The Disappointment of the Noisy People

"Embrace your base."
"Blog about blogging."

If you want to get off to a great start in the primaries, be Dennis Kucinic or Sam Brownback. Someone the noisy people like to talk about.

If you want traffic to your blog, blog about blogging, because bloggers are noisy.

Noisy: as in being willing to raise your voice in defense (or in opposition) to an idea, a product or a person.

The noisy people shun the non-believers. (This video will never be fully scraped off your consciousness after you watch it, I promise). They (okay, we, cause I'm a noisy person too) are drawn to stuff at the edges and we like to talk about it. When I heard two kids at the middle school acting out the non-believers part of the Candy Mountain video, I knew it had arrived.

And I also knew that it was unlikely to go much further. The disappointment of the noisy people is this: Jon Stewart and Peet's Coffee and the Mac almost never make it across the chasm, almost never become the choice of the masses. The parts of the story that make us delighted to talk about it, the parts of the story that make it easy to spread, rarely work for the masses.

So, if you want to reach the masses, you'll need to realize that changing your story (but not your essence) is part of the deal. It'll disappoint your noisy people, no doubt about it. But if you're authentic in the core of what you offer, they'll forgive you. The challenge is in creating a product or service or platform that can sustain both stories.