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Greater Taters

January 11, 2010 By davidebowman Leave a Comment

Saturday afternoon. Approved list in hand, dad (me) is off to the grocery to get the family some food for the week. Fruit – check. Milk – check. Bread – check. Ooo – look at that!  The product that will make dad the hero of dinner time to my wife and kids – Tater Tots shaped into letters. List be damned, into the cart the tater tots went.

Why did I feel compelled to buy letter shaped tater tots? Marketing!

I have two little ones who are fascinated with spelling. My 3 year old son in particular loves letters. “Daddy, how you spell Google chrome?” is a common utterance in the Bowman household. What parent does not want to encourage their kids to be interested in reading, spelling, and education?  Not only do my kids love to spell, they are sometimes hard to please when it comes to dinner. Overall they are pretty good eaters. Still, they are kids, so mealtime is frequently an adventure in dining. As a parent I will take any advantage I can get in an effort to get the kids into the clean plate club. Enter letter shaped tater tots into the equation.

Upon arrival at home, I quietly stashed the tots in the freezer. (the tater tots that is, not my children) When it was time for dinner, I called the kids to the table and told them I had a big surprise. Along with the hamburgers and fruit that was on their plate we were having something else. I then opened the oven and revealed the crispy potato alphabet that was waiting to be devoured. They were excited beyond my expectations. “Letters!” “We can eat the letters!” Dancing, yelling, spelling, and general mayhem then ensued. Totally worth the 3 bucks I spent on silly letter shaped potatoes – which were actually eaten too!

This product is an example of great marketing. Marketing as described by Seth Godin in his great book Free Prize Inside. Marketing that had nothing to do with advertising.   Marketing that sold a product to someone who was not previously aware of it or interested in buying it.   Marketing that made two kids excited about eating dinner.  Marketing that created a great experience for a dad. Marketing that is now generating positive word of mouth for Ore-Ida… for free.  Marketing that was as simple as potatoes and the alphabet.

I could have bought un-brand tater-tots at a lower price.  I could have bought the better tasting “crispy crowns” for the same price.  I could have ignored them all-together and just stuck to my list. However, Ore-Ida was smart enough to know that mom’s and dads sometimes buy things for other reasons – experiences, surprises, education, & the off chance of a successful meal.    Because of this understanding, they created a remarkable product, made the sale, and got me talking about, of all things,  tater tots.

What can you do to make your product or service appealing to people in a different way?

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Sharpen The Saw

August 13, 2009 By davidebowman 2 Comments

sevenHabit 7: Sharpen the Saw

Sharpen the saw is the last of Covey’s 7 habits.  (There actually is an 8th Habit, but that is another book, and perhaps another post.)  Sharpen the Saw is the habit of personal renewal.  The metaphor of “sharpening the saw” is simple -  It is counterproductive to spend all of your time sawing, while neglecting to sharpen the saw.   For people to truly be effective they need to take time out to revitalize, retool, refresh, and rethink.

Covey describes the 4 areas of life that require sharpening as being the physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual.  These elements are not isolated, but serve to enhance one another.  For example, excerise clearly offers an individual the opportunity to improve physical health.  It also builds self-esteem, which nurtures the emotional aspect of a person.  It improves circulation and brain function, thus improving mental health.  It also helps to clarify deep thoughts, potentially nurturing the spiritual portion of a human being.

Habit 7 is about finding meaningful activities to engage in for the purpose of enriching life.  It requires making time for these very important and usually not urgent activities that make life worth living.  Time with family, or reading books, painting, writing, exercising, meditating, studying, or just taking a walk – that which brings us joy, knowledge, peace, and understanding.   It is these activities that ultimately make us better people.

For me recent experiments wiht running, yoga, and a little weight training here and there have been extrememly beneficial to my physical health and overall well-being.  I also like to listen to books on tape from time to time which feed my mental need for learning.  Creating and playing music are spiritual activities for me.  Doing it with and in front of other people also make it a social expeience that builds and nurtures pesonal relationships.  Not to mention that having to write music can be cathartic, thus improving my mental state.  These are just a few of the activities that help me to “sharpen the saw.”

So what does this have to do with social media?

Social media by definition is a social function.  Sure you can spend a lot of mindless time sifting through Facebook reading silly comments, but you can also use social media to truly connect and understand other people.  You can engage with people.  Learn and follow their stories, and share your own.   This can very clearly help to sharpen the social part of the saw, but there is more to it than that.

Activities like blogging or podcasting require a lot of creativity.  This content is often the fruits of our other “shapen the saw” activities.  “You are never going to believe what I did.”  “I just read the best book.”  “Ten things you need to know about writing songs.”  “My Vacation Pictures.”  Out of our sharpening the saw activities flow stories.  Out of stories flow conversation, learning, and hopefully understanding.

Sharpening the saw gives us something to share and social media gives us people and places to share it with.  It is cyclical in nature.  This sharing of stories feeds our human needs for interaction.  Sites like NikePlus let us combine our physical exercise with our social, emotional, and mental needs.  It creates stories.  It enriches life.  Netflix makes it possible to not just rent movies, but to also experience them in the context of other people and their responses to them.  Uploading photos or writing out a blog post, or putting a song on itunes, or a video on YouTube can enrich us in so many ways.  Social media is simply an extension of sharpening the saw, and allows us to learn how to do so with the input of the world.

This can also be viewed in the context of exploration.  There are so many tools, technologies and platforms out there.  Don’t fear them.  Take some time to experiement with some of these platforms and have some fun with it.  You may discover that many are not right for you, but then again you might just stumble onto your next big creative endeeavor.  Either way, you won’t break the internet or injure youself by learning.

Whether you it as a way to strengthen your mental health, your physical capacity, your spiritual understandin, your emotional well being, or all of the above,  health, social media offers an amazing way for you to keep the saw sharp and make you a more effective human being.

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Synergize

August 6, 2009 By davidebowman Leave a Comment

Habit 6: Synergize6

Synergy is where all of the previous habits come together.  It is the payoff.  To quote Stephen Covey “Synergy is the highest activity in all of life.”  “The essence of synergy is to value the differences.”  By doing so, the human gift of creativity can be levered to produce new and exciting options for the future.

By doing all the work in Habits 1,2, and 3 you develop internal confidence from a life rooted in principle.  This confidence  then allows for respectful interaction with others.  To make this work properly requires habit 4, Think Win / Win and habit 5 Seek First to Understand and then to Be Understood.  You accept that you may have differing views, but that fundamental principles that guide life remain.  Thus it is possible to explore new ideas without fear and insecurity.  You are interdependent.  You are open to the opinions of others.  You understand the value of your perspective, while realizing that “all people see the world, not as it is, but as they are.”  “The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to apreciate the rich resources available through interaction wiht the hearts and minds of other human beings.”  Covey goes on to state,  has  “When we’re left to our own experiences, we constantly suffer from a shortage of data.”

As humans some of us are very expressive by nature.  Others are very analytical.  Some are highly emotional, and others very logical.  All see the world from different angles.  Leveraging this diversity of views is a critical part of synergy.  Further, it does not stop with personality type.  Every person has experienced different things, has different values, different skills, and different areas of knowledge – each with the potential to bring unique perspective and value to a situation.

Covey then goes on to talk about how synergy works in communication.  It is the idea that when someone disagrees with you, rather than becoming defensive, you say “Good! You see it differently.”  You may not agree with them but you appreciate their perspective.  Even if someone insults you, you choose not to take it personally, but instead to see it as a way to “improve your point of view and to enlarge your perspective.”   Covey says it like this, “If a person of your intelligence and competence and commitment disagrees with me, then there must be something to your disagreement that I don’t understand, and I need to understand it. You have a perspective, a frame of reference I need to look at.”

How does this apply to social media?

Social media is all about synergy.

If you follow Stephen Covey’s quotes in this post as you engage in conversations with people through social media channels, you are truly going to get value out of the experience.  If you are creatively expressing yourself, people are going to disagree with you from time to time.  If you immediately get defensive, you will turn people away.  This is not easy.  Our knee jerk reaction is to hit back when someone hits us.  Not to mention that text on the web tends to read more negatively than is intended quite often.  Thus we can easily overthink a comment or a post written by someone that is at odds with our view of the world.

Realize that it might just be an opportunity for synergy.  It gives you the chance to explore someone else’s view, to broaden your perspective, and ideally through the respectful exchange of ideas, to develop something new.  Sure, sometimes you come across the lame person that just wants to throw “salt in your game.”

Another point – Synergy does not always involve a dispute.  It might just involve finding a great solution.  One great thing about the potential to connect with the world is the potential to tap into that world for answers.  The synergy might take place between totaly strangers who take an interest in answering a question you pose on a blog, forum, podcast or social network.  The collective wisdom of the world is at your fingertips.  Realize that you can engage people to help you.

Tapping into synergistic communication is an invigorating experience.  It is one that you can proactivley create by using social media to express your ideas and explore your creative potential.

“You have a perspective, a frame of reference I need to look at.”  – Well said Mr. Covey.  Well said.

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Seek First to Understand

July 30, 2009 By davidebowman Leave a Comment

5Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood

Habit 5, Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood, is a continuation of Habit 4, Think Win/Win.  It is the idea that to truly think win/win, one must start with listening.  Thus the idea that one should seek first to understand, then to be understood.  We all view the world in different ways.  We have different values, different needs, and different paradigms.  Things that matters a great deal to me, may not matter much to you at all, and vice versa.   Unless you understand where another person is truly coming from, it can be very difficult if not impossible to get to a win/win solution.

So how does one truly understand?  Covey describes the process of empathic listening as fundamental to cultivating this habit.  It is listening with the intention of truly trying to deeply understand why another person feels the way they do.  It is not trying to convince them they feel otherwise, or simply regurgitating their words back to them without giving thought to the deeper meaning they convey.

Covey uses a great story to illustrate this idea.  In short, what if you went to the eye doctor and instead of giving you an eye exam, he just handed you his glasses and said “eh, this should help a little.”  That would make no sense, and you would probably find a new eye doctor pretty quickly.  Habit 5 is about diagnosing the problem first, then prescribing a solution.

Ultimately, to effectively use Habit 5, a person must use empathic listening in their interactions with others.  Done well this process involves “rephrasing the content and reflecting the feeling” that someone else is conveying.  This may take several attempts to get correct, but it is essential in moving forward to properly diagnose a problem.   Sure this takes time, but by truly listening without placing judgement, you can build the trust necessary to move closer to a solution.

Once you have gained an understanding of another’s perspective, the second half of Habit 5, to be understood, comes into play.  This is accomplished through ethical thought, emotional intelligence, and logical reasoning.  Expressing your concerns in a way that is respectful of the other person, in line with your principles, attentive to your feelings, and rational with regard to meeting your needs.

So how does this apply to social media?

Pete Blackshaw has a great quote in his book A Satisfied Customer Tells Three Friends, An Angry Customer Tells 3,000 – “Listening Drives Credibility.”   The book is about the power of postivite customer relationships in an interconnected world.   It examines the empowered customer and the impact that upsetting just one person who chooses to use the social web to convey their problem can have on a business.

Social media makes it possible to listen to what people are saying.  You can listen to what they saying to you directly through comments and direct interactions.  You can listen to what they are saying to one another through social networks, forums, and rss feeds.  You can listen to thought leaders, customers, competitors, and citizens to determine what they need.   As Covey states “Satisfied needs do not motivate.”

By using social media to engage people in conversation, you can begin to develop better solutions to their problems.  You can address their true needs.  This might be happen by thoughtfully responding to a complaint on a blog post.  It could be done through a customer forum, through a Facebook group, or through a Twitter account.  Regardless, the first step is to truly listen.  To uncover deeper truth.  To seek this out with an open mind.  Social media enables you to do this on a broad scale, at little or no cost other than the time you invest in this activity.

Once you identify a need, be that an expressed complaint about your service or a wish for something new to solve a problem, you can use ethics, emotion, and logic to address this need.  It may be that you retain a customer with this approach.  It may be that you avoid a public relations nightmare by listening empathically.  You may even find that your next “big idea” is generated by simply listening to what people are saying online.   If you Seek First to Understand, and Then to be Understood, you can apply your time and activity in social media towards building trust, addressing needs, and creating solutions that can sustain your business into the future.

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Orville Wright Did Not Have A Pilot’s License

July 7, 2009 By davidebowman 4 Comments

I recently read Gordon MacKenzie’s Orbiting The Giant Hairball, an excellent book about cultivating personal creativity – particularly how to do so in the workplace. It is a brilliant book, chronicling the author’s experiences as an employee at Hallmark.  The book is filled with doodles, sketches, stories, and anecdotes chronicling ways in which Gordon managed to leverage his creativity to further his career and enrich his life. The chapters are short, and it is a very quick but powerful read.

One of my favorite chapters in the book, happens to be the shortest.  The chapter is simply entitled Orville Wright.  The complete text of the chapter is as follows: "Orville Wright did not have a pilot’s license."  Eight simple words conveying so much meaning.

Perhaps this refernece to Orville resonates with me because of my attachment to Dayton – a place where you see the Wright Brothers referenced so often you might think they were still alive and represented by an exceptional PR firm.  I attended a University named for them.  I see a replica of their plane flying out of an airport named for them about once a week near my home.  I see references to them on water towers, and parks and in the name one of the largest military installations in the world in Wright Patterson Air Force Base. 

The thing that is so important about MacKenzie’s words to me is the idea that Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur did not need permission to change the world.  They needed creativity, passion, and persistence.  Luckily for us, they had an abundance of all three.  

Their idea was not widely embraced at first.  They did not care.  Their idea did not have huge corporate funding.  That did not stop them.  Their idea had never been done.  That inspired them.  Their idea was risky.  They believed in it.  Their idea failed many times.  They knew it could succeed.  The Wrights did not have "permission" to fly.  They did not need it.  They wanted to fly and committed to making it happen.  

What is that idea that is brewing in your head?  What is the dream you hold dear?  Is it personal, professional, philanthropic?  Are you thinking about health care? energy? human rights? pollution? job creation? communication? What is stopping you from telling someone about it… from working on it?  Is your idea really crazier than two guys in a bike shop thinking they can invent human aviation?  Are you waiting on a non-existent "pilot’s license" or are you preparing to fly?  What will you do to change the world?

Wright brothers – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The Amazing Pizza Box Video?

June 22, 2009 By davidebowman Leave a Comment

Yes, I said "The Amazing Pizza Box Video."  it is not a typo. Need proof that the opportunity to innovate is all around us?  Check out this 45 second video from Eco Incorporated, a company who is "saving the environment one pizza box at a time."  

This is such an awesome concept for so many reasons.

First is the obvious reason, it helps to reduce waste.  This is a no-brainer.  I have eaten thousands of pizzas in my life.  While I have used an entire pizza box lid as a plate before, I never thought to perforate it and create 4 plates from it.  This is just brilliant.  It eliminates the need to dirty up regular plates, and the following need to wash them, and also eliminates the alternative of paper plates which cost money and create waste.

Second this idea is so simple.  It makes me happy to see something that is easy to do and beneficial at the same time.  It is not as if they are saying "Stop ordering pizzas to save the environment." They are asking me to help by doing less, not more.

Third, the storage idea.  This is probably the most useful aspect of all.  I hate to use tupperware or saran wrap to store old pizza.  The method of choice is the "lazy" option of shoving the whole box, usually with only a piece or two in it, into the already crammed refrigerator.  This solution saves me space and aggravation, is portable should I opt for cold pizza for breakfast in the car the next morning, and again minimizes effort and maximizes benefit. 

Finally, I love that the idea is being promoted using a simple YouTube video and not a multi-million dollar ad campaign.  The idea is brilliant, and it should not need a rediculously expensive advertising budget to catch on.  The idea is the advertising.  This seems to be a small company, and they probably don’t have a ton of cash to blow on a superbowl ad – though that may not be true for long.  If I were in charge of a pizza place, I would weigh three times what I currently do and I would order these boxes immediately.

The next time you think that life is just too mundane, and that you have seen it all, remember what these guys did with the boring old pizza box.

 

Thanks to Dan Pink for pointing me to the video.  As Dan advised, I did smack myself in the head for not thinking of this idea.

 

 

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Marketing or Litter?

April 19, 2009 By davidebowman 4 Comments

If early tomorrow morning I drove past your home and threw a bag full of dirty paper in your driveway before you woke up, would that be alright?  What if I did it twice next week?  What if I did it twice every week… forever?  At what point would my “free trial” of the bag of trash start being litter?

How about this.  When you leave for work today, I am going to come to your home and stick some trash in your front yard.  It will be attached to a stick.  I am also going to put more trash on your doorstep and doorknob.  I might even hang some trash on your mailbox.  Finally, I am going to put together a big book of trash. I will drop 10 of them off on your porch, because it has probably been 3 weeks since the last time someone brought you 10 of them.

From phone books to lawn care signs, pizza delivery coupons to newspapers, everyone appears to be obsessed with filling up my property with litter, which subsequently will fill up the landfill with litter.  Yes, I appreciate your generosity.  It is a nice gesture, but enough already.  I am honestly half tempted to take my next Goodwill bag full of old stuff to one of these companies and leave it on their doorstep as a “free trial.”  Hey, here is all the old crap I don’t want.  I will give you the first load of it for free.  Unless you tell me otherwise, I will just keep on bringing it by for you.  Sound good?

The choice is up to you.  You can make me a fan of your product by being amazing, unique, attentive, and remarkable  in which case I might voluntarily place a sign for your business in my yard… or better yet, blog about it, link to the post on Facebook or LinkedIn, and tell everyone I know how awesome you are.   Or spend your money printing up junk that I don’t want, throw it on my lawn or in my driveway and continue to aggravate me by making me clean up after you.

My advice – Stop littering and start spending the time and money you save finding ways to dazzle your customers.  Let one of them tell me how good your product or service is, and I am much more likely to call you than if I have to add cleaning up after you to my to do list.  Plus according to those signs, Ohio has a $500 fine for littering.

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