Otaku

I recently read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow. Generally speaking, cows are brown or black and they basically all look alike. What if during your drive through the countryside you saw a purple cow?

Now, that would be remarkable!

Purple Cow is about actually BEING remarkable – not just having a great marketing plan or advertisements that tell people your offering is remarkable. It discusses how times are changing (have changed!) and how we need to change our approach to customers, product development, and marketing to be successful.

Some of my favorite ideas in this book are:

• Sneezers – In the age of viral marketing, sneezers spread the germs! They don’t just like your product in silence. They have to tell people about it. Embrace them. Create a remarkable offering, find your sneezers, excite them, and give them messages that are easy to share.

• Otaku – Why do sneezers HAVE to tell people about exciting offerings? Because they have an otaku for them. According to Seth, “Otaku describes something that’s more than a hobby but a little less than an obsession”. People with otaku are your passionate early adopters.

• Interpretation of Geoff Moore’s idea diffusion curve: You all would know this if you saw it. It’s the curve that starts with innovators on the left and progresses through early adopters, early majority, late majority, and finally, laggards. Historically, marketers (and product developers) shoot for the big area under the center of the bell curve (the early and late majority). They create mass advertising campaigns aimed at mass markets. If instead you target sneezers (innovators and early adopters) – they’ll bring along the rest of the curve!

This is a very quick read and I highly recommend it to everyone. It’s also a great book to get for your whole team and discuss (no I’m not on Seth’s payroll – I just have an otaku for this kind of stuff!).

Purple Cow is a purple cow! (Ah-choo!)

The Power of Inertia

Did you ever need to get something done (even something relatively small and simple) and have to go through an organizational gauntlet to get it started? Next time, don't wait for permission – just do it. Spend the money or start the project or whatever it is you need to do.

Why? Because if you start something, stopping it will require an action on someone else’s part – and odds are no one will act!

To act someone must take a stand or publicly voice a position - and people generally don’t like to do that.

Instead of being frustrated by the inertia in your organization, find a way to get it to work for you.

The New Cottage Industry: Part Deux

What do companies gain by supporting independent knowledge workers?

Financially speaking, a company gets to hire a specific expertise with no increase in headcount, salary, benefits, or other salary related expenses (e.g. unemployment insurance, social security contribution, etc.). In companies that are pressured to reduce or maintain headcount this could be a great way to manage peaks and valleys in the workload or to infuse a company with the knowledge of an expert for a limited investment.

That brings us to benefit number two – flexibility. There are some talents that you need for a limited period of time to work with your team. They may be used to help build a new competency in your organization or to offer a different perspective on a strategy, issue, or opportunity. Whatever your reason, you don’t need to make any long-term commitments.

Small companies may use an independent to fill a basic business need for which they don’t have enough work to hire someone full time. Attorneys and accountants have been providing their expertise in this way for decades. In fact, I have a CFO. His name is Gene and I love him. I see Gene about once a quarter and I call him when I have questions – works for me (and I’m pretty sure it works for Gene too)!

Personally, I think the best reason to hire independent knowledge workers is to cross-pollinate ideas. Companies can get themselves into a habit of repeating (or only recognizing) familiar patterns. They often run strategic projects and initiatives utilizing “the usual suspects”. These people are likely bright and motivated, but they are also often entrenched in a specific product or service view. They can be spread so thin that they don’t have the time to stay in touch with other industries that might have similar challenges or opportunities to their own.

Someone from the outside can offer a different perspective, connect you with a larger network of independents, and can help you customize your workforce to achieve a specific goal.

Why and where do you think companies can use independents? Where can’t they be used? Are there other benefits that aren’t listed here? What are the biggest drawbacks?

The New Cottage Industry: Knowledge Work

Last July I decided that I wanted to change the relationship I had with my employer. I was starting to find my role limiting. I wanted more diverse work and more control over what I did. My CEO agreed and I became a contractor.

Interestingly, we both gained financially. He reduced headcount, salary, and expenses (e.g. social security, unemployment insurance, benefits) and I managed to roughly preserve my salary working only part time. Sure I had to pay more social security, my own health insurance, computer equipment, supplies and every other business expense. However, with a fair hourly rate and access to the tax incentives associated with owning a business, I was only marginally behind my full time salary.

Am I an outlier? I don’t think so. Maybe “like finds like”, but all of a sudden I realize that many of my associates have done the same thing I did (or in some cases are planning to do it).

We’re becoming a cottage industry of knowledge workers!

Technology has enabled us to communicate effectively, find the information we need, travel when and where we need to, and execute initiatives virtually - as participants can now span the globe. Email, IM, and the Internet have actually made it easier and less time consuming to keep in touch with our networks and keep up-to-date on industry news. There are also continually more avenues through which we can secure health, life, and disability insurance.

One might say that I am no longer part of an organization. I would disagree. I am part of a self-selecting and self-correcting organization. This organization is built on a network of talented people that value collaboration and have a genuine desire to contribute. They are often the “cream of the crop”.

Is there a tax-id or legal entity at the top of the pyramid? No.

Why does there need to be?

I am connected through personal knowledge and reputation with hundreds (and, in my indirect network, likely thousands) of individuals. What’s more, for the closest “nodes” in my network I know these people very well. I know exactly how they can contribute to a project or business – and they know me.

I have a higher likelihood of assembling a team that is completely customized to the needs of a client than most large consulting firms. Why? I don’t “own” any of these people. I have the freedom to get the best person for the job without the constraint of worrying about idle employees on the bench. What’s more – these people have the ability to use me as part of their network as well.

Sure there are risks: Will I be able to consistently find work? Will I be able to do the work I want to do? What if I get sick? These are all things to consider - but I urge you to consider them for yourself. What are your priorities and what are your options? Too often we stay in the situation in which we’ve found ourselves just because we’re already there!

The bottom line: You’re opportunities are as strong and vibrant as your network. You don’t need to know everything yourself. You just need to know who knows.

Location, location, location!

For the last week I’ve been in Puerto Rico visiting a friend. Guess what the most interesting part of my trip has been. Do you think it was the beach, or the forts, or Old San Juan? Nope. It wasn’t any of those.

The most interesting part of my trip has been that I’m perfectly able to work. I have everything I need. Now some of you might think that’s horrible. The last thing you want to do on vacation is work and you wish that no one would bother you when you’re away.

That’s one way to look at it (and if you’re on vacation it’s a perfectly legitimate way to look at it). But what if you weren’t on vacation? What if, aside from any vacations you decided to take, you sometimes wanted to work in an interesting location so that when you weren’t working you could enjoy different scenery or the company of a far away friend?

We live in an amazing time. This is a time when we can architect our lives any way we want. It’s all about our priorities. Yes, we all have commitments and we all make our choices based on them. However, we have the opportunity to add flexibility and customization to our lives if that is something we value.

The point is that in the information industry I often get into debates about customization. How should we customize our content? How can we customize our user’s experience? There aren’t many who would argue with the statement that customization – even mass customization – is where we need to go.

Well what about people’s lives and their careers? Why can’t we customize where we work? Or how we choose to be associated with a company? (There will be more on that in my next entry)

Are your customers doing this? If so, where are they and how can you best meet their needs?

I hope you appreciate this food for thought. I need to do some work so that I can head to the beach in the morning. Good night!

A different way to run a business

This week I saw a posting on the Fast Company site about Craigslist. The post talked about how a segment on Nightline posited that the site is hurting the newspaper business. Craig Newmark, the site’s founder, said that “his site was serving customers in a way that newspaper classifieds can’t”.

For those of you not familiar with Craigslist, it’s an online listing of classified ads where users manage their own content. They have more traffic on their job boards than Monster and Career Builder combined. According to the Fast Company posting, Craiglist can also boast 3 billion page views per month. They have been in the black since 1998.

Jim Buckmaster, the CEO, was interviewed by David Kirkpatrick of Fortune Magazine at the SIIA conference I wrote about in my last posting. David estimated annual revenue for Craiglist to be about $20M. He also said that, according to a recent article in Fortune, Craigslist could be monetized to the tune of over $500M. He asked Jim why he was leaving this money on the table. Jim said that he and Craig are “not in pursuit of insane wealth” and “have enough revenue as it is”. He went on to say that they value their users and just want to keep listening to them and providing them with a valuable service.

David asked him if print papers should be worried about Craigslist and what advice might he have for print publishers. All Jim would say was that there was room for everybody, 90% of classifieds are still in print, and that he would hesitate to tell newspapers what they should do.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with Jim’s position on the accumulation of wealth, it’s hard to disagree with his focus on the customer. That focus is so sharp that Jim said they don’t even worry about competitive threats. Consider that for a minute. He invests no corporate resources in competitive analysis. He seems to regard it as unnecessary overhead. Instead he invests in providing his listings to more customers and using their feedback to enhance the site.

Craigslist is approaching classifieds with little or no overhead, with a focus on the customer, with users managing their own content, and with tools that are good enough. On top of that their business model requires little or no payment. In fact, recently some of their users ASKED to be charged (for real estate listings) so that they could re-list automatically and get some other features built into the site.

It is very clear what value Craigslist adds to classifieds. Instead of taking aim at Craigslist, traditional media should be determining what value they add. Who are their target customers and what could they be doing to serve them better?

Craigslist focuses on their customers’ well-being and Jim “can’t think of a better strategy” to pursue than doing just that. Maybe that’s the lesson here.