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Mar 2011

Posted by Michelle LaPointe

Who Owns Your Facebook Content?

Note: This was originally part of a longer posting from 2010. I’ve had a lot of questions lately about using Facebook more extensively as a marketing tool. It makes sense for a lot of organizations, as long as it’s a) part of a coherent strategy, and b) includes relevant content. But few people are aware of the significant copyright issues surrounding Facebook. That’s why I’m reposting this as a standalone topic. I’ve made minor edits and clarifications. You can see the original posting here.

The Great Facebook Content Catch

Quick quiz: Who owns your Facebook content?

A. You do.
B. You do, but Facebook co-owns it as long as you’re a member.
C. Facebook does, forever and for all time.
D. You do, but Facebook can borrow it as long as it’s on your page, or even after you take it off your page, if someone else has posted it on their page. Effectively, Facebook can use it as long as it’s on a Facebook server.

Most people think that the answer is (A). It’s actually never been (A). For most of Facebook’s history, it was (B). Except for a strange, unsettling period lasting from February ’09 until the spring of 2010, when it was (C). In fact, during the megalomaniacal fever dream that was Policy (C), the company claimed “unending and irrevocable license to use any content uploaded to its service”. (Read more: Concern over new Facebook content rules – Wichita Business Journal)

Scary. Creepy. And with the potential to collect all user-posted content into some giant Wikibook or Faceipedia. (One can only imagine the lengthy entry on uses of the word “dude”, or the photo essays on the topic, “Me and My Friends at a Party.”)

Facebook’s policy is now (D), to wit:

“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

(Read the full statement on Facebook.)

As far as I know, Facebook has not ever used these considerable powers over content, let alone abused them. But the potential for such unlimited (albeit temporary, as long as Policy D is in force) power over content makes me nervous.

This is a big deal, because content is expensive. If your content is created in-house, you may think it’s cheap, or even free, but it is most definitely not. This content, for example, took me a dang long time to write. In my opinion it’s a worthy investment, but it’s still a cost.

Of course, the best way to maximize that investment is to re-use your content. Facebook’s content ownership policy has the potential to diminish or dilute your ability to do just that. How? Here are two hypothetical examples of what Facebook could theoretically do under this policy:

You have a line of clothing that you market to pre-teen girls. Every week, you liven up your Facebook page with a clever, quotable saying. Eventually you decide to put these sayings on your back-to-school tees. Only Facebook has already loaded them into a highly popular rotating widget and printed them on bumper stickers, none of it tied to your brand. Now you’ll look like you got them from Facebook, not the other way around.
Your company is the world’s leading expert on dust-repelling heating ducts. To save money and time, you use your Facebook fan page as a blog instead of setting up a real one. You post answers to customers’ FAQs. You and your engineers write about how to achieve smooth installations and why your ducts are the best ducts of all time.
After a while, almost without trying, you have the makings of the kick-ass white paper that you’ve been putting off for years. You have loads of text and pictures to enrich your content-starved website. Only by now, Facebook has launched Faceipedia, and the article under “Dustless Ducts” has all your accumulated wisdom. Nobody needs to go to your branded site, or to download your white paper.

I don’t know that Facebook wants to do any of these things. They probably don’t. But the fact that they might be able to should give you pause about what kind of content you post there.

It would be lovely if Facebook could make you instantly cool, drive millions of new customers to your door, and allow you to eliminate all but a pittance of your marketing budget. But the fact is that it’s pretty much like all marketing tools: valuable for some, highly effective when used with skill to the right target audiences, and no magic bullet.

Posted in: Copyright issues and advertising, copywriting, Facebook, Marketing strategy, social media, Strategic planning, Strategy, Website design & content

Nov 2010

Posted by Michelle LaPointe

0 comments

The Morgan Principle

Our cat may never learn from her mistakes. But you can.

This is Morgan. Sometimes her water dish is empty, or she wants to go outside. But unlike other cats, she doesn’t cry near the water dish, or the back door. She stands near someone in the family and howls until we figure it out. As a result, you can often hear us muttering, “Cry near the problem, Morgan.”

Just like Morgan, sometimes organizations miss the mark because their marketing efforts are not crying near the problem — they’re crying near the solution. You’d think that would work just as well, or even better. But if your product or service is high-ticket, technically or conceptually complex, or requires a change in thinking by your customer, that’s not enough. You need to cry near all the problems, and near everyone who has them.

In fact, you need to

Talk to the person who has the problem.
Talk to the person who can solve the problem.
Talk to the person who has to pay for the problem.

Case in point:

I know of a company that has developed a highly advanced technical product. Coolbeans Widgets has been working their butts off to market it to the target market categories that need it badly. Their materials and pitch effectively address every objection they hear in the field. Yet, to their surprise and disappointment, they’ve been getting a tepid reception.

Last week, purely by accident, I was in a meeting with some people that could really use a Coolbeans Widget solution to solve a customer service problem. Yet none of them were aware that it existed. All work for organizations that are heavily marketed about products like this one. All were thrilled to learn that there was a solution, and all eagerly asked for information about it. In other words, they were a receptive, even excited audience. But none of them had even heard of Coolbeans Widgets; in fact, no one in the meeting even knew of the Coolbeans Widgets category.

The reason for this disconnect is that none of the people in this meeting work in their company IT departments. IT executives make decisions about technical products their companies buy and implement. Funding for those purchases comes out of IT budgets. So naturally, Coolbeans thinks of those IT decision-makers as their customers.

Clearly, that’s not the whole story.

The IT execs aren’t being insensitive to the needs of the business folks. They don’t know that they have a solution to the customer service problem — they probably don’t even know that the customer-service problem exists. The business people never thought to ask IT for help. Why would they? In their heads, customer service issues are people problems. In fact, if they had asked for IT help, the IT department may not have made the leap. The clear, well-presented materials delivered by Coolbeans address every single one of the problems and objections voiced by their IT customers — but they don’t spend a single paragraph addressing the problems of influencers outside the IT department.

Whose job is it to connect the dots? Yours, of course, oh Mighty Marketer. Or, in the case of Coolbeans, theirs. You have to put The Morgan Principle into action:

Talk to the person who has the problem.
Talk to the person who can solve the problem.
Talk to the person who has to pay for the problem (so you can make the business case).

…and talk to each one of them in a way that addresses their particular concerns.

This isn’t a new idea. Marketers have been relying on it for centuries, because it works. I’ve written about it before, and I will again. I’ve worked with companies that have expanded their markets, eliminated seasonal slumps, and dramatically reduced their sales process (and costs) simply by using the Morgan Principle.

Remember, your target audience is not just the person who pays the bill.

Even if you never meet them, whether you call them buyers, influencers, gatekeepers, or end-users — if you want to be successful, they’re all your customers.

Posted in: business-to-business, Lead-generation, marketing, Sales

Aug 2010

Posted by Michelle LaPointe

0 comments

You Lost Me At “Hello” #2

Traps to avoid if you want your prospects to stick around past the handshake

#2 in a series.

Trap #2. Congratulate a woman for running a business.

As of 2007, women owned 28.7% of all non-farm businesses in the United States. They’re executives, managers, and decision-makers with influence and purchasing power in many more. So it’s no wonder that a lot of b-to-b marketers are targeting women business leaders.

But sometimes that noble intent is ruined by lousy execution. And one of the easiest ways to turn off women business leaders is to congratulate them for being women business leaders.

Business people giving enthusiastic thumbs-up to women business owners -- and a baffled kitten

Women over 40 will be insulted – how long have we been doing this? Younger women — Millennials — will be baffled. Many of the women they know, including their mothers and grandmothers, work, and many of these role models are business owners.

Consider these two messages, both real. The first is a rare stumble from a company that normally does a good job of talking to women, and in fact, that does a good job on the rest of this site. Unfortunately, the stumble is on the site’s home page.

The advent of companies led by women has been one of the most significant changes in the world of business and in the world itself. Female leadership of companies has—and is—changing how businesses are organized, managed, and insured. At Aetna, we’ve witnessed these realities firsthand.

Our work with women-led companies has taught us that the idea of communities—places where different people come together to share interests, goals, and values—is central to their success. This is how we have developed the benefit plans and the actual tools needed to serve the health and well-being of companies led by women.

We urge you to consider this website an online community, one where you can get the information you need for the health of the business community you lead.

The second message is from a business letter:

We’ve been friends since we were girls, and you know I love you like a sister.

But we both also know that your husband is an ass, and he’s wrong when he says that I’m overcharging for those beds you purchased for your inn.

I’m sending my employee over this afternoon to collect on the debt. Please give him the money you owe me.

Babylonian business letter on a clay tablet

The first message is verbatim. I paraphrased the second; for example, where I used “employee” and “money”, the original used “servant” and “shekels”. In 1908, archeologists from Columbia University found this letter, inscribed on a clay tablet, in a trash heap behind the shop of a Babylonian scribe. It’s 4,000 years old.

Interestingly, the Aetna message seems to have been written by scientists, too: anthropologists. Not marketers…or insurance specialists…or people who have met women business leaders…or people who have met women. Aetna has “witnessed” the quaint beliefs of the culture under study, and has learned the “idea of communities”. (It even defines ”community”, and a good thing, too. Otherwise, how would we ever know the name of that thing we build? Thank you, Aetna! ) Now Aetna is prepared to help the adorable but helpless natives by building a ready-made online community just for us! They even tell us how to think about it! Woo-hoo!

It’s too bad, too, because the site has good content, organized in a way that is useful for women business owners, with categories like “Healthy Business,” “Healthy Family, and ” Healthy Life”.

And it’s kind of ridiculous, considering the irrefutable evidence of the second message. Women have been running businesses for at least 4,000 years, and probably a lot longer than that — probably as long as there have been businesses. I don’t know anything about the Babylonian woman business owner who wrote that dunning letter, but I’ll bet that she had something else in common with modern women: the urge to roll her eyes whenever someone congratulated her for simply being in business.

Posted in: business-to-business, copywriting, marketing, marketing to women

Aug 2010

Posted by Michelle LaPointe

0 comments

You Lost Me At “Hello” #1

Traps to avoid if you want your prospects to stick around past the handshake

#1 in a series.

Trap #1: The mysterious home page.

It’s cool. It’s pretty. It’s got a talking head, animation, a soundtrack, an interest form, and half a dozen widgets. It’s crammed full of keywords that the SEO specialist gave you. It matches your brand personality, your product packaging, or the colors in the CEO’s office. Yet none of that matters if the prospect needs more than three seconds to figure out what it is that you do.

That means:

The right words: A short, clear statement of what you offer. (Hint: it’s not your mission statement.)
Pictures that communicate. If you sell products, show them and/or their benefits. If you’re a charity, show the people you help. If you offer a service that’s harder to depict in a snapshot, work with creative professionals who can help you find images that quickly communicate what you do.
A look and feel that’s on brand. No matter what you do, you have competitors. Yet you differ from them in one or more ways that means something to your customers. That’s your USP (unique selling proposition). Are you the upscale custom brand? The low-price leader? The boutique brand? The friendly one? The one with the huge array of offerings? The one that specializes in a niche? The one with overnight shipping? Your USP should be reflected in every brand choice you make, from the colors in your design to the tone of your copy.

And it goes without saying (I hope) that your website should have branding elements in common with marketing and advertising you do through print, direct mail, broadcast, trade shows, social media, and every other channel.
Cues to help your audience self-identify. Your visitors have to know, instantly, that the site is for them. It would be an easy thing to say, “This site is for…” and simply list the members of your target audience. Easy — but not very effective. It’s much better to include stories, situations, images, benefit headlines, and other cues that let your audience identify themselves as part of your target market, and recognize you as someone who understands and can meet their needs.

In short, does your home page pass the “Wheelbarrow Test”?

I admit it. I made up the Wheelbarrow Test years ago on the spur of the moment, out of frustration. I did it during a meeting with six insanely smart people.

Three of them were business geniuses and three were technical geniuses. They talked about complete solutions, world-changing innovation, unique business models and flexible innovation. It was fabulous, and they were clearly excited. But after an hour of this, I still had no idea what they were planning to sell.

In desperation, I said, ”STOP. Take a deep breath. Close your eyes.

“Imagine that your customer is standing in front of you with a wheelbarrow full of money. If he gives it to you, what does he get in exchange? Is it a box with a product inside? Is it hardware? Software? Something to wear? Something to eat? A consultant showing up on his doorstep? A subscription or a service?”

“If you can’t answer that question clearly on the home page, then your website will not succeed. And if your website is crucial to sales, neither will your company.”

The conference room got very quiet. The six geniuses looked at each other. Four of them said “Oh…” The two Europeans said, “Eaux…” And at last they understood the critically important task at hand.

When we start working with a new client at C3 Advertising, invariably the first item on the client’s wish list is a website redesign. Clients are often dismayed if their existing home page doesn’t pass the Wheelbarrow Test (although it often explains a lot about why their current site isn’t working). But all is not lost.

“Cheer up,” I say. “Chances are, your competitors’ sites don’t pass the Wheelbarrow Test, either.”

Posted in: branding, marketing, Website design & content

Jul 2010

Posted by Michelle LaPointe

1 comment

Should You Be On Facebook?

Smashing Magazine had a very useful posting yesterday on how to create effective fan pages on Facebook. It turns out that creating an effective Facebook fan page takes just as much effort, design sense, good copywriting, and marketing savvy as any other advertising effort. Most of all, like the “real” web, an effective Facebook fan page also takes carefully crafted content with a high perceived value.

To that I say: duh. Too bad, but, duh.

(What’s a “fan page”? Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, Facebook believes that people are different from business entities. This means that your business can have a ”fan page,” but not a “profile”. There are more restrictions on a fan page than on a profile; for example, you don’t have the ability to add friends. The penalty for confusing the two is abrupt and ignominious removal from the Facebook universe. Ironically, that means it’s easier for a business to be tossed out than for an individual to erase their Facebook presence voluntarily. So if you’re having trouble closing your Facebook profile account, I suggest you try changing your name to Giant Corporation, Inc. and see if they’ll close it down for you.)

Should your business even have a Facebook Fan Page?

It’s probably worth a try, if…

You’ve got a consumer brand that customers regularly engage with, or get passionate about. Cars. Trendy clothing. Starbuck’s. A rock band. Organic knitting wool. Artisan olive oil. Boutique wines.
Your target market is a heavy user of Facebook. Examine your market closely. There is a big difference between “has a Facebook account” and “lives on Facebook”.
You offer a lot of coupons, short-term offers, or events. Facebook lends itself well to these kinds of programs.
You do it right, both creatively, and as part of a thoughtful online strategy. This is not a task to leave to the summer intern.
You have all your other marketing ducks in a row. Facebook is cheap — however, as I’ll show in a minute, by no means free — but it’s no substitute for a real marketing program.

It wouldn’t hurt, and might help, if…

You’re a business-to-business marketer with an offbeat brand.
You have a cutting-edge product in an emerging field where there is a lot of discussion between product creators and end-users/consumers. But be cautious — where Facebook might be a good forum for interaction and brand-building if your product is a highly experimental surfboard, I’d steer clear if it’s something like commercial-scale green energy technology. Facebook is, after all, a social network, and can appear frivolous. If you want to be taken seriously, a blog is a better choice.
Your consumer customers are on the cusp: some of them live online, some don’t. Do some real testing to see if the results are worth your time and effort before committing to a program.

You probably shouldn’t, if…

You’re going on Facebook only because you keep hearing that you should.
You think it will instantly make your solid, traditional brand look hip. It won’t.
You’re a traditional b-to-b with traditional sales channels. Hardly anyone we know develops fan-like zeal for a particular brand of rooftop tarring materials or network-management software. Customers may love your products, but they almost never feel compelled to shout “Hinkley’s Industrial Packing Tape rocks!” Nor are they likely to visit you on Facebook.
You don’t have the resources to maintain it.
You want to protect your content.

And that brings us to…

The Great Facebook Content Hitch

Quick quiz: Who owns your Facebook content?

A. You do.
B. You do, but Facebook co-owns it as long as you’re a member.
C. Facebook does, forever and for all time.
D. You do, but Facebook can borrow it as long as it’s on your page.

Most people think that the answer is (A). It’s actually never been (A). For most of Facebook’s history, it was (B). Except for a strange, unsettling period lasting from February ’09 until just recently, when it was (C). In fact, during the megalomaniacal fever dream that was Policy (C), the company claimed “unending and irrevocable license to use any content uploaded to its service”. (Read more: Concern over new Facebook content rules – Wichita Business Journal)

Facebook’s policy is now (D), to wit:

“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

(Read the full statement on Facebook.)

As far as I know, Facebook has not ever used these considerable powers over content, let alone abused them. But the potential for such unlimited (albeit temporary, as long as Policy D is in force) power over content makes me nervous.

This is a big deal, because content is expensive. If your content is created in-house, you may think it’s cheap, or even free, but it is most definitely not. This content, for example, took me a dang long time to write. In my opinion it’s a worthy investment, but it’s still a cost.

You have a line of clothing that you market to pre-teen girls. Every week, you liven up your Facebook page with a clever, quotable saying. Eventually you decide to put these sayings on your back-to-school tees. Only Facebook has already loaded them into a highly popular rotating widget and printed them on bumper stickers, none of it tied to your brand. Now you’ll look like you got them from Facebook, not the other way around.
Your company is the world’s leading expert on dust-repelling heating ducts. To save money and time, you use your Facebook fan page as a blog instead of setting up a real one. You post answers to customers’ FAQs. You and your engineers write about how to achieve smooth installations and why your ducts are the best ducts of all time.
After a while, almost without trying, you have the makings of the kick-ass white paper that you’ve been putting off for years. You have loads of text and pictures to enrich your content-starved website. Only by now, Facebook has launched Faceipedia, and the article under “Dustless Ducts” has all your accumulated wisdom. Nobody needs to go to your branded site, or to download your white paper.

I don’t know that Facebook wants to do any of these things. They probably don’t. But the fact that they might be able to should give you pause about what kind of content you post there.

Posted in: marketing, social media

Jul 2010

Posted by Michelle LaPointe

0 comments

3 Lessons From the $500 Solution, Part 2

I recently wrote about how a one-time investment of $500 could help computer companies — and Adobe — sell thousands more units this year. What follows is a summary of the lessons all organizations can learn form that industry’s mistakes.

Lesson #2: There’s no substitute for continual, meaningful communication within your organization.

You can put down your Blackberries and iPhones and stop updating your Twitter feed for a moment. I’m not talking about constantly touching base. I’m talking about serious, focused, intense sharing about who your customers are and how they use your products and services.

I encourage all my clients to conduct something I call a Quarterly Convergence. This is a formal meeting that includes a representative of every department that touches your customer: sales, marketing, customer service, R&D, product management, channel marketing, billing, management,and your ad agency. We sit down with a full pot of coffee, a basket of bagels, and no cell phones, and talk about the customer: who they are, what they want, how they’re using the client’s products and services.

I won’t go into detail about how this works, but I will say this: the result is always enlightening and always helps the organization become more effective.

Very often, it also results in extremely rapid development of new products and/or markets. That’s because — imagine this! – your customers are under no obligation to use your products or services in they way that you intended. They come up with all kinds of innovative ways to use whatever it is that you sell. And when they do that, they frequently call your support lines, mention it to a sales rep, or post in an online review. In most organizations, that extraordinarily valuable intelligence goes nowhere. But if it’s shared, you can turn a hidden demand into sales.

Had the product teams from Sony, Toshiba, Apple, Adobe, HP, Intel, or any of the other players in my example been doing this, they would have instantly seen the value of providing the information that customers in this niche need to make a buying decision. And speaking of niche markets…See next post.

Posted in: marketing

Jun 2010

Posted by Michelle LaPointe

0 comments

3 Lessons From the $500 Solution

Last week I wrote about how a one-time investment of $500 could help computer companies — and Adobe — sell thousands more units this year. What follows is a summary of the lessons all organizations can learn form that industry’s mistakes.

Lesson #1: There’s no substitute for putting your customers first

It’s especially dangerous when you spend more time obsessing over your competition than you do thinking about your customers.

The bad blood between Adobe and Apple is a perfect example how this mistake can hurt sales. “Us vs. them” thinking can quickly permeate an entire organization, especially when your fearless leader is as vocal about it as Steve Jobs has been. In this atmosphere, can you imagine that a Apple marketer would even suggest a website graphic that says “Adobe CS5-Friendly”, no matter how much it would help sales? Can you imagine that Adobe would do anything that might accidentally help a software customer purchase a computer from Apple? Yet that’s exactly what they should both be doing — if they care about sales and customers more than they loathe each other.

Next: Lesson #2: There’s no substitute for talking to each other.

Posted in: Uncategorized

Jun 2010

Posted by Michelle LaPointe

0 comments

The $500 Solution

Or, Everybody Loses Except Mr. Singh and Me

Imagine that you are a manufacturer or retailer of computers, software, or computer chips. What if I told you that you could move tens of thousands of units this year — perhaps hundreds of thousands – for a one-time investment of $500, most of which you’re already paying out in salaries?

Would you do it? Of course you would. So why hasn’t HP, Sony, or Toshiba? Why hasn’t Intel, Adobe, or Apple? I’ll tell you how they should spend that $500. But first, the back story.

I’m almost certainly going to buy a new computer this year. I don’t want to. There’s nothing wrong with our old ones. But I want to upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 5. In order to do that, I have to replace at least one of our 32-bit computers with one that will support the latest edition of the behemoth suite of apps for design, web development, and video and audio editing that is the Adobe Master Collection.

Theoretically, all I have to do is match the list of specs on Adobe’s website to a computer brand’s specs, and I’m done shopping. Right?

Wrong.

The Search Is On

Here’s where I looked:

Online: Websites of half a dozen different PC manufacturers, and PC Connection, an online retailer. I found exhaustive specs, but either their language doesn’t match Adobe’s, or there are big gaps in descriptions of key components, like graphics and sound cards. Everyone has “finders”, but they’re useless unless you fit into one of four broad buckets: road warrior, home user, gamer, or business user (by which they mean “people who use spreadsheets and PowerPoint™”).
I tried Intel’s website, too, figuring that if I could nail down the processor, I would at least have a starting point. But I ran into trouble from the home page. Adobe’s site says that CS5 requires an Intel® Core™2 Duo processor. Intel’s website offers a host of brand names on its first few pages, none of them an exact match. I picked Core vPro, the closest match. A few pages in, I did find a Core 2 Duo, only to lose it again when I clicked on a link for laptop processors. A link that said “Where to buy” lead to an error message on a server in the U.K.
Email. OK, I thought; I’ll tackle this from another angle. I copied the Adobe list into emails and sent them to sales departments of Sony, Toshiba, and Apple, among others, and asked which of their models met these requirements. Some didn’t write back. Some pointed me back to their website. One wrote that they couldn’t answer the question in an email, but that I should call the sales department. (When I did, they asked me if I was a road warrior, home user, gamer, or business user. Sigh.)
The mall: Best Buy and the Apple Store. It was no surprise that the Best Buy clerk didn’t know the products well enough to guide me. (Although, when you’re in the right mood, it can be amusing to watch a Best Buy employee “answer your question” by standing next to you and reading aloud from the card on the computer.) The Apple clerks barely glanced at my list of specs.One recommended a laptop that didn’t meet the Adobe specs for processor, graphics card, or memory, but he said he was confident it would be fine for running the Master Collection, because he, himself “does a lot of Photoshop” on that very same machine.

Google.I’m not alone in this. Sadly, if you Google “best computer for Adobe CS5″, you get a lot of people like me. You can hear them weeping through their message board posts. “Won’t someone please tell me which computer to buy? Please? Pleeeese?”

It’s not surprising that there are so many of us out there. Love it or hate, it, Adobe Creative Suite is the preeminent software package for the world’s millions of print designers, web designers, illustrators, and many people who work in animation, audio, video, and film production. If even 10% of them are in my boat, that’s a lot of people who need new computers. Right now. This year. During a recession. We just don’t know what to buy.

Sarwan Singh To The Rescue

Just when I was about to give up, I remembered U2W, the place that fixed my laptop last summer. I dug up the owner’s business card and gave him a call.

It took Mr. Singh all of fifteen minutes to solve my problem. He looked at the Adobe specs online while I was on the phone. He compared it to the specs he had for laptops, and said an Apple would be ok if I upgraded the graphics card. He suggested an HP model that would also work.

The Magical $500

Fake badge that says Ready for CS5

If any one of those manufacturers or vendors had thought about customers like me, I wouldn’t have had to go through this exercise, and they’d be selling a lot more computers. This is all they would need to make me and mine happy: a silly little badge like this one, placed on websites next to all the computers that support Adobe CS5.

That’s it. No one would have to dig, email, call, worry, or pray that they wouldn’t be making an expensive mistake. We customers would know what to buy in less than 5 seconds. The only decisions left would be the size of the hard drive and the color of the case.

How I got to $500

You need someone with a lot of product knowledge to come up with a list of products that meet the Adobe specs. Let’s say that in your organization, that person earns $150 an hour. It took Mr. Singh 15 minutes to think about which computers would support CS5, so we’re at $37.50.
I spent another 15 minutes making this awful badge in Illustrator. A production artist would want a little more time to make a non-ugly version. Let’s say that this cost is $50. Add $12 in case your designer wants to start with a stock illustration.
Someone in your marketing or web department has to look at your site, decide where these badges should go, and communicate that information to the web developer. $80.
The person who maintains your website places the image in all the right spots. $60.
You run it through QC. $40.

You’re now at $219.50. To make this work, you need two more people: someone who will suggest the idea and insist that it happens, and someone who will follow through and make sure that it did happen. Take the remaining $280.50 and give each of them half of it as a bonus. You’re done. Hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars in sales, for $500.

But since, in the real world, nobody did that,

Let’s List The Losers

Apple, Toshiba, Sony, HP, et al. They’re busily NOT selling computers to lots of people who really want to buy them.
Adobe. They’re not selling software to people like me, because we don’t have the computers to run it. At the very least, they should have used the same processor brand names that customers will find when they shop.
Me, and potential customers like me. We’re really annoyed that this is so hard to do.

And The Winners

Mr. Singh. He understands the specs, he knows his own products, and he invested 15 minutes in me. When I do buy a computer, I’ll buy it from him.
Me again. Uncertainty banished. Anxiety gone. I’ll never get my lost time back, but I can now buy a computer with confidence.

Next…

Larger lessons to be learned from this, no matter what your industry.

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Posts Tagged ‘customers’

The Morgan Principle