links for 2006-01-28
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Just how easy it would be for your employees to steal data with their ipods.
links for 2006-01-24
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Network Neutrality, and why it may change the way we use the internet.
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Need your sticky note fix on your compute screen?
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Super Cool Flickr toy!
A Different Kind of "Yellow" Pages
Looking for that next great place to … uh … “reach” your male customers? Decent Marketing may have just the ticket: Heat Activated Urinal Billboards. I know, you are wondering how it works, aren’t you?
The heat in a male's urine will deliver the message and the automatic flush from the toilet will re-set it for the next unsuspecting visitor... A perfect repetitive marketing tactic.
Buy a New Desk Every Week
Don’t know if you can bill all this time, but this is interesting:
Studies have shown that a person working with a messy desk will spend, on average, one and a half hours per day either being distracted by things in their view or looking for things. That's seven and a half hours per week.
Let’s see, at $250.00 per hour, you could buy a new desk every week.
Test Your Ideas at the Cafe
If you’ve got something you want to get some feedback on, but don’t want to pay for a formal focus group:
The basic idea behind café testing is to situate yourself at a café, put up a sign to attract participants, and test the people that come to you. Because cafes appeal to a wide variety of individuals, and people at a café often have time to spare, café testing can be a great way to perform a quick litmus test in the marketplace.
Kind of like Rosa’s Coffee Tip.
links for 2006-01-21
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"The value is in the hallway conversations, the handshakes, business card exchanges, and direct personal interactions. The sessions themselves are strictly the focal point, the common conversation piece, the marketing."
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Some links to great articles on design for business.
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Write a one-sheet book in a day.
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Check out to see if your next book's title will make it a blockbuster
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Great post on competition. Also, would make a great title for a spy thriller.
What Can You Give Away for Free?
Jim Logan has some great tips for making some marketing hay with free offers. He gives several examples of businesses that have succeeded by giving things away to customers for free. Here are my favorites:
- A few consumer electronics companies are letting customers take big screen TVs home for a free 30 day trail, you don't pay a single cent until the 30 days are over. Delivery and pick-up, if you decide to return the TV, are free. Returns are almost non-existent.
- A lawn service business cut my grass and cleaned my yard free for one month, before we signed a contract for services. Every week they showed up on time, worked like dogs, and had the place looking and staying beautiful. I signed an agreement at the end of the free service.
- I was told of a donut shop that gives away donut holes, a dozen free, seven days a week. They report having seen their overall donut sales more than double. The donut holes are a marketing expense.
- Our carpet cleaner routinely offers to clean one room free, of any size, for new customers. Without obligation to purchase anything, they clean a room and say “Thanks for trying our service. Let us know if we can do anything for you in the future.” The guys told me they almost always are asked to clean additional rooms and are usually called back in 6 months.
The best tip is Jim’s own:
In my own business, I routinely structure consulting projects around defined phases, with payment following completion of the fist phase. It the client doesn't want to complete the project after the first phase, they don't pay and we end the engagement. In three years of doing business this way, I haven't had one client stop a project of fail to pay.
If you are a lawyer and want to set yourself apart, you’d be wise to try Jim’s model with one of your new clients.
Goflockyourselfable Language Test
I’m glad to see Go Flock Yourself is back. It’s a blog about the absurdity of all things Web 2.0, and pretty funny to boot. In a somewhat mean-spirited post ripping the use of the term “Syndicatable” in the new book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, GFY’s anonymous author shared a pretty useful language tip:
The only people to whom the word “syndicatable” is going to mean anything are the ones who already know what syndication is. Think of it this way, in what I like to call the “Room-full-of-middle-aged-suburban-women-test.” In this test, you walk into a room full of middle-aged suburban women, and say “Blog content is SYNDICATABLE.” Take the number of purely blank stares, multiply it by the number of them that get up and head for the coffee table or the bathroom, and you have a direct index of that statement’s failure to convey even a lick of meaning in and of itself.
As lawyers, how often do we use terms in client conversations that wouldn’t pass this test?
Meet Me in NYC
I’m headed off to NYC for LegalTech New York. I’ll be around Sunday evening (1/29) through Wednesday afternoon (2/1). If you are New York, and would like to get together, I’d love to meet you/see you again. Don’t know if we’ll get a blogger dinner organized this year, but Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell are working on it.
Don't Advertise in the Lawyer Section of the YellowPages
Kevin Salwen of Worthwhile Magazine shares this advertising nugget:
What ads get your attention online? Probably not what you think. A new study of online advertising by behavioral marketing firm Tacoda shows that people tend to look at ads if they are not contextually connected to the rest of the information. In other words, if you want your pizza ad to stand out, put it into a technology story, not a food piece.
First exposures to ads for cars, computers and TV displayed out of context generated 17% more looks than when those ads were shown on pages where the content related to the ads, the research showed. And after the first exposure--when consumers are expected to tune out ads--out-of-context ads generated a stunning 54% more looks than in-context ones.
Still paying for that full page ad in the “lawyer” section of the yellowpages?
Get Coached Up!
If you want to make meaningful changes in the way you manage your employees, you have to check out my friend Rosa Say’s Managing with Aloha Jumpstart program.
Oh, and did I mention it’s free.
Will All Our Future Clients be Stupider?
Walter Koschnitzke points out a new study that should be scaring the heck out of all professional service providers:
According to a study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, more than half to students at four-year colleges — and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges — lack the literacy to handle real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers. (Yahoo story)
The study finds that students fail to lock in key skills — no matter their field of study. They cannot interpret an exercise and blood pressure table, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
If you don’t take this advice, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Write Your Firm Newsletter on a Postcard!
I came across Chuck Green’s Ideabook site yesterday, and once I found myself adding nearly every page of his to my daily links, I thought I’d devote an entry to this amazing resource. If you want to see how great design can improve business (and client) communication, you have to set aside some time to check out Chuck’s site. Just one great example: a postcard-sized newsletter. Freakin’ cool!
Trade Your Headache
Unless you are among the small percentage of hyper-motivated and totally focused people out there in the world, you know you have at least one “headache” sitting in a pile on your desk or on your to-do list. It may be that project you keep putting off, that client you hate dealing with, or that phone call you just don’t want to make. No matter what it is, imagine how happy you’d be tomorrow if it weren’t your responsibility any longer.
Well, odds are your co-workers have similar “headaches” they face every day too. Here is a way to cope:
Trade Your Headache. Every week (or month) get together with your co-workers and bring your number one headache with you. Identify it, and then trade it with one that someone else brought. Think of it like kind of a regular white elephant gift exchange. Just make sure the same headache doesn’t get traded over and over again.
I’m certain you’ll be happier, and more motivated, working to solve a different problem or complete a different task than the one that’s been dragging on you for so long. Let me know how it goes.
Technorati Tags: motivation, lifehacks, procrastination, white+elephant, headache
links for 2006-01-18
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Cool digital clock using Flickr images.
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Good list of sites with inexpensive and free images for use in presentations.