When we were out shopping recently, I found a copy of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson in the discount bin of audiobooks and picked it up. The Long Tail had a profound effect on my thinking when I first read it, and it seemed time to revisit this book again. So this morning, while out and about, I started listening, and thinking about how the reduction of information from physical form- books, albums, CD’s, DVD’s and more- into digital form- downloads of audio, text and more onto portable digital devices- is a huge factor in not only how we distribute knowledge, but how we value it and the “sweat equity” it takes to create something.
For example, Chris Brogan wrote a post about A Perfect Dichotomy, in his search to find a logo. In a nutshell, Chris went to a site that business people love- because they can get great work inexpensively, and designers hate, because they think it cheapens the work they do. The problem here is essentially that as a business-side person, we know we want something, but we have no idea whatsoever what the process of creating that something is. We have no easily accessible yardstick that tells us how much education, labor, passion, experience or more goes into one design over another- we’re only interested in the end product and pricepoint. And at times, things like design, art and other important, yet less physically tangible goods and services can seem equivalent from a seasoned professional and a beginner, and the purchaser has no clear way to understand the difference between cheap and expensive. (The ethics of buying work on spec is important, but you can’t eat ethics, so that argument alone will only get you so far.)
When you look at a car, for example, you can see lots of parts. Heck, my Toyota Highlander has so many buttons and nobs it feels like I’m driving the space shuttle. It looks complicated, and I can’t put the thing together myself, so I must be prepared to pay not only for the cost of materials that went into making the thing, but the designers, and workers who riveted the thing together, and the computer nerds who make the thing operate, and probably a share of that purchase price also goes into the marketing that made me want the thing in the first place. There is obvious value on display, and we feel like we’re making an exchange of cash for value add that’s clearly tangible. Likewise,when I buy shoes or clothing, I know that I am exchanging money for physical items I can’t make myself. The same with food at the supermarket. The value held in the physical items seems real.
When an author has their book in their hands, it feels like all your ideas and thoughts are now real. My book on Public Assembly Facility Law (yes, esoteric and boring, to be sure…) sits proudly on my shelf, a reminder and a memento of hard work and writing. It stores that value. But take the unpublished book projects that sit on my hard drive. They have value in terms of my time, my passion and more, but as long as they sit “in the drawer” they have no value to anyone other than me. Even if I put them in PDF format and make them available to everyone, where is the value exchange? Does anyone appreciate what went into that writing, or do they even care? If I put a tip jar on the site, is the value of the work based on the money I receive? What if I get none? Does that mean I wasted all my time?
What I’m trying to say here is that as we start to digitize information, information that has some value, even if dictated by arbitrary price points on Amazon and iTunes, I think we start to value it a little less than we did when it was harder to access. The intellectual work is the same whether the book itself is printed on paper or is merely bits and bytes, but the printing, distribution, marketing and other middle man expenses seem to act as a value filter and as a value add to make only the “best work” to make it into print.
Or at least that’s what I think our monkey brains believe, because that’s what has been true up until this point. Only a select few got to write for a living, and got paid for it, so therefore, if you were an author, that meant something. Just like being a journalist meant something special, and why the editor of the local paper was someone to be revered and even feared- he was the gatekeeper to the community’s sense of importance. I don’t think we’ve really figured out how to value the digital information we get, because we get so much of it. While some is fantastic, much of it is unimportant, so the general supply of information and ease of access overwhelms demand, and price plummets.
Bill Gates once said that Open Source was the enemy because it was essentially relying on people doing things for free and while it was creating value, it wasn’t distributing any. He felt this meant that sooner or later, people would stop contributing to open source, because in the real world, there is still rent to pay and kids to feed. (I’m clearly paraphrasing here.) Yet Open Source and blogs and more exist because people want to express themselves. This need will never go away. There may be no more HUGE hits the way there once were, because people can find and feed their niche tastes, and the choices are close to infinite. We no longer have restricted choice, dictated to us by what only a few people running the three major networks thought we should see, like when I grew up. (Except, maybe for Law & Order, but even that franchise may be reaching its end.)
All of this choice sometimes means we get overwhelmed and decide to make no choice, rather than risk making the wrong one. It means we can’t always see, know or appreciate the difference between an original designer purse and the knock-off that’s “good enough” sold on the street corner. The ubiquitous nature of choice makes it more and more difficult to determine actual value, and as a result we either make no choice or make choice based on reputation, convenience and price. This means if you are choosing someone to work with on something largely intangible like design, logos, even consulting work, you are forced to vet them by reputation, and then by judging whether the value they add to the project or the relationship you gain is worth the premium you pay as a result.
(Just as an example, there are a gazillion people who call themselves social media experts on twitter, but you can probably sort out the wheat from the chaff not just by followers, but by checking the date they started using the service, and those with more experience are probably more valuable to you than the folks who joined up yesterday.)
It also means from someone working in an “intangible” digital arena, you’ve got to make your value proposition real. You have to be able to explain why your work, your company or your stuff is so much better and deserves premium compensation. You have to have a track record, and you have to master those relationship skills that make working with you so simple and so enjoyable, people will come because you constantly exceed their expectation.
This is what Chris Penn refers to as “You have to not suck” or as I would say simply- The first rule of business is to be the best at what you do, and to be the exception, not the rule. Otherwise, you do end up being one of the multiple choices out in the long tail, with only a few hits of business over time, and probably not enough to sustain yourself long term. Independent musicians know this, actors know this, and now other people in creative fields are learning this: When you do something artistic, you have to find an outside source that values you and will support you through good times and bad, just like Michelangelo and Da Vinci had the de Medici family. You need to offer them something they cannot do themselves, and makes their life or reputation richer in the process. Otherwise, you are merely a struggling and starving artist, and will still need to wait tables to eat.
Finding your value and articulating it, unambiguously, for all to see is the challenge everyone faces is a world of infinite choice. I’m working on this for myself- are you?
I was reading my latest copy of Wired Magazine (this and Fast Company are the best ones ever…) and this month they have a great article entitled “The Good Enough Revolution“, primarily discussing how the simple and good enough products succeed, like the Flip video camera. I totally agree with this concept- sometimes, what we are all looking for is something that works, doesn’t take too long to learn, and does what it’s supposed to, even if it’s not fancy. That’s why people love point & shoot cameras, even the cheesy drug store kind; it’s why the iPhone is popular- all you have to do to operate it is touch it and it works (most of the time). The article also goes on to talk about the rise of netbooks in popularity and why these stripped down machines are taking off.
So the question that’s come to mind to me is Why Bing?
Bing is, of course, Microsoft’s latest attempt at a search engine. It’s trying to pair with Yahoo to gather their search business as well, to try to become an active competitor to Google, which now has about 2/3’s of the US search market, and its ad business.
As I was reading Time’s article discussing Bing versus Google, the good enough issue looms in the background. I’ve spent years, ever since I first learned about boolean search in law school, perfecting my ability to ask the “right” questions to try to find the most relevant results. Training people to construct better queries is actually probably more useful than my spending time learning the ins and outs of a whole different search engine. Google is good enough- and better, since Google has all the other tools I use daily- from the Social Media Dashboard I’ve constructed on iGoogle, to Gmail, to Grand Central, to Blogger, to Google Docs- the Good Enough Microsoft Word, to Groups- Google works fine, its products all integrate and work together seamlessly, and for free. Why should I switch to Bing? Relevance is not as much as issue for me as good enough.
What’s interesting here is the concept of feature creep. I’ve found each new iteration of Microsoft word just a bit more complicated and the features they add don’t significantly change what I demand from Word or solve any problems I have. If I want a better program than Excel, I frankly just have to boot up my Mac and use Numbers, if the features, cloud access and storage in Google Docs doesn’t suit. Google works for me because it keeps everything streamlined and simple. I don’t have to go anywhere else to get my needs met in an integrated way.
So switching my allegiance from Google to Bing has a bit of an uphill climb. While I am all for competition in search, and worry sometimes about how much of my life is owned by Google, the bottom line is the convenience and ease of use wins out every day. I don’t need anything else.
Battling it Out For Free
While search makes huge amounts of money for companies while the service itself is free, you wonder how this battle over free is going to play out in the marketplace, particularly after reading to Chris Anderson’s great book on the topic. Clearly, people are battling over revenue dollars, but for the public, free is free- how do you draw people away from one type of free to another? How do we define better and more accurate? That’s all in the eye of the beholder and in the composition of the search. Can anything be better for free? What happens once price has become a non-factor, and all we have to compete with is quality, where the very judgment of quality becomes highly subjective and becomes nothing more than an overt popularity contest?
I don’t know the answers to this, but I do know that, as Hugh McLeod from the Gaping Void has said, “The Market for something to believe in is Infinite”. Search and our selections and differentiations between one product and the next seem to become less based on price, but more based on increasingly subtle and largely irrelevant feature differentiations between models. (Every look at the minute differences between LCD TV’s for example, and just decide to pick whatever one Consumer Reports likes?)
But what I really want is something inspiring and something to believe in. And a new search engine just can’t get me excited, no matter how cool the commercials might be.
Chris Brogan had a very interesting post on Trust Agents this morning. It got me thinking about how people become trustworthy in the internet age, when relationships may be many, but have weaker bonds than say, the friendships you make in your off-line life, through work, school, church, or other daily encounters.
In a presentation this weekend at Podcamp Philly, Christopher Penn said everything is customer service, and every step along a transaction chain, in effect, is an opportunity to provide customer service. This got me thinking about how important customer service is becoming in most of my business and personal financial transactions. Why now? Why didn’t customer service weigh so heavily for me in the past? Let me talk for a brief bit about abundance.
Below is a great talk Malcolm Gladwell did at the TED conference in 2004, talking about how the abundance of consumer products we find on the shelves is largely due to the insights of one man, Howard Moskowitz. (This, and so many other TED talks are definitely worth your time, so be sure to check out others as well, hopefully after you have finished reading this post….)
** Chris Anderson wrote a book a few years ago called The Long Tail, which also discusses the almost infinite choice of things we now have online, and Seth Godin frequently discusses the difficulty of differentiating yourself from the pack out there on the tail, encouraging all of us to Be Remarkable and stick up above the rest of the sameness that’s out there now. But how do you become remarkable?
So let’s do some “sociological math” here and add up these insights. If you take the insight that customer service, or the opportunity to provide customer service is everywhere, and consider that in light of the abundance of choice we all face with every purchase, whether it’s online or in person, I came to the following conclusion:
Now, in an age of abundance, the only differentiation besides price is customer service, or the Relationship you create between your brand and your audience.
Let’s add in the foloowing as well: Ze Frank describes a brand as the “emotional aftertaste” you get from an interaction, and Chris Penn elaborates on this by comparing the difference in your likelihood to buy “Grandma’s Cookies” versus “Old People Cookies”- Grandma’s emotional aftertaste tends to be more loving and sweet, and much less generic than “old people”, unless you REALLY dislike your Grandma.
Examples of Creating a Relationship and Becoming a Trust Agent
Let’s take a quick look at some consumer experiences I’ve had to illustrate the point.
For example, Apple wins, for me, because the customer service is great, the “community” users have created from the days of the Macintosh User Groups, and whether thecompany allows social networking on their site or not, the forums still allow users to help each other out- and that’s probably good enough.
Likewise, when I go to an Apple Store or call customer support, I get actual human support. I get people who are understanding and wait, talking to me, while I download a third party plug-in for imovie so I can get my kid’s video project for school finished, and wait with me until everything is working. That keeps me delighted- that is remarkable, and that’s why the next computer we buy will also be an Apple. The price is always a differentiation in the marketplace, but the relationship tips the balance where it matters.
Similarly, Land’s End delighted me almost fifteen years ago now, when a coat of mine developed a hole in the pocket shortly after getting it. I called customer service, and they insisted on sending me a new coat, so I wouldn’t go a day without one, and could use that box to send the old one back. This was back in 1992 or 1993, but this takes any possible fear out of any email/catalog/web transaction with them. They earned my trust, and as a result, not only do I spread this story to all my friends, but I always consider their products before looking at a competitor, say, LL Bean, because of it. (And I do like LL Bean as well, for the record.)
Price isn’t the only factor in the decision matrix anymore.
Last example- FiOS is finally coming to my neighborhood, and I have had intermittent problems with Comcast. But I also have Comcast Cares, Frank Eliason, from twitter on my side- any problems, Frank makes sure I get taken care of, and has called me at home, from his home, to make sure everything is fine. I haven’t yet met Frank in person, but I feel a loyalty to him and the company because they have gone above and beyond to make sure I have what I need- and this makes me very unlikely to switch, even if I suspect FiOS might be a bit better, or maybe even a bit cheaper- it has to be more than just nominal price and quality to disrupt what I currently have, when I have Frank for customer care.
Can We Quantify This?
Every business wants to know the Return on Investment, or ROI for its customer service/community evangelists/Outreach efforts- I suggest the following equation for the math geeks out there:
Purchase = Remarkability or Necessity
We make a purchase when something is really special and catches our eye, like that cute item in the checkout aisle at the bookstore, you don’t really need, or when we have a real need to fulfill.
Remarkability = (Brand experience + Price) x Customer Service Experience
To be remarkable, the brand experience, combined with price is important, but it is enhanced considerably by the customer service experience. I may like a brand, or have heard good things about it. I may be willing to pay the price, high or low, or take a chance on a new version of a product, say, V8 fusion, if I already like V8 juice. If the prior relationship with that brand is positive, I’m more likely to give your new product a go, and less likely if the prior experience is poor or non-remarkable in any way.
But what is tipping the balance between all the brands on the shelf, virtual and physical, is becoming more and more dependent on the customer service I receive, or the customer stories you hear from others.
The Long Tail of Customer Experience
Just like I indicated above, Land’s End still gets business from me, not only because their products fill a need, but they enjoy a long tail of customer service excellence- I like them, even if I haven’t needed a lot of customer service since that incident, because they treated me well back then. Sites like Amazon.com, DealTime, Consumer Reports and more collect stories from customers about what they like and hate about products. Even Twitter and other social networks provide information to people every day on what brands seem great and which have led to less than great experiences. And this information stays in Google and on the Web for a long, long time. This means every time you have a chance to interact with a customer, any issues, especially if they aren’t addressed, may haunt you forever online. And this means, long after that particular not-so-great transaction took place, you may still lose sales to competitors based on one bad experience- consumers can now broadcast, making every mistake you make all that more costly when it comes to relationships online.
One answer would be to never make mistakes, but that’s simply not practical. The other option is to make sure you are human; that you understand that each of those customer service experiences act as a multiplier towards your positive or negative remarkability, and then you can reap the true ROI of social media investment- creating a brand aftertaste everyone wants to try.
