You Need to be Unexpectedly Great
Seth Godin, Dan & Chip Heath, Jonah Berger… and Slack (?) all agree
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What do a pioneering marketer, educators from Duke, Wharton, and Stanford, and communications software giant Slack all have in common?
They all know vital secrets about earning attention. What are these mystical secrets, you ask? Read on…
Best First Client Ever?
Slack was Pacific Content’s first podcast customer. It was late 2014 and high-quality podcasts from brands weren’t a thing yet. Slack wasn’t really a thing yet either - it was a scrappy, quickly growing startup that most people hadn’t heard of yet. Their marketing team was led by a brave and brilliant CMO, Bill Macaitis. He wanted to introduce Slack to people through exceptional brand experiences, but they had never made a podcast. We had lots of podcasting expertise but had never made one with a brand.
There was a lot at stake for all of us.
We moved forward guided by the goal of making a great show that listeners would love and that could ONLY come from Slack. In the process of doing this, we all violated a lot of expectations.
And that, as the cliche goes, made all the difference.
Better is Better Than Louder
To earn attention, you have to be WORTHY of attention.
Worthy of attention means that you’ve put in the work to make something of Surprising Value for others. It also implies that you have not taken shortcuts or tried to trick people into giving you their attention.
One of Seth Godin’s blog posts nailed it this week:
In the last forty years, the amount of promotion has gone up exponentially. At the same time, the success of promoted content, products and services hasn’t increased at all.
That’s because the secret isn’t to focus on your promo.
The secret is to create something that those you serve want to tell others about.
When other people do your promo, it’s not promo. It’s passion and sharing and generosity in community.
Better is better than louder. -Seth Godin
Better is better than louder. YES.
What does “better” look like? To me, it means Unexpectedly Great. That is what earns attention and, then, word-of-mouth.
Loud without being Unexpectedly Great is a recipe for disaster. I used to tell potential clients that if they made a boring, corporate-sounding, predictable podcast and told lots of people about it, they might be able to trick people into listening once, but they would never come back. If they never return because the click was a waste of their time, what kind of brand impression are you making?
It’s better to not put out anything than to put out mediocrity.
Social Currency and Identity Management
When Godin says, “When other people do your promo, it’s not promo,” that’s because when someone decides to share something with you, that person believes it will be relevant or interesting to you personally, and that, in turn, will make them look good. In Jonah Berger’s book about how ideas spread, Contagious, the first principle is Social Currency.
“People share things that make them look good to others… So, not surprisingly, people prefer sharing things that make them seem entertaining rather than boring, clever rather than dumb, and hip rather than dull.” - Jonah Berger, Contagious
And if the criteria for earning word-of-mouth is making the sharer seem entertaining, clever, and hip, an essential criterion for the message is “unexpected.”
“Something can be remarkable because it is novel, surprising, extreme, or just plain interesting. But the most important aspect of remarkable things is that they are worthy of remark. Worthy of mention.” - Jonah Berger, Contagious
Violating Expectations
This same principle is championed by Dan and Chip Heath in their book about memorable ideas, Made To Stick:
“How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive.” Dan and Chip Heath, Made to Stick
“Unexpected” works because it jolts us out of our expectations. It breaks patterns. And we want more information when something doesn’t fit our expectations and existing patterns. We want - even need - to know WHY. Unexpected ideas open up a curiosity gap, an open loop. And once a curiosity gap has been opened, we have an insatiable need to close it.
If “Unexpected” opens a curiosity gap, then “Great” closes the gap. Unexpected without Great is a tease with no satisfying answer. There is very little value for the giver or the recipient in getting attention and frittering it away with mediocrity or lack of closure. The Heath brothers write about earning attention as this type of two-stage process where surprise gets our attention and interest keeps our attention.
So what does Unexpectedly Great look like in practice? Let’s return to the Slack podcast.
How Slack Made an Unexpectedly Great Podcast
In hindsight, almost every element of the Slack Variety Pack production aligned with being Unexpectedly Great.
Slack has a distinct, quirky, and fun brand voice and identity. Still today, after selling to Salesforce for over $27 BILLION dollars, you can see the unique voice of Slack everywhere. I just checked the language on their latest software update and it reads:
“We tuned up the engine and gave the interiors a thorough clean. Everything is now running smoothly again.”
Does that sound corporate? Or full of techno-babble? Nope. It’s fun, light, quirky, and very, very Slack. It is Unexpectedly Great. All the time.
If you’ve used Slack, you will know that conversations are structured in Channels. Channels can be created for any variety of topics, teams, or projects. We structured the podcast as a mix of stories related to the future of work. Every time we started a new story, the podcast would “change Channels” in the same way you move around to different conversations inside Slack. It was a unique format for a magazine-style show that again, could only come from Slack but wasn’t actually about Slack itself in any way. The result was Slack Variety Pack, a show that SOUNDED like Slack felt to use. Again, this was all very Unexpected and Surprising for listeners.
The biggest Unexpected and Surprising element, though, was that Slack made a podcast and it wasn’t about Slack. It was a REAL show about the future of work. It wasn’t corporate. It wasn’t trying to sell you on signing up for Slack. And that, in 2015, was kind of shocking. As the Heaths might put it, it violated expectations.
Violating expectations led to a lot of press, including a headline, I believe from Forbes, that read “Slack is making a podcast, for some reason.” Isn’t that the best headline imaginable for a new show? “For some reason” just screams “Unexpected!” That is serious word-of-mouth.
The show did really, really well. Listeners loved it. We did the hard work, found Unexpectedly Great stories and guests like Brene Brown. And it was 100% Slack.
TDLR: The Takeaways
Better is better than louder
You have to be willing to do the work it takes to Earn Attention
Open a curiosity gap (Unexpected) and close it properly (Great)
The payoff is not just Earned Attention, but others spreading the ideas to a) be helpful and b) reinforce their desired identity.
Slack Variety Pack was Unexpectedly Great because it violated expectations with voice, format, generosity, and medium.
Making the Sausage
If you made it this far, I hope the opening question and promise of linking four disparate thinkers and Slack was part of why you kept reading. I opened a curiosity gap with an unanswered question and the start of the Slack story and tried to pay it off with a satisfying answer and wrap with the full Slack story of the principles in action. I hope it worked! I’m also hoping introducing ideas from people like Dan Heath and Jonah Berger will excite you for future editions because I will be featuring original interviews with each of them about Earning Attention. (How’s that for a power teaser???)
What Earned My Attention This Week
A Blog Post is a Search Query to Find Your People
I am a big fan of Austin Kleon’s books, posts, and newsletter. This past week, he wrote about how putting your ideas and thinking out into the universe is like a homing beacon for the people you are trying to connect with. I love this sentiment; it speaks a lot to the values of generosity and how many good things come from “going first.”
A blog post is a search query to find your people
On Writing and Failure
Stephen Marche and the Pacific Content team made a very unconventional parenting show for Audible called “How to Not F&*k Up Your Kids Too Bad” and I have been a huge fan of his ever since. Stephen has a brand new book about writing and failure - it’s brutally honest, highly entertaining, and should be required reading for writers. My favorite quote comes at the end of a story about how James Joyce was rejected for a position teaching literature after he had written The Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist As Young Man:
“Anyone with the desire to make art with words should be aware that James Joyce - James fucking Joyce - couldn't make a living at it.” - Stephen Marche, On Writing and Failure
Listen Time
My good friends Dan Misener and Jonas Woost at the podcast growth agency, Bumper, wrote an article about how to MEASURE attention in podcasting and it’s really smart. They introduce the concept of Listen Time and also how to calculate it for your podcast. If you want to know if you’re earning attention, you need to know how to measure it. This is a really smart solution.
Bonus Content!
My friend Steven Goldstein at Amplifi Media sent me the best invitation I’ve ever received to do an interview - he promised to “not make us both sound like dopes.” I love the word “dopes” and everytime I think about his invite, it makes me laugh. We chatted about Earning Attention as it applies to podcasting and podcast marketing.
If you’re a brand looking to earn more attention, or a creative services company wanting to grow your business, please check out the Creativity Business website.
I was nearing the end of this post when I thought I'd quip that THIS post was unexpectedly great too. But, you covered that too - haha. Thanks for sharing this!
That was unexpectedly great. And helpful. Thanks.