Perhaps you were not aware – innovation is easy. Or at least, so Tom Peters says:
You know, he might actually be right. I love the part about “saviors-in-waiting:”
Those are not the usual suspects when a company starts wondering who will lead them into the promised land.
It’s a truism in Western culture that if you set your goals high, even if you don’t reach them you’ve gotten far. That’s not necessarily true in business or project management.
“Boiling the ocean” is a word-picture for trying too hard, attempting too much:
When a company boasts that it is going to sell to the whole world, or transform its industry, it is often accused of “boiling the ocean.”
Companies are well-known for this kind of hubris, but the same can be true for an individual or a project.
The sad reality for those who want to change the world in one fell swoop is that change comes about one decision at a time, one relationship at a time, one person at a time. Sometimes lightning strikes, the stars align, and things happen quicker … and that’s what we all hope for.
But even when lightning does strike, one of two things usually turns out to be true.
It was a fad
Either the base was not built … there was no depth to the change … there was insufficient attention paid to relationships and communication and investment in a core of evangelists, true believers who are also pushing the change …
Or it’s a true movement
The work was done … there was sufficient depth to the movement … the change is real … and it has sustaining power.
The upshot
The upshot is that for sustaining change to happen, the hard yards have to be won. There’s no substitute for the grinding, meticulous work of preparing the soil, watering the plant, and weeding the garden.
Even if lightning strikes and you “get lucky,” without this work the best you’ll be is a one-hit wonder.
Measuring the results of social media marketing efforts has been challenging to say the least.
Five or six years ago, when I was helping start-ups put blogging campaigns together to kindle the development of user communities, I didn’t really have a clear idea how to measure ROI. About the only things we measured were visits and sales … which wasn’t too bad, but was only a very small part of the story. And based on our unsophisticated set-up (plus lack of Google Analytics) we really had no clue what the connection between visits and sales exactly was.
Today there are plenty of other ways to measure social media marketing results. Here are just a few, starting with quantitative measures:
A less obvious measure is the number of comments on your videos. While you’re checking that, be sure to get a sense of the overall tenor of the comments: are they positive, negative, or lukewarm?
More qualitative ….
That’s a fairly quantitative list, but there are some qualitative questions to ask as well.
In the final analysis …
… there is no final analysis. Social media marketing, is, after all, marketing. As such, there is very rarely a one-to-one correlation between input and output.
The reality, however, is that your ability to connect with clients depends on your online footprint, and the quality of your online presence. Are you findable online? Are you where your clients are, online? And if they search for you, do you have both a big enough and targeted enough Google footprint that they can easily find you?
Your online success, and increasingly your business success, relies on the answers to those questions.
If you’re in business, you’ve got competing priorities. I recently was facing a complex fork in the road, and rather than just picking it up … I need to understand the consequences of each direction.
What I needed was a filter to help me compare and contrast multiple competing business investment opportunities. I couldn’t find a good one online, so I made my own.
It’s now on Scribd, so if you find it helpful, feel free to download it and use it yourself.
Here’s an embed of the document, and I’ve got a couple of notes below …
Note:
There’s no scoring mechanism or anything, because I feel strongly that this is just an aide, not a program that you plug information into and presto! there’s the answer. In other words, this filter will not answer the question for you.
What it will do is help you to clarify your thinking and your best data around some key issues that are important to consider before making serious investments in competing directions.
Also:
If you are evaluating more than two options, just download the Word version, flip the page orientation to landscape, add another column … and go to town.
I absolutely love the way Zappo’s reminds their employees about corporate guidelines.
Sensible rule
First of all, they have a sensible rule: don’t reply to all! This is one of those Obviously Good Ideas™ that few follow … mostly for the purposes of CingYA in case of disaster, and appearing to look busy to lots of people. But in a high-trust and high-effectiveness work environment, the best email approach is only to reply to the people who absolutely need the reply.
The others, of course, need to trust that those who need to act are in fact acting on whatever information the email contained. The benefit is that they don’t have their inbox clogged with nice-to-know but useless information, and their productivity goes up.
Creative, fun implementation
However, most companies (even the ones with good rules) have nasty or annoying ways of reminding employees about the do’s and don’ts. Memos, personal chats with managers, staff meetings, etc. All of them are boring, annoying, can be insulting, and … ineffective. They’re ineffective because they’re not memorable.
Well, how’s this for memorability:
I tell you – I’d remember it. I’d probably not Reply to All ever again. Others in the office probably wouldn’t either. And, because of the fun spirit … I wouldn’t even be annoyed or insulted.
You have to have an amazing corporate culture to have earned the right to do this sort of thing, though … and especially to post it on YouTube.
But when you do … the benefits obviously spill out and support your entire branding and marketing efforts.
There are good reasons for some start-ups to run in stealth mode for months or years of their early existence.
I was reminded of a few as I was reading Chris Maxcer’s review of Joost for the iPhone. Check out this gem, about the desktop version:
I had briefly used Joost’s client-side Mac video viewing application in its early days, back when Joost had very little content … then forgot about it.
The dilemma is harsh: you want to launch as early as possible to:
But the problem is obvious: launching too soon can blow your buzz as users eat your dogfood and throw up … never to arrive at your dinner table again.
That’s exactly what happened to Chris. In this case, however, Joost is lucky enough (and, frankly, has enough market momentum) to warrant a second look – occasioned by the release of their app on a new platform: the iPhone.
The question is: have they learned their lesson? Apparently not, as Maxcer reports:
The 1,813 reviews on the Apple App Store seem to agree with me: Joost has lots of promise but it fails miserably. The average rating is two stars. Many users, though, noted that they were basically waiting for a non-buggy updated version from Joost.
It’s been a little more than 2 months in the new job, so it’s about time that I’ve got the new business cards. Here’s a sample … with a holiday twist.
There’s been a very interesting little “discussion” going around what we used to call the blogosphere.
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington spent the previous week at LeWeb, in Paris, where in response to some questions, he said that Europeans love life too much to generate the biggest technology success stories. They have too many 2-hour lunches and too few late-night coding sessions. LeWeb’s organizer Loic Le Meur responded by asking – on his blog – whether Arrington should be invited back.
Meanwhile, Zoho Office blogger Sridhar reflects that Japanese work even harder … often 12 or more hours daily.
This issue is bulls-eye topical for me, as I’ve been working 12 to 14 hour days lately in my new job.
But … let’s be honest.
There can be times when you go way overboard and work mega-hours to pass critical checkpoints. But 99% of people will not be long-term successful (or happy) being out of balance all the time. The old saw about no-one wishing on their deathbed that they’d spent more time at the office is true. And realistically, almost no-one is actually effective spending that many hours for very many days.
As I mentioned on the Zoho Office blog …
I’ve also read first-hand accounts from ex-pat workers in Japan who said that a LOT of the office time was actually just face time … there was not a lot more work actually getting done. But people couldn’t leave, because that would have been see as slacking. So they stayed at their desks, doing a little online shopping, doing a little of this and a little of that.
Here’s the deal: I’d much rather work smart than work hard. That is where you’re actually going to make the major difference – where you’re going to leap-frog the competition.
But to succeed, often you have to do both.
Do you remember vStores?
Perhaps 7 years ago that was something I tried out: hosted and completely outsourced eCommerce. I made a couple hundred dollars, and then the vStores thing went down the tubes. Last time I checked, they were still not able to get their act straight.
So it was more than a little interesting to me to get a ping from ReviewMe to review the new Pepperjam Store Builder.
This is exactly the type of thing that I’ve been looking for, off and on, for some years: a very simple way to create an online store. PepperJam sources the products, provides the technology, and handles the eCommerce. You just have to select your business focus, promote your site, and collect the cash.
Here’s the thing that particularly interests me: PepperJam allows you to host the store on your own domain … not just a virtual domain at pepperjam.com. That’s how vStores worked, and it was annoying to not be able to host your own store at your own domain.
I agreed to do the review for ReviewMe (I only review things that I’m interested in and think might be interesting to readers of Sparkplug9) and I’ve checked out the service, but haven’t been able to use it. I signed up, as I’d like to be able to actually use and implement it before reviewing, but there’s a 48-hour period in which they check potential users’ bona fides. I suppose that’s a good thing, and is going to help keep Pepperjam’s affiliates clean and above-board.
Here’s a view of their store builder:
I look forward to getting approved, in which case I’ll post more info about Pepperjam’s e-commerce solution.
Matt Rissel interviewed 100 highly successful people, trying to find the tools they used to make themselves successful. Only problem? There wasn’t any tool commonality.
However, there was a principle commonality. Here are the top 10 common principles that highly successful people share. They tend to …
Scoble interviewed Rissel on FastCompany.tv – take a look:
Michael Port sent me a manuscript of his latest book, Beyond Booked Solid a couple of months ago. It’s the follow-up book to Book Yourself Solid.
In spite of all good intentions, it sat on at table in my office for two months. I’ve just now started to crack it open and check it out. I have to say, I like it.
More as I get farther into the book …
Russell Beattie should stand up tall and proud. The Yahoo! alum gave up a secure job (well, sorta secure) and a steady paycheck to tread the uncertain waters of the startup life, and unfortunately was sucked down.
He developed Mowser, a mobile web browser for small-screen mobile devices (OK, that’s a fancy phrase for cell phones). Mowser made big fat web sites small and lean for tiny screens and narrow pipes. (Example: check out Sparkplug9 in all its Mowser glory.)
But then iPhone showed us that the future of the mobile web was … err … the web. Not some “baby internet,” in His Steveness’ words, but the real internet. In your pocket. On your phone. On your iPod. And those of us who had tried to scrunch the web down onto our 2″ screens jumped up and said Amen.
Here’s how Russell says it:
The argument up to now has been simply that there are roughly 3 billion phones out there, and that when these phones get on the Internet, their vast numbers will outweigh PCs and tilt the market towards mobile as the primary web device. The problem is that these billions of users *haven’t* gotten on the Internet, and they won’t until the experience is better and access to the web is barrier-free – and that means better devices and “full browsers”. Let’s face it, you really aren’t going to spend any real time or effort browsing the web on your mobile phone unless you’re using Opera Mini, or have a smart phone with a decent browser – as any other option is a waste of time, effort and money. Users recognize this, and have made it very clear they won’t be using the “Mobile Web” as a substitute for better browsers, rather they’ll just stay away completely.
I can’t agree more … as unfortunate as it is for someone who’s sunk his life savings into making the web work in miniature.
In any case, he’s now looking for a job.
Someone will benefit by having him on-board. Not only is he new media savvy, he’s just spent his life savings figuring out what doesn’t work. Some smart company is going to be the beneficiary of that hard-won wisdom as he starts building what does.
. . .
. . .
More analysis, insight, and general reportage:
ReadWriteWeb sort of agrees
Last 100 disagrees
Mobile Marketing Watch might want to buy Mowser
Another one hits the deadpool
Venture Chronicles thinks the mobile model is wrong
Larry Dignan at ZDNet mostly agrees
Recently posted on Flickr …
Wondering why this bottle of kid’s vitamins is less than half full, straight from the store. Annoying, wasteful, unethical.
As someone who’s recently been promoted, I need to be extremely self-aware about what I’m doing, what I’m saying, why, how, and how others are perceiving it.
As Bob Sutton quotes Dacher Keltner’s The Power Paradox, positional power is a very dangerous thing:
He argues that — contrary to the claims of many experts, going back to Machiavelli — that people who are selected for powerful positions and are able to hold them are characterized by modesty and empathy. BUT he shows that being put in a position of power turns people into them into worse decision-makers, makes them more likely to act on their whims and desires, and makes them more likely to interrupt others, to to speak out of turn, to fail to look at others when they are speaking, and to tease others in hostile ways.
I think the key is being open to criticism, not closing your mind to new learning, and having people around you that will call you on BS behavior and actions. That’s something I don’t think I can ever stop working on.
Just saw this great quote at Bob Sutton’s blog:
Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.
That is a great, great strategy. I also like another quote of his:
Indifference is as important as passion.
I guess the key is knowing what to be passionate about, what to be indifferent about … and when to switch.
There’s a reason why SMS is a hundred billion dollar industry … and it’s simply that phones companies are unbelievably greedy.
Note: the three examples cited are, respectively: from your internet service provider via high-speed modem, over standard text messaging systems, and snail mail via the United States Postal Service. All are assuming that data is transmitted digitally (in the case of the snail mail, the bits are written on paper.)
COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:
TCP/IP: $1
TCP/SMS: $61,356,851.20
USPS: $307,072.00 (Bits written out on paper)So getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.
What exactly justifies making SMS messages sixty one million times more expensive than ISP data and 200x more expensive than TCP/USPS? How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.
Full article here. Well worth the read!
(I originally saw this at Slashdot. As noted at Digg, here seems to be a technical issue with that page – if you don’t see the article at that link, try the home page. It should be the top story there for a while.)
Just saw this in a comment posted by “T-Boy” at Scott Adam’s Dilbert blog
“Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.” – Dee Hocks
Yesterday I bought 27 books from Amazon – mostly from the marketplace. Why not? The book are almost new, and they’re easily half off or less.Today I got a notice that a book I bought via the marketplace was previously sold.
No biggie – I just went back to Amazon, chose the next available seller for the book, and bought it again.Here’s the deal: when Amazon sends out that kind of email, they should include a link to re-purchase. That would probably increase their sales from people whose purchases are no longer available.And would make an already very usable store even more so.
I’m looking at some interesting education marketing reports right now and found this interesting comment:
“We have tried combo programs, encouraging folks to go to our website and answer questions if they get the direct mail piece, and/or the e-mail to test which works better – and the e-mail always does!”
The reason, I’m sure, is context. When you get the email, you’re on your computer, and you’re just a click away from the website. But when you get the mail, you’re not … and it’s too much hassle to save the piece until you are.
I recently received a promotion, and I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a manager versus a leader, what kind of leadership I want to provide, and what kind of a leader do I want to grow to be …This is tough stuff, and I’m pretty sure I have a long way to go. But I think the critical piece is summed up in this advice that I found on PositiveSharing (the chief happiness officer’s blog):
A leader is best when the people are hardly aware of his existence,not so good when people stand in fear,worse, when people are contemptuous.Fail to honour people, and they will fail to honour you.But a good leader who speaks little,when his task is accomplished, his work done,the people say “We did it ourselves.”
The person who said that lived 2500 years ago in China: Lao Tzu.[tags] leadership, office, work, lao tzu, john koetsier [/tags]
Pickthebrain has a post on selling yourself. I can personally attest that, after getting the qualifications and knowledge you need to succeed in your chosen field, being able to “sell yourself” is the most critical part of professional success. The highlights:
I’d have to say the most important one, though, is not there. To me, it’s that day in and day out, you have to work hard, put your best foot forward, make those around you look good, and not care (too much) about who gets the credit.
I just got another LinkedIn connection request this morning. Every one has a little LinkedIn fact at the bottom, like this:
Fact: 3,414 CEOs use LinkedIn every day
As you know, since you’re a smart denizen of the blogosphere, whether something is a fact or not is a function of what kind of statement it is … not about whether it’s true.So here’s my version of that fact:
Fact: 3,414 people who claim to be CEOs use LinkedIn every day
That’s much better. None of the CEOs that I know personally have anywhere near enough time to be obsessively checking LinkedIn every single day.What about you?
So, Universal wants to invent a new model for music sales:
Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record label, is looking to mobile hardware makers to foot the bill for a free music subscription service for buyers of a certain mobile phone or music player, The Telegraph reported Saturday.
Think. What does a model where you buy a piece of music-playing equipment and then the music itself is free remind you of? Oh yes, radio!Hmm … so they’re trying to reinvent radio here? Nice “new” model here.I wonder what other parts of the radio experince they’ll try to replicate? The lousy music choice? The annoying DJs? Maybe. But there’s another piece of the radio universe that I predict will come along with the “free” music, if this model actually makes it out the door.Advertising.That’s the only way there could possibly be enough revenue in this ridiculous model to support a continual flow of new music. But isn’t the 20 minutes an hour of radio advertising one of the reasons we bought iPods in the first place?No worries. As Dr Phil would say: this dog won’t hunt.PS:Why are the labels so fixated on hardware revenues? They are constantly complaining about the money Apple makes on the iPod … but they never complained before about not getting revenue from radios and stereo equipment. If only they would fixate on being best at what they’re supposed to do: find and promote great music.
But it needs Canadian financial institutions. Mint, please come to Canada!
Gratuitous quote of the day:”If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential.”- Soren KierkegaardThat is a great quote – I love it.
In case you’re wondering what’s going on with this blog, I’m currently taking 2 courses for my Master of Educational Technology program at the University of British Columbia.
Plus doing some home reno, plus I have 3 kids, plus my wife seems to feel that somehow I ought to spend some time with her (odd, that), plus I have a full-time job (money: it’s a love/hate relationship).
So some things suffer.In any case, for my ETEC 522 course “Ventures in Learning Technology” we’re reviewing educational technology ventures: start-up businesses. Since one of the profs for the course is behind a social knowledge storage/management start-up called CrowdTrust, we’re putting most of our thoughts and comments into that system. (Here are mine.)
One thing I wanted to share here is a memo I wrote concerning a company’s pitch for VC money.
Hopefully I haven’t been too savage.
Perhaps a no-return policy on guns and ammo is not the best policy …
It’s Walmart’s policy, clearly visible on their website and in their stores, that all sales of guns and ammunition are final. One San Diego man didn’t like that policy so he tried to return the ammunition in another way. By firing it in the Walmart parking lot.
Seriously … be extra-nice to these customers.
Consumer-generated Media has a nice breakdown of Steve Jobs open letter to early iPhone adopters who hit the roof when Apple recently announced the $200 price break.Excerpt:
What an incredible year to watch and learn from CEO-level behavior in times of crisis and difficulty. First we had Jet Blue, faced with an impossibly difficult situation, take to the airwaves on YouTube, apologize profusely, and announce a new passenger bill of rights. While Menu Foods practically hid their CEO during the pet recall issue, Mattel put their CEO, Bob Eckert, on the website video airwaves to nurture trust and confidence in the wake of the toy recall (a still-in-progress case study). Now we have Steve Jobs, who just wrote and posted the most remarkable letter in response to concerns about iPhone’s recent price decrease. He coupled an apology with a $100 Apple credit for all early-buyers of the iPhone. This is classic Defensive Branding. I predict it will be one of the most discussed, debated, and linked-to letters of the year, and so far I’ve already counted over 800 unique blog postings referencing his letter since 6 PM last night.
A full breakdown of the letter follows …
Job warehouse Monster has had an ongoing security nightmare, with hackers infiltrating the database and pilfering usernames, passwords, and email addresses with which to launch phishing attacks.The worst part? Monster doesn’t know how bad the problem is! From an email sent to me this morning (note the bolded portion):
As you may be aware, the Monster resume database was recently the target of malicious activity that involved the illegal downloading of information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses for some of our job seekers with resumes posted on Monster sites. Monster responded by conducting a comprehensive review of internal processes and procedures, and notified those job seekers that their contact records had been downloaded illegally.The Company has determined that this was not an isolated incident. Despite ongoing analysis, the scope of this activity is impossible to pinpoint. Monster believes illegally downloaded contact information may be used to lure job seekers into opening a “phishing” email that attempts to acquire sensitive financial information. This has been the case in similar attacks on other websites.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
