I remember reading a story from Paolo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” that essentially gave the message – don’t rip people off, because that is somewhat like stealing. I don’t have the book at hand because I gave all of my copies away, but I remember the moral to the story. Essentially, it was a story about doing fair deals, and making sure you are creating enough value from trade for both parties to profit.
For some companies, I think it eludes them that their core objective – create value; and that driver of growth is creating value for their customer. More benefit, lower cost.
There is one sure fire way of making sure that the equilibrium of the cost to the benefit is found, balancing the price and the value to a prospective customer – that is by using auctions. I’ve always believed that this was a way to find economic justice, but until now it hasn’t necessarily always been practical.
However, Google is showing us the way, as is evident in this article from Stephen Levy @ Wired.
As we move to a more efficient future (since that is where the quick wins are) - expect this trend to continue
del.icio.us Tags: googlenomics
I recently had an interesting discussion with Darren following his cry “Collaboration is a myth” as he tried to find real world examples of collaboration. he framed the question in an interesting way, “What motivates people on Wikipedia to do stuff in concert like that. What is the essence of what we call collaboration?”
At first I thought it came down to two things, user stake in the objective, and user effort required for contribution. These must be balanced against each other. the lower the effort for contribution, the less that needs to be at stake for collaboration participation.
Darren then mused if you could achieve collaboration for business processes, where the user stake in a larger company can be exceptionally minimal.
“Can the gap be bridged purely by technology? - a technology which truly brought collaboration to the workplace”
At first, I thought no, if effort is required and user stake largely removed, can technology bridge the gap to achieve any kind of collaborative work. But then I remembered a great talk from TED,
that showed us that in fact there are times when we will very willingly do something for nothing. that is when we are at play.
there are actually already examples of this type of collaboration in the real world – here are two:
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
and
Play Pumps
del.icio.us Tags:
play,
design
By now, the bricks-and-mortar retailers who are performing the best online have moved past the idea of the company website as the sole indicator of a successful Internet presence. Just like having a giant billboard at your store isn’t enough to bring shoppers in store, neither is having an amazing website (Hence catalogue distribution in the real life).
Five years ago, it may have been enough to have a heavily trafficked brand website in order to be considered a successful online advertiser. However in the light of multi-channel shopping – which we can safely accept as the norm in Australian retail today – having one point of contact with your consumer is no longer enough.
Making product and offer information available through third-party sources and websites has the added bonus of giving the appearance of review and verification, which can help attract those consumers who give more weight to information provided independently rather than via traditional advertising channels.
The bottom line is that reducing all the barriers to purchase for a potential customer is name of the game, and these barriers consist of time, money, effort. By leaving your home turf and playing “away” you can reduce the time and effort for consumers, the only real necessity to having an onsite visit is if you are performing trusted e-commerce transactions, otherwise, save the hassle to your users and inform them where they are, when they want and drive them in-store. The only issue with this is that you need to stop using website visits as a KPI and focus on measuring unique eyeballs and sales.
