Musings & Meanderings

Matt’s great post today, titled Showing the plug, not the cable illustrates for me once again how much we are all alike, tech and non-tech.

The central question, ‘Will it fit?’, is one that spans every culture and generation and knowledge gap that developers struggle with.

You could be a 40 something female (like me) shopping for clothing, an advanced user considering a social network, a developer integrating a hot web app, a collector or specialty geek looking for perfect components, a retired couple deciding on a holiday …the list of examples is endless. What we all have in common are the following questions.

1. What can it do?
2. How easy is it to get?
3. How much does it cost?
4. Who do I talk to if something goes wrong?
5. How is this any better than what I can get or already have elsewhere?

These are the basic questions in the head of every consumer of anything. The marketing approach of capturing people’s attention and making them think they can’t live without something can be effective, but it’s also transitory. What many marketers don’t do is directly address the basic ‘Will it fit?’ question. Sometimes that’s because they are isolated from other parts of the business or company. Sometimes it’s because the company couldn’t care less what happens to their customer base after they achieve a goal such as IPO. Fragmented attitudes like this have boosted the second, parallel list in most of our minds:

1. What won’t it do?
2. How hard can it be to get, install, etc.?
3. What are the real reasons I’m getting something cheap or free?
4. How much will I lose, in both time and money, if it’s a dud?
5. What’s the real cost and risk of dealing with anonymous strangers?

Anyone who wants to develop a product or service for Jonesers and Boomers needs to understand that the older we get, the stronger the negative questions are, based on negative experiences. Trying to tell us why your ‘thing’ is a hot must have isn’t enough even if, and sometimes especially if, it’s free. We want to know the downside in order to be prepared for it. Everything single thing we choose and do in life has costs and involves tradeoffs.

Use the clothing analogy and picture yourself buying a garment that you intend to wear regularly. Think of how many different aspects there are to your favorite garments. Elegant or sexy, cheap or free, are common sales propositions, and they have value, but they’re just the tip of the customer’s iceberg. It has to fit and every single body is different. It has to be flexible if it’s going to be worn more than once. It can’t fall apart if you wash or dry clean or wear it. It has to come with you when you move. This is just one shirt or jacket or pair of pants we’re talking about. We get just as attached to computer programs, browsers, and apps, and want similar things from them. The age factor falls fast with this analogy. Buy a garment in the latest synthetic microfiber and watch it fall apart or lose its shape the first time you do anything with it, and you won’t be so quick to buy another one, whether you’re a kid or an old timer, and also whether it cost one dollar or a thousand.

Matt’s post asked a great question about how cables are sold, which was …why don’t you show me all the details so I can stop wasting time and make an informed purchase? I’d be such a happy customer if you did that. The wiki video in his post is great also. I’ve had so so many of my contemporaries and older ask me what is the point of doing things online? After watching that video, I could picture many of them seeing a glimpse and thinking of trying, and also hear every single one of them asking their very first prospect question, “what about security?”.

The older and more life experienced or jaded we are, the stronger our orientation (usually) to the second parallel list above. A really powerful proposition will often bring the second list down to par with the first in our minds. Tipping the scale rarely happens by focusing only on making the answers to the first list stronger, especially once you pass a point of diminishing returns. Address both lists, and that means really answer the questions in depth rather than just brushing them off, and the result can be more than just a sale or subscriber, it can be a loyal relationship for a lifetime.

It is rare for me to sit still for a video presentation.

Anil Dash compelled me not just with Dan Pink’s drawing power, but with a connection to me personally when he told me that his tastes also ran to faster speeds, but that this presentation was nevertheless worth the time.

Anil further told me why he took the time… “far more impressively, [Dan Pink] created his own presentation in the format, and it’s a smart and thoughtful look at the emotional expressiveness of signage in public spaces.”

My first takeaway was on the title, ‘Emotionally Intelligent Signage’. I think that this describes the method or process used by the sign writers very effectively, especially for the signs that address a common anxiety. The signs which give me a reason, though, such as the ‘keep off the grass’ sign or the ‘hand dryer’ sign, go a lot further to invite response and involvement from the reader.

When I’m reading those signs, I’m being asked to think, consider, and participate, to make a conscious decision by getting involved rather than just reacting. It’s similar to my POW acronym on great blogging. The power of why …why I should care.

Communicators have been using emotional triggers for as long as we’ve had emotions, but asking me to make a conscious decision to care is a lot braver than haranguing me about why I should or trying to trigger it reflexively. It tells me two things: that you have a good reason to be asking and that you respect me enough to ask for my involvement.

Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein’s Pecha Kucha form is a delightful example of marrying discipline to creative energy, and considering it led me to my second takeaway.

I often go on about integrating different points of view and expanding horizons to embrace various perspectives. Here’s an illustration.

Reverse these…

‘All form and no substance.’
‘Form follows substance.’
‘If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing well.’

…and then put the results beside the originals, like an equation that expands their meaning. This is how I see Pecha Kucha.

What are your takeaways?

I suppose that, theoretically, they could, but only theoretically, and only given a lifetime’s worth of customized definitions.

In current reality? …not even close.

Let’s say that I spend hours exploring a site that sells sex toys. How can it be known that I’m doing that because a friend told me about how easy the site is to use and I’m interested in examples of user-friendly design? Or perhaps that I stumble across that site on a home computer that my son last used and wander around in a stunned state before learning that it was the cute girl that my son’s friend brought over who had been hanging out there. Separately, my husband repeatedly snipes auctions of decidedly femme collectibles for me, but does not shop for himself online. Take a number of such examples without context, and you start constructing the image of a decidedly eccentric (to put it mildly) family, when the reality could be the opposite.

Most of the gatherers of information on what we do online aren’t specifically interested in me and my family or in what might appear to be aberrant behavior for people in our demographic, although they would be if they could determine context. Tracking the habits and behavior of millions results in such anomalies falling by the wayside. If the systems are sophisticated, and aided by additional market information tools, the resulting information can then be developed in more detail, revealing individual wavelets within the waves across the tides of traffic movement. Little of it, though, is presently about individuals in particular.

Its primary usefulness is to marketers. For example, putting the wavelets together, they might discover that people who like to look at or buy red cars are twice as likely to buy a Camaro, and this information will lead them to put a red Camaro in their online ad. Even this group behavior information could be an anomaly, though, and needs to be consistently repeated over time to become reliable data. By also plugging this sort of information into a recommendation engine, they might increase online sales (or at least clicks) substantially. This is generally an inoffensive process to us, and many online shoppers actually like the results, finding books, music, and other merchandise to their taste that they might never otherwise have found.

Marketers also include those packaging and presenting a political candidate to potential voters, and this segment’s agendas can be tangentially tied to the secondary group to whom this information is useful, namely researchers (including academics). A tie can occur, for example, where the researchers’ data aids political agendas and results in elected representatives supporting funding for more data collection.

Regardless of the goal and end uses, none of this data gathering and weighing involves relevance and meaning to the individual except when it is 1. part of an accurate enough wavelet to filter back product recommendations or 2. the individual seeks widely popular or repeatedly accessed/recommended data, thereby improving shopping and researching experience and results.

Developing better search engines and relevancy structures matters a lot to anyone with something to sell online. They know that they can barely see the tip of the iceberg of things that I, or anyone else, might be interested in buying, joining, etc. Hundreds of millions of dollars are poured into tracking our paths and destinations and online behavior towards hopefully uncovering this ‘iceberg’. Such building could also matter a lot to societies as a whole and organizations and communities in particular. It might, in an integrated view, matter more to the second constituency if it can be customized. Recognizing that could also turn out to be a boon to the first group.

Such discovery could happen. It won’t happen, however, by following us all around with ever more complex and sensitive algorithms, and not just because the richer a user’s activities, the more likely that user is to be aware of being tracked and of learning how to evade it. It won’t happen until I, the user, have a stake in revealing my context and meanings, incentives to do so that benefit me and my fellowes on levels far beyond those deemed sufficient so far, and the structural tools that empower me to do it.

Our personal meanings are important to us. They have value. They represent enrichment far beyond the scope of today’s online transactions, social or commercial. I believe that sharing and connecting them responsibly and respectfully would result in societal changes that we haven’t fully conceived yet.

…running a sleepover camp?

Ever since reading Seth Godin’s Jobs of the Future #1: Online Community Organizer I have been pondering this job title. Seth drew a parallel, in terms of skill set, to union organizer, and that comparison flowed naturally into his description of the qualities such as passion and persistence that the two occupations would share. His post did make Community Organizer sound like a dream job. It also indirectly highlighted an aspect of the commercial internet that we would do well, I believe, to have a lot more understanding and discussion of.

Up until now, there’s been plenty of public conversation about aggregating information for the ‘common good’, but the conversation about aggregating people has been mostly about profit incentive, and therefore primarily in the province of media, marketers, and pr folks.

Now, I do not believe that profit incentive is evil, otherwise how to understand each of our need, right, and desire to be compensated for our work product? I am, though, seriously pained watching millions of people wandering about the web asking each other how to make money while enjoying their ‘right’ to all the ‘free’ toys, whether they are reading about the fortunes made by the developers of the toys or not. Free on the web, is, so far, mostly more about playing craps than about any sound economics.

So what does a Community Organizer do?

If I define community in the context of a web based destination, my broad definitions are:

A group of like minded people gathered online to share in a common activity. A group of like minded people gathered online to enjoy a common interest.

An existing offline community bringing activity related to a pre-existing common interest online.

An existing offline community creating new activity related to a pre-existing common interest online.

These definitions represent vastly different constituencies, with the biggest contrast being between common activity and common interest. Activity is traffic is the name of the game for web startups, but traffic is not community in RL any more than it is on the web. A million users can move around Times Square or Mall of the Americas on a given day. Some may be friends, regulars, know one another, but their whole is not a community, any more than the daily traffic on Digg is.

A Community Planner, however, sounds to be far more than a traffic planner.

I should clarify the big assumption that I’m making here, based on something that is indirectly implied but not specifically stated in the post that started this train of thought. That assumption is that a Community Organizer is expected to build and grow a new or expanded community. I read the description of this person’s optimal value as a proactive one.

The Community Organizer, therefore, would be someone who already has a leadership role in an existing community, online or off. That kind of role is something that usually is built and developed over years of interaction, where trust and reputation have been widely established over time. The union organizer analogy, however, is a very good one, in that a strong populist orator can walk into a strange community and collect a following almost immediately by displaying understanding of the constituents and pushing all the right buttons. Historically, people like this are often either egotists or idealists, they can be profit driven or altruistic, but, regardless of the exact makeup, they invariably have pretty strong motivations and agendas. They don’t become dutiful employees, unless, of course, they have a stake in the agenda and rewards of their employer, or vice versa. (Yes, there are actors who can straddle this either or fence, but you usually wouldn’t leave your entire community to their making.)

There are many community roles within organizations, such as in public relations, marketing, customer service, etc., which are already well defined and well filled, so I am further assuming that none of these match the definition of Community Organizer.

Going back to my definitions of community, above, existing communities can be further classed into either online or offline. The definition of offline communities is clear, so my focus narrows to online communities.

Online can be divided into commercial and recreational. I’m leaving the world of online charities and fundraising aside, as they are adjunctal in nature, and deferring the important and underdeveloped area of community projects and the public trust to future discussion.

The only example of a new online commercial activity I can think of that truly formed some new communities is eBay, where specific groups of collectors ‘found’ one another and developed communities that did and could not exist previously. Some members of those communities derive their entire income there and simultaneously interact socially.

Pretty much all other commercial web activity is strictly transactional on an individual (or corporate entity) basis. A substantial amount of recreational activity of any scale at all, is actually also profit driven, ie. many people on Linked In and now Facebook are there to network, to make, renew, and maintain connections, all of which, directly or indirectly, benefits their careers.

So online communities which are truly recreational are traditionally very small and limited. I personally don’t believe that this needs to be the case, but do believe that it will continue to be as long as we each go on our merry way and never gather to discuss and consider the reasons. The best online means of public discussion about this, to date, is what I’m doing now. Blogging.

Does it sound as though I’ve deliberately left the original core tech internet communities out of this overview? I have. They have become a small group within the population explosion here, and also seem to fall into two primary groups. (Why are we always cleaving everything down the middle?) That division can be very roughly described as falling between the open source believers in free and the enterprise aligned who believe that it takes a lot of money, which equates to ownership and rights, to build a lot of things. That is as apolitical a description as I can make. This ‘cleavage’ is a great misfortune for us all, as that core community has the valuable ability to create for everyone’s, rather than only their own, benefit. They should also be speaking more directly with us. Those with idealistic beliefs have abilities to enable and empower many, and those with capitalistic beliefs can only benefit from a bigger and happier constituency.

What about offline communities that aren’t here yet, despite many efforts. Is this the intended role of a Community Organizer? To lead those people in? Perhaps they aren’t here yet because there is nothing here they want enough, and maybe their needs and desires differ somewhat from those of the population that is here. So bringing them here means making them the right offerings, and, it seems to me that this is primarily the role of a developer. The conundrum, of course, is that most developers are like everyone already here, thereby making most new development automatically exclusionary.

In my lifetime experience with urban real estate development, every great destination has a critical collaborative component. Most developers build homes (condos, etc.) for individuals, or offices for companies, or special purpose facilities for industry. That can be accomplished profitably with tools such location and in depth market information. No one, however, builds a destination this way. In retail, you need at least one good anchor, a big draw that is already a traffic destination in itself and will therefore also draw other, smaller, concerns of the same caliber. For public spaces much more collaboration is usually needed. Great opera houses are built for great opera companies and their subscribers, and so on. In the physical world, mixing uses together and creating vibrant neighborhoods (the urban seat of community) is extremely complex. Over the internet it should be remarkably easy in comparison. The single thing that I believe we don’t have enough of here, outside of tech and on the people side, is collaboration.

It would appear, without new and innovative thinking, that a Community Manager is most likely to be a charismatic leader type whose community experience is mostly with others who are already motivated to be involved online, whether they be newbies or old hands. Sounds rather like either a former or budding entrepreneur to me. I’d suggest giving them shares.

One of the themes that I return to often is about desire to learn and to listen, to really hear and understand. Whether in personal relationships or in business, it’s one of those tools that, when applied, can expand our horizons and potential exponentially.

Jason at 37signals posts about mini desserts arrayed on your coffee cup saucer. I agree with Jason that this is a great marketing idea, the basis for which can be applied to many things. Here are just a few of the thoughts I took away from Jason’s post.

The selling proposition here does not lead a customer to a purchase decision in the straightforward way that we’re accustomed to approaching this goal. We typically start with a desirable product or service, identify the features and benefits of it that make it a superior choice, and then wrack our brains for ways to get that message to the consumer effectively. If the product/service is our baby, we can even sometimes be unreasonably disappointed if a marketing person creates a compelling call to action using a cheesy inducement, even though it has resulted in sales of our creation or offering.

The mini desert strategy isn’t about the desert itself. It has people saying, “I’d love that!” without even asking what kind of desert it is. The strategy isn’t about selling the product at all. It doesn’t offer any price advantage. The only unique selling proposition is that less is better. This strategy is totally about the user’s needs and desires.

We’re living in a world of endless menus and choices. So many that it can be overwhelming and even paralyzing to some people. This does not mean that they aren’t dazzled and attracted and tempted by all the offerings, just that people get flooded.

Here is a personal and unrelated product example that comes to mind based on my own consumer habits. There are endless publications that I used to subscribe to in print. Subscribing to and scanning those available online is different and more difficult. I sometimes hesitate. I find myself frequently wishing I could pay for selected articles and pieces by individual feature writers.

That seems to make no sense economically. I know that buying individual articles online from most serious publications could end up totaling more than the cost of a full online or even my print subscription. The psychology, however, doesn’t always make sense until you look at it differently. Both business and non-business customers will sometimes choose to pay more for a bite sized portion of something for a lot of good reasons, including the value of their limited time and attention.

I hesitate to fill more computer screens and lists with a gazillion more things to wade through. I expect an endless more to require more of my time to wade through and even then more of a likelihood that I’ll miss some of what I would have enjoyed most. It even ‘feels’ wasteful …similar to wanting a bite of dessert with coffee but not wanting to see a huge slice of cake sitting uneaten. This isn’t related to spending a few dollars. It’s an issue of overload. There is too much of everything in front of us already. Too many choices.

As consumers, we often respond to this overload by closing ourselves off and backing away. We create blinkers and tunnel vision in order to cope. We exercise discipline in order to attend to our responsibilities.

Conversely (or perversely?), in perusing many web offerings I find myself wishing for more. The desire for more depth in online networks once the initial commitment in terms of time and/or money has been made is one that a lot of development energy focuses on, resulting in more longer menus and features, that possibly scare off many users.

It is less common, though, to see simple alternative choices given for one specific offering or feature at a time. A current example of this is the ability to make some entries public and others private on new social sites. We’ve had either/or public and private community sites forever, and finally are seeing that option handed to the user. Privacy options in business (and some academic) applications have been around even longer. How many years did this simple choice take to go mainstream?

I’d bet that the option of smaller ‘bite’ sized pieces is a welcome proposition in many other circumstances, and also that enabling simple consumer choice should and will become a much more common feature.

—–
Later:

Seth Godin’s post titled Extra Profit responds to Jason’s 37signals post also.
Seth’s response is anti profit(eering?). Instead of trying to gouge an extra dollar from customers, he argues, restaurants should, for example, give small samples free to reward the best customers. I’m not sure whether that idea is more about preferential treatment in exclusive circles or about customer service as a relationship element.

Many of the comments on Jason’s original post are negative also. I wonder how much this relates to the regular reader/commenter demographic and how that demographic differs from the general population.

Positive reactions to the dessert choice proposition seem more likely to come from women. Hmmm.