#163: "Hi, I'm the New Kid"
Arthur Trope Presents: The Inscrutable #163
“Hi, I’m the New Kid”
This could be a problem. Pedersen rotated out of the Committee back to SynrSys HQ and her replacement is a guy named Slothrop who carries an actual briefcase. The Committee meeting this morning was a 1-man grandstand where Slothrop expounded on anything & everything - but most of all on our social media strategy. Short version - he doesn’t find our ‘voice’ very ‘authentic’. He follows FB+Twitter, which, let’s be honest, don’t give you a lot to work with, which I tried to explain, but it was difficult to get a word in. I tried not be defensive, but it didn’t work. Aside from the Voice, his other authenticity issue was that the panels are “too polished”. He said the thing people connect w online is the “authenticity of the handmade,” the artisanal, the rough pen & ink sketches that don’t look like they went through the ‘system’. I thought Inky was going to have an aneurysm. Now we’ve got 25 people trying to figure out how to make it look like this comic is done by a HS sophomore doodling in homeroom. He wants to see a plan by Fri. His authority seems to have spawned from a vacuum left by the other eight swivel-chair potatoes on the Committee. Inky barely touched #163 as a result, so I guess we’re off to a roaring start. He’s probably on LinkedIn hitting up old work buddies as we speak. I don’t know what Artie’s going to do. From there, things veered toward the economics of the business model. Slothrop went on about the ‘Lifetime Value’ (LTV) of Followers. He said he’d already calc’d that each follower is worth a LTV of $1.32 in today’s money, and our job was to get that number up to $1.50 (+13.6%!!! he wrote and circled on the whiteboard) by the end of 2019. So if you’re reading this, you’re worth a dollar thirty-two to me now, no offense. How you get to a buck fifty, we didn’t get into, bc it was getting close to lunch, and Slothrop seemed a little spent, and the potatoes took the opportunity to debate dim sum vs sushi. Inky & I left before they came to a consensus. But I heard they voted 7-2 for the dim sum. -Ed.
