The other day, I woke up with this song in my head from New Kids on the Block. It got me talking to a colleague at work, and I told him how I thought it was funny that I had seen a televised bit when they kicked off their comeback tour in 2008 on the Today Show. These guys had put on what really looked like their old show, but their audience had miraculously transformed from a bunch of screaming teenagers into screaming near-middle-aged women. Their act, however, looked like it was still geared to a fairly wholesome boy-band image who were used to performing in front of underage girls.

So, still chuckling it up. I jumped on YouTube just to see if I could find the Today Show snippet, and instead I came across footage from their actual tour. This was NOT the same performance I had seen on the Today Show. These guys were shaking their parts and strutting their stuff, and their backup dancers were wearing very shapely outfits. Some of their dance moves were also more adult in nature. It seems that once they realized that their audience was no longer a bunch of kids, they completely transformed their show to pander to a crowd of lovelorn 30-40 somethings with 20 year old crushes (and possibly to re-imagine their youth the way they would have liked to have lived it).

Experience it if you dare:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evp1JMGehSw

If you’re too old (or too young) to have been (or have had a sister) completely in love with Donnie Wahlberg or one of the others, you can compare it to the original here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUfWjD1k9MM

Anyway, after I got over the experience of watching these guys completely overhaul their act, I realized that, without getting into moral judgments, there’s a real lesson here in understanding your customers and delivering what they want. See, their fan base of teen-aged girls with wicked crushes and unrequited love and lust had grown into 30+ year old women with a lot more life experience. Also, because these women were now legally of age, they could stop censoring their act. They notice the differences and changed their show to fit the desires of their audience.

Markets change, technologies evolve, and clients mature. Are you taking notice to make sure that you are changing with them?

There’s also a lesson here in making sure that you make changes that you are comfortable with, but we’ll save that for another post.

Pocahontas and my Daughter at Disney's Animal Kingdom

In January of 2009, I took my family to visit Disney World in Orlando, Florida. While there, we experienced something profound in the way that Disney treats its different fan bases.

See, my then eight year old daughter, had spent the better part of her years to that point loving and wanting to be a Disney Princess. Mostly she’s into Arial, probably because of that whole fish-tail thing, but in reality, all of the princesses rocked her adolescent world. Chances are, if you’ve dealt with a young daughter of your own, you know what I’m talking about. So, knowing this about my girl, I gathered as much information about Disney World and how to find princesses as I could. Turns out there this place called the Akershus Royal Banquet Hall at Epcot Center where you can dine with the princesses. Belle greets everyone coming in and takes photos with the kids, and then while you eat, Cinderella, Aurora, Jasmine, and yes, even Arial, come by one at a time to visit each table for photo opportunities. The only person missing is Snow White. You have to book your reservations well ahead of time, and at $35/head for adults, its a bit pricey, but KNOWING that my daughter would get to meet all but one of the princesses sealed the deal for me. I booked our brunch with the princesses for our second day there.

So, our first day at Disney World was a lot of fun. Nothing but great experiences and wonders. We got there about lunch time, wandered around the Magic Kingdom, rode rides, ate food, and caught the fireworks show at the end of the day. All in all, a great time was had.

The second day, knowing what our first real stop of the day would be, I suggested that my daughter wear her princess outfit. Not knowing what was up (did I mention it was a surprise?) she was hesitant, because at eight years of age, she was becoming self conscious of her public dress and grooming. Between encouragement from my wife and I however, she eventually put on her gown and tiara, and we were off.

This is where our entire experience shifted about ten degrees off-kilter from our first day.

We boarded the bus from our hotel, and as it pulled away from the stop, over the speakers ran the normal safety/destination/have a nice day rigmarole. Unlike the day before, however, today it finished with “Please, be on your best royal behavior. Today, we’re riding with a Disney Princess.” I shot a surprised glance to my wife who did the same to me, then we both watched our daughter who seemed unfazed. Then after a few seconds, it registered and she looked up at us wide-eyed. “Was he talking about ME?” We both gave her our “I think so” shrugs and faces and we drove on. Everywhere we went after that, every cast member referred to our daughter as “Princess”, many actually stopping what they were doing to take the time to say hello. “Hello, Princess, can I get you something?” “Hello, Princess, are you having a nice day?” “Hello, Princess, you seem to be running out of Pixie Dust, can I get you some more?” (Out comes the wand that sprinkles glitter all over her head and shoulders).

Encouraged by that day’s events, she chose to dress up like a princess for most of the rest of the stay. After all, its not like at home where princesses might get strange glances. At Disney World, princesses were the ‘it’ girls of the land. In fact, grandpa had given her a coffee can of coins before we left, and it added up to about $90, which she was allowed to spend on anything she wanted. I had made sure to reserve a session at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique on our third day for her Princess Makeover, and, feeling more like a princess than ever, she purchased a full-ensemble Jasmine outfit. From then, on, it wasn’t ‘Princess’ anymore, it was ‘Princess Jasmine’ from the cast members.

And don’t think it was just simple pleasantries, either. She got preferential treatment everywhere we went. Late on the fourth day, wandering around the Animal Kingdom, I turned a corner to see a meet-and-greet line with Pocahontas. Not a princess, but still, up there in my daughter’s ‘would like to meet’ list. As her handler saw me, he said (as he’d probably been saying for the past 5 minutes) “sorry folks, Pocahontas is finished for the day.” I then recognized that there was no one in her line and that she had just finished taking a photo with her last customer. OK, I thought. Too, bad, but nothing to be done about it. Then, probably a full 15 seconds later, my daughter, with her aunts, rounded the corner of the trail dressed in her full Jasmine ensemble. My daughter, realizing what she’d just missed, looked after Pocahontas for a moment, and the handler, who was just turning to follow Pocahontas down a ‘cast members only’ side trail, stopped mid stride, turned back and said loud enough for my daughter to hear, “Your Highness! I’m SO SORRY! I didn’t see you! Pocahontas! Come back, we have a royal visitor!” Pocahontas returned, my daughter got her photo, the rest of the visitors were turned away, and again Pocahontas and her handler headed back down their trail.

Special service? In front of other visitors? You betcha. Being a Princess at Disney World is the fast track to VIP treatment. A ‘members only’ club experience right out of the gate.

This would have impressed me, anyway, but having just finished reading Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, I was amazed to watch as Disney very simply and elegantly added the newest member to their Tribe and made her a fan for life. I have no doubt that she will eventually outgrow her enamor of the Princesses. She already dresses up less and less. However, I have no doubt that based on her experiences, she’ll remain a Disney fan for life, and based on the way I saw them making her feel, they’ve actually made two. She’s in the Tribe of Disney Princesses now, and all it cost her was the guts to wear her outfit.

So, back to business. Is there something you can do to mimic this in your own business? Something small, but special, that would make your current customers or clients feel like they’re on the ‘inside’? Something that would reward your best clients, or maybe turn your average clients into your best clients? Simple things like adding someone who filled out a survey for your to a ‘discount list’, or ‘mailing list only’ specials to subscribers of your mailing list? Those are really basic, but can you grow it from there? What if your mailing list subscribers got an unpublished automatic ‘rush’ service when they placed an order? Or upgraded to overnight delivery? If you’re running a local business, maybe they get invited to a private after-dinner party?

What you can do, will obviously depend on your business and your clients, but if you look hard enough, you can certainly do something. After all, when you break down the whole Disney Princess experience it’s this:

1. Call every little girl in a princess outfit “Princess.”
2. If you see a little girl in a princess outfit, bump it up a notch.

Now, how hard was that?

The other night, Amelia finds me on Facebook and friends me. Cool enough. Of course, after accepting her invitation, one of the next things I do is head on over to twitter to try and find her there as well. I find her account, easily enough, but its a protected account, so I request to follow her. Last night, I get the following message from her on Facebook:

Hi Chris got your tweet invite but I don’t tweet just got onto facebook through brenda…..

At this point I’m going to pick on Amelia just a little bit here, and ask that she recognize that I’m absolutely NOT blasting her personally, its just that she’s convenient fodder for this situation that I’ve seen play out time and again. In fact I do recognize that she, along with a lot of other people, are just starting to figure out these tools and I commend them for at least playing around with them. I’d also like to point out at this point that since lots of people ARE figuring things out right now, that it has started to turn into a race to see who gets there first.

Anyway, after I had mustered up a good head of false indignation and misplaced ire, I got ready to answer her directly, when I realized two things:

• 1. it didn’t matter how she answered my next question, my responses would all be pretty similar
• 2. this would make a good post that could help more people than just her.

So, now its a blog post, and I’ll just send her and the other trainers a link to it.

So, anyway, my next question to her would have been this:

What is your competition doing on Twitter?

There are only 3 basic responses to that question; nothing, I don’t know, and something.

My responses to each of those are:

Nothing

You mean that there’s a space on the internet, the fastest growing in all of history, and NO ONE from your industry is there, and the first one in basically OWNS that space?”

I don’t know

“You mean that there’s a space on the internet, the fastest growing in all of history, and you have NO IDEA if your competition is there, what they’re doing, or how they are using it?”

Something

“You mean that there’s a space on the internet, the fastest growing in all of history, and whether they’re actually doing it right or not, you are letting your competition exist there UNCHALLENGED?”

Now, about her account being ‘protected’, my personal feelings on that are that you might as well not be on the network as far as branding and promotion go if your account is protected. Since she hasn’t really used Twitter, I understand that its kind of locked up until she gets there. Also, there are plenty of reasons to have a protected account, but a protected account shouldn’t be the account that you use to connect to your potential clients, your professional community and your fans. Keep the protected accounts for personal or ‘top secret’ uses only. If your account is open, you are FAR more likely to attract new followers, be indexed on Google, retweeted, and linked to than if your account is locked.

The best part of all of this is, that between all of the trainers, they already have a very solid foundation for a community. They are not a single person standing alone in the twittersphere, they are a ready-made network, able to share information freely among themselves about interesting topics in their industry, ready to set themselves up as leaders, poised to grow, and available to help and answer questions, even if their original followers are simply their students.

My advice to the trainers would be this. Each trainer opens their own Twitter account. Next, start a Twibe over on http://twibes.com, which basically creates a twitter community that allows someone to join their community and automatically linked to EVERYONE in that community. Also, people can come and go, and there’s no work on the part of any community member to keep track of who is where, since its all updated automatically. Third, set a schedule so that on busy days, they know someone will take the time to stop by and check on the twibe conversations, answer questions, greet new members, etc. The trainers are staggered through the globe, in Europe, the US, Australia and China. If everyone just logged in on their lunch break, they would have more than enough coverage in any given day. Finally, any of the trainers who blog (another topic altogether) should either manually tweet when a new post is published, or download a plugin for their blog that will do that automatically. I currently use WordTwit from Brave New Code.

Bob and I start talking about Twitter in episode 303 of Creative Independence which will drop this weekend. We cover setting up your account, branding, account options and the like. In episode 305 we’re going to go over some of the more interesting ways to leverage Twitter in your business. We also need to jump onto using Facebook soon, since it seems to be where everyone is starting.

I’m dying to let you know who these people are, but until I know who is where, and more importantly, whether or not their competition really is using these tools, I’d hate to tip off the competition that they can basically get in there unchallenged at this point.

What David meant by this was simple; as a project passes through your hands, regardless of your job, regardless of your pay, when it hits your hands, do the best you can with it, and make sure it leaves your hands in better shape than when you received it. Its an amazingly simple philosophy that when practiced, yields results that are a wonder to behold. When everybody just does their ‘job’, a project can go from beginning to end and come out pretty much the way everyone expected it to, but when every person who touches the project takes time to engage with it, to look for ways to improve it or make it even a little bit better, the final product is often far more than anyone could have planned for.

Recently, I’ve been reading a book called Linchpin by Seth Godin, which I HIGHLY recommend. He talks about this exact process, which he terms ‘creating art’ or ‘giving a gift’. When a person steps outside of what is expected of him and does the best he can regardless of his role, that person becomes an artist, and what he creates is a gift of art, and that such giving is the basis for creating tribes around yourself. Seth also makes the argument that the receivers of such gifts tend to want to return the favor, and that artists, because of their art and their gifts, have more opportunities open up before them than someone who selfishly hordes their art.

Today, during a team meeting, we had a surprise visit from a colleague of mine from another team. One of her roles in the Creative department is roughly, Keeper of the Brand. She and a few others work hard to make sure that the ESPN brand and its many imprints are maintained and handled aright across the company and in all forms of media, which is a BIG task. I, on the other hand, am one of less than a handful of creatives that work within the ESD branch of the Technology division. I stick out like a sore thumb amongst a throng of programmers, engineers and other techy types. Over the past couple of years, however, I’ve been pushing hard to make sure that the creative our web teams produce is in harmony with what the teams in NY and the main campus create. Its not something I was asked to do, its simply something that someone from a background like mine understands is important, and its one of the ways that I endeavor to add value at my level.

As I was saying, today she showed up unexpectedly (to me, anyway) at our team meeting, and presented me with an ESPN Game Ball. There are 21 game balls in all, and it passes from one person to the next roughly once per month. It is given by the previous recipient to someone who they felt has gone above and beyond. I’ve watched these game balls passing around the company for about the last year, and never thought one would make it into my hands. Now one has. Its a real honor, and now that its been given to me, I can’t think of someone I’d rather have received it from. Today, it was blindingly obvious to me, that this theory of giving gifts unselfishly and having it returned toyou is actually a reality. Its not the first time that what I’ve given has come back to me, but right now, this evening, which a brand new game ball sitting on top of my cubicle, its certainly a topic that’s on my mind.

So, create your art, whatever it is you do. Add value at every level. Explore and expand what you do, and help your team envision beyond what they currently do. Do more than is asked or expected of you, and most importantly, do it freely without expectation of compensation. It will be noticed, and you’ll be recognized as a Linchpin.

I haven’t seen Avatar yet. I can hardly believe it myself. I wanted to go opening weekend, but my wife who had recently had surgery wasn’t feeling up to it Christmas, and I really want to go with her. We tried the next day, and it was sold out. We tried again two weekends later, and again it was sold out. Why didn’t I buy tickets online, you ask? Because it was the third weekend out, and in this day and age, who expects a movie to sell out in its third weekend? Its rare enough to get a sell out on opening weekend, certainly not 3 weekends into the run. We had made further plans which have been thwarted for the past month due to family circumstances. We’re making plans for this weekend. Let’s hope.

Anyway, I’d intended to write this post after that third weekend sellout. As bummed as I was that I didn’t get in, I was also happy. You see, if you catch what I’m getting at, this is a big deal for the movie theater industry. You’d probably agree that its almost unheard of for a movie to sell out after opening weekend, and this movie was a prime example of someone trying something and doing it right. Movie theaters have been trying new things for decades; contending with home videos since the very early 80s, shorter and shorter time spans between the theatre and home video releases, and contending with home theater systems and direct download movies. Instead of doing nothing new, theaters, as well as movie studios who enjoy the double income from both box office sales and home video sales, have come together to produce ever better viewing experiences. They are constantly looking for new ways to deliver unique and better experiences.

This stands in stark contrast to the book store industry who seems to be doing not much. Last year, J.C. Hutchins teamed up with viral game designer Jordan Weisman and they created the novel, Personal Effects: Dark Art. I say created rather than written because even though it’s sold in book stores and the main component is the stand alone novel, there is much much more to it. Each book ships with a number of artifacts, all with clues so that you can follow along and try to work out the story as you go. Phone numbers in the story and on the artifacts work, as do website addresses. You can even google the characters and find sites for them. Its a bold new experiment for sure, but more than that, its the kind of idea that could help keep printed media relevant. You simply can’t get these artifacts on a Kindle.

What’s my point? Its that the movie theater industry has been trying lots of new things, from IMAX to 3D to unparalleled audio to pre-roll advertising. Not everything they try sticks, but at least they’re experimenting. Book stores on the other hand don’t seem to try so hard. J.C.’s book should have been front and center in EVERY book store in the country, just to SEE if it was an idea that could take off. The stores, if they were interested at all in finding new ways to stay relevant, should have embraced the effort. Instead, either not wanting to take a chance on a new author, a new idea, or simply because they didn’t understand the concept, they pretty much ignored it. Its too bad, too, because I love book stores and would like to see them remain relevant (see previous post for more on that).

What does this mean for you? Well, what’s going on in your industry? If things are changing, especially if those changes are starting to make you irrelevant, it might be time to start trying something new. Pay attention to what others are doing differently as well, and take note of what seems to be working. Do a bunch of things differently. If an idea comes along, just try it. If it fails, fine, but at least you know what doesn’t work, and its harder to weed through the bad ideas and find the good ones if you’re not producing any ideas at all.

See, I stopped freelancing almost 4 years ago because I realized my business wasn’t going in a direction that made me happy, and reading Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth Revisited, had pretty much showed me why (I swear that book was written just for me). The E-Myth also laid out a very solid foundation for designing and starting your own business. I just needed some time to think and regroup, so I shut down my time-sucking (60+ hours per week) ‘business’ and took a ‘day job’, where I could show up from 8-5 and then go home and think about and build whatever I wanted, NOT worry about clients.

Now, I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but from my cubicle over the past 4 years, I’ve watched the entire world change. There have been hints and foreshadowing for decades, what with outsourcing of first menial, and then later, highly sophisticated tech jobs; with factories in industrialized nations closing and new ones opening in developing nations; with “health” vacations to India and Thailand becoming more and more common; yes, hints and foreshadowing that much of what we had built, systematized, and standardized was now going to someone other than ourselves. This factory-based system that worked for so long just seems to have stopped working for any but the most rich and the most poor. The rest of us in the middle have been forgotten.

Its not that the systems from Michael Gerber’s E-Myth in and of themselves aren’t a good idea (in fact, I regularly create systems for lots of things, including my personal life, to help smooth things along), but the entire world has been so systematized and outsourced, that our ability to actually participate in these systems seems to be disappearing at a rapid rate.

This seems to be where Seth’s book steps in. Where Gerber’s book looks at the world from an old-system business owner who seeks to standardize the entire business and where the workers in a business are all interchangeable, Seth’s book is looking at our emerging era where the owners (us) actually own our own factories ($500 for a new PC, or $2000 for a new Mac?!?). Where we stop fitting ourselves into the standardized cogs of old-style business and start recreating ourselves as unique, indispensable artists.

The thing we need to realize is that we can’t afford to be compliant laborers anymore, because companies can no longer afford to hire employees who are simply good at their jobs. As Seth writes in his book, “The compliant masses don’t help so much when you don’t know what to do next.” Companies have no idea where to go from here, and a worker who simply shows up is becoming a waste of space. The world we all operated in 10, even 5 years ago is disappearing rapidly, and what we all need are thinkers and creative problem solvers to help find a new direction. And smart companies will pay for it, whether as an employee or a consultant.

I believe that this book will speak directly to most of the listeners of Creative Independence simply because doing things on our own is in our very nature; its in our core. This book is written in such a way to speak to those of us who are part of a new, emerging class of people; those who both own and are the key employees of our own businesses. Check it out when you get a chance. I’ll update more as I finish up this book.

You can pre-order your copy from Amazon by clicking here (affiliate link): Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

The culmination of everything we’ve learned from my wife’s hairdo is this: Expect pain. No matter how well we prepare or train, prepare for things to go wrong from time to time, especially at the outset. Mistakes will be made by people who are still learning. Misunderstandings about how the new solution itself works or what it will do will occasionally cause issues and confusion. These will cost time and money. We must prepare ourselves for these small breakdowns, padding schedules a bit until things come under control. We must tell ourselves and our partners and employees that the occasional mistake is OK. Pick ourselves up, work through the pain and move on.

Visible changes to your image or changes to your processes, especially at the point where they interact with our client’s processes, can stumble client relations. At the best, these kinds of changes can create trepidation, discomfort and unease; at the worst, these changes may produce costs and upgrade pains for our customers. Remaining firm to our core values and products, and offering help with the transition should make it easier for our clients to stay with us and remain our clients.

Time and use will eventually expose problems in even the most customized solution, and certainly for stock out-of-the-box products. We may find that we need either custom work or additional parts/pieces/plugins to fully integrate a new solution to our business. Keeping our eyes open for early adjustments, and being ready to take the time to make the ones we deem necessary early on will help eliminated poor workflows and habits and reduce the pain of retraining. No one likes giving up one poor solution for another poor solution.