Author: themshow

Compliance by Design

While doing some product marketing research about 3 years ago I came across the idea of compliance by design. Instead of creating tasks for your users as part of your product (fill out the activity report at the end of the week) you build the product or process so that there’s no way the user can avoid it. In the activity report example a solution would be sending out all assignments via Salesforce.com and then you could monitor and report on activities without the user having to do anything beyond the job itself.

This can be even more useful in products, having parts that only fit together in the correct configuration, making it impossible to assemble incorrectly. Superior design means no errors during assembly, no expense from failure due to improperly assembled products, and no support costs during assembly or during use of an improperly assembled product.

Daily Life

Digging Out

Today I finally had a chance to look at the big picture. For regular readers, the last time I did a progress check was the end of Q3. Unfortunately, I’ve been in a “Just survive the day” mode since then. Q4 was a tough time for the family, Q1 was the start of a new job and packing the house and putting it on the market so we could sell and move in Q2. Of course this will be short lived with the lovely Carin about 1 month from her due date now, but at least there are a few minutes to catch my breath and look back at the past 3 quarters, and see if we can’t at least see where we are on the big map.

For new readers, I break down the year on four fronts – Family, Personal, Professional and Financial. On the family front we’re moving along and although we’re still dealing with some grief and illness, things are doing well. Professionally I have been incredibly fortunate, over the past 6 years I’ve worked with fantastic people and been able to move up to higher profile projects. My first book, B2B Marketing Confessions, is completed and being formatted for release and I’m very excited about that. Financially, the home sale went very well, so what used to be a boat anchor has now jumpstarted the woefully underfunded college fund.

Strangely, the only gap I have is on the personal front. Last year I had 3 goals: lose some weight, get some running coaching, and see some live music. I lost about half the weight I wanted to and have kept it off so that wasn’t all bad. In running my switch to mid-foot strike has truly been life changing and fantastic. For music I had an 80’s revival and saw Peter Gabriel and Def Leppard, shows I never had a chance to see. With this year having been so berserk, I haven’t done anything on this front. I’m kind of avoiding running right now, about a month ago I got really sick after a run and it’s kind of like the food you eat before you get the flu, you just have no taste for it at all without starting to feel queasy. I got a new camera but spending money is definitely a lame-o goal (in past years I’ve had Photo Camp as a goal, but no chance of that this year).

So what the hell should I do? I’d like to golf a bit since I haven’t played in the past 3 years but that and skiing seem impossible with a newborn on the way. There are clay tennis courts here, I should get motivated and see what goes on up there. The Cape Cod Marathon relay was pretty cool last year in spite of the logistical hassle of team management and a hurricane. I’m not really into these “runs through a lot of mud while setting your ass on fire” races that are all the rage. What’s a fun personal goal to have?

Daily Life

Where’s the Register

While enjoying a beer in the shadow of the Museum of Fine Arts while Tim Street was in town, he pointed to the cash register and said (I’m paraphrasing) “That’s the problem with “New Media”. There’s none of those.”

I see this problem becoming more common. Seth Godin has written at length about today’s worker being an artist. While I believe this to be true there’s the problem that many artists fail (and/or have no interest) in setting up a cash register. This weekend the lovely Carin took me to see the almost equally lovely Diana Krall at Tanglewood. It was a great show and we were impressed with the opening act, a singer named Denzal Sinclaire. The best way I can describe it is that if R. Kelly were to produce an album for Nat King Cole, it would probably sound a lot like him. I was digging deep and I don’t think I’ve ever heard another man with a better voice in concert, and may never since there’s no way to hear Luther Vandross.

As he wrapped up I immediately took down his name so I could buy some music after the show. There was nothing at the merch tent, which wasn’t much of a surprise, but what killed me is that there’s really nothing online either. DenzalSinclaire.com is just a place holder, Amazon has a single track and then you can import CDs, it actually looks easier to get the CDs on eBay. iTunes has a few single tracks and that’s it.

This is the kind of stuff that hits me hard. I spend the majority of my hours trying to connect buyers and sellers. To be standing around waving cash and saying “I want to give you this money” is a missed opportunity for both sides. It is entirely possible that Mr. Sinclaire has all the money he needs and is not concerned, but in the event that’s not the case, I would refer him to Matthew Ebel, I’m sure he could set up something nice that would work for everyone. Please, don’t make me buy used CDs from eBay, don’t let the middle man take the money I’d rather put in your register.

Daily Life

Weekend with Paul

My Dad and I are both big music fans and over the past couple of months we’ve gotten into watching concerts on Blu-Ray. Watching a show on the big TV in surround sound in HD is not the same as being at a show, but between perfect sound, really seeing what’s happening on stage and not having to spend an hour getting out of the parking lot, you are getting a lot of value for the $20 or so you pay.

This weekend I watched two concert documentaries – one on the 25th Anniversary of Paul Simon’s Graceland, and the other on Paul McCartney’s Concert for New York that was done right after 9/11. I was surprised to find that I had the same opinion of both of them. While it was great to see behind the scenes I found that I got tired of that quickly and I thought both of them would have hit harder if they were not as long. I’m pretty sure I would have enjoyed watching the shows more than the making behind them. There were some interesting moments though, you get a taste of what it must be like for a former Beatle not to be able to go anywhere without drawing attention, and I hadn’t paid much attention to the controversy that was created when Paul Simon went to South Africa. Unfortunately while looking with a marketing eye I tend to cynically wonder about the line between doing art and taking advantage of political events to sell more music. Paul Simon makes some interesting points on that from the artists view.

As the music industry continues to be blown to bits I also find myself hoping that with the big data that comes out of things like iCloud that we might see more interesting stuff come back to light. After seeing Billy Joel in the concert for New York I went looking for some of the shows he had done back in the 90’s with Elton John just to see what they sounded like. With the exception of some Japanese imports it seems like there’s not much out there. I can’t be the only person out there with obscure 80’s remixes.

If you’ve seen any good shows in HD, do share. There are a bunch of older shows that are great but were prior to, or didn’t take advantage of HD, like Diana Krall in Paris. Chris Botti in Boston is the favorite so far. I was a big fan of his original material, but I enjoy the standards too and this show takes full advantage of the sound and video.

Now if I could only get U2-3D in HD…

Daily Life

Radical Departure

Hello loyal readers, I’m glad you are still around considering the lack of posts. I’ve decided that this site will be getting a makeover soon. Since there’s marketing content every week over at Marketing Over Coffee I end up posting over here about more personal items so I’ll probably start using the JW5150 link to this site. The big question is: What has been going on? Where are the quarterly goals? Why is there a picture from a barn here?

We’ve rebooted for 2012. With 2011 ending on a very sad note January became interesting quickly as I was recruited over to Glance Networks. By this point we were already beginning the process of moving out of the Boston area. All of this came to bear in the first half of this year. I’ve been traveling with the new job, our house went on the market and sold in 3 days over asking price, we have moved to the farthest reaches of Western Massachusetts and did I mention that we have a baby on the way?

Like most plans, ours for 2012 did not survive the first contact with the enemy, but we are doing well overall. We are now a short distance to both sets of parents and they are excited to spend time with their grandson, we’ve jettisoned the life-sucking mortgage making college education a possibility, and there are horses in our back yard.

I’ve completed another round of edits on the book and am dying to kick it out the door for the last time. So that’s why you haven’t seen me around the virtual water cooler, the insanity of the past six months has paved the way for me to actually begin writing again on the weekends so I hope to see more of you around this space. I hope your summer is off to a good start and perhaps we can catch up at Tanglewood.

Brain Buster

Unintended Consequences

In the mornings I listen to This American Life. I’ve been commuting again after a year off so I’ve had a stack of them to go through and it’s great to be listening to podcasts again. I’m only about 3 weeks behind and this morning I heard a story about Colorado Springs and the fact that a tax increase was shot down and so they started turning off street lights. When residents would call the would actually be told “Remember the $200 increase that got shot down? Yeah, that’s why. If you want your light back on it will be $150.”

Oh, you want us to landscape the park again? $2,500. And yet that wasn’t the part that got me thinking, it was the next call – a man just coughed up$300 to get the lights on his street back on and a city councilor said “You know if you had just voted for the increase you only would have had to pay $200 and you would have your lights, your park, snowplowing and other services.” the man responded something to the effect of “No, this way is better”. As the Councillor then summarized – the citizen was willing to pay a premium because he didn’t trust his elected officials enough to use the funds to his satisfaction.

In our town, you pay for your trash bags. I like this model – if you recycle and don’t buy a lot of crap you have less trash and you pay less. You could argue that this penalizes large families and the poor since larger families generate more trash and the price of the bags are a higher percentage of a poorer family’s income. You could also counter that the constitution says nothing about your right to generate unlimited trash. Both would be right (unless there’s some amendment I missed the memo on). You’d be right in both cases. And this creates a whole slew of interesting economic questions and unintended consequences: Was it better to just have the trash fee as part of the property tax or does this discourage recycling? Is volume of trash a concern? What happens in the parks as everyone sneaks trash into public trash cans (I see it all the time)? People “exporting” trash to work or neighboring towns?

Until the dawn of both the spreadsheet and the internet the cost of measuring these things was more expensive than just saying “throw it all into the property tax”. Now with more ability to track changes down to the dollar, and share that with the public we may be poised for significant change here. Add to that the financial pressure of public jobs under scrutiny for benefits expenses far above the public sector and the pressure for change increases.

As I was thinking about it I saw a related example in front of me, a new technology, the Waze GPS app, alerted me to a speed trap. As I slowed down to the limit I thought “There goes $150 that’s going to have to get squeezed out of the budget from somewhere.”

Productivity Booster

Gamification

Over the last 3 weeks I’ve had 2 trips to San Francisco, one for Cloudforce and the other for Sales 2.0. At both of these events I heard the hype surrounding Gamification – adding game play elements to your business process. At Cloudforce Mark Benioff was talking about their acquisition of Rypple. In addition to whatever employee review/feedback system you have you give employees the ability to award badges to each other that show up in the user’s profile (in this case in Salesforce.com).

The central idea to gamification is that people will spend hours on end chasing digital trinkets, and this seems obvious based on the success of things like Farmville, Foursquare, or sticker chasing on Get Glue. While researching yesterday I came across a great post (worth the read) claiming that gamification is BS, and while the argument has merit, that doesn’t mean it won’t work. As a friend of mine experienced in motivating sales people has said regarding their competitive nature: “I’ve seen them get in a fist fight over a bag of M&M’s”

After hearing about Rypple I came across a wide assortment of companies providing game functionality to the sales cycle such as ePrize, Bunchball, Badgeville and Hoopla (I have to admit, their ESPN style leaderboard eye candy is very cool). It will be interesting to see how many of these companies show up at Dreamforce this year. I’d go on about how well these tools can shape behavior, but the fact that I spend time checking in to 5 Guys Burgers and Fries so that I can continue to be the Foursquare Mayor is proof enough.

Podcasting

Hi, I’m Worthless

As much as we’d like our products do not work for everyone. In fact, for many businesses you need laser-like focus to separate yourself from the rest of the pack and find a market where you can survive. I saw this clearly this week as I was checking out a blog that had mentioned Glance. I’m always excited to find marketing and communications people that are interested in content to tell them about the Marketing Over Coffee library.

This time was a bit different, Anne mentioned that she can’t hear. Suddenly the value of that back library of audio content was approaching zero. The lesson learned is the same one we came to a few years back with the podcast – you need to test other channels to confirm you have the right fit. We got here when we saw that Podcast IPO was a phrase probably never to be heard.

We’ve been testing transcripts of more popular interviews (like the one with Seth Godin), eBooks like Chris’ On Heroes Project, and the Marketing Over Coffee Quarterly Report. (Now only 99 cents!) If you have any interesting stories about channel testing, please tell!

Brain Buster

HyperViral Video

After my litany of depressing news, here’s something interesting and fun:

It started almost a year ago with a video of a boy who just learned to ride his bike. It was honest and had a funny punchline so it went viral (4 million views as of this post):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaIvk1cSyG8[/youtube]

About 2 months later it went beyond viral with an autotune remix:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAhOQGISLG0[/youtube]

Here’s my favorite, it was remixed, covered, karaoke’d, and finally mashed up:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNANdn64O6c[/youtube]

“If you believe in yourself you can ride a bike”

Daily Life

The Whole Story

Aside from promoting that I was included in Chris’ eBook, I’ve been off the radar for nearly two months. I mentioned the “holiday from hell” but only now have some time to talk about it. The story is so huge, convoluted and involved that it’s difficult to explain at your average holiday party so I haven’t talked much about it. Since we’ve been doing Marketing Over Coffee and the LinkedIn group has been growing like crazy I rarely talk about pure marketing topics here so hopefully you are used to me rambling on about my goals, absurd hobbies, etc.

To give you a feel for the scope, this story includes Cancer, My Career, and a TV show, an unlikely combination. To get the whole story we have to rewind the clock all the way back to 1983 or so. At this point my Mom was diagnosed with cancer for the first time. I was young enough then that I didn’t really understand much about what was going on besides the fact that my Mom was sick, and her treatment went well that round. The second time I was in college and understood what was going on and things turned out alright then too. Around 1998 was when things got very bad, now it was bone cancer and she aged 20 years in about a year. She saw my brother married in 1999 and was able to vacation with her family after the wedding but a few months later, after a day or two in the hospital she was gone. My father had taken care of his parents and then my mom, and in many ways our family had to start anew.

I was married in 2003 and by then Dad was spending time with Helen. I’ve had friends that have had difficulty dealing with a parent being with someone else, but I always saw it as a blessing. He lives on the other side of the state so I knew he had someone to talk with, enjoy a meal with, and travel. Carin and I wanted to have children so over the next 5 years we saw doctors and did everything we could to get our little family growing. Carin has dealt with chronic lyme disease that had been misdiagnosed for many years so that complicated things a bit. Throughout all this time we had become fans of Extreme Makeover Home Edition and never missed a show. Carin’s Dad is an electrician, my Grandfather was Plumber and Electrician (and my Dad worked with him) so we’ve always enjoyed working on projects around the house. Between both the altruism and optimism of the show, it’s ability to market by creating DVR-proof content, and telling honest stories of how challenging daily life can be, we always found it inspiring.

I know, this is rambling all over the damn place, just a bit more set up before it all collides. The last piece was changing jobs less than a year and a half ago. I had been at AccuRev for more than 5 years and had two former co-workers at different companies who asked if I might be up for something different. As a proof point for a recent article that said Marketing Tech jobs are one of the 5 hardest jobs to fill, I was fortunate enough to get offers from both.

And so our stage is set at 2011. This year I have been living the “responsibility of the weird” as Seth Godin has called it – the fact that if you have an offbeat hobby, or you want to see a specific kind of art, you have to vote with your wallet. Depressed about all the Disney Musicals on Broadway? When was the last time you caught an independent show there? Yeah, me neither. We get the Gotham City we deserve. Extreme Home Makeover never really had any cool schwag on their website so I had a standing eBay search set up for T-Shirts, Jackets, whatever. In March I got an alert of a charity auction to buy 2 days on the set of EMHE where you could work on a house and meet the cast (benefit for a cancer charity ironically). I won the auction and used it as a killer wedding anniversary gift.

Unfortunately the back half of the year started to get ugly. Both Helen and Carin’s Dad had been diagnosed with cancer and were going through treatment so we spent many weekends driving out to Western Mass to help with projects and have some quality family time. I had the hope of going to the EMHE build, getting photos of us with the cast, and maybe even having the chance to tell them our story of how they inspired us to never give up and share our happy ending of the birth of our son. I have a huge debt of gratitude to Dawn, Krissy, and Rachel for putting up with our scheduling problems, thank you for your kindness. I have strings of emails 20 and 30 deep of them helping us line up our visit. As we were unable to make one week or the other for family reasons, the season of the show was winding down. We had one last shot at what appeared to be a perfect opportunity in December – the 4th from last show would be in North Carolina. Carin’s aunt lives there so we would be able to bring her parents along with us to Charlotte and we’d have babysitting covered, hang out with the family, and be part of building a house.

At the start of December everything seemed to be on track, I was free to ramble on about my scientific evaluation of Tree Toppers as part of my holiday preparations. And then everything went to hell.

Helen became very ill late in December and was admitted to the hospital. For the second time my father was having to take care of someone losing their battle with cancer. My brother came out from California to spend time with us, and we had no choice but to cancel our trip. As Helen was set up with hospice I remember getting a Google alert that EMHE was going to be cancelled, the two January shows would still be filmed but they would be the last. I actually laughed by that point, trying to do the trip had become absurd, an effort in futility and not important with everything else going on around me. Also remember that this is year end, the busiest time of the year at work trying to wrap up any deals that can could close. Thankfully people were very understanding and I was able to spend the time I needed with my family.

Helen passed away the Friday before Christmas. Christmas was her favorite holiday, she loved decorating her home and buying gifts. There’s really nothing that crushes my spirit more than thinking about the fact that my son has now lost two Grandmothers who would have done anything for him. Her ceremony was beautiful, the church decorated for the holiday and Christmas carols used as the music during the mass.

We missed our shot at the trip. Our holiday was one of the saddest things I have ever gone through. By the second week in January we were just happy to have a “normal” week.

So. That’s what I’ve been up to. Not much besides fighting through it a day at a time. Now that I have a chance to breathe for a moment I’ll get back to my normal practice of setting out some goals for the year. I hope your holiday was better than mine and you are looking forward to a bright 2012.