The facts are beyond dispute: George Bush was as much of a flip-flopper as John Kerry. But Bush told the story first. He and his team did a masterly job of telling a story about Kerry and his inability to stick to one story. The Kerry team responded with a doomed effort to point out that Bush flip-flopped as much as Kerry did. Of course, this story couldn’t take hold because the other story was already in place.

Then the Kerry campaign tired to make the case that flip-flopping was a good thing, that it was another word for flexibility. In order to adopt Kerry’s story, people would have had to admit that they were wrong–and that almost never happens.

The best strategy would have been to go first. Failing that, the appropriate response would have been to tell a completely different story, one that used a frame that matched the worldview of the undecided voter.

Seth Godin’s “All Marketers Are Liars“

Tactical victories are brutal. It’s spending more hours at the office than someone, spending another few million on commercials than the competition, or compromising on your last remaining principles. It’s playing a game that you really have no power over. It’s the +1 strategy–they’ll bid 100, I’ll bid 101.

Do you really think there is a niche out there for you to be slightly more efficient than Tim Ferriss, or a little more of an asshole than Tucker or to read .5 more books than I do? There is a guy on YouTube and all he does is make response songs about other popular people’s videos. Not only is it cringingly lame, it’s just picking up garbage views–it’s their video plus a small twist.

Attacking strategy (Robert’s most valuable lesson) is not only the most productive channel for your resources, but it’s the most authentic path you can take. In a world of Global Microbrands, your positioning in crucial. The best possible position to be in is you. When you’re you, you don’t have to do any work. All you have to do is wake up each morning and refuse to be defined by other people.

Despite what I said about the servers yesterday, Rudius does a lot of stuff really well, especially community. And what Tucker did here is the perfect example.

Chasing Kaz is slowly evolving from a blog about two guys weighlifting to a community about strength, improvement and fitness. The Alexa rank doesn’t reflect it, but the forum has threads with 20,000 and 30,000 views and discussions that run for pages. Now users can post running diaries of their workout regimen and other people can give advice or criticize.

Hosting dozens of workout logs for strangers probably wasn’t what Tucker had in mind when he launched his site 4 years ago. I still have some of the initial emails from when Chasing Kaz got started and no one brought up anything remotely close to that idea. But this is where it went–it’s what the people wanted and I think it is a natural progression for the site.

Rudius won’t make much money from the work out log forum. When someone logs on to post their stats, they aren’t looking for ads–they’re just trying to complete a task. But in the long run, every time someone does it, they are just a little more tied to the brand. They’ve transitioned from a consumer to a prosumer and that connection is harder to break. It’s harder because it’s meaningful, because the users have invested something other than just time.

In contrast to the Hollywood side, where The Agency owns a site with about the same traffic as Tucker and one of the managers keeps insisting on finding sites to merge or acquire. First, in the corporate world, mergers have an awful track record but online? I can’t wrap my head around how that would even work. We shouldn’t be thinking about acquiring a larger audience but rather how to become better connected with the one you already have. Which again highlights the two different, deeply innate approaches to value. One wants superficial relationships and the other wants concentrated, intense connections. It’s not stupid to think like that–“Let’s get more, more, more”–but it is a massive strategic error. Just because something is intuitive doesn’t mean it will work online. Because one morning you’re going to wake up and everyone will have run off to the next site, where they’re treated better, where they feel pulled to, where their life becomes intertwined into the creative process.

In my view, Facebook made the same mistake. They had a chance to grow up with the Y Generation. They could have evolved with that 9 million person userbase (and rising) and had a lock on it forever. I don’t think you could have asked for a more profitable and long-term niche than the social lives of American college students (and eventually, their business and personal lives), but that wasn’t enough. Instead they decided to spread to an numerically larger but significant less loyal demographic and now, the future isn’t looking so rosy. If Myspace was Krispy Kreme–a hot niche commodity that leveraged their buzz to flood the market and then was forced to retreat–Facebook could have been In and Out–an autonomous and principled to their core and have lines out the door at 1 in the morning. Now the core audience is alienated, the new audience has a sense of entitlement and the infrastructure is straining under the weight of thousands of applications, requests and spam-profiles.

So that is the dilemma that companies ultimately face online. The smart people are building community and a deeper relationship whenever they can. The people stuck to the old model think that what they really need is as many eyeballs as possible. If your strategy online is to “write something I care about and then get as many people to read it as possible” then you’re doomed to fail. You’re just dressing up the old model in digital form. The internet has succeeded precisely because that model is flawed and like Hugh said, it continues to exist so long as there are “young, hungry people willing to take the pyramid/privilege model seriously.” The future, online, is there for those who think differently–strategically–who create value that propagates itself instead of stealing it before it runs out. What that really means is this: Stop trying to get on the front page of Digg or “roll up” other verticals and be absolutely indispensable to the people you already have.

Every time I go to see a movie, I leave hating theaters just a little bit more. Yesterday, the movie showtime was 7:30 but the opening credits didn’t roll until 8:00 on the dot–and the movie started as scheduled. That’s because, in addition to the 10-12 minutes of previews, Disney decided to run a 17 minutes animated short with Goofy and an inexplicably stupid storyline about setting up a home theater system. It wasn’t even an advertisement and I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the fuck it was for. And naturally, this was preceded by the “20” minutes of commercials that the theater runs before the show that they half-heartedly attempt to disguise as content.

All of it is a weak attempt to milk a little more money out of a dying system. Using the contrast of the internet we can see how utterly laughable and self-defeating such measures are. Like slowly mining the movie experience of anything positive isn’t eventually going to have some repercussions. What if Rudius did this? Imagine if Tucker, to break my site, forced all the users who went to TuckerMax.com to check out out my blog for 30 seconds. It would build me an user block almost instantly, but at what cost? It’s just moving food around the plate–it’s not creating any new value. When you rob one hand to fill the other enough times, eventually one comes up empty. And that’s the experience of going to a movie–there is nothing left to take. I can’t think of one thing they could do to make it worse without going out of their way to hurt people.

The Rudius pages of have had an abysmal record of staying online recently. Sometimes they’re down for as much as half of the day. Not everyone agrees with me, but I think that this is absolutely the worst possible thing the company can allow to happen. Fixing it should be priority number 1. To raise the barrier of entry in the edgeconomy in any way is to slowly slit your own throat. People will just go elsewhere. The next site isn’t 15 miles away like another theater, it’s a click away. I know Rudius isn’t just an internet company but how can it claim to be different and then ignore the fundamental new paradigm of our age: Unfettered access, all the time.

I have a post coming on why it is that Hollywood, to date, has only one significant victory on the web: TMZ. The leader in almost every other category is someone who came up outside the system. But basically, I think it comes down how they look value. Hollywood is a genius at extracting it–they scorch the earth getting it out. “We’ve got these people sitting in the theaters waiting, how can we use that time to OUR benefit?” instead of “How can we make those people happy?” And the web isn’t about that at all. That’s why Knol will fail, because Google designed it to answer this question: “How can we get people to make pages FOR US?” You won’t find that in the philosophy of Wikipedia. The web is about creating value together, not taking it from someone else. The Entrenched Player Dilemma tells us that you really can’t transition from extracting value to collaborating to make it because extracting was where you made all your money.

Theaters are allowed (by the market) to be shitty because there are costs involved in alternatives. I’d have to wait for it to come out on DVD, or risk pirating it, or drive an hour to one of Cuban’s Landmark Theatres. There is also some cultural inertia involved–I remember that it used to be pleasant. That’s a relic though and it won’t save anyone’s ass online. Whatever early mover’s advantage Rudius has can be lost pretty easily if the servers keep making it a shitty experience.

Hollywood’s blissful ignorance of what anyone thinks or feels or has to say has been shattered. The idea that you can rape value without ever having to create it, thankfully, is going away. It’s only a matter of time before it’s totally gone.