You’re having a conversation with a company Big Wig, perhaps an interview, and she asks, “What do you think of this social media phenomenon?”
Well, imagine it’s the 1960s. Horses pull milk floats, colour TV is just around the corner for most households, shillings are in your pocket and the Bay of Pigs has petrified the world. In between watching Steptoe and Son and listening to Elvis or the Beatles, someone asks you, “What do you think about this telephone phenomenon?”
With 20/20 hindsight you could’ve said, “It’s going to be amazing in ways we can’t yet imagine. The infrastructure we and other countries are laying now will be used for revolutions in communications and commerce that sound like science fiction if we talk about them now (think fax and Internet). User take-up will be so overwhelming that the lines will be stretched to breaking point and the ‘phones themselves will become like your watch or wedding ring – always with you. In short, phones will become an integral part of our personal and business lives.
The ‘60s Big Wig would nod sagely, probably with a slight smirk, and take the conversation elsewhere. But the answer to the question if you’re asked tonight at dinner is that, “History will repeat itself here…”
Pixies, the Tooth Fairy and Big Foot have got nothing on Apple’s word of mouth phenomenon. The iPad was finally revealed today and brought the myth to a glorious Steve Jobs crescendo.
Under-spec’d, over-priced, underwhelming? Whatever. This thing is a glimpse of the future and it’s exciting – for some.
It’s certainly another nail in the coffin of traditional newspaper business. Take The Guardian for example: sales of 350,000 daily printed broadsheets need to pay for the 30 million visitors to their website (plus online ads, granted).
The iPad is another bullet the industry must’ve hoped to dodge. With ubiquitous use of smart phones, eReaders and tablets just around the corner, the physical paper is in the ICU. Long live the tree.
Wednesday was also the 100th anniversary of the death of Thomas Crapper, the man who revolutionised the flushing lavatory. Timely metaphor anyone?
Unless you’ve been on Mars this week, you’ll know all too well that Kraft have now purchased Cadbury.
Well, it now turns out that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS, hired by Cadbury, are – thanks to the purchase – to be paid more than if they’d successfully defended the hostile takeover.
It’s easy to flow with the anti-bank sentiment at the moment, but throughout the process we were led to believe that Cadbury’s management were hell-bent on seeing off the greedy American and retaining a British jewel. Let’s remember, Kraft is only in buying mood because they think organic growth is unlikely and Cadbury has a bigger future ahead of itself. They sounded like a deer being hounded by a savage tiger. Now it’s apparent that they gave the gatekeepers strong odds to leave the door open!
Nice to see the basic theory of management is still alive and well: what you reward, gets done.
Warren Buffet, Kraft’s largest shareholder, felt their shares were undervalued so instructed 500p in cash make up the 840p offer. That’s around £7 billion in bank debt added to balance sheet.
I guess it’s only fair banks both sides of the pond maxed out, right?
Following their best Christmas to date, the very on-form John Lewis was recently voted Britain’s best shop by Verdict and its 6,000 shoppers. Let’s be honest, what’s not to like? The stores are upmarket but unpretentious. They’ve a quality product offering and peerless customer service.
John Lewis is different from normal retailers. They’re known as a bell-wether for high street trading, not because they mimic other retailers but because they report sales figures weekly as opposed to the normal quarterly results from the likes of Tesco and M&S. They are incredibly transparent; a throwback to being a ‘partnership’, owned by its 69,000 employees partners. This transparency and an old fashioned willingness to ‘serve’ clearly run through this business.
Although, that said, the latest ForeSee Christmas E-Retail Satisfaction Index tells a slightly different story of their online offering. In this brief but excellent study of the top 40 retailers (according to traffic), Amazon trump John Lewis as clear overall winners.
JL did come out on top when looking at the multichannel category, ahead of Boots and HMV. Most surprisingly of the pure plays (Internet only retailers) ASOS rank seventh, behind QVC and M&M Direct.
Regardless, both polls show JL is getting it very right where its customers are concerned. If I were Andrea O’Donnell, JL’s Commercial Director, I’d be very pleased but a little puzzled as to how a cold pure play like Amazon could best me when customers can’t even speak to an individual, let alone be impressed by one. Email updates obviously go a long way.
It’s pretty much a given that SMEs are more likely to be passionate about what they do than lumbering corporates answering to the City. Let’s be honest, most SMEs don’t tend to start a gardening business if they can’t stand the sight of grass.
Unfortunately, that passion can overrun into myopia where those in business only play to themselves – the People Like Us syndrome.
I’m sure you hear it in your office all the time: I’d never buy it for my home (so I assume my customers wouldn’t either)… my wife wouldn’t like it (so let’s leave it out of the catalogue)…. I’m not sure we’ve the market for that here (because they wouldn’t pay for it themselves).
It’s said that ‘me’ and ‘I’ are some of the worst words to use in a sales pitch because the customer doesn’t care about you or your likes and dislikes relating to that car, that printer or that fridge freezer. They’re not buying for a complete stranger (i.e. the salesperson); they’re buying for themselves to satisfy selfish reasons.
People Like Us is the other side of the same coin to be avoided in business.
Charging for postage is the perennial debate of e-commerce. I think Amazon’s decision this week to extend its free postage charge trialled before Christmas might favour a good deal more consumers than Amazon serves. I can see other retailers having to follow suit as they look to win a friend and gain a client from their competitors.
You can almost see it as a cost per acquisition – how much would you pay a 3rd party to get you a customer? Is it cheaper than banner ads and affiliate percentages?
Then again, when Amazon can charge $3 billion for a Discovery Channel CD-ROM, maybe taking the hit on their postage bills wont hurt the P&L so much.
I posted previously about how I saw the web unfolding in 2010. One of my pointers was about on-site search and how bad it is in general. I recommended that the big players team up with the search engines to get it right.
Well, Google beat me to the deadline and launched its Google Commerce search offering toward the end of 2009, not 2010. I’ll be really interested to see who takes this on and how the technology (and partnership) affects their sites.
At $50,000+, it costs more than most SMEs would have in their site development budgets and I’m not sure the M&Ss or Nexts of the world would ever really incorporate it, but what a great plug in.
I used to work for someone who claimed proudly that he knew almost nothing about our product and he certainly wouldn’t use our products. He would even speak derogatorily of those who did. With pride he’d say, “I’m a businessman, I don’t need to know about a product to sell it.”
Of course there’s quite a parcel of truth in his arrogance: your estate agent didn’t live in your house before you bought it and Dr John Davis doesn’t really know what childbirth is like. But we all want our salespeople to be empathetic, don’t we? We demand advice and expertise and the only real way of gaining that is through experience.
Just how our teams communicate that to customers is as much a marketing issue as website copy or advertising budgets. And it might be worth reminding them that ‘do what I say, not what I do’ is even more unpalatable now than it was as a child. Would you take health advice from an obese, alcoholic, chain-smoker?
Gordon Ramsay is a business hero of mine because he’s built an empire through incredible hard work coupled with non-pretentious quality. His book, Playing with Fire is one of the most inspiring business reads you could pick up.
Jamie Oliver is in exactly the same league but perhaps with a little less showbiz. I’d argue he’s also more altruistic and the TED folks clearly agree with his fight against obesity. They’ve awarded him $100,000 and “one wish to change the world.” Well, if I were on such a wishful mission, TED is certainly the group I’d like to curry favor with.
$100k is small change for a millionaire who asked the government to invest $1billion on school dinners, but its a massive hat tip for heroic work. Bravo Jamie.
As we increase our personal openness and honesty via social media, so too are we appraised more as data-mining never had the chance to go so deep.
Californian data-mining company Rapleaf are at the bleeding edge of social media monitoring (SMM). Short version: they track everything about you online – every comment, every review, every status update, every tweet, every contact, every friend and they appraise you via some massive algorithms.
This pretty much promises to offer the Holy Grail for advertising online where uber-relevant adverts are delivered to you and your peer group. But Rapleaf are taking that peer group and going further than ads – they’re suggesting credit ratings! A ‘prospect’ might fail a credit score rating but their closest online friends are quite affluent, so perhaps some extra leeway should be given (they wouldn’t see you on the street would they?).
Given that we know all this, how long before people start spamming the system? In a view to becoming more credible, will the scumbag hook up with the solicitor, doctor and police officer? If an online friend will upset your credit score, would you oust them? Will this lead to appraising people who ‘poke’ you to see if they lift or drop your ‘perceived value’ to the market (think mortgage providers for a start)?
If you thought social media was free, you’re wrong. Facebook is inching toward its big payday and Rapleaf and others are offering tools that help social media grease the skids nicely.
Cartoon: the infamous “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” by Peter Steiner originally published by The New Yorker in 1993.
At their best, blogs offer insight and intelligence, none moreso than Seth Godin’s daily brain dumps. Seth goes futher than most in that he often throws out free business ideas and free ebooks.
I’ve not had a chance to digest all of his latest offering but it looks similar to his usual fare: short, digestable, direct and thought provoking. Even better is the fact he got 70 odd important people to contribute “important ideas… including Tom Peters, Jackie Huba and Jason Fried…”
Yet another naval-gazing award ceremony took place last week where BSkyB were claimed Britain’s Most Admired Company from Management Today.
Clearly, MT’s judges didn’t base the trophy on Sky’s email campaigns. If they had, MT wouldn’t discover personal, relevant and timed messages – their emails are more like blanket mini-billboards.
Every week or so Sky point me to sport I don’t watch and movies I have no interest in. Considering they have the digital knowledge of everything my household has watched for a couple of years, they display zero wherewithal in their emails.
A few ideas for Sky’s marketing team to increase email PR (personal and relevancy):
Croudsourcing – people who liked X and Y (stuff my house has seen) also watch Z on Wednesday at 10pm Follow on – if you liked The Apprentice you’ll love our top three business programs (some you may need to pay for)
Bundles – we’ve prepared three bundles of viewing which we think you’ll like. Please pick and amend them. These can be uploaded to my box and amending them lets Sky’s brain know and next week’s bundles will be even more relevant.
DVD iLike – Sky should ask me about my DVD collection to better profile my tastes. You could even take into account my book collection as well (I always think Amazon miss a trick here by only tracking purchases).
I am infinitely more likely to engage with, and probably upgrade, because of the relevancy of the above. So why do they torture my inbox with High School Musical and the Ashes?
Thorough email PR like this is way beyond the data mining systems at SMEs but surely Britain’s Most Admired could up the ante?
I was asked this week, ‘What does a manager really do?’ It was a fairly innocuous, rhetorical, jovial question from a well-paid, senior person.
The graduate switch flicked and I immediately thought, ‘seeing that the company’s goals are met’. After all, it’s the leader’s job to define and create those goals and aims, and it’s management’s job to realise them. Right?
But managing people is rarely a squeaky clean affair. I’m not a huge supporter of lofty job titles as they can often cause internal problems, but anyone claiming to be a ‘Manager’ will find themselves wearing several hats (in no particular order):
go between
consultant (to those above and below)
amateur psychologist
negotiator
dispute resolver
idea instigator
organiser
governor
role model
decision maker (the buck stops and all that)
communications expert (surely THE key to management)
soldier (ever metaphorically fallen on your sword?)
captain
big brother/sister (you need to eat more, drink less, curb spending)
counsellor
teacher
steward
servant
policy pursuer
change agent
supporter (of others, of the different viewpoint – perhaps the weaker voice)
challenger (of the status quo)
It strikes me that a manager who only wants to manage isn’t anywhere near up to the job. The seven-letter title is low-balling the variety of commitment needed in all but the safest of environments.
On the right - Prevent search engines from indexing news content and have readers pay through a variety of subscriptions to recoup lost earnings from physical news sales. People have no right to free journalism and aggregator sites (especially Google News) are to news, what Pirate Bay is to music.
On the left –
If you build it they will come. The internet is an unparalleled open space where the common good is freedom of information without class divides. If providers open their content equally the market will ensure the winners are the cream of crop. Revenue will be made through increased attention and trust.
Further right against ‘Don’t be evil’ - Stop the Google vampire by embracing its largest competitor instead – Microsoft’s Bing.
If Bing courted enough content providers to bed exclusively with them (by paying, say, the world’s top 50 newspapers and top 1,000 magazines) that would be a huge boon. Would it be enough to grab 10 or 15 percent of market share?
Of course it’s all about money for Murdoch, not attention and that’s where he and the digerati are looking at same issue from different ends.
The thoroughbred race horse, See the Stars, has retired and there’s a book out to celebrate his achievements called One Blazing Summer.
Apparently, the real test of such a horse is in its three-year-old year and See the Stars was spectacular in his. He raced every month for six months and won the lot, including the triple: the Guineas, the Derby and the Arc.
He has plenty more racing in him but retirement is the call from management. Why, when there are winners’ cheques on the table? Stud value. He’s 85,000 euros a ‘go’ and he will ‘go’ a hundred times a year!
Ignore morals and ethics for a moment and indulge a silly but interesting thought: what if that human stars put themselves out to stud? What would Pele, Tiger or Lance exact? Forget sport and think about a Bill Clinton or a Steve Jobs gene pool up for sale. Really crazy only-in-America stuff, eh?
MPs follow their vocation diligently to improve our land;
teachers are wholly dedicated to the development of children;
police and law courts will keep criminals off our streets;
companies believe staff are their greatest asset;
hospitals are clean heavens of care.
What assumptions have you made about that meeting you’re holding this week? Might they be worth revisiting?
Most business leaders don’t need a poll or a study to arrive at the conclusion that managers are the largest reason for staff resignations, but the news this week sends us straight there.
Of course direct departure isn’t the only symptom of poor management. Professor Mike Kelly, director of public health, NICE said to the BBC that more than 13 million working days a year are lost because of work related stress, anxiety and depression.
How much of that is directly attributable to managers and bosses is pretty impossible to pin down, but haven’t we got to admit there’s likely to be an element of cause and effect there?
Photo: one of the UK’s most feared managers, Sir Alex Ferguson (image from Wikipedia)
Piano maker Kemble & Co is closing after nearly 100 years producing over 350,000 pianos. They were the UK’s last large scale piano manufacturer.
It’s a reflection of yesteryear when a piano was a central asset in the home. Mum and dad would teach their kids the odd tune in the hope of lighting their musical spark. Much more likely now to see a Playstation and laptop alongside the Sky box. Even if it were still fashionable, I doubt many modern living rooms are large enough to house a piano. I’m sure Kemble is a wonderful manufacturer but they belong to a sunshine industry that is clearly setting.
Another sign of the times is the UK release of Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle. If I were a newspaper boss I’d be doing everything in my power to have my subscription service available to e-readers and smart phones. If I want eyeballs, I need to be where they are.
So why on earth are only four titles available via Amazon? The Evening Standard and Metro are free in London, but not so here. Hello! Amazon’s profits were up 68% in Q3 with the Kindle now their largest selling item by value and by volume (that’s staggering!). The music industry was far too slow to realise digital was a game changer, you’ve got to ask will the publishing and newspaper guys have learnt their lesson?
I can’t help but think of the Royal Mail strikes in the same (dimming) light. With the CWU seemingly taking glee at delaying some 50 to 60 million items, surely they’re speeding up their own inevitable death march.
Right or wrong as the union’s position may be, letters are in the same ‘sunshine industry’ as pianos and newspapers. No picket line will change that.
Most people think the saying ‘first impressions count’ is all about clothes or hair. They’re wrong (to a degree). It’s more about attitude than anything else.
How you carry yourself when you enter the room; how you interact in the opening few seconds; your handshake; your eye contact; your confidence.
It’s the X Factor test. Contestants stroll out on stage and before they sing a note the judges have formed an opinion. I’m guessing that original sniff test of an opinion is correct in the vast majority of cases (Susan Boyle is the notable exception).
I had the horrific experience of calling an ambulance for a heart attack victim recently. Of course, just having the medics arrive released some of the pressure in the room (help had come!) but their attitude was exemplary. They were: calm, authoritative, professional, clear communicators, even humorous with an obvious chain of command.
It’s largely natural, but like most things, we can teach ourselves to improve our attitude. These medics clearly had.
Marc Prensky is acknowledged to have coined the term Digital Natives, but when the business world heard Rupert Murdoch use it, the term became commonplace (remember he owns MySpace).
The reference is to the swathes of people who don’t think twice about technology being an integral part of their everyday lives. It’s not exclusively a generation Y (18-28 year-olds) phenomenon either, even though saturation surely peeks there. Two ingredients strike me most about young digital natives:
They are not colour blind. They are arguably the first to start/finish higher education with a true post-racism attitude. An Obama Whitehouse can only help cement that mindset.
They are not data phobic. On the contrary, they often broadcast and share masses of information in an open display of incredible honesty.
Seems to me companies might benefit from having a digital native or two in their organisation, regardless of the CV’s relevant work experience. How about you?
The preeminent Seth Godin commented on a Charles Blow report in the NY Times, pointing out that the internet’s low barrier of entry had led to the markets flooding. He said, “If you can’t sell to 1 in 1000, why market to a million?”
The numbers from Blow’s piece were, “…of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.”
This tells us the long tail of the Web makes Pareto’s 80-20 principle defunct. (Perhaps poor salespeople might stop overly quoting it?) The Amazons and the Play.coms of the world are now playing to different laws.
Wouldn’t you just love to get your hands on their analytics to see it with your own eyes?
Photo: Chris Anderson (from Wikipedia), who coined the phrase Long Tail in his Wired magazine article October 2004
Plenty has been said about Dixons’ comparison ads lately. They’re a blatant come-on aimed squarely at John Lewis, Harrods and Selfridges. They invite consumers to research with their competitors and then convert to Dixons for stronger pricing.
This is primarily a drive for Dixons’ website, with their retail sites only operating at airports. The strapline is, Dixons.co.uk: the last place you want to go.
These are more ‘designed’ than the comparison ads seen from the supermarkets. By using rivals’ fonts and colour pallet, they’re well and truly ‘up yours’ ads.
Having seen them for a while, I still can’t fully decide if they’re touting an honest and clever reflection of modern shopping habits or even pushing a wee bit of a class divide.
Either way, I think they’re a bellwether of what to expect from copywriters this winter, where ads will be thin on superlatives and hard on competitors. The Christmas run-up is getting all in your face – don’t skirt around with clever copy, get down to brass tacks and call your competitor out. Just look at Tesco and Asda for more evidence.
The Web makes the impossible possible. Just imagine the pitch for eBay on a 1998 version of Dragons’ Den. “You bid a fraction of the real value… may sell for less than you paid for it… pay before you’ve even seen the goods, let alone held them… trust the seller to post the product to you… count on people writing nice reviews about you… etc.”
How about the pitch for an online encyclopaedia compiled by unpaid, unprofessional authors? Would you have fancied investing in a Wikipedia concept a decade ago?
Tom Peters advocates not even starting a business until you’ve canvassed a huge range of opinion. He’s not looking at the middle ground but the edge, the ‘berserk.’ Peters said, “Never get seriously underway until you’ve surfaced a couple of ideas that score perfect 10s, or at least 8s, on the … Berserk Scale.”
Cue eBay, Wikipedia and Craigslist.
I’m not sure if many entrepreneurs would go there deliberately, but if you end up on that much of a fringe listening to the berserk, at least you should know you’re in good company.
I recently heard comedian Frank Skinner being interviewed by Dermot O’Leary on his Radio Two show. Skinner, former host of his own guest TV show which ran for six years, said that TV is rather unreal. With his makeup applied, his shirt choice amended to avoid a camera clash, specific timing, outtakes, warm ups, breaks, editing and so on, Skinner called it ‘manufactured.’
He went on to say that radio is much more authentic – like two blokes sat at the end of the bar in the pub. Just raw conversations really, making radio much more true to itself (I’m paraphrasing here).
Social media is described as many things, both good and bad. How about thinking of social media’s offer of authenticity as an opportunity for companies to host their own radio show?
You’re having a conversation with a company Big Wig, perhaps an interview, and she asks, “What do you think of this social media phenomenon?”
Gordon Ramsay is a business hero of mine because he’s built an empire through incredible hard work coupled with non-pretentious quality. His book, 
As we increase our personal openness and honesty via social media, so too are we appraised more as data-mining never had the chance to go so deep.
Clearly, MT’s judges didn’t base the trophy on Sky’s email campaigns. If they had, MT wouldn’t discover personal, relevant and timed messages – their emails are more like blanket mini-billboards.
On the left –
The thoroughbred race horse, See the Stars, has 
Most business leaders don’t need a poll or a study to arrive at the conclusion that managers are the largest reason for staff resignations, but the 
Piano maker Kemble & Co is closing after nearly 100 years producing over 350,000 pianos. They were the UK’s 
Most people think the saying ‘first impressions count’ is all about clothes or hair. They’re wrong (to a degree). It’s more about attitude than anything else.
Marc Prensky is acknowledged to have coined the term Digital Natives, but when the business world heard Rupert Murdoch use it, the term became commonplace (remember he owns MySpace).
The preeminent Seth Godin 
Plenty has been said about Dixons’ comparison ads lately. They’re a blatant come-on aimed squarely at John Lewis, Harrods and Selfridges. They invite consumers to research with their competitors and then convert to Dixons for stronger pricing.
I recently heard comedian Frank Skinner being interviewed by Dermot O’Leary on his Radio Two show. Skinner, former host of his own guest TV show which ran for six years, said that TV is rather unreal. With his makeup applied, his shirt choice amended to avoid a camera clash, specific timing, outtakes, warm ups, breaks, editing and so on, Skinner called it ‘manufactured.’