I received a flyer, home made and printed in black and white attached to my front door knob by rubber band a few days ago. This is a common occurrence in my neighborhood. I guess the slowing economy is making a lot of people search for different sources of income. What I found particularly interesting about this is that it was advertising two things. The top half of the flyer was showcasing a home based massage studio, but the bottom half was trying to sell a reusable shopping bag.
The headline read “Help save the environment. Stop filling our land fill with grocery store bags.” Then came some copy about how grocery store bags are not reused because they were so weak so most end up in the trash, and then the call to action was to buy a nice cloth reusable shopping bag. All in all for a homegrown flyer it wasn’t bad. I’ve seen some “professional” copywriters do worse. The only problem with the message was the media.
I got this flyer from my front door. So did all of my neighbors. There are probably at least 350 houses in my subdivision, and they all got the flyer on their doors. I can’t help but think that all those flyer went in the trash. The flyer about reducing trash and being responsible… went in the trash… about 350 of them. That message, while unintended, was loud and clear to me.
Posted in Mar Comm, TQM - Total Quality Mistake | May 30th, 2008 No Comments »
For quite a while, the topic of the difference between artists and designers have been floating around in my head. I don’t remember exactly what started the idea, of why there should even be a difference, but here is my short take on the topic.
It is entirely possible to be both a designer and an artist. Personally I believe there is a difference and it boils down purpose. Artists create for the purpose of expression and emotion. They create new and different ways to express an idea. A designer uses preexisting conventions and norms to convey an idea.
On the web a designer will be the one to decided to use tabs as the main navigation, with secondary navigation down the left side and auxiliary content in the right side bar. An artist might decide to make the navigation the limbs of a tree that comes in from the bottom right corner of the page and the secondary navigation the leaves of that branch. The artist is trying to convey and idea using the tree, where the designer is using the convention of tabs so web users will already know what to do.
Innovation belongs to the artists. Usability belongs to the designers. A bit of both makes for good web people.
Posted in The Wild Wild Web | April 29th, 2008 2 Comments »
Now before anyone jumps all over me shouting “Of course you would say that, thats what you do!” consider this, I didn’t start this idea. I caught this idea from Mitch Joel’s blog post DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCIES SHOULD NOT ADJUST CAMPAIGNS FOR THE WEB BUT LEAD THE BRAND STRATEGY. Here is the low down.A recent Forrester Research study, as seen in Advertising Age’s article, To Lead Overall Brand Strategy, Digital Shops Have Much To Do. The premise is that the digital agency is in the best position to lead brand strategy because markets are moving online, but more so because of the wealth of data interactive channels provide. You can read Mitch’s post, and the Ad Age article for more details.Take this information in the back of your mind and then go through the Brand Gap presentation, particularly looking at slide 60 - 65. To me it makes the most sense that with the above thought pattern, your digital agency should be the one sitting in the middle of the chart on slide 60 or 62, instead of a spoke on slide 64.
Posted in Announcments and News, Mar Comm | December 12th, 2007 No Comments »
In the professional services business, it’s common to come across a few sayings. “Use the right tool for the job”, and “When all your problems look like nails, all your solutions look like hammers”. Each of these sayings is reminder to the service professional, or rationality to the client, about the approach that is taken on a project. They both make very valid points, but I think there is a problem in the way we apply these sayings, and as a result the pressure we put on our clients and ourselves.
“Use the right tool for the job.” It’s impossible to know everything about anything. There are so many hours in a day, and most of it is devoted to production. We all have to get paid. In order to cope, specialization happens. People and even companies start to play in a niche in order to be able to know as much as they can about a specific topic, and become an expert in it. After all, that’s what clients want, experts. This knowledge leads to bias. If you know more about hammers, then every problem looks like a nail. This obviously is where the second saying comes from.
“When all your problems look like nails, all your solutions look like hammers”. This saying is usually used as a warning to keep an open mind. It works along the lines of “If you want a different result, you can’t do the same thing.” This makes sense, but if you look at the other side of the coin, you will also notice its implication for professional service providers.
If you need to increase your bottom line, you have two basic options: 1.) Reduce Expenses or 2.) Increase Revenue. Either of these will work (in our hypothetical perfect world). If you ask an efficiency expert, he will tell you that reducing expenses is the best way to go. If you ask a marketer, he will tell you that Increasing Revenue is the better option. In both cases, your asking the hammers to look at your problem and they see nails. This leads us to two points.
1.) The nail is not the same. The nail in our metaphor is dependant of the perspective of the person looking at. Just like “Don’t ask your lawyer health advice, ask your Doctor”. Your doctor sees nails based on his experience, and so does the lawyer. If you get into an auto accident and it causes damage to your health, you will need both the Doctor and the Lawyer to pound the nails that they are good at.
2.) Hammers will always see nails, and sell hammering services. This leaves a lot of stress on the client, because most often, they will not hire out a solution that can solve by themselves. They look for experts to help out. Each expert has their own hammer and their own view of nails. If you need someone to put in screws, a hammer will never sell you that. They are more likely to convince you that screws could work, but so will nails. Then they will try and sell the hammer instead of the screwdriver. Not because they are malicious, they might be right, nails will work just as well as screws, but they have experience in seeing that nails work, more than they do with screws. They can’t know it all and they are experts with nails, so a hammer is what you need.
The real lynch pin of all this is that the above statements work well for strategy, less well for tactics, and almost irrelevant for execution or production. Lets look at an example.Imaging that you are the in charge of a new technology startup. The product is a solid first version and can be purchased over the internet as a digital download. It’s time to sell some products. You need to market your product and start to make some sales. Two marketing firms with two different core ideas present their plans to you. The first group lays out a plan to build your brand awareness with the largest group of people in your potential target market. The plan includes direct response including direct mail and email, print ads in trade magazines, digital advertising and a website that shows all the features and benefits. The entire campaign is directed to the person most often responsible for purchasing, the purchasing managers of companies. For this example you are buying hammers for nails.
The second marketing group comes in and suggests aiming the campaign at early adopters to grow the user base of the product. The idea is that while purchasing managers do purchase the products; it is the users that will influence the purchasing manger to pick a certain product. The best way to get exposure to a new technology is to go after the smaller market segment of early adopters, because the rest of the main stream will be to opposed to new technology until they hear a buzz about it. To grow the buzz they will target the early adopters. Their plan includes blogger outreach programs, conversational marketing in tech communities, participation in relevant trade shows and un-conferences and a website that is built for community interactions. For this example you are buying screwdrivers for screws.
To choose between the two you have to figure out if you need hammers or screwdrivers. Are the problems nails or screws? This is a very important question at the strategy level. Do you go after purchasing managers or early adopters? When we apply the questions further down, it makes less of a difference.
If we ignore the strategy, and start to apply the question to the tactics, it makes less of an impact. Is it better to do a blogger outreach program or print ads in a trade magazine? In theory you can do a blogger outreach program to reach the purchasing managers, and you can probably use a print ad to reach some early adopters. The effectiveness may vary so it still matters somewhat, but you can impact both the nails and the screws with the tactics.
Now lets take our example down to the execution or production level. In the first strategy, we need to build a website that shows features and benefits. In the second strategy we need build a website with community features. On a tactical level, we could build a site that does both, so the questions isn’t very important, but from a production standpoint, does it matter what language the site is built in? Lets say that the first marketing group that is selling hammers to pound nails has built a specialty in Microsoft’s .NET environment, and they build dynamic websites using the language C# (c-sharp). The second group that is selling screwdrivers for screws uses open-source technology, and builds their dynamic websites using the language PHP (hypertext pre-processor). The question becomes, does it matter what the website is written in?
The answer is yes and no. In one way, the question is irrelevant. You can build a site that shows features and benefits in either language. You can also build a site that has community features in either language. Yes there are differences, but it can, and has been done both ways, and they both work. In comparison to the whether the strategy is the right tool is infinitely more important than this production question. For this reason, I say that the question is irrelevant. That is the “no” part of the answer; here comes the “yes”.
Questions of execution are not usually a zero sum proposition. It is rare that there is one “right” way and every other way is wrong. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. The real point is that due to the specialization of talent and ability each person or firm will be better at a few ways of doing something, and less good at other perfectly acceptable ways of doing things. Most often, it’s better to the let the people responsible for execution or production to do it “their” way. They will be better and more proficient at it, and because of that it will make a difference. If your professional service team prefers hammers to screwdrivers, let them drive nails. At the end of the day, what you really want is two pieces of wood joined together, whether it was done with nails or screws.
The long and the short of it this, pay attention to the decisions that matter, and don’t make decisions based the lower level pieces. You wouldn’t make the decision on what advertising agency to use based on their copywriters use of the word “pleased” instead of “happy”. You make the decision based on the brand strategy, and the copywriter’s ability to use the right “voice”. Make the decision based on the big picture, and let the people who make the product worry about the production.
Posted in Doin' it right, TQM - Total Quality Mistake | November 23rd, 2007 No Comments »
This post will be short, but very important. If you really want to drive prospects away from your website, make them register or provide you with a bunch of information before you let them see what they want.I understand that the data we collect about our potential customers is valuable, but if you ask for it at the wrong time, you will lose them. From time to time I am involved in creating web applications that are customer facing. Before talking to a potential client, I like to look at what already exists that is close to what they are trying to do. More often than not, I cannot actually see any because I am asked to register with the site before I can get enough of a look at what I came to see to tell if its noteworthy, or even relevant to what I am doing.Give away some information, then ask for the visitors information to go further. Never block the first few steps of your lead or sales funnel with a registration screen. Save it for later.Even if you put it at the end, where you might think people will ignore it the most, the worst that will happen is that your leads will be MORE qualified because they are really and truly are interested.
Posted in TQM - Total Quality Mistake | November 6th, 2007 1 Comment »
Albuquerque Barcamp 2 was held at the Media Arts Lab at the University of New Mexico on September 15th 2007. This year had a smaller turn out than last year did, but everyone who showed up presented something. I brought down all my podcasting gear and recording the entire event, but as it turns out almost every presentation required the visuals in order to make ay sense. This is always a danger when recording such events, but usually we get some pretty good stuff anyway. This year, however, really yielded only one presentation that could even remotely be understood without seeing what the presenter had on the projector.
The biggest reason for not being able to use most of the audio this year is because most of the presentation was based on the coding of website and web applications. Most of the attendees were guru’s in python (a web coding language) using zope or django. Soon I will get up the one presentation that could be (mostly) understood without the visuals up in the podcast feed (there are some charts that would be helpful, but the premise is understandable). By the way, that presentation is from Kevin Silver.
My overall take of Barcamp is not that is was bad, but that last years was better for a few reasons. The first is just due to the fact that there were a few more people there. This point is dwarfed by the next, which is that the diversity of topics last year was far greater. We had designers, front end coders, back end coders, and some that don’t fit into those categories at all, but gave really presentations on web related topics (i.e. taxonomy, usability and disability accessibility). I hope that next time the community in Albuquerque will come through and offer a greater scope of topics from a larger pool of talent.
Posted in Announcments and News, New Mexico | September 24th, 2007 1 Comment »
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