"One of the most important lessons I learned is that people are not fungible. I've had bosses who said, "We're not going to pay well, incent, or develop our people because there's always somebody to take their place." The problem with that logic is, while it might be statistically true, it fundamentally indicates a culture that is not going to invest in anybody. Nobody is going to become very effective.

The other piece of leadership that somebody tried to teach me, which I dismissed, is manage by the numbers--if you manage by the numbers everything else takes care of itself. Just get people to execute, measure, hold people accountable, and that's enough. That's not enough. Yes, it is important to instill accountability in organization, it's important to have good metrics, to discipline the process, reward people, and withdraw those rewards when they're not being effective. But that won't get you greatness.

When I am most successful, it's because the people around me have made me successful. It comes down to the fact that success is created by a group of people and not by any single individual. How do you get people to come together around a goal and objective and be great? It's establishing a sense of common purpose. Greatness doesn't come from a tactical sense of execution. Greatness comes having a vision that goes beyond yourself and even beyond the organization.

Smaller companies most successful at social acquisition.

While many marketers struggle with how to measure social media marketing return on investment, some businesses are finding at least one hard metric where their efforts have paid off—customer acquisition.

According to a February–March 2010 survey from office services firm Regus, smaller companies see the most success, with nearly half of small businesses around the world having acquired a customer through social networks. Large companies were less successful, but more than a quarter had seen social success through customer acquisition. This was despite large companies being more likely to devote budgets to social marketing.

“While the most popular function of these networks remains that of keeping in touch with contacts, businesses are also successfully acquiring new customers, supporting their retention efforts and interacting with customer groups,” said Sande Golgart, vice president at Regus, in a statement. “Organizations who have not yet ventured into the world of social networking may be missing out on sizeable business opportunities.”

In January 2010, Hubspot found that more than 40% of companies using social media marketing had acquired a customer through the channel. The Regus survey, which was not limited to businesses using social marketing, suggests that number may be slowly climbing.

via emarketer.com

Knowing where your web traffic is coming from, and how visitors spend their time on your site are unbelievably revealing statistics. I'd go so far as to suggest that if you have a website and you don't have an analytics package of some sort, you're wasting your time and money. It's the equivalent of dropping 50 cents into the newspaper stand, yet still reading the paper through the glass window. You're making the investment, but not getting the full story.

Setting up an analytics script is not expensive, and is even more useful and effective when combined with small-scale advertising campaigns through Google's AdWords (or other similar services). And for the record, I think that the first response in the chart is below is crap. As I mentioned above, setting up an analytics package is not expensive, and it's not that time consuming (most companies should be able to parse the data in about one man-hour per week). The next four reasons are much more likely to be the actual reasons that most companies don't have an online measurement strategy. To be clear, I'm not questioning eMarketer's statistics, I'm questioning the reasoning of the respondents.

Have a website that isn't hooked up to an analytics package yet? Are you looking to refine the view of your customer base and figure out how to more effectively market your business? Need someone to talk with who can answer questions? If so, we're happy to help. Give us a call at (719) 355-3579 or drop us a line at info@ideavise.com.

Thanks for reading.

—Jason @ Ideavise

To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What the pacesetters of the future really require, according to new Wharton research, is some time alone.

In a paper titled, "Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea (PDF)," Wharton operations and information management professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich argue that group dynamics are the enemy of businesses trying to develop one-of-a-kind new products, unique ways to save money or distinctive marketing strategies.

Terwiesch, Ulrich and co-author Karan Girotra, a professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD, found that a hybrid process -- in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers -- resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process. More importantly for companies striving for innovation, however, the trio says the absolute best idea in a hybrid process topped the Number One suggestion in a traditional model.

"Manufacturers prefer 10 machines with good output over one very good machine and nine really defective ones. You would rather have 10 good salesmen than nine poor salesmen and one superstar. In those areas, what matters is the total cumulative output, the total picture," Terwiesch points out. "When it comes to innovation, however, what really matters is not getting many good ideas, but getting one or two exceptional ideas. That's really what innovation is all about."

Although several existing experimental studies criticize the team brainstorming process due to the interference of group dynamics, the Wharton researchers believe their work stands out due to a focus on the quality, in addition to the number, of ideas generated by the different processes -- in particular, the quality of the best idea. They say the research is also distinctive in its study of how teams select the most promising initiatives that come out of the brainstorming phase.

"The evaluation part is critical. No matter which process we used, whether it was the [team] or hybrid model, they all did significantly worse than we hoped [in the evaluation stage]," Terwiesch says. "It's no good generating a great idea if you don't recognize the idea as great. It's like me sitting here and saying I had the idea for Amazon. If I had the idea but didn't do anything about it, then it really doesn't matter that I had the idea."

'The Boss Is Always Right'

Forty-four University of Pennsylvania students were recruited to help test how the two processes fared. The undergraduate and graduate students were divided into groups of four and asked to employ the hybrid process and team process separately to come up with student-friendly new product concepts for a hypothetical sports and fitness products manufacturer and for a hypothetical home-products manufacturer. Teams were given 30 minutes to brainstorm using the traditional group process. To test the hybrid model, they were asked to spend 10 minutes generating and ranking ideas individually and 20 minutes discussing those thoughts as a group.

The ideas generated by both methods were evaluated independently, by three separate panels asked to evaluate the product ideas on their business value; attractiveness to potential customers and overall quality based on the feasibility of actually building the product; the idea's originality; the size of the potential market for the product, and the extent to which it solved a particular problem. The students came up with a total of 443 ideas -- including a trash can that reduces the odor of the garbage inside it, a water bottle with a built-in filtration system and a waterproofing system that allows for reading in the shower.

Business leaders trying to integrate innovative ideas into their office culture can learn from the structure and intricacy used to generate and evaluate the ideas, suggests Terwiesch. He and Ulrich are also co-authors of the book, Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities, which suggests that companies should use coordinated competitions to filter the most exceptional proposals. He says an online system that creates a virtual "suggestion box" can accomplish the same goal as long as it is established to achieve a particular purpose. "People like having a process because they understand that it's fair. In a typical brainstorming meeting, it's not fair and everybody knows it: The boss is always right," Terwiesch says.

Imposing structure doesn't replace or stifle the creativity of employees, Ulrich adds. In fact, the goal is to establish an idea generation process that helps to bring out the best in people. "We have found that, in the early phases of idea generation, providing very specific process guideposts for individuals [such as] 'Generate at least 10 ideas and submit them by Wednesday,' ensures that all members of a team contribute and that they devote sufficient creative energy to the problem."

The results of the experiment with the students showed that average quality of the ideas generated by the hybrid process were better than those that came from the team process by the equivalent of roughly 30 percentage points. The hybrid method resulted in about three times more ideas than the traditional method. In addition, the quality rating was higher for the top five ideas produced through the hybrid process -- and the difference in quality between the team and hybrid methods in terms of the best idea was much higher than the average difference in quality, suggesting that "in an innovation setting, examining only [average] quality as opposed to the quality of the best ideas is likely to underestimate the benefits of the hybrid approach," the authors write.

Terwiesch says notions spawned through an individual brainstorming process are valuable thoughts that must not be "killed too early because of group dynamics. Your initial thoughts are very vital to the company because they are your unbiased opinion."

Self-Censorship and Build-Up

There are several reasons why people are less likely to offer an unbiased opinion in a purely team-based brainstorming process. Employees might censor themselves to go along with the status quo or to avoid angering a superior. Putting several people in a room together is bound to create a lot of conversation; if everyone contributes, there is less time for individuals to share all of their ideas. Some people may think less critically about a problem because they are happy to let others do the heavy lifting.

"We're fighting the American business model where everybody is [creative], which is just not the case," Terwiesch states. "We find huge differences in people's levels of creativity, and we just have to face it. We're not all good singers and we're not all good runners, so why should we expect that we all are good idea generators? But it's not politically correct to say so, even though there is more to being a good businessperson than generating ideas."

In addition to idea quality, the researchers also tried to measure one of the predispositions of group dynamics that they believe creates a roadblock to innovation -- build-up, or the tendency of people to suggest ideas similar to one that has already been proposed, and embraced by, the unit. They found that ideas built around other ideas are not statistically better than any random suggestion.

Build-up, Terwiesch believes, "is a social norm showing that you listened. If a group is working together on an idea that's already on the table, you're wary of coming in with your own agenda because you might be seen as selfish and not a team player. So you build on the idea that is currently on the table."

But that kind of thinking is what keeps the team from doing the kind of "sky's the limit" thinking that leads to the development of a product or process that hasn't been seen before. "Instead of searching the world broadly, we are all kind of searching only in this little sphere," Terwiesch says. "In innovation, variance is your friend. You want wacky stuff because you can afford to reject it if you don't like it. If you build on group norms, the group kills variance."

Nearly every company relies on the written word to woo customers. So why is most business writing so numbingly banal?

By Jason Fried |  May 1, 2010

 

What's bad, boring, and barely read all over? Business writing. If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying.

One of my favorite phrases in the business world is full-service solutions provider. A quick search on Google finds at least 47,000 companies using that one. That's full-service generic. There's more. Cost effective end-to-end solutions brings you about 95,000 results. Provider of value-added services nets you more than 600,000 matches. Exactly which services are sold as not adding value?

Who writes this stuff? Worse, who reads it and approves it? What does it say when tens of thousands of companies are saying the same things about themselves?

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you're saying, "Our products are like everyone else's, too." Or think of it this way: Would you go to a dinner party and just repeat what the person to the right of you is saying all night long? Would that be interesting to anybody? So why are so many businesses saying the same things at the biggest party on the planet -- the marketplace?

If you care about your product, you should care just as much about how you describe it. In nearly all cases, a company makes its first impression on would-be customers or partners with words -- whether they're on a website, in sales materials, or in e-mails or letters. A snappy design might catch their attention, but it's the words that make the real connection. Your company's story, product descriptions, history, personality -- these are the things that go to battle for you every day. Your words are your frontline. Are they strong enough?

Unfortunately, years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives, and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon, and vapid expressions. Words are treated as filler -- "stuff" that takes up space on a page. Words expand to occupy blank space in a business much as spray foam insulation fills up cracks in your house. Harsh? Maybe. True? Read around a bit, and I think you'll agree.

Luckily, there are exceptions. Wonderful exceptions. These are companies with a personality and a point of view. They care enough to have their own voice. They want to communicate, not just say something. They have a story to tell, and they want to tell it well. They write to be read.

Woot is one of those companies. Woot is a Dallas-based business that sells one item a day at a deep discount. Here is how the company describes itself on its website:

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 -- by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we're still the lovable scamps we've always been.

Don't you just love these people? Or maybe you hate them. Either way, I'm pretty sure you have an opinion about Woot based on this paragraph. With just a few sentences, Woot instantly set itself apart from the liquidation crowd.

Indeed, how the company communicates is a big part of how Woot built such a successful business. Woot's deal of the day sells out just about every day. I especially love the company's response to the "Will I receive customer support like I'm used to?" on its FAQ page:

No. Well, not really. If you buy something you don't end up liking or you have what marketing people call "buyer's remorse," sell it on eBay. It's likely you'll make money doing this and save everyone a hassle.

It's kind of kidding and kind of not. Some people may be offended, but big deal. Woot isn't trying to sell to every customer. It's trying to sell to the customers that can laugh along. Those are the people who understand what Woot is about. The company uses language as a filter.

Another favorite of mine is Saddleback Leather in San Antonio. Dave Munson, the company's founder, clearly loves his products and his words. Here's how he sets the scene when describing the quality of the company's bags:

You know how when a magician exposes to the world how other magicians trick people, all of the other magicians get mad at him for spilling the beans? Well, I'm about to spill the beans and ruin it for all of those companies trying to trick you into buying their not so high quality leather...You're about to learn what to look for and what to look out for as you shop for your next leather piece. By the way, if I soon die by a chopstick to the neck, you'll know why. I'm a marked man.

He then dives into great detail about what makes a great leather bag great. From the type of leather and where it comes from to how it's tanned to breakable versus nonbreakable parts ("How much is a billion dollar submarine with a plastic hatch worth?") to the number of seams, and so on. It's compelling and interesting. It holds your attention.

And check out how he explains his guarantee:

All of our products are fully warranted against all defects in materials and workmanship for 100 years. If you or one of your descendants should have a problem, send it back to me or one of my descendants and we'll repair or replace it for free or we'll give you a credit on the website (be sure to mention the warranty in your will).

Consider his choice of words. A 100-year warranty that his descendants will honor if one of your descendants needs a repair. And then he reminds you to include the warranty in your will. Who wouldn't want to do business with this guy? And it's all backed up with the Saddleback tag line: "They'll Fight Over It When You're Dead." Beauty.

When you're done reading this article, hit Google and search for leather bags. Then read through some of the sites you find. I bet you'll be bored to death pretty quickly. Then visit Saddleback's site. I bet you'll be smiling just as fast.

Here's one more example of writing done right: Polyface farm in Swoope, Virginia. Polyface is run by Joel Salatin, a pioneering farmer, author, and prophet of clarity. The Polyface Guiding Principles page is a study in straightforward language with a healthy hint of attitude:

Plants and animals should be provided a habitat that allows them to express their physiological distinctiveness. Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health....We do not ship food. We should all seek food closer to home...This means enjoying seasonality and reacquainting ourselves with our home kitchens.

I especially love his take on what it means to be a farmer:

We're really in the earthworm enhancement business. Stimulating soil biota is our first priority. Soil health creates healthy food.

Joel knows where he stands. When you read his site, you do, too. Even though Joel is a "full-service end-to-end" farmer, he'd never say it like that. He'd consider that description disrespectful to his customers, employees, plants, and animals.

The quality of the writing on sites like Woot's, Saddleback Leather's, and Polyface's gives me the chills. It's not how they look; it's how they read. These are businesses that care about what they say and how they say it. They don't write to fill up space on a page. They write to fill up your head. There is nothing inherently interesting about liquidators, leather, or farmers. They can make themselves boring, or they can make themselves interesting. Words do that job. Woot, Saddleback, and Polyface have all chosen to be interesting and engaging. They don't hide behind jargon. They aren't insecure. They aren't afraid to tell you who they are.

I can already hear some of you saying, "Sounds great. But I can't write." So hire a writer. But make sure that writer truly understands your business. Remember: It's not about telling a story. It's about telling a true story well.

Of course, words alone won't do it. Words are two dimensional. Your products and services provide the third dimension -- depth. But when it all comes together, you've got a package that's hard to ignore.