The Sebastian

Imagine for a second that you go into your favorite restaurant and find a completely new soda dispenser machine. Not that old one you are used to, but a completely brand-new design which is plugged into the web. At first, it looks a bit futuristic, it doesn't have any triggers to pull your favorite soda, but instead a large touch screen.

From the screen, you can select one of three options:

1) Create your own personalized soda/juice mix:

Will take you to a menu where you can select exactly which percentage you want (let's say, in increments of 5%) of each ingredient. There are probably about 10 or 15 different ingredients. So, to illustrate, something in the lines of: give me 15% of this cola, 15% of this other one, 50% orange juice and 20% mango juice. Once you are done, the machine will prepare your mix, but will also let you save it under a nickname of your choice. So you can type in this is my "Seb01" mix. The machine will give you back a ticket with a number that uniquely identifies yourselve.

You can later go to a social 2.0-ish website where you can login with that number and see how "Seb01" is doing. You can link it to your profile and write your own comments about it. You can link your profile to your personal blog or myspace address. Other people can order a "Seb01" from any of the machines in the "web" of cool restaurants and places having this new kind of machines. You can tell your friends to try it out, and you could "perfect" it little by little (Seb02, ...) They can also login into the website and post comments or recommend your "Seb01" drink to their friends, and they can also see the components inside "Seb01" (so they can experiment with variations of their own).

2) Select from most popular mixes:

You will get a menu with the 10 most popular mixes. Mixes get more and more popular depending on how many people drink them, how many people read about them on the site, post a comment about them, "digg" or "dugg" them, you-get-the-point. You also have a place where you can type "Seb01", even if it is not the most popular one, you can still order it if you've heard about it!. There might also be a menu with the less popular ones, the most exotic ones ("different" ones), etc.

3) Select from the existing "boring" commercial mixes:

Here you can get your boring 100-years old mix that has been there forever. Or may be you can also find new ones being pushed by known brands so that you can try them out.

There are a few more twists:

a) All personalized mixes formulas are in the public domain (exept may be for some of their ingredients from the machine). The company having these machines could also commercialize your popular creation in cans, etc without owing you any royalties or license fees, but you could also do exactly the same.

b) If you get to author a popular mix, the company will give you some incentives, gift, or may be hire you!

c) The social site could also collect some ad-related revenues, subscription fees to extended services, etc.

OK... I'm running out of ideas right now. It seems to me this would be really cool, but mostly for kids and teenagers. Some adults may also enjoy it.

Another twist: The futuristic bar. Where you can sit down and have your display on what you want to mix in your own cocktail (alcoholic or not), and everybody can also see on their displays what everyone else is mixing and drinking ... you can also enter your profile (...), save it, etc. There could be a "web" of these futuristic bars, where again the same ideas apply: a social 2.0-ish website puts them together and creates a world-wide phenomen... You can send IM messages to other people if they are in another bar, or you can just go talk with the people there... so many possibilities... The site also has videos from different bars and locators to other bars in the "web", should it happen that you are travelling.

I'll post this one on the Entrepreneurship category. Simply because I believe these are particular examples of some broader, more general ideas behind it...

Seth has just pointed out today a link to yet another "million-dollar-viral-marketing" web page. This one is called mmmzr. It's just another twist of the milliondollarhomepage

Regardless of whether this is a mesh-up of this and that site, or the exact twist that makes it different, or what this site does in particular, the interesting thing here are the powerful ideas behind it and how one can (apparently) re-use them, as long as the twist or the blend makes the new site different enough from the previous one in order to create that necessary critical mass (interest and initial traffic) to get the existing social networks diffuse the virus thorugh their favorite communication channels (oh... and yes, BTW, blogs are a very effective one, that's why there is always a blog in these sites).

As Seth points it, these sites will keep changing the rules. They are simple, cheap and extremelly fast and easy to build. They are genious in their very own way. There are just soooo many possible different twists and mesh-ups...

Tranpoline Systems has released the Enron Explorer, a very nice web-2.0-ish tool that lets you explore through Enron's 200,000 internal e-mails available on the public domain.

The little Java applet integrates nicely with the web interface and lets you browse through the social network (graph). The web interface lets you see the e-mails on every inbox and also browse by themes and/or people by using tags.

There is also a nice search toolbar. For example, you could search for:

demand response and get back this: http://enron.trampolinesystems.com/focus/19185#focus=/search/demand%20response&unique=5

or golf and get:
http://enron.trampolinesystems.com/focus/19185#focus=/search/golf&unique=6

That's it. I'll leave the evil searches up to you.

For the past few nights, my TV has been competing with my notebook for my attention. TV lost. OK, I must admit, I do not have cable or satellite TV, but there are still a few good shows or series to watch.

The thing is, if I want news, why not browsing Google news? Why not my favorite newspaper (checkout Clarin)?

After that, I still have my blogroll (at your right) and some live bookmarks. Then I have e-mail and IM and IRC (yes, I still use IRC from time to time!), and .... Then I have the commercials-free popurls dashboard throwing at me an incredible array of fresh, fun and informative stories, videos, pictures and audio clips.

I also spend good quality time writing here. Or just hopping into last.fm.

This is just a small list. But I've truly found in the past few months that if I want serious distraction for my mind, I'll go grab my guitar or my keyboard and play some music or practice some jazz tunes or exercises. Otherwise, I prefer the fast, fresh and interactive social experience on the net. But the old days of just sitting on the coach without any interaction are mostly gone for me.

What do you think? Is this your case, too?

Have you already read "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", by Malcom Gladwell? I first heard about Malcom in one of my "Fast Company" numbers a while ago. Then heard people talking about him and his books. I then bought and listen to Blink's audio CD version, about a year ago. I really enjoyed the book, all the way from start to finish. To the point I would sometimes stay in the car for a few extra minutes in the parking lot before going wherever I was meant to go.

A few days ago, I went to the outlet mall. After shopping for a while, I got hungry and decided to eat something from their food curt. I don't particularly enjoy fast food, but sometimes that's exactly what I want: fast food (hey, I didn't mean bad quality! ... hmm).

Anyway, there were three choices: subway, an italian place with the usual pizza and pasta offer, and a chinnesse food store. I didn't feel like sandwhich, so I discarded subway first. Then looked at the pizzas and ... blink! They looked really bad. The pasta looked bad too. The whole presentation was bad. People waiting in the line didn't seem happy. In one or two seconds, just by looking at all this, my fast food expert-mind resolved (without thinking) to go give the chinnese food store a try.

The chinesse store had their marketing guy standing on the way and offering free samples of chicken-something. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't very polite (neither his body language, nor his words). The sample food was OK. The line was going fast, but got stucked. There was a lady complaining in the register, apparently because she was billed incorrectly. She was being loud. The guy from the register could speak some English. It was my turn. I took the "two meats and fried rice or nooddles or white rice" plate. The lady serving me did not talk to me, but waited for me...

"May I have some rice & nooddles please?' She answered... "No". That was her first word to me, the customer. And it wasn't a friendly "No". There wasn't an "additional fee" or anything else available. The only option she offered me (after seeing I was not moving on), was to surrender one of my meats to get a full portion of rice, a full portion of nooddles, and one meat. "That's not what I want" ... she didn't quite care.

Down the line, a little kid, probably 5 years old was doing the drinks from the soda dispenser machine. I blinked again. Auugh! That was really disgusting now. Needless to say, I did not enjoy my food.

About a few more days ago, I had an extremelly good experience with another fast food chinnese store. Why was that? Whas the food so different? Not really. OK, may be it was a bit better, but not that much. The fact is, once you've blinked the bad experience flag, you probably wont enjoy the rest.

So, anyway, my points are:

• Care who's on your business front line. You can't train them to be polite. You probably can't train them to smile (at least not all the time). You can't train them to be a people's person. But you can train the skills. Don't care so much about experience. Hire the right attitude, the right personality, then train the necessary skills.
• Care about the how, not just the what. Putting the marketing guy to offer free samples wont help if he ain't good at it. The first chinnesse place had a terrific guy offering the free samples and, in one or two secconds, he induced a very possitive blink. You gotta do it, but you gotta do it right (or it might be even worst than not doing it at all!)
• Listen to your blink. Listen to other's blinks. I think I might have been better off just going somewhere else, or simply holding my appetite (that's difficult!). If possible, have your friends, employees and family experience your products or services and tell you their different perceptions. Correct whatever you want and can, then iterate. Get feedback from your customers (not only from the unhappy ones!).
• Care your presentation. Not matter what service or product you sell (or give away), it has to 'blink' good. Blink good can be induced by the product itself (e.g. beautiful design), or may be just by your sales guys creating a possitive blink (BTW, I believe this is also closely related to Keith's Ferrazzi "deep bump" concept). If your front line can't deep bump, then they probably can't induce a positive perception either.
  

Oh ... and, by the way, don't forget to go read Malcom's latest post on degree of difficulty. After reading it, we understand why sometimes it is hard to realize all this in a clear and easy way. If we are not an insider, (i.e. not the customer, not the one doing the job, etc), then you might not notice a few things; you might have an absolutely different perception. That's why it is usually so hard to auto-analyze yourself or your own company. So, one more time, go ask your friends, family and employees to do that for you. Repeat this periodically. But also remember Jerry Weinberg's Marvin's Second Great Secret: Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't. If your employees can fix it, tell them to, and let them do. If they can't, teach them how.