Owen BrunetteNew York, Management, Marketing, Consulting, Technology
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In a lecture by Professor Lord (Robert) May of Oxford he discusses the problems of co-operative association. How groups of people co-operate to manage shared resources and manage problems jointly. It offers some clues to the real challenges for unrelated groups managing common assets such as the environment, oil or water. The mp3 of the lecture can be found here.
Electronic news kiosk
The kind of project so many of us would love to get around to. Well, me at least.
It contains a Power Mac G3 which wirelessly receives news paper page images and runs a 3D display of them. It seems it would be very easy to do this with an Apple TV in HD. It has a built in screen saver that gracefully pulls photos from flickr and you could feed something suitable into the flickr account.
There are now several wi-fi digital picture frames from $150 to $170 on the market that would allow all kinds of kiosk options to be constructed in any container. Most of the frames seem to connect to a PC application over wi-fi rather than using RSS so far.
So what kind of a container would you put your kiosk display in?
I just read again David Meerman Scott’s free e-book on Viral marketing. This and similar descriptions of the marketing process give one an understanding of how a successful viral marketing campaign, or now social marketing campaign, can be created but we know that most of these campaigns fail. To be fair Scott makes this point. I was also at a live webcast by Mike Volpe of Hubspot where he stated that your staff should be so excited about their product that they can make a viral campaign work for any product. These are all worthwhile presentations but I am still a skeptic about viral marketing of a lot of product lines because it assumes that the purchasing decision makers are also so excited about the purchase that they are connecting with the network mavens. While this is true of Harry Potter fans is it true of electrical component purchasers? People read when they buy a car and even a car wax but not before they stop at a car wash or buy a chamois. People do refer to their networks but only for some unusual purchases. I am convinced that most products and services still need a blend of active outbound promotion as well as influencing the key communicators and their networks. With some products such as hubspot’s products this may be so far to one side that influencing bloggers is all that is needed. What I have no doubt about is that if you are in the words of Mike Volpe, able to identify something in your product which is “exceptional, cool or remarkable” in your business you should be taking your passion for it and sharing that as viral content with social networks.
Thinking about the very average business, such as the five dry cleaners within three blocks of my New York apartment it is clear that they need outbound marketing, printed door hangers, coat hangers and window offers as well as word of mouth and are unlikely to benefit from, let alone survive, by relying upon contacting nearby bloggers.
As a consultant I work almost entirely in large multi nationals. One can’t help noticing that while the majority of organizations are attempting to function effectively aligned with a consistent set of goals about a third of them are so confused by apparently dynamically changing remembered goals that projects are being churned more rapidly than any of their objectives are achieved.
After handling these issues for many years I have come to the conclusion that there are two significant factors. One is the corporation being isolated in a town where it is the only similar organization and as a result not getting enough cross pollination withideas and a resulting over-sized corporate ego. The second is more than four or five years of driving the bottom line primarily through controlling staffing costs. With minimized staffing costs and the accompanied reduction in interesting project opportunities there is an inevitable decline in the quality of staff remaining in the organization and ultimately being promoted. Once the organization is having to promote barely adequate people and is unable to attract from outside the organization the ability to ever make decisions consistently and attract new blood takes a fatal downturn.
Helping the managers define goals, roadmaps of projects and behave more effectively as well as attracting new blood at a senior level is the only way to resuscitate the patient but it is a painful and threatening proposition for the management in place.
Recently I was sitting at a snowbound Laguadia Airport in New York waiting for the runways to re-open. I had done my little planes, trains and automobiles routing having had the flight canceled, booked on the Acela high speed train and then had that canceled and gone to the airport to wait. I was at the Marine Air Terminal which is now used for the Delta Shuttle a 134 seater service using MD88s offering hourly routes to Washington and Boston.
The building is a grand old Art Deco building which appears to have been owned by Pan Am. I have always liked the spacious solid structure of the entrance hall and often still enter via it despite the more modern generic 70s building that now houses most of the services. Within the old building however are a lot of the bowels of the airport services. Offices for airline service companies and a small classic cafeteria.
On the walls are photos of old float or boat planes which use to use the waterfront of the marine air terminal. It appears that when the building was built it offered the sole scheduled route across the Atlantic in these large old float planes. I guess runways weren’t built for the size of plane necessary. The building is clearly just retained as a nod to history by what is now a bankrupt airline (Delta not just Pan Am) and it left me nostalgic for the past glories of air flight and wondering what price we should be putting on maintaining our reverence for such things. I would bitterly defend it but on the other hand we pay a high price for our nostalgia.
http://www.demko.com/deathcalculator.htm
Here’s a little calculator which tries to predict your life expectancy (Click the title above). Not so useful to plan the retirement savings you are going to need but interesting in that it points out some of the social factors that keep us all going. It’s an old survey so it doesn’t ask how many people’s blog diaries you read on a daily basis! Have a look you’ll understand what I mean.
Well it appears that the managing agent for the co-op where I live can’t accept electronic payment for the monthly maintenance. This illustrates why automation is going to take at least a generation to drastically change some jobs. Jobs where there isn’t the money for IT resources. I would be able to setup a regular monthly electronic ACH or Wire to the management company via a number of means which would reliably transfer the money same day or for credit tomorrow. However, what currently has to happen is that my bank prints the check (English: Cheque) and mails it to a PO Box out of town. I learn this from the woman who does the accounts at the managing agent who is paid to count the check slips and credit the appropriate accounts. The last thing of course she probably wants is for this process to go away. Things could get way past the tipping point of almost everybody automating the transfer with check printing from their bank’s web site and she would still be incented to manually credit the check slips.
Their bank has also sold them a locked box service. This is a service where you pay your bank, or at least their courier firm, to go to a PO Box actually at the post office and open it up, bring the checks back to the bank, deposit them and forward any slips off to the company collecting the money. In this case the co-op’s managing agent. This is a service used by many companies from utilities down to five person operations in order to ‘speed up’ the collection of their receivables.
As a result the bank is not about to just allow the company to conveniently list their received electronic payments online or any other means as they are able to charge for a manual process of collecting and clearing checks. So many of the advances that would apparently eliminate these manual jobs just don’t happen for want of somebody in a position to sell a service which educates customers (The average business) that their accounting process could be operated automatically with considerable labor savings, fewer errors and far faster service than the service their bank is currently selling them.
As usual the future arrives after a very long delay unless we can think of making money out of changing it…
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