Reaching Critical Mass

I just finished watching an episode of "Studio 60". I'm not a big TV watcher but there are two shows I try to always watch: <>Saturday Night Live and <>CBS Sunday Morning. Because I like SNL, I also try to catch the new "Studio 60" which parallels SNL pretty closely.

Anyway, on "Studio 60" tonight, they had Sting as the performing artist. Curiously enough he was also on TV just a few hours previously on Sunday Morning. On both shows he was presenting music from his new album. This is no coincidence.

But Sting is a very intelligent man. He knows that it is much more valuable for him to appear multiple times in rapid succession than to trickle in through various media over the course of several months. I can only imagine that Sting is making other appearances in other media across the spectrum if he appeared in two of the only three shows I watch each week, both in the span of a few hours of each other.

In fact, a quick Google search for "Sting music" revealed <>11,700,000 sites. With over 11 million web sites devoted to him and his music you would think he could just release an album and it would be a hit. But he's a businessman. As much as he presents himself as a pure artist, he is very business savvy. In fact, the very act of presenting himself as a "pure artist" is in fact a very conscious business decision, but that's a topic for another post.

Sting knows that you don't make an announcement and hope that everyone heard it. You also don't make an announcement and then wait a month to make it again. You announce it over and over and over in every medium you can find in as many ways as you can create, with a rapid succession so that you reach a sort of critical mass.

How to apply this lesson in YOUR business: Remember that you can increase your efforts by 50%, and increase your exposure by 50% but wind up with 100 or 200% more results. The more you work, the more you work. It "Snow balls", with each exposure growing the impact of the next exposure.

Think about ways to reach this "critical mass" where your results grow disproportionately from your efforts. This is what Malcolm Gladwell calls "The Tipping Point" and it is a concept that holds amazing power when you understand how to use it in your marketing.

--Julian Franklin