Forget the 30,000’ view of the marketplace, I am going into space for some cosmic observations. I invite you to debate a few of these ideas – one person’s perspective is never enough to really get a complete sense of things!
What is Brain Crack?
As far as I know Ze Frank coined this term on one of his daily videos from 2006 when he discussed the notion that having a bunch of brilliant ideas was nothing really, if you don’t act on them. It strikes point blank to the fear some of us have about their ideas being great but “would never succeed out there” etc. He is motivating us to get off our brains and do something. Otherwise, shut up. “Brain Crack” is such an awesome, clear description of that high we get from wondering what if – often followed by the post-drug crash and depression when we see someone else executing one of our brilliant ideas. He he, been there done that.Watch the original Brain Crack episode from Ze Frank here.
I do not intend to discourage brainstorming and imagining though – it in itself has tremendous rewards, and often, the ideas in the mind are all that was necessary to have the glorious experience of the idea – the high if you will – and there is no need to execute. Your mind can indeed get the emotions flowing and a somewhat palpable experience of the concept. Plus, execution takes time and effort and sometimes other people too. This is all my way of saying don’t let anyone make you feel pressured. Instead, use the ubiquitous information and inspiration to find your own voice, have your own daydreams, and execute when you feel the irresistible pull.
I’d rather focus on what we do with the execution, more than what we do with ideas.
Twitter is an Innovator, But Not a Leader
So back to my question at the beginning of this post. To me, there is tremendous innovation taking place online in the past decade. But very little leadership. Twitter recently announced they will be selling ads in the content stream and they will be demanding a cut in ads sold by others in the Twitter stream. I was so disappointed, but not surprised.Three years ago, when Twitter was a tight knit community of tech and communications early adopters, we literally begged them to charge for the service. We saw the intrinsic value of this real-time, widely distributed conversation and we wanted them to grow into a stable, successful business. As late as November, 2008, Guy Kawasaki ran a poll and over half still said they would be willing to pay – despite the usual snark attack common by internet communities.
Instead, they kept it free, getting more and more investment to cover server and development costs. Twitter has experienced crashes and growth issues throughout its entire history (including today – hence I was inspired to write this post.)
- If Twitter were truly a leader and not just an innovator, it would have seen that “free plus ads” is a very old and not too successful business model.
- If Twitter were truly a leader and not just an innovator, it would have seen that even a nominal fee would all but eliminate the huge waves of spam and bot attacks that cost it money to constantly track, clear out, manage and that irritate its users so much.
- If Twitter were truly a leader and not just an innovator, it would have realized that big numbers hold less and less true value and that the quality of the members, the quality of the conversations, and the quality of innovations being developed by the user community are far more valuable than a whole lot of bots.
- If Twitter investors were leaders, they too would have realized the unique opportunity that Twitter offered in the marketplace. It was truly a game changer – there was nothing like it even remotely. The impact it has had on the world is awe-inspiring to me. But it seems all they can think these days is “build your user base, sell ads around the content, hope Google buys you for an insane amount.”
Leadership is More Risky than Innovation
But it really is the secret sauce if you are looking for lasting change. Tom Friedman addressed this in his NYTimes editorial today:Although there are many “innovation” initiatives ongoing in this administration, they are not well coordinated or a top priority or championed by knowledgeable leadership. This administration is heavily staffed by academics, lawyers and political types. There is no senior person who has run a large company or built and sold globally a new innovative product. And that partly explains why this administration has been mostly interested in pushing taxes, social spending and regulation — not pushing trade expansion, competitiveness and new company formation.
You see, leadership is the truly hard part in today’s marketplace. Ideas are coming at us a mile a minute, yet finding the time and the courage to actually go out and do things differently is a rare find. 37 Signals has been a leader in this regard, both innovating and leading by being willing to charge for their web apps from inception. We’ve used (and paid for) their web apps like Basecamp from the the beginning and love them far more and more. Meanwhile Twitter has become something of a cesspool – relevant mostly because of the third-party apps that make swimming in that muck a more productive experience. Many new Twitter users do not realize this but most of the innovation on the Twitter platform has come from the user community and third party application developers.
I can only imagine what a rich and fertile and innovative community Twitter could be if they had listened to their core users and started charging two years ago. Meanwhile, Twitter just buys more servers, gets more investment, and encourages robots. Now it is going down the tired, worn road of embedding ads and extorting others to pay them for ads on the re-purposed user-generated content stream. That is not innovation nor is it leadership IMO. And certainly not as much fun as brain crack.
What’s your opinion? I will talk in a future post about practical ways to find leadership within. It’s an ongoing task I assign to myself.
Photo Credit: “Desert Leader” by Hamed Saber on Flickr.
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{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
That would be a tough decision for Twitter to make, do you charge for users, relegating yourself to a select club of technorati, or do you leave the service free and hope for the hockey stick of growth, a la Facebook? Twitter wasn’t really fulfilling a need that helps people directly make money (like Basecamp), so I don’t think people would pull out their wallets when there are plenty of free alternatives (Google Buzz anyone?). The value of Twitter is that everyone is on Twitter. You don’t get everyone on Twitter with a paywall. It’s a chicken and egg problem.
@Jon – Your comments are ones that are often put forward by many smart people. However! I don’t agree. I think there is a very large group of users beyond the technorati – I am not lobbying for elitism. I am lobbying against spam and trolls. And having a fee solves that instantly.
Actually a lot of people make money via using Twitter – Guy Kawasaki and Alltop come to mind immediately. It is an incredible business platform in many ways IMO.
I don’t think “everyone” is the only valuable market proposition. Yes Facebook is big but it is also incredibly noisy and same issue with a real conflict in the interests of the user, the advertisers, and of course the spam, troll, and hacking issues.
I am truly lobbying for a leadership upgrade – a way to move the herd into different ways of thinking and interacting. I could posit that no one makes money off Basecamp (except 37 Signals) – it is a productivity tool and there are not many people building apps off it or selling access to Basecamp projects that I am aware of. But its genuine value to the users is extraordinary – hence we happily pay for it! I think Twitter can have that genuine value, but it has become a big mess – and today full of fail whales.
Lucky for me though you saw my tweet about this post! Thanks so much for commenting.
Well said, Rox.
To your point that free+advertising is and old and dying way of doing business, less and less people are tolerant of advertising in free mechanisms. Further, if Twitter were a leader they would look for ways to enhance the conversation rather than blast advertising.
I’d gladly pay for a useful tool that filtered out the junk; since Twitter isn’t doing it someone will. Maybe an enhanced “business” version of Twitter will become available. This is why Twitter is a tool, not a marketing plan and some day, there will be a different tool.
Regardless, I agree that I’d like to see a model that supported Twitter financially in an innovative way that made seeing, joining actual conversations all that more possible.
I think that an unfortunate part of accepting investment money, is that the personal investment of the original team changes. It’s no longer live or die by your users and what is working and what doesn’t. What new developments are a vanity project and what ends up as a wonderfully curated featured list.
The primary goal is no longer making money. How would Twitter be different today if they hadn’t received (so much) early investment? Would more of the feature set have been community driven? Would making money had been more of a priority that running an ad network would not have been an option and would have forced a more innovative solution? I believe so.
Most of the early crowd would have supported Twitter in any way necessary. In fact, I remember during a bad time early on, many developers voluntarily helping out to try and create some stability. Twitter had earned that kind of loyalty – and squandered it in the face of new users and more rounds of funding.
I’m NOT knocking success. I believe in making money and getting paid for for services rendered. But there needs to be an initial strategy that has a pricing model included – that can change and grow – as your audience does.
Twitter will continue to grow in numbers – but the value is now in the community you build yourselves instead of new relationships that you can find and enjoy. Whether future innovation will come – and a way of making money that equals the amount of investment – is still to be seen.
@Tara When you say people are less tolerant of advertising on free sites, can I assume you also mean that the effectiveness of said ads are falling to near zero? We have learned it seems not to click the sponsored ads. So to me the advertisers actually have a stake in this leadership discussion as they should be looking out for the effectiveness of their spending.
@Jane Quigley I am all for successful businesses too! Hope that came through in my post – I truly love the essence of Twitter and want them to survive. I’m just tired tired of the dog chasing its tail, and everyone being satisfied with that level of business development. I too wonder where enough revenue will come from to satisfy the amount of investment received to date. But anything is possible, so hopefully discussions of this sort will add positively to the mix.
I think it’s interesting we’re still struggling with the issue of monetizing services on the Web after all this time and no one has really found an effective model that works well. It seems we always come back to the ad tactic, which I agree is a dying paradigm. Monetizing this kind of thing requires some serious out-of-the-box thinking.
Twitter is valuable to me because its a unique no muss, no fuss conference call where everybody can listen or participate for free. I like the 140-character restriction because it forces clarity and forethought. It’s the brevity, lack of necessity to “friend” and the fact that it’s free for everyone that defines the quality of the social graph I can develop within it.
Would I pay for it? I’m not sure if I would if it was just to use it, especially knowing that everyone else is also struggling with the same “should I pay?” question and may end up going elsewhere. That changes the character of the social graph and who’s listening for everyone. Said another way, I probably would, but only if I knew everybody else was willing to also.
I probably would pay for services that help with the bot situation if it was done elegantly enough. That does require maintenance time and energy on my part that I could be directing elsewhere.
@Peter Liu – I loved watching the progression of your consciousness on the topic. So if companies can get the so-called thought-leaders on board and make it known that a fee is applied fairly across the board, those are two powerful success factors. In case anyone is listening…
And to be clear, I think the situation is more complex than just free or fee; there is a lot of herd energy that can be tapped in numerous directions, not just in the free direction. There’s more talk about that on this post regarding MacHeist.
Rox – I’m not sure I completely agree that ALL advertising is dead – I believe that blasting information at people and expecting them to care is dead. Which is why I am less than impressed with the Twitter model. Now, using advertising to support an engaging campaign, promotion or incentive is smart and we’re starting to see more of that. What isn’t converting is the advertising that doesn’t give incentive to click, the market is ad soaked and needs a reason to care. Once again, we are reminded that no marketing medium works in a vacuum (social media included) and that the real difference isn’t what you do, but how you do it.
Yes, all are true but the main focus and objective of a social marketing is for business. So if there are people worrying about the mess around their social network profiles, there are many who enjoy the profits! And today on techcrunch I had noticed that Twitter offers new style of name search. This feature also make it visible a number of false or fake accounts. Also a special sing on verified accounts. Have you seen that?
RT @roxannedarling: Brain Crack, Innovation, Leadership:
Forget the 30,000’ view of the marketplace, I am going in… http://bit.ly/burcom from BareFeet Blog
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@chrisbrogan @pistachio @jquig99 @jowyang @rob @tdcinhawaii Pls share your ideas on Brain Crack, Innovation, Leadership http://bit.ly/burcom
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @roxannedarling: Brain Crack, Innovation, Leadership:
Forget the 30,000’ view of the marketplace, I am going in… http://bit.ly/burcom from BareFeet Blog
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@peterliu47 I think U have experience from the valley relevant to convo here: Brain Crack, Innovation, Leadership http://bit.ly/burcom
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @roxannedarling: @chrisbrogan @pistachio@jquig99@jowyang@rob@tdcinhawaii Pls share ideas on Brain Crack,Innovation http://bit.ly/burcom
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Thoughts on this by @roxannedarling? Brain Crack, Innovation, Leadership http://bit.ly/adaRq4
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Thoughts on this by @roxannedarling? Brain Crack, Innovation, Leadership http://bit.ly/adaRq4
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@PeterLiu47 Thank you; I am def trying to move companies toward more leadership in Biz Models; & seeding stories too, http://bit.ly/burcom
This comment was originally posted on Twitter