Guy Kawasaki: The Catalyst for Good

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Many of us think of Guy Kawasaki as the master of evangelism marketing, but he actually answers to a higher calling: to inspire you and me to be better people. Guy Kawasaki is what I call a market maker. Market makers are not satisfied with simply selling products and services more effectively. They think like artists and aspire to change the way people think, act, and believe.

Guy Kawasaki influenced others by teaching everyday people how to become marketers. And now he’s emerged as a Stephen Covey for the digital era by showing us how your personal values influence your professional success. Today’s re-introduction of Guy Kawasaki completes a recently launched blog series that profiles four famous market makers (including Steve Jobs, Body Shop Founder Anita Roddick, and Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun) who formed the foundation of my recently published point of view, How to Be a Market Maker. I hope you are inspired to act like a market maker, too.

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If you’ve ever Liked a Facebook page to support a brand, contributed to a program like My Starbucks Idea, or given a shout-out to your favorite restaurant on Yelp out of your sheer love for the place, you’re practicing the kind of consumer evangelism that Kawasaki helped popularize.

Kawasaki cut his teeth in the business world at a jewelry company “counting diamonds and schlepping gold jewelry around the world,” as he told the New York Times. In the jewelry industry, he learned how to sell and “how to take care of your customers.” He would really make his mark from 1983 to 1987 when he joined Apple as a software evangelist for the Macintosh computer, a role that entailed him convincing companies to write software for Mac products and to convince others to start using Macs.

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His mandate from Steve Jobs was, “Get me the best collection of software in the personal computer business,” as he would write in Selling the Dream: How to Promote Your Product, Company, or Ideas — and Make a Difference — Using Everyday Evangelism in 1991. After Apple introduced the Macintosh via an iconic Super Bowl ad in January 1984, “Initially many people condemned Macintosh and Apple as losers,” he wrote. “Macintosh didn’t have software. It was cute and easy to use but flaccid. It was a joke computer from a joke company.” Kawasaki’s job (and that of the evangelists who preceded him) was to popularize the Macintosh. Here’s how he did it:

The software evangelists did more than convince developers to write Macintosh software. They sold the Macintosh Dream. The software developers who bought into the Dream (and only some did) created products that changed Macintosh’s principal weakness — a lack of software — into its greatest strength — the best collection of software for any personal computer.

When IBM attempted to unseat Apple with its PCjr personal computer, IBM failed miserably.  According to Kawasaki, IBM failed because it sold a product, whereas Apple “evangelized a dream of improving people’s productivity and creativity.”

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Kawasaki is the first to tell you that he did not create the title of marketing evangelist. (The title existed before he joined Apple.) But he certainly defined evangelism through practical application, and in doing so he learned the difference between evangelism and sales. He would later make the distinction this way: “Sales is rooted in what’s good for me. Evangelism is rooted in what’s good for you.” And Apple’s success, rooted in a loyal following among passionate user groups, was a testament to his work.

Kawasaki became a public figure after he started teaching others about the art of evangelism by speaking, and writing best-selling books such as the aforementioned Selling the Dream, in which he put a stake in the ground by defining evangelism in ambitious terms:

Evangelism is the process of convincing people to believe in your product or idea as much as you do. It means selling your dream by using fervor, zeal, guts, and cunning.

He was an early adopter of digital, using his popular blog, How to Change the World, as a launching pad to build a brand via social media.

Throughout his career, Kawasaki has epitomized the role of idea curator. As a founding member of Garage Ventures, he’s seeded start-ups. He launched Alltop, an online newsstand that curates best social media and news on the web. If idea curators are “the new superheros of the Web” in the words of Fast Company, then surely he’s the first of the great superheroes. Here’s how he describes his role in his ebook, What the Plus: Google+ for the Rest of Us:

By necessity I became a curator, which means that I find good stuff and point people to it. Curating is a valuable skill because there is an abundance of good content but many people don’t have the time to find it. The best curators find things before anyone else does.

He applies what he calls “the NPR model” when he acts as curator. “My role is to curate good stories that entertain, enlighten, and inspire people 365 days a year,” he writes in a May 13 guest blog post for HubSpot (a post that demonstrates Kawasaki’s astonishing penchant for helping people by sharing valuable information and asking nothing in return). “My goal is to earn the right to promote my books, companies, or causes to them just as NPR earns the right to run fundraising telethons from time to time.”

This is not to say that as a curator, Kawasaki lacks a personal vision. In his book Enchantment, he articulates a clear vision for how marketers can build enduring relationships through our personal values and behavior. As I wrote when I reviewed Enchantment in 2011, Kawasaki wants marketers and entrepreneurs to aspire for something more ambitious: changing the world one person at a time through behavioral attributes such as trustworthiness and likability. In other words, being an evangelist starts with building personal trust and treating other people with respect. Focus on values and the great marketing and communication skills will follow. For instance, communicating with clarity and brevity is not just good marketing but also reflects deeper values of respecting other people and their time.

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In Enchantment he writes, “This book is for people who see life for what it can be rather than what it can’t. They are bringing to market a cause – that is, a product, service, organization, or idea – that can make the world a better place. They realize that in a world of mass media, social media, and advertising media, it takes more than instant, shallow, and temporary relationships to get the job done.”

Kawasaki’s appeal to personal behavior influences his two most recent books What the Plus and APE: How to Publish a Book.

What the Plus is ostensibly an in-depth look at the Google Plus social media platform, and to be sure, the book offers plenty of practical tips about utilizing the social media platform for sharing content, especially through visual storytelling. But when you read What the Plus carefully, you find a manifesto for acting with good behavior in the digital world revealing itself.  For instance, repeatedly, Kawasaki urges people to treat their social sites as their homes and respect the sites of others as well.

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“Stay positive. Stay uplifting. Or stay silent,” he writes. Don’t act like a troll when you comment on someone else’s social space. And don’t tolerate jerky behavior on yours, either. “Remember: you’re a guest in someone’s home,” he writes. “Show some class.”

Elsewhere he asserts, “Your posts are like your swimming pool. You can do anything that you want. If you don’t like profanity, delete. If you don’t like bigotry, delete. If you don’t like sexism, delete. The goal is building and maintaining an enchanting presence – not exemplifying free speech.”

APE, published in December 2012, is a guide to self-publishing, and as you might expect, the book contains in-depth tips for how to write, edit, design, and market a book. But whereas some pundits might focus on the mechanics of self-publishing and marketing, Kawasaki also discusses the importance of an author’s personal behavior as a factor in helping a book succeed. In a chapter that describes how to build a personal brand, he and co-author Shawn Welch write, “Likeability is the second pillar of a personal brand. Jerks seldom build great brands.”

He goes on to write, “If you want people to like you, you have to like them first. This means accepting people no matter their race, creed, net worth, religion, gender, politics, sexual orientation, or your perception of their level of intelligence. It means not imposing your values on others.”

And true to his role as catalyst, he has launched a Google+ community, APE, for writers to share best practices and ideas for becoming successful publishers and entrepreneurs. So far the APE community has 2,200 members who have agreed to live by the rules of the road: help members learn how to write, publish, and market a book. Promoting your own services and book will earn you a ban from the community.

Kawasaki is like a Trojan Horse: you read his ideas expecting to become a better marketer, and then he slips in thoughtful advice about how to be a better person — typically by sharing and being gracious. He does so with credibility because he links personal likeability and values to successful marketing.

My research into the lives of market makers like Guy Kawasaki reveals that these extraordinary people are willing to take risks, surround themselves with talent, possess passion in abundance, and live full, eclectic lives. Guy Kawasaki definitely exemplifies the trait of surrounding oneself with talent. Consider Enchantment: in each chapter, he invites guest authors to provide their own personal stories of enchanted marketing, which makes his book more collaborative and genuine. Similarly, What the Plus! relies on guest authors for some key chapters.

And according to his HubSpot guest post, he takes the same collaborative approach managing his social spaces. For instance, Peg Fitzpatrick manages his Pinterest page. Why? “There are two reasons,” he writes. “First, I don’t have enough time to do a good job with more than three services (my priority, in order, is Google+, then Twitter, then Facebook). Second, I don’t have Peg’s magic sauce to manage Pinterest as well as the Pinterest community deserves. Part of doing social media well is knowing what you don’t know and what you can’t do well, and then finding someone who does.”

Similarly, Steve Jobs was surrounded by enormous talent, people who became famous in their own right — superstars like John Lasseter at Pixar, Jonathan Ive at Apple, and Guy Kawasaki himself. Atlantic Records succeeded not because of Ahmet Ertegun alone, but because of Ertegun and visionaries like Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, and Herb Abramson. Anita Roddick might have been the face of the Body Shop, but the brand would not have succeeded without the talents of its anonymous network of franchise operators.

His approach of collaborating with others and inspiring us to become better people is rubbing off on other prominent leaders. Porter Gale, the former CMO of Virgin America and now a thought leader and marketing consultant, embraces the ethos of Enchantment in her new book, Your Network Is Your Net Worth. As I wrote in a May 13 post, Gale’s book argues the case for building networks with other people to enrich the world, not to be a career opportunist.

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“A key to unlocking the hidden power of connections is helping others when you don’t expect anything in return,” she writes, using words that would do Kawasaki proud (he contributes a foreword to the book). Your Network Is Your Net Worth, being published on June 4, relies on several examples of successful people who build their happiness quotient — for themselves and for others — by giving.

By celebrating and promoting the talents of those around him, Guy Kawasaki is an evangelist in more ways than one.

Queen of My Soul

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Music, sweet music. You’re the queen of my soul.

Those words come from a soaring Average White Band song, “Queen of My Soul.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that song during a week defined by my love of music. On Tuesday, a popular Pink Floyd news resource, Brain Damage, published an interview with me about how music has intersected with my professional and personal lives. (Befitting the focus of the website, the Q&A included lots of discussion about Pink Floyd.) The next day, I hosted a Social Media Week New York conversation onstage with musician Daria Musk and Google’s Caroline McCarthy regarding how Musk has relied on the Google Plus social media site to launch her career. Being interviewed and then being the interviewer was rewarding. Both experiences affirmed the role of music in shaping my life.

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Me, Daria Musk, and Caroline McCarthy

The Brain Damage interview was highly personal. I discussed how the music of Pink Floyd got me through hard times in life and bonded me with my brother one memorable summer. I fairly gushed about my love of Pink Floyd for aspiring to create art. My interviewer, Eduardo J. Lopez-Reyes, asked me why some people form a close bond with music, while others do not. I answered, “Listening to music is like dating: you can enjoy it at a casual and superficial level until someone comes along who changes your life. When you connect with someone else at a personal level, you form a relationship that matures as you experience whatever life throws at you.”

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Do you know what I mean? If you don’t, I feel sorry for you.

Our conversation also veered into the territory of social media. I was asked whether album-oriented artists like Pink Floyd could make it today. I replied, “Digital gives emerging artists a chance to share album-length music through performance . . . For instance, musicians such as Daria Musk and Pomplamoose are using social media platforms and services like Google+ Hangouts and StageIt to perform global concerts on shoestring budgets. Social media also gives artists ways to connect with fans more personally.”

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Musk told her own story of social media success on February 20. In the Hearst Tower, Musk, McCarthy, and I pulled off a first for Social Media Week: we held a panel discussion about how Google Plus has helped Musk find her audience, conducted a live Google+ Hangout with a global audience (projected on a giant screen behind us), and injected music through a performance by Musk and her bandmate RAM Rich.

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Musk recounted how she began writing songs as a child, found her voice as a musician, and then found her audience through social media after banging her head against a wall playing dives. Google Plus, the 500-million-member network launched by Google in 2011, gave her a platform to play her songs through marathon concerts performed through the Google Hangout feature (the equivalent of Skype for people on Google Plus). Her concerts attracted a global audience of more than 2 million fans in countries ranging from Croatia to Sri Lanka. And as she explained during our conversation, she’s been monetizing social media through corporate sponsorships with brands such as Verizon.

Some artists have built brands on social. Others have launched new music. Musk has made a career.

But as interesting as the discussion about social media was, what struck me most about her was her obvious passion for music. That love for song was evident as we prepared for our appearance. Her sound check the night before was became something of a mini-concert, as she and RAM Rich played with energy and soul for an audience consisting of me and a few audio technicians who were fine-tuning the acoustics in the theater. You would have thought she was playing the audition of her life as she let her vocals soar and her guitar sing.

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Her performance the next day was a natural extension of the song she sings every day. She could not even have a conversation with me without bursting into song occasionally, as the Livestream of our conversation shows.

Music is a way of life for Daria Musk. And music flows through me like blood.

Guy Kawasaki’s golden rules

How well I remember being invited to participate in the newly launched Google+ in the summer of 2011. Right off the bat, Google Plus seemed different from Facebook. Its clean layout encouraged posting more long-form content and graphics. Its membership included luminaries like Guy Kawasaki and Chris Brogan. If Facebook was the biggest network in the world, Google+ was the coolest. Less than one year later, Google Plus has grown to 90 million members and still feels like a more forward-thinking network than Facebook. Facebook now looks a Google Plus follower, introducing features like Timeline and video chat features in response to the robust graphics and video functions of Google Plus. Guy Kawasaki’s new book, What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us, provides an in-depth tour of the many Google Plus features that have made the platform so appealing to brands and individuals. On the iCrossing Great Finds blog, I discuss Guy’s new book. I read What the Plus! expecting to learn how to maximize the value of Google+, but I ended up finding broader meaning in Guy’s book. In advising people how to use Google Plus, Guy has articulated some new ground rules for prospering in the social era: think visually, be a content hustler, and treat social spaces like prized real estate — in other words, safeguard your own social turf (including your Google Plus page) and respect the social spaces you visit.

The best part about Guy’s book? His appeal for people to treat others as you’d have them treat you – and his frank advice to kick out jerks who invade your social turf and behave poorly. Let someone else be the arbiter of free speech while you focus on protecting your own brand.

Let me know what you think of What the Plus!

Google disrupts with Google Search Plus

Google’s launch of the awkwardly named “Search, plus Your World” has the web buzzing with commentary. Blogger John Jantsch believes Google is “shaking things up a bit” by making search a more personal experience. Twitter says Google Search Plus (as “Search, plus Your World” is quickly becoming known) is “bad for people” — an uptight reaction that actually legitimizes what Google is doing. And in a newly published blog post, my iCrossing colleague Nick Roshon offers tips for how brands can benefit from Google Search Plus. In his post, Nick asserts that Google Search Plus is a major overhaul that makes search more personal and social.

“For brands, it is now more critical than ever to pay attention to the intersection of search and social and cultivate an active social following, particularly on Google+,” he writes. “Your social prominence can make or break your visibility in the new Google Search Plus results.”

So what’s a marketer to do about Google Search Plus? Nick articulates seven steps you should take now, ranging from getting active on Google+ to cultivating share-worthy content.

For example, he writes, “Being active on Google+ will provide increased visibility for your brand, both on Google+ as well as the content on your website that you share on your Google+ page.”

We should not be surprised that Google continues to find ways to synthesize search and social — with Google at the center of the experience. Thought leaders such as David Armano and my colleague Alisa Leonard have contended that Google is creating a social data layer across paid, earned, and owned media, giving brands new ways to connect with consumers via rich content on platforms ranging from YouTube to Google+.

Are you on Google+? Is your brand? If not, why not? If so, how has your experience been so far?

Hanging out with the Black Eyed Peas

Well, I did not exactly hang out with will.i.am and the Black Eyed Peas – just with the scores of fans who responded to will.i.am’s open invitation to participate in a Black Eyed Peas Google+ Hangout at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time before a September 30 show at Central Park. The experience promised to give fans backstage access to the Black Eyed Peas through the power of the Google Plus Hangouts feature (through which people can schedule the equivalent of video chats with their Google Plus friends). After the Hangout, you could witness the actual concert through a webcam onstage. The September 30 Black Eyed Peas Hangout, although imperfect, was an intriguing approach to using technology to build brand in the entertainment world.

As will.i.am commented during the Hangout (which I watched on a YouTube replay), “I don’t think anybody has had a one-to-many webcam interactive experience like this with fans before and during a show.”

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Why Amazon and Netflix don’t always know best

It’s far too easy to allow ourselves to be led around by the nose.

Amazon tells us what to buy. Netflix and Pandora suggest movies and music based on our tastes. Facebook and Google+ suggest friends to us. Twitter tells us whom to follow.

But those tools reinforce what we know already. They broaden our horizons only incrementally.

To make a creative and intellectual breakthrough that forces you to grow, I believe it’s important to find moments of serendipity – when you stumble on new ideas that seemingly lack any immediate application to your life. You won’t find those moments by allowing others to curate your life for you.

Here are a few examples of how I’ve tried to spark moments of serendipity:

1. Getting immersed in a different setting

For most of my life, I was not interested in medieval history. So I had low expectations when I joined my family on my first visit to the Bristol Renaissance Faire a few years ago. The faire re-creates the town of Bristol, England, in the year 1574, complete with period costumes, jugglers, minstrel entertainers, and a visit from the Queen of England. And as I’ve mentioned on my blog, the faire enchanted me on my first visit.

It’s not just the passion and spirit of the fairgoers that attracts me – it’s those moments of personal serendipity that occur on so many visits. Recently, by complete chance, I discovered a band known as the New Minstrel Revue, who opened my mind to the gentle and beautiful sounds of Celtic folk.

One of my favorite things to do at the faire is to walk into the Compass Rose music shop and buy whatever the store is playing at the time. It’s a total hit-and-miss proposition that has introduced me to new music I might not have heard otherwise – such as Sacred and Secular music from Renaissance Germany (a selection that I doubt Pandora would have suggested based on my musical interests).

This year I happened to be walking through the dusty Bristol streets and heard a strange, beautiful drone-like guitar sound. By simply following the siren call of the music, I discovered the Darbuki Kings playing bouzouki and drums with a belly dancer. Even better, Antone Darbuki took the time to show me how he strums an exotic sound with an open G tuning on his bouzouki strings.

I had heard of the bouzouki — but I had no appreciation for what a bouzouki could do until this chance encounter at Bristol.

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We are all content hustlers

It’s ironic Google+ allowed the digital elites such as Chris Brogan early access to Google+ while asking corporations to hold off creating brand profiles. Just about everyone I know on Google+ (including me) uses the social platform to hustle their own content as well as any corporation could.

We are all content hustlers now. In fact, it’s the proliferation of platforms like Google+ and check-in sites like GetGlue that continues to transform everyday consumers into marketers of our own content.

You check into GetGlue on a Friday night to watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and the next thing you know, someone responds to your check-in by asking for your opinion, and then you write a mini review in reply. In a matter of minutes, you become both moviegoer and amateur critic.

Case in point: yesterday morning, I needed to do some quick online research to find a business and its street address. I visited Google to do a simple search. Immediately I encountered a Google Doodle that cleverly honored Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday by playing snippets of I Love Lucy via the image of an old-style console TV. How cool! I just had to share the Google Doodle with my friends.

But sharing wasn’t enough: I needed to add my own opinion (my contribution to your content stream) about how the Google Doodle brilliantly synthesized utility and entertainment. Within minutes, I posted a CBS News article about the doodle, plus a brief comment on my Facebook, Global 14, and Google+ content streams. I also wrote the obligatory tweet.

And I wasn’t even working up a sweat – or tapping into the many other platforms I could have used to spread my content (however brief it was) across the digital world.

Within minutes, my mindset had changed from searcher of information to publisher. And then I did what any good content publisher does: checked my metrics. Did I get any retweets? Facebook Likes? +1s? Had I found a responsive audience for the content I was hustling?

A few take-aways:

  • A Google search became an exercise in content publishing. But I also forgot to complete my original Google search, ironically. The content publisher lurking inside me was competing with the simple reality of getting on with my life.
  • Although access to social media sites makes it easier for us to hustle content, not all the content we create is worth hustling. As guitarist Jack White said in the documentary It Might Get Loud, ease of use does not make us more creative.

Yes, we are all content hustlers. But just because we can does not mean we should. Fortunately we can block and manage content, too, by paring our friend lists and curating our information streams (e.g., with Google+ Circles), although doing so is not always as easy as it looks. I’ll let you judge whether I’m hustling content you care about.