Blogger Fred Wilson asks: Can you fake authenticity?
It’s an interesting question; he defines the term as “that intangible feeling you get when you come across a service that does exactly what it is supposed to do, is novel, true to itself, etc. Digg, Delicious, Flickr, and Craigslist are all authentic services and have remained so.”
First off, reading the comments on his post, you see that Fred is one of those bloggers who has an ability to plant a seed and get the discussion going, which creates not only a good environment on a blog, but also, in a business. Which is a good thing, since in his spare time he’s also a successful Venture Capitalist.
Let’s consider the question. While I do not think you can fake authenticity forever, you can certainly create a [false] sense of authenticity amongst a portion of the broad population, but often times, the specific target market you are trying to reach might see through it sooner or later.
Let’s expand the question to music, politics, and fashion. If we define authenticity as an intangible feeling, then music, politics and fashion are perfect examples of how one can indeed fake.
In music, the business is notoriously hit or miss. But you can pretty much fake music and ride it to a commercial and creative success because there are enough consumers out there to make anything more or less a success. In other words, while an artist might eventually want other music artists to respect them, eventually they care less about their peers and find a subset of the population to “digg them.”
The same applies in politics: politicians do not really care about peers, in fact, they care about voters. Sure they need to impress (seem authentic) to their cohorts at first, but ultimately, it’s the people! Example: I am not saying that President Bush is fake (we’ll leave such debates for our WorldMojo.com blog), but clearly he struck a chord with Americans in 2000 but now, people see that there is a hollowness beneath the surface.
And art. fashion etc. perhaps best illustrates the subjective nature of what is authentic and what is not. The problem is that it’s just a personal, biased matter that “faking authenticity” and “being authentic” become one and the same! After all, using the introduction to drive home my point: a lot of it comes from who introduces you to something: if Fred (who’s an ardent fan with some pretty good taste) links to something, we are automatically biased to like it. Extending this to his other gig as a VC, if someone with connections makes an introduction to a VC, as an entrepreneur, you have won.
Finally, when it comes to passing a judgment, it is important to hold off and ask yourself “what the artist, entrepreneur etc. wants to accomplish with the project” vis a vis “how people, the target market, audience etc. perceives the project/product/service.”
As we highlighted, sometimes you can have an authentic feel to one crowd and not another: take Friendster, which is very popular in Asia, but no longer in America, why?
It’s pretty random, that’s why!
In technology and startups, oftentimes entrepreneurs tend to think too much on pleasing their peers, the writers, the bloggers, the VCs when in fact they should only care about their clients, their users, etc. I tell every entrepreneur I meet spend 5 hours on business development for every hour you spend on corporate development. If you spend a day trying to get a journalist to cover your business, spend 5 days building the darn business!
Lastly, there is a major nuance between launching something that is authentic and tweaking something and making it seem not authentic. This morning when I logged on to Fred’s site and read his post, I did not read the comments. I was expecting someone to mention Netscape’s fate which sought to take a page out of Digg’s playbook and ended up making the community that Netscape’s readers had come to find authentic for years suddenly become not authentic.
The lesson there is simple: don’t fix something if it ain’t broken… and if you want to launch something new, sometimes it’s best not to care too much about what the smartest people in the room think and see what the masses have to say, because authenticity is a pretty subjective thing.
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