Killing Profit and Productivity

Sara Robinson writes:

In 1937, the 40-hour week was enshrined nationwide as part of the New Deal. By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.

... increasing a team’s hours in the office by 50 percent (from 40 to 60 hours) does not result in 50 percent more output (as Henry Ford could have told them). Most modern-day managers assume there will be a direct one-to-one correlation between extra hours and extra output, but they’re almost always wrong about this.

If you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.

Advertising Impression

Nigel Hollis writes:

The reference to an “advertising message” makes me wince. The word “message” seems to imply that the advertising is designed to convey specific information or an argument. But not all advertising is intended to persuade people by arguing the merits of a brand. And even when it does, I think we overestimate the degree to which people actually comprehend what is shown and said in advertising. ...

But this does not mean that most advertising is ineffective. Provided the ideas conveyed by the ad come to mind when relevant, then it will have an effect, i.e. when someone is thinking about buying the product in that category. So in the vast majority of cases, the best we can hope of any advertising is that the content is noticed at the time of viewing and the idea and feelings evoked are linked to the brand in people’s memories. ...

This is why I have always preferred the old-fashioned term, “advertising impression.” Although it is typically used as a media term to imply an exposure or ad view, the word “impression” also implies that people get the general idea. They understand the gist of what is being said, without necessarily consciously considering what the ad is trying to convey at the time of viewing. An impression is the mental image of a brand that sticks in people’s minds.

After all, isn’t that what most advertising is trying to do?

Social Posturing

Meghan Casserly writes:

You know the truth. You’re simply not yourself online. As TV journalist Lisa Ling said recently, “Facebook is the life that we want people to believe we lead.”

On social networks we commonly present ourselves to the world with our best faces forward, whether it’s through photos of ourselves smiling atop Machu Pichu on Facebook or being endlessly clever on Twitter. And since we all know we’re guilty ourselves, we commonly cut each other some slack when someone’s vocabulary, say, isn’t as extensive in real life as it is online.

Direct Mail: On the Brink

Brian Halligan notes:

Direct mail, a form of outbound marketing, doesn't exactly have a great reputation these days. Consumers are continuing to ignore these interruptive communications, and much of the junk mail people receive ends up in their trash bins. The fact is, traditional marketing strategies that businesses have long adopted — including direct mail — are less effective now that the internet has changed the way people research and shop; it's the other marketing tactics that adapt to these changing buyer behaviors that are gaining traction among marketers.

User Experience: It's in the Batter

Jessica Stillman writes:

Five years ago you only really had the engineer. Then you started to get the hustler because you had to have the guy that was willing to execute everything down the road ... Now you're seeing the designer have a seat at the table because, in order for consumer Internet plays really to be successful today, the user experience has to be baked into the product. It can't just be added on top. ... design is just as important if not more than the technology that makes it actually happen.

The Cost of Customer Service

Another topic, closely related to the bit I found about the cost/damage of failure to keep delivery/appointment promises, is the cost to the customer of remaining on hold waiting for service via telephone, as mentioned in this excerpt from Michael Hoffman's book on customer service:

I started writing this book while on hold with my cell phone company, listening to horrific canned music and hearing this recording every 90 seconds: “Your call is very important to us."

The CSR on this call was kind enough to remind me, “Sir, we have over 60 million customers to take care of” ... it occurred to me: “What if all 60 million customers were experiencing the same on-hold frustration?”

His accounting seems very hinky, even at a glance, so I'll not validate (by repeating) his estimation of the total value, and would caution anyone interested in quantifying the problem to do a bit more research. Even if you're more modest/realistic about the amount of time spent on hold and the per-minute value of a person's time, the number gets quite large when you multiply by 60 million.

What's more important from a brand perspective is how this disregard further contributes to the frustration of customers who feel their time isn't valued by brands that wish to earn their loyalty - the impact of which is far more damaging than the accounting suggests.

The Wait-Time Misery Index

Here's an information graphic from a Wall Street Journal article about the problem of wait-time:

The article itself is a bit of a mess, choppy and superficial, but it speaks to a rather serious problem with home delivery and on-site services. Firms offer customers a broad window (sometime between 9 am and 3 pm on Tuesday) and then fail to keep that appointment.

There are snippets of information about it being more than a minor inconvenience - a survey is mentioned that more than half of adults use vacation time and more than a quarter have lost wages in order to wait. The implication is that the financial cost of waiting can be measured.

However, the quantifiable factors are far less damaging than the qualitative ones. Consider the responsess in the information graphic above: companies "don't care about" or "take advantage of" their customers or thye lack the competence to predict the activities of their own people or suppliers.

In all, this is a factor that merits far more consideration that it is evidently getting.

Social is People

James Whittaker writes:

Google declared that “sharing is broken on the web” and nothing but the full force of our collective minds around Google+ could fix it. ... As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy.

A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

Page Bloat

John Naughton observes:

Over the last decade, the size of web pages (measured in kilobytes) has more than septupled. From 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB.

The article in which this statistic is presented has drawn some fire from the design community, as Naughton is in favor of minimalism while designers claim the added items improve the user experience. The statistic itself if good, but what it implies (and the author goes on to state) is that the additional weight comes from elements the clutter and junk up the user interface.

An opposing view from Craig Grannell (quoting someone else):

Good design isn't about being flashy – it considers the content and aims to present it in a way that aids comprehension rather than detracts from it. Good design also concerns itself with how services are to be used, and will often focus on making them as simple and easy to use as possible. That doesn't mean stripping away all design. Instead it means making sensible choices around layout, positioning, and legibility.

Ultimately, both sides seem to be taking extremes rather than a sensible position more toward the center: not all design is bloat, but neither is all design essential or even helpful - it's defies assessment in the aggregate, but must be considered case by case.

A Culture of User Neglect

An old, but excellent bit from Jared Spool:

We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings. … Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.

Then, it gets better, or perhaps worse …

We had friends in the Microsoft Office group, so we asked them about the choice of delivering the feature disabled. ... It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user’s needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes.

[The programmer’s assumption was that] at some point later, someone would tell him what the “real defaults” should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him. ... The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.

I'm positive that Microsoft is not alone in doing this. I’d even go so far as to speculate that the programmer in question wasn’t as apathetic as the brief detail above makes him out to be, but likely raised the issue several times and was ignored, or even told to back off. This happens far more often than any firm would likely care to admit.

Good Technology Cannot Overcome Poor Culture

Brian Solis writes:

Businesses deploy new technology without designing goals, processes, and reward systems to promote new engagement. Additionally, decision makers miss the need to empower key stakeholders to drive adoption and address internal skeptics and detractors. ... Everything begins with investing in a culture ... Tools only take you so far. It’s the philosophy and eventually vision and leadership behind the implementation that serves as the foundation for internal engagement.

Solis was considering the need for leadership in implementing social networking "behind the firewall", but the remarks about what is needed identify the reason that this, and many other technologies, have failed to achieve results.

Whether it's a social network, a knowledge management system, or a new spreadsheet application, it doesn't catch on if it's installed and ignored. But even at that, you're pushing a rope uphill if the culture isn't right before the tool is purchased.

Information Avalanche

Ron Ashkenas writes:

Business information has exploded at all levels. More importantly, it no longer flows to decision-makers in a predictable, controlled fashion. Not long ago, senior leaders received well-scrubbed financial reports and had regular patterns for reviewing performance, plans, strategies, etc. If anything, they didn't get enough direct data. Now, most leaders not only receive the official reports, but also: a constant stream of emails directly from the field and from customers, internet-based data about markets and competitors, observations from colleagues, and more. It's a data free-for-all.

Facebook Friction

Jim Bruene writes:

Facebook changed the rules for brand pages ... the Internet giant only allowed 30 days to make the change. Obviously, the company still doesn't know (or more likely care) how long it takes to revise marketing materials in the real world. While the timeline change doesn't materially impact the tactics we looked at, it does illustrate a downside of developing on the Facebook platform:

• Facebook sets all the rules and you must adapt to them
• Facebook evolves faster than most brand marketing strategies, so it takes a commitment to keep up with the changes (this can be outsourced of course)
• Facebook is so popular, and has so many ways to grow revenues, it's not likely to listen business customers' feedback (yet)

While I do have some sympathy for someone whose corporate cultures is so clogged with red tape that it takes more than a month to get a simple task done, it seems somehow petulant and ungrateful for a marketer who has been given a gift of a free profile on a social media site that gives him access to half a billion customers and prospects to bellyache about the inconvenience of having to make adjustments.

The ominous "yet" seems to imply that there will come a day when the advertisers control the online channel, much in the way they have had control of traditional channels for decades, and with much the same consequence. Let's hope that never happens.

Verbs Beat Adjectives

Roger Dooley writes:

There are multiple reasons to choose verbs over adjectives. First, adjectives on their own don't say all that much and are easy to throw in without real justification. Describing a candidate as "dedicated, focused, and creative" is a quick way to satisfy the need for a favorable comment and get the recommendation on its way. Similarly, a product could be, "economical, long-lasting, and easy to use." In both cases, though, the reader has nothing to go on other than the word of the writer, who is almost certainly biased in favor of creating a good impression.

Proudly Uninformed

Seth Godin blogs:

Society changes when we change what we're embarrassed about. In just fifty years, we've made it shameful to be publicly racist. In just ten years, someone who professes to not know how to use the internet is seen as a fool. The question, then, is how long before we will be ashamed at being uninformed, at spouting pseudoscience, at believing thin propaganda?

My knee-jerk reaction is: we seem to be moving in the opposite direction on this one: social media encourages people to share superficial observations and half-baked ideas with others.

Considering that, anyone with a blog does this. Myself included. Seth Godin included.