Dan’s Wall of the Insanely Useful

I’m fascinated with how the mindset of a customer works. Obviously if you’re selling something you have to answer the above question effectively to get the sale. A lot of this I guess is Business 101 stuff, but for me I think the number one key to selling is knowing about why a person will choose one offer over another. It’s good to keep the AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) of marketing in mind, but what what factors play into this equation? Here were the ideas I came up with:

1. I offer something you can’t get anywhere else, uniquely sold by me. (Real, unique value wins. Imitators and competition obviously cut into your profits and force you to keep changing/improving the value offered, but if you’re value is unique you can slow this process. Make something very few can copy, with patents backing it up. Information can also be unique/exclusive, or simply packaged/collected better then other collections of information.)
2. The offer is located at a time and location where you need it. (If a customer has a problem bad enough that they need the fix/cure for NOW, they will spend less time looking for solutions. So if you are right there, they buy from you. Note this factor can override brand or unique value, because the customer may not spend much time looking at alternatives- just the first fix that pops up on their radar.)
3. I offer a unique offer or combination which increases the value of the individual products in the package. (Ok, so no one product is unique. But the TOTAL value of all the products included IS unique. I.E. this is not a unique product, but a unique offer.)
4. This unique offer will disappear/change soon. This information will become outdated so get in now. (Classic tactic to induce fear and promote compulsive or impulse buying.)
5. You know me and trust my brand. (If people know you and trust you because you’ve had great past products or because you’ve been around a long time and managed your reputation well, you’ll get more sales over lesser known, untrusted people. Knowing you means they see you on their radar often, i.e. advertising in multiple media, repeatedly, over a long period of time. Established businesses with longevity. However, longevity isn’t a substitute for value- just that brand factors into the quality people see in a product.)
6. You know me, Pt. 2. (It’s much easier to sell to someone who knows and trusts you because  they bought from you already and had a good experience, or because you are affiliated/partnered up with someone else that they have had a good experience, know, and trust. If you don’t have the reputation, “borrow” off of someone else’s reputation by promoting their stuff. As you do, collect the names of people who bought or were interested. Then focus on selling to these existing customers by continually making future offers- serving their continued needs/desires/questions with future products and/or product upgrades/changes.)
7. The product compares favorably to other products “close” to it. (There is only so much time that and effort a person will put into any given buying decision. If a person cannot find a “better” offer, physically located “around” your offer, within a reasonable amount of time, then your offer gets chosen. That means where your offer is located in relationship to other offers is paramount. Also includes positioning within your own product line.)
8. It takes less effort to buy my product then others. (The easier it is for a product to be understood, bought and acquired, when and how the customer wants it, the better. If it takes too much time or effort to buy, other offers get chosen instead. Everything must be brain-dead simple to do, because any snags in the process give the person a chance to bail on the offer.)
9. Other people are talking about it- especially people I care about, such as friends, collegues or famous people. (This demonstrates how social pressure can invoke a buying decision, even over and above what the individual actually wants. If friends have it, we want it. If famous people want it, then people assume that because they’re famous they make good decisions and therefore the product is good.)
10. There is little risk in trying it out. (Free stuff, or products offered with a long trial return policies, are a good way to get people to try out something even if they’re not too sure about it yet. Many times if it’s good, people won’t return it or if the like the free stuff you can continue with future offers.)
11. I wasn’t looking to fix anything, but I had to stop and check this out because it fascinated me. (There IS an underlying want in there, but sometimes the power of the headline or first introduction/presentation is enough to induce desire in a product where there was no initial desire. The most important step is getting the person’s attention- often through a threat or pain of some kind. So controversy, shocking, revolting, devistation, etc copy gets noticed the best.)
12. I can and want to be like the person I see in this ad. (Advertising is a story, and you are looking to have them put themselves in there with the actors- see the same problems, and then see how are happier/more successful/etc your solution.)
13. Invoke universal topics that sell. (Vanity, Wealth, Sex/Relationships, Immortality, Superiority over others, etc. Everyone has a “hot button” that gets their emotions going. Push the right button and your message gets heard.)

Social bookmarking services like del.icio.us use a bookmarking system called “tags”. Instead of confining your bookmarks to a folder like you did in the past, what you do is assign keywords to your information. So for example, if a website is about cars, you might use “car” or “auto” to bookmark it. Or you may use both. Or, you may decide to bookmark according to how you use the site. As such, you might give the site a tag like “daily” or “weekly”, to remind you how often to come back and read the site.

In other words, bookmarking, which should be a fairly simple activity, is now infinitely more complex. What tags should you use when you bookmark? Delicious tries to help you by giving you example tags to use, based on how the majority of other delicious users have bookmarked the site. Keeping with the social aspect, I would argue delicious does this in a not-so-subtle attempt to get you to conform to what the majority of people think the site is about.

In other words, there are two major strategies you can use Is your goa.l to:

1. Tag a site with “typical” keywords so that others will find your links, keeping with the social aspect, or:
2. Tag a site with keywords based on how you think and how you would remember to come back to the site

In other words, is bookmarking for you, or for everybody else?

For me, the utlity in bookmarking (as opposed to using just google to search for the site) is so that I can claim ownership of information I find of utility, and to make it easier to return to that information should I need use of it again.

Notice I said “return to it again”. Without a consistant way of bookmarking things (one that makes sense to ME), the tendancy is to throw anything and everything into the del.icio.us bucket, without any clue if I’m going to be able to make use of it again. One tag quickly becomes 345 tags. Some people even use 6-7 keywords per bookmark. It’s like they are thinking “I have no way I’m going to think about coming back to this information, so I’m going to try to give myself as much help as I can”. More help meaning more keywords tagged to that information. The problem with that is, tags are like roadsigns to help you re-discover your stuff. If you have to use the search function to find your bookmark, then you’ve nullified the reason for using tags. (You might as well pull out google to find it!)

Here are some tips achieving that “bliss” of being able to find your bookmarks again, when you need to:

• Use less tags. The more tags you use, the harder it is to remember which tag is used for what. 1-3 tags is much more effective then 20 tags, because doing this gives you less chance to guess wrong. (“Is it under this tag? Nope. Is it under this tag? Nope. This tag? There it is!”)
• Use delicious’ system that lets you name the title and description for your tags. If you do this, you will be forced to only use that tag for certain types of information.
• Try to ignore delicious’ suggestions of what tags to use. Or, use the most popular tags, but only use a few of them (typically the ones that make sense to you)
• Apply tag groups to collect often used or logically grouped tags together. For example, any website that has a social aspect to it (such as myspace), I can tag with “social”, or I can tag any way I want, so long as I put it under the “social” tag group.

I hope this helps you organize your links a bit better.

More and more “social” websites come out every day. One of the more popular upcoming sites is called “Twitter”. The purpose of this site is for you to post micro-blog entries that answer the question “what am I doing right now?” Supposedly this updates your friends, who are following your micro-blog, to know what you are doing. This wouldn’t be a problem, except:

1. Stopping what I am doing to post and tell people what I’m doing seems like great for my friends, but a waste of time for me. If people want to know what I’m doing, what happened to just asking me?
2. The “shit” argument. Nobody really needs to know when I’m taking a crap, and I really don’t want to know when they’re doing it either.
3. Everyone already has a cell phone. If I want to leave a quick message for someone I can leave a voicemail or a text message. Leaving a “tweet” just means people have one more information source to check.
4. There are already too many other friend/social/web2.0 sites out there. What happened to just using one of those?

In other words, Twitter doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So why are people using it? Well that’s pretty easy to answer:

1. It makes people feel important to imagine everyone in the world following what’s going on in their daily lives, no matter how stupid or mundane. It’s the same reason why reality TV took off… a lot of people out there want to feel like they are special, and that their lives to mean something to someone. (Future post: Are people who blog or spend a lot of time on the internet lonely?)
2. People obsessed with having lots of friends online, who are normally alone in their real lives.
3. Social people always going out and collecting together friends for parties. But still, social sites like myspace, facebook, etc have a mini-blog or group-posting function. So you can always post your party up there, or even just send a few text msgs to the friends you want to come. Why do we need ANOTHER service on top of what’s already out there for this?
4. Web 2.0 junkies who have to use the latest and greatest web app, even if it makes no noticable improvement on their daily lives.

I predict a time when people will tire of posting every little thing about themselves online. Or at least people will standardize with myspace or facebook and drop all the rest of the services. Because after a while, it all gets pretty redundant. How many different ways do we really need to communicate?

Research actually shows that 60-90% of communication between people is non-verbal. And text on a page conveys even less communication then talking. So degrading my experience now to 160 characters on my Twitter page is not only lame, it’s a complete defacement of who I really am. What to know me? Then talk to me dammit!