The Impact Equation

by Chris Brogan

  We’ll help guide you up the mountain.

  #

  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.

  Why Platform Is Essential to Audience Capture

  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 import
ant 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.

  Creating Content with a Purpose

  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.

  The Value Capture

  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 e
nvironment for his effort to extract value.

  Thoughts on Value and Sources

  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.

  When to Extract Value

  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…