What if nobody can hear you tweet

Apparently if I don’t use social media for marketing to the maximum possible degree I am some kind of feckless Neanderthal idiot who doesn’t comprehend that the new generation is completely different to any generation who has been on this planet before.

Just in case you think I'm alone in my views – here’s an article by Arianna Huffington on the fetishization of social media – and she is one of it’s greatest users. This is the article that introduced her quote, "The road to social media hell is paved with well-intended hashtags"

There are also other technological solutions to help drive businesses that apparently I can’t live without.

Let’s dive into a few of the typical bits of advice and have a look at them rationally for a moment.

1) Build a relationship with existing and potential customers

Ummm…. Sounds great, but I now have regular updates on the businesses of my printer toner supplier, car dealer, furniture store, book store, software provider, business shirt makers, soft drink makers, websites, and so on.  The only thing I do now is delete their spam and resent their very existence.

Sure, send me info on great discounts every now and then, but please don’t kid yourself that I in any way shape or form am regularly reading your emails. I literally don’t care!!!

I don’t know how to break this to you. People don’t buy your product a second time out of anything more than habit. Loyalty has been found to be the same across almost all products and industries. It is somewhere between 65% and 75%.

And, NO, as your customer I do not want to have a conversation with you in any way shape or form. Life is too short and you are not a friend. Also, if you are any good you will already have a follow up process on sales.

Go stick your Facebook page and Twitter account where they belong – in the bin along with all the money you spent on those initiatives.

2) Build fan pages

This is great for big established brands where there may be occasional freebies. If you are a smaller company good luck getting fans who aren’t direct family or friends. By the way, have you read the incredible amount of utter drivel that constitutes fan discussions.

And don’t even get me started on ‘paid for reviews’ – the people doing them are so blatantly obvious. I now read book reviews on Amazon for entertainment value rather than on whether to buy the book or not.

3) Drive word of mouth sales

Yes, word of mouth sales are vital for growing businesses. The problem is that social media isn’t in any way shape or form a mouth. Word of mouth means that somebody you know will pass on your existence to people who might be interested. If you are a normal startup then nobody is coming to your facebook page, reading your tweets, or are even aware of your existence.

4) Get to the influencers

This theory goes along the lines that if only you can get to those super-connected social few who influence everyone else then some kind of marketing nirvana is reached. Unfortunately this is now considered by many to be sheer nonsense. Here’s why.

Let’s say a super-influencer gets to 3 or 4 people where a normal person only influences 1 person, that doesn’t mean that you can sit back and let your super-influencer can sell your product to everyone.  You still need to be selling to the broadest market possible.

Celebrity endorsement can work, but two things. First, you need to pay a lot, and second, just because someone checks your product out doesn’t mean they’ll buy it. Even worse, the effect is just temporary and you need to be running those ads for a long time to have a real effect – which I guarantee you can’t afford.

5) Viral video marketing

If you are stunningly original, or from a mega-brand, or have really great visuals, then maybe, just maybe if you are lucky something can happen.

For the other 99.9999% of us the viral video gets lost in the lower levels of YouTube hell. This isn’t predictable or worth spending the money on.

6) Crowdsource

Crowdsourcing is both fascinating and also a wonderful example of human behaviour.

At its most basic level crowdsourcing confuses participation with creativity. Yes, there are always some people out there who are willing to give their ideas away or at a low price in order to fulfil their own needs of participation or altruism.

Think about your own attitudes. When you first participate you are excited to be part of a bigger thing and give up time and energy to contribute. However, that initial “PASSION” quickly dies when you see other ideas taken over your own, plus the quality of contributions are, to be polite, variable, and even worse others blatantly copy your ideas.

On the buy side of crowdsourcing it is not straightforward – I have done this.

First, your brief has to be written in clear but simple English – you will have a lot of contributors for whom English is not a first language.

Second, you will get a lot of blatant copyright theft contributed as an original idea – so you need to have an idea about the field you are crowdsourcing about.  Do not underestimate this problem coming from the mashup generation – you could be on the receiving end of some nice lawsuits if your company actually starts to make good money.

Third, you need to spend a lot of time responding to the hundreds of requests, encouraging people, telling people ‘no’ in polite language so you don’t get flamed or a bad rating, etc. 

Finally, you are exhausted and over it.

Here’s a radical idea – find out what the basics are in business (they haven’t really changed in hundreds of years) and then go apply them. The internet hasn’t so much fundamentally changed business as just provided another channel to practice it.

Never Again Without Equity – the NAWE Principle

The insane hours and pressures associated with a startup or any new business initiative take their toll on your health. Stress levels are high and you are likely to just go home and zone out instead of spending time relaxing or exercising. This is sacrificing your long term health in the name of business objectives.

I am world class at doing this and have been hospitalised with ectopic heart beats and full blown anxiety attacks which have pretty much the same symptoms as a heart attack. Over time I have become better at dealing with stress, but recent events have driven home the need to talk about this to you all with the stories of a couple of good friends who have both had heart problems in their mid-thirties – stress induced.

I want to talk about this in case you recognize a bit of yourself in these stories and can act on it.

Also, if you are going to take yourself into heart attack territory by working on a startup, then you need to make sure you are compensated through a decent amount of equity. The reason for this is that most of us only have one or at most two startups in us before we realise the stress is too much. So, if you are going to go there have the self-awareness to know that this will likely be your one shot at the big money. It was my personal experiences almost killing myself for a ground breaking large scale government funded clean energy technology breakthrough project that made me come up with the NAWE principle.

On to the stories of my friends – names and details changed of course.

Case 1) David joined a small wholesale distribution company in his late twenties. The economy was starting to boom, and he quickly became an integral part of the growth of the company. In the course of eight years they went from being a three truck operation with a single warehouse to being one of the biggest distributors in the country with over 60 locations, a large fleet of trucks and 65% market share.

David was always reliable. At work from early till late. His wife and kids rarely saw him as he was always at work fighting fires.

When a company grows that fast nothing ever works as it should, and as one of the senior managers he was there to make sure things worked out. The owners always looked to him to solve problems because he would always step up to make sure things were done.

He wasn’t sleeping well, drinking way too much and wasn’t eating well.

At 36 – boom – he had a heart attack and had to quit his job. His only thanks after being an integral part of the team that grew the company was a pat on the back and a hand shake –(REMEMBER - GET EQUITY!!!).

David took a few years out to reprioritise his life, and now talks about how he tries to enjoy every day, and look for solace in religion. I really appreciate this new David, but unfortunately he is still taking responsibility for other people's problems and working really long hours for a new company – again without equity.

Case 2) Debby has been running a startup for a few years. Debby has been living hand to mouth for two years and it is getting to her – she is 35 and she is now having stress-induced heart problems.

Stress-induced heart problems are unusual in that you may not have clogged arteries or problems with the hear muscles. Doctors haven’t really figured out the exact cause, but they know that the underlying cause is extreme stress.

Debby is one of the smartest and most commercially and people savvy entrepreneurs I have ever met.  It doesn’t matter what life throws at her she sees the opportunity in it. She adapts, evolves, deals with it and moves on. She communicates her vision better than anyone I have ever met. I have seen her walk into a room of complete strangers and have them asking how they can be involved within minutes.

Customers do sign up for her service and she has enough money to trickle on from month to month. Every day the service is getting better, but somehow it is never quite good enough for the flood of customers or investors to come in. “Some day soon,” is her normal refrain.

Debby keeps the faith in her vision and I truly do believe that it will come good for her soon – if she can stay alive. You see, two years of getting up every day not knowing where the next sale is coming from and dealing with all the issues of the startup has gotten to her. Optimisim isn’t enough to counteract 18 hour days and extreme uncertainty. At least Debby has a lot of equity in her company.

So, if your relationships and your health are suffering from too much uncertainty and stress here are a few tips for you.

1.   Spend time with family and friends talking and listening to conversations about non-work related and preferably trivial matters.
2. Talk to your partner about what’s happening in your life. This can be hard as they mightn’t be able to help. For example, I found that if I shared even 5% of my average day my now ex-wife would have a full blown panic attack and wouldn’t be able to function herself. What I have found is that sharing important decision points or moral quandaries is good.
3. If you don’t have a partner, then get a dog – they are always happy to see you. They like routine and force you to do things. “Come on – let’s play fetch, you know you want to.”
4.  Get good sleep – this is an old saying but it really is true. At least sleep in on weekends, and if you can go to bed early and wake up when your body makes you.
5. Watch your caffeine intake. I don’t mean that caffeine will give you a heart problem. I mean this in the sense that caffeine is a stimulant and over the longer term it will affect your adrenal system. You know when your adrenal system is overloaded through stress and caffeine as you are absolutely exhausted the next day. Ever notice how movie stars are hospitalised for exhaustion – that’s just a nice way of saying they have been abusing cocaine to the point their adrenal system has gone on the fritz and they are truly exhausted.
6. Avoid excessive hours – I know this is hard to do. I do project work at short notice and work insane and intense hours. Now that I am in my forties I should know better. I can still do those kind of hours, but unlike in my thirties when I just bounced back and went on to the next job, I now collapse for a week or two afterwards and almost inevitably have a cold. I worked insane hours for most of the last month and I am barely functioning right now. You can’t keep those hours up. Learn how to delegate and hire people if you need to.
7. Get a hobby. Painting, team sport, music, gardening, or whatever floats your boat. The main thing is that when you have something pleasurable to focus on it completely distracts your mind from all the other thoughts that are running through it. It is like meditation – you go to another place. If you have trouble working out what to do as a hobby, think back to the things you liked to do as a teenager – odds are that you haven’t changed.
8. Leave your work at work. This is one of the hardest to put into practice, especially with the continuous urgency of working in a startup. Make time to deal with issues during work hours. If your work is bleeding into your home life, then try keeping a notepad or your smartphone next to your bed. When you think of something that needs to be done you can write it down so you can deal with it the next day rather than mulling over it all night.
9. Delegate upwards and downwards. Let’s be blunt – often senior managers in company get there because they can make decisions in stressful situations and not get overly stressed. This is a polite way of saying that senior management is populated by an unusually high number of people with sociapathic tendencies – i.e. very low empathy and aggressive. If you are known for getting things done and they just pile the work on you then you need to learn to bounce things back up – “ Sorry, but I don’t have time to deal with that this week, what would you like done by when. If it is truly urgent, you should check in with Francis.”  Also, you need to learn to delegate downwards better. Yes, things take longer and need a lot of correction and quality control, but you will get more done in the end.
10. Forgive yourself – most of all you need to realise that you are only human and despite your need to get everything done properly and never disappoint anyone – it’s not possible. I am not talking about giving up and accepting sloppy work. I am talking about truly forgiving yourself for not being able to do things as you expect they should be done.

Then there’s all the usual stuff about diet, reducing alcohol consumption, etc. That’s all true, but ironically that is as much a symptom as the problem. If you actively work on reducing your stress levels you will find that your diet and drinking get back in control.

And make sure you have a good equity stake in whatever it is you are doing, so even if you do have the heart attack you can make some money out of it – NAWE!

At least act like you’re in charge

After a couple of decades of study into what makes a leader the conclusion is that a leader is somebody who other people follow. Peter Drucker may have said something to that effect.

I have been travelling for business for a few weeks now and have a couple of vignettes for you to highlight this.

Scene 1

I am sitting in the dining room at a major hotel in Asia and the CEO of a mid-sized US company walks into the room. The manager of the dining room is a strutting rooster of a stereotypical alpha male. He is in charge and his body language shows it.

When I walked in I deliberately ignored this manager, which is the kind of reaction you learn when working as a consultant to senior managers at large companies. If you want to swim with sharks you learn not to act like food. Okay, I was probably acting like an asshole – it happens sometimes.

However, this CEO reacted like he had been cornered by the school bully. He immediately showed non-threatening deference and submission, backed up a few steps and then asked permission to sit at a table in an almost empty restaurant. Whisky Tango Foxtrot!? was the first thing I thought when watching this playing out in front of me.

For all I know this guy is extremely successful, but he reverted to some long held behaviours. In the space of 5 seconds he had revealed all anyone needed to know – he doesn’t believe in his own ability and may in fact feel like an imposter.

Mind you, within 5 minutes he had spoken to every good looking lady in the room…. hmmm…. maybe he is used to presenting himself as non-threatening.

Scene 2

I am at a restaurant in another Asian capital city with a man who is a rich and successful entrepreneur, and he was giving the staff a hard time.

“Can I have your pen? I need to write something.” – said to a passing waitress.

“Pass me the salt.” – it was only a couple of inches out of his reach, and he wasn’t going to stand up so he asked the staff.

He also took a phone call while the waiter was trying to take his order. He wouldn’t order, but he wouldn’t let the waiter go until he had finished either.

Naturally he ordered items off the menu.

Thanks to Neal Stephenson I now know that the act of giving people things to do is called ‘tasking’ them. When you task someone it immediately establishes a pecking order – you’re in charge. I’ve seen it in entrepreneurs and I’ve seen it in conmen – tasking is one of the basics of being in charge. However, it can be taken to an extreme where it becomes a bad case of self-entitlement.

This guy thought he was being fair – he was just busy. He gave the pen back to the waitress who was genuinely surprised to see it again. He apologised to the waiter, saying that if he couldn’t give his order in a hurry then he’d have to leave before eating, and he liked the food there.

Okay, maybe he did explain himself, but he was remarkably self-centred about it all. But you could see that he was a natural leader – he had complete strangers doing his bidding within seconds.

Needless to say, while I am happy to provide services to this guy, there is nothing on earth that could convince me to work with him… I’ve been there before and I am not going to do it again both for my health and my sanity.

The first guy displayed too much fear and deference. He might inspire people to protect him and I guess that is a form of leadership, but not a great one.

The second guy walked into the room knowing that everyone was there to help him when he needed it. This is leadership, but it is also a form of dictatorship. It really is at the bully end of the spectrum.

As a leader, you need people to follow you. Even if you don’t feel like you are a leader, at least act like it.