Slow

Have you seen the Mary Meeker slides?

She showed them at last week's D Conference. But a tech entrepreneur friend of mine tweeted about them today, a week later.

Or how about David Lowery's screed about the new boss being worse than the old boss? That was posted on April 15th, but almost ever day someone still forwards it to me. They're just getting the message.

When I was in high school, everybody watched "Laugh In" on Monday night, discussed it in school on Tuesday and that was it. In the twenty first century, Adele has the number two selling album week after week even though it was released in excess of a year ago. The new buyers just got the message.

We believe in the new online media world, with everybody connected, all the time, that it's easier to spread the word. It's actually harder. Sure, there are phenomenons that explode overnight. Interestingly, most of them are just as quickly forgotten, like that band from Canada playing Gotye's track on one guitar. Or the guy who said United broke his guitar, where's that guy today? Chances are, instant notoriety will be just that. Rebecca Black is already a "Where is she now?" question, the only person who doesn't realize that is her. It's all about the long haul now, that's how long it takes you to get noticed!

And don't count on the media infrastructure to help you out. Television is all about today's ratings, how can we goose them right now, TV doesn't want to develop anything, it wants an instant splash or to cancel your ass.

And record labels are almost as bad. If you can't break immediately, they don't want to sign you. But as delineated above, the only thing that cuts through the clutter is lowest common denominator train-wreck, empty calories.

So, the higher your expectations, the harder you push, the more you're working against yourself. Now, more than ever, it comes down to substance. Because marketing is passe. You can gain eyeballs initially with money and press, but you can't keep them. For that you rely on word of mouth and media adoption after the fact. Hell, Amanda Palmer's been making music in excess of a decade, but only when she won the Kickstarter sweepstakes did the mainstream media finally become interested.

So it's counterintuitive. With everybody reachable, instantly, you think you can make everybody pay attention, fast. But with so many choices available, frequently deep niches that super-serve a narrow slice of fans, your message is not only ignored, it's not even heard.

We even see this in tech. Everybody knows what turntable.fm is in a matter of weeks. Now, the site is dying without ever having made any money. FourSquare just redesigned itself in the hopes of gaining revenue. There are so many apps released that you don't even bother to scan the store, you just wait until you hear about the hip one from friends. And then you use it for a while and abandon it. Madonna gets everybody to pay attention for fifteen minutes at the Super Bowl, but almost no one wanted to hear her new music, never mind buy it. She's still living in the eighties, where promotion is everything and scarcity rules.

It's kind of like Mt. Everest. Once upon a time, it was headline news when a human being scaled it. Now there are so many people climbing that there are traffic jams, with people dying as a result. If you make it to the top, it's not news. But if you die, you get a bit of ink. But you won't ever see it, you're already gone.


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