Favorite Christmas songs

Posted by on Dec 19, 2010 in Blogging, Music | 1 comment

Recently, Amy Garland asked me about my favorite Christmas song. Here’s mine, from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. It sums up everything that I love about this time of year and never fails to bring a tear to my eye. Listen carefully and enjoy it. If you like it, please do right by the band and buy it for yourself.

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#the5 for the week ending December 17, 2010

Posted by on Dec 18, 2010 in Blogging, Social media, Strategy, the5 | 0 comments

I tweet out #the5 regularly on weekday mornings. It's a list of the 5 things in my various channels that I think are worth paying attention to, usually culled from thousands of blogs and tweets in my Google Reader. Folks have asked in the past if they could somehow get these tweets in another fashion, but every Twitter/Wordpress plugin I've seen makes a mangled, annoying mess of processing the Twitterstream, so until there's a better option, I'll just throw out this digest. If you'd like to get these before the summary, just follow me on Twitter.

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Line of sight digital marketing framework

Posted by on Dec 17, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics, Strategy | 1 comment

At the Blue Sky Factory User Conference this past year, I unveiled a marketing framework that I think does a reasonably good job of explaining what’s broken in your company, how to find it, and how to make things better. It’s called Line of Sight Marketing, and it’s derived from Avinash Kaushik’s Line of Sight Analytics, which was in turn derived from Professor Ken Wong‘s Profit: The Ultimate Client Need framework. Here’s how my variation works.

Line of sight digital marketing framework

We start at the same place, always: net profit. If you’re not earning money faster than you’re spending it, you’re going out of business sooner or later. There’s no way around that. Everything that we do as marketers, as business people, must have a clear line of sight back to net profit, or ultimately it’s not a priority compared to keeping your business running and your bills paid.

Net profit comes from two gross business buckets: margin (the net profit per unit of action, such as a sale) and volume, or the number of units of action.

In turn, margin comes from income and expense. In order to improve your margins, you have to do things like raise price or reduce the cost it takes to produce your goods and services.

Income is generally a product or service development function – someone like a Product Director determines the features, benefits, and pricing of the product. Expense is generally an operational function, finding ways to reduce the costs of your products or services.

Equally in turn, volume comes from audience and action. In order to improve your volume, you have to do things like increase the amount of audience you have and increase the number of actions that audience takes.

Action is generally a sales function, whether automated or executed by dedicated sales professionals whose job it is to motivate consumers to buy. Audience is marketing’s function – finding people to bring into your community and getting them engaged in what you do.

Mathematical version of line of sight

Put in terms of a formula, Income – Expense = Margin, Audience x Action = Volume, and Margin x Volume = Net Profit.

What this framework provides is a means of diagnosing quickly where your business may be most broken. Generally speaking, marketers are often told to take very tactical actions (“we need more web site traffic!”) without a big picture perspective on what’s truly broken at the company. They are then deeply frustrated in turn by the fact that none of their efforts are generating the results they expect.

For example, if margins are razor thin and there’s no way to convince leadership to add value as a way of boosting price, then no matter how much audience marketing brings to the table, the profit generated will continue to be small.

For example, if action and engagement is low because your sales efforts are lackluster, volume will always fail to shine unless marketing pumps an absurd amount of audience into your business to compensate, making it a numbers race.

For example, if income is wonderful and sales is selling to everyone who walks in the door but audience is negligible, volume will remain low until marketing brings more people to the table.

The wonderful thing about this framework is that it’s relatively straightforward to apply key performance indicators to each of the areas. Price of goods and services, expenses to produce those goods or services, audience size, and closing ratio are all examples of concrete metrics you can assign to each of the areas. Once you lay out the numbers, you know which area of your company is most badly broken, and rather than come up with pat “solutions” that might or might not have any impact (“more Twitter followers will fix everything!”), you can see which area of improvement will deliver the most impact for improving your business.

Explore the Line of Sight Marketing framework and see how it applies to your business. If it’s helpful, please let me know!

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Passwords are not enough

Posted by on Dec 16, 2010 in Rant, Security, Technology | 6 comments

How secure are your digital assets? With the massive database compromises of sites like Gawker and its associated properties, both individuals and groups are finding that passwords aren’t enough. But what’s a realistic alternative or supplement?

Here’s one. Do you see this little gadget attached to my keychain?

It’s a World of Warcraft authenticator. It’s a little device that generates a random number bound to my Warcraft account every 30 seconds or so. To log in to play, I sign in with a password and type in the current number. It takes literally seconds to do and ensures that my Warcraft account is harder to hack as you’d need both the physical device and my password to get in.

Now explain this to me: why is my video game, my leisure activity, more secure than everything else I use in my digital life? I swipe my credit card at stores and the bored minimum wage clerk doesn’t even bother looking at the signature. I log into my bank account online with just a password. I used to work in a credit union data center a little while back where passwords for the system were mandatory – but they were four digits only and if you compromised them, you’d have access to literally billions of dollars.

The technology to add strong security – or stronger security at any rate – isn’t especially difficult for users to add to their routine. That’s a baseless fear- millions of Warcraft players like me use a strong security system daily. Database disasters like the Gawker incident highlight just how fragile and easily broken the simple text password  is, and should be a wake up call to us, the consumers, to demand more security out of the institutions we deal with daily. 

Want to get a jump on institutions? Change your passwords now, and change them in such a way that no one password works for everything. At a bare minimum, add a word for password groups so that password sets can be remembered but are different from major network to network.

For example, if the password you want to use is CheeseBurgers!, then create CheeseBurgers!Banking as a password for financial services, CheeseBurgers!Social for networks like Facebook and Twitter, CheeseBurgers!Email for mail services, etc. You’ll still mentally have “one” password but it won’t work for everything. (the added length is also a minor increase to security since longer passwords are harder to guess) If another Gawker media incident happens where millions of passwords and email addresses are stolen, perhaps only your CheeseBurgers!Blogging password will need to be changed.

Security is and will be only as strong as we demand of the companies we work with. Demand better of everyone and everything you work with!

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Multitasking is still a lie

Posted by on Dec 15, 2010 in Awakening, Productivity | 13 comments

Multitasking is still a lie. I’m going to be bold with the following statement:

If you are multitasking, you are either doing work that is trivial or you’re doing a poor job.

Seattle Trip 2010 Day 3

Watching tonight’s martial arts class, there is no multitasking. There is never any multitasking. You can’t afford to. You’ll get a fist in your face and probably have your iSmartDroidPhonePadPro shattered in moments. You are doing something important that requires all of your focus.

When I think to the tasks and things in my day that I can supposedly multitask on, they are trivial. Checking email. Checking Twitter. Surfing the web. These are all tasks that frankly don’t require a lot of attention or effort, and their impact on my day is usually minimal. The outcome is usually unimportant.

When I think to the tasks and things in my day that I have to shut down everything else to focus on, they are things that move the needle. Studying analytics in depth. Reading a book on new business strategies. Coaching a team member or talking to a prospective new customer. Writing a blog post for you to read. These are all tasks that demand my focus, my attention, my energy in order for me to generate the results others expect of me and I expect of myself. If I try to “multitask”, quality suffers. Analyses aren’t as robust or are error-prone. Books don’t get comprehended. These are all or nothing tasks where the outcome is important.

Don’t take my word for it. Look to your own experience, your own work. When you are focused and energized on a task, is it trivial work or is it important? When you are “multitasking”, giving no concerted effort to any one thing, are you doing important stuff or trivial stuff, stuff that doesn’t matter?

Here’s my challenge to you. If you are spending most of your time “multitasking”, you are either doing a poor job or you’re doing unimportant work. Sorry. There’s no other way to put it. How quickly and effectively can you shed or minimize the things that are unimportant so that you can focus and accomplish more of the stuff that should matter?

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