While their competitors are adding features to complicate their products and frustrate their customers, Nest solves the fundamental problem of in-home climate energy management in the most elegant possible way. I not only applaud their solution, I’ve put my name on the waiting list (they are currently sold out).

It’s hard to avoid the temptation of adding features and instead focus on reducing the complexity of what you do to its ultimate simplicity. This discipline, to stay focused on why you went into business in the first place and deliver the most elegant solution/experience possible, has its rewards. Apple and, particularly the iPhone, is a great example of the rewards creating with elegance in mind can bring. 

Unfortunately few companies are able to succeed in producing elegant products or services. The temptation of adding new and exciting features more often than not results in products that are too complicated, bulky and expensive. I recommend reading In Pursuit of Elegance, by Matthew May. This book makes a compelling and example filled case for why it is worth the effort to pursue elegance in product and service development. Those few who have brought discipline to their core business and focused their energies on making the complex simple, instead of making the simple complex, have a serious competitive edge. I call it the elegance advantage, and if you can get there, you will enjoy the advantages too.

On the other hand, Best Buy has never gotten the customer perspective. For a time it was enough to have all of the shiny new tech products under one roof for people to come in and play with, choose from a wide selection and walk out with a new favorite toy in hand. But, Best Buy has always put its perspective first and they are paying for it now.  They talk about their competitive disadvantage to companies like Amazon, but in reality no one was in a better position to deliver an incredible customer experience. If being brick and mortar is such a disadvantage how do you explain the sardine can like crowds over at the Apple store?

As the customer enjoys an ever expanding range of options for how they learn about, shop for, buy and receive product, one strategy is sure to fail: whining. If you want to compete, you better figure out how to give the customer a great experience. One built from the customer point of view.

Google Alerts is a tool that notifies you when a webpage online publishes something that matches the search query or topic you specify.  Basically it’s a way to have search engine results delivered to you instead of you physically typing them in to a search engine.  You choose the search term or phrase, and Google will proactively deliver new pages they find that match your query.  It’s an extremely powerful tool.

Setting up an Alert

Here is a quick video (3:10) that explains how to get started:

Google Alert Basics:

The most basic alerts you can create are for your name, brand or website address formatted in the following way:

• “Justin Smith”
• “Affinity Cross Media”
• affinityxm.com

Make sure you use quotes around a company name if it is a popular name, multi-word phrase, or commonly mistaken for something else.  This will make sure that you get specific results and don’t waste time weeding out the junk.  If you’ve never set up an alert before, I would recommend having them delivered once per day via email.  Just make sure you carve out some time to look through them, and take action if necessary.

Here are a few more tips to help you get started:

1. Treat the Google Alerts search box like it’s a real Google search box.  In other words, go crazy.  You can search for just about anything you want.  Advanced users will get creative here and start using search operators.  If you don’t know what those are, take a look at this page.  An example would be {example phrase site:wikipedia.org}  that search would deliver alerts every time that phrase appeared on Wikipedia.org.  Get creative… the skies the limit here!
2. When setting up an alert for your website.  Don’t just put in:  yourwebsite.com, make sure you enter other pages on your website that you want to track.  Maybe you’re trying to promote:  yourwebsite.com/specialoffer.  Make sure you create a new alert for it!
3. For less important searches, set up delivery to be once per week.  If you have a lot of alerts set up like I do, you’ll be getting a lot of emails.  Make sure you don’t overwhelm yourself with too many.

Hopefully you have enough information to get started.  Setting up some basic alerts like this will allow you to keep an eye on what people are saying about you, your company, or your website.  In the next post of this 3 part series on Google Alerts, we will show you can manage your brand through online reputation management.

People want to belong….belong to an idea, a vision, a story, a culture, a cause. Here’s the important thing for marketers, we want the world to know that we belong. Bumper stickers, T-shirts, clothing labels, the coffee we drink, and the smart phone we carry…all say something about us.

Give them a badge. If you have a story – something people want to belong to – make it easy for them to identify themselves with your story. This is the real genius behind Tom’s Shoes.  But, it is also why Apple was able to sell more than 300,000 iPads on the first day. For Apple users, there has never been a bigger or better badge than the new iPad. It screams, “I am Apple”. It is uniquely visible when carried around, when used in public places or when an email is sent with a signature that reads, “sent form my iPad”.

From where I sit, the iPad will be a huge success and it marks the beginning of the second iteration (following smart phones) of post PC personal productivity tools. These next generation tools are being built for a world where the internet is the operating system, applications run on the cloud, and widgets and browsers are your access points.  In my mind, there is no contest between a local application using local resources and local data and a simple, lightweight tool that packs all the power of the universe into an intuitive little interface. Smart phones, pads and yet-to-be-designed products that leverage the net will quickly begin replacing PCs as our primary tools for getting things done and staying connected.

In the massive lines formed outside Apple stores around the world, there is a significant, if unconscious, shift occurring – a shift from the PC era to the internet device era.  When the internet becomes the operating system, things change….hope you’re ready.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Drastic expectations reinforce the declaration of innovation and the innovation goals. If people realize that just doing what everyone else in the market is doing is not enough, then they will respond. Average expectations about the company encourage people to think and act averagely. Drastic expectations encourage people to think innovatively and act like entrepreneurs.

You can read the full post here -  Blogging Innovation, Mar 2010

Case in point: A couple of days ago, my nephew received a personalized mailer from a university (he’s off to college next year). The campaign also included a personalized landing page for response. The campaign knew his name, and made a point of letting him know they did. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to know anything else about him. Nor, did they attempt to initiate a relationship that would allow them to learn. For example, one of his most important selection criteria is his ability to play Lacrosse. This university will never know that Lacrosse is a dealmaker or breaker for him. Instead, they used his name, in several clever ways, at the top of an online brochure.

Here’s the lesson: digital  media requires a different marketing model, a different mindset. Digital is about engaging in conversations that create value for both parties. Companies must learn to use these powerful technologies to drive relevant interactions with their customers, and move beyond the “novelty” in these new tools to make sales.

Though there are a number of factors driving change, the incredible growth in niched and hyper-niched businesses is a remarkable and unique phenomena of the new economy. And, it stands in stark contrast to the mass consolidation that marked the end of the old economy.

· ‘Leading users’ creating remarkable product or service innovation

· Collaboration with other leading users to perfect the innovation

· Disseminate innovation across the broader user community

· Building community participation in ongoing product advancement

In his free ebook, Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel opens with an example of user-driven innovation from the 1970s – the development of foot straps for windsurfing boards. I found this a fascinating example of how the most advanced users of any given product may begin tinkering with or modifying the original product to get more out of it. What I wanted to know was, how is ‘leading user’ capacity and desire to innovate playing out in the new economy?

Following are two examples that I just discovered, courtesy of Chris Brogan and TED. The first is the application of Lego Mindstorms to create a control system and autopilot capability for a do-it-yourself areal drone or UAV. Not long ago, UAV’s where the very expensive and exclusive domain of the military. But because one GeekDad (Chris Anderson) decided to push the boundaries on both Mindstorms and r/c model airplanes, we now have a commercially viable auto-pilot system for $24.95.

In the second example, Johnny Lee, a TED Conference Speaker, creates a sophisticated interactive whiteboard, and a 3-D tracking technology based on the Nintendo Wii remote. He has taken a $3,000 product (an interactive whiteboard) and recreated nearly all of it’s benefits, for about $50. The extraordinary thing here is how quickly his innovation was disseminated across the net (more than a million YouTube views in the first week) and how many other users have engaged in the conversation to educate other potential users, further adapt the original innovation, or come up with other tangential innovations.

“Open”, my friends, is part of the new paradigm. It’s impact on our lives will only grow as, culturally, we seek more meaningful ways to engage with a connected world.

When it comes to authenticity, as the saying goes, you know it when you see it.  But, certainly what it is not is made up ads and packaging  to ‘stylize’ a mediocre product or service, with the intent of having it appear to be something more than it actually is.

But, does authenticity necessarily mean exposing the whole naked truth? The 1990 film, Crazy People takes a look at raw authenticity in a very amusing way.

In real life, this approach probably wouldn’t work. So, where do you draw the line between highlighting value and the unauthentic? I think Melissa Pierce does a nice job explaining ‘appropriate’ authenticity in the following video post.

The point is, we must always try to do our best and put our best foot forward. But, this is where the line gets a little grey. Where does preparation, planning and presentation leave the realm of the authentic and become disingenuous? I think it comes down to intent – creating additional value or putting lipstick on a pig.