Blogger vs. Blogger: We sat down with Josh Spear and found out how he’s come to run a virtual media empire at the age of 24. Josh is one of the youngest marketing strategists in the world. In addition to JoshSpear.com, his internationally recognized trend-spotting blog, he is a founding partner of Undercurrent, a digital think-tank focused on new ways to reach young people without interrupting them.
BLOGGING
Did you actively promote your site, or did the traffic just grow organically?
No, I never actively promoted the site. I was always proud to say I never marketed it. I never did banner-swaps with anybody. I was fortunate enough to start the site when design blogs were few and far-between. There was Grace from Design*Sponge, Josh from Cool Hunting, myself, and only a few others.
The community used to be much tighter. We would call each other out on postings. Grace and I used to have “scoop wars.” If I posted something, she’d dig back and say, “You’re not reading my site, I posted this four months ago!” Or if we posted something on the same day, she’d say, “I got you by 3 hours!”
But today thousands of sites link to all our sites, and it’s a re-blog world. If someone writes about something I’ve written about, I’m not going to say anything anymore. Back then, there was actually a golden rule. Now that’s completely gone. It’s all about the pursuit of traffic, and post quantity.
How does one pursue traffic? How often does a successful blogger need to post?
A few years ago I did an experiment. I went from posting about four times a day to posting 15 times a day. I did that for a while, and traffic jumped by a lot, obviously. But three years ago there wasn’t nearly as much to read. If I posted 15 times a day, you tuned in 15 times a day. Now people scroll through everything in Google Reader. I read all my blogs in Google Reader and I don’t usually know which blogs the posts come from. That’s what’s happening.
Do you get a lot of feedback from your readers?
We get a surprising amount of feedback. Especially from the core audience that’s been reading it since the beginning. Well, the “beginning.” Everyone has a different sense of the beginning. Anybody who has actually been reading the site since the beginning knows that it was never really about products. If you dig far enough back, it was a blog about “what the hell am I doing?” I wrote about politics, and things that I found inspiring, and leaving school. It was very personal.
But that growing community was always there. And when you hit some sort of milestone, you hear from them, “Congratulations!” Once in a while, we get people who are either genuinely moved by something we’ve written, or it has moved their supply in some way. I have a secret folder on my computer called “Magic” where I put stories like, “You posted my shirt and it sold out instantly.” Yes! I love that.
BRANDING
How did you get into the branding and marketing work that you’re doing at Undercurrent?
I got a random email on my blog, about six months after I started it, from the Leo Burnett ad agency in Chicago. They asked me to come in and speak to them about the interwebs, and particularly about their client, McDonalds. I’ve never been in McDonalds, and I’ve never eaten McDonalds, so it was interesting. I gave them some pretty raw and authentic thoughts, and it turned out to be very helpful. Most of these brands are so insulated from what’s actually going on. They have to do a grand study to figure out what the kids are saying, and then someone has to translate that.
Did you come from a branding background? What got you interested in all this?
I came from a brand savvy, product savvy, never “settling” household. My dad is a designer. He’s a feng shui expert. When I grew up he was designing hotels and private residences, working with people like Karim Rashid. In grade school I always had Muji notepads and pencils that my dad brought me back from trips. There was always some thought put into a purchase, and what brands stood for, and what values they had. But it took a long time for me to realize how interested I was in brands. I just knew that I liked some of them.
Josh Spear’s lecture on branding, Brand Utopia
That’s an interesting transition.
One of the first and most important things I realized is that anyone who says they’re immune to brands is so unbelievably full of shit. I have long-since given in to my love for certain brands. I buy the things they release on day one, and I far overpay for something just to know that it came from those people. Even if it’s entirely irrational, I do it.
I still meet people who say they “aren’t really affected by brands.” OK, let’s have a test. Say you’re flying to London. What airline would you rather fly, British Airways or something you’ve never heard of, like Air Chumbawumba? And when you get out of the airport, would you rather get into a taxicab that looks like the ones you know, or something that looks like a boat on wheels?
That’s like when my family comes to visit and I try to put them in an unmarked Brooklyn gypsy cab. It’s a really hard sell!
Exactly! And yet your family would probably tell you that they’re not into brands. Another example: people come to New York City to go on vacation. They don’t go to Buffalo. Which do you think is the stronger brand, New York City or Buffalo? Nobody is immune; brands affect your decision making.
Image via the World Economic Forum’s Flickr set
WORLD CHANGING
You recently got back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. How did you get the chance to attend?
I spoke at a Google Zeitgeist conference, a year and change ago. There was a delegate from the World Economic Forum in the audience. They came up to me afterwards and said, “I’d like to invite you to Davos.” I’ll never forget looking at his card and thinking, “What is this place?” I’d certainly heard about it, but I never thought I’d go in a million years. So I went for the first time last year, and I was one of the youngest people there.
I would not guess that a whole hell of a lot of people our age are at the World Economic Forum.
They invited a fair amount of younger people, though they were more internet/technology focused, rather than lifestyle/design/culture, or whatever category you want to put me in. They put me in the “Media” slot. I spoke about young people, and branding, and marketing to them.
I went again this year, and was nominated to the Global Agenda Council for marketing and branding. Councils have 4-10 people and are about planetary science, and the oceans, and national security, and Iran, and oil… All these wildly important things. The marketing and branding council is made up of bigwig agency owners and leaders. They put me on there partially, I think, because they wanted someone young to keep them honest. They’re trying to invigorate what they’re doing. We ended up collaborating with the council on climate change, to come up with better ideas to communicate climate change.
From Davos, I flew to LA to attend the TED conference. That was my third TED, and it’s the best week of the year, every time. Although this one was very subdued, having come from Davos where I met, you know, the Prime Minister of every country in the world.
It’s hard to come off that high.
Yeah, exactly. My first year at Davos, I was thinking, “Oh my god, look, it’s Robin Williams! It’s the Prime Minister of Turkey! It’s Jet Li!” And this year it was, eh, Jet Li. You get jaded really fast. Which is good; all of a sudden it becomes so much less about the people and so much more about the content.
It’s exciting to see someone our age at these conferences. What do you think our generation brings to the table, in terms of world-changing?
The first year I went to TED, you couldn’t actually download any videos. Can you imagine, you couldn’t watch TED Talks? That’s insane! So the fact that that’s broken open now means that we can all share some of the things that were spoken about there. And Davos, for the first time this year, is all HD, you can download it. 1 in 5 people in the world are under 24. If a pretty large portion of them can have access to the internet, they too can consume this knowledge.
There’s never going to be 500 24-year-olds at Davos, it’s just not going to happen. But there are more than 500 24-year-olds around the world that understand and care about those issues, and don’t need to be there. They won’t ever have the crazy experience but, nonetheless, will in some way get to shape the future. They can be much more knowledgeable, and make a much greater impact, than young people ever could before.