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.

I know what I want a netbook for. First I’m a guy, and it’s a gadget, and it’s just cool as hell. So yeah, I want an expensive toy. But beyond that, it’s something that’s small enough I can take it with me almost anywhere and get some work done. It’s more capable than a smartphone at all of the non-phone things. (And by the way, I still want a plain old phone that just makes calls and stores phone numbers. Can I buy that, please?)

But I don’t understand who the target market is

What Do They Do?

The iPhone does things no other cellphone did, in a form factor that lets you bring it places you wouldn’t bring a laptop. So no matter which you compare it to, there’s something the iPhone does that was unique.

What does a netbook do that’s unique? It’s smaller than a laptop, but not so much so that you’ll throw it in your pocket and have it always with you. You can, but you won’t, it’s just a bit too big for that.

It’s more usable than a phone, with a more human-scale user interface, but not as usable as a sub-notebook.

That leaves … playing DVDs? And games? When I said I wanted a toy I didn’t mean that’s all I thought it was good for. But now I’m not so sure. Where would I realistically want to have a computer, that I could have a netbook, that I wouldn’t want to have a laptop?

I’m coming up blank here.

Everybody wants to think they are a unique and special snowflake. And they are … in a blizzard of other unique and special snowflakes.

If I seem to be going a little Tyler Durden here, it’s because I am sick to death of people assuming that the challenges they face are unique. That no one else in the history of the world has ever faced quite what they face. And in particular, that working in IT is just so completely different from every other profession out there. Despite the fact that they’ve never worked in any other profession, and don’t realize it’s the same everywhere.

“Technical Debt” … AKA Taking Shortcuts

People who write code for a living have a very specialized vocabulary, just like every other profession. And just like in every other profession, knowing the lingo is a screening tool to separate “us” from “them”. But people immersed in the vocabulary every day don’t know that they’re using jargon to describe a well-known concept.

Take technical debt. People in IT write articles arguing whether it exists or not, what to do about it, how stupid managers are for allowing it to build up. But all it means is that if you take a shortcut today, at some point in the future you’re going to have to pay for it, and it will probably cost more when you do. Yes, this is exactly what Fram was talking about when they said, “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.”

It doesn’t sound so impressive once you realize they’re just copying an old commercial, does it?

“Arbitrary Skill Lists” … AKA Weeding Out Resumés

Job listings in IT tend to be full of acronyms, and list how many years you should have worked with each technology. These lists are “unreasonable” and “arbitrary”. And exactly the same as job listings in every other industry.

What does a degree in Art History have to do with being an office manager? Not a damn thing, but you need “a college degree” to get in the door. Any old degree is fine.

And four or more years of experience with this specific vendor’s purchasing system, which has only existed for four years, is “preferred but not required”.

Oh, and Clarity for project management.

And Peoplesoft for HR.

And SAP.

And Oracle Forms.

And Sharepoint.

And this is for the entry-level admin assistant job. The Office Manager job has already been promised to the current admin assistant, but HR says they have to advertise the opening anyway.

Same as it Ever Was

Sure, there are things about every industry and segment that are unique to that area. But it’s not nearly as much as people seem to think. Odds are whatever you’re thinking is unique really isn’t. It’s the things you do every day without thinking about them that set you apart.

Whoever is doing this is either a bot, a genius, or a lunatic.

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From here:

“Simplicity = 1/Flexibility”

That’s awesome. I’m stealing that.

- and -

I opened this thread and suddenly felt a cool breeze coming from my monitor. Curious as to the source of this phenomenon, I read through to the end, and there I found the answer. It was the furious handwaving.

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From here:

Sometimes “technically correct” is the worst kind of correct.