I don’t know if you have seen this video yet – it’s a 14 year old girl from the Caribbean covering the Adele hit “Hello”. Please watch, I will explain why it’s important later:
Before I go on, it is important to explain the title of this post, I love the The Mouse That Roared – the storyline, movie, book. I don’t want to bore you with a full recap, but the story is about a tiny country, a duchy, that declares war against the U.S. with their 20 man army armed with bows and arrows. They actually win. (The story is more fun than that). But that story inspired the title of this post because in today’s world, the internet provides relatively equally ground for the underdog – Mouses Can Roar. Even with bows and arrows.
As I think about the video above, all I can ask is “When in our lifetime has something like this been possible?” A 14 year old kid from the Solomon Islands having access to the entire world. This video has 18mm+ views. 18mm. She is a mouse but she is roaring. How great is that?
In b2b, content is a great bow and arrow. Let me give you a personal example. In a recent interview, Matt Heinz asked me about the lessons I learned building TOPO. It was a great opportunity to think about some of the levers TOPO pulled as a “mouse”. One of the strategic moves we made was to create deep, definitive content pieces that did NOT have a reg form – we let it fly on the blog. Our post on the Sales Development Framework flew through the internet and established us as thought leaders in Sales Development. It let the world know that we had arrived. No, it did not get 18mm visits like the video above…but it was our “hello”. It was 4000+ words and shared many best practices people would charge for. To this day, people ask me why we didn’t do an ebook. And boy am I glad we didn’t. It was shared, printed, etc. Had it sat behind a reg form, we would only be able to reach people we were able to market to (via email or paid ad, etc).
One of my favorite quotes of all time was Jon Miller’s: “We wrote our first blog post before we wrote our first line of code.” But don’t just think about cranking 500 words or less every 5 days (“5 Ways to Optimize your DataCenter” – Think about that big piece that will goes nuts for you. Or more than one big piece. Then you can roard.