This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

The trust of action
In a world that scans instead of reads, that gossips instead of researching, it
turns out that the best way to earn trust is through action.
We remember what you did long after we forget what you said.
When we asked for a refund for a defective product, what did you do?
When you lost our data, what did you do? When you had to close the plant
and our jobs were on the line, what did you do?
Marketers spend a lot of time talking, and on working on what we’re
going to say. We need to spend far more time doing.
Talking means focusing on holding a press conference for the masses.
Not talking means focusing on what you do when no one is watching,
one person at a time, day by day.

---

Famous to the tribe
Fame breeds trust, at least in our culture.
Everyone is famous to fifteen hundred people.
Some people are even famous to three thousand.
And that’s a fascinating new phenomenon. When there are three
thousand or ten thousand or five hundred thousand people who think you’re
famous . . . it changes things. Not simply because they’ve heard of you, but
because people they trust have heard of you as well.
If you’re a business consultant, a designer, or an inventor, being famous
to the right three thousand people is plenty.
The goal isn’t to maximize your social media numbers. The goal is to be
known to the smallest viable audience.
Public relations and publicity
Usually, marketers seek publicity. They want clips. Write-ups. Features.
Getting the word out. If you hire a public relations firm, it’s more likely that
you’re hiring a publicist.
And good publicity is great if you can get it—why not?
But what you probably need more than publicity is public relations.
Public relations is the art of telling your story to the right people in the
right way. It willingly turns its back on publicity that seeks ink at all costs
(“As long as they spell my name right”) in exchange for the marketer’s
reliance on building an engine for an idea.
The race to be slightly famous is on, and it’s being fueled by the social
and tribal connections permitted by the internet. We give a lot of faith and
credit to the famous, but now there are a lot more of them. Over time, once
everyone is famous, that will fade, but right now, the trust and benefit of the
doubt we accord the famous is quite valuable.

---