POWER OF FREE! #7: Disrupt, disrupt in Intelligent Content Marketing: Destructive Disruption

I’m going to talk about creative disruption, and talk about creative destruction. I’m going to talk about how we determine that in building our business model, we needed to really do something different.

 

At the same time, shake up the profession, shake up our industry. And the journey this evening is going to conclude with me explaining to you exactly how we went about doing this. And in a sense, what our next trick is, which I’m announcing for the camera tonight. But it’ll be three or four months before we actually make our next trick, and it presents itself on the internet. But I just wanted to for posterity to get it down. And let’s say to everybody today, what it is that we’re going to do, so there’ll be no surprises later on. So I think what I need to do is kind of just very quickly go through the first six parts of the presentation thus far, that leads us to where we are today. And hopefully, sort of, you know, if you’re here for the first time, there’s no one or two of you are, it sort of sets the scene for what’s about to happen.

First of all, I talked about the connection economy. And what I meant by this was that, you know, the world is changing, we moved from an industrial era to an era that’s based on connections as a result of 24 seven technology. And as a result of connections, we’re able to get back to what’s really important about life. And that’s the relationships that we have with others. So after talking about the connection economy, I explained that if you are in a position to take advantage of a particular expertise that you may have, and of course, everybody is an expert in something are particularly good at one thing. But if you have the ability to understand what your expertise is, and then parlay that expertise into this machine that is the recipient of all these connections, it’s called the internet, then by parlaying that expertise, effectively everybody’s got an interest in your subject matter is going to organize themselves around you. And once they organize themselves around you, you have an understanding of what it is that’s represents the real value that you have in that relationship.

And as a result of that, you’re able to develop a business and a service proposition around a complete understanding of how your market ticks, because you’re selling them what it is that they really need to buy. And because you’re trying to persuade people, that what you have is of merit, you really got to think about how you can get their attention. And by doing what I’ve done, which is to build a purple cow in respect of our business and our service model, by definition, the experience that people have with you and your brand, and your presence on the internet, essentially, makes you remarkable. And when you tie into the remarkable nature of your proposition, something called an idea of Iris, which is reflected in Hong Kong, Visa Giza, for us, it becomes possible for people to propagate essentially your proposition, both in an online environment and also in an offline environment. So having dealt with the, the purple cow piece, I then went on to talk about understanding, really at the very, very deepest DNA, your marketplace. And I explained that if you can truly put yourself in the position of the fighter that you wish to have a relationship with and understand what the psycho emotional dynamics of that relationship are, you can then build a service or a business proposition that makes it essentially seamless or frictionless who people to transact with you.

So it becomes vitally important to understand exactly how your market posture or how your market is positioned in relation to what it is that you have on offer, and then deconstruct all the friction points. So that when it comes to actually having that relationship with that person, there’s nothing getting in the way of progress actually occurring. So that was all about feeling the market. And then I talks about, really the old chestnut of internet businesses, which is this thing called s. e. o, which immediately conjures up people’s ideas in people’s minds about guys with propellers in their heads. And I explained that actually, you can throw all that nonsense out of the window. Because if you understand what the search engines are really all about is they’re looking for the best content In your particular niche, and if you can position your content in such a high quality way, and use normal language ways to describe what that content is all about, essentially, when people come looking for that material, they will eventually just type in an actual question into the search engine pages.

And lo and behold, because your content is structured in a way that it answers questions in a natural fashion, essentially, you you get delivered up on people can access your content. But if you continue to do this in your nice continuously, continuously, effectively, people who might want to compete with you decide that they’re going to see that ground. And your your act of continuing to publish means that over time you map the total Knowledge Graph in relation to your niche, so that when anybody eventually typed in a string of words in English, or whatever language it is, that you’re transacting in, essentially, you’ll always deliver content against that search string. And it will mean that you’ll always be at the forefront of people’s minds. And so the tribe will continue to build. And so natural SEO is really a function of understanding how people are going to be looking for things in the future. And making sure the content that you develop today not only answers questions, and helps people solve their problems, but it also answers to the questions that people are naturally asking to try and access that material. And then last time out, I talked about having a story.

And explaining that if you want to have a relationship with somebody, essentially, you have to empower them to know so that they can know who you are, warts and all. And I also explained that the reason why stories resonate with us as humans is because intellectually we think about things in a in a systematic fashion, the way that we conduct our lives in voluntarily, it’s all a series of, of events, sequences of little things that we have to do in the way that we live our lives, so that when people recite their stories to us, it resonates with us, we’re ready to receive it. And if your story is told in an honest, authentic, and transparent fashion, then you again, you remove all the obstacles from people having a relationship with you. So those are the kind of you know, the six constructs of really my business story today. So now I’m going to talk about how we came about disrupting our marketplace.

Now, creative disruption, is really just a subspecies of creative destruction. And Schumpeter is an Austrian American economist, last century, came up with this idea that all industrial economies are in a constant state of flux, that a business or an industry is never standing still, because new technologies are always being introduced. And in time, what was a standard way of doing things incrementally ceases to be, and then you have a new standard way of doing things. And that process of ever sort of changing standard processes is really descriptive of creative destruction in an industrial economy. And so, we have been going through this process, literally, since we moved from the agrarian age, to where we are today, certainly things in the last 30 years have sped up because of the internet. But we’ve we’ve effectively it arrived at a transition point. And the trick is to understand exactly where we are in that transition point and realize the profound nature of it.

And if you do that, if you grasp that, and ethlend It’s a lesson that I learned three or four years ago, then you can really build something before anybody else and really steal a march on your, on your competition. So Schumpeter, talks about creative destruction. Think a Harvard professor came up with this concept of creative disruption. And once well, while an economy is creatively disrupting itself constantly, sort of nested inside that is this sort of act, where existing industries or service spaces or areas of economic interests or activity, they they are pervading. They have resulted in, you know, one or two really big players that sort of own everything by the smaller pieces, either on a geographical basis or on a on a subspecies of context basis. Essentially, you get a market situation where it’s almost in possible to really compete with the big players on their terms.

And then Clayton’s and talks about the gifts examples about the microcomputer industry, and also the steel industry. And what he says this, he says, you know, when there are incumbent players in a particular industry or market sector, and a new players come in, and they introduce new technologies, the response of the big market players is to say, well, they’re actually going for what is really low, low margin, low value section of our market, we’re much, we’re much we much prefer to, to concentrate on the bigger profit, the bigger end of the market, so we’ll see the ground, and less, we don’t have to worry about them, and eventually might buy them if they become important. So but but we’ll see the ground. And this, this notion of creative disruption actually does give you an opportunity to look at any particular marketplace and say to yourself, well, what’s that piece of the existing market that I can use my expertise in, and go after. And, and that’s what really creative disruption is all about.

And once I kind of understood that, this was how it all played, I could really start thinking about what was going on in the sort of creatively disruptive world. And the major it’s, for me, the milestone products that represented the pinnacle of creative disruption in the modern era was the iPod, when they could say 1000 songs in your pocket. I mean, I come from a generation where, when I was 17, or 18 years of age, the Walkman was was all the rage. And I can assure you that was a breakthrough product that was astonishing. But it was a tech right, you only carry so many tapes with you. And then we move to these these spinning disc things which were marginally better. And then we got to, you know, the idea of mp3 ease and small mp3 players and what have you. But finally, Apple came up and said, Well, what is this proposition, this proposition is 1000 songs in your pocket.

And that then essentially changed the way that music was going to be distributed forever. And then, in the more modern era, we’re starting to see companies that have kind of cracked this nut, they’ve gone through really big market spaces, and they’ve decided that they can creatively disrupt, because they’ve got access to the resources, they understand how the technology can be worked. And essentially, these things are just gonna plug into that machine called the internet. And they will have a dominant market position. And you know, the obvious examples, the one that I cite here that everybody’s familiar with, but I’m really grateful to Thomas fine, because he says this, and I’ll read it, okay. The distinction, the one that people constantly Miss Is that real disruption is almost in possible to see unless until it’s too late, because the technology of business is so different from what already exists.

Now, that’s brilliant, because it means that you can look at any market space and you can say, Do I know that market space well enough to anticipate what the future might look like, and then come up with something that is so left field, that by the time I’ve delivered on that the proposition is so compelling, people are going to want to do it this way, they’re not going to want to do it the old way. And unless he says telesign says it’s not used as some spectacular new technique. It’s often a small and underpowered alternative. And that’s what makes it so dangerous. And fascinating. I was almost broke four years ago. And this is another amazing result. For me, I didn’t understand what it was going to lead to. But as you’ll see, we’ve arrived at a point now where, you know, the kind of excitement that exists in really big companies like these were very small, right? But we’ve got the same buzz about us because we know things are just changing.

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