citizen Evangelist

As usual, Seth Godin posts another great one. I highly encourage you to check out Before you buy your next ad… I won’t post the obvious spoiler here, but the point is incredibly valid.

On this topic, I would highly recommend picking Noise by Bart Kosko. The essence of the story is this: one person’s signal is another person’s noise. Let me see if I can make this a bit more clear. A pregnant woman is at the doctor’s office and the doctor needs to listen to the heartbeat of the mother. In this context, the baby’s heartbeat becomes noise that interferes with the doctor’s ability to determine the health of the mother. Inversely, if the doctor needs to listen to the heartbeat of the in utero child, then the mother’s heartbeat becomes noise.

If we aren’t ready to handle all of the information at our fingertips or don’t have the ability to filter out the information that is distracting (or noise) to the task at hand, it becomes very difficult to make use of any of the information. Thankfully, our brains are so well conditioned that we naturally filter out information that appears to be interference to our objective.

When we speak to customers and really listen to what they are saying, how they are speaking to us, and when they are speaking to us… how much are we really hearing? How much do we actually miss?

Make it a point to check yourself.

After all, the things you could miss could cost you that customer!

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In Pyromarketing Greg Stielstra discusses the power metaphors have provided him in the process of trying to understand marketing and what actually takes place in the market. While reading this section, I couldn’t help but think about the number of metaphors I’ve heard used over the years.

The ones that I particularly had trouble relating to this time around were the one’s I’ve heard used for sales people for years. “Hunters & Farmers” In the rare case you haven’t heard this used before, a hunter is the type of sales person who goes out and hunts big game customers. The farmer on the other hand, deals with customers by getting them to graze on new products and services.

A hunter’s job is to kill. A sales person’s job is to close deals. This metaphor gets really close to communicating that a sales person’s job is to kill the customer. I’ve seen plenty of sales incentive plans that were creating an environment of hate…

A farmer’s job is to get the animals fat so they can be milked, sheared, or slaughtered. Again, this does not lend itself to ‘relationship’ oriented images.

What’s particularly interesting to me is the power of images and the words which invoke that imagery. In “What The Bleep Do We Know” we’re exposed to the power certain words have at a metaphysical level. When our sales cultures are oriented to thinking like and acting like hunters and farmers, we’re not creating an environment where customers endear themselves to the organization. We need to look at our customers as citizens within a capitalist community. It is our responsibility to do what it takes for them to elect to do business with us again. Thinking about and treating our customers like animals is just stupid.

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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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Found an interesting note in RedHerring. Apparently there was a study in 2004 which provided some market feedback on the latest Trends in the software pricing arena.

Some 496 respondents, both vendor executives and enterprises, were surveyed in the September study, Key Trends in Software Pricing and Licensing. Licensing company Macrovision, the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), Centralized Electronic Licensing User Group (CELUG), and SoftSummit jointly conducted the survey.

I haven’t received this type of feedback during my experience working in the ASP market for the last 9 years. However, this may be more in line with those software organizations who are making the transition from installed software to hosted models. I wonder what ever came of this study.

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