Over the last few days, efforts to change Social Security have revolved around two words.
PRIVATIZATION it seems, has bad test numbers. So those who would privatize it don’t call it that any more.
REFORM, on the other hand, is on the march. Reform is a great word in terms of establishing a frame for a debate, because reform assumes something is broken and how can anyone be against fixing something that’s broken?
Don’t minimize the impact of the right word.
That’s how long it took, on the glacial scale of media change, for bloggers to completely change the media equation.
Check out this chart of the traffic to Gawker’s various blogs: nickdenton: gawker traffic.
In a good day, almost a million people read one of Nick’s blogs. In a month, more people read one of his focused blogs than read Car & Driver or the New Republic or probably New York magazine (if we count readers, not subscribers).
How long did this take? A year? Three?
Are you writing ads to run on blogs yet?
Arthur is an amateur critic. Amateur critics didn’t used to exist, really. If they did, few people noticed them.
Now, if you make something, sell something, raise money for something or invent something, you need to know about Arthur and the million people like him. You don’t have to like him (or what he does) and it often pays to ignore him, but he’s there.
Of course it’s a worldwide meme. What else could it be?
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
