I trust Sarah Fishko.
I don’t know her, I’v’e never bought anything from her and I wouldn’t recognize her if we met, but I trust her.
Every once in a while, over the last few years, Sarah’s voice has come out of my radio, telling me about one interesting cultural event or another. She’s consistent. She shows up. She has built a body of work over time, taking her time, that leads to trust.
Twitter can do that for you.
Not for a million New Yorkers, but perhaps for a hundred or a thousand people you want to reach. Blogs do the same thing.
The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.
Publishing your ideas… in books, or on a blog, or in little twits on Twitter… and doing it with patience, over time, is the best way I can think of to lay a foundation for whatever it is you hope to do next.
April 11, 2008
"We are a service company that happens to sell."
Zappos wants you to call their 800 number. They want you to order too many shoes. They want you to return (at their expense) the shoes that don’t fit.
As a service company, the more they service you, the better they do. They don’t buy (an enormous number of) ads, they don’t pay rent. Instead, they carry inventory that serves the long tail, they answer their phone and they pay for a lot of fedex shipping.
The more you ask for, the better they do.
Simple, but not so easy.
[Judging from my mail, some readers see this as a blanket endorsement of Zappos. Of course, that’s not my intent (though I do buy shoes from Zappos now and then). My point is that just as Sears used its guarantee 100 years ago to usher in an era of catalog selling, Zappos changed the fundamental business model of a small-time retailer. Instead of real estate, big ads, limited selection and grumpy salespeople, they figured out how to turn the internet to their advantage by reversing every one of those rules. If it can work for shoes, one wonders what it won’t work for… and I think the only reason what they do is unusual is that most entrepreneurs/investors don’t have the discipline and guts to go as close to the edge.]
April 10, 2008
Rob writes in from Australia, proposing that [dot] com is superfluous, just as www is.
We don’t say, "Visit us at http://www.askinosie.com," we just say, "askinosie.com."
It’s pretty clear that we don’t need the front matter. In fact, the latest version of most browsers are intelligent enough that you don’t have to type www in. But do we need the [dot] com part? Shouldn’t the user be smart enough to type in the brand name and expect to get the site?
The suffix is useful, and we’ll have it for a long, long time in my opinion. That’s because [dot] com uses just four characters to say, "we have a website and this is the address for it." No need to say "our website is" when you can just use four characters instead.
Toll free numbers developed a similar shorthand. We used to have to explain that an 800 number was free and that you could call it for more info. Now, the area code does all that in 3 digits.
I love the story on boingboing about how the phone company worked so hard to teach kids how to dial the phone. Everything is new, at least for a while.
The new rules mean that the most valuable marketing event is almost always an inbound phone call.
An inbound phone call is the ultimate in short-term permission. The customer or prospect is taking the time to call you. She’s focused, interested, paying attention and willing to trust you.
Think for a minute about how much you spend (and how high up in the organization the discussions go) when it’s time for a new logo or a new Super Bowl ad.
And yet, even though the rules have changed, the lowest-paid, least-respected, highest-turnover jobs in the organization now do the most important marketing work.
Scharffen-Berger Chocolate (which I’ve featured in some of my books) was bought by Hershey three years ago. They bought it because of me (and people like me). People who will go out of their way to find high quality dark chocolate and then pay a huge premium to buy it.
I’ve been really disappointed with the quality of their product for a few months. It seems to me that in order to ramp up production, they’ve smoothed out some edges and the product is becoming boring. Fewer high notes, less interesting. So, I called.
The operator, who couldn’t have been nicer, offered me a coupon for a free replacement bar.
A replacement of what? More of the same mediocre product I was calling to complain about?
Of course, she was just doing her job, but who’s fault is that? Who decided to give her nothing but a script, who decided not to take the inbound calls seriously, who decided that it made sense to put up a wall instead of opening a door? I guess the short version is, "why isn’t the brand manager answering the phone?"
"Your call is very important to us,"
does not jibe with,
"Due to unusually heavy call volume."
And the phrase, "I’m sorry, I’m just doing my job," does not match up with the marketing event of a person taking the time to call (or to email).
No, of course Sumner Redstone can’t answer every single letter sent to Viacom. But…
Shouldn’t every single inbound call be answered in one ring? Shouldn’t there be as much spent on self-service customer support as is spent on the design of the selling part of your website? Shouldn’t you be tracking in the finest detail what people have to say when they call in? Shouldn’t you be rewarding call center operators by how long they keep people on the phone, not how many calls they can handle a minute? Shouldn’t there be an easy, fast and happy way for an operator to instantly upgrade a call to management (not a supervisor, I hate supervisors) who can actually learn something from the caller, not just make them go away?
And I guess that’s my biggest point: the goal of every single interaction should be to upgrade the brand’s value in the eye of the caller and to learn something about how to do better, not to get the caller to just go away.
April 9, 2008
A quick glimpse at just about any profession shows you that the vast majority of people who succeed professionally also went to college.
This could be because college teaches you a lot.
Or it could be because the kind of person that puts the effort into getting into and completing college is also the kind of person who succeeds at other things.
Firefox is similar.
Example: 25% of the visitors we track at Squidoo use Firefox, which is not surprising. But 50% of the people who actually build pages on the site are Firefox users. Twice as many.
This is true of bloggers, of Twitter users, of Flickr users… everywhere you look, if someone is using Firefox, they’re way more likely to be using other power tools online. The reasoning: In order to use Firefox, you need to be confident enough to download and use a browser that wasn’t the default when you first turned on your computer.
That’s an empowering thing to do. It isolates you as a different kind of web user.
If I ran Firefox, I’d be hard at work promoting extensions and power tools (I love the search add-ons) and all manner of online interactions. Think of all the things colleges do to amplify the original choice of their students and to increase their impact as alumni.
And if I ran your site, I’d treat Firefox visitors as a totally different group of people than everyone else. They’re a self-selected group of clickers and sneezers and power users.
In the lingo of Nancy Reagan, Firefox is a gateway drug.
April 8, 2008
Turns out there are about 8 seats left for my all day seminar. All proceeds go to the Acumen Fund. Not sure when the next one will be!
See you in New York on April 30th…
April 7, 2008
You can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger:
- Use headlines. I use them all the time now. Not just boring ones that announce your purpose (like the one on this post) but interesting or puzzling or engaging headlines. Headlines are perfect for engaging busy readers.
- Realize that people have choices. With 80 million other blogs to choose from, I know you could leave at any moment (see, there goes someone now). So that makes blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.
- Drip, drip, drip. Bloggers don’t have to say everything at once. We can add a new idea every day, piling on a thesis over time.
- It’s okay if you leave. Bloggers aren’t afraid to include links or distractions in their writing, because we know you’ll come back if what we had to say was interesting.
- Interactivity is a great shortcut. Your readers care about someone’s opinion even more than yours… their own. So reading your email or your comments or your trackbacks (your choice) makes it easy to stay relevant.
- Gimmicks aren’t as useful as insight. If you’re going to blog successfully for months or years, sooner or later you need to actually say something. Same goes for your writing.
- Don’t be afraid of lists. People like lists.
- Show up. Not writing is not a useful way of expressing your ideas. Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.
- Say it. Don’t hide, don’t embellish.
What would happen if every single high school student had to have a blog? Or every employee in your company? Or every one of your customers?
How to sound smart when talking about the Internet:
You don’t have ‘a facebook.’ Facebook is a place, a network, not a page. You’re ‘on facebook,’ or you ‘use facebook.’
‘Friend’ is a verb. "I’ll friend you," is a totally valid thing to say.
You don’t look up things on ‘the google’. It’s just Google, no ‘the.’ ‘Google’ is also a verb, as in, ‘Google me’.
Instant messaging refers to a wide range of software tools and communication channels. It’s called ‘IM’ and it too is a verb.
A blog is something you have (unlike a Facebook). And blog is also a verb. As in, "I have a blog, this blog, which you probably found by googling me. I blogged about Facebook (which I’m on but don’t use often). I don’t IM, and I’m impossibly lax about friending people."
[Jackson chimes in that a blog is the whole, and that a post is just one article (like the one you’re reading). So you don’t say, "I wrote a blog about that," you say, "I just blogged about that," or "did you read my post on how to talk about the Internet?"]
April 6, 2008
Too whom it may concern:
That’s the way the letter of reference started off. I confess, I didn’t make it to the second sentence.
And that store with the really loud electronica music? I left.
But I still remember that kid I met a year ago. I can’t tell you what grade he was in, but the energy in his face and his enthusiasm was enough to get my full attention.
The facts:
Too many choices.
Too little time.
The response:
Quick decisions based on the smallest scraps of data.
It’s not fair but it’s true. Your blog, your outfit, the typeface you choose, the tone of your voice, the expression on your face, the location of your office, the way you rank on a Google search, the look of your Facebook page…
We all jump to conclusions and we do it every day.
Where do you want me to jump?
April 4, 2008
John Moore has a great series about known brands and their importance to our lives. If Pizza Hut disappeared tomorrow, who would miss them? Could you find a replacement pizza? A replacement place to work?
What about your personal marketing, though? If you disappeared tomorrow, would the customers you call on miss you? The places you’re applying for a job? The guys on the board of directors you sit on? The users who call tech support where you answer the phone?
I spent an hour on the phone with Apple support yesterday. The guy I talked to was named Seven. (Gotta love that). Seven would be missed. In fact, every time I call Apple, I hope it’s Seven on the phone.
The problem with fitting in and being a cog in the machine is that cogs are intentionally designed to be easily replaceable. When one breaks, you just get another. No one particularly misses the old one.
