(This is part four in a series on how to become (Internet) famous. You can catch the previous installments here.)

I spent a lot of time in “Social Media Is Bullshit” talking about how marketing authors like Seth Godin were basically snake oil salesmen. One’s no different than what you’d find at a 1935 carnival selling a cure to Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. Except instead of selling something useful, these authors are selling you empty platitudes based on the pre-Great Recession American Dream. The concept that hard work, “being remarkable”, and self-determination will make you successful. But as George Carlin once said, and it’s a sentiment many Americans agree with, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

How do we reconcile that concept with the idea that a simple framework can make you, or the product you’re looking to push, (Internet) famous? I’m going to address that here.

Sometimes A Burrito Is Just A Burrito

I’m not going to spend much time with you talking about these alleged marketing “experts” in this series. I already suggested the eleven books you should read instead of (almost) everything else. If you read those books, and this column, you’re good to go. But. There are a couple of important points left to make about the bad marketing/PR authors since they’ve done a considerable amount of damage to your chances for success if you’ve listened to them.

One of those points I want to make is about something you might have heard that’s not entirely true concerning the practice of marketing: Marketing is not storytelling and marketers are not often “storytellers”. This “marketing is storytelling” nonsense was popularized in part by alleged marketing guru, Seth Godin. Case in point, the following is excerpted from a post titled “Not liars, storytellers” on Godin’s blog:

“Marketing is storytelling. The story of your product, built into your product. The ad might be part of it, the copy might be part of it, but mostly, your product and your service and your people are all part of the story. Tell it on purpose.”

“Good news everyone! The Dulcolax Laxative Suppositories are made with pride in Germany by the same people your grandfather went overseas to kill!” How’s that for a story? Doesn’t work, does it? That’s because not every product needs a story. Some might, most don’t. So for those of you who might have something you want to sell, and you’re struggling to figure out what that product’s story is? Don’t worry about it. The story probably doesn’t matter in your case.

Instead, focus on what makes your product better than its competitors. And, by the way, you should know that ANY time you try to differentiate yourself from your competition, that differentiation should be considerable. If it’s a slight improvement, it’s something that could easily be copied. Then you have no advantage or something that makes you different from your competition. So just keep that in mind. You can’t just be slightly better than the competition. You need to be waaaaaaay better than your competition. Look at a Mel Brooks movie and the genre his movie is spoofing, and then look at “Disaster Movie” by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer and the genre it’s spoofing. You’ll get exactly what I’m saying. One is amazing, the other will make you wish you owned a hunting rifle and could hunt those guys for sport.

The “we are all storytellers” thing is like the social media marketing advice problem all over again: Some of you need to actively use social media, some of you don’t. It totally depends on who you are, what you’re selling, what your target audience is using, and if they use that platform in such a way that it’s worth putting the time, money, and effort in to reach them. Don’t worry. I’m going to tell you how to figure that out in this series. But this goes back to the thing I mentioned in Part 1: What works for you may not work for the person sitting next to you. Therefore, any time you see a guru making blanket statements, that’s your cue to ignore them forever.

The thing is, you just never heard that qualification from the “experts” before. They were too busy scaring you into thinking that if you don’t use those platforms, you’ll be left behind. Same deal here. There are some products where it may make sense to tell a story, but if you’re selling a suppository? Not so much. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a burrito is just a burrito.

So if that’s the case, why do these moronic people keep getting an opportunity to share their terrible advice with the general public on a big stage?

The Curse Of Cumulative Advantage & The Big Club

Put another way: Why should you care what someone like Seth Godin says, even if you, the person reading this, has never heard of him? Cumulative Advantage.

(Spoiler alert: The game we’re all playing to become (Internet) famous? It’s totally rigged against you.)

I can talk about raising the probability of success as much as I want, but the fact is, you and I are playing against people that have a 99.9 percent chance of success. You need to understand this now, because you’ll feel so much better having acknowledged this ugly truth, processing it, and then and getting over it. Yes. There is a Big Club, and you and I ain’t in it. That’s fine. Maybe the American Dream is dead. For now. But that doesn’t mean it always has to be.

That brings us back to Seth Godin and why what he says matters and causes the harm that it does. (And I’m just using him as an example. I could have said Gary Vaynerchuk, Guy Kawasaki, or any number of social media gurus and it’d still be the same sort of deal.) Seth Godin has cumulative advantage working in his favor, so people listen to, and repeat, what he has to say. Even if it’s really bad advice. In fact, he could say the dumbest thing ever (and I sure think he does pretty often) and people following him will repeat it anyway.

(SiliconAngle has pointed out how wrong Godin is on stuff, way back in 2009.)

In its most basic form, cumulative advantage is the old adage about the rich getting richer come to life. This is virtually no different than an app being made featuring Kim Kardashian’s brand all over it, and all her involvement was her probably saying, “Yeah let’s do it” which was said to net her upwards of $80 million dollars. It didn’t. But she still made around $20 million off it. That’s $20 million for doing absolutely nothing. Cumulative Advantage at its finest.

If you sold your startup to Yahoo! before the first Dot Com Bubble, or got an MBA from Stanford University (both like Godin), then it’s easier for you to make yourself even more wealthy or notable. Why does this happen? Because Godin and others have been vouched by the Big Club based on wealth (from the startup sale) and where the degree came from (Stanford). Go to the right school and have a lot of money? Congrats, you’re in the club. Don’t take my word for it. Pull up a list of all the multibillion dollar tech companies that exist right now, the “unicorns”, and start looking for how many of them came out of Y-Combinator, are based in San Francisco, and feature graduates from Stanford and other Ivy League schools as founders.

The Big Club consists of other wealthy and influential people the media depends on for access, meaning they’ll give people in that club coverage for anything they say, even if it’s dumb. It’s also not often you’ll see the media cover something the Big Club doesn’t want them to so as not to cross them. If you want to see an example of this in action, look no further than the looming presidential election and how much coverage certain candidates get compared to others within the two major parties. Or when media outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Beast selectively omitting former CNN anchor Campbell Brown’s numerous conflicts of interest concerning her anti-teacher crusades.

And this is a point that goes well beyond marketing authors. You might not know who Seth Godin is, but you almost definitely know who Jenny McCarthy is. All of these “experts”, whether they be marketing gurus or anti-vaccination wackos like McCarthy, have been vouched by the Big Club. And since the’ve been vouched, the rest of us are forced into a situation where we have to hear what they say through the media. Once these folks are vouched and they linger in our culture like the stench everyone on “The Walking Dead” probably smells every morning, their stupidity eventually trickles down and affects the rest of us.

Because of Jenny McCarthy and others in the anti-vaccination movement like RFK Jr., diseases like measles are back and affecting more people each year despite the fact that vaccinations are very effective against it. But because Jenny McCarthy is a celebrity, people listen to her, so this trickle-down stupidity causes people who don’t know any better, or just don’t want to look stupid, to parrot what she says and endanger their own children in the process.

And since we’ve allowed other people who have been vouched, like Bill Gates, to constantly attack public education, despite never being a teacher, never working at a school, and dropping out of college himself, we don’t have enough people anymore who can think critically about the stupidity they hear. That’s what happened in the marketing world with the “storytellers” thing. Seth Godin hasn’t said anything relevant since 1999, but when he said something stupid about marketing being storytelling, people who follow him became obsessed and started saying, “We’re all storytellers now”, even though they’re not. That’s just the way of the world. Consider it acknowledged, and let’s move on after one final thought:

You, as a marketer, and that’s really what we all are here, sell people stuff. Whether it’s you, your product, or your idea. You want someone to buy in to something else or someone else unrelated to them, whereas a storyteller wants you to buy into something about yourself. See the difference?

Wonder Woman isn’t The Noid. The Noid was only created to sell you pizza. Wonder Woman exists for you to live vicariously through her as she goes on an adventure. And although it’s true her image is used to sell you things not related to her adventures, that’s not why she’s lasted as a popular and iconic character for almost a century. So the next time someone says to you that they’re a “storyteller”, ask them if they’re familiar with the works of Joseph Campbell. If the answer is no, and it probably will be, then they’re not a storyteller. And, in most cases, neither are we as marketers.

So now that we’re at the end of Part 1 here in the guide on How To Be (Internet) Famous, let’s recap what we’ve learned:

1. We’re playing a rigged game. A lot of the advice that’s given to us about how to promote something (ourselves, our products) is bad because it’s generic and geared toward large companies, not us as startups or individuals.

2. So what do we do? We identify a very specific goal that we want, and we imagine what the best case scenario looks like (you win), and the worst case scenario (you don’t.) We then take the best case scenario and work backwards. “Ok, this is what I am defining success by. I have these things. How did I get those things? What steps did I take to get them?” And you work all the way back to where you are now, beginning with nothing. If you don’t know what the next step is, you can’t take it.

All the while, you make arrangements / save money / have a fall back plan in case your plan does not work. Remember: The game you’re playing is rigged. You can raise the probability of success considerably, but it’s always likely that you’ll fail too.

3. All any of us can do from there is to take steps to raise our probability of success. There’s no one thing you’re going to do that’s going to make you, or your product’s launch successful. (Usually.) Instead there’s a lot of little things you can do. Read the right books (the ones I mentioned), and ignore the bad advice, is one of those things. Now that we have this all straightened out, it’s time to help you take the first actual step and follow the framework.

Image Credits: George Carlin and Kim Kardashian images via Wikimedia Commons. The Noid appears courtesy of Jeremy Volkman.