Numanuma
I just got this in my email.
I have no explanation.
It’s fascinating. If there’s a point, I don’t get it. You decide.
Link: Numanuma.
Sell Side?
Fred Wilson talks about John Battelle’s “new” idea for sell side advertising.
It’s been around for a lot longer than you might think.
Commission Junction is one example (using affiliate links) but back in the old days (7 years ago) there was a lot of movement in this area as well.
Here’s how I see it:
1. Advertising in a new medium is sold, not bought. It’s not a commodity, it’s an idea that gets sold to someone who wasn’t planning on buying.
2. Google turns advertising into a commodity, because it’s easy to measure and easy to buy. Once you get hooked on it, you want more.
3. It’s not just the click, of course. It’s the conversion.
4. Which means that there’s room for middlemen who will optimize clicks AND conversion for advertisers willing to pay.
And that’s where the future lies, I think. Something that’s a cross between what Fred’s talking about with www.cj.com. A whole cottage industry of people who figure out how to turn adwords into clicks into conversions.
Turning this over to outsiders is a little like using a rep firm to be your salesforce. You can do it, but to really win, you’ve got to do it yourself.
If it were me, I’d start a few competing groups within my organization and challenge them to “buy” customers as cheaply as possible. Cheapest group wins. If you get good at doing it in house, go ahead and start taking on clients!
And I’ll finish by reminding you of my biggest rant on this topic: conversion skills are worth ten times what clickthrough’s worth.
Link: A VC: Sell Side Advertising.
Artifacts
In 1983, part of my job at Spinnaker was taking screenshots the same way this handsome fellow did. (I had hair, but no beard).
I wonder what other analog habits are about to disappear.
Link: core77.com’s design blog: Moving Day pt. 2 (aka. You’ve Come a Long Way Baby.).
Care
That, in just one word, seems to be the essence of good customer service.
There are tons of books about measurement and strategy and management techniques. There are people who will monitor your phone logs, or do after-sale questionnaires. The car dealers have people calling folks a week later to be sure the service was good.
You could spend all your money and all your time trying to improve your customer service through one fancy technique or another.
Or you could just care. And hire people who care.
Caring goes a long way. Caring shows up in your voice and your interactions and in your policies. Caring is the difference between a simple easy form and a three-page government interrogation. Caring is the difference between treating every stranger as a potential customer instead of as a potential thief.
Have you ever been to a restaurant where they care? Or a hospital? You can tell immediately.
When I went to the cemetery a few months ago for the unveiling of my grandmother’s tombstone, they were closed. On the window of the office was an 11 x 17 inch xerox copy (shrunk to a tenth of the actual size) showing the location of every plot. The copy was so small it was almost impossible to read. And the organization of the numbers was virtually random, so there was no way to find what we were looking for anyway.
They knew we were coming. There were only two ceremonies scheduled that day, yet there was no note.
My family spent an hour, in the rain, walking up and down and back and forth looking for the plot. No luck. All because no one cared.
A minute before we were about to give up, the caretaker came by and asked if we needed help. He recognized the name and took us right over. He cared. It showed. He wasn’t doing this because he’d get a bonus. He was doing it because it was the right thing to do.
Grazefest 04!
If you can use it to sell beef (a real purple cow) you can use it to sell anything.
His goal is to direct market his all-natural, grass-fed Charolais and create a “buzz” with his customers that makes them tell their friends, eventually making them customers. Armed with direct marketing books with titles such as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell; Permission Marketing by Seth Godin; and The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen, Baldwin focuses on making strangers into friends and friends into customers and letting word-of-mouth do the rest.
Link: Producer goes directly to the consumer with grass-fed beef.
Seems pretty late and pretty lame
Link: Magazines Gussy Up Web Sites to Court Ad Dollars.
Yes, it’s true. Online ad dollars are about to exceed magazine ad spending.
If you’re a magazine, this is bad news.
Magazines have lots of people and postage and printing costs. Magazines depend on traditional advertisers buying ads that are essentially unmeasurable, and doing so because they always have.
Everything is different on the web.
There are no incremental costs. People costs are much lower. And most of all, the ads are totally measurable.
2004 and 2005 are the years that the magazines of the future were/are born. And those magazines are unlikely to be print publications that figured out how to make it online. Instead, the new winners will be publications that figured out how to do what this medium is good at, instead of trying to protect a dying medium instead.
If I ran a traditional magazine, I’d figure out how to build a permission asset, how to enable dozens of blogs (some amateur, some pro) and how to embrace adwords, asap.
The Selfish American
I was called to jury duty this week. (Key word being "duty".)
It was an extraordinary learning experience. In New York State, they’ve eliminated most of the automatic exemptions, so everyone is there–lawyers, doctors, sole proprietors, doesn’t matter.
This is one of the only times you get a look at your neighbors, unguarded, unadorned, completely random.
Here’s what surprised me:
1. lots of people from two parent, single income homes
2. very little sense of civic pride
3. complete distaste for the legal system
4. widespread cynicism about insurance
5. most of all, selfishness.
I live in Westchester County, which is one of the most affluent counties in the USA. There was almost no one in the room who couldn’t afford to spend the two or three days that were required of them (that’s two days every six years). Yet the prevailing attitude was a wide and deep sense of self-importance. Everyone else should serve, just not me.
One dentist concocted an ornate story about a car accident twenty years ago–and how that had soured him on the fairness of the justice system (never mind that here was his chance to make at least one trial fair!) On no less than five occasions he tried to pull strings with a judge or a lawyer or someone to be freed.
As I spent the entire day sitting and watching, the "new selfishness" really became clear. I think it goes like this:
a. in the old days, public works were public. If you contributed to a charity or acted as a volunteer, your peers noticed and you got credit for it. Respected people were respected–at least partly–because they gave to the community.
b. in the last twenty years, the variety of ways to give to your community has increased dramatically. As a result, it’s hard to keep track.
c. a lot of people (respected people) have fallen through the cracks. Neighbors and peers assume that just because you’re financially successful, you must also be a good citizen, even though they can’t actually see that.
d. so the selfish nature of people is rewarded–work more, give less, keep the difference.
There in the jury room, people couldn’t help but revert to type. They couldn’t relax about this forced duty, to just accept it and do it gladly. So they radiated anger and distrust.
Marketers of just about everything need to think really hard about the new selfishness. From politics to recycling to gas mileage to philanthropy to food, it feels to me like people are making decisions in a very different way than their parents did.
Rules for failure
William Beatty was writing for amateur scientists, but it’s pretty global:
The road to failure often contains:
1. Secrecy
2. The conviction that someone is about to steal your idea.
3. Focus on selling your idea to the government or a big corporation.
4. Loss of humility and focus on fame
5. Belief that scientists and businesses (the smart ones) will hail your discovery.
“A loyalty card is a piece of plastic”
Tim Manners keeps getting better and better. In this essay: Fast Company | Where’s the Loyalty? he rips into those that have confused a program (loyalty cards, points, systems, scanners, etc.) with something that actually works.
Just because it’s the bureaucratic thing to do doesn’t mean it’s going to work. In fact, the opposite is usually true.
All real loyalty programs start in the same place: creating an experience or a product that is its own reward. We’re loyal because it makes us feel good, not because we’re being bribed.