Thinking you can do outbound marketing without a reach asset is a bit like thinking you can go from wireframes to product without a programmer. Surprising how many people don’t seem to get this.
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Reach is a compounding asset that grows by consistently underpromising and overdelivering over time. It’s a sort of trust surplus. Most people do the exact opposite. Start from zero, pretend it’s a positive number, overpromise/underdeliver until you go so negative nobody listens.
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“Reach asset” is a term I just made up. Something like a twitter following that actually pays attention when you tweet, or an already popular fictional detective who will guarantee minimum attention if you write a new story.
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Replying to
I prefer “reach asset” because “channel” is a trad marketing concept and something you can just rent with money. Like Super Bowl ad time. The NFL actually owns the underlying reach, asset, TV networks technically enable it, you rent it. twitter.com/SHAWNHOSEA/sta
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If you’re not shitposting you’re a reach asset
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Read it in 1999. Yes it’s a primitive ancestor of the concept I’m talking about, but highly reductive in a very lossy way. IMHO Godin never did figure out web marketing past email and ended up riding his pre-social-media reputation to lofty, aphoristic, eminence-grisehood.
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Replying to @vgr
Seth Godwin coined the term permission marketing to describe this. Oldie and goodie
seths.blog/2008/01/permis
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This probably sounds incredibly douchey, but is a real improvement over the social calculus of pre-web marketing. It may not seem like it, but being seen as a “reach asset” is an improvement over his TV or print ads saw you. You get to talk back at the message, subvert it etc.
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Reach assets describe Web2 marketing when it actually works
Web3 appears to have killed them btw. They seem fairly useless except for reaching idiots. I don’t know what comes next 🤔
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“Opening rate” or “click rate” (absolute, not percent) are to reach assets what “lines of code” are to a product. Tells you how big it is but otherwise reveals nothing about how good it is or whether it works at all.
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Things like likes or RTs are slightly better, but they’re kinda proforma, like number of open bugs or issue closing rate. The best measures of reach are qualitative patterns of response. Like “being ratioed” is a negative example. Being extensively QTed with dissent is a neutral.
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“Live” reach tends to produce significant patterns in the aggregate response. A meaningful shape that’s not captured by metrics. You could probably train an AI to recognize a variety. And the quality of reach is probably a function of the variety of patterns it can provoke.
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I think I finally understand Web2 marketing now that it seems headed for a rapid decline. I think it’s got a half life of 5 years now.
The concept simply seems to fail for the underground cozyweb the way broadcast thinking kinda failed for online marketing.
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