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Filed under: communication, community | Tags: blaze, Cache Valley, cats, communication, communities, fire, Logan, Utah
While on my Thanksgiving holiday, I noticed the today the front page of the small town newspaper at my wife’s parents. Take a look:
It is heartening to realize that in many less well-known areas, the “simple life” is the norm. There is also a lesson here about understanding your audience. A large city editor sent to “save” this paper may demand a focus on more mandarin matters. In doing so, the editor ought to be most aware of how his community currently and wishes to communicates, rather than how the saving editor thinks they ought to converse.
I am not advocating always pandering to the lowest level your audience. I am simply stating, sometimes people care more about cats than wars—and if that is your target group, you should be well aware.
Filed under: communication, online media | Tags: blogging, communication, communities
Today we at Zions Direct, along with a few of our sister institutions, launched our “Think” blog.
Well, it actually begin a few days back with an inchoate posting by yours truly, but today—with more substantial commentary by those who have the expertise to offer it—we can safely say it is official.
I am quite happy with how this has worked out and have great hopes we be able to facilitate better conversations through this medium.
Disclosure:
You may see that I like Zions Direct Auctions. I also work in marketing on that product, which means I may be a bit biased (but it also means I do something that I believe in).
Filed under: brands, marketing | Tags: Brand Tags, evil, humanizing, Wal-Mart, Whole Foods
My wife came mentioned to me the other day that food purchased at Whole Foods feels like “a treat”;—shopping their is a truly enjoyable experience; the other patrons feel like friends (well, your “granola” friends), the store is inviting, and the staff is pleasant.
She set this against here Wal*Mart (notice the asterisk—I am brand compliant), which has the unfortunate position of being considered “evil” (image links to Brand Tags, the web page which I pulled this information). To her, it is a chore—a place that she wants to leave as soon as possible.
Even in times of stress, I wonder how long we will be willing to trade a more humanizing experience simply because of low prices. It’s only so long before the store becomes a trial to be endured until some better can be afforded.
Filed under: economy, leadership | Tags: corporate America, economy, layoffs, Montana, Nevada, New York, New York Daily News, New York Times, Sam Gallup, Stillwater
Sam Gallup, New York miner lost his job in August, found a job in Montana, took the few days drive out to the mine, worked one shift, and was laid off as one of the 500 the mine let go.
He now is waiting for his one day check.
It would be different they found out he lied, or he got in a fight, or something else. But to be laid off, after just being hired …
The good news (hopefully) is that he is now interviewing with a company in Nevada and he has received some help along the way. Amid the multitude of calls for greater corporate transparency in times of crisis, this group simply missed it. My wife mentioned to me that she was surprised at the internal miscommunication; the executive team completely failed to mention to the hiring team that there would be some needed cutbacks.
Now they have all this negative press because they thought it would be better to leave everyone in the dark. I suppose this is their subtle introduction to new media.
We understand layoffs, and we understand hiring freezes, and Stillwater, the company he worked one day for, should have understood that these usually go in reverse order. But to do something like this … this is why so many people hate corporate America. What a shame.
Filed under: community, innovation | Tags: Nicholas Carr, communities, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, beta culture, Vista, product cycle, early adopters
Lifehacker quotes a Gizmodo rant against the “beta culture”:
We have surrendered in the name of progress and marketing and product cycles and consumerism. Maybe those are good reasons, I don’t know, but looking at the past, it feels like we are being conned. Deceived because the manufacturers of electronic products have taken our desire to progress faster and even embrace the web beta culture as an excuse to rush things to market, to blatantly admit bugs and the rushed features sets and sell the patches as upgrades.
Of course, comments centered around the notion that beta releases are usually free, but, as “tamoriel” points out, if companies are releasing beta quality as final—that is where the problem lies.
That last clarification is easy to agree with, but the earlier premise doesn’t seem accurate. Sure, there are some offerings where beta quality is treated as final (*cough Vista*), but typically, the beta culture is actually better for us than the alternative.
Early adopters have always had to face bugs, it is a part of being in that group. Things just don’t always break like they should in a test environment. But when an organization can embrace this stage, and, in so doing, they create a relationship with their top users in which the users can benefit (free service, having voice, etc) and reciprocally can help form the product or service into a better design, you have a true positive user-provider exchange. It just needs to be done well (see a 2006 “Beta Culture” piece by Nicholas Carr for a deeper look into this qualification).
Instead of hiding the offering until launch, and then give consumers a guesswork-led design, the secret is to get your end-users to truly design with you. That’s why the “beta culture” works.
Filed under: climate | Tags: Jonathon Keats, nuclear waste, universe, Wired, Yucca Mountain
Wired reported today: “Artist Wants Nuke Waste Dump to Make New Universes.” The details followed:
Artist Wants Nuke Waste Dump to Make New Universes[Artist] Keats unveils a do-it-yourself universe creation kit, on sale for just $20 and made from components bought on eBay – and, as he explains in a half-tongue-in-cheek letter to the Department of Energy, it could easily be scaled up to the dimensions of Yucca Mountain, dotting its 230 square miles with crystal towers glowing in a redemptive fount of creation.
In addition to being creating universes, Keat’s remarks:
It would be quite beautiful: the idea is to sink two-mile-deep scintillating crystal stacks into the mountain, sticking out like chimneys, looking like a factory. But instead of sending out smoke, they’d glow in the night.
There are a lot of questions that could be answered, but my biggest is: how does someone do something half-tongue-in-cheek? Does that really work?
Filed under: design, leadership | Tags: Archibald Wheeler, Chris Langan, Dilbert, Imaginary Time, IQ, Malcolm Gladwell, Participatory Universe, Royal College of Art, Stephen Hawking
While reading about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, I came across a name I’d never heard before: Chris Langan. So I decided to find out more about this guy.
Turns out, Chris has had a rough life. Born into poverty, he wore rags to school and was always the smallest. He noted that he was always “treated like scum by the rest of the kids.” As early as when “he was five, his mother—who’d in the meantime married and divorced a struggling Hollywood actor and given birth to two more sons—married a mean, hard-drinking tyrant.”
“He figured the best way to raise three boys would be to set up his own military platoon,” Chris says.
[...]
At six each morning, his stepfather would sound reveille on a bugle, line up his little soldiers at attention, heels cocked at 45 degrees, thumbs along trouser seams. He’d stand before each of the boys and feign a punch, usually a right jab that he’d stop an inch or two shy of their noses. If one of the kids flinched, he would sock him for real. Chris’s body was always covered with welts.
[...]
One morning when he was fourteen, Chris awoke to a flash of white light, followed by intense pain across his eyes. He jumped out of bed half blinded. Just home from an all-night drunk, his stepfather had wrapped his garrison belt around his fist and punched Chris while he slept. Since he was four years old, Chris had never once talked back. It was always, No, sir, Yes, sir; he’d never even said boo. Now he just went mental. Chris flew at him, knocked him across the room, against the wall, out the door. He beat down the old man in the front yard, told him never to return. He didn’t.
After high school, he dropped out of further education twice because of financial difficulties and spent the next few years doing odd jobs and temp work, such as at times working as a bartender and other times as a bouncer.
That’s one side of him.
The other half of his life was forcefully revealed in 1999, when he was tested and it was found that his IQ was 195. That’s like one in a billion smart. He spends a lot of his free time working on his
Cognition-Theoretic Model of the Universe. The result of ten years of solitary labor, the CTMU—pronounced cat-mew—is, says Chris, a true “Theory of Everything,” a cross between John Archibald Wheeler’s “Participatory Universe” and Stephen Hawking’s “Imaginary Time” theory of cosmology.
There is so much talent, so many diamonds that we miss because we expect people or ideas to fit within a certain framework. Chris was treated as a freak and simply ignored for years because he didn’t fit in. Two years ago I had the opportunity to meet with artists at the Royal College of Art. I was a business student in a design leadership program and we were working on a project together. They thought quite differently from us, and it took some time to grasp the differences, but when we finally broke down those walls, the results were astonishing. We need to do that sort of thing more often.
You know the other cool thing about Langan? It’s like we have Dilbert’s garbage man in real life.
Filed under: community, marketing | Tags: Cheney, drip, Duncan Watts, Fast Company, Fox News, Gonzales, Jon Stewart, Malcolm Gladwell, Nigerian email scam, Oprah, scam, Seth Godin, The Daily Show, Tipping Point
As I was reading about the Cheney-Gonzales indictment, I saw a link this story:
Oregon Woman Loses $400,000 to Nigerian E-Mail Scam
She explains how she lost so much (it was not all at once):
Her family and bank officials told her it was all a scam, she said, and begged her to stop, but she persisted because she became obsessed with getting paid.
[...]
Spears first sent $100 through an untraceable wire service as directed by the scammers. Then, more multimillion dollar promises followed so long as she sent more money.
I feel sick for her; and as I was wondering “how does some one fall for that?”, I considered the activities that I become “obsessed with” because of their “promises”. When does Seth Godin’s drip, drip, drip become a Nigerian email scam? In our projects, are we really heading toward a “Tipping Point” with a few influential “hubs”, or do we adhere to Watt’s statement that:
A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.
Watt’s has got it kind of right. There is no bunch of cool people everywhere, in every industry. But then again, we do have Oprah (from a 2005 BusinessWeek article):
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Oprah phenomenon is how outsized her power is compared with that of other market movers. Some observers suggest that Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show could be No. 2 [...] But no one comes close to Oprah’s clout: Publishers estimate that her power to sell a book is anywhere from 20 to 100 times that of any other media personality.
Typically, it is a drip, drip, drip—little tipping point—drip, drip, drip—little tipping point. If we don’t start to see the “promises” slowly realized, we may be putting too much hope in rewards garnered by our personal Nigerian email scam.
Filed under: communication | Tags: cliches, communication, speaking, writing
The Oxford University Corpus recently (from telegraph.co.uk, linked by Lifehacker) released a fairly unique list of the most “irritating phrases” at this moment in time. With all due respect to a similar BBC article, I personally think* that these ten sayings absolutely win out at the end of the day, 24/7, as terms that simply shouldn’t of been used in communicating. Writing and speaking correctly is not rocket science, but if done poorly, honestly: it’s a nightmare.
*I added the “think” to this phrase . . . one of my pet peeves. By the way, did it work? Do you truly feel irritated?
