I applied for a job last night with the following text in an email. The job was offered by Six Foot Chipmunk to do community organizing for the film Inequality for All. Hi Steph, I am so close to being your perfect candidate for this position, except that I don’t really want it. Wait. That may be the wrong way to start this email. Let me start over. Hi Steph, I’m so close to being the perfect candidate for this position. Since I am an overachiever in three of the six Minimum Qualifications and I’m a huge fan of Robert Reich, I have an even better idea to offer you. I would be so willing to help you with your digital presence online for this effort. If you look at my ABOUT page and my Resume, you’ll see I’m way over-qualified to accomplish this and even more. In fact, believe it or not (and it will be even more difficult to believe while reading this email) I get paid a ridiculous amount of money as a writer. This is due to some weird crack in the cosmic order, I’m sure, but nevertheless, it behooves me to exploit that sh*t until I retire, which may be a very long time according to Professor Reich. If you’ve gotten this far without hitting Delete, I can only add that I’m sincerely interested in helping get the word out about the film and would work for minimum wage to do it. Not the real minimum wage, because no one can live on that. I mean the wage that you offered in the job listing. Only for writing instead of community organizing, which, as you by now realize, would be a disaster to have me doing. If this sounds at all fun to you and didn’t give you a headache, I look forward to hearing from you. Most sincerely, Brian It’s true that I really don’t want the job they were offering because I’m now the World’s First Certified Me-Lancer. But I’d had a couple of beers and at the time it seemed like a really good idea to just ask for the job I wanted. And I figured that a company named Six Foot Chipmunk would understand and not judge. Here was Steph’s reply: Brian, Thanks for the early morning chuckle. Alas, we only have the funds to hire community organizers. I hope you’ll turn out a huge group for our opening night in Seattle on 9/27! I think we’ll be at the Harvard Exit. Cheers, Steph...
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What the hell, WordPress?…oh…I was about to curse WordPress, which actually I did already. I thought it was balking on adding “Random Shit” as a category for blog posts. I’m offended that WordPress would even consider doing this but apparently it was spinning CPU cycles because it took perhaps five or ten seconds to add the category. But I digress and I haven’t even progressed far enough to justify a digression. Except maybe now. I’ve decided I’m going to call talk to my money dude about getting some of my retirement savings. I’m not old enough to retire but that money is not really helping me right now. I mostly want to get it now because I want to take on less freelance work so I can take on more me-lance work. In other words writing my own books. NOTE TO THE WEBS (my affectionate nickname for the Web): I hereby claim ME-LANCE™ a certified original word invented by me on this day, in the year of our Lord, August 30, 2013 at the site of the landing of the Her Majesty’s ship, Cliteracy, witnessed by the noble savages found upon these shores (which live entirely in my head in a post-racial America that could only exist in someone’s head). I am, ever yours, the first ME-LANCER™ in the history of history, and ever more shall be, Kingdom until end, amen. (As a side note, Amen was an Egyptian deity, known as the “hidden one” or the king of the gods.) I’ve got one nearly complete and it’s a doozy (Book! Keep up, will you?). The world will be shocked and empires will collapse. But not if they follow the 16 rules in my new book. The Dalai Lama has already promised to canonize me, which he can’t even do that shit but, for me, oh yeah. So I got that going for me. Speaking of books, I read THE FUNNIEST BOOK IN THE HISTORY OF THE PRINTING PRESS this week. It’s the only book I can ever remember making me laugh uncontrollably out loud in public places. I have a high bar for humor. I have a high bar for chinups too and they both make me stronger. The book is this one: If you don’t read Jenny Lawson’s blog, The Bloggess, drop what you’re doing right now and go read it! And then click the link above and buy her damn book, Let’s Just Pretend This Never Happened. I’m not arguing with you about this. You can thank me later while you’re chortling over your iced grande latte with light ice and two Splenda. Sort of sad non-sequitur...
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I’m always astonished to talk to business owners who really don’t know who they’re selling to. You know a business is off track when, in response to a question about who their customers are, they respond, “Pretty much everyone.” If you think your customer base is everyone, you’re unlikely to reach anyone in numbers that matter. Likewise, if you sell a product with tons of features and benefits but don’t segment your audience into interest groups, your marketing will be off target. Let’s say you’re running an airline and you haven’t segmented your audience to the point where you can see that the bulk of your revenue comes from weekday business travelers (I don’t even have an airline and I know this much, and don’t call me Shirley). If you proceed to spend lots of marketing efforts on promoting your great weekend fares, your main meal ticket is not going to be interested. They’ll look to someone else to fill their need who speaks their language and differentiates their offering based on something that matters to the business traveler. I was in a meeting today with a vendor to a large company. They were trying to describe a project they’re bidding on for Large Company but it was clear that Large Company was entirely unclear as to who their target audience really is. The deliverable is a set of documents for Large Company’s sales team. After listening and asking some questions, I said that for me to be able to help them, I needed to know a few things. Who is the intended audience? Who is the competitor for this product suite? What differentiates this product from the competitor? I’m not saying that these questions are easy to answer. But they’re the point from which the discussion must begin. In this case, it turns out there are multiple audiences. You can’t pitch the benefits of a highly-technical feature to the C-Suite occupants that may be the right benefit to pitch to the person operating the system once it’s installed. You have to know who the audience is. Since this product, like airline flights, is something that is not unique, there has to be something that differentiates it from competitors or else why would anyone care? It either has to differentiate on price or benefits; there is nothing else. I remember asking a web design company owner who their company’s competition was. He answered, “Really, no one.” Think about this. Every time someone does a search for “web design companies,” there are nine other competitors on the search-results page before the searcher ever sees a logo or a page design. If...
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