ChaosScenario

Be Something Worth Emulating

Here is an interesting video from a person whose talent and energy up until this point seem to be underutilized.

This is why I think it's interesting:

1. Give the guy some credit. He ain't bad, and he obviously devoted a lot of time to the choreography.
2. He's using an MC Hammer song that dates back to the 80s.
3. He's doing it in a living room, without shame, with a presumed relative knitting in the background. That's devotion.

It is a reflection of love.

The dancer obviously admires and respects MC Hammer in a way that you couldn't understand unless, perhaps, you have a child who claims to want to be just like you.

What have you done today that is worthy of emulation?

- Cam Beck

YouTube video found via SpinThicket.

The Popcorn Scholar, Year II

I've really been happy to see how Avery's writing skills have improved since we started his blog, The Popcorn Scholar, together. He now seems better able to come up with topics to write about as well as tie it all into a point he wants to make. Not bad for a ten-year-old.

Well, we're now in year number 2 of our effort. Last year we raised about $250 to buy popcorn to be donated to troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. This actually bought a fair amount of popcorn, but it was about 10% of our overall goal. All of that came from family or family friends, but some of it came from remote areas that we wouldn't have been able to access had it not been for the Tip Jar made available by Typepad.

Although it looks like he hasn't posted in awhile, I actually have a stack of postings from last year that he wrote down for me to type, but I let too much time pass before recording them digitally. They were topical and are no longer relevant, so we will start anew to coincide with our first pack meeting on Thursday.

Apparently this idea has legs. I'm not saying we had anything to do with it (after all, how could we?), the new printed order form the Boy Scouts gave us actually has a place for people to donate $25 worth of popcorn to the military and their families.

If we really do raise as much as we'd like to raise, we'll have too much popcorn to distribute in a single visit to the airport, so this option made available to the scouts helps us solve that problem while at the same time distribute your kind donations to troops other than those who come through our local airport.

Please consider supporting our troops and the Boy Scouts of America by blogging about the effort or donating here.

- Cam Beck

Have AdAge Marketers Lost Their Minds?

While reading my THIRD article on AdAge for the day (which is three more than my usual consumption), my browser unexpectedly minimized with the exception of a message from PCTurboPro. Disguising itself as a system message, I was presented with an ad encouraging me to optimize my Windows computer operating system.

If the poor taste and misleading message weren't bad enough for you, the targeting was absolutely abysmal.

1. I am running a Mac.
2. I hate being interrupted when I'm trying to read something -- especially for work.
3. Like most people, I loathe being swindled.

Thinking nothing of it at first, I tried closing the message, but I got this screen in return:

So I hit cancel again, and the our heroes at pcturbopro.com still would not let me out. They insisted I optimize my PC while assuring me that the "file has been digitally signed and independently certified as 100% free of viruses, adware and spyware." Really? You put me through that and expect me to believe it?

At the time I got this, I had Google Reader (2), AdAge, WorldNetDaily, The Boston Herald, and SpinThicket tabs open. Since I read the others (with the exception of The Boston Herald) regularly and never had this problem and especially because the AdAge site was my active tab, I presumed that AdAge was the cause of this poor excuse for advertising, but I'll leave open the possibility -- the desperate hope -- that I'm wrong, especially since WorldNetDaily seems to be having problems with others hijacking its advertising (presumed by the publication's editor-in-chief, Joseph Farah, to be Google).

Still, I can't help but be suspicious of AdAge, the magazine that largely caters to traditional advertisers who are scared to death that someone might not appreciate their ads half as much as they do, and are thus madly seeking ways to prevent folks from ignoring them.

AdAge also made some waves when editor Jonah Bloom criticized the way Joseph Jaffe explained leadership changes that were happening at new media company, Crayon, and I couldn't help but notice that his words were dripping with sarcasm about Jaffe's marketing expertise, not just his rhetoric. (News of Bloom's rant comes courtesy of Matt Dickman's Buzz Friday).

Whatever the you think about the validity of Crayon's approach, Jonah, your apparent model (if AdAge is in fact the culprit) isn't the answer, either. - Cam Beck

Trademarking Stupidity

If there is a way to patent or trademark stupidity, I really need to find a way to do it. I will be rich -- just off of Wal-Mart.

Although this is old news (I found references dating back to 2006), I just found out today through an AdAge article that Wal-Mart has several trademarks pending on the smiley face.

John Simley (not "Smiley," as I originally thought, presumably because that might be a trademark violation) Wal-Mart's director of media relations, actually seems proud of the fact that his company is trying to trademark a ubiquitous symbol. Then again, maybe he's just doing his job convincingly.

Even if Wal-Mart initiated its use, which I doubt, people have been using it for a very long time without harassment, and to claim rights to a trademark, Wal-Mart must have actively tried to protect it.

I'll let you know if I get a letter from Wal-Mart's lawyers to take down the smiley face from this post.

If the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants this trademark, they are truly beyond all hope. - Cam Beck

The Black Magic of Predicting the Future

When Apple dropped the price of the iPhone by $200 so soon after launch, I tended to be forgiving (at least once they made it up to their early adopters). As I said over at Lewis' blog, I understand the difficulty anyone has in predicting the future -- especially when a product changes the way the game is played like the iPhone.

AdAge's video podcast of 9/5/2007 (subscribe) brings up an excellent example of what I mean, and they do so by using a similarly innovative product -- the DVR. In 2003 Forrester predicted that by 2007, DVR penetration would be at 25.7% in the U.S. However, now that it's 2007 and we have real data to measure against, we know that penetration is only 17%.

If you're an advertiser, don't overestimate what that means, though. As before, people are still ignoring your TV ads. It just takes them longer because they're ignoring them by means other than a DVR.

In general, the further out you try to project, the less accurate your prediction will be, because you simply don't know and can't predict how people will react in the real world... how they will be influenced once they see how people react to the new product.

I know there are very clever mathematicians out there who claim they can predict to within plus or minus three percentage points with 95% confidence what people will do, but that is only assuming that they have all the relevant information. When a product is much better than anything that has come before, it's less likely that statisticians will have all of the relevant information. - Cam Beck

Marketing Lies and Coercion

Sometimes we put so much importance in what we do that it's difficult to see things through a lens that is not our own. This is partially why, in my essay in the collaborative book, The Age of Conversation, I encouraged readers to get out of their comfort zones and seek other perspectives. I cannot stress this enough: We are not our audience.

The short-sighted phenomenon can cause some difficulty in explaining what we do to others who are not in our respective industries. If we cannot quickly explain what we do, we cannot demonstrate our value. If we cannot demonstrate our value, we cannot expect to unload whatever it is we are selling.

It isn't as simple as to explain it, though, for we must overcome some natural and learned skepticism. As I'm learning more and more as I see more focus groups, people don't like being forced to watch ads. They appreciate it when they can skip them. As a rule, I'm convinced that people don't trust marketers. They expect to be misled.

This distrust is exacerbated as marketers try to force people to view what they so plainly don't want to see. They already don't trust us, yet there are many who spend many hours contemplating ways to force people to view what they don't trust.

Marketers try to justify this behavior by pointing out that:

1. They are providing content for "free," and
2. People expect it

Perhaps both of those things are true, but since we've established that people expect to be misled by marketers, does that justify misleading them?

I think not.

Occasionally you'll find the marketer who truly loves ads, and they will use that personal preference as justification to add to the above list, but as we've already established, we are not our audience. No slanted survey is going to make forcing people to do something they don't want to do justifiable, and it will do nothing to improve our credibility with our audiences.

To overcome this problem, you must gain the trust of your audience, which means you must establish as close a relationship as you can with them. Personalize. Be nimble. Be thorough. While you can petition for a seat at the consumer's table, for goodness sake, don't sit until you've been invited. - Cam Beck

The grassroots selling of the world's most popular sport

I've coached soccer for a few years. At the beginning of this season, I attended a coach's meeting where rosters are handed out, rules are reviewed, etc. These meeting typically involve a couple of groups trying to sell soccer uniforms, team pictures and FC Dallas tickets. I had an exceptional experience that can teach us all grassroot selling.

Grassroots lesson 1: A great foundation to a customer relationship is a good conversation

I arrived early to the coach's meeting and started a conversation with the rep from FC Dallas. We talked about the addition of Denilson, a star player from Brazil, the win against the Columbus Crew, etc. He was there to promote the youth soccer night, trying to get teams to buy tickets and be part of the opening ceremonies where soccer players lead the professionals out on the team (A great tradition by the way and probably a topic for another post).

Grassroots lesson 2: Make your customer feel important

We've bought tickets to these games. Usually it's the standard process of purchasing the tickets from the ticket office and then picking them up the day of the game. When I called to get our tickets, instead of talking to TicketMaster, the rep from FC Dallas that I met took my call. He remembered my name, my team's name and our conversation. I was impressed because I knew he had attended four or five other coach's meetings and probably met twenty to thirty coaches.

Grassroots lesson 3: Whenever possible, go out of your way to make the purchasing process easy, even when your customer isn't following the process.

After ordering my tickets, I received two different calls from parents who, although the initially didn't get their order in by the dead line, asked if they could go to the game, have their daughters participate in the opening ceremonies and sit with our team. The FC Dallas rep accommodated every request, found ways for us to sit together, even to the day of the game when a parent wanted last minute tickets.

Grassroots lesson 4: Make your customer feel at ease

At the game, the girls slowly came in. I was a little concerned that, because girls were coming in at different times, we would miss our opportunity to get on the field. This was a big deal to them and I wanted to make the experience special. I was a little bit flustered. The same FC Dallas rep met me at the team sign in desk and assured me that we'd get on the field once all of our girls arrived.

Grassroots lesson 5: Create a great experience

When we did get on the field, my girls eyes were wider than silver dollars. They were inches away from where the players were warming up. Although I'm sure the FC Dallas players had a lot on their minds, they still managed to smile, give high-fives and kick a ball every once in a while against the board that my girls were standing behind. When we got on the field, the FC Dallas players (after returning to their locker rooms) came out and, as part of the ceremony, either made eye contact or gave high-fives to all the players from my team. Suddenly my daughter looked up and there, on the big screen was our girls second grade soccer team name listed as a 'sponsor' for that night's game. You could literally hear their jaws drop. The game was a good time, mostly because all the girls felt that they were VIP guests of one of the best soccer teams in the US.

Grassroots lesson  6: Follow up

I never expected this but I got a call from the same FC Dallas rep the following Monday asking how the game went. Now I felt like a VIP Soccer guest and maybe more than just a coach for a second grade girls soccer team.

With Beckham coming to the US to play soccer, a lot of attention has been paid to the marketing of soccer in the United States, especially Major League Soccer. Maybe the right answer is to create great experiences among those who have children who play the game. My compliments to FC Dallas for not only how they play the beautiful game, but for the beautiful experience they are creating.

- Paul Herring

BrandingWire: IT the Canadian Way

This month Steve Woodruff honored me by asking me to participate in BrandingWire's latest challenge.

We are an IT company that does a lot of work for non-profit organizations and financial/accounting clients, but even though business is growing rapidly (We've doubled in size over the last two years), we have a couple of problems.

First, we have some difficulty convincing potential clients that what we do has value with respect to their businesses to the point that they will invest in a contract with us. This means to me that they do not believe our expertise adds any value to them. Whatever strategy we pursue must help us establish ourselves as experts and authorities in our field.

Second, our background is with nonprofit organizations, but we hope to expand beyond that sector. Limiting ourselves to our current industries puts a natural limit on how much we can grow.

(View the details about this assignment.)

We need to start planning for the future now, and we cannot allow short-term problems to get in the way of our long-term view. Thus, my part of this assignment will be primarily focused on the long run. If by the time a business gets started, IT is but an afterthought, we have little chance to overcome the trend in the business world to underbudget and underprepare for IT costs, except after a major IT catastrophe happens within an organization or an industry. Therefore we must target people who are just getting businesses started or who are just getting started themselves in the workplace.

Connect with Canadian entrepreneurial organizations.
Our target market is small to medium sized businesses in our city and surrounding areas. To both prepare future business leaders and establish ourselves as experts in this field, we should hold workshops designed to show the sorts of options startup companies can face, and demonstrate how and under what circumstances hiring a company like ours to provide IT services makes sense.

Sponsor a nonprofit organization that helps develop Canadian youths.
Set up internship and other professional programs to help young Canadians build professional knowledge and expertise. By doing this, we will not only equip young Canadians to establish themselves in the workplace and achieve greater things in their own lives, but we also increase the mean intelligence of the marketplace and ensure those entering the workplace do so with full cognition of the IT challenges the companies they choose to work for can expect to face. Also establish a program to keep in contact with these individuals we've helped, track their progress in their careers, and if necessary, offer a helping hand.

Give guest lectures at one or several local business colleges.
Opportunities for topics include how IT outsourcing can improve the bottom line and help the environment. This is an important step for several reasons. First, of course it will, as the point before, help those entering the workplace come to know what to expect from an IT standpoint. Second, it keeps our company top-of-mind when either IT or green initiatives are started by a company anyone in the audience eventually works for are started.

Start a corporate blog.
This is, in part, an extension of the lectures mentioned above. The blog should expound on how IT services can help reduce the consumption of resources and helps our clients be more environmentally friendly. Doing this is not only good from a PR perspective, but it will appeal to a younger, more environmentally conscious audience. In addition, it positions the company well if and when the Canadian government passes environmental legislation that will be binding on our potential clients. This blog can help us as much as we want. If we want it to be a big part of our strategy, quality and consistency are key.

Whenever the marketplace doesn't think it is worth to pay for IT services, they are either right or they are wrong. If they are wrong, then there is a bit of an education problem that might be exacerbated by how rapidly things change in the industry. To make sure we aren't always chasing our tails, we must not only address the needs of right now, but we must also look to the horizon and start training the leaders of tomorrow to prepare them for the problems they will face. In the end, they will remember and appreciate that we helped them succeed, and one day we will no longer have to worry that clients don't see the value in what we do.

Get more insight about this BrandingWire assignment from the following writers:

Lewis Green

Martin Jelsema

Kevin Dugan

Valeria Maltoni

Steve Woodruff

Drew McLellan

Patrick Schaber

Gavin Heaton

Becky Carroll

Olivier Blanchard

and fellow guest writers:

Matt Dickman

Chris Brown

Making Design Priorities at the U.S. Census Bureau

Jakob Nielsen's latest article exposed a fundamental flaw in the website for the U.S. Census Bureau (census.gov). Through user testing, Nielsen found that only 14% of visitors were able to complete the task deemed to be most important for the site to deliver, which was to find how many people lived in the U.S. at that moment. Strange indeed, since this information was prominently displayed on the homepage.

Nielsen released this image from an eye-tracking study of the home page, which remarkably revealed that people spent a lot of time looking directly at the information they sought, but they did not either comprehend or process it because the way it was presented made it look like a promotion. To make matters worse, the U.S. Census Bureau used indirect language to label the content.

I can picture the usability test observers painfully watching users pass right by the information they needed to complete the task, shouting through the sound-proof glass to find what is right in front of them.

It's rarely easy to hear that after all the work you spent on something doesn't do what it was intended to do, but the U.S. Census Bureau, like all of us, need to swallow their pride, listen to the consumer feedback, and make a few changes.

Nielsen goes on to lay out some of his battle-worn guidelines for homepage usability, including some helpful information about classes of users, but I find sometimes it's easier to put it simply:

Make sure the most important thing is the most important thing.

Fixing the problem can actually be very easy, but sometimes fixing one problem comes at the expense of another issue, which is why prioritizing user tasks is so important. Any way you look at it, though, a 14% completion rate for the most important user task is unacceptable, and the page needs to be designed differently, even if fixing that problem comes at the expense of some other minor tasks (although in this case it probably doesn't need to).

Once that problem is fixed, it will be easier to discover other problems that exist elsewhere. A usability engineer's job is never done. Oftentimes a single problem is just a reflection of a design philosophy that can cause all sorts of problems.

Some designers will claim that some nebulous "brand" is most important as they make excuses to hide information to deliver a more visually appealing design, but the truth is that a enhancing a brand means delivering on your promises, and if you're the U.S. Census Bureau, your promise is to deliver the latest census data.

To determine what the focus of your own site should be, complete this answer:

If users could do only one thing on my site, they would [blank].

If the [blank] says more about your priorities than it says about your users', or if the group you'd be speaking to is so narrow that the site becomes inconsequential to most of your customers, you may need to rethink your design philosophy.

Rest assured, your website needs to meet both your needs as well as the needs of your users, but since the website needs to attract users -- and often it must get them to return -- your design philosophy must keep the user at the center. - Cam Beck

Steve Jobs Read My Mind...or My Blog

Earlier today, in the comments of one of yesterday's posts ("Does Apple Punish Early Adopters?"), I asked Roger von Oech, even though he was not concerned about the quick $200 price drop of the Apple iPhone, what it would do to his perception of Apple if the company offered early adopters a $100 "customer loyalty bonus."

Can You Be Bought for $100... in Apple credit? Heck yeah!

The theme isn't new here. Back in June I expressed dismay over the "satisfactory" experience I had at a car rental company whose employee, while my auto was getting repaired, caused more damage to my vehicle. The company treated me fair but not exceptional. They weren't obligated to do anything other than what they did, but given the entirety of my experience (and my annoyance), going beyond what was "fair" would have really made me feel good about the company and more likely to use them again.

Scott Ginsburg wrote an interesting piece where he concludes that satisfying your customer isn't enough. You must do the things nobody else does to be remarkable.

Apparently, the cacophony of voices calling out in protest over this move finally got to Steve Jobs, because in addition to rebating the entire $200 price difference for those who bought an iPhone over the last 2 weeks, he is also offering a $100 rebate to anyone who purchased an iPhone.

He was in no way obligated to do so. People who bought their phone did so of their own cognition. No one was holding a gun to their heads forcing them to act on their impulse to attempt to be the coolest people in the room. Still, had they only known that Apple would drop the price so soon, many of them would have waited. Jobs got the message, and I think this resolution went beyond fair. To foster and retain the loyalty Apple has enjoyed over the years, this was exactly what Jobs needed to do to salvage many Apple evangelists.

Some people were calling the $200 an early adopter tax. As such, this move seems a bit analogous to getting a tax refund. Sure, you could be grateful to the government for the tax cut they passed (hypothetically) last year, but then you realize it was your money to begin with.

Some will still say that $100 isn't enough. I disagree.

With this deft move, the number of Apple protesters probably dropped by a significant number, and Apple comes out smelling like roses again to most of the brand loyal. Kudos to Apple for acting quickly. It will cost them quite a bit (close to $100 million, in fact), but in the long run, people will trust them to treat them right, and that kind of reputation is priceless. - Cam Beck

Hat tip to the Experience Economist for the heads up.