The very first book I ever created was a joint venture with Chip Conley. Now it’s a wiki moderated by Ben Casnocha. Business Rules of Thumb – A wiki to add business rules of thumb….
When Chip and wrote the book (twenty years ago this week, I’m guessing), we had two goals: First, to point out that many rules of thumb are dated anachronisms, crutches used by slow-moving people in a fast moving world. Second, to teach newbies what the rules were, because you can’t change things without knowing the status quo.
The base of rules we collected is now woefully out of date at the same time it remains heavily used. Ben is hoping you might want to add some of your own.
[Trivia: Andrew Tobias declined to write the foreword for the book. His reason? Because in my note to him asking him to contribute one, I spelled it "forward." Lesson learned. Trivia #2: the book got almost no promotion because the week it came out, Vanna White’s autobiography from the same editor was published. Guess who got Jim’s attention? Biggest lesson of all for authors: you’re in charge of your own destiny.]
Rule of thumb: a well-written blog post will get a 5% clickthrough rate. The landing page the post points to will get a 3% sign up rate.
March 6, 2007
The splintering of social networks continues. There’s really very little point in trying to have more friends than anyone else at MySpace, but there’s plenty of reasons to create a new circle of ‘real life’ friends at this site.
I remain dubious about the commercialization opportunities at most of these sites, but I’ve been wrong about this before.
George points out that thousands of post offices have removed the clocks from their waiting areas. "The Watson Post Office is one of the nation’s 37,000 post offices in which clocks have been removed from retail areas as part of a "retail standardization program" launched last year. The effort is designed to give the public-service areas a more uniform appearance, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in Thursday editions."
Oh. Gotta love the focus on uniform appearance.
And Matthew points out, "I went to Sears a while back to pick up my repaired dehumidifier. They have a big sign up that says I’m to be given a gift card if I have to wait more than ten minutes for my transaction to be completed. The guy waited on me, and a timer started ticking on the TV located over the service desk. He disappeared into the back to pick up my dehumidifier. 9 and a half minutes later the timer stopped. 15 minutes later I was handed my dehumidifier.
I asked this guy about the gift card and he pointed at the TV monitor which still displayed 9:30. I asked to see a manager… [apparently, they figured out how to change the timer so it always stops just before ten minutes].
On the way out I noticed a big sign congratulating the employees for serving all customers in ten minutes or less last month."
Often, more effort goes into circumventing a system then it would take to just do a great job in the first place…
This weekend I ran into Sarah, founder of sweetriot handing out samples of her chocolate to the weekend crowds at Zabars. It’s more like Grand Central than Grand Central in there…
My first reaction was, "what’s she doing here?" and then my second reaction was, "of course she’s here."
Part of small being the new big is that the founder of the food company can spend a Saturday giving out samples at a key store. Because she needs to. Because she can. Because the feedback is essential.
March 5, 2007
If you have a won’t be undersold motto, the very best thing that you can do is find customers who find a better price somewhere else… and then give them the discount. Why? Because it proves you’re not lying, and it spreads the word. Those customers are heroes.
Compare that approach to this one from Jason found at courant.com. It appears as though Best Buy had a secret Intranet site that looked just like their regular site… except with higher prices on it. So, if you came in claiming that the store was being undersold by the website, it’s alleged that employees would show you a site that sure looked like their site…exept you were ‘wrong.’
Yikes.
Wendy’s is using a legal loophole to avoid posting the calorie content of its food on the menus in their New York stores. Perhaps they’re hoping that people won’t realize that eating every meal there is going to make them fat.
Porsche ran a huge ad in today’s New York Times for the Cayenne. It contains every imaginable stat, including the size of the brake rotors. Oh, they left one stat out: mileage. Perhaps they’re hoping that people wealthy enough to buy a $60,000 SUV won’t notice how much gas they’re using…
The thing is: if you’re going to work this hard to hide information that’s likely to be quite important to some users, it’s going to be very hard to grow. One way or the other, the market finds out.
March 3, 2007
I was doing email permission marketing long before Al Gore even had a chance to invent the Internet. In the late 1990s, email was an incredibly powerful tool. In fact, it wasn’t unusual to get a 50% response rate to a well-created piece of mail delivered with permission to the right person at the right time.
Which is why I stopped. Without a large team, I just couldn’t do justice to the responses an email would generate. If 100 or 1,000 people take the time to write to me, I figure I ought to be able to take the time to write back.
So, with some trepidation, I’m trying an experiment. This blog is equipped with a feature that allows you to be updated by email. Once a week until my book comes out in May, I’ll be posting on this site. I’ll be writing about:
- What’s the book’s about
- How to win a free autographed copy
- A new sort of speaking tour
- How I’m marketing the book
- How the book can work for your organization
Feel free to sign up for the email alerts or for the RSS feed. Or not.
I just hope you’ll try to avoid the temptation to hit ‘reply’ to every post! Or at least forgive me if I don’t get back to you right away. The last thing I want to do is waste your time or abuse your trust.
And thanks for reading.
(Amazon and BN both have the book listing up).
March 2, 2007
Big markets look sexy. Big markets are a problem.
Sitting at the vet today, I saw a brochure for an injectable chip that makes it easier to identify a lost dog. No doubt, the investor meetings all started with, "Well, there’s a hundred million dogs in the United States, and if we just make a dollar annual profit on each one…"
It sounds reasonable. It’s not.
The problem with huge markets is the same problem you’d have playing squash or raquetball on a court that’s too big. The ball doesn’t have a wall to bounce off of. Huge horizontal markets have no echo chamber, no niches, no easy entry points. To make a system like this work, everyone has to agree on the technology and then there has to be a huge push to get millions of people to make the same decision at about the same time. It might work, but it’s awfully expensive.
Small markets aren’t as sexy, but they’re actually a better place to start.
Following a long tradition of slapping the latest buzzword on everything and anything: hybrid golf clubs.
Hybrid often means ‘compromise’, ‘blend’ and ‘please everyone’. Dangerous territory if you’re not careful.
[My golfing friends point out that the hybrid club came before the hybrid car. Noted. My point remains the same… buzzwords half a short half life.]
"Embrace your base."
"Blog about blogging."
If you want to get off to a great start in the primaries, be Dennis Kucinic or Sam Brownback. Someone the noisy people like to talk about.
If you want traffic to your blog, blog about blogging, because bloggers are noisy.
Noisy: as in being willing to raise your voice in defense (or in opposition) to an idea, a product or a person.
The noisy people shun the non-believers. (This video will never be fully scraped off your consciousness after you watch it, I promise). They (okay, we, cause I’m a noisy person too) are drawn to stuff at the edges and we like to talk about it. When I heard two kids at the middle school acting out the non-believers part of the Candy Mountain video, I knew it had arrived.
And I also knew that it was unlikely to go much further. The disappointment of the noisy people is this: Jon Stewart and Peet’s Coffee and the Mac almost never make it across the chasm, almost never become the choice of the masses. The parts of the story that make us delighted to talk about it, the parts of the story that make it easy to spread, rarely work for the masses.
So, if you want to reach the masses, you’ll need to realize that changing your story (but not your essence) is part of the deal. It’ll disappoint your noisy people, no doubt about it. But if you’re authentic in the core of what you offer, they’ll forgive you. The challenge is in creating a product or service or platform that can sustain both stories.
March 1, 2007
