The Sebastian

I've decided it's time to continue a little bit on this series. If you haven't read them yet, here are part one and two, where I wrote about Why you should be blogging and What you should be blogging about.

Now it's time to talk about the Who. Depending on the mission and objectives (see part one) for your blog, you will want to write so that you can capture the readers that can help you get there. Your intended audience, that is. Think about existing and potential clients, investors, partners, suppliers, employees, etc.

As I've mentioned in part two, you should consider dividing your blog into different categories, each of them grouping articles that talk about the same main topic. One of the basic Marketing techniques is segmentation and orientation. Your categories help you do exactly this. Each category could very well represent a segment of your market and help you orientate your message to them.

A few targeted messages to each of your segments will be more efficient that only one message sent out to everybody. Tell the story that goes well with every segment. Even better, try to connect at the individual level (e-mail, comments, etc). Warning: telling different stories is tempting and is the right thing to do, but thy must have a common kernel among them, or otherwise you wont be building a consistent message (always respect your brand global message, your values and, once again, your mission).

For instance, if you are a Realtor (TM), you may have, for example, the following categories: Houses and Downtown Condos. Let's suppose Downtown Condos are very expensive and exclusive. Only very successful, wealthy individuals and families can afford them. Then you will want to tweak your message so that it is most appropriate for the wealthy readers interested on this market. This will allow you to create a better connection with them. For the Houses category, you may want to write having a family mother or father in mind. These are just examples, but you get the point.

Don't just limit yourself to think about the different content you will use for articles orientated to each segment. Think about the best way to connect with them. Be creative. Think about slightly tweaking your writing style. Include links or information regarding services, products, brands, referrals, free online tools, e-books, manifestos, lenses, books, movies, advise and other content your target audience is likely to be interested in. Remember to be human. Connect brands they already like with your own brand (e.g. review an Apple stylish product in your design category).

In other words: don't clog your blog with selfish content promoting your products or services. Offer your readers more than that, and they will come back often.

Once things start to work, care about Who is reading, and Who is reading each category. Use a good web statistics system to learn about them and how they use your website (I use, for example, phpOpenTracker). Also, keep reviewing and adapting your segmentation and orientation as needed. Flexibility and speed are some of your big advantages for being small, so profit from them! Warning: do not change your message too often, or you will end up confusing your readers and consumers. They need some time to digest your material. Be patient.

On the next part, I will talk about some clever and inexpensive ways to promote your blog by leveraging readily available technology and on-line services.

I hope you've enjoyed this part. This is just a collection of small ideas. Please help me improving them with your comments

A few days ago, I called my auto insurance company to pay my semi-annual bill. I usually send in my payments through online banking (a very convenient, free service with my bank), but this time I had been traveling a lot and was too close to the due date to do that. I had my credit card ready with me, but they wouldn't take it. They wanted a check-over-the-phone thing. I didn't have my checkbook with me (who uses checks today anyway?). How much more expensive would it be, for a company that size, to accept credit card payments online and over the phone? A small percentage, plus the setup, training and maintenances fees, minus the cost of processing checks from the people that actually use the credit card instead, minus the cost of handling the (first and) second call(s) (read ahead).

Although I don't think it is necessary, nor a good strategy for them, I would still be happy to (at least) have the option to pay a small extra fee for the convenience of using my credit card. How many clients change companies because of them being so restrictive (and cheap) at the time of accepting payments? Don't force your loyal clients to search for alternatives! Even if you are cheaper, most unhappy clients will be happy to move and pay more for a better service!

So, anyway, I called the following day with my checkbook in hand. This time, their routine was different. Unless they changed the process somewhere in between those two days, their guys were being pretty inconsistent (another expense to them). This time, they went through all possible discounts I could get, trying to lower my premium before I payed. I liked that. But the funny thing is, they got me a $2 annual discount because I am now parking my car in a covered garage.

A few days later I get my policy update in the mail (about 10 printed pages -in a kind of cheap paper-, inside a big envelope), indicating the new discount. The policy was good until next year, so they only had to send a new one because of the discount itself, not because of the payment. They never asked me if they could e-mail me that instead (not sure if that would be legal though). Oh, and yes, also their website looks like a big mess promoting all their services and products (instead of helping you get done fast with what you want). Now let's think about all this for a second...

What's the point of giving me a 0.25% discount when they had to pay for two calls (instead of just one, or zero if they would be really online), each of them about 4 to 5 minutes long to process my payment, plus the costs of printing, packaging and shipping the updated policy? What about my time? Am I happy with their service? No. Is the discount going to change my mind? No way! I'd rather have them streamline their website and processes so that they can save on unnecessary administrative burden, be more efficient, and use that to cover for the added costs (*) of accepting credit card payments and improving service level --and retain more customers (*).

To be fair though, they did get something right. The phone answering machine menu was very fast and there was a human answering the phone right after the first few seconds. So they are not that bad after all.

I was first introduced to The Flow (as such) sometime ago at a leadership training. It goes more or less like this:

The concept (apparently borrowed from psychology) states that, when you are faced with a problem, project or activity challenging enough so that you use a significant percentage of your skills and analytical horsepower, you will enjoy doing it. You enter The Flow state of mind, where you may loose track of time. You will be very focused and get less distracted by insignificant details and the outside world. This happens to professional runners when racing, to chess grand masters during a good game, to programmers when coding a complex algorithm not found in any book, to professional golfers during a good round, to researchers when developing that new exciting theory.

Facing an excessive challenge for which you are not prepared enough could get you frustrated or stressed. On the other end, working on something which doesn't exploit your skills or talents will probably get you bored or unmotivated.

If you are a good leader, you will do everything you can to have all your team members in The Flow zone, at least most of the time. You will also make sure to develop your team and keep giving them bigger or different challenges every time. If you are a good mother or father, you will want your kids to experience this as often as you can (of course, they need to play too!).

Building up. My take on The Flow.

There are some persons, however, that do not like challenges as much. They don't need to progress. These are type-B persons. Bs stay wherever their comfort zone is and don't move up in the graph. They are usually the same ones who fear (and oppose to) change. They like the status quo, they are happy to stay with what they know or have and are afraid to try anything new or take any risks. They can be average runners, but will never become professional runners, because it takes too much effort to get there and there is no guarantee of success. They don't get bored doing repetitive left-brain tasks. They don't like the idea of learning from their own mistakes.

Then, there are As. They need be challenged all the time. They are always trying to go up in the graph and don't like to stay where they are. They are ambitious. They can't stand not using their right-brain. They become stars at whatever they do (they won't do something they can't thrive at, at least not for long). They are always learning, reading, teaching and developing their skills. They keep taking bigger challenges every time. They know what their talents are, and exploit them as much as they can. These are excellent programmers, writers, leaders, entrepreneurs, researchers, professional runners, golfers, chess masters, you name it. They learn from their mistakes.

In some (most?) organizations, there are jobs designed for both As and Bs. They claim they need Bs (pun intended) to do those B jobs (that As won't take), and that those B jobs are necessary for the business to run well. They sometimes put As to do B jobs and vice-versa. Consequences are usually pretty bad.

What they don't get is, they probably experience these problems because the people that designed the organization, processes and roles did the mistake at the first place. Or they hired the wrong guy. Why have B employees? Why have B jobs? What's the value of a B job? Can they buy that service or product from someone else? Can they create a new, different process? Or use innovative technology that automates it? Can they outsource it to another company that can?

Bad processes and ideas stick around for long time because they are hard to change (probably because of the same type-B employees?) once they become the standard way of doing things. In the Software Engineering discipline, it is well known that a mistake during the requirements gathering, analysis or design phase will be much more costly to fix than a mistake on the implementation phase (aka bug). I claim that this rule is also valid when designing businesses, organizations, processes and roles (it also applies to, for example, building houses).

When starting a new team or small business, is there a way to design the organization and its processes so that there are no type-B jobs?

Are you a type-A or type-B person? Do you like working with Bs? Bs are usually boring, because they tell the same story every time.

I admit, there are some bad generalizations here. They are a cheap way to induce your comments and also to make my point. In reality, matching roles and their challenges with employee skills and talent is tough and it is not an A or B binary problem. But it is the willingness to improve, to develop and to take different and bigger challenges everytime that makes the big difference.

Besides this generalization, is there a way to combine employees, jobs, processes, projects and roles so that challenge, skill, knowledge, talent, analytical horsepower, creativity, potential and human capital investment and development all come together to an optimal maximum?

In the Flat World, and when Small is the new big, is there a point in creating a small business that will need hire type-B employees? I don't think so!

So be small, dream, think and design big, then thrive implementing it with As. Now go change the world!

As promised, here goes a small update on my toast traffic, my Top 10 referers (out of 20) table as measured by phpOpenTracker for Nov 20th:



Number / # Visitors refered / URL

1 9 28.13% yournameontoast.com/

2 5 15.63% sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/11/your_name_on_to.html

3 1 3.13% digg.com/linux_unix/Kubuntu_rocks_on_Dell_Inspiron_E1705

4 1 3.13% digg.com/search?area=all&age=all&sort=new&s=milliondollarhomepage&submit=Search

5 1 3.13% digg.com/submit?title=Is it for real ?&bodytext=What's toastmadeof...&catid=305&captchatext=d6mbj&captchaid=2b2aca82f20eda145e2b9e10b9ea5047&submit=SubmitStory&url=www.busto.dk/blog/?p=253&phase=3&key=59047825

6 1 3.13% digg.com/users/mieteck/friends/dugg

7 1 3.13% email.secureserver.net/webmail.php?login=1

8 1 3.13% popurls.com/mint/

9 1 3.13% sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/10/the_next_millio.html

10 1 3.13% www.digg.com/users/sethgodin/dugg

So, just for yesterday alone, that's a single $10.01 toast for 9 visits; the rate comes out to 1.11 $/visit. As an experiment, it would be interesting to compare this with other toasters. I'll try publish this same rate tomorrow as well. Anyone out there?

Anyway, regardless of the numbers above, it is the philantropic, cool and experimental nature of this that really interests me

Update: Nov 21st -> 12 more visits refered from yournameontoast.com. Nov 22nd -> 3 more. Total visits for first 3 days: 24. The updated rate is 24 visits / $10.01 = 2.4 visits/$.

Pete from Your Name On Toast :: Your name, except on toast wrote me a nice e-mail letting me know about his site. I like the fact that 100% of the profits goes to charity. I think this is remarkable, so I went ahead and placed a toasty ad for this very same blog (one more time, there is something 'circular' about all this... check out my article on Borges, labyrinths, dreaming, graphs, trees, blogs, the internet and viral marketing).

Seth also wrote about the toasts page . I confess, yes, I'm addicted to Seth's blog.

My toast is not online yet, but I will try to update this post once it gets there, maybe with some traffic details or something alike . Go toast, feel good, have fun and also check out my previous post on mmmzr.