I was at home on a Monday. I'd just gone for a bike ride and come back, and the post had arrived.
There was a dental magazine there, you probably know, the one wrapped in paper.
I have a format that I use for consuming dental magazines such as this. I never spend more than three or four minutes on the whole magazine, just to get a sense, an overview, and see if everything is as I think it is.
When flicking through such magazines, I'm always struck by the extraordinary amount of advertising that now exists to keep them alive; is that really effective? (I know it's necessary for their mode, but is it effective?)
And on this occasion, I was reminded of Nolan Sorrento because my head was off in different directions.
I can't remember which year I read Ready Player One, but I know that it was one of our amazing Book club efforts. I think I took it to Italy for the caravan holiday we used to share with family and friends.
We used to exchange books and read them through the holiday, and Mike and I got busy with Ready Player One (he well beat me to finishing that because he is a much faster, better reader and more clever than me).
Nolan Sorrento is one of the bad guys in Ready Player One. He's the guy who tries to steal stuff from everybody else. He is a metaphor for corporate practice, corporate America, and corporate Britain.
And so in Nolan's world, they wanted to win the competition, to win all the overall online oasis, which is where everybody lives in the future so that they could use '97% of the screen time for advertising' because, 'above that, people start to fit'.
In the film version of Ready Player One, they show you what that would look like, including graphics, flashing, icons, distraction, and all of that stuff.
And that is the vision of future advertising, isn't it? Squeeze as much revenue onto the screen as you possibly can.
And so, I'm back to the magazine now. I'm wondering how fast we'll reach Nolan Sorrento's advertising model on the television in front of us, and I have a privileged position in terms of assessing this.
So, keep with me on this rambling journey today because I want to go back to 2011 when I was part of the organising committee for the ITI Congress in Liverpool. At that stage, I was a 'big thing' on X (formerly known as Twitter).
Early on, I had 2500 followers, a Klout score, and a professional managed me month-by-month to 'raise my profile'.
During that time at that Congress, I decided to offer Danny Buser, the world-famous implant surgeon and professor from the University of Bern, the opportunity to have a Twitter account to publicise himself.
Honestly, he had no idea what I was talking about.
The night before I offered him that, I'd asked Chris Barrow whether I should do that and asked Chris what metaphor I should use to explain to him, and Chris gave me the metaphor of Times Square and the ticker tape advertising that occurs there and still does to this day.
If you stand in Times Square and look up, you can see the advertising. It flashes up and flashes out, totally indiscriminate—it's carpet bombing.
So what happens is people pay a lot of money to advertise there, and they hope that they can catch a fish, kind of like putting three fish in a massive 1 million gallon tank and shooting a machine gun in there and hoping to hit one.
What Chris explained to me was that things like Twitter were bringing the fish into a barrel much easier to shoot.
And so, I explained that to Danny Buser and we set him up with a Twitter account and he never used it.
He does now.
But my point is that moving on from that time and my 'presence on Twitter, ' I then realised that advertising and profile building for me on social media just wasn't a thing that I could handle.
Social media made me sad.
It made me filled with self-loathing.
It made me anxious with FOMO, and so the benefit to me, were way outweighed by the negatives.
It was around that time that a little seed started to grow inside of me about what would happen if I actually scrapped it all in, came off Twitter with my 'high profile' and came off Facebook, where I was getting lured into dental gym pages and other things in the middle of the night and come off this new, bright, shiny object that I just started with called Instagram.
And so a few years later, I did, and I went because I didn't want to go down the route of Nolan's into advertising because I didn't want to see it and because I didn't like it, I didn't want to do it.
And so I vanished from the face of social media in terms of individual personal content and interaction.
I got stuck on Strava for a while but realised that was the same, so I went off that.
What's important to understand about this is that I didn't come off of that and disappear into a cave; I decided to go in a different direction, market differently, and build connections differently.
I decided to move away from the Nolan Sorrento model of carpet bomb marketing into trust marketing.
I decided to move into story brand, as my friend, colleague, and marketing genius, Tom Reason, calls it.
At the practice, we pretty much all went in that direction.
And so now we use social media as part of story branding and, trust marketing, and connection building.
So, what you must understand about marketing is that you can go for carpet bomb marketing, trying to randomly select people who will come and go and pay as little as possible and snag on and snag out, or you can go down the trust marketing group. It's difficult to go down both, and so you automatically exclude one by doing the other. All I did when I came away from Nolan's principles was decide to do the other and not the one.
If you're interested in this, it might be worth getting in touch with us because we do a lot of this stuff on our business courses, trust marketing instead of carpet bomb marketing.
Don't get caught up in the anxiety of wondering why you have to have a practice Instagram page and, why you have to get as many likes as you possibly can, and why you're not attracting the patients that you want and then becoming confused and sad and tired.
Come and talk to us and go in a different direction. Go in a direction that fits your values and the way you go about your work. Go in the direction of trust because, after all, humans almost always default to trust.
Blog Post Number - 3878