Less is More

When presenting, discussing or communicating your ideas about a project, a business or your brand, keen awareness of the notion that simplicity and clarity can make or break the power and impact of your message is crucial.

How many presentations have you sat through where you had to fight off sleep, struggled to pay attention, or the content and how it was being communicated was simply, dull, boring, and uninteresting?  The power in short, concise yet passionate and meaningful statements is often unrealized.

It is almost counterintuitive. 

The less you say, the more commanding those words become. The less you say the more time people have to process what it is you expressed and can contemplate your ideas.  The less you say the more time there is to understand your concepts and process your message.

Tap into the power of brevity. It's an extremely potent weapon.

Managing complexity

In today's market with the explosion of the internet there seems to be more cogs, levers, pulleys, hinges and tools to know how to utilize than ever before.

Building your brand in many ways is contingent upon you using these tools (blogs, Facebook, Myspace Twitter, etc) in a manner that optimizes your impact in the marketplace. 

New realities such as transparency, social media, viral marketing, crowdsourcing, web 2.0, sustainability, design thinking, and user-generated content (to name a few) are necessary to understand and know about in order to stay relevant (let alone competitive) as we navigate these early rocky roads of the 21st century. 

Often times when we take a glance at the whole playing field it can be a weee bit overwhelming. 

Many times just sitting back taking a breath and hacking the big picture into bit sized chunks becomes the best way to deal with the challenges. 

A few small suggestions on how to make the overwhelming look not so daunting.

1.  Don't constantly look at the big picture - think about what you want to accomplish in the next hour. Then after that figure out what you want to get done by the end of the day.

2.  Set time aside each week (religiously) to touch base with trusted friends and colleagues to talk to, shoot the breeze with and ask some questions you are looking for guidance on. Being able to get from inside of your head does wonders for helping you tackle issues.

3.  Be comfortable with ambiguity. If you feel like you need to know the answers to everything all the time you will always feel like you are overwhelmed.  Once you get comfortable with the idea that you won't always have the answers to everything life becomes easier to manage.

4. Let Google be your friend. I can't even begin to state the number of times I had a question or a business problem that I was not able to get some level of guidance from by simply using Google.  More information than you can possibly imagine is at your fingertips.  Have at it.

5. Prioritize. Do what absolutely needs to be done now, now.  If a project that you need to complete has high priority but doesn't need to be finished today or tomorrow.  Leave it. Focus on it later.  Often times our downfall is because we do things that could be done later now instead of leaving them for another time.  Then we feel pressured when the due date looms and we didn't prioritize .

6. Remember if you are current on the new technology then you are waaaay ahead of the curve. Often times the technology created is often ahead of the markets actual ability to usefully incorporate it into their day to day in a really useful and beneficial way.  We get caught up and stressed out with staying ahead of the curve that we forget many, many folks (the majority of the market) haven't even gotten on board yet. 

7. Don't be afraid to ask questions.  People are often afraid to ask questions for fear of looking stupid or appearing as if they are not in the loop.  Well #1 - you're not stupid and #2 you aren't in the know and asking a question about what you aren't familiar with will get you in the know.

An offer you can't refuse

One of the things that we at Vosica pride ourselves on is bringing value to the table - and who doesn't want to work with a company that does that? So when we seek out clients, strategic partners, and colleagues we do exactly that. We bring value to the table. 

During November of last year I met Jeremey Epstein (the marketing strategist for Daniel Pink's new best seller The Adventures of Johnny Bunko).  After finding out what his forte was I had a few ideas in my head that I wanted to run by him. 

So about a week ago I reached out to him after my initial contact with him last year in December, and at his request I followed up midway through this month.  He was impressed with my 'presentation' and blogged about it.  Below is our conversation (via email) as posted on his blog.

How To Get A Meeting with Anybody…

I live and die by the network.

I will pretty much talk to or meet with anyone for 20-30 minutes. (Not everyone will meet with me, but that’s another story.)

A few months ago, I met Rasul Shair at a presentation I gave.

We chatted, connected on FB/LinkedIn, etc.

Last week, he reached out to me for a coffee meet-up.

I proposed 30 minutes on a date that worked for me.

He countered: I was looking to set aside an hour to meet.

To which I responded: I'll be very blunt...so pardon my direct approach. Generally, I say I will meet with anyone for 30 mins. I'm open to an hour discussion, but since you are asking for it, I'd like to have some idea of an agenda, the objective. Fair enough?

Then, he delivered the Grand Slam of networking pitches.

No worries about being blunt/the direct approach (I actually prefer it). I have absolutely no problems with that. I can only know how you operate if you tell me. Completely fair!

Reason #1.
My main reason for wanting to meet has to do with your work with Dan Pink. I know another author which I though that you may want to become familiar with his work. I was connecting the dots in my head and thinking that there may be something there of interest to you. We did an interview with him for the blog and we made a really good connection (we are also linked on his blog). I was thinking that there may be some opportunities for you two to work with each other and I could help possibly broker that connection.

Reason #2
I wanted to meet to get a more in depth feel for your work. Find out what kind of projects you are seeking out. See if I could be of assistance and bring something to the table for you from the work I am doing - which I would like to discuss with you as well.

Reason #3.
Simply to start building a rapport with you. I like to align myself with people who are movers and shakers (it helps me up my game - smile). One of my personal approaches to life is if you want to be a millionaire you need to hang out with millionaires. So I seek to build relationships with folks that I feel are serious in their work and constantly looking to grow and move forward in their lives and businesses.

We may be able to do actually to all of this in 30 minutes (not sure). I just wanted to allot an hour - just in case. So we may only need 40 or 45 minutes. Again I just wanted to have enough time for good discussion.

Let me know what you think (being blunt is fine - smile) and if this works for you or not.

What I think is that is that Rasul knows how to sell, baby!

Lesson: if you are asking someone for their time (for a job, for a sale, etc.), outline the WIIFM (aka the “What’s In It For Me”) in a way that, as the Godfather would say, “is an offer they cannot refuse.”

I’m pumped for my meeting with Rasul now.

Wrong ingredients for a business recipe

Ok you have 5,000 hits to your Myspace page (cool. throw that in the bowl)

Ok you now have 1,000 friends on your Facebook page (cool. throw that in the bowl)

Ok you have 30 blogs that link to your blog and you easily have 1,000 unique hits a day (cool. throw that in the bowl)

Ok now you have 500 people who follow you on twitter (cool. throw that in the bowl).

Mix it all up. Now what do you have?

A whole bunch of people who know about you.  

Ok now put together a statement of what your product/service is (cool. throw that in the bowl).

Ok now state who your target market is (cool, throw that in the bowl).

Ok state who your competition is (cool. throw that in the bowl)

Ok talk about the competitive advantage - what makes your product better than your competitions (cool. throw that into the bowl)

Mix it all up.  Now what do you have?

Something of potential value in the marketplace that people will want and you can begin developing an actual business around.

It seems to me that I hear more often about how many twitter followers someone has than what value the business (or person) is actually offering.  It is on just about every social network that companies advertise everything and anything - yet there isn't any real discussion around if this is really the right marketing strategy to reach their target market. 

It seems in today's web 2.0 world that all people are really trying to do is cook up schemes to get attention, followers, friends and hits.  That  in and of itself is not a problem, but what I think becomes problematic is that people are focusing more on how to leverage a Facebook profile to their benefit or get followed on Twitter than actually doing the hard and difficult work of creating a business idea that will survive - whether it's linked to a social network or not.  It seems that often the process of building and developing an  idea and creating something of value for the marketplace seems to take a back seat.

So in a slightly adjusted version of the original - If you can't cook, then put the ingredients and mixing bowl down and get out of the kitchen.

A whole lot of talk. . . and saying what?

One of my favorite business books in the whole world is ZAG - by Marty Neumeier.  His whole premise  is to help you figure out how to build a brand that's Zagging when all other's are Zigging.

One of his ideas that stuck with me is the idea of marketplace clutter - which takes place in 5 forms:

1. Product Clutter

2. Feature Clutter

3. Advertising Clutter

4. Message Clutter

5. Media Clutter

So at the end of the day the amount of clutter that we are exposed to is enormous. Now if we look at just 3 and 4 alone, the amount of advertising and the amount of messages they contain, the bombardment can be overwhelming. From television ads to magazine ads to ads on the web - its flat out - alot. I think it wouldn't be a far stretch to say that today many of these commercials and ad campaigns are like Charlie Brown listening to his teacher . . . womp, womp, womp, womp, womp, womp. We hear you, but are you really saying anything?

Often it all melds together into a big pot of goop that we don't pay that much attention to. 

One of the best marketing statements to ever be said was "less is more".  Stated brilliantly by (a non-marketing professional) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a pioneering architect of the modern movement whose intention with this statement was NOT to address the marketing world, but as design meets business in today's market it makes tons of sense. Now when juxtaposing Mies' aphorism with Marty's argument of marketplace clutter - the idea becomes immediately significant. 

If you were tasked with telling people about an idea that you think would be of value to their life, how do you address your audience and leave a lasting impression? How would you accomplish this instead of having very little impact and having people simply hear blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?