Will be back to this soon, but need to dig in on some other stuff right now. As always, thanks to everyone who keeps up with me here. I’m always on email, twitter, etc. Looking forward to hearing from you there!

-ef

Communication is about explicitness and concision. The most efficient communicators and communications say specifically what needs to be said in the least amount of expression possible. But both of these qualities are also those that most expose us to being wrong, something any human irrationally fears. Saying something that leaves room for a grey area between the black and white, either through the quality or quantity of our words, provides us an out, and puts the onus on the receiver to potentially misinterpret or fail. It’s natural, but it’s inefficient, and has no place in business especially.

I hate the word should. Its use means that someone is applying an alternative reality to whatever they are talking about. Should means that something doesn’t exist, but ideally you would want it to. Which, as we learned when we were three years old, means absolutely nothing. Should is the cause of so many of the world’s problems, and so much wasted potential. It has its place, but as a means of last resort and only when supported by examples and context from this reality, not another.

Privacy concerns are very real on the web, as they should be. But it seems the stigma with tracking has at least some roots in the illogical. In theory, there is nothing wrong with someone knowing more about you; the real question is how they get that information and what they choose to do with it.

There is absolutely no question that the web will be a better place for everyone (consumers and companies alike) if information is shared more freely, yet people tend to forget how that greater good will affect their own choices. Privacy isn’t naturally better than no privacy, it depends on the situation. And in the situation of the web, privacy isn’t natural and it isn’t healthy. We are analyzing privacy concerns through the lens of the real world, but the web isn’t the real world; it’s a digital world with different economics, different social incentives, and different politics. Stop reacting, start thinking.

There seems to be a perceived disconnect between the normal person and the corporation. People get riled up from stories about low pay, cost-cutting, and other “disgusting” or “despicable” big business practices. But why do you think businesses act this way? They act this way because of you and me and everyone else who demands more for less every time we buy.

Corporate incentives are directly shaped by consumer preference. When we decide we want to pay 1.99 instead of 2.49 we are telling these corporations to seek out options for lower pay and cutting costs. This is how the capitalist world works: self-interest maximization shapes the entire spectrum of reality from household to conference room. There is no us vs them, and certainly no victim. The world is built around dollars because we are built around dollars. It’s not as sexy as exploitation or conspiracy, but you don’t get to pick your reality, especially when you are responsible for it.

People of all ages love sports, but middle-aged men especially. There are many reasons for this, but a large part of it is the natural human search for meaning in life that increases as we age.

Sports is condensed meaning. For two hours a week, it’s not about obscure, relative objectives like happiness or purpose, it’s about three strikes, nine innings, and more runs than the other team. In softball, everything has a place and nothing is obscure. We all appreciate anything that can accomplish this in our lives, even for a short period of time.

And successful marketing tends to exhibit the same emotional offering as softball: it makes sense and it makes things easier, taking you away from the what ifs and unanswerable questions that plague our daily lives. A good ad offers condensed meaning to the viewer in the same way softball does to so many middle-aged men.

Everyone gets caught up on right and wrong, and for good reason. Perfect dichotomy is one of the easiest things for the human mind to understand. With context, a clear rating system, and a specific point of differentiation, the dumbest person in the world is just as capable as the smartest at determining right from wrong.

But decision making, especially in business, has a second spectrum that is largely ignored, but just as important: more and less. Making more decisions is essential to efficiency of production and learning. In order to progress, time and thought must be invested in the quantity of decisions we make as well as the quality.

Look, the argument has been made a million times, but that pie in the sky marketing funnel that flows fully connected from awareness to dollars hardly exists at all in this world. People are constantly perceiving the world around them in myriad places and on multiple levels of consciousness and understanding. We don’t even know all the variables that go into someone blinking much less deciding what product to by and which brand to buy it from — not to mention trying to control or isolate variables where key conversions happen. Some marketing funnels have been around so long that the fact that they are broken no longer matters; they are accepted. Fine, but don’t tell me my glass house has cracks when yours is just older, not less imperfect. Social media isn’t unique in the fact that it’s funnel is broken, it’s just new.

Attention is the currency of the web, but clicks are the most trusted unit of value we exchange between buyers and sellers. But just like dollars, clicks only represent value; they are only valuable because we believe they are, as opposed to inherent value. Clicks are the same. We have essentially decided to trust that clicks represent value in order to build an economic system on the web. However, clicks are not the end all be all, they are simply the best we can do right now. The fiscal future of the web will be built around the ROI of attention investment: How much value is being delivered for each second/micro-second of your time? This value does tend to correlate with clicks, but it is not inherent to them. With the evolution of the digital economy, clicks will become less important as new units of value emerge that are more directly representative of the value exchanged.

Seriously, think about it. Hef was all about happiness. He wasn’t about politics or really even sex; other people made him into that. What he believed in right from the beginning was delivering happiness by offering people an experience previously shunned and excluded from his industry. His business was all about culture, and he never let go of what he believed in (whether you agree with it or now) even when under tremendous pressure to bend. Playboy is different from Zappos in a million ways, but I think there might be some surprisingly similarities between Hef and Tony.