Discovering a Circuit Rider

Yesterday I discovered a new term: circuit rider. From wikipedia:

The term circuit rider, which has its roots in Methodist preaching, has more recently been applied to technology assistance providers who travel to small non-profit organizations in a particular sector to troubleshoot or support particular technology needs in those organizations. Another term for these people is eRider.
In this context, a Circuit Rider is part trainer, part management consultant, part computer expert. They provide consulting and assistance with technology strategy development, make multiple visits to the organizations they serve, and provide advice and information by phone and e-mail. They can serve regional constituencies by travel from a central location. Additionally, Circuit Riders can “cross-pollinate” the groups they service, transmitting insights, tools, and tips as they travel throughout the sector. In addition, training materials and resources can be used at multiple sites thereby spreading the development cost out across a number of organizations.
The umbrella term for this field is nonprofit technology.

Hmm. Here at Work Industries, we do that. We just didn’t know it until we had a name for it.

We’re working with some great non-profits right now, like the Pacific Salmon Foundation. They have a vision to create a online source for all things salmon. It’s an ambitious goal, but very achievable. If you’d like to support an organization working at the grassroots level to restore salmon species and habitat, please think of supporting the PSF.

This Site Will Self Destruct

At times, it will. I can promise it. In fact, I bet that right now you could click around and find something not working.

And we think that’s okay, for now.

We wanted to launch the site, and it was half-finished. So rather than having nothing we launched it. Every day we work on improving the site. If we were designing the controls on an airplane, we’d take a different approach. But we’re not. We’re taking what we think is the right approach for the situation.

That’s what you can expect from our work. Browse around the site. Read our nascent attempts to define and differentiate ourselves. Let us know what you think at james [at] iworkindustries [dot] come. Subscribe to the Work Industries RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or atom feeds to stay up to date.

mesh: Canada’s Web 2.0 Conference

A few prominent folks in the Toronto technology community have banded together to create mesh: Canada’s web 2.0 conference. I’ve been anticipating the conference that has become known as mesh for a few weeks now, since Rob Hyndman and Matthew Ingram announced they were pursuing the idea.

The mesh conference blog seems to be the best place to stay up to date on conference developments. Here’s the who should attend and why pitch:

Marketing and public relations: Billions of dollars of advertising is moving to the Web as fast-growing companies build world-class brands. Traditional advertising, marketing and public relations models are being turned upside down. Come learn from experts on the front lines of Web 2.0 about the new rules of the game and how to capitalize on them.

Media: The Web is changing the rules, and the media finds itself battling with new rivals such as eBay, Craigslist and Google News. To understand how these changes are impacting how news organizations operate, how they need to adapt, and how your job is evolving, you need to be at mesh.

Investors and entrepreneurs: In the Web 2.0 world, you don’t need seven figures to develop a product; and you may not even need five-figures to market it. This is transforming the dynamic between investors and entrepreneurs. Come to mesh - we’ll help you work it out.

Politicians and social activists: In the U.S., political blogs are new tools of mass destruction. In Canada, we’re just starting to sort out the influence of blogs and how to leverage them. If you are a political strategist, mesh will help you learn how to harness the collective intelligence of the blogosphere. If you’re a behind-the-scenes player, mesh will give you insight into how to engage the blogosphere.

I’m thinking of attending, both for the quality of the conference and to continue my once-annual-trip-to-Toronto tradition. I’ll start pricing flights and developing a budget in the next few days, then I’ll make the pivotal call to my Hogtown friends. Hi Craig and Adrienne!

Nature versus Nurture in Music Recommendations

Steve Krause writes a lengthy review / overview of two different approaches to music recommendations: Pandora and Last.fm. As he sees it, Pandora‘s algorithm-based approach is equal to the nature school of thought while Last.fm‘s behaviour-based approach is equal to the nurture school of thought.

Algorithmically, Pandora versus Last.fm is something like the nature versus nurture debate. Taking the nature side, Pandora’s recommendations are based on the inherent qualities of the music. Give Pandora an artist or song, and it will find similar music in terms of melody, harmony, lyrics, orchestration, vocal character and so on. Pandora likes to call these musical attributes “genes” and its database of songs, classified against hundreds of such attributes, the “Music Genome Project.”

On the nurture side (as in, it’s all about the people around you), Last.fm is a social recommender. It knows little about songs’ inherent qualities. It just assumes that if you and a group of other people enjoy many of the same artists, you will probably enjoy other artists popular with that group.

Like Last.fm, most music-discovery systems have been social recommenders, also known as collaborative filters. Although much of the academic work in the area has focused on improving the matching algorithms, Last.fm’s innovation has been in improving the data the algorithms work on. Last.fm does so by providing users an optional plug-in that automatically monitors your media-player software so that whatever you listen to—whether it came from Last.fm or not—can be incorporated into your Last.fm profile and thus be used as the basis for recommendations. Compared to relying on users to manually provide preferences, this automatic and comprehensive data capture leads to far better grist for the data mill.

I don’t have any experience with either music-recommendation system, but I love the way Krause connects software product design, data mining of enormous sets and basic psychology so people can understand the respective approaches. To me, this is one of the finest things an expert can do - make a subject approachable and comprehensible to a wider, general audience.

For some background on the N-vs-N expression, check out the nature-versus-nurture wikipedia entry.

Oxo Reinvents Kitchen Devices

My tongs, the tongs that I use almost every day, are Oxo tongs. They are wonderful tongs. I use them on the stove, when roasting in the over, on the barbecue grill. I also use them to serve guests. I use them for salad. When cooking and serving, my tongs act as an extension to my hand. I like them so much that when we closed up the Work Industries offices recently for ski days in Fernie, I brought them with me to cook there.

So I read this LA Times article about how Oxo has reinvented kitchen devices with some personal bias. I wanted to like the article because I already like the tongs. I like them so much I travel with them. Okay, I’m a cooking nerd. But I don’t think about them much when I use them. And I hadn’t really appreciated all the consideration that had gone into their use until I read about it, which I suppose is a measure of how well they’re designed.

In the LA Times article I love the story about how Oxo came upon the breakthrough that helped them build a superior measuring cup, and I love the way they sweat the small stuff and make things for people, with people involved in the making:

...people are often better at showing than they are at telling; mostly they could only articulate that the problems with the traditional Pyrex measurer were that it was “glass, hot, greasy.” But watching them struggle with the cup revealed the ultimate flaw: You cannot tell how full it is without lifting it up to eye level.

The Oxo measurer has markings down the inside, large enough to read without glasses. And the latest version is made of a hard plastic that stands up better to repeated runs through the dishwasher. (Improvements in materials and technology account for many Oxo upgrades — the silicone potholder can now be bonded with fabric; plastic can adhere to stainless steel in a mixing bowl.)

The measuring cup is one of five Oxo products that were not in-house eurekas but came to the company from outside in the last 10 years. “We have some very passionate consumers,” said Gretchen Holt, who handles media for the company, demonstrating to editors why “they should give a damn” about an Oxo breakthrough. Ideas also flow in from retailers and wannabe inventors.

I love it! There are always more smart, capable people with insight outside of whatever organization houses the creation.

As someone who cooks a lot, Oxo products have become a relied-upon standard, and, now that I’ve read about products like the cutting board that doesn’t slip on the counter when you cut on it, I will seek out other Oxo products because of my excellent experiences.

I’m pointing out the Oxo article because I think some great parallels can be drawn between how they design kitchen tools and how I believe web tools and websites should be designed. In particular, the article demonstrates the following guidelines.

• Better tools equal fewer tools. The better your tools are at doing their job, the fewer specialized tools you need to do portions of that job or similar jobs. Or, put anther way, the better the execution, the less need there is for alternate yet semi-same tools.
• Big ideas and breakthroughs are rare while small, incremental improvements are always available to be tackled. Whatever diety your ascribe to, we need to recognize that godliness and goodness lives in the details.
• Sometimes people don’t know they want a better product. Not until they’re presented with a better product, at least. For instance, I wasn’t really dissatisfied with my steamer basket - it’s the typical spaceship-style, unfold steamer that sits in about an inch of water, with a peg in the middle and a ring through the top of the peg - until I read in the article about the Oxo steamer. I never thought about using that peg for anything, it was pretty unusable. But because of the peg, I have to break my asparagus (a common steamed items in these parts) in half to fit in the steamer. Oxo has created a steamer with a removable peg that folds flat when not in use. Brilliant!
• Tools need to be designed with a relentless focus on serving people. Sounds simple, but it can never be repeated often enough.
• People come in all manner of varieties but tend to do things in common ways.
• Tools come with inherent biases and their design shapes the possibilities of their use.
• A rich interchange is happening between professionals and amateurs with both benefiting from the exchange of information and practices. At the same, a new type of person (user) is arising, variously called the pro-am or prosumer, someone between the professionals and the amateurs. As tools for everyone get better professionals have less tool-based advantage and must rely on craft, experience or knowledge-based advantage. Think of photographers, journalists, athletes and chefs. The amateurs are catching up faster than the professionals are pulling away. A key driver of this trend is the web. The web, as a tool, offers the following biases: transparency, decentralized coordination and constant feedback loops. Consequently, we see cheap coordination of resources, anywhere-to-anywhere networked communication, and increased access and storage of information.
• Connected Consumption: As the exchange of information continues to accellerate, and people have greater access to timely, contextual, peer-reviewed information, they purchase habits become more responsive and changeable. Most of the time I’ve seen this phenomena expressed as an increase in the fickleness of consumers, and this can be true, but I also believe that companies that deliver on their promise develop greater momentum and loyalty. The same way that someone who always sticks to their word becomes more trusted.
• Others I’m missing? Please comment.

Do You Lie for a Living?

Andrew Goodman of Traffick writes in a post called Do you lie for a living?:

I’m just flipping through Joseph Jaffe’s excellent Life After the 30-Second Spot (the PDF version—I hate to wait). When he still worked at an ad agency, Jaffe’s 10-year-old cousin asked him about the long disclaimers and small print at the end of print ads and TV ads. The kid then asked Jaffe why he’d work in an industry that requires him to lie for a living.

Which reminded me of a recent trip.

Big splashy promo by EasyJet in a UK airport, where they’d set up a booth across from the departure area. Pretty aggressive marketing—taking out promo space in the same airport you fly out of. Nice work. But the message itself got a chuckle from me.

UNLIMITED CARRY-ON BAGGAGE (Huge Asterisk)

* - Within reason. Subject to available space.

If the size of the asterisk in your marketing “communications” is literally comical, you’ve accomplished nothing but show people that ads are lies, no?

Which makes me think there exists an opportunity for an airline or travel agency. Two scenarios come to mind.

(1) People are exhausted by bait-and-switch pricing for travel products. The advertised rate is $289, with a dreaded asterix. If you read the fine print wedded to the asterix, you discover the rate is one-way and subject to a litany of fees, some charged by the airline, some charged by the airport, some tacked on by transportation regulation bodies. Price out the full trip and it looks like over $400 for that one-way ticket.

So is anyone brave enough to advertise the price someone is actually going to pay? Surely that’s a good opportunity for differentiation, even if the no-haggle, no-surcharge price only gets selectively advertised, doesn’t it seem worth the risk? In an industry with so little to differentiate between offerings, other than price, honesty seems to me a good virtue to cultivate.

(2) Use the asterix as the jumping off point for a key message, delivered in a new way. If your airline has more daily departures than anyone else, then try,

Daily Departures Now Boarding *
* Daily? Practically hourly! At least for the hours that count. We get you to where you need to be, faster. We fly more often to major destinations. We could be boarding a flight right now. Are you coming?

Consumers practice connected consumption now. They know the lies of advertising, and if they know, they tell people. Soon everyone knows. Then that knowledge becomes ingrained, and with it, a passive annoyance. Whole businesses can be built or expanded on this type of insight and breakthrough. The hypothetical campaign I describe could even be publicly announced as Putting Your Money Where Our Mouths Are. Visual: ticket counter employee with startled expression in their eyes, hundred dollar bill covering their mouth.

The Return on Investment (ROI) of a Blog

Over at the Marqui Software blog they have some great feedback for the popular question: What is the ROI of having a blog?

The case study they point to is from Stormhoek, a South African winery who marketed the launch of their new white wine through blogs and online word-of-mouth advertising. Essentially they invited a bunch of bloggers they thought were a good fit for the product launch to try to the product. Free wine? Quelle tough sell.

The venerable Telegraph called the story A very fruity sauvignon blog and did a fantastic job writing it up in their business pages. After an intro pandering to their audience, they get down to the How They Did It:

Last May, six months after Stormhoek launched, Dymoke-Marr despatched a bottle of his mid-price Sauvignon Blanc to 150 of the UK’s most frantic-fingered “bloggers”, the burgeoning community of internet diarists.

It was a plan that didn’t lack bottle. After all, since their emergence at the end of the 1990s, bloggers have become a nightmare for businesses the world over. Microsoft, Tesco and McDonald’s have all fallen victim to vicious blogs written by irate customers or seething employees.

But Dymoke-Marr’s gamble elicited barely a sour grape. “We were just really honest,” he says.

“We didn’t say we were selling the best wine in South Africa. We just said: ‘Here’s a nice wine, reasonably priced, tell us what you think.’ “

The bloggers got to work, tapping away about the virtues of the vino. Estimates of how many bloggers there are around the world range from 15m to 30m. Up to 80,000 blogs are thought to be started each day. If you had punched Stormhoek into Google last June, 500 references would have popped up. That figure stood at about 85,000 last week.

...

Of course, anyone who doles out free booze might expect to get a good write-up. But the pith of the Stormhoek story is that the chitchat in the virtual world has generated real sales.

Since last summer, monthly sales of Stormhoek’s bottles have doubled. It has won contracts with J Sainsbury and Majestic Wine. The internet dialogue has also led to greater demand from retailers such as Asda and Threshers with which Dymoke-Marr already had contracts.

Stormhoek now accounts for 20 per cent of all South African wine sold at above £5 a bottle in the UK.

“Blogging has been really, really fundamental to what’s happened over the past year,” Dymoke-Marr says. “Our retail buyers say customers go into their stores and supermarkets and say we’ve heard about this through blogs.

“But it hasn’t just seen our sales rise strongly, it’s totally disrupted the business and completely changed the way we think.”

Hmm. So this blog thing seems to have caught on.

Are you interested in how your company can capitalize on blogs and the market forces of the web? Well we’re interested in helping you do that. Contact us and and we’ll get to work.