Part 4: Just get it up! Building enginets doesn’t have to be expensive if you understand the process.
SHAHAR: I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book Wikionomics?
JIM: Yeah sure.
SHAHAR: One of the things he says there is that if you’re not willing to change the way that you do business in the next two years, you’re probably going to be out of business. You mentioned Google, for example, and how it’s revolutionizing advertising and it’s changing even the way PR is being done today right?
JIM: Yes it is. But I would say the games not over—not even by a long shot. So many people say “Oh God it’s over, it’s done. The technological ceiling and the social behavior ceiling hasn’t even come close to capping—we’re not even close to it. We have a decade or two at least of that.
One of the other things I should say, the amount of money that was spent by most of the top web engines that have reached up there, the Facebooks and the MySpaces, any small to medium sized business could afford to spend the same amount of time and money that those guys did on their first version of their engine. Any one of them, they didn’t spend any big money. Even the guys like Pierre Omidyar, you know, the main guy who coded the first Ebay. If you added up all the hours he spent in just the first engine, I mean maybe tens of thousands if he was charging full load, but it’s just not a lot of money if you know what you’re doing. That’s the difference. Because if you’re stabbing in the dark and you’re relying on charlatans, then you’re going to spend a lot of money and get something that’s sub-par from what your goals are.
Now, you can find a lot of people to build a really clean, really simple, really good website. But building a web engine with a chance to catch fire and resonate with the kind of people that you want to attract to your business? That’s a different animal.
SHAHAR: I think as long as I start thinking about, as you said, the producer who’s going to be using them, and how I’m going to give some of the control to them.
JIM: That’s exactly right Shahar, that’s exactly right. If you actually just start there and you force yourself to go through the process before you actually build anything on the web, or redesign your web presence. If you just go through the experiment in your head and say “how can I turn a person into a producer or director on my site, what can I do?” Go through all the possible things that you can think of, and exhaust that list. Then do that for “how can I turn them into a distributor for themselves or for me?” And what does that mean? Am I distributing bits or atoms? Or what am I allowing them to do right? But just ask the question and answer it, just exhaustively go through that for each one of those things and then, you know, you don’t have to build all that out of the gate, just pick some of the stuff that you come up with, because there’s going to be some cool stuff that you come up with, I guarantee you’ll come up with, especially in the context and idiosyncrasies of your own business. Does that make sense?
SHAHAR: Yeah, and I think it’s so exciting Jim because it teaches the business owner to stop looking at himself, his needs and what he thinks is right and start thinking to the others and seeing how they can be a part of it. And I would say a lot of boomers are just not used to that. And I would say that’s an amazing exercise. I need to understand how my clients perceive everything I do and how I perceive what’s out there.
JIM: Well I would agree with you too, with your earlier comment that if you don’t do that you’re going out of business. You know, I don’t whether not being online matters or not, but if are going to be online and you *don’t* engage users as more than just consumers, then I do think you do have a pretty good chance of going out of business. If you don’t switch your mindset around that very paradigm shift. Because the “cat’s out of the bag” so if you don’t start to think about how users are going to talk about you, or how they’re going to market you or how you can turn them into other things besides just consumers, I think you’re right.
SHAHAR: Now as a business we’re talking about engagement, but I’m always looking for more exposure, how do you sit on exposure versus engagement? How can I deal with those two things online so that I use my time to create more exposure for my business?
JIM: Well some of it relates directly to the individual climbing up the value chain and taking on other roles. Because one could argue that when someone’s watching a movie or reading a print article that they’re “engaged” but I think that everybody would probably agree that the difference between watching a movie and playing a multi-player online game or a sport or being involved in an auction on Ebay is a different kind of thing. So the question is “why is it different psychologically?”
In T.V. there have been always three measures of audience “engagement” and those have been “reach”, “frequency” and “depth.” Reach is how many people come. Frequency is how often they come. And Depth is how long do they stay. And a problem in linear media like television is audiences can only come once a week and they can only stay for 1/2 an hour or an hour and that’s that. So the television industry has always been focused on reach. How many people can I get in? And retail is an even better example. Retail’s primary measure is how much do I sell per square footage of store space… that sort of thing. But online, this idea of reach, frequency and depth—every one of those takes on a life of its own. So in television I could never make a business out of 10,000 people, but online I could—that 10,000 people come, for example, but they’re coming 100 times a month. So imagine the multi-player online game. They’re making a really, really good business out of less than 100,000 people. Now T.V. could never do that… traditionally (though that is changing as television becomes more targeted and efficient… more networked). Film could never do that. So the idea that you have these multi-dimensional opportunities, it’s not just about exposing as many people as I can to a message. It’s about exposing them to a message and then having feedback which then allows them to engage with that message or a brand more frequently and longer per engagement. And there’s a lot of talk out there right now. We have the wrong language, the wrong measures and the advertising industry is actually talking about it right now. How do you actually even measure engagement? I understand that we’re not just talking about rating points, which is the number of people that actually come to see something, or come to a movie theater or so forth. Now we’re talking about this thing when someone is on Ebay, how do you measure the value of that? Or on Facebook and they spend an hour cruising around there, how do you measure that? Value that? So the metrics aren’t really there, but the behavior has changed and now the industries are struggling to catch up. How do we place a value on that? Especially ad industries, they’re having trouble with that. They’re so stuck in the metrics of you know, like CPM and CPC (Cost per Click) and Cost per Action. So they don’t really have those metrics even though they covet the kind of relationship that the Facebooks and MySpaces and YouTubes have with their user. Does that make sense? Is that a little off point or—?
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