Sep 1, 2010 | Communication, Management, Personal Rant
PowerPoint, the Microsoft program has become such a part of the daily regime of sharing information sharing that it has impacted on the way we communicate, and it has its detractors, of which I am one.
Some time ago, I was at a conference where a senior bureaucrat was presenting her departments position. The presentation was replete with animations, and the various tools in PPT to the point where she was prattling on about the great features of the program. What dross.
PowerPoint is the default position now in many situations, but is becoming a crutch, as illustrated in the NY times story.
The lessons are simple:
- Use minimum words on a slide,
- Dump most of the tricky features that just distract from your message,
- Use the opportunity to sell a simple proposition, not to do a “brain-dump” of everything you know,
- Watch and respond to the audience, connect with them,
- Use the program to illustrate your points, not just list them .
Aug 24, 2010 | Communication, Innovation, Social Media
Conventional wisdom of the past decrees that copyright is essential to the well-being and motivation of the suppliers of the publishing stock in trade, authors.
This self serving position is contrary to mountains of evidence accumulating as the web goes into its teenage years of development beyond the geeks. There are thousands of new authors of everything from childrens fiction to scientific treatises on many subjects, and everything in between, things like this blog included.
In this Speigl article, the argument is made, convincingly so given the current evidence from the web, that copyright law is in fact an impediment to publication, and its benefits, rather than a protector.
Aug 19, 2010 | Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
Commodity markets have two things in common:
- There is plenty of business to go around, that is why it is a commodity market. In a mature, saturated market, the challenge is to attract some of the business that is around, not build a new market.
- Customers focus aggressively on price, usually because none of the suppliers in the market give them a reason to focus on anything else, and it is an easy common denominator.
Finding a sustainable point of differentiation is never easy, if it was, everyone would be doing it. The starting point is to understand what the commodity you sell is used for, understand how the product adds value to the customer, and restructure the offering around the source of value.
For example, hiring a car is an exercise in price comparison and the convenience of pick-up and drop-off, not much else. A hirer wants a car to give them mobility, flexibility, and economy of time, and money (compared to taxis). Why doesn’t someone charge by the Km after a small base charge to cover insurance and availability. Suddenly, the game is changed! Same with car insurance, we all pay the same differentiated only by the age and location of the driver, and type of car, but cars are about offering mobility, and logically the more you drive, the greater the chance of a claim, so charge by the Km driven after a small base charge to acknowledge the other variables. What about advertising, why not charge by the response, putting some responsibility on the medium to deliver what it promises, even something as basic as printing services, differential pricing based on turnaround times, response rates (even for printed leaflets, brochures, and so on) is possible.
When you charge for the value delivered, as seen by the customer, rather than just the production, the market loses the second of the characteristics noted above, and differentiation has emerged.
Aug 18, 2010 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
A newspaper asks itself “why should I publish this??”
It costs to publish, time, management resources, labor, time on presses, ink, paper, and so on, so it is a key decision, with implications if you get it wrong. An individual by contrast can now ask themselves ‘Why not publish this?” There is no cost, just a bit of time, and the return is you can be a “published” journalist or Photographer or movie-maker, the downside is zero.
The removal, by the availability of the web, of the organizational and transaction costs required to assemble the physical materials to publish a newspaper has driven this reversal. It costs nothing to write a blog, put a photo on Flicker, so why not just do it?.
This simple reversal, “why, to why not” has changed the world.
Aug 17, 2010 | Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
The word curator brings to mind an old bloke (mostly) running a museum, deciding what is displayed, and how, what gets bought or created, what gets thrown out, and what gets saved for another day.
The job of an editor in the one-way media (print, radio, TV) is effectively as a curator, making those same decisions. But the world has changed, now the web is a two way street, those decisions no longer have to be made, now everything can be published, by anyone, so in effect, the role of curator has lost most of its power. But there is a wrinkle, there is so much stuff out there, that a curating role is emerging to trawl the web for items of value, and to create and edit material that goes to a specific set of interests.
One of the best is the Eureka Report, run by a group of Australia’s most credible business journalists and commentators, who have created a conversation with the “tribe” whose interests are around business, politics, and wealth creation in Australia.
It is the newspaper of the future.
Aug 15, 2010 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
How do you compare prices in a range of stores when standing in the aisle of your local supermarket?
The easy answer now, is “on your iphone“. A crowd called Red Laser have an app that scans the code, compares the product/price to others scanned (presumably there is a data base somewhere out in the cloud) and using google maps is able to compare prices in your general location.
This development has the potential to re-write the equation between brands, the value of things like location and parking, and price in the retail space, and with effectively an FMCG retail duopoly in Australia, it will consume some headspace in Co-op castle in Melbourne, and the Taj in Sydney.
It is a “pity” we wasted millions on a “Grocery Watch” white elephant, a technology/populist bet in the early days of the Rudd government, when a couple of years down the track, a similar thing can be done better on your phone. We now have the same sort of thinking making a 45 billion dollar bet on the NBN, a bet that will impact on generations. Hope they get it right this time!
