August 5, 2008

"Nobody Cares About You"

NOTE: This post is old, and is probably on different subject matter than my current writing. It is possible the information is outdated or my opinions have changed. -- Josh Klein, May 28, 2012

I tried to put that line into a presentation on “digital innovation” for a late-blooming client (a behemoth of traditional marketing). The account team vetoed it – too many suits in the room, I think.

But I consider “nobody cares about you” to be the most important point of the whole presentation. It’s what marks the difference between the way things used to be and the way things are now.

See, traditional media is built from the bottom up to support business objectives. TV exists to sell ads. For a long time, the only way for Americans to spend their intellectual surplus (as Clay Shirky would say) was to watch sitcoms:

For 50-years Americans were on a sitcom bender, an unparalleled period of post-war prosperity and no idea what the hell to do.

And in our zombie-like state, we sat as the captive audience for companies who wanted to increase “awareness” of their brands. Why increase awareness? So we would be subtly (or perhaps not so subtly) influenced to buy the next time we were at the store.

It didn’t matter if you cared about those companies or not. If you wanted to watch your sitcoms, you better be ready for some hardcore product-on-product action.

Not so with the internet. The internet wasn’t built for businesses, it was built to share information, first for the military and later for academics. Business has grown out of this original purpose, but it wasn’t the intention.

I think of the origins of the web as somewhat of a quasi-socialistic, intellectual, hippy experiment. I know the internet’s origins are in the American military, and the web’s origins are European, but I equate so much of what the modern digital world is to the things that came out of UC Berkeley; from the Free Software Movement to Apple Computers (not to mention everything from BSD to BIND).

The web is not a passive medium. It’s built for engagement.

Why do companies insist on putting up brochureware websites, then wonder why nobody is visiting? Who gave them the right to take up valuable cognitive space without providing anything of value? This brings us back to the line that got axed from my presentation.

“Nobody cares about you.”

They didn’t let me get to the next line. I think it’s too frightening for people to consider that nobody cares about them, so they’re not ready for the good news around the bend.

Everybody cares about “me”

Not “everybody cares about Josh Klein.” I’m a narcissist, but even I don’t believe that.

Rather, everyone cares about themselves. That’s good news because it makes people dreadfully predictable in their desires, and business is all about selling people the things they want.

To be a successful brand in the “new digital age” (I hate saying that as much as you hate hearing it), you need to give people what they want.

You can’t build a website about yourself and expect people to care. Instead, you need to build a website about your customer.

Who is your website about?

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  • http://www.johnmarkengle.com John Mark Engle

    “Who gave them the right to take up valuable cognitive space without providing anything of value?” — Doesn’t everyone have this right? Isn’t that what the web is all about?:) A quick trip to Digg will show you that ;)

    You are correct to attribute the modern digital world to hippies. While they might not have been directly responsible for the creation of the internet, they are responsible for what we might call “personal computing”

    I highly, HIGHLY, recommend “What the Dormouse Said” by John Markoff. It goes into how the 60′s counter culture formed computing today. It’s a fascinating read, and maybe even a must read for any computer nerd.

  • http://www.joshklein.net Josh Klein

    @JM – Thanks, I’ll check out the book. I really enjoyed Pirates of Silicon Valley as an intro in the world of PCs.

    But not as much as I enjoyed Revolution OS … a documentary you can watch by following that link to Google Video. If you have an 1.5 hours to spare, I highly recommend it.

  • http://heehawmarketing.typepad.com Paul McEnany

    I’m with you, man. I actually used the “if your brand disappeared, would anyone care?” sort of thing for awhile, but, of course, that can de-rail things pretty quick. So, I started using an attention graph that basically made the point that people are likely to spend more time tying their shoes than thinking about any single brand. I think it drives home a similar point, and one that’s impossible to refute.

  • http://www.joshklein.net Josh Klein

    @Paul – Thanks, that’s a great point. In the video of Clay Shirky in the post, he mentions a few interesting numbers:

    The Wikipedia project, when you add up the man hours to write every article, every conversation on the talk page, every line of code to build the software, in every language… the WHOLE project… it amounts to about 100 million man hours of work.

    That’s the amount of time spent watching TV commercials every WEEKEND in the U.S. alone.

    The world watches 1 trillion hours of T.V. a year (200 billion hours in the U.S.). This is the activity that masks our “cognitive surplus”.

    As people realize that a life of consumption is less interesting than a life of consumption, production, and sharing … we’ll see a more interesting, participatory internet.

    According to Shirky. Or something like that :)

    I’d love to see that graph of yours.

  • http://heehawmarketing.typepad.com Paul McEnany

    Well, hell, Josh – I think I like those stats better! Alright, I’ll be taking those instead… :)

  • http://www.joshklein.net Josh Klein

    Ha! Credit goes to Clay, not me.

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