MarkWhittaker.com

I’ve been stewing for a while about Seth Godin’s notion (assertion?) that “We Are All Weird.” That’s the title of his most recent book, which describes the demise of “mass,” as in mass marketing, mass education and opiate of the masses.

The 97-page book’s theme hits home because the failure of “mass” is a root cause for the crumbling newspaper industry, in which I worked for 30 years. Godin’s explanation for the growth and acceptance of weirdness rings true, but there are one or two sour notes in there, at least for me. The problem? I’m NOT weird, at least not weird enough. Indeed, reading Godin’s book makes me wish I was weirder.

For reasons too various to explain in this article, the society of “mass” inspired by the industrial revolution worked just fine for me. I was successful in public school largely because I followed the rules, studied and the learned the material presented to me and was good at taking tests. That success prepared me for college, where I was a little less “successful” in terms of grades, but very successful in terms of preparing for a career in journalism. I spent most of my time at the Temple News, even serving as editor one semester.

I grew up in suburbia, landed a job before my college graduation day, worked my way up the newspaper ladder, got married, had a couple of kids, changed newspapers a few times, became a manager — all of it a pretty “normal” life progression. In fact, I was proud of the “normalcy” of it all, even though a part of me hated being normal. Normal means average, and who wants to be average?

A variety of life events have punctured the fiction of my “normalcy.” And it’s safe to say that my career in the newspaper industry, which ended with a layoff three years ago despite my shift to the online side of the business, has given me a front-row seat to watch the collapse of mass. Never — at least since the invention of the printing press — has the saw “You can’t be all things to all people” been more true.

Godin’s book makes me uncomfortable because even though I can accept the 21st century fallacy of “normal,” I have yet to embrace my “weird.” Of course, it’s not that I need to find something weird about myself. It’s that I need to uncover and celebrate the things that make me unique — the things that separate me from “mass” and “normal.” We all have those weird parts — whether it’s a love for baseball or the Beatles or collecting shot glasses from vacation destinations.

Somehow, I know that my life’s work remains in media/marketing/communications. I just haven’t brushed the dust off enough weirdness to know exactly how I can make my best contribution to those in my life and in my world.

Disclosure: The link to Seth’s book is an afflilate link.

It’s popular wisdom that you’ll never get anything if you don’t ask for it, and variations of the bromide are oft repeated in the sales and marketing world (“You can’t close the sale if you don’t ask for the money!”).

One of my online marketing teachers, Christopher S. Penn, often encourages his readers to come right out and ask for re-tweets, comments, follows, etc. It works, and a recent experience with a Dream Local Digital client demonstrated the theory.

We helped children’s book illustrator Melissa Sweet launch a new Facebook business page. She had been using Facebook, but only had a personal page that, with more than 1,000 friends, had become unwieldy to manage as a marketing tool. Her business page started with just 60 or so fans, or “likes,” and we had to grow that number quickly.

Facebook offers business page administrators a handy tool for inviting your personal Facebook friends to like your business page. If you’re a page admin, you’ll find an “Invite Friends” near the top of the right column on your Facebook page. It took about an hour and 15 minutes over two days, but I sent invitations to all of the client’s personal friends to like the new business page. It yielded immediate results. Within two days, the business page had 300 new “likes.” About 30 percent of “friends” from her personal page, many of whom are fans but not personal friends, agreed to like the business page.

I encountered just one glitch during the invitation process, but it was significant. When I tried to invite 100 or so friends at one time, it appeared that not all of the invitations had been delivered. So, I limited the number of invitations and had to repeat the process many times (thus the 75 minutes spent on the task).

Below is a Screenr.com video I put together for the client to demonstrate the process. Please note that since the video was created, the location of links to access business pages have changed, but the invitation process is still the same.