{"id":1446,"date":"2011-08-10T08:37:36","date_gmt":"2011-08-10T14:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/WhiteHatCrew.com\/blog\/?p=1446"},"modified":"2011-08-09T21:25:39","modified_gmt":"2011-08-10T03:25:39","slug":"applying-made-to-stick-stickum-to-your-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/applying-made-to-stick-stickum-to-your-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Applying &#8220;Made to Stick&#8221; Stickum to Your Business"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last October, I posted a review of the book \"<a href=\"http:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/book-review-made-to-stick-why-some-ideas-survive-and-others-die\/\">Made to Stick<\/a>\" (which I <b>highly<\/b> recommend reading).<\/p>\n<p>Today, I decided to try applying a little of the Made to Stick Stickum to my business. So I opened up Google Docs and created a spreadsheet with seven columns. The first contained the names of all my products. The other six were the six keys to stickiness covered by the book:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Simple<\/li>\n<li>Unexpected<\/li>\n<li>Concrete<\/li>\n<li>Credible<\/li>\n<li>Emotional<\/li>\n<li>Stories<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(Remember, these probably don't mean exactly what you think of when you read just the words -- click the link above to see my review for more explanation...or better yet, read the book.)<\/p>\n<p>The next step was to fill in each cell with how each word applies to each product.<\/p>\n<p><b>\"Simple\"<\/b> was...well, simple. I just entered the most boiled-down explanation I could think of of the purpose of each product.<\/p>\n<p><b>\"Concrete\"<\/b> was the next easiest. I entered a specific example or two of how I'd used or benefited from the product. For example, with <a href=\"http:\/\/SEOContentFactory.com\/\">SEO Content Factory<\/a> it was \"instantly went from blogging twice a month to blogging five times a week,\" and \"traffic up 236%\".<\/p>\n<p>With <a href=\"http:\/\/BlogRiffers.com\/\">Blog Riffing<\/a> (which isn't a product, but is something I'd like to make sticky), it was \"53% of my blog posts are Riffs\".<\/p>\n<p>The rest of the words were surprisingly difficult (I still only have a few of the cells filled in).<\/p>\n<p>Honestly, it was a bit of a wake up call. If I want my products to be sticky and to go viral, I need to figure out how to apply each of the other words to them, and how to communicate the ideas I come up with.<\/p>\n<p>When I read the book, I could clearly see how powerful the ideas were. But until now, I hadn't made a deliberate, systematic effort to apply them to my business.<\/p>\n<p>It's an exercise I highly recommend -- a great tool for exposing the holes in your marketing message. If you succeed at filling in all the cells, you'll be in a great position to make your products stickier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last October, I posted a review of the book \"Made to Stick\" (which I highly recommend reading). Today, I decided to try applying a little of the Made to Stick Stickum to my business. So I opened up Google Docs and created a spreadsheet with seven columns. The first contained the names of all my...<br \/>[<a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/applying-made-to-stick-stickum-to-your-business\/\">read more<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marketing","category-viral"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whitehatcrew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}