Okay, let’s be frank: The real reason most people picked up this book isn’t Trust, and it probably isn’t Contrast either. Those are important parts of the equation, sure, and everyone wants them, but we suspect that what people are actually after is something a little bit more obvious, a little less “sniper rifle” and a little more “giant freaking laser beam.” Does that make any sense?
Reach is what’s coveted, because it often comes with a great deal of prestige. The girl with a hundred thousand Twitter followers has an amazing lead over the rest of the pack. It is also possible to practically buy Reach, as you can purchase Twitter followers, buy e-mail addresses to expand your list, or whatever else you might find interesting. Although these options exist, they are not truly Reach in the sense that we mean it here. These options are more like faking Reach temporarily.
Let’s put it this way: We heard a story one time about a guy who finds other people’s ATM receipts. He picks up all the receipts showing big bank balances. He keeps them. Then he attempts to show them to girls in order to create interest. Well, faking Reach is kind of like that. It might work sometimes, but the charade is often quickly revealed and the interest, if any, does not last long. So faking your Reach may work for a while, but it doesn’t actually expand anything. In order to obtain and truly expand your Reach, you need to work extremely hard. You also need to be a little more direct than most.
Reach is almost never built quickly. A musician can tour the country over several years and still not convince a hundred thousand people to buy a record. More likely, our buddy builds true fans one at a time, convincing perhaps one person per show and convincing another after that. The process is painstaking but powerful, because it also involves practice and makes you a master. It’s how Louis C.K. became one of the best-known comedians in the world—not quickly but over fifteen years—one YouTube view at a time. This is what true Reach is like. It takes time, but it stays with you.
We’ll help guide you up the mountain.
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Chris is friends with world-renowned author Paulo Coelho. His work has been translated into more than seventy languages and published in over 170 countries. He even has a world record for this kind of distribution. A handful of months back, Chris was watching a clip of U.S. president Barack Obama talking about something, and then and there, the president quoted Coelho’s most famous work, The Alchemist.
And yet Coelho, like many of us, is still in need of a robust platform with lots of Reach.
Why? Because ideas without Reach are like plants without sunlight. They dry up and shrivel and sink back into the soil. Even the best ideas, if forgotten, lack power. Like all living things, ideas thrive on Reach.
The Alchemist is actually a story about Reach and impact. It was written as a kind of parable after Coelho completed the five-hundred-mile Road of Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage (which Julien has also completed, incidentally). In the book, a young shepherd leaves the place he knows to go off in search of treasure and learns the language of the world along the way.
In each encounter, the boy finds someone who is missing something. Sometimes the problem is that people lack the vision to create an idea with the right shape. Some people have ideas but haven’t worked on their platform and Reach. Others haven’t quite figured out how their story echoes, so they get lost in their own little worlds.
But if someone is famous enough to attain world records for being so widely distributed and translated and is so famous as to have the president of the United States quote him during a speech, shouldn’t that be enough amplification to attain Reach? What’s missing? Well, a real platform.
First, it’s interesting to consider that the big ideas and messages in Coelho’s works are widely known by other people of merit and status. Coelho speaks to diverse groups like the United Nations and prominent people from all over. But that doesn’t mean he has the attention of “the people at large,” as it were. Why? Because these leaders of higher status and standing tend to congregate among themselves, and though they have absorbed the messages of Coelho’s works (those who are lucky enough to have read them), those ideas don’t always disseminate “down” (and we’re not using this word in judgment but rather to suggest that there is still a hierarchy in play) to others in their organizations.
The fabled “grass roots” do indeed have some value here. Let’s switch entirely from world-shaping messages inside a book first published in 1988 to the land of YouTube, circa 2011, realize that Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, like it or hate it, had over 167 million views in a handful of months, and it continues to spread. This should be a “needle off the record” moment.
Did we really just contrast Paulo Coelho with Rebecca Black? Yes, we did. And we’ll compare him to deadmau5 (a famous music producer, pronounced “dead mouse”) later. Oh, that Paulo Coelho. He travels in unique circles.
A book, even a book that shows up in the Kindle or Nook store, requires a lot of push to be distributed. First, it costs money. Second, one must read and absorb it. Third, the shareability of a book is fairly limited (nearly nil in the digital format without piracy, and only by hand in the physical world).
By comparison, Rebecca Black’s video can be shared with one mouse click. Take a little extra time and you can blast it across several social networks and earn her millions more eyeballs. Even if you saw it early on, some several thousand people will encounter it today, form their own opinion (often negative), and share it (in appreciation or disgust, or just to stick that song in someone else’s ear for a while).
Reach can be a very tricky thing to accomplish.
Comparing these two experiences is a great way to talk about popularity, stardom, success, and fame versus impact. Do you think Rebecca Black has the same level of access to world leaders as Paulo Coelho? Not even a little bit. Do you think that Black will contribute a body of work that spans three decades (and hopefully many more)? It’s not likely. Will we easily remember her name and legacy in a few years? That’s to be decided.
Which one will get invited onto a late-night TV show this year, though? Black. Which one will be able to span other people’s platforms and gain even more access and Reach? Black.
Is Reach fair? No. Did we ever, ever, ever mention “fair” in this entire book? No. Nor will we. “Fair” is a lie that the vanquished tell one another while licking their wounds. There’s nothing fair about Reach.
To keep Reach alive and drive impact, Echo and Articulation must be considered in similar measure. In this case, Echo is about keeping the message alive and trying to tailor it to modern surroundings. The story of The Alchemist is as old as time, and yet it’s a message that resonates with people today. But how will it reach a new generation?
What if there were retellings that cast the story in modern parables? What if twelve contemporary authors told their own small bite of the story in their own unique voice? What if Paulo Coelho went beyond the written word and into video? Maybe your smart phone needs an Alchemist app to keep you living the message?
Echo is keeping the message fresh so it feels pertinent to newcomers. People have an unfair “not new enough” bias, it seems, so when we see something that’s a year older than our discovery of it, it’s believed to be no longer relevant.
Articulation means keeping the message brief and bite size. The Alchemist isn’t very long even by modern book-length standards, but we live in a world that seems to have trouble with more than 140 characters at a time. With more and more people receiving hundreds of e-mails a day and fewer people reading for leisure than ever before, giving people a “sample” or a “tapas” version of The Alchemist would give Coelho a chance to lure a new audience (and build more Reach) into the clutches of his world-changing ideas. But would it be worth it?
Don’t weep for Paulo Coelho. He has (at the time of this writing) 7.2 million fans on Facebook and three million followers on Twitter, and he amassed over eighty thousand followers in the first three weeks after signing up for Google+. He has an impressive and active platform of loving admirers. And yet it’s clear that to accomplish his goal of changing the world, he needs more.
Oh, and if you haven’t read The Alchemist, pick it up. It may change your life.
Since the beginning of time, merchants of widgets and ideas have been trying to get people interested in what they’re selling. They use a variety of strategies—advertising, word of mouth, getting on top of a box and barking into a crowded square, and more. They’ve tried everything. Some methods have worked, while others, not so much. Yet every single day, new people attempt to sell their ideas through a variety of ineffective methods. They are reinventing the wheel when they should see what has worked for others and iterate from that instead.
Looking at advertising is one of the best ways to understand this. The TV-industrial complex is slowly being dismantled. Advertising is not as effective as it once was, yet new business owners continue to focus on it to draw attention to their new business. Sometimes they do worse and think that they absolutely need a storefront in order to be seen. In other words, they think of what they know. It’s a natural reaction, although an ineffective one. This is the same reason the average person is more afraid of a shark attack than a traffic accident—because it is more vivid and real in their mind, even though traffic accidents happen much more frequently and are just as horrible.
So the most common methods of obtaining visibility are in fact the least effective. They are by definition most crowded, since they are the business owner’s first thought, so the market for attention in these spaces gets competitive first. But for us, competition means death. Instead, we need a place where we are top of mind as often as possible. Building a platform for yourself satisfies this need. Having a platform on the Web, accessible to all, satisfies it best.
Platform is the second part of our structure—perhaps the most important part, since literally anyone with enough Reach can contact and influence a group large enough to have a significant impact on society. This is also the most important part of the structure to disrupt, since the hegemony of platform owners from before the Internet age led to a disproportionately small segment of the population having too significant an influence on the rest.
In other words, they’ve told us what to do for long enough. Now it’s our turn.
The power of the platform in the twenty-first century is that it can reach anyone, at any time, in any place. Platform was one of the decisive factors of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, in which Barack Obama’s connection to his constituents through modern platforms allowed for quick mobilization in time of need. It will be even more significant in 2012, as this book is published, because it is easier and more effective than ever to reach people directly (their mobile phones being a prominent method).
This same phenomenon is available to anyone—once a significant audience is built, it facilitates almost any goal you have. The increased network that comes with a huge platform will help you get things done faster. Network can be transferred from one goal to another, helping you shift careers if you want to, or get advantages and information that others simply can’t have. In other words, platform multiplies power. The more vast and more effective it is, the stronger you become.
There will come a time when everyone will have a significant platform—that time, in fact, is already coming about. We see people spreading messages more quickly than ever before through Facebook accounts, helping a media democracy emerge, one that could never before have existed due to the cost of developing a platform and distributing ideas.
We hope to convince you that developing a platform is the most effective method for keeping your business afloat during good times and bad. We hope to make it clear that, at any point, your most effective job-search tool will be something like your blog or Google+ account. It may even be one of the most effective means of finding a spouse. But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Your marital status notwithstanding, platform is important because, without it, you are far too dependent on other people’s delivery methods. There is, we will argue, a massive difference between building a platform and being dependent on others’ Reach—a phenomenon we’ll call “hype,” or perhaps you’ll recognize it by its more traditional name, “advertising.”
Advertising means borrowing audience attention and diverting it toward what you’re trying to sell. Whether in newspapers, television, or banner ads, traditional advertising usually distracts people from their interest and toward something else. But platform doesn’t do this—platform is different.
The platform is the channel itself. When people gather around a television to watch the most recent episode of Mad Men, they are there to pay attention to the show, not the advertising between the segments. (We are conscious, incidentally, of the irony of our use of a show about advertising as our example.) Advertising distracts. It’s when people go to the bathroom or make a phone call. They don’t do this during the television program itself because the show is why they’re there.
This is why platform is important—it is not a diversion from the audience’s interests. Those who care about cars will focus on the car channel and ignore the hype in between. Those who enjoy the fashion channel will, likewise, ignore the advertising between pieces of content, with one exception: If the focus of the advertising matters to them too, then the hype has a chance. But in most cases advertising fails, and besides, platform is more effective, is more profitable, and works better over the long term, and finally, you have more control over it.
Platform may soon be essential for a successful business. Let’s get ahead of the game and understand how it works.
The new platform’s purpose is audience building. It’s fair to say that, if you’re sitting here right now, even with a great idea, the likelihood of influencing a significant portion of the population is slim. Therefore, we need to reach people—a significant enough mass that we can create an income stream from it or enough to influence a normally unreachable group of people.
So a new platform is like a new business or even a person in a new city—it should always be attempting to reach out to new individuals and place them inside its network. Doing so expands Reach exponentially. It’s not only effective, though—it’s also among the easiest things to do.
Reaching people does nothing unless you provide them with enough value to make them stop what they’re doing, either now or later, and participate in your media. So a blog post must be well written enough or compel with its story enough that it will cause the reader to think
a. this is an interesting new voice;
b. I’ve been thinking this forever; finally someone is saying it; or
c. I’ve never thought about this before!
The most significant absence from this list is the reader’s reaction to an attempt to convert him into a customer, get him to pay for information, or extract value from him in some other way. You are not at this stage yet—what Tim O’Reilly might call the “contraction” stage—you are at the expansion stage, and expansion demands free because free reduces friction to near zero.
How long does this stage last, you may ask yourself? After all, you can’t be capturing audience forever, building and building until you can no longer pay your mortgage or have any new ideas. Well, as usual, our answer is “It depends.” But it’s also “It lasts as long as possible.”
In other words, the more you delay the process of extracting value from your network and channels, the faster you will build audience and goodwill. Then goodwill and value can be extracted more effectively later on, when it matters.
Where many people run into difficulty in their pursuit of impact is in understanding how and when to extract value from their platform. Remember that “value” doesn’t always mean money. It might mean access. It might mean social proof. It might mean something else. And then again, “value” does also sometimes mean money.
Understanding how and when to extract value is an important piece of the Impact Equation that many others have missed. Don’t judge yourself too harshly if you’ve tried and failed in the past. Many of us have. Here’s a quick story.
Years ago, the comedian Ricky Gervais had the most popular audio podcast in the world. He had more downloads than any other podcast by far. He had a vast and enviable platform. At this point, Gervais decided it was time to extract value (and who knows, maybe some manager somewhere advised him on this). He decided to change his model and charge for podcasts. With such a large and loving audience, with so many new subscribers every week, he felt sure that by asking for just a small amount of money from so many people, he would win big.
The moment Gervais (or his people) turned on the pay gate to his content was the moment he fell from the number one spot in the iTunes podcast chart to the number who-remembers spot. He made a small amount of money on the first paid downloads, but it dwindled to nothing almost immediately. Of course, when he switched back to free later, the crowds didn’t exactly rush back in to resume their passion and commitment.
What else might Gervais have done? He might have gone the route of another funny guy, Adam Carolla. Adam’s podcast has risen more recently, and he went with the more traditional route of seeking sponsors who want access to his audience. He extracts value from the sponsors, so that his audience doesn’t have to pay. This results in more satisfaction all the way around, even though it’s the traditional method.
Now, Gervais wasn’t wrong for seeking money from his audience. That’s the public radio model, by the way; more than 50 percent of public radio stations’ revenue comes from individual contributors instead of sponsors or underwriters. It just didn’t fit the reality of the landscape. Podcasts are a new and difficult-to-navigate platform, with far more choices for consumption, so Gervais didn’t have the right environment for his effort to extract value.
The value of a large platform depends partly on whether that platform will take an action based on your recommendation. If you’re Oprah, and you recommend a book to read, that book sells far more than other books on the shelf. If you’re Chris Brogan, and you ask your followers to give twenty dollars to a charity to help hungry children, you’ll hit your goal because the audience feels that you give value to them. Another way to extract value from a large platform is to offer advertising to people who might want to reach that community. You can also extract nonfinancial value by, for instance, requesting participation in projects. But this all assumes a large platform.
The value of a smaller platform might be a tighter-knit community. For instance, if you’re Sermo, you’ve got a small group of medical professionals that allows for different value. If you’re Vistage, you lead a peer-leadership group, mostly for CEOs, that caters to a smaller set than, say, businesspeople at large. With that change in size comes an opportunity for even more value. If we forget the premium accounts, the price of having a LinkedIn account is zero dollars. The price to be a member of Vistage is thousands of dollars a year. Vistage extracts more value from a smaller and more distinct set of interactions than LinkedIn does from smaller bites of revenue from a larger set of people.
Some people worry that “immediately” is the wrong time to extract value. That’s not especially true. It’s more a matter of context. If you set the stage for a product or service that costs money, for instance, you might have an introductory rate first, but realize that charging someone more later might cause a problem. People get used to the status quo: If something is free, they don’t intend to pay. If something costs one rate, they don’t expect a rise in price. Unless…
And “unless” is a lovely word, isn’t it?
Look at the auto industry. Honda, Volkswagen, Toyota, and many other non-U.S. automakers entered the U.S. market by offering a low-cost product that led U.S. buyers to consider a switch based on price. Then they released more expensive products that appeared as “improved quality” and “luxury.” That’s another method to consider.
However, look at the difference between what Gervais did and what Honda did. Gervais didn’t offer a “deluxe” podcast. He merely offered the same podcast, now with a price. See the difference?
Value could be a whole book unto itself. Know this: If you give away as much as you can for free and charge for only the most difficult parts, you will corner both parts of a new value model that improves your impact. It’s how we do what we do, and it has served us well as a model.
We talked about this in Trust Agents. The saying “Little bloggers grow up” comes from speaker and provocateur Liz Strauss. The notion is that we should be kind to the up-and-comers in our world, because we never know where they’ll go next. We both subscribe to this concept and prescribe it to people looking to build platform.
One way to build a platform from nothing is to find the other up-and-comers and build community among them. Comment on their posts. Interact with them on their social networks. If others in your larger space are also trying to build platform, a little bit of sharing and cross-promoting goes a long way. For instance, if you’re a real estate professional in Spokane, Washington, it doesn’t hurt you to promote posts and ideas from people in Eugene, Oregon, or Doncaster in the UK, but it can benefit you. The more you promote others’ good work, the more they’ll be inclined to share your work when the timing makes sense.
Another way to build platform is to give back to others who are learning. If your profession has a college or professional school supporting it, you might meet with educators who teach courses you could add value to and offer to talk with them, either in person or via Skype. Chris talks with college marketing and PR classes twice or more a month, mostly because it’s a way to share and give back but also because all those students will eventually graduate and find their way into large companies and positions of power. It sure helps to have left a positive personal impression on them, should future opportunities arise.
There’s a balancing act to growing platform. We’ve talked about promoting the up-and-comers and giving back to students (they’re up-and-comers from a different angle), but you also have to connect with people who might be a little larger in your industry. One strategy is to offer guest posts to bloggers in your space with larger audiences. (Before you discount the idea that there are bloggers already talking about your space, swing by alltop.com and see if you can find people writing about your industry.)
If you want to go that route, it’s good to comment and be part of that person’s community before you offer to write a guest post. People with larger platforms often have many people offering to “help” by writing guest material, and they often have to turn away a lot of newcomers simply because there are so many offers. The way to get your offer accepted is to become known and feel like you’re part of the blogger’s community. How? Comment often on that person’s posts. Respond to that person’s tweets or other social media. It’s the same as with the up-and-comers. The goal is just a bit different.
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One of Chris’s biggest inspirations in business is Sir Richard Branson of Virgin fame. He has followed Branson’s work and books for years and years. Imagine Chris’s delight, then, years into his own business journey, when he got the opportunity to speak with and interview Sir Richard for a feature magazine article. Next up: Chris intends to leverage that experience to meet more of his heroes and to potentially meet Branson in person.
In his book Screw Business as Usual, Branson name-drops everyone from the Dalai Lama to Bill Clinton. But he started with a self-published student magazine at sixteen and had no real reason to have access to anyone. Yet he is now a global force to be reckoned with. This kind of access doesn’t come from nowhere.
Our first book deal came because we had a platform and a built-in audience. This book is the result of that one and the fact that it hit the New York Times best-seller list. That book led to access. If you read the blurbs on the back, there are some of the “usual suspects” of business and marketing books, but there’s also the former CEO of General Motors, Fritz Henderson. That came from building a platform and using it to obtain access.
It’s important to note that when we gain access to influential people, we never come with an “ask” in mind. Instead, we aim to serve and be helpful. When Chris approached Sir Richard Branson, it was with the goal of landing a cover story for a major magazine in support of Branson’s new book. That this also satisfied Chris’s dream of connecting with a legend was secondary to the service provided.
In almost every case, the purpose of our outreach to someone influential has been first and foremost to help them. The side benefit is the social proof that clearly we have something of value to offer, because we are afforded time by people of standing.
But again, let us stress: It’s important that you connect with people to serve them first. This delivers the best value and impact for everyone involved. Coming to someone with your hand out for help is always far less attractive than creating something of value for the person you’re hoping to connect with.
As you develop your media platform and build a way to communicate to more and more people (or to the right people), use it to attract people who have something to share. Everyone in the universe is seeking more attention for his or her project or cause and aching to tell even more people about it. Sure, sometimes people are so oversaturated with requests for their time that they have to pick and choose their media venues. Do what you can to make yours seem like the best possible place for the job.
The most common way to achieve this is to publish interviews to your blog or Web site. One challenge, however, is learning to do an interview that shows off the guest in his or her best light and is of value to your community. It’s very important to practice.
One quick side note or homework assignment about this advice. The best way to learn how to interview better is to experience the work of great interviewers. Look at how Larry King did what he did. See how David Letterman does it. Observe Tom Chiarella’s great interviews in print. Learn by dissecting the questions others have asked and seeing how you could adapt them for your own interests. Experiment and be willing to be bold. Oh, and a bonus piece of advice: Never start with “How did you get started?” It’s the sign of an amateur.
Use your “wins” to gain more access. Once you interview Bob Iger, Tony Robbins, and Sir Richard Branson, doors open to others. Where do you start? Reach as high as you can, and start there. (Again, always do this in service of the other person before your own goals and needs. This can get really scammy and social-ladder-climbing really quickly otherwise.)
Let’s talk about what this Exposure can do for you and those you help along the way.
Okay, no discussion of platform would be complete without at least a little examination of what has become perhaps one of the most famous platforms on the Web today, that is to say, the TED conference.
TED, for most, needs no introduction. It is a world-class event attended by U.S. presidents, billionaire CEOs, as well as some of the most insightful and inspirational artists and scientists of our time (not to mention at least one of the authors of this book, who managed to sneak in somehow). Occurring once a year, in Long Beach, California, it has also spawned a number of side events, such as TEDGlobal and TEDAfrica, not to mention the hundreds of independently organized events, branded TEDx, that have been launched by universities and communities around the globe. Since its first event in 1984, TED has truly become a global brand that represents both excellence in idea design and collective purpose.
But there is more to it than that, at least the way we think of it. Though TED is an event that has reached millions of viewers and touched many people, it is also the perfect example of platform because the organizers themselves do not generate the presentations at all but simply borrow and curate them. This is an important distinction, because it means that they can focus on the platform, and only the platform, ensuring it is among the best in the world.
There is something at work here that is worth dissecting. While it’s true that most conferences do not design presentations, other events have not come close to representing what TED does. TED’s motto is “ideas worth spreading,” yet TED itself does not create these ideas; it simply recognizes them and gives them a platform from which to be heard.
All the best platforms are like this: the Huffington Post, the best-known global magazines, and more. They are aggregators. They focus on what they do best—obtaining Reach and, through Reach, increasing Exposure—while letting another team address the very thing that makes TED great: world-class content.
Yet the two cannot be separated. Without great content, the platform is useless and becomes barren and abandoned. Without the platform, the great idea is invisible and unheard amid the cacophony of the idea marketplace.
What can we learn from TED about platform? Some of the conference’s characteristics are surely coincidental and need not be emulated, but others are in fact critical to the platform’s success, and we need to separate the former from the latter to ensure that we derive the right lessons. Here’s how we see it. See if you agree with our conclusions.
A great platform means great access. If you develop a powerful platform, it becomes a brand in its own right. People become enamored of the brand and will be happy to participate based on the brand’s positive connotations (see Echo in chapter 7). We saw this happen a few years ago with the Huffington Post—a quality that has since diminished because it feels like anyone can write there.
A great platform is exclusive. This is also part of access, because exclusivity by definition keeps the people on the inside feeling like they are having a unique experience. Another event, Summit Series, has developed a reputation for accepting only twenty-five-year-old millionaires as its attendees and speakers. This isn’t true (at all), but the image does make people feel curious enough to want to see for themselves. And if you were accepted to this event, or invited to speak at it, you have to admit a part of you couldn’t help but feel pleased.
A good platform should make you feel privileged to be involved, and this usually has to do with its attendees. Curating the experience means bringing in the right people, which, strangely enough, also restricts the Reach you can grow through it…at least at the beginning.
A great platform produces almost exclusively great content. If your content isn’t excellent, your brand will not be either. TechCrunch, which sold to AOL last year for about forty million, was the exclusive, go-to source for all tech news and gossip. Because of its network, anything that happened in technology was published there first, helping keep exclusivity as well.
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The best platforms are also like a rap supergroup. They enable the audience and fans of each individual to come together and appreciate the whole. If Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas comes together with Jennifer Lopez and Mick Jagger (as they did for “T.H.E.” in December 2011), then the Mick Jagger fans become more aware of Jennifer Lopez and Will.i.am, and likewise across all members of the group.
Seth Godin did this after his book Purple Cow was released with a follow-up called The Big Moo. Collaborating with a group of authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Mark Cuban, Tom Peters, and more (together the “Group of 33”), Godin created a collaborative work that draws upon the prestige and audience of each in order to help carry all of them to a larger set of eyeballs.
We could learn a lot from TED, the Group of 33, even Jay-Z and Kanye West. They understand audience building in a way that seems to be lacking on the Web, where most channels are created by individuals and stay with them, and where the stars stand alone in their platform-building attempts. We need to see that piggybacking off other channels is naturally the most efficient way of working your way upward and that when at the top, we need to carry the up-and-comers as well.
Musicians, conferences, and book authors are also different because they understand the concept of the launch. They don’t publish every day; they publish once a month—or maybe even once a year—so they know they have to make a big splash and do it right.
Let’s face it: Launch days are important. Maybe you have a new book or product, or you’re changing the price of something old but interesting. You’re going to want a big splash, like a huge ad campaign used to make when you put it in the New York Times or Life magazine or whatever other thing used to be important.
Well, this is the twenty-first century. Now you don’t need those guys or any other major institution to give you a helping hand. Don’t get us wrong; they give a boost, of course. But they are by no means necessary to the successful spread of information. For that, you don’t need a huge newspaper, a television or radio station, or anything else. You just need a bunch of friends who have used the information in this book wisely.
Every single person who uses the tools we’ve written about here will be able to build a little bit of an audience that is slightly different from any other, no matter how similar the topic they both speak about. If your friend is writing about being a mom, and you are too, you will gather similar but distinct audiences based on your personalities, what you share, and how much work you put in. So you can use this magic to help any launch you end up doing. It doesn’t matter how small or massive it may be; this strategy can scale, so you can use it anywhere.
1. Do not focus on your audience; focus on other audiences. The reason for this is simple: Your audience is already sold on you, which is why they follow and pay attention to you. Every piece of content you create (hopefully) sells them further on who you are and what you do, so you don’t need to work that hard at convincing them. Instead, work on collecting allies.
You collect allies in a number of different ways, but the most important part is just to make friends. Attend lots of different events, local and not; if you go to them with guns blazing, it’s money well spent. Write guest posts for bloggers beforehand, or just e-mail someone to tell them you respect their work. Connect with people mercilessly and find a group whose ideas and messages resonate with what you’re trying to deliver. Make a list of them—a big one.
2. Always ask beforehand, not the day of the actual launch. Everyone is busy. Even if you have built something that people care about in a big way, their own lives will always take center stage. So work with people up to a month in advance in order to push something on a predetermined day. Ask them if they’d like quotes, things to tweet, or interviews. If it connects with their audience, be forward about that and tell them you think you have a match. You’d be surprised how often people agree. After all, bloggers are the new journalists—their business thrives off good content, and if you have some, it will be evident to them.
3. Create real incentive and/or scarcity. What are people buying on your launch day? Is it your ideas, your attention, or the ability to better serve their own clients or help their own families? Amplify this feeling if that’s the case by creating different incentives for those people who are in your or your neighbors’ audiences.
Chris did this amazingly well (that’s what Julien thinks, anyway) when he launched his book about Google+ in December 2011, not only selling the book itself and the knowledge it contained (a serious steal at around ten bucks) but also offering a free webinar about how to publish a book for those who bought on a certain day. This moved the book up the Amazon rankings spectacularly fast, even for someone with Chris’s high profile. He accomplished this by asking himself what his audience really valued besides the obvious social-media advice and realizing that much of his audience was also interested in book publishing. (Seriously, it’s becoming all the rage. Everyone is doing it.) So this “extra,” a simple add-on for Chris that was easy to make, was really valuable to his audience and pushed many of them off the fence and into buying territory.
4. The quality of your work must be consistently excellent. The best advertisement for your launch is the set of customers who have already bought from you and talked about it.
REACH: HOW TO RATE YOURSELF
Reach is perhaps the easiest of the attributes to measure. It’s easy to compare, for example, how many subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, or whatever else you have against someone else. At the same time, it’s very easy to get discouraged by looking at others’ Reach. You see one guy in our industry with a huge audience, and you’re not doing not so well. But all is not lost.
There are tons of factors that accelerate Reach, but one of the things we tend not to consider is how long a certain channel has been in place. So we take that into account before we get depressed about how few people we can reach.
For example, we could look at the Web site ZenHabits.net, run by our friend Leo Babauta, and compare it to another minimalist blog, TheMinimalists.com, run by our buddies Josh Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. In absolute numbers, Zen Habits is winning with its 250,000 subscribers. It’s also been around since January 2007 and has, by far, the most readers of any blog of its type. By contrast, The Minimalists has been around only sixteen months and has 12,000 readers. In absolute numbers, this is a daunting gap, and yet looking at how long each has been around shows a whole other game. Yet another method of checking this would be to see how many subscribers each blog has per post. There are different ways of comparing two channels.
Another reason to take it easy on Reach is that this attribute doesn’t follow a linear curve. Instead, it accelerates over time. In other words, one reader can only tell so many people about something they like, but ten thousand can tell many more. So as time goes on, the same ideas can go further.
Chris often says that it took eight years for his Web site to get its first hundred readers. For Julien, it’s about the same. Reach can get depressing if you look backward. So instead look forward and work hard to improve it.
IMPACT EXAMPLE: THE DOLLAR SHAVE CLUB
It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that Chris and Julien are infatuated with DollarShaveClub.com. The site and its business model are simple: Pick which kind of razor you want (from three different types), and pay a monthly subscription to receive blades for as long as you’re a member.
What makes this interesting is that it is a simple model that will (a) make the owners a lot of money and (b) likely get Gillette (the company’s biggest competitor) to buy it or at least emulate it. What might make this interesting to you is that Dollar Shave Club has every single element of the Impact Equation in spades. Let’s look it over.
The site is simple. It features a two-minute video explaining (in comical format) what you get when you join Dollar Shave Club. Everything else is built to convert you into a subscriber.
You choose among three razors, pay, and never have to remember to buy razors again. It’s simple. It’s also ridiculously lucrative. Michael Dubin and partner Mark Levine won’t give out numbers, but they started the company with $45,000 of their own money and have acquired tens of thousands of customers since their launch. If you assume an average of $5 a month per customer and twenty thousand customers a month, that’s $100,000 a month. The cost of operating this business is obviously low. Its viral video cost $4,500 to make. We’d say this is a success.
Let’s run it through the Impact Equation.
Contrast: The Dollar Shave Club sells just three types of blades, and none has any tech fancier than an aloe vera–lubricated strip. Its competitor, Gillette, has light-up, vibrating handles on its blades and celebrity endorsements. With the video endorsement on the front page (“Are our blades any good? No. OUR BLADES ARE F**KING GREAT”), Dollar Shave Club’s blades sell themselves.
Reach: Dollar Shave Club’s YouTube video received three million views in the first week. It was covered by all the major U.S. business media, plus the tech media, plus social-networking sites.
Exposure: Dollar Shave Club sends a subscriber a new blade in the mail every single month, and that new blade translates to a great shave, exposing the subscriber again and again to the magic of the brand. Each Exposure leads to a repeat reminder of the benefit of the service.
Articulation: You can’t get much simpler than one dollar for two blades, five dollars for four, and nine dollars for six. That’s pretty simple stuff. Clarity is ten out of ten as far as we’re concerned.
Trust: Here’s one where Dollar Shave Club lags. People don’t know the brand. They don’t know the CEO. They don’t have much to go on. But Dollar Shave Club has challenged Gillette by asking why you, the customer, pay more so that Gillette can pay for celebrity endorsements. So in a way, it has poked a hole in the trustworthiness of its main competitor, raising its own brand’s Trust in the process.
Echo: Everything about the video and the Dollar Shave Club Web site is built to make you feel like you’re part of the joke. You’re hip and cool, and it’s a “thing” for you to be part of Dollar Shave Club. We haven’t (yet) heard this mentioned at a party as any kind of status symbol, but we believe it’s not too far off.
Though the business exists solely on the Internet, and its marketing success came from a YouTube video, the business itself is plain, old-fashioned product sourcing, distribution, and fulfillment. There’s nothing high tech. It’s not sexy. It’s a commodity. And yet Dollar Shave Club is playing hard. You’ll find few better examples of a company delivering impact.