Image via Wikipedia

Of course, we don’t just use the smell test in the kitchen or the supermarket, and that’s the point today.

Last week, I wrote about Paula Deen and her announcement.  This isn’t going to be another post about that other than to say one problem I (and others) had is the fact that she made her “not a big deal” announcement while on a drug company‘s payroll.  In my mind, it doesn’t pass the smell test (and in fairness, she has since stated she’s donating all her drug company income to charity).

Let’s take Google, who also did something in the past week that fails my smell test.  Again, without a long explanation (you can get one here), they’ve altered the way you see search results and just might be favoring their own content over that of other entities.  For a company with a “don’t be evil” mantra, something doesn’t smell right.  I’m sure you can find a number of other things that smell fishy in your own lives.

Our customers, employees, and partners are constantly sniffing.  We do so as citizens – why did a politician vote a certain way and how does it tie to campaign donations?  We need to odor-check ourselves constantly if we’re to pass that test, and we can’t minimize the impact of even a vague whiff of something being off.  To ignore that is a big blind spot for any business.

What do you think (and please don’t tell me this stinks!)?

Image by andreasmarx via Flickr

I’ve known a bunch of snowmen in business.  These are people who look terrific under optimal conditions but who melt away as soon as conditions change.  You know the types.  They’re the people who are standing tall when the presentation went well or sales are flowing.  As soon as things get a little warm – business takes a downturn, the boss is angry about something – they get a lot smaller.  Maybe they even fade away completely.  They can’t deal with changing or sub-optimal conditions.

Contrast a snow person’s (why limit this to men!) behavior with that of the firefighters among us.  These are the people who, when things are turning bad, run to the problem.  They ask “how can I help?”, not “where can I hide?”.   The next time an alarm goes off in your business life, part of handling the crisis ought to be taking note of who melts, who waits to be rescued, and who rushes at the problem.  The last group is the keepers.

Snowmen are fun to build but a disaster to have around the office.  Give me firefighters every time.  You?

All of these came to mind as I read a new study from The Altimeter Group the other day.  Let’s see what you think.

According to the study, which is called “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation:

Like a disease, social media proliferation will leave companies crippled unless they develop a strategy to manage now.  Some companies have opened a virtual Pandora’s box:  We found that global corporations are struggling to manage an average of 178 business-related social media accounts—a number likely to grow if unchecked.  Beyond coordination challenges, unchecked accounts and disparate customer interactions expose brands to a host of legal, compliance, and fragmented brand-perception risks.  Internally, few companies are prepared with proper roles, education, or clearly defined goals.  Externally, brands are confused by dozens of vendor options.

The document breaks down the company-owned 178 social media accounts mentioned above to include an average of 39.2 Twitter accounts, 31.9 blogs and 29.9 Facebook accounts. Forums and message boards were more popular than YouTube, with an average of 23.4 accounts per company, compared to YouTube’s 9.4.  You think YOU have digital overload!?!?

One issue I discuss with clients whenever we chat about social media is how to control, monitor, moderate where needed, and promote their efforts.  All of the above obviously takes resources of both time and money.  The Altimeter study shows that many of the companies surveyed didn’t know how they would respond to an increasing number of customer conversations.  I wonder how, with 178 personalities, they can respond coherently even when they do find the time.

This an issue you’re facing?  Let us all hear about how you’re solving it and let me know how I can be helpful.

So why mention King Gillette and Amazon in the title?

Ever wonder why it’s so easy to get a free razor when you buy a small pack of blades?  King Gillette, who invented the safety razor business, believed that it was smart to give people the razors because they’d keep coming back for the highly profitable blades.  Amazon’s model for the Fire isn’t the same as the iPad’s but does mirror Gillette’s, and the research seems to indicate it’s a smart move:

More consumers who own tablets tend to like to shop, and make more spontaneous purchases than consumers who do not own tablets, the survey finds. Tablet owners also tend to be more intent on making purchases..Tablet owners are more likely to shop for certain products than others. Electronics, at 53% of all respondents, topped the list of most-preferred products to buy using a tablet, followed by books, 41%, toys, 39%, clothing, 27%, and music, 33%.

The last part of that is good chunk of Amazon’s inventory, and the Fire is optimized to integrate the Amazon shopping experience into everything.  Given this evidence, how about eBay releasing a free tablet device?  Since the company now sees itself as an “enabler” for other online retailers, why not provide the gateway device – the razor – that unlocks all that inventory?

There’s a line in Caddyshack where Ty is asked how he measures himself against other golfers if he doesn’t keep score.  ”By height,” says the very tall Ty.  In this case, comparing the iPad and the Fire by chip speed or application availability might be missing the point.  Amazon seems to be measuring by something different.

Thoughts?

Image via Wikipedia

One kicker left the field overjoyed and the other hung his head, mirroring the feelings of their fans. Being a kicker is hard – you’re the guy who shoulders a lot of the blame (I’m sure Scott Norwood‘s name is still cursed in Buffalo) when there’s a last second loss even though you were off the field for 59 minutes of the game. Which of course reminds me of a huge business point to be taken away.

A field goal attempt is a three-part ballet:  a good snap from the center to the holder, the holder turning and placing the ball as the kicker prefers, and a successful kick.  The timing is precise, and anything from a bad snap to the holder being a microsecond off in having the ball ready to wet turf meaning the kicker can’t plant his foot well means a miss and maybe even a loss.  Yet we tend to focus on the ball’s flight and not the sequence of things it took to make that flight happen.  Unless there is an obvious problem – the snap sails over the holder’s head or the holder drops the ball – the kicker gets the blame or the accolades.

Sounds like business to me.  After all, most of the work in business is done by folks like the center and the holder, not to mention the linemen who make sure the kick goes unimpeded.  These business people do the research, write first drafts, make travel arrangements, create art, and provide feedback, none of which you think about whilst you’re watching a great business presentation.  The successful salesperson usually has a few support people to thank for the sale.  Like the kicker, the boss gets too much credit and often takes too much of the blame.

The hold was a bit off in one late try yesterday and was a game-saver in the other yet can you even name who was responsible this morning?  Think about the holder the next time you read a spectacular presentation or a well-written sales piece and remember:  like everything else in field goals and business it was a team effort.

Image by Bristol Motor Speedway & Dragway via Flickr

More about that next week.  Today, I want to talk about some of the things she had to say this week and what they have to do with a sane approach to business.  It a horrible disease, and what she had to say is, in my mind, not much better.  But let’s see what you think.

This quote is from a USA Today article:

Deen says she’s not going to change the focus of her cooking shows because of diabetes. “I suspect I’ll stick to my roots but will say a little louder, ‘Eat this in moderation.’”

“You don’t want to make a steady diet of just lettuce. You don’t want to make a steady diet of fried chicken.”

She cooks the foods featured on her show only for the six weeks of the year when she is taping the show, but “I don’t cook that way every day.” She doesn’t have fried chicken regularly, but “when you want fried chicken, nothing will take the place.”

The same is true for some of her other favorite dishes. “I don’t want to spend my life not having good food going into my pie hole. That hole was made for pies.”

I’m not a doctor, I don’t even play one on TV, but I can tell you that she’s wrong.  If you’re going to manage the disease or avoid it as your symptoms begin to emerge, you need to make radical changes in your diet.  Radical as in a completely new approach, not as in switching to unsweetened tea and pie only once a week.   It’s revisiting all of your recipes and learning what you can substitute - quinoa or farro for rice as an example – or what you just can’t eat at all any more.  Her argument has been that what she eats is only one factor in the disease  - genetics and other factors are just as much as issue.  In a sense, she’s throwing her hands up saying that she was going to get it anyway and now that she has it the solution is to take a pill.  In a nutshell, that’s the business point too.

When our businesses begin to show signs of being seriously ill, too many managers assume there is a quick fix and opt for that instead of stepping back and taking a hard look at the underlying causes.  The fixes require hard work and discipline and are rarely as simple as taking a pill yet as a culture, that’s where we are.  We treat constant headaches with pain killers instead of looking at the stress that’s killing us.  We treat diabetes with $500 a month drugs and not by changing what we eat.  We fix our businesses by looking for quick wins and easy profits rather than taking the time to install a culture of excellence, transparency, and being supportive.  I’m all for making things easier – that’s what tech does, right? – but at some point it becomes all about hard work and not the easy way out like taking a pill.

I hope Paula Deen does well with her disease.  All the coverage her “coming out” received this week has brought out a number of other chefs who admitted they too either have or are on the road to having this awful sickness.  A few – Art Smith being one – have spoken about how they dramatically changed their eating habits and warded it off.  No pills – just hard work.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil’s bargain,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Image via Wikipedia

I thought of that last night as I listened to an excellent discussion of Google+ and Facebook at the tech meet-up I attend monthly. What does one have to do with the other?
When the digital revolution began, it started within walled gardens like AOL and Prodigy.  The content was distributed only to users within the walls, you could find people only if they too were “members”, and searching only generated results for the garden’s content.  That changed rather quickly, and the open internet of web sites became the focal point.  Companies and individuals focused their efforts on build great sites that were open to all and the content was discoverable via search engines and links.

With the growth of Facebook, and now Google+, it feels as if the pendulum is swinging back the other way. To some people, Facebook is the internet – the people and brands with which one might want to interact are building up presences that are not open. No Facebook or G+ account, no access. While a lot of the content is discoverable through search engines, the use of “social signals” to prioritize the results might mean the content out there on the open web is less visible.

So this is the question on my mind this morning: are we headed back to the walled gardens of the early digital age?  Moreover, even if we’re not, is the fact that a business needs to maintain multiple pieces of digital real estate – a Facebook page, a Google+ page, a Twitter feed, a LinkedIn page along with a web site – becoming more costly than it is valuable?  I spend a fair amount of time discussing ROI in these spaces with clients and in all candor there is no single right answer I’ve found.  It’s hard to ignore the almost billion folks who are on Facebook, and Google+ is adding tens of millions of users every month.  How can one NOT be there?  On the other hand, they’re closed systems and imperfect technologies – Facebook keeps changing its basic terminology and data presentation; Google+ gives users a ton of control, but doesn’t permit (yet) the kind of innovative, exciting presentation a brand might want.

What do you think?  How are you using these services both as a consumer and as a business?  How does that compare with the open web, and do you think the walled garden approach is back from the digital dead?  Let me know!

It was usually during that part of the discussion that there was a “tell”, as poker players call it – the thing that gives away how good a hand you’re playing.  For me, this tell was always about how much skin the company had in the game, and to this day I think it’s an important factor in evaluating partnerships.

The expression, which may or may not have originated with Warren Buffet, has to do with how much money a company’s executives have invested personally in the project.  To me, it was, and is, a bit different.

When a vendor says to me “we will grow your revenues” or “we will show huge cost-savings”, I liked them to have skin in the game.  If their business model was for me to pay them a straight fee, regardless of results, I would suggest a smaller fee with far greater upside than what they proposed as a fixed fee based on increased sales.  This aligns our interests and the “tell” was pretty obvious.  If they wouldn’t demonstrate faith in their product by putting skin in the game, why should I have faith it would deliver?

We can talk about how great a product we have all until our jaws get tired, but the best vote of confidence is putting one’s own money on the line.  To this day, I’ll do that in my own business by taking a smaller fee and a large success fee when a potential client thinks that aligns us perfectly.  The monthly fee, frankly, is their skin in the game.

What skin have you put it?

At one point, the other party mentioned that they could do what I and a couple of others who are assisting them are doing on their behalf far less expensively either by doing it themselves or by hiring a “kid” part-time.  Putting aide that in essence a consultant is part-time help, I remembered the old joke about Henry Ford and Tesla identifying a problem area in 5 seconds – it’s $1 for making the mark and $9,999 for knowing where to make it.  A good thing to keep in mind and let me explain.

It’s true that anyone can learn to use Twitter or Facebook for marketing.  After all, nearly all of us are on one or both of those platforms.  But communicating with your friends isn’t the same as using them to business ends.  Reading an analytics report and spitting out numbers isn’t the same as using it to provide actionable data to answer business questions.  Running ads on a “self-service” ad platform isn’t the same as understanding how to use it efficiently (and why it often takes a little time to make the planets align for high-converting, low-cost ads).

You can buy me exactly the same kitchen equipment as Thomas Keller or Eric Ripert and my food will NOT taste as good as their food.  You can let me behind the wheel of Jimmie Johnson‘s car and I won’t be able to drive it as fast.  Give me Phil’s golf clubs and I still won’t shoot under par.  Sure, I know how to cook, to drive, to play golf.  But having the same tools as an expert doesn’t make me one.  The tools may be free – the knowledge and expertise on how to use them is what you’re paying for.

Am I making my point?

What I want to write about is how Zappos handled it and how it can be a great example for any business that has to deal with a problem not of its own making. As an aside, I think Zappos is a model for many things in business – customer service being quite high on the list. But let’s stick to the issue at hand.
This was the gist of the email:

First, the bad news:

We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).

THE BETTER NEWS:

The database that stores your critical credit card and other payment data was NOT affected or accessed.

Clear, transparent, and quick. No internet buzz prompted them to get out in front of this – most of the discussion has come after this email went out. Contrast that to a lot of companies that don’t react for days.  When you read between the lines, the “problem” really isn’t much of one. Someone can get most of the information they might have grabbed from a telephone book.  Assuming they use a pretty good encryption system, even the password should be OK (but I changed it to be sure as the mail suggested and facilitated).  Zappos sent the note anyway – they got in front of the issue and preempted the usual internet rumors.

Erring on the side of transparency and honesty is no longer just smart:  it’s mandatory.  I didn’t close my account because I’ll continue to give Zappos my business – bad things sometimes happen to good people, and how they’ve handled this and every interaction I’ve had with them shows that they’ve earned a little slack.  Can your business say the same?