Don’t Give Facebook’s Zuckerberg a Hard Time

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are placing 99 percent of their stock—valued at 45 billion dollars—into an investment vehicle for charity.

Put that way, it sounds slightly less generous than donating 45 billion dollars in cash, but in all likelihood the total over time will amount to much more.

Good for him. And good for his favorite charities.

Nobody needs 450 billion dollars. Zuckerberg could stash that much cash in an underground vault in his yard, where it wouldn’t even earn any interest, and he’d still have a cool half-million dollars a year to spend for a thousand years.

He won’t exactly be uncomfortable now that he’s knocked himself down to a “mere” 450 million. Even the Queen of England could get by on that much.

The response to Zuckerberg’s epic giveaway is mostly positive, of course, but there’s an undercurrent of skepticism out there, as well.

The Atlantic dismisses the whole thing as non-charity charity.

The New York Times is being downright churlish when it says, “[Zuckerberg’s] P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock” and suggests he’s doing this for the tax break. “He amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the world — and is likely never to pay any taxes on it.”

Similar sentiments are all over Twitter right now.

Nobody spends that much money on public relations, partly because hardly anyone has that much to spend, but also because, even if they did, there is no chance that any amount of good press can yield more than 45 billion dollars in additional profits that wouldn’t have materialized otherwise.

And nobody gives 99 percent of their wealth away to avoid paying a much smaller percentage in taxes. The math doesn’t add up. It’s not even close.

The skepticism is perhaps understandable. Hardly any of us would donate 99 percent of our net worth to charity. Most of us can’t. We all need money to live, and we all want more than we need so we can live comfortably and stress-free.

There is a point, though, where enough is truly enough. Where money is just an abstraction. Where more money can’t possibly lead to any more happiness or contentment. Zuckerberg and his wife passed that point a long time ago.

Whether or not their initiative helps the world as much as they hope, they deserve praise, not a hard time. Hopefully they’ll inspire others in their income bracket to follow their lead.

Five Things You Don ’t Know About Black Friday

Black Friday is coming.

The day after Thanksgiving. Beginning of the Christmas season. Biggest shopping day of the year.

But you know that already.

Here are five things you don’t know about Black Friday.

Where the name comes from–

The first people to call the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday were Philadelphia cops.

“Resulting traffic jams are an irksome problem to the police and, in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday,” Denny Griswold wrote in a public relations newsletter in 1961.

“Hardly a stimulus for good business, the problem was discussed by the merchants with their Deputy City Representative, Abe S. Rosen, one of the country’s most experienced municipal PR executives. He recommended adoption of a positive approach which would convert Black Friday and Black Saturday to Big Friday and Big Saturday.”

Renaming the “holiday” didn’t work, obviously. Black Friday it is, from now until the end of shopping.

The staggering sales figures–

Last year, American shoppers spent more than 50 billion dollars over the Black Friday weekend.

That’s one-and-a-half times the GDP of Montana.

It’s more than twice the GDP of Malta and 35 times the GDP of Belize.

Belize is a small country. We know. But still. 35 times.

It’s not just for Americans anymore–

Black Friday is now observed, if that’s the right word, in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Panama, Costa Rica, Brazil, South Africa, India, Romania, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Spain, Norway and France.

The day after Thanksgiving is meaningless in all of those countries. Thanksgiving is an American holiday. (Canada has its own Thanksgiving, but it’s celebrated six weeks earlier. And interestingly enough, Liberia also celebrates Thanksgiving, as it was founded by freed American slaves in 1847, but they don’t have Black Friday yet.)

Those countries imported Black Friday because, why not? Merchants make more money and shoppers get some steep discounts. Everybody wins.

Everybody, that is, except for the unlucky ones. Which leads us to:

The staggering body count–

Okay, the body count isn’t exactly staggering, but the fact that there’s any kind of a body count for a shopping holiday is pretty outrageous.

42 Million Dead In Bloodiest Black Friday Weekend On Record, The Onion reported in 2012. “First responders reporting from retail stores all across the nation said the record-breaking post-Thanksgiving shopping spree carnage began as early as midnight on Friday, when 13 million shoppers were reportedly trampled, pummeled, burned, stabbed, shot, lanced, and brutally beaten to death while attempting to participate in early holiday sales events.”

Yeah, that’s The Onion. It’s a joke.

Seriously, though stampeding, pummeling, and brutally beating to decide who gets the last discounted flat screen are par for the course now. According to the website blackfridaydeathcount.com, the casualties are now up to 7 dead and 98 wounded.

Two people were actually shot at a Toys ‘r Us in Palm Desert, California. Two more were shot outside a Wal-mart in Tallahassee, and another guy was shot in the leg while hauling a huge-screen TV to his car in Las Vegas.

If you find yourself thinking, “only in America,” hold your horses. The chaos is spreading now to Great Britain.

Last year, all sorts of people got trampled at a Wal-mart in London. The whole thing was captured on video. Manchester police arrested several people for assault. Witnesses said their fellow Brits behaved “like animals” and turned shopping centers into “war zones.”

But it’s all part of the fun as long as you aren’t the next person who gets trampled or shot.

You don’t have to leave home anymore–

You don’t have to go out. Stay home if you want.

No more pushing, shoving, hair-pulling or shooting. No more spending the night in the parking lot of a Wal-mart. No more trips to the hospital or arrests on your record.

You can get your Black Friday deals right here on the Internet.

Amazon has plenty of them. So do Target and Best Buy.

But last year, online sales accounted for only four percent of the Black Friday totals.

So while you can stay home and do your Christmas shopping in jammies and slippers, that’s not exactly the spirit.

Go on. Brave the hordes. Knock yourself out. Get some spectacular deals.

Just try not to die.

See Your Work Through Your Audience’s Eyes

You aren’t going to connect with your customers and your audience if you can’t see your work through their eyes. Before publishing those blog posts or sending the flyers off to the printer, you need to swap your writer hat with your reader hat and look at your content as if someone else wrote it.

Easier to say than to do, of course. You wrote it. Not somebody else.

But you can get there, sort of, by following a couple of steps.

Put it on ice

Just stop for a while. Save your document, close it and stick in the freezer.

The only way you can truly read your work as if someone else wrote it is to wait a long time. Like a year. And that’s obviously not going to happen. But the longer you can wait, the fresher your words will appear.

Read something else

You need a palette cleanser, though. If you pause a few minutes while drinking coffee, you’ll still taste the coffee even if nothing’s in your mouth. If you have a sip of water, you’ll still taste the coffee. If you want to stop tasting coffee, brush your teeth. Or eat a pickle. Your tongue needs a reset.

Your brain needs a reset, too, or there’s no chance you’ll see your own writing objectively.

So go read something else. And read something totally different. If you’re been working on a piece of content marketing all day, don’t read somebody else’s content marketing. Read a Jack Reacher novel. Try the sports page, some poetry, or the Huffington Post. Anything but copywriting and content marketing.

Write something else

Even better, write something else. That will really give you some distance.

Even if you work on something else for only an hour or two, your other piece of writing will look and feel a little bit alien all of a sudden. Almost as if someone else wrote it.

Go to bed

Your subconscious never sleeps. It’s always chewing on things. Solving problems. Turning things over. Coming up with solutions. It also moves on to other things entirely and gives you some space.

Print it

Have you ever laid down on your bed with the top of your head pointing toward the floor and looked up at the ceiling? Everything’s upside-down. It’s still your bedroom, but it looks like an entirely different and unexplored place, as if you’ve never even been there before. Everything is exactly the same, only totally different.

You can have a similar experience with your writing without hanging upside down. Just adjust the margins, alter the font, and print it.

It will look like someone else wrote it. It will even feel like someone else wrote it. It will be exactly the same, only totally different. You’ll see all kinds of things that you didn’t see before, especially if in the meantime you read something else, wrote something else, and slept on it.

Word of Mouth Marketing is Harder Than You Think

Word of mouth advertising is the best marketing you can get.

It’s the holy grail, the treasure chest from the sunken Spanish galleon, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

It’s also almost entirely out of your control.

Almost. We’ll get to that, but first let’s behold just how powerful it can be when it works.

George Lucas thought of Star Wars as a b-movie. He had no idea—nobody did—that it would be the game-changing hit that it was.

What kind of marketing did the film have? Not much. Hardly any at all, actually. But the relatively small audience over the opening weekend loved it so much they told all their friends about it, who then told all their friends. Everyone raved about it, on and on for weeks, months and even years.

The Empire Strikes Back was even better, and by the time the third film, Return of the Jedi, was released, die-hard fans camped in line on sidewalks outside movie theaters for days so they could buy tickets to the first showing.

Marketing for the newest film in the franchise, The Force Awakens, is everywhere. It’s all over Internet. But initially, Lucas had pretty much nothing but word of mouth going.

And he didn’t do anything aside from making one of the awesomest movies ever to get that marketing kickstarted.

You can’t force people to talk about your product any more than you can force people to buy it. That’s entirely up to them. You can execute the most brilliant marketing strategy with precision and get no word of mouth to go along with it whatsoever. Alternatively, it can all go viral while you’re in a coma.

Which makes it seem a little like winning the lottery. You need to have a great product, of course. A dud won’t go viral unless everyone is talking about how shockingly awful it is. (Imagine if Apple released an old school flip phone, for instance.)

You can try to make something as extraordinary as Star Wars, and you should, but Star Wars is a rarity. Even if you do make something equally great, there’s still not much you can do to convince people to tell their friends all about it.

If they love it and it’s portable like a smart phone, they’ll probably show it off to their friends anyway. If it’s not portable—let’s say it’s the fastest, quietest and most reliable laser printer in the history of laser printers—they might not say anything. They certainly won’t bust it out of their pockets at lunch.

Your customers and potential customers will either talk about you and your stuff or they won’t. It’s entirely up to them.

But aside from making spectacular products, you can also create share-worthy content. Millions of people are accustomed to clicking one or more “share” buttons when they find something they like on the web. And creating something readers enjoy enough to “share” with their friends is a whole lot easier than making the second coming of Star Wars.

So get to it.