Why should your message be heard and shared?

by Stan Faryna

…

Around the monitor of my MacBook Pro, a green slope sprawls with grass, apple or prune trees here and there, and fenced yards at the bottom of the hill. An elderly woman (maybe in her 70s) is feeding clucking chickens in one of those yards. A duck is quacking in complaint in her footsteps.

A boy (five to seven years old) is running up that hill. He’s got 100 yards more to go – if he’s aiming for one of the farm houses at the crest.

Above the hill, a blue sky spreads out to forever.

The symphony of sound is enchanting: clucking chickens, quacking duck, barking dogs, wild bird songs, honking geese, excited children, neighbors speaking loudly at their fences, and that’s not the half of it.

The middle-aged hotel manager wants to see something on Youtube. Or show it to me. I’m not sure which, but I push my laptop in front of him.

Pitbull, Give Me Everything

He gives me a thumbs up as the music starts to play. Then he pushes the laptop back in front of me.

…

It’s amazing that a non-English speaking man in a small village in Eastern Europe knows that he can find Pitbull’s video on Youtube. This is a man that doesn’t own a computer, a car, or a decent pair of shoes. Pitbull (aka Armando Christian Pérez) has reach! And Pitbull has the kind of international reach that most bloggers and social media people would kill for – in less than 10 years since his first album (M.I.A.M.I) in 2004.

What would you do to get that kind of of reach?

Bloggers and social media people spend a lot of time thinking, reading, and sharing about how to get their message heard and shared. Today, I noticed an email in my inbox from Lilach Bullock – a fellow Triberrite. Subject of the email: 5 little-known free ways to boost traffic to your website.

I feel bad for Lilach Bullock. I feel bad that Lilach has to write misleading subject lines in her attempt to capture customers for her social coaching business. In fact, the five things that she describes in her newsletter were blogged to death no less than two years ago.

Lilach is in a catch-22 that reminds me of how we’re climbing over each other’s messages in an ever more crowded and noisy social space. I’m also reminded of the Klondike ice cream commercials: what would you do for a Klondike bar? Now imagine 100 million people acting like monkeys (for a year or more). All for the equivalent of a single serving of ice cream.

My point is not to make fun of Lilach Bullock. She’s doing what she does to grow her market. In a recent blog post, she writes that she’s around 150k readers/month and that’s no small feat. But Lilach still has a long way to go. Generally speaking, she needs a million readers/month and that’s a hard, uphill climb even from where she stands.

Consider this.

If the lucky ones had a one in a million chance three years ago to have their message heard and shared above the din, today’s chances are one in ten million. In other words, you’re odds are better buying a ticket in a million dollar lottery than your message getting heard and shared by a million people. With a lottery ticket, you’re more likely to win something – if not the grand prize.