The Impact Equation Read online

  Not everything we write is holy writ, but we have worked hard to make sure that what we talk about is based on principles. Because this book is about spreading ideas and making your mark, we have made sure that it can apply equally across any medium, whether you’re on the social Web or shouting to a crowd in a public square.

  We can do this because, at their core, all people influenced by ideas are the same, whether they connect to the idea through Facebook or television. Instead of talking about the medium, we talk about the people and give you some metrics to help reach them effectively. That is why this book is designed around an equation. It’s about the things that matter for you, to get through to the people you care about.

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  We both naturally understand the technology of social networks, but it isn’t what we care about and it isn’t how we really build our businesses. We don’t think about optimizing the location of the Twitter button or getting the maximum number of retweets or Facebook likes. There are experts who think about this, but we aren’t them. What we think about, at the end of the day, is people.

  No matter what happens, whatever the change in technology, people will always stay the same. Whatever, whether they watch one screen or five to relax in the evening, the way people think will always be based on the same brain they, their parents, and their grandparents were born with. Working with and thinking about the human dimension has always served us well because it means we understand the final recipient.

  So, we have never been that interested in mathematical notions of popularity or influence, like Klout scores or numbers of followers. It has always been more important to us to develop a connection with a single person, and to know how to do that well, than to do it en masse.

  When we developed the Impact Equation, this is what we were thinking about. We were considering what mattered to the person on the other end of the line. We considered what would make a difference to that final individual who connected with an idea and how he or she would perceive it.

  In some ways this is easier, because you’re thinking about only one person; but in other ways it’s complex, because who knows what a single person is thinking? That challenge is what the Impact Equation became about.

  Impact = C × (R + E + A + T + E)

  Contrast. When an idea hits a person, it has to feel like something similar to an idea he or she has already experienced, yet it has to be different enough to get noticed. If every ad were the same, you wouldn’t notice any (and maybe you don’t). We could call Contrast differentiation, interest, or positioning. When you have Contrast right, your work strikes people as being something remarkable.

  Reach. This is easy. The higher the number of people you can connect with, the more influential your idea can become. In its rawest form, Reach is about the size of your list or RSS feed, your number of followers, or how many people you connect to in other ways. The higher it is, the better. At least as far as this attribute is concerned.

  Exposure. If Reach was all about how many you connect with, Exposure is all about how often you connect to them. Spam tries to reach you every day, yet it’s likely you’ve never fallen prey to it. Why? We consider reaching someone more often to be better, of course, but only up to a point. Understanding Exposure will help you figure out how often, and the best ways, to connect.

  Articulation. Some ideas are all over the place, and others are clear as day. High Articulation means an idea is like a sword, cutting through the fog of the brain and hitting you in exactly the right place to make you understand it. If Contrast is about being seen, Articulation is about being understood, instantly.

  Trust. The subject of many books (including our 2009 best seller, Trust Agents), Trust still isn’t entirely figured out. It’s a clear factor in impact, but why do we trust someone? The answer “We feel it” simply isn’t good enough. You need to know why. We’ll show you.

  Echo. Finally, Echo is all about the feeling of connection you give your reader, visitor, or participant. A single person could be good at Echo but could also alienate a subject entirely, while a huge corporation could, with a single swipe, make you feel something you haven’t felt since childhood.

  Together, these six attributes make the acronym CREATE, an easy, memorable word that is at the core of everything you’ll have to do in the twenty-first-century business game. Creation is at the center of lots of your future work, and Impact is the goal. Our plan is to make it clear as day how you can do that.

  This book is an opportunity that comes from a moment in time. As you read it, you will discover that some of it is relevant to you and some of it isn’t. That’s okay. If you’re in a small town in central Louisiana, your needs will be different from those of someone in New York City. If you’re widely connected, you will have a vastly different experience from that of someone who is just starting out. This is expected. So judge from your surroundings. Figure out what parts of this opportunity work for you. Picture it like a game, and figure out the easiest, most effective moves to make. Do those first, and see what the results are. If you fail, no big deal. Keep trying. This stuff works; it’s just a matter of figuring out what parts of it will work for you.

  The reality is that we really are the first generation of people on this planet to be not only media consumers (like the few generations before us who listened to the radio and watched television) and media creators (which we began to be when reality television took over the airwaves). Finally, for the first time ever, we are all media owners as well. This is important, and it’s the starting point for the rest of this book.

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  We think the future is bright. And we want to give you access to it. But not ten years from now. Immediately. Right now. We want to help the future along.

  We want to do this by making everyone visible and helping everyone have an impact as soon as possible, by giving everyone ways to transmit their ideas as efficiently as possible, so that they can be picked up, retweeted, and remixed and have an impact on people.

  Anyone can write a blog post, but not everyone can get it liked forty thousand times on Facebook, and not everyone can get seventy-five thousand blog subscribers. We’ve done these things, but it isn’t because we’re special. It’s because we tried and failed, the same way you learn to ride a bike. We tried again and again, and now we have an idea how to get from point A to point B faster because of it.

  In our ideal world, no idea is rejected, ignored, or forgotten because the audience is too small. In our world, people know how to convince others of the things that really matter. In our world, people know how to communicate despite the fact that society is pushing everyone to interact in person less and less. In our world, all of this comes together naturally.

  In our ideal world, everyone has a chance to get heard.

  So this book isn’t really about the Internet at all; it’s about idea and platform democracy. It’s about the ability to help others with your unique ability, whatever that may be. It’s about solving local and global problems more efficiently, not just for those who have monetary wealth but for those who will have the wealth of community on their side—that is to say, everyone.

  We are convinced that we can do this. We are convinced that someone out there can help you find the solution to the problem you have right now. We believe that by spreading this message, we will help that person have an easier time finding you, and you them. And we believe that when you two get together, amazing things will happen. We hope you do too.

  Why the Impact Equation Matters

  It’s important you know at least a little bit about us. We are businesspeople and media people. On the one hand, we work on projects that make us money, both online and off-line. On the other, we are media makers who use online media channels like Twitter and Google+ and blogs to build our businesses through relationships. Julien was one of the original successful podcasters, and Chris has been a blogger for well over a decade, so we both have always used media production and digital storytelling to grow our busin
ess. This influences what we think.

  The transformation we see in the media landscape is, in a sense, a power grab, and it will belong to those who are the fastest and the sharpest among us. If we’ve made our case properly, you should be among them, and in fact, that’s where we want you to be. We want to help inform you and therefore make it easier for you to reach your people.

  The next set of questions revolve not only around why and how this is important, but also around having a measurable, concrete understanding of how it works and, more importantly, when you’re winning.

  We’re in the Wild West, so this is actually harder than it sounds. We don’t truly know how the West was won, but we do know that lots of the rules from the old world got broken in an attempt to claim new territory. So we’re trying here to break everything down to its essential components and nothing more. Then we take those components and try to quantify them, giving us a sense of when we’re doing better or worse than the other guy. This is also kind of difficult, but that’s okay; we like thinking about hard stuff.

  We want to go deeper than this. We want to give you a set of metrics you can work with, something that you can bring to a team or work with by yourself to gauge how well you are doing on any given project. We want to help you figure out how to improve what you’re doing by seeing what’s come before. We want something you can put into an Excel spreadsheet, maybe, or even a graph.

  The way we see it, any equation that helps us understand how attention and visibility work should be based not in technology but in people. After all, technology changes, but people do not. Consider this example: Imagine you are working on a campaign for your company that involves getting lots of attention to a YouTube video you’ve created and put online. You can measure views, retweets on Twitter, or mentions on Facebook. These are all good things. But we need more than that; we need a way to help understand how the video impacts human beings. This is not measurable by numbers alone. In 2001 David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford came up with the Trust Equation, first published in the book The Trusted Advisor. It quantified abstract, touchy-feely concepts such as “credibility” and “intimacy” to help professionals understand their strengths and weaknesses in their professional relationships.

  We’ve been fans of these guys for a while, so we worked with Charles Green to help quantify the phenomena we work with too. We did this because we felt that we didn’t go far enough in Trust Agents, our last book, to help people understand how to behave on the Web. We gave people an idea of what strategies to use but no way to know when they were working. Had we done so, we would have prevented a lot of campaigns and efforts from falling flat—even our own.

  By touching upon The Trusted Advisor’s concept of an equation in Trust Agents, we edged closer to what we should have done then. Like a half-completed race, we did not go far enough. Now we hope to correct that effort, leaving you with something concrete to help you gauge everything you do.

  By working on each part of the equation, one at a time, you will begin to see what you’re doing right, doing wrong, or not doing at all. You will see where your strengths are and why your ideas are spreading, or why they aren’t spreading as much as you’d like. You’ll understand what it is you need to work on, and you may even be able to prevent your mistakes.

  This last part is the one that’s vital. We’re all for making mistakes, yes, but errors mustn’t happen for their own sake (for the hell of it), but rather for learning’s sake (to grow your understanding). So when you begin to use the equation, you can actually look back at your efforts, your launches, or whatever else and say, “Ah, this is what went wrong.”

  Here Be an Example of Brett Rogers

  We introduced you to Brett Rogers earlier, discussing how he has created a career for himself as an adventurer who travels down rivers alongside other participants. The magic of his career is that he made it himself, out of a passion that he had, and that he did not need the permission of others to do it. He funded his own trips by creating adventures for others. He documented them to continue the process. As crowdfunding businesses like Kickstarter and others continue to reach the marketplace, we will see more of these, but Brett was one of the most unique, and among the first, that we saw.

  But how would Brett rate on the Impact Equation? Let’s use him as an example.

  Contrast: Brett is like many documentary filmmakers who produce videos of their adventures. He makes us think of a few others, like Ray Zahab and Les Stroud. His category, by definition, makes him stand out, and among those in his category, he is the only one we know of who explores rivers. Beyond that, his expedition on the Mississippi led him to take some of the last footage of the Gulf of Mexico before the catastrophic BP oil spill. This further defines him and what he stands for.

  Reach: Brett’s Reach is relatively short by himself. He has been able to air some of his documentaries via the Documentary Channel, which extends it, but recently he’s been building his audience online with a Web series called Old Man River. If he gets permission to communicate with that audience, his Reach will grow.

  Exposure: The problem with filmmakers is that they reach people only very seldom, but the good news is that Brett is in his own films. His recent Web series will help him connect to his audience more regularly, since it is episodic. That should help his Exposure and get him remembered.

  Articulation: Brett is easily defined. His story is unique and easy to retell once you’ve heard it: “an adventurer who travels down rivers without using a single barrel of oil.” You know what it’s about, and you remember it.

  Trust: The style of Brett’s films is raw. They are good quality while still making you feel like you are there. You see him trade jokes with his shipmates and the mistakes they make along the way. The storytelling helps you feel you know him, and reading his biography at BrettOnTheWater.com and seeing his accolades helps you trust him too.

  Echo: This attribute is why we connected with Brett in the first place. His story is relatable and unique, and the emotion that he breathes into it is palpable. You can tell he cares about the rivers he travels in, that he wants to protect them and wants you to know why they matter. You watch what he does and you end up caring too.

  Hey, that was easy. This is how you rate attributes of the Impact Equation. No numbers necessarily, although you can use them if you like, gauging strengths and weaknesses along the way.

  RATING EACH ATTRIBUTE FOR YOURSELF

  Okay, you now know the Impact Attributes and you’re ready to learn about them individually. As you do this, you may discover a lot about yourself, your project, or your company. Good, that’s exactly what you need to be doing. But we’d like to take this moment to show you three possible graphs, each of them rating the same project.

  Anne, Ben, and Charlie are all thinking about their project after reading this book. They’re each wondering how they can improve what they do. Anne is having a hard time figuring out how to get a leg up on the competition. She feels her project is doing terribly, and after drawing her graph, she gets kind of depressed. Ben draws his graph and thinks, I’m doing all right, and Charlie thinks he’s just amazing. He feels like he’s batting a thousand (or close to that, anyway).

  Anne, Ben, and Charlie all work on the same team, but they’re each rating their project differently.

  If you’re Charlie, maybe you should stop patting yourself on the back so much. Start getting more ambitious. Are your sevens really huge successes? Perhaps in your industry they are. But try to set your sights higher. Divide all your ratings in two, perhaps, so you end up with something to look forward to.

  Then we have Anne. Anne feels terrible because she is looking at a huge amount of work ahead of her and insurmountable odds. Those may be perfectly accurate, sure, but Anne also needs to give herself a break. It’s important, when graphing the attributes, to make sure you see the differences between strong and weak areas. If everything is a one or a two, chill out. Don’t hesitate to give yourself credit w
here credit is due.

  The person who’s probably getting it “right” in this example is Ben. Ben is seeing the progress that needs to be made and also the road behind himself that’s been traveled. Ben has given himself room to expand and sees where his successes are. Whether he’s the most objectively accurate isn’t even the point. He sees where he must improve, and he sees what he has done right.

  So if your graphs end up being like Charlie’s or Anne’s, don’t give yourself the corner office or jump off the ledge just yet. Change your frame of reference and whom you’re comparing yourself to, so your needs become clear. And if you still have a lot of work to do, just remember that you have plenty of time and are probably more devoted than most. After all, you bought this book, didn’t you?

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  There’s more to think about here than just the attributes. The attributes themselves are also divided into four sections that will give you a general set of guiding principles to develop the work you do in the right direction. Here they are.

  Goals: When we think about it, it’s kind of amazing how many people operate in the world without a clear and definite goal. The first time we asked entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk about his goals, he said, “Buy the Jets,” before we’d even finished asking the question. There was no pause, no hesitation. Building useful goals and working aggressively toward accomplishing them is a trait we assumed was common, but we’ve found it could use a bit of shoring up for most people. Some people have goals but can’t communicate them by creating ideas. Or they move on from day to day through the usual corridor of decisions without really considering where it will lead them. This is a natural thing for people to do, but it’s not an effective way to achieve something great.