by Chris Brogan
Can an idea really spread like a virus? Some evolutionary biologists, such as Richard Dawkins, think they do exactly that. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explained how an idea attempts to replicate, just like a life-form, and gave these ideas the name they are known by now: meme (which rhymes with “gene”).
A meme is defined by Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary as “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” The religious examples fall into that category. They are wildly successful ideas that have spread over hundreds of generations. One could even say that they’re the most successful ideas of all time.
But successful ideas don’t come just from the Fertile Crescent; they come from everywhere and are created every day. They have designs, like any other thing, that help them replicate effectively and take hold in the mind. Like we said earlier, ideas have “shapes,” and well-shaped ideas, like tennis balls, can be caught, thrown, and bounced effectively, while ideas with improper shapes don’t go far at all.
There’s a famous story about Malcolm Gladwell, author of some of the most famous business books of our time, The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. He tells the story of how he would invent words and seed them in his articles—“tipping point” being the most famous example—and then see if other journalists would use these words in their own articles later. He wanted to see if these words would spread on their own. Clearly, some of his ideas did just that. His biggest ideas—the concepts of “10,000 hours,” “tipping point,” and others—have become concepts so strongly entrenched in Western business culture that lots of people don’t even know where they came from. But it’s Gladwell who popularized them, and now it is possible for you to do the same.
Just as this is the era of media democracy, it is also the era of idea-creation democracy. In fact, the two naturally come together; to broadcast an idea one must necessarily either have created one or caught one from someone else. You could say that the very purpose of the Web, in fact, is to facilitate connections among ideas and enable others to find them on their own; hyperlinks could have been created for this exact reason.
So we are looking at an era in which more ideas are spreading more often than ever before. Many more ideas will die natural deaths, and faster, because they are exposed to the environment more rapidly. Consider a writer, who has to launch one idea a year, rather than a blogger, who launches an idea every single day. Which one knows what his readers like better? Who will improve faster?
The 2008 video game Spore, created by Will Wright, provides yet another view into how ideas either spread or die. In the game, you create a life-form that evolves in its environment, starting as a microscopic organism and developing into a complex life-form, until it moves beyond its own planet and into space. The game allows you to see how any life-form would “fit” into its environment, either effectively or not. It might multiply quickly or slowly. It might die early or handle its environmental obstacles well and live a long time. All of these things are consequences of the connection between the animal and its environment, the same way an idea’s Reach is a consequence of its fit within the ecosystem of its time.
If we begin to consider ideas this way, we can see that each idea does not, by virtue of its being created, deserve a continued existence. Most of our ideas are actually quite bad. Although an idea may fascinate us, it may bore others—go to most dinner parties and you’ll realize this quickly enough. So the best “ideators” aren’t just creative; in fact, creativity is but a single aspect of idea creation. The rest is a matter of fitting the idea into its environment in an effective way—finding ways for it to spread naturally and quickly and to live beyond its initial contact with its host.
Learning this skill takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, and a lot of screwing up. But it is vital if you intend to transmit anything to the public, to write a book or publish a blog post—even if you want to transmit a piece of wisdom to your children. Know how to do it, and your ideas will naturally fit into the place they are supposed to. Throw out your ideas haphazardly, and they will die quickly in the mind of the recipient.
This means we need a process. We need a methodology. We need a laboratory. Thankfully, the Web has evolved to give you exactly that.
How to Recognize Bad Ideas
The front page of Reddit may be America’s new secret pastime.
Since its inception at Y Combinator, a start-up-funding firm, Reddit has been slowly gaining steam, bypassing more famous Web sites such as Web 2.0 once-darling Digg.com. Now its growth is astronomical. Recently, there were over one hundred thousand people on the site at one time. The site has so many users that some of the ideas it transmits have become important cultural artifacts in and of themselves.
Reddit is a social aggregation and news site, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s like a newspaper where you can choose how important the stories are. So if you’re a Republican, you can see news that interests you higher on the site; likewise if you’re a Democrat or independent. You choose what you see because you, and millions of users like you, control which way the stories go.
Reddit is a site that caters to the Internet community at large. It’s not especially representative of the offline world, nor is it always easy to perceive whether you feel welcome. It is, at once, a quirky source of oddities as well as an ad hoc force for social good.
Much of the content that Reddit displays is also “user-generated content,” which means that, as on YouTube, most of the stuff on it is created by people on the site. But unlike YouTube, which uses a recommendation engine powered by Amazon.com, Reddit lets you easily find the very bottom of the pile, the worst submissions possible at any time, with one simple click: the “new” button, which gives you access to all new submissions at once.
Visiting Reddit’s new-submissions page can be like exposure to an unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness babble from an insane asylum, or like hanging out with your most boring friends all at once. Jokes are falling flat everywhere, and people are saying things that don’t make sense, sometimes in languages you don’t fully understand. It’s filled with the world’s self-declared best ideas—only, before they have been judged by everyone else.
Most people don’t realize it, but if you read newspapers and visit most mainstream Web sites for your daily influx of news, the only ideas you are exposed to are good ideas—the ideas that have already won. They have been chosen by editors as the best news of the day, and the ideas that were cut have lost. In the gladiatorial ring of ideas, the worst ideas got the thumbs-down. They are dead. And the best ideas are the ones that made the front page, followed by those on page A2, and so on, until you get to the back of the newspaper, where people have paid to include their bad ideas in the form of advertising.
Since most people don’t watch an idea’s life cycle, they don’t know when their idea dies, or why, or how.
But this is changing. Most of the population’s first exposure to a laboratory for ideas is now their Facebook time line. For the first time, they can type in any thought they dare say aloud and see how many likes and comments it receives. While limited, this ability has shown people, for the first time, what others think is worthy of sharing and what is not. They are exposed to their own success, or lack thereof, quickly and painlessly, allowing much more feedback than it’s possible to receive in normal life.
If your Facebook update is the only content you create online, then your exposure to idea generation and failure is limited. Those who create more stuff—bloggers, Web designers, YouTubers, etc.—naturally understand the process better. The more content they create, they more feedback they are able to receive.
This, incidentally, is why starting out on the Web is so difficult. When there is little feedback, whether it’s traffic, comments, Facebook likes, or otherwise, there is no way to know what is working.
The easiest way to bypass this is to obtain an instant audience, such as Reddit’s “new” page. It’s difficult to handle your i
dea being voted down into obscurity within minutes, but it can also be enlightening. After all, better to know now whether any merit rests in the stuff we consider funny, interesting, or insightful or whether we should be starting over.
More often than not, when we are exposed to what the world thinks of our ideas, we end up disappointed. But this is a blessing in disguise, because feedback helps produce better ideas faster and more often.
If you are now the owner of a channel, as we have previously expressed, one idea will never be enough. One successful piece of work will never be able to compete, especially as time passes and new ideas enter the marketplace. So you’re only as good as your last success. You must create ideas, again and again, and allow them to surpass your previous ones, in both Contrast and Articulation, the two attributes by which we judge any idea. This is not easy. But thankfully, the minds of your potential audience are working for you. They will mostly remember your successful ideas and forget the bad ones. They will recall your greatest successes and forget the mediocre things in between. Experimentation shouldn’t be feared but embraced.
Everyone likes a success story, even when it really isn’t a success story but a barrage of ideas, some successful and some not. The rest is done in the audience’s head, constructing a narrative of success even when that isn’t how it happened at all.
This is the real reason your boring ideas don’t matter. They won’t be remembered; only the good ones will, as well as the massive disasters. Throughout this and the next chapter, we’ll do our best to navigate past those as well.
Obvious but Somehow Not Obvious Bad Ideas
We’re both biased, very biased, against the way larger organizations run ideas through a kind of dulling/smoothing system, a series of checks and balances, instead of allowing some to go out and be bold.
At the time of this writing, the U.S. fast-food restaurant Burger King is in jeopardy. It has fallen behind Wendy’s in the hamburger wars, and we dread to think how it would stack up if you considered Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Not good, we imagine.
Among the litany of bad ideas the company has launched that failed:
Offering table service.
Reintroducing “the King” as a big, creepy, plastic-headed man.
Using advertising offensive to women, because, hey, men are the company’s typical buyers.
It goes on. But just look at those three ideas. Table service would be great, except that the expectation for fast-food restaurants is that they are fast, and being helped by a server is the opposite of that. The King was introduced when number one star McDonald’s had just minimized Ronald McDonald’s appearances in its ads and restaurants; Burger King was bucking the trend, but not in an especially helpful-to-the-buyer way. Offending women because stats prove that men buy more often at Burger King? It’s very rare that we’ll vote in favor of offending and disqualifying a buying segment that represents more than half of the human race.
How do these ideas get introduced to real people? We don’t know for sure. We think it’s a combination of forces, however. For one thing, people are often asleep at the wheel and nodding “yes” without looking at things. (Have you ever done that?) And we think sometimes people mistake being shocking for a strategic effort, believing that an idea so far afield has to be good thinking.
This last point is really worth pausing and considering. With what we’ve written about pattern recognition, it seems that what we’re not well suited for is understanding when an idea is so far afield that it’s foreign, unacceptable, offensive, or the like. How do you guard against that? Later, we will talk about the Impact Equation attribute called Echo. If you can’t see even the faintest Echo connection in your idea, it’s probably not a good one. That might make for a simple rule of thumb.
Pattern Recognition
Humans are little else but powerful pattern-recognition machines.
We can drive to work and later not even remember how we got there. We can go through rote clicking of links on Wikipedia for hours without realizing where the time went. We learn everything we do by recognizing patterns and then by seeing the breaks.
This is natural, and it’s happened since the beginning of time. When you are young, you eat only the food you recognize, and everything else seems strange and repellent. As you get older, the same thing may happen, but somewhere along the way, most people’s openness to discovery expands, and they learn a lot. This phase of experimentation is how children learn to walk, run, ride a bike, skateboard, and maybe even build a start-up and change the world.
Pattern recognition is at the core of everything we do. It informs our behavior by showing us what works and what doesn’t. It helps us see which of our actions are worth repeating and which are not.
So it’s only natural that Contrast, or pattern breaking, becomes one of the most important aspects of the Impact Equation.
In marketingspeak, Contrast is sometimes called the USP, or unique sales proposition. Salespeople and marketers use it to differentiate themselves and their offerings from everyone else. In a world massively saturated with copycat products and services, this is increasingly difficult. It’s been said that people in punk bands are just as uniform as everyone else in the world, just within their own subculture—that rebellion is their new conformity.
In other words, every Contrast is conformity somewhere else, inside another environment. Punks who work in an office environment look different and weird unless you’re in an advertising agency, where everyone is a “creative” and visible difference is a part of the uniform. When everyone has a tattoo, tattoos cease to stand out and we need more. We need to go further.
But in our ideas we are not looking for universal uniqueness. We are looking only for uniqueness inside our own little field. Thankfully, this is much easier. In order to achieve this, we must consider whom we are attempting to connect with: our ideal reader or audience—whoever is the recipient of the message.
Putting together a cohesive impression of our recipients—where they are from, what age they are, what kind of media they pay attention to, etc.—is critical to developing the message we want to deliver. Only by putting together the audience’s world can we discover what Contrast means to them, seeing what it is they’ll notice or won’t. Attempting to spread a message without thinking about the audience’s world is like feeling your way around a room in the dark—that is to say, mostly guesswork, lots of wasted energy, and occasionally a little bruise.
On the other hand, consider the method discussed in the classic business book Blue Ocean Strategy, where one is told to simultaneously picture what a category considers to be the “default” state of things—for example, how one conceives of a circus—and how one might create a “blue ocean” of no competition in the space, such as creating a circus like Cirque du Soleil by reaching outside the realms of circus, theater, and entertainment in general.
This is the definition of Contrast—strong positioning so you are creating more value, sometimes with a different price, than most competitors in your category. We have placed Contrast as our multiplier in the Impact Equation because its value cannot be underestimated. When Contrast is low, nothing you do has any impact whatsoever. When you begin to differentiate yourself, however, you create an immediate visibility that is not easily trumped.
Differentiation, however, isn’t that simple. If your offering is too similar to the remainder of your category, you are of course invisible, leading you to compete increasingly on price, creating low margins and reducing the value of what you do. However, if you are too dissimilar, you become a radical, making you so vastly different from your competitors that you either offend or repel customers.
Let’s consider a few strategies for testing Contrast on your blog, in your business, or anywhere else.
One is to take your time and not risk offending anyone. You’re a bookstore that adds coffee or a business blogger who also talks about marketing. No matter what you’re offering, this is a small move to ma
ke—nothing powerful, but it may make people feel a little better or serve them a little more effectively. However, the changes may end up being so small your clients don’t even notice.
Method two is to take a massive leap. Paint your walls pink, add graffiti art, and start blasting death metal in your senior citizens’ home. We exaggerate, but our point is that the potential for offense is present and real. Another option could be a drastic reduction in your offering. BeautifulPeople.com might be a great example of this; it’s a dating Web site that actively rejects applicants based on “ugliness.” We are not kidding.
Third is something in the middle. Medium-size changes, especially considering the status quo of your category, but nothing that might offend. Switching up what you do, perhaps on a regular basis, perhaps arbitrarily.
As you go through the following methods for creating higher Contrast and more ideas, think about how you’re going to increase it. Drastically or slowly? While we’re at it, we’ll give you some ideas to help graph out your audience as well.
Method 1: Have Better Ideas
Why People Have Bad Ideas
One reason many people don’t have good ideas is that they were never taught how. The average workplace doesn’t have to deal with proper idea-creation methods or produce truly excellent ideas. It never has to see ideas compete against one another, either inside the organization or outside in the ecosystem of ideas. It doesn’t truly know how to process good ideas, how to improve them, or how they come to exist. Every part of the equation is missing. “Brainstorming” and its stunted siblings are the only ones present in the room.