Guy Kawasaki is a well-known marketing professional and evangelist. He has written several books on the subject, including “The Art of Social Media,” “The Art of the Start,” “APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur,” and “Enchantment.” He is also Chief Evangelist at Canva. Guy has a large social media following, with over 1.5 million Twitter followers who enjoy his marketing insights.
He launched the Macintosh computer in the 1980s while working at Apple and has since written six business books, including Rules for Revolutionaries and How to Drive Your Competition Crazy. He is currently the founder and CEO of Garage Technology Ventures.
He talked about how anyone starting anything can be successful by using his tips, which are shared below. He also included some choice quips that aren’t in the book.
1. Make meaning
Focus on making meaning, not money. Kawasaki says that great companies are built around one of three kinds of meaning:
Increase the quality of life
The goal is to make people more efficient and improve their quality of life.
Right a wrong
Join the effort to be part of the solution, not the problem.
Prevent the end of something good
Preserve something classic or historical. Save the whales.
2. Make mantra
Kawasaki took a jab at corporate mission statements by showing Wendy’s mission statement:
“Our guiding mission is to deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities through leadership, innovation and partnerships.”
He said that he loves Wendy’s, but he didn’t know that every time he ate there, he was participating in everything that the company does. He said that if you want to create a generic mission statement, you can save yourself a lot of money by using the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. Some examples he gave:
- Wendy’s: “Healthy fast food”
- FedEx: “Peace of mind”
- Nike: “Authentic athletic performance”
- Guy Kawasaki: “Empower entrepreneurs”
3. Jump to the next curve
“We’re going to put our bookstores in malls.” Great companies are not just born out of an idea to change the status quo, but out of a genuine desire to innovate and improve the customer experience. This was the case for a popular book retailer who decided to put their stores in malls. He offers three tips for how to do this:
Reboot your brain
Breaking old patterns of behavior is necessary to adopt new ones. Overthinking or overanalyzing can result in inaction, which can prevent you from making necessary changes.
Kill the cash cows
The most important competitors are the ones that are most dominant in the market. If you can beat them, then you can beat any other competitor. However, it’s also important to be aware of the internal competitors within your own company. This is especially important when launching a new product. For example, when Apple launched the Macintosh, they had to kill the Apple II. Otherwise, they would have eventually been passed up by other companies. It’s important to clear away the old to make room for the new.
Polarize people
It is better to have a small, fiercely loyal customer base than to create a mediocre product that fades quickly into obscurity according to the author. The author gave some examples such as the Macintosh, Harley-Davidson, Tivo, and the Scion XP.
4. Get going
Don’t get caught in “analysis paralysis”. Some tips to keep you moving forward:
Don’t type, prototype
There are two types of entrepreneurs, he explains. Some believe that Microsoft Office is the most important software application for entrepreneurs. This group creates business plans, Forecasting spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations for clients and investors using Microsoft Office programs. The other type of entrepreneur uses software like AutoCAD to design products and compilers to write code. These entrepreneurs focus on creating the product rather than planning and presenting.
Don’t worry, be crappy
Voltaire said that it is better to release a product that is good enough rather than waiting to release a perfect product because if companies wait to release a perfect product, they will never release anything. He says that this does not apply to medical equipment.
Find soulmates
He joking says that every young visionary needs adult supervision. He means that every very successful young person has someone older and more experienced supporting them. For example, behind Bill Gates is Steve Ballmer and behind Steve Jobs is Steve Wozniak. He advises young entrepreneurs to build a management team that shares their vision and enthusiasm, but that also has different strengths that complement the entrepreneur’s weaknesses.
5. Niche thyself
Ideally, you create something that is both of high value to customers and that few others are doing. If you consider uniqueness and value creation as the two parameters, you have four quadrants:
High value, low uniqueness
You compete on price.
Low value, high uniqueness
The “stupid” quadrant is the one where it doesn’t matter if you have no competition because no one wants to buy your product.
Low value, low uniqueness
The “dotcom” quadrant is made up of companies who forgot one thing: dog food is heavy.
Despite the fact that money was saved, high shipping costs negated the savings. It’s bizarre that not one, but sixteen companies were selling dog food online at one point. It’s not surprising that most of them are no longer in business.
High value, high uniqueness
This is where you make money, margins and meaning.
6. Follow the 10/20/30 rule
When making presentations to clients or investors, use:
10 slides
Not 50 as most people do
20 minutes
You have an hour for the presentation, but take into account that some people will be late and others may leave early. There should be plenty of time for questions and answers.
30 point font
If you use a small font, it usually means that you are trying to incorporate a lot of text, which in turn implies that you are not a good speaker. This is according to CEO’s of tech companies, who noted that most tech company CEOs are not good speakers because they do not practice.
7. Perfect your perspective
Embracing social media can be understood by thinking of it like online dating.
There are two types of online dating websites- eHarmony and Tinder. eHarmony uses psychographic surveys to determine compatibility between users, while Tinder is based primarily on physical attraction. Guy argues that in today’s “Tinder world”, marketing is more effective when based on immediate visual judgement.
8. Perfect your avatar
The start of perfecting your avatar is making sure your avatar has three qualities: likable, trustworthy, and competent. Here are his tips for creating the perfect picture:
- Show face only
- Asymmetric — not staged
- Front lit
- Consistent — use the same avatar on all your profiles
9. Perfect your cover
The cover photo should be used to show what makes the person or brand interesting. This could be something they are passionate about or what the brand represents.
Tell a narrative
He displays his Facebook cover photo and his Google+ cover photo. They don’t appear to be the same, so I assume these don’t have to be identical.
Optimize size
Check the aspect ratio and dimensions.
Go dark
He says this shows a certain seriousness and gravitas.
We look at examples of avatars and cover photos from real life and discuss why they’re all bad. This includes a dog as the avatar, a family as the avatar but the user’s head is cut off, an example of the Google+ default cover photo, and a family with photo red eye.
He provides another example from the Porsche Facebook brand page to illustrate his point. The avatar often appears in a small size, making the logo too small to be recognizable. This could be improved by removing the white space from the image. Although Porsche has strict brand standards concerning white space around the logo, these standards were probably created in the 1980s and no longer produce an optimal avatar.
“Every profile you have is seen as a professional profile by recruiters and hiring managers,” Kawasaki says. He says that he only uses LinkedIn to make judgments about candidates, likening it to Tinder. “It’s just like Tinder: hire, don’t hire (swipe, swipe motions). It is that quick,” he says.
Guy’s son’s LinkedIn profile has a photo from a fraternity winter formal that was cropped out of a group shot. When Guy told him to fix his avatar, his son said, “I don’t even use LinkedIn.” Guy explained that recruiters use LinkedIn and every profile is your professional profile.
10. Perfect your business card
Use big fonts – minimum 10 points
Ensure scan-ability
Why put his personal cell phone number on a business card? The benefit is that it makes it very easy for serious business contacts to reach you when they need you.
A good way of testing whether Evernote can accurately OCR scan a business card and extract all the necessary information is by trying it out with a business card.
Add your signature
Include your email address in your signature so that it can’t be removed if the email is forwarded.
Evercontact can be used to scan through all email to find those with signatures attached. It can then match the signature data with contacts in Google Contacts and Gmail. This merger of data can be used to update contact information across platforms.
11. Perfect your slides
You need to be able to pitch, give keynotes, and speak if you’re in marketing today in order to optimize for SlideShare.net, which is a powerful network.
- 10 slides – the magic number
- 20 minutes
- 30 point font
- 16 x 9 – this looks OK if it’s 4×3
- Black background – “Black is the new black”
Perfect your demo
A demo is worth more than just a picture or a thousand words.
Start with a demo instead of a slide with your company logo. The first slide should tell people what your company does and the next slide should be about the pain you’re solving or the opportunity you’re presenting. The demo should be so great that you never get to the rest of your presentation.
12. Perfect your pictures
He’s sharing some tried-and-true tips for making better photos:
Shoot horizontal
Guy believes that the world is horizontal and that it is better to have a tight crop.
Light from the front
The more interesting story is always the well-lit person, even though the background may not be as beautiful.
Crop crap constantly
Can’t crop too much.
Optimize dimensions
Canva has optimized sizes for every social media service.
13. Perfect your posts
Some people think that you only do social media after marketing, or that social media is a subset of marketing. This is not the case; social media is marketing. For most small organizations and people, social media is marketing — and that means posts should be perfected.
Embrace the NPR model
NPR runs a yearly fundraising campaign which people put up with because they offer excellent content daily. If you want to utilize social media as a marketing platform, make sure you’re providing value as that’s how you’ll earn points.
Who do you want to serve through your business? Connect with them through social media. As an airline, you could create content like “Here’s how to pack for a weekend getaway.” This is the TSA precheck program.
Pass the reshare test
How many likes and comments you get on a post is much less important than how many people share or retweet it. The latter shows that people are willing to put their reputation on the line for you.
Add graphics
All the engagement metrics double with graphics.
Twitter allows you to tell a story using up to four pictures in a single tweet.
Upload video natively to Facebook
You have extra work because Facebook would rather promote their own content than YouTube’s. Facebook video autoplays when you scroll on it, and the reach of Facebook videos is about three times more than a post of YouTube embedded videos of the same content at the same time.
14. Perfect your frequency
The reason experts say you shouldn’t post multiple times is because it makes you seem like you’re not personally posting, and people will think you’re a spammer. However, Kawasaki ignores this advice, as he has 1.5 million Twitter followers. It would take 300,000 days to get everyone to stop following him.
“What’s the next big thing?”
His answer: “I focus on marketing, not coming up with visionary ideas. I can listen to an idea and tell you if it will be successful or not. If I knew what the next big thing was, I would either be doing it or funding it. And I certainly wouldn’t be sharing that information with this audience.”