Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much!
I have a friend who can always be counted on to have a great book recommendation handy. Another who can not only tell you the best available movie currently in theatres, but confidently stand behind his recommendations.
And some people are eager to share a link to an article or idea that’s worth reading.
Most people, though, hesitate.
“What if the other person doesn’t like it…?”
Music, newspapers, books… most forms of media were exciting, high-pressure hothouses, environments with hits and winners and action and impact.
Many players in these industries are now trying to figure out where all the zing went. The mattering seems to have left.
Where did it go? It turns out that the air didn’t get let out, the balloon disappeared.
Balloons have pressure because there’s only one tiny opening. Scarce shelf space. Only room for one newspaper. Only forty titles on the Billboard chart. It’s that opening that creates the environment that allows pressure to exist, that pulls the rest of the balloon taut.
“Sorry, you didn’t make the team. We did the cuts today.”
“We did play auditions all day yesterday, and so many people turned out, there just wasn’t a role for you. We picked people who were more talented.”
“You’re on the bench until your skills improve. We want to win.”
Ask the well-meaning coaches and teachers running the tryouts and choosing who gets to play, ask them who gets on stage and who gets fast tracked, and they’ll explain that life is a meritocracy, and it’s essential to teach kids that they’re about to enter a world where people get picked based on performance.
Or, they might point out that their job is to win, to put on a great show, to entertain the parents with the best performance they can create.
This, all of this, is sort of dangerous, unhelpful and nonsensical.
I realized the other day that most people grow up thinking in terms of professional affiliations. “I’m going to be an accountant.” “I’m going to work for General Dynamics.”
Somehow, I always thought of my career as a series of projects, not jobs. Projects… things to be invented, funded and shipped. Sometimes they take on a life of their own and last, other times, they flare and fade. But projects, one after the other, mark my career. Lucky for me, the world cooperated and our entire culture shifted from one based on long-term affilitations (you know, ‘jobs’) to projects.
I had a two-part approach to building a career about projects. The first was to find a partner who was willing to own the lion’s share of the upside in exchange for advancing resources allowing me to create the work (but always keeping equity in the project, not doing it merely for hire). Publishers are good at this, and it enabled me to bootstrap my way to scale. The second was to grow a network, technology and the confidence to be able to take on projects too big for the typical solo venture. Complicated projects, on time, is a niche that’s not very crowded…
The traveling salesman, the carnival barker and the old-time businessman can hit and run. Make the sale, cut your costs, move on.
Today, though, in the connection economy, two huge factors are at work:
1. Subscription. The lifetime value of a customer is high and getting higher. You might buy $50,000 from one grocery store over time. If you own an inkjet printer, it might come to a thousand dollars a year in toner expenses, with a profit margin approaching 90%…
2. Spreading the word. Every customer is also a media outlet and a publisher if she chooses to be. That means that unhappy news spreads far and fast (and that remarkable products and services need lower ad budgets).
But this seems to be almost impossibly difficult for companies to embrace. A simple example:
Organized non-profits provide reach, leverage and consistency that can’t be matched by the millenia-old model of individuals helping those they encounter in the community. It’s one of the extraordinary success stories of the industrial age that they’ve been able to have such a worldwide impact with relatively few resources. As our choices continue to increase (yes, there’s now a long tail of philanthropy), it gets ever more important that we make conscious choices about what to support and how.
A parade of tourists is going to walk past your store today. Each is a separate opportunity for you to tell a story, to engage, to make a sale.
A connected community of readers is going to read what you wrote today. A cultural shift will occur among a small group of people because they will share, discuss and engage with each other about what you wrote.
Here’s the key question: are you trying to change an individual or are you trying to incite/inspire/redirect the tribe?
Direct marketers traditionally deal with separate events. Each catalog, each clickable ad is a unique transaction. In the world of separates, the simple test makes sense. You don’t pollute the pool when you try different transactions or different products with different people.
A luxury good gets its value from its lack of utility and value. A typical consumer would look at what it costs and what it does and say, “that’s ridiculous.”
When a good like this (and it might be a service as well) comes to market, it sometimes transcends the value equation and enters a new realm, one of scarcity and social proof. The value, ironically, comes from its lack of value.
“If I build this, will it delight you?”
Time spent building a spec that gets a ‘yes’ to this question is always time well spent. The spec describes what victory feels like, not necessarily every element of what’s to be built. A spec is an agreement before the agreement, it moves the difficult job of getting in sync with your client from the end of the process to the beginning.
Creatives of every stripe are so happy to get the assignment, so eager to get to work that we often forget to agree on what we’re setting out to do in the first place. It’s fun to nod your head and say, “I understand,” but even something as simple as cooking dinner deserves a few more moments of interaction before the knives are sharpened and the oven is turned on.
Dennis O. Smith wrote in with this question about Unleashing the Ideavirus: “I understand the concept of spreading the idea, but how can you control or direct that growth? ‘Going viral’ is great for fast growth and sharing of your idea, but are there mechanisms to steer it, trim it, shape it, etc.”
The reason that so many people catch a cold every year is that no one is trying to control where it goes. The reason that Wikipedia is so robust is that control is decentralized. The reason that there’s a huge disconnect between corporate marketing and ideas that spread is that the culture of contagious ideas is anethema to the command, control and responsibility mindset of the industrial marketer.