by nick on October 28, 2009
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.
by nick on October 21, 2009
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?
by nick on October 14, 2009
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
by nick on October 7, 2009
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.
by nick on October 1, 2009
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.
