Relationships - the future of business

Marketing Online Live interests and frustrates me.

It interests me because Paul and Alex have some good stuff to say, and I like the entrepreneurial way they think.

It frustrates me because they try to reduce everything to a system - which may well be the secret to their success. Even in their latest episode, Alex (who admits he doesn't actually run his own Twitter account) suggested coming up with a set of rules for Twitter ettiquette - as if everyone was on Twitter for the same reason.

I did some soul searching to figure out why this bugged me. Two reasons:

a) It oversimplifies reality.
b) It goes against my worldview, which is shaped by my Evangelical upbringing and the gospel message. In a nutshell, it says that life is not about keeping the rules, but it's about relationships. This resonates strongly with me, because most of my life, I haven't fit into the "norm" for whom rules are mostly written.

You don't have to be a Christian to believe that the universe is about relationships vs rules. But what about the world of business? Isn't that necessarily about systems?

I was willing to think so, and believe myself to be hopelessly idealistic, but it seems business may actually be about relationships after all.

The book Disrupting Class predicts that schools - in fact, any form of educational institution - will soon change (will need to change!) from a value-chain model where products are designed for one-size fits as-many-as-possible, to a facilitated user network model, where people use tools to help each other, in the way that suits them.

I haven't got to the bit that explains the economics yet, but it's an interesting shift away from monolithic systems, towards real human relationships.

Look out for my review of Disrupting Class in the next issue of Idealog.

When big is too big

SimonYoungWriters is doing a couple of jobs for large organisations at the moment, and I feel a real sympathy for anyone involved in corporate comms.



Marketing has it slightly easier - they get to be all strategic most of the time, while comms have to know both strategy and detailed tactics.

Comms people have to keep in tension three big factors: the overall business goals, each department's competing goals, and finally the needs of the reader/viewer/consumer of the content they're producing!

That last one can be quite tricky. Not tricky to understand - just spend a day in your customer's shoes - but tricky to translate into strategy that all the competing elements in your organisation understand.

I'm not sure I have an answer. One could be to think small - I used that phrase when talking about advertising, but perhaps that thinking applies to other areas as well. Think entrepreneurial, while leveraging the scale of your organisation. That's what Air New Zealand and TVNZ are trying to do, and they seem to be doing pretty well with that. (By the way, check out our interview with TVNZ's Jason Paris on Jump In, where he goes into that aspect of TVNZ in some detail)

And then there's what Deloitte calls "Services Thinking", which I heard a podcast about this morning. Similar in concept to Service-Dominant Logic, but with an operational focus instead of marketing. Worth a listen.

What is marketing?

That's the big question I re-examine in the November issue of NZMarketing - can hardly wait! :)

It's also a question being asked in the UK, as Simon Wakeman reported on his blog. Having just finished the article on service-dominant logic, I couldn't resist chipping in:

Here’s a nice concise [definition] from Vargo and Lusch, the guys who brought us Service-Dominant logic of marketing:

“To collaborate with customers and partners to create and sustain value.”

It’s not a thorough definition, but one that seems to catch the zeitgeist of marketing thinking at the moment. I think?

I've just now seen a follow-up comment from Andrew Wake, where he says, among other things, "Simon Young’s offering seems far more succinct."

Blush. Thanks! But I can't take credit; that pithy definition was lifted from one of the many papers written by Professors Vargo and Lusch.

But thanks anyway!

(While you're waiting to discover the future of marketing, read up about licensing your ideas.)

How easy do you make it to downgrade? (Aka 37Signals, you suck)

"Everyone" knows customer experience is really important, that negative word of mouth spreads faster than positive, that happy customers stay longer and spend more. So companies make it easy to do business with them.

How about the other way around? When you want to downgrade or leave a company, how easy is it? I recently tried to downgrade my accounts with LinkedIn and Highrise HQ.

With LinkedIn, it was a breeze once I emailed support asking "how do I downgrade?". To some that might be good enough, but I'm used to automation here ... this is web 2.0, right? The great usability that helps me upgrade smoothly should also be there to help me downgrade smoothly.

It's slightly more complicated with Highrise HQ, the CRM application from 37Signals. It's a powerful product, and on the face of it, it's easy to both upgrade and downgrade.

Trouble is, I want to downgrade but I have file attachments. If there's files in my account, I can't downgrade. So I emailed support:

Hi guys,

I'd like to downgrade my account to a free one but I can't because there are files. But I don't need those files. However I can't find how to delete all those attachments so I can revert to free.

Can you help?

Their reply:

Hi Simon,

There is no central file location, so you'll need to delete them from
the contacts and cases you've uploaded file to.

You've got to be kidding me. Because Highrise HQ can't handle HTML email, every email that has automatically forwarded to HighriseHQ has come through as a MIME attachment.

That means I could probably spend all day deleting files one by one, and still not be finished.

That's no fun. C'mon 37Signals, you guys do great software, how about making this task a little easier for me - and other customers who want to downgrade now (perhaps to upgrade later, you never know!)

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Update: At last night's Ecademy Auckland group I heard that Google AdWords is another service that doesn't let you downgrade once you upgrade. Bad, naughty, evil Google!

I am a shameless Xero fanboy

Switched our accounting to Xero last night. Wooo!

It's good. It seems to do all the same things our old package did, but it does them cooler. And that is surprisingly very important, even for something like accounting.

What's so cool? The fact that there's a dashboard, the fact that I can click on just about anything for more information, and the fact that the "feedback" button is on every single page, and actually goes to someone who gives me an answer!

Well done, Drury, Morgan et al. Here's to all the success you deserve.