Two years ago, in order to better understand the changes that were whipping through the world of marketing, I started a new company. We called it Squidoo.com. Squidoo makes Google work better by allowing anyone (including you) to build a simple page about an area that you care about. You could build a lens on laptop bags or the best hotels in Paris or your blog or your consulting firm.
Let me start with the punchline: in the course of a year, we spent less than $5,000 on marketing. And 99% of it was spent on one trade show, which was a total failure, and on a case of orange rubber squids. Despite the tiny spend, Squidoo is now the 800th most popular website in the world. Squidoo ranks higher than The Wall Street Journal or Consumer Reports or Forbes or ebags. We now have more than 110,000 lenses built by 55,000 individuals.
How’d we do it? More important (much more important), how can you do it?
The first lesson is the biggest one. We understood that we weren’t in charge. We couldn’t be, because we didn’t have the money to command people to listen to us. Instead, we focused on creating an environment where other people could have a conversation, and we worked hard to offer enough value that people would choose to have the conversation in our place-and to make it about us from time to time.
The second lesson? Easy beats hard. Not only are consumers overwhelmed with choices, but they’re too busy to take the time to learn irrelevant details. What’s irrelevant? Whatever the person decides is irrelevant. So, knowing a demographic fact about me might be important to you, the marketer; but if it’s not important to me then, hey, I’m out of here. At every step along the way, we focused on “me.”
The Long Tail is the third. Expounded by Wired editor Chris Anderson, the Long Tail is the observation that given enough choice, the curve of choices will get longer and fuller. Amazon makes half its sales on products that aren’t on its top 1,000 bestseller list. Computers make it easier than ever to offer infinite variety, and now consumers are beginning to demand it.
The fourth thing we learned is how slim you can run a big organization these days. We have exactly four employees at Squidoo. We’re handling millions of visitors and have hundreds of thousands of regular users. Our customer service is pretty good and our systems don’t fail. To handle an audience of this size in any other medium would take ten or twenty times as many people.
But if there’s one giant lesson I’d like to share with you, it’s this: We’re cheating. And you can too.
We’re cheating because we built something designed with the web in mind. We organized around the ideas of Web 2.0, and as a result we’re running circles around much larger, much better funded organizations. With no marketing spend at all, we reach more people than almost any other brand in the world.
It’s easy to come up with a list of reasons why this would never, ever work for you or your brand. Which is a completely bogus way to think about it. Instead, realize that your competition isn’t going to let those reasons stand in their way. Sooner or later, you are going to play by the rules of this new game-or watch the game get won by someone else. Viacom can sue YouTube, but they can’t make video sharing go away. Sony can lock up their music, but the iPod and the MP3 revolution isn’t going to wait for them.
It doesn’t particularly matter whether or not you sell records or do recordkeeping, whether you surf the web or sell surfboards. It’s still the same math. Consumers are in charge. They’re bored. They’re narcissistic. And they certainly don’t have the patience for your meetings or your strategy decks or your clueless CEO.
First one in, doing it right, wins. C’mon in, the water’s fine.
Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, public speaker and author of Permission Marketing, Free Prize Inside and the soon-to-be-released The Dip
