Return on Intention

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.

Whether you are a marketer, business owner or cubicle warrior it pays to understand people. Most of the really critical decisions made in organizations are related to the touch points, or the areas and means that an organization comes into contact with is stakeholders ( customers, employees, partners, etc.). Whether its a new market campaign or a revised company policy there is a high likelihood that the effort will effect people, so getting to know people is crucial for any professional.

This advice seems to be pretty self evident, but you might be surprised how many professionals forget this. It’s so easy to throw yourself into your work and spend all your time trying to get more done, all the while believing that it’s the most effective way to increase your value and your professional growth. Believe me and my 80 hour work weeks.

Its good to keep up with your industry, and just as Thomas Edison used to say “Genius was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”, so working hard is good too, but to really understand people you need to spend time with them. Get out of your safety circle of colleges and friends and meet some new people. It will give you a different perspective, and often, insight. Especially if your job is to communicate a message to a market (people) its good to remember that not everyone thinks the same way you do. Go find those people who think differently and have a conversation.

The trend of websites (or other online presence) being the first point a potential customer comes into contact with a brand continues to grow. First impressions are lasting so getting this introduction right is pretty important. There are many opportunities to get feedback on how your online first impressions are going, such as survey tools like 4Q from iPerseptions and Avinash Kaushik or simply asking your customers. You can also glean some insight from your web analytics – look at things like bounce rate and page views per visit. These can identify how people are using your site, giving you some quantitative results, while the surveys and user polls give you qualitative results.

Always proceed with your best judgment, but then take the time to set up a feedback / improvement system to continually improve. Like many things on the web, getting this part right is usually done faster through quick test and improve cycles rather than months of contemplating the right move.

The key here is make sure that you are offering an experience for your user. Pay attention to not only what you are saying, but how your are saying it, and how it all looks. A good combination of content, presentation and interaction are the cornerstones of a good experience, so long as its unique.

Being unique is critical. With so much competition out there on the world wide web, it is easy to forget or get confused about who is who. Getting around this problem is the process of building a brand. Too often, however, people try to take a shortcut and end up shooting themselves in the foot.

Remember splash pages? Thankfully most of these monstrosities are now gone, but there was a time when the “splash page” was running rampant and out of control. Part of this tragedy can be linked to the early idea of the web being the new television, but a lot more of it had to do with trying to take an experience short cut. Instead of spending the time to make a compelling experience, these folks tried to throw so much sizzle at us in flashing, fast moving graphics hoping to blind us from the lack of steak.

While splash pages are now mostly gone, the tendency to take this short cut still exists. It is a good idea to try and be clever and push the envelop, but there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. This line comes in the form of the “use your mouse to chase down the moving navigation elements” and other such ill-conceived ideas. The biggest problem is that it can be hard to know where this line is until you’ve crossed it. Getting the user to chase your page elements around is interactive and can even be fun the first time, but when the novelty wears off it becomes frustrating and a waste of time. Its kind of like a one night stand. It seems like a fun adventure, but it’s no way to build a long lasting solid relationship. No one wants to be with (or be) the guy who is a lot of fun for the first few minutes but then falls short after that. Don’t let your first impression online be that guy. Marriages are built with the consistent guy, not the party guy. Spend 10 minutes on your own site everyday for a few weeks and see if you can find where it falls short.

Imagine a time way back before the internet. Before television. Before indoor plumbing. The year is 1805, and you’re a baker.

In the middle of the town is a common. If you are not familiar with commons its pretty much what it sounds like, common area used by all the towns folk to keep their livestock, plant gardens, etc. The commons is where the town gathered, worked and talked about the news of the day.  To be a successful business, it made sense to put your business on the land facing the commons. Location, Location, Location, right? The age old philosophy of “go where your customers are” was very important before yellow pages and search engines. So there you are, in your bakery on the edge of the commons, accessible to anyone in town who may want a loaf of wheat bread.

Relationships were the driver of business in this time. The people who chose to buy from a particular baker most likey did so because they  built a relationship with them day after day of talking in the commons or at the bakers shop. People liked to buy from people they know. To increase bread sales, the baker could go out into the commons after the morning rush and offer discounts to try his bread, or he could start an affinity program. The baker could also hire some local kids to sell his goods for a percentage of the profit, starting an early affiliate program. No matter what the plans where to keep the business going strong, it relied on personal relationships (at least personal as in “in person”).

It would be entirely possible for the baker to bake his goods at home, and then build a stand to sell out of in the commons. By doing this he wouldn’t actually need a storefront of his own, and he could just make his money from the stand he built. This works until the customers either leave the commons to go a new area, or the commons get purchased and his stand is longer allowed to be there. In either case, the work that he put into creating his stand, and making it accessible and comfortable to customers is all lost.

Fast forward a few hundred years to today. The commons are back. There called social networks. In much the same way as our earlier ancestors, businesses are realizing that building relationships with people can pay off. All the advantages ( and disadvantage) from back then are all back, and community is the new topic to pay attention to. With all the ways you can now reach out to your customers base, the question has been raised as to whether or not a company really needs a website anymore. There are so many new services out there like Facebook and Twitter that customers spend time on that it can seem like a companies website isn’t where the people are; however, what was true in 1805 is still true today.

The point of a company having a website is to control its online domain – the space that is theirs. Thats why they are called Domain Names. Companies could spend all day on Facebook just like our baker could have spent all day in the commons, but if the commons ever became unavailable, he was out of luck. Today, the online equivalent is actually even worse. Facebook wasn’t the first social network, and may not be the last. At some point someone will create a new social network that people think is better and they will jump ship and move to that one. Facebook did it to MySpace, and MySpace did it to Friendster before that. When that day comes, then all the hard work that was poored into Facebook will be gone. I don’t mean to pick on Facebook, pick any social networking platform you want, its the same deal. 200,000 Twitter followers won’t do you much good when Twitter shuts down.

The point here is to go ahead and go out into the social media world and explore. Experiment and learn. Leverage its technology to build community and its power to build your business. Do as much as you can, but always maintain your home turf. Maintain your website. Use it to give your customers an experience that Facebook doesn’t provide them. Make it the center of your universe, just like the bread store on the edge of the commons.

A budget will tell you more about what needs to happen than any specification sheet ever will. The purpose of budgeting isn’t to find out how much you can get away with not spending but is an exercise in insight. Developing a budget requires a company or person identify how much they CAN spend on a project. To get that information, it is necessary to first identify why the project is going to be done and what it is supposed to accomplish. ( Don’t spend $500 to get $400 of value. Also, don’t expect to spend $500 to get $1,000,000 of value. )

Often, this process is done the other way around. Someone gets an idea that they “need” something, and then put together a Request For Proposal (RFP) to find out how much it will cost by getting bids on it. This doesn’t seem bad on the surface, except that most of the RFPs I come across are copies of some other RFP for someone else, or an old one that is reused with only a few words changed in it. To say the least, these RFPs have missed the whole point of an RPF.

This happens most with technology related purchases. It seems that some companies base their decision to buy something on some technology that is hot, or that other companies like them are buying. “Well, XYZ company just got a new widgetizer 5000, and they are doing good, we should get a widgetizer 5000, too.” This line of thinking does not a good strategy make.

A new technology foundation for your website (read CMS) or a new shopping cart will not increase the value of your website on its own. A good web strategy is not defined by what software packages you put on the back end. You can run a website on anything if your strategy is sound. If your strategy is not, no software package in the world will help you out.

Magento is an open source shopping cart and storefront that seems to be getting a lot of attention lately. I’m in the midst of working with Magento right now for a few clients myself. It has some really great features, but it is not the greatest thing to hit the internet. It will not improve your conversion rate. It has ton’s of features, but that also means its very complicated. One client requested it from the C-suite, and when the employees that actually have to run the software found out, they go scared. “We have seen Magento, and we don’t get it.”

We have been shown time and time again that sometimes what makes a technology so successful and useful is by what it DOESN’T do, not what it does do. Don’t buy bullet points on a box. The only way to know what features you need and what features you don’t is by understanding what you need to accomplish, and why. Start with the strategy. Plan it out, make charts. Understand as much as you can about the outcomes you want, and then work backwards to arrive at what you need. When all that is done, then go software shopping.