Adless in São Paulo

Well, somebody in Brazil gets it.

In 2006 Gilberto Kassab, mayor of São Paulo, Brazil passed the Clean City Law which banned “every billboard, poster, and bus ad in São Paulo.”

Anna Freitag, the marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard Brazil, said her company had never considered how inefficient billboards and the like were until they were illegal. “A billboard is media on the road,” she told the FT. “In rational purchases it means less effectiveness… as people are involved in so many things that it makes it difficult to execute the call to action.”

It’s like everyone is competing to see who can scream the loudest, or find the most clever way to say Click Here. I went to a business meeting a few years ago in Aspen and, in addition to the natural beauty of the place, one of the first things I noticed: no billboards, and very little outdoor advertising at all.

Estimates say some Americans now look at upwards of 4,000 ads per day. When is enough enough?

This is the main reason we don’t watch much TV at our house, and when we do everyone in the house knows to hit the mute button when a commercial comes on because most of it is vacuous or obnoxious. I don’t know how anyone tolerates it.

I wonder if any major US cities might ever try Mayor Kassab’s model. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the visual pollution just disappeared one day.

People, Processes & Tools

Daniel Tenner posted a good article about how to approach teamwork within an organization. It matches up well with what I’ve seen in large organizations.

to fix or improve something, first you need the right people, then you need the right processes to help those people work together, then finally you need the right tools to support those processes. People, processes, and tools—in that order.

I saw this firsthand a few years while working on a very expensive enterprise CRM implementation. The processes and tools had been pretty well worked out, but the ‘people’ side of the equation was a deal-killer for successful CRM: certain groups within the company didn’t want to share their customer information, while some business units wanted to participate but didn’t want to share cost because they didn’t see the value. This was a cultural problem that effectively killed the effort before it got started.

For example, many sales organisations try to get their salespeople to communicate everything they know about every client – but salespeople don’t want to do that, because it makes them more easily replaceable. Setting up a CRM tool doesn’t solve that problem, until you fix the people, by giving them the right incentives to do what you want (or, if that’s impossible, either changing what you want or changing the people).

This is exactly what happened.

Website Launch Checklist

Last month I published a post—Website Planning Guide—about steps to consider when planning your website (objectives, content, design, maintenance, etc).

Breccan McLeod-Lundy had a good post Sunday with a Website Launch Checklist that’s focused a bit more on the technical aspects like server setup (DNS, backup, monitoring, deployment) and developer tasks (analytics, sitemap, testing, performance).

Good preparation takes a lot of the uncertainty out of the process and helps ensure a successful launch.

Teamwork Ground Rules

I like this post by Kristóf Kovács about teamwork. Good advice and easy to put into practice.

• ASK: If a task is not clear, or more information is needed, please ask as soon as possible. Asking is always ok. Doing the wrong thing (or doing nothing) because you didn’t ask is not ok.
• DEBRIEF: It’s not “done” until you reported it done. This is often just a one-sentence email to me or to the client, sometimes a “100%” mark in the task list, or a ticket closed. It is done, completed or fixed only when whoever needed it done knows about it.
• WARN: If a deadline you know is important will likely be missed, warn me soon, as the situation is evolving, and then we can usually figure something out. If I have to learn at the moment of the deadline that it was missed, that’s not ok. (In multi-boss situations that occur frequently in matrix organisations, or if you’re a freelancer, also warn me if your workload is above what you can actually do, instead of not doing certain tasks.)

Most problems on a team usually stem from some form of communication failure. These simple steps could go a long ways towards avoiding them.

Dropbox updates Terms of Service

Dropbox announced on their blog today an update to their Terms of Service (TOS) in response to some unhappy customer feedback. Previously the TOS wording gave the impression that Dropbox was claiming ownership rights over customer data. This didn’t go over well, so they have revised the language to be more clear about their intentions.

I’m glad because I really like Dropbox. There are other cloud storage and sync services out there but Dropbox has really executed well with ease of use and reliable sync across multiple devices.

We’ve never been interested in rights broader than what we need to run Dropbox. We want to get this language right so that you’re comfortable using Dropbox with no reservations: what’s yours is yours.

If you’re interested in getting a Dropbox account use this link to join and we’ll both get extra storage as a referral bonus. You can sign up for a free 2 GB account and then upgrade to a paid account, or just stay at the free level.

Feedback Loops

The premise of a feedback loop is simple: Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them a chance to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors.

A feedback loop involves four distinct stages.

First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage.

Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a …

Third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead.

And finally, the fourth stage: action. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.

The ideal feedback loop gives us an emotional connection to a rational goal. And today, their promise couldn’t be greater. The intransigence of human behavior has emerged as the root of most of the world’s biggest challenges. Witness the rise in obesity, the persistence of smoking, the soaring number of people who have one or more chronic diseases. [...] Feedback loops can improve how companies motivate and empower their employees, allowing workers to monitor their own productivity and set their own schedules. They could lead to lower consumption of precious resources and more productive use of what we do consume. They could allow people to set and achieve better-defined, more ambitious goals and curb destructive behaviors, replacing them with positive actions. Used in organizations or communities, they can help groups work together to take on more daunting challenges. In short, the feedback loop is an age-old strategy revitalized by state-of-the-art technology. As such, it is perhaps the most promising tool for behavioral change to have come along in decades.

Source: www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/ff_feedbackloop

Website Planning Guide

A helpful post over on Smashing Magazine about planning a web site. There are some good principles to think through, including:

• Needs & objectives assessment
• Alignment with marketing
• Roles & responsibilities
• Content
• Site design & structure
• CMS (Content Management Systems)
• Ongoing maintenance & updates

I’ve had people ask me “how much will it cost to build a web site?” That’s like asking a home builder “how much for a house?” — there are so many variables involved, and it all depends on what it is you want to accomplish with your site. It could be anything from a simple one page ‘brochure’ site to a complex database-driven e-commerce machine.

Some content options to think about when considering what your site might need:

• Articles
• Blog posts
• Advertising
• Discussion forum
• Images
• Documents (usually PDFs)
• Audio
• Video (embedded from YouTube or Vimeo, or self-hosted)
• Flash animation (I don’t recommend it)
• Content feeds/integrations from other sites
• Photo gallery
• Twitter stream
• Facebook ‘friends’ list
• RSS feeds
• E-commerce
• Forms for contact, quotes or something else
• Physical products (how many?)
• Digital content (what kind and how many?)
• Email newsletter
• Event calendar
• Event registration
• Search
• Social media sharing links (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
• Personnel directory

Planning and building a web site is much easier when you’re clear about what it is you want from the site.

Your phone is your wallet

Today Google introduced Google Wallet—an ‘app that will make your phone your wallet.’

A blurb from the Google blog post describing the service:

You’ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC) [...] Because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a regular wallet ever could. You’ll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk. When you tap to pay, your phone will also automatically redeem offers and earn loyalty points for you. Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet.

Initially it will only work with one phone (Nexus S) on one network (Sprint) with one credit card (Citi MasterCard) so it’s a very limited rollout.

I’ve recently read that Apple is working on something similar for the iPhone, and I wonder if Apple’s approach will be compatible with Google’s. Adoption of this technology will take much longer if we begin with competing technical standards and protocols.

I also wonder how much more of my life I want to put in a device that’s capable of tracking my location pretty much 24/7 already—now it’s going to track my spending, too. Not only will Google have a near-monopoly on our search data, but now our financial data to analyze and sell to advertisers as well?

What happens to cash in the next 10-20 years?

A Decentralized Web?

A report over at ReadWriteWeb about a possible P2P (peer-to-peer) approach to the web, eliminating the need for a web server for certain kinds of applications.

Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions.

Part of the appeal here is the potential to maintain network channels independent of a corporation or government’s ability to bring them down.

Skype 5.0 beta: group video calling

A response to FaceTime for Mac?

Skype announced this morning an upgrade to their Mac client to accommodate group video calling (in beta). They’re offering a free trial right now for the group calling feature, but they say that one-to-one Skype video calling will remain free. Link to the 5.0 download for Mac is on the announcement page. The Windows version 5.0 beta came out earlier this year and it can be found here.

Some new features:

• Group video calling
• Integration with the Mac Address Book
• New & improved (read: worse) user interface
• Floating dial pad for calls and SMS

To do group video calling, everyone will need to be running Skype version 5.0 or later, either on Mac or Windows.

I haven’t tested this yet but plan to do so soon. Assuming the group calling rates aren’t ridiculously high, this could be a great teleconferencing solution.

Remember, it’s a beta so things might break. Caveat Skypor.