The Internet is Changing, Are You?
No growth stage company can thrive without that box of cable and diodes we call the Internet. The biggest challenge? Familiarity makes us cavalier. Credibility on the internet is ephemeral at best. And those gurus of "how" to make the internet work for you? From digital ads to LinkedIn sales to SEO to everything in between?
They bounce between the false positives of AI and the metaverse to the archaic tools of 2015's lead gen funnels. They hope the average C-suite doesn't know the difference.
This week we're focusing in on the very real shifting sands of the Internet. Let's go...
...To saying the quiet parts out loud.
The Internet's economy depends on a group of power users. People who buy in to the web's fundamental trades: that by the power of digital scale, what you invest today which earns you nothing but attention will eventually give you guaranteed returns.?
This economic promise has been... lopsided at best.
What no one says, because no one ever does about such things, is that this financial benefits of the internet depend on a working class of people: content creators and marketers who keep the scrollers scrolling and the advertisers happy.?
As the social media landscape fractures, some of these leaders are questioning the nature of the game:
Kaleigh Moore—a content writer and marketer—asked the big question out loud last week on Twitter (X), and set off a firestorm of responses and retweets:?
Christina Garrett, the unofficial champion of a community of thousands known simply as "Marketing Twitter" responded in a more reflective and concerned tone:
The reward wasn't worth it.
Business leaders immune to the trends of EOPs (Extremely Online People) might gladly shrug their shoulders in apathy.?Just another wave of discontent Millennials, right?
Maybe. But when the people who made the Zucks and Musks of the world possible start questioning their role in the Matrix, then we should listen.
YES to saying the quiet parts out loud.?The internet IS changing.?In exchange for its now decades-old promises of utopia, dystopia lurks around every corner.
...To more noise. Less value.
Creative media companies like Disney and Netflix and caving in on themselves. Short-term wins from not having to pay everyone on strike, masks a deeper fundamental breakage. One that is connected to every business that creates content of any kind.
The Big Media players got here, (if you're tracking this week's theme, you guessed it) by misunderstanding the Internet, selling out to its false promises, and simultaneously free falling in quality and price.
Nothing is special anymore.
Speed, scale and an obsession with pandering to distraction rather than quality is destroying America's most storied industry from within. The latest warning shot noted in this week's?New Yorker? A call from the streamers for "second screen content" that is less engaging and less valuable so people can watch it while they're already distracted on their phones. This will not go well.?
Hollywood's unraveling is a warning shot to content-creating ventures.?
If you pander to the noise, your short term wins will turn into long-term losses. Good content is hard work and most vendors are designed to do it cheaply and poorly, a lesson?Netflix, Disney and Max are teaching us as fast as we will learn.
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...to no longer feeding a non-recession.
Economists and arm-chair prognosticators alike are are shifting their talk around the threat of recession. After the Fed climbed the rate summit like a mountain goat, tempers have cooled and perhaps... the threat of the "R" is fading.
But, this misses the better question - will leaders recover from their hypnosis?
?Since early 2022, we've been berated with threats of a guaranteed precipitous free fall in the next 12 months. (Dear reader, that was 18 months ago.) Recessions are systemic but they are also psychological. And loud voices have gaslit venture leaders across the company into behaving as if the sky was falling.
Recessionary news has kept the internet hype engine running, fueled by leaders' fear of stagnation. What if we stopped feeding the beast? What if we created the economy instead of fearing it?
...to giving businesses Obama era advice.
If you boil down a lot of marketing advice, it sounds like "Do stuff on the internet, everything basically works out."
This—unequivocally—is terrible advice.
What it doesn't do is actually solve problems. In this week's insanity, I read the following advice in Wealth Management trade:
Nothing will frustrate your team more than heading onto social media and thinking they're gonna chat with their next million-dollar prospect. It won't work, and it will spoil them on the narrow opportunities that late-stage social presents.
Social media is an advertising business that platforms high-engagement users to draw people to the platform for free. If you're not a power user, you're an advertiser's mark. On today's internet, there is very little middle ground.
The speed at which the Internet has already changed is being ignored in the legacy industries. Wealth Management particularly. What was once salient yet generic advice (in 2015) is now a recipe for frustration and waste.
Someone inside your organization needs to know the difference.
Avoid being a late stage adopter.?
Today's leaders are hitting digital strategies well into their long tail. All the benefits have been sucked out, leaving you?fighting for the last 10% of attention with a bunch of lesser businesses.
?You need a strategic mind that can solve for the huge incentive problems in internet marketing and divide the signal from the noise. Putting digital in the right place in your go-to-market.
The internet is changing. Are you? If you have questions or opinions about how this affects your strategy, I'd love to chat.
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Nick Richtsmeier
Founder of CultureCraft
Giver of Damns