(this article and others can also be read on the Branson Powers Marketing/Innovation Blog)

Once you look beyond the excitement of new applications, web sites and the obscene fortunes made by the likes of Facebook and others, good social media comes down to a simple idea:  the care and feeding of your network.  Whether they are aware of it or not, every person, organization, and business has a network of allies, supporters, interested parties, suppliers, investors and customers.  When optimized, those networks can be loyal, friendly and useful, just like a faithful companion.  But if they are not taken care of they can become a hostile or, at best, an indifferent Beast.  For those who want to make that network thrive and work for them the new platforms and applications of social media stand ready to help, but they are only tools. Using social media takes more than good tools; it requires specific behaviors and processes. 

In 1938, Evelyn Waugh published a satire of the business of journalism titled “Scoop”,  where a fictional newspaper was called “The Daily Beast” – interestingly made non-fiction in 2008 when Tina Brown and Barry Diller started their on-line “newspaper” named in its honor.  It is, perhaps, the most appropriate analogue for the news business:  a great hungry beast that has to be fed with fresh content every day.  It’s also a powerful metaphor for social media and the networks we all have to nurture.

In recent articles, I’ve discussed the challenges defining your network (see Define the Beast) of feeding your network a regular, nutritious and provocative diet of high value content, (see Satisfy the Beast, Junk Food or Health Food and Feed the Beast: The Social Media Marketer’s Challenge), creating an environment of trust where relationships can grow and sales occur, (See Trust and the Beast: How to Sell with Social Media), and serving the needs of the Beast, (See Serve the Beast). But how do you get the Beast to pay attention to you in the first place?

Try a little experiment.  The next time you speak with a salesperson, ask them to tell you their differentiators.  Most likely, s/he will point out how the products/services cost slightly less, maybe they treat their customers slightly better or perhaps they just try harder than the competition.  There are several variations on the theme, but most of the time, differentiators can be boiled down to the following statement:  “We’re the same, but better”. 

Once the salesperson has described the differentiators, in the nicest possible way, ask them the following question:

“…but what makes you different?”

Without realizing it, most people have shifted the definition of the word “differentiate” close to the definition of conformity. There are good reasons to do so. Most professionals – especially those who have taken a business class or two – understand the imperative to differentiate products and services, but the risk of being different, and perhaps wrong, can outweigh the benefit.  After all, few people lose their jobs when they pursue the same successful strategies as others. It saves considerable time and resources to find out what others do – then adapt it.  The pursuit of “best practices” might lead to commoditization, but in the immediate term, one is less likely to look foolish if difference is avoided.

This strategic rationale for pursuing “best practices” in business clearly applies to communications as well, where it is prudent to reiterate conventional wisdom and to make statements that have already been proven by others. Sometimes, of course, conventional wisdom is wrong, but no one can be criticized for repeating what everyone else is saying. Put simply, sameness can protect you from the risk of ridicule. 

There is a problem with sameness however: the more you sound the same, the less reason people have to listen to you in the first place.  To get people to pay attention – to buy your ideas, your services or your products – you have to say something different, sound different, reveal difference, and ultimately be different.  Conformity is an excellent approach to blend in and avoid mistakes, but it does not draw attention to your ideas or your products. Why pay attention if there’s nothing new to learn, no new insight or unique perspective? 

Successful entertainers are often masters of differentiation – their audiences pay attention to them, not just because of their musical or theatrical skills, but also because of their uniqueness. The very best make very clear to their audiences how they are not like everyone else. Politicians, though they pretend to be like everyone else, are more likely to get elected if they can communicate difference.  New ideas, new approaches, new styles of leadership are carefully developed and discussed throughout elections. When the candidates are unable to differentiate themselves from each other, it’s also very difficult for them to gain a majority of the vote.

Businesses, especially those who rise to the top of their markets, also depend heavily on difference.  Apple Computers, for example, does everything they can to communicate difference – from their products, to their stores, to their leadership.  They have even said, “think different” in their advertising.  Every time they demonstrate how different they are, new investors, influencers and customers look at what are essentially computers, music players and telephones as if for the first time.  As familiar as those products are to everyone in the western world – by approaching them differently, Apple is able to gather interest, enthusiasm, and new loyal customers.

How can you be different?

Despite the risks of standing out, it is well worth doing so. Fortunately, it isn’t hard to be different, but it does take a slight rethinking of how one prepares communication. Typically, when constructing a thesis, most people will try to explain everything they know about a subject.  That approach has a couple of limitations.  To begin with, it is incredibly difficult to explain everything you know in less time than it took you to learn it in the first place.  Secondly, most of what anyone knows isn’t that different from what everyone else knows.  But everyone has differences somewhere, and if you are able to focus explicitly on them, you can draw attention, and ultimately start a conversation with a network.  Instead of telling people everything they should know - tell them something they don’t know.

Instinctively, everyone likes to be agreeable.  It’s more polite, it makes for easier relations, and it makes others feel good.  There is a very good reason why we were all taught not to discuss religion or politics at a dinner party – it tends to lead to disagreements.  But just because we like to agree, doesn’t mean we always do.  To prepare for differentiated communication, the trick is to ask questions that reveal your own different opinion. Here are a few examples:

• What does everyone know – that I disagree with?
• What is everyone else overlooking?
• What is everyone getting wrong?
• What would I do differently if given the chance?

These are not difficult questions to answer.  Everyone who has second-guessed the manager of a baseball team, or described in detail the idiotic behavior of political leaders, or shaken their head over a recent business transaction can say precisely what they think differently.  By nature and by perspective, every human being has a different view.  They key is to simply identify what that different view is.  Once identified, it is quite simple to construct the following statement: “Most people think ______, but actually I think ________.”  That statement can then be turned into a thesis for a blog article, a twitter entry, a discussion. 

Interestingly, these more negative questions are more likely to elicit true difference than a positive question.  If one asks, “what can I say that is better, more truthful, and more helpful than anything else?” the challenge can become too overwhelming.  Except for those with an inflated sense of self-worth, it is difficult to comfortably directly communicate – even to themselves – what they know better than anyone else.  But almost anyone can tell you what they think others are missing. The more negative “what is everyone else doing wrong?” indirectly stimulates what one believes is right because the negative is far more specific than the positive.

This approach, of course, can apply to much more than the construction of a thesis.  It can also drive a company’s core strategy.  The provocative questions to ask in that case are, “what is the market doing right now that we think is wrong?” and “what would we do differently – and better?”   Most companies only ask the positive questions, “How can we be the best in this market?” and as a result, rarely get a specific answer other than perhaps, “we try harder than the competition.”

If you want to capture the attention of the Beast, say something different.