I can’t lie, every time I see a list of top social media or digital “influencers” pop up in my stream, I cringe a little. Why? Because 99% of the time, Top 10/25/50/100 lists are nothing more than linkbait and bullshit. Here’s how it usually works:
Agency/consultancy XYZ feels that it isn’t getting enough attention anymore. Their white papers or “content” aren’t all that great this quarter, traffic and lead gen are down, so they need to think of something to do to salvage their waning relevance. The quickest way to do that is to spend an hour or two creating an ass-kissing list that awards some measure of recognition to a predetermined list of social media gurus. It’s easy enough to do. Most of these lists are essentially clones of each other. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. The names are always the same and you know what they are. The process is as follows:
1. Google “Social Media, Influencer, Top, List.”
2. Cut and paste social media guru names from any of those lists. Make sure that you don’t include companies or organizations as it will defeat the purpose of the exercise. You’ll understand why in a minute.
3. Cut and paste the reason why they were selected by the person whose list you just ripped off, but change a few words so it isn’t technically plagiarism.
4. Come up with a really cool title.
5. Publish the list on your blog.
6. Ping every single social media guru on the list. Do this every hour until they respond and share your post with their entire network.
7. Remind them to do it again the next day and engage in small talk with them on Twitter and Facebook… err… Google Plus.
8. Enjoy free traffic to your blog for months.
Sometimes, gurus create lists like these themselves. It’s… well, you know. It’s done so much that I don’t even bother getting excited when I see a list of top influencers, top experts, top gurus, whatever, anymore. For the most part, they’re just copies of copies of copies. They provide zero insight into why these folks are experts or even valuable in their fields. They are the product of a lazy, cynical, unoriginal exercise in derivative self-promotion by proxy.
However…
Sometimes, someone takes the time to actually do it right. They take a careful look at an industry, research who does what and how, dig into their track records, weigh their actual influence rather than just their Klout score and the size of their network, and… well, sometimes, they put in the work.
This week, when I ran into BSMi’s 2012 Global Influencer Survey, I expected it to be another clone of top influencer/social media guru lists of Christmases past, but instead discovered a thorough, well-researched report that analyzes in detail what the top experts in three particular fields (social media, marketing and digital) have done this year, and explains why they are the best among us. This one really is different. When you browse through it, you’ll understand why. Clever way of presenting it too.
Just really great work all around from BSMi, as always. Click here or on the image below to check it out. (UK readers, click here.)
From now on, every time a “top” influencer list comes out, I want you to think about what you learned here today. 😉
And if you’re as tired of the bullshit as I am, pick up a copy of Social Media ROI – Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in your Organization. It was written to teach managers and executives how to build and manage social media friendly business programs and incorporate social technologies and networks into everyday business operations. The book is divided into four parts: social media program strategy & development, social media program operationalization, social media program management, and best practices in measurement and reporting. If your boss doesn’t yet have a copy, time to fix that. If everyone on your team doesn’t yet have their own copy, fix that too. No bullshit. Just solid methodology and insights. It makes for a great desk reference.
(Now available in several languages including German, Korean, Japanese and Spanish.)
So yesterday, one of my well-meaning online friends sent me a private message on Facebook that included this bit of warning/worry:
You have a first rate mind .. I’m a little concerned, however about the the posts you make as they might limit your project/career options. You’re in the buckle of the bible belt and political sensibilities are hard to gauge.
This friend was referring to some of the political content and opinions I share on by personal Facebook account.
You may or may not have noticed that this blog remains for the most part apolitical. I keep it focused on business topics, and more specifically those which relate to brand management, marketing, communications, social media and overall leadership. I prefer not to discuss my political beliefs here for two principal reasons:
1. This is not a political blog. It’s a business and marketing blog. If I wanted a political platform, I would launch a blog with a political focus.
2. Politics aren’t particularly relevant to the topics discussed here anyway.
If you have ever worked with me, you know that my politics have absolutely no impact whatsoever on my professional life. If we work on a project together, I don’t care if you’re a liberal or a conservative, if your believe climate change is real or think it’s a hoax, if you think that President Obama is a decent man or a secret Muslim antichrist. I am probably too busy helping your business get out of the ditch to notice or care who you plan to vote for next November, and I certainly won’t be the one to ask. Your politics and religion are entirely your business. If you bring them up, fine. I won’t.
Having said that, I am not an apolitical creature. I have opinions and beliefs, like everyone else, and right now, I feel free to express them on Facebook and engage in political discussions with my friends, and sometimes complete strangers.
The way it works for me is simple:
While I am my own boss, I have no reason not to express my views on Facebook. If anything I post today somehow offends someone’s political or religious sensibilities, there will be no impact on anyone’s business but my own. There will be no backlash, no boycott, no drama on HuffPo or The Blaze, and no awkward conversation with my boss, Legal and HR on Friday afternoon.
Conversely, if I ever decide to leave free-agency behind and take a position somewhere, I won’t feel as free to post or share certain things on Facebook anymore. Employment changes things. It reframes the kinds of discussions you can have online. Right or wrong isn’t relevant. That’s just how the ball rolls: you don’t want to become a liability for your employer. Ever. If self-preservation isn’t enough of a motivator, then professional responsibility sure as hell should be.
But something bothers me about that piece of advice up there. It implies that I should hide who I am or what I believe in order to be employable in the first place. As if being of one political persuasion would somehow make me more attractive to employers and clients than being of the other kind.
That really, really, really bothers me, and it doesn’t bother me because it’s bullshit; it bothers me because it’s true: declaring yourself a democrat in certain parts of the US can cost you a promotion, a raise or your job. Recruiters might decide to put your resume in the dump pile on political conviction alone. A lot of liberals I know in SC are afraid to “be found out” by their peers and bosses because their jobs could be at risk, so they pretend to be conservatives and just go with the flow. I know it sounds absurd, but then again, some people think that President Obama is a secret Kenyan agent working for the Muslim Brotherhood, so our frame of reference here might be a little shaky. This isn’t about logic. It’s about the reality of blind prejudice.
So yes, friend whom I will not name, the concern you expressed on Facebook is valid. Sad and depressing, but valid. And I appreciate your sharing it with me. But I’ve given this a little thought, and…
1. If you have to hide who you are in order to keep your job, you need to change jobs.
2, If you have to hide who you are in order to keep your clients, you need to get some new clients.
3. If your company is a cesspool of discrimination and everyone is too afraid to do anything about it, things will never change. Either accept it and strap-in, or go look for a better company to work for.
Now let me share how I deal with the fear of being black-listed for my political views, starting with what some “businesses” might find objectionable about my political views. Just this one time, let me share with you my deepest, darkest political secrets:
I like President Obama. He isn’t perfect, but I like him. I like Bill and Hillary Clinton too. That isn’t a crime, nor should it be. I don’t believe that women should be treated as second-class citizen (in and out of the corporate world), make less money than their male counterparts, or be called “sluts” when they admit to using birth control. I want gay couples to enjoy the same constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms that straight couples enjoy. I don’t believe that someone is “more American” if they are of Christian and Anglo-Saxon but somehow “less American” if they are Muslim, dark-skinned, atheist or vote Democrat. I actually like that the government defends our borders, protects our forests, our water and our air, and makes sure that our kids’ toys aren’t covered in lead paint or made out of carcinogenic materials. The government does wonderful things that the private sector either cannot or will not do alone, and contrary to Tea-Party anti-government mythology, it does most of them quite well.
People who hate the government so much that they want to do away with it are basically dumbfucks. They probably need to go live in Somalia for six months and see how they like the freedom of anarchy. Then we’ll talk about how evil and “too big” the US government is. Also, I’m a Christian, if that matters. I only tell you this because even though I fall into that particular Abrahamic faith category, I don’t believe that it gives me license to be a faith tyrant. For instance, insisting that creationism be taught in public school might seem like a great idea if you care more about forcing your faith on everyone than actually respecting the US Constitution. But the real problem with it is that it doesn’t exactly prepare our youth to be globally competitive. What it teaches them is to distrust science, knowledge and facts (things that would help them cure cancer, build bridges, design tomorrow’s cars, etc.). Meanwhile, the kids who will be hired for the jobs your kids won’t be qualified for are learning real science, real history, real anthropology and philosophy and literature. Speaking of science and facts, climate change is real. (Just like gravity, aspirin, glacier erosion and Obama’s birth certificate.) Get over it. It isn’t a question of opinions. Believing that there are space aliens out there is an opinion. Accepting the reality of basic science is called being a rational, responsible adult.
By the way, as someone who grew up with universal healthcare and still runs into it regularly, I can tell you from extensive personal experience that it isn’t death panels or the end of freedom; it’s just poor kids not dying of cancer in the gutter. It’s expectant mothers receiving proper prenatal care. It’s your mom not being turned down for treatment because of a bogus pre-existing condition. It’s people living longer, healthier lives and requiring less expensive care over time. Yes, Russia and North Korea probably do it wrong. But France, Canada and other countries do it mostly right. Look into it before parroting absurd nonsense you heard on AM radio.
Social Security isn’t a frivolous expense either; it’s a promise we made to retired people that guarantees that they will not have to choose between heating their houses in the winter and being able to buy food. Yes, it’s expensive to help your fellow Americans. Of course it is. But if you think that a better alternative is to let them starve and die, then you need to ask yourself what kind of person you really are. If money is really a big concern for you, then stop supporting nation-building in the Middle-East and start supporting nation-building right here at home. That isn’t socialism, by the way. It’s just called investing in your own country. Kind of like having a strong military, and fast trains, and good roads and drinkable water. It might even be called building a really cool model that will make you the envy of the world and make other countries want to invest in you again.
Welfare and food stamps are not dirty words, by the way. Go hang out with poor Americans for a few months and see if they’re really just the lazy parasites you keep hearing about. They aren’t. They want jobs. Desperately. You know, it’s really easy to dehumanize people. All you have to do is put labels on them and use stereotypes. It’s what the Nazis did with the Jews, and what the KKK did with African-Americans. It’s also what old white men in corner offices do to women, and what homophobic preachers do to same-sex couples. One thing I’ve learned in my years is that real patriots don’t turn their backs on their fellow citizen. They don’t preach hate or division. They do everything they can to help them. Always let that be your litmus test. Cynicism isn’t a virtue. Compassion is. Try it.
Since we’re on the subject, let me close with this: the political hate machine in the US has become appalling. We can talk about how people like Rush Limbaugh Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann are irresponsible, batshit sideshows of pre-packaged angst and faux paranoia, but they have vast audiences of people who think they are brilliant and spot-on and should be President. When I hear people repeat their rhetoric as if it were gospel, (and I do, a lot,) my spider senses flash passages of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale at me, and it worries me. It really does.
If all of that makes me a liberal, fine. Label me what you want. None of my beliefs stem from a particular political or religious philosophy or agenda, mind you. I have traveled around the world, served in the military, lived on two continents, and worked with people all over the globe. I make up my own mind on what is true and what is false, what is ethical and what isn’t, on what hurts people and what improves their lives. In the US, I happen to fall on the liberal side of the aisle. In France, I easily fall on the conservative side of the aisle. But I’m not the one doing the moving. It’s just that we’re talking about very different lines. So what am I in the end? A liberal? A conservative? Depends who you ask. For some people, I will never be conservative enough. For others, I will never be liberal enough. And for some, I will never be American enough, French enough, white enough or Christian enough. But remove political labels and stereotypes, and you’ll find that I am simply someone who won’t stand for racism, sexism, willful ignorance of the facts, xenophobia, fraudulent behavior, exploitation, irresponsible business practices, hypocrisy and fear-mongering.
If that world view somehow offends a particular business, then let me tell you quite candidly that I have no problem if that business decides not to hire me. In fact, if evidence of my political leanings weeds out businesses that would rather not work with “someone like me,” that’s great. I just did myself a huge favor. It isn’t that I don’t want to work with conservatives or republicans. In fact, I love working with and for conservatives and republicans as much as I love working with and for liberals and democrats. It’s just that I don’t particularly enjoy working with and for small-minded haters.
“But Olivier, aren’t you afraid that admitting all this will hurt your business?”
Not on your life. Here’s why:
1. I am not sitting here all day trying to broaden my options. What I am trying to do is narrow them down as much as possible. The reality of my business model is that I can only work with maybe 100-200 more companies before I retire or move on to a completely different phase in my career. I want every one of those partnerships to count. I don’t have time for the kind of bullshit that invariably comes with working for companies managed by irrational, hateful pricks. That means that I have to sort through tens of thousands of businesses to get to the right ones. Businesses deselecting themselves over something this stupid helps me out. And if I were to decide to go back into the corporate workforce, I am looking at 2-5 employers before the time comes for me to leave again and go do something else. Believe me when I tell you that I have no intention of wasting my time even interviewing with mildly racist or sexist bullies, let alone wasting a few years working in a poisonous corporate environment that idolizes people like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.
2. This particular crowd only makes up about 20% of the US population. I’ll do okay with the other 80.
3. The kind of business I want to work with doesn’t give a shit whether I am Christian or Muslim, gay or straight, liberal or conservative. It’s focused on people. More specifically, on improving people’s lives. I don’t care if that comes in the form of designing awesome cars or making killer 3D flat screen TVs or tasty coffee or better artificial organs or portable water filters. It just has to have that people focus, both internally and externally, and it cannot have it if it sort of hates African-Americans, gays, women, Muslims, the French, poor people and whatever other “minority” happens to get on Rush Limbaugh’s radar. I run into enough of that just going to my mailbox as it is. I don’t want it to poison my work life with it too.
So yes, letting my Facebook friends know what I stand for politically lets those opinions radiate outward. And yes, that probably limits my employment options in the deep South and some parts of the mid-west. But maybe that’s kind of the point. I work nationally and internationally. I don’t need to work for companies in the Bible Belt if they don’t want me. And for every company that won’t hire me because I don’t fall over myself to love on Mitt Romney’s charming indecision on every issue, or because I don’t get behind the next BBQ overdose-induced boycott of France, there are 10 who will hire me for what I can do for them. And they tend to be in cool places like San Francisco, Montreal, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Sydney and Dubai. Know what I mean? It’s a big world and it’s full of businesses looking for expertise that not a lot of guys actually have.
So thanks kindly for your concern. 😉 We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Cheers,
Olivier
* * *
Social Media ROI – Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in your Organizationisn’t a social media book. It’s a business management book, and it focuses on social media program strategy, management, measurement and reporting. If your boss doesn’t yet have a copy, time to fix that. If everyone on your team doesn’t yet have their own copy, what are you waiting for? (Now available in several languages including German, Korean, Japanese and Spanish.)
I know what you are going to say: “Olivier, what’s up with the poopy-words all of a sudden? The other week, it was “assholes”. This week, it’s this. Didn’t your mom raise you to be a polite young man?” Answer: She tried. But sometimes, the polite version of a word just doesn’t do the job. Case in point: I could say “care.” Care about your customers. Care about designing the best products. Care about giving it your all every day. Care about taking your business into the stratosphere.
Care.
Except no. This isn’t about caring. This is about giving a shit, and yes, there is a difference.
When the word “care” no longer actually means caring.
“Caring” about something can mean a lot of different things. I can care about matching my shoes to my belt. I can care about the way my rainbow sprinkles touch the peanut butter ice cream but not the ball of Nutella ice cream underneath. I can care about maybe watching Curb Your Enthusiasm tonight, or waiting until tomorrow or next week. I can care about trying to sound pleasant on the phone, or maybe not so much. I can care about something if the conditions are right, and care less about it if circumstances change. Caring lives along a broad scale, as demonstrated by this awesome home-made graph:
But when you give a shit, that isn’t any kind of passive caring. Giving a shit means caring to the max. It means committing heart and soul to caring about something. Giving a shit is to caring what running a full-on sprint is to jogging. It is the storm to the light drizzle, the bazooka to the cork gun and the bear hug to the friendly nod. Giving a shit means you won’t sleep tonight if you screwed it up. It means you are going to take it all the way to the line. It means you are going to excel rather than settle for average… or mediocre. Giving a shit means you are driven by something more than a paycheck. It means you are driven by passion. And that, boys and girls, is some mighty strong secret sauce. Nothing can crush that. Nothing can get in its way.
When I walk into a store and talk to one of the salespeople there, I don’t want them to “care.” I want them to give a shit. The chef in the kitchen, I don’t just want him to “care”. The customer service guy on the phone, “care” is just the price of entry. You want to make your company kick ass? You have to take it a step further. That politician I just voted for? Guess what: He needs to do more than just “care.” The surgeon operating on my kids, yeah, her too, what I want her to do is actually give a shit.
When you give a shit, excuses don’t work anymore. Falling short (failing) becomes less of an option, if at all. Giving a shit means you’re invested, and that is when I know you are bringing your A-game. You aren’t just there for a paycheck, the dental plan or the free tickets to Wally World every summer. You are there because you want to be. Because you give a shit.
Look, everyone acts like they care when you interview them. “Oh yes, Mr. Jones, I really want to work here!” Right. In six months, that new hire will be spending half his day complaining to their office-mates about you, about pesky customers and their temperamental complaints, about having to work late, and about how poorly he gets paid. When you walk by his desk, you won’t even catch a glimpse of the Facebook tab or the game of computer solitaire you just interrupted. That’s what “care” will get you. And you know what? You’ll be to blame. Here’s why: Because your company culture made them that way.
When I call a company’s phone number and get an automated message telling me “… we care about your call,” what that company has just told me it doesn’t give a shit. And since companies don’t think – people do, namely executives making decisions (like having a computer answer my call instead of a human being), I know that this wasn’t an oversight. Someone made a deliberate decision to communicate to me and everyone else who calls them that the people in charge of building the company’s internal culture don’t give a shit. Way to get things off on the right foot.
The importance of creating “I give a shit” cultures.
None of this is rocket science. If you hire people who aren’t passionate about what you do, about what your company is about, or even people who don’t particularly care about their profession save getting a big fat check at the end of the week, you are going to create a culture of mediocrity. If instead you hire people who love your company, who were fans long before the job ever opened up, you will get a completely different result. Likewise, if you hire someone who is passionate about what they do, they will probably not disappoint.
A few years ago, one of my then employees admitted to me (when her bonus didn’t seem as guaranteed as she would have liked it to be) that she was considering transferring to HR. Puzzled by that admission, I asked her to elaborate. She told me “they just make straight salary over there.” I studied her for a moment, and asked her “Don’t you want to do this? If HR is something you’re interested in, why are you here?” She sighed and told me “I don’t really care what I do. I just want a steady paycheck.”
This is someone whom, if asked, would have told the CEO that she cared about her job, that she was passionate about it, that she loved it. That’s the average value of “care.”
Nb: I made sure my team hit its targets that month and the one after that, and she did, in fact, hit her bonus.
People like this are everywhere. It isn’t that they are necessarily lazy. Some are, but some are just apathetic. Doing what they do is a job. A paycheck. Nothing more. They spend their day watching the clock. They are out the door as soon as their work day is over and not a minute more. This is not the kind of employee you want. I don’t care if you are managing a hospital, a restaurant or a global brand, people like this are poison. They are engines of mediocrity, lackluster service, and lousy customer experiences. And god forbid they should become managers, or worse yet, SVPs or C-suite executives.
Imagine a CEO who doesn’t give a shit, for example. Or one who at least gives the impression, through their actions or words, that they perhaps don’t give a shit? What would that look like? What would be the impact of that type of “leadership” on the entire organization? On the brand’s reputation? On decisions being made up and down the corporate ladder inside its four walls? What kinds of ripples would this create?
Ken Lay of Enron
BP's Tony "I'd like my life back" Hayward
Now imagine a CEO who does give a shit. What would that look like? What kind of company culture would that generate? What kind of profitability and customer experience excellence would that drive?
Tony Hsieh of Zappos
Sir Richard Branson, of all things Virgin
Company cultures don’t grow from a random churn of interactions. They are engineered and designed from the inside out, deliberately, by people who give a shit. Or by people who don’t. The difference in outcomes between the two is typically fairly spectacular. We have all seen amazing companies falter under the direction of this CEO or that, solely based on their degree of giving a shit.
Why am I emphasizing that company cultures are engineered? Three reasons:
1. People who give a shit tend to hire people who also give a shit, and so on. Companies like this tend to hire carefully because they understand the importance of only hiring what you might call kindred spirits. Fans. Like-minds. They aren’t hiring as much as letting the right people into their little tribe of believers. When your entire company gives a shit, customers notice and become loyal. Why? Because they like that you give a shit, and they respect that. Besides, since you give a shit, you treat them well, which is more than anyone can say about companies that don’t give a shit about either their employees or their customers.
2. When customers like you (see 1. above), they tend to do a number of things: a) They love doing business with you, b) they do business with you as long as you keep giving a shit (which could be their own lives), and c) they recommend you to everyone they know, which in turn helps drive your business.
3. One CEO can make or break a company. Just one. Remember what happened to Apple when Steve Jobs left, back in the day? Should I mention some of Home Depot’s ups and downs? Show me a company whose CEO gives a shit, and I will show you a company about to bloom like a flower in sunlight. Show me a company whose CEO doesn’t, and I will show you a company about to race headlong into a very rough patch.
More than anything, customers instinctively know that they will eventually get screwed by someone who doesn’t really give a shit. They also instinctively know they will never get screwed by someone who does. This is important.
Even if giving a shit didn’t generate better design departments, better products, better service, better customer relations and generally healthier businesses, this point alone should catch the attention of CEOs, boards or directors, and investors alike: Consumer perceptions, trust, loyalty, these things matter in the mid-to-long term. Heck, they matter today. This very minute. Every single consumer making a purchasing decision right now is weighing one company against another. One will win. The others will lose. How are you feeling about your chances?
Leadership isn’t all about skills and experience. It’s also about attitude. And giving a shit, boys and girls, is a pretty important component of the sort of attitude we are talking about today.
The reciprocal effect of giving a shit.
Hiring people who give a shit, but not those who don't.
The above diagram illustrates the process of engineering loyalty and positive WOM (word of mouth) by sticking to a no asshole policy (see Part 1) and making sure you hire people who actually give a shit.
Note the jokers in red ink who didn’t really give a shit and are therefore not hired. The fact that they are not invited to spread their apathy and inevitable passive aggressive disdain to their coworkers and customers like a CSTD (Customer Service Transmitted Disease) ensures that your company maintains its edge.
Now let’s look at another kind of organization – one which doesn’t discriminate quite so much:
Hiring people who give a shit, and those who don't.
Note how in this alternate version, a company having allowed such individuals to breach its inner sanctum begin to spread mediocrity across their entire business, and how that trickles down into customer experiences and perceptions.
In short, giving a shit is contagious. From the CEO on down to everyone in the company and outwardly to customers. Positive attitudes and perceptions spread virally through recommendations, discussions and general perception. In the same way, not giving a shit is contagious as well, and it too spreads like a virus across departments, front-line employees, customers, and to their social and professional networks.
This is how reputations are both made and unmade, depending on what kind of culture you decide to engineer.
What are some of the obvious symptoms that a company doesn’t give a shit?
This is important, because these are common red flags. When consumers spot any of these (or several,) they know that perhaps your company doesn’t really care a whole lot about you, your loyalty, or your affection for their products or brands.
1. Customer service is outsourced. (Because nothing says “We care” like handing you off to total strangers working under contract for less than minimum wage.)
2. The recording says “your call is important to us…” which is kind of funny coming from a recording.
3. The company’s employees look at the clock more than they look at you.
4. The CEO, in the middle of a crisis, says things like “I’d like my life back.”
5. Outsourced social media accounts, especially when it comes to customer service functions.
6. When the product fails, technicians will be happy to “look at it,” and repair it for about 70% or more of the value of the product in about 6-12 weeks. This is usually followed by “you could just buy another one” type of “caring” advice.
7. False or misleading advertising.
8. The company spams your inbox, twitter feed, phone, or otherwise valuable channel.
9. The average customer has no idea who the CEO of the company is. Until they see him or her on TV, defending pretty bad decisions.
10. After several interactions with company employees or management, you begin to suspect that everyone who works there might actually be some kind of asshole.
11. Poor product design, characterized by lousy user UI/UX.
12. The manager, in an empty store or restaurant, still manages to blow off his only customers… assuming he is even there.
13. The company sells your personal information to third parties.
14. The CEO’s Twitter account, blog and/or Facebook page – all proof that he “cares,” wants to “engage” customers and feels that social media is “important” – are all managed and fed by a proxy, (or ghost writer) preferably working for an outside firm or agency. (Sorry Mr. Pandit, but you have been advised improperly on this one.)
15. More excuses than solutions, followed by buzzwords and lip service.
16. The CEO spends more time on the golf course than he does listening to customers.
And there you have it.
Three questions.
So the three questions you have to ask yourself are these:
1. What kind of company culture are my customers experiencing whenever they interact with one of my employees, colleagues, bosses, products and services? The kind that gives a shit, or the kind that clearly doesn’t?
2. What kind of company culture should I be building?
3. Once I cast aside the propaganda, tag lines, mission statements and sycophantic reports, what kind of company culture am I really building?
Be honest. Are you setting the right example? Are you hiring the right people? Are you teaching them to give a shit? Are you rewarding them accordingly?
… Or are you banking on a mission statement to communicate to your employees that they should “care”?
Giving a shit is hard. So is kicking ass. So what?
Yeah, giving a shit is hard. It’s expensive too. It requires all sorts of investments: Financial, cultural, temporal, even emotional. (Perhaps especially the latter.) Giving a shit means that your business isn’t just about balance sheets and incremental basis points of change. It’s about creating something special for and with your customers. It’s about building the foundations of a lovebrand – like Apple, Harley Davidson, Virgin Airlines and BMW. It’s about investing in market leadership, in customer loyalty and evangelism, in your own reputation, and in the strength of your own brand. In short, it means investing in long term success, in stability in tough economic time, and in a demand vs. supply ratio that will always be in your favor. Giving a shit is an investment, yes, and not one that might immediately make sense to financial analysts, but one that pays off every time. It is the genesis of everything that ultimately makes a business successful: Professionalism. The endless pursuit of quality, of great design, of remarkable user/customer experiences.
The moment you lose that, the moment you start giving a shit a little bit less, the moment you start cutting corners, that’s when you start to screw up. When you lose that competitive edge. When you start sinking into the fat middle with everyone else. That’s when you start to lose. Before you know it, you’re stuck picking between BOGO pitches and worrying about price wars with foreign imports. I’ve worked with companies like this. You don’t want to go there, trust me. It’s ugly. It’s stressful. You wake up one morning and realize that even if you tried to give a shit anymore, you couldn’t. There wouldn’t be enough time. It wouldn’t make a difference. It might even get you fired. Everything you’ve worked for all your life is hanging on the edge, and it’s a long, hard road back too the top. Most companies never make it back. I can tell you that it’s a lot easier to never fall than to have to climb back up again, but either way, it’s a daily battle.
In fact, giving a shit is so hard that very few companies do anymore. It isn’t how the game is played any longer. “The customer is always right” is a relic of the past, isn’t it?
Or is it?
Have you listened to what people are saying about your company on Twitter and Facebook lately? Do you know what they are saying about your competitors? In a year or two, do you think companies whose leaders don’t give a shit are going to be able to compete against companies whose leaders do? If you don’t see giving a shit as a competitive advantage yet, as a differentiator, even as a normalizing agent, then at the very least see it as a matter of survival. The age of the “I don’t give a shit” CEO is done. Game over.
Time to make a change or two?
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Since it’s June, here are this month’s three quick little announcements:
One – If you haven’t read “Social Media ROI: Managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization” yet, you will find 300 pages of insights with which to complement this article. It won’t answer all of your questions, but it will answer many of them. If anything, the book is a pretty solid reference guide for anyone responsible for a social media program or campaign. It also makes a great gift to your boss if you want him or her to finally understand how this social media stuff works for companies.
You can sample a free chapter and find out where to buy the book by checking out www.smroi.net.
Two – If you, your agency or your client plan on attending the Cannes Lionsfrom June 19-25, I am planning something a little… “unofficial” during the festival. If you are interested in being part of it, let me know.
You can send me an email, a note via LinkedIn, a Twitter DM, or a facebook message if you want to find out more. (The right hand side of the screen should provide you with my contact information.)
Three – If the book isn’t enough and you can’t make it to Cannes later this month, you can sign up for a half day of workshops in Antwerp (Belgium) on 30 June. (Right after the Lions.) The 5 one-hour sessions will begin with an executive briefing on social media strategy and integration, followed by a best practices session on building a social media-ready marketing program, followed by a PR-friendly session on digital brand management, digital reputation management and real-time crisis management, followed by a session on social media and business measurement (half R.O.I., half not R.O.I.). We will cap off the afternoon with a full hour of open Q&A. As much as like rushing through questions in 5-10 minutes at the end of a presentation, wouldn’t it be nice to devote an entire hour to an audience’s questions? Of course it would. We’re going to give it a try. Find out more program details here. Think of it as a miniRed Chair.
The cool thing about this structure is that you are free to attend the sessions that are of interest to you, and go check your emails or make a few phone if one or two of the sessions aren’t as important. The price is the same whether you attend one or all five, and we will have a 15 minute break between each one.
The afternoon of workshops is part of Social Media Day Antwerp (the Belgian arm of Mashable’s global Social Media Day event), and I can’t help but notice that the price of tickets is ridiculously low for what is being offered. Anyone can afford to come, which is a rare thing these days. (Big props to the organizers for making the event so accessible.)
The event is divided into 2 parts: The workshop in the afternoon, and the big Belgian style party in the evening. You can register for one or both (do both).
My advice: Sign up while there are still seats available, and before #smdaybe organizers realize they forgot to add a zero at the end of the ticket prices.
One particular question from last week’s Q&A session struck me as worthy of its own blog post. It was this:
You’re very active in social media, speaking engagements/traveling, etc. How do you go about scheduling your day/s — balancing work and family life? – Kristof
What about your scheduling and what are the most interesting activities of your day to day life? – Robin Clerk
You ask, I answer.
Just… whatever you do, don’t share this video with anyone. These are trade secrets I am only sharing with you, so shhhhh…
This post is about movies, but it isn’t. Just bear with me.
What movies can teach us about mass market products vs. game-changers.
Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, 2010, Reservoir Dogs, Memento, Pulp Fiction, Boondock Saints, The Machinist, Kill Bill, Fight Club, 300, Eyes Wide Shut, Moon, and now Sucker Punch.
What do these movies have in common? I’ll tell you: People either love them or hate them. Though some of them achieved mainstream status (in some cases years after their initial run at the box office), many failed to find as broad an audience when they first released. This, compared to sure-fire blockbuster movies like Transformers, Spiderman 2, Shrek 3, Terminator 4, or Fast 5 (the fifth installment of the Fast & the Furious franchise) which have come to be the new model of success for Hollywood: Franchises safely bring in the numbers, even if they often turn once original ideas into hollow shells of creeping mediocrity.
The truth though, and the numbers don’t lie, is that “simple” is safe. Franchises work.
Line up the remakes, sequels and mashups. They mean box office gold.
How many Marvel and DC comic book superheroes are headlining movie studio franchises these days? Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Thor, Captain America, The X-Men and Wolverine, Jonah Hex, Ironman, Hulk, Green lantern, Daredevil, The Losers… The list keeps growing. Transformers and G.I. Joe didn’t escape the great 21st century rehash of pop culture childhood icons. Charlie’s Angels, Starsky & Hutch, The A-Team, Mission Impossible, Green Hornet, and scores of other popular “classic” TV series are being given the same red carpet treatment in Hollywood, and for obvious reasons: Familiar titles sell. Ask anyone associated with the Harry Potter universe. Or Shrek. Or Star Wars. Or Toy Story. In fact ask any movie producer today how much easier it is to get your sequel funded, versus getting a yet unproven original idea funded.
The reality of most businesses is that money talks. Return on investment, for better and for worst, usually trumps creative or UX considerations when it comes to funding a project. There is an accepted success model in every industry – something many of us who try to push organizations beyond their comfort zones and break through stagnation refer to as the status-quo. That ROI should be a key factor (and often the central factor) in business funding decisions isn’t the problem. The problem is an often blind belief in “the safe bet.” The accepted model. The brainless PG13 sequel to the blockbuster or the formulaic movie adaptation of the comic book, complete with merchandising deals. This at the expense of relevance and long term survival. (Ergo: Long term profitability.)
Using the movie industry as a platform, we can make the case that neither studios, directors nor actors can be successful if they focus solely on creating game-changing films or solely on contributing to endless tepid franchise vehicles. Success in the film industry (as with every other industry) comes from being able to balance both. Too much of the same thing pigeon-holes you as either a corporate sellout or a fringe indie eccentric. If you are Daniel Craig, you can get away with filming Bond film after Bond film, only if you also regularly work on projects like Layer Cake and Flashbacks of a Fool. If you are Johnny Depp, you can’t build a career on The Libertine, From Hell, and Chocolat without also signing up for Alice in Wonderland and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Steve Jobs could have decided to stick to his franchise: Computers and software. Instead, he gambled on iPod, iPhone and iPad, and it paid off. JJ Abrams could have stuck to television, but he didn’t. The result: Almost cult-like excitement for every new big screen project he produces. (Super 8 comes out soon.) Steven Pressfield, in deciding to follow The Legend of Bagger Vance (a book about golf) with Gates of Fire, a historical epic about Spartans at Thermopylae, went against the grain, against the accepted model of success in the publishing world: He jumped categories. The gamble paid off, but at the time, industry professionals cautioned him against the move – which they saw as… ill advised.
The lesson here is that success isn’t just a question of repetition. Success is a process of opportunity creation through experimentation. Before you can have a franchise, you have to give yourself the chance to either buy or create a basis for that franchise. Buying it is expensive and limiting. Creating it is riskier, but the payoffs are immeasurable.
image courtesy of Dreamworks
Planting the seeds of mainstream success: Investing in success incubators.
There is nothing wrong with mainstream success, whether it is in the world of movies, TV shows, books, music, games, cars, clothes or electronics. Not every movie needs to change our souls or blow our socks off. Even dumb sequels with mildly entertaining jokes have their place, especially given their role in the cycle of profitability – which makes bolder experimental projects possible: Big successes mean big profits, big profits fuel big budgets, and big budgets often allow for experimental projects and products to be funded.
Experimental projects are, to put it simply, talent and technology labs. More to the point, they are success incubators. As such, they don’t usually exist on the same plane as deliberate blockbuster efforts, nor should they be expected to. Let’s not forget that before Shrek became a franchise, it too was an experimental concept. An original idea. A gamble.
Even within the world of commercial success, different types of products can yield wildly different types of results. Movies with niche audiences also have their place, not only as talent incubators but as gateway products for narrow (and deep) market bandwidths more interested in quality and nuance than quantity and noise. Tom Ford’s A Single Man was an outstanding film (especially for a first time director) but it could not be expected to experience the same kind of success (sales volume) as Sex And The City, for example, or even Ironman 2.
Yet judging by the sudden appearance of tightly tailored suits and Michael Caine-like glasses on the red carpet following the release of the movie, it not only impressed its audience but even impacted the way men began to dress and accessorize after seeing it. Compare Colin Firth’s look in the movie with Sam Worthington’s choice of eyewear at the Oscars just a few months later, where Ford’s movie was nominated for several Academy Awards.
image courtesy of The Weinstein Co.
image courtesy of Google
Uncanny, isn’t it? Sometimes, the impact of a movie or product – its value to the company taking a financial risk to create it – transcends the cash register. As a movie producer or a CEO, you sometimes have to see beyond the immediacy of sales. You have to take a step back and not only see the entire field, but make sure you allow yourself to see the bigger field.
Yet the low hanging fruit usually wins: Pitch the next Batman sequel against an completely original script which has no basis in popular literature or existing franchises, and the outcome of box office sales is pretty much a foregone conclusion: The familiar blockbuster franchise will almost always win. Hollywood producers know this. Distribution companies know it too. And so do movie theater operators.
Historically speaking, Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg and Chris Nolan come to the table with a much stronger sales pitch than, say, David Fincher, Zack Snyder and even Quentin Tarantino, which is why the former’s movies typically find their way to the most coveted summer release dates, while the latters’ films often see themselves released in the fall, winter and spring rather than just in time for 4th of July weekend. I won’t even get into the difference in same theater screen percentages between a Michael Bay release and a David Fincher release.
Art films and so-called “foreign films” (like The King’s Speech) notwithstanding, there is a world of difference between franchise-driven blockbusters and courageous gambles on “concept” movies that aim to provide a certain portion of the movie-going populace with something more original than the usual fare. Directors like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Copolla, Stanley Kubrick, and even Luc Besson (back when he still made good movies) have given us cult classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, ET, Jaws, Schindler’s List, Terminator, Avatar, The Fifth Element, Psycho, North By Northwest, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Nikita.
It is worth mentioning that Besson’s Nikita, which inspired an American remake and two separate TV series, still churns out revenue two decades after reinventing a genre on the big screen. The technical aesthetic of Kubrick’s 2001 still influences set design for sci-fi movies to this day, and will probably continue to do so for decades to come. Like most of Spielberg’s work, many of Cameron’s movies were enormous box office hits in spite of the fact that they were not extensions of existing franchises. Tarantino, for his part, has built his entire career on making completely original films… even though each set piece is an homage to not particularly original motifs deeply rooted into our pop culture consciousness. Before these guys became the big names of mainstream cinema, they were revolutionary film makers. Rule breakers. Rebels. They were the wild cards of their respective studios.
image courtesy of Miramax
If mainstream success grows out of cult projects, why does funding rarely fund success incubators?
When Tim Burton Chris Nolan and David Fincher aren’t taking the reins of sure studio bets like Sleepy Hollow, Alice in Wonderland, Batman or an Alien sequel, they give us completely original movies like Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mars Attacks, Memento, The Prestige, Seven, and Fight Club. Copolla, Kubrick, Besson, Hitchcock and Spielberg are still, to this day, some of the most influential movie directors of all time, and some of their most celebrated movies were not necessarily their biggest box office successes. Burton, Nolan, Fincher and Tarantino are among the next batch of directors future generations of movie-makers will spend endless hours studying and emulating. What is important to note is that they are not influential because they have huge box office successes under their belts. That came later. They are influential because they either reinvented genres or created entirely new narratives. Their true contribution to the world of movies isn’t sales numbers. It is originality. They provide for movie audiences the cinematic equivalent of what Apple’s Steve Jobs provides technology enthusiasts and Zappo’s Tony Hsieh provides shoe shopping enthusiasts (and the online shopping model, for that matter). This is where the catalyst of mainstream success lives: Not in scale and breadth first, but rather the exact opposite: In a chronic devotion to core fans, core users, core customers. Focusing on narrow but deep bandwidths is where lasting mass market success truly begins.
The byproduct of truly original ideas translated into a valuable product – like a movie, a gadget or a UI – is a cult following: A core of ardent fans who absolutely love it, sometimes in spite of mainstream scorn. In some cases, that cult following scales (as it has with Apple) and sometimes, it doesn’t. Nevertheless, the power of the cult classic is not something to be underestimated. Out of cults grow communities, then movements, and these can become the building blocks for broad mainstream success further down the road. Before Apple was the biggest technology in the world, it was the proverbial underdog. The David to Microsoft’s Goliath.
Don’t underestimate the importance of funding and fostering talent and success incubators. Pixar, Lucas Film, Imagine Entertaiment, Microsoft, EA Games and Apple get it. There’s a key success lesson in this. Remember what we said earlier about franchises and commercial success: You can either buy into it or create (incubate) it.
Buying into success should not be your first choice.
Most companies, by the way, neither fund nor actively pursue talent and success incubators. Look around. There is a reason why so few companies produce win after win.
image courtesy of 20th Century Fox
The tax for being first is often scorn, criticism and hostility: Pioneers shouldn’t expect a mainstream praise… yet.
When David Fincher’s big screen adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club first hit theaters, it was destroyed by critics. They tore it to shreds. If you go to RottenTomatoes.com and look at ratings and comments now, you will see a very positive 81% on the tomatometer and a 95% overall approval rate by viewers. Back in 2000, when the movie opened across the US, the picture wasn’t so bright. At the time, Fight Club had one of the lowest tomatometer scores I had seen on the movie review site. People called it mindless and needlessly violent. Most of the reviews looked like this:
“An unhinged mess of a movie, with potentially dangerous ideas handled in a winking, cynical manner.” – Nitrate Online
“David Fincher’s dumb and brutal shock show of a movie floats the winky, idiotic premise that a modern-day onslaught of girly pop-cultural destinations (including but not limited to IKEA, support groups, and the whole Starbucks-Gap-khakis brand-name axis) has resulted in a generation of spongy young men unable to express themselves as fully erect males.” – Entertainment Weekly
“Bloody mess of a guy film loses its battle to have any real meaning.” – Detroit News
“When you see good actors in a project like this, you wonder if they signed up as an alternative to canyoneering.” – Roger Ebert / At the Movies
You get the idea. It got killed. Was it because Fight Club was a bad movie? Was it because the book it was based on was bad? Neither. And more than a decade later, now that fans have had time to find the film and make it their own, its early mainstream rejection seems ridiculous and outdated. It just wasn’t mainstream enough when it was first released, nor was it intended to be.
The film, like the book, were never meant to appeal to the millions of fans of Friends and Seinfeld looking for a light family-friendly comedy to take their kids to on a Friday night. It aimed for the exact opposite: Fight Club‘s target audience was deep, not broad, just like films like A Single Man, Black Swan, Memento, Pulp Fiction, Watchmen and Edward Scissorhands. Sometimes, movie makers turn to projects they know will appeal only to fans of a genre or style, a narrow bandwidth of potential core fans, at the expense of huge bankrolls and mass appeal. If they didn’t, all we would end up with is derivative “content” packaged as yet another sequel to an offshoot of a popular series remake. When does a copy of a copy of a copy finally lose its appeal? (I am not just talking about movies.) How many Rocky, Rambo, Shrek, Spiderman or Kung-Fu Panda sequels do we really need to put ourselves through before brain cells actually start shriveling up like raisins?
image courtesy of Dreamworks
If originality presents the biggest risk for the cash register, it also presents the only hope for evolution of any medium or industry. Risk aversion is a short-term investment philosophy. Risk aversion favors remakes of Clash of the Titans over the pursuit of technical achievements like Avatar. It favors CSI: and NCIS: (insert random city here) over shows like Arrested Development and American Gothic. It favors gray boxes still running Windows XP behind agrarian firewalls over a fully liberated and mobile workforce equipped with dynamic, collaborative social media ecosystems and iPads.
It isn’t enough to understand that risk aversion supports cultures of stagnation. In order to be able to do something about it, you also have to understand that expecting every project to be a blockbuster success creates and supports cultures of risk aversion.
Organizations and cultures that don’t take the time to not only fund and foster but also reward talent incubators are doomed to fall into vicious cycles of “same as” or “also in” mediocrity.
Remember what we established earlier in the post: Establishing a balance between cult and mainstream is crucial to long term success. Too much focus on one or the other, and the equation fails: Your product either becomes too “indie” to scale and succeed, or too generic, and so it ends up becoming commoditized and largely irrelevant.
In order for organizations to build long term engines of success, they must not only treat talent and success incubation projects with as much respect and interest as they do their mass market wins, they must also reward each based on realistic and appropriate expectations. An Avatar sequel may very well gross $1B before it is all said and done. An indie film about an injured athlete trying to put his life back together most likely won’t. Sliding scales are important when calibrating budgets, expectations and rewards along the broad spectrum of what qualifies as “success.”
image courtesy of Warner Bros.
The danger of judging cult and experimental projects as if they were mass appeal products.
When I first saw trailers for Sack Snyder’s latest CGI opus Sucker Punch, here is what I saw: A cult movie. The imagery and stylized visuals were clearly an homage to specific genres in popular culture, namely Japanese animé, steampunk, dieselpunk, heroic fantasy, comic books and video games. Take a look:
What I didn’t see was a family-friendly summer blockbuster. Twenty seconds into that trailer, you know this isn’t going to be Finding Nemo 2 or National Treasure 3. Sucker Punch wasn’t made for the Dancing With The Stars demo. It is, first and foremost, a visual extravaganza, an overflowing dish of eye candy, which is something Zack Snyder is known for. Ever since 300, his carefully manicured comic book aesthetic has become his trademark. Love them or hate them, Snyder’s films are beautiful to watch. The attention to detail he brings into every set, every costume, ever frame and every cut is impressive in its own right, even if his movies aren’t your cup of tea. Here, Snyder also rewards his fans with an impressive soundtrack featuring covers of “Sweet Dreams (are made of this)”, “Where is my Mind”, “Love is the Drug”, “Asleep” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” though Bjork’s “Army of Me” and Emiliana Torrini’s “White Rabbit” are beautifully woven into the film.
For the cinematic experience alone, movie-goers in my demo (fans of the steampunk genre, comic book aesthetic, hyperbolic martial arts-inspired action sequences, wonderfully curated soundtracks and Zack Snyder films), the movie struck home. Even if the plot had been weak, the characters cliché, the narrative muddled and the dialog uninspired, Sucker Punch would have still been worth the $9 to a fan of beautifully crafted movie sequences.
There are a few lesson here about the importance of taking the time to occasionally make movies (and products) for fans rather than for general audiences:
1. It is how you build your audience, your reputation, and your core community of fans.
2. It is how you build towards the greater mainstream successes of tomorrow, how you progressively change the cultural landscape, one project at a time. It is how you shape it, mold it, evolve it. It is how you turn fringe into mainstream: By being there first, before something is popular. By taking the hits, the criticism, even the financial loss, knowing that somewhere down the road, having affected the currents of popular culture, the crowds will warm to your new ideas and aesthetics, and come back in droves when they finally get it.
The lesson about shooting for safe mainstream success and broad adoption without doing the core work is that you end up with a generic product. You end up with the kinds of products that satisfy but don’t inspire, like a meal that temporarily feeds your hunger but isn’t filling enough to keep you satiated for hours, or even memorable enough to revisit years later as a noteworthy gastronomic experience.
The truth is that in trying to appeal to everyone, you rarely end up truly appealing to anyone. You become the default choice rather than the inspired or enthusiastic one. The danger of turning this sort of dynamic into policy or standard operating procedure is that you end up creating cultures of average. Cultures of uninteresting. Cultures of differentiation through discounts rather than differentiation through outstanding, game-changing, category-changing original design.
Because of the trailer and reviews by mainstream critics, I went to see Sucker Punch this weekend with low expectations when it came to plot and script. I fully expected the movie to be an excuse for impressive visuals rather than a vehicle for them. As it turns out, I was wrong: Sucker Punch is actually a smart movie. A clever movie, even. One of the rare movies I have seen in recent years that makes extensive and unapologetic use of allegory and metaphor. It is bold not only in its style but in its use of narrative devices, which was a pleasant surprise. To have it compared to Inception (as it has been) is actually a bit insulting. Inception was simply a plot about dreams inside of dreams, which is easy enough to process. Sucker Punch goes further: It is a movie about metaphors inside of metaphors, which asks far more intellectual flexibility from audiences. Yes, in spite of its deceptively cliché animé imagery, Sucker Punch is actually the kind of movie that makes you think. It is in every way a genuine intellectual art film disguised as a formulaic blockbuster vehicle.
Anyone who tells you that Sucker Punch is simply a movie about muddled X-Box-fueled teenage fantasies failed to push through their own misconceptions and biases, and in doing so, completely missed the cleverness of this film. Metaphor doesn’t work well in the US. The average US movie-goer doesn’t want to have to think about what a giant ninja golem represents in the world of a young girl who feels utterly helpless and vulnerable in a desperately hostile world. They just want to know that the giant is bad and that it will lose the battle against the underdog heroine because she has superpowers.
Judging a movie like Sucker Punch with the same grading scale and intellectual lens as one would an equally desaturated and Kung-Fu superhero inspired The Matrix is a lot like judging 2001: A Space Odyssey using the same grading scale and lens as a film like Star Wars. It just doesn’t work.
image courtesy of Warner Bros.
The beauty of movies like Fincher’s Fight Club and Snyder’s Sucker Punch is that everything is a metaphor. Everything means or represents something. From the dilapidated house on Paper Street to Baby Doll’s flawless makeup. Sadly, superimposing genuine intellectual sophistication with deliberately gritty and purposely exploitative visual themes is also the initial undoing of movies like this: Too clever, too artsy, too cerebral often backfires when it comes to mass appeal and sales volumes. Fight Club took years to be understood (or at least accepted) by mainstream audiences. Judging from reviews on rottentomatoes.com (21% on the tomatometer and barely a 56% approval rating) Sucker Punch may be suffering the exact same fate.
“The movie spins out of control, until it collapses in a heap, senseless.” – The New Yorker
“”Sucker Punch” is what happens when a studio gives carte blanche to a filmmaker who has absolutely nothing original or even coherent to say.” – New York Post
“The movie is like an arrested adolescent’s Google search run amok.” – Time Magazine
The same thing happened to Fight Club eleven years ago. And just like Fight Club‘s core audience of fans came to the film’s rescue, fans of Sucker Punch (call them early adopters of this new genre) have already begun pushing back against culturally outpaced critics still struggling to adapt to a creative world heavily influenced by comic books, MTV, anime, video games, and a century of cinematic influences from Akira Kurosawa to Miloš Forman. Mainstream critics, just like mainstream audiences, haven’t yet made the transition from yesterday to tomorrow. Zack Snyder and his fans have.
“To me it is a brilliant film. Yeah perhaps a bit over the top in the stylized world, but that is ZS’s style. […] I found this is a movie that requires multiple times watching to really understand and follow the symbolism that is there. SPOILER ALERT – For example, the little sister has a stuffed rabbit which becomes the mechanized rabbit. The stuffed rabbit could not protect, while the mechanized fantasy rabbit could. These kinds of things are all over in the movie.”
“I loved the film. I loved it for it’s fresh feeling, its visual beauty, it’s crazy story line and most of all, I loved it for being DIFFERENT. I’m amazed at the amount of passion from both sides… Hate or Love. With all the remakes and revamps, I fear people are getting used to the same thing over and over only told in a different way. Sucker Punch is unique, even those that dislike it admit that. Unique? Isn’t that something? Mozart was not appreciated during his life. Orson Wells died thinking the public hated his movies… Everything is relative. I enjoy visionary directors. I enjoyed SUCKER PUNCH. I must point out that Godzilla films were never considered GREAT FILMS, honestly they were kinda inept, yet they had a kind of hidden magic to them. When Baby Doll stands against the giant Dmajin Samurai Warriors, I was reminded of that “Magic”.”
“A film has only as much meaning as the viewer watching it can give it. When my fifteen year old son came home Saturday night after watching the film with his friends all I heard him talk about was how interesting the film mixed the action/adventure genre, with the asylum genre, with the prison genre, and with the pre code backstage musical genre of the early thirties like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933; he talked to me about how the film’s structure advanced the narrative, setting up the asylum story, that eventually becomes a musical, only that the musical story doesn’t build up to singing and dancing set pieces but to big action set pieces; he told me the action set pieces payed homage to all of the great action genres: the samurai film, the war film, the medieval film, and the run-away vehicle chase films; he told me about all of the homages made to Citizen Kane in the beginning of the film, shots that mimicked Kane’s death in the protagonist’s mother’s death, and a few examples of depth staging being executed; and he discussed how the film’s end paid homage to films like One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Lord of the Rings, how in this film the Sam character is played by Abbie Cornish, and the Frodo character is played Emily Browning, the one who carries the burden that frees them all.
One of my son’s favorite parts was how the movie used creative ways in depicting death visually without all the blood and gore used in other films to maintain the PG-13 rating, like the burst of steam from the German’s gas masks whenever a German was killed. In essence the film is a prison film. My son doesn’t think it is an example of great film making, but he doesn’t deny the significance a film like this has on the landscape of contemporary film making. I think it’s too soon to describe Zak Snyder as an auteur, but he is certainly a much more interesting Hollywood director than Michael Bay, Robert Luketic, or Louis Leterrier. My point is, there’s always more to a film the explosions, effects, brawny women, and action sequences, and it is silly to think of them as just that, it only lessens the culture and the efforts of the filmmakers.”
Sucker Punch was never meant to compete against Kung-Fu Panda 2. It was never meant to bring in July 4th or Thanksgiving-size audiences. It was never meant to gross $100M in its first week. To expect it to measure up to box office safe bets is to misunderstand its place in the incubation process. A movie about a girl locked up inside an insane asylum was never going to draw big crowds, even if the desperate fantasy world she creates offers some of the most visually arresting set pieces yet seen on the big screen, and especially if every detail of these fantasies – from the way the camera cleverly travels in and out of mirrors in the brothel scenes to the choice of the bus stop’s color palette – carries a deeper meaning than the obvious. To see a project like this judged by critics against Hollywood’s typical linear three act action fares is disappointing but not surprising. A critic’s point of view is often driven and shaped by the expectations of his audience rather than a clear understanding of the culture of the industry he aims to be a part of. The same is true of tech bloggers, automotive reviewers, and anyone who sees himself as an industry influencer. Case in point, critic Christian Toto’s reaction to the film:
“Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch should send shivers down the spines of Superman fans.”
This in reference to the fact that Snyder is slated to direct the next movie iteration of Superman. (Yes, AGAIN. Talk about franchise overload.)
In spite of the fact that Sucker Punch – like Watchmen – is a niche movie while a Superman remake is a solid blockbuster bet, critics like Toto don’t seem to understand the difference. Critics aren’t necessarily industry analysts. Instead of grading and judging different type of movies with different sets of lenses, they default to their single mainstream lens.
This type of mentality echoes that of risk-averse, mainstream-focused executives who shun experimental talent incubation projects that cater to narrow but deep niches in favor of the mainstream status-quo. It is this brand of operational myopia that forgets to invest in relationships with core fans and users, preferring instead to focus on low hanging fruit “also in” product categories: The 3D animated adventure prequel. The 20th live action comic book superhero movie. The 38th flip phone in the catalog. The 53rd black flat screen TV. The other silver sedan. The other “other” e-reader or tablet.
The inability to understand the need for a different standard of success for bold niche products in a world of same-as mass appeal products stunts the growth of companies in every industry, and jeopardizes their ability to invest in their own successful future. It is as simple as that.
image courtesy of Warner Bros.
In conclusion.
So what have we learned today?
1. Incorporate experimental projects and success incubators into your company culture. Without them, you are merely surviving.
2. Fund them well.
3. Judge them through a different lens than you do mainstream successes.
4. Learn how to scale niche successes into mainstream successes, like Apple, Virgin Airlines, Zappos and Starbucks, for starters.
5. Depth first, then breadth. Not the other way around. .
6. Go see Sucker Punch… unless you aren’t into Zack Snyder movies… or visionary film-making.
No talk of social media today. Instead, let’s turn our attention to slightly more interesting topics that might come in handy as everyone is busy putting the finishing touches on their 2011 planning.
On innovation, grabbing life by the horns, and not pissing your life away:
“Do things that are gaspworthy.”
That was one of the main messages delivered by Tom Peters, the influential business thinker and management [expert], in his speech yesterday at Epsilon’s Integrated Marketing Symposium 2006 at the Quail Lodge in Carmel, CA.
“Do cool stuff that make people gasp,” said Peters, who looked older and angrier than in his “In Search of Excellence Days” (the book he co-authored with Richard Waterman in 1982 that was hailed by NPR as one of the Top Business Books of the Century). “Don’t piss away your life.”
He changed his speech at the last moment after having learning this week that one of his best friends has a terminal illness, Peters said.
Also noted
“Innovation comes not from market research or focus groups, but from pissed off people.”
“Whether you are Jack Welch or the Dalai Lama, it is dangerous not to do what you love. If you don’t have a level of passion that drives your thinking about what you’re doing day in and day out, there will be others out there who are passionate who will overtake and outrun you. People who care will take the initiative away from those who are half-hearted. So loving what you do is a competitive imperative, not simply a nice thing to have.”
Knowledge @ Wharton interviews Mark Thompson and Stewart Emery, co-authors along with Jerry Porras of Success Built to Last
On retaining talent:
“One of my favorite cliches is “there is no such thing as indentured servitude”. Iuse that line to talk about the fact that talent can’t be bought and sold. It must be retained with something more than money.“
