bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

Are you?

I did a radio interview this morning and one of the questions was how does an idea become a chapter in the book.

Well it has actually gone through a few filters, as you may know from my Great but not great enough post that is the first big filter.

For every blog post that makes it about 3 don’t.  So for the 300 or odd so posts that are live, about 900 haven’t.

Then for those that made it live, the filter was based on popularity, my personal favourites and relevance.

By the time it has made it to the book, it has gone through three filters, at each step ideas have been refined, questioned, and put back together.

All I am doing is providing a series of filters, where at each step the most remarkable stuff makes it through and the rest drops off.

This is all that YouTube does, or that email newsletter, or the people you follow on twitter.  They provide a filtered view of the mass content.  By following and engaging you get access to the end result.

So what do you filter for your customers? Can you deliver filtered (and relevant) content do your audience as a way of engaging? For if you can, you’re customers will love you for it.

A gift to take home.

A token to show their friends.

A reminder of how much they enjoyed your product.

I enjoyed this wine on a recent flight, St Hallett – Poachers Blend.  It was really good, so I read the label.

On the back you can see is a little tab that you can pull of the label.  It has the name of the wine and more information on the back.

Very neat – now I know which wine to get!  I didn’t check but they could take it one step further and on the back have a coupon (so only those that have taken it off find it) – 10% off if you buy in Duty Free once you jump off the plane.  Just a thought but I think they are already doing enough.

So why not give your customers a gift?

Having just read Chris Anderson’s latest book Free I thought I’d share a great little quote from the book:

“…a technologist’s job is not to figure out what technology is good for. Instead it is to make technology so cheap, easy to use, and ubiquitous that anybody can use it, so that it propagates around the world and into every possible niche. We, the users, will figure out what to do with it, because each of us is different: different needs, different ideas, different knowledge, and different ways of interacting with the world.”

What he is saying is, focus on the product, making it cheaper, easier and ubiqutous.  Your users will figure out the best way to use it (stop forcing them to do it your way).

37Signals is a great example of this, with the likes of basecamp (project management software), their focus was on developing the product, getting out of the customers way and letting them do their job.  In fact this is their development focus across all their products.  And of course you can get an iPhone App, send messages in basecamp through email, various other widgets and desktop applications.

Even if you wind back the clock, the postal system is a technology within itself, over time the cost of posting a letter dropped as the system became more efficient and where can you post a letter? At the post office, post box and most likely either or was situated at your regular shopping centre…

Pick up Chris’s book and give it a read (just like his first book the long tail) you won’t regret it.

Realigning your business at the moment for the next five years, there needs to focus around getting talent.

Get the best, the up and coming, those that outperform others.  (The best are also much cheaper now than they were 24 months ago.)

Remember at the end of the day it is people that run your business and if you don’t have the best people when it comes time to ramp up – you’ll miss out (to those that do).

You really have to hand it to them for looking after their customers.

Many years back my Dad told me the first time he ordered from Amazon (pre-2000 days) that they sent him the wrong book.  He let them know and they said hey can you donate it to your local library and we’ll send you the right copy.  Neat huh? He has told that story over and over for well probably about a decade now.  (Good Experiences compound!)

Also as I have found out – they provide a huge amount of detail in their tracking of orders.  See below:

This is amazing! I have been able to track my package from the moment it left to the moment it has arrived in New Zealand.  I have never seen that level of detail in tracking.

They realise that if I want to track it may as well expose as much data as possible.  No reason to hide behind (we don’t know where it is) but that’s where it is – if it’s not where it’s meant to be we will have to take responsibility.

Now who says customer obsession isn’t a winning model?