Today on the train, I finished watching the movie, Cashback. In the movie, the main character breaks up with his girlfriend, becomes an insomniac, works the night shift in a grocery store and then finds out he can stop time. Whatever. It’s an ok movie. But it did produce this great line: “She caught the wrong second of a 2 second story.” This line is uttered after his new girlfriend spots him on the receiving end of a kiss fro his ex. What she didn’t see was him pushing her away immediately after.

What can you take from this? Well, I can’t help but think how this applies to the actions or inactions of your company. In this age of consumer activism, 24 hour cameras, and the rabid blogosphere, one wrong move can mean disaster.

Customers are a finicky bunch of people. You may have 1 second to grab their attention and cause them to act. Make sure they don’t see the wrong second.

As TechCrunch called it, it was a “minor blogosphere tussle turned ugly”. In the last couple of weeks I had noticed something happening on Twitter. Two people that I was following, Shel Israel (Shelisrael) and Loren Feldman (1938Media) started trading jabs.

I won;t spend too much time discussing the details as you can read a good back history of it here. The long and short of it all is Shel Israel, a PR consultant and author of the book, Naked Conversations, fell into a trap.

When he was attacked, he attacked back without thinking it through. He forgot to take his own advice and in doing so, destroyed his personal brand. And all of this over a bunch of video interviews that Shel admits himself, were “new to him”.

Shel Israel damaged himself. But what happens when you are the face of a major corporation? Human nature tells you to react when being attacked. But a quick reaction can mean trouble.

Make sure you think before you react.

We live in an instant society. At least that’s what people say. People want instant gratification. They want to be in the know as soon as possible. They want to be wowed before the paint dries. But one should be careful to not provide instant gratification for the sake of speed. Because sometimes people will sacrifice speed for quality. This is especially true of Polaroid.

One could argue that with Polaroid, speed is was relative but quality was not. Besides a small niche market of users, instant gratification (which Polaroid seemed to base their entire business after) was sacrificed in the eyes of the consumer to the higher quality of digital photography.

In the end, what was once a fun, social activity of taking pictures and enjoying them instantly was passed over for taking pictures and enjoying them that night. Polaroid was dealing with “minutes” while the appetite of photographers was more in the “hour” range. Read more…

Jeff Chausse, a former colleague of mine, has an interesting post on his blog about the 0-1-N fallacy and how the wants of an engineer may not apply to the wants of the user interface designer.

It may seem heresy to most engineers to claim that anything less than infinite scalability is good enough, but in UI design that is definitely the case. The iPhone, for example can only have 9 web pages open at once. It probably has the memory to hold dozens more, but if it held dozens, it would have to abandon the extremely elegant UI of “flicking” thumbnails to move between pages, and use a clunky list instead.

This “fallacy” applies to marketing as it pertains to call to action messaging. Typically within an organization, the product groups and the marketing groups do not agree. Product groups want to promote, advertise, and inevitably sell product. That alone, is not the problem. The problem lies in the fact where the marketing group has to accommodate the needs of all the product groups on one single budget. And depending on what the acceptable contact frequency is for the target audience, this can create a logjam of competing messages. Read more…

Here’s a hint: when you hire people to pass out free samples, don’t require them to put them together on-site.

This morning, as I walked out of the train station on my way to work, I was stopped by a drug dealer who asked me if I wanted pot. The problem was he wasn’t a drug dealer nor was he handing out pot. He was hired to give out samples and he was giving out tea. But I never would have known it considering he had no clothing or nametag that would clue me into the fact that he was passing out samples and as he was talking to people, he was stuffing the tea bags into these little sample boxes.

If you want people to try out your product, make sure it appears to be given out by someone who is supposed to give out samples and have the samples pre-assembled!

The tea is from Revolution Tea and although the packaging makes it look legit, seeing a random tea bag stuffed into a box on the street is enough to make anyone worry.