The Impact Equation

by Chris Brogan

  It took a while to find a musician who wasn’t fond of simply retweeting fan love about him- or herself. When we did, we found musicians who let their promotions people or managers manage their online communications. We’re not fans of blasting negativity toward people we feel don’t align with our ideas, but maybe we can communicate a few lessons we learned from the musicians we observed:

  1. Sharing praise about yourself is a bit silly. Praise others instead.

  2. Calling your fans “fans” is putting yourself on a pedestal. Also try removing “you guys” from your vernacular.

  3. If you say people matter to you, prove it. Connect and communicate with them. It doesn’t have to eat up your day, but allotting some time each day would be a good start.

  4. Ignoring people outright isn’t a good plan. If your community is really making the effort to connect, respond.

  In a weird way the online world has given Echo a new life. For instance, if you still think of MC Hammer as “that guy in the nineties with the pants,” then you haven’t communicated with him lately on Twitter or Facebook. He’s getting a lot of opportunities to do more business because he’s become “one of us” through his online interactions. By showing who he is on a daily basis to those who might have an interest, Hammer avoids all the bad jokes and old memories and pushes forward into more and more interesting territory.

  As for authors who don’t really practice Echo, we’ve found more of those than we could cram into a set of examples. Many authors seem to save their connecting and communicating for the printed pages. There are many authors who have created accounts on Twitter or Facebook but use them solely for blasting out announcements about the new book, or even less interesting information.

  We could find many examples of authors who have thrown away any potential chance to build an Echo. The old method of doing business was okay with this. It wasn’t the author’s role to market to buyers; the author simply had to meet deadlines (well, you know, try).

  For those of you who want examples of what to do and what not to do as an author, here they are:

  1. Stop endlessly counting down your book release. Few people are as pumped about it as you.

  2. We get just as giddy as you do when people share their bookstore photos. But save the retweets and Facebook shares and the like for praising the followers.

  3. Spend even twenty minutes a day communicating with people through an online channel. It’s free and it endears you to your buyers and readers. Heck, Chris even wrote about one in this book because she was kind enough to reply.

  4. Turn the tables and promote your readers. It will give you a lot more to work with.

  Echo is one of the trickier parts of the Impact Equation, but we wanted to give you some thoughts about how deadmau5 and Paulo Coelho are interacting online specifically, because if you want models of how to interact with people and make them feel the excitement of being part of your experience, there are none better than those two gentlemen.

  How to Inspire

  It would be impossible to talk about building a community and understanding how human beings work without talking about the emotions we want to create with the things we do. It’s a basic, fundamental aspect of Echo that we want people to feel a certain way about us, about our brand, or about our content, but unless we really know how to make this happen, we miss out on one of the most powerful parts of creating material online.

  Let’s face it. There’s lots of information all over the Internet about every possible subject. If you want to learn to ride a bike, you can just Google it and bam, you suddenly know how. The information isn’t what’s lacking; it’s the motivation, the inspiration, and the faith. That’s what you need, not a step-by-step guide. Learning to ride a bike (or anything else, really) is never about the information—it’s about the emotion you have to create in order to do it regularly, every day, until it’s a habit.

  So for us, an inspirational or emotional aspect to our content is critical for moving beyond the race-to-the-bottom, lowest-common-denominator business of publishing on the Web. When you make people feel something, whether it’s comfortable, powerful, or any other positive emotion, they associate that feeling, not just the information you’ve provided, with you or your brand. You get more from them by getting at their heart.

  Okay, but easier said than done. How do you actually do that? This is a question we’ve been working on for a really long time. Julien works hard to make his public speaking about more than just transferring information to an audience, precisely because emotion helps them retain the message better. Chris has worked really hard onstage to make people laugh and has become pretty great at it. Both of us feel that once you have someone’s heart, you get the rest of them pretty easily too.

  1. Distill your message. Whittle it down to the tightest, sharpest thing possible. And we don’t mean something like “Google Panda is making it harder for small Web sites to get and keep high search-engine rankings.” If this is what you’re delivering, and it’s relevant to your audience, that’s fine—but deliver a punchier message as well. Use your tone, your words, and everything else to deliver a message that means more to your audience. For example, the message above might become “Big guys are making it hard for little guys to compete.” Then your message is more like an eighties movie and less like a horrible PowerPoint presentation. Think ten thousand feet. Think big. Big is emotional, and Google SERPs are not.

  2. Discover the core emotion behind the message. For example, for years we used “Don’t be afraid to try new things” as the overarching message of our social-media presentations. Once you have your larger, blurrier, ten-thousand-foot message, you can think about how a message like this is supposed to make people feel. Since there are only a few core emotions, you can basically take your pick, either here or from Wikipedia: hope, gratitude, joy, pride, etc. But remember that a message that doesn’t connect with the right emotion can create a kind of emotional dissonance that leaves people feeling not quite right, perhaps even manipulated.

  3. Deliver this feeling over and over again from multiple angles. Begin with real subtlety. Create wonder as you talk about how others have dealt with problem X or how great, unexpected successes occurred when person Y was in trouble and did thing Z. Act as if you were telling one of the great stories of mankind through your simple blog post, presentation, or video. Think about building one thing on top of another, not throwing it all out at once.

  4. Combine number 3 with detailed examples of how it happened. Don’t make the mistake of providing only motivational speaker–type inspirational talk and expect it to consistently work. Your audience needs to feel like there’s some grounding in what you’re saying. Go from high to low, from general to very specific, and then up and down again. Using examples provides a strong foundation for your subject, and it will help people come along for the ride.

  5. Practice…a lot. A ton of work is necessary to get seriously good at inspiring any audience, whether online or in person. This is because you need to both anticipate and feel out your audience’s emotional state, an ability that comes only with significant experience. So attempting to inspire weekly, if not daily, in different ways will help you understand what works and what doesn’t. There is no substitute.

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  We both have been recently working hard on self-actualization, for lack of a better term. We have both worked harder at being ourselves, unflinching versions of what we feel and believe. One piece of advice we have about the process: Package your quirks.

  What do we mean by that? There are many unique things that make you who you are. With a little bit of pruning and positioning, the parts of you that are quirky and different can often separate you from the crowd in a positive way. “Packaging” simply means putting a little bit of attention and mindfulness into the way you represent yourself to the outside world.

  Meytal Cohen is a drummer in LA who is working hard to build a platform via online video around her excellent musical abilities.
We came to know her from her covers of various hard-rock and heavy-metal songs. Think about how utterly niche and quirky this is. She’s an Israeli-born hard-rock drummer in LA who spends most of her time covering songs and putting them up on YouTube. Quirky enough for you?

  She’s doing fabulously, and many other people are finding that their quirks are a path to success.

  Chris’s old schoolmate Doug Quint is another example of someone taking his quirks and running with them. Doug was a professional bassoonist in the New York Philharmonic but decided one year to rent an ice-cream truck with business partner Bryan Petroff and sell unique flavors. But Doug didn’t stop there. He called it the “Big Gay Ice Cream Truck.”

  With flavors like “Salty Pimp” and “Bea Arthur,” not to mention the famous “Choinkwich,”—an ice-cream sandwich made with chocolate ice cream between two chocolate cookies slathered with, wait for it, bacon marmalade—the Big Gay Ice Cream endeavor is probably one of the biggest quirks-turned-success-stories we can name. Oh, and Doug and Bryan worked hard on platform, using Twitter, Facebook, and a blog to really push their message out to an increasingly rabid fan base.

  The Perez Hilton “Hot Mess” Line

  There’s a line between being quirky and being a wreck. There’s a term that we first heard via Perez Hilton: “hot mess.” Urban Dictionary defines it as “when one’s thoughts or appearance are in a state of disarray, but they maintain an undeniable attractiveness or beauty.” This is easy to define in the land of celebrities, but less obvious in the “real” world.

  For instance, does it benefit you to share photos of yourself every time you’re horribly drunk? Probably not, unless you have a very unique audience. There will never be another Charlie Sheen, who became a kind of antistar for displaying the ultimate public crossing of the hot-mess line.

  You might share personal experiences, but how you use that sharing to better define who you are and what you represent to your community will ultimately determine what that sharing will accomplish for you. Again, it’s not that you should be censoring yourself, but rather that you’ll want to have a better grasp of what it means to share your personal traits.

  Sir Richard Branson is dyslexic. He brings this up quite often to partially explain his problem with formal schooling and to make the point that he’s passionate about journalism and has written several books in spite of that challenge. This is a great example of sharing a personal quirk (or in this case a kind of disability) that betters the overall story of what Branson brings to the picture.

  Just be wary of crossing that line and landing in the “overshare” or “this just got kind of gross” line.

  Quirks Can Add Connectivity

  Chris loves Batman. He shares this in many ways, including by pointing out that he bought a black 2010 Camaro SS just so he could pretend he owned the Batmobile. Julien loves Dungeons & Dragons and has been playing the game for over twenty years. Every time we mention this, we’ll get a message from someone who has a similar passion but hasn’t quite shared it with the world at large. You never know what will connect you to someone else.

  Here’s another odd story of connections that you can file in the “there’s really someone for everyone” category. Chris mentioned a quirky, obscure video game called Katamari Damacy and said he was considering buying a PlayStation 2 video-game console on eBay simply so he could play this one game. It turned out there were hundreds of Katamari Damacy players lurking everywhere! As Seth Godin said in his recent book We Are All Weird, this is the end of the era of mass and the beginning of the era of niches. So whatever your quirk, package it and lay it out there. Julien connects with many more readers through his mentions of Dungeons & Dragons than he would have if he hadn’t mentioned the hobby at all. It’s the same with whatever your secret hobbies are—they work for you when they’re put out in public, so be proud.

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  If you want one of our best and most secret magic tricks, it’s this: Reply. That’s it. We know it doesn’t look like much, but it’s magic.

  Julien is better at this in e-mail than Chris is. Chris does rather well in responding to people via his blog and social networks like Twitter. But both of us value replying to people, and it’s abundantly clear that when someone receives a reply, they are almost always amazed, for lack of a better term.

  Let’s be clear. They aren’t amazed because we’re important (that’s not what we think of ourselves). They’re amazed because so few people actually bother to reply/respond these days. Yes, sadly, the bar has dropped that low. If you reply to someone, you might actually beat the competition. In poker, this is the same as having a 2 and a 3 in your hand and winning the pot.

  This takes work. This takes scheduling. This takes effort. But the act of replying pays off in a way that doesn’t fit nicely into a spreadsheet.

  Think about it: Have you ever sent a message to someone you thought of as “very important” and received a reply? How did you feel? Which company do you value more, the one that satisfies your needs and also keeps a personable level of contact, or the one that satisfies your needs but isn’t exactly friendly?

  To be perfectly honest, some companies can get away with not being all that personable. Apple has legions of fans (and both of us are writing this book on MacBook Airs), yet it doesn’t do a lot to cultivate the human element of its own Impact Equation. It doesn’t matter. We (the combined audience of Apple fans and fervent users) do it for the company.

  But you’re not Apple. You likely never will be. The rest of the universe has to connect and respond to people.

  As magic tricks go, we admit that this one seems rather simple to pull off, and yet people don’t do it. Do you? Do you reply to people? Do you respond to e-mails?

  Do you know how many e-mail marketing newsletters are sent from e-mail addresses that look like “donotreply@pleasedontre spondtothis.com”? Hint: most. Have you ever tried hitting reply on an e-mail from a company that has sent you a newsletter? Where does it go? Nowhere.

  But we think there’s value in responding. We think there’s plenty of magic in delivering a reply. And we feel that this is actual business value that can be ultimately tied back to dollars, whether or not you can easily track it.

  Why does it work? Truth be told, we’re not entirely sure, except that in this world of multitasking, apathy, and one-upmanship, the expected response to a piece of fan mail (or any mail) is nothing whatsoever. We can’t count the number of times people have sent us e-mails that say, “You probably get this all the time,” and end with “No need to answer this, I just wanted to share.” No one expects an answer, but when they get one, they love you.

  People know that e-mails and tweets take time. They are small sacrifices that imply you took a moment out of your day. They are the opposite of auto-responders that say, “Sorry, I get lots of e-mail.” Instead, a reply, even a short one says, “Yes, I am busy, but I actually give a damn.” This is important.

  Speaking Their Language

  If we said our shirt gave us “plus five defense against getting a date,” some small group of you would chuckle knowingly. Others would think, I don’t exactly know what you’re saying, but I recognize some kind of nerd joke when I hear it, and a larger group would just smile politely and wait for the book to return to its regularly scheduled program.

  All tribes have their language. If you’re into Internet memes, you can separate your planking from your owling, and let’s not even get into Tebowing. Chris’s kids, at the time of this writing ten and six, can each name over fifty obscure little Internet “inside jokes” without breaking a sweat. They know their “Awesome Face” from their “Annoying Orange.”

  Sports fans can talk about end zones and the shot clock and the crease. Real estate pros can rattle off the definitions of liens and escrow and easements. These languages matter to the people who speak them.

  When we talk about “Echo” in the equation, we’re talking about how people resonate with your ideas and how they see th
emselves in them.

  We both speak professionally, which quite often puts us in front of very interesting and unique audiences. We’ve spoken to the glass industry (the people who do everything from making the Gorilla Glass for smart phones to tinting and coating the glass on skyscrapers) to the auto repair and paint industries, to groups of architects and retailers. In every presentation there’s a moment within the first few minutes where the audience “sniffs” us with a mix of anticipation, distrust, and near outright rejection. Why? Because we’re not “one of them” in their eyes yet, and we can’t possibly understand what they are dealing with in their business.

  Faced with this opportunity (and it really is an opportunity, not a problem), we often find a way to signal that we have done our homework on the industry at hand. Sometimes it’s telling an inside joke that we picked up at the cocktail party the night before. Other times, it’s mentioning some names to show we’ve learned who’s saying what about the state of affairs in their businesses.

  But every time we’re faced with this, we reach out for some piece of their language and use it to signal that we understand a little bit about their world.

  There’s a difference between speaking the audience’s language on the surface and really understanding the challenges they face. There’s also a difference between empathizing and showing we’ve done our homework and saying that we know what’s best. We prefer to demonstrate that we understand who we’re talking to, that we have a sense of what is going on, and that we bridge our ideas to their needs in that way. We never say that we know how they feel or that we’ve experienced what they’ve experienced, unless we actually have. There’s no benefit in faking it.