The Impact Equation

by Chris Brogan

  When Chris and Julien first met during the early days of podcasting, one of everyone’s favorite podcasts was the Daily Source Code. Hosted by former MTV VJ Adam Curry, it ran every single day, with few exceptions, and became the default for a huge number of podcast listeners, especially those with an hour-long commute. They were ready with their hour of driving, and Curry was ready with his podcast; it was an unbroken social contract that lasted almost five years.

  The show wasn’t always magic, of course—perfectionists need not apply here—but nobody expects media to be perfect. Instead, it works more like a glass that suddenly overflows with water when the last drop falls into it. Either it was good or it wasn’t. The Web site Rotten Tomatoes works similarly: At 59 percent, a movie is “rotten”; at 60 percent, it suddenly becomes “fresh.”

  As long as you can stifle your perfectionism, increasing Exposure this way actually has a kind of power. The producers of Saturday Night Live could wait until the show was perfect every time if they wanted, but they don’t; they go for it, with whatever material they have, on Saturday night. It creates some groan moments, yes, but it also creates magic on occasion by increasing the pressure on the creators. More environmental pressure means more evolution. Same goes for you.

  Okay, but How Often Should I Tweet?

  First off, please just feel as stupid as you should for having to use words like “tweet” and trying to look serious while saying them. We do. Tweet, blog, wiki, Pinterest, and the whole steaming lot of these words are just utterly useless and make us feel like we’re in a nursery. But it’s okay. You’re among friends. We can say “tweet” and realize that what we’re really saying is “communicate with people on these social networks.”

  Everyone has an opinion on this, and some companies even spend a great deal of time creating metrics and measurements and charts to determine the most powerful and appropriate way to tweet. There are hundreds (thousands?…sigh) of posts by bloggers and social-media experts telling you that you’re doing it wrong and they know how to do it better.

  As with everything else, the metrics offer some guidelines, and there are always ways to do things worse or better. We’ll share with you what we know.

  1. Chris’s Twitter stream is stuffed full of replies to other people, which is supposed to be a no-no, because replying isn’t very good information. Every time Chris replies, he gains a few hundred more followers, because people feel seen (a basic human need/desire).

  2. Tweeting on-topic information all the time is a surefire way to get nowhere. It makes you a robotic news stream and not someone of interest worth paying attention to. Learning how to be interestingly off topic while still serving those who choose to follow you is a wonderful goal.

  3. Tweeting over a hundred times a day will likely relegate you to some less viewed list or get you unfollowed. And yet there’s someone for everyone. We follow @guykawasaki’s Twitter account, knowing full well that it is supernoisy, is ghostwritten by several people, is full of programmed messages, and doesn’t really have much to do with Guy Kawasaki the person anymore. Why? Because we like what he has to say. (And he’s a friend.)

  4. Tweeting four times a day, every six hours, would at least mean that you’ve covered all the time zones in some form or fashion.

  5. We both advocate replying to people and being conversational in our Twitter streams. Others choose to use it like a news feed, and that’s okay (probably even successful). We just do it differently, and it seems to work well for us.

  There are many other ways you can “do it wrong” with Twitter. You can use programmed tweets (we do). You can choose to have a logo instead of a picture of your head (we don’t). You can tweet out sales and offers instead of whatever else you’re supposed to say (we do). You can talk off topic (we do). Believe us, if there’s a way for someone to say you’re doing it wrong, they will. There are a few ways that you can use Twitter that aren’t ideal, but for the most part, you’ll experiment and learn those for yourself. You don’t need us for that.

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  If we’ve learned anything from the mass-media age, it’s that if we are bombarded with a jingle for long enough, it will eventually get stuck in our heads, and perhaps we’ll eventually want to buy it, whatever it is. Exposure is perhaps the most familiar Impact Attribute, the one that the general public will understand intuitively. But there are many ways to get Exposure wrong, as we’ve said, so it’s really about how to get it right.

  At one end of the Exposure spectrum is personal conversation. It isn’t scalable. It happens once, with only one person as the recipient. It’s in person, so it’s deeply influential. Exposure is low, but other Impact Attributes (Trust, etc.) are high, so it doesn’t matter. It’s a sales pitch or a personal favor. It works because of the relationship, not because it’s repeated.

  On the other end is spam. E-mail is one of the most scalable things of all. It costs nothing to send to millions, even billions of people. It can be hitting you over and over again, perhaps thousands of times a day. Exposure is massively high, but impact is supremely low. Spam is a testament to needing multiple Impact Attributes in order to successfully spread a message.

  But between these two extremes are things that work. Even some spam works with people who aren’t sensitive to deception. Assuming your audience is a little skeptical, you’ll want to work on Trust, Echo, and other attributes, and if both Trust and Echo work well, and you maintain variety, you can keep Exposure high too.

  Interestingly enough, as we were writing this section, a donation-request e-mail came in from Wikipedia. Since it is a perfect example of a high-Exposure, high-impact, and high-Trust message, let’s talk about it. After all, it worked on us (we just donated twenty dollars, and hey, maybe you should too).

  Wikipedia is high Trust because you’ve connected with the Web site, and perhaps seen the face of its founder, Jimmy Wales, multiple times in a nonsales environment. You think of Wikipedia every day, or at least every week, as you search for anything under the sun and it tells you about it, for free. Most of the time when you connect to Wikipedia it doesn’t try to get you to do anything. But around once a year, Wikipedia turns the Exposure knob way up during a donation drive, asking you and every other user to donate to the site until it reaches its goal. (It does this to make sure it stays advertising and influence free.)

  Another way to look at this is that all year, Wikipedia’s Exposure rating is ideally high. It never connects to you, but you’re always connecting to it to find out all the stuff you’re curious about. So Trust remains high, building and building all year, until the pledge drive. Some people become slightly annoyed (we aren’t), but since it doesn’t last long, Trust begins to rebuild immediately after.

  To us, this is a perfect use of Exposure. We hope you liked it and it helps you understand how often to communicate and when to do it.

  EXPOSURE: HOW TO RATE YOURSELF

  It’s up to you to experiment with how you’re going to build your platform. There’s not a lot you can do that will permanently damage or damn you. Experiment. See what works. You’ll find the formula that works best for you.

  And never presume that you’ll hit some number and then be done. Platform is an active experience, a verb, like the word “love.” It’s like setting the thermostat in your house at seventy degrees and realizing that some days that means turning on the heat and other days it means cooling things down.

  Realize that it’s about keeping your contacts alive and building and maintaining relationships. Your role as the ringleader of a large experience never ends, and the Impact Equation way of looking at things means you never take your foot off the brake and instead look for ways to get even more cars into the race. It’s a challenge.

  Celebrate the brilliant minds that follow your platform and always recognize them as individuals loosely joined around similar ideas—never as your community and least of all as “you guys.” You’ll have a shot at success and you’ll have a chance to improve on your own i
mpact by nurturing relationships that matter to your larger story.

  We have a whole section about the human element, and this is where people seem to fall down the most. If you thought figuring out a platform was difficult, you’ll realize in no time that the hardest work is what used to be (somewhat snidely) called the “soft skills” and that very few successful ventures exist without understanding the human aspects of impact.

  That’s where we’re going next.

  IMPACT EXAMPLE: RACHEL HAWKINS

  Rachel Hawkins is an author, most recently of a series of young-adult books about Sophie Mercer, a young girl sent to Hecate Hall (better known as “Hex Hall”), a kind of boarding school for not-so-quiet witches, shape-shifters, and fairies, who are normally supposed to be quiet and blend into the crowd. The books are targeted to young-adult readers, the kind who love Twilight, The Hunger Games, and the like.

  Chris picked up Rachel’s first book on Kindle based on a recommendation and read through it quickly. He’s not exactly the target reader for the series, but it was a fun, fast read, and he enjoyed it. One quick Google search later, he’d found Rachel Hawkins on Twitter (@ladyhawkins). He sent her a quick message:

  “@ladyhawkins: just finished Hex Hall! Tons of fun, though I’m not at all your demographic.”

  Within two minutes, Hawkins wrote back:

  “@chrisbrogan: Ah, thank you so much! and I always appreciate my Grown Dude Readers:)”

  Does this kind of interaction generate impact? We say yes. But let’s look at the attributes of the equation.

  Contrast: Rachel’s book doesn’t exactly stand out from others in its genre. Young adult/teen fiction, and more specifically paranormal teen romance fiction, is having a renaissance the likes of which has never been seen on American soil. But having a conversation with an author via Twitter most certainly sets Rachel apart from other authors. (Chris also gushed all over young-adult author Scott Westerfeld, who wasn’t as responsive.2

  Reach: Rachel has the same Reach as most authors. She put out a book that has to fight with other books on the shelf. Does she have anything special here? No. But Rachel is quite active on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and beyond and does a great job of building community among her readers and fans. Again, this gives her more Reach than some authors, who might have sold better in the past but who have yet to perceive the “threat” of Rachel Hawkins earning her place among her fans.

  Exposure: Here we can kind of “ditto” the above points. Rachel has low Exposure the way most fiction authors do: She releases books very seldom. But her use of social platforms to build community gets her out there a little more. Watching her blog is amazing. She connects with readers regularly and on many subjects, not just the books themselves, and every post her readers receive teaches her audience a little bit more about her, which helps sell the books when they’re released.

  Articulation: Rachel’s series, Hex Hall, does a great job of walking that perfect line of being parent-approved while seeming naughty enough. But what also works for Rachel is that she defines the guts of the books quite well. They’re about feeling that you don’t fit in, that everyone’s hiding something from you, that there’s more to everything than what you see.

  Trust: Rachel has been around a while. Her Trust is solid with her audience, and although Chris isn’t in her target demographic, her quick response to him shows reliability, an aspect of Trust.

  Echo: Rachel is her community. She gushes about Game of Thrones on her Tumblr.3 She writes funny tweets about fantasy books. She’s exactly like the people who read her writing. Notice that I’m not talking about her character, Sophie Mercer, or any of the other well-crafted people roaming her series. I’m talking about Rachel. She’s got a great Impact Equation because when people get to know the person behind the books, they realize they’ve just met themselves, and now they really want her to succeed. That’s golden.

  There’s a key lesson here: Your product or service might not stand out on its own. If you sell insurance, for example, your policies are likely similar to everyone else’s, but if you can do something to make you, yourself, more interesting and engaging and embody the attributes of the Impact Equation, you have a chance.

  There are a few big-name fiction authors who do a great job communicating with their fans and turning them into online communities. In Rachel’s genre, our favorite is Neil Gaiman, who started blogging back in the nineties, around when Chris started, and was at the same event where we did our first-ever book signing of Trust Agents. Neil actively makes his community feel seen and heard. But he’s also a powerhouse in his field and probably doesn’t need to work the Impact Equation to succeed.

  Rachel Hawkins, however, earns her way over many other aspiring and published-but-not-very-seen authors by the very way she puts herself out there. You might look at this example and say, “So what? Anyone can do that.” Here’s the hint: Anyone can do that. Rachel is getting buyers because she does do it.

  2 See http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-opportunities-authors-might-miss/.

  3 See http://hexybellerachel.tumblr.com/.

  PART 4

  Network

  Congratulations, you have reached the final part of the roller coaster. You have screamed, and your heart is pumping in your chest. You may even be ready to stop, but we’re not done yet. The most important Impact Attributes are yet to come.

  You may have a wide Reach, a massive platform that enables you to connect with everyone. Your idea may be genius, and it may be caught immediately imprinted onto people’s brains. You may be differentiated from your industry and highly visible. But if you are not trusted, if you are not credible, you are nothing.

  Though Trust was the subject of our last book, we didn’t delve into the real details of how it works, how people come to believe in one another, and how networks grow. We never discussed the secret sauce of getting into someone’s inner circle, partly due to space constraints but also because the obsession with social networks (the new thing!) at the time was so high that we obsessed about the tool instead of the human.

  Today we are here to correct that. As we have said before, if you come away from this book unable to foresee success in the impact of your venture, if you leave unable to make a better impression on people than when you began, we have failed.

  We want to explain the human element in such a way that it becomes indelible in your mind. What you’re doing right, or wrong, must be immediately clear to you, as if a coach were watching over your shoulder throughout your interactions.

  For us, this is also the most daunting part of the book. Why? It is the softest, the most unquantifiable of all of the elements of our equation. Thankfully, it is also the place where we stand in the shadows of giants.

  What makes people trust one another is a subject that has fascinated people since the beginning of time—and it shows. From How to Win Friends and Influence People to The Trusted Advisor, this subject has been at the core of business for a long time. It has never vanished because human relationships, in reality, are never truly mastered.

  The reality is that the study of Trust, credibility, and all of the soft skills is never truly done. There’s always more to learn—always another aspect that eludes us, maybe forever. Yet, there are some things that are set in stone, sets of best practices that most people know yet do not perform. One of our goals is to get you up to speed.

  Methods for community building have always existed, yet the best methods for developing community have never truly been deciphered, especially with the new complexities of online interaction. We often see supposed experts making the same mistakes as beginners, proving once again that the lessons are never truly done.

  You have to see yourself as a constant student if you are interested in making progress in any human art form, whether it’s salesmanship, network building, or anything else. Improvement is always possible, and we hope to teach you a thing or two.

  Audience, Community, and Network

  Quite often
people will say they have a community built around their business, or they have a huge community following them on such and such a social network. We would disagree. More often people have an audience, and that audience is essentially some number of people who have opted in to receiving information from them. An audience can be a physical one, like people at a conference, or it can be a group of people who receive a newsletter. But never mistake an audience for a community.

  Your community are those people who work to maintain an ongoing interaction with you. And never, ever make the mistake of crowning yourself the king or queen of that community. Instead, realize that you have the privilege and honor to serve the community, even if they have chosen to gather around your ideas, your products or services, or something else of your creation. And always realize that communities in this context are loosely joined and quick to disperse.

  Say you’re an Apple fan and you love your MacBook Air, for instance. You might even participate in MacBook- or Apple-related forums online. You might supply ideas, advice, or helpful information to other Mac users. We know quite a few people who self-identify as Apple fans, but very few of them consider that a primary identity label. You might be a huge Nine Inch Nails fan, but unless you’re running the Santa Barbara chapter of the club, you probably consider that just one part of your identity.