Closer To The Ideal

The advantage of focusing on a niche.

In fact, you might be better off in a tiny niche that seems like it’s too small to be viable, because it’s likely under the radar for almost everyone else, except your audience. So the next time you find yourself thinking about how much you love polka-dotted socks made in Middle-Eastern countries, or Middle-Eastern country music singers who wear polka-dotted socks, think about starting a blog on the topic. You never know where it might go.

Sites, especially community sites, should start off with a focus on a narrow niche:

A major problem behind any person that comes up with an idea that involves lots of people using it is that they just assume that because they are excited about the idea that others will be equally excited. It doesn’t work like that unfortunately, otherwise we would all be a part of every online community created. Focus on a small number of core people and build out from there. Trying to get everyone at once never works.

Obviously I’m biased, since I’m trying to do a start-up in New York, but everything about this rings true:

Tumblr and Posterous are the two most prominent “tumblogging” sites, i.e. sites that make blogging more straightforward by making it easier to post media. Both were launched within six months. (Actually, Posterous was started later than Tumblr.)

But now Tumblr has been an Alexa Top 100 site for a while and is still growing strong. Meanwhile Posterous has about 4 times less uniques. Yet Posterous has everything to win: it’s a Y Combinator company with top-tier investors like Chris Sacca and Mitch Kapor. Its founders are experienced software engineers with computer science degrees from Stanford. How come it’s eating dust from a small startup started by a high school dropout?

The answer is as easy as it is counter-intuitive: Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company.

Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.

Posterous is extremely well engineered. There’s nothing wrong with it. Every single thing about it is well thought out. But it’s not just that it’s less pretty (though it is). It’s just not designed as well as Tumblr is.

…In fact, everything about Posterous is nice. It’s very nice. I’m not here to bash Posterous, I think it’s a tremendous product and I wish them the best of luck.

But everything about Tumblr is better designed. I used the landing page as one example, but there are tons of features where Tumblr shines by its gorgeous design.

Meanwhile Posterous is typical of the Silicon Valley engineering mindset where everything is measured, ranked, weighted. It’s like Google. And having terrible design like Google is great if you have a technology edge. But if you’re in a market where what matters is design edge, that’s not enough. There needs to be great design, by which I don’t mean looks (though they’re important), but how it works for the end user.

…The first is that New York has truly come of age as a startup hub, with its own “style”, its own way of doing things, its own mindset, which can sometimes — not always, but sometimes — kick Silicon Valley’s ass.

A simple spelling error leads to a dramatic increase in sales:

I successfully used this technique for a while. When I sent the follow up, I had a reply rate of about 40%. Then I discovered a simple trick that drastically improved my reply rate and increased my income to about $1500 a month.

Previously I had

—-

Subject: About your pricelist request for Klein SDK

Body: Dear John Doe, I saw that you…

—-

I changed it to

—–

Subject: Re: Klein SDK pricelist request

Body: Hey John Doe, I saw taht you…

—–

The idea behind it was to let the people know that I actually wrote the email to them, and this was not a form email or a machine sending it to them. Adding only the “Re:” gave me about a 60% conversion rate. Adding the “Re:” and the “taht” increased my reply rate to close to 75%. And made me $600 more a month every month after that.

This reminds of a story from GE. By the late 80s email had replaced paper memos, but the upper level executives were spending a lot of time crafting perfect emails. Just as they had once put great effort into writing the perfect memo, they were now putting great effort into well-researched, well written emails. By the 90s, Jack Welch (the CEO) felt a potential breakthrough was being wasted – the advantage that email offered was that it was quick and spontaneous. He insisted that his executives should start writing in a more informal manner. The goal was more creativity and brain storming and fast communication. Welch wanted to see spelling errors, damn it!

In response, the upper level executives at GE continued writing well-researched, well written emails, but then, before they hit the Send button, they would go through and strategically place some spelling errors, to give their email the look of something written in haste and casually tossed off.

I used to laugh at that behavior and think it was stupid. Now I realize that, in terms of marketing, it might be brilliant.

I’ve spent the last 10 years working as a computer programmer, but now that Darren Hoyt and I are trying to launch WP Questions I find myself reading a lot more about marketing.

I very much like this bit in Fast Company, where Duncan Watts argues that which songs emerge as hits is a largely random process:

Watts wanted to find out whether the success of a hot trend was reproducible. For example, we know that Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again? To find out, Watts built a world populated with real live music fans picking real music, then hit rewind, over and over again. Working with two colleagues, Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song’s merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had “social influence”: Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs.

Watts predicted that word of mouth would take over. And sure enough, that’s what happened. In the merit group, the songs were ranked mostly equitably, with a small handful of songs drifting slightly lower or higher in popularity. But in the social worlds, as participants reacted to one another’s opinions, huge waves took shape. A small, elite bunch of songs became enormously popular, rising above the pack, while another cluster fell into relative obscurity.

But here’s the thing: In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs–and the bottom ones–were completely different. For example, the song “Lockdown,” by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song’s success seemed to be due to merit. “In general, the ‘best’ songs never do very badly, and the ‘worst’ songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible,” he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

Word of mouth and social contagion made big hits bigger. But they also made success more unpredictable. (And it’s worth noting, no one in the social worlds had any more influence than anyone else.) So yes, Watts figures, if you rewound the world to 1982, Madonna would likely remain a total unknown–and someone else would have slipped into her steel-tipped corset. “You cannot predict in advance whether a band gets this huge cascade of popularity, because the social network is liable to throw up almost any result,” he marvels.

Predictably, the music industry received the analysis–”Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market,” published in Science in 2006–with a cocked eyebrow. When Watts presented his findings to executives at a major record label last spring, the younger among them were reasonably receptive. They’re accustomed to the unpredictability of hit-making online, so they can grasp the terrifying randomness of success.

But the older execs?

Watts laughs. “They were all like, ‘I think it’s bullshit. I’m still going to go with my gut,’” he recalls. “And I’m like, Okay, good luck to you. You’re going to need it.”

He is going over ground that Clay Shirky examined in 2003, in such essays as “The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality“:

Yesterday, the FCC adjusted the restrictions on media ownership, allowing newspapers to own TV stations, and raising the ownership limitations on broadcast TV networks by 10%, to 45% from 35%. It’s not clear whether the effects of the ruling will be catastrophic or relatively unimportant, and there are smart people on both sides of that question. It is also unclear what effect the internet had on the FCC’s ruling, or what role it will play now.

What is clear, however, is a lesson from the weblog world: inequality is a natural component of media. For people arguing about an ideal media landscape, the tradeoffs are clear: Diverse. Free. Equal. Pick two.

He talked about the issue at even greater length in Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality:

Freedom of Choice Makes Stars Inevitable #

To see how freedom of choice could create such unequal distributions, consider a hypothetical population of a thousand people, each picking their 10 favorite blogs. One way to model such a system is simply to assume that each person has an equal chance of liking each blog. This distribution would be basically flat – most blogs will have the same number of people listing it as a favorite. A few blogs will be more popular than average and a few less, of course, but that will be statistical noise. The bulk of the blogs will be of average popularity, and the highs and lows will not be too far different from this average. In this model, neither the quality of the writing nor other people’s choices have any effect; there are no shared tastes, no preferred genres, no effects from marketing or recommendations from friends.

But people’s choices do affect one another. If we assume that any blog chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically. Alice, the first user, chooses her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of liking Alice’s blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the future because they were chosen in the past.

Think of this positive feedback as a preference premium. The system assumes that later users come into an environment shaped by earlier users; the thousand-and-first user will not be selecting blogs at random, but will rather be affected, even if unconsciously, by the preference premiums built up in the system previously.

Note that this model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for “solidarity goods”, things best enjoyed by a group). It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.

Because it arises naturally, changing this distribution would mean forcing hundreds of thousands of bloggers to link to certain blogs and to de-link others, which would require both global oversight and the application of force. Reversing the star system would mean destroying the village in order to save it.

Discussion of Levis jean commercial.

Actual Walt Whitman poem:

COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you, western youths, see you tramping with the foremost, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind;
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing, as we go, the unknown ways, Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we, and piercing deep the mines within;
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come, Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d;
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern, Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless, restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult—I am rapt with love for all, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress, (bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang’d and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon’d mistress, Pioneers! O pioneers!

See, my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear, we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions, frowning there behind us urging, Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on, the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill’d,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping, Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill’d, Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,
Falling in, they beat for us, with the western movement beat;
Holding single or together, steady moving, to the front, all for us, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life’s involv’d and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves, Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying, Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
Through these shores, amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo! the darting bowling orb!
Lo! the brother orbs around! all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams, Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing, Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the west!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands! you may sleep—you have done your work;)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet;
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious;
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock’d and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged, nodding on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you, in your tracks to pause oblivious, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the day-break call—hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind;
Swift! to the head of the army!—swift! spring to your places, Pioneers! O pioneers.

It is tragic the way murder taints every part of American history. There are parts of this poem that I would really like to like, except I know these pioneers were not headed into uninhabited territory, but rather they were taking the land away from American Indians. “Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes?” – we know who these pistols and axes were used against. From the perspective of 2009, the poem reads like a celebration of the murders of the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children that the pioneers got rid of.

Hat tip Darren Hoyt.

David Griner has a list of problems for businesses to avoid when they start using social media (I assume he’s thinking of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. The only site he mentions, in the past tense, is MySpace). At first, these might sound like clever warnings:

1. Lust: Loving your customers is great, but take it slow.

2. Gluttony: Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

3. Greed: It’s hard to shake hands while you’re reaching for someone’s wallet.

4. Sloth: Always avoid the temptation to “set it and forget it.”

5. Wrath: There are a lot of people out there itching for a punch in the nose, but you’re not the one to give it to them.

6. Envy: Don’t be dissuaded by other people “doing it better than you.”

7. Pride: Stay humble, rock star.

Sadly, the post is devoid of any data suggesting that these bits of advice have the slightest validity. Rather, the advice is hopeful, but fact-free:

In the ribald days of 2006, a business would sign up on MySpace and then start “friending” everyone with a pulse. These days, lusting after fans like that will get you labeled as desperate — or even as a spammer. So keep it in your pants and truly get to know the first people who connect with your brand. In return, they might just love you for life.

I’ve written before of my efforts to help The Second Road with their marketing. We spent a lot of time trying to find a marketing firm that we could hire. We were disappointed by most of the folks we talked to. They were fuzzy. What we wanted was a scientific approach. If, for instance, we spent $100 buying an ad on Facebook, how many people would that bring to our site? What if instead we hired a well known blogger? Everything needs to be tried, using small amounts of money. We wanted research, well-tested solutions, or experiments where success and failure were clearly defined. Instead, we got a lot of mush about things that are difficult to measure, for instance, “We will influence the way opinion shapers think of your site”. Okay, but how to measure that? We could potentially measure how many times the site got mentioned on blogs, but how much of that could be traced back to a particular marketing effort? If there was an uptick in mentions on prominent blogs, was that because of the efforts we’d made over the previous 3 months, or was it because of the new marketing firm we just hired? How to measure?

Susan Payton’s advice was a bit of a shock to me. I was almost offended by her tone of “let’s ignore the facts and do this anyway.” Her argument for social media marketing was wholly faith-based:

I think we need to shift our thinking about marketing results in terms of having absolute control and ability to micromanage the results and just sit back and let it happen. You won’t see results overnight, but if you use social networking sites correctly and participate in the right conversations, you will see a positive change. You will see traffic to your site increase. You will see sales climb. Just relax and let it happen.

Let’s all take a deep breath and let out all those years of being control freaks, of needing to know exactly how everything will pan out. Marketing 2.0 is happening as we speak. There is no precedence set. We are making history with internet marketing and social media. Do you want to go along for the ride or sit this one out and regret it later?

I’m unwilling to have that kind of blind faith in a strategy that has never been tried before and, frankly, I have to question the reasonableness of anyone making such a suggestion. I need some data before walking down that road. Even a few success stories, however much over-hyped, would help to justify this strategy. But where are the great breakthroughs? What company can say “We made friends with our customers on Facebook and results were amazing! Sales doubled!”

I apologize for picking on David Griner. I’m sure he is a nice guy. But his post gives me a good starting point to repeat my concerns about hype regarding “social media marketing.” Griner is apparently in the marketing industry. His blog describes him thus; “David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie & Company. He’s also a contributor to Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com.”

What I feel is missing from some of Griner’s advice, and from the advice I’ve been hearing from other enthusiasts of social media marketing, is a sense of ROI, some concept that maybe the dollars might be better spent elsewhere. Consider this concluding bit from Griner:

Successful social media really is easier than you’d think. If you plan ahead, pace yourself and listen more than you talk, you’ll strike a chord with existing customers and potential fans alike.

Right, but is it cost effective? I’ve no doubt that a company can forge close relationships with a few hundred people on Facebook or Twitter, if it makes enough of an effort to do so. But will those few hundred people actually be worth the effort? I’d like to see a lot more information on this, detailed studies, before I’d trust this approach.

I disagree with this post by Susan Payton:

I think we need to shift our thinking about marketing results in terms of having absolute control and ability to micromanage the results and just sit back and let it happen. You won’t see results overnight, but if you use social networking sites correctly and participate in the right conversations, you will see a positive change. You will see traffic to your site increase. You will see sales climb. Just relax and let it happen.

Let’s all take a deep breath and let out all those years of being control freaks, of needing to know exactly how everything will pan out. Marketing 2.0 is happening as we speak. There is no precedence set. We are making history with internet marketing and social media. Do you want to go along for the ride or sit this one out and regret it later?

I am astonished by the attitude that Payton is expressing. Why are we suppose to have blind faith in social media? Why is it that any normal ad platform has to prove itself to us, but social media gets a free pass? If people are having trouble measuring the results of their social media efforts, maybe that’s because those efforts are worthless and need to be stopped?

One of my current clients has pages on MySpace and Facebook. They occasionally post news bulletins to both of them. They’ve tried to build up a network of friends on both. How much traffic do we see in the referers from either? Generally, we get zero a month, though sometimes we get 3 or 4. Therefore, I am strong advocate of abandoning both platforms. The return on investment is terrible. The time spent on those sites could be better spent elsewhere.

If you can’t measure a result, there is a good chance that you are wasting your money. Therefore, you should not spend money on this kind of media.