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The Mesh: Marketing, Environment, Culture

October 28, 2010 /

For a class I’m taking this semester in the MBA program at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, I got to choose and review the online marketing book of my choice.  The deliverables included a formal book review, a blog post, a video and an in-class presentation.

With my first two choices gone (David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR and Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing), I turned to Rework from the guys at 37 signals.  Rework turned out to be a little too general business for the purposes of the class, but I did write it up here earlier.

Fortunately, a brand new, big idea book was recommended by Seth Godin as I was still in search mode.  I ordered, read and reviewed The Mesh: Why The Future Of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky.

book, business, marketing, online, social, mobile, GPS, businesses, share, sharing, share platform, access, ownership, Lisa Gansky

Cover: The Mesh

The Mesh was very obviously a labor of love for Gansky, whose personal and professional passions are evident in the book’s concept, premises, tone and style.  The describes her vision, illustrates it with examples and backs into the broader driving and enabling trends making Mesh businesses and strategies possible and advantageous right now.  It’s this drawing together of otherwise disparate observations that makes her book feel so fresh.

I’ve already written a review and collected several links for the class blog post.  Here, I thought I’d take a minute to observe how it so nicely connects the themes and sub-heading of this blog – marketing, environment and culture.

Marketing The Mesh argues in favor of a business model that both threatens traditional companies and creates opportunities for new ones.  A Mesh company or a Mesh strategy employs: a core offering that’s shared (access rather than ownership); web, social and mobile networks; increased customer interactions; increased layers of information and analysis of data; and offers that are more and more timely, relevant, personal and location-based.

Think Netflix versus Blockbuster.  Both rent DVDs, but Netflix is, at its core, an information company dedicated to making it easier and easier for customers to find, watch and review movies and television shows.  Meanwhile, Blockbuster is in bankruptcy protection.

Zipcar was another key example in the book.  With your mobile device, you can locate, select, reserve and unlock one of dozens of individually-named Zipcars parked around your city.  Each transaction provides data about who, when, where and how long the car is used.  Zipcar’s partnered with all kinds of other businesses in complementary ways to provide more – and more personalized – value to each customer.

Environment One of the underlying themes behind the share concept is an increasing population and limited resources.  The increasing population is also increasingly urban; this density is required for share platforms to scale properly.  At the same time, it’s clear that our disposable consumer culture is unsustainable.  Mesh companies need highly durable goods from their suppliers.  Through frequent and repeat use of shared goods and real-time data collection, Mesh businesses will understand each product’s strengths and weaknesses, like when and how it’s likely to fail.  While demanding greater durability from suppliers, they’ll be in a unique position to provide information to aid in that mission.

Culture There are many broad, cultural themes in The Mesh.  For example, acceptance and adoption of share platforms requires a shift away from ownership toward access and sharing.  Gansky also covers customers as communities within the same share platform.  So many of the factors that permit the Mesh characteristics and driving and enabling factors to be observed and formally captured in a book are temporal and cultural.

All three themes – marketing, environment and culture – are ever-present in this quick and fun read.  I recommend it to marketers, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, futurists and anyone broadly interested in what’s happening out there right now.

My blog post for class that’s loaded with links can be seen here.

My video review can be seen here:

 

Mesh, The Mesh, meshy, companies, company, business, businesses, Zipcar, Crushpad, Kickstarter, thredUp, Prosper, Roomorama, Netflix

Seven of the dozens of examples provided by Lisa Gansky to illustrate her concept of The Mesh.

Reading “We Are The Web” – Better Late Than (N)ever

October 23, 2010 /

I’m completely late to the party on this one, but the distance created by my tardiness gave me enhanced appreciation for Kevin Kelly‘s 2004 essay “We Are The Web.”

It was most famously published in Wired in August 2005.  He’s conveyed it in a variety of ways since then, including edited and retitled versions.  It’s also echoed significantly in his 2007 TED presentation, embedded below.

Rather than restate the essay’s key points, I’ll only advocate for your exposure to the essay and its points through your own efforts.

I copied, pasted then printed it on 9 pages.  Contained therein are snapshots of the web and our relationship with it in 1995, 2005 and 2015.  The history was useful.  The forecast felt genius for the clarity and simplicity in its expression.  The whole piece really came together for me toward the end; ironically, it was as he was slaying the once-popular vision of “convergence.”

I’d not read Kelly at all, so it was all fresh to me.  I know neither how novel his concepts are, nor who else is writing on or adjacent to them.

Again, this video includes all the themes and many of the specific points made in “We Are The Web.”  If this presentation is of any interest to you, I highly recommend giving the original essay a read.

U.S. Postal Service: Are You Emotionally Attached?

October 14, 2010 /

They don’t seem to care much about customer service or performance.  You’ve probably got a complaint or six about them.  They expect to lose $7,000,000,000 of our money this year.

But when NewMediaMetrics surveyed 3,500 Americans ages 13-54 with annual income of at least $35,000 earlier this year, they beat the following brands, among many others.

  • Car makers: Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Jeep, BMW, VW, Toyota
  • Big boxes: Walmart, Target
  • Tech: Microsoft, Sony, Samsung
  • Iconic: Nike, Coca Cola, M&Ms
  • Various: Victoria’s Secret, Visa, Hershey’s Milk Chocolate, Sea World, Southwest Airlines

Look who rounds out the top 15 of the Leap (Leveraging Emotional Attachment for Profit) Index this year.  Beating out loads of heavy-hitting brands … it’s your United States Postal Service!

Consumers Brand Ranking NewMediaMetrics

Leap Index: Top 15 Brands Consumers Are Most Attached To

This 9/10 list ranks brands based on how many people are most unwilling to give up the brand, ranking it a 9 or a 10 on a 0 to 10 scale.  That’s some love … for the USPS.

The United States Postal Service is the same operation that delivers mail to my home any time between 5 and 8pm most nights.

The U.S. Postal Service is the same operation that set up deliveringtrust.com to teach people about preventing mail fraud when they deliver other people’s mail to my home, including “Important Tax Documents” and what look like bank statements, at least once a week.  Yes, they’re handing over to me other people’s sensitive information (which I either take to their house or drop back into a nearby mailbox).

The USPS is the same operation that could not deliver a piece of mail addressed 100% correctly to my wife from a store that’s less than 3 miles from our house – even though they tried twice.

Undelivered undeliverable fail failed address

Though addressed 100% correctly, this letter could not make it less than 3 miles from its source to its destination on either of two attempts. Instead, it was picked up in-store a month later. Blue marks made by me in Photoshop to conceal partially the address for public posting here.

I like to receive mail.  I read many magazines brought to my front door by the mail carrier.  I pay many bills by mail.  We still physically exchange our Netflix DVDs by mail.

I like attachment.  I want to feel attached to our USPS.  The problem is that they consistently give me reasons not to like them.  (TWO WEEK UPDATE: my wife’s been sending packages to a friend in the military overseas requiring two customs forms each time and says our local office has been very helpful and friendly.  Still not attached, though.)

Are you “emotionally attached” to the United States Postal Service?  Positively or negatively?

Do you have a USPS love or hate story you’d like to share here?  Please do!

Links

2010 Leap Index Top 100 as PDF

Ad Age article about 2010 Leap Index

Good News: You Get to Decide What’s “News!”

September 30, 2010 /

A couple experiences demanded of me this post, though I fear I the question won’t be answered here due to complexity and variance.

First: lingering thoughts about my recent post about ForbesLife magazine, in which advertising functions as actual content.  What is normally seen as interrupting noise seems to be a legitimate value add in that publication, which is why I identified it as kin to bridal and fashion mags.  How far does that phenomenon extend?

Second: the first comment on a video I posted on the News First 5 (local NBC affiliate) Facebook page – “this is still news?”  That, in response to a piece of video that was broadcast 36 hours earlier about a victim fighting off a pair of would-be home invaders about 48 hours earlier.  If you follow the link, you’ll see my unnecessary, but polished defense.

So, what is news? In the first scenario, it’s advertising.  In the second, it’s extremely perishable.  There are nearly as many answers to the question as there are people to give it consideration.

Those answers, though, are decreasingly dependent upon or influenced by the one-time gatekeepers who produce and sell a traditional form of “news.”

action news, TV news, television news, news, local news, graphics, live local latebreaking

Action News!

I’ll spare us all the rote litany of tired criticisms (think “if it bleeds it leads”) that have been lobbed at mainstream media for decades.  I’ll take a short cut straight to: you get to decide what’s news.

House fire or traffic accident in a part of town I’ve never visited?  Not news.  Big sale at a retail shop or new location of a restaurant I occasionally patronize?  Definitely news.

((Off-topic, but worth noting here: Action News is all over the former, but won’t touch the latter.  The former’s a consequence of broadcasting to an anonymous mass of people whose only definite common trait is that they share a defined geographical territory.  The latter’s a consequence of a “church and state” separation of advertising and content creation to erect and defend an idealized notion of objectivity.))

Want to follow attention-getting, dramatic story lines this election season?  Want to understand more truly the issues and candidates instead?  Totally your call either way.

See?  You get to decide.

You get to choose from an increasing array of sources through an increasing number of channels.  You get to pick what to read and what not to read.  You get to determine what to see and what not to see.  Viable information consumption options range from spoon-fed to ultimate control.

So why a common body of “news?”  Agenda setting remains an influencing factor.  Every other outlet chasing down whatever one of them shows interest in means many of us will read or see the same things.  The dispersal of the one Associated Press story across several hundred news sites also assures a common base of news.  The incessant retweets of the moment’s celebrity death spread insanely fast as they jump across different social channels, at least in part due to the self-important rush to “beat” the wire.  If the use of all sources, channels and stories was charted by consumer or consumer groups, the boolean overlap is what’s generally regarded as “news.”

To the degree I control my consumption, I define news as information previously unknown or perceived differently that possesses one or more of three characteristics:

  • Important: big things that happen about which I should probably know – things beyond my control that affect me or people I love in a significant way
  • Helpful: information upon which I can act or through which I become more prepared for what’s next – makes me “better” in some way for having learned it
  • Remarkable: the kind of thing I’d pass along to a family member, friend, neighbor or co-worker – because it’s unexpected, hilarious, fascinating, outrageous or similar

But that’s just me.  Have you a definition for “news?”

Rework by 37signals: Setting Conventional Wisdom Ablaze

September 29, 2010 /

16 employees in 8 different cities on 2 different continents serving more than 5 million customers, including some of the world’s biggest brands.  How do 37signals do it?

They’re eager to tell you.

Before I take on their book, I’ll give you a sense of the company, which exists almost completely online.  They design web-based software that helps you run your small group or business.  The table below, including the names and images of each offering, is as stylish and clear as the book.  This product/service line was developed for their own use; they run their company on their own applications.

37 signals, basecamp, campfire, highrise, backpack, software, online, SaaS

Back to “eager to tell you” … from the 37signals perspective, teaching is marketing.  That’s a perspective about which I want to learn more.  Of course, they’re eager to teach me.

In addition to countless interviews, speeches, and presentations – many of which are available online (here or here) – founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, along with several other members of the crew, put together a couple books.  I’ve read only one of them; this is my review.

Rework is their go at a “general business” book.  In it, 37signals explain how they do what they do – how they built and how they run their business.  I won’t belabor it in detail, since there are already several tons of love and press about this publication.

In short, they set ablaze conventional wisdom about how business “needs to” or “should” be done.  Instead, common sense is put on its proper pedestal …

  • Meetings waste time.
  • Interruptions slay productivity.
  • Resumes are ridiculous.
  • Press releases are spam.
  • More features do not a better product make.
  • And on …

Though the hardcover contains 270+ pages, the layout and style make for a very quick read and begs for a re-read.  There are loads of wonderful illustrations accompanying each “verse,” which vary in length from three or four paragraphs to a page or two.  Each verse is one of maybe a half dozen pieces that make up a chapter.

It makes sense that Seth Godin‘s endorsement stripes the top of the cover.  Rework is a collection of short essays as efficient as Godin’s blog posts.  An idea is introduced, supported by an example or two, then wrapped up.  The lessons are communicated so cleanly that they seem overwhelmingly obvious.  The writing is so straightforward and clear that these essays read in sequence as a series of punches.

As a sample, here’s the lead from the “Speed Changes Everything” verse from the “Damage Control” chapter:

‘Your call is very important to us.  We appreciate your patience.  The average hold time right now is sixteen minutes.’  Give me a fucking break.

As you might expect of a book that torches conventional wisdom about hiring, PR and marketing, growth, culture, management, venture capital and so much more, Rework is irreverent and refreshing.

Needless to say, I recommend the book highly – especially for those with an entrepreneurial bent.  Really, though, it’s a must-read for anyone interested in the structure and running of an organization.  For no other reason, you should read it for the gentle but meaningful open-hand slap to the face it’ll give you about what’s happening in your day-to-day work life.

I may write a couple of follow-up posts about how the book functions as marketing and manifesto for the 37signals community and about the other companies 37signals name checks as illustrations of their points.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this interview of Jason Fried from O’Reilly Media:

Also, here’s a link to the 37signals “about us” page with company history, executive team profiles, statement of beliefs, and more.

Why Let Highly Qualified Leads Jump Out of Your Sales Funnel?

September 27, 2010 /

I’m putting together a 2011 budget right now for my little corner of the operation for which I work.

We do several outdoor events each year and need to replace (and upgrade) our 10′ x 10′ pop-up tent.  A colleague and I briefly searched online, found a solid-looking vendor with a nice range of products and narrowed down their offerings to our specific interests.  Because it wasn’t perfectly clear from their website how our combination of tent, accessories and printing would cost, I actually picked up the phone and called their 800 number to speak with someone directly.

I am deep in the funnel.  I am a highly qualified lead.  I know what I want.  I know you provide it.  I’m on the phone with you RIGHT NOW.

I am a $2,800 sale waiting to happen.

Sales, Funnel, Conversion, Leads, Prospects, Customers, Generate, Convert, Sell, Qualify, Highly Qualified

A basic sales funnel out of which I was allowed to jump.

So what’s the issue?  I spoke directly with an employee for three to five minutes about purchasing $2,800 of goods and services from her organization.  At no point, however, did she ask for my name, my phone number, my email address, the organization on whose behalf I was calling … nothing!  No system.  No protocol.  No foresight.  If she’d asked, I’d certainly have given her all four of those pieces of information.

How do you expect to close highly qualified leads – to convert them into paying customers – if you can’t even follow-up with them?

There are many vendors who provide these kinds of promotional displays.  There are probably many competitors who provide the goods and services you provide.

When you’re lucky enough to have a highly qualified lead fall into your lap, don’t let them jump out of your sales funnel.  Set up a basic system to follow up with them.

It seems elementary because it is.

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