Web Strategist Lab

Okay, yadda yadda lots of posts about how blogs are dead for young people blah blah Twitter and Formspring yadda yadda shorter attention span et cetera et cetera crazy kids with their gizmos and widgets and so on and so on and its like a song straight out of Bye Bye Birdie (allow me to take a moment and underline how proud my mother would be that I just referenced Bye Bye Birdie, despite my not being a big musical theater fan. No, that was it. Thanks).

So yeah, blogs are dead… to kids who text. Wha?! You mean kids don’t want to read 800 words on a screen the size of half a post-it note?! You don’t say. These crazy kids and their Twittering, LiveJournaling, blogging, hip hop, punk, rock & roll, bee bop, swing jazz, dixieland, moving pictures… whatever.

Fine. I’ll buy that blogging is a dying medium when you bring me another medium that can allow 800 words published instantly, annotated perpetually, commented upon freely, spread virally, illustrated effusively, and seen publicly that costs less than free. You do that and I’ll start digging blogging’s grave. I’ll use a teaspoon.

Today’s Mashable headline is “Nokia CEO: Why We’re More Relevant Than Ever”

C’mon. If you have to say you’re relevant, you’re not. You can’t press release relevance. It takes a miracle of marketing savvy and guts to “commercial” yourself into relevance (Exception: movie trailers).

Relevance exists in the consumers’ and critics’ minds.

It’s the inverse to the idea: If you have to explain why you’re funny, you’re not.

Ten seconds at this site: http://neversaidaboutrestaurantwebsites.tumblr.com/ will teach marketers more about how people view their marketing than any 2-hour focus group ever could.

Remember: No one cares about your marketing. They just want a problem solved.

The New Law of Development:

A genius idea messily executed will always beat out a bad idea perfectly executed.

Corollary:

It’s far cheaper to invest in good project management than good idea creation, so businesses will always lean towards the latter over the former.

I need a pithy title for this. Maybe I can leverage Seth Godin’s cache here and call it Seth’s law, so long as it can be the Ellis Corollary. Thoughts?

I’m just going to dive in with no preamble, so here goes.

A company’s organization and culture is often a function of it’s size. Here’s what I’ve learned working in companies of various sizes:

1-2 People. Single-Owner or Partnership.
Because one or two people are the only people, they have to do everything. Smart companies figure out how to carve out a little time to outsource the things they aren’t good at (billing, marketing, etc), though most companies wear the “I’m too busy working to think about how to work better” badge like a medal and don’t grow as fasts they want. Usually, this leads to burnout.

3-7 People. Personal Business, Mom and Pop Shops and Hobby Businesses all fit into this group. This is an extension of the previous group in that the owner(s) still do everything, but now they have a little help with the things they hate doing or the things that are most profitable. Owner can take an occasional vacation, but really, they are just a bigger version of the single-owner. Burnout a real issue, as is employee morale: unless you’re a family member, you’re probably an hourly employee and you’ll be lucky to see a raise or benefits.

8-40 People. Small Business.
The company has turned a corner and figured out how to “go pro.” The employees are salaried with benefits or are contractors. The owner will still work had, but now they’ve built a platform on which they can rely more. Will take annual vacations, maybe even hold company picnics and Christmas parties. The company os almost completely flat – the owner has direct knowledge of every price of business going on every day and everyone reports to the owner. The owner has figured out how to delegate tasks, but not necessarily responsibility or control. Owner will ask questions of front line staff, and use that information to challenge their manager. In reality, the owner is often everyones manager, which can create confusion if everyone has an extra boss to please. A successful organization needs to teach the owner that either the owner needs to learn to delegate power, or become a silent partner (think back to every dot-com and how they replaced the initiator with a seasoned CEO. The issue at this size, as you grow isn’t tech savvy or vision, it’s the ability to let go of direct authority with losing control of the company).

40-100 People. Medium Business.
Successful businesses who get to this stage have built a management structure that mostly cordons off management from front-line staff (not in a bad way: this makes sure that owner/CEO can communicate through channels, and maybe gives access, but doesn’t interfere with day to day business (they will instead talk to the department heads and figure out problems and solutions that way). Successful medium companies have found a niche that’s profitable enough for everyone to profit from working there. They are small enough that they only outsource when it makes sense (payroll, specialized marketing, etc) because they can hire quality people internally. owner/CEO has time to pursue other ideas and ventures with much less risk of burnout.

100+ People. Large Business.
My only experience with large companies are as a low-level contract employee or through case studies and magazine articles, neither of which I trust enough to build an opinion here on.

Cool used to be amazing, strange and unattainable. Why was James dean cool? Or Bob Dylan? Were they just mavericks and that makes them cool? Then why isn’t John McCain cool? Or Tom Cruise?

The idea of cool, pretty much invented out of whole cloth in the sixties to reflect the fire that burned inside disaffected youth growing up in England after the war is old.  The first ones found their own path, and that aura migrated across the pond to America in the shape of fashion and music to combine with Andy Warhol and a clear hatred of the grey-flannel suit /organization man crowd. Thus, rock and roll, hippies, punks, slackers and hipsters.

The second companies realized people in that age group desired cool, it was marketers’ job to make everything appear cool.  Airplane travel, sunglasses, books, German cars, comedy variety hours, jeans, the list goes on.

The end is near

Then Gen X got a whiff of it, cried “bullshit” in their day (remember Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything not wanting to making anything processed or sold) and spend their youth avoiding it.  Their younger siblings learned that yes, all that crap sucked, but that nothing they did was going to change the commercialization of cool, so they might as well dance, so to speak.

This world has entered a phase where Toyota is doing a great job trying to sell Cool Minivans (aka swagger wagons) to grown up gen x-ers now that Dennis Hopper has died selling his kin on income planning and investment.

Cool is dead. It went comatose decades ago, but the marketing world kept it on life support for as long as it could because it had just learned how to leverage cool for their own uses. But we’re pulling the plug.

So what comes after cool? Before cool, there was conformity, before that there was loyalty and patriotism, and before that fear, and before that reckless abandon.

My guess? Freedom.

Freedom

This isn’t just about marketing or capturing a hindsight zeitgeist (like I did two paragraphs ago), but about thinking what will the world (more to the point, my world, the internet and capitalistic worlds) will desire.  It’s not about 40-yo dads at Wilco shows because they are terrified about growing old and uncool, but about looking at a broad sweep of anything and choosing what to believe in and what to enjoy.

Patton Oswalt penned an interesting article in Wired about the death of geekery and pop culture otaku nerdery.  He says the wide horizon of anything and everything being available to you at a moment’s notice to dive into deeply is actually destroying pop culture.  That as he was writing the article, someone was already writing the version of the same article in LOL speak and another as if written by the Hulk and another spoken over a Korean cover of a journey song. That was what was going to ruin pop culture.

Yes, maybe, and, no. His argument relies on cool as the primary currency. You can’t be cool outside of the Lost fan group if you know who Jack’s dad is, but you can’t be cool inside the group if you don’t.  Cool is the currency that determines the value of that knowledge. What if the currency devalues? Who cares if you know or don’t know a factoid. You can google (sure, I’ll just lower-case that word) it, right? If anything is available 24/7, there’s no cache is knowing or not. You’ve printed so much money, no one cares how much you have.

Hacking Is the New Cool

Freedom to choose your life is the new goal.  Look at the rise of hacking culture (not the g33ks in black t-shirts, but the people who are teaching us how to be better eaters, exercisers, workers, thinkers, time managers, completers, anything). Look at Tim Ferriss and his two books that challenge you to rethink everything you know about jobs and health.  Both NYT bestsellers. Or Getting Things Done and the cult that has formed around that. The garage tinkerers who love buying Ikea furniture and turning it into other prices of furniture that better fit their lifestyles.

This isn’t self help, who’s primary goal is to make you feel better, but about being better. The hacker has learned that they can lose weight if they stand at their desk in their day job, but can’t afford a $600-$1,000 standing desk, so they learn how to hack their existing desk for less than $50. They learn how to use existing tools to ditch their cable account and still watch Top Chef. They trade credit score secrets.

Hacking is the first step to understanding freedom. You can’t choose a thing if you can’t build, use, or change a thing.  We value the choices we make more if we have to work a little to make them happen.

Freedom to select your love and your job and your lifestyle is the new cool. It’s the kind of trend that will define the post-post-industrial age more than any other.

Proof: name the Internet meme that captured more awareness than the 2010 Iranian protests. Sure, you can, but there are only a handful, and they are all designed around kids. Turning your twitter icon green got people who don’t care about Bed Intruders to care about something that was happening on the other side of the planet.  Choice and freedom is good, getting more people to feel that choice and freedom is even better. Look at the fury over iPod assemblers having a bizarrely high suicide rate.  Look at the coverage over the Sudan, which, for the first time in a decade, is making the front page of the papers.

Cool is dead. Freedom grows up.

I’m still surprised by the number of people I work with, people in positions where strategy is clearly in their job description (if not their job title) who confuse strategy and tactics.

First, you have a goal. A goal should be tangible and measurable. Hitting a sales target is a goal. Being the #1 whatever (based on market share) is a goal. To be the most dominant force in the XYZ industry is a goal. Starbucks goal is to be the dominant coffee seller in the world (with a sales number attached to it, I would expect). Apple’s goal is to be the dominant seller of high-end personal technology products (and a sales number). Notice that neither of those goals has anything to do with anything. There’s no discussion of product lines, branding, corporate structure, etc. It’s the star that the company sails towards.

Strategy is the way in which you are going to attack those strategies in the broadest of strokes. It’s a focus on an audience, market, demographic, or region. It’s a focus on a new line of products that focus on a new audience. There can be multiple strategies, especially if the company is big. Some of Starbucks’ strategies would be: Getting the consumer to spend more outside retail stores or getting each customer to spend more per visit. Some of Apple’s strategies would be: Fill the niche between smartphone and laptop, or become the number one music retailer online.

Tactics are the actions, projects, programs, product families that support the strategy. For Starbucks, if the goal is to have a customer spend more money at each visit, the tactics might involve new non-coffee products.

If it helps, here’s a breakdown in outline form:

1. Goal
   1. Strategy
      1. Tactic
      2. Tactic
   2. Strategy
      1. Tactic

Starbucks

1. Goal: Become the world largest coffee seller (and sales target)
   1. Strategy: Get the customer to spend money on Starbucks outside of the retail outlet.
      1. Tactic: VIA instant coffee
      2. Tactic: Sell bulk coffee at more retail outlets (grocery stores, et al)
   2. Get each customer to spend more per visit
      1. Tactic: Introduce new egg sandwiches
      2. Tactic: New flavors of coffee
      3. Tactic: More types of mugs and coffee makers

Apple

1. Goal: Become the largest seller of high-end personal technology products
   1. Strategy: Focus on the niche between iPhone and laptop
      1. Tactic: Apple Air
      2. Tactic: iPad
   2. Strategy: become the largest seller of music online
      1. Tactic: Get the Beatles’ catalog on iTunes
      2. Introduce Ping

If you look at these lists, any of these tactics could become a series of projects, each with their own goals, strategies and tactics. Also, these strategies can support other strategies. For example: To support the strategy of becoming the largest online music distributer, the tactic is to get the Beatles. But what you may not know is that Apple doesn’t make much money on selling songs. They sell songs because having access to the world’s largest library of legal music means that more people will choose iPods over Zunes (which is a tactic inside a strategy that’s probably called something like “focus on non-computer products” which is in itself a tactic of a strategy called “How to get people who won’t buy Apple computers because they are too expensive to get a taste of Apple technology”).

In a nutshell, as a rule of thumb, on the back of a napkin, at the end of the day, I would just say that strategies are obvious (meaning, that anyone outside the company can see them and that they don’t surprise anyone) but tactics are where the surprise is. Anyone could have seen a niche between phones and laptops (strategy), but the surprise was a product called iPad.

Huh. So this is what happens when you treat every business like every other business (as a money machine who’s only need is growth at any cost)  and not as an idea unto itself.

From The New Republic, “Why can’t Americans make things? Two words: business school.”

A focus on financial instead of manufacturing leads to the commoditization of business itself. A well-run and well-managed company that has a crappy product and horrible service will succeed where a badly-run business selling a kill product will thrive. For example: XEROX, IBM, Digital, and every other company the Tom Peters/Jim Collins crowd talks about as being well-run vs Microsoft and the entire music industry who made money hand over fist despite having horrible management and seeming not to be able tot do anything right for years.

Just because you can take financial management models and replace the money with people doesn’t mean that’s a smart way to run a business.

From a VP of some sort:

“We’ll do that based on our  five strategic directions.”

Someone should let this VP know that moving in five directions at once is the same as going nowhere.

Yeah, I know. It’s “semantics” but I am perpetually amazed by the looseness and vagueness of language at some places. And frankly, if being clear isn’t important to the VP, it won’t be important to their employees, who will make it very unclear for their customers.

This is the same place from whence “I don’t think there’s a difference between strategy and tactics” came.

Do you know what it costs to start a national magaizne these days? Multiple million at the very least, depending on whether or not Tina Brown or Jann Wenner is on the board.  Where does that money go? Not to writers or designers (they account a tiny fraction of the cost). Maybe a little to the sales team (gotta get all that ad revenue), but that stuff can’t account for half the cost of a magazine.

I bring this up because I’m getting sick of Fast Company. Not the web site, but the magazine. What once was a glorious beacon to those work 2.0′ers who understood the weight of Tom Peter’s “The Work Matters” manifesto, one that discussed new models in working, new ideas in getting things done, and trying to cross-pollenate ideas from one industry to the other is now In Style for the laptop-and-business-class set.

Recent covers: McGee, director of Terminator. Sure, he’s got an interesting history but… shouldn’t that be on movie magazine? Skater/surfer kid Shawn White? The current issue some cleavage-bearing woman with hair bigger than Montana. Skin on the cover of Fast Company? This is the same magazine (technically) who’s August 1997 cover was simply “Brand You,” a model just getting traction (And note that the magazine really fell down hard when it stopped putting just typography on the cover and started finding pretty people for the cover… Ning anyone?).

Ask any pro in the publication world and you’ll hear the same thing over and over again: in order to cover the sunk costs of starting up and the hard costs of printing and delivering a magazine, a magazine must sell X number of copies to justify the real engine: subscribers. A magazine doesn’t make money because you buy it, it makes money because it call sell your eyeballs to someone else.

Thus, magazines are a numbers game. If you can’t keep your circulation above certain point, it almost makes more sense to mail all the subscribers a booklet of ads.

But why buy a magaine? Is it for the ads? (Maybe it is for Vogue, but not why I used to buy Wired, Spin, Business Week, Fast Company, The Industry Standard or the Red Herring.) No.

It’s the content, stupid.

You build a customer base by having good ideas, well written and well-presented. That creates fans, increases the circulation base to justify ads. (I swear, the ad model makes as much sense as owning a grocery store not to sell produce put to collect coupons.)

But everyone seems hell-bent on skipping steps 1-5 that they make nothing but crap magazines.

So here’s the solution.

Web-based magazine (duh!).  But it’s more than that. It’s turning the model around.  Instead of building a print magazine that makes money and you build a seperate website to remind people how much they love the printed magazine, make the web site first.  Create great content. Open submissions to anyone. The crowd picks the best articles (and helps copy-edit it), adds great comments and you pick the best stuff (and the comments), package it up with ads (yes, you have to re-write the ad contract to say you are buying web ads, and that the paper ads come free) and ship it to newstands and people who are willing to buy a paper-based subscription.

How does that work? Well, everyone gets the content for free (plus ads). But in the process, everyone helps build the magazine. Crowd sourcing determines the best ideas (you know, the ones that would sell best on a newstand). You only pay for stories that make it to press. Ad buyers will pay a higher web rate knowing that their ads are also in the print peice. 

The best part is this: if you want it on the newstand or a subscription, each issue is $30. An annual subscription is $200. No one would buy it?  Wait. Who buys magazines on a newstand? People in airports waiting to fly business-class. People who can afford it. People who don’t have time to read a whole community site. People who buy subscriptions to summerized business books. Execs who have more money than time. If it’s an amazing magazine that’s built a reputation for bringing new ideas to light first in a well-managed forum (and that’s exactly what the website would be), they’ll pay for it.

The best part? Costs are like nothing. Server space and a couple of drupal managers and a team of copy-editors and designers with an editorial lead. You pay per word relative to the sales, so if no one buys the first few issues, you don’t pay the writers much. But if sales go crazy, writers get paid big bucks, thus drawing more people and ideas out of the woodwork. Print costs are unit-based just like writing, and you can even say that the first year the magazine will be web-only just to get things going.

It’s already been said: Journalism isn’t dead, newspaper are. The model must change.