For thousands of years, practioners of acupuncture would burn mugwort on a patient’s skin, believing that the heat would penetrate and help heal the patient.
Superstition is a funny thing.
Often expensive, time-consuming and even dangerous, a superstition can stick around for a long time, even when there’s no evidence that it really works.
Everywhere I look, I see organizations practicing moxabustion. With a vengeance.
Denis Papathanasiou points out that a leading candidate in the race to be mayor of Seoul calls herself a Purple Cow. Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English About Korea.
I had no idea it might lead to this.
Most learning, especially most organizational learning, occurs through trial and error.
Error occurs whether you want it to or not. Error is difficult to avoid. It’s not clear that research or preparation have an enormous impact on error, especially marketing error. Error is clearly not in short supply.
Trial, on the other hand, is quite scarce, especially in some organizations. People mistakenly believe that one way to successfully avoid error is to avoid trial.
We need more trial.
Josh Kaufman, who needs a new haircut, may just be on to something: The Personal MBA. Worth a look.
Boingboing is one of the most popular blogs in the world… it’s read by more people than most magazines. Day to day, though, it’s easy to assume that most of the posts are not particularly earthshattering–particular the ones about earwax.
Enter the Squidoo boingboing contest. Heath just sent me to: Squidoo : How BoingBoing is Changing the World. This lens from Erin Banister will probably change the way you read the site, and if you’ve never read it, will probably cause you to give it a shot.
If you want to put together a totally different point of view about boingboing, enter the contest.
John Dodds responded to my post about measurement. So here’s some more: There’s no doubt that you should measure things that are both important and measurable. When you do, it’s inevitable that what you measure improves.
Caveat #1 is not to measure things that aren’t important, just because they’re measurable. Business lore is rife with stories about companies that started measuring something… like defects to the last sigma… only to discover that people figured out that the best way to improve the measurement was to not make anything at all. Start measuring how long your operators stay on the phone, for example, and you’ll discover plenty of operators that just hang up on long-winded callers. Measuring the right thing is essential.
But caveat #2 is even more important: the art of business and organization is in realizing that there are important things you can’t measure. These ephemeral, soft things are the ones that often differentiate one organization from another, that lead to one company winning when all the metrics appear to be the same.
True story: I have a gig coming up, one that was planned a month or two ago. I went to book the tickets. First I went to Travelocity. Then, halfway through the process, decided to go straight to American to do it. Not sure why. Finished the reservation. Went to pay. Got a popup: can’t do that because the ticket has already been booked.
Amazing.
I had forgotten I had already booked the ticket (That part isn’t amazing. that happens all the time). No, what was amazing is that six weeks ago, I had gone through the same process, picked the same airline, the same flight times… exactly the same. Because of something you can’t measure, but is important nonetheless. And smart managers know how to invest in that too.
Jim Logan, who I’ve never had the privilege of meeting, lives in California. Capital One just sent him a piece of junk mail, soliciting credit card sign up… with my name on it.
This could be a trend… putting the names of bloggers or authors or famous accountants on junk mail addressed to others, just to get them to open the mail.
See the picture here: Jim Logan
Miel has a post about Melody: Coolz0r – Marketing Thoughts � Logitech’s 17 Year Old Brand Ambassador.
The first thing a jaundiced marketer would wonder is if this is just a special case. After all, the product that Melody is videoing about is the video camera. It’s hard to be more self-referential than that. The second thing I would imagine one would ask is "how can we make this happen for us?"
Of course, you can’t make it happen. That’s the point. If Logitech had orchestrated this, it wouldn’t have worked.
What you can do is make products that allow people to feel good (no, great) when they express themselves. Products or services that involve stories that are fun to spread. YouTube is just the medium.
an entire site of music for (and from) tv newscasts: News Music Now V.2 — [In The Spirit of Texas].
One of the secrets of the Yellow Pages was that the phone company would give you a second line when you bought a big ad.
Within days of the book coming out, you’d see and hear the phone ring. And you knew which phone it was. So when the time came to renew your Yellow Pages ad, all the sales rep had to do was glance over at the phone on the wall and the prospect would imagine that phone no longer ringing…
Aaron writes in and asks, why is it so easy for a client to spend a fortune on a brochure and to spend hours agonizing over it, and so hard for them to invest in an end to permission marketing/ideavirus system?
The answer is the same: measure this, measure that.
Once the number is on the wall, in marker, or in phone calls or dollar bills, the investment will follow.
Example: Google adwords. The price of adwords keeps going up because the cost per click pricing model forces clients to measure. As soon as they measure something and see it is working, they want more. Magazine ads don’t have that effect, so companies rarely bid up the price.
Example: Indie musicians at cdbaby. They tour to make a living, and they obsessively track which gigs translate into record sales. As a result, they go back to the places and the types of venues that work, and stop going to the others.
So, my best advice is not to argue with the client about building a big kickass system. Instead, it’s to argue with them about measuring. Once they start measuring, they’ll be begging you for the big system.
