From Plastic Bag:
“To make money by appealing to the stupid human instinct to collect dumb things.”
Check the whole post for more …
Tag - business
OK. Here we go again.
I’ve just started a new project. Some details will come out over the next month or so as it goes public.
It’ll be basically an independent start-up business. I’ll be doing it with some minimal help, but essentially by myself. And here are my guiding principles.
(Subject to change, of course, like extreme unbelievable immediate success, job offers to blog about ice hockey for 6 figures annually from La Jolla, California, and the other usual stuff, like … umm … changing my mind.)
- funded on my expense account (i.e., no expenses that don’t fit on a credit card)
- conducted publicly: as soon as a few more details are set I’ll be blogging the journey
- products will be cool or they will die
- client/customers/market will be partners or they won’t be clients/customers/market (in other words: we will not sell, we will listen … and we will suggest)
- products will be social or they will die
- marketing will not be marketing (it will be what Tara Hunt calls common space un-marketing)
- it will be web 2ish (that means something, just don’t ask me exactly what)
- I’ll make mistakes; people will tell me; I will change
- I’ll make it up as I go along
Oh, and one more thing. At various points, I will be as scared as baby gazelle on a National Geographic lion documentary … but I will keep on keeping on. So help me God.
I saw these great rules for start-ups from Evan Williams, the ex-CEO of Pyra Labs (who made Blogger) and current CEO of Odeo.
In brief:
- Be narrow
- Be different
- Be casual
- Be picky
- Be user-centric
- Be self-centered
- Be greedy
- Be tiny
- Be agile
- Be balanced
Very, very worth a look for anyone who’s doing or thinking about doing a start-up.
Yup. I went and got a Pro account at Flickr.
Part of it is Rastin Mehr’s fault. He’s a colleaugue and a friend who is a great photographer and recently moved his image management to Flickr. He’s been raving about it to me recently.
And part of it is Flickr’s fault. Giving out the free account and then limiting uploads to 20 MB a month is a well-known marketing strategy: the first hit is always free.
Managing and organizing photos on Flick is fun. And easy. Crazy easy – as in pain-free.
This is the ridiculous part: it’s easier than iPhoto. I use iPhoto more days than not, and it’s great for storing all our images. But it’s simply not built for easy tagging and categorization of photos. Flickr is. How a web app can be easier and quicker and simpler to use than a desktop app is astounding.
(I guess it has something to do with this web 2.0 meme going around.)
The final reason for delving into Flickr is that it has some relevance to a project that I may be taking on for a rival photo-sharing service. I want to know what the “competition” is up to in detail, and the only way to do that is to join. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, huh?
I liked Flickr as a casual user. As a Pro member, I’m loving it.
Trying to improve service? Build better products?
Everyone knows you should talk to customers. Not as many people know that you should talk to non-customers.
Even fewer know that you should talk to uncustomers.
Uncustomers are people who used to be customers. People who stopped being customers. And people who have absolutely no intention of becoming customers (of yours) ever again.
These are the people that will teach you the most about your product, service, or company. But these are the people that companies listen to least.
Case in point
My wife took a phone call yesterday from Investor’s Group. We used to have mutual funds with IG, but recently took them out and invested them with another company. Lots of reasons, none relevant right now.
The call was regarding a survey of customer satisfaction. Teresa agreed to do the survey, although it would take 10 minutes out of her busy day. Then she informed the person conducting the survey that we had just withdrawn our investments from Investor’s Group.
All of a sudden, everything changed. Within the 20 seconds from the start of the call to Teresa telling her we had moved our money, the survey was “filled up.” Just that quickly, IG had all the customer input they needed. Or wanted. Or were prepared to listen too.
Summing it up
Your enemy is your friend. Those who do not like you, or what you sell, are teaching you. But are you listening?
Based on my years and years and years (errr … years, anyways) of experience in the business world, I’m firmly convinced that this is the biggest mistake you can make when starting or running a business:
Not asking questions whose answers you fear.
In other words: sticking your head in the sand and charging forward blind (that’s a shaken, not stirred, metaphor by the way).
I’ve just started on a marketing project that will be aimed at kids/teens.
I don’t like the word marketing … let’s put it this way: I want to create some really cool stuff that people (young people) will be interested enough about that they’ll want to talk about, share, and, yes, buy. Both online and off. Marketing in the Pinko Marketing sense.
(Sorry for the vagueness of “stuff,” but it’s too early to chat about it yet.)
So, in the interests of understanding teens, I went to YouTube a couple nights ago and spent some time clicking through videos. Found this “hot” one:
I had lunch with Peter Field (VP business development) of Agile Media today.
Agile’s a smallish but very very sharp marketing agency in the Vancouver, BC area that is putting all the pieces together in one place: marketing expertise, branding, image, direct marketing, plus print and web solutions that make it real.
I have to say I have endless amounts of respect for guys (and women) like Peter and his partner, Rick Gagner.
While I’m starting up a new division/products/business from within a largish corporate entity, they’re doing it by themselves. Bootstrapping. And putting lots of their own skin in the game.
Intrapreneurship has it’s own challenges, but the rent is paid every month, the lights never go out, the chair is cushy, and the salary is not at risk (well, not at high risk, let’s put it that way).
Congrats to Peter and Agile, who are looking to expand right now. I won’t provide details, since I’m not sure that’s public information, but suffice it to say they have a lot of irons in the fire, and it’s impressive.
OK, “Odeo is incredible” is a fairly giddy title. But frankly, that’s the way I feel.
I’ve been using and building web technology for over a decade … but Odeo blows me away.
It’s the best of what’s sometimes referred to as web 2.0: simple, beautiful, social, searchage, taggable, mashable software. (Mashable in at least the very weak sense that I can import it right into my blog with one line of code, and possibly in more involved ways that I’m not aware of.)
In the past 2 years, I have never had any real interest in creating podcasts. I did it for a client that used podcasts to teach English-as-a-second-language students, but it was not a passion of mine by any stretch of the imagination.
But Odeo caught my eye recently and I’ve been using it – more for fun than anything else.
The kids and I made a “happy birthday” podcast for their grandfather – over on my personal & family blog: Art & artifice. Aidan, my youngest son, and I had some fun the other night.
It’s just so easy and instant. Two minutes, and you’ve got a podcast. Add one or two to post it on your blog, if you wish. It’s literally child’s play.
Incredible!
Richard MacManus at ZD Net Blogs has a great post about the coming web office, in which he argues that Google is much better positioned to succeed at creating a web office – simply because it’s a native web company, and Microsoft is not.
Note: the web office is coming, but not coming soon – as MacManus states:
My basic Web Office premise is that office software will slowly but surely migrate to the Web.
As I was reading his post, something occured to me about printing.
Printing has been one of the things that an installed, desktop software tool has always been better at than anything web. And actually, that might continue to be true.
But I wonder: how important will printing be? I think that when we are working on some kind of web office application, printing will actually, finally, long-awaitedly go (mostly) away.
Printing will be replaced by publishing.
Why print when you can just publish? And the web office will publish automatically, bloggishly. RSSishly. Mashupishly.
I don’t know anyone who is web-savvy who prints out web pages anymore – something I saw a lot of just 5 or 6 years ago. Bookmark it. If the page moves, Google still has a copy. If Google doesn’t, maybe the Wayback Machine does. Really paranoid? Save it to your hard disk.
I think the same will happen with documents. Why do you print? Well, sometimes I print to give myself a better view of what I need to edit. That may not go away. But mostly I print to share.
When sharing’s built in, printing goes away. And when work is done online (web office), you publish instead of printing.
A Portland consultant says that good websites cost $10K per page. Yes, that’s 10,000 dollars.
For evidence, he cites the following:
Way back when, someone once wrote that, when you total up the true costs, a high-quality professional corporate web site costs $10k per page. It doesn’t matter how you do it – it doesn’t matter what kind of platform or technology you use… from Zero to the final, high-quality site will cost $10k per page.
I’m sorry, but I could not agree less. This is a ridiculous statement.
Put aside the fact that the cost of development tools and backend applications has gone down to approximately zero in the past few years (thank you, open source!). Put aside the fact that the frameworks and content management systems and information management systems have kept getting better and better.
Just look at the statement at face value, and it’s obviously off-base. Here’s how to prove it.
- Pick a major, corporate, well-done site. Say Sun Microsystems’s.
- Google only that site for the company name, in this case Sun.
- Note the number of results: in this case, over 48,000,000.
- Reduce the number by a factor of a hundred, as the company is likely to have a lot of pages with a lot of mentions of its name: 48,000. This is a guesstimate of the number of web pages at all the various Sun.com domains, and sounds fairly reasonable, if not low. (Remember, Sun has developer sites, partner sites, documentation sites, you name it … all adding up to many, many pages.)
- Multiply 48,000 by the $10,000 figure cited: $480,000,000.
- Case closed.
Yes, that’s a whopping half billion dollars. Trust me, Sun has not spent that much on its website.
There’s a vital clue to the thing that the consultant isn’t grasping a couple of paragraphs in:
To start thinking about “true cost” you need to understand all the actual costs that go into a site. So let’s imagine that you need a 10 page corporate web site. Say it’s a simple marketing site – pushing the message and the brand in order to create brand awareness, brand affinity and to create demand for the product
10 pages? 10 pages? “Simple marketing site?” These are not corporate websites – these are Mom and Pop business card websites.
And “pushing the message and the brand in order to create brand awareness?” Umm … business card website, circa 1997.
Today, websites have to actually do something … and thanks to a thousand free tools, platforms, frameworks, applications, and scripts, can do so quite cheaply.
Cases in point:
Need I repeat myself? Case closed.
Sorry for the oxymoron in the title. I know simple technology is almost a contradiction in terms, but … I saw the below quote at Andrew McAfee’s blog, and I’ve been turning them over in my mind ever since:
Wikis were invented by Ward Cunningham, whose most frequently-repeated quote is “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?”
That’s a powerful thought: what’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?
I’m guessing that just about any project could benefit from that question being asked a dozen or so times at each stage. I know my past projects would have.
. . .
. . .
By the way, Here’s an interview with Cunningham on how and why he developed Wikis.
A while back I posted on a Guy Kawasaki phrase, intrapreneur. It’s someone who’s an entrepreneur, but inside a large company, instead of out on his own.
Well, as someone with some experience in intrapreneurship – and someone who’s made his fair share of mistakes – here’s how to not be one. Or, at least, how not be a successful one.
- Stay in corporate HQ
Be in the corporate offices. Don’t separate yourself or your team physically. This will ensure that you stay connected to the big boat, and you will only move when it moves. Then you will be nimble and able to navigate wherever you need to go, whenever you need to move. - Rely on shared resources
Don’t require your own team. Instead, rely on shared resources. Why? Well, first off, they’ll always be available when you need them. Secondly, they’ll have your best interests and the new start-up’s best interests at heart, which will never conflict with the parent company’s. - Go as big as possible as quickly as possible
The parent company is a cash cow, so treat it as such. Go as big as you can as quickly as you, regardless of whether or not you’ve validated your market premises. Big failures are much better on your resume than tiny successes. - Meet often with the parent company
Meet with the parent company regularly. Say once a week. This will ensure that you will set a course identical to the one the parent company would have set, as if your start-up is just a new division. This helps you meet the needs of your market, which in all cases and all times is precisely identical to the parent company’s market. - Treat your start-up as just another job
Your new job is just another project. Fill in the boxes, check off the lines, dot your T’s and cross your I’s, and you will complete the project successfully, just like all your other ones. Running a start-up, after all, is just a matter of execution. Do the right things in the right order, and success will automatically follow. - Do nothing without approval
Always get all major decisions discussed and approved by the parent company. Then you have the great advantage of being able to move at exactly the pace at which the parent company can afford to spend time on you. This way you will never miss big opportunities or be late for key launches.
Naturally, I have never made any of these mistakes. Of course not. Never happened. At least, I have no recollection … can I take the fifth? (Whatever that is.)
Three years ago, Fast Company published an article about Google focusing on why the company is successful.
They picked out 5 rules that are still relevant today … and sound oddly web 2-ish. Here they are … through the John filter:
- The user is in charge
Find out what the people who are using your service want. Find out what they’re doing. Give them more of it. And continuously always incessantly keep taking obstacles out of their way. - Open up – let people play
All of us are smarter than some of us, most of the time. So let people use your stuff. Intentionally build it so that as many people as possible can do as many things as possible – things that you can’t anticipate or predict. Some of them will be interesting. - Fail often, fail fast, fail cheap, but most importantly: learn
Just try lots of stuff. Let your engineers play. Don’t scale until you know you have a winner, but let a thousand flowers bloom. But, but, but, when you fail, make sure you understand why. Failure’s OK. Failing to understand why is not. - Small teams of smart people managing themselves
Command-and-control is dead with a spike in its head. Success today means small smart lean mobile teams that can achieve a lot quickly. Flatten! - Money follows value
First, build something incredibly amazing, incredibly important, incredibly valuable. Then the money will follow. Forget the first because you’re so focused on monetization, and you’re never get to the cash.
What do you know – web 2.0 in 2003!
The best work is play, and the best play is work.
I learned that again when Ethan, our 6-year-old son, spent a fairly good chunk of Saturday making wonderful, beautiful, but especially labor-intensive birds.
And when he had finished a few, he asked Teresa if she wanted one. It was hard labor – each one took him the better part of an hour – but it was fun.
So was it work, or play?
I’ve started to think that these terms are not antagonistic but orthogonal … that the best of all possible human activities are high on both scales:
The best work is play, and the best play is work. And if you think about it, we should never settle for less … because we won’t do our best work unless it’s play, and we won’t play as hard as we possibly could unless it’s work.
I think I’m just going to decide not to settle. What about you?
Great title (which I stole) on on an article at A VC.
But the best paragraph is in a comment by Dick Costolo from Feedburner:
More reasons big companies can’t attack new ideas: their lawyers pontificate, managers ask teams to elaborate, resources bifurcate, the accountants try to substantiate, and competing agendas expropriate. This all frequently causes the frustrated CEO to look around and yell: “Procreate!” ….or words to that effect.
This guy can write more than code.
I’ve been thinking about business blogging lately.
Partly because of a months-old post on Hugh McLeod’s blog about what comes after the Cluetrain, and a post he references on Marketing Hub.
But mostly because of a need in my present business venture to spend more time listening to real people in real jobs in real organizations that we think will buy/use/promote the products and services we’re creating.
Here’s the key piece from the Marketing Hub post:
“The value may not be the immediate impact of their [bloggers’] words on the market, but how the conversation changes the blogger. As Hugh says, it may be a mistake to focus on using blogs to sell things; it’s more about creating real engagement – where you are changed too. And the thing about good conversations is that more goes on than just an exchange of information. Something more energising takes place. I think that’s the deeper insight of the whole ‘markets are conversations’ meme.”
In other words, business blogging is not something you do, it’s something you are.
It’s not operational but ontological.
It’s not economical but epistemological.
And in the end, business blogging is not something you are, it’s something you become.
The traditional company is an organization defined by barriers. These people are in; these people are out. Employees know certain things; customers know other things; non-clients know other things: all separate domains of knowledge.
(And sometimes keeping those domains of knowledge separate is facilitated, even encouraged.)
Blogging is just one thing that can turn this beast inside out … making the surface area outside greater than the surface area inside. The more surface, the more touch. The more touch, the more influence.
And the more you touch, the more you are influenced.
Barriers are defined by what they keep out – and what they keep in. Business blogging is one way of turning an impermeable barrier into a permeable barrier – if a barrier at all.
What kind of company would result?
Perhaps one that ‘gets it.’ Perhaps one that is (not just understands) its market. Perhaps even one that doubles its sales.
I would not like to be Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates right now. (Well, they are both billionaires, but still … )
Microsoft just simply cannot seem to execute lately. Release dates on everything are slipping, re-organizations of major divisions are coming every couple of months, the bad news is piling up, and they can’t even buy good press anymore.
Daniel Lyon’s recent article in Forbes is a case in point. He absolutely savages Microsoft. Not that he’s trying to be negative about the company or that he’s looking for bad news to report … it’s just that the facts are so bloody grim.
Let’s see … what’s going wrong?
- Vista slipped (again!)
- Ballmer and Co. did not reveal the slip to journalists at a press event just 2 days before the slip announcement came out. He must have known at that point that it would slip, but kept hyping the coming technology with never a hint of a problem. This does not help build your credibility with the chattering classes who write articles and file stories.
- The new stuff in Vista and the Office 2007 is not (yet) plug & play for non-techies.
The new programs are phenomenally complex, with scores of buttons and pull-down menus and myriad connections among various applications. A Microsoft VP zipped through a demo, moving information from Outlook to Powerpoint to Groove to some kind of social networking program that lets you see how your colleagues and your colleagues’ colleagues rate various Web sites.
Well, what do you expect when the new features are primarily about relationships between applications. Anyone in development knows that when you build X, things are simple. When you build X and Y, you have not doubled your complexity, you’ve tripled it – at least if X and Y have to be able to play together. Well, Microsoft is integrating dozens of applications – the complexities (and therefore the difficulties) must be staggering.
- The new features Microsoft is coming out with are inventive (great!) solutions for invented (uh oh) problems … using your a) cell phone to b) call your computer to c) access your email and d) have it read aloud to you is so laughably, stupidly complex and over-innovated and cumbersome a process that you wonder how on earth it got out of an new product ideas meeting. Must have been one of those “no-idea-is-bad” positive thinking sessions. They’re great, but at some point you have to apply the bullshit filter – you need a brutally honest Steve Jobs-ish person who will tell you you’re smoking something.
- Microsoft is not connecting with tech buyers and tech journalists anymore. Can you imagine people just ignoring them and talking out loud as Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates addresses the room 5-6 years ago? Another way of putting it: would Microsoft have created such a useless “media event” 5-6 years ago with nothing really amazing, startling, new, or different to say or show?
- Free alternatives to everything Microsoft are getting better and better every day.
I almost feel sorry for Microsoft. How can they be in such a rut, screwing up enormously month after month, year after year?
One thing to keep in mind, however. $50 billion in the bank buys you a lot of second chances. Maybe even a decade’s worth.
. . .
. . .
BTW, Lyon’s article is an example of good things that are happening in “real” journalism. It’s a much more real, personal, and authentic article than your typical journalist would ever write – even in an opinion piece. I think blogs are having an impact on the way reporters write their stories, and I think it’s a great direction to be moving in.
Got an email from Sun a couple of days ago: they want to send me a free server. And what a server it is – wow!
Trial configurations of new Sun Fire T2000 servers ship with the UltraSPARC T1 processor, two 73-GB drives, and dual power supplies. You can select from the following multi-core CPU and memory options:
Small: 4 cores, 16 x 512MB (T20-104A-08GA2C) – US$8,295
Standard: 6 cores, 16 x 512MB (T20-106A-08GA2C) – US$10.895
Medium: 8 cores, 16 x 512MB (T20-108A-08GA2C) — US$13,395
Large: 8 cores, 16 x 1GB (T20-108A-16GA2C) – US$16,995
Only one catch: I gotta give it back after 60 days. Or write such a stunning post about it that Sun Marketing will let me keep it for free.
Last night I met with a local non-profit that has a problem with technology – but it’s not a technology problem.
A quick overview: this non-profit is the first line of defense for people with problems – any kind of problems. They take phone calls from people with problems: issues with relationships, addictions, careers, you name it. They don’t counsel; their focus is on referring people who need help to the help that’s already available in the community.
Their needs:
Their referral “database” includes about 1200 organizations and individuals. They need ways to easily collect this information, search it, and make it available to various volunteers, and, perhaps, other organizations.
Properly stated, their needs are incredibly simple:
- organize,
- access, and
- share limited amounts of data
To achieve this goal, they wrote a grant proposal last year, won $5000 worth of funding, and hired an intern to achieve the goal.
The problem is that now, a year later, they have a bunch of data in an Access database. And that’s about it. Essentially, the intern defined some kind of data schema, created one data entry form, and keyed in all the data. Unfortunately, there’s no simple search capability. No categorization. No interface to the application. And no ability to share the data electronically with volunteers or other non-profits.
So now they’re stuck.
With about $500 left in their budget, they have some data, but no real application. And $500 will buy them about 5 hours of a good developer’s time.
But here’s the sad part.
With everything that’s available today, much of it free, the $5000, the Access database, and the CD-ROM are all incredibly unnecessary. And that’s the cost of ignorance.
I don’t mean ignorance in a negative way – not at all. There are very good people behind this organization. I simply mean it in the most non-pejorative sense: being unaware of information, knowledge.
The problem that they are facing is so incredibly simple, so trivial in today’s environment of amazing, excellent, and FREE software, that it’s just a tragedy that the nonprofit felt they had to raise the money, spent so much time (the entire summer of 2005) getting an intern to play around with Access and key in data, and spin their wheels ever since with an incomplete and virtually unusable “application.”
Just off the top of my head, there are probably 10 different ways they could have solved the problem: fast, free, and more flexibly than any Access-database-on-a-CD-ROM solution. Here are just a few:
1: iRows
While I’ve really enjoyed NumSum, iRows is a web2-ish application that has some features it doesn’t (last time I checked!) Being able to put very nice fine-grained permissions on your sheets and powerful group functions are two that really come to mind.
iRows would allow them to organize their data, make it easily available for quick updating by whoever they choose to allow, wherever they are, and makes it easy to publish to anyone with an internet connection. Also, you can suck the data down in a variety of formats if you need offline capability.
With only 1200 records which would be divided up in perhaps 12 categories, you’d only have 100 records or so per sheets, which is manageable and navigable. And, your data is easily searchable, with tagging, descriptions, and other features. Best of all, it’s free.
2: Writeboard
Can you imagine a simpler solution than Writeboard?
Create 12 writeboards, one for each of your categories. Copy, paste, assign privileges, email everyone you want to have access with a link and a password, and sit back with a sigh of relief.
It’s searchable, shareable, and any of your volunteers can update it whenever they wish. And it too is free.
3: Wiki
Even better than Writeboards, although possibly with an ever-so-slightly steeper learning curve, would be a Wiki. This would be absolutely perfect: storing, sorting, updating, and sharing information is what Wikis were created to do!
And you can get one – you guessed it – for free: PB Wiki. In fact, I’m sure you can get any number for free – certainly if you have your own server – but this is one possibility, and it’s hosted for you.
The beauty of a Wiki – beside the social construction of information – is scalability: it will grow right along with you … from your initial 10-15 pages to a million-plus pages of Wikipedia.
4: A blog – perhaps WordPress
A blog would provide all the capability you would ever need, and there are dozens of companies out there in the big wide internet who will give you one for (drum roll, please) free. WordPress.com is one of the best and most powerful free hosted solutions.
Create a blog category for each of your categories. Write a tiny blog entry for each data node. Define access privileges. Drink your coffee (insert caffeinated beverage of choice).
You could even – with just a tiny bit more technological savvy – installed a structured blogging plug-in that would give you the ability to have a standard data entry and presentation format.
Simple as pie … and radically, completely, free. Free as speech, and free as beer.
The price of ignorance: $50,000?
OK, I could go on and on, but you get the point. If you don’t know what the possibilities are, you can miss out on so much. The cost is not just the money you spend – it’s the time you waste. And depending on who you are and what you’re doing, that could be $5000, $50,000, or $500,000.
It’s just so bloody unnecessary.
How many good organizations and good people are out there right now spending hard-earned money, volunteer time and energy, when they could accomplish their goals so easily and quickly?
We’ve got a ton of amazing hammers and chisels and saws on the internet right now that anyone with just a tiny bit of initiative and technical know-how can access and use. But too few people are aware of them.
W need to keep spreading the word!
[ updated March 3 with a new graph ]
Today I noticed on Digg that someone had graphed iTunes songs sold since the iTunes music store was opened.
One of the comments on the site was: I’d like to see that contrasted with iPods sold. So I thought I’d take some data points from the web and play a little.
Note: when I first posted this, I posted a bit of a rough graph that just showed iPod sales … which means that visitors would have to look at both this site and the one mentioned above to compare.
So now I’ve put together a graph that shows both iTunes and iPod sales on a single graph:
Be aware that while the iPod y axis goes up by fours, the iTunes axis goes up by tens. It was the only way I could get both datasets on one graph (that fits on this web page without scrolling!)
Here’s the data that I found (all over the place online):
- Jan 11 2006 42 million
- Nov 29 2005 30 million
- Nov 2 2005 28 milllion
- March 31 2005 15 million
- January 13 2005 10 million
- Jan 6 2004 2 million
- June 1 2003 1 million
- Dec 31 2001 125,000
- Oct 23 2001 0 sold
You never know how stupid you are until you have to leave lots of voicemail messages.
Sheesh.
I’ve had to call a large number of principals (school principals) over the past week or so, and like most busy leaders, at least three quarters of them were unavailable. Which means that a voicemail is usually the best option to get a message through.
There’s a reason that leaving moronic voicemails is a comedic sitcom staple – leaving a good voicemail is harder than it seems. Especially for those of us who prefer to email, skype, IM, or talk in person, and usually shy away ancient telephonic technology.
Fortunately, most voicemail systems these days are smart enough to let you erase and re-record you message. And double fortunately, once you’ve done it a couple of times, you get your facts straight and get used to speaking to a machine.
The really odd thing is that you need to pace yourself. Your message has to be short, or it won’t get listened to. But it has to be long enough to get the reason for your call across. The critical thing is not spitting it out like a machine gun, but pausing for breath – as if you were talking to a human being – even though you’re actually talking to a machine.
Now that I’m an instant voicemail expert, here’s John’s 10 Rules of Great Voicemails™:
- Keep it short: less than 90 seconds long
- Get the good stuff out first: 15 seconds in, if you haven’t gotten her attention, her finger’s on the delete key
- Pace yourself: speak in short phrases, with pauses for breath and thought
- Edit to the essentials: you don’t have to say as much as you think you do
- Repeat your number: nothing is worse than having to replay a voicemail three times because the person – who knows his own number like the back of his hand – spit it out in three seconds flat
- Reference a relationship: if you can, explain how you and the person you’re leaving a message for are connected … e.g., when we met at the conference. If you can’t do this, at least …
- Reference a commonality: mention a common friend, or the contact who directed you to this person, or the package you just sent
- Answer the WIIFM: as they listen to your voicemail, busy people will be asking themselves: what’s in it for me? why should I bother returning this call?
- Be loud: better to be a little loud than too soft (within reason!)
- And finally, SMILE: yes, you do talk differently when you’re smiling
I’m more convinced now than ever before that insiders are not the best people to explain a product or service that they’ve created. They’re not the best people to write about it; they’re not the best people to market it.
I rediscovered this recently when feeding our CEO some information for a PowerPoint.
I went full-bore and gave him 5-6 chunks of data to use. He selected 3 of them, elaborated on one, and killed 3. I gave him too much. I was so close to the project, so close to the data, that I could not simplify it adequately for him.
(Or, as I just to believe, it’s not that I could not. It’s that I did not.)
In other words, I was in the forest. I could see lots of trees, but I didn’t see the edges. And the edges, the boundaries, are where the definition takes place … where is-X and is-not-X becomes obvious.
Knowing those boundaries is essential to knowing your product. Knowing your service. Only by knowing them can you define what you are and what you’re not.
This is irritating, because this is something I believe I’m good at.
Lesson of the day:
Find ways to abstract myself from the problem/project/product/situation. Get perspective, then define it, explain it, market it, hype it.
It’s always rewarding to meet entrepreneurial people who started something tiny and grew it to an enormous enterprise.
So it was great to meet Mike Panaggio for lunch a few weeks ago …
Mike is the founder and CEO of DME, a direct marketing firm in Daytona Beach, Florida. In 1982, he started it as a small printing company. Today, they have probably one of the largest concentration of digital presses in North America. But their business isn’t printing – it’s direct marketing.
The technology they’ve assembled for creating, managing, and tracking marketing campaigns via mail, phone, web, email, etc. is, frankly, amazing. I was impressed by Mike’s strategic thinking – and by how much money he was willing to invest to win accounts like Microsoft and Harrah’s.
There’s something about how really successful people carry themselves that I find fascinating. Really successful people have no need to impress anyone. Nor do they need your business. Rather, they have something really, really good that, if you’re interested, you can get in on.
Some people try to portray themselves this way, and some just are. Mike just is.
. . .
. . .
On a related note, this is my first real close-up experience with direct marketing, and it’s a different industry than I thought it was. Direct marketing as an industry may bring to mind all the junk mail that we recycle every day … but nothing could be farther from the state-of-the-art that DME has refined it to.
. . .
. . .
I have to say, this is one of the biggest benefits of my job: meeting cool smart people.
As you know, we are all criminals in Canada.
We steal music, ripping it from the skinny hands of starving artistes, leaving them and their 5 children and 3 spouses to the (rather tender, actually) mercies of the Canadian welfare system.
That is why the Copyright Board of Canada is re-introducing a levy on the sale of all blank media. It’s the least we can do for all those poor singers and songwriters out there. If they benefit even a tiny bit, we are happy to pay double or triple the actual cost of our CDs and DVDs:
As prices have dropped, however, the levy now frequently comprises a significant percentage of the retail price. Consider the purchase of 100 blank Maxell CDs. Future Shop retails the 100 CDs for $69.99. The breakdown of this sale is $48.99 for the CDs and $21.00 for the levy (even worse is a current Future Shop deal of 200 blank CD-Rs from HP, which retails for $59.99. The levy alone on this sale is $42.00 (200 CDs x 21 cents/CD) which leaves the consumers paying $17.99 for the CDs and $42.00 for the levy).
Since all Canadians are criminals, we’ll just charge them all right up front.
Bloody thieves.
A week ago the story broke that researchers at the University of Toronto were working on technology that would allow internet users in China to access anything they wanted, anywhere on the web, without being traced.
The beauty of their technology is that it uses the same networking port that all ecommerce runs on … so authorities won’t be able to shut it down without lobotomizing their internet traffic. This is exactly what a company like Google should have invented. (Or Yahoo!, or Microsoft for that matter).
Why?
Reason #1
Why should Google have done this? Their mission, so they say, is to make all the world’s information accessible. That, in itself, is reason number one.
Reason #2
Plus, their motto is “do not evil.” It’s been sneered at often, and with good cause. It is sophomoric and silly. Not for the usual reasons – that they’re a company, after all, or that corporations have no business inserting themselves in moral conversations.
Rather, it’s sophomoric and silly because simply refraining from doing evil is not nearly enough. To be good, you must do good … not simply withhold from doing evil. As Edmund Burke said, “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” However, silly as it is, it’s reason number two.
Reason #3
It’s great that the University of Toronto researchers are coming out with a tool that can help ordinary Chinese access any information they want on the web, without government censorship.
But Google should have come out with that tool. Why? Google could bring instant scale to a tool like that. Google’s adoption of anything puts it in the spotlight. Who knows whether the U of T’s tool will become well-known or popular in China? If Google did this, China’s censors would have been swamped. China’s people would be given much more free access to information, and that would have enormous consequences, over time, on China’s political situation.
Sure, China would have countered, somehow. But Google is the smartest company in the world, supposedly. They could have stayed one step ahead. Probably more steps ahead than some post-doc researchers at the U of T.
China would have had two choices: cut the physical pipes, or accept continual, high-level leakage. Cutting the pipes would have been economic suicide: China’s lifeline is commerce and commerce does not exist without network connectivity.
So when, finally, China’s government would have thrown in the censorship towel, Google would have owned the Chinese market. They would be the very company whose technology had forced the Chinese government to accede to their own people’s desire for information. Information from Google, and other providers. And that’s the very prize that Google is now selling its soul to win.
Which is the third reason why Google should have created the tool that infiltrated the Great Firewall of China: they could have won without doing evil.
They could have won by doing smart good.
I’m getting a little sick of the European Union extorting money from Microsoft.
I’m the last person to be a Microsoft apologist – I’m a Mac person through and through, as anyone who follows my blog knows.
But what the EU is doing smacks of a witchhunt. Worse, I’m getting the feeling that there’s more than a small amount of anti-Americanism in this whole legal shakedown. Not to mention a big slice of European protectionism.
(Note: I say that as both a proud Canadian and the son of European immigrants.)
I totally affirm the concept that a very successful company should not abuse its success to crowd out competitors through sheer bulk and ability to completely undercut a smaller enterprise’s business model. And I think that’s partially been what has happened in the US.
But in the EU case, the Europeans actually want Microsoft to not just avoid competing unfairly with other companies. The also want Microsoft to give those companies a friendly helping hand – a boost.
I think that’s unfair. How does that provide for free and open competition? Microsoft has to spend money – big money – stripping down to its skivvies and parading around in public so that its competitors can put them under a microscope and find all their weak spots? Microsoft has to do a big chunk of its competitor’s product development?
I also think that the Europeans keep setting the bar just a little higher, and in effect, are demonstrating that their minds are made up: they want to punish – they want to humble – Microsoft.
Perhaps they’d even prefer to legislate Microsoft out of existence.
It’s not fair. Not ethical. Not European.
Shame on them.
John C. Dvorak, the one-time Apple journalist who has a history of incredibly inane predictions of doom and gloom for the company he used to cover, has completely outdone himself this time by predicting that Apple will drop Mac OS X completely in favor of Windows.
Dvorak still, pathetically, does not get it.
Apple is a hardware company, he says, citing the iPod as an example. Apple could still make its cool hardware, and just fit an “executive layer” over Windows to customize the UI.
I know it’s common wisdom that Apple is a hardware company, but as is so often the case, wisdom is not common, and what’s common is not wisdom.
Apple is an aesthetics company – Apple is a lifestyle company. In a digital age, how do you organize, manage, and accomplish everything you want and need to do? You need a digital solution.
And that is Apple’s niche.
Because the most successful solutions are the simplest solutions, Apple wants to control as much of the hardware and software as is necessary to ensure that the solutions it sells are as simple as they can possibly be.
Apple is Steve Jobs.
And Steve Jobs wants to create wickedly cool widgets that help more people get more things accomplished easier, faster, and more beautifully.
That’s why the iMac is one piece. That’s why the long-cherished one-button mouse. That’s why Apple’s Cinema Displays have been displayed at MOMA. That’s why iTunes and iPod go together, like two peas in a …
OK.
That’s the emotional, aesthetic, and passionate side of the argument. It’s also the side of the argument that’s based on who Steve Jobs is and what he really wants, needs, to accomplish.
Now here’s the business side of the argument:
How could any company be so incredibly stupid as to let another company completely control its own destiny? That’s exactly what would happen if Apple built an “executive layer” on top of Windows.
Assume that Apple took leave of its senses and did this. What if, the next month, Microsoft releases a patch that kills the Apple layer? Where would Apple’s customers be? Especially if it was a “top priority” security patch?
Dead in the water, that’s where.
Dvorak might want that kind of solution, but it would so tie Apple to Microsoft – and in a completely slavish way – that Apple would cease to exist as an independent, passionate, innovative company.
Crazy.
What’s the “comma-stupid phrase” for your business? job? department?
Do you know what the “comma-stupid” phrase is for your product or service? In other words, do you know what is most meaningful for your users? Because whatever that word or phrase is (i.e. the part that comes before the “, stupid!”), it should be driving everything from product development to documentation to support and marketing.
The “comma-stupid” phrase popped into american culture in 1992, with the political message, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
To be really frighteningly nakedly honest, for at least half of the projects I’ve been involved in over the past decade, I didn’t have a bloody clue what the comma stupid phrase should have been.
Scary!