Business Insight Zone

During his panel presentation this morning at the Innotech conference here in Austin, Hoover’s EVP Peter Poulin fielded questions about Web site testing platforms. He promised the crowd a follow-up with a longer list of testing/optimization providers.

Here’s a starter set for that list, drawn from our own experience and from audience feedback at Peter’s event:

• 7 Billion People
• Autonomy Optimost
• Google Website Optimizer
• Omniture Test & Target
• SiteCore Online Marketing Suite

No endorsements implied — just providing a handy reference.

Now, over to you: What platforms would YOU add to this list?

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Photo by Luca Volpi, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

And why wouldn’t they? Folks in the Twin Cities know quality when they see it.

Researching Companies
The Internet is a marvelous resource for digging out facts about prospective employers. Just make sure to choose the right tools.

. . .

[C]onsider the results from a recent survey of senior human resources, finance and marketing leaders at some of the nation’s largest companies. In that report, leaders said the biggest single mistake job applicants made was a lack of demonstrated knowledge about their companies. That single miscue outpaced the second-place answer – a lack of preparedness to discuss skills and experience – by a ratio of nearly 3-to-1.

. . .

While information provider Hoovers (www.hoovers.com) has a comprehensive listing of public companies, it also provides good data about leaders, markets, financials and competitors of large and midsized private firms. . . .

Give it a read — plenty of good tips in there for job-searchers.

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Related:

• Using Hoover’s in your job search — for free.
• JoblessJoe: when the going gets tough, the tough MAKE something.
• Hoover’s Jobseeker Reports

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This post is prompted by a headline that’s innocuous enough in itself:

US new housing figures disappoint

I’ll spare you another rant about how little we should rely on economists’ projections at this point. My point here is to encourage you not to use — and not to feel — words like “disappointed” when you think about the current state of the economy.

I wish the economy were better. I wish more new jobs were being created. I’m just as ready as you are — and as the BBC headline writers are — for the financial picture to get rosier.

Meanwhile, though, I’ve got a job to do. I can do it better if I have an accurate clinical understanding of what’s going on in the economy. Words have meaning, though, and words like “disappoint” don’t help the cause of clinical understanding.

Think of a scientist working in her lab: She WANTS the experiment to work. She would LOVE for the findings to verify her potentially groundbreaking hypothesis. She HOPES for a good outcome.

But then when the results don’t match her expectation, she doesn’t let herself get disappointed — or, at the very least, she doesn’t allow herself to stay disappointed. Because now she’s got work to do to determine what happened, and to figure out what she might try next. She moves forward based on the data, not her feelings.

We’re human. Feelings are an inescapable part of business, and they are often a beneficial part of business. But please, don’t let your feelings about the economy — be they ever so grim — cloud your scientific judgment about what your business needs next.

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Photo by Arwen Abendstern.

Among the many truisms about dealing with failure in business, my favorite might be the advice that Tom Watson, the architect of IBM’s rise to greatness, gave to young entrepreneurs: “Double your failure rate.”

Yet in our daily working lives, how many of us really embrace failure? How often do we look upon our failures as useful laboratory results telling us what doesn’t work?

More practically, how many of us (or our companies) reward instructive failures — with informal kudos, formal rewards, cash bonuses? From what I’ve observed and heard, most organizations, no matter how entrepreneurial they try to be, stigmatize failure either overtly or covertly, to the point that people fear trying out bold new ideas. (A nice contrast: my department gives a quarterly award for the most instructive or interesting failure.)

How do you handle failure? How can we take it in stride in our working lives? And how can we benefit from the failures that will inevitably crop up during our careers?

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Related posts:

• “You’re constantly on the brink of crashing, because that’s the fastest.”
• The benefits of failure.

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Photo of the 1926 Fremantle bridge collapse via Donna Barber.

“Apple’s not THAT much better in terms of functionality, no matter how slick the outer design may be.”

“Apple’s biggest cash cow isn’t impressive for a technology company — it’s more about a business model than actually inventing new things.”

“Apple is a closed system. They insist that you play their game for both hardware and software.”

[Apparently I didn't make it clear enough in the first go-round of this that these things are what Apple's detractors say.]

Oh-by-the-way, Apple just posted terrific quarterly returns. If you had had the foresight to buy $1,000 of Apple stock at the start of 2005, it would be worth $6,184 as I write this. (Over the same period, $1,000 invested in the S&P 500 would have turned into $901.)

The best quote from that Dow Jones story (just linked) on Apple’s great quarter:

“What it confirms to us is Apple’s proprietary competitive advantages and that customers value Apple products greatly and believe its premium is more than justified,” [Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw] Wu said.

As a result, analysts are hesitant to transfer Apple’s strong numbers to other electronic makers.

Durn tootin’. Apple’s not a bellwether for other companies; it’s a company that makes its own weather.

Consider that this is true even in the face of an economy that has stymied many consumer brands.

[The detractors can cry about Apple's prices etc. all they like. I'm sure Apple doesn't mind.]

Now, what if we all set aside our complaints about how bad the economy is, about how we can’t be expected to compete toe-to-toe with Company X, about how our industries are different from Apple’s (or Amazon’s, or Cisco’s, et al.) . . . and then we set about the task of making our companies into businesses for which an Apple-like premium is justified?

What would happen then?

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ADDENDUM: Here’s a story on the same theme from a different industry:

• 22 Magazines Are Actually Kicking Butt In 2009

The money quote:

What’s Meredith’s secret to surviving and thriving in such a tough environment?

Patrick Taylor, also of Meredith Corporation, says these titles “do a good job of building their brand” — especially on the Internet.

He says that by creating and maintaining easy-to-use websites, magazines create more exposure to their title. At the same time, they open up another avenue for ads and ways to sign up subscribers.

Simple, right?

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UPDATE, an hour later: Early comments made it clear that the first version of this was overly subtle, so I added the sentences within brackets, plus quotation marks around the title and opening lines.

Are we in a recovery? Is the recession over? Maybe. But in line with what I’ve said before, it pays to be cautious — and to run your business as though things won’t be back to what we think of as “normal” for a long time to come.

That’s been my view for a long time, but my trawl through the business front page of Google News this morning reinforced that idea. That page contains headlines on 20 topics. Here, in order, are the 20 top headlines from this morning. Everything that speaks to the economy is bolded, with positive news in green and negative news in red:

• US Stocks Drop on GE, Bank of America Results, Consumer Data (Bloomberg)
• US EARNINGS WRAP: GE Profit Down 42%; Bank Of America In Red (WSJ)
• Rising Loan Losses Pull Bank of America To Q3 Loss (WSJ)
• Consumer sentiment pulls back in Oct. (MarketWatch)
• Industrial output grows the most in four years (MarketWatch)
• Florida unemployment rate highest in 24 years (Bizjournals.com)
• IBM Drops After Bookings Show Clients Slow to Spend (Bloomberg)
• Google ready to open wallet again after stellar 3Q (AP)
• European Exports Decline 5.8%, Most in Seven Months (Bloomberg)
• Halliburton’s Profit Falls 61% (WSJ)
• Sony Ericsson Sees Improving Markets – CEO (WSJ)
• Estee Lauder sees 1Q results higher than expected (Forbes)
• Mattel 3Q Earnings Fall 3.5% On Sales Decline (WSJ)
• Goldman Sachs sets aside $16.8 billion for bonuses (BloggingStocks)
• Walmart.com cuts prices on yet-to-be-released books (Reuters)
• Nokia Says Finance Chief Rick Simonson to Head Low-End Mobiles After Loss (Bloomberg)
• GE, bofa Weigh on Stocks (WSJ)
• Dollar gains against most rivals, but slips versus pound (MarketWatch)
• MGIC Posts Ninth Straight Loss as Defaults Hit Record (Bloomberg)
• UPDATE 1-First Horizon posts narrower-than-expected Q3 loss (Reuters)

The point isn’t that bad news outweighs good — this is hardly a scientific sample, and anyway GE’s and Bank of America’s lackluster results show up under four different headings.

No, the point is that we’re living in an economic world in which U.S. industrial output can grow the most in four years . . . AND Florida has its worst unemployment rate since the mid-1980s. It’s a world in which companies as different as Halliburton and Mattel decline . . . AND Sony Ericsson and Goldman rise.

This economy is not just one thing, and it doesn’t make sense to boil it down to one word, whether the word is “recession” or “recovery.”

This economy is many things, and for many of us it is going to be what we make of it.

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Related posts:

• How worked up should I get over financial headlines?
• Innumeracy in financial reporting?
• “I want you to have expected it.”
• What if the economic world has changed?

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It’s this:

Dow surpasses 10,000 mark for 26th time

Sure, having the Dow at 10,000 is better than having it below 8,000, like it was in April.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh?

That’s what I told my audience last week at the Inbound Marketing Summit held at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts.

The distance to your customer is nil because the wave of new social technologies — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. — has made it so easy, even frictionless, for customers to find out about your company, talk about it, and let you know what they think about it.

We can fear this revolution, or we can embrace it as a chance to get back to our honorable roots as merchants, creating customers by discovering what they really value and then giving it to them.

Here’s the slide deck I showed to the audience in Foxborough. I’ll annotate it slide-by-slide and relate it to other relevant posts tomorrow (when I have a better Internet connection than I do at the moment).

Annotations:

Slides 1 – 2: The picture of the crowd at Woodstock was offered as joking encouragement to the audience to have their questions ready so that the Q&A at the end of the talk could turn into a landmark cultural event.

Slide 3: The major thesis of my talk: The fundamental questions haven’t changed, and they CAN’T change.

At a surface level, the technology (Blackberries, Twitter, etc.) makes things seem different, but at the core they’re still the same — because business is still about people serving people.

Slide 4: The inspiration for the talk was Peter Drucker, who had a knack for asking disarming questions of businesses — questions with simple answers on the surface level, but deep implications for how businesses run.

I offered this list of questions as examples of business concerns that transcend eras, industries, and geographies:

• How do I get people to know the name of my business?
• How do I get them to think of me ahead of my competitors?
• How do I get them to come in my front door (literally or figuratively)?
• Once they’re in, how do I meet them at their point of need?
• How do I get them to come back for more?
• And tell their friends?
• Internally, how do I operate at a better margin?
• In particular, how do I take costs out of the business while delivering higher value — not just yesterday’s value, but something better?
• What IS value, from my customers’ perspective?
• What do they want?
• Given the answer to that, what business am I really in?

Slide 5: Questions like those would have occupied you just as much if you were a fruit merchant in a market in Cairo 500 years ago . . . or Henry Ford perfecting the Model T 100 years ago . . . or Anne Mulcahy rebuilding Xerox over the past 15 years . . . or the folks running the pictured hardware store today in Turkey.

We are all pursuing the honorable craft of merchant, and merchants will be just as obsessed with these questions 500 years from now as they were 500 years ago. [See "Social media makes merchants of us all" for more.]

It’s not about the technology, even though the social technology we can use today is amazing and allows us to address these questions in ways we never have before.

Rather, it’s about how you build a business — under any circumstances, in any weather — to meet human needs. (And it’s especially important to re-focus on these fundamentals when the economy isn’t cooperating.)

Slide 6: Business can be highly complex, but wherever and whenever you are doing business, some core principles apply. I suggested these three:

1. Drucker said that “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” This works at the most literal level of finding a new person who will pay money to your company, but it also works at the bigger level of building a business that is a customer-creating engine for the long haul.
2. Successful companies build enterprise value all the time by constantly improving the ways they operate.
3. The short term is very important. In fact, this economy reminds us of the old piece of entrepreneur’s wisdom that “Cash is more important than your mother.” But even in times like these, you must use the short term to build for the long term.

While there are all sorts of complexities hiding within these three concepts, just these three are enough to keep all of us busy for every day of our working lives.

Slide 7: These old-school core questions should inform your use of new social technologies. But you should also use the arrival of these new technologies as an impetus to re-ask the old, fundamental questions of your business. It’s a two-way street.

Slide 8: Four examples to show how social technologies and age-old questions can play off of each other profitably:

• For Comcast, Frank Eliason and his crew have used the @ComcastCares Twitter account to re-ask the timeless question, “How can we make our customer service better?” Not only have they succeeded in improving service for individual Comcast customers, they’ve achieved something far more stunning: they’ve helped us reconceive what sort of customer service is possible from an industry notorious for bad service.
• Gary Vaynerchuk has used WineLibrary.TV to answer the timeless entrepreneurial question, “How can I bring something I love to a lot of other people and build a business around it?” He’s intent on changing the way people appreciate wine and the way the wine industry works, and he’s doing that by using every social technology at his disposal. As Gary said from the stage of the Summit the day before I spoke, he doesn’t care much about which platform he’s using — so long as he’s reaching people.
• At BreakingPoint, my friend Kyle Flaherty is using Twitter, LinkedIn groups, and so on to reach not a consumer audience, but a very particular slice of network engineers who can benefit from BreakingPoint’s knowledge — and from their high-end network testing equipment. By the way, this isn’t just general purpose brand marketing, but honest-to-goodness lead generation, which answers the most fundamental question of all: “How can I find more customers?”
• John Jantsch, who also spoke at the Summit, has answered the question “How can I use my passions to empower others?” He’s built DuctTape Marketing into a successful business through which he conveys his passion for marketing and social media in ways that empower legions of small businesspeople in many industries.

Slide 9: The underlying reality of this whole social revolution (and the line from the talk that got the most play on Twitter) is this: The distance to your customer is nil.

Sure, there may be a fence there where your company stops and your customer’s world starts — but customers can walk right up to it, talk to you over it, and see way more of your operations than you might want them to. It’s certainly not a wall, a moat, or an ocean.

If this reality unsettles you . . . it should. You may realize that what your company offers (products, level of service, whatever) isn’t good enough, simply because customers are talking frankly to you and to one another about it. That’s a good thing — you can use this feedback to drive you back to improving the fundamentals on behalf of your customer.

Slide 10: Here’s another key: it won’t be enough to say nice things to your customer and then not to actually serve them in the ways they want. You can’t just say “We’re listening” or “We’re sorry” and then avoid doing something to fix the problem.

To put it another way — and to explain the slide — the era of mass media and mass marketing has meant that we can play with meanings, like Magritte did when he painted a picture of a pipe that says “This is not a pipe.” (Because it’s just a . . . picture of a pipe, get it?)

When companies controlled all the mass media for talking about their products, they could rely on damage control or brand marketing to change perceptions of inferior products. But the social media are a great leveling force in that game.

What I’ve seen in my near-decade as an analyst at Hoover’s tells me that there are many great and good companies out there — but many lousy ones, too. My hope is that this social revolution will force those companies (along with the lousy parts of all our companies) to change or die. We’ll all be better off when that happens.

Power will shift into the hands of companies with:

• Better ideas
• Better service
• Better hustle on behalf of the customer
• A real sense of caring
• The character to build real trust with their customers.

The companies that have the guts to embrace the new technologies and use them to answer fundamental, Drucker-level questions will succeed. This will obviously be true of little bootstrap companies — two roommates working out of a back room to implement a good idea — but it will also be true of old-school companies willing to re-earn their customer’s business and trust by providing value in every interaction.

Slide 11: Talking about old-school, I pointed out that Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln once served as a credit reporter for our parent company, Dun & Bradstreet. Hoover’s itself has been online since 1994 — which is pret-ty old-school for the business we’re in.

And even though we’ve been profitable for years and growing like clockwork, we’re more committed to a customer focus, interaction by interaction, than I’ve ever seen us before. Better, we understand that this is the price of admission for earning customer’s sustained trust in this era. So even though we’re not where we will be in terms of gee-whiz social technology, we’ve got the foundation right because we’re intent on re-earning it every day.

Slide 12: For every new tool you use . . . for every new technique or idea that you take away from a meeting like the Summit . . . you should be returning to THE fundamental question of the worthy merchant: “How can I be of use?”

And that’s my manifesto for how old-school meets new-school in business.

Slide 13: During the discussion period, I fielded two questions:

• How do you go about building that trust with customers? The social media give us many, many chances to interact with customers as real human beings. If we’re consistent in treating them fairly and giving them a square deal, they’ll know it. You earn it over time.
• What should you do when you encounter negative statements about your business via social media? Two things: (1) Address the individual complaint promptly, thoroughly, and in the mode of a human being rather than a robot or bureaucrat. (2) Look ten times as hard in that venue for other criticisms. As I’ve said more than once here, the Godfather dictum that “Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news immediately” should animate us all.

Slide 14: My contact information. It’s not just for the Summit audience — I want YOU to feel free to use it, too.

Comments?

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Related posts:

• Social media makes merchants of us all.
• Why companies should explore social media, in a nutshell.
• The Basic Basics: Solve someone’s problem.
• Social media: the right tool for the job.
• “The community of discourse IS the market.”

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(The usual Twitter disclaimer applies: if you don’t use Twitter, skip this post with no worries — other programming will resume presently.)

Late on Friday I returned from four great days at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston with a head full of ideas. I got to reconnect with old friends, meet people face-to-face whom I’d only know through Twitter or their blogs, and make plenty of new friends. Fantastic.

Inevitably, though, the travel put me behind on e-mail maintenance. While I try to practice Inbox-Fu at all times, it’s tough when (a) you want to prioritize your time for the people you can actually talk to in person, (b) your laptop doesn’t play nicely with the conference venue’s wi-fi setup, and (c) you only have time, back at the hotel room, to take care of the most vital messages in your inbox.

Those notices that Twitter sends to let you know someone’s following you? They fall to the bottom of the pile for a few days until I can handle them efficiently in batches — which I did over the weekend from my desk at home.

What’s amazing to me is how many perfectly nice folks on Twitter — legitimate users with no intent to spam or, I assume, to game the system — have unfollowed the @Hoovers account since following us just a few days ago.

Don’t get me wrong: if someone never follows you back and completely fails to interact with you, unfollow them. But after a day? Or two? Or even five? It strikes me as more than a little hasty.

Here’s why to be patient with follow-backs: when I go went back through that stack of following messages, I automatically discarded all of those from people who had summarily unfollowed us. I made two exceptions for people who had interacted with us on Twitter; they made an effort to engage, and it was our own fault (abetted by some technical hiccups) that kept us from following them back immediately.

But for all the rest? If you can’t hang around for at least a few days, it sure does seem like you’re pursuing a follower number instead of real interactions.

A commitment to real interactions wins every time, in my book.

What do you think? How patient are you waiting for follow-backs?

Just to tie two concepts together . . .

You’ve heard me rail against dumb questions. (I.e. questions you could and should have easily answered for yourself before you ever asked them.)

You’ve heard me rail against automatic direct messages (DMs) on Twitter. (People use these to spam welcome new followers on Twitter, but they seldom add any value.)

Now let me just make the connection:

• If you ask a dumb question once — hey, who doesn’t?
• If you ask dumb questions over and over, people will come to think that it’s you, and not just your off-the-cuff question, that’s dumb.
• If you want to set up a Twitter auto-DM, you have the (risky) opportunity to make a good first impression over and over on everyone who receives it.
• BUT, if you ask a dumb question via auto-DM, you’re asking the same dumb question over and over of lots of different people. Which, not surprisingly, may cause them to think you’re dumb.

So, don’t do that. Stick with “Hi — thanks for following!” if you’re not sure.

(In case you’re wondering, yes, we’ve been getting a lot of these.)

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Related posts:

• There IS such a thing as a dumb question.
• What Works Better than an Auto-DM.
• What not to say in a Twitter auto-DM.
• The Basic Basics: Don’t do something avoidably stupid.

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Photo by cesar bojorquez.