Alex Pooley reminds us that people really enjoy seeing their name (and hearing it as well).
Your name is the simplest, shortest way to be involved. Spammers have figured this out, but it still hasn’t diminished the pleasure people get in hearing their name. I even smile when I get email from someone else named Seth
Infinitely customizable short run printing makes it possible to create color images like this one. No doubt that this tactic, like all others before it, will be abused and eventually lose its luster. Until then, people love seeing their name in lights, especially if the message that goes with it is authentic.
December 11, 2006
A great post from the always great tompeters!
December 8, 2006
Sitting behind the pilot on a tiny plane today, I was reminded how important, difficult and tedious this job is.
Pilots have to get it right every time. They have to follow a myriad of procedures. They must be calm and focused and consistent, and yes, boring. No one wants to notice the pilot.
Good pilots probably do very well in job interviews–and not just for pilot jobs. They have many of the traits that hiring managers look for. They follow instructions with an eye on detail. They don’t fail (if they did, they probably wouldn’t be at the interview). They show up on time.
I’m grateful there are pilots. I’m also glad I’m not one.
Here’s the thing: I think (outside of the airline business, of course) that our need for pilots is diminishing, and rapidly. I think the value add of a person who carefully follows instructions and procedures keeps going down. I think the fact that pilots would do well in a job interview at your organization means your organization probably should change the way interviews get done.
We don’t need pilots. We need instigators and navigators, rabble rousers and innovators. People who can’t follow a checklist to save their life, but invent the future every day.
December 7, 2006
Courtesy of Npower New York and Squidoo. Download pdf
Feel free to share.
December 6, 2006
Sanj sends us this quote:
Last weekend our family had a get together for my aunt and uncle’s 40th anniversary. Anyway, I brought my 360 with to play some games with my nephews. Turns out both of my nephews that showed up already had 360s, and one of them even brought theirs with, too. So we went downstairs to hook them up, when my uncle said "don’t bother, I already got my 360 hooked up to the big screen". I was floored. My uncle is 62 years old! Just then my other uncle (the 62 year olds brother) said "What? I didn’t know you had a 360! We could have been playing Gears of War coop!" Now I couldn’t believe my ears. Just then our family priest showed up at the door, he normally stops by for big events like this. Well, under his arm he had a 360. He had just bought it and didn’t want to leave it out in the cold. All of us who were just talking about 360 were shocked and we all just started laughing, including our priest.
While we were laughing we heard a big sound, like boxes falling over. My aunt had opened a closet where no fewer than two dozen Xbox 360s tumbled out all over the floor. She looked embarrased, then explained she had bought them for all the memebers of her bridge club. They were tired of playing bridge and heard about how you could play Uno online with 360. She was worried my uncle would be mad for spending so much money. Luckily he wasn’t mad at all, he said ‘No way, I love Xbox 360!’. Then we all laughed for a good half hour.
Yeah, I’d say 360 is really picking up some steam.
The 360 buying spree has begun… – Page 3 – Xbox 360 & Xbox Forums.
[PS, added a few hours later for my irony-disabled readers: the above is an over-the-top bit of hyperbole, a fake, a scam, a joke, a riff on florid marketing prose.]
The web hates channel conflict.
Actually, it’s consumers who hate it.
Channel conflict is what happens when a producer doesn’t want to favor one retailer over another, or gets stuck because the terms at the effective retail channel conflict with the terms at the channel they would like to have succeed.
Too confusing. Let me try again.
I visited a blog this morning. There was a clever ad for a new paperback book called Whale Season. I clicked, intending to buy, partly to support the blog, partly because I needed a trashy book for vacation.
Oh. It’s the Random House site. See, Random House, the publisher, doesn’t want to send me to Amazon, because then all the other bookstores would be angry with them. So they offer to sell me the book at full retail, and I have to pay for shipping and I have to enter all my data. Nope. Bye.
See, it’s the "nope, bye" part that producers have to worry about. I have a million ways to spend my time and my money, and Random House’s channel conflict problems are irrelevant to me. So I leave. The ad is wasted. The author is bitter.
If you are getting in the way of the path between your customers and your products, your customers are just going to go away. Clear the path, don’t clutter it.
Lenny Levine died yesterday at 67.
He was the greatest kindergarten teacher ever.
Lenny taught kids two things:
He taught them how to learn. He understood that kindergarten wasn’t third grade for little kids. It was an important step in beginning the process of becoming someone who could learn without stress, forever.
And he taught them this motto, "You can’t say you can’t play." It was a mantra about inclusion and openness and it let kids understand that what you thought about someone yesterday didn’t really matter if they had something to contribute today.
I’ll miss Lenny. But the world (all of us) will benefit from what he taught for a long time to come.
December 5, 2006
It’ll pay big dividends. Ben and Jackie’s new book pubs today: Church of the Customer Blog.
So, the latest bit of civil disobedience from the seventh grade is the pencil drop (nothing new). Word goes out that at exactly 2:04, everyone drops their pencil.
Teachers hate this.
Coordination turns random events into noticeable events.
I’m on record as being a huge fan of Reddit and Digg and the other social bookmarking sites. I’m still a big fan. But I wonder about the self-inflicted damage of their success.
Now that they are so powerful (the front page is worth hundreds of thousands of impressions, for free, in one day, among some of the most influential people online) people are starting to notice.
They’re noticing by encouraging their fans to post in a coordinated way.
Sometimes they do this in ways that most of us would consider ethical (hey, please Digg this post if you think it’s worthwhile) while others are hiring clickfarms in India to do it for them. The leverage is just so great, it’s irresistible (in some categories, just a few hundred Diggs is enough to work your way up to the top).
As this gaming approach catches on, I have no doubt that the social networking sites will do a pretty good job of stopping the spammers. But they can’t (and shouldn’t) stop the semi-organic ones, the good blog posts where the blogger asked for the Digg and made it easy, right?
So the market will adjust and the good will still win.
Except it won’t. It won’t because the truly good, the overlooked, the stuff that is built by someone who doesn’t know how to IM the top Diggers, doesn’t want to pay a bribe or even know how to put in links to the sites–those pages can’t possibly compete with the coordinated pencil drop. So they disappear.
I’m fully expecting that sometime quite soon, the front door won’t be open quite so wide… that it won’t be so easy to get a dubious page into the clickstream. The idea of social bookmarking isn’t going to go away, I think, but it can’t help but evolve.
December 4, 2006
Another mystery to ponder.
Why would anyone put a sign like this up on her store?
If I liked your store before, now I’m on notice to be careful–it might not be as good.
If I didn’t like your store before, why on earth am I paying attention to your little sign and why should I go out of my way to take another chance?
This is a vivid symbol of the ego-centric nature of most marketing. The sign is about the owner, not about the prospect.
