Some of my friends are bloggers that look like America. Women bloggers, Asian bloggers, bloggers of color.
Lately, there’s been some wailing from this community. How come the democratic, open blogging community appears to be turning into yet another white male bastion?
I’m hesitant to wade in here, because feelings are pretty easily bruised, but I’ve been giving it a lot of thought because it doesn’t make sense.
Obviously, the problem isn’t that traditionally under-promoted communities aren’t talented enough to write a popular blog.
Also, it’s not possible that these communities don’t have access to the marketplace. Most of us have precisely the same access. If you’ve got $20 a month and a public library, you can do this.
I also don’t believe the problem lies with the audience. I don’t think people (or Bloglines. for that matter) screen content based on who it was written by. If the headline registers, you click and read. Then, and only then, do you bother to worry about the origins of the person who wrote it.
So what is it?
I think it involves the long tail.
In the old days, it mattered a great deal who you knew. If you knew the head of casting at MGM or someone at CAA or the right A&R person, you got the "break" you needed to find an audience. If you knew someone on Sandhill Road, you could get funded. Today, most of the winners work their way up. Boing Boing did, Scoble did and so did Doc Searls.
Working your way up requires a few things:
1. Persistence. Success comes slowly, and you have to stick with it.
2. Patience. Your peers won’t see success, so the fortitude needs to be internal.
3. Low overhead (access to resources). While dealing with #1 and #2, you need a day job, and more important, the confidence to keep going even though it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work.
It seems to me that some communities are better at supporting all three than others. One reason, for example, that Silicon Valley creates start ups is that the entire community, from the supermarket to the school to the church to the bank supports the process.
Many of the underserved communities I’m talking about can’t provide the support and expectations that many white men get. In other words, the blogosphere isn’t stacked against women and others, the real world is.
The real world doesn’t even know what you’re doing. All they know is that you’re not doing what they expect. And the curse is that once this new thing turns real, once the community expects you to go off and do it, it’ll be much much harder to succeed.
So, what I would say to the struggling entrepreneur or pundit or expert or consultant or musician or person spreading that important idea is this:
1. it’s okay if it doesn’t happen fast
2. don’t worry so much about getting the approval of those who came before and are farther along the curve
3. keep costs as low as possible so you can do this without panicking when it doesn’t work so fast
4. surround yourself with friends and colleagues who "get it" and root for you, even when it’s not going so fast
(variant: fire the friends and mothers-in-law who aren’t supporting you so much!)
5. realize that it’s not about you or the way you look or what you wear. It’s about the tail.
I started with plenty of advantages, but it took me a decade to make it as an entrepeneur. That’s a lot of macaroni and cheese. I was lucky–my network didn’t lose faith.
Obviously, this applies to a lot more than blogging. There are so many tiny businesses (like eBay selling) or bigger businesses (like designing stuff) where these same rules apply. I hope this new medium finally gets us where we need to be.
March 16, 2005
For a long time, Metro North lied about their ontime record. According to their policies, a train was “on time” if it got in less than six minutes late. For a harried New Yorker, six minutes is a lot, especially on a 25 minute ride.
So Metro North bragged about their ontime record and it didn’t jibe with user expectations. So consumer happiness was quite low.
What did Metro North do? Did they work hard to train engineers and upgrade machinery to make the trains run on time? Nope. They chose an effective marketing tactic instead: they changed the schedule.
By adding a few minutes to every ride (on the schedule) they are telling a very different story, setting different expectations. People aren’t going to avoid the train because now the schedule says it’s going to get in three minutes later, but they are going to smile more when the train gets there when they expected it was going to get there.
Chris Anderson wrote a brilliant article, and was clever enough to post it as a ChangeThis manifesto: ChangeThis :: The Long Tail.
I can’t stop thinking about it, but in ways that are different than his original riff.
His point (for which he has data!) is that once we eliminate artificial bottlenecks like shelf space and the spectrum restrictions, the mass market effect drops off very quickly.
Give people 1,000 channels to watch, and they won’t all watch the same thing.
Give people 1,000,000 books to read, and they won’t all want to read a bestseller.
Yes, people read the DaVinci Code because everyone else is. Yes, people watch The Apprentice for the very same reason. But no, this effect isn’t as pervasive as most of us would believe.
Joe Krause (co-founder of Excite) jumped on the bandwagon with this insightful post about what he saw there: Link: Bnoopy: The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens. His data shows that 3% of the searches were about the same handful of things… and that the other 97% were all spread out.
Apple’s iTunes store has the same effect at work. They’ve sold more than a million different songs.
So, we see that:
1. hits aren’t what they used to be. Hit TV shows, hit music, hit books–it’s impossible to get the volume you could get 20 years ago in almost any field (even business to business stuff like consulting).
2. the choices are wider than ever before and the pickins for each producer are slimmer than ever.
Great. So what to do about this?
Well, unmentioned in these posts as far as I can tell is this:
It’s cheaper than ever (by an order of magnitude) to make a product and bring it to market.
Which means your hits can be smaller.
Which means you can make more variety.
So, when Coke launches Water Salad beverage in Japan, it doesn’t have to be a New Coke sized hit (or miss) in order to succeed. You can have a blog with 1,000 loyal readers and do just fine, thanks very much, on an ROI basis.
Our instinct is to push, to pull strings, to advertise, to hustle, to do whatever it takes to get to that top 3%. Hey, if you can write the Da Vinci Code, more power to you.
The better path, though, is to figure out how to be:
patient
persistent
and low cost
enough to be quite happy with a whole bunch of long tail scraps. A dollar here and a dollar there and soon, it all adds up.
This is my best advice if you have a radio station, a supermarket, an insurance agency or run Apple computer.
PS Danny Sullivan has a nice piece on this. Link: Search’s Long Tail.
So, there are two kinds of business books.
The first kind contains a simple truth and then tries to persuade you to actually do something.
The second needs a big pad of paper and a pencil. This is the kind of book that covers the mechanics of a skill. Things like process control or cost accounting.
Josh comes through with a big ol list of the first type. Link: Josh Kaufman: Inside My Bald Head: The Josh Kaufman "Personal MBA" Program.
like me!
There’s no real purpose to this site, but I have to confess, on the twentieth anniversary of my first book being published, it did make me smile. It creates your name out of your book covers. Since I used to be a book packager, there’s a lot of unsold titles to choose from.
Link: amaztype. Thanks to Cory at Boing Boing for the link.
Thanks, Faisal, for the pointer.
Link: The Tao of Mac – blog/2005-03-12.
A lot too much inside baseball blog talk lately. Here’s a riff from the other side–if you’re blogging to help your career, maybe you should think twice.
March 15, 2005
Brandplay recommends its top 10 as part of my 30 books.
Link: Confessions of a Brand Evangelist: Top 10 Brand Books (Seth Godin’s MBA Program in Action).
Feel free to send links to your own lists. No promises, though.
Got some synergistic mail from Adam and Jeff.
Yes, it’s weird and cool and clever… and Purple. The best part is that is exactly what the team set out to do.
Link: BATMAN: NEW TIMES.
PS Art Asylum does some very very cool things with toys. They’re not actually Lego, but if you remember Lego, you’ll feel the Proustian thing happening.
My old college chum David Schatsky says that Jupiter is right and I am wrong about the cookie statistic (40% of American net users delete their cookies every month, with a significant percentage doing it every day). Hey, there are some states where people don’t even brush their teeth that often.
I will happily stand corrected if Jupiter is that sure of the data. What’s fascinating though is that among all the mail I got from my sophisticated reader base, not one person wrote in to tell me she deletes her cookies daily.
Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine … by Jeff Jarvis) thought it might be automated software that’s automatically doing the work. One writer (nameless) thinks it’s people covering their porn tracks. I think it might be survey design and people saying they do something they don’t really do.
Link: David Schatsky: Cookie Grumbling.
means friend of a friend.
Link: Social networks: All around the Net, but underused by news sites.
This is such a loaded expression. It starts with "friend". Not a formal relationship, but a tenuous one. And a relationship that doesn’t belong to you! The friendship is between your friend and her friend.
The very idea of utilizing a FOAF network for your own gain is scary. Scarier still is allowing your FOAF network to be used by someone else to make a profit.
There are firms sprouting up every day promising big companies that they will do just that. That they’ll organize and exploit FOAF networks to product big profits for corporations. It might work for a little while, but not for long.
The reason is the tenuous nature of the friendships. The fourth person in the chain (marketer, you, your friend, your friend’s friend) is awfully low on the totem pole.
So what works? Two things:
1. Smooth, simplify and formalize the process of spreading the idea so if an idea is worth spreading, it’ll run into less friction. The white headphones on the iPod, for example, amplify the message of the player even when someone can’t see it.
2. Make stuff that people want to spread even if they don’t care about you. The Republicans definitely got this right during the last election cycle.
