citizen Evangelist

In the Church of the Customer Blog, Jackie Huba recently posted The Influence of One, which describes a series of events that were kicked off by the activities of Jupiter Research.

The basic story is this: Jupiter claimed that their research indicated that 70% of large companies will implement corporate blogs by the end of the year. This claim caused a Blink reaction by many and was enough to drive several into action to rebuke the claim.

Huba goes on to tell that the blogging community carried this story forward like wildfire. The moral of the story: had Jupiter taken the moment to speak to the person who had issue with their claim, the entire process may have been diffused.

I would go on to say that there is another aspect that makes this event interesting. Jupiter over-stepped its center of gravity. When pushed on the subject, they could have reacted in a health human mannor and allowed themselves to tumble and then recover. Instead, they took the same corporate attitude that removes the humanity from the message.

In today’s market, there is nothing that bloggers and humans dislike more than the lack of humanity in conversation. We heard the early support of this concept with Cluetrain and daily in the blogosphere. There is no other place where Karma has a more tangible presence: What you send out, you will receive back many times over.

The fact that the message was about blogging, a tool that is used by humans who use it to communicate… should have been a red flag to anyone who was thinking about over stating or over-exerting their position. Nothing spreads like drama. The more intense the drama, the farther and faster a story will spread.

We all need to remind ourselves that we must seek to be human, truthful, and respectful in all things. In today’s world, failure to do so can harm us so much more than it would have even five (5) years ago.

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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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Check this out: Time and time related measurements are on top of the top 25 most used Nouns in the English language.

1) time
3) year
5) day
17) week

With the changes in technology, marketplaces, and the rapid globalization that is taking place, we have the conditions for the ultimate case of arbitrage.

arbitrage
Pronunciation: ‘är-b&-”träzh
Function: noun
1: the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies

According to wikipedia, arbitrage becomes possible when one of three (3) conditions are met:
1) The same asset does not trade at the same price on all markets (”the law of one price“).
2) Two assets with identical cash flows do not trade at the same price.
3) An asset with a known price in the future does not today trade at its future price discounted at the risk-free interest rate (or, the asset does not have negligible costs of storage; as such, for
example, this condition holds for grain but not for securities).

Now.. I can’t imagine that I’m on to something that has never been thought about before, but it seems strange to me to think about it. My greatest asset is my time. For my time, I am offered compensation in the form of a salary. With that salary, I then buy products that allow me to better utilize my time in other ways.

If I were in Silicon Valley or New York, my time would cost an employer more than it does here in Austin, TX. When I need to hire a team to complete a project, I can look to India or Russia, or other off-shoring environments to hire labor at a price that is significantly cheaper than here in Austin. These are great examples of meeting the first condition.

Time, time, time… see what’s become of me.

When I am able to get you to donate your time to my cause, and the value you perceive makes that worthwhile, then we’ve truly done something magnificent together.

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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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