Before Branding, There Is Something to Re-Test

Introduction: Where the Presentation Gets Placed

How to do self-branding, and how to present a worldview, are already well documented. What this article takes up is the measurement that comes before it. Where does the presentation you have refined get placed?

Presentation is discussed endlessly, and one point is generally assumed away: who holds the authority over the path that presentation travels.

Here is the conclusion first. Branding is the design of what people think once you have arrived. Where arrival is decided by someone else, that design stands on ground that can be voided at any time. So before refining how you appear, it is more useful to re-test what is already in your hands against a different criterion.

Why Measurement Comes Before Action

Asked what should I do, people usually expect a new activity. Start something, stop something, adopt a tool.

But most people stuck in publishing are not short of activity. If anything they are active to excess — posting daily, analysing response, learning formats, refining presentation. The problem is not a shortage of activity but that all of it takes place on ground they do not own.

Add activity on the same ground and you do not leave that ground’s design by a single step. So the first thing to change is not the activity but the eye that sees the place. If the map is wrong, walking faster does not get you there.

Do not treat this ordering lightly. There is a reason most publishing advice skips the measurement and opens with instructions for action. Instructions for action are easier to sell. Do this and it will grow is legible, immediately testable, and appealing to buy. First, measure where you are standing is plain, does not connect to a result quickly, and is hard to sell.

The Criterion Is One Thing Only

Set out the criterion plainly.

Nearly everyone judges publishing by the size of the numbers. More followers or fewer. Views up or down. Effectively all advice on publishing assumes this.

What this article proposes is replacing it with something else entirely.

Do I hold the authority to deliver my words to that reader, whenever I choose, reliably and directly?

The question is not size. It is the location of authority. Who decides whether it arrives. If you decide, that is an owned path of delivery. If a distribution mechanism decides, then however large the number, it is borrowed attention.

What makes this criterion sharp is that it does not correlate with the numbers at all. A hundred thousand followers whose reach is held by someone else are a hundred thousand units of borrowed attention. A hundred readers you can reach reliably are a hundred units of ownership.

Ten thousand in your own account and ten thousand lent by someone who can call it back are not the same at the same face value. The size of the figure guarantees nothing about whose it is.

Testing What Is in Your Hands, One by One

An abstract criterion only settles into the hand when applied to concrete things. Take what writers tend to count as achievements and put each through it.

Followers on a short-form posting service. Almost entirely borrowed. However many there are, whether your post appears on their screen is decided by the distribution mechanism. The follower count is not the number of readers you own but the number of people currently included in the pool your posts may be shown to.

Subscribers on a video-sharing service. Same structure. The word subscribe suggests a direct connection, but whether a new upload appears on a subscriber’s screen is left to a recommendation judgement. Borrowed.

Contacts on the official account of a messaging app. This looks more direct at first — you can send to people who have added you. Yet limits on volume and frequency, changes of terms that alter features, and suspension of the account itself all remain possible. More owned than a plain follower count, but the foundation sits on someone else’s ground. “Borrowed-leaning, in between” is the accurate reading.

Readers connected by email address. This comes closest to an owned path. When you decide to send, it arrives in the inbox without passing a third party’s recommendation. You depend on a sending tool, of course, but the decisive difference is that the relationship with the reader survives a change of tool. What is removable is the instrument, not the relationship.

A blog on your own domain. More involved. The land itself — where the articles sit — is genuinely yours; move servers and the articles move with you. But arrival at that land is, in most cases, still borrowed. If readers come via search, what decides who reaches an article is a ranking judgement. A blog is a difficult object to test: owned assets and borrowed arrival live together in it.

The Ground Gives Way, Once

Now the honest side effect. A sound account of a solution does not hide the pain it causes.

Test them one by one and most people reach a common finding: nearly everything they counted as an achievement lines up on the borrowed side. And the genuinely owned paths — people they can reach directly whenever they choose — are far fewer than assumed, or not yet present at all.

At that moment the ground gives way. This is unavoidable, and it would be wrong to say it does not matter. It is legitimate pain, produced by accurate perception.

Two things are worth adding.

First, it is not a loss but a correction of perception. The numbers did not fall. Yesterday’s figure is still there today. What changed is your understanding of what it is. Walking on with a wrong map is more dangerous than having the ground give way once while holding a correct one.

Second, the collapse happens once. Optimising on borrowed ground never ends; each change of criteria restarts it, and the unease continues as long as you publish. The collapse of a re-test occurs once, at the moment of testing. One collapse in exchange for stepping off an unease with no end is, honestly assessed, a good trade.

One further aspect is easy to miss. After the re-test, the borrowed figures appear to shrink drastically while the genuinely owned figure is usually tiny. Someone who thought a hundred thousand followers were an asset finds they can reach a few dozen people directly. That gap feels like a balance falling from a hundred thousand to a few dozen.

But those few dozen are not a scaled-down version of the hundred thousand. They are different in kind. The hundred thousand borrowed could be zero tomorrow. The few dozen owned cannot be taken by anyone. The certainty per person is not comparable. You cannot subtract the owned few dozen from the borrowed hundred thousand on one ruler.

Conclusion: Measure the Placement Before Refining the Presentation

Branding is not meaningless. It becomes meaningless when a precise design is built on ground that can be taken at any time.

So the order changes. Before designing how you appear, measure who holds the authority over the path that appearance travels. The same work means something entirely different depending on whether the measurement came first.

After the ground gives way, the real question stands up: where is a path I can own?

The whole picture is gathered in why blogging longer leaves less of your own voice. On how to make the move, see why newsletters are called outdated, and the one thing that remains; on why the move resolves the problem, the real advantage of owned media is not on the comparison table.

References

Books

• Wu, T. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016) Knopf
• Marx, K. Das Kapital (1867)
• Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten