FlyCan'tBird

How To Succeed In E-commerce While Retaining The Ability To Function

Too many choices

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. The modern day caveat is that this is also a predictor of one’s ability to thrive in the world of e-commerce.

The two contradictory notions are as follows: shoppers like limited selection and unlimited choice (and they both work).

One could argue strongly for the case of scale and the benefits of unlimited selection: Zappos had 33,000 pairs of shoes in stock as of February 2012, and having a wide selection is certainly part of a model that has worked for them.

But this model works for a certain type of shopper: the kind that has formed opinions, and will probably spend most of their time on Zappos trying to decide on the color or price for a capped-toe oxford rather than between different styles. If you haven’t decided on a shoe style, Zappos can be absolutely overwhelming.

On the other end of the spectrum exist the limited selection e-tailers, aka the curators, those e-commerce enterprises that are prescriptive. In other words: If you are X type of guy, these are the X styles you should wear. The curators have limited selection, and the benefit is they’ve removed the paralysis of choice. A good example of a new enterprise in this is space is Frank and Oak, from online retailer Modasuite.

In the curated model, the hope is that customers subscribe to an e-tailers style and defer many of their style decisions to the one trusted source.

This model also has its limitations: According to a Q3 2011 iPerceptions survey, only 20% of consumers come to e-tail stores with an intention to buy, while 55% of users come to browse and educate themselves. In other words: the curators may inspire styles that are eventually purchased elsewhere. In other words, their visitors are window shoppers.

What is old is new again

Brick and mortar retailers have understood the benefits of the coexistence of curation and selection for eons. It explains the importance of storefront displays and curated collections within stores.

The natural online evolution is for e-tailers to do a better job with curated looks within their sites while offering a wide selection for consumers to choose from once a desired style is determined. Gilt’s Park and Bond does this by using external curators like GQ to help turn shoppers into buyers. The challenge is that e-tailers must maintain a perceived independence of their curators, so that shoppers don’t feel like selections are influenced by brands or store inventory issues.

All while retaining the ability to function.

Want a faster web? Speed up the ads.

The President of IGN with some great advice on how to speed up the web:

roybahat:

Pageload times are a problem for some online media companies – for good reason — heavy content, with video, high-res images, and features jammed in. (Let’s set aside the separate problem of content/feature bloat, and assume for a second that it’s a good thing to have all that content and all those features.)

IGN sites need to load much faster — and we’re down to 6 seconds or so on a typical site, from 7.5 seconds a year ago. But it still takes too long to enjoy the site.

But as much as we improve our content and features, about 40% of the load time for IGN.com is still in the ads — even though the ads take up less than a fifth of the real estate on the page. We introduced an open source JavaScript library to call ads simultaneously and ensure content loads, but there is much more we need to do.

Why are ads slow? First, the creative is getting better and so it takes longer to load. Ten years ago, online ads were mostly just flat images and everything else was called “rich” media — anything animated, interactive, and therefore heavier. Last year, two-thirds of the display ads on the Internet were rich — so rich is the new standard.

And the delivery of online ads is a complicated handoff from third-party ad servers to creative agencies to clients and to publishers. Add in targeting services and a daisy chain of ad networks and the delays stretch longer. This relay race happens under constant deadline, and creative is often discarded after a campaign is over — so there is less re-use of code and tools than there should be, and a lot of invention on the fly.

Advertisers can’t solve this alone. Advertisers don’t spend their time focusing on shaving tenths of a second from load times, but publishers do.

So online publishers need to help advertisers by making it easier to speed up ads. We need to not make ad calls when ads are unsold, we need to treat it like a shared issue — not like someone else’s problem.

This is an opportunity for advertisers — users would enjoy their marketing campaigns, and probably pay more attention to them (though we need to do the research on that), if they only loaded faster. In fact, online ad blocking tools promote how much faster it is to surf the web if you’re not looking at the ads.

The advertisers still need to have a full palette of creative choices: explosions, video, animations, all that stuff. We need to apply all the tools of speeding up the web — compressing files, minifying, reducing requests. Imagine a toolkit creative agencies could use that would create faster ads out of the box. We should see how far we can get.

(And thanks to Mediapost for sharing this with their audience as well.)

Flipboard, Livestand and The Dark Side Of The Moon Dilemma

Dark Side

When it comes to newspapers and magazines, the whole has always been greater than the sum of their parts.

This is the challenge that “reader” apps such as Flipboard, Pulse and Yahoo Livestand face as they try to create compelling magazine formats housing the RSS feeds of many publishing brands.

Fundamentally, the appreciation of a publisher brand is not a function of content fragments alone, but an appreciation for a general point of view, a design aesthetic and the story told within the content assembly itself.

I think of it as the Dark Side of The Moon Dilemma.

Dark Side is to Pink Floyd what the 9th is to Beethoven. It is their masterpiece, and in standard prog. rock fashion, the ordering of songs tells a greater story than any single song. Strip a song out of the environment, and you have just stripped away vast unseen value. You also have songs that depend on the album for cred (yes I’m looking at you “Money”). The argument can also be extended to accompaniments the album: design, cover art and so forth, that add context to the album experience.

Newspaper and magazine publishers aim to make their own monthly and daily masterpieces, not only by producing the right content, but also assembling it in the right order. Each part of a magazine relates to another part. There is an effort to make a cohesive whole. Publishers understand the value of this, and that is why Graydon Carter kicks of each issue of Vanity Fair with his own piece that synthesizes all of the varied content into one narrative.

Behind the scenes, newspaper editors are giving themselves ulcers daily, thinking about how to order their content, particularly on their homepages. They know that aggregated content tells a story itself. Readers are looking for a unifying theme as well as a point of view. One piece of New York Times content does not tell the daily narrative of the New York Times as well as a perusal of its front page.

Reader apps have focused a great deal on magazine aesthetics: when you turn a page in Flipboard, it looks like you are actually turning a page. This is interesting a few times, but eventually, you realize that what you are looking at is just an RSS reader on steroids.

The next iteration of reader app needs to be about integrating publisher brands into reader experiences rather than just publisher content. There is a distinction, and it’s a big one.

Just ask a Pink Floyd fan.

Are The Right People On Your Bus?

Bus

I’m usually wary of books of the business variety.

I’ve found that many lead to wretched business “fads”, and management by fad just doesn’t seem, well…sustainable. Granted, it does add more buzzword variety to the boardroom.

Before all of you Six Sigma Black Belts begin to weep uncontrollably, I do have one business book I can recommend that is worth its buzz, and that is “Good To Great” by Jim Collins. It has been around for awhile, and recently I stopped resisting.

What’s great about this book is that it is a data-based assessment of what makes companies sustainably great. It looks at firms that have consistently performed above others and tries to determine what makes them tick.

One concept that stands out is the idea of getting the right people on the bus. According to GTG, it is the most important move a manager can make and Collins goes so far as to say that it trumps strategy and an individual manager’s vision, no matter how brilliant. The logic goes that if you have the best people in place and are open to an environment of healthy debate, much of the rest will take care of itself. That sounds simple. Sustainably great companies are not led by Steve Jobs, but by humble coaches who field the best teams.

The problem is that most companies simply recruit based on need, hiring active job seekers who may not be the best and the brightest. Oftentimes the gems are actually passive seekers: those who are already employed and are performing well in current roles.

The reality is that HR needs to be much more strategic to attract passive seekers, building up a persistent presence in the community such that managers can source candidates they have already met at company hosted meet-ups and hack days. HR should be much less about recruiting, more about about building awareness and affinity such that people are aware the company is awesome and are queuing outside to get a chance to join the party within.

Really, people aren’t your most important asset, the right ones are. Next time you pay lip service to HR having a place at the table, be aware that they should actually be at the head of the table.

Why 80% Of (Online) Success Is Showing Up…

Woody Allen

Two weeks ago I spoke at Ecom Montreal about AskMen’s story, and some of the things we’ve focused on to help become the largest men’s lifestyle site in the world.

The one quote that sums it all up is the classic quote from Woody Allen: “80% of success is showing up”

Anyhow, “showing up” for AskMen has been about 1) An execution-oriented mindset, including a focus on building and launching quickly to tweak afterwards, rather than getting bogged down in excessive process, or over-specification of products/site features prior to launch (channeling some Eric Ries here…though we have still have a lot we can learn from him) and 2) a focus on low-cost mass distribution of content. Things like SEO,content swaps and cooperative editorial with other large publishers.

So how are you building your audience on your site?

When Smart Ideas Are Stupid…

Dumb idea

An occupational hazard of the tech and new media sectors is the possibility of getting your lunch served to you by an overnight competitor, who through nimbleness, a clever idea or just a burr in his/her saddle is able to put together a product that is absolutely ass-kicking, leading to an existential crisis for your company that you didn’t have when you went to sleep the night before.

It’s what keeps management teams in these sectors up at night, and what makes a culture of innovation an absolute necessity in order to thrive and survive.

But creating a culture of innovation is a massive challenge, because there are several parts to it, and the parts that are the least fun are the parts that are the most important. It’s the neglect of what happens after an idea emerges that makes smart ideas stupid.

The Trouble With Ideas

Everyone loves a good brainstorm, with ideas flying back and forth and folks in the room riffing off each other’s creativity; big brains jamming together and coming up with great ideas that could have massive impacts on the business. It’s fun, and it reminds folks of why they love what they do, or for those less fortunate, is a glimmer of light in an otherwise bleak day. It’s exciting, not just because there are great business possibilities, but also because it reminds folks of the power of teamwork and the creativity that people are capable of.

The bad news as far as business is concerned is that it is pure recreation until you are able to put these ideas in to action. You’ve planted a seed but you don’t yet have a crop in the field. Seeding is just one part of a process: its the months after that determine whether a crop will be successful. If you are a farmer, it involves worrying about things like weather, insect scourges and eventually the harvest. Enjoy that salad today.

Alas most ideas of the corporate kind die in the conference room. Short lived, shooting stars. RIP idea, you could have been a game changer.

Ideas Are Born as Orphans

The truth is that ideas come in to the world as orphans; the people who suggest them are not yet fully invested in them. They are usually offered trial balloon style, with half conviction, and folks who offer them are looking for some validation from others before they invest further psychologically. The magical part, and the part where managers play a role, is creating an environment where people feel that they can emotionally invest in an idea, to the extent that they will become its champion. To do this, you need to create an idea investment culture; and help your people plant that seed and stick with it until harvest.

Assuming that managers have created a culture where ideas can be shared freely, the next important steps are:

Clearly communicating buy-in to specific (good) ideas once they are born, explaining how the idea aligns with company priorities (they must) and backing efforts for their execution. No ambiguity will do.
Identifying the idea champion, AKA the person who will shepherd the idea from its genesis to actual product execution, and asking them to fully hash out the idea in a product proposal.
Setting a deadline to review of the plan and a go, no go decision & establishing the metrics with which the product can be judged as a success or failure.
Communicating to relevant stakeholders the resources that you are putting at the idea champion’s disposal once the product plan is approved.
Creating a series of checkpoints where obstacles to execution are discussed with the product champion (managers then need to actively intervene to remove obstacles).
Loudly celebrating the launch of the product, not just it’s success. The reason for this is that win lose or draw, you have made a bet, and smart bets are what business is about. No one should be ashamed of smart bets that fail, and the act of follow through on a sanctioned product launch should be rewarded. Make sure that everyone gets the distinction between celebrating a launch and celebrating a successful product…in this case you are celebrating execution, not success.
If a product bombs, have the patience to make tweaks. If these fail, do not chastise the idea champion for the idea itself. After all you made the bet together.

These steps make it easier for teams to invest in ideas, and the more this process is repeated, the further it goes to strengthening an idea investment culture. It’s simple: people make an estimation of the likelihood of their time being wasted before they become an idea champion. Clear, repeated evidence that people can invest in ideas with management’s support and without excessive time wastage in the process is what a company needs to make sure that its smart ideas see the light of day.

Top Five Reasons Your Partnership Proposal Has No Chance…

Working in business development at a large media site means I have had the luxury of having a lot of different companies pitch me their products/services daily. A wide variety of great ideas come by my desk, whether it be a new mobile app platform, a revolutionary newsletter marketing tool or an innovative ad-targeting product, on certain days, it feels like I’m running a pawn shop, not knowing what will come in the door next, and whether I should double-down on the civil war sword.

But a company with a great product does not make a deal a shoe-in…in fact it is the equivalent to the “you need to be this tall to get on this ride” sign at the amusement park. You are that tall…but it just gets you started…and there are plenty of reasons why our companies won’t do business together. Here are five of them:

5) You Haven’t Boosted Your Odds With an Intro

Question: you see a beautiful woman at a store that you want to meet, and you have two choices a) Approach her yourself with your standard intro monologue, and hope that you don’t scare her away or b) Have a friend, who is also her friend, make an intro.

Choice “a” probably works just fine if you are a handsome movie star but not so much for muggles like you and I. Most people would choose “b”, because your odds of striking up a good conversation are higher. The credibility that you have with your friend has been passed to her, making it easier to move to the next step.

The same applies to business development and partnerships. If I get a cold call from a known brand, I’m immediately listening. Goodwill surrounding their brand acts as a voucher for the person I’m speaking to. If I get a cold call from company XYZ I have never heard of, I am immediately skeptical. It’s simply a matter of opportunity cost of time…I could waste 30 minutes hearing a pitch from a source who’s credibility is yet to be determined or I could do something else that could have a bigger impact on the business.

If your awesome company doesn’t yet have an awesome brand, you can still easily mitigate this first barrier by getting an intro to the BD contact at a prospective partner by someone they know. Linkedin is an awesome tool for this, but remember that the person you choose to make the intro makes a difference. When at all possible, try to get an intro from someone in a more senior position at their company, but failing that, at least make sure that your intro comes from someone credible in their industry.

4)You Want To Have The Dreaded “Exploratory Discussion”

For the love of god, if you are pitching an established company/brand and are a part lesser-known, lesser-established company, have specific ideas about how your two companies could work together. Know that an established company likely does not need to work with you to survive,and remember that the most natural state of things is status quo.

Countless times I have gotten on the phone with potential partners who want to do business with AskMen, but who have no real idea how this will happen. The signal that sends is a lack of commitment. If working together is important, and you see a company as a valuable partner, show it by putting together solid ideas about how you see your product or service integrating with theirs. The ideas you put forth may not be winners, but certainly they will serve as a starting point for further conversation.

Huge Bonus: Do mock ups. A picture is worth a thousand words, and it’s nice for a potential partner to be able to visualize your ideas. Oftentimes, a mock will become the center point for a discussion, with all the other bullets, slides and your cleverest animated beany men falling to the wayside. I have seen this happen when I pitch and I have seen this happen when I’ve been pitched.

3)You Know A Lot About You, But Not A Lot About Them

Assuming you know why the partnership is important to you, when crafting your pitch you need to switch hats and think about why the partnership is important to the potential partner. In some ways, it’s similar to asking your boss for a raise: If you lead with “I need a raise to bring my kids to Disney World” you may be stating something accurate but sort of uninteresting, failing entirely to address the needs of your boss or the business. A better approach might be to speak about how you can help the company lower costs, increase revenue or position it for growth. Your best chance of success is to address the company’s needs first, while always being aware of your personal goals (meeting Mickey Mouse).

The same logic applies to partnerships…you need to understand as much as you can about the company you are pitching. This begins with understanding the problem your product solves and/or the need it addresses, the alternatives that the company would have if they didn’t do business with you, the costs of the partnership to the potential partner (Not just direct partnership costs…but indirect costs e.g. engineering resources, editorial resources, etc) including opportunity costs (the cost of the thing they won’t do because of the resources they are dedicating the partnership).

You also need to understand how the organization works, reporting structures, who are the deciders, who are the decision influencers and who or which department is most likely to raise objections to the partnership.

2) You Have No Narrative

So you did all of the things that you were supposed to do, built a good product, got a great intro and put yourself in their shoes when figuring out how to pitch a partnership. You even built a beautiful Powerpoint…nay Keynote presentation, with elaborate mocks on how your product would look integrated with theirs.

The only problem: you are a zombie.

Understand, cold-blooded Keynote building monster, that people are drawn to narratives and to passion. It’s part of being human, and including your company’s story or “creation myth” in your pitch goes a long way into making your story part of theirs. AskMen writer and TED speaker Simon Sinek calls it a company’s “why”…why does your company exist and what makes you passionate about it? Though many rational people will claim that they don’t let such stories cloud their vision, they are lying. People are always looking for inspiration, and more often than not, the details of a pitch will be forgotten faster than the narrative, so have one and share it often.

1) You Haven’t Watched Enough Woody Allen Movies

The caveat to the preceeding rules can be summed up in a quote often attributed to Woody Allen: 80% of success is showing up. You need to be on the phone, reaching out, getting introductions and talking about your product with people. Don’t get caught up in reading too many top 5 lists like this, or thinking yourself into inaction. Whether you like it or not, the success of your product or service will likely be a function of the relationships you build as much as it is a function of the quality of your product, so work on your approach, make the connections, and nail that pitch.