sâmbătă, 2 aprilie 2016

Seth's Blog : All the events you weren't there to control...



All the events you weren't there to control...

Yesterday, thousands of people got married. Just about every one of these weddings went beautifully. Amazingly, you weren't there, on-site, making sure everything was perfect.

Last week, a letter to investors went out from the CFO of a hot public company. It was well received. Yes, it's true, you didn't review it first, but it still worked.

And just the other day, someone was talking about the product you created, but she didn't ask you about it first. That's okay, because the conversation went fine.

When we're in the room, it's really difficult to sit back and let other people do their work, because we know we can make it better, we know the stakes are incredibly high, we know that we care more than anyone else. More often than not, we give in to temptation and wrest away control. And often, we make things better. In the short run.

Caring matters. Your contribution makes things better. But when the need for control starts to get in the way of your people doing their best work, caring about their craft and scaling their efforts, and when the need for control starts to make you crazy, it might be worth thinking about that wedding in Baton Rouge that went just fine without you.

       

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vineri, 1 aprilie 2016

Seth's Blog : The choke points



The choke points

You might not be reading this. Or the blog I sent out early today. And you might not be getting those other newsletters you subscribed to.

Google also automatically moves many Mailchimp newsletters to your promo folder in gmail. As well as airline alerts, school newsletters and more. Without asking you first. Plenty of babies in that bathwater. This error violates the do-not-harm principle... If people trust you to deliver their email, then deliver it.

And now they've chosen to go further, and put some of the blog posts you were waiting for in your spam folder, which is the deepest of black holes. No joke.

I hope you'll agree that my blog isn't spam.

The irony is not lost on me.

If this was just about my blog, it would be a petty rant by a long-time blogger. But of course, the land grab is a persistent erosion. Do we need spam filters? No doubt about it. Selfish marketers keep pushing the envelope. 

Google's spam filter is a revelation, it's free and it works, most of the time. The challenge they face, though, is when they start to ratchet up what they filter. The number of things you are counting on getting by email keeps going up, and we need to be able to count on this medium to keep us informed.

There have always been gatekeepers. Martha Stewart decides who gets into the magazine. Steve Case got to decide who got on the front page of AOL. Apple controls the app marketplace by controlling what gets featured in the app store. This is one way gatekeepers create value--the editorial and focus decisions complement the advertising and increase subscriptions. But it also makes it harder for new voices to be heard.

Modern organizations, like Facebook and Google, have set themselves apart as post-gatekeeper platforms, but of course, they're not, particularly Google. Google profits by putting its own pages higher than those of companies that aren't paying to be there. Google benefits when organizations need to buy ads in order to get through to people who might not see their message, even if they have permission.

If you're not paying, you and your attention are the product.

People who create content are spending more and more time figuring out how to alter their messages to get past the filters that are being erected between their readers and their creations. Which is a shame.

Yes, this is a rant. I'm also hoping you'll take a minute to groom your promo and spam filters for all the other stuff that's hidden there. And that you'll subscribe to your favorite blogs by RSS, because it's mostly uninterrupted by people who'd rather you didn't get what you were hoping for. Just you and the blogs you want to get.

My feed is here, and Feedly is easy and free.

/rant.

       

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joi, 31 martie 2016

Seth's Blog : Considering the nocebo



Considering the nocebo

The letter to the co-op board sounds likely enough. The tenant is up in arms because air fresheners and other common household odors are seeping into the writer's apartment, giving him severe migraines. What to do about this chemical onslaught?

There's no doubt that these odors are giving the letter writer a debilitating headache, but also little doubt that there isn't a likely double-blind, testable, organic chemistry cause to the headache only in this setting. 

The migraine in this case, like many things that bother us, is caused by a nocebo.

A nocebo is a placebo that makes things worse.

In this case, the lack of control over his home, the unwelcome and unasked for odors, are making him feel trapped, and thus annoyed, and angry, and so they lead to a headache. It's pretty clear to most of us that if that very same bundle of molecules wafted in the door when the clever and happy grandson came to visit, there would be no problem. 

Of course the nocebo is real. And eliminating it is a great way to improve your life or the lives of your customers.

The TSA intentionally brings a nocebo to the airport, stressing out innocent travelers. And schools know precisely how to raise the blood pressure of stressed out students. In many situations, loud noises, uncomfortable seats, moments of lost control... these create actual physical discomfort.

We can use the nocebo to give you a headache, a backache, or even a chronic degenerative disease...

But you don't remove the nocebo with medical tests. You remove it with a better story, with a situation that makes us feel powerful and in control, with a setting and a narrative that gives us agency and dignity.

       

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