The Impact Equation

by Chris Brogan

  Tell stories that make the buyer the hero. If you’ve built an amazing rain-gutter-screen business, who’s going to care except the kind of person who is asking how to improve the value of their house?

  Help others first. Most people fail in getting the attention of others because they approach with their hands out long before they have done anything to earn a seat at the table. If you want attention, earn it. Be helpful to others. (Hint: Retweeting someone’s posts all day doesn’t really count.)

  Be There Ahead of Time

  If you want the magic trick of all magic tricks, however, here it is: Be there before anyone even knows who you are. What do we mean? What if you’re selling craft beers in Michigan? Why not be the person putting out the Michigan Craft Brewer’s Monthly magazine online? You’re suddenly the person people come to regard before they even know that you’re part of the space. See?

  The trick, again, is to represent other brewers equally. It wouldn’t do to highlight your own products more than anyone else’s. People will notice, and you’ll lose credibility. In fact, disclose everything. Talk about the fact that you too are part of the ecosystem you’re writing about. The more you can position yourself to be the person covering the space while being part of the space, the more chance you’ll earn credibility while gaining Exposure.

  Jeremiah Owyang did this a long time ago while working for Hitachi Data Systems. He created a very useful wiki site for all the various large storage companies, who were promoting competing products, along with his own products. People knew that Jeremiah represented Hitachi, but they found his site so useful that they considered his products alongside the other companies’ products and sometimes bought his, simply because they appreciated all his hard work in covering the space.

  It’s amazing how few companies take this approach. They prefer the “What? We have no competitors. You’ve never even heard of them. Look over here! It’s our product!” approach. This is silly, but you see it all the time. You see credit card companies and automobile companies that refuse to mention their competition when they should. And what comes of it? A diminished sense of Trust.

  Want to get a lot more Exposure? Learn to be the go-to resource instead of begging for scraps from people you perceive to be powerful.

  How to Do Exposure Wrong

  The only real way to do Exposure wrong is to betray the sacred places your audience members set for themselves.

  A sacred place, for the purpose of our conversation, is an implicit part of the social contract you build with your audience member. Every person in the world has one, whether it’s their place of worship (literally) or their e-mail in-box.

  But the irony of the sacred place is that you cannot assume what your readers consider valuable and what territory is okay to step upon. Some are comfortable with blogs in their in-box, while others find it immensely distracting and invasive, but how do you tell which is which?

  The reality of Exposure is that, in order to understand it, you must sometimes break the social code you have built with your audience purposefully—but delicately, of course.

  How to Break the Social Contract

  Breaking the social contract is a difficult part of making progress with your audience, especially when you don’t explicitly know what it is they do or don’t want. Your understanding of your audience is limited—you may see they spend a long time on your site, for example, but not know why. You might think you know from the comments, but they may not be representative of the entire group.

  Your understanding of your audience is necessarily incomplete and always will be. This was true even when one saw one’s audience face-to-face, and it’s even truer in the media channels we use today.

  The only way to truly understand how your audience members feel is to see what happens when you try new things. You only discover the limits of Exposure when you hit your audience too often or in an offensive or different way so that they change their behavior (causing changes in your analytics—bounce rate, time on site, or what have you), react via comments, or begin to leave altogether.

  So if you have any anxiety about any of these things, it’s best to get rid of it now. Perhaps take a look at Julien’s book The Flinch, or his blog (inoveryourhead.net), where you will see how offensive content can be and still work. Once you overcome the fear of losing your audience, you will discover that experimentation’s apparent risk usually leads to high reward.

  Mapping Out Your Audience’s Values

  Every piece of content your channel creates should be considered an experiment. What do your readers send out to others? How do they gel with the stuff you’ve made? The more content you create, the better you will know, and even the failures will teach you about what matters to them. As your content gets spread out and hits different parts of the Web, the creation of an ideal reader or audience is perhaps one of the most valuable processes available.

  Our friend James Chartrand first guided us to this idea, and you can find out more about it on MenWithPens.ca. Here’s something Julien wrote for his blog a long time ago, when he was first trying to figure out who his readers should be. The process he used to create it is called freewriting; he wrote down everything that came into his head without judgment in order to have the longest possible list. Try it. After all ideas are down on paper, use this exercise to create a list of descriptors for your prospective audience, such as “cynical,” “friendly,” or “just starting out.”

  IDEAL READER EXERCISE FOR JULIEN’S BLOG

  The ideal reader is a person in his or her twenties or thirties.

  He reads this blog first thing in the morning.

  He either works for himself or has some job where he is not totally happy—maybe advertising or online marketing, but something related to an interest of Julien’s. Or he might have a normal but boring job, like Julien once did.

  He is eco-conscious. He is liberal (or maybe libertarian). He is “socially liberal but fiscally conservative.”

  He is urban, or at least has an urban mind-set. He is from New York instead of, say, Omaha. He is kind of cynical.

  He might be married, but he is “free.” He wants more out of life and has the ability to get it but just can’t seem to take the necessary steps.

  He might have kids. He might have pets. He probably has neither.

  He is college educated but is not working in the industry he was educated in. Continuing his education/learning is important to him.

  He is an overachiever—or he wants to be.

  He is otherwise an ordinary dude, whatever that means. Like everyone else, he has some quirky traits, but he’s not crazy out there or something. Julien is much weirder than he is. That, maybe, is why he is interested in Julien’s blog.

  The ideal reader, like Julien, has an activist mind-set.

  Whatever the case, he wants everything out of life—as Julien does. Whatever part of him that ideal life appeals to, that is the part Julien speaks to.

  You can see now that only after imagining an ideal reader (and experimenting against it) can we see what kind of people are paying attention to a certain channel and what their values are. You can also get a sense by watching their responses. Fox News viewers, for example, may become upset at a poll stating that President Obama’s attempts to reduce unemployment are working, while BBC viewers may become upset if something interrupts Coronation Street. In other words, their values become evident based on what they feel is worth talking about.

  The Coming Oversaturation Issue

  We’ve talked a lot about online channels and the great opportunities that come with them, but there is one major pending problem. Those of us using these new tools to connect and communicate are now facing saturation. See if this resonates with you.

  You get about two hundred or more e-mails a day. You have a few hundred friends and connections on Facebook, some of whom post updates quite often. You have a Twitter account where all the other people you follow post even more updates. You read a bunch of blogs and on
line news sources. You watch videos on YouTube, TED.com, and Hulu.

  Be honest. There’s so much going on that you’re even losing track of the people who matter most to you. You’re skipping half of the newsletters you subscribe to. You’re not keeping up with e-mail. And yet at the same time you feel this hunger to consume information and learn more, for fear of being left behind or in hopes of finding that next big thing.

  You’re not alone. Everyone we know is experiencing the same set of issues, and that includes your target audience. What can you do about it? How do you rise above the noise? Here’s a tool kit.

  Purposeful Media Making

  First, realize that every post you make to a social channel (including e-mail) is information. You are adding information to the queue for people who have opted in to receiving that information. People judge the value of what you share.

  Depending on how you want to use your platform, you must consider how to make your information purposeful. You don’t have to be strictly serious. Please don’t let us get you thinking that you need to button up tightly and not share your personable side. That wouldn’t do at all. We both advocate being very human.

  But we do want you to be purposeful. Ask yourself whom you’re trying to attract with the information you’re sharing. Then ask yourself whether what you’re sharing will be useful, interesting, entertaining, or compelling to that person. Remember what we said in part 1 about being a fledgling TV station? That applies here.

  Brevity and Mobile Rules

  The rising trend cannot be avoided: Smart phones and tablet computers are outpacing laptops and desktops as the information-consumption product of choice. More and more people are connecting to everything you share with a three-inch screen or a seven-inch screen. If you’re not creating your information so that it plays well on a mobile device, you’re going to lose ground in the platform game. If you’re not brief enough to be consumed by someone thumbing through a smart phone, you’ll lose them.

  Here are some quick fixes to implement now (not next month).

  Configure a mobile version of your Web site (or sites). This doesn’t cost much. The real effort is in understanding what someone most wants to do with your Web site while not at their desk. The answer isn’t always the same as the experience you offer on a larger screen.

  Throw out the fancy HTML e-mail newsletter templates and go thinner. You can still use HTML, but use more text and less graphics.

  Simplify e-mails to a single call to action, and lead with a sentence that explains the most important point you’re trying to make. People read the first line or two of your e-mail and decide whether or not to reply. You have about twenty-five words to hook someone into taking action. Choose wisely.

  Consumption Nation

  People are chewing through content faster than ever. That’s the almost-good news. The bad news is that they want it simpler and simpler. People aren’t reading Moby-Dick anymore. They are reading bite-size posts and moving into visual formats like video and informational graphics. If you want to keep your platform alive, you have to create for their tastes.

  Consider e-books, video, and infographics. People are consuming more than ever before, but they’re less interested in simple text. Create e-books for their tablets and readers. Create video for them to consume in small bites (three minutes or less). Make infographics or draw pictures that explain complex ideas or numbers in simple visual formats.

  Again, brevity rules. Everything you’re making should be modular, easy to download to a mobile device, and compelling enough to keep someone’s attention.

  The Dangers of Cross-Wiring Your Social Channels

  The oversaturation problem is exacerbated when you choose to post the same information across several channels, perhaps with a push-to-many service. Plus, the current trend for many social platforms is to cross-populate on your behalf. For instance, many people have wired their Foursquare (location-based check-in service) updates to populate on Twitter and elsewhere. Many people have linked their Twitter account to their LinkedIn account. There are issues with all of this.

  If you cross-post the same content to all of your social channels, people who subscribe to you in more than one channel will receive it more than once, making it far less likely to compel them to take action. Further, some of these people will decide to unfollow or unsubscribe from you on whichever channel they value the most and relegate you to a back burner, hurting your ability to grow and maintain a healthy platform.

  Instead, consider creating a unique spin on the content for each platform. A tweet is very different from a Facebook or Google+ update, and you would phrase a lead-in to your information on LinkedIn differently from content on any of those platforms. See how that works?

  By overlapping, you’re throwing information into a platform that might not benefit from having it. Look at your last twenty tweets. Would you want them all showing up on LinkedIn? We bet not. If you’re checking in on Foursquare and your client sees five Starbucks trips over the course of the day while you’re behind on your deadline, how beneficial will that be?

  Sever the connections. It all works better when you treat each network like its own beast.

  So what should you do?

  Oversaturation Is Real

  This issue is already afoot. The name of the game is to penetrate the noise and clutter and to build impact and value.

  Contrast is a matter of standing out from the oversaturation. Exposure is an issue. You must find ways to connect with people and capture their attention, but if you stuff the box, so to speak, you’ll find yourself ignored. Echo is important, as you’ll want to share information that resonates with those people you’re trying to build relationships with. This merits a lot of consideration.

  How Not to Wear Out Your Welcome:

  High Exposure Done Right

  If you’re working to get more and more Exposure and improve your potential for impact, there are ways to do that where you’ll grow and ways that will cause everyone to sneer at best and revolt at worst. The line between Exposure being good for you and Exposure turning people against you is hair thin, and we can’t articulate it very well for you. Perhaps, though, we can offer insight into what helps and what hurts people’s perspectives.

  The iPod shipped with sleek white earbuds (not even earphones) because from a gazillion miles away, they indicated that you were using an iPod. The more we saw those earbuds around, the more we thought about the iPod. This got us thinking more about buying one, and then, suddenly, we too were sporting those earbuds and signaling to others that they might consider buying an iPod too.

  What’s interesting is that Exposure is one of the core elements of being a powerful disruptor. Most people tend to believe that when there’s an ingrained leader in a certain space there’s no sense in challenging them. What we’ve come to realize, however, is that there are always new ways of slicing a marketplace and for enterprising and risk-taking types to lead.

  Kevin Plank did. He was facing a big fork in the road at the end of his college career. He was doing okay at football but knew he probably couldn’t go all the way with it. He had a big job offer from Prudential Life Insurance, but he felt like that would suck his life away.

  But he also had an idea. He created a performance fabric and made shirts from it, which in and of itself wouldn’t have given him much hope of success. What did was that he realized he wasn’t going to sell it strictly to athletes. The mainstream would consider buying the shirts if he could get enough Exposure and professional endorsement.

  In a relatively brief amount of time, Under Armour has grown to half the size of Nike (its biggest competitor) and has dwarfed much of the competition. Its logo is becoming as recognizable as the world-famous swoosh. This disruptive brand came to be because Kevin Plank networked and got his shirt onto the backs of as many professional athletes as he could. He leveraged that Exposure to get more professional deals, while he was well positioned to sell directly to the consumers who wante
d to wear what their champions wore.

  Under Armour won almost strictly through Exposure, beyond the other Impact Attributes.

  There are many ways to think about getting Exposure. You can get product placement within larger media channels. You can push for reviews. You can look for celebrity endorsements. You can do giveaways at certain events that will get people thinking about giving something new a try.

  When we think about Exposure of ideas or of people, that’s where it starts to get more complicated.

  Live from New York

  Saturday Night Live has a kind of magic to it. It may be amazing, or it may be simply okay. It may blow your mind, or it may simply blow, but whatever happens, if you’re at home on a Saturday night, don’t you worry. SNL will be there.

  Exposure, when done right, is a magical thing. It creates a default status in the mind of the recipient, saying to him or her, “Well, if there’s nothing else to do, there’s always this.” For Saturday night, it’s Saturday Night Live—and hey, the day it plays on television is hard to forget when it’s in the name. But you can take advantage of this anytime you like.

  The grooves that form in the brain due to recurring activity are deep. If you brush your teeth every day upon awakening—or even better, if you chain it to another activity, such as showering—the act becomes automatic. It becomes almost impossible not to do. The same thing works with media. There may be an infinite number of channels, but the reality is that you just have to be among the top ten sites your audience thinks of at any given moment. Julien’s favorite blogs—SethGodin.Typepad.com, AVC.com, and Kottke.org—are what he defaults to when there’s nothing else to do. It’s human nature to develop patterns, so all you have to do is increase Exposure (and keep the quality high) to place yourself inside them. This is the same reason you probably remember your childhood phone number.