citizen Evangelist

A four-letter word typically refers to the obscene and the taboo. In our personal lives, if we were to treat love as a four-letter word, we would be viewed as an oddity. But, have you noticed how our business attitudes are so different?

Let’s look at just two examples:

• “I love you!” — Human Resources taboo (relationships at work, sexual harrassment, stalking)
• “I love this team!” — management taboo (overly emotional employees, touchy-feely)

I just finished reading two books from Steve Farber: Radical Leap & Radical Edge (both were published on April Fool’s day??) and was re-inspired with the power of love in business and the work place. I knew that Southwest Airlines was a big proponent of “LUV” and had remembered reading that Love is the Killer App. But, for what ever reason, it didn’t touch me as deeply.

The Golden Rule is the foundational belief that you should act or do as you want others to act or do. Why is it so hard for us to love our customers? Why is it so hard for us to pursue relationships with our customers in the same way we pursue intimate relationships in our personal lives?

Imagine the power that would unleashed from your customer base if you were passionately pursuing a relationship with them.

The Customer Evangelists provided a Mark Cuban quote in their book that is, for now at least, my favorite quote.

“A good business is like a good lover. First you ask your partner what you want. Then you give it to them. Then you ask them if they liked it. If they did, you give it to them again.”

I’ve probably misquoted in some way… as I’m trying to do this from memory, but it should get the point across. It is so rare in today’s world that we enter into our business relationships with the same honesty, vulnerability, and affection that is required for a passionate long term relationship in our personal lives. If we if we can’t take the steps necessary to start that process in business, how can we ever expect to experience the full potential that our customers bring to the table?

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On my way in to the office this morning, Sirius Channel 22: First Wave was playing an old song from Love and Rockets “No new tale to tell” and it got me to thinking about my past, present and future. There really is no new tale to tell. We’ve seen it all…. and done it all…. nothing really is new.

“Our little lives get complicated
It’s a simple thing
Simple as a flower
And that’s a complicated thing”

Or is it? Everything, and I do mean everything, is nuanced and complicated and much deeper than we typically give credit. Take this for example: Techfoolery references a Washington Post article about musicians playing virtual concerts. Musicians playing music. That’s not new. Playing a virtual concert for virtual fans? That’s a little different.

Or, what about the latest patent application from Amazon? That certainly raises the stakes of personal data a few levels. Won’t be too long before we need to go to the three clearinghouses to checkup on the safety of our personal data. We’ll be able to look so many more places

“My world is your world
People like to hear their names
I’m no exception
Please call my name
Call my name”

Sure… its mostly the same old things… no new story, but one powerful & fundamental truth. It all comes down to the people. It can get complicated at times, and the answers aren’t always fun.

At the end of the day, we are all people with our dreams, families, obligations, and day to day needs. We want to feel important. We want to be inspired. We want to belong. We are, after all, social creatures of habit.

“When you’re down
It’s a long way up
When you’re up
It’s a long way down”

Isn’t it great when we find a vendor that understands our humanity? Doesn’t it feel wonderful when we feel someone truly cares?

Why is it that so many companies spend so much time and energy figuring out how to squeeze costs out of their processes instead of letting humanity back in?

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A good citizen is well read. Here’s what I’m consuming today:

Agencies are watching as ads go online
Among the teenage video diaries, pet tricks and rejected television pilots circulating on the online video site YouTube, there is another major category of clips: advertisements.

Amazon adds ‘Search Suggestions’
Amazon.com introduced a new feature on Friday, called “Search Suggestions,” that enables users to contribute keywords for items sold on the site.

Give users a Hollywood ending
We can all take a lesson from filmmakers: endings matter. The way we end a conversation, blog post, user experience, presentation, tech support session, chapter, church service, song, whatever… is what they’ll remember most. The end can matter more to users than everything we did before. And the feeling they leave with is the one they might have forever.

Mobile Marketing
Yesterday I received an unexpected message on my cell phone. It was actor Samuel L. Jackson shouting in my ear demanding me to go see Snakes on a Plane, the new movie he’s starring in that’s about–what else–snakes on a…

New Jupiter Report on Ratings & Reviews
Today JupiterResearch released and announced a report on user-generated content for retail specifically the use and impact of ratings and reviews for retailers. We launched our own release with more detail, below

Software’s big fight over small business
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) — The software that runs businesses’ sales, finance, and operations, has never been the most exciting field - but lately, it’s been downright sleepy. Thanks to a merger frenzy over the last few years, Oracle, SAP, and to a lesser extent Microsoft dominate enterprise software sales to the world’s largest companies, and annual sales growth in this arena has slowed to a 3 percent trickle.

Citizen Evangelist: Buy a product. Join a community. Change the world

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Making and supporting a product why trying to grow a company is hard work. I’ve often told my non-co-worker friends that I imagine it to be very much like raising a child.

In the early days, before there is any real product, you have an idealized picture of what your baby will grow up to be: innovative, paradigm changing, etc. And then, after nine months of hard word, and a terrible period of labor getting the first version out to market (beta or first customer ship), you’re exhausted.

You were running hard for the finish line only to figure out that once released, the real work begins.

Each hour you pour more of your heart and soul into the application, working hard to craft it in a way which meet your understanding of the need and helps you to accomplish the revenues required to either keep your doors open or the investors happy enough to continue funding your efforts.

Inevitably, the customers who start using your product have a different vision for its future than you do. This is your baby, but it is their tool. And, like any good parent, you have to do what you can to provide the best environment for your child, but you have to let it grow up on its own. When you are exhausted, working hard, and already anxious because no matter what you do you’re not seeing the level of growth you though you would see when the whole process started, its easy to get edgy. Its easy to start to take comments personal.

The one thing we must keep in mind, its not personal. Its business. If our business isn’t helping others to get their business done, this it does get personal. For our customers, it gets personal really quickly.

When I see something like this, it makes me cringe. I know I’ve been frustrated at times… having my best efforts criticized, critiqued, and told it came up short. Its not fun.

But, you know what? It’s part of the process. One commenter on this post at 37Signals pointed out the irony of how the customer’s word choices so closely mirrored their own using Google as proof.

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According to Clayton Christensen in an article entitled Marketing Malpractice, there are 30,000 new consumer products which are launched each year.

Think about that: 30,000 NEW products… each year!

Each year, 90% of these products fail. That’s 27,000 failed products. Further, I’ve seen other sources quote that 96% of all product in all sectors fail to meet or exceed minimal revenue expectations. Holy Cow, folks! What in the hell are we doing out there??

Christensen contends that the root cause of this is a fundamental flaw in how we have learned to define customers in the abstract. The common practice taught to Marketing professionals is to segment the market by various elements such as demographic elements, geographic elements, behavioral elements, and psychographic elements. I can tell you that this is starting to change… but we still have a long way to go.

While it’s true that we’ve seen significant historical benefit in using this methodology, we’ve failed to see where its true limitations exist. Christiansen writes: “The great Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt used to tell his students, ‘People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!’ Marketing must philosophically make the switch from defining who they are targeting to the context of the solution. Or to state it in a straight forward way: Marketing needs to understand the “JOB” the product does, not the person.

Kawasaki shows us how we can back into this process inadvertently. But, the question is, can we change our ways and actually get to the point where we understand the context the customer elects to hire us?

What is preventing this? When we are on the job… Do we just get too enamored with our features? Have we translated what our customers have said and classified that feedback into something we think we heard? Are we using organizational filtering to make sure that we hear only the important information? What are we doing?

We owe it to ourselves, our companies, and our customers to find a better way.

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