Making Things Better, Marketing and Music

In this interview you will learn who to combine commercial activity and volunteering and social entrepreneurship, why it’s a mistake to fail fast and the most important ingredient in marketing. (It might not be what you think).  

In this episode you will discover:

• How to combine commercial activity, with volunteering?
• Why advertising and marketing are completely different?
• Why you should not listen to people who tell you: Fail fast and make mistakes (and what to do instead)
• The most important ingredient in Marketing
• Tools and services you DON’T need to succeed
• Why you MUST not compare yourself to Apple
• Why Jonathan left Facebook & Twitter (with one exception)
• Why Jonathan genuinely thinks that’s it’s NOT healthy to keep reading what people like me think (+real life proof)
• Why most companies are measuring the wrong things
• Why Jonathan started United Heartbeat and Vienna Greeters?
• Jonathan’s answer to the question “When do you stop being a refugee? (Referring to the Refugee Crisis in Europe”)

About Jonathan Irons

Jonathan helps people market music products online. He has been working in classical music publishing and promotion, online and offline, for 20 years now. He is working for Naxos running the Naxos Works Database (www.naxosworks.com) and looking after some pretty nifty projects they are developing.

When he is not doing that he is running Vienna Greeters, and volunteering at a wonderful charity for Integration called Station Wien in Vienna.

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The Interview

This Is The Headline From Jonathan’s Website.

What do these words mean for you?

That’s a very good question. I made the website when I became self-employed. I knew I wanted to make a website which just very, very briefly told people what I actually do. And I’d seen so many websites and LinkedIn profiles where people say they’re passionate about marketing or they’re experienced professional with years of experience as a dedicated blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I always thought, “Yeah, but who are you and what do you actually do?” So I just took a piece of paper and whenever I work on a website, I take a big piece of paper and I just say, “Right, what do I want to tell the reader?” And I came up with a few things. One of the things I say on my website is I help music companies sell things and communicate online. Because everything else is just marketing buzzwords. What I do is help people communicate and sell things.

It’s very difficult to concentrate on one thing that you do.

The heroes thing on my website, I think I stole that from Seth Godin, and just about everything I do is stolen from Seth Godin.

Whenever I thought about heroes I always stumbled across teachers. A teacher isn’t just somebody who you encounter in school, but a teacher is somebody you learn from.01:56 I’ve learned from many people over the years in work situations, and outside work situations. I wanted to write it down.

How to combine commercial activity, with volunteering?

There’s lots of music in there. I studied music and I’m a musician. I combine commercial activity, with volunteering.

In German you say, “soziales Engagement,” which is a lovely way of saying a social engagement. In English you say volunteering but I don’t really like this word.

Germans have other words like “Freiwilligenarbeit,” which means literally voluntary work, meaning you’re not forced to do it. I liked the term social engagement.

I remember speaking to someone a few years ago working in a charity and someone asked me, “Well, what’s the goal, what do you want to get out of this?” And I said, “Isn’t the goal always to change the world?”03:00 Jonathan Irons: And she laughed, and I said, “Well, if your goal isn’t to change the world even just a tiny bit then why are you doing it?”

People seemed to think it was too bold or arrogant to say that they want to change the world. I am here to say:

You can, you’re allowed to. And so I try to combine my work and my social activities on the website, and it’s been very, very good because the two things live off each other. They cross-pollinate each other.

I’ve learned a lot from running two charities, but my two charities have also profited from the things I do for my job.

How did you transition from being a musician into a marketer?

03:54 That’s quite easy to answer. I’m a lazy musician, which means I wanted a salary and a warm dry office. Then I stumbled across the idea of working for a music publisher 24 years ago. I really found something that I liked, so I’ve always worked with music, but I don’t earn my living from playing music. I studied music. When you start working for a small publisher, where there were just five people, you have to do everything.04:32 In Germany at the time, the word marketing was used as a synonym for advertising. This is not true.

It’s always misunderstood that marketing is advertising. In that company, we developed this idea that marketing was how you orient yourself within a market.

How do you place yourself?

What is your position in the market?

Everything you do with that is marketing. The people who write the music are just as much in marketing as the people who do the bookkeeping. They’re all members of this chain of quality or production or productivity which brings in any company who wants to bring an improvement to the lives of the people they’re selling their product or service to.

And so I ended up getting a business card that said, “Marketing On Air,” and I thought, “Oh, oh, yeah. Oh, I’m in marketing.” So I don’t have any classical training in marketing but I’ve done marketing my whole life.

How did you get your marketing education?

By trying to sell classical music. [chuckle]By selling contemporary music, in fact. When I started working, it was in ’94 most people didn’t have the internet. In ’97 we set up our first website and we started changing some of the things we were doing, like digitalization.

We started scanning music, we started putting everything on hard drives using scanners, digital printers and things. There was this different way of working with data.

One thing I noticed early on, was that most of the databases that companies used in the last 10-15 years were replacements for paper versions.

In the old days they’d have a card system and then they’d have ring binders and then they’d have lists and sheets and things, and they said, “Well, we have this data which is already organized, we’ll put that into a database.”

Now, 15-20 years later, when companies start creating products and services, they don’t have this old data, so they start with a fresh field to work in. The advantage for me taking that music and digitalizing it is that it was very easy to make a website once you had the database.

That’s where this whole marketing idea came around. My marketing is self-taught. Lots and lots of books,… there weren’t many blogs and websites around back then.

Lots of books and learning by doing. Of course I made lots of mistakes.07:34 Martin Boeddeker: Everybody I talk to says they are usually self-taught and they made a lot of mistakes. I remember a friend of mine who built a really successful company in the Netherlands called StudyPortals, and when I asked him this question, he said, “Yeah, we made a ton of mistakes but nothing that completely screwed up the company, so we are fortunate.”07:58 Jonathan Irons: Well, somebody said to me once that I was a good photographer. The truth is I’m a very bad photographer. What I’m very good at is deleting bad pictures.

I do not agree with this kind of bullshit marketing speech that says, “Go and make mistakes, you’ll become wiser from them.”

That’s an analogy to learning from mistakes. Just one thing, though, I do not agree with this kind of bullshit marketing speech that says, “Go and make mistakes, you’ll become wiser from them.”

No, no, no, nobody should try to make a mistake. The thing is that if you do make a mistake, and you will make a mistake, just get up and dust yourself down and keep working from it.

One of my interests was computers and technology, and the other one was ergonomics. I wrote a recent blog post about ergonomics and empathy, and I think it’s an old-fashioned concept, but maybe you can tell me if you agree. I think that in all forms of marketing and usability and UX and communication, there has to be a very strong element of empathy.

If you can’t imagine what your customer is doing with this product, stop it. If you can genuinely put yourself in the position of the reader or the customer or the user of your services, then you’ve done half the marketing already, if you can actually succeed at that.09:57 Jonathan Irons: The number of websites I’ve gone to where you spend 30 seconds on the website and you still don’t know what they do, and these are big companies, serious companies. I looked at one yesterday, and I said, “I really don’t know what they do.”

And it seems, I don’t know, some people have a problem with it because they think that the marketing tools that we’ve been sold over the last decades are the main thing, and they’re not.

The Most Ingredient In Marketing

The whole thing with Google, Google AdWords, search engine optimization, Facebook, all of them, everything everyone’s ever talked about on the internet, they’re just the tools.

If you don’t have the empathy, you don’t create a service which solves a problem for your user, then none of those tools are gonna help you, or you’re just gonna be another cheap app, which I don’t know, makes smileys or emojis or something like that.10:48 Martin Boeddeker: If you understand your customer and have empathy, you’re better at explaining what your product actually does for him and the true value of your product.11:11 Jonathan Irons: Yeah. What the internet has also done and the cheapness of creating code, basically, you only need a laptop or any PC, any computer, you can create code.

This has brought around many solutions for problems that don’t exist. So there’s lots of wonderful software out there, especially in the music business.

I’ll give you a simple example, which I have done myself, and it’s page turning software for sheet music, for music.

The problem here is that the page turning technology built by various companies around the world is excellent, is wonderful, is perfect. It does what it says it does.

The problem here is that the pain threshold for people using paper music isn’t high enough for them to change to digital music, and that’s something which is really curious, because the supply is too good for the demand.

Why You Must Not Compare Yourself To Apple

12:15 Jonathan Irons: And Apple said, “Well, we didn’t ask our customers if they wanted an iPhone or an iPod.” But they also had millions of dollars of advertising money. They’re not you and me, right?

Technology has brought lots of, if you like, marketing shortcuts, which look very attractive, the whole ads etcetera, you get bombarded every day saying, “Boost this ad,” “Pay for this,” and if it doesn’t work spend more money. That’s not marketing, or in a sense, it is marketing, but that’s Facebook marketing. That is not your marketing.

Why Jonathan left Twitter

I found you via Twitter and I saw your last post there, so you actually left the service. Can you tell us a little bit about that?13:09 Jonathan Irons: I’ve been off Twitter since July, beginning of July or end of June or something, whenever that tweet was, I’ve been, I’m dry, I’ve been off there. I actually missed a very important message on Twitter because I was off it.

I switched off the notifications and I missed a very important message. It’s very easy to say Twitter’s a waste of time, blah, blah, blah. You’ve heard of all that. You’ve heard all of that before.

I had a difficulty with was cross-channel communication. It genuinely irritates me to get Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, Twitter, Facebook, email, etcetera, messages from people.

I’d really love everyone just to use the same thing. And so there’s that side of it. The other side with it is the technological thing, which I think is a challenge for everybody who wants to sell a message, which is the the endlessness of Twitter and Facebook.

I’ve been off Facebook for a couple of years now, except for propaganda purposes and yeah, so if I post something I’ll share it on Facebook. But I’m afraid I don’t read other people’s posts. I’m very rude about that.14:29 Jonathan Irons: The Twitter thing is quite important, because it ties in with my views about news and all of these things tie in with my views of work and, yeah, work life, if you like. Twitter rolling news, newspapers, online news and all the other things, Instagram, Facebook, etcetera, they’re all time sinks.

They’re all things where you can always spend time. And what they do is they need you to come back. They don’t profit from you reading one message. They profit from you coming back every hour or every day or every week, whatever it is. That’s the same for every newspaper, for every TV show, for every online website.

They Want You To Come Back

What this means is they produce content which makes you want to come back, and they sort the content, like Twitter and Facebook, according to algorithms that make you come back.

And to be brutally honest, I was just not very good at resisting that. I would just get sucked in and I’d find myself going to the Guardian website for a few minutes, then I’d go to Twitter for a few minutes, then I’d check my emails and then I’d see if there’s anything new on Twitter.

And then I’d end up in this vortex of time-wasting. I stopped in June. I’ve read more books than ever before. I’ve stopped reading newspapers. I read one newspaper a week, one weekly newspaper, the Economist.

I don’t read anything else. I don’t listen to radio news or TV news, and it’s absolute bliss, I tell you. [chuckle]16:13 Martin Boeddeker: I was struggling with that, but I just re-read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. He has the same low information diet. It’s  about the opportunity cost, what you could actually do and achieve in the time that you’re just wasting in an endless feed that does not even provide real value or real information.16:42 Jonathan Irons: I fully agree. There are two aspects there for me. The first one is, I’m not saying that Twitter is a bad thing, and I’m not saying that other people should be like me, because other people may have better discipline than me. Other people may enjoy it more than me. They may really enjoy doing it and reading it so, great. There’s no moral prerogative here that Twitter is a bad thing.

I genuinely don’t think it’s healthy to keep reading what people like me think

But the other point is the bubble, if you like. That’s a cliche as well. The echo chamber, the bubble. I genuinely don’t think it’s healthy to keep reading what people like me think. I’ll give you an example.

In Austria they have the national newspaper called Der Standard, and they had a, what was their project called, I think it was City Speaking, I don’t know.

There’s an international project about people getting in touch with other people who have a different opinion from them. So they ask you a few questions on the website, and then they ask you if you would like to sign up and meet someone in your city who has a different opinion to you.17:53 Jonathan Irons: I thought, “Oh, yeah, this is a bit crazy, but okay, I’m game.” I signed up, and it said things like, “Do you agree with President Trump’s policies? Do you agree with the work of the Austrian government?” Then they said something which made me really angry. “Do you believe that Islam is compatible with the European values?” And then something about vegetarianism, and right at the bottom, oh, yeah, something about women.

I answered my questions and I submitted my answers. And a couple of weeks ago, I got a reply back from Der Standard and they said, “Unfortunately, we have not been able to find anybody in your area who has differing views to you.”

That was a real eye-opener for me because, in fact, this is a real declaration of bankruptcy for Der Standard, because what Der Standard is saying is, “Our readers agree with our readers.” You could say, “Well, that’s obvious.” But I wonder what they were trying to achieve?18:56 Jonathan Irons: And the reason I say this is that Twitter amplifies that, Facebook amplifies that, all the online media amplifies the views that you already have. And other people have spoken more eloquently than me about how your own views get amplified by online media, and how you become less and less and less open to contrasting views. But I found that a very good punchline that the newspaper should then say, “We are sorry. We couldn’t find anyone with differing views to you.” Well, obviously, because we’re all reading the same newspaper, or we were back then.19:34 Martin Boeddeker: I remember one book from Sherry Turkle and I think the whole social media is just making communications worse and yeah, it’s disappearing and we do not even notice it, but everyone who has just a cell phone, like if I have, for example, have a look at the YouTube channel or the Instagram of my wife, she gets completely different… She’s living in a completely different world than I do and we do not notice it but it’s happening, this kind of bubble and it’s getting worse, I think.20:12 Jonathan Irons: The cross over or the connection here to the way we work is, it’s a little bit difficult to see, but I think there’s a connection here between this, what we do in our spare time and what we do at work, and it’s basically, it’s what you do with your app as well. It’s literally finding focus, because when you’re trying to focus at work, you’re trying to concentrate on something important. You’re trying to be creative and productive and produce something.

Why Companies Are Measuring The Wrong Things

20:44 Jonathan Irons: Unfortunately, the companies we work for measure us at all their wrong things. They measure us on things like revenue and attendance, and I remember working for a company that spent a colossal amount of time talking about working time directives, and arguing and discussing and negotiating, and they were very positive about it and they were a good company, but they spent this huge amount of time talking about, “Well, if you take one hour off there and then you have minus hours and then you have to… ”

And I’m thinking, “Okay, well, talk about that if you want.” But if they’d spent the same time talking about productivity and creativity and training and what would you like to do, then maybe the revenue would have gone up [chuckle], instead of just spending all this time talking about administration.21:38 Martin Boeddeker: Yeah. I’ve been studying this whole thing a lot. And in the end, especially, for example, if I read Seneca or something, really old, I just have the view that, yeah, that’s just like humankind is wired. Some people get it. They are reading philosophy and things that… And actually try to improve our world, and some people are just mindless and going for status things, buying the most expensive car, getting the latest mobile phones, stuff like that. And other people are caring more about relationships, friendships and yeah, truth, beauty, and goodness.22:26 Jonathan Irons: Yeah, that’s curious, though, because there’s never been any proof that the big car makes you happy. There’s no correlation between salary and happiness. There’s relative happiness and relative salary, with someone else. If you have the feeling that everyone else in the office earns more than you, then you’re unhappy, but that’s a fairness thing. That’s not a monetary question.

I don’t know if I disagree. I know exactly what you mean. I don’t think it’s a case of some people don’t get it. I think it’s some people are just busy, because if you get in the tram in Vienna in the morning, you see messages on the screen all the time and they’re going really fast. They’re very quick. And you’re being told worry about America. You know what I mean, half a year go, everyone was worrying about being killed by North Korea. Oh, that’s gone now. That’s over. It’s just half a year ago, we were facing nuclear Armagedon from North Korea. Apparently, that’s not a thing anymore. We have to worry about something else now.23:29 Jonathan Irons: So it’s not that other people don’t get or don’t have the intellectual capacity to understand what’s around them, it’s that they don’t have the chance to have those thoughts, because they’re being saturated with not even negative things, they’re being saturated with commercial and exciting things.

So negative stories are more exciting than positive stories, blah, blah, blah. We’re getting onto my favorite subject here, which is the news thing. Like I said earlier, the newspapers and blogs and Twitterers and everybody on Facebook, they want you to come back, so they create their content so that it’s sticky, so that you do come back. And I was in England the other week and there was a newspaper article in the I, a British newspaper, about a shortage of allergy medicines for children, and it was a front page.

Then there were two pages, one page inside and then there was a two-page spread further in, so there were three pages inside and half a page on the cover. It was the main headline, about this shortage of allergy medicines for children. That’s a dramatic story and obviously lots of information to be had there and solutions. They were saying how can we sort this?

Why Are Newspaper Stories Are Always Negative?

24:56 Jonathan Irons: But next to one of those articles about a quarter of a page on the left-hand side of the newspaper, and everyone knows the right-hand side is more important than the left-hand side, was a piece of news saying that the number of strokes in the UK had declined by something like 40% since the year 2000.

And these are people who didn’t die. [chuckle] Strokes one of the, I think the leading, heart attack and strokes is the leading cause of death in the UK. I’m guessing here, I’d have to look up the numbers, but it’s one of the most important killers in society, and there was a dramatic, absolutely heroic decrease in the number of deaths over the last 20 years, less than 20 years, but the kids with allergy were more important, because of course the kids with allergies, were more interesting, right?

But in terms of actually dead people, and I always say things like dead people, dead children. Whenever I talk about vaccines, I talk about dead children, because people don’t like when you say dead people, dead children, but when they talk about, “I’m not gonna vaccinate my child because of blah blah, blah,” what they’re talking about there is increasing the number of dead children in the world.

26:12 Martin Boeddeker: One story I just reminded me is like more negative news and good news in the newspapers. And I remember the last time I’ve been to London in the Tube there