A good friend of mine said something to me the other day, over dinner,  that I keep thinking of, and led me to write this post – a post that I have wanted to write for a very long time, close to a year, but held myself back.   Perhaps, I lacked the exact vocabulary to formulate the message, but it needs to be said.

What was said?   A specific process or product would not work because it wasn’t “scalable“.   I used scalability often, people around me use it too – and some of us who are of the analytics elk have often complained that process and products are or aren’t scalable … but who knows what anyone really means when they’re talking about what is scalable and what is not.

For the purposes of this post, scalability is the ability to replicate a process or product easily, without having to do any, or very little additional work.  Work that is scalable is easy to replicate and usually easy to resell.  Conversely, work and deliverables that are not scalable, are much harder to perform consistently, and almost impossible to sell or resell.

I have been “seeing” a concept in my mind for a while (above), and I charted it, as best I could, without getting overly complex.

When a company or agency wants to create a deliverable or service (in order to differentiate itself from the competition and gain market-share) there is a choice of creating something along the lines of Analytics Capabilities, Slightly Above the Line (something that can be stretching a little bit, but not too much beyond what everyone else is providing) and finally, something that can be done, but is so difficult that is not sustainable.

It’s important for me to point out the line of Analytics Capabilities is constantly evolving – what is hard today will probably be easier a year from now; when a product or service is rolled out it should be accessed on where analytics capabilities are today and for the next 6-12 months.

In benchmarking your competition you notice a “gap” in what is provided (say, an analytics or reporting gap) and you decide to fill it with something on the “easy” or “moderate” level, your much more likely to be successful, longterm, than if you go after something way up on the difficulty scale.

In other words, if there is a gap in reporting or analysis, that no one has filled, there’s probably a good reason why (smarter people figured out it was too difficult – un-scalable, in other words).

I’m not suggesting those activities aren’t worthwhile to do (they are) or profitable.  What I am suggesting is that anything that has to be redone on a periodic basis probably isn’t “scalable”, and should be redefined in such a way as to make it easier to “scale”.

And some things, might never scale – like visits to my doctor, dentist or social worker - these are services – and are by nature, not possible to scale – but they are still needed.  But for the most part, unless you can charge your client a lot you’re not going to become a millionaire on the service (since you can only see so many patients – you’d have to up the charges for each one, etc).  Art, for the most part, isn’t scalable, unless you’re knocking out lithographs that can be effortlessly reproduced.

The more set aside time to think about what isn’t scalable, the more examples I see, and the more I think that people who are the most successful in business, long-term, figured out what was actually doable, and profitable to do, and that could be replicated easily.  I had a list of things all set to add here, but decided now to as what I call “un-scalable” someone else might think is very scalable, and rather than get into a spirited discussion on what is, or is not, worthwhile to undertake, I’ll leave it to everyone’s imagination.

But that led me into another area, Creation vs. Consumption.   I wrote about it before – but take a crude case – I go into McDonald’s to get my Big Mac …. I expect that to be “easy” …. I’m hungry (I must be really hungry to want a Big Mac – Ha!) and I don’t want to wait.    Consumption should be easy … right?     But what about the 100,000 hours it took to figure out how to franchise McDonald’s?

That’s an activity that is invisible to the consumer .. there’s no reason for a consumer to see it – but it’s a cost that is still there.

Same thing with getting on a plane and taking a trans Atlantic flight, or any flight.  The aircraft took hundreds of thousands of man hours to precision design, and the support needs of almost unimaginable, but when I want to get on a flight, as a traveler, as a consumer of the services – I want ease.

But …… I see that in our society, we are so very focused on the Consumptive process that we  overlook the Creative, and mix them up.

I think, in the business process, when we’re selling a product or service, the only thing a customer cares about is whether they get what they wanted (or believe they wanted).   I think that is where the Gary Vaynerchuk is coming from in calling “99.5 Percent Of Social Media Experts Are Clowns” (TCTV).   True, the Consumptive process can only be solved by someone who understands the business context well enough, and a lot of people who are doing social media haven’t really figured out how to make it work in the business context.

But much of the fault of that isn’t with the people, until just about now, business was also maturing to a point where they wanted to work with Social Media in a serious way, and invest in it seriously, and not just for the consumptive side that we all expect as consumers of anything.  But if we take Vaynerchuk’s arguments about the shift of social media being unprecedented, it should not surprise him, or anyone else, that business is also grappling with how to adapt.  It may be that Social Media is just becoming normal business now, and people need to be involved in the business in order to deliver it via Social Media, and the bubble (people who call themselves experts, are about to “pop”, along with Social Media, itself – or at least, the hype around it).

Getting back to my first point, I addressed Scalability, but not Cost or Acquisition strategies.   I think the “cost” goes up as we move from the “sea of commoditization” (when a product becomes indistinguishable from others like it and consumers buy on price alone, it becomes a commodity) to the level of difficulties encounter (might I add levels of standard deviations here?).   Business pays for the degree a product or service is useful, that moves the bottom line.

But in order for a business to decide to pay for anything, they  first have to value it (that’s why Social Media and Social Media Analytics didn’t get much attention till this year … not only was the field immature but business had not, collectively, decided it was worth investing much in it).  But that has changed – we have to recognize it.  But it’s also true that business, up till now, did not particularly value social media, which why it was easier for people to morph into “experts” of Social Media – there was really no good way to evaluate what someone knew that pertained to the business, or not, since most businesses were not seriously invested or valuing social media, in the first place.

So what about Marketing Acquisition Strategies?  I have had something specific in mind, but will not name it.  Still, I wrote about the subject about 18 months ago.

Going back to my diagram, a company or agency can get market-share by going after un-scalability as a differentiation, itself (but may not be a six months or a year from now).  Influence lists was a prime example of what might be hard a year ago, but is almost a commodity now, with mPACT, TRAACKR, Infinigraph, and not to leave out Klout.

According to the diagram above, un-scalability might actually be profitable (as profitable, I suppose, as hiring 10 people to change a light bulb – 9 to turn the ladder and one to unscrew the light bulb – just about the most un-scalable solution I can think of, offhand, if the client doesn’t understand the nature of the task at hand).

All five positions are profitable if leveraged right.

Take a boutique service, or product, that can be targeted to succeed even with un-scalability, but in time, with the changing taste of clients, increased sophistication of clients, and a fierce competitive market, will eventually make boutique services or products into something that is a commodity unless the product or services stay ahead of the curve (which is hard to do).

I think that’s it for this weekend – I’ve said what I needed to say about scalability and what I truly think.   Let’s not mix up consumption and discovery/learning – they are different stages of learning and being and they need to be valued differently that sorta takes care of Gary Vee’s argument while leaving everyone with something to stand on.