by Chris Brogan
By this time, the answer should be obvious: Because it’s a joke. It’s funny. It makes people laugh.
Here is something fundamental we must impart to you; to everyone, actually. It’s a lesson that people understand intuitively because they know the social mores of the society they live in. People understand instinctively, and often subconsciously, what is acceptable and what isn’t. They feel it in their chest. They get it without truly understanding why or how, but everyone does get it. Companies, naturally, do not, because they simply aren’t people.
This is why human beings make sacrifices to help their friends, and often strangers, even if it isn’t in their best interest. They know it “works,” even though companies do not. It’s why human beings make jokes and trust that their friends, acquaintances, and even Twitter followers will “get it,” and not be upset. It’s why people admit they’re wrong, even if it bothers them to do it—yet another act that companies have difficulty with.
There is a lesson behind this. Human beings, when grouped together, intuitively understand how to work in concert. Within a company, groups form that work better than individuals, and inside jokes are normal. People act like people when speaking to their coworkers. It’s normal behavior that doesn’t need to be questioned or examined. It just works. It’s when they interact with the outside that it begins to break down. All of a sudden, when companies speak to the outside, a hierarchy is intimated. We feel we need to speak differently. It’s insiders versus outsiders, not like speaking to like.
This is why YouTube’s vuvuzela button was a magic moment. It took a risk. At its core, that is what a joke is, and the people inside the company understood this. A barrier was broken down between the usual inside jokes of the company and the outside world. YouTube meshed the two, and by doing so, it appeared human.
In short: This is the secret. In order to be a part of the culture of the Web, you must actually be a part of it. You don’t have to try to emulate human behaviors. You have to actually be human, in every possible way. Otherwise you enter what could be called the uncanny valley of social networks: You appear almost human but not quite, and that “not quite” throws off the whole equation. Everything falls flat and the illusion fails.
This is why you need this part of the book. It’s more important than you think, because as soon as you begin making these public gestures, the way people do and the way your customer does, people who see them will change. Their attitudes toward you will shift. If you make sacrifices, if you tell jokes, if you do all of these things in public, the public will begin to act that way toward you as well.
The Cocktail Party
Quite often, when explaining how the online experience feels, we talk about a cocktail party. We ask questions where the obvious answer is “no,” like this one: “Would you go up to a complete stranger at a cocktail party, hand out a stack of your business cards, and ask that person to distribute those cards to his closest friends?” You have to answer no. And yet there’s a reason why we have to make that analogy often.
The rise of social networks and social communication is still on an upward curve. At the time of this writing, Facebook has over 800 million users. Google+ (which launched in July 2011) has over 150 million active users. Twitter has over 100 million active users after five or more years. We all use them for different purposes. Some of us connect with friends and families. Others use them for marketing and business communications. It’s important to remember that if you replace the words “social network” with “phone,” the same is true: We use it for many different purposes.
So back to the cocktail party.
It’s important to think about the online version of the human element with the idea of a cocktail party in mind as a litmus test for how social tools help you do business. If you’re looking to connect with people and create an Echo between your ideas and their interests, this requires interactions that build a relationship. Let’s lay out some specific actions so that this isn’t so abstract.
From across the room: At a cocktail party, as online, we tend to approach people we find attractive and interesting at first glance. Thus, we dress nicely (or have a good avatar photo) and may be overheard saying something interesting (either through our posts or in something written in our profile information).
First contact: When you approach someone at a party, you tend to ask them something about themselves: “I see you prefer red wine” or “I thought I heard you mention that you’re a fan of Andy Warhol’s work.” This is true of the online space as well. What works best is leading with some connective point between yourself and the person you’re approaching, whether a prospect or a potential partner. “I see in your profile that you like fly-fishing. Do you get out often?” The opposite, leading by talking about yourself, would be just as rude online as at a cocktail party.
Fishing for business: If you’re at a party for business purposes, you know how to ask some prequalifying questions. “So you work for PepsiCo? What do you do there?” The person might not be your target buyer, but they might know how to introduce you to the right person in the organization. The same works online. You would no sooner start rolling into your sales pitch with a junior software developer at Microsoft (when you need the ear of a VP of finance to sell your product) than you would in person at a party. Learn who you’re talking with and determine how to proceed.
The gentle prepitch: A cocktail party isn’t the right setting to flip open a laptop and walk someone through a PowerPoint deck or a demo (sure, it happens, but it’s not often the right setting). The same is often true for an online experience somewhere like a Facebook page. What happens in that environment is the gentle prepitch, involving a bit more effort to qualify any interest and then some effort to secure a time to meet (virtually or otherwise) to talk through next steps.
Introductions: Gold at a cocktail party is when you can introduce people to each other and not have any stake in it yourself. The same is true online. The more often you can introduce two people who have potential future business together from which you extract no further value, the more often you’ll find yourself privy to opportunity that seems almost to come from nowhere.
Going out for a nightcap: At a cocktail party, you can count it a success if you can convince the other person to join you for the after-party. In using online platforms to build relationships, this translates to being able to invite someone back to your main site or offer. If you’ve built up a good enough rapport and it’s obvious that the two of you have something further to discuss, you invite the person back to pursue the rest of the business.
If you look through that flow, it makes sense for how one might conduct business online, at least in one-on-one interactions. The beauty of the online universe, of course, is that some of this takes place without your even being present. People might observe your profile and some of your posts while you’re sleeping. Then they might e-mail you because of what they read, which, if it leads to a sale, is business that started while you were literally asleep. Plus, you can carry on far more than one conversation at a time. It’s an opportunity to be at cocktail parties all over the world without ever leaving your home.
How to Become Credible
As one of the core factors in Maister, Green, and Galford’s Trust Equation, credibility leads the pack. Due to the nature of the Web, most people with Web sites or small companies are nobodies, with little to no credibility, which is one of the reasons they have such difficulty with impact. You might find an amazing article using StumbleUpon or Reddit, but if you don’t know whom it’s from, what does it matter? We like to think that a strong idea will carry us, and to a certain degree this is true, but the top performers are also always high in credibility, another name for which is status. They have accolades. They have testimonials. They have important publications attached to their names and are married to celebrities or whatever.
In other words, they have lots of signals that say they’ve been around awhile and are trusted by many.
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In Trust Agents we discussed the well-known story of Donnie Brasco and how he, an FBI agent, infiltrated the mob to the highest levels, seeing things and identifying people in a way the FBI had never been able to do before.
While we told this story, what we did not say, but should have, is that it was possible largely because of credibility. To have a significant impact on any group or culture, credibility is significant because so many people rely on it before giving you any attention. People magazine doesn’t just give some stranger the front page, after all; its editors need to have seen or heard a name many times before.
In a larger sense, credibility is a necessary indicator for human beings because it prevents society’s hierarchies from being disrupted and destroyed. It keeps society stable. Not just anyone can be a doctor from Harvard, because if they could, it would mean nothing. Quality and skill would become largely undetectable, and in a society where strangers are always interacting with one another, we need indicators of quality. Credibility fits the bill.
But how is it really developed? Well, we know from experience that the only real answer is: slowly. The levels of ease with which people feel comfortable with you, from easiest to hardest, are: intimacy/Echo, self-interest, reliability, and, finally, credibility.
So while intimacy is easy to work on, and being liked is one of the first ways you can build Trust, credibility is the most difficult and one of the only ways to reach the top. Credibility is at least partially hackable, in the sense that you can use the names of companies that you’ve worked with or that have covered your work, or even awards or anything else you’ve won.
However, credibility is generally a long process in which there is no substitute for continuous, hard work that is consistently excellent. This plays into reliability too.
Quality is the core of Trust. Never forget that.
How to Become Reliable
Even though we said not to, this is the one aspect of the Trust Equation that everyone will ignore. Reliability is hard for lots of people, especially the flighty masses we find on blogs, on Twitter, and elsewhere. Coming up with ideas for content is hard, especially excellent, punch-in-the-face work that will grab attention without resorting to cheap tactics. But it’s a necessity. And reliability, ironically, will help you get there.
Rather than using up all your ideas, producing more content will actually help you create more ideas more quickly than before. If you were tweeting or blogging once or twice a week (or month!), creating stuff every day might intimidate the hell out of you, and rightly so. After all, you think that what you’re doing right now is your limit—that it’s as hard as you can go. But you’re wrong.
Keep in mind that we’re not talking here about actually attending meetings you say you’re going to, or handing in the presentation on time, or anything else, although those things all matter and will affect your reliability “ranking,” if it can be called that. What we’re talking about here is creating content, or media, regularly enough that you are seen as a trustworthy and consistent source.
In reality, reliability is all about little stretches. When you begin working online, you’ll begin with very little information about how often you should create content, how often you should respond, or anything else. There aren’t that many people who will give you direct answers about what’s right either. You have to play it by ear and discover what your audience wants. Here are a few things that helped us.
Editorial calendars. You can set these up either personally, on your own computer’s calendar, or in a content-management system like WordPress. Planning what you’ll publish and when will radically change how you think about content and how you get seen. You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but some of the biggest content creators do this almost like magazines, with months of content lined up ahead of time.
Regular writing schedules. Set up a schedule for yourself for daily creation of content. It doesn’t take much time and can help you have breakthrough ideas using any of the methods we’ve mentioned earlier. Finding thirty minutes a day, or even choosing a certain number of words (such as a thousand a day, as our friend Chris Guillebeau does), will help you produce enough material for everything you own in a very short time.
“3 Tiny Habits.” We came across B. J. Fogg’s method of habit creation only recently, but his theory is that creating effective habits is itself a habit, and that you can get good at it. To get the full benefit, check out TinyHabits.com, but to start out, find the smallest possible behavior change you can, such as “write one word,” and do it immediately after something you already do (such as finishing dinner).
WHAT POKÉMON CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT
PERSONAL GROWTH
Chris’s daughter is currently obsessed with Pokémon, mostly the trading card game, but also the video games for the Nintendo DS. To participate, Chris purchased his own copy of the video game and played his own version, starting at the same time she did. Along the way, he learned something about improving your impact.
First, let’s explain the game’s setting and a rough story line, as well as how it’s played. If you’ve played Pokémon on the DS, skip a paragraph or two. If not, keep reading. (You can treat this part as a “choose your own adventure” book!)
In the world of Pokémon, people catch and train different creatures (collectively called Pokémon) for the purpose of staging “friendly” battles. Your character in the game is a Pokémon trainer, and you capture the creatures in various Poké balls and release them to fight against other Pokémon, either in the wild or led by other trainers. Got it so far? You are basically managing a team of differently abled creatures who battle other wild creatures or managed-by-a-trainer creatures in a series of increasingly complex battles.
The creatures earn experience for every successful battle and gain levels after attaining a set number of experience points. The other rewards are financial, but that’s not important to the conversation. As your creatures rise in levels, they are permitted to learn new (and more effective) fighting moves, which deliver more damage to your opponent. So, if a level-thirty creature fights a level-five creature, it’s reasonably safe to assume that the more experienced Pokémon will crush the other one, usually with one hit.
Now, back to Chris and his daughter. Chris had been training all of his Pokémon nearly equally, giving them each a chance to try to win battle after battle, so his six creatures were all between levels twenty and thirty-five. By contrast, Chris’s daughter Violette had one Pokémon at level thirty-five, a few in the high teens and twenties, and the rest around level six or seven. She asked her dad to “level up” all the weaker creatures in her group by making them more powerful, and that’s when things started to click for Chris beyond the dynamics of the game.
It would be easier for Violette to just let those weaker creatures go and catch higher-level Pokémon to add to her team than it would be to train each of the weaker creatures. Does that make sense? You could battle for hours and hours with a level-six creature until it grew to a level twenty, or you could just catch a level-twenty creature and add it to your team.
Now, remove everything about that game from your mind for a moment and think about your work, whatever it is. If you’re a skilled and experienced musician, do you start a band from scratch, or do you work with people who have a certain level of skill? If you are a reasonably skilled writer, do you partner with a newcomer to write a book? Will you learn what it takes to get to higher levels by surrounding yourself with people who are at a different, earlier part in their journey? Or will that require stretching to learn how to master skills above your current capability?
Whom are you surrounding yourself with right now? If you are an employee, it’s not like you can release your coworkers into the wild and capture new ones to do the job better. But then again, does that mean that maybe you’ve outgrown your workplace?
You can look at this in many ways. Maybe your job is not your calling. Maybe it’s just paying you so that you can work o
n what you really intend to do. Or maybe you’re using it as safe harbor between your own adventures. Whatever the case, it’s important to realize that you can still do something with the information above, even if you can’t apply it directly to work.
Whom do you surround yourself with at work? Are you challenging yourself or learning from them? Whom are you surrounding yourself with outside of work? Does that help you level up? How are you spending your off-hours? Are you at the top of that learning curve or are you finding new, steeper curves?
Whom do you see as part of the journey to achieve your dreams? You have to do the major work yourself, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have friends, allies, challengers, supporters, and colleagues along the way.
If you’ve never practiced a single half hour of yoga, then showing up to a beginner class at any venue will probably be a good start. You will quickly outgrow that level and find yourself seeking a bit more of a challenge. Once you reach a certain level with your instructor, you might have to find a more advanced class. It doesn’t mean that your instructor is suddenly no good. It means that your goals have shifted beyond what can be attained there.
Chris learns a lot from Julien, from Sir Richard Branson, from Jay-Z, and elsewhere. Julien has most recently learned a ton from Howard Schultz of Starbucks. Along the way, we still maintain friendships with people we knew at different levels of our journey, but at some point we part ways from working with some of those people. As we reach new places in our journey, we require higher-level assistance to grow and succeed. There’s a world of difference in learning what it takes to record a podcast than in learning how to prepare your business for sale.
