Click Here now to purchase your copy of Be the News: A Guide To Going Viral on Amazon.com.
What is a Human Interest Story?
An Excerpt from Be the News: A Guide to Going Viral With Your Human Interest Story
While we might have a lot of interest in the election results, a cure for cancer, a food recall, or what tomorrow’s temperature will be in your fair city, news media may want to add local flavor or want to put a “face” on the news by covering a story or topic more in depth. This is sometimes referred to as the story-behind-the-story, the “better half” of a story, or the sidebar.
The human interest story may look at a news item in a more personal, emotional way. This is accomplished by pressing the flesh with people who have been directly affected by it or creating a report on one or several people facing challenges that it may have uncovered. The mission of covering these stories is to grab us by our emotional shirt collars and make us think and form an opinion.
It’s rare to see a nightly newscast or a morning newspaper without at least one human interest story. Most have a standard location for them, in broadcast, it is often the last story told before signoff.
A newspaper might be covering post-hurricane financial losses and have an article that deals with statistics regarding them. To push past the grind, they might have a sidebar article on a few people in the town that is rebuilding. The main topic is the hurricane, but the underlying emotional piece is how it affected people, like you and me. It gives a whole new paradigm to understanding the losses and puts them in a feeling perspective – beyond the facts.
In contrast to a regular and objective news story, the rules of journalism are bit looser, dare I say, even slightly more subjective with human interest topics. In some cases the story is so intense that the reporter barely needs more than the facts as they are reported. Other times, the story needs to be reigned in. A slant is sometimes created and then the job of the human interest story is to add perspective rather than the opposite happening.
If yours is a human interest story, it doesn’t have to be deeply stirring and emotional, just on-topic or perhaps more for light laughs (if that falls within your goal for going wide with it to begin with). This is especially true when news venues are leading with gory, crime laden flavored journalism. Stories that meet neither of those end goals can make it into the news just as a diversion to the hard stuff to make it more palatable to the viewer. If the lighter material wasn’t there, readers and viewers would sooner turn the page or the channel to avoid the ugly news.
Many news stories are focused on reporting the facts, especially those facts which involve money, sex, drugs or rock and roll. You might find this gets both boring and depressing after a while unless you have specific interest in the details.
While we might have a lot of interest in the election results, a cure for cancer, a food recall, or what tomorrow’s temperature will be in your fair city, news media may want to add local flavor or want to put a “face” on the news by covering a story or topic more in depth. This is sometimes referred to as the story-behind-the-story, the “better half” of a story, or the sidebar.
The human interest story may look at a news item in a more personal, emotional way. This is accomplished by pressing the flesh with people who have been directly affected by it or creating a report on one or several people facing challenges that it may have uncovered. The mission of covering these stories is to grab us by our emotional shirt collars and make us think and form an opinion.
It’s rare to see a nightly newscast or a morning newspaper without at least one human interest story. Most have a standard location for them, in broadcast, it is often the last story told before signoff.
A newspaper might be covering post-hurricane financial losses and have an article that deals with statistics regarding them. To push past the grind, they might have a sidebar article on a few people in the town that is rebuilding. The main topic is the hurricane, but the underlying emotional piece is how it affected people, like you and me. It gives a whole new paradigm to understanding the losses and puts them in a feeling perspective – beyond the facts.
In contrast to a regular and objective news story, the rules of journalism are bit looser, dare I say, even slightly more subjective with human interest topics. In some cases the story is so intense that the reporter barely needs more than the facts as they are reported. Other times, the story needs to be reigned in. A slant is sometimes created and then the job of the human interest story is to add perspective rather than the opposite happening.
If yours is a human interest story, it doesn’t have to be deeply stirring and emotional, just on-topic or perhaps more for light laughs (if that falls within your goal for going wide with it to begin with). This is especially true when news venues are leading with gory, crime laden flavored journalism. Stories that meet neither of those end goals can make it into the news just as a diversion to the hard stuff to make it more palatable to the viewer. If the lighter material wasn’t there, readers and viewers would sooner turn the page or the channel to avoid the ugly news.
Great Tools to Track Your Footprints on the Internet
A great tool for searching the social Web, Social Mention offers a quick glance at mentions of your name on the Web. Just enter your name and switch between blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news or all of them at once. An RSS feed is available.
Pipl: Searching the Invisible Web
Pipl claims to search the Web to find documents, blog entries, photos, publicly available information that other search engines don't serve up. It's a great, fast search engine that I like; the only disadvantage is it offers no RSS feed.
Monitter: Tracking Twitter
Monitter is one of the coolest looking monitoring tools for Twitter and one of the most useful. Although most people are using Twitter's own search tool for search and alerts on Twitter, Monitter offers a little bit more. Giving you the option to search for three different keywords at once, Monitter is great if you want to keep your eye out for mentions of your name, your username and your company all at the same time. It also offers an RSS feed. Monitter also allows you to narrow the search to a particular geographic location, allowing you to find out what’s going on in a particular area of the world.
BoardTracker: The Ultimate Search Tool for Forums
BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alert system offering relevant results quickly. It’s a great search tool for forums and message boards.
Google Alerts: The Big G
I couldn't end this post without mentioning Google Alerts, although likely most of you are familiar with it outside of what I’ve written here in this book. Although Microsoft and Yahoo have alert tools, I find that Google's offering beats them hands down. It offers e-mail and RSS alerts for any set of keywords including your name.
How to Create Your Own Media List
This resource page is an excerpt from Be the News: A Guide to Going Viral With Your Human Interest Story, a highly reviewed Amazon Bestseller! 5 Stars!!!! Buy Your Copy By Clicking Here!
1. Decide which media outlets you
want to target. You probably wouldn't pitch a story about senior citizens to an
alternative rock radio station. Choose the media that will have an interest in
your story.
2. Go to the web site for each media outlet. Most have a
"Contact Us" page, but do not send your story idea to a general
contact email address.
3. Look for an editor, producer or reporter and find their
email address. Often, you will find it on a profile page for the person, or on
a page with a story they did. Tip: You may have greater success contacting an
editor or producer than a reporter.
4. If you can't find an email address for a specific
person, try using the organization's default email structure. Most companies
use a standard format for employees at their company email addresses. For
example, they might be first.last@media.com, or firstlast@media.com or
firstinitallast@media.com. If you want to reach reporter Jim Smith, but can't
find his email address, see what the structure is for other employees there.
Then, use that structure for Jim. If the addresses you found were
first.last@media.com, try jim.smith@media.com.
5. Consider buying a list of media contacts. There are
sources where you can buy a list of media email addresses and other contact
information. If you want to reach a lot of media outlets, or can't find
contacts for the ones you want, buying a list might be the best way to go.
Good Tips to Remember
· Keep your pitches short and to
the point. Never deluge your contact.
· Put all information in the body
of an email. Never use attachments.
· Never spam media outlets. Send
personal pitches to each contact.
Why I wrote Be The News: A Guide to Going Viral With Your Human Interest Story
The reviewers love it and I am ever humbled! Be the News: A Guide to Going Viral with Your Human Interest Story has marched its way up the ranks of bestselling books at Amazon to the #1 spot in its category.
After much rumination and over 2,000 hours spent on writing a memoir of our personal family story I found myself wondering about the 15 minute of fame rule. How do news stories that dominate the landscape of every media venue in the country end up looking like isolated examples with nary a trace of change effected by them just a few months or years later? Is it apathy or is it just because we are a flash in the pan society? I refuse to subscribe to either of those possibilities and can merely surmise that there just aren't tipping points on the meaningful issues at the foundation of the stories. So, I set aside my memoir to write a simple to follow How-To book about going viral.
It's hard to risk your reputation for something you believe in. I cover this extensively in Be the News. It's hard, but it's not without a well won sense of accomplishment if it helps to effect change. There are specific steps you must take in order to prepare your story for release. It is key that the reason for your story is not ego-centric but issue or story-centric and that you position the mission of your decision to speak out ON TOPIC. Again, identifying a topic that is relevant and newsworthy already puts you in the "back story or side-bar" category to most journalists and that moves you closer to having a venue to speak through.
Carrying a media megaphone isn't the way to ingratiating yourself with journalists but carefully plotting who you trust with your story based on their experience with others like it, as well as their overall integrity is. If you have a story, business related or otherwise, that you would like to see the media grab onto, there are specific steps you must take in order to gain the attention you want. Be the News is the only how-to guide offering the insights as to what those steps are.
My seasoning of over 26 years of public and media relations and strategic marketing expertise didn't even begin to prepare me for the days I hid in my basement avoiding the media on a hunt for my story. I wrote the book from the standpoint of the things I did right in addition to the things I did wrong, but mostly from the standpoint of things I didn't think about at all as an outgrowth of the intention to advocate on a larger issue. Our story started a national discussion. If I were to be a little more candid, what it started was a real (and sometimes nasty) national argument. Did it effect change? If our appearance on live national TV and our 10,000+ newswire pickups and radio interviews saved even one child from the legacy of FASD, then yes, I believe it effected change! Would I like to see more change? You bet! Which is why I wrote Be the News. With this step by step guide to going viral with your story, more people can stand up for their right to effect change and make a difference. So go ahead, think about going viral, but don't do anything until you read Be the News. It will prepare you in a way no other book will.
Have you been Sullied?
The Scoop to Online Reputation Management
Have you been sullied or besmirched online? They are great words with horrific repercussions. Can you go no further than a Google search on your or your company name before you witness the literal slamming of your reputation, corporate philosophy, product and/or service quality, or worse?
This is a huge issue in this day and age where the internet rules and everyone is an expert by means of just tapping what is out there on the great WWW.
Here’s an anecdote for you to put this issue into perspective.
Six months ago you engaged an employee to work for your small to mid-size company. You knew within the first two weeks that it probably wouldn’t be a marriage made in heaven. Your hire wasn’t communicating with management, wasn’t fulfilling the goals of the position and had already started showing up late for work, but you held back judgment and decided to give them a chance to get their feet on the ground in your business.
Unfortunately, by 8 weeks on the job things had only gotten worse and it necessitated a review meeting and the probation discussion. Not exactly where you wanted to go when, after a year of a hiring freeze, you excitedly brought on a new staffer.
At 12 weeks, it was obvious that this hire was not interested in growing into the position and you were frustrated. In a frenzied moment when you discovered the employee was taking two hour lunches, surfing the net during office hours and harassing other staffers you very professionally called the person into your office and after explaining your position on their choices very privately let them go, effective immediately. In your mind 12 weeks was sufficient enough time to let them prove their value and get on board. You were fair with compensation and even gave them a severance pay of 2 weeks.
Fast forward 3 weeks and while you are vanity surfing your name and your company’s name on the internet to see how your website fares against competitors in your market, you SEE it!
A complaint! In fact, it’s worse than just a complaint. Hell, complaints give you an opportunity to do better and actually make it right by someone. This was a complete trashing of your reputation, your standards, your philosophy and your entire staff! It’s written from the standpoint of a disgruntled customer, but immediately you recognize the rhetoric, the vocabulary, the energy and essence of this virtual attack, and know intuitively that this was written by the employee you fired.
What do you do? This reputation destroyer begins to post complaints in many high profile optimized sites and suddenly your recently updated, highly optimized company website falls in the 5th position below all the bashing being done to your company by this angry, and probably still out-of-work ex-employee.
In 2009, a study commissioned by Microsoft found that of the almost 80% of U.S. hiring managers who had searched for candidates online, 70% of them said they had rejected a candidate based on what they found in his or her search results.
Can you imagine what this means when translated into a prospective customer looking for services or products like those your company has delivered with integrity since its inception?
While there are many companies that manage reputations online they charge a pretty good sum to do so. For immediate damage control, you should start by utilizing some simple SEO techniques on your own. You might not be able to remove the damaging results from the Internet but you can definitely minimize their impact without having to engage a specialty company to do it for you.
Here’s where you should start.
________________________________________
Step 1: Assess the Damage
________________________________________
Before you begin to manage your online reputation, you should assess it. Type your names in search engines. Set up search alerts for your name (Google recently made this easier to do from the Google dashboard through a new “Me on the Web” tool).
If you find something negative, ask yourself:
• Did I post it? If, for instance, photos from your Facebook account are showing up in search results for your name, you can simply delete the photos or adjust your privacy settings.
After you’ve removed the content, you can use Google’s URL removal tool to stop it from appearing as a cached copy or snippet in search results.
• Is it personal information that could be used in a crime? If someone posts your social security number, bank account number, credit card number or an image of your handwritten signature, Google will make efforts to remove it from search results. It will also contact the site’s hosting company to request that the page be taken down.
• Is it posted on a high-traffic news site? Competing for search results with a popular news site is difficult. But Patrick Ambron, the cofounder of a personal online reputation management service called Brand-Yourself, says that all hope is not lost. “Google usually only likes to rank one result per domain name per page,” he says. “So if you could get another result on the same domain name like Huffington Post that was better optimized for your name, you could theoretically knock the bad article off.” One way to do this is to create a profile on that news site using your full name. Use as many links as possible, and link to the profile from all of your other web properties.
If you didn’t answer “yes” to any of these questions, your best bet for reducing the visibility of negative content is through the use of positive content.
________________________________________
Step 2: Post Positive Content
________________________________________
“If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either,” reads Google’s guide to keeping personal information out of Google. “Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business.”
In other words, if you want to make negative webpages appear lower in search, you’ll need to create content of relevance to push the negative links down. Google suggests responding to negative reviews of your business, for instance.
Profiles on social networks are powerful tools for this purpose, as results from large sites like Facebook and Twitter often carry more SEO power than a single post on something like a personal blog.
________________________________________
Step 3. Create an Identity Hub
________________________________________
One secret to pushing your positive online presence further up in search results is to make a hub that links to all of your content. Ambron recommends these tips for pushing your hub to the top of search results for your name.
• Claim your domain name. Including the search term (in this case, your name or your company name) in the URL of your web page tells search engines what the page is about.
• Mention yourself and your company. You’re trying to tell search spiders, “This page is about me and my company!” A good way to do that is to use names a lot. Use your name in tabs and headers.
• Link to your content. “[Google] considers each link to your site a vote for the site,” Ambron says. “Google has gotten pretty smart, so where those links come from is very important. The more reputable links are better votes. A vote from CNN is better than some site you made that you just linked to yourself.”
Remember all of those social media profiles that you created in step two? They’re attached to reputable sources like Facebook and Twitter, which makes their “votes” count as much more reputable than a page you just created.
Sign up for as many of them as possible and then link them all to your hub.
• Post often. Search engines love fresh content. One easy way to create it is to post your social media feeds to your blog.
(Thanks to http://mashable.com/2011/06/27/manage-online-reputation-seo/for the specific steps to online management of ones reputation)________________________________________
In the end, the integrity of your business and your reputation are your greatest assets. Protecting them is a matter of priority and enlisting outside help in addition to your proactivity is often the best method.
There are many online reputation companies to choose from with varying rates and maintenance programs. I've included a list reprinted from my book, Be the News: A Guide to Going Viral With Your Human Interest Story below. Make sure the company you do hire understands your business philosophy and has a keen sense for small to mid size business and you are well on your way to recovering your brand identity and reputation!
Have you been sullied or besmirched online? They are great words with horrific repercussions. Can you go no further than a Google search on your or your company name before you witness the literal slamming of your reputation, corporate philosophy, product and/or service quality, or worse?
This is a huge issue in this day and age where the internet rules and everyone is an expert by means of just tapping what is out there on the great WWW.
Here’s an anecdote for you to put this issue into perspective.
Six months ago you engaged an employee to work for your small to mid-size company. You knew within the first two weeks that it probably wouldn’t be a marriage made in heaven. Your hire wasn’t communicating with management, wasn’t fulfilling the goals of the position and had already started showing up late for work, but you held back judgment and decided to give them a chance to get their feet on the ground in your business.
Unfortunately, by 8 weeks on the job things had only gotten worse and it necessitated a review meeting and the probation discussion. Not exactly where you wanted to go when, after a year of a hiring freeze, you excitedly brought on a new staffer.
At 12 weeks, it was obvious that this hire was not interested in growing into the position and you were frustrated. In a frenzied moment when you discovered the employee was taking two hour lunches, surfing the net during office hours and harassing other staffers you very professionally called the person into your office and after explaining your position on their choices very privately let them go, effective immediately. In your mind 12 weeks was sufficient enough time to let them prove their value and get on board. You were fair with compensation and even gave them a severance pay of 2 weeks.
Fast forward 3 weeks and while you are vanity surfing your name and your company’s name on the internet to see how your website fares against competitors in your market, you SEE it!
A complaint! In fact, it’s worse than just a complaint. Hell, complaints give you an opportunity to do better and actually make it right by someone. This was a complete trashing of your reputation, your standards, your philosophy and your entire staff! It’s written from the standpoint of a disgruntled customer, but immediately you recognize the rhetoric, the vocabulary, the energy and essence of this virtual attack, and know intuitively that this was written by the employee you fired.
What do you do? This reputation destroyer begins to post complaints in many high profile optimized sites and suddenly your recently updated, highly optimized company website falls in the 5th position below all the bashing being done to your company by this angry, and probably still out-of-work ex-employee.
In 2009, a study commissioned by Microsoft found that of the almost 80% of U.S. hiring managers who had searched for candidates online, 70% of them said they had rejected a candidate based on what they found in his or her search results.
Can you imagine what this means when translated into a prospective customer looking for services or products like those your company has delivered with integrity since its inception?
While there are many companies that manage reputations online they charge a pretty good sum to do so. For immediate damage control, you should start by utilizing some simple SEO techniques on your own. You might not be able to remove the damaging results from the Internet but you can definitely minimize their impact without having to engage a specialty company to do it for you.
Here’s where you should start.
________________________________________
Step 1: Assess the Damage
________________________________________
Before you begin to manage your online reputation, you should assess it. Type your names in search engines. Set up search alerts for your name (Google recently made this easier to do from the Google dashboard through a new “Me on the Web” tool).
If you find something negative, ask yourself:
• Did I post it? If, for instance, photos from your Facebook account are showing up in search results for your name, you can simply delete the photos or adjust your privacy settings.
After you’ve removed the content, you can use Google’s URL removal tool to stop it from appearing as a cached copy or snippet in search results.
• Is it personal information that could be used in a crime? If someone posts your social security number, bank account number, credit card number or an image of your handwritten signature, Google will make efforts to remove it from search results. It will also contact the site’s hosting company to request that the page be taken down.
• Is it posted on a high-traffic news site? Competing for search results with a popular news site is difficult. But Patrick Ambron, the cofounder of a personal online reputation management service called Brand-Yourself, says that all hope is not lost. “Google usually only likes to rank one result per domain name per page,” he says. “So if you could get another result on the same domain name like Huffington Post that was better optimized for your name, you could theoretically knock the bad article off.” One way to do this is to create a profile on that news site using your full name. Use as many links as possible, and link to the profile from all of your other web properties.
If you didn’t answer “yes” to any of these questions, your best bet for reducing the visibility of negative content is through the use of positive content.
________________________________________
Step 2: Post Positive Content
________________________________________
“If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either,” reads Google’s guide to keeping personal information out of Google. “Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business.”
In other words, if you want to make negative webpages appear lower in search, you’ll need to create content of relevance to push the negative links down. Google suggests responding to negative reviews of your business, for instance.
Profiles on social networks are powerful tools for this purpose, as results from large sites like Facebook and Twitter often carry more SEO power than a single post on something like a personal blog.
________________________________________
Step 3. Create an Identity Hub
________________________________________
One secret to pushing your positive online presence further up in search results is to make a hub that links to all of your content. Ambron recommends these tips for pushing your hub to the top of search results for your name.
• Claim your domain name. Including the search term (in this case, your name or your company name) in the URL of your web page tells search engines what the page is about.
• Mention yourself and your company. You’re trying to tell search spiders, “This page is about me and my company!” A good way to do that is to use names a lot. Use your name in tabs and headers.
• Link to your content. “[Google] considers each link to your site a vote for the site,” Ambron says. “Google has gotten pretty smart, so where those links come from is very important. The more reputable links are better votes. A vote from CNN is better than some site you made that you just linked to yourself.”
Remember all of those social media profiles that you created in step two? They’re attached to reputable sources like Facebook and Twitter, which makes their “votes” count as much more reputable than a page you just created.
Sign up for as many of them as possible and then link them all to your hub.
• Post often. Search engines love fresh content. One easy way to create it is to post your social media feeds to your blog.
(Thanks to http://mashable.com/2011/06/27/manage-online-reputation-seo/for the specific steps to online management of ones reputation)________________________________________
In the end, the integrity of your business and your reputation are your greatest assets. Protecting them is a matter of priority and enlisting outside help in addition to your proactivity is often the best method.
There are many online reputation companies to choose from with varying rates and maintenance programs. I've included a list reprinted from my book, Be the News: A Guide to Going Viral With Your Human Interest Story below. Make sure the company you do hire understands your business philosophy and has a keen sense for small to mid size business and you are well on your way to recovering your brand identity and reputation!
Reputation Management Companies
Top 10
Reputation Management Companies (listed in order) as chosen by Visibility, the
Magazine for Online Marketing Strategies (tinyurl.com/avg8p)
· Reputationchanger.com
· ReputationManagementConsultants.com
· Netmark.com
· Customermagnetism.com
· Brucelay.com
· 1SEO.com
· Rebuildmyreputation.com
· SEOimage.com
· Submit-express.com
· Iprospect.com
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
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The Purpose of Marketing (I love this article!)
Written by Somik Raha
Go To Original Article Here
"You need to understand the purpose of marketing," said a successful CEO mentor of mine, with stern compassion. He'd invited me to meet him, and since I'd just finished my Ph.D., he asked me about my work. I went on for about 15 minutes about my dissertation, which focused on getting clarity on our values in the context of decision-making, before he dropped this gem in my lap (paraphrased): "This world is a noisy place, and people gift you a short amount of time with great difficulty. You have no right to steal their time by rambling and being unclear. To honor their time, you must share your deepest truth as directly and clearly as possible. Now, in a single sentence, I will summarize your work. Your work is about helping people align their decisions with their core values!"
It was the most simple, succinct, accessible, comprehensive and beautiful description of my research. More importantly, I started to wonder, what is marketing really about? I realized that I'd been filtering my understanding of marketing through my own biases and to reexamine this question, I had to ask a more fundamental question, "Do our beliefs create our experiences, or do our experiences create our beliefs?" A professor of mine once shared a three-step exercise he did at a retreat that provides insight into this question.
In the first step, he was asked to look at a sculpture with intense love and note his experiences -- he found grandness, beauty, simplicity and many other "good things." Then he was asked to look at the same sculpture with intense hatred. He noted paint peeling off, problems with symmetry and many other "bad things." In the third step, he was asked to look at that sculpture with neither love nor hatred. At this point, he realized his beliefs were completely swaying his experience in the previous two steps, and was convinced of something powerful: by making the polarities of his perception explicit, he was able to release their subconscious hold. As a result, the quality of his third experience was poignantly clear, and he was able see things more as they were. We can understand marketing more truly by adopting this method.
Belief: Marketing is Good: Take the example of the Buddha, an expert marketer of grand ideas -- he never delivered his message in the same way to everyone, instead tailoring it to the occasion, with mindfulness of his listener's ability to access his message. He focused on asceticism with the monks, on being a good householder with householders, and building a strong republic with kings. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were also legendary marketers in recent times. Gandhi made full use of the pen to take his message of nonviolence and commitment to truth far and wide. His short phrase, "The fragrance remains on the hand that gives the rose," was his philosophy of marketing. His vision was that of providing people a way to constructively channel their frustration with a great injustice. Be it spinning cotton at home or making salt from the sea, he connected a great pain with a simple, yet great action. These examples have one thing in common: the marketers did their marketing without any expectations of personal gain, and had in their hearts the well-being of those they wanted to serve.
Belief: Marketing is Bad: This was a viewpoint I held for a long time. I remember reading Robert Cialdini's Psychology of Influence for an Organizational Behavior class; the book horrified me with its depiction of what goes on in marketing -- its study of human habits for the express purpose of manipulating people into buying things, regardless of actual need. Cialdini described our tendency to fall into repeated patterns with a succinct phrase, "Click, whirr." That is how mechanistic and predictable we humans tend to be. For example, marketers know that we respond to kindness and gifts, so they bombard our mail with gifts goading us into purchases. Over time, we develop a thick skin to avoid being sold on something, although researchers find that we are less successful than we might think.
Marketing As It Is: When I consider the things that I've desired and acquired, I wonder, why am I bored with many of them quickly? It is usually because I discover that these things are severely limited. So then, what I'm really seeking is limitless satisfaction. There are those who are skeptical about this and say, "there's enough for our need, not enough for our greed." What if there were enough for our limitless wants? What if we could really have limitless satisfaction?
The trick is that limitless satisfaction cannot be achieved with anything that is limited. Now, there is nothing mysterious about limitlessness -- anyone who has meditated deeply and felt something separate from their thoughts has tasted it. Those who have not meditated may also have tasted it, by entering "the zone" at work or in sports, where their effort seems effortless. Or by giving or receiving overwhelming unconditional love. Or by giving up on a complex problem only to have an elegant solution float in front of their eyes.
In all these experiences, we don't remember the "I," however briefly that may be, and this is where it gets intriguing. What emerges from this space is a creative impulse grounded in abundance. In every experience that has been marketed to us, this is what we have really been looking for. A connection to our own limitless creativity. We are deeply joyful when the connection is made -- and deeply sorrowful when it eludes us. Ironically, we can only perceive this limitlessness when it is limited through our creations, just as light can only be perceived when bounded by darkness.
It's a game. We enjoy this play of placing limitations on ourselves and then breaking these limitations over and over again to discover that we cannot be limited! Going back to the CEO's message, we can now restate the truest purpose of all marketing: it is a game of inviting others to access their unlimited creative nature by sharing our creations with them, and doing so within the limits they've placed on their time.
Of course, not everyone sees it this way. There are marketers who have exploitative and deceitful intent -- wouldn't blindly accepting their invitation amount to falling into a trap? An ancient Indian tale inspires us to deepen our awareness. Whenever sages would grow powerful in their practice of connecting with their limitlessness, the lord of the senses, Indra, would feel terribly insecure and try to disrupt their practice. When all material pleasures would fail, Indra would send sensuous beauties to distract them. Most would succumb, but not all. As the story goes, one sage was invited by Indra to attend a dance by his most beautiful dancer. As she proceeded to dance, she also started to strip, and to Indra's delight, the sage swayed wildly, saying, "Take it off, take it off." This continued, and soon there was nothing left to take off. Indra was certain that he had knocked the sage's mind off of limitlessness. And then, he noticed strangely that the sage continued to sway and utter, "Take it off. Take it off."
The stunned silence from Indra and his dancer marked their recognition of one who pierced through the limited into the limitless. By being established in his own limitlessness, that unknown sage transcended all judgments and words, and effortlessly marketed a timeless possibility: it is always possible to see the limitless in our own limited experiences. Are we game?
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"You need to understand the purpose of marketing," said a successful CEO mentor of mine, with stern compassion. He'd invited me to meet him, and since I'd just finished my Ph.D., he asked me about my work. I went on for about 15 minutes about my dissertation, which focused on getting clarity on our values in the context of decision-making, before he dropped this gem in my lap (paraphrased): "This world is a noisy place, and people gift you a short amount of time with great difficulty. You have no right to steal their time by rambling and being unclear. To honor their time, you must share your deepest truth as directly and clearly as possible. Now, in a single sentence, I will summarize your work. Your work is about helping people align their decisions with their core values!"
It was the most simple, succinct, accessible, comprehensive and beautiful description of my research. More importantly, I started to wonder, what is marketing really about? I realized that I'd been filtering my understanding of marketing through my own biases and to reexamine this question, I had to ask a more fundamental question, "Do our beliefs create our experiences, or do our experiences create our beliefs?" A professor of mine once shared a three-step exercise he did at a retreat that provides insight into this question.
In the first step, he was asked to look at a sculpture with intense love and note his experiences -- he found grandness, beauty, simplicity and many other "good things." Then he was asked to look at the same sculpture with intense hatred. He noted paint peeling off, problems with symmetry and many other "bad things." In the third step, he was asked to look at that sculpture with neither love nor hatred. At this point, he realized his beliefs were completely swaying his experience in the previous two steps, and was convinced of something powerful: by making the polarities of his perception explicit, he was able to release their subconscious hold. As a result, the quality of his third experience was poignantly clear, and he was able see things more as they were. We can understand marketing more truly by adopting this method.
Belief: Marketing is Good: Take the example of the Buddha, an expert marketer of grand ideas -- he never delivered his message in the same way to everyone, instead tailoring it to the occasion, with mindfulness of his listener's ability to access his message. He focused on asceticism with the monks, on being a good householder with householders, and building a strong republic with kings. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were also legendary marketers in recent times. Gandhi made full use of the pen to take his message of nonviolence and commitment to truth far and wide. His short phrase, "The fragrance remains on the hand that gives the rose," was his philosophy of marketing. His vision was that of providing people a way to constructively channel their frustration with a great injustice. Be it spinning cotton at home or making salt from the sea, he connected a great pain with a simple, yet great action. These examples have one thing in common: the marketers did their marketing without any expectations of personal gain, and had in their hearts the well-being of those they wanted to serve.
Belief: Marketing is Bad: This was a viewpoint I held for a long time. I remember reading Robert Cialdini's Psychology of Influence for an Organizational Behavior class; the book horrified me with its depiction of what goes on in marketing -- its study of human habits for the express purpose of manipulating people into buying things, regardless of actual need. Cialdini described our tendency to fall into repeated patterns with a succinct phrase, "Click, whirr." That is how mechanistic and predictable we humans tend to be. For example, marketers know that we respond to kindness and gifts, so they bombard our mail with gifts goading us into purchases. Over time, we develop a thick skin to avoid being sold on something, although researchers find that we are less successful than we might think.
Marketing As It Is: When I consider the things that I've desired and acquired, I wonder, why am I bored with many of them quickly? It is usually because I discover that these things are severely limited. So then, what I'm really seeking is limitless satisfaction. There are those who are skeptical about this and say, "there's enough for our need, not enough for our greed." What if there were enough for our limitless wants? What if we could really have limitless satisfaction?
The trick is that limitless satisfaction cannot be achieved with anything that is limited. Now, there is nothing mysterious about limitlessness -- anyone who has meditated deeply and felt something separate from their thoughts has tasted it. Those who have not meditated may also have tasted it, by entering "the zone" at work or in sports, where their effort seems effortless. Or by giving or receiving overwhelming unconditional love. Or by giving up on a complex problem only to have an elegant solution float in front of their eyes.
In all these experiences, we don't remember the "I," however briefly that may be, and this is where it gets intriguing. What emerges from this space is a creative impulse grounded in abundance. In every experience that has been marketed to us, this is what we have really been looking for. A connection to our own limitless creativity. We are deeply joyful when the connection is made -- and deeply sorrowful when it eludes us. Ironically, we can only perceive this limitlessness when it is limited through our creations, just as light can only be perceived when bounded by darkness.
It's a game. We enjoy this play of placing limitations on ourselves and then breaking these limitations over and over again to discover that we cannot be limited! Going back to the CEO's message, we can now restate the truest purpose of all marketing: it is a game of inviting others to access their unlimited creative nature by sharing our creations with them, and doing so within the limits they've placed on their time.
Of course, not everyone sees it this way. There are marketers who have exploitative and deceitful intent -- wouldn't blindly accepting their invitation amount to falling into a trap? An ancient Indian tale inspires us to deepen our awareness. Whenever sages would grow powerful in their practice of connecting with their limitlessness, the lord of the senses, Indra, would feel terribly insecure and try to disrupt their practice. When all material pleasures would fail, Indra would send sensuous beauties to distract them. Most would succumb, but not all. As the story goes, one sage was invited by Indra to attend a dance by his most beautiful dancer. As she proceeded to dance, she also started to strip, and to Indra's delight, the sage swayed wildly, saying, "Take it off, take it off." This continued, and soon there was nothing left to take off. Indra was certain that he had knocked the sage's mind off of limitlessness. And then, he noticed strangely that the sage continued to sway and utter, "Take it off. Take it off."
The stunned silence from Indra and his dancer marked their recognition of one who pierced through the limited into the limitless. By being established in his own limitlessness, that unknown sage transcended all judgments and words, and effortlessly marketed a timeless possibility: it is always possible to see the limitless in our own limited experiences. Are we game?
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