…sometimes, though, they don’t do it very well.
If you want to travel to India, you need a visa. The Indian government would very much like you to travel to their country, to exchange ideas, do business, see the sights and spend some money. But you need a visa first.
I spent a few hours at the Indian consulate in New York Friday. It was filled with so many possibilities, I had trouble remembering them all.
Many of the chairs are broken, leaving sharp steel platforms on which to crouch. And there aren’t enough chairs, broken or not. The signs are confusing, the two clerks are protected by a sheet of glass a full inch thick (which is twice the thickness of a typical bank’s) and the little machine that dispenses deli-style tickets is broken.
Fixing the consulate would be easy. I’d start by putting in phone lines to a call center in India and making it easy for anyone waiting to get questions answered by a helpful person with plenty of time to invest in the conversation. I’d buy some comfortable chairs. I’d invite airlines and hotels to have brochures or even better, a booking agent right there in the waiting area. I’d hire seven more clerks. And I’d definitely lose the glass.
The more important issue is this: this is a business. They take in more than $20,000 a day in fees, but even more important, the way they market themselves has a direct and important impact on travel decisions. No visa, no trip. Big hassle, no trip. Given that every single person traveling to this vast country must deal with the consulate first, think of the leverage… Just a small influence on the quantity or quality of travel to India would be huge.
My takeaway was this: the people in that building were way too nice and way too smart to not know the many ways they could fix this process. The problem is that this bureaucracy, like most bureaucracies, has an attitude of minimizing, not maximizing. They want to minimize expense, not maximize benefit. There isn’t a single person there who has as part of his job, "change systems to increase the satisfaction of people we deal with." Nobody who is charged with, "increase revenue opportunities for us and for the people we work with." Or even, "employ more people in Delhi."
Same thing happens at my village zoning board, at most schools, at many churches and even, believe it or not, at most businesses. It’s not that difficult, but it requires a very different mindset.
April 29, 2007
On Friday May 18 in NY, Micah and Andrew are running a conference that just might be one of those seminal events that everyone remembers attending years later… even if they didn’t. Like the Fast Company Advance in 1997, or the AOL partner event in 1996. Check it out: Personal Democracy Forum – Technology Is Changing Politics.
Some speakers: Tom Friedman, Arianna Huffington, Jay Rosen, Kim Malone, Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis,
Cheryl Contee, Eli Pariser, Sara Horowitz, Josh Marshall, Ruby
Sinreich, Craig Newmark, Joe Trippi, Becki Donatelli, Andrew Keen,
Ellen Miller, Chris Rabb, David All, Todd Ziegler, Allison Fine, Clay
Shirky, Liza Sabater, Brian Dear, Ben Rattray, Seth Godin, Steve Urquhart, Mindy
Finn, Mike Turk, Zack Exley, Walter Fields and Robert Greenwald.
Hope to see you there.
April 28, 2007
A few weeks ago, I blogged about a new kind of book tour I am planning for May. Little did I know that it would turn into a fascinating experiment in the power of the network. Find out all the details on the entire tour right here.
As of now, the tour is scheduled for about half a dozen cities, including:
Philadelphia, May 16
Chicago, May 22
New York, May 29
Santa Clara, May 23
Ann Arbor, May 22
Phoenix/Tempe, May 24
…with Salt Lake City coming as soon as we nail down the timing. [Breaking news: Salt Lake City, May 24 in the afternoon is now ready for booking.] The amazing thing is that most of these were created, built and run by people I have never met before. Satisfied readers decided it would be fun to see if they could organize hundreds of people, find a venue, work with a bookstore and pull the entire thing off. And they have. It’s gratifying and humbling, and a testament to what one person with dedication can do now that we all have access to the network. You can find organizer pages for Salt Lake, Phoenix, Ann Arbor and Silicon Valley for more details on how they did it.
This is a much bigger story than one author visiting a few cities. This sort of approach works for just about any marketer. If you don’t have customers who are willing to organize this sort of event, what are you missing? It’s easy to imagine doctors doing it when bringing a brain researcher to town. Or chocolate or wine fanatics welcoming a particularly talented vintner to their neighborhood. And it doesn’t have to be an in person visit. It could work just as well in sending people to a vibrant, important YouTube document on a politician, or a blog post about a new actuarial practice.
It’s taking the world (including me) a long time to get around the top-down, Oprah-driven mindset that comes so naturally.
Almost all authors hate book tours. They hate the idea of going to a city on spec, hoping the bookstore can scare enough people into coming by (usually by posting signs in the lobby) and most of all they hate the idea of a slightly indifferent audience walking by, sniffing at a book and walking away. Ouch. And it’s not just authors that hate it. Willy Loman hated it, too. So does John McCain.
The takeaway for all of us is this:
1. Build a permission asset: a group of people that actually wants to hear what you’re up to.
2. Create something (a product, a service, a story) that those people want to spread (not get paid to spread, but choose to spread) and get out of the way.
Thanks to the organizers around the country, we all just learned something.
April 27, 2007
We’ve all heard variations on Pareto’s law. 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. You get 80% of your media awareness from 20% of your buy. 80% of your grades come from 20% of the effort. Or, as Woody Allen would say, 80% of success is just showing up.
The Dip turns this thinking upside down. Since most organizations do the 20%, almost all the value you can create comes in the next 80% of the effort. Most organizations (and most people) settle for 20%, hit the Dip and move on to the next thing. A few people insist on devoting an unreasonable amount of effort into something. They cross the Dip and get rewarded handsomely for it.
A simple chart. Five companies do just enough, which is 20% effort. One overcommits and does the other 80%. Which would you choose? Who wouldn’t?
Here’s a brief interview with TheStreet.com. Small businesses are beginning to see the value of extraordinary specialization and significant overdelivery. Witness headblade.com.
And also, a harsh review in Ad Age. As Ray points out, the reviewers there didn’t get the book at all. That’s okay, it’s the risk I take with a book like this. Matt was disappointed that I didn’t outline the ‘answers.’ I think that’s awfully hard to do at a distance. But he underestimates how important it is to know what the questions are.
You can get registration info here.
And the original petition site is here.
Thanks! (One more left to formally announce).
April 26, 2007
Smart marketers already know that marketing is more than advertising. Here’s one tactic that might be overlooked: time.
Domino’s rode this for a while with 30 minute delivery. Fedex still does. But using time as part of your story can be a lot more subtle than that.
At a conference I recently attended, the group was 50 minutes behind schedule after only 2 hours of the program. For the speakers, the message was, "I’m important, as important as the last guy, so since he went over ten minutes, I will too." For the audience, the message was, "this is a conference about the guys on the stage, not about us."
When a doctor overbooks her schedule and it’s typical to wait ten or thirty minutes for an appointment, then the story is made really clear to the patient. Who’s more important? And doesn’t this marketing effort affect the way the patient and the doctor communicate?
A contractor that prides himself on finishing every single job on the day it’s due, regardless of what it takes, is telling a powerful story, doing marketing that’s actually cheaper and more effective than advertising ever could be.
Sometimes, organizations tell a story that works. And then they overreach. They believe that they have the ability to expand the story, to move it beyond where their authenticity lies. It’s very tempting to do this, because the old story was so effective and people are giving you the benefit of the doubt. The challenge is, once your new story is discovered to be a fraud, your old story starts to be scrutinized even more closely, you no longer have goodwill or momentum and the whole thing falls apart.
I accidentally brought a grapefruit with me on my last trip to Florida. Tucked it into my carry on, didn’t eat it at the airport and forgot about it. A big grapefruit. A juicy one. No one questioned it.
Hmmm. I wonder what all that fuss about four ounces of hair gel is about.
B&N jumped the gun, the abridged audio edition is just $5.00 on their site.
I was checking out the very neat Google History feature and discovered that I do far more searches on Tuesday. In fact, it looks like a graceful curve that peaks each week on Tuesdays.
Your brain looks for coincidences wherever it can find them. That’s how we make sense of things. Even though the chart seems to be clearly non-random, I can guarantee that there are no external factors at work here. It’s a coincidence. Short version: just because a graph looks good doesn’t mean it’s true.
April 25, 2007
