The Maker movement is a return to valuing craftsmen (and women), and the incredible, hand-made quality of the goods they produce. There are some bad-ass makers out there. There’s even a really cool Tumbler dedicated to those who make. But the problem is, when people write about the makers, they write about the makers. Where they came from. What job they left to pursue their passion for Making.

For example, I make leather goods– bags, bracelets, knife sheathes. All hand cut, riveted, stitched, and finished. It’s detailed, painstaking work. And I love it. I taught myself how to make this stuff back in college because I couldn’t find a bag I liked enough to spend my cash on. Then, I went into the workforce as a marketer. It was a great experience, but it left me wanting more. Wanting to feel like I would have something to point to other than piles of money and long-forgotten ad campaigns. So, I started making handmade leather bags again.

But who really cares? Nobody. What does that tell you about the stuff I make or why you might like to carry around one of my handmade leather bags? Nothing. So why do bloggers and media types keep using that angle? Maybe it’s because we want to have a more personal connection with the things we buy. Maybe because we want to live better, not just have more stuff anymore. I don’t know.

I do think the Maker movement deserves better, though. I’m  a marketing strategist by education and experience. I’ve made my clients and employers hundreds of millions of dollars by helping them tell clear, compelling, consistent stories about their products and services. One of the most effective ways to do that is to stop talking about the product. And stop talking about the company. Instead, talk to the customer. Let them know you understand their trials and triumphs, and that’s why you made your product. Then, give a couple examples.

Something like this.

In a world of disposable razors, paper plates, and ephemeral communication, you’re yearning for something real. Something that’ll get scratched and dented, but still work. Something that your kids will pass down to their kids. That’s why I use super-tough, vegetable-tanned 7 ounce leather in my handmade bags. That’s why I double-stitch all the seams with nautical grade waxed nylon thread– these handmade leather bags are put together so tightly they hold water (for a few minutes). Not that you’d want to. You’d probably rather carry your laptop, iPad, and Moleskine, instead. Sure, you could get something from a leather shop in the mall for half the price. But that was probably made by unskilled laborers working 16 hours a day in a factory on china. Your handmade leather bag, the one you really want, was made with my calloused hands on a second-hand workbench. Your bag, the one your grandkids will bring when they come visit you on your front porch, took longer to make so that it’ll outlast you.

Perfect? Nope. But neither are my handmade leather bags. And perfect isn’t always best.

-Seth

P.S. I make handmade leather bags, but my lovely wife makes these awesome new leaf necklaces.

Daytrotter, yer doin it right. Also, I <3 you.

For those of you unfamiliar with Daytrotter, here’s how it works: they bring kick-ass bands to The Horseshack recording studio in Rockford, IL, record the bands live, and put the recording on Daytrotter.com. Yesterday, they announced a brilliant promo called Daytrotter Presents #1. Buy a membership (for you or someone else) and they’ll send you the 12″ split record with The Civil Wars and The Lumineers for free. Both are fantastic bands.

But let’s look past the music. I think there are three lessons on how to promote music, from Daytrotter.

1. Limited physical quantities: Daytrotter is only going to press as many records as are pre-ordered. Simple. People will still buy something if it’s special enough. Bonus: they’ve drastically reduced their risk by only pressing what’s ordered, vs trying to guestimate how many might be ordered. How could you limit your inventory exposure and make your customers feel special?
2. The music is (essentially) free: buy an annual membership and get The Civil Wars and The Lumineers 12″ split for free on top of all the other great stuff behind the paywall. The membership is only $2/month for unlimited consumption of Daytrotter sessions. You probably spend more than $2 a day in gas driving to and from work. Crazy cheap. It’s more like payfence than a paywall.
3. They’re targeting current members: current Daytrotter members can get the album for free if they buy a membership for someone else. This appeal has three parts: look cool for tipping a friend off to rad new music, be nice by giving the friend access, and get something tangible for yourself. Put some brightly-colored Ray-Bans on it and it’s the ultimate hipster trap. Plus, current customers should be your best evangelists. How often do you empower your customers?
4. Bonus point! It’s actually a limited-time promotion. They’re taking orders until July 3rd. That’s it. If this one goes well, I’m sure they’ll do a Daytrotter Presents, #2. Are you one of those companies that always has some sale going on? Quit it. It takes the special-ness away.

What do you think? What’s your favorite example of somebody doin it right?

Look out, intrepid Pinners. Spam has made it’s way to Pinterest. I posted a lovely cartoon by The Oatmeal about how frustrating it is to try to watch Game of Thrones, and within seconds had a “like.” While that’s not all that odd, what got my interest was that the like was from a company– they were using a logo, rather than headshot for their profile image. Curious, I clicked through to their boards. Wow. If I were a coupon clipper, I would’ve been in nerdvana. Then, I looked at the little activity ticker on their profile.   As you can see, they had liked about 49.3 billion other posts “just now” (meaning just then… right before…). Anyway, I figure that either they have a team of trained chimps hitting the heart/like button on Pinterest, or they’ve developed a spamalicious tool using Pinterest’s API.

Anybody know how they’re doing this? I mean, seriously. 307k+ likes?

P.S. To the product managers at HBO: you’re an interesting dichotomy. You produce outstanding shows, but are so stuck in outdated business models and distribution methods, that you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. “Piracy” just shows that you’re not effectively serving current market demands. Sure, it’s easy for me to criticize from the outside; I don’t know all the complications due to royalties, and blah blah blah MyBrainJustMeltedFromBoring. Yep. But you work there and I don’t. So fix it. I’d be happy to pay you per episode, or for a season pass to a show. But I’ll never sign up for a cable subscription again, which means I’ll never add the HBO subscription on top of that already ludicrous cable charge. You don’t need those cable companies anyway. You’re HBO. Act like it.

If you look at how the US education system evolved, there are striking similarities to how our workforce evolved. The industrial revolution turned farmers with broad skill sets into incredibly specialized factory workers. Schooling moved from truly individualized curriculum in the living room, to a rigid, standardized, curriculum-driven classroom. Mass production meant less variation. Mass education meant we could educate more kids in a standardized system, as long as they fit in within the system. It meant less tolerance for “abnormal” kids.

Back in the day, Horace Mann thought that “public education was the best way to turn the nation’s unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens.” He thought a standardized approach to education would level the playing field for kids from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Give them all a fair shot at the American dream. Lofty goal. A goal I agree with. But what happened was factory farms and factory education.

And it’s not that people haven’t been trying to make reforms– they have. For a long time. Back in the early 1900′s, John Dewey was pushing the idea of “Progressive Education.” He argued (rightly, I think) for a more balanced approach to education. According to Wikipedia, “The problem was that Dewey and the other progressive theorists encountered a highly bureaucratic system of school administration that in general was not receptive to new methods.” That rings true today, too. Massive, entrenched institutions are structured to preserve the status quo.

But the status quo isn’t working. Obviously. Something needs to change. Just like Dewey, and Maria Montessori before him, I’m arguing for a more balanced approach to education. Rather than teacher-centric, vs. content-centric, vs. student-centric, it ought to be more collaborative. Maria Montessori put it best: “Education should no longer be mostly imparting of knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities.” There are people pushing for this today. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote an article on RWW about how How YouTube is Part of a Global Economic Transformation. From the article: “It has become increasingly evident that to realize human potential in today’s societies and economies, lifelong learning is required, not just an initial period of formal schooling.” Hell yes.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the US education system has failed. Or that it’s terrible. Or that I hate teachers and textbooks. On the contrary. I think that on the whole, we’ve tried our best. But we can do better. Because in our attempt to give our national treasures an equal shot at success, we forgot that “equal” doesn’t mean they should be treated like so much carbon in a diamond factory.

Our children are not factory-made. Each has unique strengths and weaknesses. Each has unique experiences that will inform their learning. If we can minimize the demagoguery and leverage some of the amazing technologies (iPads, serious games, the friggin internet) to create mass-customized learning, we can help each of our precious stones polish themselves into the gem they can be.

In the good ol’ days, I could’ve signed a deal with some huge record label, borrowed a ridiculous amount of money from them to record those songs, and end up putting 2 good songs, 5 mediocre songs, and 3 terrible songs on an album.

Then, if anybody bought my 2/5/3 (good/boring/bad)  album, the retailer takes a cut, the distributor takes a cut, the label takes a cut and repays themselves (with loan-shark-level interest) that fat loan I took to record. Then, if there’s anything left, I’d get about $0.50 an album. That’s $0.05 per song, for you non-math types. Seems like an awful lot of hullaballoo for me to earn $0.05 per song.

As a musician, I don’t need those companies who are trying to preserve a bloated, dead business model by litigating their customers into obedience. I don’t need those companies who are trying to preserve a bloated, dead business model by censoring the Internet with asinine, heavy-handed legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

I don’t need that huge loan to record some songs anymore. I can do it with my computer and less than $500 worth of gear in my basement.

People who pirate music are actually just an under-served market segment. Music pirating is the market telling me it doesn’t value recorded music the way it used to. It’s my job as a business owner, then, to shift my unit of value to something the market is willing to pay for.

If you’d like to learn more, watch the video below. Then, once you’re sufficiently pissed off, do something about it.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

1. You typically over-promise and under-deliver. It’s like you’re afraid nobody will want your product unless you make outrageous claims. The consequence: nobody believes the marketing claims, and you have to make even more outlandish claims next time to catch attention. You’re making my job harder every time you stretch the truth. Stop it. Learn the difference between True stories and Truth Stories, and tell the latter.
2. You typically don’t have a shred of actual empathy for the user. Sure, you’ve got your demographic research, feedback from vocal sales people. Stuff like that. You have generalities. Averages. The problem is, there actually is no average user. What if you flipped that thinking on its head? There are no average customers, but there are common trials and triumphs– understand those and your marketing will improve exponentially. Please do this one, k?
3.  You hock stupid stuff. Let’s face it, most of the products you develop strategies, ads, and PPC campaigns for are pretty mediocre. That’s why they need you– they’re not good enough to spread through organic referrals. Or they are, but only to a niche market… and your client is bent on total world domination. Stop it. I understand needing a paycheck (and I’m fortunate enough to love what I do and get paid for it). I understand that you have to take clients that you’d rather not. But what if you refused to do work for 1 out of 4 new business prospects that you thought kinda sucked? Maybe some of you already do. Maybe more of us should.

Have you spotted the irony yet? A Top 5 list that’s actually only a 3 point rant (over-promise, under-deliver) about how there is no average user… directed at the average marketer. Look, I don’t actually hate you. I hate what you (and I) do from time to time. I’d just like to see more product marketing treat users like human beings.

In the US, there are  tens of millions of searches every month for things related to social marketing, social media marketing, and the like. But, if you look at Google Trends, it also looks like that search traffic may have peaked (for now, anyway). So have searches for Facebook, by the way. What that tells me is that, as George Colony from Forrester Research put it at Le Web (to paraphrase), social is running out of people and it’s running out of hours. So, here are my 3 predictions about the future of social media and social marketing:

1. Social won’t die. But it will become a zombie mutant. When the printing press came along, written stories didn’t die, they mutated. When TV came around, radio didn’t die, it mutated. People are predicting “the end of social” and I think what they actually mean is “the end of social as we know it.”
2. You won’t care about social media anymore. “Social” will become a parallel offering– not a differentiator. Oh wait. That already happened– even this novelty “flatulence gift underwear” company has a “social” presence.
3. I lied, I only have two predictions, but who wants to read a post titled “2 Predictions About the Future of Social”?
4. Psych! Here you go, Prediction 3 about the future of social: in 12 months, all the predictions made by talking heads in fancy suits skinny jeans, flannel shirts, and stocking caps, will look like the intro to the Jetsons. Speaking of which, where is my flying car?

Ok, here’s the point: calling something social doesn’t make it social. Having a Facebook page or a Twitter account doesn’t make your brand social. On the other hand, we humans are social people, so everything is social already. The trick is figuring out what part of your product/service/experience we humans actually care about, and building a clear, compelling, consistent story around that. Easy.

Because we can learn from our successes just as much as we can from our failures. So, what I’d rather see is a switch from Failure Chic to Learning Chic. Steve Jobs said he realized after he was ousted from Apple (sorry, obligatory Apple reference) that making awesome stuff in an awesome company should be the goal rather than profits. Success should be a byproduct of a lifelong love of learning.

So, forget failure. And forget success. Let’s learn how to make awesome stuff.

“I’m sorry we billed you three times for the same thing. Our process had some hiccups.”

“Sorry, but our process requires [insert absurdly long time frame] to make the changes you’ve requested.”

I worked at a place once the had TPS Reports. For real.

Sound familiar? When we’re making the process, we’re doing it to make life easier. And it sure does work. It makes our life so much simpler. Don’t have to rethink every project. Don’t have to brainstorm an answer to every question. But then it becomes a real boy, and we focus on the process, rather than the people we built the process to serve.

Or, it could become a sacred cow. Maybe it’s time to make a steak out of that cow.

When someone is clearly wrong about something, my first reaction is to tell them so. I’ve never really found that to be a great way to get someone to see the Truth, though.

Think about it this way: we make choices based on the information available. We used to know that the Earth was the center of the universe. Until it wasn’t. The speed of light was as fast as anything can go. Until it wasn’t. (Well, maybe).

So, if your customer is always right (even when they’re wrong), what’s a marketer to do? Help them feel validated and understood with some active listening. Ask questions about their assumptions. For this, I love to use IDEO’s Five Whys.

You can’t help shift their perspective until you truly understand it.