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The future of social media: pay content, gossip management

Pay content and gossip management

I’m Twittering today. And I’m Facebooking. And I’m blogging. And I’m writing my newsletter and my podcast. In pursuit of building my so-called personal brand, I’m getting my name out there and sharing my brilliance with the world. Once I get some decent lighting, 2010 will see me introduce a video blog as well. Yessiree, I’m building that brand right on up. Yup. Building that brand. Look at it go. Right on up there…

What’s striking, however, is that none of this pays a cent. Not only does it not pay, but it conditions people to want my content for free. I had the audacity to pose a question to my Twitter subscribers last week, to get some suggestions for an upcoming episode. One happy person responded, “Dude, STOP ASKING US how to get stuff done and START TELLING US how to get it done!” I have hundreds of pages of free articles. I have written close to 500 pages of podcasts, all freely available, and apparently that’s not enough.

The social media promise

The theory is that social media lets people discuss my products and services without my intervention. I can now enter into a dialog with my customers, that will let me optimize my products, respond to my markets, and manage my reputation real time. The magically I’ll be successful and have a thriving business. That sounds really good on paper.

Then I think for a moment. I’ve always been able to read reviews of my products. I’ve always been able to survey my customers. And if I’m at all smart about handling customer queries and support calls, I can even optimize my products and design in solutions for my customers based on their problems. In short, pretty much everything social media can do for me, I could do in a pre-social media world. So what’s the difference?

The social media cost

One big difference is the cost. Maintaining an ongoing social media presence is a huge use of time and effort. If I were a big company, I might hire someone full time to do nothing but tweet, twitter, Yelp, Blorp, and Blubber. But as a one-man shop, I have to do all this myself. Then I have to track the responses and figure out which channels are actually getting attention (that will change in six months, requiring another full round of marketing research), and then generate content content content.

At some point, I’m apparently supposed to develop products and services, which is where I make the money. And by the way, those products and services better contain content I haven’t given away for free in the process of generating all this social media.

My prediction

Where will this go? Based on my own experience, I think social media will continue to be important as a channel for monitoring end consumer needs, wishes, and experiences using products. At the end of the day, it’s a giant gossip network, and your reputation is part of your brand, so you’ll have to manage it.

When it comes to content from businesses to customers, I don’t think it’s sustainable. The free content generation will die down over time, unless there’s a clear return on investment to it. Quality content is hard to produce. Companies that can afford to hire someone to be a web presence will do so. They’ll be able to produce high-quality content on an ongoing basis.

Small businesses and solopreneurs will gradually drop out of the fray, simply because the demands are too great and the returns too small. It takes good education and/or experience to be able to generate huge amounts of quality content, and those things are expensive. How much time should a smart, capable, good person with great writing skills spend giving away their knowledge for free without expecting a return? If there’s a demand for high-quality content (which there may not be), it will mainly be on a subscription model.

The few who manage to attract large followings will do great, of course, but that’s always been the case. And attracting a large following seems to be a function of direct marketing skill, more than high quality content creation skill.

Bottom line: in five years, by 2014, we’ll see the quality of free content dropping as the high-quality content creators turn their attention to activities that actually drive their business. Social media will remain important for reputation management, however, and as a tool for monitoring our customers and what they’re thinking.

One Price Doesn't Fit All

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But offering lots of options can destroy the buying experience.

I’m flying this morning. More accurately, I’m waiting in line after line after line at the airport. Once, I needed my boarding pass. Then I needed my boarding pass and driver’s license. Now, I need my credit card, too. Every line brings a new, extra charge. The check-in kiosk gleefully says it costs $15 for my first checked bag. At the gate, the little headphones cost me. On board, a pillow and blanket—once free free—now cost big bucks. And don’t get me started on the snacks.

Every price tag becomes a separate purchase decision. Every purchase decision makes an impression. The airline has me asking “Is this worth it?” a dozen times during a single flight. And every extra decision risks my deciding “No.”

Any good sales person knows you want your customers crying Yes, Yes, YES! As soon as I think No, they’ve lost me as a customer.

If you offer options, do it at once.

When you have lots of little add-ons that someone can choose up front, that’s fine. Call it “customization.” If I’m buying a new Mini Cooper, I get to run the Mini Cooper customizer. It becomes a game to choose the white racing stripes, chili pepper red paint job, fancy suspension, and cool hubcaps. Will I pay extra to customize? You bet. And since it’s a one-time fantasy fest, I only have to abandon common sense once to sign on the dotted line. Now I have my cool car with lots of options, and I love the chance to go into debt for life for my new tricked out Cooper. But only if it’s a single purchase decision, where the excitement happens all at once. One purchase, and I can enjoy my car forever.

Don’t take away what used to be free.

Of course, don’t customize add-ons that are expected as part of the base product. If I had to pay extra to make sure my Mini came with wheels, it would be annoying, not delightful. But since the car comes with wheels, all my attention is blissfully on my Speed Racer fantasies.

For Goodness’ sake, never start charging for something that used to be bundled into the price. People hate losing things. When once my plane pillow and blanket were complimentary, charging extra for them stirs resentment.

You might think airlines have to start charging for the extras or they’ll go out of business. Maybe. But maybe not. If they just tacked $50 onto the ticket prices and announced that they still give “free” blankets, pillows, and checked luggage, I suspect many people would be willing to purchase. All it takes is one nickel-and-dime experience to realize that a low price ticket might be a smokescreen for an expensive bundle of travel “add-ons.”

If airlines want to offer variable pricing, they shouldn’t charge extra fees. Instead, they could frame the choice as a discount: you get $7 off your ticket if you decline a pillow and blanket. More people would take the blanket and pillow (people often just accept the defaults), so the revenues would be higher. Yet those who really care can still get the lower price. Furthermore, people would be imagining their flight with all the goodies, and would be inclined to forgo the discount since it would seem like losing that amenity—and remember, people hate to lose extras.

How many purchase decisions do your customers make?

What’s your product or service? Do you offer it as a series of purchase decisions? Try an experiment: create an all-in-one pricing bundle and offer discounts for unused options, rather than extra charges for extra options. Track how many customers choose to the default options, how many customers purchase again, and how satisfied customers are with their purchase. You just may find that the best way to serve your customers is to charge them more.

[Note: the way decisions are presented to people makes a huge impact in what they choose. This is called “decision architecture.” You can learn all about decision architecture in the book “Nudge.”]

Cause and Effect in Current Events

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Don’t be surprised when you get the expected result.

Stupidity is running rampant, world wide. It’s frustrating, because the mistakes aren’t rocket science. They’re really simple stuff. People forget their actions have consequences. Let’s explore some cause/effect you should keep in mind, through the lens of current events. Think how these apply to you, so you aren’t surprised by the utterly predictable.

(This is going to be a provocative article. If it offends you, recommend me to all your friends. The provocation may cause many unsubscribes from my list from people who would rather indulge in knee-jerk responses than think for themselves. Oops!! That sentence just lost a dozen, right there…)

Ignore the competition and you’ll lose. Detroit has been whining about how they couldn’t have forseen the current downturn. In business school in **1989**–twenty years ago–we did cases about how uncompetitive the car companies were, and how they were ignoring foreign competition, etc. Anyone who lived through the gas lines and 50+ mpg Honda Civics of the late 70s and hears Detroit complain that they can’t get 30mpg by 2020 should have nothing but utter contempt for the executives running the Big Three.

If you hit people, they won’t sit there and take it. Hello, Israel and Hamas. Are you listening? Kids beat me up in grammar school. It didn’t make me like them. And if I’d been bigger and stronger, I would have hit back. When Hamas broke a cease-fire and sent rockets into Israel, what did they expect to happen? It isn’t a matter of history, or who deserved what. Just that simple question: what did they expect to happen, other than violent retaliation? (Terrorists knocked down two of our office buildings seven years ago, and we started two wars over it, with a body count that some say is over 100,000 civilians. Clearly, if you swat someone who has more firepower, they just might swat back.)

Debt is bad if not managed wisely. Learn this: if you spend $10 today that you don’t have, how can you expect to have $12 to repay it with interest tomorrow? This only makes sense if you invest the $10 with the expectation of making $12 or more. Thinking of credit cards as free money is dumb. Thinking of a $1 trillion yearly budget deficit being used to fund expenses (e.g. war) rather than investment (e.g. R&D, research, education, infrastructure repair) is dumb.

Deliberate get-rich-quick stupidity will be appropriately rewarded. Banks have a thousand-year history of how to evaluate good credit risks. When they write mortgages to people they would never lend to under prudent guidelines, they shouldn’t be surprised when it all collapses. And by the way, every manager involved should be fired. I’d rather have a high school student running the bank than someone with proven bad experience.

Pay current expenses with current dollars. People get so upset and angry about tax levels. Get over it, people. Borrow-and-spend is _more_ toxic than tax-and-spend; you have to pay back with interest. Unless you are spending on investment that will generate a return, tax-and-spend is a much, much healthier policy. In any event, tax vs. borrow is just a financing detail. The problem is *spend*. (And anyone who still believes either party is more fiscally responsible than the other needs to have their head examined. As far as I can tell, the Repubs are abhorrently irresponsible, while the Dems are despicably irresponsible.)

Don’t borrow if you can’t repay. See the previous paragraph. This applies to credit card holders, home owners, governments, and investment banks. If you borrow $100, you have to pay back $110 next year, or even more in following years. Borrowing gives you the illusion that you have a higher standard of living than you can afford. The world will happily correct that misapprehension.

People do what you pay them for, especially if there are no perceived consequences. I’ll let you find the examples for this one. Just look at politicians, lobbyists, and CEOs of failed banks. (Why, please remind me, are any of those people still there? Aren’t we supposed to fire people who demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt their utter, complete, and total incompetence to run a solvent business?) This applies to politicians, too. If we connected their pay and career paths to desired national outcome measures, you would likely suddenly see a whole different set of conversations in Congress.

Does email overload help us?

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Tim Sanders wrote a blog entry that references a Business Week article on information overload I commented on last week. The writer suggests that information overload might be good. There might be some valuable information, and besides, young people can handle it just fine.

Sure. In what universe? My Get-it-Done Guy podcast email and people’s reaction to my what is email costing you assessment, suggest many people of us feel our life force being regularly sucked from our bodies by information overload. It makes us jump from topic to topic. It interrupts us when we need to concentrate. And then we feel guilty that we still can’t keep up. Gee, that sounds like a resourceful emotional state for reaching our goals.

Yes, we’re getting more info. Yes, some of it’s useful. But that’s not the point! We need to ask: is it useful enough? Are the benefits—financial, social, or emotional—worth the cost?

For Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy (mentioned in the article), the answer is Yes. In email, they say things they would never say otherwise. Like that comment about the chocolate mousse, telephone pole, and garter belt. Who would ever say that out loud?

Of course, an anonymous suggestion box would fill the same function. Even better, the tipster could actually include the original garter belt. But apparently, those emails are amazing enough that Anne devotes a lot of time to her email. Since she’s gotten great results at Xerox, for her, the benefits might be worth the cost. (Assuming, of course, that her success is because of email, rather than in spite of it. Maybe a weekly suggestion box would be just as good.)

If you’re top dog, no one pays attention to how you use your time as long as you produce business results. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. Our pointy-haired boss gives us specific goals, and email can suck up a lot of time without moving us towards our real goals. That “Top 10 Reasons Working Here Sucks” email will only help you reach your goal if that goal is a new job at your major competitor’s firm.

When you’re deciding how much time to spend with your inbox, think long and hard about the benefits you’re getting. After all, there’s lots you could be doing with that time. Ask yourself if there is any other way to get those same benefits? If you hired a $50/hour assistant to read and answer your email every day, what would you tell him/her to process versus ignore? Are you following those same guidelines?

Being perfect in every way, I follow my own advice and am ultra careful with my email habits. Even so, I often get sucked in for up to 30 extra minutes a day. Since I’m perfect, that must be the perfect amount of time to waste. But there’s still a nagging feeling: that comes out to three weeks per year. If I’m going to spend three weeks a year blathering mindlessly, I’d rather do it wearing a bathing suit on a sunny Caribbean beach than sitting hunched over my computer in my basement office, looking like one of the Mole People. At least on the beach, I might get a tan.

So don’t take my word for it. Don’t take Tim Sanders’s word for it. And don’t take Business Week’s word for it. Your email time is productive to the extent it helps you get what you want out of life. Hold it to a high standard and if it isn’t performing, drop it from your life faster than that stalker you accidentally dated in college. With email, only you can take control; there’s no way to get a restraining order.

Be Thankful; It's All in Your Mind

A Financial Tailspin sucks! Don’t compound it.

We’re going through some … interesting … times, financially. People feel insecure, established institutions are in desperate need of bailout (funny how attractive socialism becomes when you’re the one who needs the handout) and the world economy seems to be teetering on the brink. Now’s a great time to realize: it’s all in our minds.

I mean this quite literally. Have you seen “Money as Debt?” It’s an excellent 47-minute video on where money comes from. It tells how our current system came to be. It highlights flaws in the system and offers some alternatives, all with a tasty dose of conspiracy theory thrown in here and there(*). You can watch the video here: https://www.steverrobbins.com/r/moneyasdebt

Money is literally nothing more than an idea. It’s a promise we make to deliver a good, a service, or more money at a later date. Why is Bill Gates a billionaire? Because the rest of us agree that he is. We also agree to give him our stuff if he gives us enough money. But it’s all an agreement. Because it’s an agreement, we take action on it, and it’s our actions that have real-world consequences.

“Don’t worry, be happy.”

Bobby McFerrin’s song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is right on the money. At any given moment, you may or may not be able to control what’s actually happening around you. But you can always choose your attitude about it.

I was in a meeting earlier this year, discussing a key feature of entrepreneurship: the ability to see opportunity where others see problems. Just for jollies, I decided to try spending a week deliberately asking, “Where’s the opportunity here?” every time a problem cropped up. Every single time I asked the question, I was able to find an answer. Often, in mere seconds.

The housing bubble gave many time in an elevated lifestyle

Then I asked, “What’s the upside of the financial crisis?” You know, one answer is this: millions have had the chance to live far beyond their means for many years. While we don’t much care for the consequences, at least they got to enjoy a standard of living they couldn’t have otherwise afforded. I’m serious about this, by the way. Of course it’s natural to be upset when losing your job, your credit, your home, or your car. But being upset won’t change anything. It will just make you feel bad. You can also choose to feel thankful that you had those things to begin with.

Be a Thanksgiving Gratitude Geek

Are there problems in the financial world right now? Yup. And we can live through those problems giving all our attention to the downside or giving all our attention to the opportunities and the upside.

My suggestion to you: spend this Thanksgiving dwelling on the upside. Ask yourself, “what do I have to be thankful for?” and make a big long list. Help everyone around you do the same thing. They say what we need is more optimism in the economy. Optimism isn’t something “out there,” it’s one of the few things we have control over. So let’s exercise that control and see the glass as 10% full, not 90% empty. Because we can’t always change the outside reality, but we can certainly choose our inner reality.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving. Here are some of the things I’m thankful for:

  • Friends and community
  • Hot running showers
  • Democracy
  • My four-year-old iPod that still works great
  • The chance to teach high school students at an after-school program
  • Zipcar
  • My podcast
  • Friends and community

(*) I love conspiracy theories! I always like to remind myself that just because someone’s paranoid doesn’t mean the conspiracy doesn’t truly exist.

Nightmare or Hope? Your decision.

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You have only yourself to blame for the quality of your decisions. Improve it. Start today.

Are you committed to becoming a spot-on decision-maker who can make great decisions that actually guide your world? Because chances are, your personal decision-making process is no guarantee of that.

We’ve just finished two years of hate-filled, vitriolic lies and attacks. Most of us were swayed, one way or another, by the election rhetoric and talking heads. One thing is certain: few of us went to the candidates web sites, read their platforms and policies. Even fewer then consulted a range of economists, industry professionals, and others to figure out whether the policies were realistic, whether we have any data on that kind of policy, or whether they would even lead to the kind of world we want.

Pretty much all of us relied mainly on charisma (or lack thereof) and ideology (or lack thereof) and knee-jerk logic to make our decision. And yes, this means you, my above-average-intelligence friends! Intelligent people seem to believe that they understand things better, even though when it comes to politics, there’s no reason to believe that. Smarts are no defense against relying on shallow, biased media reports and cherry-picked statistics.

The challenge: improve your decision making!

Here’s my challenge to you: actually learn from this experience.

Whether you’re feeling fear, anger, hope, or happiness today, grab a piece of paper. Write down all your fears. ALL of them. If you are convinced our President-elect is a terrorist whose greatest desire is to bring down America, write that down. If you’re convinced he’ll raised your taxes, write that down. If you’re convinced that taxes a worse financing decision than debt when you’re running a deficit, write that down, too.

If you believe that America will become a hotbed of corrupt moral practices, write that down.

Now write down your hopes. If you believe we will magically become debt-free in an economic prosperity paradise brought on by a single change in President, write that down. If you believe that America will become a multicultural paradise of acceptance and love, put it on paper.

For both your fears and your hopes, jot down the basis (or lack thereof) you have for those beliefs. You are the ONLY ONE who will see this, so be honest. Expect to have fairly little evidence for any of this.

You know now what you’re projecting on this candidate, good or bad. You could be wrong about a lot of what you’ve written. In fact, you probably are. And you’ve done this with every election you’ve ever voted in.

Now is the time to learn, instead.

Arrange to re-evaluate your decision-making in 2012

Head over to TimeCave.com, and schedule an e-mail to yourself to be delivered in July, 2012. Type in everything you’ve written. Also paste in the following debrief form. Then in 2012, you may be able to make an even higher-quality decision than you did this year.

DEBRIEF OF MY 2008 DECISION
1. Where was I right in my ability to project the candidate’s results?
2. Where I was right, how much of that was due to the candidate’s efforts, and how much of that was external factors that the candidate couldn’t control?
3. Where was I wrong?
4. How much of *that* was under the candidate’s control?
5. Where did I get my information about the candidate?
6. Am I using the same or different sources this time?
7. Do I know how high-quality the sources are? Why do I believe they are high (or low) quality?

When you receive the email in 2012, spend some time thinking through the questions. You may discover that your fears were misplaced. The world didn’t come to an end. You may discover that your hope was a bit overblown. The world didn’t become paradise.

Either way, you’ll discover that you can find ways to improve your decision-making in 2012. That’s a good thing. You will begin to be more nuanced and more thoughtful in your vote, which is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.

And why not start now? Campaign 2012 starts in about three weeks…

The key to ethical, sane behavior: the *little* voice.

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Your little voice may have all the answers you need.

Have you ever wondered how certain corrupt businesspeople can keep spouting great, moral words while doing the exact opposite in their behavior? You wonder how they can wax eloquent about the need to give customers high-quality products while they happily substitute inferior quality raw materials to save costs. You wonder: are they insane? Probably not. Yes, they hear voices in their head. But we all do that. The problem is that they’re listening to the wrong ones.

In a New York Times article today, John Tierney discusses the science behind hypocrisy and how we fool ourselves. It seems when we distract our conscious mind, we listen mainly to our “gut” (or our “heart,” depending on how poetic an image you prefer), and we know when we’re doing The Wrong Thing. When our conscious minds are free, however, we use them—to self-justify. When we engage in hypocritical or anti-social behavior, our conscious mind goes to work creating justifications so we believe we’re doing the right thing, even when we aren’t.

In the past several years, I’ve become more aware of my own “heart voice.” When I have a troubling decision to make, or strong ambivalence about a situation, I sit quietly. Actually, my brain is usually shrieking gibberish about how unfair I’m being treated, or about how I don’t deserve what’s happening, or about how I’m an utter and complete failure at life because I missed “9 Down” in today’s New York Times crossword puzzle. So here’s this Shrieking Monster in my head, and I let it rant while putting attention on the middle of my chest. Then when the Shrieking Monster stops to take a breath, I quickly ask, “What should I do in this situation?”

Then I sit. After a few minutes, beneath the Monster comes a little, quiet voice. It’s barely even in words. And it has an answer.

The moment the answer comes, I know it’s the right one for me. It’s almost always the moral thing, the ethical thing, the loving thing, the passionate thing. In some weird way, it’s the answer I already knew was right, but just wouldn’t admit to myself. It took a chat with the Little Voice to bring it to the place where it could be heard over the Shrieking Monster voice.

The Shrieking Monster is the one that usually pushes me to do stupid things. It goads me to yell at people when I’m frustrated, to get petulant and childish when I could be forging alliances, and to beat myself up when I don’t do well, even if I did my best. The Little Voice, though, is my own internal Dear Abby: its advice is excellent, even if its hairstyle could stand some updating.

If you’ve never tried this, give it a shot. Ponder a decision that’s giving you angst. Maybe it’s an ethical quandry, or an issue with a co-worker, or that persistent fantasy about wrapping your boss in duct tape upside down, hanging from the ceiling. Choose something really, really important, like: is it fair that I always have to spend the 3 minutes to type up action items after a meeting?

Sit quietly with the situation. Your Shrieking Monster will helpfully point out how unfair it is that you have to type those action items, how your fingers ache, how it’s probably carpel tunnel syndrome and you’ll be crippled for life, and how you really deserve to be the boss and are just not deeply appreciated. Then sit quietly and listen to the Little Voice behind the shrieking monster. It just might have some good advice.

If it seems reasonable, give it a shot. You might find yourself acting more ethically, more morally, more professionally, and more happily. In other words, you just may find your little voice is the key to acting as—not just aspiring to be—your Very Best Self.

Find the article on hypocrisy at http://r.steverrobbins.com/hypocrisyarticle.

Groupthink, brainwashing, and politics: eek!

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You have everything to gain by thinking outside your own box!

Click here to hear this article as a podcast.

Maybe you’ve been successfully brainwashed and just don’t know it. How would you? Pretend you were kidnapped by the People’s Liberation Front of Jordania, which originally attracted you by serving your favorite brand of spaghetti sauce every night of the week (yum!). They successfully brainwashed you, and now you would go on raids with them, eat with them (spaghetti!!), live with them, and genuinely believe in their cause. If someone said to you, “The PLFJ has brainwashed you,” you wouldn’t believe them. You’d go back to contentedly slurping spaghetti.

Schools brainwash us

This is more than an academic question, though it arises in academia as well. People attend schools where they learn certain ways of thinking and are taught that some thinking is preferable to others, or even that some thinking is “right” and some is “wrong.” For example, they teach that the Earth revolves around the sun, and not vice-versa. For centuries, people believed the opposite, and could even be put to death for suggesting the Earth orbited the Sun. So which is the brainwashed? Both have their belief systems, both indoctrinate new people into those beliefs, both have evidence that suffices for them, and both would view the others as living in a fantasy world.

In Business School, students are taught to do cost/benefit analyses, and many of them reframe their entire world in terms of costs and benefits. Great for balancing their checkbook, maybe not so much for making their Sweetie feel loved. “If I spend five minutes cuddling and my time is worth $45/hour…”

In contrast, philosophy majors are taught there are many ways to approach a problem, and may have a very different way of thinking about life (“Amour! Eros! Love! Let’s cuddle!”), and be lousy at balancing their checkbook.

Who’s “right?” Both are. And both have habitual ways of thinking that were taught by a school. How are the schools not brainwashing institutions?

Politics brainwashes us!

Scott McLellan, Pres. Bush’s former Press Secretary, just published a book that reveals how he now believes he had been manipulated and misled for years by Bush. It wasn’t until he left the administration, however, that he had enough perspective to question what he had been told and been living for several years.

We’re all brainwashed, all the time.

If you think about it, you’re probably the member of an exclusive club, all the way down to having your own language. Maybe you’re part of the business club, and you talk about “profits” and “margins” and “business models.” Or you’re a Swing dancer and you talk about doing a “Texas Tommy” (isn’t that illegal in 39 other states?). Or you’re a graphic designer and you know what “Pantone” means.

Now think about your organization. You probably have your own shared beliefs. Those beliefs are a form of brainwashing, and you don’t question them. Everyone takes them for granted, and those who don’t are marginalized or ignored. But the world changes! Yesterday’s “common sense” is today’s backward thinking. “Cars will never take off; they require pavement, and who’ll pay to pave a downtown when so few cars exist to use the roads?”

Sometimes, the world doesn’t even change, the conventional wisdom is just wrong. “The world will only ever need four computers.” “Customers will never buy water in bottles when they can get it free from the tap.”
“I’m really happy to listen to you talk about your ex-boyfriends, dear.”

Find freedom beyond your assumptions

In organizations, getting through your brainwashing is the key to innovation, creativity, and “thinking outside the box.” Indeed, it’s your shared assumptions that are the box!

The key to getting past your brainwashing is to seek out evidence that you might be brainwashed. Write down some of the reasons you know your business is successful:

  • People love our customer service.
  • We are the low-cost provider.
  • We hire the best and the brightest.

Now write down some of the reasons you know your competitors are doomed to fail:

  • They just don’t “get it.”
  • Our customers would never like their product.
  • We’ve locked up the biggest, most important customer.

Take the reasons you just wrote down, muster your courage, and spend some time exploring each one. If your belief is false, how would you find out? What data would you seek? What trends would you be following?

You don’t just have to re-examine your work assumptions. You can also list things you “know” about your family life. Stuff like, “my teenagers won’t listen to me” or “watching TV together is the highest form of quality family time.”

Start seeking some data. Start following some trends. Try a few alternatives. Find out where you’re following the herd, and where you’re really in touch with reality. You’ll learn how much of your life is groupthink, rather than YOUthink. You’ll find yourself thinking outside the box. Although it could scare people around you, it might open your eyes to a whole new world of opportunity. There are advantages to being the sighted man in the land of the blind, and not just because it makes it easier to button your shirt…

Update your user experience…or die!

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Your survival could depend on it!

Are you up to date with your user experience? I have been coveting my friend’s iPhone. It is true I have both a Palm Pilot and a Blackberry but the iPhone is getting more and more attractive. Not just because it has got a nice user interface, the reason is deeper.

I have a Macintosh. Palm made $1.6 billion dollars in 2006 but they haven’t updated their Macintosh software in several years, maybe even as much as a decade. The software is clunky, hard to use and it doesn’t integrate with Apple’s synchronization system, which lets everything else synchronize beautifully with the address book and the calendar.

Blackberry paid $450 million dollars to quit a patent suit early and resolve it so they could stay in business, and their software doesn’t properly handle certain types of calendar attachments. Their browser is poor and they don’t handle a type of e-mail accounts called IMAP, which let people have their mail on a central server and access it from many places.

Oh! And by the way and by the way, they have never bothered to come up with a way to synchronize with a Macintosh. From the user’s point of view that makes this products fairly difficult to use on the Mac without third party software and even with the third party software it is usually not as good and has bugs etc. etc.

But think about it for a minute: 1.6 billion dollars and Palm can’t be bothered to develop an updated version of 10-year old software? Hello! Blackberry 450 million dollars to settle a suit? Where is the $10 million dollars that they could use to make the Blackberry compatible with every existing calendar system, contact management system and sales management system in the world. They haven’t bothered.

I donâ’t know why they haven’t bothered but it doesn’t really matter because there is something out that there will work for me and that’s called an iPhone.

Palm is reported to be looking for a suitor because sales are down and they just don’t know what to do. Palm– update your system! Blackberry, I don’t know. They think the iPhones are a threat and until Blackberry realizes that people aren’t just buying a slick little package; they also wanted to work with their computer, well they are going to lose people to the iPhone as well.

One final example: I recently changed insurance companies and my new insurance company has no autopay option for my premiums. In the year 2008? Excuse me? It hasn’t occurred to them that the user experience for virtually every type of vendor (particularly one with recurring payments) now includes the ability to pay automatically either by credit card or by bank debit. Now it’s true in the short term that’s not going to make a difference. But it’s remarkable because they are the only bill in my entire life that has to be written out by hand every month.

If they are falling behind on that, what else are they falling behind on? So think about your product. Have you tried your competitor’s products lately? Have you noticed if sales are falling, where are people going instead of your product? When you use and evaluate the competitors, look at the whole experience and what you will find is that there are very compelling experiences out there, some of which may not be yours.

Leap on them, surpass them, develop your own experience, put some money into what it will take to make your product fun, happy, easy, simple and streamline to use and you just might find that you will be able to stay ahead of the competition instead of going to them asking them to buy you.

Happy or Successful? Which will you pursue?

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On a recent birthday I was looking back at the strategies that my friends from high school and college and I employed to get where we are today. We assumed that success would bring happiness, and as far I can tell, we were wrong. It turns out that the two are separate, even though marketers would have us believe otherwise.The slogan for Cadillac is “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit.” Of course what your mind fills in is Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. As if a $50,000.00 car will actually make you happier. And maybe it will. But keep in mind, if your life fundamentally sucks, it’s gonna keep on sucking the moment you step out of the car and onto the concrete. So, if the two are different—if happiness and success are not the same—what’s the best life strategy?

We are certainly taught to believe that being successful will make us happy. Society tells us, our parents tell us, our teachers tell us, students in high school as young as 12 and 13 are already being lectured about college. I take it to an extreme. I have a 5-year-old nephew, I am thinking about his college, I am thinking about his high school. It’s ridiculous; I am missing his entire childhood because I am so busy thinking about making him successful in the assumption that thus will he be happy.

I also find that in career coaching new MBAs, they have an almost religious belief that they can plan out a 20-year career path. They say things like, “I will make my money and then I will be happy. Then I will do the things that are meaningful.” Then, then, then. As if, among other things, you can even control whether “then” ever arrives.

So strategy number 1 is: pursue success and hope for happiness. The other strategy is to pursue happiness and meaning and find a way to make a living doing it. This is the strategy where happiness leads to success. Which one is better? Let’s see…

If you go for success and you become successful and you find a way to be happy doing it, yeah, you’re happy and successful. If you go for happiness and find a way to make money doing it, yeah, you’re happy and successful. So, in the case where you can achieve both, it doesn’t really matter which strategy you choose, you end up happy and successful.

But the point we rarely consider is what happens if everything doesn’t work out. If you define your life as pursuing success but you don’t actually find a way to be happy while doing it, or you get to that point where you have the money and now you don’t even know what makes you happy because you have spent the whole time pursuing success instead of happiness, well, great. You’re successful, but you’re not happy. You walk into an empty house surrounded by beautiful gorgeous things. You have a lot of friends and they like you. Why? Because you have a lot of nice things that they want to borrow. You buy a cat, the cat puts with you because you leave its automated feeding bowl in place while you go work at office. It actually hates you because you’re never around. You are too busy working, but at least it will pretend to purr every now and then.

On the other hand, if you go for happiness and aren’t successful, at least you will be happy and you will have a life full of meaning. They found one of the big things that helps people be happy, for example, it is having family and friends and community. So, if you are happy, but don’t quite make it to successful, you may wander into your one-bedroom tiny apartment and be surrounded by friends and family and people who love you and a cat that purrs because it recognizes you—it knows who you are and it appreciates the fact that you feed it. You may not have the money, but you will be happy.

So, in the case where the future works exactly the way we want it to, it doesn’t matter whether you pursue success and then find happiness or whether you pursue happiness and then find success. But in the case where you can’t guarantee the final outcome, it makes so much more sense to pursue happiness and hopefully you can find a way to be successful doing it.

I have spent my life up until very recently doing the opposite. I have spent my life pursuing success under the assumption that it would make me happy and it is not clear that it’s been worth it. Missing a weekend with friends so that I can work hard and earn enough money that I can take time off and … spend a weekend with friends. Hello? This doesn’t exactly make a whole lot of sense.

What I would like to invite you to do today is to examine your own life and your own motivations—How do you work? Are you pursuing success assuming that someday will bring happiness? Are you pursuing happiness looking for way to be successful while doing it? Are you getting both? And I would invite you to play around a little bit. Try doing something from the other camp and find out if that works for you.

If you’re a Type-A Personality Workaholic, skip a day of work, call in sick and do something that makes you happy, that’s meaningful, and that could be a taste of the life you could be living right now, maybe in exchange for money but maybe not. Because when you pursue happiness, you never know what kind of opportunities arise.

I am now one year into a three-year experiment of living my life to the extent that I can get my Type-A Personality to do so. I pursue the things that make me happy and have meaning. The bizarre part is my life is less predictable than ever before. The things I am getting involved with weren’t even on the radar screen a year-and-a-half ago, however, some of them are grander and more exciting than anything I could possibly have planned. Make a choice. Pursue success and find happiness or pursue happiness and find success. Either way you have a shot at both, but in one case you guarantee you will be happy.