Duty Calls

You don’t normally see flamewars in real life except in special-interest forums: politics, academia,[1] sports,cosmology.

Then there are those special people, the polyflamers who will argue on any topic. No, not lawyers. Geeks.

Something in the geek psyche makes them — okay, us — prone to obsess over pedantic distinctions that ordinary people just don’t care about. If you think about flaming in geek terms, though, you see a way out.

Compiled language

When writing code, a programmer usually writes instructions that are in (somewhat) human-readable form. These instructions are then “compiled” into commands that a computer can interpret and execute. If the output from the computer is wrong, either the commands the programmer entered were wrong, or the compiler didn’t work correctly.

Experienced programmers quickly learn that it’s very unlikely they’ve found a new compiler bug. If there’s a problem, it’s almost always the code they wrote. Sometimes, though, there really is a bug in the compiler. Compilers can get fixed, but not quickly, and not often. The changes have to be small enough that they don’t introduce new problems. And they will potentially break any code that was designed to work around the bugs. Which is exactly what programmers do: They work around the bugs.

Debugging politics

Now think about a political campaign as a computer program. The campaign staff is writing instructions (commercials) that they hope will cause the public to exhibit specific behavior. But the target platform is the brain of each individual voter. Each one has its own rules, so every compiler works differently. But here’s the important part: You can’t fix the compiler. No matter how broken you think someone’s thinking is you can’t change the basic rules.

What you can do is figure out what rules they’re using. Which means stereotyping people. pigeonholing them based on a few characteristics you’re sure of, and assuming that a whole bunch of other things are probably also true. The sad fact about humanity — sad if you’re a fan of individuality, that is — is that this tends to work pretty well.

These are not the earmarks you were looking for

So now that you know each brain is wired differently, and you don’t have much chance to “fix” it, what are you supposed to do about it? Stop using arguments that work on you, and start using ones that work on them. Whoever “them” happens to be at the moment.

If you like dirty jokes, go check out this one from Penny Arcade, then come back.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Read it? Okay, look at that last panel:

They can’t cut out the middle-man! The middle-man is the whole point!

This is a good lesson for any small business owner, or the people who do marketing for them.
When you’re a chef, sometimes you want someone else to cook for you specifically so it’s not just like you always do it. Sometimes it’s not just okay to be a middle-man. Sometimes that’s exactly what your customers want.

Same for garbage collectors, travel agents, crime scene cleaners. You’re not doing anything your clients couldn’t do. They just don’t want to. If they don’t want to badly enough, you can make some serious money doing it for them.

This works for managers, too, but for a different reason. Don’t hire people who will do everything just like you. Hire people whose skills don’t completely overlap yours, and let them use those unique skills. If your employees do everything just like you would, you keep hiring copies of yourself. That’s not a good strategy. (Unless you’re perfect.)

No, not that. I mean your first time reading your favorite marketing blog. It wasn’t your favorite at the time, but something made you stick around. Do you remember what it was?

Odds are, that day was nothing special to the blog’s author. Just another day, just another post. They didn’t know you’d be coming by for the first time today.

But there was something good there, something worth seeing. Something worth coming back for.

A reporter was talking to Joe DiMaggio after a late-season game, after the Yankees were already mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. DiMaggio had made a spectacular running catch. The reporter asked why he would risk an injury in a game that didn’t matter. DiMaggio told him:

There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first time. I owe him my best.

Most people don’t see your site for the first time just as you’re starting a launch. They show up in the middle of the launch, before it starts, after it’s over.

What will they see?

Seth Godin asks in his latest post:

A newspaper asked me the following, which practically set my hair on fire:

What inherent traits would make it easier for someone to becoming a linchpin? Surely not everyone can be a linchpin?

Why not? How dare anyone say that some people aren’t somehow qualified to bring emotional labor to their work, somehow aren’t genetically or culturally endowed with the seeds or instincts or desires to invent new techniques or ideas, or aren’t chosen to connect with other human beings in a way that changes them for the better?

I’ve heard this so many times that it almost sounds true. But then I watch Ratatouille again. If I’m in a hurry, I’ll just skip ahead right to Anton Ego’s final review:

In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize that only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

I think Ego — or rather the writer who put the words in his mouth — is closer to the truth than Seth. No, everyone can not be whatever it is they want to be.

Not because they aren’t “qualified to bring emotional labor to their work”, but because emotion isn’t enough. If it were, Rudy wouldn’t have been the subject of a movie.

He had more passion for the game than any five of his teammates, but as Fortune tells him:

You’re 5 foot nothin’, 100 and nothin’, and you have barely a speck of athletic ability.

All the passion in the world didn’t overcome some limitations that he just couldn’t fix. Never could. Sure, his coach eventually rewarded him by putting him into a game. But only when the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Until recently, stories like Rudy’s were for the most part private affairs. But now the auditions for American Idol show a parade of contestants with all the passion in the world, and no more talent than Rudy had. And they simply refuse to listen to the advice of people who also have passion, plus talent and a record of successfully identifying new talent.

Part of Seth’s definition of a linchpin is that they’re indispensable. That can only be true if the “emotional work” that you do is work that other people value. It still depends on what other people want.

So if what you have passion for is something that you just aren’t capable of doing well, or that other people don’t value, then what you have is a hobby.

I just published the first WordPress Tip, an ongoing series based on questions from clients. This first one is How To Install WordPress Plugins.

If you believed the germ theory of disease in the 17th century you might find some obscure texts to support you, but mostly you were alone in the wilderness. To stick with that belief in the face of universal scorn, you had to have some really compelling (at least to yourself) evidence.

Most people won’t persist with an unpopular belief. Until late in the 20th century, if your neighbors didn’t share a belief, for most people you might as well be the only person in the world who holds that view.

Today though, you can pick any outlandish theory — the moon program was faked, 9/11 was a government plot, Britney Spears can sing — and you can find more blogs and news sites trumpeting that fact than you can read in a lifetime. Everything is confirmed. No one has to question their assumptions if they don’t want to. And frankly, none of us really want to.

The current media saturation means it’s possible for the first time in history to read only media that confirms your bias, no matter what that bias is.

All the talk of people pirating music — and movies, and software — is enough to make you think it’s a hard problem to solve. But it’s not, really. All you have to do is disincentivise copying. (That’s sarcasm, for those who missed it.)

The MPAA and RIAA have tried licensing, lawsuits, lobbying (I didn’t do that on purpose, I swear) but the copying doesn’t stop. People are amoral thieves!

Or … maybe people remember that when the compact disc format came out, it was supposed to be cheaper than cassettes. They cost less to produce, so as soon as the studios recouped the cost of building the new technology we’d see prices drop. It’s been over 27 years now, have they recouped that investment yet?

Apple to the Rescue

Leave it to Apple, a company not making their money stamping out CDs, to finally break the logjam. They made it cheap and easy to buy individual songs, something the RIAA members had been fighting for years.

The RIAA wanted people to pay for whole albums. People didn’t want to pay $18 for two good songs. Since they couldn’t buy singles, they used Napster. As soon as someone made singles available, people started buying them. And Apple has made a fortune selling what the RIAA didn’t want to sell.

People Pay for the Good Part

I don’t go to many first-run movies. Too expensive. But the local theater that shows them a few months later for $1.50, or $1 for a matinée? I’m there all the time. So I don’t get to talk about it with people around the water cooler. I survive. Other people will camp out to see the first showing. Would they pay more to pre-order that ticket if they didn’t have to wait in line? Probably.

Point is, “find another business model” and “disincentivize copying” end up meaning the same thing. Anyone who wants to make money has to figure out what is rare about what they do and charge for that. First is rare. Convenience is rare. Taste is rare. Complex physical objects are rare. Copying data, that’s easy.

The iTunes store combines convenience and, through recommendations, taste. That’s what people are paying for.

What Do You Do That’s Good?

If you want to make money creating something that can be easily copied, then you need to come up with a business model where you can get paid for it.

I’m really good at sitting on the couch watching TV. I’d like to get paid for it. Some people have cracked that nut. They’re critics, and they get paid to watch TV. No one set out to decide, “Gosh, how can we pay these people to watch TV?”

Copyright worked for a long time, when large-scale copying was as rare and expensive as what was being copied. That’s no longer true. We don’t need to pay for copying any more.

This is the exact problem being faced by newspapers. Their business model was based on printing. They focused on the “paper” instead of the “news”. Take away the printing and suddenly they don’t know how to charge for anything. They need a new business model.

Blaming people for not wanting to pay for something is stupid. First, because people want what they want. Second, because it’s not true. They do want to pay for things. They’ll pay $1 for a 15-second snippet of a song as a ringtone. Because someone saw an opportunity for a new business model and jumped on it, instead of trying to coerce people into paying for what they wanted to sell.

She’s Black Lab and German Shepherd. Hmm … lab … shepherd … Leperd?

Oh no, she can already do stairs.

Most of the pictures I have are her butt, because every time she sees the camera she runs right at it.

She still likes to chew on shoes just a little too much.

See, keeps running toward the camera.

Until she discovered squeaky toys.

If you plan to make $200 per hour doing something, you first need to believe that someone is willing to pay that much for what you do. So what makes web analytics worth $200 per hour? Convincing people that you’re worth that much is your second challenge. Your first challenge is convincing someone they need to pay someone to do web analytics at all.

This isn’t a new problem. Kevin Kelly talks about the changing network effects in different phases of the evolution of all new markets:

Maximizing the value of the net itself soon becomes the number one strategy for a firm. For instance, game companies will devote as much energy to promoting the platform—the tangle of users, game developers, and hardware manufacturers—as they do to their games … During certain phases of growth, feeding the network is as important as feeding the firm.

What he’s saying is that people have to want a game before they can want your game. It’s the same with analytics. People have to want analytics services before they can want your analytics services.

Do Not Want!

Web analytics suffers from the same issues as copywriting: Everyone thinks they can write, so they don’t value good writing. Same with analytics. Anyone can read charts on Google, and with a couple of days practice you can even set up split tests. What do you need to pay someone for?

The consultants already making money at it will tell you that that yes, anyone can optimize a site with enough testing. What you’re paying the big bucks for is someone who can skip past two months of split testing and show results in the first week. Some people are that good. Identifying them out of all the ones claiming to be that good is hard.

Your challenge in getting clients is mostly going to be convincing them the service can have a large impact. Large companies already know this. That won’t help you, because they already have people doing it.

That leaves small businesses. There’s a ton of opportunity for small businesses to use an analytics consultant. Convincing them of that is the hard part. Do you plan on cold-calling small businesses? How will you get leads? What’s your pitch going to be?

Oh, you don’t want to have to be a salesman? You don’t want to sell yourself that way? Sorry then, I guess I can’t tell you how to make $200 per hour doing analytics after all.