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Snow Job

January 5, 2010 By davidebowman 2 Comments

I heard a great story by Jeff Brady on NPR while on the way home yesterday.  It was about the work of two researchers from Dartmouth who found it odd that ski resorts seemed to report more snowfall than surrounding areas and and steeper increases in snow amounts on weekends.  They also found that resorts close to major population centers exaggerated figures even more.  These scientists were skeptical about this “weekend snow” effect, and started collecting data about it.  Turns out that ski resorts were in fact inflating the snow fall amounts quite a bit, falsely using extra snowflakes as a marketing tactic to get people to come out and hit the slopes.

Michael Berry, President of the National Ski Areas Association, said that ski resorts had often been “optimistic” with their past reports.  However, he went on to say that this practice is quickly dying.  Why?  Two reasons  – the iphone (or any mobile device) and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  These tools and technologies are rendering snow reports obsolete, as users report conditions to their friends in real time.  The researchers stated that the number of exaggerated snow actually reports dropped off sharply with the release of numerous iphone apps enabling users to document conditions.  Mobile and social technologies are growing fast and empowering people to better understand the world.  Many of the techniques and tactics that “optimistic” marketers could get away with in the past, are now becoming problematic.  If you are not working on building trust as a core part of building your business, you are simply lying to yourself about your future prospects.

Berry had a great quote in the piece – one that transcends skiing.  “If you try and create a reality that you perceive to be the truth, it had better be consistent with the reality on the ground, because the consumer will remind you of it instantly.”

Service truly is the new marketing.  Every consumer is a researcher.  Every customer is a journalist.  Everyone is now what Mike Wallace or Consumer Reports once was – armed with flip cams, iphones, and 24 x 7 communication networks.  People trust the advice of their friends. so work hard to make friends, earn trust, and dazzle your customers.  Real people and their tweets, posts, and updates either represent your next great new ad campaign or a damaging expose on the truth about your company.

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2010 by the Numbers

January 1, 2010 By davidebowman 6 Comments

One of the best things I discovered in 2009 was Nike+. The ability of this tool to track and then present data about my running thoroughly captivates me.   It actually makes running interesting. How far? How fast? How often? How can I do better?  Every time I run, Nike+ is adding insight to all if these questions and more. So in 2010 not only will I be using Nike+ to help me train for my first full marathon; I am also going to copy the idea and start gathering data about other parts of my life as well.

Exercise:
I want to continue to exercise more in 2010.  2009 was a good start, but in 2010 I am going to push much harder.  There are 3 numerical goals that I am going to attempt to reach with regard to physical exercise.  They are doing 50,000 push-ups, 50,000 sit-ups, and running 1,000 miles.  That amounts to about 137 push-ups and sit-ups per day and about 2.8 miles per day.  I know that there will be days that I don’t exercise at all.  To compensate for this, my approach will be to do at least 200 push ups and sit ups daily, and running a minimum of 3 miles – allowing for the occasional off day.

I am going to track all of this activity by creating a form using Google docs.  I will put a link to the form in my gmail inbox using the quick links feature, and then complete it daily with all of my activity.  This information will then feed automatically into a spreadsheet where my results can be measured.

Can I do it?  As of right now, I have 49,800 push ups and sit ups to go, as well as 996.8 miles to run.  I also hope to do more yoga, weight training, bike riding, and just being more physically active overall.

I am not just going to track my exercise, there are other things I want to track as well.

Diet:
If I am going to take time to log information into a form, I might as well make it worth my while.  One of the things I want to track is what I eat and drink every day.  I am going to track what I eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the number of  beers, sodas, coffees, and waters I drink, as well as any snacks that I much on throughout the day.  I am not looking to track everything precisely.  I am not concerned with capturing everything exactly.   What I want is to get a general idea  of what I am putting into my body, and gauge it against my overall health.  Perhaps I will find that I need to eat more fruit, drink less soda, or drink more beer.  It will be interesting to find out.

Sleep:
Sleep is important to health.  Everyone knows it.  I have never tracked exactly how much sleep I get every day, but I know it is not enough.  In 2010 I plan to roughly track when I go to sleep, when I wake up, and how soundly I was able to sleep.  If I stick with the exercise program, I have a bunch that sleep will not be a problem. My hope is to get at least 8 hours a day – hopefully this is more than a dream.

Television:
I watched less television in 2009 than in 2008, but still watched more than I needed to.  I am going to watch less television, especially mindless television in 2010.  I have no problem with tv, but sitcom re-runs and TMZ are doing nothing to enrich my life.  I like watching sports, and will continue to do so within reason.  Not having cable television helps to limit my choices.  I will also will continue to watch a lot of PBS, as it brings so much entertainment and education to my life.  I will also watch other select programs that I enjoy.  Still, I am going to be much more quick to hit the off button and find something else to do.  I don’t want my life story to be about me sitting around in a catatonic state staring off into the abyss.  I would rather do things.   I plan to track how many hours of television I watch, and plan to be stunned with how much of my life is still being wasted.

Reading:
One of the activities that add tremendous value to my life is reading.  I know it.  Still, as Goethe said “to know and not to do is not to know.”  Thus my goal is to spend over 5,000 minutes reading books in 2010.  If I  spend only 15 minutes a day reading, I will beat this goal by almost 500 minutes.  Hopefully I will be able to beat it by even more.  I know that I want to read at least 25 books on Creativity, and Seth Godin, Garr Reynolds, and Dan Pink all have new books either out or on the way.  To get all these books read is going to take effort.  I am certain that I am up to the task.

Writing:
In 2010 I want to write 150 blog posts.  That amounts to about 3 posts per week.  These posts will force me to write and will also include more podcasts, videos, and photos too.  I look forward to applying my creativity and creating some interesting content for those of you who are kind enough to spend time visiting my site.

2010 is going to be a great year.  I have a lot to accomplish, and a lot to track.  I will keep you posted on my progress.  Wish me luck.  Happy New Year!

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Dead Cat Marketing

November 19, 2009 By davidebowman 3 Comments

Suppose your business sells something to a customer.  Following the sale, you gather no information about them.  Instead you send the customer out the door and off into the universe, hoping they will come back again someday.  In the time that follows, you make no direct or indirect attempt to determine if the customer is happy with the level of service provided, feels good about the purchase, would be inclined to come back or will tell others about good things about you.  In this scenario you have a customer that potentially exists in multiple states.  Happy? Angry? Loyal? Profitable? Vocal? Dissatisfied? Disgusted? Disengaged completely?  You can theorize about it, but you don’t really know until they come back again.  In this scenario, you are engaging in dead cat marketing.

“Dead cat?”  “What the heck are you talking about dead cats for?”  To answer that, we travel back to 1935, where Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger created a hypothetical experiment now known as Schroedinger’s Cat.  It used the following construct:

“A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against interference from the cat) : in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none [will decay]; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrochloric acid.  If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed.  The first atomic decay would have poisoned it”

In short if  the device triggered the hammer, the cat is dead.  If the device did not yet trigger the hammer, the cat is alive.  To the outside observer, the cat exists in multiple states.  The cat can be considered to both alive and dead.  You can not know until you open the box.  Schroedinger was using this experiment as a way to debate quantum physics.  Since I  know nothing about quantum physics, I will instead use analogy to share what I think this means to Marketing.   Here goes…

deadcatboxIn the box, the cat was either very alive or very dead.  The observer’s uncertainty did not truly dictate that outcome.  It simply prevented the observer from knowing.  The same holds true of your customers.  Whether you choose to ask them or not, they have an opinion.  They may hate you, they may love you.  You can speculate all you want, but until you listen you can not be certain.  Until you are certain, or at least have some probability of certainty, you can’t do much to improve.

Good marketing requires you to “open the box.”   Unlike the cat experiment, chances are that the outcome with customers is not an absolute.  Rather than dead cat or living cat, customers are likely on more of a continuum – from very happy to very unhappy customers.  You need to ask, observe, measure, and… then actually do something to alter the outcome where appropriate and able.   The beauty of the social web, search, rss, email, online surveys and other tools we now have, are they make the box very easy to open.  People are already out there talking, you just need to make the effort to listen.

While Schroedinger’s cat, if found dead, could not come back to life, opening the box and listening to your customers can bring new life to your business.

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Use RSS to Get More from LinkedIn

June 11, 2009 By davidebowman Leave a Comment

LinkedIn is a great tool for keeping track of your contacts, researching individuals and organizations, finding employment and employees, asking questions and getting answers, and better understanding the professional world. As you add followers, it can be a bit of a challenge to keep up with everything. Sure you can check out the weekly summary email of activity in your network, and you can periodically scan your home page to see what your connections are up to, but these methods are limited in their ability to provide you rich and useful information when you need it.

One way to overcome this problem is by using RSS to subscribe to the changes to your network with a service like Google Reader. By doing this you create an ongoing, searchable stream of data about everyone in your network. Because Google Reader allows you to archive old posts and easily search through them later, you can build a repository of data, day by day and update by update that is always at your fingertips.

I use this in 2 ways. The first is to scan through the latest updates in my RSS reader every few days to see who has moved where, who has been promoted, who is forging new relationships with whom, and which of the thousands of updates might be important for me to follow up on.  That might be a phone call, thank you note, email, or just some thought as to what might be happening in the world around me.  All good stuff.  The problem is that all too often I get busy, can’t check this for a few days, and the number of unread updates gets into the thousands.  At that point it becomes tough to really give this information the due diligence it requires, which leads me to the second way you can use this. 

Once you have read these items in Google Reader, they disappear from your unread items, but they still remain stored in your reader.  Thus, this becomes really useful if you want to search for information about a specific person or business in your network.  Simply enter their name in the search box in Google Reader and up pops every update, status update, activity, and connection this person has made since joining your network.  Not only that, but it can combine it with other places where they have appeared in your RSS reader – like blog posts or Twitter mentions if you track them. 

So if you are calling on that important client, you still want to visit their page to see the static background information.  That will tell you all about their past history, their connections, and their employer.  However if you want to learn more about what they are "doing" then you can use this method to better inform yourself. 

Again each of these updates is simply data.  Your ability to aggregate it and then do something with it changes it to information.  Understanding all this is akin to knowledge and actually following through with it is more like wisdom.  I encourage you to make wise use of your time by using this tip to better understand and help the people you serve.

What tricks are you using to get more out of LinkedIn?

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User Generated Health Care

May 8, 2009 By davidebowman 2 Comments

I have an idea that would help improve the health care system.  This idea would dramatically speed the process of diagnosis, reduce unnecessary testing, more quickly identify effective courses of treatment and radically reduce the costs associated with the entirety of it all.   I call it User Generated Health Care.  The idea is simple as works as follows:

  • You visit the doctor as the result of an unknown problem with your health, or the health of a family member.
  • The doctor asks you an initial set of questions allowing for a preliminary diagnosis.
  • Based on your answers, the doctor loads a specific set of questions onto a mobile device,  which you take home. (Could be secure web site, or other technology tool.  This is the easiest problem to solve.  Could even be as basis as refurbished cell phones and sms)
  • The mobile device prompts you to answer a few short behavioral questions, documenting diet, medication, mood, sleep, and overall wellness at specific intervals or times of day.  These questions are numerical in nature so that they can be mapped relative to other pieces of data.
  • The device prompts you weekly to answer a more extensive questionnaire – explaining your overall impression of how a specific course of treatment is working, documenting symptoms and side-effects and ranking your overall state of health.  Again these pieces of data are set up in such a way so that value can be attached to them.
  • You return to the doctor, who has already analyzed the aggregated data you have provided.  Because this data is digital, data analysts could examine the data for statistical correlations that would yield actionable information for doctors and medical professionals to present to you.
  • You talk to the doctor about the next 6 weeks and what you will do, instead of the last 6 weeks and your vague recollection of what you did.
  • Your conversation includes charts, graphs, and statistics about the information you provided.
  • You are given another course of treatment (or kept on the same) based on the careful analysis of factual data.

Doctors repeatedly say that patients are one of the most valueable sources of information.  Yet the gathering of information from patients is typically restricted to the 15 or so minutes you get to discuss your situation.  If you or they are tired, having a bad day, distracted, hungry, having a good day, or are in essence “human,” the gathering of this data is highly flawed at best. The entirety of the conversation is going to be shaped by the feelings of the doctor and patient in that moment – which may be very different from general reality.

This would provide a steady stream of measurable data.  This data could be kept private very easily.  This data could be combined with video testimonials capured on demand.  This data could be combined with the opinions of others (with their consent of course) as to observable changes.  This data could be aggregated across demographic, geographic, and sociographic groups to look for overall trends – helping to yield further insights.  This data could be used ot alert us of new diseases, new medical breakthroughs, and new techniques that yield tangible results.   All it takes is a few minutes to answer a few questions that would explain “how are you doing?”

I know the idea is not perfect.  I am not certain that it is not in use somewhere.  I can say that I have never witnessed it for any of my friends or family members, and that I would welcome the opportunity to help create and participate in such a system.  If this idea is already out there, then consider this my vote of support.  If not, then consider this a call to help me fix something that is broken.   Either way, I am good with the outcome being better information for the hard working medical professionals who care so much and work so hard to keep us all alive and healthy, and ultimately better care for those who need it.

For the time being, if you like this idea, you can vote for it on CincinnatiInnovates.com. If it wins, $25,000 will be donated to bringing it to life.  I will donate that money to a health care organization with the express purpose of piloting it.  You can vote for it daily while the contest is active.  I doubt it will win, and really don’t care about the money, but mention it none the less.  More importantly, I hope this sparks an idea – perhaps one very different from this one – that helps.

Once the contest has elapsed, you can help by discussing this idea, improving this idea, and making this idea – or some morphed for of it – a reality.

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The Physics of Marketing – Bragg’s law

January 29, 2009 By davidebowman 1 Comment

braggBorn in 1890, William Lawrence Bragg was the son of a  Sir William Henry Bragg, a professor of science and mathematics.  So in his work, William Lawrence Bragg was simply carrying on the family business.  In 1915 the two father and son  shared a Nobel Prize for their work which involved using X-rays to analyze crystal structures.  The work they did eventually helped scientists to identify the double helix structure of DNA – earning Crick and Watson a Nobel prize.

In a nutshell, Bragg’s law predicts how x-rays will travel through crystal structures – thus allowing them to be identified by the light patterns that are produced.   This is the same science that is used today in PET scans and MRI tests.

From a marketing perspective, I struggled with this one.  So I am hoping for someone with more familiarity in Physics to throw me a bone.  Still, I will take a crack at it too.

Braggs Law is about the observation of patterns.  Much like we can observe consumer behavior.  In the same way that Bragg used X-rays, Marketing professionals sometimes must use more than just the naked eye to find meaning.   So when I think about this, I think about those swipe cards that are so popular at the Grocery.  These cards collect enormous amount of data about who is buying what and when.  Ultimately, if a marketer is able to properly analyze that data patterns emerge.  Such as when men buy diapers at the grocery, they also buy beer.  If one can understand these patterns, they can then be utilized to increase sales and improve the customer experience.  So if you know that on Thursday nights, there is a large influx of men buying diapers, you may want to put a display of beer on sale at the end of that aisle.  Throw in some pretzels too.

The idea is using tools and data to see patterns that are not readily observable on the surface.  I know that this is not exactly analogous to Bragg, but I think it is similar enough to post.  Now, I will let you teach me more about it. (Chad, Geoff)   Fun how this works.

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The Physics of Marketing – Brownian Motion

July 23, 2008 By davidebowman 4 Comments

In 1827 Robert Brown was trying to observe the fertilization process of flowers under a microscope when he noticed slight movements in the grains of pollen, which were suspended in water.  “Were the particles alive?”  “No, so how did they move?”  The answer is Brownian Motion.  The pollen on the microscope’s slide was suspended in water.  Thus the movement of the pollen was not due to the pollen being alive, but was actually caused by the constant and random movement of the water molecules which were bumping into the pollen.  These collisions created the illusion of the pollen being alive.  In actuality the movement was a by-product of the movement of the water.

This phenomenon can be observed in the way that air pollution spreads, or how dust particles seem to dance about in a sunbeam gleaming through a window.  Brownian motion can be influenced by things like the type and temperature of the particular gas or liquid in which something is suspended.  For example molecules in warm water are more active than in cold water, and thus would result in more movement.

How does the concept of Brownian Motion pertain to marketing?

For me this is very similar to the concept of signal versus noise, discussed by Don Wheeler in his book Understanding Variation.  The central premise is that a data without context is basically meaningless, and that changes in numerical values are not necessarily representative of real change.  Wheeler asserts that “the first mistake in interpreting data is to interpret noise as if it were a signal.”  The second is to “fail to detect a signal when it is present.”

Much like Brown’s initial reaction to the moving pollen, business leaders can mistakenly attach value to motion.  So the 5% increase in sales that made everyone feel so great, could actually be the act of random motion.  The increase in the response rate on that piece of direct mail – might just be noise.  Conversely, the decrease in hits to your web site might just be the result of random movement.  There is a certain amount of variation inherent to everything.  Thus, making the numbers or beating the numbers can be misleading.

Just as happens in suspensions, every environment is different.  And just as temperature and chemical composition influence the amount of variation, so do things like competition, market saturation, market awareness, and other factors.  Some industries may have little fluction, some may have substantial changes.  As Wheeler states, The Voice of the Customer decides what you want from the system, the Voice of the Process decides what you will get.  “It’s Management’s job to bring the voice of the process into alignment with the voice of the customer.”  That is how real motion, not random motion, takes place.

As a marketer it is important not to attach too much importance to individual data points, (the numbers are up today, the numbers are down today) but rather to view the data as a whole.   Variation, or random movement, is inherent to nature.  One must take the time to separate the signals from the noise, and then to act accordingly.

How would you apply Brownian Motion to Marketing or Business?  Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

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