So this past weekend I finally carved out the time to go and get a pedicure, which I used to do once every week and a half, pre-marriage-baby-being-a-serious-writer. Serious as in I write every day, not serious as in I am above Star Wars references and quoting Monty Python.

What you guys likely don’t know is that I have like the World’s Skinniest Feet. I wear a 9.5 AAA, which means nothing comes in my size…ever. It also means that I am condemned to living in flip-flops all year, clogs for the handful of really cold days in Texas. This means my feet are almost a perpetual train wreck of callous, which used to not be too bad before I got married and started valuing sleep over having a flower painted on my big toe nail.

Thus, this past weekend I drew the line and decided it was time to get a pedicure, and I really felt sorry for…Tina, because she had her work cut out for her (I am an excellent tipper).

So Tina hands me this menu so I can pick out what “flavor” I want. Now I know there are words that are easy to confuse and lose in translation. I once asked a Swiss woman if she was cooking dog for dinner and then later announced at dinner that I was sexually aroused.

Ich bin heiss apparently means you’re feeling randy and it’s Ich habe heiss if you mean that you are feeling hot, not HOT. “I am hot,” not “I am HOT.”

…I’ll shut about that because you guys get the point.

Anyway on the pedicure “menu” I can choose such flavors as Chocolate Mint, Pina Colada, or Strawberry Margarita….like “dipping my toes in a margarita.”

WTH? I would honestly hope my husband loves me enough to cut me off before I stuck my feet in my cocktail.

But this made me think of an interesting point. Why do so many female products come in “flavors?” I can see how a foreigner could get confused when you see Strawberries and Cream Skintimate or chocolate body lotions or cucumber melon body scrub or cotton candy bubble bath.

Men don’t do this. Seriously…they don’t.

We don’t see body sprays that smell like barbecue or deodorants that smells like beer or a Philly cheese-steak. No bacon moisturizer or Cola Slurpee athlete’s foot powder.

Ew….might have gone too far with that last one.

Of course, after I noticed this, I had to mentally work out various hypotheses to explain this differences between the sexes.

And my third grade teacher said I didn’t use time wisely. *rolls eyes*

Theory #1

If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, are we just lathering ourselves with man-bait? Sort of like spraying on deer urine to attract a 12-point buck.

This seemed like the best explanation, but upon further rigors of the Scientific Method the hypothesis fell apart. I know! Seemed solid to me, too. Then, I realized that most of the “flavors” are foods women like. Chocolate aside, I will never get my husband to eat a cucumber unless I grind it into his burger, and the melon better be garnish on an ice cream cone. If we ever see a man order any drink that comes with an umbrella, he is likely batting for the other side and apparently using the wrong deer urine because coconut attracts chicks.

Theory #2

Girls buy products that smell like all the stuff we’d love to eat if we weren’t trying to fit into something other than pregnancy pants.

This theory held up a bit better, but the cucumber is still the weird outlier. Although, granted, if one happens to be a Hollywood starlet I guess that anything with more calories than air might be seen as “forbidden.” And again this doesn’t account for the lack of a Cheese Enchilada body lotion or Movie Popcorn with Extra Butter shaving cream.

Theory #3

Proctor & Gamble has not yet realized the “deer urine aspect” of their products.

I tell ya, make a perfume that smells exactly like brisket? You’d have a line. Just sayin’.

Theory #4

Girls don’t mind smelling like Peaches and Cream, but we draw the line at Fried Chicken.

Hmmm. Plausible. But, if they’re single gals who want a man, they might want to up their game with some Cheese Coney hand cream. It’s a thought!

Theory #5

We are not above smelling like bacon, but we might attract more than men…like feral cats, raccoons, neighborhood dogs or potheads with the munchies.

Could end badly.

A Glaring Hole in the Marketplace

Yet, the fact remains that there remains a wide-open gap in the marketplace. Clearly P&G could get some competition if an up-and-coming entrepreneur wished to exploit said weakness. While P&G focuses on making women smell like Berries & Cream, a start-up company could develop some body sprays and bath oils that might work better as man-bait. I found an image with some great suggestions. My favorites are Rattlesnake and Panther, though Freedom was a close third.

Photo via Manoverse.com

I now see why it took me to age 35 to find a husband (weirdness and possible insanity aside). We women have been doing this wrong. We didn’t need Raspberry body wash, we needed “Gun,” “Duct Tape” or “Shrapnel.”

So what are your thoughts? Any suggestions for manly fragrances? Any other hypotheses about the reason for this clear difference in the sexes and their toiletries? Or maybe my reasoning was flawed and you’d love to spend your precious time applying the Scientific Method to a random theory by a crazy blogger. If you are a writer, yes it counts as work.

I love hearing from you!

I also hope you pick up copies of my best-selling books We Are Not Alone–The Writer’s Guide to Social Media and Are You There, Blog? It’s Me, Writer . And both are recommended by the hottest agents and biggest authors in the biz. My methods teach you how to make building your author platform FUN. Build a platform and still have time left to write great books.

The post Pina Colada Pedicures & Gunpowder Body Lotion–The Difference Between the Sexes appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Author Piper Bayard and I are “WINNING!” Foxy with Moxie at DFW Con 2012

Last week we talked about some changes with Facebook. Can they now hold our fan pages hostage? Now that the giant is a publicly traded company, we just should expect that they are going to look for ways to generate profits for shareholders. This doesn’t make Facebook evil. It isn’t personal. It’s just business.

I am very careful to not be too indignant, because what did I expect for free?

Last week, I mentioned how fan page holders could expect to show up in the feeds of only about 10-15% of their fans. But, Facebook is now offering a promotion service to make sure your posts show up in all our fans’ feeds. And, the price per post, from what I have seen, ain’t cheap. Some fan page owners were looking at $300 or even $500 per post.

Remember, Facebook is only sharing posts with fans who repeatedly return to your page, post on your page, comment on your page, or otherwise engage on your fan page.

I am hesitant to charge Facebook with doing anything nefarious. I watch how many fan page holders use their pages, and a 10-15% ROI is actually not bad. I know we would all love to believe that when people “Like” our page, that they are hanging off every word, every announcement, and every post. But, the sad truth is they likely aren’t.

A World of Invisible

We have created a world where mass marketing is powerless and most products are invisible. Technology has fragmented the marketplace, which means that modern consumers are inundated with choices.. We no longer live in a world with three major television networks who control the lion’s share of content.

We have hundreds of channels and Internet and blogs and You Tube and dozens of additional social sites to tickle our collective fancies. These days consumers can focus on what they want and then ignore the rest.

Exposure Doesn’t Mean What It Used To

I’m always seeing these marketing companies offering ways for authors to have some “exposure,” but in a world where most ads are invisible, what real use is this? I’m not saying exposure is worthless, but it certainly doesn’t have the impact it did in the Golden Age of Advertising.

The TV-industrial complex is hemorrhaging, and most marketers don’t have a clue what to do about it. Every day companies spend millions to recreate the glory days of the TV-industrial complex, and every day they fail.

         ~Seth Godin, Purple Cow–Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

Exposure used to be all we needed to catapult over the competition. We just needed the right ad in the right magazine. The right commercial at the right time on the right network.

Of course this was before the day of DVRs, The Power of the Four Arrows, and Sirius radio.

A Quick Survey

How many of you have ever clicked on an ad on Facebook or some other social site? Now, of those ads you clicked on, how many of those translated into a sale? When you look at your purchasing habits as a whole, what percentage has been influenced by interruption marketing? How many books have you bought from authors who tweet:

Title of MY Book. Rated best book of the year by ME and fans you’ve never heard of. Buy NOW! Only 99 cents #fiction #freebooks #Iamseriouslyannoying #Ilovespam #sales #memememememememememe #lookatme #allaboutme #buymystuff

Yeah, me neither.

Facebook is Feeding the Delusion

Facebook is charging to make sure our posts come up in the feeds of all of our followers. Okay. All this means is that Facebook, for a fee, will guarantee that all our fans will see what we post…not just the vested ones. But, in a world where most advertising is invisible, does this do us any good?

I think it might do some good for the large companies/brands like Coca Cola or Colgate. I mean, we need to give them a break. Newspapers are going under and most of us throw away our mailers before we ever take a look. We use the Power of the Four Arrows to zoom by their television ads.

Let’s face it, they are running out of places where they can tell us about their products. Yet, here is the deal, most of those products or companies who would find the new FB service helpful?

They are already brands. They aren’t going anywhere. They are using advertising merely to maintain their market supremacy, and they have multimillion dollar budgets to fuel this.

Millions of Americans are going to buy Tide and Kleenex whether we see an ad or not. Proctor and Gamble is not going anywhere. These guys entrenched themselves back in the Golden Age of Advertising, and start-ups would be INSANE to try and go against them on their own terms. When was the last time you saw a T.V. ad for a detergent that was totally new and NOT part of an established mega-brand like P&G?

You haven’t.

The big guys have the ground and they have the budget to use Facebook in ways the new and upcoming competition cannot. Facebook is a way of maintaining what they have in the market.

In fact, want a real dose of reality?

Interbrand values the top 100 brands in the world every year. When we look at the 2011 report of the top 100 global brands, most of them are brands that were relevant 30 years ago back when heavy TV ads and magazine campaigns worked. Of the top 100, maybe 25% were built by harnessing word of mouth and generating a grassroots campaign. (I learned about Interbrand via Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. Great book that I HIGHLY recommend).

Writers would be wise to pay attention.

Artists are Entrepreneurs

Here is the deal. Artists are entrepreneurs. Writers, especially self-published and indie published authors are small businesses. We can’t use the same tactics as Phillip Morris and have success. Frankly, we never could.

When we rely on paid advertising, we are hoping for an easy way out that takes away accountability for failure. It is easier to throw a couple thousand dollars at buying Facebook advertising than it is to get in the trenches and create relationships.

Is Facebook Really Up to No Good?

I don’t believe Facebook is hiding anyone’s feeds, but since I don’t work there, I can’t be sure. I know that some authors have been complaining that their posts seemed to be disappearing into the ether and that fans were having a hard time finding them. This very well could be the case.

Facebook could be manipulating the data and hoping we pay money to get back in front of our fans. Thing is, Facebook is free and they can do what they want, so it is difficult to complain. Even if they aren’t doing this now, we should anticipate and plan for a day that they will juke the stats to make a buck.

***Note: I might recommend that you sign up for WANATribe, the new social site for creative professionals. No ads, bots, spammers or friend limits. Also, you can customize your page to be as unique as you. We aren’t trying to be Facebook. We’re very niche. We want a fun place for creative people to hang out, network, make friends and build a community of like-minded professionals. We are not alone!

Tactics that Work in the Modern Age

My goal has always been to help creative professionals, primarily writers, understand that they cannot use the same tools as Proctor & Gamble. Mass advertising and relying on fan page ads works for Target, but not for us. There are many ways that we can build a thriving, vested community to support our goals and careers, but here are five of my favorites.

1. Be Remarkable with Your Product

This is one of the reasons I blog about craft. Good books generate buzz that can’t be bought. These days everyone can be published, so we need to be better than the competition.

At WANA International, we bring the top teachers in the industry to help you take your writing from good to outstanding. Invest in yourself, your business and your future. NY Times Best-Selling Author Shirley Jump is teaching The Basics of Scene & Sequel  and Plotting with Paper Bags this month for WANA. The author of the Digital Age has to write better, cleaner and faster. We offer classes to help you up your game.

2. Reach for Everyone and We Reach No One

Mass marketing doesn’t work, but these days it doesn’t have to. We don’t need to reach all the people, just the right people. A dedicated group of hardcore fans are worth more than all the advertising dollars in the world. In fact Kevin Kelly asserted that all an artist needed to make a good living was 1,000 True Fans.

WANA methods and a blog are the best ways to locate and nurture that critical 1000. In fact, this is one of the reasons I push authors learning how to blog. We have the power to create that base of 1,000 True Fans before our book is even ready for purchase.

3. Use a blog to build/fuel a grassroots movement for you as an author brand.

WANA methods have been responsible for launching authors from total obscurity to success. A fan page is powerful, but paired with a great blog? You won’t need to pay Facebook to put your posts in your fans’ feeds because your fans will be vested. They will come to you. And, if Facebook goes crazy and implodes? Your blog is yours and your fan base will remain in tact. Your 1,000 True Fans will follow wherever you go.

4. Be genuinely interested in service.

Serve first. Talk to people. Interact. Stop marketing and STOP SELLING. I love the #MyWANA group on Twitter. I love it when I see true WANAs talking and helping one another. I know those people will have all the help they need when it comes time to promote their books. The same goes for Facebook. Comment on other people’s pages. Be interested in other people.

I take regular breaks throughout the day and I scan down the home feed on Facebook and look for ways that I can interact, serve, compliment or encourage. Genuine kindness is so rare, and people are so hungry for it, that they remember it and look for ways to repay in kind.

5. Be different.

If everyone else is doing something, then it has already become invisible. One thing I teach in my classes is how to use our artist imagination to be remarkable even in our social media. My Blogging for Author Brand class will be starting tomorrow, so I hope to see you in class. You can sign up here.

If you want to know a little more before making a decision on what class is right for you, I am giving a free webinar tonight at 7:00 p.m. CST. Rise of the Machines–Human Authors in a Digital World. Sign up asap because slots are limited. I look forward to seeing you guys tonight.

Facebook has almost a billion members. They are valuable, but Facebook advertising (like all advertising) is virtually invisible to the modern consumer. When we understand that hard truth and focus, instead, on people, we have more impact and are far more resilient to change.

What are your thoughts? Is Facebook too big? What are your favorite parts of social media? What are your pet peeves?

I love hearing from you!

The post Standing Out in an a World of Invisible—Does Advertising and Marketing Still Work? appeared first on Kristen Lamb.