Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (56 page)

And yet we spend most of our time learning (or teaching) the map, yesterday’s map, while we’re anxious and afraid to spend any time at all calibrating our compass.

More than 50 years ago, Duncan Hines (a real person, unlike Betty Crocker) turned the restaurant business upside down. He began certifying restaurants as clean and safe, offering a sign for roadside diners that wished to welcome travelers from out of town.

The existence of his certification changed the way restaurants did their job.

Today, it’s sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp (among many others) that are transforming the way service businesses operate. Here’s how it works: at first, a business might try to ignore the system, but then they notice their customers talking about the reviews and their competitors. So some businesses stoop so low as to attempt to game the system, sending sock puppets and friends to post reviews. But that
tactic doesn’t scale and the sites are getting smart about weeding this stuff out.

The only alternative? Amazing service. Working with customers in such an extraordinary way that people feel compelled to talk about it, post about it, and yes, review it. It’s not an accident that Hotel Amira is one of the highest-rated hotels in all of Turkey. They didn’t do it with the perfect building or sumptuous suites. They did it by intentionally being remarkable at service. And yes, the Holiday Inn in Oakland has the same story. They took what they had and then they deliberately went over the top in delivering on something that never would have paid off for them in the past.

Amplifying stories causes the stories that are built to change. Outliers are rewarded (or punished), and the weird and the wonderful are reinforced. Once people see what others are doing, it opens the door for them to do it, but with more flair.

The Web changes everything it touches, sometimes in significant ways. Travelers ranted about poor service for a generation, but now that the Internet makes it easy to rank and sort and connect, the service has no choice but to change. Some businesses see Yelp and others as a tax, a burden they have to pay attention to in order to stay relevant, and they grumble about it. Other businesses see these sites as the opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to deliver service (which takes guts and care, more than money) to get ahead.

You’re going to hear that more and more often.

The movie, the book, the meeting, the memo—few people will tell you that they ran short.

(Shorter, though, doesn’t mean less responsibility, less insight, or less power. It means less fluff and less hiding.)

It’s easy to join.

There are a million reasons to say no, but few reasons to stand up and say yes.

No requires just one objection, one defensible reason to avoid change. No has many allies—anyone who fears the future or stands to benefit from the status quo. And no is easy to say, because you actually don’t even need a reason.

No is an easy way to grab power, because with yes comes responsibility, but no is the easy way to block action, to exert the privilege of your position to slow things down.

No comes from fear and greed and, most of all, a shortage of openness and attention. You don’t have to pay attention or do the math or role-play the outcomes in order to join the coalition that would rather have things stay as they are (because these people have chosen not to do the hard work of imagining how things might be).

And yet the coalition of No keeps losing. We live in a world of yes, where possibility and innovation and the willingness to care often triumph over the masses that would rather it all just quieted down and went back to normal.

Yes is the new normal. And just in time.

The Web is minting both, in quantity.

Bandits want something for nothing. They take. They take free content where they can find it. They fight for anonymity, for less community involvement. They want more than their fair share, and they walk past the busker, because they can hear him playing real good, for free.

The spammer is a bandit, stealing your attention because he can get away with it, and leaving nothing in return.

Philanthropists see a platform for giving. They support the tip jar. They argue for community standards and yes, for taxes that are more fair to the community. They support artists online, and when they can, they buy the book.

The artist who creates a video that touches you, or an infographic that informs you—she’s giving more than she gets, leaving the community better than it was before she got there.

Both types have been around forever, of course. But the Web
magnifies the edges. It’s easier than ever to be a free rider, to make your world smaller and to take. And easier than ever to be a big-time contributor, even if you don’t have any money. You can contribute your links or your attention or your energy.

The fascinating thing for me is how much more successful and happy the philanthropists are. It turns out that when you make the world smaller, you get to keep more of what you’ve got, but you end up earning a lot less (respect, connections, revenue) at the same time.

A whisper in a quiet room is all you need. There’s so little noise, so few distractions, that the energy of the whisper is enough to make a dent.

On the other hand, it’s basically impossible to have a conversation (at any volume) in a nightclub.

The signal-to-noise ratio is a measurement of the relationship between the stuff you want to hear and the stuff you don’t. And here’s the thing: Twitter and email and Facebook all have a bad ratio, and it’s getting worse.

The click-through rates on tweets is getting closer and closer to zero. Not because there aren’t links worth clicking on, but because there’s so much junk you don’t have the attention span or time to sort it all out.

Spam (and worse, spamlike messages from organizations and people that ought to treasure your attention and permission) is turning a medium (email) that used to be incredibly rich into one that’s becoming very noisy as well.

And you really can’t do much to fix these media and still use them the way you’re used to using them.

The alternative, which is well worth it, is to find new channels you can trust. An RSS feed with only bloggers who respect your time. Relentless editing of whom you follow and whom you listen to and what gets on the top of the pile.

Until you remove the noise, you’re going to miss a lot of signal.

Before, when your shift was done, you were finished. When the inbox was empty, when the forms were processed, you could stop.

Now, of course, there’s always one more tweet to make, post to write, Words With Friends move to complete. There’s one more email message you can send, one more lens you can construct, one more comment you can respond to. If you want to, you can be never finished.

And that’s the dance. Facing a sea of infinity, it’s easy to despair, sure that you will never reach dry land, never have the sense of accomplishment of saying, “I’m done.” At the same time, to be finished, done, complete—this is a bit like being dead. The silence and the feeling that maybe that’s all.

For the marketer, the freelancer, and the entrepreneur, the challenge is to redefine what makes you feel safe, to be comfortable with the undone, with the cycle of never-ending. We were trained to finish our homework, our peas, and our chores. Today, we’re never finished, and that’s okay.

It’s a dance, not an endless grind.

It’s not unusual for a book publisher to look at Kindle books and get nervous about the pricing. After all, if the Kindle version of a book has the same words, available just as soon as the hardcover, why should it cost half as much (or less)?

Eighty years ago, if you wanted to read a book, your choice was a hardcover. The price was the price. All hardcovers, all new books in a category, cost just about the same.

Decades later, paperbacks gave you an alternative, but the thing was, you had to wait a year for the book to come out in paperback. Bargain-seeking readers could read older books, but
within
each format, there was parity.

The ebook presents a conundrum. It is cheaper than a hardcover for the same content. The real puzzle, though, has nothing to do with hardcovers, and this is what publishers are missing:

The competition for a Kindle book isn’t the hardcover
. The competition is a game on the iPad or a movie from Netflix or a song playing on your Sonos. Pricing is about substitutions, and if we want books to avoid becoming a tiny niche, we need to price accordingly. There are more substitutes, and they are cheaper than ever before.

An ebook might be faster to get and easier to carry around, but it
doesn’t offer the prestige or interior-decorating benefits of a hardcover. We don’t devalue the book when we price it lower as an ebook, because we’re actually not selling the souvenir/lendable element that we sell with the hardcover.
They’re different products for different readers
.

The market is clearly willing to buy ebooks, and now our job is to price them in a way that makes them an irresistible habit.

Most nonfiction book publishing focuses on solving a problem for the bookstore and the bookstore visitor. The problem is something like this:

I need a book about Marx.

Can you help me find a great book about knitting?

I’m traveling tomorrow … got a good junky novel?

This focus explains, for example, the fabulous series of “for beginners” books from Pantheon. If you have a problem like this, they can solve it. Pick this book, they say to the seeker. If there are four picks to choose from and enough people choosing, you can do okay this way, solving information problems for those on a search.

The problem is that Google can probably solve it better.

Which leads to the alternative. Instead of books that seek to be one of many to be chosen by the shopper with a problem, there’s the opportunity to publish books that spread, spread from someone who is in love with an idea to someone who
didn’t even know they had the problem
.

And in every endeavor, there are far more people who don’t know they need help.

The Internet amplifies this behavior. The ’Net makes it easier than ever to spread solutions that touch you, books that matter, ideas that make a difference.

The implication for publishers and readers is this: I think the glory days of publishing to fill a niche are gone. There’s just no reason for it; we have enough books in the world to solve most of these book problems. The new frontier is to publish books that spread.

My friend Fred Wilson (one of the great VCs of all time) did a talk at Harvard Business School. In his post on it, he said that he was thrilled that the professor encouraged the class to tweet their notes.

I confess to being fascinated, mystified, and horrified by people who tweet lecture notes in real time. I mean, here is one of the giants of his industry, and the best the students can do with their attention is tweet short sentences, out of context, to an unknown audience of busy people who are reading hundreds of other out-of-context, abbreviated notes at the same time? What a wasted opportunity.

From the point of view of the person reading these tweets, it’s hard to see how you’re actually going to learn enough and be moved enough to change your point of view about something.

From the sender’s point of view (the student in that room with Fred), what if you sat quietly and actually gulped in all that was being said and displayed and communicated? What if you were there,
right there
, not halfway there and halfway (mentally) across the world? What if you were interrupting Fred with questions, preparing counterarguments, and actually engaging with him?

I get the flux, the flow, the connective power of social media. It’s incredible to be able to widen your circle, to be aware of so many people and so many inputs. I wonder, though: Is one status update enough to get you to alter a habit or make a better decision?

This is why books matter. Books, used properly, immerse us in a single idea. Books bring a voice into our head, create a different brain chemistry, open doors to a more powerful lever, a learning that can change us. Dozens (perhaps hundreds) of times in my life, a book has changed my mind. So have some powerful lectures or direct engagements with teachers or mentors. These are the moments of true change, times when we are in sync with the message, when we feel the learning happening in real time.

Yes, tweet. Yes, stay in sync. Yes, absorb the lessons that come from many inputs, over time.

The quiet enjoyment that books (and great teachers) bring, the
uncomfortable place they bring us to when we’re open enough to let them in and to be honest with ourselves—these are precious.

No one wants to pay for a PDF if they don’t know who wrote it and what’s in it. Without the filter and imprimatur of a publishing house, we assume the worst.

Once someone
knows
what’s in it, they probably don’t want to pay for it. (Why should they? They already know what it says.)

If you have a huge audience already (as Jason & Co. did when they launched their PDF at 37signals), then you will inevitably do just fine, as you need only a small fraction of your fans to step up and support you.

If you are marketing a get-rich-quick (or -slow) product, you can possibly make enough promises to entice the reader, but this genre is a tiny slice of all the books in the world.

For the rest of the world, though, if you’re trying to break into the market, the purchased PDF is hard to share, hard to talk about, and hard to monetize.

The secret is to write something brilliant, share it far and wide and for free, and then wait until you have enough fans to monetize the
next
one you do.