There were two Super Bowl commercials that caught my eye the other night. One really funny one from Doritos and a somewhat serious, but very cool one from Dodge, narrated by the great Paul Harvey. I've embedded both below.
Doritos - Goat For Sale
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d8ZDSyFS2g&w=420&h=315]
Dodge Ram - Farmer
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE&w=420&h=315]
A year ago this month someone asked me this question: if I had to invest in one of the big four internet companies -- Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google -- which one would it be? Without hesitating, I chose Amazon. I wrote a post about my reasoning at the time.
One year later, I thought I'd check in to see if I made the right choice. Here's how each of the stocks performed in 2012:
So it turns out I made the right call. Too bad I didn't put my money where was my mouth was.
That said, it's not a completely missed opportunity. I definitely think there's still a lot of money to be made on Amazon. I'm probably even more bullish on them now then I was 12 months ago.
I just finished reading Influence, by Robert Cialdini. The book is about persuasion and examines the psychology of why people say "yes". I've never been a fan of the psychology of sales (I don't like the notion of tricking someone into buying something) but the book definitely gets you thinking. It basically walks through 6 "principles of influence". The principles are: reciprocity, scarcity, consistency, consensus, authority and liking.
The book describes each principle and gives several examples of them in action. I've included some of the more interesting examples below.
The book describes a study where people go to homes and ask if they can place a small sign in the owner's front yard promoting a charity of some kind. Then, a few weeks later, the same people come back and ask if they can put a much, much larger sign in the front yard. They find that the people that said yes to the small sign are far, far more likely to say yes to the larger sign than the average person. This is the notion of consistency -- once you know you're the kind of person that puts a sign on your front yard, you become much more likely to do so when the stakes are raised. There are some obvious applications of this in sales (e.g. small deals that turn into large deals over time).
Another study found that when you call a potential voter and ask them if they're going to vote and they say "yes", they're far more likely to actually go out and vote than they would've been had they not taken the call (again, people like to appear consistent)
Several studies have found that we are far more likely to help people that dress like us.
In one controversial Ohio political election a few years ago, a man given little chance of winning the state attorney-general race swept to victory when, shortly before the election, he changed his name to Brown—a family name of much Ohio political tradition.
Salespeople in men's suits stores will always show the customer the most expensive suit first. Because when it comes time to buy a sweater or a pair of shoes, these look very expensive when contrasted wiht the expensive suit. It turns out that when a man enters a clothing store with the express purpose of purchasing a suit, he will almost always pay more for whatever accessories he buys if he buys them after the suit purchase than before.
This principle is applied in this excerpt from the book which is a letter from a college student to her parents.
Dear Mother and Dad:
Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now.
The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute.
He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child.
The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him.
Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective.
Your loving daughter, Sharon
There are lots of funny and interesting examples like this throughout the book.
Influence is pretty good and definitely worth the read if you have an interest in this topic. But like most business books it's way too long. So if you only have moderate interest in this topic, I'd try to find a cliff notes version.
When we think about moving healthcare from a model that is focused on treating sick people (big buildings with lots of beds and lots of drugs and complex procedures) to a model that is focused on keeping people healthy (community-based primary care offices where patients can monitor and manage their health), we must consider two important questions:
Regarding the second question, I met with a healthcare executive last week that worked with the Saudi Arabian government when they were going through their transition from treating the sick to providing community based primary care. He told me that he warned people over there that, despite their best efforts, it wasn't going to work. Because even if you tell people they must come in for their annual check-up, they won't do it unless they're sick.
The Saudi Arabian government responded by saying, "oh, trust us, if we tell them to come in, they'll come in."
It turns out they were right -- patients do come in when the doctor tells them to come in.
Because an enormous part of the population over there receives their monthly paycheck from the government, they're much more engaged and compliant when the government (e.g. their physician) asks them to do something.
Obviously American culture is much different.
It's critical that we recognize the substantial structural and cultural change that must occur before we truly reform the U.S. healthcare system. This isn't going to be easy.
A friend of mine received the letter below from his son's school last week (click to see larger image). Amazing what things have come to.
I had a conversation the other day about the apps I have on my iPhone's home screen. I thought I'd capture the list here. Here's a screenshot.
Foursquare. I like 'checking in' because it keeps a record of the places I've been. I don't interact with people on it but the 'explore' function is good for finding new bars, restaurants and coffee shops. It's better than Yelp in many ways.
Twitter. I don't Tweet all that frequently but I check my feed multiple times a day.
Reeder. This is where I read the blogs that I follow. I check it multiple times a day.
Facebook. I'm trying to move away from using Facebook. I hardly ever post though I check it a couple times a day.
Google Maps. The best mapping app I've ever used. I use it constantly when I'm on the road.
LinkedIn. I interact with people through LinkedIn almost every day. I also check it sporadically for news and other updates.
WEEI. This is an app for my favorite Boston sports talk radio station. I listen to it pretty much every morning.
TripIt. This app keeps me organized when I travel. I wrote a post about it a while back.
Instagram. I don't use it that much but I have it on my home screen as a reminder to take more photos.
Podcasts. I listen to multiple podcasts a day.
Weather. Very simple app. I've preset the cities I travel to most frequently so I can easily find out what to expect.
Kindle. I don't use this app all that often as I prefer to do long form reading on a larger device. But I try to crack it open while I'm on the subway.
Music. I have lots of music apps (screenshot below). I'm still trying to determine the app(s) that work best for me. I probably use Pandora the most these days. I'm going to write a post on this in the coming weeks.
Settings. I have this on my home screen so I can easily manage wi-fi connections. I wish there was an easier way to manage these on the iPhone.
Clock. I use the alarm clock app daily.
WordPress. I've actually never written a blog post on the app but I use it often to capture new ideas.
So that's my home screen. It'll be interesting to see how this changes over time.
60 Minutes had a story last week on the increasing impact of robots in corporate America. Because of the technical innovation that continued during the recession, as companies begin to grow again they're finding that they can replace many of the lost jobs with robots instead of people. One of the researchers in the piece points out that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are all public companies and have a combined market capitalization of nearly a trillion dollars. But together, they only have around 150,000 employees. Which is about half of the size of GE and less than the number of new entrants into the American workforce each month. Sounds like a bad thing, huh?
Not really. What this comment ignores is the ecosystem that these companies have built. Each one of the companies listed above creates far, far more jobs than the number of employees that work for them directly.
Some examples:
So when you dig a bit deeper you find that the combined market cap of these four companies is incredibly dependent on the work of an enormous number of entrepreneurs that are making a living through these platforms. So while GE may have more employees than these companies, the number of individual livelihoods that are supported by their platforms dwarf the employee headcount of any American company.
Over the last few months, Twitter has removed the auto-preview feature for Instagram Tweets. So now you have to click through the link in the Tweet to see the photo. Presumably Twitter did this to encourage their users to use their native photo sharing application. When LinkedIn redesigned their profile page about a month ago, they dramatically decreased the exposure of a user's Twitter account. In fact, it's not even on the main profile page, you have to click "contact info" to see a user's Twitter account. This is a drastic change given the LinkedIn/Twitter integration that used to exist.
So LinkedIn is blocking out Twitter and Twitter is blocking out Instagram.
I think this is dangerous for LinkedIn and Twitter. I've written in the past about how difficult it is to build a successful B2C business. Your product has to be so great and so valuable if you want to win. You don't have the luxury of a salesperson whispering in the user's ear giving them context on your decisions or information about what's coming soon and how the product will improve. The product has to be great, right now.
Of course, I don't know all of the facts behind these decisions. But I do know that the effect of blocking out applications that users like is bad. And in a B2C business, what's bad for the "C" very quickly becomes bad for the "B".
When preparing for an important sales meeting, salespeople will generally do a bunch of research; they'll read news articles, read the company's 10-k, check out the LinkedIn profiles of the people in the meeting, etc. Often, they'll spend money on Hoovers or other databases to gain any edge they can. Of course there's nothing wrong with this, but one thing to consider: how often has the thing that you currently care about most at work (the thing that is going to get you a big bonus) been available in a 10-k or a press release.
Sure, directionally we know that you want to grow revenue or cuts costs or prioritize a new product launch. But I can't learn the important specifics of that in the media or in a 10-k. Further, business has become so much more iterative over the years that, in my experience, by the time the media picked up on an initiative I was working on, we were already onto the next thing.
With that in mind, I would propose that when you do research, you prioritize having conversations with people on the inside. Before a meeting, find someone you can talk to that will help you prepare. It could be a junior person, it could be a personal assistant, it could be anyone that can help you get information.
These people should be happy to talk to you. You're not having these conversations to get inside info you shouldn't have access to, you're having these conversations to make the upcoming meeting more productive.
So when preparing for a meeting, yes, do your research. But more importantly, have conversations with people on the inside that know what people on the inside care about.
Seth Godin had a good post a couple weeks ago titled, The danger of starting at the top where he talks about the downside of selling directly to a company's CEO. They key line is this:
When making a b2b sale, the instinct is always to get into the CEO's office. If you can just get her to hear your pitch, to understand the value, to see why she should buy from or lease from or partner with or even buy you... that's the holy grail.What do you think happens after that mythical meeting?
She asks her team.
And when the team is in the dark, you've not only blown your best shot, but you never get another chance at it.
I agree and disagree with this. Two thoughts:
Regular, short and highly interesting/engaging/insightful pieces of information (most often without an ask) that educate the recipient and — just as importantly — change their perception of what you do in a favorable way.
If you're having conversations and "dripping" the right people, you should be free to navigate your prospect's company to find the person that will be most interested in your solution.
I've written in the past about the fact that Google+ is trying to fix social networking. While they’re not doing it very successively, the concept behind Circles is a powerful one. It allows users to easily share with discretion; i.e. to share certain updates and photos with selected groups (or circles) of friends. If Facebook favors 'open social networking', and Google+ is promoting 'discreet social networking', then Snapchat is promoting 'private social networking'.
From Wikipedia, Snapchat is:
a photo messaging application. Using the app, users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their photos, up to 10 seconds, after which it will be deleted from the recipient's device and the company's servers.
Sounds like something James Bond would use.
Snapchat was started back in September 2011 by a couple of Stanford guys. It now has around 200k monthly uniques, a $50 million valuation and users are sending 50 million 'snaps' a day.
Snapchat's success is a clear indication that there's a market for privacy. Social networks that don't facilitate the ability to easily share with discretion would be smart to take a closer look at Snapchat.
I came across some really good productivity tips this past week. One group in a great post from Matt Heinz and the other in a post from Erin Schulte from Fast Company. I'll add two things to their lists that have worked really for me:
I'm sure I have others but those two stand out as things that have really helped me ramp up my productivity in recent years.