Sometimes you can't make this stuff up.

As the photo below 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.

Enter a new verb. Liveblogging.

When I was in college, WBCN in Boston tried an experiment. They sent DJs to report live from rock concerts. "We're here in the Gahden, listening to Bruce Springsteen..." The thing is, the promoters wouldn't let them play any of the performances on the radio. So all you heard was breathless commentary on what was happening on stage. "Oh, could it be? Yes, it is, YES YES Little Stevie is back on stage..." As you can imagine, the experiment didn't last long. The DJs had fun, but we were bored.

A few times over the last week, I've spoken at conferences where laptops were open and people were online. They were liveblogging, taking notes in real time and posting them online for all to see. At first, this sounds like a fantastic idea. Now, thousands of people can listen on what's happening in a smaller group.

On closer inspection, it doesn't work particularly well. I mean, not only was I there, but I was speaking, yet I can't make sense at all of the posts. That's because most people don't take notes to be read. They take notes to write them. The act of writing things down triggers different areas of our brain, it focuses attention, it makes it easier to remember things. You can read your blog notes later and say, "yeah, I remember that slide..." But for an outsider who's not there, the amount of information that's imparted is small indeed.

Compare these liveblog posts to posts written an hour later, ones that digest and reflect and chunk the information. These are deliberately designed to inform the reader, not to remind the writer.

I don't mean to pick on the medium. I think it's incredibly valuable--for the poster. We're finding a growing dichotomy now, between blogs that help the reader and blogs that helps the writer. And there's room for both.

If you look down the left hand column of this blog, you'll see some little blue arrows next to some of my books. (Here's a photo).

Click on any of the buttons and a window pops up, offering you all sort of things you can now do. Places to buy, places to post, ways to bookmark.

After exploring that, take a look at the bottom of each of my posts. There's a 'flare' (perhaps named after the buttons Jennifer Aniston wore in Office Space) that brings the functionality of services like Technorati into the blog at the same time it makes it easy to bring the pithiness of the blog out to Digg, etc. [Sometimes the flare magically disappears... hey, life is a beta. If you don't see it, try the next one down].

The sooner we view the web as a process, not a place, the quicker we will understand it. It's two flows. The flow of information and the flow of attention.

Craig writes in with a story about a Dyson vacuum:

I have a question for you about buying decisions.

A while back I upgraded my Dyson vacuum cleaner when I got a great deal on the latest model. I had been using my old one for about 5 years or so but it was still in perfect working order. I had even replaced a couple of attachments for it via the Dyson website.
I gave my old Dyson to a friend. She had never used a Dyson before and she loved it. So much so that the very next day her own vacuum cleaner was put outside ready for the refuge collection!

But here’s the thing: a few months later the Dyson I gave her stopped working (not sure why, that thing was indestructible) so she decided to buy a new vacuum. Even though the vacuum I gave her was the best she had ever used, she didn’t buy a Dyson.

I was amazed how someone could love a product so much but replace it with an inferior product. I don’t think it was about cost because I told her where she could get an excellent deal on a new Dyson.

This just doesn’t make sense to me so I thought I’d ask if you had any thoughts as to why this happens?

My take: Craig’s friend didn’t see herself as the kind of person who would buy a Dyson. Sure, she might use one, especially if it was free. But buying a weird, fancy-looking vacuum is an act of self-expression as much as it’s a way to clean your floors. And the act of buying one didn’t match the way his friend saw herself.

So many of the products and services we use are now about our identity. Many small businesses, for example, won’t hire a coach or a consultant because, “that’s not the kind of organization we are.” Wineries understand that the pricing of a bottle of wine is more important than its label or the wine inside. The price is the first thing that most people consider when they order or shop for wine. Not because of perceived value, but because of identity.

Paul sends us this classic example of committee thinking at work.

The Dip is now the fastest-selling book I've ever published. Amazon just lowered the price to $7.77 (at least for now). I appreciate the support. Thanks. (other versions and stores are here).

Many people are arguing for a fundamental change in the way humans interact with the world. This isn't a post about whether or not we need smaller cars, local produce, smaller footprints and less consumption. It's a post about how deeply entrenched the desire for more is.

More has been around for thousands of years. Kings ate more than peasants. Winning armies had more weapons than losing ones. Elizabeth Taylor had more husbands than you.

Car dealers are temples of more. The local Ford dealership lists four different models... by decreasing horsepower. Car magazines feature Bugattis, not Priuses on the cover. Restaurants usually serve more food (and more calories) than a normal person could and should eat.

Is this some sort of character flaw? A defective meme in the system of mankind? Or is it an evil plot dreamed up by marketers?

There's no doubt that marketers amplify this desire, but I'm certain it's been around a lot longer than Jell-O.

One reason that the litter campaign of the 1960s worked so well is that 'not littering' didn't require doing less, it just required enough self control to hold on to your garbage for an hour or two. The achilles heel of the movement to limit carbon is the word 'limit.'

It's a campaign about less, not more. Even worse, there's no orthodoxy. There's argument about whether x or y is a better approach. Argument about how much is enough. As long as there's wiggle room, our desire for more will trump peer pressure to do less. "Fight global warming" is a fine slogan, except it's meaningless. That's like dieters everywhere shouting, "eat less" while they stand in line to get bleu cheese dressing from the salad bar.

As a marketer, my best advice is this: let's figure out how to turn this into a battle to do more, not less. Example one: require all new cars to have, right next to the speedometer, a mileage meter. And put the same number on an LCD display on the rear bumper. Once there's an arms race to see who can have the highest number, we're on the right track.

Rick points us to this article about a Saturn initiative. You'll be able to test drive the competition at the Saturn dealership.

Brilliant.

When there's a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed.

Plenty of customer service people would like to do the right thing. They'd like to fix the problem that's presented to them. But frustration hits when the policies and procedures and metrics they've been given to work with won't let them.

For the last two weeks, the audio version of The Dip has been for sale at the iTunes music store. And for many iPods, it doesn't work. Hundreds of people have written to me and let me know. These hundreds of people have written to Apple, too, and they've shared their notes with me.

In general, the responses from Apple that people are reporting are respectful and straightforward. But none of the responses have addressed the problem. Apple could easily take the product down. Or they could change the description in the store with a note that says, "sorry, but it doesn't work on some iPods, we're working on it", or they could email everyone who had bought one and let them know what the plans are. And, yes, best of all, they could fix it.

The amazing thing is that except for the last choice, each approach is free, quick and relatively easy. If the head of the iTunes store focused on this problem for ten seconds, it would go away. The challenge isn't a lack of tools or resources, it is a lack of alignment. For a service rep in this particular situation, "doing my job" means making the person go away, while "doing the right thing" means taking initiative and actually solving the problem. The customer service reps don't have access to the tools (or the authority) to do what the company would actually benefit the most from.

Getting your team in alignment (having their job match their tools match their mission) is perhaps the first job a marketer has to do.

Here's today's entrepreneurial trivia question:

Even after Starbucks had five stores and more than 20 employees, which item was unavailable for purchase at their stores:
Espresso
Hot Coffee
Biscotti
Frappucino® blended beverage

Actually, it's a trick question. The answer is 'all of the above.' It wasn't until several years after the company was up and running that they realized it would be a good idea to sell any beverages at all. All they sold was beans (but you could get a free taste of coffee if you asked nicely).

It might not be too late to fix your marketing/story/product mix.

It was so typical. Eight people, the regular bunch. New client kick-off, business as usual. And it showed.

You've done it before, and before that and before that. A dozen or a hundred or perhaps a thousand times before. The typical meeting, with everyone in their typical roles. Often, people even sit in the same spot.

Why are we surprised, then, when the outcome is usually the same as well?

Instead of approaching that moment as JAM, maybe there's a different way. Instead of focusing on how similar this time is to last time, instead of realizing that the similiarities demand similar approaches, maybe, just maybe, the team could focus on the differences. How is this opportunity different? What could we try that might have a radically better outcome?

Different isn't always better, but if all you want is the same, send a memo.

So, how to overcome those that have a reflex to say no?

One way is to flood the zone with people who are likely to say yes.

Unless you're selling to just about everyone in the world, this is far easier than trying to persuade the nay sayers.

My school realizes this. They hold the spring concert the same night at the budget vote. 200 parents at a concert are only a few steps away from the voting booth in the gym. Starbucks realizes the same thing when they put their stores directly in the path of yuppies who like spending $4 for a cup of coffee. You don't find many Starbucks at bus stations.

Instead of focusing on arguing with people who say no, it might be easier to get near the people who like to say yes.

Do you really need a home page? Does the web respect it?

Human beings don't have home pages. People make judgments about you in a thousand different ways. By what they hear from others, by the way they experience you, and on and on. Companies may have a website, but they don't have a home page in terms of the way people experience them.

The problem with home page thinking is that it's a crutch. There's nothing wrong with an index, nothing wrong with a page for newbies, nothing wrong with a place that makes a first impression when you get the chance to control that encounter. But it's not your 'home'. It's not what the surfer/user wants, and when it doesn't match, they flee.

You don't need one home page. You need a hundred or a thousand. And they're all just as important.

"Claudio Giordano opened this highly lauded West Lincoln Road restaurant with one purpose in mind: to fuse his lifelong passion for fishing with reliability and quality, while making his new endeavor creative, affordable and friendly."

No one was offended, nothing was left out, nobody got hurt.

A knife usually cuts through the clutter better than a spoon.

In the old days, authors wrote. Other people did the marketing, and that was all there was to it.

Now, of course, most blogs are one-person operations. Which means that successful blogs are often run by restless, outward-bound people in a hurry. And a lot of bloggers either have day jobs or passionate sidelines. I think that's a good thing, even when they fail. It's frustrating for me to hear, "stick to your blogging," when people criticize a project created by a blogger--because it's part of the blogging, part of the learning, part of what's unfolding. I'd rather read a book that's informed by the activities (not the reporting) of the writer, and I'd rather read a blog that's based on the successes (and failures) of the blogger.

Which brings us to Hugh Macleod and his work for Microsoft. Some critics think he's selling out. I don't. I think he's having a huge impact on an organization--from the outside--at the same time that he demonstrates how just about any large organization can rethink its role in the world. And he's doing it in front of all of us, without a net.

Which brings us to Guy Kawasaki and his new project. I disliked this project from the very first moment I saw the beta. It's unlikely that it will fail. It will almost certainly generate a lot of traffic and a huge ROI for Guy. For the rest of us, it demonstrates just how easy it is to start a web company today, and just how important it is to create one that makes the world better, not just noisier.

If you bought The Dip from iTunes and are having trouble making it play on your iPod, please drop me a line. Put "iPod" in the subject line. Apple is working to fix a glitch, and I'll email you when I'm alerted that it's been fixed. If you've been thinking of buying the audio version with the intent of playing it on your iPod, please wait a bit. Thanks. And I apologize for the hassle.

They just announced the results from the vote on the school board budget in my little town.

As usual, several hundred people voted no. In fact, every year approximately the same number of people vote no. The budget passed, it almost always does, but the naysayers get their say.

Here's the interesting part. Also on the ballot was a New York State grant. This would permit the town to use State money (a grant, not a loan) to improve a building. More than 200 people voted no. Even the most selfish person who analyzed this measure would see that there was no downside, selfish or otherwise, to the town. Yet hundreds voted no.

When no becomes a habit, it's very hard to break.

This is a fantastic essay by Cory Doctorow. I wish it were three paragraphs longer, but it lays out a thoughtful analysis of the flame/idiot/troll phenomenon.

My take: you can't (and shouldn't) treat all customers the same. It's not clear to me that you can always change the attitude of an angry person. But you can avoid bringing down everyone around them.

If you've been following along, you can see that I'm more than a little obsessed with landing pages and the offers/links that get people there. We've finally decided to put some money where my mouth is.

Check out this contest. If nothing else, it'll get your boss to focus.

[PS while you're over there, this is a great riff].

Most people in the US can't cook. So you would think that reaching out to the masses with entry-level cooking instruction would be a smart business move.

In fact, as the Food Network and cookbook publishers have demonstrated over and over again, you're way better off helping the perfect improve. You'll also sell a lot more management consulting to well run companies, high end stereos to people with good stereos and yes, church services to the already well behaved.

We begin to close the reservations for my US speaking gigs this week. Every attendee gets 5 free copies of my new hardcover and the ticket price is $50. I'll be speaking about my new book for about 40 minutes and then taking questions and having a discussion with the audience for up to an hour or so.

The cities: Philly, Tempe, Salt Lake, Silicon Valley, New York and Chicago. The details are right here. I'm trying to be able to offer seats at the door, but it's logistically difficult, so I'm hoping that if you are planning to come, you won't hesitate. See you there.

In many auctions, the most irrational person wins.

Here's the proof: eBay offers a service where you can enter your maximum bid. Say you're bidding on a signed Derek Jeter baseball bat. You decide that the most you'd ever be willing to pay for this bat, under any circumstances, is $99. Type it in.

The auction may be at only $15, and eBay will automatically bid $16 for you. If someone else outbids you, eBay keeps increasing your bid automatically, but never exceeds your maximum.

A rational purchaser sees this as a no-lose proposition. If no one else bids more than $80, you get it for much less than you were prepared to pay. If someone else is willing to bid $100, you lose, but that's okay, because you determined ahead of time that it was only worth $99. If it goes for a hundred bucks, no big deal... it's like seeing a diamond ring for a million dollars. You'd like it but you're not willing to pay for it.

The price someone in Texas is willing to pay shouldn't have anything to do with what you think something is worth, should it?

The thing is, very few people who win auctions on eBay use this feature. It's human nature to want to keep what you've got, to want to avoid losing. Even a ten-year-old gets incensed when he discovers he's been outbid.

That's why so many auctions are active at the last minute. Auctions don't work in a rational way.

When you bid $16 for that bat on the first day, you feel terrific. I mean, you just bough a $99 bat for $16.

Of course, you're only the high bidder for a day or so. Then it's not your bat anymore! Someone else has your bat. So you bid $4 more. It's okay, you tell yourself, because, hey, you only spent $4 to get your bat back.

And this keeps going and going until you've spent $200.

A friend of mine spent almost a thousand dollars on a piece of furniture worth $20 using this tortured logic. Human beings are quite willing to repeatedly spend small amounts of money to avoid losing something that they think already belongs to them.

Last thought: the only thing worse than losing a big-time auction is winning one. If you win, you feel like a chump because everyone else in the world dropped out before you. Which is why, if you ever sell something big at auction, you need to bend over backwards to pleasantly surprise the purchaser. It's the only way to overcome auction-buyer's remorse.

Bonus lesson: If you can sell a trial version of the product or service you offer for a small amount of money, do it. (Not 'free', though, cause that'll ruin it). Once someone tries the trial--assuming they like it--then future purchases are easier to justify, because all they're doing is paying a bit extra to keep the item from disappearing...

You may very well already have Google Analytics installed. It's free, it's accurate and it's cool. Google lets anyone with a website measure their traffic and dozens of other metrics. The entire dashboard is focused on how many people come to your site, how many pages they view when they get there and how long they stay.

Given our desire to be popular combined with Google's desire to give users what they want, it's not surprising that traffic is the key driver of the program.

But traffic is a red herring. At best, it's distracting, a stand-in for something more useful. At worst, though, it's dangerous, because the quest for traffic causes you to make bad decisions.

Why do you have a site? What's your goal? Is it to sell something? To receive email? To spread an idea? Whatever it is, you can probably measure it. And measure it you should. Every other piece of Analytics data is trivial compared to that one number.

Short version: if you don't understand how to do goal tracking and funnel analysis, don't use Analytics until you do.

Google offers Analytics for a reason. They're not being selfless... they understand that efficient websites are more likely to buy traffic, because those sites can more easily convert traffic into revenue. The purpose of the program, then, isn't to stroke your ego (or make you feel inadequate). Instead, it's a tool to help you redesign your site every single day to make your ultimate efficiency go up.

Kevin points us to the broken ipod store.

Our life has become a Saturday Night Live sketch. The question is this: now that you can connect anyone, who will you connect?

Chris points out this article, all about a woman who sells tumbleweed online.

She's grossing more than $40,000 a year, almost entirely to organic search engine traffic.

I would imagine that the slow shipping option would be pretty cheap, as long as you live downwind from her.

Last Wednesday, the Times ran an article (okay, it was more of a puff piece) about a new gelato shop in New York. (It hadn't even opened yet). This little shop, called Grom, was the first US outpost of a successful chain in Italy.

I took a few friends on Saturday night, which was opening day. There were more than 50 people waiting in line on the sidewalk. It had been that way all day. While we were waiting, they completely ran out of product. All gone.

Gluttons for punishment and always eager to do research for my valued readers, we went back Sunday afternoon. Another 40 people in line.

Is Grom a purple cow? Or was it a combination of perfect weather, the perfect street, the perfect time of day and the best buzz rollout ever? If they're busy in February, it means they've got more than just buzz.

Which brings us to the Fugees, a refugee soccer team in Georgia. These are kids who were lucky enough to find a wonderful coach... it's a great story. The team got a write up in the Times a few months ago. Which led to a book deal, and a movie deal and a guarantee of more than $2,000,000 for the movie alone. That'll put a lot of kids through college.

There's no denying th power of this effect. The real question is this: can you count on it? Plan on it? Scale it?

The answer is no. It's a little like planning your retirement by hoping to win the lottery. Nice work if you can get it.

... is almost a useless thing to say.

If you want to end a conversation with a teenager, just ask, "How was school today?"

If you want to end a conversation with a customer, just ask if you can help. Instead, ask, "can I get you a hot drink?" or "what's the worst thing about your insurance company?" or "one slice or two?"

Content is getting shorter. Much shorter. Call it snack culture if you want. (Josh sends us this one. Of course it's fake.)

At the same time, advertisers are tempted to get shorter as well. To run shorter pre-rolls and shorter ads and pay to get their jelly-bean-sized logos in the corner of the screen.

I think the answer is to do the opposite. To make loooonger ads (put em on YouTube, they're free).

I heard an argument about the Presidential debate from last week. 90 minutes for ten people. Impossible!

Why not start the Debate Channel? 20 hours a week of live debate available online. Get a cable network to run three or four hours of highlights every week as an inducement to the candidates, but it will really be about the Net. If a candidate doesn't show up, the others get more time to talk. Use a chess clock to be sure no one bullies the conversation.

A huge portion of our lives (as marketers, as consumers, as voters, as citizens) has been dominated by the fact that there were three or twenty TV networks. That this was a scarce resource. It's not. Not any more. So, if there's unlimited real estate, what are we going to build?

[it seems from the trackbacks that I wasn't as clear as I could be, so here goes: the reason you wanted shorter commercials is that they were cheaper to run and you had a shot at stealing attention. But now, you can't steal attention and airtime is free (online). So, since the only people who are going to watch your commercial are the people who WANT to watch it, might as well give them something at least as long as they want to watch...]

Leaving aside the obvious contradiction of strategy (laptop users are more likely to buy books and less likely to steal stuff, so why not let them in the store and offer them a mesh bag to carry about), this sign highlights one of the silliest (and common) policy rules: no exceptions.

No exceptions? Really?

If I gave you a million dollars could you make an exception?

And on top of the unreality of the idea, consider the message it sends to the consumer. "We're so busy and so centralized and so hierarchical that you shouldn't even bother to discuss this with our staff." Or, the short version, "go away."

Why not try a sign that says,

WELCOME!
To keep costs down, we require anyone carrying a bag bigger than this square to check it. Our check area is run by Ralph, who is kind and honest, but I hope you can understand that we can't be responsible for any items you might want to check. If this is a problem for you, consider asking for one of our mesh bags, which can safely tote your laptop or camera. Thanks for shopping at the Strand... we're really glad you're here.

If making a sign gets you all stressed out, let someone else do it for you.

It turns out that it's a lot easier to peel a banana if you start from the 'wrong' end.

You don't even have to use your teeth.

Here's the thing: I know this. I've tried it. It's true.

I still peel a banana the hard way. It feels like the right thing to do.

Selling change is much harder than you think.

Do you ever ask for advice? Do you try out your new ideas on people before they are seen by the public? Probably.

My experience is that the world is divided into several groups when it comes to critiques:

One group likes everything. Tell someone an idea and she'll love it. This could be because she has such esteem for you, or it could be because it's easier than being critical.

Another group hates everything. These folks have discovered that if you are harshly critical early on in a process, it means you won't be responsible for failure of the idea later.

A third group eggs you on. These are the people who push you to make it sharper, more remarkable and, yes, riskier.

The last group pushes you to tone it down. To go ahead, but carefully. To round off the edges.

Yes, there are people who are able to jump from group to group, who have unpredictable insights. I know one person who is unpredictable... except for the fact that she is always 100% wrong about my ideas (if she likes it, we've got trouble).

The interesting thing is that you get a choice. The choice of who to ask.

So, who are you asking?

Everything you need to know is right here in this little snippet from a lens I found today:

Chris sends us a Powerpoint made by his daughter. (Download everywhere.ppt)

So, the Net is abuzz with news that after years of flirting, Microsoft is serious about buying Yahoo. Most of the pundits are busy talking about strategic fit or Google or overlaps or asset valuation.

The real point, I think, is people.

The best things to ever come out of Yahoo, as far as I'm concerned, have been the work of individuals. Not of some hyperbolic purple and yellow machine, but from people, strong-willed individuals willing to buck the bureaucracy. And all the worst stuff the company has done has come out of committees. If Microsoft buys Yahoo, a huge (huge) number of talented people will be even richer than before and will almost certainly walk away.

What we haven't figured out how to predict yet is which people will perform breakthroughs, which people are the ones that will change everything. What we do know for sure is that some organizations are more hospitable to that sort of behavior than others. Microsoft has gotten good at developing pockets of this sort of innovation. The challenge of an acquisition is going to be: Can the combined company make it a lot more likely that mavericks actually bring great stuff to market?

“I’m sometimes frustrated by the long stories,” Rupert Murdoch says about the Wall Street Journal.

Even in the web 2.0 world, marketers need money. We need money to create remarkable products and to tell stories that spread. We need it to hire the best people and most of all, to stick it out until our ideas spread.

Which is why all but the largest companies need to learn a key lesson of personal finance.

This chart shows what happens to two people. The smart person, we'll call him Gallant, manages to save $100 a month for five years.

The other one, we'll call him Doofus, spends $100 more than he has every month.

After five years, Gallant has almost $7,000 in the bank. Even with only 5% interest, he's building an asset that keeps him out of trouble with his mother-in-law and gives him the freedom to invest in the next part of his business.

The same period of time, Doofus has used his credit cards to finance his debt of $100 a month. That tiny nut has now added up to about $13,000 in 24% credit card debt. And every single month it gets a lot bigger.

If this isn't interesting to you, consider the company that spends $10,000 or $100,000 extra every month.

A lot of organizations decide to skip the rice and beans and studio apartment step. They decide to "go big or stay home." More often than not, they end up going home.

I spent many years window shopping restaurant menus and driving all night to get to meetings where the plane cost just a bit too much. I thought at the time that I had no choice, but now I realize that I could have borrowed money on my credit cards and lived a little easier. I'm glad I didn't.

When I talk to people who want to become marketers, I almost always tell them to go start something and go market something. The same advice for 15 year olds and seniors. Turning off the TV and building a Cafe Press store is not only free, but it starts to build a professional-skills asset for the long haul. Pay as much as you need to for things that matter, and as little as you can for things that don't. And never borrow money to pay for something that goes down in value.

On Friday May 18 in NY, Micah and Andrew are running a conference that just might be one of those seminal events that everyone remembers attending years later... even if they didn't. Like the Fast Company Advance in 1997, or the AOL partner event in 1996. Check it out: Personal Democracy Forum – Technology Is Changing Politics.

Some speakers: Tom Friedman, Arianna Huffington, Jay Rosen, Kim Malone, Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Cheryl Contee, Eli Pariser, Sara Horowitz, Josh Marshall, Ruby Sinreich, Craig Newmark, Joe Trippi, Becki Donatelli, Andrew Keen, Ellen Miller, Chris Rabb, David All, Todd Ziegler, Allison Fine, Clay Shirky, Liza Sabater, Brian Dear, Ben Rattray, Seth Godin, Steve Urquhart, Mindy Finn, Mike Turk, Zack Exley, Walter Fields and Robert Greenwald.

Hope to see you there.

Every year, more than a thousand new 'business' books get published in the US. Not textbooks or manuals, but general interest books about how to do business better.

Some sell a few hundred copies. Some sell a few hundred thousand. One or two might sell a million. Out of a potential audience of 30 or 40 million white collar workers in the US.

Do they work or are they an utter waste of time?

I'll admit to being biased (wow), but my mail is an interesting barometer. Here's a self-selected group of people, a fairly large one, fortunately, that takes the time to write in and tell me what helped and how. Not only do my books seem to help, but the general consensus from this group is that many different books from many different authors help. There are plenty of clunkers, lots of dramatically overwritten brochures masquerading as books. But mixed in with the drek are books that change everything.

If we're going to be honest about it, we should agree that the best business books are either useless (in which case rational business people should avoid them) or they're useful.

So here's my real question:

If you went to a doctor who told you that she hadn't read a scholarly article or taken any training since med school, would you stick around? What about a lawyer who doesn't read law journals or a dentist who never bothered to read up on the newest case studies?

Never mind the professions. What about the machine shop down the street? Think the $18 an hour machine operator is supposed to read the manual that came with the new machine? Who cares if he doesn't like to read?

Why does our bizarre national fear of reading have anything to do with this? We read stuff all the time (email, stop signs, the comics) but for some reason, people think it's fine to draw the line at books. (Typical annual per capita purchase rate for hardcover books in the US: one).

True story: I was doing a speech for a bunch of twenty-something campus reps for a clothing company. One young lady raised her hand. She pointed to Purple Cow (about 160 pages long) and said, "If we only have time to read twenty pages, which twenty pages should we read?"

Fortune 1,000 companies have literally hundreds (or thousands) of salespeople. Why aren't each of these salespeople required to read the latest sales book from Jeffrey Gitomer? Compared to the cost of training, it's almost free. Compared to the cost of not doing anything, it's a bargain.

Can you imagine web designers who proudly proclaim that they never read up on Ruby on Rails or metatags? So how come so many marketers are comfortable announcing that they've never read anything by Guy?

Now, repeat the entire post substituting 'business blog' for 'business book'.

Predicting the future of the iPhone is perfect bait for marketing pundits everywhere. How about a pool and we'll see who's as smart as they pretend to be?

Steve Ballmer says, "There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."

Laura Ries writes,

"I don't disagree with the prediction that initially Apple will sell quite a few iPhones. Steve Job's brilliant job with the PR and the media's love of convergence will make an iPhone a must have for some early adopters and elites.

But shortly after the launch the initial hype will wear off and Steve will move on to the next project at Apple. Then the iPhone will end up in the convergence scrap heap along with the ROKR, N-Gage, WebTv and many others."

Easy to be hard, I guess. My take is quite different. I think the iPhone is going to sell 2 million units in 2007 and more in 2008. There, I said it.

So, I invite you to make a prediction, trackback it here and a year from now, we'll take a look.

Have you seen these people? Are you these people?

A few months ago, I showed my friend Dave a poster I had in my basement. I thought it was astonishing that so many of the people that were at the top of their game in 2000 appeared to have disappeared.

Well, Dave ran with the idea and came up with an entire site devoted to the poster, the Dip and the hunt for the missing people.

He asked me for some advice, but it's his gig. I hope you enjoy it. Get your friends to help and let's see if we can figure the whole thing out.

Why doesn't someone make a wireless bluetooth lavaliere microphone? It would be perfect for Skype calls, and also make it easy to give a speech. The bluetooth would magically hook up to your laptop, the laptop could jack out to the speakers. If it exists, I can't find it.

While we're at it, I really need a TypePad plug in that would highlight relevant archival posts automatically. If you look to the left, there, in little teeny tiny print you'll find all the archives for the last several years worth of posts on this blog. But most of you will never read any of them, even though a few are sort of good. One or two are even great posts. So, without completely interrupting the discussion with extraneous links, how do I point deep into the archives?

Marketing, I think, can be divided into two eras.

The first, the biggest, the baddest and the most impressive was the era in which marketers were able to reach the unreachable. Ads could be used to interrupt people who weren't intending to hear from you. PR could be used to get a story to show up on Oprah or in the paper, reaching people who weren't seeking you out.

Sure, there were exceptions to this model (the Yellow Pages and the classifieds, for example), but generally speaking, the biggest wins for a marketer happened in this arena.

We're watching it die.

The latest is the hang-wringing about the loss of the book review sections from major newspapers. Book publicists love these, because it's a way of putting your book in front of people who weren't looking for it. Oprah is a superstar because she has the power (the right? the expectation?) of regularly putting new ideas in front of people who weren't looking for that particular thing.

Super Bowl ads? Another example of spending big money to reach the unreachable. This is almost irresistible to marketers.

Notice the almost.

In the last few years, this model is being replaced. Call it permission if you want, or turning the world into the Yellow Pages. The web is astonishingly bad at reaching the unreachable. Years ago, the home page banner at Yahoo was the hottest property on the web. That's because lazy marketers could buy it and reach everyone.

Thanks to the Long Tail and to competition and to a billion websites and to busy schedules and selfish consumers, the unreachable are now truly unreachable.

If I want a book review, I'll go read one. If I want to learn about turntables, I'll go do that. Mass is still seductive, but mass is now so expensive, marketers are balking at buying it (notice how thin Time Magazine is these days? Nothing compared to Gourmet.)

And yet. And yet marketers still start every meeting and every memo with ideas about how to reach the unreachable. It's not in our nature to do what actually works: start making products, services and stories that appeal to the reachable. Then do your best to build that group ever larger. Not by yelling at them, but by serving them.

Smart marketers already know that marketing is more than advertising. Here's one tactic that might be overlooked: time.

Domino's rode this for a while with 30 minute delivery. Fedex still does. But using time as part of your story can be a lot more subtle than that.

At a conference I recently attended, the group was 50 minutes behind schedule after only 2 hours of the program. For the speakers, the message was, "I'm important, as important as the last guy, so since he went over ten minutes, I will too." For the audience, the message was, "this is a conference about the guys on the stage, not about us."

When a doctor overbooks her schedule and it's typical to wait ten or thirty minutes for an appointment, then the story is made really clear to the patient. Who's more important? And doesn't this marketing effort affect the way the patient and the doctor communicate?

A contractor that prides himself on finishing every single job on the day it's due, regardless of what it takes, is telling a powerful story, doing marketing that's actually cheaper and more effective than advertising ever could be.

I was checking out the very neat Google History feature and discovered that I do far more searches on Tuesday. In fact, it looks like a graceful curve that peaks each week on Tuesdays.

Your brain looks for coincidences wherever it can find them. That's how we make sense of things. Even though the chart seems to be clearly non-random, I can guarantee that there are no external factors at work here. It's a coincidence. Short version: just because a graph looks good doesn't mean it's true.

Sorry, full!

Friday, May 4, I'll be trying out some new slides and riffs on the presentation for the Dip. If you'd like to be part of the audience (I need your feedback!), would love to have you stop by the office. Drop me a line, there's only room for ten or so people (and it's an off the record, non-public sort of thing). I'll write back with specifics, timing, etc. Admission is free, no strings, no promises. The focus is going to be on the presentation, so it's not really a workshop, except in the theatrical sense.

I'll take this post down once we're full. Thanks.

Pam points us to Family to Family. This extraordinary non-profit connects communities with plenty to communities without enough.

I'm fascinated by the lack of infrastructure necessary to accomplish this. An all-volunteer group is able to become a clearinghouse, connecting people who need and want to be connected.

...sometimes, though, they don't do it very well.

If you want to travel to India, you need a visa. The Indian government would very much like you to travel to their country, to exchange ideas, do business, see the sights and spend some money. But you need a visa first.

I spent a few hours at the Indian consulate in New York Friday. It was filled with so many possibilities, I had trouble remembering them all.

Many of the chairs are broken, leaving sharp steel platforms on which to crouch. And there aren't enough chairs, broken or not. The signs are confusing, the two clerks are protected by a sheet of glass a full inch thick (which is twice the thickness of a typical bank's) and the little machine that dispenses deli-style tickets is broken.

Fixing the consulate would be easy. I'd start by putting in phone lines to a call center in India and making it easy for anyone waiting to get questions answered by a helpful person with plenty of time to invest in the conversation. I'd buy some comfortable chairs. I'd invite airlines and hotels to have brochures or even better, a booking agent right there in the waiting area. I'd hire seven more clerks. And I'd definitely lose the glass.

The more important issue is this: this is a business. They take in more than $20,000 a day in fees, but even more important, the way they market themselves has a direct and important impact on travel decisions. No visa, no trip. Big hassle, no trip. Given that every single person traveling to this vast country must deal with the consulate first, think of the leverage... Just a small influence on the quantity or quality of travel to India would be huge.

My takeaway was this: the people in that building were way too nice and way too smart to not know the many ways they could fix this process. The problem is that this bureaucracy, like most bureaucracies, has an attitude of minimizing, not maximizing. They want to minimize expense, not maximize benefit. There isn't a single person there who has as part of his job, "change systems to increase the satisfaction of people we deal with." Nobody who is charged with, "increase revenue opportunities for us and for the people we work with." Or even, "employ more people in Delhi."

Same thing happens at my village zoning board, at most schools, at many churches and even, believe it or not, at most businesses. It's not that difficult, but it requires a very different mindset.

Sometimes, organizations tell a story that works. And then they overreach. They believe that they have the ability to expand the story, to move it beyond where their authenticity lies. It's very tempting to do this, because the old story was so effective and people are giving you the benefit of the doubt. The challenge is, once your new story is discovered to be a fraud, your old story starts to be scrutinized even more closely, you no longer have goodwill or momentum and the whole thing falls apart.

I accidentally brought a grapefruit with me on my last trip to Florida. Tucked it into my carry on, didn't eat it at the airport and forgot about it. A big grapefruit. A juicy one. No one questioned it.

Hmmm. I wonder what all that fuss about four ounces of hair gel is about.