Wallflowers
Tom Vander Well writes:
"Blogs are conversations. You have a lot to share, and I’d love to hear what you have to say"
One can hear stuff about blogs: not mainstream .. bunch of nerds .. sub-par to print media. Whatever the retort, in general we’d rather lay back and let someone else lather it on. I can see why we’re hesitant to join the conversation. And it is hard to join one when it is already on, yes?
Even if we’ve never said anything before or think we don’t have stuff to say, the key has been that blog sites have made it easy to communicate. We owe it to ourselves to click on Comments like Tom says and see what happens. Treat it as an experiment. See what happens.
Sales Experiment
It is earnings week on the Street. From the time of this post, I’ve had 5, 10, 5 and now 8 shareholders; people that invest their money on this blog. Time = Money. Focused, powerful, relevant "stuff" wins.
In reporting Q2 earnings, Netflix grew 62% in subscriber growth but spends ~$43.95 per new customer. I don’t think Netflix markets the idea that DVDs can be shared with friends/family. It is not canniballistic, especially at $43.695! The lesson here is that the value of cold leads < warm leads. I’m earning new shareholder "investment" in this blog as the existing ones bring them in by sharing the link.
Now the industry my employer’s competes in, is moving into this setup:
Service Providers —> MSP —> End-Client
Sales, at first, marketed to End-Clients to get their MSP door-keeper to let us in. This strategy had birthed our current MSP relationships, so it works. Just that it spread us thin. Now we leverage existing relationships and it works too and very cheaply – this week, in 2 days over email, we signed up a $5M potential End-Client by just talking with a MSP we serve (and love!). I don’t think we’ll let go of the first strategy, but you can imagine where we’re focused now.
Cortisol
Ellen and Patsi talked about Cortisol and its paralysing effects. I’ve been faced by it more often than what I’d like to admit. The article struck a chord, so I’d like to share a particularly tough situation I faced recently.
Let me set the scene: as Co-Chair (now happily ex!) of the BCCF at TIE-Boston, I was fortunate to produce an event for TIECONEAST 2006 with a venerable panel on networking as an advanced marketing tool. It was a single-person effort. But that did not bode well with the group’s ex-chair/founder, a person I’ll call Sainath. A "team" meeting turned ugly and he came out swinging with some pretty sick accusations.
Sure enough, back home I thought of a million responses especially since I was wrongly accused. Pointless! Cortisol, I now realize, had taken control of me during that exchange. I think an actionable solution applies to many situations, so let us:
1. Breathe normally; not heavy or long or short; just regular and usual
2. Pick battles: choose and focus only on 2-3 issues and flesh them out
3. Pause after every point made to let it sink in and help gather strength
4. Walk away if the situation does not get resolved in 30 minutes
5. Talk about the problem extensively with family till total exhaustion
#5 could be controversial. But I’d rather flush the Cortisol out than let it build inside – I’m guaranteed to spend the night pondering about it! I also don’t think one can control the tone, level or speed of talking during the conflict. But I wonder what else works.
Power Users
Aaron Dignan posted about power users of a business. After the CRM hype, we still don’t have a clue about these folks.
CRM is all about small. Think of Maria’s frustration here. My experience was similar: the manager was glad to joke around with his workers but could only grunt and wiggle his finger at me – the guy who just paid $80. So the U-Haul brand no longer appeals to Maria and me. Now I’m sure they have great folks working there but their CRM and brand custodian, the manager just did not connect with me as a person. It was U-Haul and "customer" not Eric and Harsha. So he couldn’t care less.
My friend Rajesh Setty has a great blog on distinguishing oneself (Beyond Code). Relationships are hard to manage and highly influenced by the point-of-contact person. Uniformity is impossible so U-Haul can’t mean the same to all of us. It has to be different and distinguishable.
So my #1 goal first and foremost, has been to get to know client peers since they could have very well have been a friend. That also gives me so much more job satisfaction. Otherwise, it is just boring account management stuff. My team sees me live this goal and is emulating it. So, CRM is small: you and I as individuals (not a compiled statistic) determine what others think of our business.
Power users have to be in touch with someone from the company, yes? That "someone" will be one of your top sellers in new and repeat sales. You don’t need a CRM to find that out – you’re already tracking it. Find and shadow them. Ask questions. Figure out how they track their interaction with your clients/users. Is it by memory, an Excel tool or a modification of your existing CRM? Abandon the old carrot-and-stick way of motivating your sales team to treat users well. Then bring those performers into one room and ask them "Why?" Your power user is recommending your business based on the interaction with that person.
A brand is an intangible asset. When we can worry about that so much, why not worry about the one that holds the attention of power users? It is amazing how the Pareto law (80/20) is universally applicable. That is all we need to do.
Blog Experiment
Fact is that blog readers outnumber writers. What I am finding by writing these experiments out, is that I learn better and can start a conversation to share/learn with you.
You, me and others think, buy, sell, create and trade stuff. I’ve already posted that here. Do think about it: everything you do is experimental, from something as mundane as work to something as fun like sailing.
Want an honest example? I gained 7 readers two days ago. Then I posted about stuff I had read elsewhere and 2 lost interest and unsubscribed. So I’m trying to figure out who my user is (you) to learn what works, will keep me honest and you interested.
Thoughts 2.0
I’ve believe the #1 question to ask is – Who’s your end user?
Web 2.0 looks like Web 1.0 taking advantage of broadband. Blogs would have been fine on dialup yet all we had were personal homepages that not many folks were interested in and had little value/growth unlike blogs.
I fear that the Internet will end up as one huge billboard. Do we actually click on ads like what Rajesh posted about?
TypePad knows it’s users. They have a moolah model ($4.95/mo for this blog) and their widgets seamlessly integrate with sites like Technorati and Feedburner. They probably figured out that their user is a serious blogger and partnered with those sites to make it easy to plug in. Besides that, there is little difference left between them and a regular hosting service. It is good Web 2.0 stuff with a volume bet. $4.95 doesn’t bust this blogling’s budget. Free did not work in 2000 and won’t work this time too.
Everyone has a skeptic gene. But few of us can build stuff that can be monetized. Shel Holtz has a nice post on users as the #1 priority and not worrying about other stuff. Users are just people! So MySpace is a revolution no doubt, but we’ll probably see Mudoch kill it trying to make dough.
Web 2.0 Flares
So I read Easton Ellsworth’s defense of Know More Media’s business model to Dead 2.0’s reality-check that Web 2.0 is not monetizable. I haven’t read The Long Tail (in short, today’s success stories involve many small hits than the mainstream few) so somewhere this is applied.
I read Ajit’s long post on his blog called Open Gardens. But one paragraph caught my attention. He says collective intelligence has not been harnessed. A lot of the Web 2.0 is about social networking. I was reading the Wired article on Murdoch and his purchase of MySpace for $580M. Gosh, doesn’t that sound familiar?
So this brings me back to these things:
1. No guru, marketer/consultant can prove he/she knows what will win
2. Social networking is the basic need for us to be social. Period
3. We all are selling, buying, deciding, strategizing, thinking about stuff
4. So harnessing this collective knowledge is the killer app.
I emailed KMM suggesting that they need to create a new segment. But free advice = no one listens. Very few people can predict the future, yes? This My blog does not have all the answers. But I would love to know what works for you and you and you, in near-infinite situations (that is quite Long Tail-ish).
KMM Experiment
Pew Research
The Pew PDF is making the rounds. I read the first 6 pages (will read the detailed portion later). Seth Godin commented too so it should be popular by now.
Wow. I am part of an elite group (aka minority); I’ve published a little before, keep a blog, read blogs, write mostly "business" related stuff and use my real name (read this to figure out what I’m saying!).
The skew is towards young folks, probably influenced heavily by a site like MySpace. They’re the ones that write the not-for-sale personal stuff. But I think bloggers are mostly senior consultants/small-businesses sharing their wisdom (pure anecdotal speculation).
Blogs are notice boards. People put stuff up for others to see. I’d keep a "Dear Diary" offline journal if it was not for public consumption. I’d like to share my experiments with you and not just spend time writing about it for personal reasons (it’s already in my head for me!). And I think that idea powers us. Of course, search engines make it easy to seek out these "homepages" and listen to what others like us are talking about. I believe in collective wisdom. Blogs do just that.
Hiring the right folks
Adam’s post was a good take on Godin’s experience with the receptionist.
But being pleasant at dinner with the boss may not translate as being pleasant with your users. So knowing who the end-user for your business is, becomes vital.
I want stick with the receptionist example: if people who come in through the door are mechanics, electricians and other similar working folks then you need a quick-talking and technically sound individual (won’t matter if he/she is "courteous"). If users are women or young adults then you need a person with a little maturity, an outgoing personality and a soft voice.
Have you seen college kids shopping in a store get frustrated with the college kid behind the counter??
Disclaimer: PLEASE! I don’t discriminate. Everyone has a place; you just need to insure you don’t put a square peg in a round hole.
