Chris Writes.

We got a fantastic package of letters from a 3rd grade class delivered to work today, all from kids who were writing with questions about bikes, and stories about their bikes.  There are too many to list here, but I thought I’d share a few inspiring, thoughtful, and playful highlights.  But first, a few answers to the most commonly asked questions:

1. How many bikes do you have?  I have six, at the moment: two road bikes, two mountain bikes, a track bike, and a cyclocross bike.

2. Do you have to glue or tape [your bikes] together?  We never use tape, but sometimes on some of our bikes, we use glue that is so strong it could hold an elephant to the ceiling.

3. Do you get to ride at work?  Yes, every day at lunch time we go for a ride.

4. How much does your fastest bike cost?  A tough question, because the bike is only as fast as the rider can pedal.  But I would say that the fastest looking bike is our carbon fiber Transition.  They cost between $3,300 and $8,800.  If you want to see pictures, you can find them on our website!  Here’s one:

And now, some excerpts, first from Tyler who rides a fixie:

Next up, from Cassie who asked that we not tell anyone that she didn’t take off her training wheels until she was 7.  Got news for you Cassie: lots of kids keep them longer than that!  Cassie will be a pro racer, because she just wants us to make a 10-lb Tarmac SL2.  In her size, it might be!

Sarah’s dad clearly keeps her in the loop on pro racing as well, so I suspect this 3rd grade class is going to develop into a lot of fast athletes in the future:

Brandon has different interests, he’s more into skateboarding.  Guess what?  That’s cool too.  Just remember to wear a helmet, whether you’re skating or riding, okay?

Michael wrote to us with some sweet color ideas, perhaps he’s got a future in our graphic design department. His letter said that he and his sister both ride Specialized bikes! Awesome!

Mia wrote in her letter about things she likes. We appreciate independent thinkers.  I bet she doesn’t color inside the lines, either.  And let me tell you Mia, I never did either.  And now I work for a bike company and get to ride my bike a lot! And because she asked: Mia, my favorite bike memory is when I got my first 10-speed, a red one that my dad and I fixed and painted together.

Megan is a step ahead, she knows that biking is always good for the environment. No Megan, we don’t make scooters, but we do all ride with helmets whenever we ride.  Hope you do too!

Natalie is already serious about riding: this 3rd grader can ride 4 miles!

Raphael measures distance in pedals – it takes him fifty to get to school! – and he’s faster than cars! Not only that, he likes reading AND math, so for sure he could be a bike engineer and design new bikes some day!

And while all the letters were fantastic, for so many reasons, I really loved this 3-word request from our distance rider Natalie.  I think I’ll come to work tomorrow. But I’ll still ride at lunch.

A lot of people gathered in one place does not guarantee that you can get their attention, if they’re not gathered there to listen to you in the first place. In fact, at the *person* level, I think it might be harder to get someone’s attention when they’re already distracted by the reason they’re part of the crowd in the first place.

Think about the last big music concert you went to: there were a lot of people there.  Probably thousands.  Maybe tens of thousands. All around the show were lots of $BIGNUM  advertisers, in all sorts of guises, and yet sponsor recall is notoriously low – except maybe for the name of the stadium, though even those change often enough that I still call the nearby SF stadium by it’s old name, SBC Park, `cuz it works well for the mnemonic of “Some Big Corporation”.  The point is: people are there to see a show.  The fact that there are lots of people doesn’t necessarily make it a good medium for advertising.  Budweiser and Coca Cola may disagree, but they have an advantage: within that environment, they’re valid. They get to sell their stuff right there in the stadium.

It’s largely the same with big TV advertising campaigns: we live in a world of increasingly fragmented and competing consumer interests, coupled with a frustratingly fixed amount of time in the day.  This means that messages seeking a narrower target than “18-45yr old males” fail to work in a crowd setting.  A TV ad for a bike company (like the one I work for) that plays during coverage of the Tour de France is valid, but this same ad should not be expected to have much validity in the middle of a Thursday night sitcom.  Even though the sitcom has millions more viewers, the validity is orders of magnitude higher when shown during the Tour de France.  Collectively, the marketing world is finally realizing this, and social media continues to charge forward as the proof in this pudding, providing scalable ways to connect at a virtual one-to-one level with relevance, authenticity, and validity.  Particularly at scale, I think it’s safe to say that social media can connect valid messages with relevant groups faster and more efficiently than any other medium.

And yet, companies are now turning to Facebook and Twitter for the same wrong reason that stadiums and prime time don’t work for them: “there’s a lot of people there, so someone must need me”, and the classic “if I just sell $1 worth of stuff to everyone on Facebook, (or on Twitter, or in China) I’ll be rich”. This method isn’t reliable, and it’s usually embarked upon because time isn’t spent figuring out what the most valid approach would be.  In the short term it’s almost always easier to try to blanket the world and then see if we can get 0.001% of the people to care.  This is the attitude, you might note, that brings spam to your email inbox every day.

So what’s the point?  it’s that you need to be valid first, and then present second.  If you’re not valid on Facebook first, figure out what it will take to achieve the same validity that CocaCola has at a concert, or that Lego has to an 8-year old boy, or that bike companies have during race broadcasts. I’m pretty sure that the time spent to figure this out is always worth it.