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Not everything worth measuring can be measured. Sometimes we measure things just because we can, even though they are not really worth measuring. As times change, some things that were worth measuring 20 years ago, aren’t anymore. I think the above holds true for both marketing and life. June 23rd, 2010 |
Perhaps more so than anything else in an organization, its Social Media success starts and stops at the top. It has nothing to do with the right or wrong way of doing business; it has everything to do with being compatible with the online world and/or the Social Media space. An organization with an open culture is more likely to have an open Social Media policy. They are more likely to embrace the transparency nature of the online world. On the other hand, companies who are struggling with Social Media and probably a lot of other things online don’t have to look very far for the reason. More often than not, its rigid structure and closed doors have already determined its fate online. Think of it this way: if a CEO panics and defends like crazy when she sees a bad review online, where does that leave her employees? Naturally, they defend like crazy just as their boss does — nobody wants to get yelled at or blamed on by the boss. This in turn leads to deletion of criticisms and negative comments which could lead to one of two things: 1) more criticisms or 2) worse, no more feedback from the consumers. Because of its free/cheap nature, Social Media could be wildly underestimated of its importance. Boss’ thinking 101: More money, more important. Free? Not so important. While it’s perfectly okay to experiment things online externally, you should treat it as part of your job to educate internally — especially your boss(es) — about this new and exciting online world. Let’s face it, all the right strategies and content don’t matter if your boss says, “No, I don’t want the world to see this.” June 22nd, 2010 |
When Internet was first created in the 1970s, its leading designers, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, tried really hard to solve two problems: #1) how to design a system that seamlessly links lots of other networks, and #2) how to design a network that is future-proof. The solution was surprisingly simple, and it became the base of almost all other major networks online. Firstly, there is no central ownership or control. Meaning that no single personnel or organization could gather enough power to decide who should be part of the network, or what the network could be used for. Secondly, the system isn’t optimized for any single application. Music, data, image, movie, porn, the network doesn’t care. It transmits and treats everything equally. Because of these two basic protocols, disruption online is simply a feature, not a bug. And it’s not something we could stop. We are not just talking about someone writing an application that destroys the current music industry, or building a network that stumps the classified ads revenue for the newspaper industry. Also included in these disruptions are: viruses, malwares, “botnets”, or even “cyber terrorism”. Understand that the disruptive nature of the Internet is by design, not a mistake, and not something that you could control, is the very first step for you to understand and utilize the Internet. [Note: "Disruption is a feature, not a bug" comes from John Naughton's article, Everything you need to know about the Internet. A great read.] June 20th, 2010 |
Businesses get scared of bad press more than they should. Think twice before making decisions solely based on bad press. Taking away the “bad” word of mouth (WOM) element could also stop the viral effect which you worked so hard to get altogether. More importantly, it might not work again, even if you decide to do the exact same thing later. Customers don’t always know what they want. Especially the loudest ones. They could be saying one thing and meaning something entirely different. Most of the time, when people say “bad”, they don’t really mean bad. Instead, they are telling you that it’s something which they don’t understand and aren’t ready to accept or deal with as of this moment. I don’t think taking away the WOM element is the way to go here. Now isn’t the time to be lazy or scared. You should feel blessed that people are talking about you (over your competitors or anything/anyone else). You were lucky enough to have found an edge, so keep up the good work. But remember to educate your customers. Make them see your vision, show them your thoughts, and explain to them why things are the way they are. Rather than trying to mute the negative comments, work hard on getting rid of the fear your customers might have. June 19th, 2010 |
There is a difference between making something on TV so that you can sell ads, and making something so that people will watch. Just as there is a difference between creating a website so you can sell stuff, and creating a website to help people solve their problems. And it could very well be the only difference between failing and succeeding. June 18th, 2010 |
Perhaps there is a reason why you are miserable everyday, if you spend everyday working to stretch the lies that your company is telling so that it resembles just a little bit of truth. Everyday, you suck it up and spend most of your energy trying to convince your peers (and yourself) that what you are doing actually matters, instead of just doing it. Maybe being happy is merely a choice. But if the choice needs us to jump off a bridge, would you do it? June 17th, 2010 |
As I was driving the other day, I saw there were some fruit stands on the side of the road. So I stopped and bought some cherries. It turns out that the “fresh” cherries were not only overpriced, they also didn’t taste good. Sometimes we can’t avoid bad purchases. You see, I didn’t have enough information at the time of my purchase to make a better decision. And there are some businesses who are counting on that. You know, the miracle diet pills or the guaranteed get rich overnight programs. The Internet could play an important role on stopping us from making bad purchases. Or at the very least, minimize it. The key though, isn’t to complain about the bad ones, because people generally don’t have a lot of interests in hearing what doesn’t benefit them. Instead, make an effort to talk about the great ones. Make it so that your friends can’t help (and won’t forget) but to choose the great businesses when they are buying something. June 15th, 2010 |
AS marketing often focus on getting more people, I think it’s important not to fall out of sync with the rest of the business does. Ultimately, you are selling something. You are asking people to pay you, with money, time, attention, whatever. So here is something to think about:
While it’s getting more and more expensive to get people in group #1, perhaps marketing should work with other departments to reach people in group #2 and #3. June 14th, 2010 |
As Apple leaps past Microsoft in market share, Steve Ballmer isn’t worried because “94 times out of a 100 somebody picks a Windows PC.” I think Microsoft should be worried though, mainly because they seem to be struggling to get into online mode. The root of all online growth comes from “remarkableness”, that is, the likeliness of people spreading the words about your company/product/service. More often than not, the growth is organic, not structural. Attention online is not bought or even planned. They are earned, and often come from places that you don’t expect. There is no one model to follow. Even if you duplicate EVERYTHING Google has done up to this point, you are not likely to achieve the same kind of success. I think one of the major problems with Microsoft isn’t that they don’t have enough talent or experience. They do. Unfortunately, all the brilliant minds seem to be finding to ways to cancel each other out which ultimately result in compromises. Compromises don’t lead to bad products. They simply prevent people from talking about you because you have already found and resolved any controversies before they even begin. Microsft doesn’t need to be very good — they have done plenty of that and people expect them to. They need to be great. While controversies don’t always translate into greatness, greatness, when it’s first born, is almost always controversial. June 12th, 2010 |
Most retailers believe that the Web has made things easy for them. That’s wrong. The correct expression is: The Web has made things that used to be complicated, simple. Things such as finding a good location for a storefront or shelf space for products; having customers to look through your inventory and finding what they need. Things don’t cost nearly as much or take as much time as it did before. But in doing so, the Web has now created a new challenge for us; a challenge that is far greater than anything we have experienced before. More importantly, a challenge that can’t be solved by time or money. …not by purchasing a 30-second time-slot on NBC during prime time anyway. Today, everyone on the Web is fighting over something that’s hard to scale: attention. I say it’s hard to scale because even though Yahoo is still among the top websites in terms of traffic or time spent on site, their revenue or market share is dropping by the minute. Twitter, even with its tremendous growth in the past year, has yet found a real way to generate income. At the same time, a tiny website by a local artist could be making more money than he has ever dreamed of before the Internet-age. For businesses to succeed online, their focus has to shift away from what used to be important for businesses. And that’s an extremely tough transition for most people. It means that people have to re-learn, re-organize, and more importantly, re-value what they have known for years. It also means that what made them “middle or upper management material”, no longer matters that much. If I tell you that the things you learned for past 20 years at your job are all of the sudden useless, it’s not unreasonable that the first reaction from you is to disagree with me, is it? Except the things that made you successful aren’t really useless. They are just buried under those everyday tasks you choose to spend your time on. You choose to do what has proven to work — even though you can see that they don’t work as well as they did before — instead of spending your effort to try something that you have tried (and succeeded and put behind you) a long time ago: getting out of your comfort zone and take risks. Now back to my point: In order to live online, businesses need to live in online mode. Offline mode doesn’t work because people spend too much time and resources on things that could be done easily online. What used to take months of carefully planning and executing now takes weeks, or perhaps even days. People get lost with all these free “leftover” time. They try to fill them with more “offline” stuff, and overlook the important “online” stuff. The bottom line: there are still many important decisions to be made. You just have to realize that they are not the ones you have grown accustomed to. June 10th, 2010 |
If you have a 9 to 5 job, chances are, you have people working for you. Whether you are a leader of a small team in a big corporation, or head of a small business, I think it’s important to bring a little happiness to the workplace. You see, most of the people I know work to simply get out of work. They work for the weekends and/or the annual 2-week vacation. But the truth is, whether you like it or not, your job still takes up a major chunk of your life. So here is a question for your ponder a little bit: What is it that you could offer your team, besides a raise and some time off, that will cheer them up during work one day out of a week? Who knows, the answer to that question (or the simple attempt of looking for it) might just be enough to change everything at work. June 10th, 2010 |
…if nobody is talking about you now. Perhaps your should first focus on making your customers talk, instead of inviting them to come. June 8th, 2010 |
I think there are three ways to beat your competition today: #1) Outspend them. This used to be the simplest way, except it doesn’t work that well anymore. But if you are willing to spend 10 times more than your competition to buy whatever it is that you need to buy (including cutting the price on your product or service), then you still have a chance to beat them. #2) Outwork them. If you are like almost all the businesses today, are not willing to spend more, then you should expect to work harder — a lot harder — than your competition in order to beat them. And by working harder, I don’t necessarily mean working longer. More research, better products, longer hours, whatever. #3) Out-luck them. Okay, so you don’t have enough money, and you are not willing to work your ass off, then I guess you are left with the only other option: luck. Maybe you will be at the right place at the right time tomorrow, and all of the sudden, you are on top of the world. And all I have to say to that is: Good luck! June 7th, 2010 |
I know some businesses who refuse to even try creating something remarkable due to the lack of their R&D budget. The chart below should make it quite clear that the amount of R&D spending power doesn’t necessarily translate into “remarkableness” of a business. Microsoft spent about 8 times as much on R&D as Apple did in 2009, but whose products do we choose to talk about more?
June 4th, 2010 |
Every since we were little, we were taught relentlessly to fit in. In fact, those who don’t fit in were often put in positions to “fail”. I work with people who insist that their websites should look like their competitors, that if they don’t have this or that (which their competitors have), then the website is simply not good enough. We tailor make our resumes to be exactly like someone else who is applying for the same opening. My point is, fitting in isn’t a bad thing, except the result is often average and in most cases, below average. I heard a great quote yesterday:
Marketing or just about anything else in life, originality isn’t born with fitting in. June 3rd, 2010 |
What’s the second largest search engine online? No, it’s not Yahoo or Bing. If we are to rank websites according to the most queries(searches) submitted daily, the second largest search engine in the world today, behind Google, is actually YouTube, which is also owned by Google. The sheer number of videos on YouTube, and the time which users spend on them is simply astonishing. According to the company, its daily traffic now exceeds more than 2 billion views a day – that’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all major US TV networks, COMBINED! As a business, if you haven’t exploring or experimenting on YouTube, you are missing out. People look for and more than likely find video solutions on YouTube everyday. Anything from how to improve your badminton skills to how to make a delicious spam dinner. The bottom line: in most cases, a 90-second video clip on how to use your product works far better than the 20-page manual you have right now. June 1st, 2010 |
I think we are entering an age where “traditional” brands no longer matter. And by traditional, I mean a business’ name, sign, symbol,color combination or slogan. As far as I am concerned, we could be drinking Google cola, searching on Pepsi.com, use Sony’s Internet Explorer, driving Starbucks cars, or drinking Panda Express’ coffee, and we wouldn’t care a bit. As Jake Shimabukuro explained in the video below, he used to use many tools to “dress up” his music. But it wasn’t until he decided to go back to basics, that people started to see his true talent and who he really is: quite possibly the best ukulele player you’ll ever see in your life. Perhaps you ought to ask yourself this: when it comes down to stripping your brand naked, and taking away all but the essence of your business, what exactly are you left with? May 29th, 2010 |
When I talk to business owners whom I am building websites for, one question often comes up that almost never has any precise answer: “how many sales do you expect to make with your website daily/monthly/yearly?” 10 out of 10 times, the answer usually is “as many as possible”. And that’s a really bad answer. I think most of us don’t realize that we can not afford “as many as possible”. Not because we couldn’t handle the logistics, but because we don’t have nearly as enough resources to reach “as many as possible” in the first place. I think figuring out the right number of customers for your business to survive is vital for a startup. Knowing exactly how much money you need to make from each customer will help you to manage your time, effort and resources more efficiently. Keep in mind that sometimes it helps to set your feet on the ground first before reaching for the sky. May 27th, 2010 |
This is an interesting talk @ TED Global 2009 from Rory Sutherland. He argues that “advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself.” Worth a listen. May 25th, 2010 |
This is the follow-up talk Sir Ken Robinson did after his fabled 2006 talk @ TED on “radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids’ natural talents can flourish.” May 24th, 2010 |
I’d do the following:
Lastly, I’d do all of the above for 6 months before I put any money into advertising my website. May 23rd, 2010 |
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