"Ideas that Spread, Win"
The sentiment that "Ideas that Spread, Win" as promoted by Seth Godin and countless others, is sound business marketing advice. In this classic TED Talk, Mr.Godin describes a few ideas that 'won' - such as sliced bread, which was a total failure until a company called Wonder™ discovered how to market the concept effectively.
The Utility of Being Remarkable
If your company, product or initiative is remarkable it is literally 'worth making a remark about'.
The great benefit of 'remarkability' in growing an organization is that this type of marketing is nearly-free and self-sustaining - a remarkable idea will spread through personal referrals, social media (blogs, Twitter, et. al) and possibly result in some great free press.
Compare this to the traditional media advertising model: interrupting a great deal of people with a radio advert or commercial and hoping that 0.4% of them will respond to your message. Traditional advertising is more expensive, less engaged, and certainly more annoying.
How to Be Remarkable
Actually being remarkable may seem quite challenging at first. Most organizations have similar competitors targeting similar markets, and follow an identical profit-motive. Many companies sell the nearly-the-same products at nearly-the-same price, to the same people.
So, how does your organization stand out and get noticed?
Before addressing that question, we suggest starting at the basics. Most successful businesses have a primary selling point. If you're sharing the same selling message with a host of other companies you aren't being viewed as unique by potential customers. Being unique, of course, is a critical factor in getting noticed.
If you already have a remarkable, unique selling point - great! Use it. If you don't have one, then it is time to step back and look at your business as a whole. We'll address the question of how your company can be more remarkable a little farther into this article.
Why Are You in Business, Anyway?
One our favorite quotes at CartaNova comes from Jason Fried at 37Signals:
What's missing most from business today? Not sales. Not service. Not technology. Answer: A point of view
Companies rarely survive on profit-motive alone. In fact, it may be that none do. At some level, a complex web of social and ecological relationships manifests what potential customers perceive as whom your organization is, and what value your product(s) offer.
Potential customers are also selfish - and rightly so. The average person in a developed Western economy is exposed to anywhere from hundreds to thousands of advertising messages a day.
Consumers and/or constituents simply won't care about an organization unless you give them a reason to. This is why being remarkable, relevant and ethical is essential to sustainable long-term business growth.
You Can't Buy Love, Trust or Relevance
Have you heard of Solo Mobility? I certainly have. Bell's cellular phone service identified CartaNova as a potential customer and cold-called us 34 times in a single month. This is the old media marketing model at work - interrupting people with services they don't care to hear about, to sell products they don't need.
So Bell is remarkable as evidenced by this post, but for all the wrong reasons. They gave their customer data to third-party sales teams, breaching consumer trust. Worse, they treated existing Bell customers as having no more individual identity than the phone number used to call them.
But what if Bell had done things differently? CartaNova is an ecofriendly web design firm, so we may have been interested in a Solar-Powered Mobile Phone, or a smart-phone with a particularly tech-friendly setup - if we had been contacted in an ethical manner.
Identifying a key community-of-interest and talking to them in a relevant, transparent and ethical manner is critical to 'REMARKable' marketing.
Seth Godin labels these communities-of-interest as 'Otaku' or 'Tribes':
Communicating Relevance to a Community of Interest
Do you already have an idea of what's truly remarkable about your work?
Being remarkable and doing things differently is risky - but being complacent in business is more risky. If you need some ideas on how to discover or create the remarkable, check out the post How to Be Remarkable on Seth Godin's Blog. It's a great place to start.
When you've identified a unique, remarkable selling point and start talking to people who care about it, things tend to grow organically. At CartaNova, our mission follows what we care about - what's relevant to us as a business and as a group of people. Our mission is:
To help eco friendly technologies and initiatives to grow.
To that end, we communicate and network with our community of interest - web designers, environmentalists, green businesses and renewable energy companies. We do that through this blog, through our Twitter feed, through LinkedIn and numerous other sources.
These discussions are never a chore, and never only 'for the purpose of marketing' because we actually care and are actually interested in what we're discussing. In the process, we learn more about our field of interest and find new contacts, solutions and customers.
The 'Remarkable' unique selling point for CartaNova is our directly wind-powered web hosting, from the Biglow Canyon Wind Farm in Portland, OR. It's not what we primarily do (we build web sites), but we see interested green companies and bloggers share this information all the time. That's great, because the same people would be interested in ecofriendly web design services.
At CartaNova, we also aim to create remarkable things. We broadcast our sustainable business model to a community of green businesses through Twitter, and received some great visitor traffic (and praise!) in return.
This month Robert Porter is working on a project called Sepiida - and if our proof-of-concept holds, it may be so remarkable that 'Sepiida' will be broadcast far and wide on the net'.
Summary: What Works
To sum up, our advice on being remarkable follows the same advice we used to end our post Marketing on the Web: What's Different and What Works.
That is:
Be Accessible. Be Unique. Be Relevant.
Editor's Note: As I was finishing this post, Bell Solo Mobility called us one more time. Not kidding!
