Business lessons gleaned from a mom on a bus

On my commute home today, I happended to overhear a conversation between a couple of ladies.

"I may be old fashioned," said the first woman, "but I just don't want to hear any talk of sex from my children."

The second woman silently nodded. In fact, that's pretty much all the second woman did throughout the conversation.

"My twelve year old is asking me about puberty. I don't want to have conversations like that. I don't want to hear that kind of sex talk from my kids. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but that's not the kind of conversation my kids should be having with me. He asks me, would you believe this, he asks if I'd ever done it before getting married. Who the heck is he to ask me something like that. I don't want to hear that kind of conversation from my kid. He asks if his dad was the first person I ever did it with. I tell him you better believe it. There wasn't nobody but your father and we waited until well after being married. Was he the first? Sheesh. What kind of question is that for a kid to ask a parent. Okay - he was from my first dozen, but do you think I'm going to say something like that to my kid. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I think that it's a good thing."

About this time I transfered busses and left the conversation behind.

Now here is a parent who has built a wall between herself and her son, because she is uncomfortable with the subject matter. Mom has declared early on - "don't even talk to me about this stuff because I will likely freak out". This is a boy who is going to rely upon friends and upon what he sees on television and finds online to fill his knowledge of sex - and that's just begging for the kind of problems this mother dearly wishes to avoid.

I'm still a good many years from having to deal with this sort of thing with my own son, but I couldn't help but draw some parallels between this woman's parenting style and the manner in which many businesses operate.

Sometimes customers ask hard questions. Are you prepared to answer them in an honest and respectful manner? Do your stakeholders feel they can trust what you have to say, or are have you stonewalled them so often that they turn to inneundo and rumour to form their opinions? Are your employees able to freely discuss problems that have arisen within the organization or have you made it clear that you will dismiss the first person to tell you something you didn't want to hear?

Business is about trade. It's awfully hard to trade when you've surrounded yourself with walls.

Two Kinds of Designers

There are two kinds of web designers.

Okay - there are actually quite a few more. But let's, for the sake of argument, say that there are two. And to make things easier still, let's affix a descriptive label to each of these kinds: the builder and the partner.

The builder works entirely to spec. Tell the builder you want a feedback page, and the builder will make you a feedback page. Tell the builder you'd like a fancy, schmancy animated singing and dancing intro to your site, and the builder will provide.

The partner treats your web project as if it were their own. The partner will question your specs, provide specs of their own, and debate you til they're hoarse if they disagree with the course you've outlined for a site.

It would seem the builder is extremely easy to get along with, and the partner has the potential to be a pain in the ass. In fact, that very likely is the case. But before you choosing a designer, be sure to remember: the builder endeavours to deliver exactly what you ask for; the partner will strive to deliver exactly what you need.

Hot Buttered Popcorn

My secret pleasure is to pop a ginormous bowl of popcorn and scuttle away to some quiet room with a book.

This used to be quick and simple to do. That is, until the hot-air popper that has been with me since the mid-eighties finally bought the biscuit and moved on to appliance heaven.

I attempted the hot-air popper we recieved as a gift a couple years back, but these modern day devices just don't cut it. When I pop some corn, I expect to fill a bucket. The best the new device can do is produce a cup's worth before shutting itself down.

Microwave popcorn won't do either. At ten times the cost, it takes me three packages of the stuff to get a decent sized serving.

I've currently settled on the stove-top method, using a stock pot and a goodly sized helping of butter. Popping corn on the stove is an art. There's a fine line between a nice pot full of hot buttered popcorn and a pot with a chunk of smoking carbon weilded to the bottom. I'm finally getting the knack of it, but find the amount of unpopped kernals to be far out of proportion from what I could achieve with my original hot-air popper.

Fortunately, teams of scientists appear to be working on this unpopped kernal problem for me. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they engineer the ultimate poppable kernal. Unless one of them is hard of hearing, in which case we may end up with a corn monster ravaging the Iowa country side, bullets and missiles uselessly bouncing off of its ultimate, unstoppable kernals.

drawn and quartered by SOCAN

Michael Geist reports that SOCAN and other Canadian copyright collectives are seeking to grab at least 40 percent of gross revenues from music downloading services. While all the talk is how this will affect iTunes and other music download sites, I can't help but wonder what it will mean for the burgeoning trend of podcasting. SOCAN is seeking a minimum payment of a quarter per song used per download. From what I gather, that would mean using a clip of music in a podcast could end up costing you big time. Even if your audience consists of a dozen visitors a day, that catchy little tune you use to open your show could end up costing you over a thousand dollars a year. God help you if you're linked by slashdot or boingboing and have to shell out for ten, twenty thousand dollars worth of downloads.

If you're even thinking about podcasting from Canada, I'd strongly recommend limiting your music selections to works under a Creative Commons license.

Everyone is a newspaper

We've all heard of the cases where an employee has been sacked due to the content of their blog. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted some valuable comments on how to blog safely. Regardless of how careful you are, though, in your own postings, it's only a matter of time before someone is sacked due to the content of someone else's blog.

What happens when the teenage daughter of a regional manager idlely blogs that her mom's upset because a major contract is about to fall apart due to the actions of a VP? Or when the brother of a politician talks about the crazy weekend they had a few years back in Tijuana? Or when the courier blogs about an argument he overheard while doing a pickup, and in doing so discloses a material change regarding a public company?

Everyone is a newspaper. Everyone is a radio station. We are all the media.
Is your company ready for that? Are you?

Get Perpendicular

Hitachi gets it.

They not only have an innovation that's worth talking about - they're talking about it in a way that's remarkable in and of itself.

Hitachi has engineered a means of increasing hard drive space ten fold. In March 2005, they demonstrated how a 3.5 inch hard drive could hold a terrabyte of data. As a point of reference, a terrabyte is the equivilent the text from six million books, or 250,000 songs, or over 500 movies. That is a huge amount of storage in a space that can fit in the palm of your hand. A remarkable achievement, but one you've likely not heard unless you follow tech news.

But dollars to donuts, their little 'school house rock' style animation will reach far beyond the general tech consumer, educating on the value of this innovation, instilling brand awareness, and creating general buzz.

Go watch 'Get Perpendicular'

The Party: A Parable for Brands

So it's Friday evening. You're at a shindig that a couple of coworkers are throwing and you're mixing and mingling your way through the crowd, quietly sizing up who it is you have to kill to get a martini.

Clusters of people form around the ebb and flow of conversations. There's a fella with a raised voice, jumping about in an excited way. People swing over to see what the excitement is, and slowly edge away when they realize there is no excitement, the man's just annoying. A woman in a sleek and revealing dress has drawn an audience, but you can see from the leer in their eyes, not one of them is actually listening to her words. An argument has started over by one of the booths. Seems this guy thinks his way is the only way and he'll interrupt, shoot down or just plain slap around anyone who tells him different.

A dry martini has made its way into your hand and so you worm your way into one of the larger circles. There's an active conversation going on. People are talking. People are listening. It's late in the night before you realize how much time has flitted by and you withdraw from the circle with great reluctance. You exchange numbers with everyone and agree that, yes, we simply must do this again.

The market is the party.
Your brand is the conversation.

Be honest with yourself - are you the life of the party, or are you just a boor. Is anyone thinking 'we must do this again?' If not - can you expect to be in business much longer?

The best ad for your product is your product

A single cup of really good coffee is worth a thousand billboards, posters and placquards for Starbucks. Typing in a search phrase and getting the right result, first time around is worth a dozen ads during the SuperBowl to Google. A relaxing flight and not losing your bags is better for WestJet than a dozen pop divas lending their song to your brand.

If you truly believe your product is heads and tails above the competition, then your marketing dollars are best spent getting a sample of what you offer, a taste of the experience you provide, into the hands of your potential customers or clients.

The buzz phrase junkies are calling it 'tryvertising'. I call it common sense.

RTFA

An email petition has made it's way into my inbox, calling upon my sense of 'Canadian Decency' to help ban a film.

This particular email calls for a stop to the creation of a film documenting the rape and murder of two girls by a sick and depraved couple. What makes this film different from all the other true-crime tales to hit our televisions and local theatres, is that this crime happened, not in big bad LA or New York. It happened here, in Southern Ontario, and it happened not more than a decade ago. Under the blanket reason of, 'protecting the families of the victims', there is a hue and cry to ban the film.

Never mind the dozen Law & Order shows that fill the airwaves. Never mind CSI. Never mind the film 'Monster' which won numerous awards both in the US and Canada. Nor the made for TV movies of the traumatic or shocking event of the week. Ignore the dozen shows on forensic science or tales of true crime. Forget the rush of Canadians across the border into the US who went to read the grisly details that didn't make it to our press due to a publications ban. Ignore the sections of libraries and book stores dedicated to True Crime. No - it's just this, and only this film, which demonstrates the depravity of entertainment and must be stopped. Only this needs muzzling, for the good of the victims.

Needless to say, this little rally call for censorship of an extremely narrow minded variety irked me.

Aside from the issue of censorship, would you like to know what I found particularly distasteful about this email?

It's not that the petition is so poorly written that there is no clear goal or objective requested. Nor is it that email petitions carry absolutely no weight with any politician, business or serious organization.

No - what's distasteful is that within the body of the petition itself is a link to an article explaining that this very petition is poorly written and carries no weight. Right there! Right in the email itself!!! Over 200 people had signed the email petition by the time it reached my in-box, and I imagine there are hundreds of other who are right now signing and forwarding this thing on. And all of whom are missing that right within the petition itself is a link explaining to them that the petition is useless and ineffective. What does that tell you?