Perspective Can Make All the Difference

I read a lot of books, usually several at a time. One which I’m currently reading is Seth Godin’s small is the new big. I go through one of his riffs daily. One such riff really hit me, it’s titled “Do you cling to your job title?” It’s about how we all wear multiple “hats” (do multiple jobs a day) so we really don’t have one single job title. I’d quote it all, but I’d be doing you a favor by just leaving it for you to buy the book. The book is great. It’s a perspective changing book, and perspective can make all the difference.

So what perspective did Seth Godin change for me today with “Do you cling to your job title?”? I wanted to become an expert in marketing. But then I realized something. I should aspire not to be the best, but the most passionate. Because while people look up to the best, they flock to the passionate.

That change in perspective makes a phenomenal difference to me.

Perspective isn’t merely the way we see things. It’s the way we live the things we see.

I believe I can accomplish anything I put my mind to. That’s my perspective. The difference between me and someone with a contradicting perspective? Huge. It’s the difference between someone who actively pursues their passions and someone who figures they’re going to eventually be learning about it anyways. It’s the difference between Virgin Atlantic and American Airlines. It’s the difference between the iPod and the MP3 players that came before it.

Here’s a perspective of mine I’d like to share with you:

Dreams are something you wish you could accomplish. Goals are something you know you can accomplish. Have goals, not dreams.

 

Passion & Ambition… Caesar Style

“When he was a young man on assignment in Spain, Caesar came upon a statue of Alexander, who died at roughly the same age that he was then. Upon regarding his image, Caesar wept, not because he had no more worlds to conquer, but because he hadn’t yet conquered any.” (108 Rome Inc.)

The perfect quote. I love it. It’s motivating. It’s passionate. You can feel the desire. It resonates with me. It’s on my wall. It keeps my passion aflame.

Are you like Caesar? Do you have that passion? That desire? That something that draws people near? Who helps you keep that fire going? Thank them.

For me, it’s my parents, it’s everyone willing to listen, it’s every person on my blog roll (and for honorable mention: Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Tara “miss rogue” Hunt, David Armano, Jake, Those at Brains on Fire like Spike, the people over at Marketing Profs: Daily Fix, and really… the rest of my blog roll). They educate me, inspire me, and help keep my passion for business burning.

Burn hot.

Do You Set Yourself Apart?

While this is a few days old, I thought it was worth sharing. One thing I always talk to people about is how having a distinct identity isn’t a bad thing. That those that set themselves apart (in a good way, not Hitler style or anything) are those who have the right idea- those who will be noticed. Here’s a great example of setting yourself apart. The article is from Breitbart.com. It’s about a guy who dropped a $20 over a 50ft ledge and jumped over after it.

Then he swam about 100 yards to fish the bill from the water.

“I got my money back, hell yeah,” Giorgio told the Sarasota Herald- Tribune. “Twenty bucks is a lot of money when you’re broke.”

What do you do to set yourself apart? I play freeze tag in hurricanes.

How Not To Do Image Thumbnails

Here’s how not to use Thumbnails. Thanks BlogFusion for giving us this great example:

No. I did not thumbnail that image. Those are actually their screen shots. Don’t believe me? Here’s the link. Honestly… What is that? How am I supposed to tell what is going on before I click the image? You’re trying to sell me on why I should use your blog software, but when I go to see what it looks like, I encounter this. That is unattractive and unappealing. I don’t have the patience or the time to click through each one. In addition, because I can’t see what is going on, you lose the benefit of getting those who might just do a “quick glimpse.” While I’m commenting on it, having a image based walk through of each area (Writing, Presentation, etc) would be nice to see. At the very least you may want to consider replacing your “Random Pics” with a caption of what’s going on. Captions have been suggested for pictures since Ogilvy on Advertising. (Tested Advertising Methods is also good for the sake of knowledge). Come to think of it… maybe that’s why tagging for online photo’s caught on so well.

For the record, i’m planning on starting to post only two or three times a week for my educations sake, my contents sake, and your sanities sake. This, however, was too much in conjunction with my last post on e-commerce to pass up.

E-Commerce Wants of ~45 College Students

I had written more stuff but a memory dump made me lose it all. So here’s short and to the point:

The e-commerce web design wants of approximately 45 college e-commerce consumers. This is in no particular order and the ones that came up more than once are in bold.

• Easily search-able site

• Easily identifiable price & shipping

• Easy to find price & shipping

• Step by step and easy to understand order process

• Customer Reviews

• Easy, clear, and simple website

• Customer Support that responds to the customer no matter what the message is about.

• Secured checkout (That little green url bar does matter)

• Suggested products/Customer Recommendations (“Customers who bought this also bought X”)

• Quick checkout option

• Sales put on the main page

• Large fonts (I’m assuming this lends itself to ‘easy to read’)

• Product/service categories that make sense to the customer

• Contact info

• A company’s mission statement (Eg: An “About” page)

• Knowing where the links on the site will take you (the “title” style for css lends to this)

• Shopping list where you can save items to purchase later

• Packaged deals

• Easy to modify items in your shopping cart even if it’s something as small as the color shirt you want to purchase.

• This product was purchased X times (This was one of my ideas, but i was surprised how many students liked it).

Now consider how many of these things Amazon does, and how many things in addition to this they do. It’s no wonder they’re doing so well. One thing in addition to this that’s interesting is eye tracking research that shows people read in an F shaped pattern when reading web content.

Pinger.com – Voice Messenger for your Cell

Note: This has been updated. See bottom.

Pinger.com is an instant voice message service for your cell phone.

I am actually surprised someone hasn’t come out with something similar. It’s one of those ideas that you figure would have been already done. I guess those are the good ones, eh? I went ahead and signed up for the beta that’s currently going on. Some impressions:

The sign up process was pretty smooth. Their voice tree is also pretty simple. “*” being backwards or undo and “#” being forward. Their interface is also nice.

Setting up your contacts is relatively easy as they have various import options for Thunderbird, Outlook, and so forth. One thing about the contacts, though, (and I know it’s still in beta) is they don’t have a “Nickname” option. The contacts and message sending are handled through your phone where you say the persons first & last name and it then identifies them. It would be much smoother if I could simply say a friends Nickname.

You can send a voice message to both those who are a part of Pinger and those who aren’t. If you’re a part of Pinger and someone sends you a voice message, you’ll receive a txt on your cell which you can then use to listen to the message. If you’re not a part of Pinger the message is sent to your e-mail (which you can have it do even if you are a part of Pinger). The messages seem a little soft when you listen to them through the web interface, but are great through the cell.

All in all I’m impressed. The only downfalls I see right off is the fact that they only ask for the e-mail address in contact information. Because of this, if you’re not a part of Pinger, the only way for your friend to receive your message is to check their e-mail – if they check their e-mail. I’m a bit surprised they don’t have it linked in with cell numbers for contacts. Additionally, it’s missing the “Ping me!” widget that can be put on sites to allow others to ping you, among other things.

Either way, I’m in the beta now and I look forward to seeing just what becomes of Pinger.com. It’s a great idea. I wonder how it will do in conjunction with text messaging.

Update 09/19/06:

I meant to update this sooner, but after I posted this I decided to contact Pinger and give them my opinions. I thought I’d say that there seem to be a great bunch of people who are a part of the company. As opposed to ignoring me as most companies would, I got a quick response. It wasn’t just automated, mind you, or brushing me off, the person responding actually gave his thoughts and thanks to my suggestions. In addition, we discussed them a bit more, and he said he’d forward it on (which I surely believe he will). As it stands now, Pinger seems to have great customer service and a care for the opinions and suggestions of their users. Those are some very nice aspects to have in a company.

Update 2 12/27/06

Pinger continues to impress me. While I can’t say I have been avidly using their service, the support they provide and dedication to a quality product is great. After having received the comment I did (you can see it below) I decided to forward it on to Pinger and let them decide whether or not this security risk was in fact the case or not. While I was a bit frustrated not having an actual support email address available to contact (something that should be easy to locate if you’re a business on the internet), I did find a contact address (though I don’t know if it was correct) and used that. To my surprise, the person responded thanking me for forwarding him the information and basically said that their development staff was already aware of potential risks and were working to solve them. I have no idea what exactly the guy responded to me does (business etiquette, anyone?), but none the less I felt like he would indeed forward the information on. Thank you for responding, Pinger, and keep up the good service!

 

Pinko Marketing thoughts for Orion Telescopes & Binoculars

 

I’ve been reading up on Pinko Marketing a bit lately. I quite enjoy the concept and plan on reading Cluetrain as soon as humanly possible (which means after I get Tacos working a little better, after finishing The Long Tail, Art of the Start, and a web app that helps me learn Japanese).

While reading about Pinko Marketing, I began to wonder just how you could apply the Pinko Mareting concept to something that wasn’t [as] plugged in to the Internet or to the community (as I’ve realized I’ve been doing something quite similar to the pinko marketing concepts with the game dev team I work with). With that, I decided to analyze Orion Telescopes & Binoculars. I picked Orion because it’s a company I used to work for on the front-line (and really enjoyed working for to a fair degree). So the below is, as I understand thus far, how I imagine a Pinko Marketing strategy for Orion Telescopes & Binoculars. Essentially how Orion can empower their community. I realize the thought of empowering the community may be scary since they don’t even empower their front-line (Don’t nod your head, I was on the front-line, and I know I wasn’t empowered) but it is worth it.

 

A blog

Hear me out on this one. As I see it, a lot of companies have been doing blogs wrong. Among other things, they’ve been creating blogs to make themselves look good (McDonalds is being a good example). Blogs aren’t about making yourself look good. They’re about being authentic, they’re about connecting with the community, and connecting the community to itself. With that in mind, this blog has a focus:

Every week or two, an employee from the company would take one of the Orion telescopes and use it. They should document (with pictures) how they set it up, what eye pieces they used, what they could see using what eye pieces, etc. They could at the end comment on the telescope. However, this is where isn’t advised. It would be best if they didn’t, unless the comment was authentic. For example, if I was doing this blog and the telescope I used was the StarSeeker 130mm, I would probably say “the images I got were better than I expected. But I would still much rather have used X telescope.” I dissuaded customers from purchasing the StarSeeker 130 many a times and to purchase a higher grade telescope. This wasn’t an upsell, this was me being considerate.

 

Listen to your employee’s and to your customers.

Your sites search engine sucks. It’s entirely too slow. You know this. I know you know because I and others brought it up all the time. Why not fix it? If your search results aren’t as fast as Google, then make sure they are. Chances are people found you with Google, anyways. It sucks you have to compete against Googles’ result speed, but that’s life. Make your search results return faster.

 

Flickr

Check out the tags on flickr. There are quite a few dealing with astronomy and telescopes. A quick run through and I saw a few astronomers displaying their Orion telescope. Get in on that. Get in contact with those people and see about starting a tag that you can specifically reference. Put the link to that tag on your main site, or better yet, have the images viewable on the main page. One thing customers were always asking is what the telescope looked like or what you could see with it. By addressing this problem you reduce the customers buy consideration time for your product, so they’ll decide to buy your product sooner (or ditch it sooner).

 

Astronomy E-mails

I forget if Orion was doing this or not. But that in itself means if it was being done, it wasn’t being done well. Send off a weekly email that says what people can expect to see this week, what the estimated forecast is, let them know about astronomy parties that are going on, and link them to astronomy blogs. 88% of people don’t know what RSS is. But guess what, you do. Use this to bring your community the benefits of RSS via your e-mail. Become a reliable filter for them. They don’t know what RSS is, but they know what a community news letter is. Support the community by helping the astronomy bloggers get noticed through your news letter. I bet they’ll appreciate it.
Note: Don’t ruin this by automatically putting people on your list. It’s about serving the people, not forcing service to the people.

 

Find Astronomy Blogs

Type “Astronomy Blogs” into google and you get a multitude of hits. Talk to these people. Find out what they might have been saying about your product. Really, marketing should have been doing this anyways. But I’m assuming that even if they were, they didn’t personally contact a blogger and thank them. You want to be really awesome? Actually care about these people. Do you notice that one of them is talking about your telescope and would love to talk more but is restricted because they don’t have X eye piece? Send them the eye piece free. Now, I suppose that can get a little sketchy (because everyone might start asking for handouts) but if the appropriate minds get together then maybe the right decision will be made.

 

Get Involved

Send staff to astronomy events, but don’t send them as Orion staff. Send people who want to go, who want to learn, and who want to help. You could pay them if absolutely necessary, but that takes away from it. The point is to get to know the community of astronomers. If after doing this for a while an astronomer from the community calls your cell phone and invites you to a star party, you know you’re on the right track.

 

Sponsor Events

Help create an environment that astronomers want to come to, become a part of, and grow in. You make telescopes… have some raffles. Have a contest give away for the best instructional blog or website. Do some demonstrations. Create your own, free event for people who have been interested in astronomy but have been too overwhelmed by what’s needed to know to start. Don’t just get them excited and involved- get to know them.

 

Passion Builds Passion

The stars are incredible. Employee’s need to be passionate about the stars. If necessary, bring in a speaker to build that passion. Have an astronomer talk about something that is valuable to your front-line both information-wise and inspiration wise. Find someone who makes your employee’s want to go look at stars after they hear the speaker. Better yet, plan these speaking sessions around star parties. That way whomever is going to go will be twice as charged as they would have been.

 

Let me re-iterate quickly an important part about all the aforementioned ideas. They’re about getting to honestly know your community and about being authentic. Keep in mind when I say “your community,” they really aren’t yours. You don’t own them. A better statement would be “a community you’re a part of,” but that’s much too long to write. If you can’t understand that, you shouldn’t even consider what I’ve written.

At any rate I’m hoping all this can be construed as some accurate amateur thoughts that go along with the notions of Pinko Marketing. None of the above may be revolutionary, but it was a good practice for me that I thought I’d share. Now I will go to pondering the concept of Pinko Marketing in a B2B environment. If you’re curious about Pinko Marketing, check out miss rogue’s blog.

 

Time Isn’t Money

After reading through a fair portion of the Pinko Marketing Wiki I decided to take a nap (for the record, the decision for the nap wasn’t induced by the reading of the wiki). While I was taking the nap I came to a conclusion about the phrase “Time is money.” (I also drempt a shower head was attacking me… don’t let this dissuade you from the relevance of this post, though).

Time most certainly isn’t money. Time is something ultimately more valuable than money. The time you spend with your companies community is more valuable than the money you could spend (waste?) telling others about it yourself. Time is worth ultimately more than money.

You pay to have flowers sent to someone to show them you took the time to think of them. But if you take the time to purchase the flowers yourself and bring them to that person yourself, the worth of that is vastly greater than paying to have the flowers delivered.

“It’s the thought that counts,” is about showing that you took the time out of your day to consider someone else. That phrase is also the courteous flip side of a coin that says “You don’t really matter because I didn’t take the time to show you do.” The phrase falls on its face, barely missing a nail that would poke out its eye (ouch!).

Doing marketing for Ascension, I take time out of my day to be with our community, and I love it. I’ll talk with community members on instant messenger, via private messages, etc. Many of them apologize for taking up my time, with which I always ensure them that no apology is neccessary. Ultiamtely, we’re there for them. People instinctively know time is very valuable. So when you show that you’re willing to sacrifice your time, something so much more than money, for them, you’re bound to get a good response.

Your Community > You

Your community is ultiamtely cooler and more creative than you are. You never know just who is a part of it. Take part in your community. Take the time to get to know them… it’ll always be worth it.

Tabblo.com – Community Collage

I am not sure how behind I am on this one, or if I am behind, but I found Tabblo.com interesting.

Tabblo.com is a site where members of the community can easily upload their own photos, arrange them how they feel, and add words. They refer to the “Tabblo” as an “online photo album.” I think they’re limiting their communities mind by putting it tabblo into such a box, especially when it seems more like a community collage site. Some of them are really quite neat and they also allow you to comment on other peoples work as to encourage continued use.

It’s an interesting enough site. I’d be curious to see just how much it takes off, and in addition, if people utilize this tool to create quick easy online magazines, among other possibilities. Sure, we already have online magazines, but with Tabblo you can easily create a magazine-esque style. An example of such a style can be found here.