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A Must See

Yet another fantastic TED talk. Tip of the hat to Gene Wrights blog....

World of Mouth

Thanks to Shannon for sending this along....

To Be Honest....

I do a lot of writing at work - email, memos, general communication.

The other day my boss was reviewing something I'd written before we published it.

He was stopped dead in his tracks over the phrase "to be honest".

"Aren't we always honest?" he asked.

I had used it as a throwaway phrase without thinking much about it. I was sharing the fact that a change in company policy benefited both our employees and (to be honest) our company.

Perhaps I should have said "to be clear" or perhaps I should have discarded the phrase entirely.

To be honest (wink) I wrote it without thinking.

When writing, brevity and clarity matter.

Presentation to MSOE MBAs

As requested, here's a copy of the presentation I gave last night at MSOE. Enjoy.

20 Ideas In 20 Minutes Rev5

View more presentations from guest5678bdcc.

Inertia is Expensive

It's interesting how we take business services for granted. You hire a company to provide a service. They do a good job for you and the next year, raise their rates 3-5%. Year after year this practice continues.

Everyone is happy. Your payroll service or cleaning service or web conferencing service meets your needs. Where's the problem?

In business, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. We're pre-programmed to solve problems, to fix things, to make people, processes and products better. With this mindset, why would anyone take the time to look at non-problems?

Even if you see an opportunity to save some cash on these services, we usually do a mental accounting of the effort it would take to change suppliers and quickly decide in favor of the status quo.

After all, change is difficult and how would your company react to a change from a good (but expensive) vendor, if the change had some hiccups? Most of us would argue that the potential savings aren't worth the personal or business risk.

Your current vendors count on that. They provide good service and in return, take their incremental increases year after year.

The wild card in this arrangement is technology. New web based services change the game. They put more traditional businesses at risk, if their customers take the time to look. I'm not advocating that you should change out good vendors - just keep them honest.

Recently our company made a couple of calls to competing vendors only to find that we could be saving as much as 50% on some business services. During these challenging economic times, these savings can easily add up to real savings!

You don't have to change vendors - just keep them honest. If you discover huge potential savings, let your current supplier know that YOU are aware of the opportunity. You may be able to negotiate savings without changing suppliers.

Until you actually look, you'll never learn the lesson.

Inertia is expensive.

How to Get Customers - Simply

After recently describing how to lose a customer in 3 easy steps, here's a refreshing post from the guys at 37signals, about how simple attracting customers can be.

How To Lose a Customer in 3 Easy Steps

In the past 48 hours, a long time service provider to our company, lost our business. You too can easily shed customers if you follow their example.

1. Make it difficult for your customers to interact with you. Last week I spent 15 minutes navigating voicemail, automated attendants and then a "generic call center person" who wouldn't even give me the name of the salesperson I needed to speak to. Their response? "A salesperson will get back to you within the next 2 business days." Not good enough. Not in these economic times. Force customers to do business the way YOU want to, at your own peril.

2. Take your customers for granted. This whole saga began, because we happened to notice the amount of money we were spending to rent some equipment (a time clock). The payroll service had been in place for a decade (and was working acceptably) and so no one bothered to determine whether the service was still price competitive. Like many service providers, the pricing inched up year over year - not by a big enough margin to raise any flags, but over a decade, the pricing became significant. Because I could not get an answer to a very simple question about the pricing for the time clock (see #1 above) we began examining the pricing of the payroll service itself.

3. Ignore your competition. No one at our office can remember the last time anyone from the payroll service provider has ever contacted us. Their business model is geared toward a successful initial setup, then milking the processing fees until the customer wakes up and leaves. They count on the fact that their customers will be lulled into a state of apathy....until they aren't.

My call to a competitive payroll service was returned within 20 minutes. I had a quote on my desk within 90 minutes. Potential annual savings for the identical range of services was 5 figures.

A 10 year customer gone... in 90 minutes.

You too can achieve these amazing results by following these three easy steps!

Building Customer Communities

Last week, I attended a three hour presentation on SharePoint functionality. it was sponsored by a local I.T. consulting company.

SharePoint, for those of you who don't know, is a Microsoft application platform that enables companies to easily communicate, collaborate, share documents and can act as a portal for basic information workflow. SharePoint, used well, helps companies share knowledge and execute better.

For several weeks prior to the seminar, the sales team were beating the bushes, trying to attract local companies to sign up - to invest a morning listening to their internal expert share knowledge about how SharePoint works.

For the most part, I enjoyed the presentation, but afterwards sent a note to my rep with some suggestions because it seemed ironic that a company purporting to be SharePoint experts weren't using their platform to share knowledge and build a community of potential customers!

The approach might have been - now that you have SharePoint, let us show you how to get your company to use it well and how to build a collaborative culture within your company. Instead, they invited a room full of geeks to show them features and functionality of the software, in the hopes that somewhere down the road, we might need some development help.

Why not help the geeks sell the idea of collaboration within their own companies and then drive consulting from the dozens of business people who want to collaborate more effectively or work more efficiently?

Why not build a community of people who want to collaborate by developing and hostin an attractive and useful SharePoint Community site to foster enthusiasm, share stories, share knowledge and attract potential customers from the millions of people who were not at the seminar?

My advice to our hosts? Stop the local lecturing and start building a global community! Find ways to help the geeks evangelize. Make it easy for their end users to quickly gather confidence in using the tools. Once end user creativity is unleashed, the development consulting opportunities will abound.

User Voice

I've long been a fan of "voice of the customer" technology. I've blogged several time about Dell's IdeaStorm project, where customers get to suggest improvements to Dell's products and services and the customer community gets to "vote up or vote down" ideas submitted by the community.

I'm really excited by a brand new web service called User Voice. This web service easily allows any company to start up their own customer conversation. The service comes in several different "flavors". The feedback tab you now see on the left hand side of my blog, is an example of the free version.

I'll leave this tab here for several weeks and encourage any readers to post blog topic ideas of their own and vote on those ideas submitted by others.

The application is very easy to set and use.

The toughest part of the entire process will be for User Voice customers to summon up the courage to actually begin an honest conversation with their customers!

Interesting Googlism

A talk with our Web stats provider revealed that now more than 50% of Google searches are unique and contain 4 to 6 words in the search string.

What this means is that not only does the "Long Tail" exist, it's thriving.

Recently we were trying to determine why our site visits were increasing, while our keyword rankings were staying relatively stable.

To test the theory, we tried a bunch of long tail searches for our products and found that our websites were always ranking at or near the top of the results pages.

We're blessed to have VOLUMES of well tagged information on our websites and blogs, but this little gem came as quite a surprise.

What did we learn?

Provide loads of valuable content (especially in blog form) and you'll be found on the web.

Buy the ink and we'll throw in the printer for (almost) Free

My Dad doesn't know it yet but he's about to be a guest blogger. Here's an email I received from him yesterday...

Hi Guys,

Thought that I'd bring you up to date with my latest bargain.
My little HP printer ran out of black ink so I went to Zellers to get another black cartridge. It would have cost $30 but I went for the bargain -- both colour and black for $69. It doesn't sound like a bargain but they came with a Lexmark 5495 which will handle photos, scan, make copies and fax with its own built phone. It even has auto feed for copies etc.and slots for all the photo media sticks. It is amazing the extras they give away with their ink!

Dad

Bright, Bold and Ambitious

I have always been a fan of big ideas and bold initiatives. I discovered Shai Agassi thanks to Garr Reynolds' blog Presentation Zen. Shai Agassi was incumbent CEO at SAP software (we won't hold that against him) when he discovered his new calling - ridding the world of it's dependence of oil for our transportation needs.

This is the kind of out of the box thinking that is bold, ambitious, and after listening to this TED presentation, entirely achievable.

I love great new ideas, clearly and passionately expressed. Shai Agassi doesn't disappoint.

Mixed Message

I just received a webinar invite from Ziff Davis entitled "Can You Be Safe Without Vista?"

It's designed to promote the additional security features that the Vista operating system provides, but I'm not certain that's the message they are sending.

The problem is that the webinar is co-sponsored by Microsoft.

So, let me get this straight.

The very people who wrote the operating system you're likely still running (XP, for most of us) are telling their customers that our legacy operating systems, also written by Microsoft, aren't secure.

Imagine if GM sold you a crappy car, then invited you to an open house where they spoke about why you needed to purchase the newer model because the old one was so unsafe?

You wouldn't expect GM to close many sales.

Microsoft shouldn't either.

Sending and Receiving

Back when I was Director of Marketing for a B2B catalog company, I constantly battled our Product Managers over the catalog content and layout. Let's call it having a "creative difference".

The product managers would always want to load up the copy with every conceivable benefit and feature. They were looking to make the presentation as comprehensive as possible - to cram their entire story on a quarter page.

Now don't get me wrong - attention to detail is a good thing. As long as all the work you're putting into sending the message is being received by the customer. If we were lucky, a customer might spend as much as two seconds looking at a product page. What really mattered in getting readers to linger, was great page layout design, a compelling headline and a fantastic photo.

Think about how you leaf through all the advertising that comes in the Sunday paper. Is it the compelling copy that gets your attention? Probably not.

Taking a day to tweak copy for a product that gets a fleeting glance may not be the best use of your time. Understanding that just because you send the message, doesn't mean it's being received as you'd like it to be.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this designer who radically improved newspaper circulation by dramatically improving it's design. Same columnists, editors, just a different design.



First, you need to capture attention. THEN, your message has a chance to be received.

New Rule

In hommage to one of my favorite comedians, here's my New Rule:

New Rule: If you plaster my email inbox with advertising I have NOT asked for, you must stop it immediately if I opt out.

Kohl's has recently been sending me a ton of email advertising. I have opted out of this advertising several times. The note they display during the unsubscribe process is that it can take up to two weeks to actually take effect.

That's fine...

As long as Kohl's is okay with me shopping at your stores and leaving without paying, as long as I promise to come back in a couple of weeks or so to settle up.

Expectations

Setting an expectation is a double edged sword.

On Saturday morning, if the paper isn't delivered, it can ruin the start of your day. We like predictible. Same is good.

A visit to your favorite restaurant, when the chef has an "off night" can wreck your evening.

Recently Seth Godin celebrated his 3000th blog post, IN A ROW. Daily, for almost a decade, he's been sharing his thoughts each morning.

For anyone, this is a Herculean feat.

Delivering fresh throughts on a daily basis, without missing a day is unheard of.

This morning, when I logged on and checked my RSS Feed reader, there was nothing from Seth.

He didn't meet my expectations. I was disappointed.

Now Seth didn't promise me that he would post every day. He never committed to posting before 7 am. In fact he made no representations whatsoever. But based upon his record of daily insightful posts, he set an expectation.

Or rather I "assumed" an expectation.

Today's post may arrive in my RSS Reader as I'm writing this, but it's already too late. I'm already feeling a little let down.

That's the trouble with fans. We're fanatical.

A Lesson in Change Management

1. Don't berate those who think differently.
2. Don't criticize.
3. Show them a better way.

Liquidity

Vocabulary Word of the Day:

LIQUIDITY

Definition: Liquidity is when you look at your retirement funds and wet your pants.

Messages to the Banks - Make Lemonade

The U.S. Banking industry is missing a HUGE opportunity. At the moment they've circled the wagons, admitting no wrongdoing, protecting executive bonuses. For them it's business as usual - except for the fact that they're receiving HUGE bailout money (mine and yours).

America has turned sour on all things Financial. To us it represents greed, betrayal, recklessness and dysfunction.

It is a huge opportunity for the industry.

Imagine how well an entirely new strategy would work if just one banking CEO changed direction.

Here's how his press release might read:

America,

We at (insert Bank name here) would like to apologize for our part in the economic crisis in which America finds herself. Over the past decade our Bank has undertaken unacceptable risks in our mission to drive profits for our shareholders. Our compensation plans provided bonuses for those most successful at driving the very behavior that helped our nation into the crisis we now face.

We accept responsibility for our actions and from this day forward pledge a new beginning.

We are working hard to repair our balance sheets to balance our assets with our liabilities. We are movong away from a 35:1 debt/asset ratio and are working to achieve a very conservative 5:1 ratio. Our progress towards this goal will be monitored by independent 3rd party accounting firms in conjuction with the SEC and Fed. Today we are announcing a new policy of transparency, and will show each and every account holder how we intend to keep these promises.

We are announcing today that 30% of all future profits will be returned to the taxpayer until such time as the TARP money we have received is paid back. This may well take decades, but it is our commitment to every American, that we consider this money a loan.

Finally, we are addressing compensation. Our bonuses, if any, will be based upon both our profitability and our journey towards a conservatively structured, sustained balance sheet. Every customer of this Bank must be assured that their assets are safe and that all creditworthy customers have access to the capital they need to run their businesses and their lives.

If your current bank is NOT pledging similar response to this crisis, may we suggest that you open an account with us.

Together we'll forge a healthy and sustainable economic future for America.

Signed,

Joe Moneybags,
CEO
insert Bank name here.

America has a huge capacity for forgiveness. It's time that the Banks stepped up and admitted their mistakes and told America what THEY are going to do to fix things. I think for a "first mover", the rewards could be substantial.