Go Fractal! Taking you from conception of your business vision and mission to the use of social media to syndicate your brand and business online through an understanding how to tap into the infinite nature of fractals to take your marketing to infinity and beyond. Anne Robinson
Š Anne Robinson 2010 The moral rights of the author have been asserted National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Author:
Anne Robinson
Title:
Go Fractal!
ISBN:
978-1-4466-3853-8
Notes: Subjects:
Women, Business and Economics
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form of by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above.
Cover Design by Michael Petter
Disclaimer The material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and neither purports nor intends to be advice. Readers should not act on the basis of any matter in this publication without considering (and if appropriate taking) professional advice with due regard to their own particular circumstances. The author and publisher expressly disclaim all and any liability to any person, whether a purchaser of this publication or not, in respect of anything and of the consequences of anything done or omitted to be done by any such person in reliance, whether in whole or in part, upon the whole or any part of the contents of this publication.
Fractal Magic Marketing
TM
Taking your marketing to infinity and beyond!
Annie Infinite a.k.a.
Anne Robinson
@AnnieInfinite
"Fractals reveal a hidden "order" underlying all seemingly chaotic events. The fractals are intricate and beautiful. They repeat basic patterns, but with an infinity of variations and forms. The worldview emerging from this scientific research is new, and yet at the same time very, very ancient." Dedication
TM
This book Go Fractal! and subsequent Fractal Magic Marketing system and training was written with all my followers, fans and friends in mind, those early adopters who encouraged me, motivated me and kicked me up the butt when I needed it. Thank you all for your help and guidance and most of all for your belief in me. You rock!
A special mention to the wonderful friend and colleagues who were kind enough to read, comment on and help edit this book and from whom I got the courage to finish and publish it for everyone else to read.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
“Annie thanks for the sneak peak at Fractal Magic MarketingTM and what an awesome approach to marketing. I can't wait for the official launch when everyone can get a look at the next inspirational marketing era that will take the world by storm. Pure genius of course :-)” Heather Boon, Maximum Results http://maximumresults.com.au “When it's time to get your stuff out there and share it with the world you want to be sure that you're at the cutting edge. And Annie is the person you need! Her Fractal Marketing MagicTM is fantastic, keeping you in the flow as you head towards your own personal success story. There is so information here that is priceless, and will support your adventure into social network marketing and beyond.” Xx Kim Gould, Love Your Design http://loveyourdesign.com “This is a completely revolutionary system for doing business created by Annie Infinite. If like me you are always coming upon the latest new system, this one will delight you. Annie combines a wealth of experience in social media marketing with an impressive intellect but manages to deliver something that is new and exciting within a simple framework so we can get complex ideas with ease. This system is foolproof, exciting and Annie’s writing is a joy! Having worked with you Annie many times I KNOW what that you have this extraordinary ability to combine spiritual and conscious approaches to business with a razor sharp way of bringing ideas together. You explain complex concepts with ease. ” Sam Adkins, The Homeopathic coach http://www.thehomeopathiccoach.com “This is such a wonderful concept, and I am so glad you are articulating this Annie! I am really looking forward to more of what you are offering. I would love to interview you about this topic in the new year, so your message can be shared with others on my database. Love and healing to you…” Krishna Everson, Health Biz Mentor http://www.healthpracticesuccess.com “Annie, I loved your book! It made me laugh, it gave me goosebumps, and it amazed me. I loved your authoritative yet engaging style of writing and wished I had been one of your science students at school. I felt like I was right there in your presence as I read and I learnt so much! About how to market my business online with social media and at the same time I was transported into a spiritual world of what I can only describe as "enlightenment". Is that even possible? Oh yeah, I forgot, just for a moment, that anything is possible with a woman who calls herself Annie Infinite, and whose business name is Infinite Possibilities :-)” Jacleen Allen, Success Zone http://successzoneunlimited.net “I have read it and am in awe, I knew of these things but you put them in such a way I am now 'clear' in my concept of how i want to market my business.” Suzi Franks, 2 Women 2 Acres
WARNING! What you are about to read is not your typical marketing manual or book. It is not going to be for everyone. This information is cutting edge and takes into consideration some simple quantum mechanics concepts and aspects of marketing still in their infancy. This is not about what up until now has been known as marketing. This book is revolutionary as the social media revolution is taking place right now and its fractal nature is being revealed. This book explains why marketers need to be acting differently to keep up with the changes of this social media are bringing in. This is not about marketing campaigns that have a beginning and an end, this book is about campaigns which create fractals which create more fractals on and on without end. If you can't keep up with this or adapt, stop reading now because like all dinosaurs your time will end and you will not want to read about your demise in this manual. This book is an introduction to a system that will never be fully systemized because of the ever fractalizing and evolving nature of the medium on which it is focussed – the internet and so this system will also follow that nature by evolving and fractalizing.
Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 8 Why Fractals? ..................................................................................................................................11 Infinite Streams of Memes.......................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Creating Fractals ......................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Passionate Visioning ............................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Branding You and Your Business............................................ Error! Bookmark not defined. Adding Values ............................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Growing Fractals ......................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Now Add This:......................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. 3… 2… 1… Launch! .................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Going Tribal................................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Being a Fractal Magic Marketer Means...................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Social Engineering....................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Leave a Legacy............................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. List of sites: .................................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Introduction I began my introduction to the internet way back when we were all using DOS, yes I was and still am to this day an early adopter and as my sons call me a Nerd. I can prove I am a nerd, yes a real one as I can answer trivia questions about Star Wars and the Matrix movies and I am online more often than I am not. My first experience with computers was when I was 33 and a wife and mother and was fascinated by computers and what they seemed to offer a lover of learning and curious person like me I took a course in using DOS so as to be ready to buy my first computer. After that early beginning it was to be a few more years before I was able to talk my then husband into purchasing our first computer, with the idea that our son needed for his schoolwork. By the time we got this computer I didn't really need my DOS skills as Microsoft had already put Windows out and I started blogging and going onto forums to find people I could talk to about my first love, quantum physics. After my divorce about another five years after that, I of course purchased my own computer and began to play on the internet, I again began a few blogs of my own on subjects close to my heart and was a regular contributor on some forums, mainly regarding quantum mechanics and personal development. I worked out that I have been blogging for about 18 years, and online using forums (the old social media) for around 19. I was on Twitter when there were just 500 users, because again that’s where I could find those people who were interested in science and philosophy. Come forward a few more years and having finished university, a few courses on business development and other interests like NLP, I was looking for someone to joint venture with. A friend introduced me to another friend of hers and a few months later this lady called me and offered me the chance to partner with her in a website about health and fitness. She had no internet skills at all, but had the money to purchase a DIY CMS site and needed someone to do the courses with her on how to use the site and market it on the internet. She knew from our conversations that I had some skills and understood how to use the internet and computers and suggested the partnership. So I was introduced to the early world of internet marketing. It was fascinating and I picked it up very quickly, more quickly than my teacher thought possible as by this time I was in my late forties. However the more I learned the less I understood about how this information really related to marketing. It was very hit and miss from my perspective as back then, we were taught to create a main website and then create multiple one page sites that led web surfers back to our site through various campaigns that involved giving away eBooks. The sites only got found via good keywords and search engine optimisation and at no time, to my consternation, were we encouraged to actually market our business or sites in ways that displayed, advertised or showed our sites to the general public.
As I had been a member of several forums and had a few blogs of my own, it occurred to me to tell some of my many friends and followers about my new site and as I was highly thought of and respected on those sites we saw our sites stats jump immediately. I knew that I was onto something, something I had not been taught, but which in retrospect was perfectly obvious. Instead of waiting for my customers to 'find' our site via generic searches, I could take my marketing right to them. Thus began my journey into social media. When I joined Twitter there were barely 200 people on it, and it was a very unreliable site. Oh what am I saying, we still see the fail whale now and then here in 2010! My teacher could not understand what I was talking about when I told him what I was doing, it seemed time consuming and silly and not what he had been taught. But I was getting better results than any of his other students and so he thought he would give it a go. Fail! He tried to advertise on social sites instead of earning trust and respect the old fashioned way by connecting, making friends and adding value. The three main rules of social engagement and I still see it happening today. So there you have it, my story, well the part you need to know about anyway, how I got to be a social media *maven. So with the success and popularity of social media marketing, what does this mean for your business? It means you can no longer do business 'as usual'. It means you cannot market, sell or manage your marketing in the ways you did three or four years ago, or even six months ago for that matter. In this new era of social media anyone with a computer, internet connection, a video camera and a little education can become a social media star, an overnight sensation. This means that no longer do the big company's hold sway over the sole operator business, as with just a little time and savvy everyone has the chance to be heard by millions of people from all over the world. It can become difficult to stand out from the crowd as being the great leveller does have its downside as well as its upside, but that problem is solved by each person and brand being authentically real, as each one of us is unique and that is the key to fractalization of your message. Social Media and the internet is evolving into a multiple sharing cosmos, with fractal building blocks made of up social sharing tools including social sites of all kinds, widgets, plugins, apps, and platforms. Each of these will have multiple fractal patterns and variations from each other that appeal to different sectors of your market, who will pick and choose your content as it aligns with their fractal makeup. And this is just the beginning! Over time these patterns accumulate; they do not end or close, they instead become real parts of the social identity of groups of people. Have you heard the terms, “Do you
Facebook?” or “Are you on Twitter?” or “Do you have a LinkedIn resume?” etc.. these are memes or thought fractals… ideas that spread. People all over the world now identify with their online aliases and profiles and some spend more time online than off. If you are not marketing online you are missing an entire universe of prospects from all over the world. With Facebook now at over 500 million users, when I say a whole universe of prospects you can see I mean it
Why Fractals?
“It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world.” - Chaos Theory - ‘The Butterfly Effect’ 2002
"Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean universe - which stands continuously open to our gaze, but which cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth." - Galileo (1623)
A fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity.
“The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set ... is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as 'chaos'.” — Benoit Mandelbrot
“Fractal marketing is more natural than viral marketing. Viral marketing has a hook, a catch, or a gimmick (some of them brilliant) but fractal marketing might not have any of those things and a virus can be killed off (think about it). Unlike viral marketing, which grows enormously and then dies quickly, fractal marketing goes forever, repeating itself at every scale imaginable. When your name is synonymous with your service, you’re there.” Fractal Magic MarketingTM harnesses the idea that consumers, clients and customers will 'pick up' and promote your product or service throughout the internet thereby scattering smaller, unique versions of your marketing and branding throughout the web. Whereas viral marketing is built on the premise that a consumer is infected with the intended message, Fractal Magic MarketingTM is the understanding that the consumer will modify and create their own message about your business and you depending on their perception, thus creating a whole new 'set' of messages about you and your business: just like snowflakes falling to earth each one a snowflake, each one a part of the snowfall, yet each one unique. Famous examples of this kind of marketing are Google, Apple, Velcro, Post-it's and any other brand that is identified by the consumer in their own perception and with their own message about who they are. Go test this theory; ask someone to explain who Google is and then ask others, and see if each of these people are not necessarily parroting an ad or message they have heard, but rather the brand has meaning for them outside of advertised messages. Fractals are "geometric figures made of shapes that repeat themselves at smaller scales infinitely. Computer graphics, most notably video games and movie CGI, are built largely on fractals." (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Fractal Geometry is the study of selfsimilar structures and is at the conceptual core of understanding nature's complexity. Benoît Mandelbrot was the IBM employee who successfully measured the coastline of England in 1967, coined the term fractal in 1975 and opened new worlds in mathematics and now, I believe, human emotional understanding. Fractals are ubiquitous in nature. Look up you can see the forever changing shapes of fractal clouds. If you have rich imagination beyond your eye sight, your mind will see the fractal distribution of matter in the universe. Look around, you see fractal trees, fractal mountains, fractal coast lines. Look inside your body, you see the fractal architecture of arteries and veins, fractal bronchi, fractal nerve system ... all perfect examples of Nature's efficient and optimal use of space and
materials. Look at the hierarchical structures of a bureaucratic system and a society; the word "fractal" never fails to pop up. When wandering at the vegetable department of a supermarket, did you ever pay attention to a fresh and clean cauliflower and get intrigued by it? If not, take a look at the image of a cauliflower now, or simply buy a fresh and clean cauliflower, then zoom in and out using your eyes at its surface structure. Despite the elegant spiral arrangement of the small buds - what more can you see? The whole cauliflower consists of smaller cauliflowers, and the smaller cauliflowers in turn consist of even smaller cauliflowers, so on and on...! If, as you look closer, your size shrinks according to the size of the cauliflower buds you focus on, can you tell whether you are looking at the whole Fractal geometry will make you see cauliflower? A small bud of it? A smaller bud on a everything differently. There is a danger in small bud? ... Most certainly you cannot, because reading further. You risk the loss of your you are looking at a self-similar structure, a childhood vision of clouds, forests, flowers, scaling-invariant object ...a fractal. Fractal geometry is found in nature even on the internet; you only need to Google (there it is again now used as a verb), words like: fractal, Fibonacci, Phi, sacred geometry to see the abundance of fractals in the world we live in. Nature itself loves fractals and produces them in abundance (great word abundance).
galaxies, leaves, feathers, rocks, mountains, torrents of water, carpet, bricks, and much else besides. Never again will your interpretation of these things be quite the same. — Michael F. Barnsley Fractals Everywhere (2000), 1.
How does this have anything to do with marketing? Note the word ‘repetition’; this is something that lodges itself so firmly in the system, (the marketing system for our purposes here) that it repeats itself everywhere. Not only does it repeat, at certain intervals 'bifurcation' (scientific word for branching) or branching points are reached where the original message is changed and updated and this creates yet another 'branch' to the pattern that is emerging. In complete contrast to viruses which die out over time, a fractal can not only go on infinitely (one of my favourite words), it can continue on in new guises and with new enhancements and it all comes out of the original vision, mission, branding and message using it as a root or foundation. Doesn't this sound like something you would want for your brand and your business? Social Media is where the concept of fractals becomes truly understood, as in nature social interaction is seen as a chaotic system, one in which there is very little order and which uses the concept of fractals to grow. According to science you will never really know what conversation or trend will create a branching point, every conversation or idea is not only a possibility, but a probability. Interestingly at a glance each person's message looks unique, yet just as in nature the recurring makeup of people's output, patterns emerge (order out of chaos) just like the
patterns in a fern. What looks like random human chatter, is seen from a distance as a huge woven pattern orchestrated by the trending topics, yet all part of the larger whole. The fractal nature of social media is revealed as communities are built around certain subjects creating a 'bifurcation' point in the trunk of the conversation.
[Chaos theory] says that complex and chaotic systems; which mean most of the systems we encounter in nature and in society -- cannot accurately be predicted or exclusively controlled. Neither can rigid systems be easily budged. However, there's a loophole. What if we acted through the myriad tiny feedback loops that hold a society together? Chaos tells us that each one of us has an unrecognized but enormous influence on these loops. Chaos suggests that although we may not have power of the controller in the traditional sense, we all possess the "butterfly power" of subtle influence. - John Briggs and F. David Peat, Seven Life Lessons of Chaos
Marketers should now be thinking and acting differently as humanity once again finds its voice and the power to create or destroy businesses, perhaps even nations through the power of social media and world-wide conversations. It is here is in this collective voice that the power of social media is truly experienced as more than one business has found to their detriment. Now that the world has found its collective voice every person including marketers will need to understand this power and harness it for good.
Based on the science of exponential algorithms (fractals) somewhere along the line of conversation a branch appears also called a bifurcation, as each person begins a new fractal based on their understand of your original message. Just like the conversations started in the testimonials at the beginning of this book. Take a look at these right now and notice how each person has understood the information in this book and gotten something of their own out of it, and their conversation is sprinkled with this understanding. When they get their copy of this book and begin to tell others about it, their conversation, their marketing will be sprinkled with these understandings and their excitement will create amazing word of mouth fractals as marketing for my book. These fractal bifurcations and the ‘butterfly effect’, allow any brand no matter how new or small to offer multiple kinds of branded content that attracts different types of people who will choose to pull it into their social world, creating fractal versions of any message, brand or business within their social conversation and community. You can see this happening every day right now with widgets, apps, blogs, social platforms, games etc.. Each of these has multiple fractal patterns and bifurcation points that appeal to different types of people and who then pick and choose their content as it aligns with their fractal makeup. This is just the beginning! Over time these branches accumulate; they do not end, close or die out‌ instead they become memes, messages that become a part of society, even create new language for the masses (think of how many ways you can use Google in a conversation). These branded branches of the fractal whole become valuable and together they connect over time to truly extend the value of the brand in each person's world.
If done correctly, people will value your branded fractals like their collections of CD's, DVD's, music, comic books, antiques and other fractalized merchandise that engenders and attracts an emotional connection to it, and your brand will be the centre of their passions, creating evangelists who further fractalize your brand out into the world. It is my intention that Fractal Magic MarketingTM will become the only way to market, especially online and include value based social media, authentic marketing strategies, ethical commerce, prosperity consciousness and compassionate sharing of resources so that all may benefit. The idea is that this fractal magic can also be used to help us understand the many variances of human emotion. This 'Fractalled Emotion' can give us the strategies to get to the heart of the emotional makeup of our prospects, clients and customers and engage with them using everyday authentic connection and conversation already beautifully revealing themselves on the human canvas of social media right now. Just like fractals, at first glance each social media looks unique, however when looking closer and see the recurring patterns of users conversation, patterns become visible just as the repetitive fractal patterns of a fern leaf, or a snowflake. This observation matters as we can now reveal an underlying guiding foundation for what seems like random human chatter. We can even begin to see the natural humanity of our fellow man and our way forward to help make this world a better place.