I walk you through roasting coffee at home with a WestBend Poppery air popcorn popper and bean from Sweet Marias and dig into the promise of RSS as a distribution channel.
Intro: Tod Maffin & Sean from I Love Radio.
Listen to Roasting at Home [13 min]
I give you some tips on making better coffee at home with the Melitta Mill & Brew 10-Cup Coffeemaker, Black, coffee shops strategies in the Twin Cities, and rant on the poor state of reality television.
Featured in PodCat’s Best of Podcasting Oct 29
Listen to Better Coffee and the State of Reality TV [22 min]
As an introduction to the perspective Working Pathway’s brings to your project, I present this excellent overview of systems thinking from the late Donella Meadows: Dancing with Systems.
Here are some highlights to get you started:
“Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.”
“Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself.”
“Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.”
“The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error.”
“A decision-maker can’t respond to information he or she doesn’t have…”
“Look for the ways the system creates its own behavior.”
Here’s an additional link to Dancing with Systems. Yes, it’s that good.
Thanks to Willem Van den Ende for bringing this seminal work to our attention.
A couple years back, Amazon attempted two things:
They found little return on the first, and a found a huge backlash against the second.
Amazon now finances their Super Saver shipping with their advertising budget: NY Times – Amazon Tries Word of Mouth
Holiday Inn just took a page from Amazon’s playbook.
About the Towels We Forgive You, documents guests’ stories of ‘borrowed’ Holiday Inn towels. An excellent idea, capturing the enthusiasm of their most brand-passionate guests and giving the proceeds to charity.
Yet the idea is only being half-executed.
I agree with David Paul at Perceptional Analyzer when he says:
“I think hotels should encourage guests to take a towel or robe anyway. They take it home, use it, see the logo all the time. What better way to stay top-of-mind for when people are making their next travel plans? Sure there is a cost involved, but it’s called the marketing budget.”
I see a similar phenomenon in talking with clients. They want to proceed with a project, and aren’t able to support it in their discreet budget. While other, related budgets have a surplus.
Should redesigning a website or software product come out of product development’s, customer service’s, training’s, or marketing’s budget? Yes.
As should the customer research driving the redesign. As all those departments are intertwined in your customer’s mind, building a passionate customer base will help all those departments. In this cooperative environment, to paraphrase Seth Godin, everyone gets a Free Prize Inside.
Until now there were only 5 responses you’ll receive when asking a store clerk about an item:
That was before Jhanice Nelson.
Nelson introduced a whole response. It’s a response that understands how shopping fits into a customer’s life goals and how their value to a store can be measured in customer evangelism and lifetime purchases.
“You came to me with a wardrobe problem, and I wanted to help you solve it,” she said. Just because she didn’t have anything to sell me shouldn’t stop her from helping me, she said.
Read the entire article by Jackie Huba @ Church of the Customer.
Instead of spending milions of dollars on “The Superbowl Ad”, why not spend that money cranking out beermat campaigns, till you find one that really works? Using beermats in small, test markets, you could easily create 50, 100 (500? Who knows?) campaigns for the price of one decent Superbowl/TV commercial. It would be a simple, cheap and quick way of working out the necessary language to resonate with the beer-drinking public. – hugh @ gaping void
I met a art professor in college who believed everyone had 500 bad drawings in them. Only after getting the 500 bad drawings “out” would you start drawing well. Some professors asked their students to complete 1 or 2 drawings in a 3 hour studio. This professor – 50. Fifty drawings, each from 5 to 20 minutes a piece. Each one to find out what works and what doesn’t. No erasing. If you’re not happy with it, start a new one.
This quick and cheap way to success stuck with me and is one of the underlying principals of Working Pathways. We’re continually asking, “What’s the simplest, quickest, most effective way to reach the project’s goals?”
With this perspective, we’ve reduced turnaround times for some of our client’s research initiatives from weeks to hours. We solicit feedback continually. We provide long-term ‘teach a man to fish’ success.
We’ve all got 500 bad ideas in us, Working Pathways is here to help you get to the good ideas more quickly.
UPDATE: This notion of small, quick, projects paving the road to success is re-iterated by Robert Rodriguez,
“The more experience you give yourself the better prepared you are for the next project…”
This by way of Anita Sharpe’s Thought for the Day, Tuesday, October 19, 2004
The easiest way to collect interesting, usable data from a research effort is to blend into the background of the subject’s life. Media journalists know this – that’s why they’re embedded in the presidential campaigns and in the military actions.
To give honest unselfconscious, response, subject’s need to be comfortable with researchers – as peers, as collegues, as one of them.
Susan Orlean describes this necessity in her recent interview on MPR’s Midmorning. For good data, she schedules at least a week to blend into the background.
The need to commit time to really see into someone’s life is echoed in Tod Maffin’s the Art of the 10-Hour Interview.
The projects here at Working Pathways move much more quickly than those in either of the articles. We are often charged with capturing usable data with less than hour per respondant. With that in mind, here are 5 tips we use for “becoming invisible” in under an hour.
Murphy’s Law struck all my gadgets today including my PowerBook, Jabra Bluetooth Headset, and iPod. As an added bonus, I rant on the shortcomings of Bluetooth.
Listen to Bad Technology [26 min]
The line between “user” and “developer” is blurring daily. Through participatory media, the people formerly known as “users” are effecting and developing the media they care about.
Listen to There Are No Users [3 min]
In a highly collaborative working environment, the traditional hierarchical relationship between employees doesn’t exist. The result is peers making requests to one another to move their respective projects forward. More akin to a volunteer organization than a button-down for-profit business.
The best volunteer organizations use a 6-step process to motivate peers in assisting. This is a time-proven process for both getting things done and clearly identifying those individuals that are not at all interested in your project. Use it whenever you need to make a request of someone’s time.
“Hi, this is Garrick Van Buren from Working Pathways. I’m calling for Darrel Austin regarding the AcmeCo Accessibility Audit. Is now a good time to talk?”
This is very similar to my earlier Get Your Email Read post. Notice the “is now a good time…” question. Always provide an out at this point. It’s most polite to do all this upfront. Otherwise you’re wasting your peer’s valuable time and reducing the chance they’ll help you now or in the future.
“I’m working with Darrel Austin on redesigning the AcmeCo.com shopping cart process. We’re about to evaluate the new model with AcmeCo’s best customers.”
“We have evaluations scheduled for early next week and we do not have all the timeslots booked.”
“The good news is store managers like yourself are helping out.”
“It’s going great, and we have one last remaining timeslot to fill before the end of business today.”
This is your opportunity to make a clear, formal request to them:
“Can I put you down for the Wednesday 4pm timeslot?”
If there are multiple ways the person can assist you, start with the option requiring the greatest commitment and wait for a ‘No’ before offering the next option.
If they decline all options – I recommend re-evaluating them as a future resource.