Everyone will tell you it is about Content, Stories and Targeting (Relevance) your audience. Well, sure it is, we have been talking about that since before the days of Moses. Just look at what Moses offered:
- He was born a Hebrew, he was one of them.
- Evidence to lead: He was practically king of Egypt
- His Call to Action was a better alternative to slavery, independence.
- During the journey at certain moments of truth he brought a few (10) plagues, parted a few seas and received the 10 Commandments to help form a nation.
This is not attempt to discredit Moses. I could have used the “marketing” campaign of our founding fathers that resulted in the creation of the United States. It is just an attempt to demonstrate that most “marketing” campaigns have contained the same successful platform for the last thousands of years. Today, marketers have taken this construct online with the tools that exist today.
I have always operated under the philosophy that the best indicator of future performance is past performance. We could argue this point, but I am betting my evidence on a few thousand years of history. What I do believe is communication happens at a more accelerated rate which causes change to happen quicker. Once when Moses campaign may take a lifetime, we now see an overthrow in Egypt materialize and happen in a short time span. It is the speed of communication.
There is another component that I believe that is happening that couples with the speed of communication, it is influence. We construct our present day messages with more data and information than ever thought possible (I have read that data can now predict where I will be (location) a year from now). As Kaiser Fung said in a Business901podcast (Framing Big Data Transcript):
Having the data and the numbers are really important. Like we said previously, completely trusting the numbers and the analysis is also very foolish. You need human intelligence to interpret these numbers. It is really an interplay of the numbers and your interpretation because ultimately, even though the numbers will never give us cause of information – they can never really tell you with certainty that A causes B, it would tell you that A is related to B. It is human interaction that is needed that kind of tie these things all together into a credible story. Forget the notion that you will find one story that is correct, and everything else is wrong. All we are trying to look for is a story that is our best story, given our constraints of what we can and what we cannot.
Even with all the data in the world, it is the influence of the person delivering that has the most significant effect on our decision. How do you gain that influence? How do you become an influencer? Is it by the number of connections? Is it by the books you have authored? Or, do we leave LinkedIn tell us?
I think it can be summed up in one word, participation. Are we participating in the conversation? Are we participating in doing the work? Are we participating helping to create outcomes? I think it goes past the Jobs To Be Done type thinking. It goes into what I have always termed playing in the customer’s playground. It requires additional influence that we gained with developing cooperative structure both internally and externally to the organization. It is not passive observation. It is participation.
This is what my new eBook CAP-Do (More Info) discusses, The change that is needed in the conversation between the supply and demand side. The change in structure of that overlapping responsibility. That area where we struggle to maintain balance between “whose job it is”. We must assume it is a joint responsibility versus drawing the line in the sand. It is not saying the customer is always right. It is not assuming the blame. It is about how we frame the opportunity to move from a solution type thinking to openness. We must be willing to be influenced before asking others to be influenced by us.
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