Return on Intention

Standard economic theory says the value of a good or service is directly related to the supply of that good or service in contrast to the market’s desire for that good or service. Simple supply and demand. If there is a high supply and low demand, the value is lower. If the supply is low and demand is high, the value is higher. What does this have to do with blogging? Everything.

This isn’t just a blogging problem, but a problem for all social media channels. The early theory of social media was that anyone could publish and we as a community could produce content just as good as the broadcast media, if not better. The best part of social media channels is that you don’t have to interact with concepts, topics or brands that you don’t want to interact with. When you watch TV, you have to watch whatever commercial comes on, but on social media channels, you can pick and choose what is most relevant to you. This is where the problem starts. In order to participate you have to be able to find what is most relevant to you. With new blogs being started everyday, the supply side of equation is exploding.

Let’s say you are really into pig farming. You can stay up to date on the industry of pork farming by reading blogs that cover that market. If there are only a few blogs, then great, you can stay up on the times pretty easily. Now imagine that there are over 1,000 blogs on pork farming. You can’t read them all—you’ve got pigs to farm. So what do you read and what don’t you read? And what about all the podcasts, Facebook groups and Ning sites? You can’t keep up, and trying to becomes a time-consuming pain. Staying on top of the industry is harder now with all of the choices.

When there was one blog on the subject, it was very valuable.  There wasn’t any pain involved in keeping up when it was simple. But now if there are 100 or 1,000 blogs, you can’t read them all, so you pick a few and stick with them. Now if you read four, then each of them is only a quarter of the value that the first one was. The tragic part is that the first blog on the subject is probably still as relevant as ever. Blogging is hard work, but the value is diminished by each new entrant regardless of how hard the first blogger works.

To have a successful blog, podcast, or personal brand you have to have a reputation for providing value to your community. This hasn’t changed and never will, but now you have to work harder just to be as valuable as you were before. This becomes even more true if you are just starting out now. Building a reputation for value in a sea of competition is harder than fighting a value recession. Perhaps its time to think about that blog or podcast you’ve been meaning to start.

Advertising, and marketing communications are generally viewed as an unwanted intruder. If you get it in your mail box it’s called junk mail. If you get it in your email it’ s spam. This view is not based on marketing communications being inherently bad, but rather it has come about from years of marketers and communication professionals sending irrelevant messages to us. If it’s irrelevant it becomes irritating. Basically, as marketers we have done this to ourselves. Most often I don’t think this was done intentionally and certainly not maliciously, but rather because we had mass media, so we got used to (and rewarded) for getting the message out to as many people as possible. The industry got too focused on quantity over quality.

Email is a great example. Email is so easy and inexpensive to use that spam has gotten out of control. When you are judged by the size of your list it becomes more important to blast out to 5 million than it is to blast to the 5 thousand that should get it.  As it stands, email is a fantastic medium. Social media is the new hot thing, but you don’t always want to talk about doing business in the middle of the party. Look at email as “Private Media”, the corner of the room where you and your buddy go to get away from the rest of the party just for a few seconds to really engage with each other. Email can be powerful, but not if its just a conduit for spam. Here is how to make sure you do it right.

Clean your list

Forget quantity. Go for quality. Look at your open rates and systematically cut out the bottom 10%. If they aren’t opening your emails then sending it to them makes no sense. Its a good idea to send them a plain text only email first, making sure they still want to be on the list. If they don’t, or don’t respond, remove them.

Segment your list

Not all your customers are the same. There are groups in your list that  have different interests. Segmenting your lists, and then sending different emails to each group that has more of the types of content they want will make your email more valuable to them. When the information is valuable, then its not considered spam. This is easiest, and most overlooked part of good email marketing, but it can make all the difference in the world.

Henry Ford once said “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Henry believed that innovation needed to come from inside because most people don’t really know what they want, just that they want out of the options that already exist.

Craig Newmark has a very different story to tell. Craig said that he essentially never made any decision about Craigslist, his users told him what they wanted and he implemented it.

Both Craigslist and Ford are successful companies, so which way is right? Do you get your ideas from customers or do you innovate internally? Both. Innovation often comes from insight, and that can happen both inside and outside the company. Here are few quick tips to help you create the potential for insight, and hopefully innovation.

Listen

A good start is to listen to your customers. Its a good idea to NOT rule out the feedback of your customers, it can’t hurt. This may not lead to the next great innovation (although it might), but at the very least it can point out some of the pain points they have that can give you a good idea of where to look for the innovation. Understanding how your product or service fits into your customers lives can help you find new and innovative ideas that can really make a difference.

Eat your own dog food

This point is related to the point above, but from a new perspective. To really understand the highlights and short comings of your product or services you have to experience it. I don’t mean drive your companies new car for an afternoon. Live with it for months. Fully integrate your offering into your own life as best you can.

Get to you know your place in the ecosystem

Your product or service fits into your customers live’s not in isolation, but in the midst of all the rest of the stuff in their lives. A coffee mug is not an isolated experience. The “user” of the coffee mug uses it in conjunction with their coffee pot, coffee grinder, milk, creamer, sugar and their morning newspaper to create an entire morning routine experience. By understanding your product or services place in this larger experience you can then try to see how your offering can  increase the pleasure or effectiveness of the overall experiences. That’s innovation.

Look at other industries

Every industry has gone through wrenching changes that have created amazing innovations to deal with the crisis.  While this can be challenging, if you can identify the current state of your industry and match that to the state of another industry before a time of change, you might find some insight into your  industries next innovation.

It’s new years eve, I’ve had my annual sushi fest with friends, and now it’s time to start thinking about what to change next year. Before you break out the pen and paper to make your to do list, take a few minutes to make your don’t do anymore list. Often times we get confused into thinking that being busy is the same as being productive. If you are anything like me, you spend a lot of time telling people to step outside their comfort zone and stop doing what they have always done because that’s that way it’s always been done. This new year is a good time to step back and practice what we preach.

There seems to be a rash of meaningless slogans going around. Don’t get me wrong, a good slogan or tag line is hard to craft. It should be meaningful and serve as an accurate indicator of what you or your product stands for. Often a good slogan or tag line is aspirational, and can call out the unique selling proposition of a brand or organization. It can be a hard to encapsulate so much meaning into a short, memorable phrase that is clear to both the market and the members of the organization. This is really easy to get wrong. All this aside, there should be some pretty obvious indicators that can point out when this process has gone awry. The first indicator that a tag line should be reconsidered is, well, if the phrase actually doesn’t mean anything. “The Difference” is a good example. I saw a sign on the back of a truck today that read “Our people make the difference”. What does that even mean? What difference? It could be a bad difference. Really all this sign conveys is that they have people, and that creates a difference. That is hardly unique or even slightly compelling. That slogan will not help me remember or choose a service provider. If you have a difference, say what it is in terms that are meaningful to your customers. Just a thought.

Global warming is a topic that gets  lot of air time. I’ve seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and it sounded very convincing. I’ve also heard that the reason for the temperatures rising doesn’t have anything to do with global warming, but have more to do with outside circumstances surrounding the measurement tools used to collect the data. Personally, I think that paying attention to our impact on the environment and reducing our consumption of energy is the right thing to do whether we have a threat of  becoming extinct or not, but global warming isn’t really the point of this post. Accurate measurement is.

The saying goes “You care about what you measure”, after all how can you improve something if you don’t know how your doing with it, or whether your getting better or worse at it. In this example, climate change is what you care about, so its measured. To get a measurement you need a tool for collecting data and a system for analyzing that data into meaning. If you want to increase your businesses sales, you have to track the sales over time. This will tell you whether or not your improving or not. This doesn’t help much on its own, you also need to know what changes have taken place that can be used to explain the movement of the trend. A big problem with trying to identify the actions that cause the changes are to figure out what actually makes a difference and what doesn’t.

Assume that I try to see what has caused a 10% increase in my sales. The first thing I notice is that on the days my sales increased I wore a blue tie. I might be tempted to mandate that all sales people wear blue ties. While there is some data that indicates the color of your clothing can have an impact on how people perceive you and therefor have an impact on whether or not they want to do business with you, it is not a proven fact that my blue tie has anything to do with my performance. It might just as likely be true that I happen to wear my blue tie on the sames days that the state employees get their paychecks, so they are more apt to buy because they have the money now. So what impacts the increased sales, the tie or the cash on hand.

The most believable story I have heard against global warming is that the thermometers used to gather the temperature readings  are located near airports in most major cities. When the airports where built they were located outside of the city. As the cities grew, the large amount of concrete and asphalt from the city development crept closer to the where the temperature readings where taken. The concrete and asphalt held the heat from the day longer and raised the temperature of the immediate environment making the readings of the thermometers higher than they were previously. Whether or not this is actually the case, it illustrates the errors that can occur in metric gathering and analyzing. Check your metric gathering tools and see what other elements could effect its readings or your analysis of them.

There are more books published in a year then any human being could possibly digest. Business books are no exception. Whether it’s the latest marketing tactic book or the newest breakthrough in human resources, there will be a dozen books dedicated to the subject. I’m not complaining, I love reading about a subject from multiple view points ( I enjoyed both Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye), but there is a pattern emerging in the business literature category. It seems no matter what the subject matter, there is a case being made for either a new position or promoting an existing one to the C-suite. The conference room is going to get crowded.

Whether or not every position that has had a case made for it reaching the C-suite actually gets there is up to each organization to decide, but the fact that the case is made so frequently suggests a few points to consider.

1. Most departments or professions feel under represented. The only reason to be part of the C-suite is so that your department has more of an influence on major decisions. This suggests that many people believe that their profession is either under represented or that other departments are taking more of the spotlight than they deserve. Everyone just wants to have a voice, right?
2. Interdepartmental communication needs some improvement. A persons belief that their point of view is over looked or at least not defended when they are not present is a good indication that organizations still suffer from departmental silos.

The strength of a brand relies on the ability of the organization to work toward a shared set of ideals and vision. Each department needs to be performing it’s function to support the goals of the organization. With departmental silos, it can be difficult to rally functions toward a common goal. As the economy returns to one driven by marketing instead of advertising, unity will become more and more important.