04 December 2006
Last week a hero of mine walked right past me in the street... as close to me as you are now.The chances are that you won't know the name Joss Whedon, but you'll likely know his work. He co-wrote Toy Story, created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel, and the brilliant Firefly. He's currently writing the forthcoming Wonder Woman movie... which he will also direct. Mr Whedon is a guy who likes to tell stories... and in the end almost everything is about stories really... isn't it?
At Semantic we tell a lot of stories, and my guess is that you do too. Of course we tell each other stories about what happened over the weekend or the evening before... but we also tell a lot of stories about Semantic. Here are a few of our Best Sellers.
1) The story about how and why I resigned from IBM on the spur of the moment, to start Semantic.
2) The story of how one handshake in 1997 has led to 75% of our business over the last six years.
3) The story about how Mike and I have been friends for 25 years, and how he got me kicked out of 'O' Level French.
(Mike might argue the detail of that a little)
4) The story about the time we decided to amputate 60% of our clients in 2004... on a point of principle.
5) ... and the story of how we won them back!
And on it goes.
Stories are powerful. Each of the stories above tells the listener something about Semantic, about who we are and how we work. Of course I can tell you that we offer 'great service' to Clients... but doesn't everyone say that. It's much better to tell you the true story of this past weekend (2nd-3rd December 2006).
One of our Clients was in serious trouble. Bad weather was ruining a major launch... and she needed her web site updated continually over the weekend. 'No problem' I said, 'here's my home number, just give me a call and I'll do it from home'. We did the updates on Saturday no problem, but on Sunday the same bad weather caused a 15 hour power failure at my home. No computers, no internet... no nothing... except a Client who still needed some lines of copy changed on her web site!
At that stage a lot of people who offer 'great service' would have apologised about circumstances outside their control. "One of those things... nothing we can do blah blah blah". But not here. We came back into the office on a Sunday to make the change.
There you go, a simple true story about the kind of service you'll get from Semantic. It's not War and Peace, but it's part of a larger story we've been telling for almost ten years. We've got hundreds like it... and they speak far more powerfully than marketing copy or mission statements. When I'm talking to potential Clients I'm not selling in the conventional sense (I'm a rubbish salesman)... but I do spend a lot of time telling stories.
And good stories spread.
Our Client will tell other people about her horrible weekend (it's human nature), and if we are lucky she'll throw in a reference to Semantic... "as usual they were fantastic." And if we are even luckier that story will lodge in the listeners mind until, perhaps months from now, they need help with a web project.
Of course most stories don't spread... they are not big enough, funny enough or remarkable enough to be passed on. But if you tell good, consistent and true stories consistently enough it does work. We have seen it often over the last nine years... in fact we've built a business on it.
(For more on this see All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin.)
Posted by Nick Warren at 8:25 AM
