Analogies in Business

Human Friend Digital Podcast Transcript: 

S01E02, Analogies in Business

Jacob:

Hello, and welcome to our next episode of the human friend digital podcast. I’m your co-host, Jacob Meyer. 

Jeffrey:

I’m your other co-host Jeffrey Caruso. 

Jacob:

And today, I want to talk about analogies.

Jeffrey:

Analogies in business. So Jacob, Albert Einstein, once said, “if you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself”. So there’s lots of concepts in your business that are too abstract or esoteric for people who aren’t familiar with them to understand. And so you use analogies to bridge that gap.  

Jacob:

Yes. And I would say that Albert Einstein’s… that was a lofty goal because I also have children between the ages of six and four, and I think the biggest problem with trying to explain things to a six-year-old, that still applies to everyday life, is that they only have so many experiences that they’ve had, so when you have to explain something to them, you have to get it on a level of something that they’ve actually experienced themselves, because if I talk to them about the speed of light or evolution or anything like that to children, it can be really difficult to come up with analogies that work on such a small scale. However in business, it’s kind of similar: You’re working with people that are experts in their field, and they might be experts in engineering or experts in running a funeral home business– the differences between those is crazy– and I’m an expert in the digital marketing space, and so you’re going to have to learn to translate these things to other people because in digital marketing, especially without the power of electricity, my job just disappears overnight. 

Jeffrey:

Yeah, absolutely. And so, what’s one of the biggest concepts that you encounter with your clients that needs to be analogized, and needs to be explained to a six-year-old? Because, like you said, they’re not part of that sphere, they don’t have expertise in it: they might know everything about engineering, but they don’t know anything about “X”. So what’s that “X”? 

Jacob:

Well, the one that comes up the most– since I’ve been doing this for going on 12 years now– the one that’s consistently come up the most is the difference between domains, and hosting, and CMS platforms. 

Jeffrey:

Okay. What CMS? I don’t know.  

Jacob:

And another acronym soup edition. So I could have said DNS “domain name servers,” and hosting, and CMS is “content management system”, so the systems that manage your content. So WordPress is an example of a CMS, or Squarespace as an example… Actually Squarespace is a weird one because it’s an example of a DNS, a host, and a CMS platform all combined into one thing.

Jeffrey:

Jacob, you’re gonna have to back up: you’re getting into the weeds too quickly.

Jacob:

Exactly. So, this is what happens with clients too, because then when I would be developing a website, I’d be like, “hey, in the very early stages of it,  do you have access to your DNS?” And they’d be like,  “what’s that?” and then they’d be sending me stuff to their hosting information. 

Jeffrey:

So wait, what’s DNS then? 

Jacob:

Exactly. So let’s go to an analogy:  My favorite analogy for this is an apartment building… kind of like the post office: they have to get a package to an apartment building. So, what do they need to get to that apartment? They need to know the address, where it’s located in the world, and then where you’re located in that building.  And the building is a physical thing, and a lot of us live in apartments… So, let’s break that analogy down here: So your address, the number, that is in the street that you live on…

Jeffrey:

The building itself? 

Jacob:

No, no, no. We’re going to go right down to the bottom line of… let’s say you’re in Google maps and you need to type something in: that’s your domain. Your domain is definitely your address.  Now what happens when they get to that address? What the building is? The building is your website host. And it’s a lot like apartment buildings: unless you are a large business that has lots of money to spend on server space, you do not get a dedicated server machine that hosts and runs your website. You are in an apartment building with a bunch of other websites on what’s called shared hosting. It’s basically: you’re a tenant in apartment 1, and someone’s in the next website over is in apartment 2, and so on and so forth. And then, what’s in your apartment, like the furnishings, the chairs, the decorations, the artwork, your piano…  That is your CMS platform; your content management system. That is how you rearrange and present yourself to the world. And so… 

Jeffrey:

That’s like your website and how it’s organized? 

Jacob:

Yeah. That’s what people think of as a website, mostly, is the CMS platform that content management system. 

Jeffrey:

So, what’s in the apartment? 

Jacob:

Yeah. But the website host is the box that everything fits into. But people don’t… when you go to an apartment, you don’t really think, “Wow, this is such a great apartment because the walls are nice”, it’s usually because all the decorations look nice in there. But you can rearrange things inside your space, but your domain name is your street address. It’s only a little weird in websites, this analogy breaks down right there at the domain thing though. And this is the problem with analogies that we have to always remember in business: They’ll never be absolutely perfect, they just have to get close enough for you to be like, “oh, I get it now!”. And a domain is actually more like a vanity plate: you can get anything that you want on that.  You can make it say “isellcheese.com” right?

Jeffrey:

So within the framework of the post office analogy, who’s the host?  

Jacob:

The landlord.

Jeffrey:

The landlord of the building. 

Jacob:

Landlord of your building. So that would be in my website’s hosted on WP engine. And if you want to be a sponsor to WP engine, you just call me up. My website’s hosted on WP engine. They’re my landlord and just like when you’re shopping for apartments, you always are shopping based on what are the amenities of that stuff. In website hosting, you might have 30 days of backups, certain levels of security…

Jeffrey:

So you get different amenities depending on who’s hosting you. 

Jacob:

Yeah. If you have a nice landlord, you get a lot of nice amenities. And if you go cheap and you live in a cheap apartment, you don’t get a lot of amenities. And that’s basically the exact same thing with website hosting. And your domain, it’s your vanity address that you tell people to go find it.

Jeffrey:

So what’s yours? Your domain? 

Jacob:

Is Humanfriend.digital

Jeffrey:

So that’s the domain? 

Jacob:

Yes. 

Jeffrey:

That’s your apartment within…? 

Jacob:

No. That’s my address. 

Jeffrey:

Oh, that’s the building that you’re in…

Jacob:

No, that’s my address. 

Jeffrey:

Yeah. Your address. So it’s the building that you’re in, and your apartment number that is human friend digital?  

Jacob:

Yeah, it’s, kind of. But you can get the idea that you do have an address: that’s the number on the street. That’s just like the number on the street of any apartment building. You don’t get to pick that. And the people, the landlord, doesn’t get to pick that either, that’s like a government ordained in our world. In the domain world, you get to actually say what your address is, but the building is there. And you can, when people type in your web browser, which is basically your Uber driver in this situation: You get your Uber, like Chrome, and you say, “take me to humanfriend.digital”, and it will look up how to get there, and it will take you to that building and get you into that apartment and you look around and everything. And it does this all in about a half a second. So it’s very fast, but that’s essentially what a web browser is, that’s essentially what…

Jeffrey:

The web browser’s the Uber driver, or maybe the mailman sticking with the postal service analogy…

Jacob:

Sticking with the postal service, they’re going to be taking that package, you, into that building. And that’s that information that you’re going to be getting out of it. So, but that’s how it goes, and for most people, that information breaks down. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to people because what your experience of websites almost always is the CMS platform, the pretty thing. 

Jeffrey:

Sure. Right, and what you see when you’re there… some furniture in the apartment. 

Jacob:

Yeah. What you’re experiencing when you go visit that place. And that’s what people think everything is there. But that’s the tip of the iceberg, right? 

Jeffrey:

They don’t think about how they got there. They’re there, they see it, they see an apartment that they’re in, but they’re like, “I don’t know how I got here. How did I get here?” through the postal service, basically.

Jacob:

Through the domains. Yes, the postal service: Getting your domain to that address, to the right building, to the right block in that building, and then you’re in. 

Jeffrey:

Right. Um, so we kind of already touched on this a little bit, but when do analogies break down, and have any of your analogies with your clients? You know, have they brought them to a conclusion that you’re like, “No, wait, that’s not what I meant”? 

Jacob:

Yes, that happens all the time. I think analogies are so great, until you start picking them apart. And it gets really, like we just did in that conversation. Like if I just kept it simple like, “this is your address, this is your building, and this is the furnishings in your place”, and I kept it like that? You’d have been like, okay, cool. But when we start nitpicking, it falls apart. 

The worst analogy I’ve ever done, in sales and business, was comparing SEO, search engine optimization… in SEO, you have all these pages that you’re building up, right? And these pages have keywords, and then you’re building this structure to this site: So I’m like, “Oh, I got these pages, they’re like blocks. I’ve got these keywords. These are important. They’re building to a primary overarching keyword for my business. I should call it a pyramid!” And I was young, and I thought, “Oh, this is gonna work really well in sales calls”. Well, it didn’t work that well. It turns out, when you do base an analogy on something, you should base it on something that doesn’t have other connotations. And the words “pyramid and business” don’t always go together that well. You know, you don’t really want to say, “I want to make your website into a pyramid scheme”…

Jeffrey:

It’s a pyramid scheme, and that has all of this loaded meaning behind it. So, when I was doing research for this episode, I ran across a study from Stanford University where they asked participants to read an analogy about city crime that was based on either a “rabid beast”, or a disease. And the people who read the analogy about the rabid beast tended to support solutions that were more punitive, more violent, and the ones that read the analogy about the disease were like, “Oh, we need to treat the root cause of this”. And so, that’s exactly kind of what you’re saying is: You can unintentionally push someone into a direction that you don’t want them to go, or that’s not what you want them to think, just based on the verbiage of the analogy that you’re employing. 

Jacob:

Yeah. Because in your case, you’re asking the audience to picture themselves as a hunter, or picture themselves as a doctor. And we know what a hunter does: they kill the thing. 

Jeffrey:

And a doctor heals.

Jacob:

And the doctor’s going to heal it. And that’s exactly what you need to avoid when you’re talking about these complex things in business, especially in digital marketing that are almost the equivalent of talking about the speed-of-light for some people, it’s very detached from your day to day. If you start bringing up things like pyramids, people are going to say, “well, that might be a pyramid scheme”, but that analogy also broke down because… Like a pyramid is one object, and a lot of businesses do more than one thing. And so, you’re like, as soon as they were trying to ask about like, oh, what should you do with the extra service that I do, like, you know, if I… 

Jeffrey:

Yeah, that might not be to the point of that pyramid, it might lead somewhere to the left of the point of the pyramid. So, how can you reconcile that within the framework of the analogy, and you can’t.

Jacob:

And you can’t, then you have a pyramid with a bunch of pitchforks: it doesn’t look well. So eventually, a lot of the time what I would do is, I would get the analogy to more like a university setup? Like, if your SEO, search engine optimization, the greatest power of it is education. Like the framework: when Sergei Brin and Larry Page were back in Stanford University, making this…

Jeffrey:

The Google people? 

Jacob:

The Google people, the founders of Google. There was an educational purpose behind it. And so, SEO, at its root, is an educational tool. 

Jeffrey:

Okay. Can you explore that a little bit? Like, what do you mean, it was an educational tool?

Jacob:

Yeah, this is basically how search engines work in general. I often liken it to: your website is like a university where you have a lot of colleges, which could be your services that you’re going to reach out to, and each one of your colleges teaches your audience about a specific thing that you do. And that’s kind of how Google kind of sees your website too, as an educational resource. But the way the algorithm works… and an algorithm is just a complex system to solve something else, right? It’s just there: like tying a shoe, you know, over, under pull it through loop de loop… 

Jeffrey:

Here are the steps.

Jacob:

Right. That’s an algorithm on a basic level. So in their view, they took this university mindset: so if you have a web page, this is a written article, so there’s content on it. But in a university mind, you also have links, which are cited sources. And cited sources are the links that people do– if you actually see in my business, people will call it citation services, even citation link-building, they use that word interchangeably. Because it is like that term paper from college, and basically, if you have a really well-written article and you are citing a lot of sources, that’s basically how a search engine works to a certain degree, because what they’re going to do is they’re going to take all those cited sources, and they’re going to go out there and say everyone that talks about this topic site source X. Well, that must be really, really good on the topic if all their papers are citing this source, then that’s going to get ranked higher and higher in their tool and that’s really the basis of Google, that’s what Google was back in the day. It would crawl, compile all of this stuff, look at people’s link profiles, look at the content of their site…

Jeffrey:

And if everyone linked to the same article, it would rank really high.

Jacob:

And it would just be like that scholarly, have the citation. 

Jeffrey:

So, I get what you’re saying, because my background, of course, is in science and research. And publish or perish was always what I was taught when I was doing my research. And, a lot of it’s not just publishing a paper, but if people link to your paper, then you get more prestige in the industry and more grant money and all that stuff. And so what you’re saying, it’s an educational background for search engines, it’s sort of like that same model where the more people cite your paper, the higher in ranking you’ll be.

Jacob:

Exactly. So, that’s the kernel of truth of SEO, and that goes all the way back to the beginning. How that has changed quite a bit over time, because now they can, especially now, they have AI that can actually read the content of your site and kind of weigh it a little bit differently. So they can actually have a bit of an active participation in the content quality that is being ranked in it. But still, it goes back to that. I mean, if you look at the sites with the greatest authority on the internet, they have great link profiles throughout a lot of content, just like a university and a college produces a ton of content. 

So, from a business perspective, you need to project yourself. If you want to dominate the keyword space of your business, you need to think of yourself like a university. I have one big university and each one of my services is like a college and I’m going to have to educate people when they come to my site. And if I educate people, and every step and every little place that they go and like the little buildings of my campus, which is my website, they have an extremely high likelihood of purchasing from you. I think HubSpot had a statistic: if you can catch someone in their earliest stages of the research and you educate them, and show that you’re a positive resource, you have a 70% chance of landing that sale. So it’s really valuable.

Jeffrey:

Yeah. So, going back to the topic of the day, how do you come up with analogies? Obviously they’re really important to explain foreign concepts to your clients, how do you go about thinking about that, structuring an analogy? 

Jacob:

Well, I would say that the biggest thing to do is to go out and live your life, and start paying attention to the normal, really mundane things. When I was struggling, explaining website domains and hosting to people. I was just trying to think of what… They gave me a really easy starting point: they call it a web address. Sounds like an address, and people are used to website address as a term that was thrown around there. So I was just living my life and thinking through that on a basic level, and usually the best analogies tend to be the most basic, if you can get them to the most…

Jeffrey:

The most relatable…

Jacob:

Yeah. And, that university campus analogy that might not be that good for a lot of clients. If you’re working with a client that might be in,let’s say primarily a trade school thing, where they might be say, an auto mechanic. They don’t really have going to a big university experience. They might go to a college, like a community college. I went to community college for a specialized skill and people go through that all the time. They might not go through a big community campus experience, and so that might become an unrelatable analogy. 

Jeffrey:

But, we could modify it, you know? An analogy to the analogy: analogous analogy might be like a village center.

Jacob:

Exactly. You might try to do that. And you can even see Facebook, that was like one of their biggest things before they… I shouldn’t say “before they got evil”. But, you know what I mean? One of their biggest things was they wanted it to be the new town center. The new meeting place of the world. That was their analogy that they told people they wanted to be. But yeah, you can use that for a business as well. Like, come visit my town. And that’s just an important thing about analogies. But the best thing to do to create them is just, have a problem in your head, and go out and live your life and just find things that are really mundane. The most mundane things tend to be the way to explain it. 

Like, I was listening to Stephen Hawking’s Universe in a Nutshell recently, there was an analogy about a cannonball for the speed of light. And they were talking about that with like a black hole or a dark star and shooting a cannon ball up in the air and watching it come back down is like, this is what happens on a black hole: speed of light light is trying to escape, but it can, it will come back down like a cannonball. And I was like, “oh, yeah! Now I can visualize it”. And you know, that’s really where it is that I’m sure that person who was writing it, maybe it was Galileo talking about cannonballs. 

Jeffrey:

Well, he was the first one with the cannonball analogy, but I think it was a different analogy. He was talking about orbital mechanics, not black holes.

Jacob:

Yeah, we’re going to get back in my lane. Get back in my sight, not in my non-science lane. But that’s it, he was just living his life. That was something he saw. He saw that analogy right there and used it, and that’s what you got to do.

Jeffrey:

One more question. Other than– we talked about the postal service analogy, and touched on a couple other ones– do you have any other analogies that you really use very often with your clients?

Jacob:

Yeah, I would say my biggest cliche is the bus driver. And this is for anybody. It’s just– and I was actually nicknamed this in my first job– because sometimes when you get into a project, and you have a lot of people in the room, and you want to get it done, sometimes you get in that room and you realize there’s no bus driver.

Jeffrey:

Yeah, it’s all passengers. 

Jacob:

Yeah. And I ride the city Metro here in Cincinnati. I like riding the bus. I think it’s fun. I enjoy it. And every chance I get, I do not regret it. Some people don’t like riding the bus, but I do. And the one thing I always like about the bus driver is they got to go: They don’t care about all this stuff that’s going on in the back, you guys can be talking about whatever you want in there. I have a thing to do. I’m going to get there. Sometimes you see a bus driver and they will take out a street sign cause they got to get there. I’ve seen that before

Jeffrey:

Right? I’ve seen videos online of like, especially tram drivers, cause they can’t maneuver: they’re on a track. And just someone pulls into their lane and they just run them… Like “you got in my way. I’m sorry.  Here we go.”

Jacob:

Right. So a lot of times I joke with people, in an analogy sort of way, like “Who’s driving the bus?” Because someone needs to be responsible for it. One of my favorite project management tools is Asana. And one thing I really like about it, but a lot of people find…

Jeffrey:

A sauna?

Jacob:

Like, the Yoga? 

Jeffrey:

Oh, okay. I was thinking… I thought you were doing another analogy, like “a sauna” like “a steam room”.

Jacob:

No, no. This is a project management tool, it’s called “Asana,” it’s spelled like in the yoga form of it. But one thing that they do is every task that’s in there can only have one assignee, which bothers some people, but in my view: that’s a bus driver. There’s not two people driving a bus. It doesn’t mean that they have to be the leader, they don’t have to be the navigator, they don’t have to be…

Jeffrey:

Right there could be other people there, like the captain of a ship: There’s only one captain, but they have…

Jacob:

They have some guys holding the wheel. And that’s the analogy I always like to use. But you can use it in any context: Sometimes I feel like I’m hanging out with friends and we’re like, not doing anything, just talking around and stuff like that. I’m like, “Man, this feels like there’s no bus driver here.” 

Jeffrey:

Right? Or like trying to plan a trip with friends? Gosh, that happens to me all the time. And it’s just like, someone has to take control, they have to be the bus driver in a lot of settings is what you’re saying? 

Jacob:

Yeah. And again, everyday experiences. I think I remember, specifically watching a bus driver take out a roadside thinking “they got places to be people!”  

Jeffrey:

They’re on a time schedule. Gotta make it to the next stop within plus or minus three minutes. 

Jacob:

Yeah, they’re going to get there. So I respect that a lot.

Jeffrey:

Absolutely. Well, Jacob, this has been a really fun chit-chat. And this is episode two of the Human Friend Digital Podcast. And next week we’ll be talking about something… but we don’t have it yet?

Jacob:

Next week’s going to be the Jeff episode. 

Jeffrey:

Oh, next week is the “friend” episode 

Jacob:

It’s the “friend” episode. So we’ve done some digital episodes, now we’re going to move back to the “human friend” side of this thing, and I’m going to turn it around and quiz Jeff on some things with…

Jeffrey:

What are you quizzing me on next week? 

Jacob:

Well, with your chemistry background, I’m thinking I’m going to quiz you about– and your career in the food and beverage industry…

Jeffrey:

Hospitality. 

Jacob:

Hospitality, there we go. Some chemical reactions that I’ve always thought were really funny with Sommeliers and people that smell and taste things like… sometimes you see people say they tasted…

Jeffrey:

Only Sommeliers smell and taste things. 

Jacob:

I know. But you actually can help me understand why some of them say the word “tennis ball” when they’re talking about beer or wine and stuff like that. And that always melts my mind. 

Jeffrey:

Yeah. I mean, Sommeliers and beer tasters, “Ciceroneos”…  I don’t know if that’s the real… Cicerone is like the Sommelier of beer. I don’t know what you would call someone who practices the Cicerone. Well anyway. 

Jacob:

Jeff: you better get ready for the next episode 

Jeffrey:

I’m gonna be ready!

Jacob:

All right. Well, this is good. Um, thank you, and… We’ll edit this later.  

Jeffrey:

I thought that was good.