Context is critically important. One of the first lessons we learn is the importance of context – there is a time and place for every message.  Anyone caught passing a note to the cute girl in the front row in first grade and facing the embarrassment of having the note read aloud by your teacher can relate.  Mitt forgot that he was not only in front of millions of potential voters, but an army of social media pundits eager to pounce on any mistake.

For those of us who live on the internet, realize anything we post becomes part of the permanent record.  When running a promotion or committing anything to writing, think about the impact of your words in various contexts – from the front page of the New York Times to being rebroadcast by your least favorite political talk show host.  You can never assume a sentence will always be placed in context.

Consumers interpret moments in unexpected ways.  After the bet comment, the debate hall had moved on to the next question.  If you read the wire service or newspaper coverage that evening, the bet was not even mentioned.  But by Sunday morning it was the most talked about moment of the debate.

Again, when you make your living with words in public places, you have to think beyond your perspective before you post.  One of the most important lessons I am learning these days is the impact of culture on perception.  Take two people from different regions with different backgrounds, and they can see a message two totally different ways.  You know your audience, but you must also continually educate yourself on cultural impact on marketing.  Know your dominant culture, and experiment with writing in the voice of other cultures.  Work at reducing your risk of misinterpretation.

Don’t over commit.  (Or is it co-Mitt?).  Mitt was convinced he was right and Perry was wrong.  The bet proved he stood behind his opinion.  Naming any amount of money was unnecessary. Mitt is working to build a reputation as the trustworthy candidate, the non-fire bomb thrower.  He is working hard to make his word means something.  So he should have just offered Perry a bet.  Extend his hand to show he’s putting his word behind it.  Naming an amount of money, no matter the amount, was not required.

The risk to marketing people is over commitment.  To confuse truth with spin.  To go from selling the sizzle on your steak, to selling the sizzle on someone else’s steak.  And every time you cross that line, you run a risk.  In my career, I’ve learned to work hard to promote my product or service, squeeze every benefit and advantage out of the copy, but don’t overreach.  It seems to always cost more than $10,000.

This was a post by Rj.

The film stars yours truly.

It’s a comedy. It’s called The Book Signing. Click here to watch the short film.

I’m liking this movie marketing thing so much I decided to start another blog, Moviepreneur.com entirely devoted to movie marketing. I’m hoping to carve out my own niche and continue to do really cool films that help promote stuff.

The man in the pictures is a real homeless man from Massachusetts. He was paid (handsomely) for his time and very happy to be a part of this.

For some of the other promotional efforts, check out a Short Film that I created called The Book Signing.

As I jot down some things that I want to get done today, I find out about this Celtics/Dunkin Donuts event at my local Dunkin Donuts with Ray Allen.

I decide to take the show on the road and get some work done in a different environment.

So, I arrive at Dunkin Donuts and I’m hanging out working on some things on my laptop and writing doing things in my notebook.

I’m very productive when I have caffeine, so I pick up an Iced Coffee – which also makes me eligible to be selected for the event.

Next thing I notice is that they are walking around telling people it’s all going down outside, and that’s where they are going to be selecting people to take part in the challenge to possibly win a chance to compete vs. Ray Allen in a game of knockout (winners would get tickets to the Home opener tomorrow vs Miami Heat.)

They tell us to form a line as I’m sitting there working on a few things, making a few calls and grinding out some work but paying careful attention to everything that is going on.

A man in front of me calls over one of the people from the event and asks how we can participate. They let him know that there will be 5 rounds of “foul shot contests” and the winners from each of the 5 games will participate with Ray in a showdown with the winners. In order to be selected for this you must be “caught cold” drinking Iced Coffee.

So, at this point, I’m thinking to myself that I’m good to go… in the front of the line, there’s not even 25 people here yet and I’ve got my Iced Coffee. I’ll make sure they see me drinking it to get in.

A good amount of time goes by, there are about 50 people in the line behind me. I’m within the first 5.

Finally, the WAAF announcer goes to the court and reiterates what the person from earlier had said about there being a chance to play vs Ray Allen and that if you are “caught cold” you could be selected to come up and participate in one of the 5 games…

The winners would go on to a showdown with Ray in a game of Knockout, and tickets would be given out to tomorrow nights Celtics vs. Heat home opener game at TD Garden in Boston.

A little bit more time goes by and Lucky the team mascot shows up and they are about to start.

At this point the line has moved up but I’m still right in front of the ropes court side, there’s no way they won’t see me drinking Iced Coffee.

Before I know it the cheerleaders are walking around selecting people to participate in the first game. I see a lot of kids trying to get their attention, so I back off and let the kids have the first shot. Plus, it wouldn’t be cool to be participating vs kids to win something.

2nd round is the same thing, mostly kids, so I pass again.

Finally round 3 comes around and I see some people that look my age who are trying to get the cheerleaders attention, before I know it just by looking in their general direction they are waving me over. Cool, I’m about to get to shoot foul shots and if I win I move on to the 2nd round with Ray!

They take down my information and I’m up 3rd.

The first 2 people only make 1 or 2 foul shots each, out of 5.

I’m up next. Before I give you the outcome, let me tell you that I was a 90% foul shot shooter when I used to play. I used to shoot thousands and thousands of foul shots as a kid and had a dream of one day being in the NBA. Unfortunately, injuries and ankle issues kept me away from those dreams.

So, I walk to the foul line. My nerves are up, I want to win. I brick the first shot, badly… uh oh… Is it the cold? Am I really nervous? Is it my knee surgery? Am I rusty? As I’m thinking all of the above, I find personal motivation from within…. I have tons of opportunity around me, here’s just a little cool chance thing that would be awesome to witness history and see probably one of the biggest games ever… the first time these 2 teams will face each-other with their new rosters. Tickets are pretty much sold out, the only other way to get them would be to spend a truck load of cash on eBay.

I proceed to make the next 4 shots in a row. I get 4 out of 5. The announcer is going crazy, people are cheering. I do a little flex as I walk away from the foul line. Awesome!

As it happens nobody in my group makes more than 2 shots, I’m the winner from my group!

They hand me a few $2 Dunkin Donuts gift cards, take down my information and tell me to stand aside as the other groups come. The showdown with Ray Allen will be later on.

Woohooo!

But wait… fast forward to 4pm and I am walking away with my head down, no tickets, and I never got to compete against Ray Allen with the other winners.

So what went wrong?

Well, I wish I knew…

I was talking with one of the other winners from another group and me and him were joking with the other about how we were going to beat each-other. It was “interesting” that most of us were 20s white males, coincidentally.

So, finally Ray Allen shows up at 3pm. I go snap a picture of his car. Nice BMW, almost as nice as my last BMW

People are going CRAZY, screaming, the announcer from WAAF and Lucky the mascot have everyone chanting “RAY ALLEN!”.

Wohoo!

So, I move over back to the spot they told us to wait in. This time it’s much harder to get back in over there. People are swarming to get close after they announced that Ray is finally here.

I get sort of back to where I was but there is still a big wall of people. Cops are in place now and they aren’t really letting anyone move around. I’m wearing a special winners shirt so I try to show them that to get back in, no soup.

I grab one of the other guys that won his group of 5 and ask him what’s going on, where are we supposed to be…?

Next thing we know Ray is walking out. We try to get back in, the cops aren’t informed of what’s going on and we can’t really get in.

OK… I guess they are just going to call us in from the audience and people will clear a path for us…

Ray gets into place and does a little thank you for everyone coming out.

The announcer grabs the mic back and calls up the participants. He starts announcing them… but WAIT, my name doesn’t get called as I try to push my way up there… What’s going on? Who are these other people… they didn’t win Round 1????

Myself and the other guy I’ve been busting about beating him in the game with Ray, go up to one of the people we were talking to earlier about all of this.

“What’s going on, who are these other people!? Why aren’t we up there?”

They act like they can’t hear us (it was loud, but we were practically yelling…)

They say, “These are the people we are using.” and they walk away…

The police officer tells us to back away from the ropes & camera crew over in the corner.

Me and the other guy look at each-other… WHAT?!

We proceed to get pretty irritated and try to get someones attention from the event, but with a loud microphone and fans screaming for Ray… nobody even acknowledges us. We get nowhere fast.

Here’s the kicker.

Remember how I said that it was mostly 20s something white males?

I get a look at the “other group” of people and it’s a fully balanced group of different races, ages and genders! WOW…. HMMM………

Yep, it looks like I was  just racially discriminated on because I won a contest with 4 other 20s something white males by the event put on by the Celtics, Dunkin Donuts and WAAF Radio!

What’s the lesson here? What does this have to do with marketing? Am I just ranting?

Well, yes, I am ranting. But there is actually a lesson here.

It shows how the reputation of major brands like Celtics and Dunkin Donuts can get bad press by having shady stuff like this happen. Was it incompetence? Was it the Celtics fault? Not necessarily. Was it Dunkin Donuts fault? Not necessarily. Was it WAAFs/the event organizers fault? Not necessarily.

Maybe it was the organizers, maybe it was internally rigged, it’s hard to say… I’m leaning towards RIGGED at this point.

I hope you guys do the right thing and re-tweet this, re-post and really make people accountable for something like this.

The funny part is, I’m looking at this more like a press piece and a “what NEVER to do to your fans/followers”…….

Don’t rig contests!

Don’t hire incompetent people!

And this type of stuff would never happen and people like me would never be going to the lengths of posting this stuff.

I used to LOVE the Celtics and Dunkin Donuts… now I’m not so sure what they are doing and who they are hiring these days…

Oh, and all of the people that participated in the game with Ray got 2 tickets each.

Ok Brian… but how does this apply to marketing and what’s the lesson here?

This is a very very important marketing lesson actually. Something that people NEED is now not available unless they jump through hoops (boil their water). This leads everyone to freak out and go buy water.

Here’s where public perception comes in. Not only do people freak out about having to boil the water (not really a big task, doesn’t take that long to do and there’s still plenty of water available) however the NEWS will display stories about how people are going to the grocery store and buying dozens of cases of water at a time.

The perception is that, since everyone else is going out and buying water, maybe I should too.

This is how a lot of marketers make their living using social proof, scarcity tactics and countdowns to change the desire level and perception for a particular product. It’s almost always intentional when a marketer does that. However, if you are going to use them make sure they are legitimate. Check out a recent post from Mike Filsaime on the subject.

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad thing at all. If I’m going to launch a product and only sell 2,000 copies for a specific reason (saturation usually) then that can be a very good thing. Not only am I selling a product that won’t be saturated due to only 2,000 copies being sold amongst 6+ billion people on the planet, I’m also creating a need to buy it as fast as possible since those 2,000 could sell really really quickly.

So the water situation here in Boston, hypothetically may have been the most sales water copies have had in a few day period in a long time. If they wanted to, they could charge more money and give less cases of water to stores to create a scarcity and demand. However, the industry as a whole would have to do that and stop undercutting eachother to really make it work.

This scarcity stuff can actually play into just about any business model you can dream up.

This is called perceived value. If you are giving away something for free people associate a value with it. They perceive it as not worth that much, since you don’t even want it. The same thing is true with Internet Marketing… if i give something away for free, people perceive it as not very valuable, most of the time. If I were to charge $100 for this article and label it a technique to increase your ad revenue 10x then it would be perceived as more valuable.

Now to continue on with the story, I was talking to my friend last night about his furniture. Eventually someone came and picked it up, and he was absolutely shocked that nothing was wrong with it. I started talking to my friend a bit about perceived value and being a Software Engineer my friend had heard about some website that partially crashed a few weeks ago and how the guy had increased his revenue 10x due to the content of his website being unavailable.

Essentially what happened was that the content of the website/app was not displaying and only ads were displaying. This led to a massive viral outbreak of traffic because everyone was polling up their friends and hitting the site/app over and over again to try to get that content. They perceived the content as MORE VALUABLE because it was seemingly unavailable and hard to get. There was no message that the server was partially down or anything like that. It was simply not accessible. The guy went on to make 10x more money on his site over the course of a few days before he realized what happened.

As marketers how can we use perceived value and scarcity to our advantage? We can set an exact time in which our content is going to be unavailable and make it unavailable any time outside of that predetermined window. That is going to create demand and have people banging down our doors for that and our next piece of content.

Using the example above, they accidentally discovered how to get people more interested in their content. By making it harder to access and unavailable most of the time. Then, granting access to it only at certain times. This increased their ad revenue 10x because people were following links and affiliate banners and opt-ing in to all their lists as well as doing everything they could to try to figure out another way to get the content and see what else these guys had to offer.

My challenge to you is to make your free content unavailable for 24 hours with no explanation and see how that affects your business. I’m willing to bet that it will have more of a positive effect than negative done over a short period of time.

1.      Not knowing your demographic. I could write a book about all the clients I’ve consulted who’ve just put up a website, put a ton of cash into Adwords, or some douche bag “internet marketing specialist”, thinking they’ll make bank. How can you sell a product if you don’t know who you’re selling to?

Same goes for all new affiliate marketers, who think that you can just put up a landing page and do some social bookmarking, and you’ll be able to quit your day job. No. This is THE most important foundation for ANY marketing campaign. Know your demographic! Only then can you design a campaign that will be profitable.

2.      Sell on value, not on price. Ask any salesperson who’s successful if price is the factor that makes or breaks a sale, and they’ll tell you it’s not. If the customer is unhappy with your price, you didn’t do a good job selling the product. Sell the value of the product, explain what’s so good about it, explain the features AND the benefits.

This applies to all your web shops, websites and landing pages as well. When you’re putting together your copywriting/sales letter, remember that you have to show the value of the product, how it is of value for the visitor, and if you did a great job, they won’t care if it’s $47, $67, or  $127 (well, there is always a limit for a product, you can’t sell a can of soda for $48, but some of them are pretty expensive!)

3.      The Lone Ranger attitude. No one becomes a millionaire on their own. There are always other people involved. If you don’t have the money to spend for a large ad campaign, create some strategic partnerships.  Teamwork is the key to success. Think big, go for the leaders, not the individual people. Here are some examples of what I mean:

Commenting on blogs vs. Contacting the blog owner
Adding individual friends on social network vs. Utilizing someone with tons of friends
Trying to build a list from scratch vs. Asking someone with a big list
Posting your thoughts on Facebook vs. Setting up an interview with a magazine/blog

You get the point. Go for the people that already have a following.

To be continued…

I gotta give it to him, the guy was smart and a fast learner, and most important of all, he was a social person. He knew to dress up for business meetings, and he knew how to talk (although I had to help him improve his talking for some occasions).

So, with no prior knowledge of internet marketing, and he wasn’t very computer savvy, he made $20,000 in the third month we were doing this. How, you ask? Well, same old cliché, he was creative and I taught him to think outside of the box, a bit differently from everyone else. Here is how it breaks down:

1. He joined a couple of chamber of commerce’s here in L.A, and I hooked him up with some business networking groups. Through this he got 5 clients for building websites. They each paid him around $1500, and he outsourced it to India, making him a 5x$1500-$1500(outsourcing)=$6000
2. He realized that there is one thing EVERYBODY wants online, and that is content. So he outsourced article writing, created PLR packs and sold them via forums and his website. Total income from that=$2000
3. He landed a rather big SEO gig from a client, and since he didn’t know anything about SEO, he outsourced it. Total income from this=$8,000
4. The last $4000 came from some CPA offers that he was running with PPV, because it was the “new thing” when we did this.
5. There you have it, $20,000 in one month. Now, where can you make that straight out of college?

Did this money come easy? No, he worked his butt off for 3 months, and that’s what you gotta do. Can anyone do it? Well, yes and no. Anyone CAN, but not everyone WILL do it. When we do seminars, even if people pay thousands of dollars, only 3 out of 10 take any real action. Yet the people that don’t, continue attending seminars and buying products…it’s just how it works (and I’m not complaining).

Oh, and before you start bombarding us with emails about getting coached… Remember, this guy worked his butt off for 3 months, and I mean it. Does this happen to all people we coach? Absolutely not, because we can only lead you to the water, you gotta drink it yourself. If you don’t take action, we can’t help you make a dime, but we have definitely helped people earn substantial incomes.

I’m just going to paraphrase as to not give too much away.  One (of the many) ideas that the book presented was relating to contacting people that were seemingly impossible to contact. The idea is that the average person will just assume that they won’t respond. Woah, this makes a lot of sense. And, maybe they would respond if you took the time to try to create a genuine dialogue with them.

I’m going to go a step further and make a set of goals that I want to achieve for each of the “impossible to contact people” that I’m going to try to get in touch with. I’ll probably start with 10 billionaires that would have some insight into businesses that I’m in.

Goals:

1. Create a list of 10 “impossible to contact people”.
2. Find their contact information (phone or email).
3. Contact them without giving up until I get an answer or f-off from them.
4. Create a real dialogue with that person.
5. Get 3 important questions answered.
6. Use that advice to make more money.

I’m also considering a similar strategy for some fund raising that I’m doing for some movies. I’ve just barely brainstormed on this so far but one of the first “impossible to contact” people that came to my mind was James Cameron… you know, the guy that made Avatar. Wow, he would be super hard to contact, right?

Wrong. It would just cost some money to get involved in charities. There’s a charity that’s raising money to take a Zero-G Flight with James Cameron and you can win a seat with him at this eBay auction. Who better to talk to about fund raising than a man that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his movies?

For reference, I did something similar about 4 years ago and met Randy Couture and a who’s who of Mixed Martial Arts stars. I donated (a lot of money) to a charity and got to spend an entire day with Randy. I went to his gym Xtreme Couture before it was finished, had lunch with him his girlfriend, Big John McCarthy and his wife. It was a blast. My girlfriend got to go too. Add me on Facebook if you don’t believe me, I’ve got pictures

Randy personally drove me and my girlfriend to UFC 66 in his TUF hummer, not many people can say that Randy Couture drove them to UFC! The funny thing that happened was that a bunch of Mixed Martial Arts clothing companies and other brands started contacting me. I made my money back in no time doing consulting and other marketing for these new contacts.

Now what the heck do I mean? Well, every time I go to an actual physical meeting (which you should do more of, because that’s how REAL relationships are built), I find out a bit about the person I’m meeting with, and I also find out information about the place we’re meeting at. Why? If I’m meeting a business guy who’s always wearing a suit, and who wants to meet at a fancy restaurant or lounge, I’d have to put my suit on to match. That’s the mistake my friend did.

My friend came in typical California clothes, meaning shorts, t-shirt, sandals, and on top of that, he hadn’t shaved. The first guy we met was from Europe, and I know for a fact that it’s way stricter with business clothing over there. I could see his eyes scanning my friend from top to toe, and he wasn’t liking what he saw. Because of this, he kept addressing me and barely looked at my friend, who was the one the meeting was for.

Now, this isn’t a fashion blog or a men’s style blog, but if you want respect, and if you want to do big business, you gotta look like big business. It’s ALWAYS better to overdress than to underdress in business. If your peers are programmers that don’t shower, shave or wear clean clothes, you might not have to put on your best Armani suit, but at least look like you mean business.

Don’t have a suit? Go get one, and no, it doesn’t have to be the most expensive one to start with. But get one, dark gray usually works for everything here in the US, and make sure it fits nice. Tie is optional in California, but if you’re on the East Coast, I suggest you get one.  And get some shoes too. You’ll notice that people look at you in a completely different way when you look serious.

And that’s it for today’s askmen….I mean Daily Conversion fashion advice.

Peace Out!