Art and Life

This is an interseting tilt from the forward thinkers in San Antonio on art education in schools. As I have said before, not only does art education and the apprenticeship of creativity prepare you for art but also for life. The capacity to think creatively and to improvise efficiently is an important part of any business person's tool box. Thanks to Dan Pink for the heads up. Enjoy

AUSTIN — Ben Chacon-Torres, a junior at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School, has no idea where his life would be headed if Texas schools didn't teach music, dance and theater.

For him, the fine arts make his life go around, giving him a good idea where he might land some day.

"I'm going to be famous," Chacon-Torres said last week while waiting to perform in the Capitol rotunda with his school's Razzle Dazzle Concert Choir and Show Choir.

Hundreds of students from around Texas performed in the rotunda and on the Capitol steps Thursday to draw attention to Arts Education Day.

A new study by the Texas Coalition for Quality Arts Education shows both students and schools with robust fine arts programs do better academically. Schools rated "exemplary" had 61 percent of their students enrolled in fine arts courses, compared with 54 percent for "recognized," 51 percent for "acceptable" and 44 percent at "low-performing" schools.

"We're not claiming that those statistics by themselves prove that having fine arts makes students smarter or are more likely to make them stay in school," said Robert Floyd, executive director of the Texas Music Educators Association.

Video

The Brackenridge High School choir speak out for continued funding of arts electives.

"But these statistics show that a high level of student participation in fine arts is one of the characteristics of outstanding high schools and middle schools in our state."

For Chacon-Torres, who said he ranks in the top 5 percent of his class academically, dance and song "help me express myself."

"It helps me get out of that zone to spring out," he said, adding he plans to pursue the arts in college but has not decided where.

Though the arts face no immediate funding crisis in Texas schools, supporters worry that increasing demands for more academic courses will put elective classes at risk. Last year, legislators increased the number of math and science classes that high school students must take.

"When you add a number of subjects to a student's already crowded load, in essence, it is ruling out fine arts. They don't do it on purpose. It's just one of those aftermaths," said Joyce Brannon, director of the Razzle Dazzle choir.

About 1.2 million of the 4.5 million children in Texas public schools participate in fine arts.

 

"It adds enrichment to a child's life," Brannon said. "It gives them ready-made friends. It gives them a reason to come to school. It gives them creative thinking ability and (teaches students) how to analyze."

The state of Texas requires high school students to take at least one fine arts credit to graduate under the recommended and distinguished achievement graduation plans. The fine arts include music, art, theater and dance.

Arts advocates have at least one influential ally in Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, chairman of the House Public Education Committee.

A fine arts education is imperative "for our culture to survive," Eissler said, adding Texas schools develop "amazing talent."

"Left brain is logic, right brain is creativity," he said. "We don't want our kids to compete internationally with half of their brain tied behind their backs."

The Karma Café

Oh, I love this... 

You can pay anything you like at the Terra Bite Lounge in Kirkland, Washington, reports Amy Roe in The Seattle Times (2/6/07). No prices are listed on the menu — it’s up to the cafe’s customers to decide how much to pay, or whether to pay at all. “Does it really matter to any of our patrons … whether they pay a dollar or three dollars or five dollars?” says Ervin Peretz, a Google programmer who scraped together the dough to start a cafe that he says sells “good karma” as much as coffee and snacks. His bet is that “he can finesse the largesse of well-off latte lovers to cover the tabs of the less fortunate.”

Ervin says he got the idea while drinking at a bar in Saigon, and named the place as “a play on the tech term ‘terabyte,’ a trillion bytes, as well as a reference to earth and food.” As he explains: “People want something different. They want simplicity … They want to be taken to a new place, and they want to contribute something.” One patron, Tonja Maciolek, says she likes the idea “because she’s sensitive to price and would prefer to name her own, even it ended up being the same.” She contributed $4 for a bagel with cream cheese and coffee.

Kate Lewis, a high school student, says she’d pay extra for the privilege of setting her own price. "It’s kind of like a social experiment," she says. Which makes Chris Allar, slightly crazy. "It’s always hard to see if you paid too much or too little," he says, admitting to a certain anxiety over that. But Ervin thinks he’s onto something — since opening late last year he’s served an average of 80 customers a day, each of whom has paid an average of $3. He says he needs about 100 a day to break even. If that doesn’t happen, he says his alternative is pretty obvious: "If it turned out that 20 percent of the population were dishonest, we could just put in a cash register," he says. ~ Tim Manners, editor

 

Powerpoint (again)

Seth Godin is at it again and as easy as it is to rip this off and beat my chest about how I've been hammering this into companies for years, if this post serves as a lead into the gems distributed by Seth then I with feel less guilty about the cut and paste. Happy reading... 

 

Really Bad Powerpoint

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to champion at a church or a school or a Fortune 100 company, you’re probably going to use PowerPoint.

Powerpoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department—and vice versa. It’s a remarkable tool because it allows very dense verbal communication. Yes, you could send a memo, but no one reads anymore. As our companies are getting faster and faster, we need a way to communicate ideas from one group to another. Enter Powerpoint.

Powerpoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it’s not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way.

Communication is the transfer of emotion.

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.)If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report.

Our brains have two sides. The right side is emotional, musical and moody. The left side is focused on dexterity, facts and hard data. When you show up to give a presentation, people want to use both parts of their brain. So they use the right side to judge the way you talk, the way you dress and your body language. Often, people come to a conclusion about your presentation by the time you’re on the second slide. After that, it’s often too late for your bullet points to do you much good.

You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough.

Champions must sell—to internal audiences and to the outside world.

If everyone in the room agreed with you, you wouldn’t need to do a presentation, would you? You could save a lot of time by printing out a one-page project report and delivering it to each person. No, the reason we do presentations is to make a point, to sell one or more ideas.

If you believe in your idea, sell it. Make your point as hard as you can and get what you came for. Your audience will thank you for it, because deep down, we all want to be sold.

Four Components To A Great Presentation
First, make yourself cue cards. Don’t put them on the screen. Put them in your hand. Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.

Second, make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It’s unfair! It works.

Third, create a written document. A leave-behind. Put in as many footnotes or details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience that you’re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it’s over, and they don’t have to write down everything you say. Remember, the presentation is to make an emotional sale. The document is the proof that helps the intellectuals in your audience accept the idea that you’ve sold them on emotionally.

IMPORTANT: Don’t hand out the written stuff at the beginning! If you do, people will read the memo while you’re talking and ignore you. Instead, your goal is to get them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation.

Fourth, create a feedback cycle. If your presentation is for a project approval, hand people a project approval form and get them to approve it, so there’s no ambiguity at all about what you’ve all agreed to.

The reason you give a presentation is to make a sale. So make it. Don’t leave without a “yes,” or at the very least, a commitment to a date or to future deliverables.

Bullets Are For the NRA
Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing Powerpoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.
2. No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.
5. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).1

Sure, this is different from the way everyone else does it. But everyone else is busy defending the status quo (which is easy) and you’re busy championing brave new innovations, which is difficult.

Some advice...

 

Here is some useful advice from a pro. English Cut is the sort of blog you read and can't help feeling shabby. In keeping with my share your knowledge mantra which I am going to sing in the new year with read this and start taking care of your suits...  

[A classic sleeve board, cheap and useful]

Recently I've had a lot of customers asking me about the best way to press and look after their suits. So I thought I'd let you know how I do things.

In an ideal world you've got yourself a good week's supply of bespoke clothing. I say this not to keep tailors like me in beer money, but to let you know how to get the very best from your bespoke wardrobe. If you're new to bespoke and have recently got your first suit, this often when caring problems arise.

You see, if your tailor has done a good job, your first bespoke will now be your favourite in the wardrobe, and you'll want to wear it all the time. Wonderful, but the problem is you'll end up wanting to wear it too much. As I've said before, a proper bespoke suit can easily last ten or fifteen years. But they need a rest, just like the rest of us. So the most important key to success is to rotate your wardrobe. Wear your suit a maximum of a couple of times a week. Then brush it down well with a good quality brush. It may not look dirty, but dust, pollen and other particles will have settled on the cloth. And if you don't shake them out they'll go deeper into fibre and you'll ingrain dirt into the fabric each time it's worn.

Secondly, always put your suit on a quality hanger. it should be broad and shaped to support the coat's shoulders. Also make sure the trouser bar is anti-slip- it's not very nice to find a heap on the wardrobe floor.

Now as long as you're not unlucky with the tomato ketchup, this is all you'll need to do, and trips to dry cleaners should be very rare. However, one thing that your suit will miss is a good pressing. To attempt this on a conventional ironing board is useless and frustrating, to say the least. They're always too small and you can never keep a hold of what you're pressing.

What you need is a good iron [preferably with the option to vertically spray steam], a good sleeve board [just like real tailors use] and a solid flat table and cloth. The manufactured sleeve boards you buy in the shops are pretty useless, so you're much better getting your local carpenter to make you one. Just show him the picture above, to give him an idea. You'll need to cover one side with padding, just like a regular ironing board. It's not rocket science to make, and you'll be in business right away. It'll last a lifetime and you'll wonder how you ever managed without it.

[Me trying to be a "Blue Peter" presenter. Sorry, only the British will get that one.]

Here's a little demo video of me using a sleeve board which will help. [You'll need Quicktime to view it, which you can download for free here.] Sorry the video's a bit short [my phonecam can only upload so much], but it gives you the idea.

Stop Whining and Get to Work

 

From my buddy (sort of) Guy Kawasaki, the king of the cheesy smile and the million dollar idea, comes one of the best interviews I have read on the web. If you have ever thought everything is too hard get a load of this woman and go back to work. Great stuff. 

Ten Questions With Aziza Mohmmand

What’s the most inspiring story of entrepreneurship that you’ve heard in 2006? My answer does not involve two guys in a garage who sell their company to Google for $1.6 billion. No way...my answer is a woman who runs a soccer-ball factory in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Her name is Aziza Mohmmand, and she told me what it takes to be a woman entrepreneur in Afghanistan. I met Aziza when I spoke to a group of Afghani women who were attending a class in entrepreneurship at Thunderbird in Glendale, Arizona. (Interestingly, Thunderbird is a former Air Force base.)

1. Question: What is your life story?

   Answer: I was born in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1959 to a liberal family. My father was a prosperous businessman. After high school I went to Kiev, Ukraine and received my masters degree in Social Sciences. Soon after I came back to Kabul in 1983, I was hired by Kabul Institute of Pedagogy as an instructor.

   In 1997 I continued my endeavors in education by starting a tutoring business in my home. My courses were offered to boys and girls both in one class, and they were popular across Kabul City especially during the Taliban regime when the girls were deprived of education. Gradually my classes were limited only to girls, and my home was the hope for 385 girls to study from first to ninth grade.

   Despite all the restrictions set forth by the Taliban regime and the challenges I faced every day, I continued my work until June, 1998 when the government confiscated girls’ schools all across the country and banned young women and girls from social life or participating in any educational institution. Consequently my school was forcibly closed, and I was desperate to find a safe place for my family.

   Thus, we moved to Pakistan to find our destiny and the lost hopes of my family. In Haripour, Pakistan I was hired by an American institute called Safe Children and worked as an instructor for three years. When the interim government announced its arrival in Afghanistan, I came back to Kabul and started my nonprofit organization named Moscau, and it was soon registered at the Department of Economy.

   In my NGO, I trained more than 2,000 men and women in baking, sewing, leather treatment, ball assembly, carpentry, electrical, blacksmith, plumbing, computer, and English language. In the ball assembly department, I hired 200 trainees who were widows and their family’s bread winners. They had no opportunities to work elsewhere.

   In order to help them improve, I hired some masters of leather goods to advance these women’s skills in ball assembly with my own money, but I soon realized that I couldn’t sell my products through my NGO. Therefore, in 2003 I registered the Moscau Leather Goods and Ball Production company with the Investment Committee of Afghanistan.

   My intention was to make a difference in the life of women in Afghanistan and keep them busy while they have an income with an active role in the growth and building of the new infrastructure of the country. In 2006, I established a foundation named Women’s Handicraft and Ball Assembly Industry and registered it with the Afghanistan Department of Justice.

   This foundation serves women of Afghanistan to improve their skills for making leather goods and leather balls. I am the first woman in Afghanistan involved in the leather goods industry. Despite numerous challenges in the beginning, now I feel very successful. I can produce any design in leather goods and return the finished product in any volume on the agreed-upon deadline.

2. Question: How many people work for your company?

   Answer: There are 220 widows who are the bread winners of their families in ball assembly and forty women in the leather goods department. I also work with five masters who specialize in treatment of leather goods.

3. Question: What kind of products do you sell?

   Answer: Different kinds of soccer balls, volleyballs, and handballs. In the leather goods department, I sell suitcases, wallets, purses, and other leather goods products.

4. Question: How many balls do you sell per year?

   Answer: In the first years we didn’t sell much, maybe 5,000 or 6,000 per year. In 2006, however, we sold 10,000 soccer balls, more than 3,000 children soccer balls, and 1,000 volleyballs. Our revenue in leather goods department was also good. Right now we have a contract with UNICEF for 173,000 school bags.

5. Question: How much do your employees make per month?

   Answer: Women in the ball assembly department are paid by piece. The skilled masters, however, are paid $150 per month.

6. Question: Where did you get the money to start the company?

   Answer: I started with $5,000 personal savings. I also took loans from friends in the beginning. I was lucky to have $3,000 worth of machinery from my previous business which I could use in the leather goods production.

7. Question: What’s the first thing you’re going to tell your family about America?

   Answer: The kindness and hospitality of the Americans.

8. Question: What did you like the most and the least about America?

   Answer: What I liked was the discipline in driving, great roads, advancement in the infrastructure of the country, respect, cooperation of people with each other, the value of human beings, execution of the law, hard-working people, peaceful environment, and beautiful nature. During my stay in the US, there was nothing that I didn’t like.

9. Question: What are the general living conditions for a woman in Afghanistan?

   Answer: Just in the center of the Kabul City living conditions are good for some women, but life in rural areas is not so good. Freedom for women outside big cities is very little. Maybe 10% of the women in rural areas are independent and have freedom of action.

   In rural areas, life is better for educated people. In general, life is okay in villages and small cities. Girls can now go to school the same as boys. Unemployment rate is pretty high for young people even in Kabul, but in rural areas unemployment is much higher.

10. Question: What factors does a woman have to overcome to start and run a company in Afghanistan?

    Answer: If a woman decides to do business, she should be ready for many problems dealing with security, religion, family, regional concerns, and gender. Women have to overcome all the above problems in order to be successful in their businesses. Most women who start a business normally enjoy their husband’s, brother’s, and father’s support.

11. Question: Under Taliban rule, what was your life like?

    Answer: My family and I had a lot of problems at the beginning of the Taliban regime. My home tutoring practice didn’t observe Taliban’s regulations for separation of boys and girls. Later in 1998 I was forced to immigrate to Pakistan where I was constantly threatened to death by the religious hard liners. Eventually I was supported by the security forces of Pakistan and could have a safer life in exile.

12. Question: How has your life changed since the war?

    Answer: After the fall of Taliban, some circumstances, including the establishment of my NGO have made great changes in my life. I started my own business through which I could educate thousands of Afghans. I could rub elbows with men to achieve the freedom of running my business and dive into the future.

13. Question: Are you living in greater fear of terror because you are an entrepreneur?

    Answer: Obviously, no life is without problem, but human beings have a great power of adaptation. We work hard to annihilate the dangers and the risks that we take every minute of our lives. Over the past four years, since I started my business, I have never been threatened for doing business per se.

14. Question: What would happen if America pulled its troops out of Afghanistan?

    Answer: The US forces allied with the international peacekeeping troops are the major support for peace in Afghanistan. Without their active support, bloodshed will cover all the country and people of Afghanistan will no longer experience peace.

15. Question: What can someone who’s just a “regular person” do to help your country?

    Answer: Anybody in any country can help his/her fellow human being. However, in an advanced capitalist country such as the US, entrepreneurs can greatly help the Afghans who are novices in investment. Americans can further provide social, economic, and humane support for Afghans. I need your support in order to better help the women in Afghanistan who are expecting my support.

The Art of Sharing and Social Networking

This from Tom Peters (my take on it is after): 

"Oddly enough, I've run into two situations in the last 24 hours where someone wanted to restrict the activities of a competitor relative to seminars I was giving or products I was developing. It's a position that I adamantly oppose on both moral and commercial grounds.

At the top of my business priority list, I want my overall market to grow by leaps and bounds. My market share will go down (It was about 100% after In Search of Excellence, when I was more or less the only public "management guru"), but my revenue will soar—the "bigger pie" axiom.

In short, I want my competitors to thrive. And I welcome their presence at my events. I go so far (see our "Cool Friends" interviews, for example) as to enhance their careers!

Does all this suggest an altruistic streak? Perhaps, but I actually think mostly not. I think that when one badmouths one's competitors or tries to limit their activities, the "word gets around." And one develops a reputation as prickly and egocentric—and, well, as a selfish jerk.

More important, my only effective long term defense (think Apple) is to do better and different work—and earn and retain the custom of those who would engage me.

In the original glory days of IBM, one of the legendary Thomas Watson's Golden Rules was "Thou shalt never badmouth a competitor." In fact, to violate this rule was a no-debate firing offense. As IBM struggled in the eighties, the rule slipped into disuse, and the company's reputation suffered as a result. Back to my basic premise, IBM's real problem was the loss of product distinction.

I come down hard on Mr Watson's side. It is my goal—selfishly, actually—to be a highly regarded member of my professional community. Speaking crudely, I think that is an incredibly strong and sustainable competitive advantage. And, yes, I bloody well do want to win more than my fair share of business.

Your opinion?"

 I'll tell you what I think Tom, my opinion is French people I talk to can't seem to get their heads around this idea either. Even the idea of blogging and sharing information and ideas about work practices apparently is a way to total ruin from people stealing from me. This is bollocks and is the type of thinking which is driving the economy here at a snail's pace.

I have participated in social networking groups and I'm not convinced the French are ready to operate using a spirit which is beneficial for everyone. People are passive and clan-like. This means they will stay in small safe groups viewing people from outside their group as intruders. They will share limited information for fear of someone ripping them off and talk crap with people they already know. It's instant aristocracy and it's obvious from a mile away. Newcomers are seduced by the prospect of meeting new contacts but quickly recognize the school yard atmosphere. 

Get talking everyone. For God's sake pull your fingers out and give the idea of real social networking a chance. There are great structures in place for people to be doing business rapid-fire instead of chipping away at icebergs. If France wants to go from zero growth to playing with the big boys she must stop preening herself in front of the mirror and stop prattling on about les trente glorieuses and start interacting, working intelligently, thinking differently and stopping the perpetual bleeding of the wound of suspicion.  

Measuring WOMM

Is There a Reliable Way to Measure Word-of-Mouth Marketing?

 

If you have a few minutes read through this one. Something I find interesting is the want for people to regulate and standardize phenomena. This article from Marketing NPV tries to pin it all down... 

ord-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is one of the recent darlings of the marketing industry. It’s becoming increasingly more common to find large firms retaining specialized WOM agencies in an effort to counteract the rapidly rising CPMs of the fractured media landscape. Some are even hiring marketing managers specifically for word of mouth. Industry associations are tripping over one another with conferences and workshops to share best practices and develop standardized codes of ethics, while marketing trade publications extol the virtues of harnessing the holy grail — getting one person to “objectively” influence the opinions (and hopefully buying behavior) of another.

Beyond all the energy, enthusiasm, and hype, only two things are known for certain:

1. WOM can have a very positive impact on a brand marketing plan. Case studies abound — both B2B and B2C — that bear this out.
2. Metrics are all over the lot. We count almost 50 different measures being used by WOM “experts” to calculate the value of word of mouth.

Most telling in underscoring the challenges in measuring WOM are the publications of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) itself. In their comprehensive 2005 report on the subject, they readily admit that there is no simple or direct way to understand the financial payback from WOM investments. Even experts quoted in the book disagree on which metrics make sense and which don’t.

Defining Word of Mouth

Try to define word of mouth and you’ll quickly hit the first gap. There’s no consistent lexicon yet for understanding how it works or how to talk about planning, executing, and measuring a campaign that exploits its capabilities. In WOMMA’s report, their executives do a good job of explaining WOM simply. Brad Fay, managing director of GfK NOP says: “The purpose of … word-of-mouth marketing is … to enlist target consumers to become senders of marketing-relevant information to other consumers, who will ultimately go on to buy products and services.”

Karthik Iyer, senior vice president of business development for Intelliseek, adds this clarifying thought: “If marketing is the science of moving things from a producer to consumer, then word-of-mouth marketing is the science of understanding the kind of moving that goes on, one consumer at a time, from consumer to consumer to consumer.”

Most expert-practitioners agree there are two types of word of mouth: organic — that which happens naturally — and amplified — a campaign that the marketer facilitates. The former can be measured through traditional brand tracking, reputation surveys, and customer experience monitoring, while the latter can also be measured through traditional campaign tracking tools.

However, some marketers lean heavily toward measuring the online portion of WOM to the detriment of their offline segment, because online is easier to track. But WOM research and consulting firm Keller Fay notes that nearly 80% of word of mouth occurs offline. For Vocalpoint, a social networking website for mothers, that number approaches 90%.

The Intuit Experience

Intuit practices amplified word of mouth extensively and even has an executive dedicated to it. Kira Wampler, word-of-mouth senior marketing manager for Intuit’s Home & My Business segment, treats WOM the same way she would any other marketing discipline — first by understanding the key customer insights and marketing goals for the product being featured — Quicken, QuickBooks, or TurboTax.

Intuit’s recent efforts provide as close to a best-practice example of how to measure an amplified word-of-mouth campaign as you’ll find. The firm had recently launched its new portal Web site jackrabbit.intuit.com, which provided new small-business owners with actionable content and tools they could find useful in starting and building their businesses. The content came from both Intuit and other industry sources.

Since the site was in beta, Intuit wanted to create buzz, but wasn’t ready to commit to a full-blown marketing campaign. They started building relationships with five influential bloggers, giving them access to the site before it went public. Then, two days before the public launch, they gave an exclusive to two bloggers, asking them to look at the Web site and then share their thoughts. Intuit didn’t attempt to influence their comments. Wampler notes that one of the bloggers did a lot of her own legwork to determine whether the site was relevant to her readers. Her post, which was positive, was picked up by 13 other bloggers, creating exponential visitor growth.

As measures of success, Intuit counted the number of blogs that picked up the story or wrote their own and noted the velocity (whether it took a month or happened in two days); share of voice (how much talk occurred in the blogosphere); voice quality (what was said and the extent to which those comments were positive or negative); and sentiment (how meaningful the comments were) of each.

Solid execution; yet, like Intuit, most WOM efforts today focus on “stroke counting” — page views, number of eyeballs, etc., rather than ROI or financial payback.

The Difference between B2B and B2C WOM

In the B2B environment, word of mouth historically has manifested itself in the amplified category through conferences, sales calls, and special-interest communities. In the tech sector, customer reference programs are common, where potential clients are introduced to existing clients they can grill about how well the product works and meets their needs.

But the main difference between B2B and B2C is that B2C WOM occurs pretty much anywhere, according to Steven Nicks, EVP of client services for The Phelon Group, a customer intelligence consultancy. For instance, a self-acclaimed TiVo buff, he admits that while sitting on an airplane, he might go on and on to the person next to him about how great he feels TiVo is. But opportunities like that are few and far between in the B2B space. As a result, he notes that organizers of conferences such as EMC World in Boston have begun providing such WOM vehicles as specialty cafés that foster the ability for people to congregate, connect, and chat. Five years ago, such an idea might have been considered a waste of space. Today, it would fall under the category of “marketing opportunity.”

Walking a Thin Line

There’s been a lot of press recently about how some WOM tactics walk a thin line between what is ethical and what is shady. Questionable methods include hiring people to go into bars and loudly order a specific branded drink, or sending an “actor” out with the latest cell phone camera to ask tourists to take his picture as a means of getting the device into their hands and creating opportunities to talk about how wonderfully miniature it is.

In addition, there are companies that charge advertisers to take their message and distribute it out to a “network” of agents (for instance, teens or seniors) they maintain. Agents get paid to promote advertiser messages on blogs, in chat rooms, at events, or to talk it up with their friends. Teens are paid to talk up certain candy bars, clothing items, or music to their friends, while grandmothers earn points for sharing their knowledge of over-the-counter medications with others at the senior center.

Nicks says that unethical word of mouth is not as prevalent or noticeable in the B2B space as in B2C. However, there are a number of B2B initiatives he would classify as bad ideas. First, if a company is going to connect two people together, telling Person A what Person B is concerned about before introducing the two is a good idea, and prepares Person A to speak intelligently; however, telling Person A what’s important to say is not.

Second, companies exist that offer discounts to current customers for talking to prospects, or for allowing their case study in the media. There are also sophisticated blogs that compensate people around their activities. Anything that removes the genuineness and openness and dilutes the quality of the message, Nicks feels, devalues what you’re trying to do, noting that word of mouth has to be truly genuine to have real impact.

While the vast majority of WOM network companies employ clear rules of conduct, it would be difficult to ignore the enormous potential for abuse here, particularly where measurement is concerned. First, the quality of the context for these types of in-person contacts cannot be monitored, so a small spike in sales can be easily be misconstrued as a success. We wouldn’t even know if the agents were just buying more of the product themselves. Even more importantly, such a program could give word-of-mouth a bad reputation, quickly equating it to spam, exposing the category to potential regulation and legislation and effectively killing it before it even has a chance to mature.

The WOMMA Framework

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association came together in 2005 to create a framework around word-of-mouth marketing, including defining it, and developing standards, metrics, and measurement tools. They concluded that a WOM “episode” involves four components:

• Participants: Creators, senders, and receivers who can be measured on their propensity, demographics, credibility, and reach;
• WOMUnit: A single unit of (media-agnostic) marketing-relevant information;
• Action: What participants do to create, pass along, or respond to a WOMUnit; actions can be measured on velocity, distribution/spread, and source diversity; and
• Venue: The medium or physical location where the communication takes place; venues can be measured on total potential population vs. actual audience received.

A single “episode” achieves one in five outcomes, each of which serves as a trackable event:

• Consumption: The receiver absorbs the information but takes no action;
• Inquiry: The receiver seeks additional information;
• Conversion: The receiver completes a desired action;
• Relay: The receiver redistributes the WOMUnit to another person; or
• Recreation: The receiver creates a new WOMUnit.

WOMUnits can also be broken down into more distinct measurable parts, including:

• Topicality: The degree to which the marketing message is contained in the WOMUnit;
• Timeliness: Whether the WOMUnit arrives in time to be relevant to a specific campaign;
• Polarity: The positive vs. negative content of the WOMUnit;
• Clarity: Determines if a message is understood by the receiver in the way it was intended by the sender; and
• Depth: The amount of visual, written, or verbal information included in a WOMUnit presumed to increase message persuasiveness.

Tying WOM to Experience

For organic word-of-mouth, both Wampler and Nicks use Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score®1 (NPS) as their main measurement tool. The score is based on the concept that all customers can be divided into three categories: promoters (your best customers), passives (satisfied but unenthusiastic), and detractors (unsatisfied customers at the highest risk of defection and producing negative WOM).

To build the score, companies must first ask their customers the “ultimate” question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Answers range from 0 (least likely) to 10 (most likely). Nines and 10s are promoters — your best referral sources.

Your Net Promoter Score would then be determined by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters (%P – %D = NPS). The resulting number should serve as your starting benchmark as you try to turn more customers into promoters. WOM programs are measured on their ability to impact the NPS.

But even the Net Promoter Score requires a lot of effort and back-end work, says Gary Spangler, e-business leader for the electronic & communication technologies platform at DuPont. Wampler cautions that often, when people evaluate their NPS, they are simply handed a number and don’t do anything with it. To really get value from it, companies must look at the underlying drivers that would make someone more or less likely to offer a recommendation. Getting a handle on those drivers, she says, will, in turn, drive the decisions used to affect change within an organization.

The flaw, says Nicks, is that the score only tracks what people are saying they would say about you, not what they’re actually saying about you. A better measure to have in a marketing dashboard, he feels, would be the percentage of deals that word of mouth is being leveraged on and how those deals compare with non-WOM deals — a true tie-back to sales.

Alternate Approaches

An alternate metric suggested by The Phelon Group is “return on reference,” which measures the impact of satisfied customers on recruiting new customers and on shaping the impressions of influentials. Phelon often measures, for instance, whether a customer-reference program is able to shorten the sales cycle.

While we agree it may be a good idea to measure the correlation between WOM and the sales cycle time, we don’t recommend using vague phrases such as “return on reference,” as they tend to undermine the credibility of the effort in the eyes of the CFO for whom “return on …” is a sacred pretext to “investment,” “capital,” or “sales.”

DuPont, in the early stages of WOM adoption, intends to look at measures such as campaign scale (how far it reached); speed (how fast it spread); share of voice in that space; whether it achieved positive lift in sentiment; whether the message was understood; whether the messages was relevant; whether the message had sustainability (something you can add to or a one-shot); and how far it moved from its source. Spangler is also trying to define financial metrics, such as whether WOM will increase sales, revenue, inquiries, and lead conversions, but admits it’s tough to articulate a tried-and-true method for getting there.

Nicks feels that the ROI of WOM may be easier to track in the B2B space because, while it’s hard to single out its impact by specific account, it is possible to measure overall lift for campaigns with WOM against campaigns without WOM, something he calls a lift “in combination.” That’s a hard notion for executives to accept though, he says, because everyone wants to know the exact revenue impact.

The Paradox of Measuring Financial Return on WOM

Even if you could isolate the specific revenue (or profit) created by WOM, the measurement effort itself could eat up all your profits. Consequently, many advocate either the stroke-counting approaches mentioned above, or other “strategic” frameworks.

Dr. Walter Carl, assistant professor at the Department of Communication Studies of Northeastern University, measures the “credibility” of word of mouth in six ways¹:

• Credibility effect: Whether the information provided by the participant’s conversational partner made information heard from another source (such as the media) more or less believable;
• Thinking change: Whether the episode resulted in a change of thinking or ideas about the product or service and the action a person plans to take;
• Inquiries: The likelihood that a person will seek additional information after a WOM episode, such as visiting a Web site;
• Purchase likelihood and behavior: The likelihood of the participant to purchase or use the product or service;
• Pass-along likelihood and behavior: The extent to which the participant will tell other people about the product or service; and
• Relationship consequences: Whether the WOM episode has an effect on the participant’s relationships when they engage with their friends and family, etc.

Measurement solutions provider CRM Metrix recommends companies measure “the perceived newness and differentiation of their messages” and message “talkability,” while Brandimensions suggests companies focus on “buzz,” which is a proxy for awareness, and “sentiment,” which Wampler uses. On a 1-5 scale, sentiment reflects the degree to which consumers are feeling negatively (1) or positively (5) toward the brand and its attributes.

Others use automated media analysis solutions from organizations such as Biz360 and Delahaye to measure the number and nature of media references picking up the WOM message.

A Prescription for WOM Measurement Progress

Most vendors and consultants working in WOM circles today profess to tie word of mouth to sales or some other form of financial payback. However, too often, these efforts fall back on traditional tracking methods such as web metrics, pre and post surveys, and publicity monitoring. These types of measures are a good start, but they don’t go far enough. Too many companies are settling for what they can get, rather than trying to develop processes that directly correlate to increased sales.

It seems to us that the right process for measuring WOM would include the following steps:

1. Define objectives. Clearly and succinctly state the intended outcome of the campaign expenditure in economic or behavioral terms. If your primary goal is to influence awareness or attitudes, attempt to forecast how that will translate into an increase in profitable customer behavior patterns. If the objective is to shorten the sales cycle, develop hypotheses about how much shortening you can do and what the economic value of a shorter sales cycle would be. If you’re intending to influence the net promoter score, be clear on your expectations for the financial outcome associated with a 1%, 5%, or 20% improvement.
2. Test message strategy effectiveness on behavioral intentions. There are many choice/options techniques available today that can tease out the potential impact of subtle changes in message execution. Much of this can be done quickly and inexpensively via online research panels.
3. Construct experimental designs to validate the relationships between intended behavior change and actual behavior change. Develop test/control constructs to determine the true predictive value of the awareness or attitude change. Try to control WOM message exposure either geographically or, if that’s not possible, on the basis of targeted delivery channels, demographic sub-segments, or simply time (pre-launch vs. post-launch). Methods of controlling for extraneous environmental factors are readily available from your local statistician or academic.
4. Conduct post-campaign interviews with current and new customers, and those who still resist your value proposition to find out what did/did not influence their decisions to act/not act as you desired.
5. Review your proposed measurement methodology with key constituents of the outcome in advance. If the campaign results are positive, who is most likely to challenge your eventual findings? Ensure that finance, sales, and operations are able to air their concerns about the validity of the approach before you launch and ask if they have any better ideas.
6. Keep the proper perspective in mind. Effectiveness and efficiency are only relevant in the context of your expectations. State them clearly and in as close-to-financial terms as you can. Did you achieve the specific result you expected? Did the result come at a favorable cost? If the answers are both yes, you likely have a successful WOM campaign on your hands.

Word of Mouth in Action:
What are marketing agencies tracking and measuring?

We asked a few leading marketing agencies to tell us what they track in word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. They told us:

• Exposure and interaction with the content, by those receiving content directly and by those receiving content from another individual in their network;
• Influentials;
• Pass-along rate;
• End-actions, such as Web site visits, registration, and acquisition
• Most passionate brand advocates;
• A participant’s role in brand information propagation;
• Tools used to communicate;
• Consumer conversations;
• Referral names and addresses; and
• How incoming buyers heard about us.

Blog, social networking, and other buzz metrics include:

• Volume of discussion;
• Share-of-voice compared with competitive products;
• Message type, i.e., positive, negative, neutral;
• Message segmentation — how do consumer-generated messages compare to desired positioning;
• Recommendations — either positive or negative;
• Blog site hits.

Sources: MRM Worldwide, Starcom Mediavest Group, and Wunderman.

Protecting the Future

Measuring word of mouth is certainly a work in progress and companies have gone to great lengths to drill down below the surface and understand its value drivers. Now it’s time to link those drivers to results. Key WOM metrics that can move the needle on brand equity, customer franchise value enhancement, or short-term cash flow should be elevated to the dashboard level and monitored frequently. The potential impact of WOM is enormous if we can keep it from being discredited before it gets a chance to mature as a valuable marketing tool.

Net Promoter is a registered trademark of Satmetrix Systems Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.

¹ Source: Measuring Word of Mouth, WOMMA, Summer 2005.

For a word-of-mouth metrics glossary, click here.

Nike is Uncool

It's official. Nike is uncool. They are paying jillions in sponsorship and sales are down. Everyone is shaking their head by the look of it, trying to understand why people are stopping the blind lemming dive into automatically buying Nike. I remember when Nike was truly cool. When Jordan was cool. When the world of Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (no one remembers their shoes) was catapulted into the next era by Michael Jordan and it was cool. We marvelled at the photo of Jordan flying toward the basket from about the half-court the ball gripped in one hand overhead, shouting his approach as if the guy couldn't believe he was actually going to dunk the thing himself. Air Jordan. It's been three years since Jordan has played a game and about twenty since he was majestic, and the retro-Jordan shoes still outsell the new models.

The fact is no one wants to wear big goofy white basketball boots anymore because, well, they look big and goofy and the aura is gone. The product hasn't changed but the story around it has. Now, when I talk about the difference between information you have (the product) and creating the desire in your audience to want the information (the story), this is what I mean.

 

Needless Oblivion

I couldn't resist this from Gaping Void: 

 

cafe de la merde francaise

Apparently Loic Le Meur's blog traffic has gone crazy since he announced that he voting for Nicolas Sarkozy in the next French presidential elections:

The reason I did that is that Nicolas Sarkozy, currently #2 in Government and future candidate is the only politician in France to my knowledge to say he wants to transform France into a "nation of entrepreneurs" when entrepreneurs are often seen as "enemies of the State" these days, so I can only support him. Of course, many people disagree...

I certainly don't disagree. If anyone is going to save that lovely but stubborn country from needless oblivion, it's going to be its entrepreneurs, and not the L'Ecole de La Mort mandarins currently running the place like their own private country club.

Rock on, Loic! Godspeed, Sarkozy! Vivent les entrepreneurs!

 

 

The bold type is mine.

Design Thinking and Management

So I was in a meeting yesterday in Nantes and this is really the idea I was trying to get across:

"[W]e must consider the possibility that if Design Thinking is critical, maybe restricting it to designers and protecting them from business people is not actually the most productive avenue to pursue. Perhaps eliminating the need for protection by turning business people into Design Thinkers would be more effective. To create a Design Thinking organization, a company must create a corporate environment in which it is the job of all managers to understand customer needs at a deep and sophisticated level and to understand what the firm's product means to the customer at not only a functional level, but also an emotional and psychological level... ...The great firms of the 21st century will be those that recognize the goal isn't to supplement analytics with design; it is all about integrating design and management." Roger Martin.