Just because it’s online, doesn’t make it tech.
Us internet folk have a small problem. We keep forgetting that technology doesn’t always matter. In many cases, it’s an executional side-effect of what a company or person actually does.
You wouldn’t say Fed-Ex is a Car company, or a Plane company. But you could find an army of people who would tell you Amazon is a tech business. And I’ve never really understood that, except as a barrier to keep people from thinking they can understand, or contribute to something.
This came to my attention when I was discussing Wikipedia on twitter, with Spencer Saunders. We were talking about open source projects, and Wikipedia came up… But I think you can argue that Wikipedia is far more of a crowdsourcing success, than a technological one. The fact that a wiki is the backbone is less important than the fact that volunteer collaborators filled it with content.
Similarly, the fact that Amazon has a massive technological back end laser focused to optimize experience, is less important than the fact that they’re a massive retailer with the best catalogue ever.
It’s easy to see the overlap, but I think it’s important. We can’t keep pretending that everything online needs to be tech first, and something else second. There are ALWAYS going to be interesting technical problems and challenges to solve in the online space.
But this technology, for the most part, is soon going to be invisible, the same way a telephone is, or a cash register is, or a car is. Things on the web are already becoming black boxes that just DO what they are supposed to DO.
And I get that this scares people. I get that some deeply brilliant people, like Cory Doctorow, for example, will feel like a closed, Apple style product future for the web is terrible. I see his point. But what he’s forgetting is that EVERY CONSUMER PRODUCT IN HISTORY has undergone this transition.
You used to make your own clothes at home. Now you buy them in a store, and probably can’t fix them if they break. You used to build your own home. Now contractors do it, and allow you to have more complexity and range than you otherwise could have.
You used to need to know how to maintain a car, to drive a car. Now you need a mechanic.
This isn’t downgrading or denigrating any of the skills mentioned. But it is making a very clear point - that expertise narrows over time for a reason. The average person can only master so many complex skills. And insisting everyone needs to know how to code to understand the online world is akin to insisting that someone needs to know how to repair an internal combustion engine to be able to commute.
I’m a digital person. I wouldn’t call myself a technical person, because frankly, I think we’re already starting to set the bar too low for that.
But I think it’s very important that we stop creating the impression that everything new, vibrant, and important online is really just for the internet people.
We need to worry more about making the technology invisible, for more than just the very lowest experience level of user.
The only important question:
How does this fit into someone’s life?
Whether you’re creating a product, or a service, or a marketing message to encourage people to acquire a product or service, your only question is: how does this fit into someone’s life.
For the product, this is use case / product market fit / the core of the concept. And too often, the answer is ‘because it’s awesome’ or ‘because it’s sexy’ or ‘because it says something about your identity’. These are answers, but not good ones.
For marketing, I don’t see a future in telling people how the product will fit into their lives. It’s important to do so, but that’s not what is going to, at core, drive people to make a decision that they wouldn’t have already made. Good marketing is going to need to have it’s own answer to the question, and provide value (entertainment, informational, personal, or social) independent of the product itself.
Awareness is a side effect of generating real value. If marketing is aimed at aiding awareness and translating it into intent, marketing will need to create it’s own value, not just hype and weak association.
The worst answer to ‘how does this fit into someone’s life?’ is using marketing to try to create a use case. And for most of recent history, this is what marketing has done. Whether it’s associating a car with masculinity, or a Mac with creativity, these are weak ties at best. Your message should extend directly from what you do, and how you do it.
Your marketing should extend your philosophies into action, moving with the same purpose as the product, but with a focus on spreading those core principles, rather than giving them shape as a product or service.
The key point I’m trying to make is this: the idea that marketing is about manipulation is obsolete. Marketing is about extending and operationalizing your brand, where brand is defined as the identity created by the synthesis of your process, culture, product and ideals.
[This post owes a massive debt of inspiration to Umair Haque’s The New Capitalist Manifestio, which I finished reading this morning. Possibly the most inspirational business book I’ve read since The Rebel Sell.]
What You Didn’t Learn From The Music Industry.
No one learned from the music industry, which was my worst fear about the whole debacle.
As the first industry to really feel the brunt of the shift to digital distribution, the amount of fear, floundering and failure that we all witnessed from the major labels, the aging executives, and the dying business model made a certain amount of sense. To the people who grew up digital (or the digital kids, or generation y, or ‘us’) a new approach seemed obvious, but we didn’t have the greatest tool necessary for success yet - we hadn’t seen anyone fail.
That said, we’ve seen the decline of the music industry to the point where major labels are more laughable than laudable, and no one seems to be learning. And so, for news, for film, for television and for industries like books and magazines that will be forced into competing in a world of digital distribution in the coming years, here is the short version.
5 Things You Should Have Learned From The Music Industry:
Physical packaging wasn’t your product, it was UX.
Without physical packaging, UX is the manifestation of your product. Apple is (somehow) still the only company that has figured this out when it comes to music - iTunes regularly sells albums to me, and my contemporaries, because it is less work than piracy. It costs infinitely more, the bitrate is not always as high, but buying an album from iTunes is a better experience than pirating one. It just works.
This is why so many companies lose to piracy - a pirated movie, or tv show, has a better UX than the legitimately purchased version. Which, for those of you watching at home, was the same case with CDs. When buying a CD was, cost notwithstanding, a shittier experience than downloading one, people stopped buying CDs.
You have to choose between keeping your rights, or keeping your customers.
I don’t mean this in an ‘information wants to be free’ manner, but instead as a reminder that there is always a trade-off. If you lock something up with DRM, you will lose customers. If you insist that Blu-Ray disc will only play in 65% of Blu-Ray players, you will lose customers. If you try to sell me the same content 5 times, so it will play on 5 devices, you will lose customers.
At the same time, you need to be willing to make the trade in the opposite direction - there are certain rights you should be willing to trade customers to protect, like artistic integrity in terms of the presentation of product, or the choice of venue for performance. Rights does not always mean legal matters.
You make more money from stuff your product sells, than from selling your product.
If you have to pick between selling CDs, or selling tshirts, concert tickets, stuffed animals, vinyl toys, a clothing line, or other branded goods, you would be an idiot to pick the CD, and only the CD. Often, there’s more money in selling things that people will want, if they love your initial creative product. Give away the movie to sell the toys. Give away the crappy, low quality, iphone screen version of your movie to get people in the theatre to see it in epic 3D. Give away your comic on the internet to sell the hardbound signed collection, and give away your book as a PDF so people will buy it from you to put on a shelf, or share.
If you can give away your content at no marginal cost, and then sell something that gains significant value for people who love the content, you should probably stick to that. Especially because the content is going to be available free, anyway.
A lawsuit wins you nothing, except a lawsuit. Maybe.
This ties into the rights point, but needs it’s own clear section - if you sue your customers, they will turn on you. Being treated like a criminal, en masse, encourages behaving like a criminal. Just ask any kid who gets accused of shoplifting one too many times.
Backstory is worth money.
Whether it’s a kickstarter funded documentary, or an open forum where you post pictures of the creative process, or notes, images, etc, backstory will always be valuable, because it leverages an existing connection with the content, and offers the chance to connect with it on a deeper level than is normally available. In addition to offering that deeper connection, it also confers a certain amount of legitimacy, or superfan status.
People will pay for status, but people will continuously and happily pay for the kind of status that displays itself through knowledge, rather than possessions.
Greatest ‘Hits’: Explaining Millennial Arrogance
[This post originally appeared on my old blog, BrokenGentleman.com, on Feb 18, 09]
This weekend, while doing some volunteering at OYP, I heard the now tired rant about my generation (the ‘millennial’ generation) and the apathy, entitlement, and arrogance that define us. I’m going to do my best to explain some of that, if not justify some of it.
The internet is likely the biggest alteration to human interaction with information, since written language became commonplace. I don’t think this is hyperbole. The written word allowed stories concepts, ideas and information to exist without being directly shared, and to have a life beyond the individuals, and even the cultures, that created that content. The internet allows instantaneous communication, collaboration, and access to mankind’s collective stored information, and has the ability to make physical and temporal distance irrelevant. It has changed everything, and the millennial generation is the first one to consider it as a given and as a right, rather than as a tool. The way we envision communication, culture and problem solving is based on this level of connectivity, which did not exist when current leaders learned how to solve problems.
Every generation thinks that it is living in the apocalypse times. We don’t have nuclear war (yet), but we have the strongest economies in the world collapsing, the spectre of rapid climate change, and asymmetrical insurgent warfare, on top of everything else. We’ve inherited a pretty ruined world, and after a lifetime of being told we wouldn’t have pensions, or steady jobs, or social security, we are being told that expecting a career, or a stable environment, is unrealistic. We also can’t help but notice that many of these issues are at least partially traceable to the generations preceding us.
We were raised specifically in rebellion to the discipline and sacrifice taught to our parents by the Greatest Generation. Most millennials have been told from childhood that they are valued, they should expect to be heard, that they have valid ideas, and that expecting fulfillment in one’s work is a bare minimum. The education system in many areas has been shifted to one that doesn’t consider failure an option until the early teens, and in my experience we’ve created a culture where we expect that 75% of students can be above average. This inherently results in apathy regarding results, as expectations are absurd, and/or grading criteria are meaningless.
Now put this person in the workplace.
They have ideas, they are excited and motivated to finally have a chance to do something that MATTERS, that will be judged on functionality, not an artificial standard. This is not the reality of the working world.
The people in leadership positions, in most corporations, are people who don’t like being presented with entirely new ideas, especially not by people who are considered untested. Most business structures are still operating on a pre-internet base, or at best with a thin veneer of new technologies applied to old structures. Old structures are resistant to new ideas. And millennials in the workplace quickly realise when they are in another situation where what comes before is dictating the options available to them.
We don’t subscribe to the idea of paying dues before you get to make change, because in our minds, everything has changed, and the people who have the status necessary to influence things don’t understand it. If you’d like proof, the best example I can give is record industry execs admitting that they didn’t hire anyone to help them with technology, because they wouldn’t know who to hire.
To a millennial, every industry looks like that, or will soon.
We were raised to think this way, we have been presented with a well and truly ruined world, and when we actually try to do something about it, we are told we will have to wait a decade or so, to establish the credibility necessary to get anyone with influence on our side, or we are shown by others to strike out completely on our own, and make the change we see as necessary without support from older structures. While being told to wait a decade, we are also hearing that we have a decade or so to change everything before the world falls apart.
We can see how bad things are, the world over, in more detail, and more personally than any other generation in human history. And we keep getting told that the only thing we can do, for now, is business as usual.
Not sure if you’ve noticed, but business as usual has failed. Miserably. And doing the same thing, with hopes for different results, is the definition of insanity.
Of course we come across as arrogant, as entitled, as apathetic. The entire world has changed, the way the human race interacts has fundamentally changed, since the current leaders of the world have entered the workforce. Speaking to close friends and family members even ten years older than me is astounding, because they cannot speak ‘internet’. And we’re being asked to wait, and to stick to failed structures.
You’d be arrogant, entitled and apathetic, too.
