Filed under: Uncategorized
‘if you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if you want pleasure, you must toil for it. Pleasure comes through toil and not by self-indulgence and indolence. When one loves his work, his life is a happy one.’
-Sarah Louise Arnold 1917. A Mastery of Words.
Filed under: Emergent media, Digital culture, Google, Geek stuff, Future of Media, Looking for insights | Tags: Google, Bill Gates, Lynette Webb
The future of search is verbs
I like the simplicity of this statement. It’s a catchphrase for the concept that most of the time people aren’t searching for information just for the sake of it, but because they want help in making a decision or carrying out some action.
Here’s the quote in full, as reported by Esther Dyson:
“Bill Gates uttered one of the smartest things he has ever said: “The future of search is verbs.” But he said it at a private dinner and it never spread. To me, the meaning was clear: when people search, they aren’t just looking for nouns or information; they are looking for action. They want to book a flight, reserve a table, buy a product, cure a hangover, take a class, fix a leak, resolve an argument, or occasionally find a person, for which Facebook is very handy. They mostly want to find something in order to do something.”
Via www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/dyson23/English
Image via Flickr CC thanks to Andrew Hefter www.flickr.com/photos/andross/3353830887/
I have borrowed the above little post from Lynette Webb the Google Insights Manager who I have posted about before here and here. For those of you who don’t follow her on Flickr, get on it. She’s got some great pithy one liners from smarty pants peeps and pairs them with poignant pics [not sure why the alliteration but run with me on this one]. Anyway, she’s worth a look in.
Filed under: Sales effectiveness | Tags: Dan Pink, motivation, Sales effectiveness
I was just watching this Dan Pink clip on TED (for those of you who don’t watch TED get thee to the site immediately) and he talks about how to motivate people, namely staff. His theory is that traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance but if you want engagement, self direction is better. Pink’s proposition is that autonomy, mastery and purpose are the new building blocks of an entirely new way of thinking about staff for the 21st century. It’s not about beating people with a bigger stick, it’s about tapping into our desire to do things because we like them, because they’re interesting, because they matter, because we’re part of something bigger.
Autonomy – because we all want to feel like we are in charge (to some extent) of our own destiny. The urge to direct our own lives.
Mastery – The desire to get better and better at something that matters.
Purpose – The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
Filed under: Sales effectiveness
A great little ditty from Paul Sparks at Sales Effectiveness that I thought I’d share with you:
As salespeople, we often hear that we need to be passionate about our products to sell them effectively. And this is probably true.
But what does passion look like, and how do we display it?
This video is an example of what passion in business and life looks like. John Nese is the owner of Galco’s Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles. His shop carries over 400 types of soda and soft drink.
Is he passionate – yes.
Is he obsessive – it seems that way.
The video raises many questions we can ask about ourselves and how we “sell” to people with passion. Have a look – and then challenge yourself to ask some questions about what you’re doing to pursue your passion – and how, as a salesperson, do you connect with your clients’ passions.
Life’s short. Too short, to quote Wayne Bennett (the coach of the St George Rugby league team), to die with the music still in you. But we also need to be realistic about pursuing passion to make sure we’re not just tilting at windmills.
Here are some questions about passion and selling to get you going.
At a personal level:
- Do you have a passion that dominates your thoughts and your life?
- Does your work help you maintain and build your passion?
- Is it a stepping stone to a role which will align with your passions? Why – or why not?
- If you don’t think you’re a passionate person – that’s cool – perhaps it’s not an essential element of life. But have you reflected on your ultimate goals – what do you want to make sure you’ve achieved in your time on planet earth?
Most of us, when we really think about it, have something which drives our life.
OK – so you’re passionate about some things – to some degree at least. Now consider you current sales role:
- Do you connect with the passion of your clients and prospects?
- Does your work – and the opportunity to help your customers – add to the joy of your life?
- Or would your passion be better channelled elsewhere?
We all want to be with others who genuinely share our interests and dreams.
It doesn’t matter what you sell – you need to at least be passionate about what your products do for your customers. Even if your industry or products are boring – so what. If what you sell helps your customers achieve their goals, you’re on a winner.
If you have a passion to see your customers get what they need, you’ll succeed in sales. You’ll also be on a road to see your own dreams and passions be realised.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: rhys giles jones, the day the media died
Was surfing a new site this morning by Giles Rhys Jones and found this little musical ditty. All sensationalism aside this is a great little toe tapper. Enjoy.
Filed under: Advertising | Tags: pocket bar, pocket optimism, surry hills
Has anyone been to Pocket bar in Surry Hills Sydney? I haven’t but was surfing the net having a nosy about when I came across this cute little promotion they’re doing for pocket optimists. I wonder whether they’re relying on the fact that many people don’t respond to things like this [the averade direct mail response rate used to be about 3% I think] or whether they’ve been inundated with parking offenders. I did recently receive a parking fine the other day and considered taking it down to Pocket Bar for just a moment but then . . it felt kind of rude to just rock up to a bar that I had no relationship with and present my parking fine. I wonder if anyone has taken them up on their offer? Either way, it’s certainly an usual promo idea…
I’ve been trying to make a claim (or in fact about 40 claims) with HBA my health insurer today. It has become so difficult to even make the claim that it’s becoming laughable. I pay an extraordinary amount for health insurance a month, I mean a lot. I looked up on the net today to see whether I could make a claim online to start sorting out my receipts, you can claim online but not for medical, dental and some other category. Right.
I then rang them to see if I could visit an HBA centre (how very old school I know) but guess what? they’ve closed every single HBA centre in Sydney apart from Chatswood which might as well be in Canberra given the proxiomity to Surry Hills and the CBD. They said I could claim over the telephone which I thought sounded labour intensive but at least it provided me with an option. But wait, you can’t claim amounts over $500, or anything to do with medical, sport and some other restriction.
Okay so I’m just a little peeved so far so I ask the nice lady on the phone what my options are to which she replies – Snail Mail. She says she can send me out some claim forms by post and I can return them in the post and get them to process the claims remotely, all of which will obviously take a significant amount of time. I check the website to see if I can circumvent even one step in this arduous process and download a claim form online but the link is broken. Of course it is. So I ring back another nice lady and ask if she can send me a soft copy of the claim form (it didn’t sound like HBA even made soft copies of the online forms available for their operators) but the lady was very helpful, however I suspect I shall have to wait to receive some claims forms in the post.
Admittedly I’ve been a little fluey off late and my tolerance is low but oh my lord HBA in the days of digital communication and electronic efficiency, you guys absolutely suck. Further to this, the fact that I pay such a ridiculously huge amount each month in health insurance (a preventative style anxiety I probably inherited from my mother), and you can’t provide me with a branch or an online service that works.
Health insurance has always been difficult to understand, impossible to negotiate and now, they’re making it near impossible to even make a claim. I don’t know about any of you but the health insurance industry is one space which is crying out for a new competitor to cut through the crap and offer real value, easy access and efficient effective service.
I was just flicking through some old newsletters from Australian Anthill when I came across this article about Quirky. Quirky is the brainchild of 22 year old Ben Kaufman and it’s a really interesting site worth checking out. So here’s the deal:
Entrepreneurs and other creatives can submit a product idea to the Quirky community. The community picks one product idea every seven days and then everybody gets busy on that one idea to see whether it could fly. Basically the idea is that you get a whole bunch of creative people involving themselves in the ideas from the very beginning, the product positioning, packaging, naming etc right through to the marketing and selling of the product which happens via the quirky online store. Once the product hits its pre-sales threshold, the product goes into the production and delivery stage. Thirty cents out of every dollar a quirky product makes goes back to the quirky community, with 12 of these 30 cents going to the person who originally suggested the idea.
An interesting idea, especially for those of you who are itching to get out of your advertising careers and make a million selling widgets all of your own. Stop by and take a look. Check it out here quirky
HP has launched a campaign for small and micro-businesses with the theme of “the office tool”. The idea is that small and micro-business owners and employees often escape certain stereotypical colleagues that are common in large businesses. The cartoon portrays an example of this – the annoying guy that takes credit for your work and brags about it to the boss, portrayed as the “tool” you don’t need. So, what is the tool you do want? Well, in this instance, it’s the HP Officejet Pro 8500 printer.
Here’s a link to the cartoon “The Office Tool“
What the?
I assume they’ve created it as something that can be passed around to get down with the peeps who run their own businesses and might be in the market for a new printer. They obviously don’t know those peeps very well. This has to be one of the worst executions I have seen in a long time. Not only is it really simplistic, they also explain it to you just in case you’re too dumb to get the joke.
The irony is that it’s so crap I’ll probably pass it on. Or not.
