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Steve Spalding
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Steve Spalding
We are all going extinct.
Information moves way faster than you do.
Whatever your business is, as it stands, it’s a form of arbitrage with you at its center trying to make as much money as you can before the market wises up and puts you out on the street.
One of your core business questions should be whether you have the brass to change everything when the time comes, and whether right this second you are far enough out in front of the next curve to keep from getting crushed when this one comes crashing down.
That is all.
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Steve Spalding
We really don’t care all that much about fancy new ways to organize data.
Ask anyone how excited they get about updates to Google’s search algorithm.
The information systems that will survive in the longest run are those that have human beings at their core. Human beings who get a jolt out of things that touch on “human stuff,” like their biases and their overwhelming sense of existential deprivation.
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Steve Spalding
We are not robots.
Size doesn’t matter. At least when you are discussing the volume of content you generate.
Falling into this lie is one of the principle reasons there is so much junk in the world.
Human beings, consumers, users want tiny moments of extraordinary beauty not great piles of commoditized crap.
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Steve Spalding
I like the word “narrative” a lot. I imagine you will see it at least a dozen more times through this narrative.
If you want to get people to pay attention to something, the most important skill you can have is a gift for grasping narratives.
People learn and act through analogy, this fact is an essential marketing tool when you’re trying to cut through the background noise.
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Steve Spalding
It never ceases to amaze me how obsessed otherwise clever business people are with perfection.
Having a flawless, seamless product is great for commodities like, say, toilet paper but it’s terrible for the sorts of character-driven businesses that modern economics demands of us.
Anyone can be perfect, if you look hard enough you can find a style guide for that, but it’s very hard to be interesting.
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Steve Spalding
I feel like I should be thinking more about how long these entries should be.
When I really think about why this fear keeps bubbling up, I realize I’m actually suffering from College Research Paper Syndrome, which is the belief that regardless of whether you have anything interesting to say, you better have 5000 words by the end of it.
You should write whatever you need to in order to get your point across, no more and no less.
I wonder why it’s so hard to accept what seems like such an obvious truth.
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Steve Spalding
The first and hardest act is always convincing business owners that people are more than the numbers in their Google Analytics. This is true whether they are a non-profit looking to cure Cancer, or a E-commerce brand trying to push some new sunglasses.
The Internet has given us access to more information than we’ll ever know what to do with. While this is great news for anyone who has ever stayed up late wondering how many seconds have really passed since the beginning of the Universe. Unfortunately despite all the gifts the web has doled out, and the high-minded talk about Social Media Revolution, we have a greater and greater tendency to see each other as statistics rather than people.
Trust me, it’s really easy to do, especially when the only access you have to the people visiting whatever slapdash piece of content you’ve put together is from the comments, which are often poorly concealed spam and from analytics packages which can barely differentiate between people and bots let along tell you anything useful about them.
Despite the ease of viewing the Internet as a nameless, faceless playground, this is dangerous. Not because abstracting things doesn’t have a practical benefit, but because it makes it far to easy to think you can succeed by following trends lines rather than thinking about what actually makes sense to do.
Reducing people to data points makes us far too comfortable ignoring common sense, which is a bad thing – always.
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Steve Spalding
Night time thinking.
In the information playground we all exist in fame is pressure. It is no longer something you have or you don’t, but is instead a state that must be maintained with constant activity, constant creation and constant reinvention.
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Steve Spalding
The path of innovation is not from obscurity to acceptance, it’s from anger to ambivalence.
Whenever there is a change to anything people consider valuable there will be blow-back. If Facebook adds a change to their terms of service, it can be pretty much guaranteed that some portion of the people who track these things will throw a hissy fit about it. That’s the sign of a strong and vibrant democracy, but it is also not a good reason to change course.
They are going to complain about privacy and fairness but like anything else, give them some time and distance and you’ll see the mental costs of continuous dissatisfaction begin to take their toll and these same people will forget just why they were so upset in the first place.
I’ve seen this happen over and over again when companies change their terms or seriously revamp a feature set. If I could give any advice to a company getting this type of blow-back it would be to listen, smile and wait. If after a month you are still hearing the same thing, then it might be time to start getting worried.
