Irreverent Thinking

And no, I’m not talking about funky coffee machines or Apple’s venerable portable juke-box I’m talking about the collection of sites, communities, blogs and forums that I derive the vast majority of my information from. I’ve coined/nicked the term from it’s common use to define a social group of cetaceans (whales, porpoises, dolphins, etc.). As we trust traditional marketing less and less we are turning not just to anywhere on the web but places that we trust. So "who do you trust?" becomes the question and for me that’s an odd mix of well-known places (Wikipedia, sort of. Google, comprehensive. BBC, news…..etc). I recently changed my mobile phone (Sony Ericsson K800) and wanted something more featured and useful for work so I was heading down the PDA route and decided to ask on the Internet and where did I ask….a Lotus forum of all places! They are pretty geeky and gadget-focussed on there and only have a high percentage of computer people so it seemed to me to be the natural place to ask. I also knew them and many of them I trust so why not ask there? I could have gone to a mobile phone forum but I would have had to learn about the people, the politics and the background and this decision was, put simply, not such a big deal. If I was going to have Laser Eye Surgery then I would spend ages getting to know the forums and researching but a phone is a phone is a phone.

So this got me to thinking about the places I go and I called *it* my pod - my home - my buddies. It’s the place I go first when I want to find something out. I like my pod and I’m eager to spread the word about it, I make recommendations to friends about stuff I learn in it and it also fulfils a certain community need. If I had to write down what i wanted in my pod then I would find the following:

1. Somewhere to the learn stuff about my interests, the things I am an expert in
2. A place to go to ask my idiot questions
3. An authoritative information repository
4. A place to rant, rave and generally let off steam
5. A safe place for my work ideas, separate from the places above
6. Where I prefer to buy stuff

No doubt there are many others but if I looked at the vast majority of my web activity using the Pareto principle then I would find a remarkably small number of web-sites and people. My real pod is actually quite small.

The New Media world finally shows that it has lost the plot by the great and mighty Nielsen deciding somewhat belatedly that page views are now not the way to measure sites and the way to measure them is by time spent on the site. What is going on?

I think, aside from the obvious mistakes that time-based measurement causes we need to realise that the web is used for different things by different people. Comparing Google’s page-view/time connected metric against, say, Facebook is just plain wrong - it’s like comparing time spent in your car versus time spent in the office - it is completely unrelated.

What it did make me think about was the (sort of) obvious next step of putting a Google search onto Facebook. No ones really goes to Google with the aim of staying there, it is a transit place and in fact the better the answer means the quicker the journey starts (so a huge poke in the eye to Nielsen!).

Many of us now certain forums, communities and other such places as regular drop-in centres and it would be so convenient to integrate these together. I know some people would argue that the Google toolbar means you don’t need to do this but it would be a great chance for Facebook (and Google) to start to tailor the results to the search request based on what they (jointly?) know.

You can imagine the scene, Henry Ford is looking to expand car production and he knows to do that he has to buy another factory and a lot of machinery - it takes a lot of capital investment and that is all upfront. He also needs a workforce and they need wages, heating and lighting - that is revenue spend. Add the two together and there is a balance of financial needs, the machinery might last 10 years, each weeks wages last just, erm, 1 week so if we can buy machines that do the work of many it is good because although the machines cost more they actually reduce the ongoing costs.

This is a simple analogy because machine produces the parts for 100 cars per day and it can therefore be measured. It might be the latest and greatest machine in the market but over time it will become the worst machine in the market. On the other hand, the workers over time actually become the best in the market after (often) starting as the worst in the market. So what’s happening is that we are replacing machines (humans) that can improve with machine (physical) that actually get worse with time. Does that sound like a good idea? No, not to me either.

But what has this got to do with Stone Age accounting. Well a client recently asked me to separate out the revenue (ongoing) element from the capital (major project) for his rolling monthly contract. This is proving quite tiresome to do and he is paying for my time to plough through timesheets and control systems to dig out the information and it crossed my mind that we really need to update our accounting systems, practices & taxation in the 21st Century.

I can see the point of having capital and revenue systems in a world of big machinery but I struggle to see how the procedures and practices sit in this new world, a world heavily focussed on services. Maybe everything becomes revenue expenditure but I know that causes problems for the corporate world as they like to invest in capital projects.

Best of all - we are paid to think, to create novel approaches and great ideas that transform businesses. This items come under the somewhat grubby title of consultancy when the are central to much of the business process and generate the highest RoI.

My company is re-building the web-site for Ultralase at the moment, we are lucky as they are a pretty brave company and leave us to pretty much run their whole Internet strategy and as a result they are the dominant force in their marketplace. That’s nice, but recently I have wondered what it would be like if we had to explain to them everything we did. It would be damn near impossible to value it, sure we keep timesheets for programming and project management but so much of what we bring is measured in cleverness but not in the huge ideas. We had that huge idea (VITES) back in 2003! No, this is about the small, tiny, clever ideas we come up with day to day - our leading clever-idea bloke is John Hyde who has just immigrated to New Zealand. John will carry on working for us when he settles there but for the moment I am back in the harness working on these ideas and I came up with a corker today, a simple you have UNREAD mail link that appears on the web-site to all returning visitors who have not left any personal details yet.

Simple, yup! When it was tested in the office everyone said they would click on the link out of (either) curiosity or simple conditioning. We are used to seeing those 3 (4 in this case, it makes is more compelling) little words at places we stop at frequently. So, we’ve made a (as yet) unresponsive visitor click a link we wanted them to click…anything else whilst we are at it? How about a login/register screen….

Please enter your email address and password to retrieve your message(s)
Email [                        ]
Password [                        ]

Excellent, we have a way to let someone register and login at the same time and, for a bonus, we get his/her email address and we have closed the relationship gap slightly as they are now part of the family, they have opted-in to our love-generator!

I’ll keep you posted on the outcome - behavioural and conditioning are wonderful on the web and with the ever-changing landscape it should prove to keep us all on our toes.