When Every Action Is A Transaction
What happens when every good deed goes unsold... (plus, you're invited to a workshop on remarkable marketing)
I'm taking the week off from publishing new essays! Instead, I'm continuing to work on my Big Project and having a very full week of meetings.
One of those meetings is Thursday's live workshop on Remarkable Marketing Basics——sort of an excerpt or preview of the Big Project!
→ Click here to get all the info on the workshop.
The essay below was originally published on September 23, 2023 for premium subscribers. Since it's a great set-up for Thursday's workshop (and an audience favorite), I thought it was a good time to "unlock" it and share it again.Today, I want to tackle a conundrum that I hear quite often among generous, caring people who make stuff online.
It goes something like this:
I'm just really tired of making valuable content that people consume for free and then never pay me.
And look, I get the disappointment and frustration here. You make a podcast, a video series, or a newsletter. People listen, watch, or read. You also offer a product or service related to the content you create. If they appreciate the free content, then why don't they buy the product or service?
Underneath this question is an assumed quid pro quo: If I make you free stuff you like, then you should pay me for more stuff. The vast majority of people I've heard this complaint from would not cite that reasoning. They would claim to make free stuff for various reasons: as a creative outlet, to help people who can't afford to buy, as a way to demonstrate their credibility and expertise, etc. But all of those reasons—including the underlying quid pro quo—can be true at once.
This all begs the question: What do the people you make stuff for owe you?
And that gets to the question at the heart of any human relation: What do we owe each other?
Before we get to that much bigger philosophical question, we need to talk about what content marketing is—and how it fries your brain.
I'll preface this by acknowledging that I've spent most of the last 15 years either explicitly in the business of content marketing or something adjacent to it. The reason I say content marketing fries your brain is that once you've been indoctrinated into the content marketing mindset, you seem to see the world as a series of quid pro quo opportunities. You recognize that certain stories, emotions, logical arguments, and twists of text can get you what you want with confidence. And you start to expect that creating and sharing generously entitles you to a compensatory response from those you create for.
Let me offer a definition of content marketing. Content marketing is the practice of using written, visual, audio, or video content to attract, build trust with, and ultimately sell to customers. Just because someone is creating content doesn't mean they're practicing content marketing. The difference between creating content and content marketing is primarily in the intent. Is the content created with the intent to sell a related product or service? If so, then it's probably content marketing, but there is plenty of gray area.
You may have heard people offer the advice to show up on social media or an email newsletter and "give value" as a way to build an audience or customer base. When "giving value" is in the form of content, that's a kind of content marketing.
The idea of "giving value" gets to the heart of the quid pro quo on my mind.
"Giving value" sets up a scenario in which you think you're being helpful so that others will either pay attention to you or pay you for something. I'm sure some will argue that that's not why they offer help or advice in online spaces. But I'm not making a case about why you do what you do. Instead, I want to argue that the this-for-that logic is like a tiny larva that eventually grows into 3-inch brain parasite.
A couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel about podcasting generally and pitching podcasts specifically. All in all, it was a good panel, and I largely agreed with what others on the panel shared (which is by no means a given at this point). That said, I certainly came at the craft of podcasting differently than the other podcasters involved—namely, I don't use my show (or newsletter) as content marketing 98% of the time. That's not to say that I don't think about editorial strategy, calls to action, and offers I want to make. But I very rarely think about using content to make a sale or woo a potential customer.
I make content because I have something to say. And I make offers because I have something to sell.
I spent years learning how to connect those things, in spite of the fact that making content and making offers in an ad hoc, disconnected kind of way had changed my life for the better.
Okay, back to the podcasting panel. As I said, it was going pretty well. But as we got to the end of the discussion, the panelists were asked for tips on pitching oneself to podcasts as an interview subject. My main tips? Don't lie. And don't pitch yourself; pitch an idea for an episode.
One of the panelists said that they advise people to leave a 5-star review for the show they're pitching, then screenshot that review and include it in the pitch email.
Reader, it took all of my willpower to keep from screaming.
I have gotten these emails. I've had people pitch What Works (typically without having ever read a single episode description) and include a screenshot of their 5-star review.
Do you know what I do with those emails? I trash them. Immediately.
First, this tactic breaks my first rule of podcast pitching: don't lie. I don't want your 5-star review if you made it to get my attention. Your review has no credibility, and now your deceptive review is front and center for those who might genuinely be looking for information on my show. Your review is a lie.
But more to the point of today's subject, that screenshot says one thing and one thing only to me: Look at this nice thing I did for you—won't you do a nice thing for me and have me on your podcast?1
I know that not everyone will agree that this is a (not-so)-subtle attempt at establishing quid pro quo. Maybe this doesn't piss you off as much as it pisses me off. That's fine.
But I wanted to share this example because this is the 3-inch-long brain parasite. Writing a few social media or blog posts designed to attract attention or sales seems harmless enough (and it can be), but soon, we start to see the whole world as transactional. Every interaction is an opportunity to give something and get something in return.
Everything you create becomes a debt you impose on those you create for.
Anthropologist David Graeber argued that debt relations have been fundamental to the way we conceive of human exchange for more than five thousand years. Debt is a specific form of obligation one has to another. It's an economic calculation, even if that calculation doesn't involve currency. There are other non-debt forms of obligation in human relations, though. To varying degrees, we believe we have obligations to our families, our communities, and the state. Different moral and legal systems wrestle with how we understand and fulfill those obligations.
In the introduction to his seminal book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber posed key questions he wanted us to wrestle with:
What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?
Further, he clarified that debt is a unique form of obligation. It's the only form of obligation that can be "precisely quantified." That quantification then leads to "money's capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene."
We can see the moral obligation and debt obligation play out in the sitcom The Good Place.
The Good Place wrestles with what it means to be a good person through a variety of absurd scenarios and philosophical thought experiments.
One way the show depicts what it means to be a good person is through a points system. While you're alive, you earn or lose points through your actions. If you have enough points when you die, you get to go to the Good Place. If you don't, you go to the Bad Place.
The points system is a sort of debt obligation that applies to all human behavior broadly. It demonstrates how our actions can be "precisely quantified" to determine our worthiness or provide justification for our moral goodness. And while the idea of a divine leaderboard sounds preposterous, it's really only a step further afield than many ways people talk about morality.
But the beating heart of The Good Place isn't an eschatological accounting scheme. It's a philosophy called contractualism. Contractualism is a moral philosophy outlined in T.M. Scanlon's book What We Owe to Each Other. "Owe," in this case, isn't conceived of as a debt obligation but, instead, refers to how we imagine our duties to each other. Contractualism asks us to consider the moral principles which no reasonable person could reject.
What Graeber called "baseline communism" echoes contractualist philosophy. By "baseline communism," Graeber means all of the things we do for each other outside of market-based logic. We let our neighbor use the weed-whacker. We offer snacks to our child's playdate. We make a meal for the couple who just had a baby. When someone trips and falls, we stop to make sure they're alright.
Sure, you can say that we do those things because we want the same to be done for us or those we love. But the obligation isn't between the person who trips and the person who stops or the person who lends the weed-whacker and the neighbor who uses the weed-whacker.
The obligation is social—we feel a responsibility to behave according to the world we want to live in with others.
No matter one's politics, this tends to make sense on a small group level. We're all baseline communists when it comes to our families or our neighborhoods. And anyone who doesn't behave that way might be labeled a sociopath.
But we start to diverge when it comes to larger and larger groups that contain more and more difference. We've learned that the only way to ensure that large, diverse groups maintain peaceful relations is to marketize them. Debt obligations stand in for social hierarchies and threats of violence. We quantify everything so that we never have to ask: What do we owe to each other?
Or, as Graeber put it, we maintain the system by "converting love into debt."
At this point, I better swing back to where we started: content marketing and its assumed quid pro quo. Cue awkward transition.
The internet is the ultimate large, diverse, and impersonal group.
We don't know who is on the other side of the computer screen—and unfortunately, we act like it. We don't treat the people who read our words or listen to our voices as if they were neighbors. We see a number of subscribers and ask ourselves why more of them aren't paying up. We see the number of episodes we've published and ask what we got in return (and why wasn't it more).
But the reason I wanted to write this piece is that that's not who we are. We are not people who have to reduce the world to debt calculations. We're people who believe in what we owe to each other. We believe in our duties and moral obligations to others outside of the marketplace.
I want to write and podcast in a world where sharing our knowledge and experiences is part of what we owe to each other. If not in this particular form, in whatever form “works.” I want to work in a world where the value of what I share freely isn't attached to the assumption that I'll receive financial value in return.
Economic realities make this a difficult and precarious worldview.
I readily admit that. Many of us working independently from traditional employers depend on the quid pro quo to put food on the table and pay rent. Even still, I think it's worth interrogating our assumptions about what we're owed when we create and share work freely.
Changing the way we think about what we create and share online is a very tiny change. But it's a significant step in rethinking how we relate to others and what that means for society at large.
New Workshop: Remarkable Marketing Basics
When: Thursday, March 28 at 12pm ET/9am PT (90 minutes)
Format: Live Workshop (recorded), with slide deck & worksheets
Cost: Pay What You Want ($15 min), FREE for Premium Subscribers (upgrade)
The practice of marketing is all about connecting the right people with the right product at the right time.
Put another way, marketing is how a business connects with potential buyers, earns their attention, introduces its offer, and helps potential buyers evaluate whether its offer is right for them.
There are loads of possible ways to do this, and social media marketing is just one. And this workshop isn’t about social media at all.
This workshop walks you through:
the 3 critical building blocks of any marketing strategy: Discovery, Nurturing, and Evaluation
how to figure out where your marketing strategy is breaking down
and 2 of my favorite frameworks for creating remarkable marketing that resonates with the right people
This workshop is Pay What You Want (minimum $15) for those who aren’t Premium Subscribers. Please pay the minimum if you’re dealing with any financial hardship. The suggested price is $25, and $50 helps make the minimum price possible. Once you pay, you’ll be redirected to Crowdcast to complete your registration.
Premium Subscribers: click here to access the link to register free of charge.