Business Practice

I hate “quality” “products” (and so should you)

"Quality" is so abstract, ill-defined, and over-used, it doesn't mean anything. "Product" is about as descriptive as "widget." So I'm banning both from my office.

November 21st, 2011 by Andrew Swenson
Quality Cleaners Drive-In sign

image credit: debaird™ on Flickr (see below for link)

There are plenty of cliché business words and phrases I hate (“optimize,” “low-hanging fruit,” “web 2.0,” “leverage,” and so on), but none as much as two words I’ve recently decided to ban from my vocabulary and my office: 1) “Quality” and 2) “Product”.

Why I hate “quality”

I owe my contempt for “quality” to Dr. Brian Till (author of The Truth About Creating Brands People Love). During a marketing and branding seminar I took with him, Till refused to accept “quality” as a satisfactory position description or brand equity.

His point: you can always be more specific.

Marketing

We’re not all marketers now

It's not marketing that needs to be more pervasive in organizations. It's people who care about customers.

July 16th, 2011 by Andrew Swenson

image credit LongitudeLatitude on Flickr

Perhaps I’m just piddling in semantics, but it really bothers me when the “marketing” term is applied to any and every customer-facing activity. Lately it seems that anyone with a Twitter account is considered “doing marketing.”

The McKinsey Quarterly, published by the international management consultancy McKinsey & Company, is the latest to elevate the claim that “we’re all marketers now” with an article of the same name.  In fact, authors Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill make some relatively lofty proclamations (emphasis original):

Straight-up Snark

What’s Davos done for you lately?

The efficient market hypothesis isn't so efficient and the rich are getting richer.
Now what?

February 1st, 2011 by Andrew Swenson
William H. Gates

image credit: World Economic Forum / photo by Moritz Hager

Nothing.

Davos has done nothing for you lately. Unless, of course, you’re one of the global elite who managed to snag an invite.

This assertion should be met with fierce resistance from the political right, especially given their penchant for the liberal economic model (in classic sense) formed most recently by Ronald Reagan. After all, it’s this approach that suggests wealth will trickle down from those Davos-going plutocrats (from Francis Fukuyama’s excellent essay in The American Interest):

Business Practice

War, Meaning, and the Future of Social Business

January 11th, 2011 by Andrew Swenson

image credit: The U.S. Army

Global capitalism in the last century has been a conquest. “It’s a dog eat dog world,” we say without much thought. Business is war. Sure the battlefields have changed, as Mark Shaefer explains, but it’s still the same fight—”trying to sell more to more people for more money more often.”

But just over a decade into the twenty-first century, are we losing the fight?

A decade with no wage growth, with return on assets of publicly traded American companies approaching zero in the next ten years, and with public sector workers railing in the face of service cuts and tax hikes. Something’s got to change.

Marketing

When marketing (and Santa) isn’t enough

December 21st, 2010 by Andrew Swenson
Andrew and Santa

yes, I'm really sitting on his lap. yes, it was a little awkward.

While I was traveling home last weekend from Dallas, a few artificially bubbly college kids in festive hats asked if I wanted to take a survey. In exchange for my trouble, I’d get my photo taken with Santa and $20 off my next flight.

You know how that ended.

I quickly found out that Southwest Airlines and Microsoft had teamed up to offer “Holiday Photos on the Fly,” a promotion mainly for Windows 7. The sales pitch came in when I watched one of Santa’s elves take my photo “to the Cloud” for editing with Windows Live.

Business Practice

Business and WikiLeaks: There’s nothing to fear

December 21st, 2010 by Andrew Swenson

I normally love the Economist, but every once and a while the mag gets it slightly wrong. So it was for a brief article regarding WikiLeaks in the December 11th edition that told us to “Be Afraid” as we face a world where our corporate secrets are increasingly unsafe.

It’s not that the reporting was bad, that was right on (albiet painfully obvious):

The State Department has learned what the music and film industries learned long ago: that digital files are easy to copy and distribute, says Bruce Schneier, a security expert. Companies are about to make that discovery, too. There will be more leaks, and they will be embarrassing.

Life

An Open Christmas Letter

December 12th, 2010 by Andrew Swenson
Happy Xmas

image credit: scottfeldstein

Family, Friends, Followers, and those I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting:

Happy Xmas.

So this is Christmas / And what have you done? / Another year over / And a new one just begun

It’s strange to me how Lennon and Ono’s protest is now a Christmas standard, covered by everyone from The Fray to Diana Ross. The words flow out easy for me, but the meaning has eroded a bit, worn by familiarity.

I guess in some ways Christmas feels worn too.

Marketing

What Is A Facebook Impression Worth?

December 2nd, 2010 by Andrew Swenson

Consider this from Nes Desmond recently posted on Business Insider:

What is the value of a Facebook impression? Consider pricing today for products like e-mail and online advertising. […]

We think the Facebook impressions and interactions are worth more than e-mail cpms and less than clicks in a sponsored link. That’s a big spread, and there is plenty of room to build a great business there.

The article itself attempts to determine the value of sponsored Facebook posts on a Facebook fan page like GoFishn, certainly valuable if you’re selling ads on your Facebook wall, but a venture that’s completely worthless for the rest of us.

Business Practice

Process won’t solve ambiguous problems

November 9th, 2010 by Andrew Swenson
wrecked Model-T by dok1

image credit: dok1

Ever since Henry Ford gave us the assembly line, the business community has been addicted to process. Now after more than 100 years of shooting it up, it’s hard for us to fathom controlling our businesses in any other way than through process.

Even some social business leaders have argued for the use of process to introduce social tools in to the enterprise. As Michael Idinopulos, VP of Socialtext writes:

Process, rather than culture, is increasingly seen as the key enabler of social software in the enterprise. Rather than wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth about how to change organizational culture, we’re looking at how to insert social tools into the existing business process.

Business Practice

On leadership and social business

November 2nd, 2010 by Andrew Swenson

We’ve been talking about how community management is as much of an internal process as it is external for a while now, but I was glad to see some affirmation of our argument from Quy Huy and Andrew Shipilov on the Harvard Business Review blog yesterday:

Firms that lack leaders with social media skills are often tempted to outsource community management to outsiders, such as web development firms or advertising agencies. Unfortunately, this increases the risk of failure. The problem is that when community development is outsourced, the organization doesn’t learn and people inside communicate like they always did, even though the use of social media might have speeded up internal communication and flattened the hierarchies. As a result, the company is often very different from the face it portrays online, which almost always gets discovered.