It reminded me of a story.

A few years ago, my alma mater Carleton College rolled out an extensive redesign of their website.

The design was driven not just by the aesthetic taste of talented designers, but also by extensive research.

When you visit the site, something might strike you as odd:

There are no students.

Not on the home page, anyway. Not on the primary “welcome” screen, where they expect everyone to begin.

That’s weird, right? That’s completely different from almost every other school website you’ll visit. If they show photos at all, they are almost always photos of happy, smiling, multi-cultural students, right?

What gives?

Well, Carleton did some careful research, and they discovered:

Prospective students unanimously disliked pictures of people.

Specifically, they found that:

High school students are extremely cynical about people pictures. Typical comments were:

• “Everybody has the same pictures of students studying under a tree.”
• “They look like models.”
• “The people look posed.”
• “This doesn’t tell me anything about the school. It could be anywhere.”

We saw this reaction consistently, whether we were testing first impressions of competing college web sites or testing early versions of our own design concepts. The first thing our prospective students seem to want is a sense of place, and that means campus photos rather than people.

At the time of the redesign, I read a great article about it (which I can’t seem to find online at the moment) describing how they further discovered that students wanted to imagine themselves at Carleton.

You can see in the homepage design they created, everything guides your imagination to placing yourself in the scene. On top of that, they find places to slide in the spirit of the school — a sense of silliness alongside deep curiosity.

So what?

Thinking about this today, I started to wonder:

What if the same forces are at play for theaters?

It seems like every theater on the planet makes websites showcasing actor photos. But do we know that’s what people want to see? Has anyone ever asked them?

What if people would actually rather see the building? What if people really want to imagine themselves in the space? What if they care more about imagining the way the seat feels, than the way the star looks?

What if all those actor photos look the same? (They do!) What if people want to know what’s different about your theater? Could your theater be anywhere? No! Can you tell it from your website? …Probably not, right?

For an art form built so very deeply on a specific place, there sure are a heck of a lot of nearly placeless theater company web sites.

Worth Asking

I don’t claim to know whether the research of a small liberal arts college should be applied to a theater. It would be unwise to assume it does.

But it does seem like an interesting possibility, no? Maybe worth trying to find the answer?

My favorite caption on Carleton’s site might be the bubble that marks the spot where you’d find a “Web team running out of clever caption ideas.” It’s in the library, if you’re curious.

This summer, in the depths of my obsession, I had a few conversations with Adam Bachman and Jesse Kriss. I posed the observation: “Okay, I really care about this stuff. If I wanted to put some money where my mouth is, could I actually make a constructive contribution?”

After a few cups of coffee, a few paper sketches, and a whole lotta talkin’, one of the fun ideas someone suggested was: Why not just, you know …do it.

Just create a news product. A minimally viable news product, to be sure. Not a proper, full-grown news product. Yet, nonetheless, something with a minimal semblance of reality, built under real life entrepreneurial pressures.

Is that crazy? How might one build a news entity from scratch? What if you had to create the whole thing, from start to finish, in a single weekend?

One couldn’t get too ambitious, certainly. You’d need something extraordinarily simple, with simple demands on your time and money. But it would also need to be, in some sense, real. A thing that someone, somewhere, might actually, you know, dig.

That’s the fun of a minimally viable product, right? It can be useless to almost everyone, and therefore make no money, but if it costs you almost nothing to build, and almost nothing to tend, then, well, if it’s cool to just a tiny number of people, it could be the seed of something bigger and better. Right?

Here’s the Idea

The simplest news site we could think of that might still be worthwhile is something along the lines of Boston.com’s The Big Picture. It’s simple, it’s beautiful, and it’s compelling.

Maybe Baltimoreans would like to see our own city in pictures like that. The daily pictures of our life in this city — maybe that’s a compelling thing. Maybe I’d like to sit with my iPad in the morning and flick through a page of big, beautiful, Baltimore images. Snapshots of my neighbors. Not some ice sculpture contest in Sweden, but the new graffiti by that amazing street artist who works up and down Greenmount Avenue, or the kids that were hula-hooping at HampdenFest, or the view from the stands at the latest Raven’s game.

Okay, so we have an idea.

Here’s the Implementation

In the spirit of building a “real” thing in a weekend, there had to be a comprehensive plan. It wouldn’t do to say “okay, design an ideal site, then hire some photographers, then….” No! Too much time! Too many resources!

Instead, we’ve got to find some pieces that already exist, and figure out what we can do in one weekend that would bring additional value.

Friday Night

Now, the reason I got on a kick this weekend is because Friday night was the night I stumbled across the new WordPress template by Information Architects.

I had already admired iA. They build news sites. They build really good news sites. And they do it based on principles in which I believe. Go ahead and check out their site. You’ll notice right away that it’s clean and easy to read. What you might not notice right away is that it’s been designed with much more care than first meets the eye. Not sure what I mean? Try resizing the window. You’ll find that this site has been designed five full times, to create the perfect layout for whatever screen size or device you might be using to read it. The same page will magically pop into a new layout as you resize your window. It’s really lovely. It’s really carefully done. And it’s really up for sale.

For, at the present time of writing, a measly 55 buckaroos.

Gentlepersons, we have ignition.

Saturday Morning

What’s a source of photography? I could pay someone, but I need something immediately. Well, there are a lot of photos on the web. Flickr has a bunch. They even have a bunch licensed into the Creative Commons — that lovely place where creative impulses go to live instead of die.

Let’s start with Flickr.

Now we’ve got a site template, and we’ve got a source of photography. Are we done? No. Why? Because the long term cost is still high. I could search Flickr every day, laboriously copying and pasting content from each page into my site. But the time it takes to do that would add up, fast, and the whole point of this is to try an experiment that doesn’t suck me dry while I figure out if it’s got any potential. I want good photos, but I don’t want to spend 30 minutes every morning collecting them.

The Tool

My answer to this problem was to make a tool. I spent Saturday building it, and I call it Seymour. Say hi to Seymour!

What does Seymour do? Well, it automates the curation of images for my site.

When you launch it, it looks like this:

And what is it doing? Well, it’s loading up a search page of all Flickr photos uploaded in the last two weeks that include the word “Baltimore” and are licensed under an appropriate Creative Commons license.

That’s the default starting point. Then, I can start browsing. I can do so by clicking around, or by entering more specific (or less specific) search terms.

Maybe I want to create a collection of photos about the ships down in the harbor. I can enter the search terms up top and refine my search. So far this isn’t anything more fancy than a normal web browser, right?

But the helpful bit comes next: I click on a photo I like, and it looks like this:

Down at the bottom, you’ll find that Seymour has automatically pulled out all the information I need. Title, description, and author information so I can give proper credit to the photographer.

I click on that arrow button there, and Seymour files away this information until I’m ready to publish.

I do this a few more times. Click, browse, click, browse, “Ooo, that one’s cool, let’s use that one”, click, filed, click, filed, done.

Then I click the “Post Them!” button, and friendly old Seymour goes out to my WordPress site, talks to it in the language it understands (XMLRPC), and creates a new post with the photos I liked.

And that’s it! Takes a few seconds.

It didn’t take the entirety of Saturday to make, but I did have to figure out a lot of new Cocoa technology I’ve never used before, so it did become the day’s project. It was a lot of fun just learning new stuff.

Sunday Morning

Well, now that I’m this far, I might as well try to make the site look decent, right? It starts out looking just like the Information Architect’s site, because it IS their site. I don’t want or need to change it much, but it should have its own look.

I’m not a professional web designer, but I can poke around in a site without bringing it to utter ruin, and I did my best to customize this one. Well, the best I could do in a day.

And thus was born

SeeMoreB.com

A place to see large, lovely photos from in and around Baltimore.

Fun! (Well, fun for me at least!)

What happens next

To be honest, I’m not really sure. It’s the sort of thing I could actually keep updating for a few months and see what happens. That was, after all, the whole point of creating Seymour. The tool makes it easy. If nothing ever came of it, I’d be down 55 bucks for the template, 10 bucks for the domain name, and a weekend worth of work. Plus, of course, whatever little amount of time I’d spend actually clicking on photos I liked.

Would there be a reason to do that? I don’t honestly know. I certainly like having the site as a sandbox. If I tried to make it more than a sandbox, would it have a path to something more mature? I think it’s possible. If it did develop some kind of audience, a tasteful ad in the right spot might actually generate a dollar or two. Or maybe it wouldn’t. It’d be an interesting experiment either way.

Anyway, like I said, I honestly don’t know what happens next. If nothing else, or perhaps above all else, I’m open to suggestions.

P.S.: Thanks to luckydave for finding the picture of Seymour.

See, at the moment the world of indie theater is having a great big-ol’ chew-it-up hash-it-out discussion about the pros and cons and wherefores and howtos of dynamic pricing.

I find this fascinating, and entirely worthwhile. But, aside from believing some version of dynamic pricing is probably a great idea, I don’t have any direct experience using it. So: can’t really comment.

Thing is, the general topic of “pricing” is something I do have a little bit of experience with, and all this talk of dynamic pricing has been getting me hot and bothered about a related subject which has been festering on my blogging back burner for months.

Well, on Friday Dan Granata made a comment on Twitter that made the pot boil over. Dan wrote:

So it’s been a few days, but the comment re: my theatre, “Let’s be clear, tickets are $18, this isn’t Broadway” is a depressing datapoint.

I asked:

Wait, what? Someone was complaining about an $18 ticket being too expensive?

To which Dan replied:

No – they were saying *because* it was $18, they respected us less. Because we charge so little, we must not be worth much.

I tried to clarify:

Ah. Then: depressing because of all the work that goes in to it, and the quality that isn’t being respected?

And Dan explained:

sort of. More that someone who saw the show (and liked it) would still use ticket price as a indicator of quality.

And also that it supports my long-held fear that a low ticket price may actually hurt your reputation, rather than up sales

Which was, it turns out, the precise moment that

My Pot Boileth Over

First off, let’s just set a ground rule here: you know your customers better than I do. (Or at least I hope you do.) If I say something here that feels clearly stupid, and seems to suggest that you should do something that would offend or abuse or exploit your customers, then the rule is: your gut trumps my bloviation.

But I do want to humbly relate a few things I’ve learned in setting a price on my own hard work. It may be instructive. It may not. But at least hear me out, because the way I think about pricing now is very different from the way I thought about pricing at the start. I think it’s useful to know how, at least in my case, things that seemed obvious from the beginning weren’t always true.

Dear indie software friends, dear indie theater friends, this is a letter to you both, from four years in.

First, a few datapoints.

I make a product called QLab. There have been two versions of QLab so far.

QLab version 1 had an audio license priced at $49. It had a video license priced at $149. It was very popular. It won a fancy award. It was so successful, in fact, that I quit my day job to work on it full time.

When I released QLab version 2, however, I changed the pricing. To wit:

• QLab 2 has an audio license priced at $249.
• QLab 2 has an educational discount for the audio license: $199.
• QLab 2 has a new rental licensing scheme. It allows renting a license starting at $3/day, or $1/day for educational purposes.

The story I am telling today is about:

• Why I decided to change the pricing,
• What happened when I did, and
• Whether or not I regret it.

While I don’t want to be overly prescriptive here, I have enough evidence at this point to draw a few firm conclusions. We’ll get to them in a second. But first,

The curious case of the complaining customers.

I’m about to tell you a story which I can only really describe as “freaking weird on the face of it”.

It is the story of how my customers complained about my prices for QLab 1. Specifically, how they complained that those prices were

Too low.

I spend some time paying attention to what people are saying about my product. I check the mailing lists. I check the forums. I check the Twitter. And what I found in the days of QLab 1 was that, mixed in with the astonishing news that some people were buying their first Mac ever just so they could use QLab, was the equally astonishing news that some people were unwilling to buy QLab at all because it didn’t cost enough.

Even weirder, I started getting emails from people who did buy it, asking me to raise the price.

Whaaaa?

That’s freaking weird.

I know, right?

But actually… it’s not. And here’s why: my customers knew themselves. They knew themselves much, much better than I did. I had started down this QLab road unsure there was any destination at the end of it. The first steps were for fun, the next steps were for fun and curiosity, and the next steps were for fun, curiosity, and maybe a little extra spending money on the side.

Yet, for my customers, it was more than that. I’d made something that people wanted to be part of their lives. They looked at my prices, and they knew: if this guy doesn’t raise his prices, he’s not going to be around long. They saw this problem clearly, and they saw it long before I did. So they told me.

And you know what? They were right. It took me a while, but eventually I realized they were right. Because at first, hey, I was actually doing pretty well for myself. I quit my job! I was working for myself! I was living the dream! I’d tell my wife at dinner the sales for the day and she’d look at me astonished and say “how many sound designers can there possibly be?” and I’d say, with a hint of hysterical terror in my voice, “I don’t know! Maybe that was the last one! Ha! HAHAHAHHAHAHOHGODOHGODPLEASELETMESELLANOTHERCOPY” But they kept coming! Eventually I managed to even view each sale not with terror, but merely with mild discomfort. Because they kept coming! Surely probability was on my side!

And yet… each sale also meant a new person in our community. New people in the community brought wonderful energy, wonderful stories, and lots of new questions, new requests, and new emails in my inbox every morning. I loved it! But I’m only one guy! And I was running a company that could only afford to be one guy!

And my customers knew it. And eventually, even I knew it. Which brings me to

What happened next.

Or

Probably the most anxious 9 months of my life to date.

Wow, was it really nine months? Let’s see, I quit my job in April, and I released QLab 2 the following January. Ha! Nice! Symbolism, that was a perfect place to step in. Thanks for that.

What did I do in that nine months? I rewrote my product, and I reexamined my company. Both needed adjustments. The product would become QLab 2. The company would become…what, exactly?

I said in my illustrated history of QLab that I was “literally shaking” when I pressed the send button on the email that announced QLab 2. It’s true; I was.

Whatever happened next was essentially going to determine the future of me and my company. Would people like the product? Would they be willing to support it at the new prices? (The audio license had increased in price by 500%! That’s not a little bump!) Would I be able to make a real company, that could support real employees for the real long term? It had been nine months of hundreds of hours of coding, testing, designing, tweaking, second-guessing, hair-pulling work. And all nine months of it came down to pressing that one button. You’d shake too.

Well, here’s what happened:

<insert stunned silence here>

A fluke? Turns out: no. Here’s the bigger picture:

And here’s the breakdown by count, gross, and license type:

So. What to make of this? The graphs tell part of the story, but what was going on at the human level? Was I fielding outraged emails from customers that could no longer afford my product? Did I raise my profits by turning away large swaths of the community I’d worked so hard to find? When I actually did raise my prices, did everyone, in short, freak the hell out?

To my astonishment, the answer was

No.

Really. It really was.

People did not get angry. I can count on one hand the number of angry emails or Twitter messages I’ve seen about QLab’s price. And for each of those angry messages? I reached out. We talked. I listened to what was making them angry, and we talked about it. And not one of those people are angry anymore.

People did not get turned away. I know of a single customer that turned away because of the price. One. And while maybe there are people who turned away and didn’t tell me, I will remind you that we are selling more licenses. And those licenses are being sold, as far as I can tell, to the same kinds of people as before. How? How could I possibly raise my prices by 500% and not turn people away? Because, remember, I didn’t just raise our prices. I rebuilt our entire pricing structure. I still had the free version. It was still really powerful. I added the rentals. They’re even more powerful, but they’re also really cheap for the situations where it’s most justifiable that QLab should be really cheap. And I added the educational discounts on everything. And, at the end of the day, there was me, a human being who cares and who really wants people to use my software. If someone reaches out to me, we talk. We figure something out. And only once did it get that far and reach an impasse.

In short: I fixed my broken prices, and everyone won.

Or, to put it a different way: Pricing is a single variable in a multiverse of important variables. In this complicated universe of ours, it’s rare that myopically optimizing one variable does the universe any good.

Or, to put it a third way: Pricing reminds us that

There is. No. Spoon.

There’s this single moment in time when money changes hands for a product or service. That’s an unusual moment, because at that moment the product, in some sense, has a real, definable “price”. But before and after that moment the value of whatever is being purchased is a probabilistic blur where reality, emotion, and psychology mix in strange ways.

Each person who buys your software, your theater ticket, your whatever, will assign their own value to the thing. In a perfect world you would charge each person exactly how much they value your software, your theater ticket, or your whatever. But you can’t do that — not just because it will be different for different people but because it will even be different for the same people, depending on when and how you ask them.

By setting a price, you are basically taking a stab or three into a probabilistic soup. We all know there’s no cosmic ledger of “correct” prices. We all know we’re taking a stab. But what we don’t always fully consider — or, at least, what I didn’t fully consider — is how deeply

Psychology trumps.

There is disturbing anecdotal evidence of this in the form of people who spend money they don’t have. But the best evidence I have from personal experience can be summed up in two words: Educational. Discount.

Recall that above I told you the initial price of a QLab audio license was 49 dollars. That was the flat rate. That was the take-it-or-leave-it. That was the here’s-the-best-I-can-do.

And you know wanna know something? You wanna know what question I fielded most often? Any guesses? It was:

“Do you have an educational discount?”

On a 49 dollar license! For a piece of software that, it may also interest you to know, was offering a genuine and viable alternative to a product that, at the time, cost around — wait for it! — 1000 bucks!

Now fast forward to version 2. The price of the audio license has gone from 49 dollars to 249 dollars. But, knowing my most common question about version 1, I also add an educational price: 199 dollars. Or, to put it another way, the new discounted price is 400% greater than the old standard price.

And now? Now we sell more of these than we ever did with the standard price of version 1! Does the new rental license have something to do with this? Probably. It certainly gives a fantastic alternate discount for those who have an exceptionally tight budget.

But I’m telling you that I used to get the “educational discount” question on almost every single license I sold to an educational institution. Now, I have an educational discount, and it’s 400% more expensive than the old non-discounted version, and I have never once received a request for an additional discount!

Psychology is weird!

But also: important to respect!

Alright, let’s bring this home.

Here’s my thing.

You care about your customer. You’re on their team, and they are also on your team. That’s an important relationship. My goal here is not to abuse or break that relationship, but if anything to strengthen it. The right price is the one that’s fair to both of you, and if you’re genuinely on each others’ team, you can stand up for this fact without shame or greed.

When you’re starting out, you try to guess how your customers will value what you do. You’re probably going to be wrong, and you’re probably going to guess low. Because you’re a nice person. You want to make your work “accessible”.

Now, in my experience, there is such a thing as accessibility, but it has a bad psychological influence on you when you’re setting your base price. It skews you low. You’re new at this, you’re not sure what you do is worth money, you’re thinking of all those hypothetical customers who can’t afford more than X dollars for your product, whatever. Point is, here you are, you’ve just started out, you have no data, and you’re a nice person, so you tried to be fair, and accessible, and your price is really low.

Now, shooting low isn’t automatically a terrible way to start. You can always change your price, and it’s not so bad to come out of the gate humble instead of cocky. So the problem isn’t so much where you start, as it is,

What you do next

This is the tricky part, and this is the part I see my fellow young people flubbing.

You essentially have one data point. “This is what happens when I value my work at price X.” Maybe it even works okay. You’re selling a bunch of tickets at 15 bucks a pop. Sure, you’re living on egg noodles, but you’ve got young people coming to see your shows that couldn’t otherwise afford it. Well, maybe. You probably don’t actually have hard data to confirm that, but you’re pretty sure it’s true.

But what if it’s not?

Consider QLab for a second. Lucky for me, I wasn’t just a little ignorant about pricing, I was a lot ignorant. I priced my work so extremely low that my own customers knew I’d overdone it. I’m blessed with smart, professional customers, and they knew my market (i.e. themselves) way better than I did. They knew that in the long run I couldn’t survive on the prices I’d picked. They wanted me to survive. So they warned me: “Your prices are too low. You need to charge me more.”

You’re probably not as dumb as me.

So back to you, and your 15 dollar ticket. Or your 40 dollar piece of shareware. Whatever. The point is, you’re probably not as dumb as me. When you stabbed into the probabilistic soup of prices, you may have aimed better, and gotten a better number up front. If so, that may be a problem, because the warning signs may be less obvious. Maybe your patron thinks to themselves “huh, 15 bucks, that’s a really great price”. And silently enjoys your show. For 10 bucks less than their internal value-ometer was inclined to suggest.

And now, week by week, month by month, where does that extra 10 dollars go? Well, if you never needed it in the first place, good on you; you’re not greedy. A little odd that you’re willing to value yourself less than your customers, but that’s your prerogative.

But if you DO need that extra 10 dollars, then the common wisdom is that it’s going to come out of your budget. Sure, that’s probably true. That’s probably partly where it comes from. But I suspect that maybe only 7 bucks of that really actually comes out of your budget.

I suspect that the rest of it probably comes bleeding out of you.

And that’s a problem.

And, tragically, it may not even need to be a problem. And you don’t even know it.

You’re worth it.

You’re on the same team as your customer. You know that. They know that.

By all means, make your work accessible. But be careful about what you think that means, and how you choose to do it.

Your customer thinks you’re worth it. For the sake of you both, act like you are.

After that, I don’t know the chronological order, and I don’t know a complete list of the experiments. I just know what has fallen in my lap. But here’s what’s on my tiny little radar:

• In New York, Stolen Chair Theatre Company is half way through their first year of Community Supported Theatre.
• In Chicago, New Leaf Theatre took a leap toward developing a new “partnership” model—a sort of uber-membership.
• In Baltimore, fast-growing Single Carrot Theatre is preparing to offer a new membership option for next season.
• In North Carolina, Scott Walters is refining a community membership model for Cradle Arts.
• In Seattle and New York, video crews from OnTheBoards.tv are recording performances, and making them available for unlimited streaming for 50 bucks a year.
• Over in the world of music, Magnatune switches to a no-limits membership business. Because it earns them more money.

Whether live or online, all these arts orgs are making bets on larger, long-term, often indivisible value propositions.

I am really, really curious to see how this all shakes out.

I’m also pretty sure I’m gonna rent this one and see how it goes.

Edited to add: Super interesting: listen to this MP3 interview with the creator of OnTheBoards.tv describing how they’ve built it. Especially note how they had to work around current IP laws to make this happen.

Edited again to add: No really, listen to the interview with Lane Czaplinski. It’s intelligent and fascinating. It’s clear he knows what he’s building, and why, and how it fits into the larger picture. This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Number 1

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a world-class symphony with a world-class conductor, is taking a sledgehammer to their own pedestal.

Filed under:

• Increasing Surface Area
• You Don’t Have to Be Small to do this Stuff
• Your Immediate Neighborhood (Yours) is Full of Awesome
• Scott Walters Knows What He’s Talking About
• There Ain’t a Lot of Wiggle Room on a Pedestal

Number 2

Man, it’s just so hard to get people to come to see live theater anymore isn’t it? It’s so hard to get people excited about getting out of their houses to go see some real live people tell stories abo–

Hey-oh! Hi! Shut up a second and meet Baltimore’s Stoop Storytelling Series:

Each Stoop show features seven storytellers who get seven minutes each to tell a true, personal story about a specific theme. No notes, no scripts, no actors–just true stories, artfully told.

In other words, the conversation went a little something like this:

The Stoop: “Hey Baltimore, got any good stories?”

Baltimore: “Jesus Christ, I thought you would NEVER FREAKING ASK.”

Result: Well, they’re looking for a bigger space, because their current host, Maryland’s largest regional theater can’t fit all the people that want to come to the shows.

Yeah. Just saying.

Oh, and I’ve heard rumors on the street that some of the theatrical establishment in town is tilting their head ever so slightly upward when looking at The Stoop. Those rumors may not be true. But if they’re true? Hey guys? For your sake: knock that shit off.

Filed under:

• Campfires Will Never Die
• Simplicity Wins
• No, Seriously, Stop Looking Where You Don’t Live. Your Neighbors are Awesome
• Tap That Shit, People.

Among many brain-bending talks was one by Joel Salatin, the now-famous farmer from Polyface Farms.

In Joel’s talk he challenged us to bring nobility and sacredness to our work. He said:

My success is tied to the cumulative effect of everyday stories, and faithfulness to injecting sacredness and nobility into every little action of my day. And when we allow that kind of sacredness, and that kind of nobility, to permeate every one of our actions, the world will be ennobled. The world will indeed rise up to meet us.

Today, Dave Troy, the man who conceived and oversaw the organization of TEDx MidAtlantic, made an interesting observation. He wrote:

How can we imbue marketing with nobility and sacredness? Not a knock, just asking. Thoughts? Seems the ultimate challenge.

I find this just a fascinating, challenging idea. Is there, or could there be, a noble core to marketing? Or is that idea just a joke? Is it an activity that can be pursued in a sacred way? Or is it inherently ignoble?

In looking at my own company, I see that my attempt to be honorable about marketing could probably be summed up as “when in doubt, avoid marketing”. Which is, if not a total cop-out, at least a pretty unsatisfying guideline. It’s an un-principle. A “first, do no harm” principle. It doesn’t carry much insight. But it’s my way of trying to avoid the “sexy umbrella” syndrome, a.k.a. “manipulating people into paying me money for my work when the simple merits of their situation would not otherwise lead them to do so”.

The closest I can get to identifying something “noble” in marketing is the idea that one really good way to market is not to market per se, but to simply, you know, help people. When they’re in distress, I try to help my customers quickly and with empathy. I guess at some level I’m doing this because I want them to like my product and talk about it with their friends, but when a frantic message appears from an engineer across the world who is under stress due to the software I wrote, I tell you what, I am not thinking “sweet! check out this marketing I’m about to do!” It’s much more personal. It’s fundamentally empathetic. “This person needs help. I am responsible for helping them. I am going to feel terrible until I do.” And I’ve found the result of that empathy is that, just as Joel says, the world has risen up to meet me.

So that’s one way I think marketing can be genuinely noble: honoring your responsibility for helping your customers.

But does that idea cover all the bases? I doubt it. What other principles could there be? Anyone have any ideas? I’d really love to hear them.

This is neat. I like this idea, and in the spirit of public feedback about it, here’s, uh, some public feedback:

The Metrics I Generally Dig

@mentions — Measuring mentions captures something about both re-tweets and conversations. Both of those things feel very important.

Followers — Measuring the number of follower certainly seems, on the face of it, to be a good yardstick. But: it only captures one level. I suspect this metric could be improved by factoring in the 2nd degree followers, i.e. how many followers do your followers have? My own Twitter account doesn’t have that many followers, but when I wrote a proposal for a new funding model for theater it reached the eyeballs (and struck the fancy) of Jess Hutchinson. It was Jess’s tweet, not mine, that gave that post traction. At the time Jess was a 2nd degree follower, through Nick Keenan. So I’d like to see a more sophisticated model for measuring followers.

Web Badge location — I don’t now how to weight this, but I’m so glad Devon tried. I know it can take time to modify a website, and maybe you want to test the twitter waters gently at first, but eventually, if you’re in, then freaking go in all the way. Make the choice. Commit. Don’t go weaksauce on us.

Twitter Name — Again, I don’t know how to weight it, but kudos to Devon for trying. It’s not just a branding thing, it’s a user interface thing. Think like a software developer and imagine what it will be like to actually use your Twitter name. I bet you a lot of money that a lot of people misspell GLTFCleveland.

The Metrics I Generally Don’t Buy

Frequency — Proof by counter-example: I have no qualms about un-following Twitter accounts that won’t shut up, even if they’re great tweets. In my experience quality and quantity don’t seem closely correlated on Twitter.

Total Tweets — See above.

Time in existence — I mean, if you were on the ball early on, cool, but I don’t think you get extra points for this. Maybe you knew you didn’t know how to use Twitter, in which case you should get extra points for not putzing around. Late to the party is no big deal if you come out swinging.

Client — Devon describes this metric as follows: “Included under the assumption that theatres using desktop applications (like TweetDeck) are able to better manage their Twitter presence”. I think that’s a bad assumption, and anyway, don’t grade the tools, grade how they’re used. A great foley artist could beat a lousy QLab user without much trouble.

Running with it

I’d love to see Devon’s metrics refined and extended. I’d also like to find a way to close the loop on evaluating the metrics. Can we connect these numbers to, say, ticket sales? Or volunteer hours clocked for the theater? Until we do something like that, it’s all speculation.

Speculating is fun, though

After reading Devon’s analysis, I wanted to play with some numbers too. However, I don’t really know anything about most of those LORT theaters (with one huge exception). Instead, I wanted to play with numbers for which I have some real-life context. To do that, I browsed through the Baltimore theaters I currently follow. Here they be, ordered by number of followers:

What to make of this, Armchair Edition

First off, what’s that “ERS/ING Ratio” thing? I propose that it’s one way to measure the strength of your magnet. If that number is high, your followers sought you out. A high ratio means you didn’t just troll for followers as a Twitter whore. (The tactic of following every single account you stumble on and hoping for a tag-back.)

The trouble with this ratio is that a high number is good, but a low number isn’t necessarily bad. For example, you yourself might be a tag-back follower. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, at least for an organization. If your style is to tag-back your own followers, then they might have all clicked “Follow” before you returned the favor, in which case you’ve still got a great magnet even though your ratio is diluted.

“I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.” ~ Ralph “Doomed to Ironic Appropriation” Emerson

Another thing worth noting: Lots of tweets don’t translate to lots of followers. Yes, I’m looking at you, CENTERSTAGE_MD. Yes, I know you’re running The Importance of Being Earnest, aka “the mildly amusing play that theaters will NOT FREAKING STOP PRODUCING”. Yes, I know Oscar Wilde was a clever fellow. Now stop using Twitter to quote him every single day, because no one cares.

Is it just me, or is it getting young in here?

Maybe this means nothing, or maybe it’s just to be expected, but I’d like to note that the theaters run by younger people (Single Carrot, BIG Improv, The Strand) are all kicking the Twitter asses of the theaters run by older people (CENTERSTAGE, Everyman, Theatre Project).

I have gone on record respectfully needling the older theaters about their relationship to Twitter. I don’t think anything I said in that post has really changed.

You Don’t Have To Twitter

Look, I’m big on Twitter. I think it’s the best, cleanest, coolest combination of personal and practical social networking that we’ve seen so far. But I can dig that it may not be your style. I genuinely don’t care if you use Twitter or not. I’d much rather see an organization use one kind of marketing really really well, than ten kinds poorly.

One thing I get from these numbers is that the bigger, older theaters maybe shouldn’t be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. That would be okay. No, seriously, I’m a huge technology geek and I’m telling you: it’s okay to not use technology. The marketing that works best is the kind that comes from your heart. Find out what that means for you. If that means marketing a romantic show solely with the stunning use of letter-press printed postcards that double as a buy-one-get-one free coupon, which is the single way in which anyone can get a ticket for your event, which in turn leads to a massive “date night” for your show and you never even think about Twitter at any step of that process, dude, go for it. That would be so hott.

We need data

Despite all that stuff I just wrote, my biggest realization from looking at this table is that I simple don’t know what these numbers really mean. I want tools to give us more data. I want to see follower break-downs by locality (near/far). I want to see multi-level follower counts (1st degree/2nd degree/3rd degree). I want to track the effect of tweets on ticket sales, or volunteer hours, or something else I care about. I want to keep a running tab of how many local actors, designers, carpenters, or directors were found through Twitter connections. (I got my first acting gig in Baltimore because of Twitter.) I want to quantify the strength of the relationship on a per-follower basis (how did they start following? how often do they get into a conversation? how often do they re-tweet?). I want, in a word, more data, with more granularity. But we’ll need some tools to gather that stuff. (Do they exist already? Anyone know?)

Final Thought

Dude, Theatre Project. I love you. I am literally wearing your t-shirt right now. But come on, guys. You didn’t even try. You just gave up.

Central principle number one? Be remarkable. Be worthy of remark.

Easy enough to say, I know. But I’m not so sure it’s actually that hard to do. Because all it really means is that you are doing something that is not ordinary. That’s actually pretty easy.

I mean, not everything extraordinary is easy. Creating an extraordinary product is, I admit, not usually easy. Why? Well, usually because everyone else is trying to do it too. You say you’re in a band? Great, everyone is in a band, and they’re all trying to rock. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to rock. You absolutely should. Striving for exceptional quality at your core is going to be the basis of everything else you do. Accept no substitute for core quality.

I’m not saying you can take a shortcut past doing a good job. I’m just saying that once you do a good job, there are ten million ways to not be ordinary, and a bunch of them are easy.

Seriously. Just pick something about your company. Anything. Pick something boring. Pick the most boring thing you can think of. Then flip the creativity switch, and find some way to make that thing less ordinary. And if it seems hard? Pick something else! Somewhere in your company is an opportunity to not be ordinary. An opportunity that’s stupid easy.

Yes of Course I was Leading Up to an Example And Here We Are

This summer I bought a bike. I needed one to get back and forth from rehearsals.

I went in to the shop and came home with a SWOBO Baxter. She’s a beauty:

Now, SWOBO makes great bikes. They no doubt work hard to make them. All that hard work convinced me to walk out of the shop owning a much more expensive bike than I had expected to own when I walked in. Good on them: a hard-earned sale.

But the story doesn’t end there. I wouldn’t be writing this blog entry if the story ended there. I love my bike, but frankly I am not enough of a bike nerd to blog about it just because it has disc brakes and a sick retro/modern design and some kind of fancy self-contained ten gear shifting mechanism that I don’t really understand.

What makes me write about my Baxter—what, in this specific case, makes it remarkable—is something I just found while recycling a bunch of waste paper from my office.

Sorting through a pile of junk, I found the manual for my bike. Just to be sure I wasn’t about to recycle something important, I flipped through it. You know: scanned a page here and there. As I expected, it was nothing I cared about. Nothing I couldn’t get more directly from the friendly folks at Baltimore Bicycle Works.

But right on the last page, the very last page, right before I tossed the whole thing in the bin, my eye caught a single sentence:

Uh, wha?

That’s certainly out of the ordinary. Okay, well, I can’t throw it in the bin until I’ve looked closer.

Page 1

You can click to enlarge this image if you want, but don’t bother. It’s just what you’d expect from the legal guys:

Page 2

This one? This one you should click to enlarge:

That there? That there is remarkable. I mean: the warranty. Seriously. Can you pick a more boring piece of your company? Doubtful. But instead of making it a throw-away piece of crud on the last page of their manual, they turned it in to a surprising, funny, vulnerable, remarkable bit of prose. So remarkable that I actually, you know, remarked on it. And it wasn’t hard for them. It was already the way they were running their company, they were just brave enough and creative enough to write it down. That was it. Not hard. With one page of copy, they A) transformed my sense of them as a company, B) cemented my feeling of loyalty, and C) got me blabbing about how cool they are on my blog.

Just a little creativity and one page of copy. Remarkable.

I love it. If you’d asked me five years ago if I had any interest in business, I’d have said “No. Hell no.” But five years ago I didn’t have the first clue what “business” meant. The word felt vaguely dirty, tainted with self-interest and full of mysterious people called “managers” who, if they had any function at all, were (I assumed) perversely situated to obstruct the people who actually accomplished things.

I don’t pretend now to have more than the second or perhaps the third clue about business, but I’ve made it far enough past my first impressions to feel a kind giddy delight at escaping that nonsense. The creative forces in play are in every way peers to those that inspire designers or engineers. The satisfaction of elegance and efficiency is the same. To manage complexity well is a thrill, whether the complexity is built out of people or electrons.

This post was about marketing, right?

Right. The point of all that intro was to make it clear: I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve only been at this for a few years. I reserve the right to be wrong in what I’m about to say.

Then why are you wasting my time?

Well, I don’t think I am. I think I may want to revise some of these ideas later, but I’m comfortable with the core.

Why?

These ideas are working for me.

Define “working”.

Also, here’s a very incomplete list of where this product is used.

Alright, you’ve got, like, seven minutes.

Thanks.

Okay. Here’s what I know about marketing so far:

Fuck Sexy Umbrellas

Not like you’re thinking, sicko.

Half my background is in theater. Specifically, acting. At some point back there I had an audition class for TV commercials. A class where they told us to pick a noun and an adjective out of a hat, with the instructions to say that noun to the camera in a way described by that adjective. I picked: “sexy” and “umbrella”. Then I got 10 seconds to go say “umbrella” at the camera in a sexy way. All in the name of honing those money-earning, commercial-shooting skills so I wouldn’t flat-out starve trying to make a living as a piss-poor actor.

Fuck that. I used to think I hated marketing. You know why? Because of sexy umbrellas. Sexy umbrellas represent everything I hate about modern marketing. I don’t want people to buy shit they don’t need. I don’t want to lie to people for money. And I don’t want anyone else doing that to me.

I’m pretty sure most ideas I have about marketing are a reaction against sexy umbrellas. It leads directly to rule #1, which is:

Trust is the trump card.

It’s not hard to find information anymore. But it is hard to find information you can trust. Almost everyone is trying to sell you umbrellas, which means almost everyone is lying to you.

If I can trust you, you are special. If I can trust you, our relationship will last.

Discover ways to be surprisingly trustworthy.

Make your mistakes visible.

You know how you can tell if someone can be trusted? Because you see them making mistakes.

An exceptionally trustworthy person will even bring a hidden mistake to your attention—one you might never have known about. Telling the truth even when you don’t have to is good evidence that you’re trustworthy.

It hurts to do this. Get over it. Focus on why you’re doing it. The pain is temporary. The trust is long-term.

Your customers are your sales force.

View every interaction as a chance to recruit a new salesman. Surprise is a good tactic for this: “What can I do here that would be literally remarkable?”

I provide startlingly good customer service, and I let my customers tell their friends. That’s about it. Aside from my website, that’s my marketing.

Do not “make” a sale.

You can make a product. You can not make a sale. You can bully a sale, but you can not make one.

A pressured sale is a mediocre sale at best, and a disaster at worst. I have customers who have used a free version of my product for years. For professional productions. Some of them will never need to purchase an upgrade. That’s fine. They’re still my unpaid sales force. Others will, one day, need an extra feature. In that case, it’s not even that they’re on a fence; they’re floating over my yard. They’ll drop right in when the time is right.

Conference booths are not worth what you pay for them.

In other words, they’re not worthless, but they’re not even remotely worth what they’ll cost you. People will come to you if your software is compelling. If your software isn’t compelling, no amount of gasbagging at a conference booth is going to help that.

Will there be exceptions to this rule? Sure. But be damned sure you know you’re paying for an exception.

Do not advertise.

Advertising is a cousin of brainwashing, and we all know it. I’m not saying brainwashing can’t work. I’m pretty sure it does. But I’m also pretty sure you’re not the Coca-Cola company, which means you’re not big enough to brainwash anyone. So don’t mimic the brainwashers. Even if you’re big enough to try: don’t mimic the brainwashers. Your money is more powerful elsewhere, building something truthful and trustworthy.

If you don’t count some ill-advised trips to conferences, I have spent zero dollars on advertising. I have paid Google no money for search results. No SEO has optimized my website. I have no plans to advertise, ever.

It’s always personal.

The illusion of companies has died. We’re not fooled by that idea anymore. We know a “company” isn’t a real thing. We know it has no point of view. It has no wishes. It has no feelings. A company makes nothing, accomplishes nothing, cares about nothing, and can provide you with nothing. “Company” is a stand-in term for a specific group of people. And it is those people, not the illusory “company”, that make things, accomplish things, care about things. Only a human being can have a perspective. And we’ve figured this out.

The illusion of the company as a living creature with an “official” point of view is a lie. We’re going for trust here. Drop the lie. Be personal.

They also just climbed on board the Twitter wagon.

Now, I’ve got nothing but love for Everyman. And there’s nothing really wrong about how they’re using Twitter. They’ve set it up just like anyone else would. They’ve got a link on their homepage (next to the link for their Facebook page), they’ve got a decent list of followers already (although a fair number of those are fake tag-back followers, like WholeFoods, or BarackObama), and they’re usually posting in a personal, genuine way (although they’re still getting warmed up to the style of a good Tweet, which counsels against awkwardly retrofitting a marketing moment by painting it in the guise of a personal update, or giving in to the lure of generic filler).

All in all? A great company that’s smart enough to know Twitter is something worth investigating.

So why mention them? Because this is a good example of what I think Gavin Clabaugh means when he says:

From the nonprofit’s perspective, [...] despite the increasingly ubiquitous nature of technology, they’re never too sure that they’ve put it to the right use. It may not be true. They may be using it very well. But they’re never too sure that it really fits. [...] It doesn’t ever seem to be fully formed, fully realized.

— Gavin Clabaugh, CIO at the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation

Everyman has every reason to go whole hog on Twitter. They’re already the smaller, hipper alternative to the heavy monolith in town—who, by the way, is also on Twitter, but shows less evidence of understanding why they signed up, and isn’t confident enough in the value of Twitter to announce it on their homepage. Everyman already has the feel of being an accessible, personal organization woven from the people of this city. They’re pros, and they’re our pros. So Twitter is a perfect fit to Everyman. They’ve already shown they want to have a personal relationship to their city. Twitter is a way to do that.

And yet…it feels…tepid. Like they’re sure they don’t want to get left behind…but they’re not completely sure it’s a good fit.

Dear Everyman: Show some confidence! It’s a good fit!

You’ve stumbled on a chance to distinguish yourselves even more as the company that’s connected to Baltimore. Don’t pussyfoot around, man, go for it.

Do it simply—no over-worked slogans that come off as trying too hard to be cool—tone and savvy are everything here. You can’t afford to try to be cool, you have to actually be cool. Your audience can spot a marketing bullshitter from a hundred city blocks.

The key is that you don’t have to be a marketing bullshitter to let people know you really, genuinely care about having a relationship with them, in a small way, each day.

And the way you do that is by starting with an understanding of what the heck Twitter is, and what people might be trying to get out of it. (You’re not just jumping on the wagon because everyone else is, right? You actually have a specific underlying reason why you think that Twitter is a good idea, right?)

The consequence of achieving that understanding is it lets you know how to talk to the people who might care. It lets you know how simple you can go with this.

A Digression: How to Spot a Company that’s Uncomfortable with Technology

Look for an overcompensating explanation.

“Check out our new blog, where you’ll get to hear the inside scoop from Artsy Pants Theatre! You’ll get production updates, thoughts from the Artistic Director, and more!”

Reality check: anyone who might care about your blog already knows why they will. At best, explaining it is just patronizing. At worst, it’s a red flag that you don’t know why you’re doing it—if you feel the need to clarify the point, maybe it’s because the point isn’t very clear to you. You don’t spend time explaining your phone number, so why your blog or your Twitter account? If they don’t already understand phones, they’re not going to call you.

Anyway, back to Everyman

Okay, Everyman, so you’re committed to Twitter. You understand both the possibilities and constraints of a Twitter relationship. You know the etiquette, you know what makes a Twitter account worth following, you know it’s a two-way street, and you’re ready to use all this to lift the Everyman experience even further away from the “generic theater company” brand. Sweet.

Show me that commitment.

You’ve put it on your web site. That’s a good start.

Add it to your business cards.

Put it on every poster you make.

Create an insert for every program.

Make a 30-foot banner for your building.

You’re selling out shows. Every one of the people who walk in your door should see that banner. They should not be able to get to their seat without that thing landing right at eye level at some point on their journey.

You should, and you easily can, have way more than 82 followers.

Keep the campaign simple. You don’t need to explain anything. You’re making an offer to enter into a relationship. All you need to do is make that offer. Do it directly and in good faith. You can relate every piece of information I need with two words and an at sign. Simple. Focused. Easy. The people who get it will appreciate that you respect their intelligence. The people who don’t get it may well be curious enough to figure it out. And the people who don’t get it and don’t care? No harm, no foul.

Sure, you can use Twitter just like everyone else. But being just like everyone else doesn’t win you any points. You guys rock, but you can rock harder.

Photo Credit: Ange Soleil, who has specified that some rights are reserved.