As a case study in how social media can revolutionize business and create whole new careers, there are few better examples than Gary Vaynerchuk. A wine merchant by trade, he became a new-media icon after starting a daily [...]]]>

Crush It! Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, by Gary Vaynerchuk, HarperStudio, 2009.

As a case study in how social media can revolutionize business and create whole new careers, there are few better examples than Gary Vaynerchuk. A wine merchant by trade, he became a new-media icon after starting a daily video series to talk about wine. His new book, Crush It!, argues that virtually anyone can replicate his success, given the right mixture of passion and hard work.

Superficially, at least, Crush It! is a fairly standard business book of inspirational encouragement and practical advice. Like The 4-Hour Workweek, which it somewhat resembles, Crush It! draws from the author’s life and business experiences for much of its content. At 160 not-very-dense pages, the book is a quick read and may feel a bit disappointing at first. But for me, at least, it repays second and third readings.

Although Gary Vee, as he’s known to his fans, makes efforts to direct at least some of the advice in his book to established businesses, his real target lies elsewhere. He is speaking for the most part to early-stage and wannabe entrepreneurs, to disaffected or unemployed workers, and to other individuals who may be contemplating striking out on their own.

His premise is that the Internet “represents the biggest shift in history in how we do business.” Online social networking applications, he argues, have given individuals the tools they need to go into business for themselves and live their passion. Even if you like your job, he says, “you should aim to leave it and grow your own brand and business or partner with someone to do so, because as long as you’re working for someone else you will never be living entirely true to yourself and your passion.”

Underlying his argument are what might be called Gary Vee’s three Ps: passion, personal branding, and patience. All three are essential elements in his vision of new-media business success.

Passion.  Even if you have only a passing acquaintance with Vaynerchuk, you probably associate him with the word passion.  In his view, passion “is the whole key to staking your claim in the new business world we live in today.” Before the rise of social media, a lack of business experience and training would have been steep hurdles to success; now, he says,

“Don’t worry; skills are cheap, passion is priceless. If you’re passionate about your content and you know it and do it better than anyone else, even with few formal business skills you have the potential to create a million-dollar business.”

Though living your passion may lead to considerable wealth, that’s not the point for Vaynerchuk. Crush It! is not about making loads of money. Rather, he says, “It’s about ensuring your own happiness by enabling you to live every day passionately and productively. “

Personal branding. Vaynerchuk takes as an unspoken given The Cluetrain Manifesto’s thesis that markets are a conversation. He offers his own version of this in Crush It!: “Social media = business. Period.” Thus, he argues, in the social media world, “everyone—EVERYONE—needs to start thinking of themselves as a brand. It is no longer an option; it is a necessity.”

Living your passion may be its own reward, but it can only lead to an income through personal branding: “Developing your personal brand is key to monetizing your passion online.” In today’s world, he says, “your business and your personal brand need to be one and the same, whether you’re selling organic fish food or financial advice or just your opinion.”

Patience. Throughout his book, Vaynerchuk takes pains to temper his enthusiasm for the potential of new media with stiff doses of reality. It’s almost as if he fears his readers, perhaps like you as you read this review, will start to suspect that his vision of business is excessively rosy—or worse, that he’s just another purveyor of get-rich-quick nostrums.

To begin with, he says, don’t expect success without a lot of hard work, perhaps more than you’ve ever done before. And, moreover, don’t expect too much too soon: “As hard as you’re going to push yourself, don’t plan on seeing results right away.”

Accordingly, he warns his reader that “if you contact me within a year of starting your business to complain that you haven’t made the money you thought you would, you’re not listening.” In some cases, he even argues that purposely delaying making money can be wise:  “The longer you hold out to monetize your blog, the better.”

A few words for journalists. Although he writes about the opportunities for a wide range of industries and disciplines, GV dwells at length on the situation of journalists. Just because old-media platforms are crumbling doesn’t mean journalism is history, he says: “Everyone who is screaming that journalism is dead because newspapers and magazines are folding is insane. The old platforms are in trouble, but that’s the best thing that could happen to journalists…the good ones, anyway.”

In his mind, the opportunities for journalists are decidedly not to be found in the traditional roles of freelancer or paid staffer:

“Their opportunity is not as a work-for-hire, where they scramble to earn a few bucks here, a few bucks there writing pieces for various online publications, nor as a staff writer earning pennies while the company keeps a disproportionate amount of the ad revenue brought in on the backs of poorly paid talent.”

As alternatives, GV sketches out several scenarios for how journalists could start up their own businesses, earn at least as much as in those more traditional roles, and have a far greater share of equity and control.

You’ve bought the message. Now buy the book? Crush It! is an example of the new-media mantra that people should have content when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it. There’s little if anything in this book that you can’t find in Vaynerchuk’s various videos, recorded presentations, or blog postings. You could, for example, read my earlier post on Vaynerchuk’s lessons, watch the linked videos, and get the gist of Gary Vee for free. But if you appreciate the unique advantages and convenience of the book form, Crush It! may be right for you.

The latest dose for me comes from Farhad Manjoo’s True [...]]]> True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo. Wiley, 2009

The Internet is cool, and it is easy to mistake coolness for goodness. So for every few new-media optimists I read, I like to pause for a quick a dose of counterbalancing pessimism.

The latest dose for me comes from Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. Manjoo is the technology columnist for Slate magazine and, I infer, an Internet enthusiast. His book, however, is not as much about the new media per se as it is about the interaction of new media with the psychology of belief.

Manjoo acknowledges that the fragmentation of media is good, in so far as it allows a diversity of views to be aired. But, he argues, it is bad in that it allows people to choose to hear only those viewpoints that reinforce their own beliefs. Instead of reaching out for truth, society is willing to settle for truthiness. (For those who are unfamiliar with the word truthiness, here is Manjoo’s definition, paraphrasing that of the word’s progenitor, Stephen Colbert: “the quality of a thing feeling true without any evidence suggesting it actually was.”)

To illustrate the rise of truthiness, Manjoo walks us through a variety of examples from the political spectrum: the Swift Boat Veterans, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, amateur analysts convinced that the 2004 presidential election was stolen, Lou Dobbs and his abandonment of objectivity, and PR video clips passed off as straight TV news.

A common thread in all these examples is Manjoo’s belief that the decline of traditional mass media has enabled all of these deceptions to achieve much greater public exposure than would have been the case two decades ago. As he says,

“. . . the Swift Boat campaign points to a critical danger of what you might call the modern infosphere. People who skillfully manipulate today’s fragmented media landscape can dissemble, distort, exaggerate, fake–essentially, they can lie–to more people, more effectively, than ever before.”

The decline of mass media, Manjoo says, means we have lost our “real gatekeepers and authority figures” that controlled the flow of news to us. He compares the network news anchors of old to  “particularly attentive and imposing hosts of a national dinner party,” who “guided their guests, the American people, to whichever topics they considered worthy of our attention.”

In the election of 2004, one of those traditional mass-media hosts, Dan Rather, was embarrassed by bloggers who were able to show that Rather relied on a false document in a report critical of George W. Bush. This episode is often celebrated as an example of the value of blogs in actually uncovering the truth. But for Manjoo, it’s a rare exception, “sui generis”, that simply proves his point:

“It’s easy to catch a news anchor’s phony memo, but all the bloggers in the world cannot prove to the satisfaction of a dyed-in-the-wool Fox viewer that Fox is wrong about global warming. . . . Whatever competition it faces, Fox and its audience can live safely in the comfort of the lie . . . .”

Manjoo does not really propose any way to reverse or mitigate the trend toward truthiness. As his subtitle suggests, the best we can do as a society  is learn to live with it.

For the most part, Manjoo looks at these issues from the point of view of content consumers.  How should we, as content producers, regard them? Knowing that, as Manjoo demonstrates, readers tend to go to niche products for confirmation of their views, what is the right role for B2B? Do you simply reflect and reinforce the predominant attitudes of your audience, or, depending on the facts you find, challenge them?

B2B producers have always had to struggle with the temptation to pander. True Enough suggests that this temptation will only get more intense. For producers, the dark side of new media is that truthiness sells. Can you learn to live with that?

In the previous three parts of this review of What Would Google Do?, I’ve looked at how Jarvis’s ideas apply to B2B in terms of its relation to readers, the impact of hyperlinks, and the shift from product journalism to process journalism. [...]]]> Turning Cash Cows into Mini-Moos

What Would Google Do? By Jeff Jarvis. HarperBusiness, 2009.

In the previous three parts of this review of What Would Google Do?, I’ve looked at how Jarvis’s ideas apply to B2B in terms of its relation to readers, the impact of hyperlinks, and the shift from product journalism to process journalism. The last subject I’ll address is in some ways the most obvious and dramatic: the impact of these areas on the way we do business.

To begin with the most obvious point, as succinctly phrased by Jarvis, “print sucks.” He’s talking here not about the usability of print—give me a hardback over my Kindle in terms of sheer reading ease and pleasure—but about the burden it places on a print-based publisher. “It’s expensive to produce content for print, expensive to manufacture, and expensive to deliver. Print limits your space and your ability to give readers all they want. It restricts your timing and ability to keep readers up-to-the-minute. Print is already stale when its fresh.” And so on. Sure, there will always be a role for print—but it will a very small role indeed. So to the extent that you’re still in print, you need to think carefully about whether you should be.

The big mental road block to dumping print, of course, is cash flow. Jarvis calls this the Cash Cow in the Coal Mine problem. The challenge for traditional print companies, he says, is to be able to change early enough—a challenge because to do so means giving up or threatening an existing, if doomed, source of revenue. “Beware any strategy built on protection from cannibalization,” he says, “for it probably means the cannibals are at your door and ready to eat you for lunch.”

Jarvis doesn’t hold out much hope for old-media companies, which he suggests are mostly incapable of the bold moves and innovation necessary to survive. “Bureaucracy, task forces, org charts, and formal processes do not breed innovation. They kill it.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve been there, and he’s right.

What does this mean for the future of B2B media? The old cash cows will be replaced by networks of mini-moos. In other words, there will be a lot more fragmentation, and much smaller enterprises. As Jarvis puts it, “small is the new big.” Any of us, he says, “can start a highly specialized and targeted media company using blog software and paying for it with Google ads.” But, he adds, small can only succeed as part of a network—that is, as part of something big. For these small entities to make it, they will have to collaborate with other such entities, through ad networks, blog networks, and so forth.

As noted in part 1 of this review, my goal here has been to highlight four key issues for B2B publishers raised by WWGD. There’s much more of vital interest to media companies in the book. If the trends in publishing today have you uncertain how to proceed, you won’t find a better guide than What Would Google Do?

Scenes from an editor’s desk, circa 1989:

Copy arrives in the mail. You do a first read-through, do some fact checking, call the writer for clarifications, edit, and send it off to the type setter.

Galleys come back from type. You read [...]]]> How the Shift to Process Journalism Affects Ethics

What Would Google Do? By Jeff Jarvis. HarperBusiness, 2009.

Scenes from an editor’s desk, circa 1989:

Copy arrives in the mail. You do a first read-through, do some fact checking, call the writer for clarifications, edit, and send it off to the type setter.

Galleys come back from type. You read through quickly for major errors and send it off to proofreading.

Galleys come back from proofreaders with changes. You send marked galleys back to type setter for corrections.

Corrected galleys come back. You check the changes. If copy is clean enough, you send it to production for layout; if not, it goes back to type for another round.

Boards with layouts come from production. You check them over and send to proofreading for a final read.

Corrections to boards come from proofreaders. You type up a list of line changes and send to type setting.

Line changes come back from type; if correct, you send to production for line stripping; if not, you send back to type.

You get the line-stripped boards back from production, review them, and sign them off for printing. You’re done (except for the blueline, but enough of all this. . .).

In WWGD?,  Jarvis makes a key distinction between old-style “product journalism” and the new “process journalism.” Now, reading the above description of old-style journalism (or “editing,” if you prefer), you might think, “Hey, processes don’t get much more complicated than that.” True, there was a long and involved process, but it was all behind the scenes–the product never emerged until it was fully vetted and, as much as possible, free of mistakes. Copy was read and processed by a multitude of people, over the course of several weeks. The time lag was a month and a half from writing to arrival of the article in the subscriber’s mail, but since you were the only source of the information, it didn’t really matter.

So much for the last century. For a blogger today, none of these steps exist–you write the copy and you publish it. But as Jarvis argues, this doesn’t mean that all those iterative steps have disappeared–they’ve just been transferred from behind the scenes to the Web. “Today, on the Internet,” he says, “the process has become the product.”

Traditional (“old school”) journalists and editors have major problems with this development. To many, it seems like an unquestionable assault on the journalistic ethos. But Jarvis argues that, ethically, we gain as much as we lose in this transformation. By opening up the process to participation by readers, we regain the continual improvement of the old process, with as many or more hands involved than before. Will we make mistakes? Sure. But Jarvis tells us not to focus on avoiding mistakes, but on making them well–that is, expect to make mistakes, admit them readily, and fix them swiftly. Does this make you look untrustworthy as an information source? Not at all, says Jarvis:

“Corrections do not diminish credibility. Corrections enhance credibility. Standing up and admitting your mistakes makes you more believable; it gives your audience faith that you will right your future wrongs.”

The point really is that even in the old system, we made plenty of mistakes, but we were loath to admit them, precisely because we had invested so much time and energy in trying to avoid them. The end product in both the old and new system may be pretty much the same, but Jarvis argues that the transparency of the process in the new approach gets us all closer to the truth, and more quickly.

Wouldn’t it be better if we could make mistakes well, but still take the time and resources to minimize or eliminate the number we make? Sure. But the days when we could do that are gone forever, like it or not.

Next: Part 4, Turning Cash Cows into Mini-Moos.

When Jarvis writes in an early chapter of WWGD, “the link changes every business and institution,” it may sound a bit portentous.  But he has it exactly right.

The first time I encountered a hyperlinked Web page, back in the early 1990’s, I thought [...]]]> The Transformative Power of Links

What Would Google Do? By Jeff Jarvis. HarperBusiness, 2009.

When Jarvis writes in an early chapter of WWGD, “the link changes every business and institution,” it may sound a bit portentous.  But he has it exactly right.

The first time I encountered a hyperlinked Web page, back in the early 1990’s, I thought it was just a lame version of Gopher–a now largely forgotten way of finding various documents around the Internet. What I didn’t get at first was that the innovation was not in the links themselves, but the enormously powerful relationship of those links to the document in which they are embedded. The link, the ability to take readers directly to other sources of information, has revolutionized publishing and journalism. No longer is a document by necessity a hermetically sealed, constraining vessel. And no longer do you need to provide all the background details and related information yourself. Links are liberating for journalists and publishers alike.

Unfortunately, too few people in B2B seem to realize this yet in their practice. The desire to control the reader’s experience, to keep them on our site, has kept us from fully exploiting the power of links. Hence Jarvis’s admonition to “do what you do best and link to the rest.” If a publication is to stand out, he says, “it needs to create stories with unique value.” To do that, it must concentrate its resources where they matter most, and “send readers to others for the rest.”

As Jarvis sees it, one inevitable consequence of links is specialization. Mass media must give way to niche media. Pre-Internet, with a captive audience, you could realistically aim to be everything for everyone. Now, though, publishers will have to focus on a few areas they cover extremely well, and leave the rest to others.

Here, we in B2B have a leg up. Coming from a background in mass-media, consumer journalism, Jarvis sees this as a wrenching transition for journalists and publishers. But for B2B people, most of whom thrive on the niche, the change will seem perfectly natural. This doesn’t mean, though, that the transition is complete. If your niche in print has been covering an entire industry, for instance, maybe in the future you will only cover regulation or manufacturing.  Just because you’re already in a niche doesn’t mean your niche shouldn’t and won’t get smaller.

The process of media fragmentation also means that brands become commoditized, Jarvis says. People find everything through Google, enter our sites through back doors, and don’t remember where they found things. Jarvis suggests four strategies for dealing with this situation:

1. Play to Google and take its money
2. Join networks of niche web sites
3. Get people to link to you because you’re so good
4. Develop a deep relationship with your constituents so they come back to you directly.

Jarvis’s final words on this subject sum it up nicely: “Serve the niche well rather than the mass badly.”

Next: Part 3, How the Shift to Process Journalism Affects Ethics

The world of business-to-business publishing is falling to pieces. Ad pages and revenue are plummeting, staffs are being decimated, and magazines are being shut down or cut back at a dramatic pace. And no, it’s not just the recession, which has [...]]]> A Review of What Would Google Do?

What Would Google Do? By Jeff Jarvis. HarperBusiness, 2009.

The world of business-to-business publishing is falling to pieces. Ad pages and revenue are plummeting, staffs are being decimated, and magazines are being shut down or cut back at a dramatic pace. And no, it’s not just the recession, which has merely accelerated a long-term and irreversible trend. So the question for B2B professionals is, What are we to do?

Jeff Jarvis suggests that’s not quite the right way to phrase the question. Rather, we should ask, What would Google do?

Why Google? Because, Jarvis says, there is simply no better example to help us understand “how to survive and prosper in the Internet age.”

I confess to having a love-hate relationship with What Would Google Do? as a title. It’s cutesy, simplistic, and misleading. Having taken it as his title, Jarvis has to partially disown it in his preface, warning his reader “not to get hung up on trying to be Google, on mimicking what Google does.” As he goes on to say, this “isn’t a book about Google. It’s about you. It is about your world, how it is changing for you, and what you can gain from that.”

On the other hand, the title just works. We all know Google, and no matter what our line of business, we all suspect we have a lot to learn from the company. And indeed, Jarvis applies the lessons of Google very broadly, across a wide variety of industries and professions. This review, however, will address only the lessons most applicable to B2B publishing. That’s made relatively easy, I should note, by the fact of Jarvis’s background as a reporter, editor, publisher, and blogger.

Perhaps it’s just my bias, but I actually think the book is most persuasive and valuable in relation to the world of media—print in particular. Although Jarvis’s experience is entirely on the mass-market, consumer side of publishing—I’ve found little evidence that the trade press is much on his mind—there are plenty of relevant insights for B2B people in his book.  So in this review, I’ll cover what I think are the four most important lessons for B2B in WWGD:

1. Put the reader in charge
2. Open up your business to links
3. Accept the new ethos of journalism as a process
4. Get small and act big

I’ll address the first lesson here, and leave the remainder for subsequent posts.

Put the Reader in Charge

The B2B worldview always oscillates between two poles: readers and advertisers. Needless to say, the result is an ongoing tension over whom to serve. For most B2B publishers, the advertising pole has the stronger attraction. Readers are carefully selected, sorted into demographic piles, and delivered to the advertisers. Publishers need to be in control of the reader—they don’t call it “controlled circulation” for nothing.

So for B2B professionals, Jarvis’s first and most important observation—what he calls his “first law”—represents the toughest switch in the B2B worldview: “Give people control and we will use it. Don’t, and you will lose us.”

Pre-Internet, readers willingly gave up control to publishers. Information was scarce, and publishers played a key role in finding the information, sorting it, and distributing it. But the Internet has changed everything. Information is now largely a commodity, and advertisers and readers don’t need publishers anymore to reach each other. So the role of publishers now isn’t to control information, but to offer ways to help people use, understand, and contextualize that information.

Accordingly, publishers now, Jarvis says, need to “think distributed.” People now want and expect content (whether music, video, or print) when, where, and how they want it. Publishers have to abandon the idea that readers must come to their websites, or that readers have to wait for the print version before they can read the online version. “Don’t make readers come to you,” Jarvis urges. And don’t fight having your content aggregated (as AP is currently doing against Google). Rather, you should “beg to be aggregated.”

Giving up control of the reader may be a challenge, but there is a big payoff in doing so, Jarvis says. Quoting David Weinberger, he points out that there is “an inverse relationship between trust and control.” To give up control to readers, you have to trust them. And likewise, we can’t gain their trust unless we give them control. “Too many companies,” he says, “have been built not on trusting people but on making rules and prohibitions, telling customers what they cannot do, and penalizing them for doing wrong.” The most blatant example of this comes from the entertainment industry, which has spent incalculable energy on digital rights management to control how the user listens to music or watches video. But, in a subtler way, it applies just as well to B2B companies, who have, in their passive-aggressive way, told readers that print is good for them and online is not, or that they can have their information if they check box A but not if they check box Z. This is changing, of course, but too late for many.

Next: Part 2, The Transformative Power of Links