief systems and her actions. Once again, he has spoken the truth; she does have to win them over.
And Hillary needs these people. Independents and left-leaning Democrats will be major factors in November. If they stay home, we get whichever monster emerges from the Republican convention. If they show up, we get a Democrat.
I have serious issues with Hillary Clinton, and particularly her foreign policy. I worry that she’s too much of a war-hawk and way too comfortable with the worst excesses of Israel’s ultra-right government. I don’t love her cluelessness about people’s movements and her coziness with Wall Street. And while she’s obviously extremely smart, she’s done some really dumb things over and over again. I don’t expect any significant progressive shift under a Hillary Clinton administration.
In the past, including in 2000, I’ve voted 3rd party. Of course, I have the luxury of living in a state where my vote doesn’t count anyway. Knowing that Massachusetts was safely Democratic made it easy to vote my conscience and cast my vote for Nader.
Yet, if she’s the nominee, I will hold my nose and vote for her. The prospect of either a Trump or Cruz presidency is so distasteful that I want the margins of victory to be enormous; this year, I want to be counted in that victory margin, and not pushed off to the side with a Green Party vote that nobody pays any attention to. Under Clinton, I would expect some attention to economic policies that help poor people—as a sop to Sanders supporters, if nothing else—and some good stuff on women’s issues. I would expect excellent Supreme Court nominees.
And, unfortunately, I would expect once again to be out in the streets with thousands of others, doing my best to keep us from being sucked into whatever war HRC would get us into.
I deeply resent Hillary Clinton’s message that we can’t go for what we really want. Barack Obama beat her in ’08 because his message was “hope” and “yes we can.” He made some of that a reality in spite of tremendous resistance–more than I’ve ever seen for ANY president’s policies. But he would have gotten much more accomplished if he’d continued organizing: bringing the same coalition that led him to victory into supporting his agenda and pressuring that reluctant Congress. As a former community organizer, he should have known this.
Bill Clinton’s presidency shows the dangers of the HRC approach. By dismissing any effort at real change right from the start, he allowed himself, over and over again, to back away from meaningful change and turn what should have been the post-negotiation fallback position into the starting gate, and then allow that to be whittled down further until the change was so small that Grover Norquist actually could drown it in a bathtub.
Obama made the same mistake. “Single payer isn’t on the table but we have a public option” turned into. “no public option.” And the ACA as finally passed was a giveaway to insurance companies. Yes, it made people’s live’s better and I’m glad it passed. But Obama squandered the potential for much deeper reform.
Isn’t it so much better to aim for what you really want and get only three-quarters of the way than to aim for what you think is “achievable”—and still get only three-quarters of the way? It’s a very rare football play that gets a touchdown from the kick-off point. Much more commonly, the team advances the ball, play by play, and starts again from the end point of the last play. Then they get the touchdown.
It took 100 years to eliminate slavery in the US. It took another 100 to pass meaningful civil rights legislation, and it may be another 100 before the cancer of racism is nothing but a memory. It has already taken about 80 years to get even the wimpy ACA; that doesn’t mean we say we don’t need to make more progress. And it certainly doesn’t mean you have to tear down the ACA before you have something better in place.
Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”
Muhammad Ali put it this way:
Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.
And I personally have taken on the “impossible” goal of showing the business community how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—at a profit. Taking my cue from Ali, when I speak on this, my talk is called “Impossible is a Dare!” I’ve also written a book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, that demonstrates how these future victories are actually quite possible. I’ve done “impossible” things before. Why restrict ourselves by thinking small?
I have other issues with Hillary besides her willingness to settle for less even before the negotiations start. HRC’s ties to Wall Street make me nervous. Her hawkish rhetoric, even more so. And her Middle East policy is just plain shameful. As an American Jew, I stand up and say “Israel right or wrong” is as misguided as “America right or wrong” was in the Vietnam era—and I further say that we progressives knew that going into Iraq as we did was a terrible mistake. I was out there in the streets with millions of other Americans, saying “don’t do this, it will be a disaster.” There is zero justification for her vote to support the worst foreign policy disaster in history.
I will proudly—excitedly—vote for Bernie in the primary. Nonetheless, if Hillary is the nominee—and she probably will, due in part to Party rules that allocate delegates to high-status mainstream Democrats over and above those allocated in elections—I would support her unequivocally over any of the Republicans running. I think she has a good heart, I’d much rather see her in charge of picking the next members of the Supreme Court than any of that bunch, and I would see her election—as I saw Obama’s—as getting us closer on the path from the kick-off to the goal.
Shel reading at the exercise bike. Photo by D. Dina Friedman
In the fall of 2011, my doctor told me, “you’re on the border for diabetes.” That scared me into action. I’d been aiming for an hour of exercise per day and requiring myself a minimum of 30 minutes (travel days and the very rare sick days excepted). I immediately doubled that. (I also looked at my diet.)
For the next three+ years, I dutifully tracked the number of minutes of exercise I did each day—but I didn’t track the results cumulatively. My pound-shedding had plateaued, and I decided that starting on January 1, 2015, I’d log the minutes each day on that month’s calendar page.
At the end of January, I totaled it up—and was shocked to discover that far too great a percentage were much too close to the one-hour mark. Although I did have 9 days where I exceeded 120 (including two days of 160 minutes) and four days at exactly 120, that meant I failed to make two hours 22 out of 31 days. I had too many with numbers like 63, 65, 75, and even one total bust with only 30 minutes. Tracking over the course of the month made me realize how I was letting myself cheat. My total exercise for January 2015 was only 2277 minutes, with a paltry daily average of 73.45.
But here’s the thing: because I was tracking, I was able to adjust. For the remaining 11 months, I never got less than 3290 minutes (February). Many of them were in the 3600 to 3900 range, and in October, I actually went past 4000. The difference even between 2277 and 3290 is an extra 16.88 hours of exercise between January and February—not too shabby. I ended the year with 42,178 minutes of exercise, or an average of 115.55 minutes a day. If I drop January off the average, it goes to 119.46, or just a whisker under my goal of 120 minutes. Because I was tracking, I ended the year averaging an hour and fifty-five minutes, versus an hour and thirteen in January. That’s a significant increase.
Shel reading at the exercise bike. Photo by D. Dina Friedman
Since I do a lot of my reading (and a lot of my exercise, especially in the winter) on the exercise bike, I decided to also track how many books I read. In 2015, I read 89 books. Some of these were monsters in the 500 or 600-page range. Others were quick and easy Young Adult novels of 100-150 pages. Many were business/environmental/social change books, including at least one a month for my review column. But I read more fiction and memoir, by far. This is an outgrowth of a resolution I made several years ago to do at least five minutes of pleasure reading per day. Once I started using the exercise bike regularly, this was a resolution that was easy to exceed.
The proof? I went back to the doctor this summer, and my blood work was all in the normal range (yay!).
The brain of a call center clerk ("Call Center Dave," by Ray Smithers)
The brain of a call center clerk (“Call Center Dave,” by Ray Smithers)
Dear business owners and bureaucrats: If you fill your customer positions with stupid people, or if you don’t empower them to address issues that come up, you damage your own brand.
All customer service people are by definition part of your marketing team. If they perform badly, they drive customers away.
I’ve just had one-too-many encounters with a stupid person in a customer service position, and I realize I won’t get any real work done until I can blow off some steam. So I may as well blow that steam as a blog post. I’m overdue for a good rant in this space.
I’m helping an 85-year-old, not-very-computer-savvy Japanese citizen renew his passport. The Japanese Consulate Boston website says their online renewal form only works with PCs; my friend has a 12-year-old Mac. So I called them to get an application form mailed to him.
The idiot I spoke to was amazingly UNhelpful. First she said we had to send a self-addressed 9×12 envelope to Boston with $1.20 in postage just to get the forms. And then she refused to give me the consulate’s address and told me to get it off the website (which is in Japanese, which I don’t read). I actually had to yell at her before I could pry the street address out of her.
You would think they could simply mail out the packet, and tack an extra $5 onto the renewal fee if using postal mail.
This has the effect of pushing Japan farther down on the list of countries I’d like to visit.
It also got me thinking about the hundreds of times I’ve encountered an employee charged with “customer service” who either didn’t have a clue about what customer service actually means, or haven’t been empowered to actually deal with situations that come up.
I’m remembering in particular the time (about ten years before they went out of business) that I was in a Blockbuster Video and I saw a sign with great language about how they empowered every one of their employees to do right by their customers. I was writing a book on marketing (as usual 😉 ) at that time, and I asked the counter clerk for permission to photograph the sign so I could quote it in my book. And this disempowered employee in this supposedly enlightened store said he didn’t have authority and I’d need to ask headquarters!
It wasn’t so much his inability to let me do what I asked. It was the disconnect between what the sign said and the 180-degree-opposite reality that completely wrecked my perception of Blockbuster’s brand. I never set foot in a Blockbuster again. They lost a decade of my business for being stupid.
Then there was the chief mechanic at my local Toyota dealer, who called me after several days of non-response to my status queries and told me I had 24 hours to get my car off his lot, and by the way, the engine is in pieces in the trunk. I was so appalled I wrote a long letter to the VP of customer service for the United States, and I never went back to that dealer for anything else, ever, not even a tube of touch-up paint. I drove 40 extra miles round trip when I needed something from a Toyota dealer. And the next time I bought a new car, it wasn’t a Toyota. That mechanic threw away 20 years of brand loyalty and a lifetime customer value in the hundreds of thousands.
Let me say it differently: front-line customer service reps are either your marketing ambassadors (think Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom, Ritz-Carlton) or your marketing saboteurs. Which do you choose to represent you?
Here’s what they mean to me, and why I picked them:
Transform
First, there’s the social transformation I want to bring about by transforming the business world. I want to end the biggest crises of our time, and I see the business community as the best lever. Appealing to enlightened self-interest—the profit motive—I want to make the bottom-line business case that just as going green saved costs and increased revenue, so too can addressing big picture issues like how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. When I first started talking a great deal about going green as a profit booster, around 2002, people looked at me funny. Now, it’s common business wisdom. I think the same will be true eventually for creating profitable products, services, and a company DNA that address these issues at their roots.
Second, the transformation in my own business. I see consulting, speaking, and writing on how business can bring about that transformation (and how any particular business can develop and market the right social change products and services for its own culture and markets) as a major part of my business in the coming year, and for the rest of my working life. While I’ve been thinking about these things for many years, have written books and given talks about it, I still have to find the markets that are willing to pay for what I know I can do for them. I go into the year with two possible markets that are quite different: small entrepreneurial and startup companies, and large, established corporations. I’ve developed two different websites for these audiences, because the agenda, methodology, timetable, and price structure will be very different.
All of this is a natural outgrowth of the green business profitability work I’ve done the past several years—but while it builds on the past work, it is different. I’m confident that I can make it work, but am still a bit fuzzy on the how. Which brings us to the second word:
Win
My original choice was “succeed,” but then I went to Chris’s post. He chose “win” as one of his words, and I think it’s like success, but stronger. It can also work as both a noun and a verb, as can my third word.
Also, I feel that on many levels other than the material, my life IS a success. I made a conscious decision about 30 years ago to have a happy life, and I’ve made good on that: I love the marriage I’m in, the house and community where I live, the places I visit, the local organic fresh food I eat, the books I read, the performances I watch, and so on. That decision rippled through all areas of my life. As early as 1985, it was the difference between feeling angry and frustrated and cheated when I had to spend an entire day of precious vacation mailing packages back to myself, as the old me would have—and thinking, even before I was married, about the wonderful story I’d have to tell my grandchildren.
But there are two areas where I need to replace that general feeling of success with a clear, strong victory: the economic underpinning of my business (which has now had two low-producing years in a row while I retooled for the transformation)…and the deeper impact of my work on the world.
The problem with having many interests and multiple skill areas is that it’s really hard to focus. When everything is fascinating, how do you choose? Yet, to succeed—to win—you have to close some doors so you can pass through the doors that remain open.
This is the lens: I’m using to help me choose what to focus on:
Over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to overcome a case of what my friend Noah St. John calls “success anorexia.” I’ve looked at my money/success blocks, and overcome a number of them. But, watching my own failures doing things that have worked really well for others, I realize there’s still some hidden piece, deep in my subconscious, that courts failure. I need to find that piece, hold it up to the light, make an alliance with—and redirect—the parts of it that act out of love, excise the parts that are rooted in self-hatred, and have a clear win. This will be difficult, because I don’t even know what it is that’s holding me back. But it’s essential.
Once that hurdle is overcome, I want to look at how to broaden my impact. I have a great message and great examples of how we can solve these big problems. But for that to really change the world, I need to find tens of thousands, maybe millions of people who are open to that transformational message. None of my books have ever sold more than a few thousand copies. My blog and social media audiences are limited. The number of people who hear me speak in a year is much too small. The second big win I need is to get myself in front of a far larger number of people. That this will help with selling more books, doing more paid speaking to larger audiences, and getting more consulting gigs—in other words, contributing to the win I’m looking for in my own blocks—is an extra benefit. At age 59, I have a limited time to make a big impact on the world. I want to leave a legacy of creating deep transformational change, because I love this planet. And that’s a nice transition to the third word.
Love
Love of others and of self, love of the ecosystem and the planet. In my youth, I was a very angry, loud activist who felt utterly betrayed by governments and corporations and wasn’t good at finding common ground or seeking alliances with those who thought or felt differently from me. Over the years, I’ve learned how mistaken I was—starting all the way back in the 1970s. Some might say I’ve softened but I don’t see that way. I’ve learned to approach with love, respect, and an understanding that almost all of us want a better world; we just have different ways of understanding how to bring it about.
Love is often about deep listening. It’s also about seeking a higher good for a greater number of people, without sacrificing the needs and desires of others. It’s about building the communication skills to allow environmentalists and Tea Partiers to discover their common ground (something I talk about very specifically in my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World).
Going deeper, this is what allows even the most hate-filled opponents to go past the hurt and build a better world for everyone. Nelson Mandela was a master of this. So were the people who formed the various Arab-Israeli joint projects such as the magnificent Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom community in Israel, where Jews and Arabs study and work together—the name, in both languages, translates as “Oasis of Peace”—or Combatants for Peace, which pairs Arab and Israeli former combatants to travel around and speak about cooperation.
It’s easy to love those who agree with you. It’s much harder to love those you might blame for the death of a loved one or the loss of your land. I have tremendous admiration for those involved in these sorts of cooperative efforts and I want to be more like them.
“What does he mean by ‘attacks on our democratic society?'” you ask. I’ll answer with a couple of excerpts from the article:
The trucking industry wants to allow longer tandem trucks and block rules requiring added rest for drivers.
If you don’t think that’s an attack on our democracy, consider the consequences if the driver of a supersize truck falls asleep at the wheel and crashes into a school bus. There’s the human cost of an avoidable tragedy, of course, but also the financial burden on cities and counties already squeezed to the bone. It will be the safety net that gets shredded.
Financial companies want to ease tighter regulations imposed by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.
Have we learned nothing from the debacle of 2007-08?
And there are efforts to repeal a law requiring that meat be labeled with its country of origin…and to block mandatory labels for genetically modified foods
Whatever happened to consumers’ right to know?
And then, of course, there’s the usual run of Islamophobic racism in our land built by immigrants, many of them refugees:
Republicans want to include a House-passed bill restricting Syrian refugees trying to enter the U.S. Faced with an Obama veto threat, that may be replaced by a measure, approved with bipartisan support by the House, restricting visa-free entry into the U.S. by many foreigners.
These Republican politicians forget that they are also descended from people who came here seeking a better life.
It happens that I sent a birthday greeting on Facebook to a Muslim (Pakistani immigrant) friend yesterday (I happened to sit next to him at a Bruce Springsteen concert several years ago, and we’ve stayed in touch). His response and the dialog we’ve had is relevant to the conversation. I reprint with his permission:
Him:
Thank you Shell….. It’s been an awesome few weeks. Finally became an American citizen and celebrated my birthday the same week.
Me:
Wow, congrats. We’ll have to change that Springsteen song (did he sing it the night we met? I don’t remember) to “CHOSE the USA!” It’s a powerful time to make that choice, with anti-Islamic crazies running high-poling campaigns for president.
Him:
Lol…. The same day I received my naturalization, Trump opened his mouth …. Lol…. It was funny…. However, the support has been wonderful from friends and coworkers.
Me:
All I can do is shake my head in wonder. He is sounding more like a Nazi. It shakes my faith in America that he has measurable support. My best hope is that he doesn’t get the nomination but gets close enough that he runs as an independent. And Hillary (more likely) or Bernie (my preferred choice) leads a Dem sweep that gets not just the WH but both houses of Congress and we can actually get some stuff done around here. Of course, US media has been playing up anti-Arab and anti-Islamic bigotry since at least the 1970s oil crisis–even though other than 9/11, Fort Hood, and this recent tragedy in California, most of the gun violence is at the hands of people who self-identify as Christian (I don’t think Christ would agree with their claim).
It just occurred to me as I hit send that this might make a good blog post. May I have your permission to reprint your comments–you can be an anonymous “Muslim friend” or I can name you.
Him:
Sure. Trump is just an attention seeking idiot. Amazing that a reality star, upstart millionaire can received so much attention …. Lol.
I’m glad he’s not deterred by recent xenophobia. Like my ancestors and yours, he will help us build a better country in the US.
Visiting Minneapolis for the holidays, we happened to walk by the American Indian Movement Interpretive Center and its Thunder Before the Storm Gallery, located in the Ancient Traders Market, 1113 E. Franklin Avenue (at South 15th Avenue).
As a child in the 1960s and 1970s, I learned about the powerful activism of the American Indian Movement; they were in the newspapers constantly with bold actions around native people’s rights in the US and elsewhere.
Their multipronged approach included:
Nonviolent direct action such as the occupation of
Alcatraz Island and the Trail of Broken Treaties March on Washington/occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices
Shows of force, including the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota
Creating alternative institutions such as schools, community media (including a radio station), and career training programs
Later, in 1980, I attended the Black Hills Gathering, as did many people involved with AIM, several of whom spoke from the stage. The Black Hills Gathering fused the causes of environmentalism/protecting land and water/the safe energy movement with those of indigenous rights around the world, and particularly the native peoples of North America.
Along with the Seabrook, NH nuclear power plant site occupation of 1977, the Black Hills Gathering was a turning point in my own activist journey. I’d already been involved in the safe energy movement for several years, starting well before Seabrook, and before that was a high school and college activist on ending the Vietnam War, abolishing nuclear weapons, LBG rights, and students’ rights.
The Black Hills Gathering was my first deep exposure to the specifics of the indigenous people’s movements. Speaker after speaker drew connections among seemingly disparate struggles like the Dine (Navajo) people’s resistance to uranium mining in the Southwest, the struggle to replace a collaborationist tribal government on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, and the battles of native peoples around the country and around the world to block the corporatization and expropriation of land, water, and other resources.
I trace my advocacy on water issues, and my promotion of the idea that urban rooftops could be food and energy sources, to this 3-day outdoor conference and festival. Those are both areas that I still talk about 35 years later; they’re even discussed in my newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
Walking into the AIM Interpretive Center, seeing the photos on the walls, brought back all those memories.
The gallery doesn’t get a lot of visitors, but it is open to the pubic (and it’s part of a neighborhood that’s a hotspot of American Indian culture). We were lucky enough in our visit to meet Eric Byrd, AIM’s archivist and curator, who filled us in on plans for future exhibits and on the photo-history publishing program the organization is working on.
If you’re in the Twin Cities, pop on in. If you’re not, visit the website.
In part 1 of this post, I referred to the “story-behind-the-story” news releases I learned to write after reading Jeffrey Lant’s Cash Copy. So here’s the story behind the story of Part 1: the lessons I hope you come away with.
First, of course, are the obvious messages: John Corcoran and his readers prepared a good resource, and reading those books can provide you with new skills and insights. And the two books I added to the list provided ME with important skills and insights.
But I’m a marketer. There’s a deeper psychology here. I believe in transparency, so I’ll step you through the goals I had in posting this, and the action steps I took to meet those goals—so perhaps it may influence the way you craft your own messages:
To introduce myself to—and build and nurture a relationship with—John Corcoran. I build relationships with many people who have a network I want to be part of, and who I’d like to see me as a colleague whose expertise complements theirs. This is my first communication to him. I got on his list a few weeks ago after listening to a webinar he did with one of his marketing partners. As far as I know, he doesn’t subscribe to my newsletter, doesn’t know me from any of the discussion lists I participate in, hasn’t heard me speak or read any of my books. Thus, I’m assuming it’s a cold contact.
To introduce myself to his community in ways that may spark interest in my books and/or consulting and copywriting services
Notice how I work toward those goals as I:
Complement him on the resource he put together, right in the very first paragraph
Mention that I’m a business book writer—thus positioning myself as someone it makes sense to pay attention to, since he pays attention to all these other business book writers—and an addicted reader who consumes business books, and thus a natural member of his community
Show that I’ve taken the next action step: listening to his podcasts and naming the first one I played; I’m engaging with his material and psychologically rewarding him for making the resource available
Add two new books that no one has mentioned, along with the reasons why I recommend them—and in those reasons why, I begin to reinforce, not just to John but to anyone else reading this page, the idea that I’m a creative, problem-solving marketing guy that people could turn to for new approaches to marketing (notice how I mention that the example was from work I did for a client)
By citing the year I first read Lant’s book, show that I’ve been in this world for decades
By using the “we we we all the way home” reference, show that I have a sense of humor and a knowledge of cultural references
Provide direct value in the post, by suggesting (without selling and without hype) and giving an example of story-behind-the-story copywriting and mentioning that going green/solving the world’s biggest problems can be a formula for profitable, successful business
Reference the relevant book I have out, and the one that’s coming out soon
Make a direct offer to John: the gift of an advance copy (of course, I’m hoping he will recommend it to others)
Tell him to expect a private email from me, so when he sees it, he’ll open it
Finish with the most relevant of my website URLs, so anyone else whose attention I caught can easily track me down without having to do a search
Incidentally, this transparency extends to my outreach to John. When I send my private note, I will include the links to these two posts so he can see how I used my post on his site as a case study for you. 😉
