A story worth thinking about
Making your own change. How could it change your business?
I don’t make this stuff up!
Rob May pointed me to A purple polar bear. More proof if you needed it that various purple animals can, “increase visitor numbers to the zoo by 50%.”
The last workshop (for a while)
If you’ve been debating signing up for a Purple Cow workshop in my office, here’s your last and best chance for a while. September 10 near NYC.
The best part (for me, anyway) is how much fun everyone has. It really is a great day.
The next big thing?
Pocket IM is a new product from Motorola. It lets kids (or kidlike adults) roam about the house, IMing their friends via AOL instant messenger.
A walkie talkie on worldwide steroids.
I liked this…
I just got a note from the guys at http://www.snapnames.com/. A quick visit to their site shows a neat idea–you reserve a domain and they check it all the time, grabbing the domain the minute it expires. What’s remarkable is how they got the little things right. The banana is right there (twice) on the page. The design communicates quite obviously that this isn’t a scam (actually, it might be a scam, I haven’t tried it, but I doubt it’s anything less than it appears to be.)
They’ve got an API and even though the business isn’t inherently viral, it has many of the markings of a smart net business. Just FYI.
A good ideavirus
Flawlessly executed.
Go to google, type in “weapons of mass destruction” and hit “I’m feeling lucky”.
It’s going to spread fast.
Politics and the Internet (Dean isn’t “raising money on the Internet”)
So, it appears that the New York Times has discovered the fact that politicians are starting to use the Internet. Their insightful analysis begins and ends with several articles describe the Dean site as a place where donors use credit cards to make donations.
The Times (and the entire beltway establishment) appears to see the Net as just a modern version of TV–with a little junk mail thrown in. For them, it’s all about being in charge, about marketing AT people, not with them.
My favorite part of the article in today’s Times is this quote from Bob Bauer, “whose company represents Mr. Kerry, Mr. Gephartdt and … Senator Joseph I. Lieberman”. Mr. Bauer says, “…But the Internet as a revolutionary tool? I don’t know.”
So what’s the real point? The internet isn’t a tool. It’s a medium. And it’s not a medium for interactions between Dean and person A and Dean and person B. It’s a medium for interactions between A and B –about– Dean. In other words, by enabling an ideavirus to spread, the Internet allows someone without the money to buy a lot of TV to be the topic of (many) conversations.
The insight of the Dean campaign (accidental or not) is that sites like meetup.com and constituencies of online sneezers can dramatically increase the chances that your candidate will get talked about. Add to that a site optimized for the interactions you desire (where’s that banana!) and a candidate can radically recast the entire campaign process.
How wrong is the DMA? How right is Verizon (huh!)
So, it appears that on Friday, about 735,000 people signed up in just 17 hours for the do not call list (www.donotcall.gov). That’s about 12 per second.
When 12 people a second, or almost one in 150 households sign up for a service in the very first day, the message is pretty loud and clear. While the head of the Direct Marketing Association may not LIKE this outcome, the fact remains that it’s very pronounced. Instead of fighting it every step of the way, instead of insisting that they have the right to steal attention from people who don’t want it taken away, the DMA would be better off figuring out how to get permission, don’t you think?
Compare this to the newly revitalized (and consumer aware) Verizon, which just announced it will no longer fight to prevent you (and me) from keeping our cell phone numbers when we switch services. While this will no doubt lead to less amazing deals for signing up with a cell phone service, it’s so clearly beneficial to users that it was going to happen one way or the other. Better to give up, I say, then to fight a battle against your customers.
On that topic, I just can’t tell you how stupid the RIAA looks in all their writings about why they are now planning on suing 12 year olds and their parents. Do they think a reign of terror will restore their industry? I especially like the logic that explains that music sales AREN’T down because music over the last few years is pretty lousy–“hey”, they say, “it’s good enough for you to steal, isn’t it????”
hmmm. I won’t bore you with a rehash of my previous posts on this, but you can look them up in the archives if you want. Bottom line: the right thing is to rejigger the business, not to change the reality.
A purple magazine
Ode magazine is worth a look. One technique they’ve pioneered–instead of those annoying blow in cards, they have annoying blow in cards that let you send a free issue to a friend!
Ode .
Naming a business
Greg Harrington writes, “I’ve been thinking quite a bit about a topic lately—how to best name a business—and in looking for some ideas, I’ve reviewed several of your books, but don’t find anything in the way of a thorough treatment of this topic.”
Here’s what I think:
First, the main point: a brand name is a peg that people use to hang all the attributes of your business. The LESS it has to do with your category, the better.
If you call yourself International Postal Consultants, there’s a lot less room to hang other attributes. Some names I like? Starbucks. Nike. Apple.
Second, please pick a real english word, or a string of them. Axelon and Altus are bad. Jet Blue, Ambient and Amazon are good.
Third, be sure it’s easy to spell AND pronounce. Prius is a bad name. I can’t tell anyone to buy a Prius because I’m embarrassed I’ll say it wrong.
Fourth, don’t obsess about getting a short web name. If you want to name your venture capital firm Nickel (a great name, imho) then you could have www.NickelVenture.com and that would be fine. The only way this turns into a problem is if the current owner of the URL is a competitor (which won’t happen if you pick a non-obvious name, as I write in #1 above).
If you follow these pieces of advice, you’ll discover that there are literally millions of names available to you (lemonpie, for example, is perfect for a scuba tour company. So are orangepie, melonpie and kiwipie). You will have far fewer trademark hassles. You will have no trouble coming up with a cool name that means nothing and makes it easy for you to hang a good brand upon. And you’ll have fun.
BUT, don’t forget to come up with a great tagline. “lemonpie, the easy way to learn scuba,” for example.
PS a couple more tricks:
1. Use a stock photo CD and find cool pictures that match your name BEFORE you pick the name. If you can find a bunch of $30 images that work with a name, grab the pictures, then the name.
2. Don’t listen to anyone else. All your friends will hate it. GOOD. They would have hated Starbucks too (you want to name your store after something from Moby Dick!??) If your friends like it, run.