The headline read “Help save the environment. Stop filling our land fill with grocery store bags.” Then came some copy about how grocery store bags are not reused because they were so weak so most end up in the trash, and then the call to action was to buy a nice cloth reusable shopping bag.  All in all for a homegrown flyer it wasn’t bad. I’ve seen some “professional” copywriters do worse. The only problem with the message was the media.

I got this flyer from my front door. So did all of my neighbors. There are probably at least 350 houses in my subdivision, and they all got the flyer on their doors. I can’t help but think that all those flyer went in the trash. The flyer about reducing trash and being responsible… went in the trash… about 350 of them. That message, while unintended, was loud and clear to me. 

It is entirely possible to be both a designer and an artist. Personally I believe there is a difference and it boils down purpose. Artists create for the purpose of expression and emotion. They create new and different ways to express an idea. A designer uses preexisting conventions and norms to convey an idea. 

On the web a designer will be the one to decided to use tabs as the main navigation, with secondary navigation down the left side and auxiliary content in the right side bar. An artist might decide to make the navigation the limbs of a tree that comes in from the bottom right corner of the page and the secondary navigation the leaves of that branch. The artist is trying to convey and idea using the tree, where the designer is using the convention of tabs so web users will already know what to do. 

Innovation belongs to the artists. Usability belongs to the designers. A bit of both makes for good web people. 

“Use the right tool for the job.” It’s impossible to know everything about anything. There are so many hours in a day, and most of it is devoted to production. We all have to get paid. In order to cope, specialization happens. People and even companies start to play in a niche in order to be able to know as much as they can about a specific topic, and become an expert in it. After all, that’s what clients want, experts. This knowledge leads to bias. If you know more about hammers, then every problem looks like a nail. This obviously is where the second saying comes from. 

“When all your problems look like nails, all your solutions look like hammers”. This saying is usually used as a warning to keep an open mind. It works along the lines of  “If you want a different result, you can’t do the same thing.” This makes sense, but if you look at the other side of the coin, you will also notice its implication for professional service providers.

 If you need to increase your bottom line, you have two basic options: 1.) Reduce Expenses or 2.) Increase Revenue. Either of these will work (in our hypothetical perfect world). If you ask an efficiency expert, he will tell you that reducing expenses is the best way to go. If you ask a marketer, he will tell you that Increasing Revenue is the better option. In both cases, your asking the hammers to look at your problem and they see nails. This leads us to two points.

1.) The nail is not the same.  The nail in our metaphor is dependant of the perspective of the person looking at. Just like “Don’t ask your lawyer health advice, ask your Doctor”. Your doctor sees nails based on his experience, and so does the lawyer. If you get into an auto accident and it causes damage to your health, you will need both the Doctor and the Lawyer to pound the nails that they are good at.

2.) Hammers will always see nails, and sell hammering services. This leaves a lot of stress on the client, because most often, they will not hire out a solution that can solve by themselves. They look for experts to help out. Each expert has their own hammer and their own view of nails. If you need someone to put in screws, a hammer will never sell you that. They are more likely to convince you that screws could work, but so will nails. Then they will try and sell the hammer instead of the screwdriver. Not because they are malicious, they might be right, nails will work just as well as screws, but they have experience in seeing that nails work, more than they do with screws. They can’t know it all and they are experts with nails, so a hammer is what you need.

The real lynch pin of all this is that the above statements work well for strategy, less well for tactics, and almost irrelevant for execution or production. Lets look at an example.Imaging that you are the in charge of a new technology startup. The product is a solid first version and can be purchased over the internet as a digital download. It’s time to sell some products. You need to market your product and start to make some sales. Two marketing firms with two different core ideas present their plans to you. The first group lays out a plan to build your brand awareness with the largest group of people in your potential target market. The plan includes direct response including direct mail and email, print ads in trade magazines, digital advertising and a website that shows all the features and benefits. The entire campaign is directed to the person most often responsible for purchasing, the purchasing managers of companies. For this example you are buying hammers for nails.

The second marketing group comes in and suggests aiming the campaign at early adopters to grow the user base of the product. The idea is that while purchasing managers do purchase the products; it is the users that will influence the purchasing manger to pick a certain product. The best way to get exposure to a new technology is to go after the smaller market segment of early adopters, because the rest of the main stream will be to opposed to new technology until they hear a buzz about it. To grow the buzz they will target the early adopters. Their plan includes blogger outreach programs, conversational marketing in tech communities, participation in relevant trade shows and un-conferences and a website that is built for community interactions. For this example you are buying screwdrivers for screws.

To choose between the two you have to figure out if you need hammers or screwdrivers. Are the problems nails or screws? This is a very important question at the strategy level. Do you go after purchasing managers or early adopters?  When we apply the questions further down, it makes less of a difference. 

If we ignore the strategy, and start to apply the question to the tactics, it makes less of an impact. Is it better to do a blogger outreach program or print ads in a trade magazine? In theory you can do a blogger outreach program to reach the purchasing managers, and you can probably use a print ad to reach some early adopters. The effectiveness may vary so it still matters somewhat, but you can impact both the nails and the screws with the tactics.

Now lets take our example down to the execution or production level. In the first strategy, we need to build a website that shows features and benefits. In the second strategy we need build a website with community features. On a tactical level, we could build a site that does both, so the questions isn’t very important, but from a production standpoint, does it matter what language the site is built in? Lets say that the first marketing group that is selling hammers to pound nails has built a specialty in Microsoft’s .NET environment, and they build dynamic websites using the language C# (c-sharp).  The second group that is selling screwdrivers for screws uses open-source technology, and builds their dynamic websites using the language PHP (hypertext pre-processor).  The question becomes, does it matter what the website is written in?

The answer is yes and no. In one way, the question is irrelevant. You can build a site that shows features and benefits in either language. You can also build a site that has community features in either language. Yes there are differences, but it can, and has been done both ways, and they both work. In comparison to the whether the strategy is the right tool is infinitely more important than this production question.  For this reason, I say that the question is irrelevant. That is the “no” part of the answer; here comes the “yes”. 

Questions of execution are not usually a zero sum proposition. It is rare that there is one “right” way and every other way is wrong. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. The real point is that due to the specialization of talent and ability each person or firm will be better at a few ways of doing something, and less good at other perfectly acceptable ways of doing things. Most often, it’s better to the let the people responsible for execution or production to do it “their” way. They will be better and more proficient at it, and because of that it will make a difference. If your professional service team prefers hammers to screwdrivers, let them drive nails. At the end of the day, what you really want is two pieces of wood joined together, whether it was done with nails or screws.

The long and the short of it this, pay attention to the decisions that matter, and don’t make decisions based the lower level pieces. You wouldn’t make the decision on what advertising agency to use based on their copywriters use of the word “pleased” instead of “happy”.  You make the decision based on the brand strategy, and the copywriter’s ability to use the right “voice”. Make the decision based on the big picture, and let the people who make the product worry about the production.

The biggest reason for not being able to use most of the audio this year is because most of the presentation was based on the coding of website and web applications. Most of the attendees were guru’s in python (a web coding language) using zope or django. Soon I will get up the one presentation that could be (mostly) understood without the visuals up in the podcast feed (there are some charts that would be helpful, but the premise is understandable). By the way, that presentation is from Kevin Silver.

My overall take of Barcamp is not that is was bad, but that last years was better for a few reasons. The first is just due to the fact that there were a few more people there. This point is dwarfed by the next, which is that the diversity of topics last year was far greater. We had designers, front end coders, back end coders, and some that don’t fit into those categories at all, but gave really presentations on web related topics (i.e. taxonomy, usability and disability accessibility). I hope that next time the community in Albuquerque will come through and offer a greater scope of topics from a larger pool of talent.

All this is well and good, but it does seem to raise one problem. We know that people are motivated by WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). You can’t motivate someone to care about something they just don’t care about. To solve this problem it has become common practice to use a bonus or reward system tied to a set of metrics. “If you can bring up production levels 10% by the end of the quarter, you will get a $500 bonus.” On the surface this tactic sounds good. It allows us to help motivate our employees to do better because if they do, they get a reward. It’s the carrot and the stick at work. Do good, get a carrot, do bad, get the stick!!! There are two evident problems with the carrot and the stick as we know it.

1.) It doesn’t matter what you measure, the better you get at something, the harder it is to get better. Lets say that you are measuring production of a product. You find out that you are running at about 20% of what you could be running at. You set up a system of measurement, create a reward structure, train and educate your workforce about the system and then get to work. In the first quarter, you get an increase to 30%. Everyone gets bonuses and everyone is happy. The next quarter you get to 50%. More bonuses are handed out and life is good. Then you go on to get 60%, 65% and then 70%. Then all of sudden your increases are now lucky to grow at 1 or 2%, if they grow at all. What Happened???

There is a certain amount of energy that takes place maintaining a position. Its a lot more work to stay at 70% than it did at 20%. This is predictable and can be planned for, but more often that not when the numbers stop growing at a rapid pace, many people get complacent again as they don’t seem to be making as much of an impact. It hard to get the troops worked up over 1%. How much of a bonus can you get for that extra 1%? Is the work required to maintain your position PLUS the amount of work to get even better worth that 1% bonus? This brings us to point number 2.

2.) The carrot and the stick deal with very shallow motivational tactics. Don’t get me wrong. Money isn’t everything, but stop paying your employee’s and see how many show up to volunteer. The problem is that the prospect of more money is a superficial motivator. Many people want to do a great job. Given the choice between work that is mediocre (or working for a company that is) and working for an industry leader, or at least a strong competitor at the head of the market, almost everyone wants the latter. It is also apparent that most people understand that good work done smartly is the key to a great company. The carrot and the stick relies too much on such a shallow premise that it can actually work to lower motivation.

There is a part in most of us that wants to succeed, and have a part on the winning team. The sense of satisfaction that comes from knowing we did important work for a winning team feels better to us than the satisfaction we get from an extra $50. By focusing on the money (the carrot) we degrade the mission to one of greed, and most people do not want to be seen as greedy, or to be thought of as someone who can be bought. The metrics we use and the processes that surround them should be used and presented as tools given to a skilled and valuable worker. They should not be presented as a “program” or “an initiative”. Rewards should still be given, but they should be done as a thank you in the background, and not the focus of a project. Let the business purpose stand out and be the purpose, not the prospect of a bonus. Let your employees have a deeper since of purpose by completing identified key objectives instead of chasing a carrot.

It is no coincidence that my whole family uses the same agent. They know who we are. They know all about us and our policies. They know the name of my kids and how old they are. After my son totaled his car a few days ago, the local office called to make sure he was OK after getting word that it happened from the regional office. The bottom line is that they care about us.

I like a lot of the insurance company ads that are running right now. I love the Geiko gecko and the cave man. I also think the All State campaign is right on, but at the end of the day I won’t even consider getting a quote from anyone else. Even if I am paying more than I would from another company (which I don’t think I do) I wouldn’t switch. The bottom line is that if you want your customer to be loyal, be loyal to them first. It worked for State Farm, from my family alone they are insuring 2 trucks, 3 SUV’s, 2 cars, 3 motorcycles and 5 life insurance policies.

Again this point is relevant to a lot of music styles, not just rap, but let me be wildly stereotypical to make a point. While we project that pop music is predominantly about love and relationships, we also suggest that another popular content for song is all about selfishness. We will use Rap music as an example.

Many Rap songs are based on attitude and personal gratification. One of the most popular of them all is the subject of how much money, wealth, cars, toys and women a particular artist or group has. This, like our pop music example is an insight into human behavior.

While the two topics may seem contradictory, they are not so different. On one hand we have the pop music’s idea of love, and on the other hand we have raps view of collecting women. Could we find any two things more opposite? Actually, there not so far apart. How are they related? They are both in reference to relationships.

There is no point expressing an accumulation of things (money, cars, etc…) unless it’s used as a comparison to another. This is relation. “I have more women that want me than you” is a relational comparison. The argument doesn’t work unless there is another side to compare it with.

This suggests a few things. One is that differentiation is critical to a brand. If you don’t have a strong and meaningful way of comparing yourself or your brand to your competition, then how are your fans (customers) supposed to know that being on your side is the right side to be on? The second thing to consider is whether your differentiation and brand image is built using the right “metrics”. To be successful in rap music you have to have the most money, cars, houses, toys and women wishing to be with you. If you decided to become a rap artist and rap about how you have more life insurance and a better retirement package, you probably won’t get too far. You would be using the wrong metrics. What metrics do your customers use to rate brands? What metrics is your brand built on? Are they the same or related?