Revisiting the Long Tail

When we were out shopping recently, I found a copy of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson in the discount bin of audiobooks and picked it up.  The Long Tail had a profound effect on my thinking when I first read it, and it seemed time to revisit this book again.  So this morning, while out and about, I started listening, and thinking about how the reduction of information from physical form- books, albums, CD’s, DVD’s and more- into digital form- downloads of audio, text and more onto portable digital devices- is a huge factor in not only how we distribute knowledge, but how we value it and the “sweat equity” it takes to create something.

For example, Chris Brogan wrote a post about A Perfect Dichotomy, in his search to find a logo.  In a nutshell, Chris went to a site that business people love- because they can get great work inexpensively, and designers hate, because they think it cheapens the work they do.  The problem here is essentially that as a business-side person, we know we want something, but we have no idea whatsoever what the process of creating that something is.  We have no easily accessible yardstick that tells us how much education, labor, passion, experience or more goes into one design over another- we’re only interested in the end product and pricepoint.  And at times, things like design, art and other important, yet less physically tangible goods and services can seem equivalent from a seasoned professional and a beginner, and the purchaser has no clear way to understand the difference between cheap and expensive.  (The ethics of buying work on spec is important, but you can’t eat ethics, so that argument alone will only get you so far.)

When you look at a car, for example, you can see lots of parts.  Heck, my Toyota Highlander has so many buttons and nobs it feels like I’m driving the space shuttle.  It looks complicated, and I can’t put the thing together myself, so I must be prepared to pay not only for the cost of materials that went into making the thing, but the designers, and workers who riveted the thing together, and the computer nerds who make the thing operate, and probably a share of that purchase price also goes into the marketing that made me want the thing in the first place.  There is obvious value on display, and we feel like we’re making an exchange of cash for value add that’s clearly tangible.  Likewise,when I buy shoes or clothing, I know that I am exchanging money for physical items I can’t make myself.  The same with food at the supermarket.  The value held in the physical items seems real.

When an author has their book in their hands, it feels like all your ideas and thoughts are now real.  My book on Public Assembly Facility Law (yes, esoteric and boring, to be sure…) sits proudly on my shelf, a reminder and a memento of hard work and writing.  It stores that value.   But take the unpublished book projects that sit on my hard drive.  They have value in terms of my time, my passion and more, but as long as they sit “in the drawer” they have no value to anyone other than me.  Even if I put them in PDF format and make them available to everyone, where is the value exchange?  Does anyone appreciate what went into that writing, or do they even care?  If I put a tip jar on the site, is the value of the work based on the money I receive?  What if I get none?  Does that mean I wasted all my time?

What I’m trying to say here is that as we start to digitize information, information that has some value, even if dictated by arbitrary price points on Amazon and iTunes, I think we start to value it a little less than we did when it was harder to access.  The intellectual work is the same whether the book itself is printed on paper or is merely bits and bytes, but the printing, distribution, marketing and other middle man expenses seem to act as a value filter and as a value add to make only the “best work” to make it into print.

Or at least that’s what I think our monkey brains believe, because that’s what has been true up until this point.  Only a select few got to write for a living, and got paid for it, so therefore, if you were an author, that meant something.  Just like being a journalist meant something special, and why the editor of the local paper was someone to be revered and even feared- he was the gatekeeper to the community’s sense of importance.  I don’t think we’ve really figured out how to value the digital information we get, because we get so much of it.  While some is fantastic, much of it is unimportant, so the general supply of information and ease of access overwhelms demand, and price plummets.

Bill Gates once said that Open Source was the enemy because it was essentially relying on people doing things for free and while it was creating value, it wasn’t distributing any.  He felt this meant that sooner or later, people would stop contributing to open source, because in the real world, there is still rent to pay and kids to feed.  (I’m clearly paraphrasing here.)  Yet Open Source and blogs and more exist because people want to express themselves.  This need will never go away.   There may be no more HUGE hits the way there once were, because people can find and feed their niche tastes, and the choices are close to infinite.  We no longer have restricted choice, dictated to us by what only a few people running the three major networks thought we should see, like when I grew up.  (Except, maybe for Law & Order, but even that franchise may be reaching its end.)

All of this choice sometimes means we get overwhelmed and decide to make no choice, rather than risk making the wrong one.  It means we can’t always see, know or appreciate the difference between an original designer purse and the knock-off that’s “good enough” sold on the street corner.  The ubiquitous nature of choice makes it more and more difficult to determine actual value, and as a result we either make no choice or make choice based on reputation, convenience and price.  This means if you are choosing someone to work with on something largely intangible like design, logos, even consulting work, you are forced to vet them by reputation, and then by judging whether the value they add to the project or the relationship you gain is worth the premium you pay as a result.

(Just as an example, there are a gazillion people who call themselves social media experts on twitter,  but you can probably sort out the wheat from the chaff not just by followers, but by checking the date they started using the service, and those with more experience are probably more valuable to you than the folks who joined up yesterday.)

It also means from someone working in an “intangible” digital arena, you’ve got to make your value proposition real.  You have to be able to explain why your work, your company or your stuff is so much better and deserves premium compensation.  You have to have a track record, and you have to master those relationship skills that make working with you so simple and so enjoyable, people will come because you constantly exceed their expectation.

This is what Chris Penn refers to as “You have to not suck” or as I would say simply- The first rule of business is to be the best at what you do, and to be the exception, not the rule.  Otherwise, you do end up being one of the multiple choices out in the long tail, with only a few hits of business over time, and probably not enough to sustain yourself long term.  Independent musicians know this, actors know this, and now other people in creative fields are learning this: When you do something artistic, you have to find an outside source that values you and will support you through good times and bad, just like Michelangelo and Da Vinci had the de Medici family.  You need to offer them something they cannot do themselves, and makes their life or reputation richer in the process.   Otherwise, you are merely a struggling and starving artist, and will still need to wait tables to eat.

Finding your value and articulating it, unambiguously, for all to see is the challenge everyone faces is a world of infinite choice.  I’m working on this for myself- are you?

Tags: chris anderson, chris brogan, chris penn, digital information, law & order, the long tail, value

Blogging About Parenting- GNM Parents

For over the past four years, I’ve been blogging over at GNM Parents.  Started originally b y Chris Brogan, it’s always been one of my favorite projects, where I can write about kids, parenting, and family issues that are important to me, but don’t fit as well over here at Reading Whitney.  GNM Parents has been the pet project of Megin Hatch and Stu Mark, and both Megin and Stu have been the guiding force of this blog, getting new writers, making sure we all stay on schedule, editing, formatting and generally doing all the hard and boring work blogging can entail.

GNM Parents has always been different from other parenting blogs.  I’ve always thought of it as more of the New Yorker Magazine of parenting blogs, rather than a blog focused more on promoting products or talking about the drudgery of parenting.  My last post talked about the iPad and my kids, but I often write about the issues that come up in our lives, including how the dance between parents and teachers works, what it’s like to be raising young men and dealing with things like the first date and how to chaperone but be invisible at the same time.

I love the opportunity to be reflective about what parenting and family means to me, and the comments often help me solve some of those problems where you just kind of feel lost in the weeds of parenting.  We’re all going to have those times where we just don’t know what to do, or who we can talk to to try to work out the feeling of being less than perfect, and not having all the answers.  Parenting has far more grey areas than I ever thought, and often, we’re all flying by the seat of our pants.  Having a place to talk and share those things openly is a real blessing for me, and it’s hard to believe I’m still doing this after 4 years.

If you get a chance, please take a peek over at GNM Parents, and let me know what you think.  We’re always looking for folks who want to write with us, and if you are interested, please send me your name, email address, and, if you’re up for it, a sample post on something that’s meaningful to you.  (Please send all submissions to hoffmandigitalmedia (at) gmail.com)  I’ll send these on to our editor, Stu Mark, and we’d love to have you join us.  It is a volunteer position, but I have to tell you, it’s the best outlet I’ve had, and I’ve never for a moment thought I’d only do it if I got paid.  The experience, the growth I’ve had as a writer, and the support I’ve gotten continue to be tremendous.    I think GNM Parents is something special on the web, and we’d love to have you give it a whirl yourself.

Tags: chris brogan, family, GNM parents, Megin Hatch, parenting, stu mark

Why Trust is the Killer App

I’ve been listening to NPR in the morning, following the news about international politics, and these points keep being made over and over:

• In (international) relationships, trust is important and vital to getting anything done.
• The kind of reception leaders get make all the difference in what they are willing to do or not do for the other Country.
• The view of the relationship from the outside- the (media) perception- does not always reflect what’s going on behind closed doors.
• What other people see, through the media or with their own eyes effects their perception of a whole Country and their citizens.

Does any of this sound familiar?  (Let me take a moment now and tell you if this “trust” thing doesn’t resonate with you, please go out an purchase “Trust Agents” by my friends, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith immediately.)

The talk about trust, building strong relationships, and what happens when that trust equation fails is a thread that seems to be running through more and more news reports, or I’m finally paying attention and have a new filter through which to view this news.  So if you thought Chris and Julien’s book about the importance of trust and relationships was important for business, what could the same perspective do for relationships not only between individuals, but between nations?

Before you write this off as silly, think what the lack of trust does.  When a Country doesn’t follow through on it’s promises, relationships suffer.  When Israel and the Palestinians seem to go out of their way to provoke each other, it starts to sound like the fourth grade boys teasing each other on the playground, begging for a fight.  Unfortunately, this fight involves serious weapons and the loss of life, not a bloody nose and being sent to the principal’s office.  (I guess the US gets to play Principal in trying to get these kids to place nicely with each other and respect each other’s boundaries, but we call it Peace Talks and unfortunately, you can’t call their parents at home to make them behave.)

And just like in your relationships with friends and family, helping others goes a long way to building trust and constructive relationships.  In a news report this morning on the BBC, a reporter spoke to a Pakistani official who said that when the people saw Americans and American helicopters coming to help them after the devastating earthquake, moving concrete and rescuing people, their perception of the US and Americans in general started to change.  Treating people in other countries like neighbors, instead of as “the other”, as “foreign”, but instead as just people goes a long way to changing hearts and minds about what an “American” is or stands for.

The coverage of international politics sounds more and more like a middle school playground, or a daytime soap opera, where trust and drama and small provocations have similar effects as they do on an actual playground, just painted with a much broader brush.  And just like on the playground, trust is a currency that facilitates relationships, and a lack of trust makes relationships way more complicated.

Trust, I tell my kids, is the one thing that can’t be easily fixed or replaced when it’s broken.  It’s fragile.  When you have it, it can create value- people will do you favors, cut you deals, and treat you well, whether we’re talking neighbors, businesses, or Countries.  When trust is in short supply, people start acting suspiciously.  They look out for themselves first, and others second.  There’s less emphasis on what’s mutually beneficial, but on a competitive advantage- winning rather than compromise.  The dynamics of the relationship totally change, and friction builds up- there’s more checkpoints, more regulation, more checking the score- and all of this friction slows up the process of actually getting things done.

As I look for fundamental concepts that are universally important at every level of human interaction, Trust ranks up there as one of the most important fundamentals we need in order to make progress of any sort.  A lack of trust signals problems that are hard to resolve, since trust requires faith and taking risks that others are worthy of that investment.  Fear that others will not follow through, that they will lie and break our fundamental trust keeps us frozen in time and place, and keeps us from acting.

Rick LaVoie talks about disappointment as being one of the most powerful emotions- the emotional nuclear weapon, we should use only rarely, if ever, with people in our lives.  It makes us feel shame and injures us to the core.  Our fear that trust will be broken is our defense against that disappointment, and the anticipation of disappointment, of having invested trust unwisely causes people to do irrational things, even aggressive, provocative things to strike first and to avoid getting hurt.

If we can remember these things for our personal relationships, if we can apply Chris and Julien’s advice in our business relationships, there’s a chance we can even make things better on a bigger scale as well.

What do you think?  Is this crazy? Or is trust the fundamental currency we all trade in, even when we think it’s all about dollars and cents?

Tags: apps, business, chris brogan, foreign relations, Israel, julien smith, NPR, Pakistan, relationships, trust, trust agents

The Digital Generation Gap

Last week, the Archer Group in Wilmington held a Trust Summit at duPont’s Theater N, featuring presentations by Mitch Joel, Julien Smith and Chris Brogan, some of my favorite people ever.  One of the stories Mitch told keeps coming to mind again and again.  It can best be summed up by saying “There’s no going back, only moving forward.”  As businesses are coming to terms with what digital communications channels are doing to business, we have to keep in mind that we can’t rewind time back to what we’re used to and comfortable with-  times have changed and there’s simply no going back.

To this point, I”m reading a great book by the vastly under-appreciated Seymour Papert entitled The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap.   It seems to me  that the phrase “Digital Generation Gap” describes  the core problem businesses are having these days- the digital generation gap and its disruption of business as usual is causing all sorts of problems and pain.

People are simple creatures at heart.  We are built to try to make our lives as easy and simple as possible.  Occam’s razor rules the day.  We want what we want when we want it.  We respond to positive reinforcement, and stop doing the stuff that’s difficult, unless we see a light at the end of the tunnel, and know the path will yield results.  We can get this wrong from time to time, of course, but the more assurance we have of success up front, the more patient we’re willing to be.

Take the case of the flashing twelve on the VCR, or get used to a new cell phone.  These are tasks that can be done or ignored in large part, if you can use work arounds, but in each case, the benefit of getting the small task done makes other things possible.  Program the time on the VCR or DVD player, and you can record shows when you’re not home.  Get used to the software of your new phone, and you can take advantage of more features.  Children and young people have grown up in a world where they readily adapt to the rules and structure of these new systems, but I would bet most families have some members who have instead decided technology is just too complicated for them and it’s easier to maintain the old ways, until they can no longer avoid it.

My mother in law, for example, wanted CD’s for Christmas, and I bought her an ipod touch instead.  She can have all her music available all the time now, and no need to worry about carrying around all those CD’s, but she still worries that she can somehow break it or otherwise make a mistake.  She teaches classes online, but computers seem complicated, they seem to break for no rational reason (yes, she is on an old Windows machine) and they’ve made her feel silly and dumb, and so she resists doing anything new.  She can see the advantages, but the thought of learning yet another new way to do things doesn’t excite her as much as scare her from trying. Trying to convince businesses to try a social media strategy for building more business feels the same way.  What’s worked in the past feels comfortable, and while they may have gradually adapted to things like email marketing, asking them to try something like Facebook or Twitter, and the whole method of engagement they’ve been using gets turned on its head- it’s scary, and there’s no guarantees that it will be successful for them, regardless of the number of case studies coming out.

We have a whole generation of people in management and decision making authority who see the world around them changing, with no real stability in sight.  They’ve been through the betamax to VCR changes.  They’ve gotten rid of all their old 8-tracks and cassettes and adopted CD’s and maybe even digital music and photography.  But they worry that what’s great today is going to be outmoded or out of fashion tomorrow, just when they finally feel comfortable with what they know and are doing.  And they’re right- things will continue to change.  The flood water is rising, and while you might be waiting for the river to crest and recede, I think we all have to get in a boat and start paddling together, because staying still isn’t the answer- you’ll drown and fall farther behind.

I’ve grown up with computers changing rapidly around me, and my kids are even more used to living in a rapidly evolving world than I am.  They still are more eager to experiment and take risks than I am.  I keep hoping to develop some sort of flow and pattern to my work to become more efficient, but that is coming more and more from adaptation than stagnation.  I need those reminders from time to time that just because I always “do it this way” does not mean there’s not a better and faster way to do it coming up tomorrow.  This sense of constant change is definitely anxiety-provoking, but denial isn’t helping.  Like sharks, we need to keep swimming (and experimenting) to stay alive.

The other part of the Digital Generation Gap that causes problems is the sense of community that grows through hazing.  There aren’t any more sure things and guarantees like there used to be- if you followed the rules, you would get rewarded later on- pain first, profit second. (Seth Godin discusses this brilliantly in Linchpin.)  We want people to do it the way we had to, so it’s hard and they appreciate the journey we had to go through, we tell ourselves.  Yet I never took any of the “pain from the depression” stories my grandparents told very seriously, and their struggle didn’t help me all that much- just because they couldn’t call their neighbors or watch TV, what did that mean to me as a child or young adult?  Somehow if I didn’t use the phone, I would have better moral fiber?  I didn’t believe it then, and I know my kids don’t believe it now when I tell them similar stories about my childhood.

Someone asked me recently if the podcasts we were doing for medical resident education was providing them “cliff notes” to knowledge.  Is it letting them off easy?  Why should it be any easier for them than it was for us?  In the end, I am more concerned that my doctor knows the right thing to do and why than how they learned it, but I also understand there’s a richness of experience that comes not from just reading a review of a book, but actually reading the whole thing.  I think the short cuts, if you want to call them that, are really about making the on-ramps to knowledge and experience easier, so you have time (hopefully) to reflect and gain deeper knowledge once you are engaged with the possibilities.

And as I write those words, I think about how this is basically the model for marketing and advertising.  We try to gain people’s attention and tease them with the prospect of our product or service, to let them see how our offering solves problems or makes their life easier, not more difficult.  We all want short cuts and friendly user experiences, so people can get to the heart of the matter- whether that’s advancing knowledge, buying a product, engaging our experience and expertise for money.  We can’t all be expert at everything, so we look for short cuts and anything that will ease our journey.  No one has to reinvent the wheel from scratch- we start out by sitting on a mountain of knowledge,  and our job is to contribute to that as best we can for our kids.

We may all carry the pain of our hazing- of the problems and experiences that made us the people we are today, but that’s no reason to make sure everyone else has to experience the same thing over and over again, ad infinitum.  We’ll close the digital generation gap in part by remembering how fun it can be to try something new, make mistakes and get on with it.  We learn most by experimenting, and more and more of life requires us to be adaptive rather than stagnant.  It doesn’t always mean it will be cheap.  It doesn’t guarantee success.  There’s risk involved.  But in the end, we learn more by moving forward than standing still, hoping it will stop raining.

(And don’t forget to check out Chip and Dan Heath’s new book about change, called Switch.  One of the best reads so far this year.)

Tags: adaptation, archer group, change, chris brogan, digital generation gap, experimenting, julien smith, linchpin, seth godin, Seymour Papert, six pixels of separation, social media, switch, trust agents

The Art of Buying and Selling in the Digital Age

I woke up this morning and wandered over to Chris Brogan’s blog and read all about his recent issues encountered when trying to buy a pair of Timberland Boots.  I think the comments and Chris’s point may have gotten a bot lost in the shuffle, so I thought I’d write about it over here.

Back in the old days, say, even 10 years ago, we largely only had brick and mortar stores as an option for things we wanted.  That meant we were limited to catalog shopping or stores near where we lived, or how far we were willing to drive for our access to most goods and services.  The access to the long tail of goods online has disrupted this traditional model, and we can see its effects everywhere.

For example, the consolidation of the Department Stores to a few national brands has in some ways offered less nuanced choice, as well as less advertising revenues for newspapers who used to have competing ads from the three, four or more regional stores, but now have ads from only one, and we all know what that declining revenue is doing to the newspapers… but I digress.

The issue here is that we are fragmenting markets.  As the department stores consolidate, choice becomes more one note, and we see the rise of specialty stores to offer what the big guys don’t anymore.  How else does something like The Walking Company come into vogue over another shoe store which hopefully also carries shoes you would want to walk in? Why do we have three flavors of The Gap, both in malls and in local strip centers, rather than a department store that carries it all?  The all in one has become uniform, and as a result the specialty retailers are making hay by offering the special and filling that nice well.

But then we added Online as an additional choice.  Heck, today is “Cyber Monday” where all sorts of online specials take place, where it’s been formally acknowledged that we are buying stuff through another channel than merely in person.

Here’s the crux of the problem:

In person, in bricks and mortar, the experience of the customer, and making them feel valued is important.  It’s not just about making a sale, it’s about making that person feel that their effort in dragging themselves to the mall was worth it- otherwise, why shouldn’t they just shop online?  When bricks & mortar was the only choice, competition was more fierce and we seemed to understand this better.  Now that the competition is largely invisible, ie. not the guy with the sale sign two doors down, but someone virtually, online, without limited shelf space- this competition is not as obvious.  You may think you are the only option in town, but you may still see your sales declining- not because you are doing anything different, but because your customers have other options you can’t even see.

And thus the little quirky things that customers used to have to put up with- a sales clerk snapping their gum while you were waiting to be helped, people talking on the phone rather that seeing if you needed any assistance,  someone acknowledging you in the store- they don’t have to any more.  And that means that now, unlike any other time before, those “threshold experiences”- the first person people encounter in your establishment, and how they are treated- matters more than it has in the past.  In some ways, it’s a shame these people seem to be hired as place holders and not paid very well, because they may be in the best position to effect your bottom line as never before.

In medicine, doctors who have practices in hospitals get reviewed regularly by things like the Press-Ganey scores.  And it’s amazing how the quality of care patients perceive receiving is directly related to the office atmosphere and front line clerks and nurses, rather than the physician themselves.  Likewise, large law firms help manage the perception of success by the waiting areas, fresh flowers and the like, which often has little bearing on the quality of work, just on how much you pay for it.

In the digital age, these threshold experiences are going to become more and more important, because they are going to set the tone for any subsequent interaction.  Your mom may have told you something like “You only get one chance to make a first impression”  and in a world where people have less free time and shorter attention spans than ever before, this is more true than ever.

This means that both in the real bricks & mortar world and in the online world, those first impressions and encounters are important, and will effect return business, recommendations and the like.  So while a company like Timberland may not be able to manage the clerks at Macy’s, the clerks at Macy’s need to realize that the success of Macy’s depends a lot on whether they take their job seriously, and whether they make an effort to help a customer find what they want.

Isn’t that what we all learned back when when we watched “A Miracle on 34th Street”?

Tags: choices, chris brogan, customer service, department stores, macys buying and selling in a digital age, timberland