This post clearly has the opportunity to be a whoa is me post, but I’ll try and not make it one of those.
So I’m officially immersed in the my spring speaking tour, 3 speaking gigs this week and at least another 12,000 air miles and additional 3 pitches before June 10 and various and sundry trips in between. I just received an email from a colleague informing me to have fun in Boston and I thought about it and I think folks who don’t travel much don’t necessarilly understand that travel isn’t fun.
The Essence of Business Travel
No matter what the location - Pheonix, Maui or Amsterdam it is still work! Typically you travel somewhere because you have stuff to do and places to be. You may be staying at the Pheonician, a four seasons or resort in some place like Banff Springs - you rarely get to enjoy the ammendities. OK sometimes you DO get to golf…
Ultimately I try my best to weave in friends and family in as possible, but it is normally a 1 out 10 type of thing since the paid gig comes first - priorities. You have to make sure your up for a keynote, customer meeting or prospect meeting at 9, so you can’t do bars with your fraternity brother until 3 AM. So while I appreciate Ed’s well wishing and fun recommendation, it is gonna be difficult.
But wait, I should have a good meal at least right?
Good Food Must Mean Good Times, Right?
A man’s got to eat and not every meal on the road is good, there is a whole lot of airport McDonald’s, more than I like. That being said, admittedly I have had some GREAT meals on the road, both on and off the expense account, but that doesn’t mean that it was fun. The general rule is that the better the meal, the more likely it is NOT on an expense account, since I’m a foodie I try and get the best local food possible. I acutally spend a good deal of time investigating place to eat, since this is typically the only thing which you can ultimately count on when on the road, since a man’s got to eat.
At the end of the day, no matter what the restaurant is - it is business if you aren’t able to eat alone. You’ll typically have customers, partners or staff members and you still have to talk supply chain or technology all night long, remain sober and not unveil your real interests. I gotta be work Jon who likes wine, boring stories and is just facinated by your latest project which has no relationship to the deal I’m trying to position or close.
Not that I’ve done the math, but I think there is actually an inverse relationship between food quality and fun on the road. The better the restaurant the more mundane the discussion - karma punishment. Too often you are forced to fain interest in stories about a kid’s tee ball league, football or the latest cool thing they did with a Seibel integration.
So while you may get good food, you’re ultimately stymied by the atmosphere. How many people who you work with or who you are selling to are people you would actually hang out with?
In closing, I do have to say the event I’m at and speaking to are some of the most interesting folks I know. The people that participate at NEECOM are as innovative as anyone in the industry and significantly improve my understanding of the stuff I do every time I attend. I am ultiamtely blessed by the opportunities I have and the people I meet, so Ed - I guess I will have fun in Boston since I will learn from the folks I see.
Please Note: Feel free to forward this to your spouse if you have the same type of discussions I have when I say good night as I leave Morton’s. If you have these discussion you know what I mean and you need to forward this as independent validation of life on the road.
Since there are a considerably more readers these days, I thought I would piece together a thanks for stopping by piece, but got distracted with this email. I got a slideshare notification on someone putting a pitch in a group, so I thought I would I’ll look at the preso again. Glad I did - not only did I get to reminisce on the salad days when I had more time. I also got to find out I have a spelling error.
So now I have a topic of sorts - bad spelling and slides. At the end of the day - I haven’t been able to fix the error so it will live on the interweb forever. While I will admit an error, I’m not going to let you know exactly where the error is. C’mon - transparency can only go so far. (Hint: I before E, except in words like neighbor or their.)
On a technology note, I think slideshare is one of the more interesting widgets available for blogs. It offers something more visual for my blog and it is within my skill set.
So can look for the error or look at some other folks slides on slideshare.net if you haven’t used slideshare before.
That’s right - honesty is the best policy. So in full disclose this is Just a traffic update, yesterday was the worst traffic this blog has had since I’ve been paying attention! (Nov. 07). That’s right, celebrate the little things, because it appears y’all are transitioning to rss readers. Thanks team!
Maybe it is that no one is searching of relevant terms for what I’m writing about, so let’s highlight the top 10 search items, since we have analytics.
bob’s ichthyosaur - A Great book and apparently the top search term.
what is scientific management - High school students everywhere are googling.
mbifm - A made up acronynm, which apparently means Member of the British Institute of Facilities Management.
calculating gross margin
danielle pribbernow - Chick on the Check out blog, wonder if it’s just her searching on herself? Way too much traffic for a Wal-Mart employee. No I mean WAY TOO MUCH.
dijouri - I made up this name for my second son, 12 years old. I think this IS my son searching on himself or people trying to figure out if I made up his name or people looking for movie made in 2003.
things i am thankful - This is encouraging.
afro - Right on.
giggly quotes - Who searches on giggly quotes?
So if you don’t find anything interesting above interesting, perhaps one of the top 10 “trafficked” pieces, mainly produced via keywords - which you will notice via the relationships between keywords above and titles below. That being said,I REALLY am partial to the Stuck in the Middle series — and — I like the Mosaic piece the most, mainly because it plays well in my head. Yup, I’ve sucked you into a replay post, but a replay of posts everyone else seemed to like too, or at least this is 10 most visited posts here.
Satmetrix has some interesting research, as noted in the release excerpt:
Applying this framework to the computer hardware industry, Nowinski and his team discovered that each Promoter was worth approximately $2,634. Promoters spend $203 more than the industry average of $1,615 and account for roughly one-half of a new customer acquired through positive word-of-mouth. In comparison, each Detractor can cost a business 0.84 percent of a new customer through negative word-of-mouth. The lost business associated with their negative referrals subtracts nearly the entire value of their purchase behavior, leaving a total customer worth for Detractors of just over $100, accounting for $2,500 less than Promoters.
The study examined customers in the computer hardware industry and found, using the Net Promoter methodology, that “promoters” would spend about $1,818 of their own money and refer an additional $816 of revenue from friends and associates.
“While Detractors spend lags the average customer by only $158, their negative word-of-mouth behavior represents a significant hidden cost and net drain on future revenue,” said Nowinski.
Interesting stuff, wonder what the general CPG impact is?
A little too much time on my hands and just a little bit of data, armed with just that I went to thinking. I was able to get a front row seat for influence in action yesterday by random happenstance and journaled it. Networks are interesting things, Andrew Baron is selling his twitter account. Could be a new market and what is the value?
So I continue to get amazed with the valuable information I receive from stumbling around folks links, browsing my network on Del.icio.us or just digging around. But then I realized that a great deal of folks don’t actually share their links, they more so browse. Why is that? Just in case you get the urge to share, he’s a reminder of why you have an account on mixx or propeller.
Thanks for the video Lee! Odd question have we all replaced social bookmarking with Twitter?
I haven’t spent much time doing pure play product management posting in a while, so I thought I would today. I’ve been doing a bunch of leisure surfing and looking at a bunch of greatstuffonline and challenged myself to think about what it takes to transition a technology into a product. While I didn’t come to a great deal of conclusions, I think I’ve come up with some reasonable litmus tests for consideration:
Does your product have more defects than enhancement requests?
Can the users manage their own product experience?
