MyMindshare Blog

Blogs and bloggers are a perfect fit for MyMindshare, so to stimulate participation in MyMindshare, I have created the “100 Blogs Target Marketing Challenge”.

The challenge for me is to get 100 bloggers to participate. The challenge for the bloggers is to get as high as possible on the Target Marketing Challenge Leader Board.

The top ten bloggers on the leader board will be listed here:
Top 10 Blogs in the Target Marketing Challenge

I will write a profile here on the MyMindshare Blog about every blogger who enters the top 10. If you qualify for the profile, please let me know if I don’t contact you myself.

In the coming weeks I will be posting tips and tricks to assist bloggers in finding their audience and their fans. It all starts by joining MyMindshare.

Here are the rules for the Target Marketing Challenge, which can be modified at any time as needed:

1. Bloggers are encouraged to exhort their followers to join MyMindshare to lift their score.

2. Bloggers are also encouraged to take advantage of the referral program ($5 credit for good standing members referred).

3. Everyone is encouraged to figure out ways to cheat. Special praise will be given to successful cheaters if you tell me how you cheated. Anyone who exposes how someone else is cheating will be hailed as a conquering hero.

Feel free to contact me at any time if you have questions, complaints, suggestions or criticisms.

There is a lot of rhetoric in marketing circles about making your customers into friends. It’s not bad advice to treat your customers like friends, and it certainly is helpful when your customer treats you like a friend, but I think it is a mistake to confuse customers with friends, and vice versa.

To borrow terminology from database development, marketing is about creating and managing one-to-many relationships. One-to-many relationships are by definition asymmetrical. The One in the relationship experiences it very differently than the Many. Think about your relationship with a movie star. We get into trouble when we think that we share a special bond with a celebrity. I may have a special bond with Tom Cruise because of his performance in Magnolia, but we don’t share it.

My relationship with my bartender, Thomas, is qualitatively different than my relationship with Jose Cuervo, and it would be a big mistake for either me or Jose to think otherwise.

It takes skill to manage one-to-many relationships and I’m not sure they are the same skills one employs in social settings.

When you are trying to build something new and different, there is a lot of tension between simplicity and complexity. Almost by definition, something novel cannot be simple. It’s not easy to teach somebody something new, especially when your hold on their attention is very tenuous. That is my constant battle with MyMindshare.

The variety of ways that bids can be targeted at MyMindshare necessarily increases the level of complexity. It’s the skin’s job to cover up the complexity and put a simple, understandable face on MyMindshare.

For me, personally, that is the fun part of MyMindshare. I am constantly asking myself, how can I make this simpler? What is important for the user to know? What is not? How can I make it easier to understand and use?

My challenge is to make it simple up front, and then gradually introduce complexity as the user learns more and more about the principles and methods of MyMindshare.

Target marketing at MyMindshare simply means delivering a bid to the people who want to see it, and not delivering it to the people who don’t. The people who want to see a bid are the people who give it a “thumbs up” — we call them fans.

A bid’s rating is a measure of how well a bid is targeted. A high rating indicates that a high proportion of the bid’s audience are fans.

Here’s a great idea for a home-based online business:

Invite four friends with $25 each to come to your house. Collect the $25 from each of them and put it in an envelope and set out three chairs. Instruct your guests to walk around the chairs while you play some music, and when you stop the music, they each go for a chair. The guest who doesn’t get to a chair is eliminated. Then take out one chair and repeat until only one guest remains.

Next, ceremoniously give the last guest the envelope containing $100 and pronouce him/her a “Success!”

Write a pdf document decribing the process and call it a manifesto or a report, entitled “How to make $100 in less than an hour with passion and fun.” Launch a blog and post something at least twice a week on variations of musical chairs. When you have compiled a suitable amount of material, write an ebook and sell it to the community/network you have built around your manifesto and blog. Sell it for $39 and set up an affiliate program that pays 50%.

If you are successful, you can repeat the whole process again and again, except you can drop the musical chairs part — you can tell people they just have to figure out their own version of musical chairs.

I got my start in the “media” biz as the publisher of a small monthly literary magazine based in the NoHo Arts District in the eary 90′s. NoHo is a section of North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley, here in Los Angeles.

For those who are not familiar with L.A., the San Fernando Valley is “The Valley” as in Valley Girls and has served Hollywood as the quintessential suburb in film and tv. NoHo is the closest thing the Valley has to a bohemian neighborhood and is home to several small theaters. David Cox, a transplanted New Yorker who ran the American Renegade Theater came up with the idea of creating the NoHo Arts District, and he helped me create NoHo Magazine.

Given that live theater was such an important part of NoHo, I made theater reviews a central part of NoHo Magazine. My ambition was to publish reviews that could stand up as creative works unto themselves. Thanks to the contribution of a few talented writers, I think we succeeded.

Criticism as a literary form is well and good, but when it is done well, it can be brutal when it takes the form of a bad review. We didn’t just say such and such is a bad production. We pilloried it.

As the publisher, I stood behind and stood up for the writers. To be fair, I also published the letters we received from theater directors defending their work and lambasting the review. One of those directors was David Cox, and my editorial policy cost me a friend and supporter.

NoHo Magazine was very much a starving-artist endeavor. It was a disaster from a business standpoint, but it had a good 20-issue run from an editorial standpoint.

Since then, I have thought a lot about criticism and the creative process. Creation is difficult, risky and very personal. It takes a lot of courage to create something and then send it into a world that can be cruel and unforgiving. If I could do NoHo Magazine over again, I wouldn’t publish negative reviews. It does much more harm than good and the best thing is to simply ignore bad productions. It’s much better and healthier for the entire community to put energy into promoting the good stuff. Is that Pollyannish? Perhaps. I’m not saying the bad stuff should be papered-over or excused; I am simply saying that it is enough to ignore the bad (we are just talking about creative work here; of course there are other contexts in which the bad stuff has to be called out).

Here is my confession:

Because of my contrarian nature, I have little voices in my head that keep up a running commentary on EVERYTHING. They are constantly pointing out flaws, weaknesses, errors, conceits, ignorance, stupidity, greed, hypocrisy etc. You could be Jesus Christ incarnate, and I can find something about you that just doesn’t measure up.

This is a classic character defect, and it is something that I am trying to change. I am trying to do some counter-programming by thinking of gratitude whenever a negative voice speaks out.

It’s not easy and sometimes I slip. I apologize and I ask for compassion and forgiveness.

In our ongoing battle to reserve the birdseed for the birds, we went out and bought a shepherds crook thingy to plant in the bushes, from which to hang the basket of birdseed.

As you can see, the squirrels had little trouble negotiating it.

It is said in some quarters that marketing is like dating. If you want to build a long-lasting, valuable relationship, you don’t try to get laid on the first date.

The problem with the dating analogy, when it comes to marketing, is that one of the parties in the relationship is in it for the money.

Imagine you are a single, heterosexual man at a party where you meet an attractive, single woman and strike up a terrific, engaging  conversation in which she expresses a real interest in you. Throughout the evening you find yourself back at her side, talking about all the other guests at the party — who’s into who, who’s not, blah blah blah.

At the end of the evening, you decide you have to ask her out; this is not going to be the woman you lose to your insecurity and self doubt. After screwing up your courage and throwing back a couple of martinis, you ask her out only to discover that she is a professional who has been hired to make sure the men at the party have a good time. That vibrant, fascinating conversation in which she appeared to be so interested was not what you thought or hoped it was. She was in it for the money.

At a brothel, there is a lot less confusion about motives.

At MyMindshare, there is only one way that cash comes in, and only one way that cash goes out. Cash comes in from bidders who deposit funds. Cash goes out when Good Standing Members cash out their mindshare revenue.

The challenge for MyMindshare as a business is to make sure the income and the out-go has a positive balance.

The best way to understand MyMindshare’s business is to look at it like a bank.  Money comes into the bank in the form of deposits, and money goes out of the bank in the form of loans. If those two things stay in balance, the bank is healthy and everyone benefits.

In the banking industry, the bank’s capital acts as a sort of shock absorber, smoothing out its balance sheet with the ebb and flow of deposits and loans.  The more capital a bank has, the more it is able to weather and adjust to a changing business climate.

Right now, MyMindshare is like a bank with very little capital. It has to be very carefully managed  to ensure that the inflow and the outflow stays in balance because we don’t have a large capital base to smooth out temporary imbalances.

The greatest risk to MyMindshare comes from referral fees.  Referral fees are backed by MyMindshare’s capital, and the danger is that referral fees could exceed MyMindshare’s capital. That being said, there are several things that have been put into place to mitigate the risk.

First, referral dollars cannot be cashed out. They can only be used to pay for bids.

Second, by placing a $10 minimum to cash out, we are ensuring that cashout cannot occur until revenue has been generated in excess of the referral fee.

The key is to grow the MyMindshare membership without referral fees. The revenue generated by members who joined without a referral fee will help to cover the cost those who joined with a referral fee. Eventually, even those who joined with a referral fee will cover there own cost. But that takes time.

In the meantime, we have to manage MyMindshare very carefully and prudently, using old fashioned bankers’ values of thrift and wisdom.