Clicks vs Impressions

Eminent writer Bob Bly dissects the difference between direct marketers and non-direct marketers.

In my experience, his analysis is spot-on.

I had a client where both mentalities struggled for dominance. The incumbent mentality (non-DM) was all about branding, impression, design, and well known for it. A team of direct marketers was brought in to handle the website. They brought measured click-throughs, ROI, incremental A/B test, all that.

These new tools brought success – but at the price of completely disenfranchising the non-DMers. Not good, at all. In fact, it’s a huge lost opportunity considering the internet gives non-DMers these DM tools out of the box. This means, the brand managers and advertising buyers can know – exactly which 50% of their ad dollars are wasted. About time.

Care and Feeding of Your Harshest Critics

Marqui is paying people to test drive and blog about their content management system.

From Marc Canter on the origins of the idea:

When I first came up with the idea – the question was poised “what if they blog something negative?”

My answer was “that’s a good thing! Can you imagine how powerful it will be for us to listen to and react to that criticism and show that we responded in a timely manner by actually fixing the problems?”

That’ll be worth its weight on gold.

Exactly. People are going to criticize your company’s offerings whether you allows them to or not. By listening to your harshest critics – i.e. most passionate customers – you’ll learn more about what the world expects from you.

I’ll be tracking the Marqui program.

On a related note, we launched the MNteractive Directory earlier this week. The MNteractive Directory is a wiki containing the Minnesota’s interactive design talent.

Wikis, by their very nature, are editable by anyone. Like Cantor, one of the first questions poised was, “What if someone changes something of mine?”

My response is two-fold:

  1. Everything is backed up, so an unnecessary change can be easily reverted.
  2. It’s your responsibility to not put up information that needs to be changed and not change things unnecessarily.

The world is becoming more and more transparent. Therefore we are need to be more responsible and open to criticism and praise. For that is the order – 1. criticism 2. praise.

How to Stifle Teamwork – Part 2

“Rating and ranking engender competition, not collaboration” – Esther Derby, An Alternative to the Yearly Performance Review

I always felt annual performance reviews existed for disconnected management to reinforce hierarchy. To know that their prime purpose (in employees’ minds) of securing an individual salary increase actually incents people to not collaborate is doubly disheartening.

Compare this individual-focused structure against a work environment where: everyday at 10am the entire team, manager and all, meets for 15 minutes to review the previous day and prepare for the current day.

That simple, regular, act promotes collaboration among the team members and an engaged, connected manager.

In this new world, how do you determine an individual’s salary? The same way you did originally, compare what they’re doing against the market.

Job Security is the Ability to Get a Job


My sister and I recently shared a phone conversation on the state of work. While she finishes her undergrad, she’s working for a temp agency. She’s continually negotiating with the agency on work; she calls the temp agency with her schedule, they call her with jobs. When there’s a match, there’s a match. If not, no harm, no foul.

She was forecasting life after school and lamenting the schedule flexibility with a full-time job. I offered that my near-decade “real world” work experience proved to be extremely similar to her relationship with the temp agency.

My mom has worked for the same organization for more than a quarter century. 25 years in the same building. Not something possible today. Today, employer-employee relationships is more akin to the Dread Pirate Roberts and Westley in the Princess Bride:

“Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.” – Dread Pirate Roberts

What is job security in this new world?
Having an active network of people to help you get the next project.

With that, all the benefits of traditional fulltime employment take care of themselves.

I want to thank Evelyn Rodriguez at Crossroads Dispatches for her recent Accidental Entrepreneurs post which inspired this post.

First Crack 11. Folk Music & Copyright Issues

Jeremy Piller and I discuss the Intellectual Property Protection Act and some other copyright issues. He shares the history of folk music and how it wouldn’t exist with copyright protection.

Download

Control vs Distribution

One of our current projects is with a client with a reputation of being extremely protective of their brand. They know the value of having customers distribute their brand message yet they’re struggling with the lack of control that entails. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle rearing it’s ugly head.

This is the same dilemma political candidates had this election season. Do you:

  1. control your message
  2. make your message easy to distribute

I lean on the side of distribution. Customers or constituents will mold your brand into what they want anyway – best you can do is help them.

For more on this dilemma, I highly recommend listening to the Election 2004 session recently held at BloggerCon.

More Slack Keeps Projects on Track

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of ’emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Swap in “project” for “emergency” and Eisenhower’s statement is equally as true. Yes, projects are as unexpected as emergencies. If all the variable of a project were known ahead of time – processes, timeframes, resources – the project would already be complete. Projects are in fact the process for answering these questions.

When I was working for a WiFi startup a couple years back, my product manager spent a good chunk of his days in Microsoft Project. Every day, he would tweak the Gantt charts to reflect the current state of the project, and print out the revised plan.

Then as the plan came off the printer, some new information would arrive making the new plan obsolete.

Lately, I’ve been involved in a number of enterprise software projects all at the early planning stages. Project 1 is starting with a Gantt chart. Like all Gantt charts, it depicts a tiered, linear, hand-off process. This is inherently ineffective.

A more effective, collaborative, and true-to-life model is a weave [WorkingPathways_ProjectWeave.pdf]. The pdf illustrates the weave model I helped a design agency work towards.

Another effective planning model comes from Frank Patrick and has traction in the Agile Software development community: the Hurricane model for predicting uncertain futures. The crux – we know where the project is now and some notion of time it takes to get in any direction, but we don’t know exactly where the project will be at that time. That’s the classic quantum mechanics trade-off: you can measure velocity or precision. Not both.

The most effectively run projects I’ve observed are based 2 principles;

  • Slack:Project schedules should have 2 forms of slack built in – 1 day per week and 1 week per month. Only schedule work for 80% of the available time. That’ll keep the schedule flexible enough to adjust for all the unknowns you’ll discover along the way.
    Read more on slack in the excellent book Slack : Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
  • Keep a loose association between work and resources:
    Define the pile of work and define the members of the team. Don’t define it in any more detail than that.

I think Steve Pavlina sums it up nicely:

“No plan survives contact with the real world.”