citizen Evangelist

Many businesses find great wealth in focusing on the small things. For example, banks and other financial institutions are very fond of the benefits of partial percentages and fractional cents. When collected together, the sum of those parts is quite exciting.

What if there were an opportunity to do the same thing with time? After all, time is money, and based upon my earlier arbitrage post, wouldn’t there be an opportunity to do some great things?

Let’s start with calculating my spare time. Each year, I have time I can invest in projects of my fancy. That time can be broken down into these categories (assuming 365 days per year):
hours: 8,760
minutes: 525,600
seconds: 31,536,000

Now, in most cases, I’m going to have certain amounts of that time allocated to things that I really need. Those things are going to include sleeping, eating, and working.

Let’s say that I’m going to sleep 8 hours per day. On average I eat two real meals, and I spend and hour on each. For work, I’ll falsely state that I only spend 8 hours each day at work, five days a week (40 hours).  Of course, I do get sick time, vacation, and holidays. For argument sake, let’s say that there are 1′840 hours which are allocated as work (2080 work hour possible per year - 80 hours for holiday - 80 hours for vacation - 80 hours for sick/personal time).

The annual time allocated will include:

Sleep: 2,920 hours (8hrs x 365 days)
Eating: 730 hours (2hrs x 365 days)
Working: 1,840 hours

Allocated time: 5,490 hours per year

Now, let’s figure out how much time I have left to discretionally invest.

Available hours: 8,760 hours
- Allocated hours: 5,490 hours
======================
Free hours: 3,270 hours

Stated in the same terms as above:
Free hours: 3,270
Minutes: 196,200
Seconds: 11,772,000

Now, imagine that I can get 24 seconds of your time to complete a small project. What would that be worth? In general, the amount of time required to complete a project will take much longer than this, but we’re talking about less than 1/2 of a minute. This represents
0.00020% of your free time per year…

Now, imagine that I can get 10% of the population to give me 45 seconds of time.

Population Clock:
U.S. 299,315,488
World 6,530,710,933
13:14 GMT (EST+5) Jul 26, 2006

US: 29.9 million people x 24 seconds = 718,357,171 seconds
World: 653.1 million people x 24 seconds = 15,673,706,239 seconds

Let’s make that tangible:
US time: 11.9 million minutes = 199,544 hours = 8,314 days = 22.8 years
World time: 261.2 million minutes = 4.4 million hours = 181,408 days = 497 years

Now.. we can argue about my assumptions… but let’s create one more calculation. What if I would normally need to pay minimum wage to accomplish these tasks, but was able to offer a solution which eliminated that cost? What type of value creation are we talking about?

US: 199,544 hours x $5.15 USD = $ 1,027,650 USD
World: 4.4 million hours x $5.15 USD = $ 22,422,107 USD

Now.. imagine I could get that accomplished more than one time per year.

Following the example of Linus’ Law, which states “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” I believe that we can expand this to state that given enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow. And, I think that the companies who figure out how to leverage this crowdsourcing framework are going to drive the next wave of innovation.

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I suppose it knew it… but I had never really thought about it.

An article on CNN referenced social networking sites as the ultimate marketing tools, promoting “the virtuoso of yourself.”

In certain ways, I’m sure that blogs fulfill the same lizard brain needs.

In a world of so much anonymity… so many strangers in the crowd. I suppose that deep down we all want to connect and belong and be liked.

Match.com and many others have long catered to individuals looking for members of the opposite sex. It only stands to reason that the disconnection that is our lives would ultimately drive the need to meet with or stay connected to others in a ‘non dating format.’

My 20 year reunion is coming up and I’ve been working with a few friends to find all of our classmates. We turned to Jot to facilitate this. Our graduating class was about 120 folks, if memory serves.. and we’ve managed to get over 50% to the site… and probably 1/2 of that group to create a page with some information about what’s happened in the last 18 years with pictures of the family.

Its amazing how technology has made it so easy for anyone to create content that is enjoyable. Most classmates spend hour upon hour reading each page with detail before posting their own information. Each page that is created gives a glowing perspective on what’s going on with their lives and their families. Its right out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

When the consumer takes on the role of the marketeer… how effective can marketeers be in reaching those individuals through traditional mediums?

Even now, I want individuals to come to my site… leave a comment… enjoy their stay. But, my traffic is low. I haven’t built the infrastructure of linklove required to show up in the relevant search results. I’m now focused on how to promote my site in order to fulfill my lizard brain need for love and acceptance.

Companies that provide a customer with a venue to promote themselves will begin to endear that customer. Especially since we all have a small bit of anxiety that we may not be in the types of relationships that will allow us to accomplish the goals we have.

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I bought the book last week. I’ve been looking at it each day, but haven’t cracked it open yet.

I’m reading three others at this time (1, 2, & 3), and I’m in various stages of completion on each. When a new text hits the shelves, i’m drawn to it.. Especially when the topic is so near and dear to my heart. I have it, but now its hard to know whether its time to break my promise to those authors and start with this one, or to keep the course.

I’m a maven.
I’m a visionary or inventor rational
I’m a conductor, naturally and adapted.
I’m a cross-pollinator & collaborator who is working to be the storyteller.

For the last year, I’ve been working on a project with my team that is a tail enabling technology. What I haven’t been able to do is get the story down. I appreciate great storytellers. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy Guy’s work. He tells a mean story.

What I think is interesting is the way that Guy assumes folks will forget the important elements of implementing a long-tail play. I think our society and our infrastructure often prevents us from implementing solutions that fit this category.

Have you ever tried to give an elevator pitch for a new type of solution? Imagine that you were doing so for a new long-tale technology? Rob Adams keeps telling me that it sounds too good. “Cures cancer, tastes great, costs a buck” is the line I’ve heard him say most often. I know most VCs are equally cynical.

The irony… if you build your solution with the philosophy that the customer is the platform, you don’t need to be that cynical. But if you’re going to require me to keep me to 30 seconds, it will sound too good. Give me 30 minutes, and I’ll start to make you a fan.

Let’s be clear here. The Long Tail is merely the application of the efficient markets theory. I give Chris major props for coining the phrase, giving it context, and creating the framework for all the stories. But, at the end of the day, this is Business 101 stuff. Perhaps it does sound too good to be true. Perhaps economists have been deluding themselves for years. I don’t happen think so.

And, to Guy’s point, I don’t happen think that the folks who matter will forget.

I think that the real problem is that very few producers of Long Tail technologies will survive long enough to realize their dream because “the system” beats it out of us.

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I’ve been working with a few individuals (whom I’ll keep nameless at this time) who are posturing that they know something which I’m quite certain they don’t.

Do you know what I’m talking about?

Everything they say and do has brushed up against the truth at one point in time… but, like an exercise where you take directions on how to get there from here and then mix up the order… the whole package is just wrong.

What is IT? How can you tell when someone has IT versus when someone claims to have IT?

What makes certain people think that they know what they are talking about when they don’t? What drives certain people to misrepresent what they know? At what point is it fair to confront them? Does the context of the situation drive this?

As a customer, I’ve been finding that more and more organizations that I work with use the evil power of “we’re experts and you’re not” to wrangle control out of my hands and into theirs. I’m getting better at sniffing out this behavior earlier and earlier, but it begs the question: why would anyone do it unless it was profitable to do so?

There is so much damn information floating around these days. No wonder we are overwhelmed and overloaded and ask our friends instead of trying to go out an process/consume the required information in order to determine the real deal from the claims.

Recent tangible examples:

My bank allows a large amount of my money to be transferred out of my account without my permission and then postures that I need jump through their hurdles in order to get it back

My cellular phone company modifies my account because of a text advertisement that results in nearly a thousand dollars in extra charges and then claims that I should have better monitored my account

My business provider is upset because I’ve elected not to move forward with one of their service offerings and then claims that I should have told them that I did not want their services versus my belief that they should have asked if it did want their services.

What is that?

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I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t allow myself to slack on posting. One post a day.. like an apple, is supposed to keep the guilt away and the mind healthy. So much for that. With nearly a week between the last post and now, I’m a bad bad boy.

This delay got me to thinking… why did I put it off? What are my excuses? Of course… its time, or more importantly, the lack of time. What is the value of time? What is the value of my time? your time? Their time? How does that factor into our decision making processes? Of course, it has a huge but often subconscious effect on our decision making processes.

As my socio-economic status has changed, my value of time has been dramatically altered. When I was a minimum wage earner, it was more economically beneficial for me to self-source tasks (assign to myself for completion). At some point in time after I began to earn more money and my responsibilities grew, it became more worthwhile to outsource many tasks that I previous completed.

In “The World is Flat” we’re reminded of just how much the economics of the world have changed. No longer are we restricted to approach markets within towns and states. We have the opportunity to address markets in countries and continents. This dramatic expansion of scope mixes affluence with poverty and interesting conflicts in cultural beliefs. However, the constant in every culture is time. Until our scientists find a way… we all operate with the same resource constraints of self: 525,600 minutes. How we decide to spend this currency is a matter of self definition and context.

A minute of my time. What is that worth to me? What is that worth to you? What is the fundamental value I need to see or experience in order to give you a minute of my time? That truly is a fascinating question. When applied to the world, the variation in possibilities is dizzying.

Further, when looking at this valuation framework from a group or corporate level, it makes sense why there are so many new ways for organizations to look at engaging people’s time in goal accomplishment: insourcing, outsourcing, homesourcing, offshoring, and now, crowdsourcing.

In Crowdsourcing… the talent pool is described by Jeff Howe as possessing the following five (5) attributes.

1. The crowd is dispersed
2. The crowd has a short attention span
3. The crowd is full of specialists
4. The crowd produces mostly crap
5. The crowd finds the best stuff

It is under this precept that Word of Mouth marketing actually works.

Are you able to thin slice your customer contingent enough to involve them in marketing your products or services? Do you know what they value?

If you don’t, you better better figure it out. The answer comes down to understanding their individual value of time and how your offering weighs in that process. If you’re not offering an experience that is in excess of the time required to experience it, there is no way you’ll ever successfully get them to speak positively of your service.

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