The Teckki Says

Last week I attended two seminars, one that had a panelist on social networking, the other was about social networking. This topic seems to be dominating the business community right now. My thoughts? This will die down at some point.

Anything that has a huge audience mass and astronomical growth rates is going to attract businesses willing to exploit the numbers. However, social media seems to be built for two reasons:

1. To actually be social - Who would have thought it? I can share with a group of people my thoughts, pictures and videos, and get back a response. I can be a part of a conversation. I can make friends around the globe. This is great. Since I am in front of a computer for much of the day, this is a nice diversion. Since I’m on the phone the other part of the day, I can keep up with those diversions. I can continue my social life with the help of these tools.
2. To make the founders rich - Some of the college-aged kids who created this stuff quickly realized that they could become billionaires before they matriculated. At that point, does matriculation matter? Now, in addition to doing something they did for fun or creativity, they can hang out with the stars.

Here are two things that Social Media hasn’t done:

1. Make money – the ultimate investors, like Fox who purchased MySpace, and Google who purchased YouTube, have yet to make money from their investments. MySpace in particular is suffering the ultimate blow – a mass migration from it, it has suffered spectacular losses, and has fallen out of favor to Facebook. YouTube, while still popular, is still a financial sinkhole, and Google is still trying to get the ad revenue to work out. I personally give them more hope since their founders are only a decade removed from their college careers, but time is running out before they become what Microsoft has become to this generation – an old school company that young talent would rather seek employment elsewhere.
2. Turned into major advertising mediums - Actually, this point should be first, because it better explains why they are not making money. Why haven’t they turned? Could it be that people want to be social? I look forward to videos, pictures and messages, but only from the people I want them from. We might want to take a lesson from email here. While still popular, laws eventually had to be created to regulate advertising via email. It was too easy and cheap to send millions of messages to people who did not want them and could not turn them off.

I think that we forget why radio, TV and print are still effective – because people choose to use those mediums, and accept that they will be marketed to. Like cell phones and email addresses, social media are much more personal, and by that very nature, much more filtered.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that any medium can be viable under the right circumstances. As cliché-ish as that sounds, I believe that social media is personal media, not a bunch of people out there waiting to buy something we are selling. Blogs, email, websites and other old 'hotties' have not gone away, but they have found a place and purpose that lets them thrive beyond the hype.

Scamming on a large scale is not for the faint of heart. Aside from the moral and ethical aspect of scams, they tend to work because they contain elements that make any salesperson successful.

Advertising Lessons from Kevin Trudeau and the Nigerians

If scammers had a Hall of Fame, they might seriously consider inducting Kevin Trudeau. For all of his alleged deceptions, he has come back again and again with a variation of the same theme: I'll reveal to you what "they don't want you to know". Whether "they" are the FTC and FDA concerning weight loss, the health care industry on curing diseases, the financial community about debt, or whoever is big enough to be a bogeyman in the eyes of most of us small fry, Kevin Trudeau presents himself as our knight in shinning armor.

In the same manner, Nigerian scam artists and their promises of huge windfalls have raked in billions, and continue to do so. However, since they do not have to go to such lengths to evade U.S. law enforcement, they operate a little more freely. They, too, have a basic message: I got a big check, please hold it for me, but send me money first. However, it takes many more bait takers of their scams to produce the billions that the FTC claims Mr. Trudeau has made. For the Nigerian scamsters, this can best be described as an industry. Mr. Trudeau, by comparison, can best be described as mogul, with one of the more larger slices of the market.

Why do these scams still work?

Most who presume to be the in least bit intelligent will never admit to being taken in by a shenanigan. This is why the amounts authorities finally attach to these scams are surely vastly underestimated. The amounts they do report are staggering. The Nigerian scams were estimated to have taken in $4.3 Billion worldwide. Mr. Trudeau had been reported to have amassed an estimated $2 Billion alone several years back. The Hall of Fame changes it's name to include yours for that kind of money.

Both of them bring understand several important points about selling:

• They understand mass markerting
• They adapt to their environment
• They vary the message, not the product
• They have a belief in what they are doing will work, and the patience to see it through

I am always amazed at the brazenness of these scams. It seems that by now, they would have run out of a market since they've been in business (and in the news) for several years. While P.T. Barnum aptly stated that a sucker is born every minute, these guys prove another truth: If you repeat something often enough and long enough, people will believe it.

It happens every recession. Organizations flatten, and staff find themselves doing more than they are used to doing. Some of if comes from necessity, where the person who used to perform those activities is gone and not coming back. Some of it comes from fear - it you don't do it, you may be next on the chopping block. Organizations go through this purge every recession, and with it comes the opportunity to do some tasks in house that was farmed out in order to save money.

I am often reminded of this when I build makeshift photography equipment versus buying the real thing. This is almost always driven by cost. Pro photo equipment is EXPENSIVE! Stands, lighting, backgrounds, etc, needed to take ONE set of pictures can be a huge undertaking, and you don't get to charge it all back to the client.

Hardware stores are a treasure trove for this type of makeshift equipment, and there are so many DIY (do it yourself) websites that almost any inhibition you have is overcome. In the end, you can have equipment that effectively operates like pro equipment, with professional results.

What I have ended up with is a collection of pipes, poles, clamps, tools, odds and ends that in some cases has cost me more than a portion of the pro equipment I could have purchased. The advantage is that I can do much more with the hardware because it is general purpose, and much more versatile. The downside is that I have to create what I want from scratch, and I find it difficult to establish a work flow with these items so that I might save another precious asset - time.

In contrast, the expensive equipment that I drool, agonize over, and in some cases, finally buy, works right out of the box, and VERY QUICKLY. Often, it became the CHEAPER option, because it increased efficiency, productivity and decreased time on a project. Another benefit was that I could take it to a client's office. Try doing that with makeshift equipment - it makes you look much so unprofessional.

I tell this story to give pause the next time you need to cut. Too many people look at dollars only, and make no mistake, dollars need to be looked at. However, one important thing that needs to be looked at is the overall effect on your organization and what you are trying to achieve, as well as the image you are trying to project. This is not a recession-only exercise. It is continual value analysis.

Your paying clients will never fully value your products and services if they think they can replicate them. This is true even if they don't have the time to do it themselves. They pay you for what they need, but CAN'T do. If I don't have time to wash my car (and I don't), I may pay to have it washed. However, if I pay to have my car washed, and people are always complimenting me on how nice it looks, and I could never get to look that way by doing it myself, I'm going to pay to have it done more often. The contrast has to be that great. It isn't the wash, but the compliments I'm paying for.

When trimming your organization, always remember what people are paying for. If you cut that, you may just be cutting the heart out of it.

Do you bring items to a checkout line, only to make the decision not to purchase after the item has been rung up? Do you add an item to your online shopping cart, only later to abandon the sale?

I do this, but not necessarily out of a buyer's remorse.

In a recent AP article notes that during this recession, up to 25% of brick-and-mortar shoppers are abandoning purchases, while upwards of 70% are doing so online

I don't feel guilty about abandoning merchandise. In some cases, I was only looking to see what the price was. If taking it up to the register or going as far as I can in an online shopping process is the only way I can get the price, and I mean the NEAR FINAL PRICE, then I will do so with full intent of possibly abandoning the item.

I bet most of us have done this as well, but feel guilty about it. If we do it in front of a checkout person, we feel really guilty. This probably explains the rate differential between online and brick-and-mortar stores.

I'll cite two examples of places I shop in how, a large department store, and an online equipment retailer, helps it's customers with pricing information and lessens the chances of abandoned purchases. In the case of the department store, they have scanners in the aisles. They are generally very good about pricing on the shelves, but with tens of thousands of items, not everything is marked clearly all of the time. I think the in-store scanner was a fantastic idea, and one that saves money. Most likely, when a shopper is able to scan an item near its shelf, the unwanted item will go back on the shelf from whence it came. This means that a stock clerk doesn't have to restock it, or more importantly, won't spend time searching for it when the inventory screen says that there is one left, but someone who abandoned the item left it at the cash register or in another department.

As for the online retailer, the equivalent of this is a wish list, or a feature that calculates shipping and handling based on zip code. If I can get all of the pricing information prior to placing it into a cart, I won't abandon the cart later when I intend to buy. They beauty of this retailer's system is that I don't even have to log in to get an exact purchasing price, just enter in my zip code. There are no emails to hassle me about what I wasn't going to buy.

It seems to me that some of the most brilliant people in business forget that they shop like this. These same people will go over contracts and proposals with the finest tooth combs, and still not sign, but express exasperation when someone puts back a $3 item at the checkout counter, or abandon a $10 online purchase.

What they should understand is that if people will drive another mile or two to save a nickel per gallon on gasoline, they'll have no problem abandoning merchandise before a purchased.

Especially if all their customers wanted to know was the price.

In reading the article Phones, PCs put e-book within reach of Kindle-less, I can't help but ask how many times are we going to have this debate? Everybody wants to think that they can do everything from their phone. Every generation of smart phone is supposed to replace all of the older, larger devices it incorporates.

By now, Dell, HP and other large footprint computer companies should have shelved their desktop and laptop operations a long time ago. With so much computing power built into our phones, we should have all replaced our "big boxes" with these devices. In fact, we should be upgrading our old, less powerful smart phones with newer models that would allow us to throw away more hardware, like mice and keyboards, because if they aren't already built in, touch screens will finally render these devices obsolete.

But everyone I know still has a computer.

It's the real estate, stupid!

Smart phones are definitely more powerful than computers of just a few years ago, but I am not doing work I did a few years ago, I am doing TODAY's work! My screen of a few years ago was 19", it's now 22", and a larger one would not hurt. The likelihood of me putting larger screens into a backpack or a back pocket have long been nil. Looking at pictures, documents and websites on a 2"x2" represents such a step backwards in both size and resolution that I can't see (no pun intended) why we still think smaller is better in this case.

My need for memory (4GB and counting), hard drive space (160GB primary, several external drives) and connectivity to
additional devices (I have a hub in addition to 8 on board USB slots) requires more than I can expect from a device as small as a smart phone. Try sticking a thumb drive (which many of us have) into a phone slot.

There are things that I find wonderful about a smart phone: Keeping my contacts and appointments, acting as a portable Yellow Pages directory, a GPS system when I get lost (or before), and text messaging. Since I use email as a documentation system, I limit usage to quick notes and replies, and I don't attach nor appreciate receiving attachments over cellular lines.

Oh, I forgot the most important thing I need from a smart phone - the ability to make calls.