Fedex plus smaller plus cheaper equals opportunity.
Consider Meeting Tomorrow. These guys will ship a projector, a sound system, a wireless microphone… whatever you need for a meeting… directly to your hotel or venue. You arrive, it’s waiting for you. You drop it off at a Fedex box and move on.
This was inconceivable five years ago. The stuff was too big and too expensive and there was no easy way to interact with the user.
I’m betting that there are hundreds of applications of this idea, especially in the business-to-business area. Stuff that you need, reliably, but not often.
May 28, 2007
Sometimes you can’t make this stuff up.
As the photo below attests, a profit-minded entrepreneur is trying very hard to make ends meet. The problem with this strategy is obvious. It sends the anti-sushi message. Hey, we’re not fresh. We don’t even care so much about fresh.
If I ran a quickserv sushi place, I’d write the time the product was created on every single box and would offer a local shelter anything that was more than 55 minutes old. The money they make selling the old sushi can’t possibly make up for the horror the full-price customers feel.
May 27, 2007
Ernie really comes up with some winners here: Dips, Dead Ends, Joyrides, Lotteries, and Quests � iHack, therefore iBlog.
Here’s a taste:
Joyrides are things you do just for the fun of it, without caring if you’re getting anywhere. Seth himself said (roughly) that “if you play the flute just because you enjoy it, not because you’re trying to make a living as a flautist, then The Dip doesn’t matter.” It is worth noting that for some people college is Joyride, not a Dip!
Lotteries are a particularly seductive variant of Dead End that looks like a Dip, in that we periodically see people who do make it out into the Good Life. Unlike a Dip, though, there is nothing we can do to ensure we make it through to the other side; we are at the mercy of external forces. Thus, even thought there is a non-zero chance we might win the Lottery, for most of us it really is a Dead End, and a complete waste of our potential for greatness. This is particularly true for Talent- (rather than Skill-) based disciplines, where the Lottery took place before we were born.
Quests, on the other hand, are Dips that look like Dead Ends. Seth encourages us to pursue Dips where we can make measurable progress towards a well-defined goal. However, he admits that this doesn’t apply to things like cutting-edge scientific research, where there there are no guarantees or guidelines; fortunately, he says people like that won’t be discouraged by anything he says in his book. 🙂
However, I think he overstates the case when he says Quests (like Crick & Watson’s search for DNA) don’t have measurable progress. They do, but it is a matter of personal growth and accumulated wisdom, not the usual business metrics. Even though we may not reach what we thought we were aiming for, a worthy Quest enobles us and ends up benefiting humanity.
May 25, 2007
Rick points us to this article about a Saturn initiative. You’ll be able to test drive the competition at the Saturn dealership.
Brilliant.
There's a million things I want to share about last week, but I may need to get some sleep first.
In the meantime, some things you might enjoy:
Utah recap (and a bonus)
Tempe, too
and the Valley.
More soon.
If you look down the left hand column of this blog, you’ll see some little blue arrows next to some of my books. (Here’s a photo).
Click on any of the buttons and a window pops up, offering you all sort of things you can now do. Places to buy, places to post, ways to bookmark.
After exploring that, take a look at the bottom of each of my posts. There’s a ‘flare’ (perhaps named after the buttons Jennifer Aniston wore in Office Space) that brings the functionality of services like Technorati into the blog at the same time it makes it easy to bring the pithiness of the blog out to Digg, etc. [Sometimes the flare magically disappears… hey, life is a beta. If you don’t see it, try the next one down].
The sooner we view the web as a process, not a place, the quicker we will understand it. It’s two flows. The flow of information and the flow of attention.
Craig writes in with a story about a Dyson vacuum:
I have a question for you about buying decisions.
A while back I upgraded my Dyson vacuum cleaner when I got a great deal on the latest model. I had been using my old one for about 5 years or so but it was still in perfect working order. I had even replaced a couple of attachments for it via the Dyson website.
I gave my old Dyson to a friend. She had never used a Dyson before and she loved it. So much so that the very next day her own vacuum cleaner was put outside ready for the refuge collection!
But here’s the thing: a few months later the Dyson I gave her stopped working (not sure why, that thing was indestructible) so she decided to buy a new vacuum. Even though the vacuum I gave her was the best she had ever used, she didn’t buy a Dyson.
I was amazed how someone could love a product so much but replace it with an inferior product. I don’t think it was about cost because I told her where she could get an excellent deal on a new Dyson.
This just doesn’t make sense to me so I thought I’d ask if you had any thoughts as to why this happens?
My take: Craig’s friend didn’t see herself as the kind of person who would buy a Dyson. Sure, she might use one, especially if it was free. But buying a weird, fancy-looking vacuum is an act of self-expression as much as it’s a way to clean your floors. And the act of buying one didn’t match the way his friend saw herself.
So many of the products and services we use are now about our identity. Many small businesses, for example, won’t hire a coach or a consultant because, “that’s not the kind of organization we are.” Wineries understand that the pricing of a bottle of wine is more important than its label or the wine inside. The price is the first thing that most people consider when they order or shop for wine. Not because of perceived value, but because of identity.
May 24, 2007
When there’s a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed.
Plenty of customer service people would like to do the right thing.
They’d like to fix the problem that’s presented to them. But
frustration hits when the policies and procedures and metrics they’ve
been given to work with won’t let them.
For the last two weeks, the audio version of The Dip has been for sale at the iTunes music store. And for many iPods, it doesn’t work. Hundreds of people have written to me and let me know. These hundreds of people have written to Apple, too, and they’ve shared their notes with me.
In general, the responses from Apple that people are reporting are respectful and
straightforward. But none of the responses have addressed the problem. Apple
could easily take the product down. Or they could change the
description in the store with a note that says, "sorry, but it doesn’t
work on some iPods, we’re working on it", or they could email everyone
who had bought one and let them know what the plans are. And, yes, best of all, they
could fix it.
The amazing thing is that except for the last choice, each approach is
free, quick and relatively easy. If the head of the iTunes store
focused on this problem for ten seconds, it would go away. The challenge isn’t a lack of tools or resources, it
is a lack of alignment. For a service rep in this particular situation,
"doing my job" means making the person go away, while "doing the right
thing" means taking initiative and actually solving the problem. The customer service reps don’t have access to the tools (or the authority) to do what the company would actually benefit the most from.
Getting your team in alignment (having their job match their tools match their mission) is perhaps the first job a marketer has to do.
Brad sent me a note about a guy who’s running a campaign to make himself come up on the front page of Google when people type in his name. (Try ‘seth’. If you’ve got a weird name, it’s sort of cool.)
This is hard work if your name is something like Bill Wilson or John Woo. And the question is: why bother?
Sure, climbing a mountain just because it’s hard is a great hobby. But too often we get caught up in the tactics of getting through the Dip just because we can. Difficulty is not the only thing that makes a Dip worth pursuing. The end result matters too. Seeing the destination and valuing the outcome can make a huge difference in having the ability to push through.
May 23, 2007
Enter a new verb. Liveblogging.
When I was in college, WBCN in Boston tried an experiment. They sent DJs to report live from rock concerts. "We’re here in the Gahden, listening to Bruce Springsteen…" The thing is, the promoters wouldn’t let them play any of the performances on the radio. So all you heard was breathless commentary on what was happening on stage. "Oh, could it be? Yes, it is, YES YES Little Stevie is back on stage…" As you can imagine, the experiment didn’t last long. The DJs had fun, but we were bored.
A few times over the last week, I’ve spoken at conferences where laptops were open and people were online. They were liveblogging, taking notes in real time and posting them online for all to see. At first, this sounds like a fantastic idea. Now, thousands of people can listen on what’s happening in a smaller group.
On closer inspection, it doesn’t work particularly well. I mean, not only was I there, but I was speaking, yet I can’t make sense at all of the posts. That’s because most people don’t take notes to be read. They take notes to write them. The act of writing things down triggers different areas of our brain, it focuses attention, it makes it easier to remember things. You can read your blog notes later and say, "yeah, I remember that slide…" But for an outsider who’s not there, the amount of information that’s imparted is small indeed.
Compare these liveblog posts to posts written an hour later, ones that digest and reflect and chunk the information. These are deliberately designed to inform the reader, not to remind the writer.
I don’t mean to pick on the medium. I think it’s incredibly valuable–for the poster. We’re finding a growing dichotomy now, between blogs that help the reader and blogs that helps the writer. And there’s room for both.
