Although I quote my friend Seth Godin regularly, I rarely repost his thoughts in their entirety.  Today I am going to make an exception for a post which is, in every way, exceptional:

Horizontal marketing isn’t a new idea.  But it is the new reality for just about every organization.

Vertical marketing means the marketer (the one with money) is in charge. Vertical marketing starts at the top and involves running ads, sending out direct mail and pushing hype through the media. Your money, your plans, your control. It might not work, but generally the worst outcome is that you will be ignored and need to spend more money.

Horizontal marketing, on the other hand, means creating a remarkable product and story and setting it up to spread from person to person. It’s out of your control, because all the interactions are by passionate outsiders, not paid agents.

Most marketers instinctively want control. We reach for the budget and the ad and the press release and most of all, the powerful media middleman. We buy SuperBowl ads or shmooze the reporter.

Horizontal marketing, though, requires giving up control. We spend all of our time and money on a great story and a great service and a remarkable offering. The rest is up to the market itself. You can’t control this, and you can no longer ignore it either.

One thing I would add is this:

While you can’t control whether or not a consumer will want to spread the message about your product, you can absolutely build pathways which facilitate that spread.

For example, if you are posting audio…

1. Are you making it bite-size, or are you making it a three-hour archive extravaganza of a morning show?
2. Is it properly tagged for search and Google purposes?
3. Is it represented using multiple media so it can be experienced in the form of the consumer’s choosing?
4. Is it easily sharable (not just the page but the clip itself)?

What spreads is what’s easy to discover, consume, enjoy, and share.

What spreads is content so good it makes me look good to share it with you (thank you, Seth).

Is your radio brand nothing more than the sound emanating from the speakers produced by your tower?

Or is it something much more?

Well, in 2012 and beyond it can be a LOT more. But understanding this requires a new way to think about what a radio brand is and how to leverage it across platforms.

It begins with a definition, because if we don’t understand what we are then we can’t possibly realize our fullest potential.

I boil down my definition in this short video.  Watch:

Prefer audio?  Try this:

Download mp3

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Zuckerberg, that is.  Founder and CEO of Facebook.

Fast Company has a great piece on leadership lessons from Zuckerberg, and here is a sampling:

1. Have A Strong Personal Philosophy

“We don’t build services in order to make money,” says Zuckerberg, “we make money in order to build better services. Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission–to make the world open and more connected.”

What is your goal?  Is it only to make money by any means necessary?  Or is it something deeper, something significant, something your consumers and partners will embrace as much as you do?  Do you have a social mission? Why not?

2. Give it Time

“I’m here to build something for the long term. Anything else is a distraction’” Zuckerberg said.

Are you in it for the long-term?  Can you dodge the distractions of this week, month, or quarter?

3. Support A Culture Of Innovation

“Things still retain the playful air of a tech development hive, but with an edge,” says Fast Company.

4. Pull, Don’t Push

Fast Company:

What Apple and Facebook know and more specifically their founders/CEOs’ Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg have in common is aspirational clarity. They appear to be able to see where the puck will be and into the future of what their market will not just want, but go ga-ga over and then they deliver it. Some may refer to that as their being market makers, but what enables them to make their market is that they can anticipate what will delight their customers and members that those people don’t even know will delight them.

It’s about pull, not push.  Or, as I put it in a recent post, you can’t force people do do anything nowadays, you must attract them like moths to a flame.

What’s the best way to defend radio’s audience from those who steal away attention and usage and ad dollars?

Here’s one strategy from my friend David Bujnowski of Coburn Ventures (where I am a research fellow).

In the “old days”, service providers could trap their audience who either didn’t know or didn’t care what their alternatives were.

Today, with hyperpersonalization running rampant, consumers have a choice of a million different service providers.  The customers can’t be held captive any longer.  We are free to choose and we’re well armed to find whatever it is that we want (and that my old “service provider” is no longer giving me).

So…as a service provider, how do I keep my audience?  I have to build/create a service that is so bright…so energetic…so wonderful…that the moths WANT to come to [my flame].  It’s their choice!

Spend less time mimicking others.  And spend less time trying to figure out how to keep me held captive (you can’t do it!).  And spend more time on your product so that I’m drawn to it like a moth… so I just can’t help myself.

This is important and too easy to forget.

Defending our products and services from the choices enabled by the inexorable march of technology is a fool’s errand. If technology can conceivably solve a consumer problem, assume that it will – and sooner than you think.

Recently I told one broadcaster about a tool that could transform one of his radio assets in a very meaningful way (forgive the vague description). His response:  We can’t do that because the audience might like it too much, and if they like it too much they will listen more to that and less to my stations.  In other words, “If I don’t believe in the future maybe it will never come to pass.”

Well, the future always comes to pass.  The question is whether or not your business is a part of it.

The key is to seek out these disruptors, to embrace them and wield them like weapons, not to look the other way.

Our best defense is a vigorous offense.  The secret to protecting our audience is attracting them like moths to a brilliant flame.  It’s not to  force them or bribe them or trap them.  It’s about attraction. It’s about being that good.

In a world where anybody can have anything they want, “average is over,” as Tom Friedman writes in the New York Times.

“Average products for average people” (to use Seth Godin’s phrase) will be impossible to defend against products and services designed perfectly for me.

We can try to keep consumers captive – or we can captivate.

I and many others in and around the radio business would prefer to create magnificent flames.

Recently I was interviewed by Olivia Collette for Sparksheet, a business-to-business blog on media, content and marketing.  Olivia has allowed me to share the audio of that interview with you, so here it is.

Some of the questions we covered:

1. Is Pandora “radio” or not?
2. Is “radio” today a service, an experience, or a medium? (My answer:  It’s an “experience”)
3. What’s one sentence that can define radio for the future?  And what can we do because of that?
4. What’s the difference between “retention” tactics and “discovery” tactics for radio?
5. Which is more important in the success of our digital ideas, money or passion?
6. Is personalization a replacement for a “curated” radio experience – or just a supplement?  And is Pandora really as much “work” as it seems to be?
7. What “curation” is – it requires the presence of human beings and a sense of “taste”
8. How can broadcasters make their content stronger in the midst of so much online competition?

Here’s a sharable, social version of the interview:

And here’s a non-sharable, not-so-social version:

Download mp3

(You can subscribe to all the MRM video and audio via iTunes and get the goodies before everybody else.  You can also get advance notice of this content if you “like” MRM on Facebook or follow me on Twitter).