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Using Twitter as a research tool! Follow me…

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What a great idea! Twitter is a little one-to-many text messaging tool. I can send out a text message to Twitter, and everyone who has elected to “follow” me gets the message. The intent of Twitter is that you send out a message answering the question, “what are you doing right now?”

Initially, it was fun. I followed some friends from college and this oh-so-mundane peek into the trivia of their lives sparked several impromptu phone conversations (“Waiting in line and can’t decide which movie to see? I’ll call him and suggest something!”) We’ve reconnected and it’s been wonderful.

Grammar Girl has a gazillion followers. She uses her Twitter friends as a resource for examples, research, etc. She sends out occasional “here’s what I’m doing” tweets, and then she sends out, “Has anyone every been confused by a sign that used quote marks?” and voila–she has a dozen examples for her book.

Since I’m starting on the Get-it-Done Guy book, I’ve decided to start Twittering as a research and outreach tool. Furthermore, I’ll be creating a new BLOG where I post ideas, sample chapters, and questions for my community to share ideas with me.

I’d love to invite you to be part of my Twitter group. Simple text “follow GetItDoneGuy” to 40404, or go to my Twitter page and follow me. I’ll send along my BLOG URL once I have it, as well. We’ll see how this works. It could make collaborative book writing a great way to synthesize, craft, and polish ideas!

Difficult divorce makes reconcilitation unlikely…in business

I upgraded to a LinkedIn premium membership last year when I wanted to use it to make a couple of introductions. It was interesting, but hasn’t become a staple of my networking strategy. After paying $240 over a year, it seemed prudent to downgrade back to a free account.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn provides several automated ways to upgrade, but no obvious way to downgrade. They seem to believe that no one would ever want to leave the fold (unrealistically absurd). Or perhaps they actually think that by making it hard to downgrade, people won’t.

To some degree, it worked. They made $240 from me that they might not have made had I had an easy way to downgrade before today. But now I’ve wasted a lot of time discovering that the only way to downgrade is to contract Customer Service through a web form. The message has been sent, and no response yet received…

What are they thinking? I wanted to downgrade because the membership hasn’t served me well. My feelings about LinkedIn were neutral to positive. Now, they’re negative. Really negative. LinkedIn has gone from “not getting much value from it” to “actively stealing my money.”

Will I return in the future? Probably not. This has left a bad taste in my mouth.

What could they do instead? Make unsubscribing easy. And give people a 3 or 4 question, super-fast-to-answer (radio buttons?) survey to find out why people defect. They will leave with a memory of begin supported and helped and might give useful info for improving the service.

When your customers leave, make it easy. Help them out the door. And as they leave, ask where they’re going, so you can call a cab. And once they’re happily on the way, use that information to find out how you can meet their needs better next time, so customers are leaving your competitor and flocking to you.

Chaos and celebration – Book deal!

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Hey! Can only type for a minute. Very exciting stuff happening. I’ve closed a book deal for a book based on the Get-it-Done Guy podcast. Starting to write next week! This week was too exciting. Burst hot water heater. Had to have the whole thing ripped out and replaced. Back went out, couldn’t walk. Car died. Yada yada yada. It’s a testimony to all the work I’ve been doing on myself that my main reaction was amusement as all my best-laid plans were washed into a maelstrom of plumbers and the like.

The time commitment to keep up a high-quality podcast (Get-it-Done Guy) and write a book is huge. I’m still working out exactly how I’m going to keep this BLOG going in a meaningful way. There’s only so much content I can generate per week before my brain explodes. (And remember that currently, all of this content is free. My actual income comes from coaching, so I still need time to run the darned business.)

We’ll see how it goes.

Cheerio!

Update your user experience…or die!

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Your survival could depend on it!

Are you up to date with your user experience? I have been coveting my friend’s iPhone. It is true I have both a Palm Pilot and a Blackberry but the iPhone is getting more and more attractive. Not just because it has got a nice user interface, the reason is deeper.

I have a Macintosh. Palm made $1.6 billion dollars in 2006 but they haven’t updated their Macintosh software in several years, maybe even as much as a decade. The software is clunky, hard to use and it doesn’t integrate with Apple’s synchronization system, which lets everything else synchronize beautifully with the address book and the calendar.

Blackberry paid $450 million dollars to quit a patent suit early and resolve it so they could stay in business, and their software doesn’t properly handle certain types of calendar attachments. Their browser is poor and they don’t handle a type of e-mail accounts called IMAP, which let people have their mail on a central server and access it from many places.

Oh! And by the way and by the way, they have never bothered to come up with a way to synchronize with a Macintosh. From the user’s point of view that makes this products fairly difficult to use on the Mac without third party software and even with the third party software it is usually not as good and has bugs etc. etc.

But think about it for a minute: 1.6 billion dollars and Palm can’t be bothered to develop an updated version of 10-year old software? Hello! Blackberry 450 million dollars to settle a suit? Where is the $10 million dollars that they could use to make the Blackberry compatible with every existing calendar system, contact management system and sales management system in the world. They haven’t bothered.

I donâ’t know why they haven’t bothered but it doesn’t really matter because there is something out that there will work for me and that’s called an iPhone.

Palm is reported to be looking for a suitor because sales are down and they just don’t know what to do. Palm– update your system! Blackberry, I don’t know. They think the iPhones are a threat and until Blackberry realizes that people aren’t just buying a slick little package; they also wanted to work with their computer, well they are going to lose people to the iPhone as well.

One final example: I recently changed insurance companies and my new insurance company has no autopay option for my premiums. In the year 2008? Excuse me? It hasn’t occurred to them that the user experience for virtually every type of vendor (particularly one with recurring payments) now includes the ability to pay automatically either by credit card or by bank debit. Now it’s true in the short term that’s not going to make a difference. But it’s remarkable because they are the only bill in my entire life that has to be written out by hand every month.

If they are falling behind on that, what else are they falling behind on? So think about your product. Have you tried your competitor’s products lately? Have you noticed if sales are falling, where are people going instead of your product? When you use and evaluate the competitors, look at the whole experience and what you will find is that there are very compelling experiences out there, some of which may not be yours.

Leap on them, surpass them, develop your own experience, put some money into what it will take to make your product fun, happy, easy, simple and streamline to use and you just might find that you will be able to stay ahead of the competition instead of going to them asking them to buy you.

Once again, we penalize people who make smart money decisions

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It’s amazing. I always found it odd when applying for a mortgage that banks considered income, but not asset base. If I have a bunch of money and invest in an investment that’s growing in value by 33% per year but not throwing off income, they won’t consider that in deciding to grant a mortgage. But if I put the same money in the same investment that throws off taxable income every year, it reduces my effective return by more than a third (since my combined tax brackets are more than 33%).

Let’s review: Person A invests and is making 33% on their money yearly. Person B invests and is making 20% on their money. Yet banks consider person B, who made the stupider financial decision, to be a credit risk.

Not to be outdone, the State of Massachusetts is doing this now, too, with Romney’s mandatory Health Insurance law. (He claims to be business savvy, but if this is an example of his overwhelming business sense, I’m missing it.)

First, let’s look at the policies: the quoted premiums for a $2,000-deductible policy are $350/month ($4,200 per year). A $3,000 deductible policy is $300/month ($3,600 per year). So here’s the choice: I can pay a guaranteed extra $600 yearly for the $2K deductible, or I can risk that I’ll need more than $2,000 worth of medical help and if my bill makes it as high as $3,000, I might pay out an extra $1,000 under the higher-deductible plan. P.S. I haven’t even visited a doctor in five years.

So: guaranteed pay $600/year or take a risk of maybe paying $1,000/year? To me, the choice is obvious. Take the maybe $1,000, since I certainly won’t need $3k of medical coverage every year, and the extra $600 in premiums will be a guaranteed yearly payout.

But the wonderful MBA-inspired law mandates the $2,000 policy. So I’m stuck paying for this silly policy that’s a bad financial decision.

If you believe people should simply be required to buy their own insurance, Gosh darn it, let them buy the insurance that makes sense.

If you believe that we should have a national insurance program, Gosh darn it, do that.

But isn’t it absurd to say, “Gee, people aren’t buying insurance because they can’t afford it, so let’s just mandate it. And while we’re at it, let’s mandate a financially crappy requirement for the people who actually have some financial literacy.”

Romney, hats off to you. You made a third of a billion dollars writing checks to buy other people’s companies while they did the work to make them profitable (yes, yes, picking up a pen is hard work when you don’t have someone to sign for you, but we sympathize). Oh, right, you also laid people off to get those companies to profitability.

Of course, it made good practice for your time as Governor. You ran on a business development platform, and we lost 126,000 jobs during your tenure as Governor–more than any other state in the union. Perhaps you thought that eliminating residents of Massachusetts would bring economic health, the way layoffs let you quickly flip a company at a profit in Private Equity? Oh, right, then let’s throw in the health care plan that forces me to siphon off my money to private insurers by buying an inferior policy.

Hats off to you. I hope you run again in 2012. You’ll make a fine President. You can be the second in our new tradition of Presidential Harvard MBAs who have so keenly demonstrated their skill and acumen at making themselves rich, while gutting the organizations they run.

Happy or Successful? Which will you pursue?

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On a recent birthday I was looking back at the strategies that my friends from high school and college and I employed to get where we are today. We assumed that success would bring happiness, and as far I can tell, we were wrong. It turns out that the two are separate, even though marketers would have us believe otherwise…

Click here to read the entire Happy or Successful podcast as an article.