Ideas worth talking about.

talking with goodby

 
Zach Slow Canfield (left) and Derek Robson of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners met for a Q&A session last Friday after Derek talked about the agency's vision. On the previous day, Zach talked to students about what he looks for in a creative intern. Zach said 64 out of the 97 creatives at the agency are working on interactive. So, an intern's book should show their interactive skills. Of course, he's also looking for an understanding of typography, use of photography and raw talent.

Zach showed an example of a project he worked on. It took him about three days and $100 to create. He made a site where he attempted to ask out UK emcee Lady Sovereign. He wanted to raise $10,000 for his date. One month and 1,300,000 hits later, he met his goal (with only a couple of hours to spare before her show). Zach would love to see something like this in a creative's book. See his site here.

Two things came up during my conversation with Derek that I've been meaning to share here too. First, is dutchtub (a brand I like). It's a portable wood fired hot tub. The tub is made from a light weight polyester and uses a coiled stainless steel heating system. Here's a brand promise: you can have a nice warm soak anywhere there's wood and water.

Second, is The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier. It's everything I've been thinking and learning about for the past year—all condensed into a small book. "Not since McLuhan's The Medium is the Message has a book compressed so many ideas into so few pages."  Download the pdf presentation of the book here. I'm sure you'll love it too.

Thanks, Zach, Jill and Derek. Great to meet you all!

made to stick

How can you create ideas that people remember and talk about? I think this book complements what Ira Glass says. The title of this book by Chip Heath and Dan Heath is self-explanatory: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

These guys must be on to something. I’m already spreading their ideas and I haven’t read the whole book yet. I want to share with you the six principles they say make an idea sticky. (They also wrote a ChangeThis manifesto called Talking Strategy: Three Straightforward Ways to Make Your Strategy Stick).

1. Simplicity: How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, "If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won't remember any." To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion.
   
   
2. Unexpectedness: How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people's expectations. We need to be counterintuitive.


3. Concreteness: How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions — they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless.
   
   
4. Credibility: How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don't enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials.
   
   
5. Emotions: How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.
   
   
6. Stories: How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations.

citizen marketers

I’m looking forward to reading Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell’s book, Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message. Guy Kawasaki posted an interview with Jackie and Ben a few weeks ago. Has anyone read their book yet?

perfect pitch

I just got my hands on Jon Steel’s new book Perfect Pitch: The art of selling ideas and winning new business. Check back in a week for a review. Until then, I’ll leave you with this interview (mp3) Russell did with Jon.