Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (50 page)

(Compare these examples with McDonald’s, a company that continues to rent eyeballs for a high price and has no real platform to speak of.)

Or consider the acquisition of Omniture by Adobe. What did Adobe pay for? I’d argue it was direct access to the right people at the leading advertisers and websites around the world. Technology isn’t so hard to copy. Permission to connect is almost impossible to achieve.

Compared to the cost of renting eyeballs, buying a platform is cheap. Filling it with people eager to hear from you—that’s the expensive part. But if you don’t invest in the platform, you’ll be at a disadvantage, now and forever. The smart way to build a brand today is to invest in the elements of the platform: the product, the technology, the websites (plural), and the systems you need to make it easy for people to show up at your very own trade show. And then embrace these people and shoot for 90% conversion, not 0.5%.

Like most good investments, it’s expensive and worth more than it costs.

Dunbar’s Number is 150.

And he’s not compromising, no matter how much you whine about it.

Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can have only 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren’t cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily. That’s why, without external forces, human tribes tend to split in two after they reach this size. It’s why W. L. Gore limits the size of their offices to 150 (when they grow, they build a whole new building).

Facebook and Twitter and blogs fly in the face of Dunbar’s Number. They put hundreds or thousands of friendlies in front of us, people we
would have lost touch with (why? because of Dunbar!), except that they keep digitally reappearing.

Reunions are a great example of Dunbar’s Number at work. You might like a dozen people you meet at that reunion, but you can’t keep up, because you’re full.

Some people online are trying to flout Dunbar’s Number, to become connected and actual friends with tens of thousands of people at once. And guess what? It doesn’t scale. You might be able to stretch to 200 or 400, but no, you can’t effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people. You get the politician’s glassy-eyed gaze or the celebrity’s empty stare. And then the nature of the relationship is changed.

I can tell when this happens. I’m guessing you can, too.

So if it’s true that to a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, the really useful question is, “what sort of hammer do you have?”

At big TV networks, they have a TV hammer. At a surgeon’s office, they have the scalpel hammer. A drug counselor has the talk hammer, while a judge probably has the jail hammer.

Maybe it’s time for a new hammer …

One study found that when confronted with a patient with back pain, surgeons prescribed surgery, physical therapists thought that therapy was indicated, and yes, acupuncturists were sure that needles were the answer. Across the entire universe of patients, the single largest indicator of treatment wasn’t symptoms or patient background; it was the background of the doctor.

When the market changes, you may be seeing all the new opportunities and problems the wrong way because of the solutions you’re used to. The reason so many organizations have trouble using social media is that they are using precisely the wrong hammer.
And odds are, they will continue to do so until their organization fails.
PR firms try to use the new tools to send press releases because, you guessed it, that’s their hammer.

It’s not just about new vs. old. Inveterate community-focused social media mavens often bring that particular hammer to other venues. So
they crowdsource keynote speeches or restaurants or board meetings and can’t figure out why they don’t have the impact others do.

The best way to find the right tool for the job is to learn to be good at switching hammers.

If we’re in the idea business, how to protect those ideas?

One way is to misuse
trademark
law. With the help of search engines, greedy lawyers who charge by the letter are busy sending claim letters to anyone who even comes close to using a word or phrase they believe their client “owns.” News flash: trademark law is designed to make it clear who
makes
a good or a service. It’s a mark we put on something we create to indicate the source of the thing, not the inventor of a word or even a symbol. They didn’t invent trademark law to prevent me from putting a picture of your cricket team’s logo on my blog. They invented it to make it clear who was selling you something (a mark for trade = trademark).

I’m now officially trademarking thank-you™. From now on, whenever you use this word, please be sure to send me a royalty check.

Another way to protect your ideas is to (mis)use copyright law. You might think that this is a federal law designed to allow you to sue people who steal your ideas. It’s not. Ideas are free. Anyone can use them.
Copyright
protects the
expression
of ideas, the particular arrangement of words or sounds or images. Bob Marley’s estate can’t sue anyone who records a reggae song; they can sue only the people who use his precise expression of words or music. Sure, get very good at expressing yourself (like Dylan or Sarah Jones) and then no one can copy your expression. But your ideas? They’re up for grabs, and it’s a good thing, too.

The challenge for people who create content isn’t to spend all their time looking for pirates. It’s to build a platform for commerce, a way and a place to get paid for what they create. Without that, you’ve got no revenue stream and pirates are irrelevant anyway. Newspapers aren’t in trouble because people are copying the news. They’re in trouble because they forgot to build a scalable, profitable online model for commerce.

Patents
are an option, except they’re really expensive and do
nothing but give you the right to sue. And they’re best when used to protect a particular physical manifestation of an idea. It’s a real crapshoot to spend tens of thousands of dollars to patent an idea you thought up in the shower one day.

So, how to protect your ideas in a world where ideas spread?

Don’t.

Instead, spread them. Build a reputation as someone who creates great ideas, sometimes on demand. Or as someone who can manipulate or build on your ideas better than a copycat can. Or use your ideas to earn a permission asset so you can build a relationship with people who are interested. Focus on being the best tailor with the sharpest scissors, not the litigant who sues any tailor who deigns to use a pair of scissors.

It’s a process, not an event.

Dating is a process. So is losing weight, being a public company, and building a brand.

On the other hand, putting up a trade-show booth is an event. So is going public or having surgery.

Events are easier to manage, pay for, and get excited about. Processes build results for the long haul.

A friend is building a skating rink. Unfortunately, he started with uneven ground and the water keeps ending up on one side of the rink. Water’s like that, and you need a lot of time and power and money if you want to change it. One person, working as hard as he can, has little chance of persuading water to change.

Consider this quote from a high-ranking book publisher who should know better: “We must do everything in our power to uphold the value of our content against the downward pressures exerted by the marketplace and the perception that ‘digital’ means ‘cheap’ …”

Hello?

You don’t have the power. Maybe if every person who has ever published a book or is ever considering publishing a book got together and made a pact, then they’d have enough power to fight the market. But solo? Exhort all you want; it’s not going to do anything but make you hoarse.

Movie execs thought they had the power to fight TV. Record execs thought they had the power to fight iTunes. Magazine execs thought they had the power to fight the Web. Newspaper execs thought they had the power to fight Craigslist.

Here’s a way to think about it, inspired by Merlin Mann: imagine that next year your company is going to make ten million dollars instead of a hundred million dollars in profit. What would you do, knowing that your profits were going to be far less than they are today? Because that’s exactly what the upstart with nothing to lose is going to do. Ten million in profit is a lot to someone starting with zero and trying to gain share. They don’t care that you made a hundred million last year from the old model.

If I’m an upstart publisher or a little-known author, you can bet I’m happy to sell my work at $5 and earn 70 cents a copy if I can sell a million copies.

Smart businesspeople focus on the things they have the power to change, not on whining about the things they don’t.

Existing publishers have the power to change the form of what they do, increase the value, increase the speed, segment the audience, create communities, lead tribes, generate breakthroughs that make us gasp. They don’t have the power to demand that we pay more for the same stuff that others will sell for much less.

And if you think this is a post about the publishing business, I hope you’ll reread it and think about how digital will change your industry, too.

Competition and the market are like water. They go where they want.

Kevin Kelly really changed our thinking with his post about 1,000 true fans.

But what if you’re not an artist or a musician? Is there a business case for this?

I think the ability to find and organize 1,000 people is a breakthrough opportunity. One thousand people coordinating their actions is enough to change your world (and make a living).

A thousand people each spending $1,000 on a special-interest cruise equals a million dollars.

A thousand people willing to spend $250 to attend a day-long seminar gives you the leverage to invite just about anyone you can imagine to fly in and speak.

A thousand people voting as a bloc can change local politics forever.

A thousand people willing to try a new restaurant you find for them gives you the ability to make an entrepreneur successful and change the landscape of your town.

Even better, coordinating the learning and connections of this tribe of 1,000 is not just profitable, it’s rewarding. If you can take them where they want to go, you become indispensable (and respected).

What’s difficult? What’s difficult is changing your attitude. Instead of speed dating your way to interruption, instead of yelling at strangers all day trying to make a living, coordinating a tribe of 1,000 requires patience, consistency, and a focus on long-term relationships and lifetime value. You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.

If you want to know if a ship is going to sink, watch what the richest passengers do.

iTunes and file sharing killed Tower Records. The key symptom: the best customers switched. Of course people who were buying 200 records a year would switch. They had the most incentive. The alternatives were cheaper and faster mostly for the heavy users.

Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It’s the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It’s over.

When law firms started switching to fax machines, FedEx realized
that the cash-cow part of their business (100 or 1000 or more envelopes per firm per day) was over and they switched fast to packages. Good for them.

If your ship is sinking, get out now. By the time the rats start packing, it’s way too late.

Ten thousand years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented, and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding, and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing, interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to medicate kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming.

A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser—for a while—if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.

Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers … and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of
Vogue
, hurrying through the pages and then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles—she’s hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago—she’s farming.

Both groups are worthy; both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring, and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I’m not sure if there’s a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people’s personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).