New interactions, not just moved interactions

By Seth Godin

eBay is basically an auction online. It's a great idea, I wish I'd had
it, but it's still an auction, same kind we've had for a million years.

Jeff Jarvis points us to a new feature
<http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2008/02/stop-sharing-spreadsheets-start.html>
in Google Docs. Think this through for a moment:
You send an email to your permission list. It points to a spreadsheet
online. People can fill it out without logging in. You get the
summarized data back, and can present it as a chart, a graph or just run
with the numbers themselves. The depth of analysis you can generate is
far deeper than a simple poll. My guess is that 99% of the people who
use it will do a simple one dimensional poll. It's more powerful than that.

Now, what else do we need?

How about a simple system that lets you run a new kind of auction for an
event with limited seating? Say you want 200 people to come to a
networking event, the sort of thing that's no fun if only a dozen or two
show up... Instead of charging $50 a ticket, why not charge $1 for the
first five tickets, $2 for the next five, and on to $500 for the last
ten? You'll earn just as much (if not more) but reward the brave who
sign up early. (The folks who like to wait until the last minute 'to be
sure' end up paying for the privilege). It's easy to imagine a simple
interface to set up whatever graduated pricing model you'd like.

Or, how about a geography-based system for pricing? Many services are
sold by a flat fee, but add a zip code and a map and it could completely
change the pricing model.

Why don't airlines have tools in place to make it easy to integrate
charter flights with conventions so flights run when (and where) people
are going? Flights for passengers instead of passengers for flights...

There was a lot of this discussed 9 years ago. The world wasn't ready.
It is now.

I guess my point is that this is just the beginning of using internet
tools to change the world we interact with, as opposed to trying to make
it easy to interact with the standard world using the Internet.

Quoted from Seth Godin's Blog

Fear, hope and love: the three marketing levers

By Seth Godin

Where does love come from? Brand love?

The TSA is in the fear business. Every time they get you take off your shoes, they're using fear (of the unknown or perhaps of missing your plane) to get you take action.

Chanel is in the hope business. How else to get you to spend $5,000 a gallon for perfume?

Hope can be something as trivial as convenience. I hope that this smaller size of yogurt will save me time or get a smile out of my teenager...

And love? Love gets you to support a candidate even when he screws up or changes his mind on a position or disagrees with you on another one. Love incites you to protest when they change the formula for Coke, or to cry out in delight when you see someone at the market wearing a Google t-shirt.

People take action (mostly) based on one of three emotions:

Fear
Hope
Love

Every successful marketer (including politicians) takes advantage of at least one of these basic needs.

Forbes Magazine, for example, is for people who hope to make more money.

Rudy Giuliani was the fear candidate. He tried to turn fear into love, but failed.

Few products or services succeed out of love. People are too selfish for an emotion that selfless, most of the time.

It's interesting to think about the way certain categories gravitate to various emotions. Doctors selling check ups, of course, are in the fear business (while oncologists certainly sell hope). Restaurants have had a hard time selling fear (healthy places don't do so well). Singles bars certainly thrive on selling hope.

Google, amazingly quickly, became a beloved brand, something many people see as bigger than themselves, something bigger than hope. Apple lives in this arena as well. I think if you deliver hope for a long time (and deliver on it sometimes) you can graduate to love. Ronald Reagan was beloved, even when he was making significant long-term errors. So was JFK. Hillary may be respected, but Obama is loved.

I don't think love is often a one way street, either. Brands that are loved usually start the process by loving their customers in advance.

The easiest way to build a brand is to sell fear. The best way, though, may be to deliver on hope while aiming for love...

Quoted from Seth's Blog

Ambition and Productivity

Tom Peters

Last week the Associated Press reported that "Worker productivity, the
key factor in rising living standards, slowed sharply in the final three
months of the year while wage pressures increased." This drop in
productivity coupled with the news that the service sector shrank for
the first time in five years has many economists talking about how big
the impending recession will be rather than debating whether one will occur.

At tpc we have long advocated enabling IT efforts and structures to
increase organizational productivity. Many of you are familiar with
Tom's rants on the white collar revolution and the advent of white
collar robots. We also believe there is another, powerful mechanism for
improving productivity. People will become more productive when they
want to become more productive! And they want to when their output is
moving the organization closer to a compelling shared purpose, vision,
or what we call "Ambition" in our Future Shape of the Winner model.

Many of us have probably known someone in the workforce who was going
through the motions, fulfilling their job duties with no particular
zeal, and sometimes even beginning their retirement while they were
still on the payroll. And yet this same person may be a hardworking
volunteer for a charitable organization they believe in. The difference
is having a purpose that has real meaning. Being part of something that
really matters! And improving the return for investors (although the
lifeblood of a successful business) is not compelling enough to pull out
that voluntary discretionary effort we all have available. It has to be
a statement of the common cause for the common good.

That is why we advise our clients to start with ambition. Who do we
intend to be and what part might the individual members play? Why does
it matter? When it is important, it becomes a "want to" driver, rather
than the "have to" necessities of my job. And the work we perform when
we want to is always more productive than the work we do because we have to.

What do you think? Agree or disagree that it's the place to start in
your strategic plan? Can that raise productivity? Do you have any ideas
for building passion through purpose?

<http://www.tompeters.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=10263>Posted
by Mike Neiss for Tom Peters

It's good to talk

There has been a lot of talk on this blog lately about how an
organisation's structure and infrastructure (which, in Future Shape of
the Winnerparlance, we call its Architecture) can affect the ability of
its people to innovate, or even just to get things done. For many of our
clients there is a limit to what they can do to change organization
structure or infrastructure, and yet, if they want to release the
potential of their people, we believe there has to be a way around this
dilemma.

So, it was with great delight I read a recent study done by Google, that
has uncovered some fascinating insights into how information flows
around their organisation. Google has been able to correlate information
flow amongst their employees with a whole variety of factors; a person's
department, their membership on email lists, projects they had worked
on, friends, where they went to college, etc., etc. ...

What they have discovered is that by far the most significant influence
on who knows what is their physical location at work. Their study has
found that social and professional proximity matters very little,
whereas people who sit near each other in the office tend to know the
same things.

Over the years, I have seen a number of situations in which my client,
apparently restricted by organisation charts and structures, has simply
decided to sit people together who ought to collaborate, without
changing any reporting relationships. Particularly when there is a
customer service dimension to the work, the natural outcome of such a
relocation is that everyone settles into a pattern of sharing that has a
significantly positive effect on the work.

The study findings were rather surprising to me in today's world of
multiple virtual connections. And yet one conclusion is rather
depressing–if you really want to influence a person's behaviour, must
you live in their world? So, what can we do in our dispersed
organisations? Are we doomed? How are organisations that you know well
overcoming the problems of distance in getting their messages out there?

Quoted from Tom Peters