Information marketing tip #something.

Always like for ways to disrupt patterns. People start paying attention when things are slightly off kilter. Slightly different than they expect.

If you go too far, they’ll be over-saturated and won’t be able to relate. If you don’t go far enough, they will be bored to tears and screen you out.

Good teachers know that lectures can’t be facts alone.

Human beings aren’t machines, we learn through experiences and intuitions. It’s why we like stories so gosh darn much. Narratives are the shortest cognitive shortcut we have to actually being somewhere.

I am getting a hand cramp, Internet people don’t write with pens.

More marketing points.

“It’s not the quantity or the quality that determines influence, it’s the context.” In other words, it matters a lot less how many people look at your stuff or how hood it is as compared to the situation in which it’s made and distributed.

Let’s take a look.

I have a certain number of people who pay attention to me across the dozen or so Social Networks I belong to. This number is much small than an Internet celebrity like iJustine and much, much smaller than say…Lady Gaga.

Does that mean that if I switched out my readers for either of there fans it would automatically increase my clout?

Not likely and a little bit of applied intuition will tell you why.

Do people who happen to be interested in a Pop Star like Gaga also share a passion for esoteric ramblings about information culture? Maybe but not a whole lot of them. At best, a few people might be confused enough by a post title to click through, but they would pretty quickly realize that something had gone horribly wrong.

You could play this mixing and matching between one person’s fans and anothers all day and it would be rare indeed when you would come out with a combination that would actually help you reach a wider audience.

It’s not enough to have a lot of people puttering around your network, it’s not even enough to give them some kind of objectively “good” content to look at, the secret is to have the right people and show them the right content when they are ready to consume it.

Here’s an example of one of the hypothetical problems that might turn up. Pricing is based primarily on comparison.

You know what a bottle of wine should cost because you have seen what other bottles of wine cost.

It’s a clean, simple and efficient little system that most of us could handle blindfolded.

Now, try to tell me how much more your Facebook Consultant should cost than your Twitter Consultant.

We are becoming a world of gunslingers.

Well, there is this dream that little boys grow up with that one day they are going to be a Fireman or a Superhero or a Space Cowboy or something.

The core of the wish is that they will be free to roam the plains bringing joy and light to a world in need. Information technology and the web are bringing us one geeky step closer. It’s bringing into being a world where traditional career paths are shifting wildly and may, dare I say it, become extinct.

It’s stunning when you think about how many thousands of job descriptions won’t exist at the close of the next decade. There are just the jobs that will be automated and oursourced away. Much worse, many more jobs that once took a half-dozen people will may be able to be done part-time by a single person with the right combination of off the shelf technology and savvy.

Where does that leave the legions of information workers who will find themselves on their butts in a few ears? Well, since it’s work or starve the most clever of these folks will take up their guns and spurs and put themselves up for hire. We are seeing it already in Social Media. It’s the rise of the Consultant Culture, people who in any other time would have found themselves inside firms are blazing their own trails and creating new styles of work.

It’s a world so far removed from anything that we have seen previously that the question isn’t what effect a herd of wild consultants will have on a particular industry, it’s what in the world could a cult of knowledge workers all with slightly different jobs mean for a society and an economy.

My other pen is running out of ink, if you were thinking about asking.

There are two sides to every story, right? This one is no exception. The Internet has a really strong, natural distaste for experts.

I am sure it has something to do with our famous dislike for authority and traditional institutions (included on this list is anyone who walks around in a three-button suit discussing the merits of different paper quality in stationary).

I worry our expert hating reflex has become so finely honed that we might be becoming immune to it. We need to overcome the appeal of being contrarian all the time and learn to pick our battles more wisely. “We” as always includes me, you and the self-righteous horses we both road in on.

There is nothing quite as sexy to business services types than trying to define themselves as experts or gurus. Unfortunately, the world in which they live now is changing so rapidly that by the time you become an expert at one thing, it is already unrecognizable.

Getting caught up in this love of self-aggrandizement not only makes you sound like a shill to your fellow seekers who know as well as you do that you might as well be calling yourself an expert hammer operator, but it also pigeon holes you into a job description that will probably be non-existent in 18 months time.

Even people who drink mightily from the Kool-Aid will find it a wee bit strange how you manage to become an “expert” in every new technology shift through months after they occur.

Dollars to doughnuts says that someone in a basement somewhere is dreaming up a better solution to all of this. One that marries the computer’s ability to sort and collate with a human being’s ability to analyze and contextualize.

The Nightmare

Dollars to doughnuts says that 50,000 people are dreaming up solutions to this problem that do neither, but they all be highly funded and claim that their pet project does both – perfectly.