On pages 192-3 of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson introduces us to the concept that “nature wastes life.”

The background is that in an era of abundance (as the digital world is), you can’t afford NOT to waste. It’s often more effective to waste than not to.

And it was on this page that the difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing fully conceptualized for me.

As a digital marketer, waste is good.

Stay with me here. :-)

Anderson (author of the Long Tail and editor-in-chief of Wired) cites the fact that bluefin tuna can release “as many as 10 million fertilized eggs in a spawning season. Perhaps ten will make it to adulthood.”

Nature, he says, “wastes life in search of better life.”

The reason that nature does this is because “scattershot strategies are the best way to ‘fully explore the potential space.”

Anderson then quotes the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow who calls this “thinking like a dandelion.”

“The disposition of each-or even most-of the seeds isn't the important thing, from a dandelion’s point of view. The important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions. The dandelion doesn’t want to nurse a single precious copy of itself in the hopes that it will leave the nest and carefully navigate its way to the optimum growing environment, there to perpetuate the line. The dandelion just wants to be sure that every single opportunity for reproduction is exploited!”

So, how does this apply to you, as a marketer?

In the pre-digital era, your resources were scarce, limited, and expensive.

You couldn’t afford to undertake a “campaign” unless you had some degree of certainty that it would work. So, you tended to rely on the tried and true, not willing to take unnecessary risks.

Today, however, digital resources are cheap (your time isn’t of course, so you can’t waste it all), but you can afford to do more things that may turn out to be “wasteful.”

As a marketer, you want to “think like a dandelion” and since the cost of testing out a marketing idea online is MUCH, MUCH lower, you should try and plant as many seeds as you can.

Some will live, some will die. Some may even cause you pain (like a promotion/contest/comment that turns people against you), so a 100% scattershot strategy may not be the best, but scattering more shots does make sense.

• You can build a Facebook quiz and deploy it in 20 minutes.
• You can make a survey in less.
• Change your status update to link to a special offer.

And you can “slice and dice” the test to only a few people see it. If they like it, you know. If not, it’s waste and move on to something else.

I cringe when I hear people talk about “making a viral video.”

Let’s be clear. You can’t make a viral video. You can make a video and hope it goes viral.

And the way to increase your odds of something “going viral?”

Scattershot.

Make a lot of really good videos at lower cost instead of putting all of your dandelion seeds in one basket.

Spend $100k on a TV spot (or whatever it costs) or use that same money to test out 1000 different ideas for your community?

Don't abandon your objectives and think strategically, of course, but increase your odds of "going viral" by putting more chips on the table.

I loved this book. I thought it did a phenomenal job of explaining the fundamentals of the macro-shift under which we are going.

I’ve long said that this era is “like the Industrial Revolution, only bigger” and I think Anderson explains it as well as anyone.