You talkin to me??

As fortunate as we are to be living in the information age, to have access to unprecedented amounts of information and knowledge at virtually any time and anywhere, shouldn't we all be able to be contestants on Jeopardy and do pretty well?  Call me a pessimist, but I don't think that's the case.

There have been periods in our collective history where knowledge and information was such a closely guarded asset.  It's been used to control and manipulate, to get rich off of, to strategize with- you name it.  People have fought for it, suffered for it, died for it, and so now we have it...  Shouldn't we be dancing in the streets, taking it all in like a kid who has been denied candy his whole life and finally gets a taste of the sweet nectar?  (Spoiler alert: The answer is no)

The human condition causes us to be obsessed with scarcity and nonchalant with ubiquity.  All the world's information that was once scares was once a thing of wonder that very few people had access to.  Today, all that illustrious information is just noise.  How is it that someone could have grown up and spent their whole life in New York City and have never gone to see the Statue of Liberty, or never stops to look up at the Empire State building every time they walk by; yet people flock from all around the world to do those very same things?  People are weird.

What color is your cow?
According to everybody's favorite marketer Seth Godin, because of the sheer volume of exposure that we have to information, we have no choice but to ignore the vast majority of it; and so the best way to combat just being a part of that noise is to stand out.  Break the monotony of your industry, your craft, your job, and you will begin to separate yourself.

The Longtail
As a brand, one of the best ways to ensure that people are listening to you, is to concentrate your efforts on only those segments of people who want to listen.  The concept of the longtail refers to the idea that as things become more specific the number of results will decrease.  This is important because as you become more specific, there will be less competition trying to say the same thing.  In other words, specificity -> scarcity -> people caring.

In The New Influencers, Paul Gillin discusses the origins of social media, and at the heart of it is the concept of the longtail.  Web 2.0 has enabled communities to form around any and EVERY topic, interest, activity, genre, fetish, lifestyle, and beliefs fathomable.  

Messaging that blankets a wide grouping of people has become noise, ubiquitous noise that we've become very good at ignoring.  If you want to be heard yes, you need to differentiate your message, but really you need to differentiate your DNA.  

Just because your message is out there, doesn't mean people are listening- just being out there isn't enough.