Category Archives: Reality checks

August 23, 2017 · 11:25 am

Living In A Potemkin Village

I’m not sure if the story is true (historians disagree), but back around the time of The American Revolution, Russia had fought a war to annex Crimea (talk about history repeating itself!). The governor of the region, Potemkin, was trying to impress the empress and the ambassadors from other countries as they toured “New Russia.” Although the region was devastated, Potemkin set up “mobile villages” which were populated by his men dressed as peasants. As the barges with the VIP’s passed by, they’d be impressed by how lovely it all seemed. Once they were gone, the villages would be dismantled and moved to the next location. The term “Potemkin Village” has come to mean any construction (literal or figurative) built solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it is.

The term (as well as a key plot element in Blazing Saddles!) came to mind as I read an article about a new app that allows businesses employing it to summon “its ideal crowd and pay the people to stand in place like extras on a movie set. They’ve even been handpicked by a casting agent of sorts, an algorithmic one that selects each person according to age, location, style, and Facebook likes.” Presumably, when you see the line, FOMO kicks in and you are overcome by an insatiable desire to join the crowd.

I’m not naive. I worked in TV for a long time and know how laugh tracks are used and how stage managers will fire up a crowd to applaud as a show goes to and returns from a commercial break. I get enough press releases to recognize hyperbole and the need to surround something very common with an uncommon sense of excitement. The use of this app by a business, however, reeks of opacity when transparency is a critical element in marketing these days. In my mind, it’s as bad as any other kind of “fake news” that is manufactured out of the air to advance an agenda.

How would you feel if you found out that most of the other people attending a party were paid to be there? Deceived, I’ll bet, and that feeling generally leads to anger and a determination never to go back. Is that how you want your customers to feel?

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July 24, 2017 · 11:46 am

Nobody Knows Anything

I’m going to start the week by running the risk of bumming you out. At least we’ll have the rest of the week to recover, right? I was looking at some analytics data this morning and as I looked at it, I realized that much of it is wrong. So is a lot of the other information this client is using to make decisions. Yours is too, by the way. I’ll explain why but along with the realization came an insight that I think will be helpful to your business.

When I began in digital we used server logs to track traffic. They were pretty accurate although pretty limited as well. Web analytics came along and the quantity and quality of the information we got about who was coming to our web sites, how they got there, and what they were doing improved quite a bit. As business people, we were able to make content and marketing decisions based on the data we were getting.

Things have grown quite a bit more complex over the last 20 years and that complexity has obscured much of the good, useful information. Anyone who knows analytics will tell you that much of the referral data you see (where traffic comes from) is wrong. “Direct” traffic is way overstated. “Referred” traffic is encumbered by referrer spam. A lot of so called direct traffic is really dark social traffic (I send you a link). Transfers from HTTPS to HTTP sites report as direct as well. Keyword data is “not available.”

I’m not trying to make your head hurt nor to get really wonky. The point is that if you’re relying on that data to make decisions, you’re really just guessing. It’s the same with much of your ad data. I’ve written before about the lack of transparency in the programmatic ad markets and that opaqueness obscures the validity of the data as well.

I can add search data, email data, and more to the list of what probably isn’t what you think it is, but all of this fostered a thought: what do we really know that’s truly actionable?

I can answer that. We can know how our products and services are really differentiated and how much better we are at solving peoples’ problems. We can know (yay review sites!) how good our customer service is. We can know how our revenues and costs and changing and we can ask why.

I’m the last guy to say we should ignore that large and growing amount of data every business gets each minute. But maybe the time has come to act on what we KNOW and less on what we really don’t. What do you think?

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July 17, 2017 · 11:41 am

Buy Less, Get More

I recently bought a Chromebook that has a touchscreen. I’ve been using a MacBook Air for half a dozen years as my primary computer but it has slowed to a crawl and work was taking much longer to get done. I debated replacing the Mac but then I took a hard look at what functions the laptop served. Over the last few years, nearly everything I have been doing is done in the cloud and having a device that’s basically a glorified web browser actually seemed like a good idea. I moved my accounting to a cloud-based system and started using the Google suite of office programs (Docs, Sheets, etc.) in lieu of the programs on my Mac. I’ve been a lot more productive and I got a large Android tablet out of it to boot (the Chromebook flips around to be a tablet!).

There are a few other things that I noticed. First, this device reminds me of the Mac when I first got it. The thing just works. It updates itself, it’s safe from malware, battery life is good, and it’s easy to add extensions to customize it to my liking. I can run any Android app the will run on a phone (admittedly, that’s often a so-so experience) and that opens up a ton of additional software on a bigger screen than my phone.

This isn’t a screed to get you to buy a Chromebook. The point, rather, is to get you to think about why you buy, build, hire, or otherwise add to your organization. Another Mac would have been overkill based on what I needed the device to do. I saved money (the Chromebook cost about half of what a new MacBook would have cost) and I’m more productive. We often spend our precious resources on unnecessary things and that’s bad management.

Some examples. Most of the people who buy Microsoft Word have no clue how to use most of its features. The same with Excel. They are both wonderfully powerful programs but there are so many features that they become difficult to use and simple tasks can become daunting. There are free programs out there, and there are some great alternatives to the Office suite that have 99% of what most of us will ever need. You buy less and get more.

Another one. I worked with some managers over the years who would always put new positions into their budgets. Did they need them? Nope, but since other departments were growing, they felt as if they had to grow too. A corporate form of keeping up with the Joneses, I guess. We can’t manage our businesses to impress other people or out of jealousy. We can’t spend on a Rolls Royce when all that’s called for in order to get the job done is a Volkswagen.

Buying less can often get us more. It certainly did in my case. Give it a try?

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