The Greater Good

I love this quote from Andrew Warner at Mixergy:

“Online community organizers talk about their communities as if they were hippie communes where members participate because they only care about a greater good.”

The sad truth is most people don't care about the greater good. Even when they do, they're unlikely to act on it solely because it is the greater good.

If your mission is to create a greater good, you need to do it through tactics that appeal to the immediate self-interests of members. 

Which makes the greater good irrelevant. You can replace ‘the greater good’ with ‘huge profits’, and you would succeed, as long as you can appeal to the immediate self-interests of members.

Comments

[Andrew Warner]

I forgot that I said that. Ha.

One of the challenges I have in my interviews is getting people off their scripts. Content makers, for example, start out telling their secret is that they "just write good stuff."

But when my questions get more probing, I find that they have tricks for creating link-bait. Or that they watch Google Trends for subjects that bring in lots of traffic.