The Impact Equation

by Chris Brogan

  So we want to focus here on the clarification of an idea—making people care not because they’ve never seen it before but because it sticks in their head instantly.

  Give your complex idea a name. Simplicity is a key part of clarity, and if you can give an idea a name (Gladwell’s The Tipping Point comes to mind), you capture the imagination much more quickly.

  Acronyms: We actually try to resist this idea, because it seems contrived, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention it, so here goes. The Impact Attributes are interesting, but placing them in an order that results in the CREATE acronym is a good example that helps make it memorable. We also used this technique when we reformulated the David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford Trust Equation in our last book. So T=C*R*I/S became C*R*I/S = T. Generally, ideas that use human mnemonic devices are more memorable and clear than almost any other ideas, because we are verbal creatures who learn based on narrative and story.

  Tell a story: Any time you express a complex idea, this is one way to simplify it. We naturally learn through stories and metaphors, so expressing ideas with them is simple and effective. This is why those terrible “business parable” books sell so well; they express simple ideas through narrative. Whether the story is real or imagined is actually irrelevant (some say the story in Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad never happened, for example); what matters is whether it resonates emotionally with the reader. We’ll return to these concepts later in our discussion of Echo, but for now, remember that proper Articulation of an idea keeps it memorable.

  One great example of Articulation comes to us from Chrysler, which has, interestingly, relaunched the Fiat brand in the United States. The company capitalized on the marketplace reopened by the Mini Cooper, as well as on U.S. gas prices, and brought back a car that hadn’t been viewed as anything particularly notable before. How does Chrysler articulate what you’re buying into on its site?

  It mentions “Italian style,” “emotional design,” “rational appeal,” and a lot of personalization options. In a few short phrases, you get a sense of what Chrysler wants you to know about its car.

  Swing over to the Mini site, and its language is about “incredible gas mileage,” “premium technology,” “legendary performance,” and “smiling.”

  A car purchase is an interesting way to think about Articulation. It is an exercise in justification from start to finish. If you’ve gone without a car for a long while, you must justify why you now need to buy one again. If you’ve got an older but still functional car, you have to justify why you’re upgrading or replacing it. Buying a sports car versus an economy car requires a story told to oneself, and then sometimes the rest of the family.

  It gets interesting when a car’s advertising must speak to the passionate reason why we’re really buying the car while arming us with the information we’ll need to make others in our decision-making circle (or only ourselves) feel good about the decision.

  Both Fiat and Mini talk about how their cars are economical and fuel efficient, yet they both rave about their design and performance capabilities. They cover both bases, and each Web site’s ad copy, by the way, does it with fewer than fourteen words.

  We’ve talked about brevity a lot throughout the book, but its value can’t be highlighted enough. In every case where you seek to get a point across, brevity is a core selling point. It will get you much further than trying to paint with words. You’ll see.

  IMPACT EXAMPLE: INSTAGRAM

  On the day the news broke that social-networking giant Facebook was buying photo-sharing application Instagram for one billion dollars, opinions on why and what next were quite mixed. We were split in our opinions. Julien thought it was a great purchase and cited the thirty million acquired users, plus the revitalization of photo sharing, which had reportedly been dwindling on Facebook’s own platform, never mind the fact that Facebook seemed genuinely threatened by Instagram’s dominance of mobile photo sharing. Chris dug into some reporting that said Instagram might be an angle Facebook could use to break into China.1 We decided to look at Instagram to see how it matched up against the Impact Equation.

  Contrast: There are hundreds (thousands, actually!) of photo applications in the Apple and Android stores. Instagram, however, backed its app with a social network, so people could follow certain tags, certain photographers, and more. Tying an application to a network of like-minded people made for good Contrast, but it wasn’t enough. Only when the founders had made their third photo application, simplifying every time, did they get to something that had the Contrast it needed to win.

  Reach: If Instagram really is the gateway drug to get Facebook into China, that’s a great way to extend Reach. Even if that isn’t the case, Facebook purchased thirty million passionate Instagram users and gave its photo-sharing credentials a powerful shot in the arm. Since they are leaving Instagram be, there is no question it will continue growing.

  Exposure: Facebook’s brand isn’t mentioned at all inside of Instagram, but that doesn’t matter. To the users who care, Instagram is a more highly valued brand, and every time a new, great picture appears, Instagram gets a shot of Exposure.

  Articulation: Instagram is an almost perfectly simple application. Take, edit, and share photos. Photos, if you think about it, are a great currency for social networking. What do we like to share? We love sharing photos of our kids, our new cars, our whatever. The app’s social network is simple to articulate too. It’s not nearly as complex as Facebook or Google+. People who like sharing photos congregate there. Instagram gets high marks in Articulation.

  Trust: Does Instagram have our Trust? It probably would rank higher in a survey than its new parent company. Facebook goes in and out of public favor with privacy issues and other conundrums that shake its users’ comfort levels. Instagram? It has earned Trust over the last few years. It was a very big seller on Android’s marketplace in its first few weeks on that platform, ranking number three overall at its zenith. That says something.

  Echo: Do you see yourself in Instagram? This is a no-brainer. The application is built to let you take, edit, and share photos from your life. Chris’s joke is that Instagram turns your otherwise boring life into album cover art. Instagram also earns Echo by mapping into all kinds of social networks besides Facebook, thus creating a bridge between the application and wherever your crowd is.

  We rank Instagram as a highly successful user of the Impact Attributes. You might be lucky enough to have Facebook come and offer you a billion dollars for your company, but if not, think about how Instagram worked its Contrast and how it articulated the value of the product. You might not have thirty million users or customers, but you can certainly benefit from thinking about how adding some kind of user-to-user social experience might help your product grow.

  It’s early in the acquisition, but we think it will be a smooth integration and people will extend their use of photo-based networking and sharing even more with this product. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, but evidently, it’s also worth a billion dollars.

  1 Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/04/10/will-instagram-help-facebook-crack-china/.

  PART 3

  Platforms

  Ask a Los Angeles native about Angelyne, and they’ll come up with many theories. Some say she’s the wife of a billboard king, though none know who. Others remember her from some punk band in the eighties. But none of these theorists actually know the truth—or if they do, they’re not telling.

  Angelyne first popped up in the 1980s on posters throughout the city. She later began appearing on billboards, which became so famous in their own regard that they appeared in the backgrounds of movies like Get Shorty, Volcano, and The Fan.

  If you see one, or find one on Google, you’ll see her painted portrait, not a photograph in the traditional billboard style. Her appearance is a combination of The Jetsons–like style and Joan from Mad Men. The billboards were gigantic, monolithic renditions that viewers couldn’t
help but notice. They were fifty feet tall, for God’s sake. Everyone saw them, even though no one knew who she was.

  Angelyne really did exist—she had been seen about town—but what she did was a mystery. Was she a model, an actress, or a singer? It didn’t seem to matter. Because she was on billboards, she was somebody…wasn’t she?

  Billboards are obviously expensive, but nobody knows exactly where the money for the billboards came from or why she chose to publicize her Bettie Page–type pictures on hundred-foot-high canvases throughout the city. As time went on, Angelyne began to become a celebrity in her own right—not for any specific talent, skill, or exceptional accomplishment, but for the simple fact that everyone knew her name.

  Angelyne was among the first people in America to become “famous for being famous,” like Paris Hilton and many others since. In other words, Angelyne is a testament to the power of platform.

  Even now, years later, Angelyne still has a massive fan club—forty thousand people, they say—who pay a yearly fee for the privilege. Her platform has carried her throughout these years, much further than most celebrities or one-hit wonders last.

  If billboards were enough to make Angelyne famous, is a powerful platform enough to put you on top? Well, maybe. If your platform is strong enough, you might fall into a kind of rich-get-richer scenario, that’s true. But it’s more complex than that, because you can’t just expect an amazing platform to be given to you. There is no record deal waiting for you, no movie producer tapping you on the shoulder in the checkout line, and definitely no one with billboards just waiting to put your face on them.

  Our story necessarily began with ideas, because without those ideas, you are nothing. But our work has to continue, because one story or idea, no matter how perfect, will never be enough. The next step is to build your own transmitter, your own newspaper, or your own TV station. That is what platform is all about.

  Not too long ago, the expression was “Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” Thankfully, now ink is cheap. Anyone can have that power, including you. All you need is a blueprint.

  #

  A powerful platform does not appear on its own. Instead, it must be built, and that is more about what happens outside the platform than inside. This is true no matter the platform, whether it exists virtually or in real life.

  Let’s say you want to start a conference—an event at which dog lovers, say, gather together to talk about all things dogs. Thousands of these events probably exist everywhere, but no matter; we’re going to assume the first one is about to be invented.

  So you come up with the logistics for this event. It will happen on a weekend in November, you decide, and it will happen in a convention hall in your hometown. Tickets cost twenty dollars if you’re an early bird or twenty-five if you show up at the door. So far, so good. Next you want to bring people together for the event.

  Okay, here comes the question. Do you

  a. go out to dog parks, talk to pet owners, put up fliers on your favorite pet site; or

  b. go to the middle of your now-rented convention center and start shouting into the void, hoping dog owners will hear you?

  Right. Exactly.

  All platforms, from Twitter to Google+ to in-person networks to speaking events and more, require outside work. They cannot be built from the inside out. They must occur from the outside in, building from one platform to another.

  Picture this, but now on Twitter. You create an account and add a nice picture and custom background. You begin tweeting amazing stuff, but unfortunately, no one is there to hear it.

  If this is happening to you, and you are waiting for someone to come across your channel and tweet about it, creating a barrage of interest and fans, you are wasting your time and may be delusional.

  It is extremely unlikely that a single person will (a) come across your channel, (b) find something they consider interesting, (c) find it so interesting that they decide to spread it among the people they care about, and (d) have significant influence. In other words, you have better chances of winning the lottery.

  Therefore, our focus in this section is to leave you with a practical guide to building a channel that has significant audience, so you may take advantage of the channel building that others have done and finally get a significant platform of your own.

  What We Mean by “Platform”

  There are lots of definitions for “platform.” We’re talking about the combination of tools you use to reach others and communicate ideas. In the traditional world, most people had very little access to platforms with any real kind of Reach. Mainstream media had television, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Meanwhile, individuals had telephones, letters, and the “opportunity” to run advertisements on various media channels. Web sites in the early days cost tens of thousands of dollars to make and maintain. My, how times have changed.

  We now have access to inexpensive or free Web site creation. We all have access to a video-distribution channel (YouTube and hundreds of other similar platforms). We can build e-mail lists that rival the distribution of any mainstream newspaper. We can build social networks whose size dwarfs the populations of some cities. We can buy a video camera for under a hundred dollars and create our own “shows,” if we’re so inclined.

  When we talk about platform, we mean the creation of some combination of the above. Even mainstream celebrities work in multimedia mode now. Kim Kardashian rose to fame with her reality TV show, but she greatly improved her platform by blogging regularly and actively using Twitter. Others have gone the opposite way.

  Lucas Cruikshank, creator of the horribly annoying Fred Figglehorn character, started from scratch. He posted “Fred” videos on YouTube and rapidly grew a following. In fact, he was the first YouTube publisher to reach a million subscribers. Cruikshank parlayed this effort into a Fred movie made with Nickelodeon, a second movie, a TV series, and soon a third movie. (At this point, you should stop reading, go to YouTube, type in “Fred,” and see who we’re talking about.)

  From zero, Cruikshank turned his YouTube platform into a large mainstream presence and many opportunities. We know you aren’t likely to finish this book and start recording yourself speaking in a high-pitched, squeaky voice. And yet it’s important to realize that this is exactly what brought millions of viewers, fame, and success (so far enduring success, at that) to one young man without access to traditional channels.

  He’s not alone. In her spare time, former assisted-living worker Amanda Hocking wrote seventeen supernatural-themed novels. She tried publishing them via the traditional route and received rejection after rejection. No one cared one bit for her romantic supernatural novels. So she decided to self-publish them on Amazon.

  In no time, she was selling over nine thousand books a day. Yes, over nine thousand.

  Amanda made over two million dollars in sales on her own, mostly by pricing the books so low that people felt no risk purchasing them. People came, then more people, and word of mouth pushed these books up the Amazon sales charts, which then spurred even more activity. Soon she was the game to beat.

  And that’s when St. Martin’s Press gave her a book deal for two million dollars more.

  Amanda started from zero. Now? Her platform is giant. She blogs, tweets, uses Facebook, and stays well connected with her fans, who will buy her next mainstream books without question.

  Don’t discount this if you’re a plumber or a business-to-business air conditioner vendor. You can have the same success. You can find the method to build a platform of value for your business. Our friend Marcus Sheridan did it with swimming pool sales and service. Our friend Joel Libava does it with his franchising consulting. We know many successful people who don’t sell the sexiest product or service in the world and yet, they are very successful.

  The point we’re making here is that platform is a powerful part of impact and that you will have to work in earnest on this detail. We’ve divided platform into two chapters: Reach and Exposu
re, which you’ll learn about next.

  4 Reach

  Okay, let’s be frank: The real reason most people picked up this book isn’t Trust, and it probably isn’t Contrast either. Those are important parts of the equation, sure, and everyone wants them, but we suspect that what people are actually after is something a little bit more obvious, a little less “sniper rifle” and a little more “giant freaking laser beam.” Does that make any sense?

  Reach is what’s coveted, because it often comes with a great deal of prestige. The girl with a hundred thousand Twitter followers has an amazing lead over the rest of the pack. It is also possible to practically buy Reach, as you can purchase Twitter followers, buy e-mail addresses to expand your list, or whatever else you might find interesting. Although these options exist, they are not truly Reach in the sense that we mean it here. These options are more like faking Reach temporarily.

  Let’s put it this way: We heard a story one time about a guy who finds other people’s ATM receipts. He picks up all the receipts showing big bank balances. He keeps them. Then he attempts to show them to girls in order to create interest. Well, faking Reach is kind of like that. It might work sometimes, but the charade is often quickly revealed and the interest, if any, does not last long. So faking your Reach may work for a while, but it doesn’t actually expand anything. In order to obtain and truly expand your Reach, you need to work extremely hard. You also need to be a little more direct than most.

  Reach is almost never built quickly. A musician can tour the country over several years and still not convince a hundred thousand people to buy a record. More likely, our buddy builds true fans one at a time, convincing perhaps one person per show and convincing another after that. The process is painstaking but powerful, because it also involves practice and makes you a master. It’s how Louis C.K. became one of the best-known comedians in the world—not quickly but over fifteen years—one YouTube view at a time. This is what true Reach is like. It takes time, but it stays with you.