The Impact Equation

by Chris Brogan

  Think of your neighbor. You don’t befriend him because you’ll need a cup of milk. You do it because it’s a good thing to do, and it’s good to know your neighbors.

  The same thinking should apply to your network and your need to create a channel. You may not know why you need to do this, since you have no cause to support, no idea to spread, or anything else. But when you do have such an idea or something that needs attention, wouldn’t you rather know your entire neighborhood? Wouldn’t you rather spread it to two hundred people than to, say, ten?

  But getting your list to two hundred isn’t as easy as it looks, and it certainly doesn’t happen instantly. This is why starting early is so important, just as we’re always told to begin saving early for retirement, even though nobody actually does. The earlier something begins, the more powerful it is, even if it begins only with friends and family and moves up from there.

  The first few members of your network are hard to build, and it’s a big challenge at first, but the audience builds more easily over time. So doing the hard part early, as in any endeavor, is important. Starting now is key.

  Channels that start now have other advantages as well. Just as in writing, the more practice you get, the easier it becomes, and getting that practice early, while no one is paying attention, is valuable because there is little downside to writing badly for an audience of no one. As you get better at your craft, the audience will grow, and by the time it’s significant, you’ll be much better.

  So the message is actually simple: Do the hard part now in order to reap the rewards later. This message will be repeated again and again throughout this book, because it relates directly to all three parts of visibility: idea, platform, and human element, which all need work before they can become significant assets, sometimes for quite a long time.

  Over time, as you progress with these ideas, you will also make them your own, so your model of how to create content, or build platform, etc., will develop into something that is uniquely yours. But as you’re doing it, you must never act as if you had made it—that is to say, as if you had already gone far enough. You need to act as you did the first day, as if you had nothing.

  Acting as if you had no audience will help you work harder than most people around you. You will be less defensive about what you own and naturally work to build more instead of being afraid to lose what you have.

  But however you continue to build audience, you must begin before the need. It’s like your walk down Main Street; don’t begin when you’re broke. Begin when you’re doing well and don’t need anything at all. The results will be better, and when your time of need comes, it’ll seem significantly less needy.

  As goals go, building before the need is an important one. It means that you recognize the importance and value of attention, and nurturing this platform will allow you to share ideas that can then take shape into something of further value.

  It’s not easy to keep people’s attention. It’s not easy to build something like this without having even a vague sense of the potential audience you want to gather around you. Here are some thoughts about what might work for you.

  Tell stories about the people in your community. Even when your community in this new channel is fewer than fifty people, you can talk about the people who are there. Do it early. Do it often. People want to see themselves, want to identify, want to belong. Business is about belonging.

  Be helpful. The more you can share how to do things that matter to your community, the more likely they’ll come back for more. People interpret the world through a “what’s in it for me” lens, no matter how saintly they ultimately act.

  Be personable. The more human you are in connecting with this channel, the more it will benefit you later on. Every piece of information you share is a great representation of your company’s value. When you talk about how your grandfather used to take you fishing and how that changed the way you approach problems, that will be remembered long after the details of your business story.

  Be concise. Don’t waste people’s time. In developing and building a channel before it’s needed, flooding and overwhelming people isn’t helpful. In this world of mobile-device domination and excessive drains on our time, people want to consume bite-size chunks of information. It’s tapas, not a buffet. Make sure to share in brief formats as often as possible. (See this bulleted list? We rest our case.)

  Share value. Use your channel to help connect your community with value. For instance, if you introduce two people from your community and they’re able to do business (without your asking for anything in the transaction), that kind of effort gets remembered. In Trust Agents, we called this being at the elbow of every deal.

  Be original. As often as possible, share unique perspectives, ideas, and information that come from far outside the typical source material for your community. If you’re selling fishing gear, don’t repost articles you find in American Angler magazine. Everyone in your community already read that story when you did. Instead, look for stories that are interesting and helpful but that come from far outside the normal channels. It’s easier than you think. (Google helps.)

  It doesn’t cost a lot of money to develop this kind of channel. Thankfully, these days, it isn’t about money. It’s about how much you’re willing to work.

  #

  But what to work on? The Web is huge, and there are so many different types of companies out there. You’re probably thinking, I have a ton of ideas, I could execute on any of them or maybe I have no idea what I should create. I wouldn’t even know where to begin!

  Well, no matter what your stance, it’s the process of starting that matters. Starting once, on any given day, is easy. Starting every single day is hard, but it’s how your media will be created, how your book will get written, and how your empire will be built. As Kimon Nicolaides once said, “There is no such thing as getting more than you put into anything.” In other words, the work creates the results. There are no shortcuts.

  It’s in this vein that we introduce, in the next section, the laboratory in which you should develop, refine, and sharpen your ideas. Execution is everything, this is true, but before something is released to the world it needs to be considered, experimented with, and properly polished. It needs to be handled and designed until it has the best shape, so when it’s sent into the world, it can be properly caught by your audience. But more important, your brain needs to be able to wrap itself around what a good idea even is in the first place. You may think you can recognize a good, spreadable idea when you see one. If this is true, congratulations are in order, because there are few who really can.

  We intend to put that knowledge into the hands of everyone. So if you want to learn, read on.

  PART 2

  Ideas

  Attending the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, is a little like visiting the future.

  It starts slowly. The plane lands, and your iPhone suddenly tells you that ten or twenty of your friends are at the airport at the exact same time you are. You arrive at the center of town, where you can use Wi-Fi absolutely everywhere (last year, in a controversial move, a company paid homeless people to walk around as mobile hot spots). You pay for taxis by liking them on Facebook, and sometimes the hotel upgrades you based on how many Twitter followers you have. You also know which restaurant all of your acquaintances are visiting tonight, and you detect the location of every party around through your phone.

  This is just a taste of what happens during the weeklong festival, a kind of Mecca for indie types, including many Web personalities and their fans. It’s amazing how crowded the space, and your brain, becomes.

  South by Southwest is a place where everyone understands where the Web is going. They all download the newest apps. They all move at the speed of Silicon Valley, not the speed of the rest of the world. So visiting it truly is like attending a party in the future, where everyone has a blog or a Web app they’re trying to tell you about. Everyone is launching a new game or
a new service they want you to try. They’re funded by important venture capitalists, and they believe in what they’re doing. Unfortunately, the truth is, not all of them can win.

  More quickly than you can imagine, you become immune to this bombardment of information and hype. It hits the retina and dies there before entering the brain. You begin to build a kind of mental and emotional fortress, as you would if you were walking through a village torn apart by war.

  You have no choice. You can’t arrive and listen to everything. You get skeptical. You stop listening to anyone who seems too interested. Even attendees from small towns, who are used to saying hi to strangers on the street, become suddenly aloof.

  This place is a kind of physical manifestation of the marketplace of ideas you travel through every day if you use the Web at all. Visiting it in a physical place is different, and most are unused to the feeling it evokes—a sense of ignoring a lot of the wildness that is going on, as if you were visiting a mining town in the Old West where everyone is trying to sell you something, or a bazaar in which you are being cajoled into stall after stall, or maybe even a carnival where barkers call out to you. Everyone wants a piece. They’re hungry for your attention, because the more of it they get, the brighter their own future becomes.

  The only thing that keeps the Web from feeling like this on a daily basis is the filters that have been placed at the walls of your city, preventing most ideas from hitting you at all. You only see things that your friends post or that have been voted to the top of Reddit.com, so you aren’t exposed to every single thing the way you are in Austin during that week. So your Web experience is calmer and less defensive. You can have more faith in the things that you see, because they have been filtered. But in the real world, there are people in your physical space. Ignoring them is difficult. You begin to get a real idea of just how crowded this carnival is.

  But seeing this conference in person means you can begin to understand what the marketplace of ideas is really about. You can grasp just how many ideas are out there, wanting your attention. You can experience people’s truly bad ideas instead of filtering them out at the gates. The hordes are visible and accessible. You can choose what to pay attention to, that is, if you can make sense of the chaos at all.

  As you imagine this scene (or remember it, if you’ve been), realize that it’s how the future will look. If you live in New York, it may happen more quickly. If you live in South Dakota, perhaps a little more slowly. But as time goes on, as it becomes less expensive to produce and distribute content, you will be exposed to more ideas more often, and you will get better at choosing among them. In other words, you will become more discerning. The quality of ideas will have to keep up with your galvanized mental barriers.

  That’s right, you and the rest of the audience, just as in a bazaar, will become even more cynical and discerning than you are now. It will be harder to impress audiences tomorrow than today, as it is harder today than yesterday.

  So you must begin as soon as possible. You must realize that your ideas, almost all of them, are simply not strong enough to survive in the modern idea ecosystem. They haven’t evolved enough. They haven’t encountered enough challenges. You haven’t worked on distilling them enough or sharpening them like a sword. They cannot cut through the armor that shields your potential audience’s minds.

  This will be the first step in understanding how impact works. The more complex and competitive the ecosystem, the more adaptable and targeted your messages must become.

  Forget the things you’ve heard, the myths like “good content markets itself.” It may have been true once, but it isn’t anymore. Yes, the strongest ideas survive, but content creators are getting more savvy every day. They know what you like, and they are designing their work around it. They are curating the experience to make sure every part is delightful, and unless you can compete with that, your work will be forgotten.

  Ideas are not organic things that are simply born out of a brain, fully formed. They are crafted the way writers craft sentences and stories. They are edited over and over again and go from lumps of clay to masterpieces. But most people are never in the idea laboratory, so they don’t see this process. For example, imagine the difference between this manuscript when it was created and the final state in which you are reading it today. How much better is it? Would you have read it in its original, unpolished form?

  This also means that most people cannot throw out one idea a year and expect to succeed. They must be consistent in their experimentation in order to understand what the marketplace wants. Everyone has to get better at designing and polishing. Only this kind of labor will allow you to truly understand how an idea survives.

  Thankfully, there is a system behind all this that almost everyone on the Web understands to some degree. Some get it instinctively; others have learned over time. We’d like to help you skip the line and teach you what we’ve learned.

  2 Contrast

  About Gloves and Baseballs

  Underlying this entire section of the book is a philosophy that we take for granted but that may need to be explained: The shape of an idea matters.

  Every idea, or meme, as it spreads, has a sender and receiver. A long time ago, that was a storyteller and an audience; more recently, a writer and a reader or an actor and a television viewer. We used to understand intuitively that, in order for a story to have impact or for an idea to take root in the audience’s brains, there had to be resonance. They would have to “get it,” of course, but that was easy because the speaker would be able to see the audience directly—there were no books, no tablets, but only the speaker and the listener, and the speaker could easily figure out whether his audience was getting what he was saying. But now we send ideas out blind.

  This disconnection between sender and receiver has left us unprepared to truly deliver an effective message unless we’ve already tried and failed to do so multiple times. This is why the best comedians, for example, are usually the most experienced ones. They’ve performed many times, and they know when people laugh. They also hear their audience coughing, or heckling, when they fail. They know how to respond in all of these situations to improve how they’re perceived.

  Yet our interactions with people are increasingly through media. We are leaving tracks for people to check out later on, not screaming in the middle of a town square for an audience to hear right that instant. So we end up presenting our ideas, yes, but we don’t think as hard about how they are received, because we don’t actually see them being received. We don’t experience it because we’re not there.

  The best idea spreaders think hard about how they design and shape their ideas. Consider a baseball game, where the ball is round and the mitt is designed to catch it. Now change the shape of the ball but not the mitt—what happens? Both the throw and the catch become less effective. The idea is caught less often than before. Only the smartest people catch badly designed ideas—and even then, only if they have the patience to do so.

  This is the situation we are in now. Almost all successful movies in the modern age work from a template because they know that’s what the audience reacts to best. The ones that don’t work from this template (screenwriters like Charlie Kaufman come to mind) work through emotional resonance instead. Fiction also follows certain trends—wizards, then vampires, then science fiction, all in a cycle. Business books try to find contrived acronyms to help people remember their ideas. (We are no exception!) There are even world-famous seminars such as Robert McKee’s STORY that help people design around these structures because they are so effective.

  At the same time, because media creators are increasingly amateurs, we are finding ourselves making the same mistakes beginning writers, filmmakers, storytellers, and businesspeople make because we don’t have the right mentors or teachers to prevent us from reinventing the wheel. The audience reads the same blog posts over and over again, while authors are convinced that they have come up with a new idea, even if it’s as old as tim
e and not very effective. The environment is reminiscent of the philosophical musings of some teenagers, which we remember having ourselves: “Whoa, what if the green that I see is really your red? Have you ever thought about that? Wild!” Yes, wild indeed. Wildly boring.

  But originality is not the point of this exercise. We want our ideas to be connected with, to be caught and thrown again in turn. We need them to be visible against the backdrop of the stadium crowd, so they must have the right color. Finally, their material and weight must be right or they’ll get nowhere.

  As the environment for our ideas gets more competitive and cluttered, these are no longer trivial subjects. Our friend Alistair Croll once told us that an environment with excess information devours the one thing that information truly demands: attention. Attention is becoming scarce, so we have to use it wisely when we get it.

  Here we will learn how to do that. Your idea and its shape are where a lot of your work must go before you release the idea into the world. This work can’t be skimped on, and trust us, doing it will lead to the best possible outcome.

  An Ecosystem of Ideas

  Ideas have never won or lost. Just like any species, they are always competing either until they have achieved a monopoly, like human beings, or until they die out entirely, like the dodo.

  It’s possible you’ve never thought of ideas as a competition at all, but as creators we have no choice but to think this way. We have many ideas all the time, and you probably do too. Which to follow, which to wait on, and which to take off life support? Knowing these things is a big part of having your ideas take off.

  Consider the three major monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some may consider them complementary, and it’s possible that they are, but in other ways they are actually competing ideas inside the ecosystem of the human brain. They are attempting to pass on to as many people as possible. Only when they have passed to everyone can they be said to have won. Until then, they remain in competition. They want the same turf.