The Impact Equation

by Chris Brogan

  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.

  5 Exposure

  Hype and the Channel

  Here’s how to tell if your content is hype, or if it really matters. This distinction is vitally important, especially if you are trying to build a lasting audience. Are you connecting with people over the long term, or are you distracting them in an attempt to give yourself a chance? Figuring this out is key. So here’s a quick checklist.

  Your material is something someone would be delighted to come across.

  You, your department, your company, or your clients look forward to what you send them.

  Your content is like a television show (not an advertisement).

  These items aren’t trivial. They are part of a constant self-analysis necessary to the pursuit of platform in the digital age.

  Super Bowl aside, the reality is that people no longer care about advertising and don’t seek it out. As we write this, immediately after the 2012 Super Bowl, we can easily recall that Matthew Broderick was in a clever ad that parodied Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But can we remember the car advertised? Definitely not, and it’s likely that you can’t either.

  The attention you can get through hype is huge, and if you happen to have your own Super Bowl ad, you’ll see how it works. The traffic to your Web site or project looks like a bell curve—it’s huge during the commercial and shortly thereafter, but it flatlines afterward.

  Let’s compare this to a blog. First of all, it isn’t expensive to build, which is good, because you probably don’t have $3.5 million to spend anyway. Instead of money, you’re being diligent, building something one day at a time. Slow, incremental improvement on your channel will also teach you a lot more than a superstar director working on your thirty-second spot.

  Once you get someone interested in the work on your blog, Twitter account, etc., you’ve got them not just today but tomorrow as well. If you have a YouTube channel that’s just starting out, and someone subscribes, you don’t need to ask him or her to subscribe again. You can work on the second person in line instead, which is easier because now it’s you and your first subscriber convincing that person. Same with the third person, who has you and two others to convince him or her, and so on. It gets easier over time, with the 101st easier than the first, and the 1,001st easier still.

  If we were to look at the impact curve of a channel you own, it would not look like a bell curve—up then down, flatlining quickly—but a continuous, never-ending mountain. Over time the peaks get higher; you see the line climb to heights unimaginable. And just as each step up a mountain seems easy and eventually leads to huge heights, each step in building audience is easy, and unlike with hype, you don’t immediately fall to zero afterward.

  In other words, hype dies, but the channel you build is forever.

  But here’s the thing. Buying advertising is easy. Any kind of hype is easy. But others own the channel, so you can’t control it. Besides, by definition hype is a distraction from what people are there to watch. When Mad Men is on, you’re not waiting anxiously for Banana Republic to interrupt the show.

  So besides their impact curves, the main difference between of hype and your channel is this: When you have a channel, people who watch it actually give a damn.

  What Is Exposure?

  Exposure is the art of hitting people, again and again, until they finally decide to take some kind of action. At its simplest, Exposure is frequency. It’s what makes the prospective car buyer finally walk into the Nissan dealership or what happens when the blogger is finally able to convince readers to give him their e-mail addresses. It’s what happens when the New York Times finally gets someone to agree that yes, perhaps its offering is worth paying premium prices for.

  All of it comes down to Exposure: making sure that you are everywhere without offending the hell out of your prospective audience. It is an art, and those who manage it do it very well. Those who fail are tossed in the spam folder. Exposure has proven itself to be delicate.

  At one end of the spectrum is something so innocuous
we would never consider it advertising—or even a repeat, since every impression is a unique experience. At the other end is a telemarketer, who connects to us at the most inopportune moment, with the worst possible style, using what should be the most intimate medium available.

  No matter what happens with your message, you will land somewhere along this spectrum. Of all the things we do, let’s make sure we get this one right. It encompasses everything from the basic questions, such as how often to blog, to the more subtle ones, such as how many ways your message should be crafted.

  Exposure, when done right, isn’t even noticed. It’s when an idea gets spread through many different means and remixed by each participant so it’s slightly different. Or it’s when people are exposed to your personal brand multiple times, through a variety of ideas or projects, so it seems new to them.

  The following will be a practical guide to doing Exposure right. Like the rest of us, you’re probably doing part of it well, but there can still be some improvement. Let’s get started.

  The Fallacy of Needing a Vast Platform

  We’ve each come to a different opinion about the ideal frequency of contact in building platform. Chris spent a number of years blogging daily, sometimes more than once a day, while Julien decided that blogging weekly, sometimes every two weeks, was plenty. The numbers suggest that Chris has more readers. But does that translate into more business opportunities?

  It’s not an apples-to-apples situation. Julien’s business comes from different sources than that of Chris, who benefits from blog posts that educate prospective buyers on what Chris might be able to do for their industries. Second, tracking leads is something neither of us does with any kind of vigor, so this information is somewhat anecdotal. But what Chris has discovered regarding the differences between our two platforms is worth considering.

  Blogging frequency does impact number of subscribers, and this can be easily measured. Post once a week and your subscriber count goes down. Post once a day and your subscriber count rises. Post three times a day and it rises even more. However, volume of subscribers isn’t especially useful unless you’re working in a “cost per impression” (CPM) business. When Chris experimented with posting less frequently to his blog, his subscriber count went down, but the quality of comments and the general level of interaction stayed even. However, this impacted Chris’s social proof. His rank in the top five of the Advertising Age Power 150 slipped to seven. Is this earth-shattering? No, but it means something to some people.

  On social networks, multitudes of “simple touches,” such as quick responses to people via Twitter, stack up in recipients’ minds as a sign that you see them and respect them and like interacting with them. This translates to a great deal of positive sentiment. In this case, experimenting with fewer updates didn’t matter, unless the kind of updates that suddenly declined were the positive responses to other people’s posts. Commenting and replying, it turns out, are much more valuable than posting your own original content, as far as engagement and response metrics indicate. On social networks, posting less frequently reduces the rate at which new people follow you, but it doesn’t often translate to a drop-off in subscribers.

  Quality of contact was interesting to experiment with. Julien began weekly phone calls with people he felt he could learn from, as well as people he might be able to help, and he reported great value from these meetings. Chris refocused some of his social-media following and attention on a smaller set of people who were good connectors or had other value to him, instead of following everyone who chose to connect with him, and the impact was immediate and tangible.

  It appears that a vast platform doesn’t immediately mean a bigger impact, though neither of us dismisses the potential boost that arises when one is more widely known. Neither of us has been offered a perfume line like Kim Kardashian, nor do either of us have any requests to stop wearing certain products, à la Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino from Jersey Shore, who received a note from Abercrombie & Fitch offering to pay him to stop wearing its clothes.

  The focus, we suspect, should be on filling your platform with a number of high-quality connectors and nurturing relationships that share value between yourself and that network. It’s okay to embrace and interact with others who aren’t as good at connecting or who don’t offer the same level of opportunities to your future, of course. We’re not advocating that you be strictly business about building your platform—that’s just being a straight-up cad. We’re saying that when you focus more attention on your relationships with connectors, platform size matters less.

  Okay, but How Often Should I Blog?

  Ever since blogging began, bloggers have asked, “How often should I blog?” It falls neatly into the category of questions like “How long is a piece of string?” You should blog as often as you have ideas to blog about. You should blog as often as you have something amazing to say.

  If you’re looking for numbers and statistics, they exist, but they’re generic and definitely not a one-size-fits-all formula. We’ve experimented a lot with this, though. Here’s what we know from our own experiments.

  1. If you blog daily, your number of subscribers will go up (almost without fail, but with some kind of cutoff at the higher numbers if your posts are crap).

  2. If you blog twice or more daily, your number of subscribers will go up even more.

  3. If you blog weekly, you won’t necessarily lose subscribers.

  4. If you blog monthly, you might lose subscribers, or you might not.

  5. Sunday is a kind of magical day for releasing a blog post, because it appears that people take a break at some point during that day to catch up on nonhome matters, and they comment just a bit longer, visit just a bit longer, and more. Why? No idea. But every time we post on Sunday, the results are pretty good.

  6. There’s no magical time of day to post a blog. Chris likes to post by 4:30 A.M. Eastern time, but he has some readers in India and the UK, in addition to those in the United States. It’s always at a weird time somewhere in the system. That said, posting around anyone’s 5:00 P.M. on a Friday isn’t a good idea.

  We worried about these things too, when we thought they made a difference. The truth is, they don’t. When you post and how often you post don’t matter nearly as much as whether you’re posting information that other people can use and relate to, information that will prompt them to maintain some kind of relationship with you.

  The point is, unless you’re trying to be a media property, like a new magazine or breaking-news source, you don’t need to post more than once or twice a week. In a world where everyone seems to malign the reality of 24-7 news coverage, why would you seek to emulate it?

  Realize, though: People’s consumption habits are very real, and their consumption is growing. The rise of tablets and other “lean back” devices means that people are seeking more and more passive entertainment and information and consuming it without ever really digging too deep.

  Playing the “how many subscribers” game once seemed like the way to do things, but the real metric is, as it has always been, “Who takes action when I ask?” That’s the metric you want to measure.

  How often should you blog? As often as you can get a reaction that’s useful to your pursuits. As often as you can serve your community. That’s how often. Don’t have time to blog? Well, no one has time for anything. That’s not what you’re asking us.

  The “Look at Me” Problem

  The “look at me” problem is a big reason why people go wrong with the Exposure part of the Impact Equation. We call it this because it’s what kids spend a lot of their time saying. “Look at me, Mom!” Essentially, we are so hungry for attention that we overwhelm people with a need to be seen…and it backfires.

  Exposure and Being Seen

  There’s a difference between Exposure and attention. Exposure is a blend of opportunity and the ability to be part of various platforms. Jimmy Fallon has a late-night television show that gives him a lot
of Exposure. From this, he has the ability to earn attention. People without that kind of access might struggle to be seen, crave attention, and lack Exposure. The difference is profound and often misunderstood. What comes next is usually where the problem starts.

  People with some level of superficial access, such as the ability to message someone via the social Web, mistake this ability for Exposure. For instance, someone might send a tweet to Ashton Kutcher to attempt to draw his attention to their issue or project. At the very moment we typed this sentence, there were approximately seventy-four people asking him for attention. Do you think he’ll see any of those requests? No, not really.

  So What if You’re the “Unknown” Person?

  Where everyone seems to get this part wrong is that they set their sights on the biggest name they can find, online or otherwise. If they think they can reach the mayor of the city, they go for that. If they have a sense that they can reach a minor celebrity, all the better. But that’s not what works.

  If you want success in Exposure, there are a few good strategies:

  Start with like-minded people. If you are interested in preserving the habitat of snow owls, figure out who else is and talk to them first. You need to build some level of Exposure with those passionate about your cause before you try to raise awareness at a new level.

  Tell stories that relate to people who don’t share your cause. If you’re hoping to sell people on donating bikes to people in Africa, it doesn’t matter that the people in Africa know the story line. It matters that the person you’re looking to get the money from understands.