White Noise

By David Baker

Published Monday, June 7, 2010 – Media Post, Email Insider

A 12-year-old pianist sat down to play before a venerable musician and an audience of 50 or so observers. The older musician had played hundreds of gigs around the country and was often credited with inventing jazz. The young performer played classic after classic, from Mozart to Chopin, and he was note-perfect. One of the observers leaned over to the older musician and said, “Isn’t this amazing?” The musician replied, “This kid is great at playing the piano. One of these days he’ll learn to make music.” 

I think in the marketing world we get caught in the rat race of doing the mechanics, yet struggle with putting the picture — or even part of the picture — together. This story made me think about the context of successful email marketing and online marketing in general. I’ve seen, over the years, every excuse in the book keeping marketers in the world of “urgency.” The problem with living in this world of “urgency” is that you get too mechanical and don’t take calculated risks.

I answered an RFP this past week that posed the question: “What do you believe is the most critical aspect of email marketing?” There are obviously hundreds of ways to answer this — tactically, or with a best-practice view, or restating what the analysts say. Yet it’s so contextual to the client that I chose to end the response with: “Key to GREAT email marketing is efficiency without losing strategic direction and the value these efforts drive.”

To make music with our channel, you need to consider a few things that will directly impact how you operate and thrive in the future.

1. Create operational relationships with the search team. Both support brand- and purchase-related intents. Both are driving growth in many businesses, and are key to retention and engagement. It will be the challenge of the businesses to understand the symbiotic relationship between the two and figure out points in time and channels that can be optimized in tandem.

2. Social retention marketing: while social marketing is so broadly defined these days, there are natural synergies between these experiences and how and why consumers engage with a brand. The challenge will be to hedge your bet on key social network behaviors and sites while the industry matures. You can’t sit by and wait for Facebook to take over the world; you must find out which environments can help bring about a measured return on engagement. In order to do this, take a risk and do only things that you can measure or find some retention correlation to.

3. Email and the device. The penetration of smartphones is growing so rapidly, it will reach critical mass in the next few years. The email communities need to figure out how to isolate device-specific experiences, report against them, understand the timing, and “triage” the email experience of the transient consumer. This will evolve so rapidly that companies will need to get smarter about predictive response modeling and take on more intelligent analytics in order to adapt to this very dynamic usage pattern.

While these are just a few thoughts, I believe them to be critical to the evolution of eCRM. To make music, you have to commit to the “practice,” take risks, engage with a lot of people, and yet understand the measures of your success will not always be noticed or appreciated by others. But when you do finally put it together, you’ll see an amazing shift in how you approach your business and how you express this to your partners and internal teams.

Published in DMNews ,

By David Baker, VP of CRM solutions, Razorfish

Apple is well known for its progressive digital marketing approach, and it is a no-brainer to market pre-orders to the faithful Apple audience. It’s not that different than the iPhone launch, with its sensationalized TV spots and unparalleled pre-buzz. Some would say it’s not hard to market such an innovative product, but the synchronization of marketing activities to fulfillment that sustains itself for months is what I admire most. Apple has applied its messaging and brand positioning to this launch. That simple message, consistent across media, did not waver as the skeptics and loyalists battled it out.

Taking advantage of a pre-launch is the primer to trending anticipated sales. This campaign is important not for its promotional or direct response timing, but for its alignment with the cadence of customer communications to iTunes, iPod and iPhone users. Apple has created brand connections with each product and leveraged many forms of media and direct response to build consistent messaging and value that support each other. The iPad campaign created such market buzz and millions in free advertising from partners and publishers that it can easily be seen as one of the most effective, talked about campaigns of 2010.

The e-mail program may be the prompt to urgency and the reminder to buy, viewed both in the in-box and on the mobile device, but these types of promotions are only as successful as the supporting media and engagement vehicles. Countless publications were talking about this product and its implications. Apple is not a follower by nature, so you won’t see a fan page dedicated to the pure Apple brand; you’ll see social media at its best, contextual to the product. Apple makes fans segment themselves, self-selecting based on product interest. It’s a novel concept I’m sure many brands will follow. With more than 3.5 million fans on the iTunes Facebook fan page, this is a perfect platform to release and pre-release products to these dedicated and sometimes fanatical audiences. To do so, you must have good coordination with other channels to deliver on the brand promise. Apple used its digital and offline outlets to make this launch amazingly effective.

By David Baker, Monday, May 3, 2010

While many of my references come from the B2C space, I do believe that the B2B market will better inform the technological direction and focus on the marketing automation space over the next few years — more so than the vast needs of a consumer-data-driven organization. 

The foundational trends are still the same buzzwords we’ve used for years:
-        ROI and Reporting
-        Integration of social media
-        Buyer-centric content
-        The need for new analytical skills
-        Renewed focus on data quality
-        Sales and Marketing Alignment

Nothing new, you might say, but there are some pretty common observations that shift how we think about this in today’s world.   First, ROI has always been the driver in B2B marketing.  But more progressive digital channels and methods of reach, have put pressure on ROI to be measured at the lead quality stage, not just the conversion stage.  This puts more pressure on the systems and businesses to adjust lead scoring to adapt to a more complicated sales cycle and attribution.  Second, the combination of sales and marketing has always been the utopia of a business.  How to build in the right amount of integration between a sales agent and the web experience?  We research differently, we use many more sources, and we have much better filtering mechanisms these days, which make this synchronization of sales interactions and support/consideration a much more difficult challenge to manage and optimize the funnel.

We have so much more data than we’ve ever had, which creates more pressure to sustain this over time.   The problem here is data quality.  If you believe in the concept of lead recycling, then you will realize how important data quality is in taking an extended view and investment in managing leads longer, even if they aren’t ranked high in your “ready to buy” scale.  

With the emergence of socially engineered experiences and connectivity, the world of data quality got a lot harder.  Our view of a lead will change from “when will they buy and how much” to “how much influence do they have over the buying decision — and who else is involved in this decision?”  This unstructured data will present many challenges for marketing automation systems.  Can you accurately mine “intent to buy” through unstructured data sources?  How will LinkedIn and other B2B social networks influence lead scoring and value?   It’s not just a reach vehicle, it’s about real-time simulation of social networks to gauge influence and engagement.

Buyers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how we research, consider, compare, try and buy. The sales cycle has become an amazingly complicated web of interactions.  If you have ever tried to develop a linear lead conversion program, you’ll quickly realize there are so many permutations that you are forever modifying to support optimization.  This manual task has become much easier to manage with the tools, but the analytical competence that goes into making decisions based on known facts is where most businesses will struggle.  What makes this even more difficult is the need to create buyer-centric content that aligns the experience with need and fulfillment.

We’ll face many challenges in this space, but we’ve seen great progress with the tools. With the emergence of SaaS solutions, they aren’t as expensive as they used to be.  They are much more intuitive, too, with improved modularity. Yet most will struggle with the physical management of these tools , processes and data.  

Your marketing automation program must match the intensity and sophistication of your sales cycle.

This article was inspired by the following blog post.  Definitely worth a read: http://www.leadsloth.com/blog/marketing-automation-trends-for-2010/
 

By David Baker

When it rains, we talk a lot about email. For the diehard email marketers, welcome to Captiva Island, Fla. for the Email Insider Summit. For those not attending, follow the event at #MPEIS. I’ve programmed this event the last four times and I’m not sure what’s in the air, but there was a lot more demand to speak and be involved in this event. There’s a new energy it seems: businesses are strong, marketers’ outlooks are bright, and the vendors in the space have a hop in their step. 

This should be one of the better events we’ve programmed. This line-up of thought leaders and brands is designed to explore the growth of the space more so than other events. 

Day 1 leads off with Bruce Biegel of The Winterberry Group. Having worked on many of the major acquisitions in the industry, Bruce lends a very broad view of technology/trends and what types of emerging companies will shape our industry in the future. 

The Microsoft and Yahoo product managers will expound on the future of the inbox. How is it evolving? How will they evolve the social interfaces? Will they create more integrated advertising opportunities? Better utility for the user? And what are the 200-plus million consumers who use these think of the email they receive? 

What we haven’t had at EIS in the past is a view of the ESP world from the marketing automation perspective. Now we do. Our panel, featuring some of the leading marketing automation software companies, will explore how marketing automation has grown from a world of point solutions to a suite of products that include email. We’ll discuss how these email tools support an entire enterprise’s need for triggered, lifecycle and 1:1 communications, and what the future holds for these platforms in social CRM and mobile. 

We have some of the top thought leaders in the space headlining great panels on topics such as integrated marketing, progressive tips for the email marketer, lifecycle messaging, and generating engagement. These thinkers include Stephanie Miller (ReturnPath), Loren McDonald (Silverpop), Ted Wham (Orbitz), Lisa Harmon (Smith-Harmon), Morgan Stewart (ExactTarget), Ken Magil (Magilla Marketing); with Gretchen Scheiman (Ogilvy) as our emcee. There will also be some really great brands featured: FedEx, Sprint, Dell, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Under Armour, NBC, Barnes and Noble, National Hockey League, Disney, AT&T and American Express. 

Quite a line-up! Really look forward to all the contributions, great thinking, collaboration — and of course, hope the sun does shine sometime while we’re down here. 

by David Baker, Monday, March 22, 2010

Most people reading this article will spend more money in 2010 for pet food, baby food, cereal, and detergents, and less on wines and vitamins. What if I said that you, reading this, had on average 150 or more LinkedIn connections, at least 100 followers on Twitter, follow at least 200 others on Twitter, have one or more Facebook accounts, and upload at least 50 photos a year to some social network site?

What if I knew that you shopped at Target and were a member of Costco and preferred mass supercenters and mass merchandisers over traditional grocery stores or drug stores? What if I told you that you spent more on average at these supercenters than any other generation ever did?  That you have redeemed at least one coupon in the last month (that includes the 25% off at Macy’s)? And that most will have emailed your spouse about this weekend’s plans instead of calling them to confirm? (The source of this research data is a Nielsen study excerpted in a recent MediaPost article,  “Generational Mix Reveals Shopping Similarities and Differences.”)

What would having this amount of consumer knowledge mean for a brand that sells luxury automobiles? What about a publisher? Or a merchandiser of children’s toys, exercise equipment, macaroni and cheese, Fruity Pebbles, or someone who sells customized tchotchkes? What about the business selling back-office software solutions or outsourcing HR services to small businesses?

This is what we will be grappling with in the future. I gaze into my crystal ball and see a very significant spread in how behaviors and brands will interact, use the Internet and engage the generations in the coming years. The aging Greatest Generation (older than 64), Boomers (45-63), Gen X (33-44) and Millennials (15-32) all trend differently in so many ways. Over 50% of these active generations are Boomers and Gen X  — but you’ll likely be surprised to know that the Boomer generation isn’t the biggest any longer.

We will be challenged with assimilating these data points and behavioral conditions, and providing some context to engagement. Does this mean we shift how we market to the young, active generation (Millennials) because they spend less time shopping, and are more efficient at researching, comparing and finding the best deal? Do we use less Internet marketing to engage the Greatest Generation and Boomers, since they love to shop and have a tendency to engage in lifestyle activities on the Internet more than buying/comparison tasks?

We talk about building experiences and understanding channels of engagement; we talk about a complete view of the customer and emerging channels. But I believe we should really be talking about the shift in how these generations react, how they engage, how they form and break buying habits, and how life stages and economic situations influence consumer experiences. Our ability to obtain granular behavioral and attitudinal data on individual consumers and segments (i.e., generational) is outpacing  our ability to proportionately extend or intensify engagement with those same individuals and groups.   

Customer relationships are fickle things that shift according to factors both in and out of our control. I sense we react to the upcoming generations as they embrace all the new social channels, while we also struggle to shift our thinking about the “other” 75% of the world that is shifting just as rapidly, albeit from less sexy channels.

We love riding the Wave; it’s singular, dramatic and volatile. It can be risky, though, and is difficult to measure, as it’s so variable.  As a CRM person, I believe we aspire to the Waves, but live in the Tide, which is more mundane, yet measurable, predictable and practical.   

From the Email Experience Council

Building programs to re-engage dormant leads is a necessity for many email marketers, particularly those that have not had buttoned-up strategy for segmentation and targeted communications in the past.  List re-engagement and “win-back” program strategy was the open forum discussion topic at the February meeting of the Email Experience Council’s List Growth and Engagement Roundtable.

“If you need to do re-engagement after a long period of subscriber inactivity, that is a failure of strategy,” suggested Stephanie Miller, VP, Return Path and Vice Chair of the eec.  “Marketers who are trying to catch up have a steep road.  Rather, win-backs should be a consistent part of your segmentation strategy.”

Bottom line, Stephanie pointed out, effective email marketers reach out early in the cycle and “shouldn’t have a situation in which someone hasn’t responded in a long time.

Ultimately, the question of glass half-empty or half-full regarding re-engagement may boil down to the buyer. In BtoB, noted Bulldog Solutions’ Amy Bills, list re-engagement can be an effective way to generate more ROI from an existing database. “A lot of time and money has probably been spent putting together that list.  Marketers are looking at making the most of it.”

Yael Penn of i360 Marketing reframed the concept of re-engagement as an ongoing effort. “In BtoB we’re always thinking about reengagement strategies. We’re planning re-engagement from the start.  BtoB purchases are more complex and the sales cycle is much longer. Sometimes a company is only doing the research now and they are not ready to make the purchase decision for six months.  In BtoC,  the reason to buy is impulse; in BtoB, because the sales cycle is different, re-engagement can be more effective.”

On the BtoC side, ExactTarget’s Nate Romance said, “There is risk to carrying a lot of dead weight. We’re hearing re-engagement as a drumbeat in reputation management and deliverability. If you’re beating on 60% of your list that is not responding, it’s costing you something.” (Some more on low engagement concerns here.)
A discussion of specific re-engagement strategies included:

• Ideas for engagement tactics including changing the subject line format, adding interactive elements like polls or surveys, featuring a high-value offer and highlighting exclusive information.  Sometimes just asking straight out can work, too.  “We hate spam, too.  Let us know if you want to stay on the file,” can be an effective approach, Stephanie noted.
• Nate described test findings regarding language used to confirm a prospect’s interest and willingness to stay on a list. “We did some testing and found that inclusion of the ‘No’ option caused more ‘Yes’ responses,” he said.
• The preference center tactic—asking people to “update their information” had not been found by the group to be a compelling re-engagement tool. “With a true re-engagement we typically encourage a strong call to action,” Nate said. “Not enough people do a good job of explaining what’s in it for the recipient to fill out preferences. It’s perceived by subscribers as the marketer’s tool, having little value to them, he said.

We hear a lot about engagement being effective and necessary – but the pressing need for re-engagement  is a reminder that engagement must be earned with every message sent, Stephanie suggested.   Nate agreed, “If you want to optimize the value of your email marketing asset, you must keep the file engaged and fresh.  That is more than a one-time win back campaign, but an imperative for your content strategy.”

Place your comments below to tell us what you are doing to engage – and re-engage; we’d love to feature your efforts in a future blog post or as part of the Roundtable’s discussions.   Also, check out the List Growth & Engagement Roundtable’s 2010 Benchmark Guide to see how your list growth efforts stack up.
—————————————————–
http://emailexperience.org/blog/2010/03/win-back-programs-smart-marketing-or-failure-of-strategy.

I thought I’d resurrect a column from the past and see how accurate my predictions were.   Roll your calendars back to July, 2006, when I wrote a column on “The Future of Email.” I quoted from an article by Paul Gillin, “New Technology, New Media and New Paradigm,” that had just appeared in  BtoB magazine: 
 
“We hear a lot about blogs, but blogs aren’t important. What’s important is personal publishing, or the ability to communicate a message to a global audience almost instantaneously. Personal publishing will permeate electronic media, providing counterpoint to mainstream sources and adding depth and color to the conversation.

“We hear a lot about podcasts, but podcasts aren’t important. What’s important is time-shifted media. The phenomenon that started with TiVo has spread to digital audio and will soon capture portable video. Information consumers will no longer be beholden to program schedules or even their living rooms. Our TV shows will travel with us.

“We hear a lot about RSS, but RSS isn’t important. What’s important is the ability to subscribe to information that really interests us. RSS is mainly used to subscribe to blog posts and podcasts. But in the future, they will use it to subscribe to ideas.”

Then I continued: “So, as someone who aspires to effect a change in the paradigm of digital communications and consumer behavior, I put my spin on the future of email using this same logic. I conclude that we hear a lot about email, but email isn’t important. What’s important is our ability to communicate in a synchronous and asynchronous fashion in a mixed media world. Email will be our notification agent, alarm clock, Post-it Note, pager, cell phone, fax machine, instant messenger, and document management system all combined. It will be supported on any device via many different sources.”

I was suggesting that email will evolve and people will develop their own digital signature, voice, personalities, behaviors and preferences, all of which will lead to the customization of the devices and communication patterns. There will be a blur as to what e-mail, RSS and mobile messaging are to the consumer.

Roll forward the calendar and it’s 2010.  It seems the challenges we had in making email more effective as a marketing tool are virtually the same: SPAM, deliverability, email’s viability as a channel, technology and data challenges.  So, what’s changed — and where will it go in the future?

The thing that has changed the most in our space is awareness:  while email alone gets only a small piece of the pie, organizations have readily admitted that email is critical to customer engagement. Then there’s governance. While not many organizations have faced the wrath of the Federal Trade Commission or state governments, there is much more awareness of consumer rights to privacy and respect for permission. There is a much stronger governance in the use of email and database marketing. 

I see amazing progress in the next five years, specifically the speed at which data is made available to fulfill the many needs of a marketing and sales organization.  I see real-time modeling trumping sequenced messaging.  I see dynamic ad presentation that shifts with real-time buying patterns, self-learning models and in-market advertising.

I also see the inbox morphing to be a simpler thing to manage all in one interface. This will allow all the functional values of email to survive. I see the allure of “social” as a cheap viral tool, changing how we build containers for our message.  I see our view of customer value changing to accommodate direct and indirect, synchronous and asynchronous.   I still see email as a critical spoke in your time management hub and spoke system. and the business will not move away fast enough to trump. 

As the history of communication began with simple flashes of information, email will become more of a communication tool, as it was designed to be initially, and less of an information tool.  Watch out, publishers, this will put increased demand on how you evolve your reader bases, how you monetize your lists and how engaged consumers will be in the inbox with reading anything but 400-character chunks.  There is brilliance in the concept of Twitter and microblogging, and I see email returning to the core of this communication chain, at least from a personal prospective.

While the hub may not be your laptop or desktop in 5 years, it will be a super portable device, with amazing memory and connections to your community tools.   Hang tight, all major technological advances in mankind have an impact on “time” and “space” — so our next generation of email may be so convenient it’s not even called email.  
 
 

Great article by Loren McDonald in the Email Insider: Google Buzz

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=122321

What’s the Buzz? It’s Google’s effort to weld social networking and content sharing onto its Gmail email service. It also poses the latest challenge for marketers to stay relevant and visible in the inbox.

Buzz, which Google is rolling out now to Gmail inboxes, incorporates status updates and shared content such as photos, video and links from people on the user’s contact list into the inbox.

Buzz: Game-Changer or the Next Wave?

In its first few days, Buzz has generated plenty of, well, buzz, ranging from game-changer predictions to jaded shrugs.

It won’t change the email game immediately, the way Gmail itself did since its 2004 launch. But it could have Gmail-like growth, grabbing market share slowly and surely, giving it a huge base of regular users in three to four years. (Gmail email addresses now likely account for about 10% to 15% of a typical B-to-C list and up to 25% for newer lists.)

Buzz likely has greater adoption potential than other Google initiatives such as Wave, which generated a lot of initial buzz but limited adoption. Among Buzz’s plusses:

• It leverages existing features, including your Gmail contact list and inbox. Buzz auto-follows your closest contacts to give you an immediate follow list and delivers fresh content alerts to your message inbox.
• Users can toggle links to move between the message and Buzz content lists.
• Buzz connects other Google properties, such as Picasa, Google Reader and YouTube, to the Google profiles of people you follow, and to your Twitter stream if you opt to connect. (No Facebook Connect function yet.)
• Users don’t have to learn a new protocol of interaction, because Buzz incorporates familiar features of other social-networking platforms: like/unlike, share via email, comment on other posts and “at” replies.
• It aggressively filters content so that “less-valuable” posts (“me too” or “nite peeps” posts) get collapsed at the bottom of the viewing window, leaving more room for theoretically meatier posts.
• Lastly, one of the more interesting aspects of Buzz is that many of your Gmail contacts are likely “true” friends and relatives, many of whom you may not be connected to in other networks.

Rising to the Challenge of Inboxes Gone Social

Although it’s too early in the game to predict how Google Buzz will affect Gmail use, this broader encroachment of social conversations into the email stream is clearly the future, with the following implications for email marketers:

Email inbox interfaces are getting busier. Besides Gmail, email clients including Xobni and Outlook, and Webmail services such as Yahoo have expanded inbox functionality. Yahoo recently added inline chat, a beefed-up calendar and links to Flickr and PayPal. These functions are designed to integrate with and complement email, but they can also distract the user from reading email.

The inbox itself will be more crowded. Buzz will send alerts whenever friends post fresh content. If your recipient is an exceptionally busy social networker, these alerts will push your email-marketing messages farther away from the fresh-content sweet spot.

How to respond to the Buzz factor:

1. Work harder to get your sending email address added to recipients’ contact lists or address books.

2. Brand your “from” and subject lines. This helps your messages stand out from the onslaught of Buzz message alerts.

3. One-to-one messaging must replace one-to-many broadcasts. Personalization that reflects preferences and buying history, triggered emails and value-added transactional emails will compete better with Buzz’s highly relevant message alerts.

Wrapping Up

It’s your turn now. Do you think Buzz is more likely to gain traction than Wave because it leverages an existing inbox, contact list and Google services that millions of consumers already know about?

Until next time, take it up a notch!

Three numbers: 90/10/0. 90 is the percent of time that email marketers spend on the tactics of getting an email campaign out the door. 10 is the percent of time that is spent in reporting and analysis. 0 is the amount of time most marketers spend figuring out how to optimize a program. The key to optimization is understanding what is maneuverable and weighing this with the expected return. If the return is too small, you’ll never build continuity over time. If the effort is far too complex or time consuming, it will compete with the day-to-day operations and ultimately drive your business down.

The keys to creating actionable insights is best described through these metaphors:

1. Simplify the Cockpit Instruments. If you’ve ever looked inside an aircraft cockpit, it is in many cases synonymous to business process and analytics; confusing if you try to take it all in at once. While the marketer, much like the pilot, may know all the panels and instruments and the outputs of each, it becomes increasingly difficult to marketers to know which instruments to monitor, which to tweak, and in what order. To simply the instruments, you have to strip it down by what insights each variable or output informs. Think RFM. While it’s directional in theory, I do want to index high frequency purchase segments and keep a pulse on these campaign over campaign, program over program. I want to know the high cart value transactors and index them to understand timing and how offers/pricing impacts these behaviors. I want to understand how these segments interact with my site and model this against other front of the funnel behaviors. All in all, I want an instrument panel that helps me understand transactional behaviors and how this channel influences this.
2. Shake the Magic “8 Ball.” As I’ve said many times, marketing and business is a process of hedging bets on what you think will work. In the eCRM space, the tactics have been done over and over again for years, so there really isn’t some magic bullet that works for everyone. I think you should create your own “Magic 8 Ball” for marketing decisions. Just ask a question, shake the 8-Ball and the following options will come forth: “Go with your first instinct.” “Ask your best engineer.” “Reference your benchmark guide.” “Do what you did last year.” “Ask someone that knows nothing about email.” And “Shake it again.” The magic of great marketing is making decisions faster than someone else, so you can maximize in-market. You can’t do this, unless you have strong hypotheses about the outcomes. The problem with many is we wait for data before we make decisions. This only works if you are a really fluid organization. If your reports take two weeks to produce, then your data supply chain or outputs are too complex and need to be revisited. But that shouldn’t preclude you from making in-market decisions. Just shake the “8-Ball” when in doubt.
3. Become a Finance and Risk Manager for a day. In finance, actionable analytics are a vital forensic and forecasting tool which helps assess the implications of past performance and model future implications. Take a day per month and run analysis of performance, costs, process assessment, and vendor analysis and pull these variables together. By removing your marketing hat, you can take a clear picture of the finances of your business unit and the marketing function and assess which attributes are most important. What is your real cost to send an email? What would happen if you wanted to modify the conversion process on your site, what is the potential risk? What if you wanted to hold out a group for testing? What is the impact of that hold-out ? What costs would apply putting some of your hypothesis in action? What is the cost /benefit of outsourcing some of these activities?

Actionable insights can be realized but only if you understand the gaps in your data supply change, you are willing to take “action” on your hypothesis, you have a financial foundation to support your logic and you have an understanding of the risk involved.

From Seth’s Blog by Seth
Godin

In
the face of significant change and opportunity, people are often one of the three.
If you’re going to be of assistance, it helps to know which one.

Uninformed people need information and
insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the
problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a
pejorative term, it’s a temporary state.

Clueless people don’t know what to do and they
don’t know that they don’t know what to do. They don’t know the right questions
to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold
on what the platform even looks like.

And frightened people
will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress
the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck.

The
worst kind of frightened person is one with power. Someone in a mob of other
frightened people, someone with a gun, someone who is the CEO. When confronted
with a scared CEO, time to run. Before someone can change, they have to learn,
and before they learn, they have to cease being scared.

One
reason so many big ideas come from small organizations is that there is far
less fear of change at the top. One mistake board members and shareholders make
is that they reward the scared but hyper-confident CEO, instead of calling him
on the carpet as he rages at change.

When
I first encountered surfing, I was scared of it. It looks cool, but an old guy
like me can get hurt. A patient instructor allayed my fears until I was willing
to get started. When you first start out, the things you think are important are
actually irrelevant, and it’s the stuff you don’t know is important that gets
you thrown into the ocean. Finally, and only then, was I smart enough to
actually learn.

I’m
bad at surfing now, but at least I know why.

Comfort
the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed.