It seems like I can’t get enough of The Gaslight Anthem since a friend recommended their album "The ‘59 Sound." I love listening to the title track, though once you absorb the lyrics it starts to tug on the ol’ heartstrings.
There’s a clue to the meaning of the phrase "59 sound" at 3:07 in the video, though it’s not something I ever would have picked up on without a previous search for the meaning of the lyric.
"Young boys, young girls, Ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night"
Your brand (whether personal, professional, product, or corporate) embodies a story. A good story sells. A great brand story helps people connect with a brand.
I recently finished reading "Save the Cat" by Blake Snyder. The book is for screenwriters. Let’s clear up one quick point: I do not aspire to screenwriting. The book was recommended by Kathy Sierra at an O’Reilly workshop for its insights into good storytelling.
The title of the book refers to the hero of a story doing something that endears him/her to the viewer such as saving a cat. When telling the story of your brand, the hero is your product, your service, your company, or you.
What is something the hero of YOUR BRAND STORY can do to endear it to customers or partners? I am not suggesting something fabricated or disingenuous—what can you do that is genuine and awesome and noteworthy and endears your brand to people in your target market (or even just your coworkers)?
A mechanic friend of mine does work for free for people in need when they are referred to him. He certainly doesn’t advertise it, but the word spreads enough that it makes people feel good about giving him business. It’s part of his story.
A caterer in town takes leftover food to shelters. Everyone’s tired after a big event. The customer has already paid for the food. It would be easier to just throw it out. Word spreads.
A pizzeria proprietor offers cheap and even free soup to students at the nearby high school who are sent to school with neither lunch nor lunch money. That made it into the newspaper.
What about you? Is there a cat you can go save?
Following the vein of some of my other #junechallenge posts, I’m doing some thinking about Internet hype cycles and the impact of Internet on culture.
As a prelude to that, listen to Nora Young’s interview with Bill Wasik on Viral Culture. One thing that piqued my interest was a comment about spending time working on things that don’t have to be published ASAP to be relevant. Content that is good because it is good, not because it is timely (something for all you Twitter addicts out there).
http://podcast.cbc.ca/spark/spark_20090611_billwasik.mp3
(For those of you not addicted to CBC, Nora Young is, among other things, the host of Spark on CBC Radio. Spark is "a blog, radio show, podcast and an ongoing conversation about technology and culture.")
Here is a fantastic piece of video art using Post-it notes to do pixel-style stop motion. Brilliant work. Great job, Bang-yao Liu (Savannah College of Art and Design).
And lest you think this is just some bored kid wasting time, watch the "Making of" video to see just how involved it was:
Is there something you want to accomplish? Is there a side project, a small business, a rental property, or something else you’re dreaming about? Maybe you want to write a novel or act in the theatre. Maybe you simply want to end a week feeling like you are not falling behind. Why are you avoiding the next step in accomplishing your goal? What is holding you back?
Why are you hedging?
Consider this a challenge: take the next step. If you leave a comment on this post stating what you want to accomplish and what your next step is going to be, I will follow up with you by email to see how you’re doing. Sometimes all you need is to state your plan and have someone hold you accountable.
Obviously it is OK to hate your customers because so many companies clearly do, and they do so actively. Want proof? Test the limits of their "friendly customer service." Be a little bit annoying or high maintenance or disagreeable.
You might want to be cautious and experiment with a company that sells a product or service you can live without. 
Of course you probably don’t need to try this experiment. Chances are good that you have already had several experiences in which you have had reasonable requests met with bewildering responses best described as inept, rude, or counterproductive.
Why do we put up with it as customers? It seems to me that in many cases the worst offenders are major players in their market. They don’t need to try as hard to keep customers happy and they don’t. Once again my local Walmart springs to mind (sorry to keep picking on Walmart, but I think the company can take it).
I made a personal decision to stop shopping at Walmart after trying surprisingly hard to buy an Xbox 360 last year. I knew what I wanted. I simply needed a clerk to unlock the case and ring me through. I stood waiting in front of the sales desk in the electronics section for quite a while, my friendly expression gradually fading to a look of mild annoyance as I waited for one of several clerks to respond to my previous request to buy an Xbox. Then one of them held up a finger in the direction of my face, a nonverbal cue that I would roughly translate as "don’t bother saying anything, we’re not ready to deal with you yet." That finger-in-the-face was too much. I bought my Xbox and left the store, returning only on the rarest of occasions (normally at the behest of my wife) and so far having purchased nothing else personally.
Some companies can treat their customers with disdain and get away with it, but it comes at a cost. To compensate for terrible service, companies like Walmart need ultra low prices and aggressive business practices. Phone, mobile, and Internet providers get away with it because of limited competition and massive barriers to entry. Other national and multinational companies rely on massive advertising and ubiquity.
You might argue that "hate" is too strong a word to use in this context, and you might right. There is a continuum from "loving your customers" to "hating your customers."
If you have any kind of leadership role in your company in any area that interacts with customers, here are some points for consideration:
Please share your comments if you have advice for other companies or if you have any horror stories about times you’ve felt like a company must truly despise its own customers.
A digital native is a person for whom digital technologies already existed when they were born, and hence has grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet, mobile phones and MP3s.
The world is changing and you need to pay attention to an important trend: digital natives are not very good at paying attention. Neither are those of us who spend a significant amount of time online with complete control over how long we view / process information flows (e.g., web surfing). We jump from task to task quickly, often because our brains have been trained to seek out constant stimulation from novelty and change.
Based on web usage data (see Writing for the Internet Generation), I must assume that most of you will not read this entire article. In fact, you are likely to only read 20-40% of it. You might leave because you don’t find the content engaging. You might leave because a thought of something else pops into your head. You might be struck by the urge to check your email. You might be interrupted by an IM conversation. You might even leave via one of the many links in this post. Whatever the reason, the predicted average time readers will spend on this page is somewhere around 90 seconds. The point is: YOU WILL MOVE ALONG QUICKLY.
That is important for me as a content creator to realize. It’s also important to realize as a marketer, an employer, and a parent.
As I prepare to officially launch Crowd Space (http://crowdspace.net), I am preparing an intro video for the home page. I have set the strict requirement of 2 minutes because I care deeply about visitors actually watching it. I am keeping text on the home page minimal so the brief time I have someone’s attention is spent considering my product rather than scanning text.
I enjoy writing and speaking, especially about topics I really care about such as a product I’ve poured my heart into, so it takes discipline to be brief. It is an art form I am working on. I have become increasingly aware of the length of emails I write. In some ways Twitter (I’m @derekhat, BTW) and IM have been good for helping me boil thoughts down to very succinct points.
I do wonder, though, if we are cheating ourselves as a society with our plunge into brevity and 9 second attention spans.
Some researchers and educators are quite concerned about the trend toward short attention span and shallow multitasking, suggesting that we might be doing damage that will have wide-reaching social implications:
…that’s what worries me. That we are rearing a generation of kids that are in danger of becoming emotionally stunted, inarticulate, hedonists with the attention span of a gnat. Because they spend the majority of their time in front of a computer screen. A whole generation that can’t interact because their skills are limited to inhabiting a fantasy world on a screen."
The human brain, Greenfield explains, is very sensitive to change. And as we become increasingly addicted to a lifestyle in which the virtual world of the computer screen so often replaces reality, so our brain adapts to a new way of life – to our detriment.
"People who spend a lot of time interacting through the screen can easily become emotionally detached," she says. "They see life as a series of logical tasks that demand immediate reaction. Language gets crunched, along with the ability to imagine or analyse and attention spans shorten."
Recently I noticed a group of teenagers (boys and girls mixed) sitting together at church who were all staring at devices in their hands. They occasionally muttered things to one another but they reminded me of toddlers playing near each other rather than with each other. With no eye contact and limited verbal communication, I wondered how these kids would ever learn to flirt, an important social skill for anyone interested in every attracting a mate (IMHO).
Of course some would just call me a fuddy-duddy and point out that they are probably interacting via those devices. Sure, that’s probably true. But these kids also have to learn to interact with other parts of society and develop the ability to adhere to different social norms based on context. A story I recently came across illustrates how the behaviour patterns of digital natives can actually alienate them from other parts of their social world:
The professor was teaching in a computer lab and saw one of his students sending e-mail messages to someone during the lecture. The professor told him to pay attention.
"I’m listening," the student said.
"Well, I would like you to turn and look at me," the professor said.
"Why?" said the student. "I have an A in your course, and I can repeat back what you said."
That is a "cultural shift," Mr. Sweeney says. "To the professor it was rudeness. To the student, it was, Why shouldn’t I do it in a way that works for me?"
I’m not going to fault a student for multitasking in a computer lab. I often did homework from one course while sitting in other lectures if the professor was moving through the material slowly. But it is significant to note that the professor had expectations and the deviation from what the professor considered appropriate social conduct caused tension. What will happen when an entire generation hits the workforce and has to work closely with the older generation that holds radically different expectations about social norms and appropriate behaviour?
While classroom decorum is an issue that those of us on the other side of graduation are mostly detached from, there are bigger life-and-death implications here as well:
Young people make bad jurors because they find it hard to concentrate for long periods, according to the most senior judge in England and Wales.
The so-called ‘internet generation’ are so used to information presented on a screen that they are unable to listen to complex arguments in a courtroom, said the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge of Draycote.
If I’m ever wrongfully accused of something, I’d sure as heck like to know that the jury of my peers has the wherewithal to actually pay attention to the case.
"Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things," says Ted Selker, an expert in the online equivalent of body language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.
"If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating," he told the BBC programme Go Digital.
The mind seems to gravitate toward novelty. Not only does a novel experience seem to capture our attention, it appears to be an essential need of the mind… The pace of novel experiences has changed…
Today’s mind, young or old is continuously bombarded with new and novel experiences. Rather than novel opportunities every few days or weeks, we now have novelty presented in micro-seconds…
Video and television have trained our minds to perceive and interpret quickly and be ready to accept the next presentation. Even outside of television and video, the presentation of commercial product is at an unprecedented pace.
So it would seem that if you get used to constantly switching between tasks (or other inputs), you train your brain to be "uncomfortable" without the continuous flood of novelty.
Clearly access to many sources of information flow is part of the reason we’ve become this way. We watch television shows broken into small chunks interspersed with many short commercials. The second we become bored, we can channel surf or skip over the commercials with a DVR (Tivo et. al.). We listen to radio stations with ads as short as 2 seconds. We read a steady stream of barely formed thoughts from many sources brought to our virtual doorstep via services like Twitter and Facebook. We watch online videos on YouTube where the average length is less than 3 minutes.
So much of our world is broken into small mental bite-size chunks that it can take some effort and discipline to actually get into a situation without constant distractions. When I was in university, people would go to the library to study in carrels where they were theoretically free from most distractions (roommates, TV, phone, etc.). Now cell phones, laptops, and wifi access have turned even that former sanctuary into a place you can easily attention surf.
And this all starts young. A study from 2003 concludes that "early television exposure is associated with attentional problems at age 7. Efforts to limit television viewing in early childhood may be warranted, and additional research is needed." [1] So even before we know better, our parents can plant us in front of the television too often and apparently create attention problems. Although the brain is incredibly malleable, I wonder how much one can recover if inundated with today’s hyperpaced media and constant novelty from an early age.
Are we dooming the next generation?
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[1] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/113/4/708
You won’t read most of what I write in this post. You will most likely skim it and at best read half of the content (on average).
In May 2008, usability guru Jakob Nielson published his analysis of web usage data borrowed from a research study. I recommend you read it after this article. Here’s the big stunning quote:
Obviously, users tend to spend more time on pages with more information. However, the best-fit formula tells us that they spend only 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words.
Let’s make the reasonable assumption that most people cannot read 100 words in 4.4 seconds. The implication is that for each 100 words I add to this article, readers on average will read a smaller percentage of the content (up to 1250 words, after which point the data becomes erratic according to Nielson).
On an average visit, users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less.
Wow.
Tomorrow I am going to post some additional information and insights on attention span in the Information Age, but for now let’s draw a couple of conclusions about writing for the web:
The less you write, the more that gets read percentage-wise. Keep your message short and tight.
Research from the 90s tells us that people scan web pages more than they read them. The tried-and-true advice still holds: use headlines and lists to help guide scanners to the information they might want to read.
Assume the average visitor will only read 20-40% of your page. Make the most important content prominent so the reader spends her time absorbing the most fundamental parts of your message.
This is not derived directly from Nielson’s analysis, but you can experiment with visuals as a way to pack information into fast-to-interpret visuals instead of blocks of text that are not likely to be read.
I would write more here but the data says most of you won’t read it. So instead stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on attention span.
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Jakob Nielson’s article: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html
Original research paper: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1326561.1326566
"A job worth doing is worth doing well"
This past week I received a book of coupons in the mail from local businesses. I believe in supporting local business, especially locally owned and owner-operated businesses, so I flipped through it. One coupon caught my eye. It was for a business I had not heard of before and it looked like it might sell products I would enjoy. I tore out the coupon and later checked out the store’s web site.
The web site was atrocious. It looked like a 1997 high school project. It was hard to read, products were hard to view, and there were sundry user experience design flaws. The site even had a guestbook feature, which was fittingly empty (oooh, web snob alert!).
I find it sad to see a small business putting itself out on the web in shambles (there’s really no need for it these days with so many hosted ecommerce providers offering high quality services). Along the spectrum of ecommerce web sites, this site was definitely low quality. A low quality site inevitably leads to some loss of business whether large or small.
You should care about quality. It’s good for business.
One definition of quality is "high grade; superiority; excellence." Take a moment to consider North American culture. "Quality" is not something we truly value collectively: Walmart, Chrysler, GM (condolences to everyone affected), McDonald’s, Burger King, 7-Eleven, and the like are indicators that price, convenience, nostalgia, and even patriotism can trump quality. Nevertheless, I believe that quality is an important piece of any truly successful venture. McDonald’s, for example, might not have high quality food but it does have an extremely high quality franchising system that is nearly a license to print money. The complex and highly refined procurement and inventory control systems that run Walmart must be high quality.
My local Walmart has low quality customer service, a plethora of low quality products, and low quality stock organization. But Walmart isn’t trying to make me love their store and products. Walmart wants me and lots of other people to come and buy cheap stuff. A lot of stuff. Walmart does not care (apparently) that its cheap t-shirts can barely survive a few washings. Walmart cares that lots of people buy those cheap t-shirts. Walmart cares that it keeps exactly the right quantity of shirts in the right sizes and colours in stock at exactly the right times.
Quality, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. One person’s "quality entertainment" is another’s hillbilly trash. One person’s frustrating superstore is another’s Mecca for the best prices on commodity products.
Whether you create products, deliver services, or give your time in the service of others, the quality of your output is up to you. If you value high quality output, you must first determine what high quality means in your context. Is it customer service? Is it product reliability? Is it product design? Is it helping people get up on their own two feet? What does high quality mean for you?
Once you have identified what high quality means, you need to be passionate about achieving it. Your team needs to understand your definition of high quality. If the team is not unambiguously aware of what meets the quality standards of your organization, you run the risk of producing mediocre results.
You should consider having one or more champions of quality. In the world of software development, testers and product managers are often the champions of quality. Without champions of quality, little things can be overlooked until they add up to something customers notice. If you want "high quality" to be part of a customer’s mental picture of your organization, you must guard your standards carefully. Have you ever been in an immaculate restaurant with filthy washrooms? Ever dealt with a grumpy hotel concierge? Ever sat on hold for 20 minutes while a voice recording reminded you that "your call is important"?
Finally, you must budget for quality. Leave yourself enough time to do things right. Set aside adequate resources to achieve high quality results.
Quality matters, I believe, whenever you want to be successful. If your results are not what you hope for, check your quality standards.
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* I have said in the past that "I hate Walmart" but that isn’t quite true. I don’t hate Walmart. I hate shopping at Walmart. Even though I don’t enjoy being in a Walmart store, I must admit that I am in awe at the scope of an empire that relies on poorly motivated workers and ultra low prices. I have the same awe for McDonald’s.
The June Challenge is a final kick of self-discipline before the lackadaisical days of summer.
What’s your June Challenge for 2009? Share it with the world on Twitter using the hash tag #junechallenge.
Two years ago my June Challenge was to blog every Monday through Saturday for the month of June. It was a reasonably successful exercise in self-discipline so I am going to repeat it this year with a slight variation: I will post something at derekhat.com every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday for the month of June 2009.
What’s your June Challenge?
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