The Power of Pips

Back to the blog! With my good friend James Burgin I have been invited to speak this month at an event hosted by wealth guru T. Harv Eker. As of now we’ve decided to focus on what we call “social branding.” We mean branding for participants in the social media that have taken over the world in (what feels like) the past 24 hours. One idea I’ll be exploring is “pips”, which I get from bird droppings.

The thing about birds is they fly about eating stuff and then poop the seeds all over the place, making new things grow. I realize the metaphor is a bit unsavory — but it can hardly be worse than “viral marketing” (Here, catch my new disease…). And I think it’s more precise, because you can actually design the fruit — tasty information-stuff — and embed it with the tiny seedlings you wish to spread through your market.

So what is a pip? Very simply, it’s a neat idea that you come up with (or commandeer) and feed into the prevailing conversation. In other words, a pip is your Personal Intellectual Property. To me the value of thinking in pips is that it accelerates the conventional approach to messaging: you deal with messages that are more compressed, less permanent, and more easily disseminated by word of mouth. So next time you sit down to write a blog, email blast, or even old-fashioned ad, think pips.

I just realized I should offer you an example. Well how about… pip?