SXSW 2012: We Need Your Votes!

For SXSW 2012, we have proposed a session titled "Embrace Your Inner Super Villain," and we need your votes.

Every super villain has minions. Every godfather has lackeys. Every rockstar has groupies. If you want to build your micro-empire, you’ll need them too (though we hope you’ll use your powers for good and not evil). Over the years The High Calling has built a network of 1900 brand evangelists serving 40,000 subscribers with a team of 20 editors.

This year at SXSW 2012, one of the premier tech conferences in the world, we want to share our entire strategy with people—editorial roles, editorial tasks, editorial philosophy, distribution channels, engagement funnels, metrics, revenue, and costs. We plan to have packets of information and ideas, simple marketing steps attendees can implement with just a few hours each week.

Maybe you've seen the movie Despicable Me? We hope that we honor our community more than Gru honored his yellow pill minions. Certainly, our ideas for this site began long before that movie came out. In fact, I remember distinctly sitting in a booth with Gordon Atkinson and Dan Roloff at a suburban Bennigan's in San Antonio, Texas. Gordon was drinking his signature Diet Coke. Dan and I had coffee. We were talking about the need for online authors to have an online platform.

At The High Calling, we had been publishing some pretty fantastic authors for six years, but we couldn't get much traction. For example, Eugene Peterson, author of The Message translation of the Bible, was publishing on our site every single day. This is a name that carried a lot of weight and credibility with our target audience, but it didn't matter. Eugene Peterson's strong print platform never translated into an online platform. (In fact, Eugene doesn't even have an email address which is partly why we love him so much.)

However, we wanted to show more substantial growth to the people who were funding the site. In Despicable Me, Gru is backed by demonically ugly bankers. Our backers aren't so scary, but we still owed them the best possible website with the largest possible influence for their money.

We needed minions. It sounds a bit tacky, but it's the truth. When Gordon Atkinson first wrote an article for TheHighCalling.org in 2006, he linked to it from his blog and sent us his minions. They landed in the comment section like a flock of happy grackles, making noise, stirring up controversy, and causing people to stop and pay a little more attention to what we were doing. Some of Gordon's minions even posted about his article on their own sites, sending their own minions.

It was the first time I really began to understand social media.

This stuff is old hat now, which means everyone talks about it as if it is obvious. Just get people to link to you. Get them talking on Facebook and Twitter. Market to your friend's friends. Tap into word of mouth. It sounds so easy and so intuitive. And it takes a lot more work than anyone realizes.

We're not just talking about marketing. We're talking about community. But we don't hide our ambitions for The High Calling. Heck, we hope to rule the world and motivate the masses with velvet covered bricks. This is what I tell our editorial team on the conference calls. Then we all channel Dr. Horrible together, chanting, "The world is a mess and we just need to rule it."

Actually, we don't do that. But it's okay that we have grand ambitions for our site and for the Laity Leadership Institute and Laity Lodge. It's okay. Deep inside, we all have some selfish goals, but ulterior motives don't mean that our ambitions are evil. 

In the beginning I talked a good game of villainy. I played up the idea of a blog network, using phrases like "link bait" and social media influencers. Almost before we started, I had trouble thinking about our community as a community. But Gordon helped keep me on track. Over the years, with much help from others like L. L. Barkat our managing editor, we have applied the rules of healthy communities to online spaces across multiple channels from this site to blog communities to Facebook and Twitter.

We never intended to be super villains, even though we needed minions. In the end, like Gru, we all fell in love with the people in our community and so didn't treat them like a bunch of nameless customers who have been suckered into selling our brand.

At SXSW, we hope to teach others that NOT being evil is both what you wanted all along and the most effective strategy for growth.

All of that in 15 minutes to shape our core conversation, followed by an invitation to join us in a hosted hospitality suite.

We hope you'll be able to join us. Even if you can't, please please please, be a good minion and visit the SXSW website panel picker to vote for our presentation between August 15 and September 2. Gordon will play the role of Gru and kiss you on the forehead as a special thanks.

Image available as a free download from Universal.

What YOU can do to help:

• Vote for our panel at SXSW 2012.

• Leave a positive comment about our panel.

• Ask others to vote for the panel. Just copy this text into Facebook, Twitter, or Google+
  We need your votes to help @thehighcalling get to SXSW 2012 => http://bit.ly/sxswthc   

• Tags:  
• community
• despicable me
• marketing
• sxsw

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