Strategic Bastards

The internet is not made of hugs.

[cross-posted from attentionindustry.com]

This is my manifesto for 2011, and I’ve been putting off writing it.

It’s going to bother some people, and it might even change a few opinions of me. But it’s important, and not just because it’s been driving me nuts for six months.

The internet is not made of hugs.

By this I mean, it’s time to leave internet kindergarten.  It’s time to abandon the beautiful ideation of tech-utopianism, and get to the hard and sometimes brutal game of turning social behaviour online toward being mostly useful, rather than just being mostly new.

I’m writing this from the perspective of someone fairly involved in the toronto tech, twitter, and start-up community, both by choice and by luck. I’m not writing it with any background as an entrepreneur, which I think is important - it’s very easy for me to be objective on this.

There are a few key things holding us back, and this is the year I will address them as much as is reasonably possible, given I’d like to have a few people left in my corner at the end of the year.

We have to admit that some ideas suck.

Half of my wider social circle has dabbled in a start up idea. Some of them have been amazing. And some of them have clearly been invented out of a desire to be an entrepreneur, and needing an idea to do so. Bubble 1.0 crashed very hard, because the fact that it was online was enough for capital investment, in too many cases. Bubble 2.0 will collapse when we realize we’ve been substituting social capital for money, and investing heavily in anyone we consider a friend or potential friend, with time, tweets, status updates, and participation. Be honest - how many services do you use because you want to support the creator or company, rather than because the use case genuinely excited you?

We have to admit that some people suck.

I’m going to waste very little time on this. Utopian thinking has had too many of us focused on being accepting and welcoming, rather than on keeping circles productive and valuable. Social media has made it possible to cast a wide net, and focus on reach as a definition of influence. This has incentivized ‘surrounding’ yourself with anyone, regardless of whether they add value. I’ve watched this take a community from being beneficial, to being another place to get asked 1.5 questions before people start hounding for job leads, business, or advice. Admit when someone sucks, and distance yourself. Best case, it results in an attempt not to suck. Worst case, they behave like a child, signalling others to distance themselves, as well.

We have to call out the difference between knowledge, data, and theory.

Data is information. Theory is an idea, based on information and related knowledge. Knowledge is the combination of data and theory to arrive at a solid understanding of something. Traffic is a fact. Saying that those numbers mean you understand influence is a theory. When we see someone presenting data or theory as knowledge, they should be called on it. When we see repeated public presentation of correlation as causation, we should call it out. Information is not always justification. Letting people publicly act as though it is, without consistent and clear dissent, limits all of us.

We have to embrace that criticism isn’t a bad thing.

If I question your business model, it’s not because I want to hurt you. It’s because I don’t understand it, and I want to. Criticism isn’t about destruction, it’s a step on the path to supporting an idea, product or company. If I point out that your business model is already being executed, well, by a larger, better funded, established company, I am not questioning your ability to execute. I’m trying to understand why you feel you can succeed. Criticism is generally only unwelcome when there isn’t a ready response. I’m tired of hearing people praised for an idea that isn’t quite articulated. I’m tired of the excuse that you have some magical ‘secret sauce’ that you can’t explain: if your value cannot be clearly expressed without it diminishing, you do not have value - security by obscurity works as poorly in any area of tech, as it does in cryptography.

We have to start being harder on the definition of success.

Survival is not success. Large numbers are not success. Shipping something, anything, isn’t success. Unsustainable growth is also not success. Success is building something meaningful, that serves a purpose, and impacts lives positively, more than it impacts lives negatively. I submit that it’s actually that simple. If you collapse in the pursuit of this, you’ve still succeeded in a real way.

We have to start being harder on the definition of failure.

I’m tired of hearing people throw the word ‘failure’ around constantly. I understand that what people mean when they say ‘fail fast, fail often’ is really ‘accept mistakes in the pursuit of improvement’ and ‘risk is not negative’, but I’m tired of hearing it all the same. When you fail, it means you have made a series of errors you cannot recover from. Failure, to be clear, is bad. It should be avoided. There is a difference between making mistakes, and failing. Failure is not acceptable, but the need to risk failure is mandatory. If this sounds like it requires being very hard on yourself, it does. That’s part of moving from new, to useful. It’s also part of growing up.

We have to call bullshit loudly, and regularly.

There’s a quick risk/reward calculation that everyone involved in social media makes a dozen times a day: ‘that’s bullshit, but is it worth calling them out on it?’ the answer is almost always yes. Calling bullshit is also a key part of nearly everything else I’ve mentioned. Calling bullshit is about holding others, and yourself, to a higher standard. There is nothing cynical about calling bullshit - it is the most optimistic thing you can do - it is the act of insisting that we can, and will, be better.

We have to let people fall, rather than holding them up.

This will sound odd, after the above rant on the unacceptability of failure. But when, despite their best efforts to avoid it, someone falls, one of two things happens: they either rebuild themselves better, or they disappear. Either one of these is a good thing. The greatest periods of development in my life, personally and professionally, came after times I needed to rebuild. The habit of coming together, as a community, to help a person in genuine need is laudable, and beautiful. The way we, as a community and industry, will change our behaviour as participants in an industry and economy to prop up things doomed to fail, is not. There’s very little honour in a stay of execution when you know there’s no pardon in the wings. I’m not saying ‘do not support people’. I’m saying ‘know the difference between someone who needs a shoulder to lean on, and someone who is looking for a crutch.’

These are my goals for the coming year, and this is as close to a guideline as I have. We’re reaching the point where this community / industry, and the people within it, are literally helping to define the future. We can’t let the future turn out to be a pile of mediocre entertainments because we were worried about being nice.

The internet is not made of hugs. It’s made of potential, which will come to nothing unless we insist that we can and will do better.

Public Guilting is not an effective network-building method

Let’s get hypothetical for a moment, shall we? Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a local blogger who likes to talk about cultural topics – fashion, for instance. For some time now you’ve been trying to build your following and to promote your own personal brand of cultural insight. You attend tweetups, comment on other peoples blogs, all that good stuff…

Things are moving along at a reasonable pace – every day you’re inching one or two followers toward your goal of becoming one of those influencer people you keep hearing about.

One day the unthinkable happens – someone you’ve met at one of those tweetup things, who you really don’t know that well at all, unfollows you. What do you do?

A) Shrug it off and go on with your quest for popularity.

B) Call the person out on Twitter and make a bunch of racket about it.

If you answered B, you are an asshole. And your being an asshole with misplaced motivations might have something to do with your quest for influence and popularity not going so well.

If you answered A, you probably had the common sense to realize that:

• Followers come and go.
• That person probably unfollowed you because they aren’t interested in the things you talk about, thus having no real strategic value to your quest for influence and popularity anyhow.
• You realized that you’re an asshole and resolved to change your misguided ways.

Unless your objective is to pretend that people like you, or to pretend to be popular you should stop being a bitch. Get over it.

Popularity is not a Social Strategy.

Being active in the social media scene in Toronto, to the point where I cringe when saying ‘social media scene’, I know I’m not supposed to say this.  Luckily, I don’t really give a damn.

Being popular is not a social strategy.

I mean this in four ways:

Popularity is not a strategy.  It can arguably be the outcome of a strategy, but I’d say that even that is missing the point – when you can focus on relevance, on meaning, and on tapping into a need or pain point that you can alleviate, popularity seems shallow.  This is because popularity is shallow, and we should know by now that reach isn’t how you define success in 2010.

Being popular in social media doesn’t make you a social strategist.  There are many people who have become hugely popular in the social space, speaking entirely about how people and brands should behave and act in the social space.  I generally judge their advice with a pretty straightforward litmus test: has this person helped develop guidelines or strategy for anything in the social space other than themselves? Popularity can come from many sources, and relatively few of them are positive.  It’s very simple to become well known, and even well liked, without being respected, trusted or recommended.

You can buy popularity.  You have to earn positive associations.  Offer someone a free sample with every click of the “Like” button, and you can have 50,000+ people connected to a Facebook page.  They will think precisely one thing about your brand – that it gives away free stuff.  If you don’t strive to build on that very tenuous, very temporary link, you’ve wasted 50,000 free samples, despite having a shiny number to put in a PowerPoint deck.

Striving for popularity is limiting.  Very few people can actually call ‘bullshit’ on someone well liked, without suffering a hit in popularity.  Fewer still can take a risky position that no one agrees with, while making popularity a leading goal.  Real connections are often made when you do something polarizing, meaning pissing ~50% of people off at first glance.  If you’re worried about yourself, or your brand being ‘popular’, you may pass up being meaningful.

Popularity can be a side effect of a strategy, and in specific, reach-focused cases, the outcome of a strategy.  But possessing popularity doesn’t mean you understand strategy, know how to develop a strategy, or have executed a strategy – whether for yourself, or for someone you represent.