TechEvangelists

January 04, 2006

Dual Screens

I'm officially addicted to having 2 displays on my computer. I have a laptop and now have additional screens at both home and office. It allows me to spend less time managing windows or switching between windows. It also helps to partition my thinking, sort of like having one drawer for your pens and another for your paper.

Like a lot of us these days, I live and work on the net. I have hobbies, friends, work, recreation -- all on my little PowerBook. When you live here like we do, you may as well have a big house, as in pixels, and lots of 'em.

Posted by Michael at 08:41 PM | Comments (3)

August 30, 2005

Shopping Carts

This is a minor pet peeve but, in my opinion, a serious sales failure. I went to Dell to order some computers, had them in my basket and a little while later, my session timed out and my shopping basket was empty. Why on earth would someone walk up to you in a store and take everything out of your shopping basket! amazon.com, for example, never does this. My basket is there for eternity. I can think of no reason to empty peoples' shopping carts unless you have a major change in price or availability. It should not be necessary to create an account for this either. A cookie is a cookie is a cookie.

It is nuts to make it harder for people to buy your products. I think Dell has the disk space to cache my shopping baket until eternity or so.

Posted by Michael at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)

June 30, 2005

Customer Service Is Alive And Well On The Web

Developing websites for business allows us a glimpse at how people think about communicating with customers. Usually the first website is something they embrace, because it will mean less customer hassle, or it is something they resist, because it will mean less customer contact. I am constantly telling people -- what happens on the web should never be INSTEAD OF customer contact, it should be IN ADDITION TO. It's a way to enhance your process, your work product, your deliverable. But it shouldn't take the place of real-time, human-centric customer service.

I recently ordered a vintage clock from a small, low budget website. The clock was a gift for a friend. I moved through the entire process online and anxiously awaited the arrival of my item. But when I tracked the package to my hometown, I was troubled to learn it had been misaddressed and was being returned. I immediately accessed the customer problem area of the website and filed my complaint. Within 12 hours I received a phone call from a rep who explained and offered to overnight the package. That short exchange made me feel confident in their brand and my purchase. And it illustrates how the web really compliments good customer service. It should never take the place of a real-time exchange. But it helps when a human isn't available.

Posted by Nancy at 07:51 AM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2005

Blogging Essential To Leadership?

According to the blog, Between The Lines, on ZD Net, Sun President, COO and chief blogger Jonathan Schwartz recently gave an interview in which he suggested that blogging was 'essential for leadership'. The article is a decent read. My favorite aspect of the piece is Schwartz's assertion that blogs are the cornerstones of 'reaching out and cultivating community'. In my opinion, that's the real value overall on the web. Community. Connections. He suggests that blogs must be authentic - no ghost writers allowed. I'd argue that anything that represents a brand or a brand position, that is published in the web space, requires authenticity for success.

Blogging requires a certain amount of courage. Authenticity requires courage. Traditional business culture contrasts the most powerful aspects blogging. In business we learn to 'position' brands. Oftentimes we mistake 'positioning' with 'posing' and in the process we lose our authentic voice. Blogging may be essential to leadership because it is a breeding ground for the truth. You can only pose for so long in the blogosphere. After a while, every story must come to an end. But a really good blog is a reflection of the truth, and that goes on and on.

Posted by Nancy at 09:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 23, 2005

A Brand Awareness Success Story

On fark.com they list a bunch of news stories. Like slashdot, the sites linked on Fark often go down because of so much traffic. On Fark they call this "getting Farked".

Guinness had a promotion where you filled out a form on their web site and you got a free bar towel. It got linked on Fark.

I'm guessing someone got fired over the fact that probably millions of bar towels were requested. It became a running joke on Fark that no one was ever going to see a free bar towel. I filled out the form, too. Long after I forgot all about it, my free towel arrived. I was impressed that they kept their word even though they probably lost a boat load of money on the promotion.

But my email address went into a database somewhere and lo and behold years later I get some direct email marketing about the Guinness web store. I happen to love Guinness. I immediately went to the store and spent about $70 on pint glasses, a shirt and a wallet. Yes, I will pay for the privilege of advertising Guinness.

My $70 purchase easily paid for the free bar towel. They should rehire that person that got fired. Their promotion worked and they are building on their relationships with their customers.

Lessons from this? One -- the viral marketing via fark.com was extremely successful. Give things of value away for free and people will respond. If the promotion had been to be entered in a drawing for something, I would not have filled out the form. Give stuff away. Two -- follow up with the people who respond and give them an opportunity to give you money. Many will. Even those that don't are giving you an opportunity to market to them. They opted in. Capitalize on that.

Posted by Michael at 11:49 AM | Comments (1)

February 19, 2005

Business & Physics

Momentum, in business, is things happening faster. It's not just growth, it's more growth than the same period last time. Momentum, in physics, is the product of the mass of an object multiplied by its velocity.

This means that to increase momentum you need to move more mass or you need to move it faster. Force, in physics, is the time rate of change of momentum.

To increase momentum you need force. So momentum is how fast a mass is moving and force is how fast a mass is accelerating.

I'm curious how, if at all, the physics way of looking at these things relates to the business way of looking at them. Let's say we are working for a client. Our job is to increase momentum. We can do that either by doing more, or doing the same amount faster. Faster, in this analogy, probably means more often. Either do more stuff, or do it more often, or both. But to do this we need force. What force do we apply to achieve this change in momentum? The force is that portion of the work we do that effects the outcome. Note the distinction. A lot of the work that we do in a given day is sort of like friction in a machine -- it steals energy from the system. Yet friction or other inefficiencies are an inherent part of all systems. So our total capability to change momentum, the total force, is proportional to our efficiency. If you push against a box and the box doesn't move, according to physics, you've done no work. The same might in some sense be true of business.

This is not to say that administration and such is a waste of time. Such activities are necessary for any business. If done correctly these activities should increase efficiency in some way and so ultimately contribute to the amount of force that can be applied.

Posted by Michael at 05:17 PM | Comments (4)

February 16, 2005

"Could a Blog Help My Client?"

This is gonna sound like a plug, but Moveable Type features a few case studies highlighting companies that use blogs to serve customers. One that stands out is the organic dairy Stonyfield Farms, with their grassroots approach. In blogging about women's health/wellness and organic dairy life, their real M.O. is to engender a sense of community among customers. Smart.

The debate of 'to blog or not to blog' grinds on for CEO types nowadays, yet examples like the above are still few. And while there is the valid fear of objective bloggers misrepresenting brands or worse, success stories like these are good to see.

Posted by Andy at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2005

Technology and Work Culture

My first job in high school was at a medical clinic in which my mother was a partner. I worked as a file clerk in the records room in the back of the administrative office. The clinic acquired their first personal computer when I was about 14 years old. It was an IBM 5100 or 5110 with a green monochromatic screen and a 5.1 floppy drive.

The machine was purchased for insurance billing; a mandate by the Wasusau Insurance Company, to whom we had a direct connection for daily data dumps. A loud, cumbersome dot-matrix printer spewed trails of transactions recorded by the 55 year old admin who begrudgingly logged each day's insurance events.

Initially 'Ellen' was the only person trained on the system. She was flown to dozens of training sessions out-of-state and tutored by on-site consultants, highly skilled in dealing with admins as resistant as this one. 'Ellen' liked things the way they'd always been. Change was nothing she was interested in. The learning curve was too intimidating and the investment of ramp-up time was more than anyone had in mind. Still, in spite of Ellen's resistance, the system was necessary and soon the clinic was processing all insurance billing online. I know, because I was trained as a back-up billing admin and enjoyed my first exposure to a PC or 'personal' computer.

As we continued to enhance our various processes with this new technology we were consistently met with push-back and criticism. We were testing the patience of an established staff, most of whom had been working in these positions for 10 or more years. While the clinic was thriving from improved cash flow, more accurate reporting, direct connectivity to insurance providers, shared resources, appropriate process redundancies and better access to information, the human resources were feeling threatened and uncertain. Change is hard. Accepting that these PC's were meant to enhance communication and process -- that they were there to enable the staff to improve their performance -- they were powerful IN ADDITION to the staff, not INSTEAD OF the staff--well, that was an all-too-difficult prospect. In fact, the thing that seemed to calm everyone down was the idea that the technology was, essentially, useless without the human interaction. This was a totally new way of thinking. It required a dramatic paradigm shift. And that took a great deal of time, education, patience and persuasion. But gradually it began to happen.

We all know how the story goes, personal computers went on to take over the world. The little slice of change I witnessed was just a fraction of the change that was taking place across the globe. That paradigm shift was a global journey. The thing is, the shift isn't over. We're still on that journey and we continue to run into obstacles that prevent us from taking full advantage of the power of technology.

The real power of technology is in access to information and conversation. If technology is used appropriately the power is in the removal of layers that stand in the way of progress. One of the most compelling books to come out of the dot com revolution was The Cluetrain Manifesto - a tome that made an argument for the new conversations enabled by 'internetworked communities'. Among the Manifesto's most challenging points - "The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media." Mass media talks at us. This medium enables the conversation. We become a part of the medium. It creates connections. The manifesto suggested that "In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way." And it goes on to say, "These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge." We made many mistakes as we blew up that dot-bomb bubble, but most of the mistakes came out of overvaluing the commerce and undervaluing the connections. Now, as we scrap our way out of the lingering residue, we're trying to make sense of what works. Therein lies the ongoing struggle with the paradigm shift. We've recoiled in fear. And, in some ways, we're back where we started. We're resistant, threatened, intimidated. And our fears are continually confirmed by the errant viruses spread by inexperienced users and unprotected operating systems. Unfortunately, most often our response to the fear is to compromise the conversation, rather than to empower people through education, training, experience and exposure, to become a part of the on-going solution, and, as such, pioneers for the continued paradigm shift.

We look at corporate culture as this large, unweildy organism that must be controlled. All the while we expect energy and creativitiy to come out of culture to fuel good work and good ideas. I recently read an article that made the claim that four out of five workers cannot do their jobs properly when they cannot access their email. That's how ingrained and necessary that one method for communication has become. Just ten years ago email wasn't at all a part of how we worked, thought or communicated. And, based on my experience, it was only 20 years ago that people were completely resistant to personal computers in the work place. So what do we do? Stop here? Continue to fear the viruses and the inexperienced users and keep things locked down as they are, maintaining a functional, but mediocre, status quo? How will corporate culture be influenced by technology over the next ten years? How will we continue on the path toward that paradigm shift? I think the answer can only be -- evolve or die. Evolution, in the age of technology, looks like education, exposure and experience.

People respond to what we do in the web world in one of two ways, with excitement and curiosity or fear and confusion. I'm not exaggerating, it's true. Inevitably their eyes light up and they're intrigued by technology or their eyes widen and they say something like 'I don't get that at all!' or 'That stuff is so foreign to me.' I often say that my job is to demystify technology -- to make it accessible and make people at least want to be conversant around it. I think that is our responsibility across the board. The technology is going to continue to enhance and enable us to work better by allowing us to communicate better. That's, after all, what we do. We make websites and web systems and applications that facilitate some kind of communication. Sales channel communication. Marketing communication. The list is long. It really is what we do. These technologies are going to make their way, more and more, to the desktop as technology becomes more and more seamless. You're seeing it happen right now -- with cell phones and PDA's, and browser based applications. We're banking online and syncing up our phones and we're wireless and on-the-go. One can only conclude that in order to compete in this networked marketplace we must understand the networks. The only way to understand the networks is to have access and to be educated. Understanding comes out of participation.

Someone said to me today, "Computers don't inhibit human interaction, they allow it, in that they are just one more way for humans to connect." Again, it isn't about using computers to interact INSTEAD OF talking to one another, it's about using computers IN ADDITION TO talking to one another. It's about more conversation and connections. In order to continue toward progress we need to embrace this thinking, in spite of our fears. In order to be technology-forward we must educate our people and infuse our cultures with connections and possibility. We must eliminate fear through exposure and options. We must evangelize. Because, after all, those souls that aren't saved will be left behind.

I ran into "Ellen" on a visit to my hometown just a few summers ago. She was recently retired and planning a winter in Florida. We sat for a few moments and chatted about her career after my mother had closed her clinic and moved away. I was delighted to learn that "Ellen" had stayed in healthcare for another 18 years, but her path had shifted a bit after she left the old clinic. It seems "Ellen" had spent her last working years in this 'new' space, Information Technology, teaching people like she'd been (all those years ago) how to embrace and get the full value from their PC's and those mysterious connections. There was my paradigm shift, right there.

And the journey continues.

Posted by Nancy at 07:31 AM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2005

Spreading Fire: Community-based marketing

Mozilla Firefox is a powerful, open-source web browser that I've mentioned before. Since its version 1.0 release, it has been downloaded 22,000,000 times. Want to find out how Firefox acheived such popularity in a market utterly dominated by Internet Explorer? Read on.

Introduction

At times, the web can seem like a very close-knit community. The so-called "blogosphere" has contributed to this small town feeling---when a popular blog features a link or story, other weblogs across the net link to or mirror the content. Soon, a single page story becomes an internet phenomenon.

An Example

"All your base" is a prominent example from the internet's past. "All your base are belong to us" is a poorly translated phrase from a Japanese video game called Zero Wing.

Amused fans created a Macromedia Flash "All your base" movie and distributed links to it. The original humor made the movie an instant hit, and soon every web site imaginable referenced the "All your base" movie.

So what about Firefox?

Firefox isn't a humorous spoof on a poorly translated video game; yet it is far more popular. The underlying answer is brutally simple: a good product will attract willing advocates.

The Firefox browser has won over many tech-savvy internet users through sheer quality. Its features, streamlined interface, and pop-up blocking were enough to make it an instant hit. However, its true success is a direct result of its users' endorsements. Leveraging this force was the brilliant idea that brought this browser to the masses on a shoestring budget.

Spread Firefox

SpreadFirefox.com was developed as a community marketing blog---a way for Firefox enthusiasts to discuss how best to inform others about the browser. The website offers several branded banners for easy download and placement on web sites, as well as interesting incentives for its users.

Each sfx (Spread Firefox) user receives a free blog along with her account, and a unique affiliate ID. An sfx user will then place a link to getfirefox.com on his web page. Each person that clicks through to the Firefox website generates a point for that sfx user. Top-ranked users are displayed on an honor roll of sorts. Additionally, each visit to the sfx web page will show you the most recent referral at the top of the page.

For example, clicking on the following button will add sfx points to my account:

sfx points are mainly provided for bragging rights within the community, although top point accumulators are linked from the SpreadFirefox main page (a valuable reward), and some are awarded sfx e-mail addresses, t-shirts, and iPods. Apparently this is incentive enough; there are tens of thousands of sfx users, according to the SpreadFirefox.com web site, and more joining every day. The download count (since November 9th) speaks for itself. Clearly, Firefox's team has hit upon a simple but powerful way to drive community-based marketing.

Applying the principle

How can Firefox's success be matched? What are the requirements?

1. Provide a useful product or service. It's hard to get a community to rally behind something pointless. Many of sfx's users are weary of typical advertising, and distrust what they are told to like---a common trait in the online community. This is not surprising given the barrage advertising a person sees while browsing the web, watching TV, walking outside, or reading a magazine. Overuse will dull even the sharpest knife.

2. Involve the customer. Too often products and services sales form a one-way relationship: the customer receives goods for money and is rarely asked to give anything else. Unfortunately, such a child-like role can make individuals feel powerless---why would the company listen to them?

SpreadFirefox is successful because every "customer" has a voice. Each person can contribute their own ideas with an expectation that they are being heard. This is a difficult feat to accomplish. In traditional marketing, the testimonial or case study is an attempt to show "involved customers" and address this issue. After all, if Joe Regular from Peoria likes product X, then it's good enough for me!

This tactic is no longer effective. People are becoming jaded; it's easy to imagine Joe Regular in makeup before the shoot, being carefully primed to say exactly what the target market wants to hear. People want recommendations from real people.

3. Provide means of communication. Involved customers and a quality product mean nothing if it is not discussed. SpreadFirefox.com is an excellent example of using cutting-edge tech (the blog) to spread a controlled idea (Firefox is a good browser). The natural solution is a web site with some ties to the user community. It may be moderated by the company, but to a minimum degree.

Trust is crucial here; if potential customers believe they are being tricked by intentional censorship or omission, they will form a strong, negative opinion of the brand. The person to person bond must be maintained.

4. Offer incentives. Every product will have advocates. However, people are increasingly busy. Few happy customers are willing to donate hours of their time promoting their brand of laundry detergent---unless there is incentive.

Some people genuinely want to help each other out. A good product or service is worth sharing with friends and acquaintances; however, this will not become a priority unless there's a reward system in place.

sfx has up-to-the-second stats tracking for each of its members. Users can see exactly how many people clicked on their web page button, or read their blog entries. Points are earned, and may be redeemed for prizes, drawings, or website traffic (a valuable commodity). A website that provides utility to the promoter as well as the potential customer will serve the best of both worlds.

In fact, potential customers may wish to become advocates themselves. The snowball effect in action; building an internet phenomenon, even on a small scale.

Summing up

Well, I've written more than I intended. SpreadFirefox is doing all the right things, and has successfully brought Firefox to many, many people: through the website itself, a full-page ad in the New York Times (funded by donations!), and the recommendations of satisfied users. Uniting a product's backers using technology is a brilliant idea with corporate distrust on the rise. Therein lies the power of the community: people are much more likely to take a friend's (online or otherwise) word over that of a print ad. The trick is to encourage existing customers to become willing brand advocates.

Community power combined with the technological power of the internet can create a truly awesome force. These are not the days of the 1-800 comments line printed on the back of a box; this is the era of the community website.

Posted by Matt at 10:35 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack