While it might be more fun to rant about broken online forms and systems, we can learn a lot from sites that aren't broken as well.
Consider the Ibex store. Here are five things they do that make them successful online:
They sell a product you can't buy at the local store. This is easily overlooked and critically important. Because it's unique, it's worth seeking out and talking about. Just because you built a site doesn't mean I care. At all. But if you build a product I love, I'll help you.
They understand that online pictures are free. Unlike a print catalog, extra pictures don't cost much. Make them big. Let me see the nubbiness or the zipper or the way you make things.
They use smart copy (but not too much).
They are obsessed with permission. Once you sign up, you'll get really good coupons and discounts by email. Not too often, but often enough that my guess is that they make most of their sales this way. 25% discount on a product just like a product you love–just before Valentine's day? Sign me up.
They aren't afraid to post reviews. Even critical ones.
No site is perfect, of course, and I hesitate to tell you that this one is. I'm sure there are glitches and your mileage may vary. But the checkout is simple and the customer service, while not trying to be Zappos, is pretty good too.
Penguin Magic, I just realized, follows all five of these rules as well. While the site is very different in look and feel (and has a different audience), they're using the same principles.
The amazing thing to me is that none of this is particularly difficult to do, yet it's rare. The state of the art of online retailing is moving very very slowly.
RSS is the best way to consume content online. It always has been, and it still is.
Not gated, not filtered, no ads, just want you want.
If you’re not using it, can I strongly suggest you give it a try? I use Feedly. Not sure the particular reader software matters, though.
Once you are ready to add this blog, just type in https://feeds.feedblitz.com/sethsblog to your Reader, that’s it, done.
Here’s what you need to know:
It’s not particularly difficult to keep up with 200 blogs you care about in less than hour using an RSS reader.
RSS provides home delivery. Instead of remembering where to click, or waiting for a post to get all buzzy and hot, the good stuff comes to you. Automatically and free.
Subscribing to a blog is easy. In Newsfire, you can paste the URL of any blog and it automatically finds the RSS feed for you.
RSS is quiet and fast and professional and largely hype-free. Perhaps that’s why it’s not the flavor of the day.
[2021 update: I wrote this ten years ago. Since then, Google has tried to kill blogs, one social network after another has come along to entice people who want to write (and read) and figured out how to steal the permission that writers have worked so hard to earn. And yet, RSS, free, open, easy to use RSS persists. If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.]
What would happen if your organization hired a meeting fairie?
The fairie's job would be to ensure that meetings were short, efficient and effective. He would focus on:
Getting precisely the right people invited, but no others.
Making the meeting start right on time.
Scheduling meetings so that they don't end when Outlook says they should, but so that they end when they need to.
Ensuring that every meeting has a clearly defined purpose, and accomplishes that purpose, then ends.
Welcoming guests appropriately. If you are hosting someone, the fairie makes sure the guest has adequate directions, a place to productively wait before the meeting starts, access to the internet, something to drink, biographies of who else will be in the room and a clear understanding of the goals of the meeting.
Managing the flow of information, including agendas and Powerpoints. This includes eliminating the last minute running around looking for a VGA cable or a monitor that works. The fairie would make sure that everyone left with a copy of whatever they needed.
Issuing a follow up memo to everyone who attended the meeting, clearly delineating who came and what was decided.
If you do all this, every time you call a meeting it's going to cost more to organize. Which means you'll call fewer meetings, those meetings will be shorter and more efficient. And in the long run, you'll waste less time and get more done.
In a discussion on why Heinz has such high market share for ketchup in the Pittsburgh area, one commenter posts, "It's just better ketchup. Their other products may be closer in quality to the competition, but for Ketchup nobody compares. When you go to a restaurant and they have a different kind, it feels you are eating at some cheap cafeteria."
This is really telling, but probably not the in the way Matt intended.
Heinz doesn't make better ketchup. Heinz makes better Heinz ketchup. There's a huge difference.
If you define ketchup the way most people do, you define it as, "the ketchup I grew up with." Or to be more specific, "the ketchup my mom served me, the one that I was allowed to serve myself when I turned three…"
One thing that marketers do is sell us a feeling, not a set of molecules or bits. When you spend $3 on a bottle of ketchup, that's what you're buying. And Matt and the rest of us are so brainwashed we rationalize it as 'better ketchup.'
Please don't underestimate how powerful this sentence is.
When you say this to a colleague, a new hire, a student or a freelancer, you've established a powerful norm, one that they will be hesitant to challenge.
This might be exactly what you were hoping for, but if your goal is to encourage innovation, you blew it.
Incumbents compromise to please the committee and bend over backwards to defend the status quo.
Insurgents have the ability to work without a committee and to destroy the status quo.
The game is stacked in favor of the insurgents, except–
They're under pressure from boards, investors and neighbors to act like incumbents.
It takes guts to be an insurgent, and even though the asymmetrical nature of challenging the status quo is in their favor, often we find we're short on guts. … and then the incumbents prevail.
January 1, 2011
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