Stop for a second
Tom Peters reports that
In England more people are employed by Indian restaurants than in steelmaking, coal mining, and ship building combined!
Think about that for a while.
MBA mail
I’ve gotten a lot of heat about my "don’t get an MBA" post–(Harvard did those guys a favor when they didn’t let them in). Here’s one: Life Beyond Code :: MBA or no MBA??.
Let me make my point in a more MBA-esque sort of way:
What if an MBA cost $2,000,000?
What if an MBA took five years?
Would it would be worth it then? Of course not.
So my question really is: is the marginal value (in terms of opportunity cost, time value of money and capital expenditure) higher or lower than the current cost? I think it’s pretty close to a no brainer.
All Marketers...
But Whose Lifetime?
Phil Yanov sends us this great fine print lie.
Link: The Gripe Line Weblog by Ed Foster.
The bottom line: Sirus sells you a $500 “lifetime subscription” that applies not to your life or even Sirius’ life, but to the life of the radio itself. If you want to buy a new radio, tough.
Transfer Fee: If you wish to transfer your Subscription to a different Sirius Receiver during the term of a prepaid subscription or committed subscription period, we may charge you a transfer fee of up to $75.00. You may not transfer a lifetime Subscription to a different Sirius Receiver.
Let’s think about this lie for a second. Why on earth would you want to alienate the most loyal, highest spending customers on your list?
What happens next?
I think there are two blog/RSS frontiers worth considering… whether you manage a project, a church or a brand.
The first is the idea of the micro-blog. Ed Brenegar got asked to help a small group understand word of mouth and turned it into a blog: University of Word Of Mouth. Now, as he gets new groups to work with, he can repurpose the blog. I did the same thing when I produced a musical for an elementary school last year. I made a blog for the parents to use to keep up with the news about the play, with the schedule, with photos of each rehearsal.
Blogging doesn’t have to mean "talking to anonymous strangers."
The second is what BaseCamp is doing (Link: Project management and task management software: Basecamp.) This is project management software that uses RSS to alert the people who need to be alerted whenever something is up… and they can ignore it the rest of the time.
RSS is like email, except there’s no spam, the loop is closed, the media that’s available is far wider and, best of all, the recipient can configure a host of readers to present the info in the way they want. Thinking like this led to podcasting, and it’s going to lead us in a bunch of new directions now.
Again with the RSS?
If you’re already using RSS, please skip this post.
Otherwise, you really need to read it.
RSS is the next big thing. Find out about it here: FeedBurner – About Feed Syndication.
Even better, click below and you’ll be automatically subscribed to updates about this blog. Instead of having to go from blog to blog to find out if there’s anything new, you can just go to bloglines.
More books worth reading!
Diego Rodriguez writes:
What’s more powerful than a designer who thinks like a marketer who
thinks like a designer?
Bedtime reading?
My friend Lynn with a new galley.
Let’s hope Otto gets his fair share of Goodnight Moon.
Link: Seth Godin – Liar’s Blog.
Where is the rainbow? (long tail, part 2)
Some of my friends are bloggers that look like America. Women bloggers, Asian bloggers, bloggers of color.
Lately, there’s been some wailing from this community. How come the democratic, open blogging community appears to be turning into yet another white male bastion?
I’m hesitant to wade in here, because feelings are pretty easily bruised, but I’ve been giving it a lot of thought because it doesn’t make sense.
Obviously, the problem isn’t that traditionally under-promoted communities aren’t talented enough to write a popular blog.
Also, it’s not possible that these communities don’t have access to the marketplace. Most of us have precisely the same access. If you’ve got $20 a month and a public library, you can do this.
I also don’t believe the problem lies with the audience. I don’t think people (or Bloglines. for that matter) screen content based on who it was written by. If the headline registers, you click and read. Then, and only then, do you bother to worry about the origins of the person who wrote it.
So what is it?
I think it involves the long tail.
In the old days, it mattered a great deal who you knew. If you knew the head of casting at MGM or someone at CAA or the right A&R person, you got the "break" you needed to find an audience. If you knew someone on Sandhill Road, you could get funded. Today, most of the winners work their way up. Boing Boing did, Scoble did and so did Doc Searls.
Working your way up requires a few things:
1. Persistence. Success comes slowly, and you have to stick with it.
2. Patience. Your peers won’t see success, so the fortitude needs to be internal.
3. Low overhead (access to resources). While dealing with #1 and #2, you need a day job, and more important, the confidence to keep going even though it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work.
It seems to me that some communities are better at supporting all three than others. One reason, for example, that Silicon Valley creates start ups is that the entire community, from the supermarket to the school to the church to the bank supports the process.
Many of the underserved communities I’m talking about can’t provide the support and expectations that many white men get. In other words, the blogosphere isn’t stacked against women and others, the real world is.
The real world doesn’t even know what you’re doing. All they know is that you’re not doing what they expect. And the curse is that once this new thing turns real, once the community expects you to go off and do it, it’ll be much much harder to succeed.
So, what I would say to the struggling entrepreneur or pundit or expert or consultant or musician or person spreading that important idea is this:
1. it’s okay if it doesn’t happen fast
2. don’t worry so much about getting the approval of those who came before and are farther along the curve
3. keep costs as low as possible so you can do this without panicking when it doesn’t work so fast
4. surround yourself with friends and colleagues who "get it" and root for you, even when it’s not going so fast
(variant: fire the friends and mothers-in-law who aren’t supporting you so much!)
5. realize that it’s not about you or the way you look or what you wear. It’s about the tail.
I started with plenty of advantages, but it took me a decade to make it as an entrepeneur. That’s a lot of macaroni and cheese. I was lucky–my network didn’t lose faith.
Obviously, this applies to a lot more than blogging. There are so many tiny businesses (like eBay selling) or bigger businesses (like designing stuff) where these same rules apply. I hope this new medium finally gets us where we need to be.
All Marketers...
Scorecards
For a long time, Metro North lied about their ontime record. According to their policies, a train was “on time” if it got in less than six minutes late. For a harried New Yorker, six minutes is a lot, especially on a 25 minute ride.
So Metro North bragged about their ontime record and it didn’t jibe with user expectations. So consumer happiness was quite low.
What did Metro North do? Did they work hard to train engineers and upgrade machinery to make the trains run on time? Nope. They chose an effective marketing tactic instead: they changed the schedule.
By adding a few minutes to every ride (on the schedule) they are telling a very different story, setting different expectations. People aren’t going to avoid the train because now the schedule says it’s going to get in three minutes later, but they are going to smile more when the train gets there when they expected it was going to get there.
Thinking about the Long Tail (part 1)
Chris Anderson wrote a brilliant article, and was clever enough to post it as a ChangeThis manifesto: ChangeThis :: The Long Tail.
I can’t stop thinking about it, but in ways that are different than his original riff.
His point (for which he has data!) is that once we eliminate artificial bottlenecks like shelf space and the spectrum restrictions, the mass market effect drops off very quickly.
Give people 1,000 channels to watch, and they won’t all watch the same thing.
Give people 1,000,000 books to read, and they won’t all want to read a bestseller.
Yes, people read the DaVinci Code because everyone else is. Yes, people watch The Apprentice for the very same reason. But no, this effect isn’t as pervasive as most of us would believe.
Joe Krause (co-founder of Excite) jumped on the bandwagon with this insightful post about what he saw there: Link: Bnoopy: The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens. His data shows that 3% of the searches were about the same handful of things… and that the other 97% were all spread out.
Apple’s iTunes store has the same effect at work. They’ve sold more than a million different songs.
So, we see that:
1. hits aren’t what they used to be. Hit TV shows, hit music, hit books–it’s impossible to get the volume you could get 20 years ago in almost any field (even business to business stuff like consulting).
2. the choices are wider than ever before and the pickins for each producer are slimmer than ever.
Great. So what to do about this?
Well, unmentioned in these posts as far as I can tell is this:
It’s cheaper than ever (by an order of magnitude) to make a product and bring it to market.
Which means your hits can be smaller.
Which means you can make more variety.
So, when Coke launches Water Salad beverage in Japan, it doesn’t have to be a New Coke sized hit (or miss) in order to succeed. You can have a blog with 1,000 loyal readers and do just fine, thanks very much, on an ROI basis.
Our instinct is to push, to pull strings, to advertise, to hustle, to do whatever it takes to get to that top 3%. Hey, if you can write the Da Vinci Code, more power to you.
The better path, though, is to figure out how to be:
patient
persistent
and low cost
enough to be quite happy with a whole bunch of long tail scraps. A dollar here and a dollar there and soon, it all adds up.
This is my best advice if you have a radio station, a supermarket, an insurance agency or run Apple computer.
PS Danny Sullivan has a nice piece on this. Link: Search’s Long Tail.