Neighborhood watch 2.0
How many of you know what a neighborhood watch is? It’s an old school idea – neighbors keep an eye out in the neighborhood for suspicious activity and report it to the police. It’s especially effective when neighbors know each other and are happy to look out for each others’ interests.
How many people know their physical neighbors well?
You should.
If you don’t, make friends, and soon. Why? Simple.
The economy is spawning more crime. The numbers estimated by the University of Arizona suggest that a 1% increase in unemployment correlates to a 1% increase in crime rates. Crimes begin casually, with opportunity crimes, and worsen from there if unchecked.
Kicking it up a notch
A basic neighborhood watch is effective, but now add in the capabilities of social media, of new media to the mix. If you have several social media aware folks in your neighborhood (or you can train them easily), when you meet with your police department’s crime prevention officer (CPO, the officer assigned to instruct Neighborhood Watch programs), introduce him or her to Twitter. Get your neighbors who are Twitter-savvy to create a hashtag for your neighborhood like #54&Pine or #7Gables and have members report mildly suspicious activity there (“scruffy kid, about 5’6″ with black backpack walking around block 5th time this hour”). Show your CPO how to use Twitter Search so that real-time updates can be casually viewed at the station.
Got a camera on your data-enabled mobile phone? You have an awesome crime deterrence tool. Use services like TwitPic to take instant shots of suspicious activity and upload them immediately to your neighborhood watch Twitterstream.
Own a digital camera with a decent lens and low light ability? Take photos and load them up to sites like Flickr so that your neighbors and CPO can inspect in detail things that you find suspicious.
Know someone talented at using Google Docs and Google Maps? Help your local police department geographically map crimes in your area and look for trends using freely available Google tools.
What other new media/social media tools can you think of to empower ordinary citizens to help local law enforcement prevent crime?
Note: in no way do I advocate unnecessarily putting yourself in harm’s way or taking the law into your own hands. As with all community-based initiatives, the idea is to work WITH your local police, not compete with them.
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The lie of inbound marketing
Stop me if you’ve heard this one:
Interrupting consumers doesn’t work any more. Outbound marketing – direct mail, trade shows, conferences, PR, advertising – just doesn’t work any more. Instead, you need inbound marketing. Attract customers like a magnet to your products or services! The new truth of marketing is that interruption is out. Ideas that spread, win. No one is listening any more. Go viral.
If you wholeheartedly believe every bit of this, stop reading now. Close this browser window, walk away, and have a wonderful, productive day.
Stop staring at the pizza!
A friend was at a recent business meeting where product marketers were going over color palettes, organization of their stores, and a bunch of other details, all important. What was critically missing, however, was their marketing. When asked, they said that they were doing marketing, that all of the operational details they were discussing was marketing.
Wrong.
They’re staring at a pizza. See, a pizza can be good. It can be tasty, with crispy crust and sweet but salty tomato sauce, hot cheese, in exactly the right proportions, made just the right way to be delicious and awesome.
That pizza will never, ever sell itself. At a minimum, the pizza has to be delivered or received somehow. That’s service. Given how much competition there is for pizza joints, even if it’s the best pizza in the world, the parlor will at least initially need to let people know about it, invite them to try it, tell them of its existence. That’s marketing.
Where my friend’s colleagues went wrong was in mistaking the product for the marketing and service. They thought that making a quality product was marketing and wondered why their stores were empty day after day after day. “But we have an awesome product!” “Maybe we need a new color palette for the inside of the store!” “Maybe we should move the register closer to the door!”
They’re rearranging toppings on the pizza instead of figuring out how to get people in front of the pizza to at least take a bite. They’re staring at the pizza, wondering why no one is buying it and eating it.
Are you mistaking product for service and marketing? Are you staring at the pizza instead of sharing it? Ask yourself these questions in the next marketing meeting you sit in, and if you’re in that situation, get people in your company to stop staring and start sharing your pizza.
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Association is not recommendation
Guido Stein asked a terrific question in this Twitter conversation:
cspenn: @chrisbrogan I am stingy with my recommendations, but when I recommend something, I *mean* it. High bar, but kudos if you reach it.
GuidoS: @cspenn how can you be stingy about recommendations but not about people in your network? Isn’t association partly an endorsement?
To some, perhaps. In the slightly warped perspective of the ninja, association isn’t recommendation. Association is information. If you look at the folks who follow me on Twitter, who are friends on Facebook, who are contacts on LinkedIn, you’ll find an enormous variety of folks, from Asian cooks to college students, from presidents and CEOs to exotic dancers, from independent musicians to search engine optimization wizards. All of these people that are in my network are folks I ‘associate’ with, but more importantly, each of them has unique perspectives and information that I find helpful.
There’s an old ninja expression relating literally to seeing in the dark – the lower you go, the more you can see. Try it at night sometime. It’s a metaphor as well – the closer to the ground, to the real people doing real stuff, you can get, the more you can see. It’s easy from a financial or economics perspective to look at macro stuff like GDP, the Dow Jones, etc. but if you want some real insight, you need to put boots on the ground and see what’s really happening. You can only do that through association, through making lots of acquaintances across the spectrum of people out there.
Recommendation is different – recommendation to me means that I have experience with some aspect of the person, product, or service, and when I recommend something, I confer a bit of whatever trust you have in me to that person, place, or thing. In this crazy world we live in, trust is exceedingly scarce, exceedingly rare, and something that you should absolutely be stingy with.
Associate with lots of people. Associate to learn, to grow, to share your experiences. Recommend only when you want to confer trust, because if you blow it on a recommendation, you betray that trust a little, and as everyone from Presidents to CEOs to the broken hearted know or are finding out, trust is very, very hard to recover.
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A different stimulus idea that might work
Jobs are what matter most. Here’s a stimulus idea to send to Washington.
Create a $100,000 loan grant run through the federal department of your choice, backed by the Treasury.
Businesses of any size may apply for and receive a $100,000, one year loan at the Federal Funds Rate. If a business then spends that loan funding solely on employment (verified by new payroll taxes and W-2 data from the IRS), at the end of one year, the loan is forgiven, essentially giving the business a free employee or three for a year.
Conditions: payroll taxes and W-2 data should verify that the business spent the equivalent of $100,000 solely on employing new hires. Using data the government collects anyway, controls should be able to easily verify that these are new hires and not existing employees. Don’t spend it correctly? IRS detects a little hanky panky? Interest capitalizes and the loan enters repayment immediately.
Why a stimulus idea like this? Rather than attempt to plow money into specific industries, this lets businesses hire or rehire based on what that specific business needs to grow. The Student Loan Network might need a junior web developer but the Advance Guard might need an admin. By giving businesses the discretion to hire who they need, the market can get the talent actually required, rather than decided by government fiat.
This kind of stimulus will, by design, disproportionately benefit small businesses. Because they’re more agile, this will help them grow faster. Because it’s small business, the ability to bring unemployed citizens in for retraining will work better – after all, you’ll learn the craft of baking bread faster at a small family bakery than you will at Omni Consumer Products Grain Division. (though certainly they can apply and get the same loan)
What’s the cost? The IRS estimates roughly 30 million small businesses exist in the US. Guess what? This is a three trillion dollar stimulus. Considering some of what’s being flung around Wall Street and DC, that’s in the ballpark of other proposals. What makes this one different? If 10% of businesses get the loan and start hiring, the 3 million job deficit goes away immediately, rather than waiting for government funding to flow through states, cities, and banks.
What’s your stimulus idea?
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