Hackoff – The Blook, Part II

A few weeks back, I posted about a new blook (book delivered in single episodes via blog) called Hackoff.com – An Historic Murder Mystery Set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble, by Tom Evslin.  A few weeks into it, and I’m hooked.  It’s:

– complete and total brain candy, or mental floss as Brad calls it

– a great 2 minute break in the middle of the day (episodes are delivered once a day during the week)

– a very entertaining reminder about some of the wacky things that went on back in the Internet heyday

– a good look into some of the processes that go on behind the scenes in taking a company public

If you haven’t started the blook yet and want to give it a try, you can catch up on all of the first episodes and subscribe to the new ones here.   You can also preorder a hardcover copy of the book here on Amazon.com.

Learn Word of Mouth Marketing

Our friend, former RP colleague, and WOM guru Andy Sernovitz is hosting a small-group word of mouth marketing seminar. Usually he only does private training for companies at a very large price, so this is a rare chance for 50 people to get the best introduction to word of mouth that there is.  I blogged about his book a while back here.

We’ve arranged for a $250 discount for our clients. Use code “welovereturnpath” when you register (kind of catchy code, isn’t it?).

This is a very practical, hands-on course. In one intense day, you will:

• Master the five steps of word      of mouth marketing
• Construct an action plan that      your company can start using the very next day
• Get the same training that      big corporations (Microsoft, TiVo, eBay) have received — for a fraction      of what they paid
• Know how to translate word of      mouth marketing into real ROI
• Participate in an active,      intense day of practical brainstorming (not boring theory)
• Learn from Andy Sernovitz,      the guy who literally wrote the book on word of mouth marketing

Andy promises you will learn a repeatable, proven marketing framework that is easy to execute, affordable, and provides measurable results within 60 days.

More information: http://events.gaspedal.com

Chicago: July 30 and September 4

Pass it on: http://events.gaspedal.com/banners

A Better Way to Shop

I love Zappos.com.  It’s rapidly becoming the only place I buy shoes.  Their web site experience is ok – not perfect, but pretty good, but their level of service is just unbelievable.  They are doing for e-commerce (shoes in particular) what Eos is doing for air travel.

They’re always great at free shipping and have always been super responsive and very personal and authentic when it comes to customer service.  But today took the cake.  I emailed them when I placed an order for new running shoes because I also wanted to buy one of those little “shoe pocket” velcro thingies that straps onto shoelaces and holds keys and money for runners.  I didn’t find one on the Zappos site and just asked if they carried the item in case I missed it.

Less than 24 hours later, I got an email reply from Lori, a Customer Loyalty Representative there, who apologized for not carrying the item — and then provided me with a link to buy it on Amazon.com which she had researched online herself.

Zappos’s tag line on their emails says it all:

We like to think of ourselves as a service company that just happens to sell shoes.

Does your company think of itself and its commitment to customer service like that?

People are People

So after nearly seven years of running Return Path, I think it’s now fair to say that I’m a direct marketer.  I’ve learned a lot about this business over the years, and there are a number of things about direct marketing that are phenomenal — the biggest one is that most of the business is incredibly clear, logical, and math-driven.  But there’s always been one thing about the field that hasn’t quite made sense to me, and I think it’s because the Internet is once again changing the rules of the game.

There are traditional companies in the space that focus on B2C direct marketing.  There are others that focus on B2B.  It’s been obvious to me for years that there was a huge cultural or perceived divide between these types of companies.  You can see it in the glazed over eyes and hear it in the scratchy voices of long-time industry members from the postal and telemarketing world — "Ohhh," they say, "they’re a B2B company.  We don’t do that."

But the distinction between B2B and B2C is rapidly diminishing.  I may not want a telemarketing call about office supplies on my home number or one about car insurance at work (or any of them at all!).  It might not make sense to send me a catalog for routers to my home.  I get that.  But at the end of the day, people are people, and the ubiquity of the Internet is eroding distinctions between the different places I spend time. 

True, most of us do have multiple email addresses, and some are company-sponsored while others are personal.  But how many of us have all that email coming into the same mailbox in Outlook?  Or if we do have a Yahoo or Hotmail or Gmail account, how many times per day do we check it from the office?  Is an @aol.com account a B2C account?  I don’t know – AOL says there are hundreds of thousands of small businesses who use AOL.  Is an @ibm.com account a B2B account?  It’s probably someone’s work account, but how many times does he check that account on his Treo over the weekend?  And what if it’s that person’s only email address?

Sure, you’ll want to use different media properties or lists to acquire corporate buyers vs. individuals.  Sure, there are still some nuances of data collection in the distinction as well (no reason for LL Bean to ask you for your title), and there will always be differences in creative and copy to drive response for a corporate buyer vs. a personal buyer.  But the legacy distinctions between B2C and B2B are definitely melting away.

So I’m not accused of being Internet-myopic, this same principle (or a related one) explains why you see ads like crazy for FedEx and DHL during The Office on NBC.  I had this quote written down from several months back for which unfortunately I don’t have attribution, although I’m pretty sure it was a media buyer in a Wall Street Journal article, who said, "The best time you can reach people is when they’re in their entertainment mode and consuming media they really want to see when they’re in their down time.  And that might not be CNBC, that might be My Name is Earl on NBC."

Everything That is New is Old

With a full nod to my colleague Jack Sinclair for the title and concept here…we were having a little debate over email this morning about the value of web applications vs. Microsoft (perhaps inspired by Fred, Brad, and Andy’s comments lately around Microsoft vs. Apple).

Jack and his inner-CFO is looking for a less expensive way of running the business than having to buy full packages of Office for every employee to have many of them use 3% of the functionality.  He is also even more of a geek than I am.

I am concerned about being able to work effectively offline, which is something I do a lot.  So I worry about web applications as the basis for everything we do here.  We just launched a new internal web app last week for our 360 review process, and while it’s great, I couldn’t work on it on a plane recently as I’d wanted to.

Anyway, the net of the debate is that Jack pointed me to Google Gears, in beta for only a month now, as a way of enabling offline work on web applications.  It clearly has a way to go, and it’s unclear to me from a quick scan of what’s up on the web site whether or not the web app has to enable Gears or it’s purely user-driven, but in any case, it’s a great and very needed piece of functionality as we move towards a web-centric world.

But it reminded of me of an application that I used probably 10-12 years ago called WebWhacker (which still exists, now part of Blue Squirrel) that enables offline reading of static web pages and even knows how to go to different layers of depth in terms of following links.  I used to use it to download content sites before going on a plane.  And while I’m sure Google Gears will get it 1000x better and make it free and integrated, there’s our theme — Everything That is New is Old.

The iPhone?  Look at Fred’s picture of his decade old Newton (and marvel at how big it is).

Facebook?  Anyone remember TheSquare.com?

MySpace?  Geocities/Tripod.

LinkedIn?  GoodContacts.

Salesforce.com?  Siebel meets Goldmine/Act.

Google Spreadsheets?  Where to begin…Excel…Lotus 123…Quattro Pro…Visicalc/Supercalc.

RSS feeds?  Pointcast was the push precursor.

Or as Brad frequently says, derive your online business model (or at least explain it to investors) as the analog analog.  How does what you are trying to online compare to a similar process or problem/solution pair in the offline world?

There are, of course, lots of bold, new business ideas out there.  But many successful products in life aren’t version 1 or even version 3 — they’re a new and better adaptation of something that some other visionary has tried and failed at for whatever reason years before (technology not ready, market not ready, etc.).

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On the Other Hand…

A couple days ago, I wrote about how crummy the customer service experience was with Clear going out of business with no notice and no apology. 

Today my inbox revealed the exact opposite experience:

Greetings from Amazon.com.

You saved $1.40 with Amazon.com’s Pre-order Price Guarantee!

The price of the item(s) decreased after you ordered them, and we gave you the lowest price.

I didn’t even know Amazon had a Pre-order Price Guarantee.  They could have gotten away with not giving it to me, and I would have never even thought about it.  Great experience!

Everyone’s a Direct Marketer, Part III

With every company as a direct marketer, and with (hopefully!) every company embracing some of the best DM principles, what does this shift mean for the way companies will be structured in the future?

First, let’s talk about the internal structure of a company.  The biggest shift going on here is that customers are becoming a more important part of all employees’ daily lives, not just those in the advertising department.  I wrote an earlier posting called Everyone’s a Marketer which applies here.  Most likely, more and more members of your organization are touching customers every day — and they need to be trained how to think like marketers.

But beyond that, companies will be constructed differently in the future as well.  While not true in some industries, there are many industries founded on the “mass” which will never be the same again.  Here are three examples of how direct marketing is infiltrating — but enhancing the opportunities of — corporate America.

– Disney’s film unit used to make movies only for theatrical release.  Today, they have an enormous volume of direct-to-video (or DVD) movies that never see the big screen but that drive huge sales numbers when marketed to Disney’s customer email database.

– Ralph Lauren used to make Polo shirts with a fixed number of configurations of shirt color and knitting color of the logo.  Now, you can go onto Polo.com and custom build a personalized shirt for someone with the right size and color combination of their college or company or favorite baseball team.

– Barry Diller used to run a studio, then he bought a TV network called the Home Shoping Network (and, I’d add, a lot of people laughed at him for doing so).  He has now turned HSN into InterActive Corp, a true convergence company that mixes content and media with commerce and direct marketing with brands like Match.com, Ticketmaster, eVite, CitySearch, and Expedia.

That’s it for this series.  All thoughts and comments are welcome.

Change of Name

Fellow CEO Greg Reinacker posted an open question on his blog about whether he should change the name of his company, NewsGator. This is a GREAT topic.

We struggled with it for years at MovieFone, because at some point, the Internet became a huge part of the business, and the name seemed antiquated. Plus, everyone knew us by the phone number, 777-FILM (or whatever number it happened to be in any given city). But it had 10 years of brand equity at that point behind it.

Return Path used to be called uLocate.com a really long time ago, and we changed the name to be less “dot com” three months after we got started (that’a story for another posting as well). People ask me all the time if I sitll think that Return Path is the best name possible for the company. I’m sure there’s a better one out there, but I am sure it’s going to be hard to convince me to change it. Why? Let’s start with these 3 reasons:

1. It’s close enough. We’re in the email business, in general, and Return Path is a good name for people in the industry to remember (it’s the first two words in every email header) for people in the industry, and it’s easy enough to say.

2. It has good equity. Almost five years in, most of our customers and industry watchers know it. Of course, it’s not Coke and has limited equity in the grand scheme of things, but its equity relative to the size of our enterprise is meaningful. That’s the important part. There’s a reason GE is still called GE even though its primary business is financial services now.

3. I have no idea what business we’re going to be in three years from now. Ok that’s an overstatement. I’m pretty sure we’ll still be in email. But while there are perhaps more appropriate names for us today, in today’s dynamic technology market, the company might look very different down the road, and changing a name is painful enough that I wouldn’t do it without a MAJOR event underway like a dramatic change of focus for the company, or a massive acquisition.

That said, if I had happened to name the company CompuTyco or EmailEnron, I’d change it because the collateral damage or risk thereof. If my mom had named me Adolph, Osama, or Saddam, I’d also be headed down to the courthouse to switch to a new one. They’re not as evil as a bad dictator of course, but Gator has so much baggage — they changed their own name to Claria!

So Greg, change that name despite the challenges outlined above. You’re lucky in that t’s still early enough for you. Just make sure you pick a new name that’s flexible and extensible into other areas in case the business you have in three years isn’t the business you have today. And don’t bother with an expensive naming consultant (let me know if you want to hear about that nightmare). Just have a good, structured brainstorm with your team.

Well, that’s a mouthful.  Let me break it down.

Ideas Matter Less Than Execution

Execution Matters Less Than Timing

Timing Matters Less Than Luck

There’s a persistent myth about entrepreneurs as heroes – the people with the brilliant ideas and Eureka moments that bring companies to life and create success.  I’ve never believed in that myth, or at least not in its universality, as I’ve always valued both ideation and execution in terms of business building.  But as I was thinking about that construct more the other day, it occurred to me that there’s actually a hierarchy of the two, and not just of the two, but of timing and luck as well.  The best businesses — the runaway successes — probably have all four of these things going, or at least three.  And in many cases, THE IDEA is the least important of the bunch.  Consider these examples:

Plaxo was launched a year or two before LinkedIn.

Friendster was launched a couple years before MySpace, which was launched before Facebook.  (You can go back even further and look at things like PlanetAll and Classmates.com).

Geocities predated blogging and Tumblr by more than a decade.

The Diamond Rio was launched three years before the first iPod.

Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Altavista, Yahoo, and lots of other search engines and web crawlers were started well before Google.  Goto.com (Overture) did paid search before Google.

The ideas were all pretty similar.  In most cases, if not all, execution won out.  In the case of the iPod vs the Rio, it’s not that the world wasn’t ready for portable music – my Sony Walkman from the early 1980s is testament to that.  It’s that the combination of iTunes and the iPod, combined with Apple’s phenomenal design and packaging — all elements of execution — won the day.

The role that timing plays is also key.  Sometimes the world isn’t ready for a great technology yet, or it may be ready, but not for sustained growth and usage.  Friendster and MySpace vs. Facebook is the best example of this.  Facebook isn’t necessarily a better service, better marketed.  Friendster and MySpace were similarly viral in adoption at the beginning.  But the world was still in the Visionary or Early Adopter stage (in the language of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm).  By the time Facebook came around, the world was ready to mass adopt a social network.  Geocities, for example, was a big financial success at the time (Yahoo acquired the business for $5B – they “only” acquired Tumblr for $1B, give or take), but then it disappeared from the scene, where Tumblr seems much more durable.

The role of luck is harder to explain, or at least harder to separate from that of timing, and there’s a good argument that luck can be at the bottom of this particular chain, not the top (as in, luck is hard to separate from ideas).  Sometimes luck means avoiding bad luck, as in the story about Southwest Airlines — a great idea with promising early execution and good timing — narrowly avoiding a major crash during its first week of operations in 1967.  Sometimes luck means being in the right place at the right time, or making an accidental discovery, as in the case of the Princeton University professor, Edward Taylor, who discovered a powerful cancer treatment a bit accidentally while studying the pigments that produce the colors on the wings of butterflies for a completely unrelated purpose.

Don’t get me wrong.  Ideas are still important.  They are the spark that starts the fire.  And ideas can be partly created by the luck of being in the right place at the right time, so maybe this whole construct is more of a virtual circle than a hierarchy.  But entrepreneurs need to remember that a spark only gets you so far.  As the old saying goes, I’d rather be lucky than good!

Seth Responds

About an hour after I posted a not so flattering review of Seth Godin’s new book this morning, I got an email from Seth with a couple good points worth responding to here.

His main points (other than offering me a refund, which was nice) were that (a) the book itself was very clear about its content — on the book itself (back cover, inside flap, marketing copy), kind of like a ‘live album’ for a recording artist; and (b) if I thought the blog postings were worthwhile, why  did I still feel like there was a downward trend in his writing?

Ok, so these are fair points.  Let me try to clarify.  I am 99% sure that I bought the book off the Amazon.com email which said “if you enjoyed other books by Seth Godin, then here’s his latest,” which prompted my robotic one-click order without paying attention to the fine print.  That’s why I was disappointed when I got the book.  My bad, I guess, although that’s somehow an unsatisfying thought as a consumer — that I should have paid more attention to the fine print.  Live albums from musicians usually have that in the title so the marketing is clear, and they still sell a ton, probably even more so.

In re-reading my review, I actually think it’s balanced — I do say there are a bunch of circumstances where the book is a must-have — but my use of the word “sell-out” was a bit harsh given the attempts to present the book as a compendium.  But the downward trend in my mind is more than just this book.  I think a lot of Seth’s writings have been hitting the same notes for the last couple of years, while I’ve been hoping to hear his next Big Moo.

I didn’t take up Seth’s offer for a refund, as I fall somewhere between (a) and (c) in my definition of why this is a must-have.  And while I’m at it, maybe I should rethink my earlier point that this whole blog thing isn’t about conversations.