» 2009 » September

I was introduced to the Kano model theory and found it to be fascinating so I thought I would share a quick overview on the theory.

As Wikpedia states:

The Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 80’s by Professor Noriaki Kano which classifies customer preferences into five categories:

* Attractive
* One-Dimensional
* Must-Be
* Indifferent
* Reverse

Visualized here very well:

So what does this mean in short, it sums up innovation, product development and all of the above.  I heard Paul Annett speak on the topic a couple of weeks ago and he used these two examples:

1.) Your at a hotel and you go to the bathroom and there is no toilet paper, that’s going to upset you but if you go to the bathroom and it’s there, it would not satisfy you since it’s a basic need that was fulfilled.

2.) Let’s take for instance, the camera phone, when it first came out, it was cool and hip, now it’s considered a normal thing to have with a phone.  The level of excitement has gone away because time has taken over and camera phones are no longer exciting.

So in short what does this mean, new innovation becomes a basic need with time.  What’s cool and hip today, will become a norm tomorrow.  So keep innovating or hire an agency like us to do it for you.

Chris Brogan

I just came back from A Night with Chris Brogan at Chapman University in the city of Orange, California. Chapman was the eighth venue of the day for Chris, who was touring the greater Orange County area talking about the importance of social media integration and selling a few copies of his book Trust Agents.

Chris was introduced as a Social Media Rockstar. Which he is. He has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. He’s one of the top five bloggers in the nation and he has been at the forefront of social media for over a decade. But, in the social media world a rockstar isn’t the same as it is in the music industry. Chris was humble and soft spoken. “I’m a typist. A guy who types, that’s it,” Chris said in response to the moniker. He even found an opportunity to make a joke at the expense of Chris Garrett, a regular contributor on this blog.

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While I was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, I had limited access to newspapers and really news in general. One of the most solid sources of news for volunteers was from old copies of The Economist passed around from volunteer to volunteer. I would often read stories months after they occurred.

Since my return last year, I rarely read The Economist but now and then I come across a copy or see something online and I get a little nostalgic. Now I’m surrounded by information. I am on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and many other sites. With 24-hour news channels, I’m never more than 2 minutes behind the latest news event. So times have changed for me in the past year alone. But where will we be in 50 years? Or even better 5 years? Facebook, MySpace and Twitter didn’t even exist 6 years ago. What will happen in the next 6?

I came across the Did You Know? video created by XPlane in a partnership with The Economist. The video is a visualization of social media and marketing statistics. It does an amazing job of summing up all of the statistics that we try to pass along to our clients, plus a few that we didn’t even know.

Like, did you know that there are 2,000,000 televisions in U.S. bathrooms? Or more importantly did you know about the $3 million that Dell claims to have made from Twitter posts since 2007? The big number for our DC friends is of course the $55 million President Barack Obama raised with the help of social networks.

Redbeacon was this years TechCrunch 50 winner. I wasn’t that impressed with the judges selection. I thought that the presentation was fantastic as they created a mock scenario where they ordered 500 cupcakes which were delivered to the audience in a matter of minutes. Sure, this sounds like a fantastic idea, but let’s face it, it’s a bit far fetched. They’re launching this October in the bay area and then hopefully expanding to other cities in the near future. You can see their presentation here:

My good friend, Cyrus Massoumi, launched ZocDoc at the orginal TechCrunch 50 and his idea which is currently in operations in New York city is a great company because he focused on one specific industry: doctors and dentists. He’s not trying to basically achieve the “get whatever whenever” philosophy which is actually W Hotels motto by the way.

My favorite company that presented this year was Crowd Flower. They created a Software as a Service that allows you to provide quality assurance with Mechanical Turks. You can watch the presentation here:

For those of you have worked with Mechanical Turks, you would know that they fill a gap in areas where machine computing can’t play a role but present some very obvious issues. Your paying people to complete micro-tasks known as “Hits” for pennies and controlling the quality of this tasks can be very challenging. Crowd Flower did a great job at providing a solution for this and I personally would have liked to have seem them win.

You can see all of the companies from TechCrunch 50 here.

Social Media is a great tool, there are many benefits to all kinds of business

1. Help you gain visibility
2. Generate interaction
3. Grow your audience
4. Boost your traffic and links
5. Aids search engine performance

… but all of those things are about what you can “take” from Social Media.

Is it any surprise when people go in with this approach that things go wrong?

OK, I understand that business is business, time is money, and nobody is going to go into this without having a goal in mind. I get that. But to be truly successful in social media you have to focus on who you want to interact with.

Take for example a Automotive Dealer. How can they benefit from social media?

• Offer automotive news?
• Help people with car questions or problems?
• Inform about maintenance, tips, ideas?
• Share video about sexy dream cars?
• Give advice about how to not be ripped off by unscrupulous competitors?

What do all those things have in common?

It’s not about you … it’s about them!

Answer for your audience “What’s In It For Me?”

Remember this is not a technology, it is not an advertising platform, it is social.

Social means people talking. It means you have to understand the human at either end of your conversations.

Start your social media journey by listening,  investigating, understanding. Get to know your community, the audience you wish to engage. Find out what drives them, where they are finding problems and challenges, work out how you can help.

Also this is an opportunity for really valuable insights:

• What do people think about you? What do they think your message is?
• How do you compare against competitors?
• Where are you getting things right?
• Why might someone resist buying from you?
• Do your prospects even know who you are?

By understanding your current reputation, and what your audience really wants help with, and how they like to be helped, you can improve your positioning and gain competitive advantage.

Best of all you can grow a positive reputation and word of mouth by being seen as a genuinely valuable part of your community, not all take-take-take. And you can’t buy advertising better than that!

Paul Annett, the Design lead at Clearleft, presented at Refresh D.C. last night. His public speaking engagements this year include: SXSW (Austin, USA), Webdagene (Oslo, Norway), FOWD (Leeds, UK), Refresh DC (Washington DC, USA), eBay (London, UK).

Here are some video clips I took of the presentation. He explained how his Youtube video which appears number #1 on Google when you search for magic trick has received over 13 million visitors.

He also went on to speak about a bunch of different interests and views regarding web design and usability. Thanks to Refresh D.C. and it’s sponsors for hosting such a great event!