Shopping around, social style
One of the most difficult forces to fight against in a service-oriented business is commoditization, or the reduction of comparison shopping to price alone. Who’s cheapest is a decision-making process we default to when something is too complex for us to understand. For example, if you know nothing about web hosting, then your decision will likely be swayed by whoever has the lowest price tag.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make a choice based on things that matter to you? For example, in web hosting, server technology is more or less the same across the board. Bandwidth costs are more or less the same, especially when you’re talking about the low end of the market. What really matters to the average small business or personal web site owner? Price is still a factor, of course, but service tops most people’s lists. If my site goes down, what do I do? Who do I call? How can someone help me fix it in a timely manner?
In the days before social media, there was no simple, fast way to do this. You relied solely on word of mouth or reviews written by people you didn’t know or trust. Today, however, you can test this for yourself very quickly, easily, and fairly publicly. Today, in just a few minutes of time and work, you can comparison shop on service and get reliable results using social media.
Here’s an experiment I did as an example. I went around to the various hosting companies I could find on Twitter and gathered up their Twitter handles. Next, I headed over to FutureTweets and scheduled one tweet to each of them asking, “If I were hosting a site with you and had a problem RIGHT now, would you help in the middle of the night?”
Initially, I had thought I scheduled them all for 1:38 AM, but I missed a time zone setting and they fired off at 1:38 AM GMT, or 7:38 PM ET. Still, that’s a period of time when I like someone be listening and fixing my problems.
Our contestants in this little exercise were @westhost, @spiralhosting, @site5, @mediatemple, @justhost, @hostway, @hostgator, @hostdime, @dreamhost, @bluehost, and @asmallorange.
In order of response time:
- @mediatemple: 2 minutes.
- @dreamhost: 4 minutes.
- @hostdime: 15 minutes.
- @site5: 17 minutes.
- @asmallorange: 74 minutes.
- @spiralhosting: 11 hours.
No response from the others yet 12 hours later.
If I were shopping around for web hosting and one of my primary concerns was service and how quickly I could get a response if I was having trouble, I’d have a pretty definitive answer for myself. Are there plenty of good hosting companies that aren’t listening to Twitter? Probably. Is this a fair test of them? To me it is, but only because I invest a lot of time in social media, so it’s one of my preferred methods of communication. I’d rather do business with companies in the same space as me if possible. Most important, I would pay more for great service.
The lesson for companies here is that if you’re going to use social media, it can’t be a half-assed effort. As Yoda quipped, “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Listening to Twitter and responding costs time, employee resources, and a functional Internet connection. If you’re going to be in social media, be here when people need you the most. Food for thought: for the 5 companies that didn’t respond within 12 hours, have they basically wasted all their marketing dollars since, if this were a true purchasing decision, they would no longer be in the running no matter how much they spent on marketing?
The lesson here for everyone isn’t who is the best hosting company in terms of service. If these tweets had gone out as scheduled at 1:38 AM ET, the results probably would be different. The lesson here is that social media provides you with another set of tools you can use to make decisions based on things you actually care about. These tools are available to everyone, to you, and if you make use of them, you’ll get better results than trying to guess what all the features on an endless supply of marketing collateral mean.
What do you think? Was this a fair test to you? Would you have done it differently? Will you try it the next time you’re making a purchase where service is important?
p.s. I’m glad to see that the companies I do business with currently were ones who responded in a timely manner. Thanks @mediatemple and @asmallorange!
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The flipside of diminishing returns: being the best
Very often, when we talk about diminishing returns, they’re something to be avoided. If you’re looking for total return on investment, the moment your returns diminish below a certain point, you’re better off innovating rather than trying to optimize. There’s one exception to this rule, however:
Diminishing returns are largely irrelevant if you want to be the very best of the best.
For the average person pursuing performance in, say, the local baseball league, a certain amount of working out and training will yield large returns. After a certain point, too much will yield too little in return. For the exceptional Olympic athlete, working out and training is done until the very edge of self injury in order to squeeze out every last performance gain, however minor.
For the average Warcraft player, most gear is good enough. You’ll get to play most of the game, succeed a reasonable amount of time, and have fun with it. For a hardcore, heroic-mode raider, there’s virtually no limit to the efforts you’ll make to get the very best gear, perfect your abilities and skills, and eke out a 0.1% DPS gain because you want to be the best in the world.
For the average marketer, ranking for various search terms is important, whether via organic search or pay per click. After a certain point, the amount you spend on SEO and PPC will outweigh any profit you could earn. For a few select terms, however, you might accept a negative ROI in order to dominate those listings, such as your company name. To be #1 requires investment beyond average.
For the average company, saying you’re the best on your marketing collateral is easy. Demonstrating it is much, much harder. If you’re truly the best at something, you invest a disproportionate amount of resources in that area of focus. If you’ve got the best quality, you spend the lion’s share of your reinvested profits on quality control. If you’ve got the best service, you invest far beyond minimum wage and minimum effort employees to get people who actually care about the customer. You get customer service representatives making decisions on behalf of the company that may not be in the best short term interests of the company, choosing the relationship with the customer over a financial gain. If you’ve got the best product, you spend all your money on R&D so that you continue to make incredible things.
Best is expensive. Best is intensive. Best is not what most people and companies are, and if you want to truly be the best at something, be prepared for an all-or-nothing effort.
Question for you: if you want to be the best at something, as a person or as an organization, are you truly making an insane, all-out effort?
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Four Questions For Happiness and Success
I’ve lost track of the number of people who have said that for the new year, they’re going to work on positive thinking, a positive attitude, a new outlook on life. They’re going to be less angry at their families, at work, at school, at life, and they’re going to be better people for it.
If they haven’t already, I would wager you the adult beverage of your choice that they’re on the brink of completely failing at that resolution, about to plunge back into the abyss of their usual outlook on the world. Here’s why: your outlook, your temperament, is as much a product of your environment as it is what’s going on inside your head. You can only willfully deny the reality around you for so long. You can only suppress your emotions and affix a fake smile to your face for so long before your head explodes.
So if your goal is a happier you and pretending you’re happier isn’t working, what are you to do? How do you achieve that noble goal in less than noble circumstances or with less than noble reactions to the things around you?
Let me share with you four questions that can legitimately help you become happier, richer, more successful, and more powerful. If you use any one of these or all of them in a situation which is generating the opposite of the result you seek, you’ll find a path away from unhappiness towards happiness. You’ll feel immensely better because you will be honestly acknowledging that things didn’t go right, but with an eye towards changing what needs to be changed.
1. What can I learn from this? This powerful question takes a flaming failure and forces you to step away from the immediate reaction to look down the road. What lessons will your current situation give that can help you prevent or mitigate similar in the future?
2. How can I use this to my advantage? A knife in the right hands can prepare a luxurious dinner. A knife in the wrong hands can murder. Look at the situation, object, or person you’re dealing with as part of the big picture. What attributes or characteristics do they have that formerly provoked you that you can instead skillfully manipulate to serve your needs?
3. What resources am I not bringing to the table? Sometimes a tool isn’t being misused so much as it’s not being used at all. Sometimes a situation isn’t being malevolently disrupted as it is simply without a captain at the wheel. What untapped potential is there around your situation that you haven’t brought into the battle? Which key players aren’t at the table? Who doesn’t have direction that, if you provided even a little prompting, could suddenly bring tremendous influence or resources in the direction that you need to go?
4. What clues preceded this? This powerful question takes you out of the present moment and makes you step backwards into the past to look for clues about what happened. If you can be a detective and find the patterns and precursors that led to the current situation, you can know the warning signs in the future that will avert yet to happen problems. One of my martial teachers, Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center, often tells us that if a part of a technique isn’t working, look at the preceding step for the mistake we’ve made there. Do likewise.
Instead of simply pretending that something unpleasant didn’t happen or wishing away a problem, use these four questions to start immediately rebuilding your momentum towards the results you want. Ask the questions of yourself and demand answers! You’ll get out of the funk you’re in faster and you won’t feel like you’re just pretending that life is better.
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What World of Warcraft achievements can teach us about motivation
Achievements.
Every World of Warcraft player has some, and they’re awarded for things as trivial as logging in on a certain day to things as meaningful as beating certain game encounters at the hardest possible level. At the end of the day, however, they’re nothing more than a few extra pixels and a flag in a database. They have no value at all in the game, cannot be redeemed for any game privileges save maybe a title or two in front of your name, and cannot improve your game experience in any substantive way, such as change game play mechanics.
… yet players lust after them. They chase after them. They spend hours upon hours doing incredibly menial tasks, like shooting rats in a subway tunnel, just to get one of these. Why?
For some players, it’s social status. For some players, it’s an intense competition with one of the few metrics the game provides. For some players, it’s a way to fulfill a nearly obsessive compulsion with “completion” in a game that has no end. Whatever the case may be, they’re incredibly motivating for something that has no intrinsic value at all.
Think carefully about how your company operates. Think carefully about how your organization operates. Think carefully about how you provide rewards to your team, to your customers, to your partners.
If a video game can award nothing of value to people who are paying customers in a virtual world almost completely unconnected from reality and have millions of people chasing after them, imagine what you could do with real rewards in the real world for real results.
The question is, do you? Do you provide enough opportunities for reward, even social-only rewards? Foursquare figured that one out really quickly with their badges. What are you doing to acknowledge both the menial and the epic in your own work?
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The essence of anger
As part of the 2011 theme at the Boston Martial Arts Center, I was doing some digging around in my brain today about anger, especially after a learning experience this morning at the dojo. (a learning experience, as my college political science teacher once quipped, is what you get when you don’t get what you want) This year’s theme is all about looking in the mirror, looking inside, and freeing ourselves from ourselves. As a result, I spent a lot of time rooting around in my head about my anger, how I value it, and some ways I make it useful. I hope it’s useful to you.
In Buddhism, all unhappiness begins when reality isn’t the way we want it to be. Your cake falls in the oven, your kid throws a tantrum, your department misses its numbers, your Twitter followers abandon you – whatever the case is, reality and what you want are not the same thing.
Fear is when you have an unwanted reality that you want to run away from. Fear of losing something, fear of heights, fear of a tiger trying to eat you, fear of rejection – all of these things we try to run away from. Fear’s a vital component of our survival and always will be. It’s a primordial emotion that keeps us alive in times of true danger, and when it serves its purpose, we are grateful.
So what does that make anger? Anger is an unwanted reality that you want to forcefully impose your will upon. Anger at a child’s temper tantrum, anger at an insult, anger at a spouse’s seemingly unreasonable point of view, anger at a company’s treatment of its employees – all of these things we want to impose our will on. If only they would do it our way, everything would be all right. If only they would stop doing what we don’t want and start doing what we want. If only they would submit and surrender, our anger would be sated.
Anger’s a vital component of our survival, too. Think about it for a second. If fear makes you flee from something, anger makes you rush in to conquer it. If you’re fighting for your life and retreating isn’t a possibility, anger keeps you in the fight. If you’re starving for a meal, anger lets you conquer the animal, kill it, win over it, and have something to eat. Acknowledging that anger is as much a part of us as fear and other survival instincts is vitally important. Far too many people try to demonize anger, theirs and others, to claim that it simply shouldn’t be there. To deny anger’s existence and usefulness in the right context is to deny something incredibly basic that’s wired into us, something that is there to help us in the right context.
If fear chills, anger boils. If fear is about avoiding a loss, anger is about winning a victory at any cost, and that’s the key right there to taming the beast. If you can have the presence of mind during an anger experience to ask yourself if there’s anything worth winning, you can very quickly short circuit it and pull the rug out from under its feet.
If a child is throwing a tantrum, ask yourself what’s left to win by expelling your anger on them. Not much to win, is there? Tears, a runny nose, and some parental guilt – some prize, huh? If a supervisor at your company is doing something callous and uncaring, ask yourself what’s left to win by getting fired up at her or him. Is getting on their bad actors list a worthy prize? Is losing your job a worthy prize? Not much left to win there.
Sometimes there is a very worthy prize, and when there is, anger is absolutely called for and appropriate. If someone is trying to harm your family, there is a very worthy prize at stake. With focus, direct your anger to win that prize. If someone is trying to rape you, there is a very worthy prize at stake. With skill, channel your anger into winning over them. If someone is malevolently destroying your company and your livelihood by extension, there is a worthy prize, especially if you have a family to feed. With cunning and cleverness, harness your anger to be effective in neutralizing them.
Try this perspective the next time you’re angry. Ask yourself the honest question: is there anything worth winning? If you have trouble maintaining presence of mind even during anger, write it down somewhere you can see it in situations that make you angry, or hold a contest with yourself to see how quickly you can distract yourself so that you can think again and ask yourself what’s left to win. If the prize isn’t worth it, you may find that the angry simply fades away as the rest of your body, mind, and spirit figure out that there’s no point fighting for a valueless prize and that there are better opportunities for victory ahead.
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