Recent Activity

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  Marketing 101 - getting attention

  It's like another one I heard.

  A fishmonger was planning his sign and had pencilled in

  Fresh Fish For Sale Here Today

  A smart passerby said

  "Hey, do you need to put 'today'? You're not asking people to come back.

  "true!" says the FM.

  "And the sign is right out the front of your shop. Do you need 'here'?"

  "You're right" remarked the FM.

  "And you're not going to give them away, so you don't have to say "For Sale".

  "Yup" - FM

  "And you wouldn't sell anything but 'Fresh' fish would you?"

  "No, thanks, all I need to do is say 'Fish'. Nice one."

  "Actually, you can smell it from a mile away" quipped the passerby as he ran off laughing....

  Posted 02 Oct 07

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  Marketing-Sales.....whats the difference?

  Sales is a marketing tool. It has to be.

  You get someone to know about your product.

  You get them to want to buy it.

  You let them buy it.

  They can buy it through a sales person, through a retailer, online. Sometimes they buy it after they've been using it, like shareware.

  Because they way something has to be sold must be in line with the customer then sales needs to be a decision made by marketing.

  Posted 02 Oct 07

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  Trends

  Keeping up with trends are hard. Just look at my fashions or lack of them! But web trends are equally hard. One of the main reasons is that there is different waves. There is the very early wave, the early adopter wave, then the mass market wave. (ready for metaphor) And it's easy to drown under all those waves. 

  My approach? Rely on random luck and a great network. I have bookmarked a bunch of good sites that I visit over coffee a couple of times a month and browse through them. That is how I find my own stuff. Funnily enough, this is good to keep me up to speed on about 90% of things I need. Some sites include;

  Digg - user generated news that they think other users will want. Then users vote on the news and the good stuff makes the 'front page'.

  Springwise - general lifestyle news. It's a bit random but they have cool stuff that I normally wouldn't run into. Architecture, fashion, toys, etc. 

  On Springwise;

   

  BoingBoing - one of the oldest treasures of random stuff from across the net. These guys started crawling and now they have enough gravity that news comes to them and they filter it past their "gotta be really cool" process. 

  Rocketboom - daily video that covers cool stuff. Random too. Sexy english host. 

   

  The second part is making sure you're friends/colleagues know what you're interested in. This works pretty well and catches the other 10% (60%) of stuff you need to know. You do get 10 emails from friends when something big happens, but better then missing out.  

   Yeah, you can get reports like Trendwatching which is good but expensive.

  That's my first online tip.  

  Posted 24 Oct 06

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  Letting Go of Control

  It's hard for big firms to let go of control. It's a Pandoras box. If you let people say what they want, then they will sometimes say bad things then you have to acknowledge it and deal with it. Easier just to not listen.

  Posted 01 Oct 07

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  Who has your customers before you and after you?

  One helpful way to think about not only acquisition but also value is to consider what your customers do before they get to you and what they do after they get to you.

  e.g. Motorbikes.

  Before I buy a motorbike, what do I do?

  1. get a license.
     
  2. Research
  3. Talk to friends.
  4. Trial them out.
     
  5. Watch dvd's?
  6. visit bike shows?

  And after I buy a bike?

  1. Buy a jacket.
  2. Buy a helmet.
  3. Want to go on a cruise.
  4. Want to take my  babe for a ride up the coast.

  Where they are before you get them is a good source for promotional partnerships and where they go after is a good source for value add, surprise value add, referral revenue, etc.

  I think the same principle applies for online. I just found a great video on I Am Bored.com but it didn't let me embed it in Tangler. Sheesh, who doesn't allow that these days. So I went to YouTube and embedded it in 12 seconds. Easy. Make it easy for customers to come to you, and then make it easy for them to move on. Be a valuable part of the 'system' and customers will always use you and will more often refer you.  

  Posted 21 Nov 06

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  PR

  Nothing useful, just a joke courtesy of dilbert;

  

  Posted 21 Feb 07

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  Making Your Customers Look Good

  Stolen article - from one of my favourites. "Creating Passionate Users"

  http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/

  Tech t-shirts aren't sexy enough

  

  I've been to seven JavaOne conferences. I've paid more than $10,000 of my own money, just for the attendance fee. You'd think--just once--they'd give me a show shirt that didn't hide the fact that I have, say, breasts. You'd think--just once--they'd take part of the $2000 entrance fee and spend, oh, .1% extra to print up some shirts that sub-6-foot folks can wear. And it's not just Sun's JavaOne show, of course--practically every tech company out there is guilty. If I had a dime for every booth vendor who's smiled and said , "Here, you can sleep in it!", I'd be typing this from my ocean-front villa. (Pssst--tech companies: most of us women don't sleep in anything, but I digress...)

  The formula we've done to death on this blog is pretty simple:
  How are you helping your users kick ass?

  I put "helping them look good" in the "kicking ass" category.

  But that's not even the point. The point is showing us that you care about more than just saving a few bucks on a t-shirt print run. That you care about ALL your users, not just the Big Burly Men. And even if you do not care, you'd think the marketers would get a clue that people aren't going to be wearing your logo around giving you free advertising if the shirt doesn't fit.

  The bar's been set pretty low on this, so even a MEN'S SMALL would make me happy. But Webstock went all the way to give the gals women's shirts. I actually wear mine all the time. I've even been photographed wearing it at another conference.

  I so don't want a lecture on logistics or saving money by making shirts for the largest common denominator. And I don't want to hear that, after all, it IS mostly men at these things. So what if you have some leftover shirts? Give them out at other tech events. Send them to user groups. Donate them to a homeless shelter.

  Yes, you could argue that as a web-focused show rather than a pure programming event, Webstock was likely to have more women than JavaOne, so it made sense. And that's true, but doesn't explain why I also got a fitted, flattering, rather sexy blue tee at GUADEC (the GNOME user's and developer's european conference) which was not expecting but a very few women attendees. But they treated us like we mattered too. Like we weren't the tacked-on not-really-target-audience people. Besides, this isn't even a gender thing... it's a SIZE thing. There are plenty of men who don't look that much better in an XXL Hanes Beefy T than I do.

  This is partly tongue-in-cheek, but still...the t-shirts are a metaphor for--or at least a reflection of--the way the company feels about users as individual people. The shirts matter, and they speak volumes about your company.

  And hey, tech companies, I AM available to beta test your freshly-minted women's T's (size small or x-small). In fact, for any tech company that tells me they'll be keeping plenty of women's shirts on hand for trade shows, user groups, etc., I'll post a picture of the shirt on this blog. But it better make me look good. ; )

  Posted by Kathy Sierra on December 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (65) | TrackBack (6)

   

  Posted 18 Dec 06

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  One New Thing at a Time

  One of the big challenges with innovations is that they are new. There is a small group of people who are ok with big new things, but most people prefer things the way they were, not even are. So newness is going to scare them.

   General rule - change one thing at a time. 

  Hmm, that makes it hard to be different. Therein lies the challenge. To succeed, you have to be different enough to warrant wanting to change, but close enough so that people know the result to expect and know how to get the result.

  How do you do it?

  My tip is to sell the end value, but then start with one step. e.g.  Tangler let's your groups communicate in rich, live and accessible ways.  First step, create a group like a discussion forum and start using pictures instead of just smileys. Discover the rest later. 

  It's not easy, but worth it.  

  Posted 27 Nov 06

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  Enterprise vs Consumer

  This is a quick posting to say that since my trip to San Francisco I have concluded my many years of thinking about the key difference between enterprise technology and consumer technology. Here is the executive summary.

  1. Enterprise - you make money.

  2. Consumer - you may very possible make some money in the future.

  That's it in a nutshell.

  So if you're a budding entrepreneur, then my advice is to try and do enterprise. It's 100 times easier and more profitable. Just ask the Skype and Youtube guys.

  The equation goes like this;

  Enterprise = consumer + money - fun.

  Yeah? 

  Posted 20 Nov 06

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  Skipping The Chasm

  There is an interesting phenom going on where there are so many people using the Internet and knowing how to 'get it done' that there is the possibility of skipping the early adopters and going straight to the big chunk mass market. Hmmm......

  Of course this is referring back to Geofrey Moore's great but aging book, Crossing the Chasm.

   

   

  In it, Geoff says that to get to the early majority and the mass market from the early adopters you have to cross a void. On the geek side you have a technically strong but usably weak product. To get to the other side you have to polish it off and also work your butt off to get the first few users who act as your reference group to the rest of the early majority. 

  Makes sense.

  But what about MySpace? Is it technically strong? NO!! Is it polished and easy to use? NO!! So how did it get to the mass market? And did it even have an 'early adopter' period?

  Well it probably did. Even if it was just teen agers who are technically strong, or technically exploratory. Then it moves little by little to the right. Not because the product get's easier to use or technically better, but just because people with the confidence in the product introduce it to the next person.
  
  "Then just click 'Add to Friend'. Yeah, sometimes it screws up. Just click back and click it again. Then you have to put in this code thing. Just go to photo bucket. I don't know. Type it in Google."
  
  So the chasm isn't skipped, it's just not about technical brilliance. It's about investment in training.

  What do you think?
  

  Posted 03 Nov 06