Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week. This week’s High Five is a special edition: It lists my top five TED presentations for inbound marketers.
The first rule of inbound marketing is Creating Great Content (PDF). Since you won’t get far without it, and because so few people provide advice on exactly how to create remarkable content (except for this guy), I thought I would share my five favorite talks to help and inspire inbound marketers.
#5: Jacek Utko designs to save newspapers
What happens when an architect is hired to redesign a newspaper? He treats the pages as a canvas for creating posters that tell stories. The inbound marketing lesson is to pay attention to design. And by “design” I mean creating something the world did not know it was missing (Paola Antonelli). This means fully leveraging the form, fit, and function of all of the electronic canvases available to us.
#4: Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man
Think “45 degrees.” In this talk, Sutherland discusses how to add product value by changing perception – in one case by turning something 45 degrees – and hilarity ensues. It’s worth watching for the entertainment value alone, but the inbound marketing lesson here is that remarkable content can actually add value to your products and/or services by changing their perceptions.
#3: Scott McCloud on comics
Fasten your seatbelt for this one. Scott McCloud whooshes down his road to discovering the answer to the question, “What does a scientific mind do in the arts?” He describes how comics funnel words, pictures and symbols through the single conduit of vision. The inbound marketing lesson in this talk is… well… there isn’t one, there at least a dozen but he covers them so fast you really need to buy his book, “Understanding Comics” to get the full picture (pun intended). I think his lectures and writings are pure marketing and advertising gold for our highly visual Age of Content.
#2: Steve Jobs: How to live before you die
OK, I cheated a bit because, technically speaking, this isn’t a TED talk. But I don’t care because it’s important enough. History will remember Steve Jobs for many things, and his communication skills and persuasiveness will likely be very near the top of the list. In fact, there was a terrific book written on this skill - The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs (highly recommended). His commencement speech at Stanford is well known and has been watched by millions. The inbound marketing takeaway in this talk is simple: it’s simplicity. After a quick, self-deprecating joke about never having graduated college, Jobs gets right to the heart of the matter by saying, “Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.” In all of his presentations and speeches, Jobs is ritualistic about setting expectations up front. He tells you exactly what he’s going to say, continually reminds you where you are in that continuum, and always manages to under-promise and over-deliver. His presentation style is an entire encyclopedia on being remarkable.
#1: Seth Godin on standing out
Who better to teach how to be remarkable than the guy who wrote a book titled “Purple Cow” and marketed it by giving it away in a milk carton? Godin is Remarkable Royalty, the Earl of Extraordinary, the Duke of Different, the King of Compelling, etc… The inbound marketing lesson from this talk is that success “is not always about what the patent is like or what the factory is like. It’s about can you get your idea to spread.” At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.
This week’s High Five theme is, “Social Media Grab Bag.”
#5: Government websites get the chop
As part of the UK government’s austerity measures to combat rising debt levels, it announced that it will be shuttering over 600 web sites. But that’s not the interesting statistic. As Chris Rand puts it, “Sadly, like most public sector projects, the cost of running them is eye-watering.” He cites one example in which a UK government web site cost over $7M to build and received just under 400k visitors at a cost of over $15 per visitor.
#4: Former Facebook Executive Adam D’Angelo Confirms New Google Social Networking Effort
There has been some Buzz (rimshot) about Google’s next move to combat Facebook’s growing threat in the social search space. This article suggests that Google drastically underestimated Facebook’s potential and never made social networking a company priority – until now.
#3: How To Rank #1 In Facebook Search In 60 Seconds For Any Term
My reason for highlighting this article isn’t so much for people to learn how to accomplish this feat, but to understand the implications of the 21st Century Land Grab. Whether or not you intend or a ready to fully engage in social media marketing, it’s important to plant a flag to prevent someone else from claiming your territory.
#2: How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!)
Like the previous article, the most important lessons of this story aren’t the most obvious. While the author and columnist question the true value of a Facebook fan, what struck me was the negative impact that such a throng of the wrong fans can have on your brand. Like accidentally optimizing for the wrong keyword, having a fan page populated by the wrong demographic can be just as damaging.
#1: Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world
There are a trillion hours per year of “spare time” that are currently spent watching television. When you think about social media and wonder aloud, “Where do people find the time?” now you know. Shirky wants to start talking about how we should be using this cognitive surplus.
One of my favorite, most quotable movies of all time is The Princess Bride. While a small group of kidnappers is pursued by a masked man, the ring leader (Wallace Shawn) repeatedly exclaims, “Inconceivable.” Eventually, Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) grows weary of hearing this every time their plans are thrown of kilter, saying, “You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Which brings me to the point of this post. I saw another marketing article this week (which shall remain anonymous) from a highly respected thought leader in the industry, which looked at a very small set of statistics and made ridiculous claims and conclusions based on dubious data. I see this far too often, especially in the blogoshphere and Twitterverse, where self-made marketing mavens abound who may be very successful and knowledgeable in many areas but also have a tendency to play “weekend warrior” with statistics in order to prove a preconceived point.
Common Mistakes
My engineering and quality control background give me just enough knowledge to be dangerous. I would never claim to be a statistical guru, but I do know enough to understand when statistics are being abused (sometimes). I’m going to try to keep this list short and as non-mathematical as possible in the hopes that it can help people be a little more suspicious of titles they read and conclusions they adopt.
Mistake #1: Assuming Normal Distribution
The vast majority of statistics that non-mathematicians use and understand are based on normal distributions. This is what people commonly understand as the “bell curve,” in which the majority of occurrences in a population are centered around a mean, and tail off more or less evenly on either side. Whenever you use a term like “average,” “mean,” or “standard deviation,” they must describe data in a random, normal distribution in order to be accurate. There are mathematical ways to deal with non-normal distributions, but they are rarely applied by the “weekend warriors.” There are two common fatal flaws that happen:
The data itself is not random. In fact, data is generally much less random than we think; especially if we’re talking about marketing data because human behavior is rarely truly random. But there are often situations in the physical world (like boundary conditions) that result in non-random distributions also.
The sampling is not random or not representative. There are numerous examples of this, including cherry-picking, small sample groups, placebos, etc… Garbage in, garbage out.
Mistake #2: Assuming Causality
This is probably the most common (just a guess on my part) form of statistical abuse, and it comes in several different flavors:
Reverse causality: Most basketball players are tall. Therefore, playing basketball makes you tall.
Or, if you prefer a marketing example: Most shared posts on Facebook contain word “x.” Therefore, word “x” makes your post more sharable.
Spurious relationship: Vodka and water gets you drunk. Scotch and water gets you drunk. Gin and water gets you drunk. Therefore, water causes intoxication, since it is the only common factor (alcohol is the hidden variable).
Or, if you prefer a marketing example: Most Twitter re-tweets occur around 4PM. Therefore, people create better content in the afternoon.
Coincidence: Sales of ice cream increase in direct correlation with increases in drowning deaths. Therefore, ice cream causes drowning.
Or, if you prefer a marketing example: The number of Facebook users has increased sharply during the same period iPod sales have exploded. Therefore, Facebook is responsible for the success of the iPod.
Mistake #3: Gambler’s Fallacy
The gambler’s fallacy is rooted in a misunderstanding of randomness. We feel that a distinctly non-random pattern increases the likelihood of a particular result. For example, if a roulette wheel lands on black eleven times in a row, we mistakenly believe the changes are greater that the next result will be red. The chances of a truly random outcome are always the same, regardless of previous outcomes.
Risks
Examples abound from prominent marketing companies and mavens who draw spurious conclusions, based on questionable data sets and containing logical fallacies. I am concerned that businesses may be making important decisions that result in the mis-allocation of precious resources (time and money) based on declarative titles like, “Data Shows: X Gets Shared More on Y.” Caveat emptor.
Comic Relief
This post was prompted in part by this brilliant and hilarious TED presentation, “Lies, damed lies and statistics (About TEDTalks) – Sebastian Wernicke.” As is so often the case, it’s funny because it’s tragically true.
Clifford Stoll displays the presentation notes scribbled on his hand.
I was watching a TED video of Clifford Stoll last week, during which he was asked to talk about the future. He confessed that he didn’t think he was the best person to ask, saying “In fact, I think if you really want to know what the future’s going to be, don’t ask a scientist, a technologist, a physicist… No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in twenty years, ask a kindergarten teacher.” I mention this because earlier that very same day, I was paying attention to my four daughters, all of whom were in the same room and all of whom were consuming one form of content or another in a different medium on a different device. What was running through my mind was the fact that these kids are not only going to demand content delivered on their terms, they will demand it.
Throughout this post, I am refusing to discuss a certain gadget announced by a certain company named after a certain fruit that will be released amid much fanfare next month. The first reason for this is that everyone is growing weary of such discussions. The second is that this first product release is only the beginning and will be opening the door to a new class of products that will heavily influence expectations and demands from upcoming generations.
And So It Begins
I bought my daughter the movie “Sitck It!” on DVD for her eleventh birthday yesterday. The cover proudly hailed, “DVD + Digital Content,” which I thought was strange because a DVD is digital content, but I was pretty sure a knew what they meant. And what they meant was that it contained a second disc with a DRM-signed file in iTunes and Windows Media Player format. My daughter was beside herself that she didn’t have to sit in front of the television to watch it. Instead, she could load it on her iPod, take it with her, and watch it wherever and whenever she chose.During the time when I was helping her download the movie into iTunes on our family desktop PC, her older sister was on a laptop watching videos posted to Facebook by her friends, her seven year old sister was watching an iCarly television episode on her iPod and her four year old sister was interacting with friends from across town on the Club Penguin web site. Not a single person sitting in front of the boob tube. No two people consuming the same content at the same time.
New Rules
Taking Dr. Stoll’s advice, I have combined my own habits and preferences for content consumption with observations of my own household to form these five rules that I think will dictate content consumption patterns five to ten years from now. Kids growing up in the digital age will expect and demand that content have the following qualities:
It must filterable. They will not tolerate having to spend their time reading through ten articles they don’t care about to find one they do. This is another way of saying that content distribution is going to flip from a push model to a pull model. If your content doesn’t have handles, it won’t be going anywhere.
It must be asynchronous. Again, I don’t think people appreciate the parallel universe our kids live in these days with DVRs and iTunes. We all grew up in a world where our schedules had to wrap around broadcasts (think not just television, but library and store hours, magazine and newspaper deliveries, etc…). This generation is entering a world where the broadcast schedule wraps around them. Content is downloaded now and consumed later, at their convenience.
It must be portable. This is a mega trend I see that, despite what many feel is a large amount of hype, is actually being underestimated. Most people think of portable in terms of taking content on to a plane or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. I am talking about taking content into the other room or out on the porch – a few feet (meters if you prefer) away. In a family with four children, I am watching the splintering of content consumption with great interest as, at any given time, you will see four or five family members reading, listening to, and/or watching different content at the same time in the same room.
It must be compelling. Content production used to be expensive and time consuming. Amateurs can now upload high definition video with integrated graphics and subtitles that exceed the quality of professional versions from just five years ago. This can be uploaded to YouTube in seconds and viewed by hundreds or even millions in a matter of days. All this for the cost of a $500 flip camera and an hour of time. This democratization of content production and distribution means that, to a certain extent, all publishers are in the fashion business now. It’s not enough to have technically sound content; it must be visually appealing and grab attention.
It must be interactive. As a software developer, I know first hand how expensive a mouse click is. It’s astonishing how rapidly human tolerances can recalibrate, and a few extra mouse clicks can literally destroy a product. One inadvertent click might even cost you $150k. This is all to say that people are having less and less tolerance for hunting for answers and it needs to be embedded, linked, or otherwise a single click away. An article about cyber security, for example, may reference a particular news story. Many people will inevitably want to pause reading the article to gain a deeper understanding of the incident by reading the full account of the incident. Path of least resistance. Instant gratification. And so on.
Maybe publishers think I’m being an alarmist. Somehow, though, I can’t resist a shameful attempt at borrowing from Dirty Harry: “I know what you’re thinking. Will it take ten years or only five? Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement I don’t know what to think myself. But being that this is the Internet, the most powerful change agent in the history of publication since the printing press, and can blow your publication clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?”
PowerPoint doesn't kill people, bad presentations kill people.
I used to think I was pretty good at creating presentations. I took a business communications class in graduate school and learned the same old rules; limit your fonts, three to seven bullet points, don’t read your slides, blah blah blah. I withstood others’ horrible presentations, invisibly smirking and silently mocking the 250 word novels slides with their horrifying color schemes and monotone, stammering presenter. I congratulated myself on not being “that guy.” But the truth is that I was just as guilty of Really Bad PowerPoint as anyone else.
Then I read Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and everything changed. My goal in this blog post is nothing short of paying forward that same change, and so I’m using myself as a case study to show what my presentations used to look like, what they look like now, and what I aspire them to be in the future.
But before we go down that road, in case you’re dubious about whether or not really bad PowerPoint is a problem, here is a presentation that Guy Kawasaki put together that was used as the forward to Presentation Zen.
The Presenter As Storytellter
The number one lesson I’ve learned is that “slides do not a presentation make.” Rather, they are simply a prop for the story you’re telling. The following slide show contains a series of before and after shots from the same presentation, which I completely overhauled after reading Presentation Zen. They illustrate the first major change; move the narrative off of the slides and into the oratory.
Once the presentation is transformed from a distraction to a storytelling prop, the burden of communication falls on the story itself. Based on the recommendation in Presentation Zen, I also read “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive And Others Die.” This indispensable book presents six principles that make stories “sticky.” It’s invaluable to crafting messages of all sorts, not just creating presentations. Whether writing an email, composing a blog post, or crafting a memo outlining your thoughts on your organization’s next mission statement this book will help you do it more effectively and memorably. These six principles can be represented by the acronym “SUCCESs”:
Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotions
Stories
The Presenter As Designer
Duh. That’s the one word that best describes how I felt while reading Presentation Zen. Reynolds eloquently and convincingly makes the case that design is important, poorly understood, and badly implemented (by and large). Those were the “duh” moments, as I realized that those are all true and that I had never realized it or paid much attention previously. But next came salvation, as basic design principles and techniques are presented that make it possible to learn how to improve design. Imagine that – you can actually learn how to design! Looking back, I can’t believe that design wasn’t part of the core curriculum for my engineering degree or any of the computer science tracks I’ve seen. And now that we live in the age of Web 2.0 where we are all content producers, it seems to me that it should be required in all college programs. But I digress.
Reynolds begins by stressing simplicity, balance, noise suppression, and space. These are all related and as I look back on my old presentations it seems as though I was deliberately violating as many of these guidelines as possible on every slide. Take the slide shown below, for example. This is not simple at all; there are too many ideas at once and even the screen shot, while appropriate was still complex and distracting. The layout is completely unbalanced and top-heavy. The slide template is noisy with lines and the “ISA” logo implanted in the corner of every slide. Finally, there is a small amount of empty space on the slide, but it is concentrated in one corner and looks more like something is missing. They eye darts around this slide searching for meaning with no help provided from the design.
My personal design renaissance has begun with what Reynolds calls “The Big Four:” contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. I’ll now provide examples from my own presentations on how I’ve implemented these principles.
This slide uses contrast in two different ways. The first is the color contrast between the dark gray background and the pure white text. The words jump off the page in way that bullets never can. The second use of contrast is the emphasis of the words “interesting” and “boring” by changing the font size. For some reason we seem to be afraid to make things BIG enough or bold enough.
One of the central themes of this particular presentation was the abundance of free tools available on the Internet in our Web 2.0 world. Therefore, I made use of design repetition by placing the “Free” price tag graphic element on eight consecutive slides in the exact same spot. I also made sure to emphasize this in my delivery by asking the audience to guess how much each solution cost. Of course, the answer was the same and the audio and visual repetition made sure that this point would be driven home. Plus, the audience had fun with it.
Alignment stresses the importance of making objects appear as if they were placed in a particular place deliberately, rather than simply thrown anywhere there was space available. This slide aligns the letters of an acronym quite deliberately to show their relationship. While this is a good example of alignment, I’m not sure it’s a great example of contrast, balance, or noise. I’m sure there is a better way to present this idea, so I will keep tinkering.
This title slide demonstrates the use of proximity. The graphic and title are strongly related and so they are grouped together in close proximity. My name, company, and position are also grouped together and separated from the title in order to distinguish and de-emphasize them. You can also see elements of contrast and alignment in play here as well.
The Presenter As Heretic
Alas, as much as I believe all of this makes sense, it remains heresy to create a PowerPoint presentation that does not utilize the prescribed template or can’t be used as a handout. If you look at most of my presentations now, they are completely useless without the presenter and that’s exactly as it should be. Nonetheless, many conferences are still beholden to the same formula of “Email me your presentation three days in advance so that we can print them out.” Adopting this approach means that you need to create your own handouts that contain the substance of your presentation and not just the props. This all takes more work, but it’s worth it for you and your audience. My recommendation is to write the document in Word, then upload it to Scribd (or Posterous or other similar service) so that you can embed it in web pages and blog posts and also increase your online visibility. Leveraging Social Media & Internet Technology (Handout)
Looking Ahead
While my presentations are a night and day difference from what they used to be, the one thing for certain is that I still have a long way to go. I’m continuing to hone my public speaking skills (which I still think are not very good) and currently enjoying “Confessions of a Public Speaker” by Scott Berkun. I’m simultaneously thumbing through Nacy Duarte’s “Slide:ology,” which is not merely informative; it is incredibly beautiful, mesmerizing, and inspirational. I now look upon each public speaking engagement with excitement and optimism of not merely meeting the challenge, but improving each and every time. I’m looking for an end result that comes close to something like this…
Photo credits:
“death-by-presentation” from HikingArtist.com on Flickr (Creative Commons)
