Sponsored Links and Posts in the Texas Heat

I see a lot more small businesses employing wavers this year – people standing by the roadside in the triple-digit Texas heat, holding signs promising big deals, waving at traffic.

A waver at the roadside may attract my attention to a business I didn’t know was there. That gets me in the door exactly once. After that it all depends on whether a customer gets value or not. Wavers are like an aggressive search engine marketing strategy, when you think about it.

I’ll see the waver again when I drive past tomorrow. (And I’ll see the sponsored link at the top of the Google results again tomorrow too – and I’ll see sponsored blog posts, for that matter). But I won’t stop because, in this case, the experience didn’t live up to the promise.

What if they’d put that waver to work inside the business, improving things like the broken ‘Open’ sign, the cleanliness of the shop, the speed of the service? Maybe a little more focus on making existing customers want to come back will translate into less of a need to flag down new ones at the roadside. Do it right – and maybe your existing customers will be the ones waving new customers into your shop.

Metcalfe’s Law Revisited, Or Take a Node to Lunch Day

Take your best node to lunch today.

Metcalfe’s Law states that “the value of a network  is proportional to the square of the number of nodes.” Every 10 nodes added increases the value a hundredfold. Big isn’t just better, it’s better-squared. The law applies to a network of compatible communication devices (fax machines, cell phones). Does it apply to people in your personal network?

There’s been a bit written on Metcalfe’s Law in a Web 2.0 world here and here. If you want to get mathy, follow those links. But here’s my take:

• Metcalfe’s Law: V = n², where V is the value of the network and n is the number of nodes (compatible communication devices)
• Metcalfe’s Law Revisited For Getting Stuff Done in a Web 2.0 World: V = (n*e)². e is engagement of the users

Think about this for your personal network. It’s not hard to amass crowds of Twitter followers or LinkedIn connections. But the more you go for volume, the less committed the average member is. Which is fine, parts of life are a volume game and the n in the equation is important.

But in a Web 2.0 world, the e is equally important. Who are the most engaged nodes in your network? Don’t treat them like nodes. Treat them like the valued and committed collaborators that they are. Take your best node to lunch today.

Photo by Noah Sussman

New Coat of Paint

It struck me this morning how faded some retail businesses look right now. On a drive through South Austin I passed a Hollywood Video. The bright blue had faded beyond pastel. Like all the other businesses in the strip mall. Like the other strip malls I passed. They all blended together. Is this how we feel as a business community? Faded, battered and weathered?

In a down economy, improvements can wait. It makes financial sense.

But whoever bucks that trend will stand out. If I had a store in that strip mall right now I’d give it a fresh coat of paint. Bright and cheery. Everyone who drove past would notice my store and know that I don’t plan on closing my doors anytime soon. At the cost of a new coat of paint. There’s your ROI.

You make impressions on customers, prospects and bystanders every day. What message are you sending? Are you telling them that you’re white-knuckling it through the recession, hoping to be lifted by a rising tide before you hit the rocks? Or are you telling them that you’re optimistic and in it for the long haul?

You probably don’t run a Hollywood Video in a strip mall. But you’re in some kind of business. Tell me – what’s your version of a new coat of paint?

Photo by Mess of Pottage

The Hardest Kind of More

Marketers and Bruce Dickenson both love ‘More’.

Mostly we focus on more feeds & speeds. Sometimes we promote more deeds. We don’t spend nearly enough time where it really matters – on meeting more needs.

Incremental More is more feeds and faster speeds. It’s a Toyota Prius going from 46 MPG in 2009 to 50 MPG in 2010. That’s a big deal in Engineering, but “gas mileage just got a little better” won’t get people talking. To grab attention you need to translate those feeds and speeds into First, Best or Most. Otherwise you’re like Gene Frenkel, loudly banging a More that no one cares about.

Different More is new deeds. The Prius in 2001 wasn’t positioned as improved mileage, but as a whole new way of achieving that gain. Done right, it gets people talking. But Different More can fall flat. Consumer electronics manufacturers have tried to position Blu-Ray as Different More, but outside of the home theater crowd it’s been received as Incremental More. In fact, it looks lame compared to the Different More of streaming and downloading.

More Fitting is the hardest kind of more because it’s about needs. Feeds, speeds and deeds are all within your control. Needs belong to the customer. More buttons and options are clear signs that you don’t know how to do More Fitting.  Subtract features (like the first iPod shuffle did)  just as a tailor subtracts fabric in the right places to create a suit fitted to the needs of the customer.

More Fitting is hard to trump. Would you trade a well-tailored suit that fits your needs (and body type) perfectly for an off-the-rack suit with Incremental More thread count or Different More styling? I wouldn’t.

What could you subtract from your product positioning that would result in More Fitting and higher customer loyalty? How are you connecting with your customers today so you know their needs?

photo by flick

WOM Marketing Secrets of the Carnies

Here in Pflugerville it’s been Deutschen Pfest weekend. With a five year old daughter, naturally I spent much of my time on the midway, where I realized that carnies are WOM masters. I chatted up a few of them and present three of their secrets below.

Give your customer something others will ask about. “Make sure people win some of the big stuffed animals early,” said the guy running the darts booth. “They carry ‘em around and other folks ask where they got ‘em. And it lets everybody know that you’re running a booth where people can win.” Sure, you give your customers value worth talking about and add forward-to-a-friend buttons to your email newsletters. But what do you give that makes prospective customers ask them about you?

Tailor your pitch and your product to your customer. “Think you can throw hard enough? Betcha can’t”, yelled the man with the milk bottle game to a 20-something guy and his friends. The 20-something tried to walk past but his friends wouldn’t let him – he had to try (and fail) several times. A few minutes later a mom with a seven-year-old walked by, and the pitch was completely different. “Let her step up and try,” the carnie encouraged. “She’s a guaranteed winner.” He scaled the game down to three milk bottles (instead of four), coached her on the right toss, and sent her on her way with a prize. We’ll all happily refer a friend to someone who’s shown they treat each customer as an individual, because we know they’ll have a better experience.

Make your customer a co-conspirator. The woman running the hoops game spent time teaching my daughter the trick: throw underhand so that it comes down vertically into the hoop. “It’s smaller than a regulation hoop, honey,” she said. “The boys always throw free-throw style because they think they’ll look silly throwing underhand, and it’ll never go in that way. But now you know the secret. Don’t tell the boys, y’hear?” My daughter’s only five so she never got one in, but she enjoyed laughing at the teenage boys trying their best free throws.

Photo by minvervah

Little Things are Big

Do something your competition doesn’t do because they think it’s too small to care about.

Take business cards (I know, how uncool in this post-paper world, but stay with me). Any printer offers an array of options designed to differentiate you. Pictures, textures, custom stock, unusual sizes. Those are OK options but they don’t give me a reason to want to do business in the way that a recent card did.

It was an ordinary card from a car salesman. Plain stock. Two or three colors. Nothing special at all.

Here’s what was special: a friend and her partner were car shopping, with their 14-year-old daughter in tow. The salesman greeted the friend and gave her a card. He did the same for her partner. Then he did the same for the 14-year-old daughter.

The 14-year-old won’t be buying a car for the next couple years, but it was still a good move. Of half a dozen salespeople, he was the only one to greet the 14-year-old, let alone treat her as respectfully as he treated the adults (and as a potential future customer, which she is). Guess where they’ll be buying their car?

A small thing that’s a big thing to a customer should be a big thing to you. Are you doing the small stuff that your customers notice and talk about?

Managing Metawork

Urban Dictionary defines “metawork”, in part, as “trivial or unnecessary work.” If only it were that simple.

I think of metawork having more in common with metadata (data about data). The words you’re reading right now are data. If you go to ‘view source’ in your browser you’ll see, in the source code for the page, data about the data. You’re (I hope)  interested in the data – the words – not the metadata. But your browser needs that metadata to know how to display the words. Search engines need it to know how to classify the information. It’s not core to the content, but it’s necessary for the delivery.

Just as metadata is data about data, metawork is work about work. But the farther your work gets from directly delivering or communicating value, the closer it gets to metawork. Selling something? Work. Documenting the sales process? That’s metawork. Updating a Web page that communicates to customers? Work. Going through a process to request those changes? Metawork.

Your work probably contains a blend of work and metawork. I know mine does.

And there’s nothing wrong with metawork. We need it so people can collaborate and communicate in business. We also need heat  and air conditioning for our office buildings. Climate control doesn’t directly create value for customers and shareholders, but we don’t cut the power and make people freeze in winter and swelter in summer. We spend what’s needed. And no more.

There’s a certain amount of status reporting and processes to go through. Do it. Don’t complain about it, any more than you complain about having to pay for utilities. But – as with utilities -always remember that it’s not an end in itself. You don’t put more effort or money into heating and cooling the building than you need to. Treat metawork the same way. Keep it as efficient, low-cost and streamlined as possible. Get it out of the way so you can focus on work that delivers value.

photo by spacemanbobby

Use Your Superpowers

Are you using your superpowers wisely?

You could be gifted with numbers, or words, or both. You could be a natural at building deep relationships with people or able to charm a roomful immediately. Maybe you have a talent for breaking a problem into its components to find a logical solution. I have a friend who can look at a machine and instantly visualize its inner workings in 3-D.

You have superpowers. Maybe you have more than one. If you’re lucky, you’ve found a place in the working world that uses those talents.

But it’s not enough to simply use them. A gift for quick mental math is useful because most people lack it. It helps the minimum-wage worker at the hot dog stand make change. But (combined with a few other talents) it’s also useful for negotiating mergers & acquisitions in the millions or billions of dollars.

I’m not dissing the idea of using your superpowers to serve customers hot dogs. With 13 years of bartending experience (which was vital to financing my college education and subsequent MBA) I can’t afford to cop an attitude. And I believe that all work is inherently noble and inherently ennobling.  I’m just pointing out that the guidance counselor at high school might have advised Spiderman that his skills were perfect for window washing.

As you assess your career from time to time, I suggest that you ask two questions:

• Does my current role use my superpowers? If not, are you consciously making a choice to play against strength for a time to learn new skills or offset weaknesses?
• Does your role use your superpowers for their highest and best purposes? If not, is this role a step towards a role that makes better use of those superpowers?

Photo courtesy of Dulce Pinzon

I Got It (I Got It)

An exec in a meeting recently said “You gotta dumb it down for me, dude. I’m an executive.”

Both funny and true. But execs aren’t the only ones who need things simplified. Customers need it. Business partners need it. And Sales needs it. Why do marketers so often act as though they’re paid by the word? (Maybe because we think “value proposition” is plain English).

That doesn’t mean we avoid polysyllabic words and jargon. If your customers are network engineers, words like SNMP, MIB and OID are commonplace. So smart marketers think in terms of their audience’s plain English, not their own. A co-worker gave me a great lesson in that the other day when he needed to explain IP addresses and subnets to a non-technical audience. He said:

“An IP address is like a phone number. If you know Jenny’s phone number is 867-5309, you can call her. And if you know a device’s IP address, you can talk to it on the network.

“More than one person has the phone number 867-5309. But we don’t get confused because they have different area codes. A network has different subnets, and those are like area codes. If two people in the same area code had the same phone number, there would be a problem. On a network, that’s an IP address conflict. As long as they have different area codes – subnets – they can have the same phone number.

“If you move you keep the same cell phone number. That’s like a static IP address; it’s always the same number. But when you move you get a new home phone number. That’s like a dynamic IP address. Everytime someone moves their notebook to another wireless access point in the building, they get issued a new dynamic IP address.”

Every person there got it. They don’t get this or this, but they know Jenny’s phone number.  I’m lucky I’ve got smart co-workers to learn from.

Abstract away complexity. Keep it as simple as possible and put it in your customers’ language.

Photo by erenata

No Guru, No Method, No Teacher

My all-time favorite album title is ‘No Guru, No Method, No Teacher’ by Van Morrison. Forget that it’s brilliant music by a world-class artist. The title alone rocks.

I’ve been thinking about it lately as I’ve considered discussion around the title ’social media guru.’ Brand Dialogue suggests that you view anyone bearing this title skeptically. Jeremiah Owyang thinks that the tide of the recession will sweep the beach clear of many self-proclaimed gurus -and that this will be a good thing.

Others clearly view it differently. I just ran across yet another Craigslist job listing where a company was looking for a ’social media guru’. I see the title used frequently without irony on Twitter and in profiles, and I hear it used as a compliment. And many people have deep expertise in the field – I’m lucky enough to have worked with a few and know a few more.

My own take is that I don’t like the term for a couple reasons. From a Geoffrey Moore perspective, we’re nowhere near all the way through the adoption curve on social media. Everything that you know today will change very shortly as the late adopters and laggards from Moore’s classic model start showing up. (Yes, the book was written in 1991 – peg me as a dinosaur if you like, but it’s the best model of technology adoption I know). I’m seeing this more and more on Facebook. The changes they’ve made to their interface are minor compared to the changes happening in the community as more aunts, grandpas and non-technophiles start SuperPoking each other – and me.

More than that, though, I don’t like the term ‘guru’ – for any field of endeavor. Okay, maybe Jesus and Buddha and a few others have truly earned it. But I don’t like the term applied to me. Really. And it’s more than just my Midwestern modesty.

I’ve been called ‘guru’ in several roles – sometimes around data analysis, sometimes around pricing and packaging, sometimes around product launch. All areas in which I’m proud to have some expertise. But the folks that called me ‘guru’ in any of those roles were rarely the greatest collaborators on the team. More often than not they wanted transactional discipleship – to get my expertise applied to their project or deal and to move on. Which is fine. We all have roles on the team, and I behave no differently when I need signoff from Legal or Finance on something. Except I don’t call them ‘gurus’, because I’m not there to learn from them – I’m there, openly, to get their expertise applied and move on.

I’ve spent the past half hour rewriting the paragraph above and trying to make it not sound cranky. I may have failed at that. But Van Morrison is famous for his crankiness. And he urged us to accept no guru, no method, no teacher. Some of us know more than others. We can and should learn from them whenever possible. But there’s more unknown than known, and we all have a lot to learn from each other.

“You can’t stay the same. If you’re a musician and a singer, you have to change, that’s the way it works.” – Van Morrison

Photo by oddsock