Market Navigation, Inc.

Technorati: The most unresponsive company of 2009, so far - kdbm6q4y8x

George Silverman — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0000

kdbm6q4y8x

The above cryptic post has been up for a while. A word of explanation and a lesson to be learned:

I have been trying for a month to get this blog indexed by Technorati, the search engine that specializes in blogs. The procedure is pretty simple. When you give them your blog address — in this case http://mnav.com/blog — they give you a little piece of code that is 10 numbers and digits long, which you can see at the top of this post. You publish that on your website, which tells them that this is your site.

Well, that little piece of code has been sitting there for about a month. Technorati claims that it goes out and finds that code on your blog within about an hour. When I keep checking, I get various kinds of error messages which they ask you to report back to them. I've done that several times over the last month, receiving an automated response to my e-mail but never a reply or resolution.

So I went to their support forum. There are dozens upon dozens of complaints about the inability to claim blogs. Most of these are unresolved and unanswered. A wider Google search (what, do you think I'd use Technorati?) reveals widespread complaints about their unresponsiveness chronicled on dozens of websites.

Apparently, their unresponsiveness is both broad and deep, across many different issues, for a long period of time. These complaints stretch over the last couple of years. They are punctuated by occasional responses from Technorati claiming that they are rectifying one kind of technical problem or another, but never, apparently, resolving the issue.

Responsive, customer oriented companies actively monitor the web for these kinds of posts. They respond quickly to complaints, especially from authors and bloggers like me. Especially when the post might give voice to the many many other people out there who are also dissatisfied but not leaving complaints on their forum. let's see how long it takes them to spot this post and respond to me. Don't hold your breath.

I nominate them for Most Unresponsive Company of 2009.

Their slogan should be:

Technorati: Taking Web 2.0 to a new level of unresponsiveness

Oh, the lesson: You don't have to work hard at making people hopping mad. Just ignore them. It's easy.

Expert Blindness

George Silverman — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:23:36 +0000

Expert Blindness, and Knowledge Blindness, both refer to the things that people who are knowledgeable can’t see because they can’t experience what it’s like not to know: such as what words beginners don’t understand, distinctions that non-experts can’t discriminate and appreciate, and implications that are dependent on advanced knowledge. Experts know everything except what it's like to know nothing.

An example of knowledge blindness is the person who gave a friend of mine driving directions. “Drive down to the corner where the bank used to be, and make a right.”

In marketers, this is extremely prevalent in product descriptions. People do not realize that new customers do not understand even the most rudimentary terminology.

What are some of your favorite examples of Knowledge or Expert Blindness?

Gobbledygook EZification

George Silverman — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:56:16 +0000

(9/12/09) There is a wonderful story, with the title Goodbye, Gobbledygook, in today’s NY Times. It’s a perfect example of the kind of Decision EZification that I’ve been talking about for years:

It seems that computer makers are abandoning the complex “fact tags” they have always attached to computers.

As the Times put it (with an assist from my boldface:

Once cherished, the fact tag has turned into an object of scorn as PC makers finally reach a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.

“We have been stuck in 1995,” said Leslie Sobon, the vice president of product marketing at the chip maker Advanced Micro Devices. “We are basically the laggards.”

Over the last couple of years, the industry has made a slow lurch away from its engineering roots toward a more shopper-friendly strategy that recognizes that if you make your product simpler to understand, more people will buy it.

They are switching instead to what Intel calls “use model marketing.” They are now beginning to label computers according to their intended uses such as web surfing, gaming and entertainment, instead of their technical specifications.

AMD has gone from presenting 220 combinations of chips to See, Share, and Create Systems, and reduced its 40 page salesperson’s manual to two.

My comments:

Most ezification and simplification attempts are aimed at the product itself, usually called product “usability,” more broadly “the customer experience.”

What this article shows is that more attention needs to be paid to the decision process itself. This case illustrates the importance of focusing on the initial information gathering stage of the decision process. Most customers do not understand “DDR2 RAM, 5400 r.p.m. hard drives, Turion benchmark scores and the robust L2 cache sizes of Core 2 Duos. ” The people at the manufacturing and retail levels think, “What’s not to understand? This is important information that differentiates the products.” “Expert blindness” strikes again.

The store visit turns into an intimidating and humiliating experience. If you don’t make the information about your product easy to understand, your customer will be dead in the water. It won’t come up in market research unless it is specifically asked about because people are embarrassed.

When the customer goes, “Huh?” the young geek in the electronics store gets to feel superior. The customer is polite and scratches his/her head all the way to the Apple store, where they will be treated with respect.

The Decision Matrix

George Silverman — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:07:00 +0000

This page was printed incorrectly in George Silverman's Book, "Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing." Apparently, the errata sheet did not make it into all copies of the distributed book. It is printed correctly below.

The idea is to get your customers to the next stages of the decision process, using the messages below in the right order, from the right sources. So, if you are going after early adopters, read across the early adopter row and get people word of mouth in the order prescribed.

http://mnav.com/node/53

An amazing story

George Silverman — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:37:19 +0000

Here is an amazing story of good will, mutual admiration and good business sense.

It’s also on one of the best designed web sites I’ve ever seen. By “design,” I mean decision design, not decoration. Take a look at this page to see what I mean. It’s also for a product that I’ve been using from its inception -- one of the most elegant, simple, easy products I’ve ever seen: Things. A “Getting Things Done” (GTD) type To Do manager. I recommend it without reservation. You’ll get your life a lot more organized.

It’s only for the Mac. Another reason why there is almost no excuse to use Windows.

I wish them well.

The new site of George Silverman's Blog

George Silverman — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 20:32:06 +0000

kdbm6q4y8x

I’m in the process of moving my blog from TypePad to my home site, which is constructed with the Drupal Content Management system (CMS). It will allow considerably greater flexibility and aid in the creation of my “Live Books” concept. I’ll be able to post a blog post and have the post, or a longer version, automatically inserted into one of the books that are being written on this site. So, let’s say that I post something about a great word of mouth example. It will be displayed on the Blog page, inserted into the relevant chapter in the new edition of The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing book, and also appear with related postings, book pages, articles when its tag (for example “WOM example” is clicked.

How to Harness Word of Mouth

George Silverman — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:42:09 +0000

http://mnav.com/node/33

The Secrets of Word-of-mouth Marketing

George Silverman — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:46:36 +0000


This is a "Live Book" Update: I'm now working on a 2nd Edition of *"The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing."* My plan is to post it here and revise it publicly. You can make comments or ask questions. In the meantime, I think you'll find the following articles to be very informative. The next post will be the new table of contents, followed by each chapter of the 2001 Edition. As I revise it, you will be able to see the changes.

As the book is being posted, here are some articles that should give you some background:

How to Harness the Awesome Power of Word of Mouth.

Reprint from Direct Marketing Magazine

http://mnav.com/node/20