Mario Fantoni's Blog

Wikipedia is Accurate...Yeah Right

Somebody did a research and found that there are 965 domains that simply scrap information from Wikipedia and serve it up with ads (usually Google AdSense).

So people get their information from Answers.com or whatever and don’t realize that their source is Wikipedia, a collection of facts, truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, myths and outright falsehoods written by complete amateurs. Of course those people, we are told, are idiots to believe everything that Wikipedia serves them - but they don’t know that what they’re reading comes from Wikipedia.

Pathetic.

Jigsaw is a Really, Really Bad Idea

Jigsaw is a marketplace for contact information, and it is very efficient. It boasts detailed personal contact information for 8 million people, and 25,000 new people are added every day. If you want the name, title, email address, direct phone line and/or address of any executive of any company, there is a very good chance Jigsaw will already have it in its database and will sell it to you. And if you are a sales guy and have no ethical concerns about where you get your contact information, you probably already know all about Jigsaw.

Unlike competitors like Hoovers and InfoUSA, which gather company information by semi-legitimate means such as scouring SEC filings, cold calling companies and asking for information, and reviewing other public documents, Jigsaw simply pays people to upload other people’s contact information. Users are paid $1 for every contact they upload, and some users have uploaded information on tens of thousands of people.  Jigsaw is also self correcting, and incentivizes people to also correct bad contact information.

That’s right, the next time you hand out a business card to someone you may be handing it out to the entire world.

Here’s how it works: Sign up and start downloading contact information. This includes name, title, company, address, email and direct phone line.

Let's see...am I there? Of course, thanks to "Osiris" (a Maven user, with 483 contacts entered):

But wait, it gets much worse.

Anyone can find out if Jigsaw has their contact information via a link on the home page, but amending or trying to delete that information simply puts a flag on the data with the changes noted - but the original information also remains.There appears to be no way to remove your own contact information from Jigsaw once someone has entered it into their database. There is no method that I was able to find on the website to do this (including in the privacy policy), and an email to the company asking about this went unanswered (it's been ten business days now).

Jigsaw has a carefully worded privacy policy to deal with the fact that they are the antithesis of privacy. They say “This privacy policy covers how, when and why we collect, use and share information about our users…This policy does not apply to our collection and use of data about companies and contacts contained in our database system.”

Is Jigsaw legal? Maybe in the U.S., although I’d love to see a class action case brought against them. Is it ethical? Absolutely not. Every Jigsaw employee and investor has dirty hands and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Like Plaxo, Jigsaw makes money while pushing costs to other people. In Plaxo’s case, its spam. In Jigsaw’s case, its making private contact information public. The problem here is that Jigsaw’s actions aren’t easily found out by people getting constant cold calls and emails - it’s very unlikely they’ll know that these people got this contact information at Jigsaw in the first place.

If they wanted to do this right, they’d set up a marketplace where individuals could choose to sell (or give away) their contact information. The owner of the data could set the price, and Jigsaw could take a cut. Would this model work? Perhaps not, but that just proves my point. The only reason Jigsaw does work is because they don’t have to bear the costs that they push to third parties - all of the people who are in their database.

Really bad PowerPoint

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to champion at a church or a school or a Fortune 100 company, you’re probably going to use PowerPoint.

PowerPoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department—and vice versa. It’s a remarkable tool because it facilitates communication. Yes, you could send a memo, but no one reads anymore. As business gets faster and faster, we need a way to communicate ideas from one group to another. Enter PowerPoint.

PowerPoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it’s not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way.

Communication is the transfer of emotion.

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.) If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report.

Our brains have two sides. The right side is emotional, musical and moody. The left side is focused on dexterity, facts and hard data. When you show up to give a presentation, people want to use both parts of their brain. So they use the right side to judge the way you talk, the way you dress and your body language. Often, people come to a conclusion about your presentation by the time you’re on the second slide. After that, it’s often too late for your bullet points to do you much good.

You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough.

Champions must sell—to internal audiences and to the outside world.

If everyone in the room agreed with you, you wouldn’t need to do a presentation, would you? You could save a lot of time by printing out a one-page project report and delivering it to each person. No, the reason we do presentations is to make a point, to sell one or more ideas.

If you believe in your idea, sell it. Make your point as hard as you can and get what you came for. Your audience will thank you for it, because deep down, we all want to be sold.

Four Components To A Great Presentation

First, make yourself cue cards. Don’t put them on the screen. Put them in your hand. Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.

Second, make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It’s unfair! It works.

Third, create a written document. A leave-behind. Put in as many footnotes or details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience that you’re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it’s over, and they don’t have to write down everything you say. Remember, the presentation is to make an emotional sale. The document is the proof that helps the intellectuals in your audience accept the idea that you’ve sold them on emotionally.

IMPORTANT: Don’t hand out the written stuff at the beginning! If you do, people will read the memo while you’re talking and ignore you. Instead, your goal is to get them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation.

Fourth, create a feedback cycle. If your presentation is for a project approval, hand people a project approval form and get them to approve it, so there’s no ambiguity at all about what you’ve all agreed to.

The reason you give a presentation is to make a sale. So make it. Don’t leave without a “yes,” or at the very least, a commitment to a date or to future deliverables.

Bullets Are For the NRA

Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing PowerPoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.
2. No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.
5. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).

Sure, this is different from the way everyone else does it. But everyone else is busy defending the status quo (which is easy) and you’re busy championing brave new innovations, which is difficult.

Day old sushi

Here is another classic "blink-no" sign. As the photo on the left attests, a profit-minded entrepreneur is trying very hard to make ends meet. The problem with this strategy is obvious. It sends the anti-sushi message. Hey, we're not fresh. We don't even care so much about fresh.

If I ran a quickserv sushi place, I'd write the time the product was created on every single box and would offer a local shelter anything that was more than 55 minutes old. The money they make selling the old sushi can't possibly make up for the horror the full-price customers feel.

Good and bad signs

Last weekend I stayed with my wife at a cozy bed and breakfast in Sonoma, California. One morning we went for breakfast to a small coffee shop across the street named "Adobe Net Cafe" (now, that's a technological name!) and while waiting in line I saw two signs - one that created a "blink-yes" reaction in me and another that generated a "blink-no" one. In case you didn't read my post from 06/27/07 called "I Love You, I Hate You", after reading Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" I realized that most decisions that we take in life are "decided" in the first 2-3 seconds, the "blink zone" according to Gladwell. Anyway, here is the first sign that evoked the "blink yes" reaction:

Definitely "blink-yes": funny, engaging, positive. Right below, somebody placed a classic example of "blink-no" (no humor, repelling, negative):

So wireless internet access is now like restrooms, "Customers Only"? People don't get it. Technology is cheap these days, and 2 or 6 people using your wireless network makes no difference. Starbucks would not be Starbucks with a "customers only" internet access policy. The way they keep people moving is with music that is uncomfortably loud and setting the air conditioning at a freezing cold level, but that's another post.

Be careful with the snipers!

My wife's nephew decided that he wanted a Nintendo Wii video game console for his birthday. Just in case you don’t know, the Nintendo Wii is the first game that understands the movements of the player’s body. So we went to Circuit City in San Francisco, asked for the Wii and the salesperson laughed at us: “you see, each store receives 10 units per week, usually on Sundays at 9 AM. Make sure to be here this coming Sunday at 8 AM to see if you can get one.” Not for me. So I went to the natural place: eBay. I found 4,430 Nintendo Wii consoles for sale, with a selling price between $320 and $450 (MSRP is $250). Now you know why you don’t find it at the stores: they are all being sold on the black market at eBay! Anyway, I saw that the initial bids were around $100, and that the final price was reached on the last 30 seconds of each auction (that’s pretty normal for hot items on eBay), so I went ahead and set a “sniper” at auctionsniper.com for $320, with a 5 second delay (the minimum amount of time allowed). It didn’t work. I had to find another technique if my wife’s nephew was going to have some fun playing bowling at home. After some logical thought I found the solution: to set up a sniper just to use its countdown clock, to enter a $320 bid, then go to the confirmation page (yes, there are 2 pages, that’s why it takes more than 5 seconds) and to click on the “confirm” button 3 seconds before the end of the auction using the sniper countdown (eBay doesn't have a countdown with seconds). It worked! The first time I tried this system I won a Nintendo Wii for $320!  But, wait! What about misspelled consoles? A search for misspelled Nintendo Wiis at auctionbloopers.com returns 16 consoles on eBay. The top 10 ending first auctions have an average price of $222 for the misspelled and $314 for the right spelling. Here you go, this is Mario's eBay secret trick: use AuctionBlooper to find misspellings and the countdown clock of AuctionSnipper and save 30-50% on your eBay purchases. You are welcome.

Prostitution

Why does it bother us so much when marketers try to buy their way into our lives? Precisely because it feels so intentional. Because it represents an unwelcome intrusion, a display of power... it's a lot like spam, in fact. When you run into someone with "Scion" tatooed on her forehead, it's odd. When you realize that person got paid to do it, you feel used. Maybe it's just me, but I think there's a huge difference between the famous Honda Cog Movie (or the BMW movies) and the manipulative Scion campaign. In the first cases, the car companies built something worth talking about. In the second, the manufacturer just bought the conversation. With more than 55,000,000 downloads to date, the BMW campaign is a success by any measure. It's hard to imagine that Scion can afford to buy enough "buzz" to make a difference. If marketing is like dating, then buying these conversations is about nothing more than prostitution. (PS what about bzzagent.com? Yes, they get paid to help start conversations. But a key part of their business model is that they DON'T pay people themselves. The bzzagents work for free. It needs to be that way for it to work, imho). Is it a fine line? You betcha. So is dating, for that matter! The magic and the art comes in creating remarkable products that don't cross the line... they're worth talking about, but they're not paid conversations.

The secrets of success

If it's not money or brilliant programming (see below) what will characterize the success of tomorrow's internet?

1. Relentless execution. This is far and away the winner. Persistence and focus and consistency. We saw how this worked for Amazon and we saw how getting distracted hurt Yahoo and others. It's far more important today, because markets at rest tend to stay at rest. Changing the market is hard.

2. Resistance to compromise. Because you can do so much, so fast using tools, and because it's easy for non-experts to chime in, the temptation is to go for the middle, to compromise, to be all things.

3. What you don't do. This is a little bit like #2. Go take a look at an Amazon page. Now you can do a web search, search inside the book, order it new, order it used, on and on and on. The temptation is to do everything you can do (it might work for Amazon, but it's not going to work for you!) The very best new Net companies understand in their heart and soul what they WON'T do.

4. Desire to be three steps ahead. One step is easy. One step isn't enough. If you're only one step ahead, you'll get creamed before you launch. Two steps is tempting. Two steps means that everyone understands what you're up to when you pitch them. Two steps means that you can get funded in no time. Two steps is a problem. It's a problem because the smart guys are three steps ahead. They're the groundbreakers and the pathfinders. They're the ones inventing the next generation. It's harder to sell, harder to build and harder to get your mother-in-law to understand, but that's what's worth building.

5. Doing something worth doing. Hey, nobody is going to switch to your service because you worked hard on it. Being a little better is worthless.

6. Connecting people to people. Over and over again, that's what lasts online. Folks thought it was about technology and it's not.

7. Monetizing from the first moment. Google without Adwords is worthless. So Adwords are built in to the experience. Not, "hey, we have to do this because otherwise we'll go out of business" but "this actually makes the service better." Given how cheap most online services are to build and run, you can't charge money if the only reason you're charging is to make a profit. Charging adds friction and selectivity. If those two elements are a drag on your service, you will fail. Hotmail's founders missed this point. Banner ads made Hotmail worse, not better, and because they didn't build useful ads into the service from the start, they never could.

8. Not depending on a big, hairy partner. Sure it would be great if you could be on Yahoo's home page every day, or built into blogger or featured on Fox every night. But it would be great if you won the lottery, too. That's a wish, not a plan.

9. Ignoring the experts. Including me. If I'm so smart, why don't I go build my own business?

10. Keeping promises. Even though the internet is here and it's real, that doesn't mean that the laws of business have been suspended forever. And those two words capture the best of what we've learned for four hundred years. Do what you say you're going to do and the rest is a lot easier.

If it's not money or brilliant programming (see below) what will characterize the success of tomorrow's internet?

1. Relentless execution. This is far and away the winner. Persistence and focus and consistency. We saw how this worked for Amazon and we saw how getting distracted hurt Yahoo and others. It's far more important today, because markets at rest tend to stay at rest. Changing the market is hard.

2. Resistance to compromise. Because you can do so much, so fast using tools, and because it's easy for non-experts to chime in, the temptation is to go for the middle, to compromise, to be all things.

3. What you don't do. This is a little bit like #2. Go take a look at an Amazon page. Now you can do a web search, search inside the book, order it new, order it used, on and on and on. The temptation is to do everything you can do (it might work for Amazon, but it's not going to work for you!) The very best new Net companies understand in their heart and soul what they WON'T do.

4. Desire to be three steps ahead. One step is easy. One step isn't enough. If you're only one step ahead, you'll get creamed before you launch. Two steps is tempting. Two steps means that everyone understands what you're up to when you pitch them. Two steps means that you can get funded in no time. Two steps is a problem. It's a problem because the smart guys are three steps ahead. They're the groundbreakers and the pathfinders. They're the ones inventing the next generation. It's harder to sell, harder to build and harder to get your mother-in-law to understand, but that's what's worth building.

5. Doing something worth doing. Hey, nobody is going to switch to your service because you worked hard on it. Being a little better is worthless.

6. Connecting people to people. Over and over again, that's what lasts online. Folks thought it was about technology and it's not.

7. Monetizing from the first moment. Google without Adwords is worthless. So Adwords are built in to the experience. Not, "hey, we have to do this because otherwise we'll go out of business" but "this actually makes the service better." Given how cheap most online services are to build and run, you can't charge money if the only reason you're charging is to make a profit. Charging adds friction and selectivity. If those two elements are a drag on your service, you will fail. Hotmail's founders missed this point. Banner ads made Hotmail worse, not better, and because they didn't build useful ads into the service from the start, they never could.

8. Not depending on a big, hairy partner. Sure it would be great if you could be on Yahoo's home page every day, or built into blogger or featured on Fox every night. But it would be great if you won the lottery, too. That's a wish, not a plan.

9. Ignoring the experts. Including me. If I'm so smart, why don't I go build my own business?

10. Keeping promises. Even though the internet is here and it's real, that doesn't mean that the laws of business have been suspended forever. And those two words capture the best of what we've learned for four hundred years. Do what you say you're going to do and the rest is a lot easier.

Is viral marketing the same as word of mouth?

Viral marketing does not equal word of mouth.

Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that's it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn't have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.)

This distinction is vital. For one thing, it means that constant harassment of the population doesn't increase the chances of something becoming viral. It means that most organizations should realize that they have a better chance with word of mouth (more likely to occur, more manageable, more flexible) and focus on that. And it means, most of all, that viral marketing is like winning the lottery.

Viral marketing does not equal word of mouth.

Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that's it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn't have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.)

This distinction is vital. For one thing, it means that constant harassment of the population doesn't increase the chances of something becoming viral. It means that most organizations should realize that they have a better chance with word of mouth (more likely to occur, more manageable, more flexible) and focus on that. And it means, most of all, that viral marketing is like winning the lottery.

The Placebo Effect

Everybody already knows how powerful the brain is. Take a sugar pill that’s supposed to be a powerful medicine and watch your symptoms disappear. Have a surgeon not perform bypass surgery on your heart and discover that the angina that has been crippling you vanishes.

The placebo effect is not just for sick people anymore.

Why do some ideas have more currency than others? Because we believe they should. When Chris Anderson or Malcolm Gladwell writes about something, it’s a better idea because they wrote about it.

Even as your culture of ideas and marketing enters its long-tail, open-source, low-barrier, everyone-has-a-blog era of mass publication, we still need filters. Would your iPod sound as sweet if everyone else had a Rio? Would your Manolo Blahniks be as cool if everyone else were wearing Keds?

Arthur Andersen audited thousands of companies, and those audits gave us confidence in those companies, made them appear more solid, which, not surprisingly, made them more solid. Then, post Enron, the placebo effect disappeared. Same companies, same auditors, but suddenly those companies appeared LESS solid, which made them less solid.

The magic of the placebo effect lies in the fact that you can’t do it to yourself. You need an accomplice. Someone in authority who will voluntarily tell you a story.

That’s what marketers do. Of course, we need to persuade ourselves that it’s morally and ethically and financially okay to  participate in something as unmeasurable as the placebo effect. The effect is controversial and it goes largely unspoken. Very rarely do we come to meetings and say, “well, here’s our cool new PBX for Fortune 1000 companies. It’s exactly the same as the last model, except the phones are designed by frog design so they’re cooler and more approachable and people are more likely to invest a few minutes in learning how to use them, so customer satisfaction will go up and we’ll sell more, even though it’s precisely the same technology we were selling yesterday.”

Very rarely do vodka marketers tell the truth and say, “here’s our new vodka, which we buy in bulk from the same distillery that produces vodka for $8 a bottle. Ours is going to cost $35 a bottle and come in a really, really nice bottle and our ads will persuade laddies that this will help them in the dating department… nudge, nudge, know what I mean, nudge, nudge…”

It would be surprising to meet a monk or a talmudic scholar or a minister who would say, “yes, we burn the incense or turn down the lights or ring these bells or light these candles as a way of creating a room where people are more likely to believe in their prayers,” but of course that’s exactly what they’re doing. (and you know what? there's nothing wrong with that.)

It’s easier to get people to come to a meeting about clock speed and warranty failure analysis than it is to have a session about storytelling.

We don’t like to admit that we tell stories, that we’re in the placebo business. Instead, we tell ourselves about features and benefits as a way to rationalize our desire to to help our customers by allowing them to lie to themselves.

The design of your blog or your package or your outfit is nothing but an affect designed to create the placebo effect. The sound Dasani water makes when you open the bottle is more of the same. It’s all storytelling. It’s all lies.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

In fact, your marketplace insists on it.