To Greener Pastures

If you're reading this I've moved the blog!

The blog is now at PeterTanham.com

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Pete's Picks - 4th Jan 2009

A new weekly feature for this blog, obviously drawing inspiration from Damien, Joe and others. I hope you enjoy

Seth Godin talks about the future of radio.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the most popular presentations on Slideshare. Do it.

Usain Bolt's not just a record breaker, he's a curve breaker too.

ReadWriteWeb's introduction to Greasemonkey, and their 7 favourite browser tweaks.

Gigonomics - the new economics of the music industry

Recruit When There's Blood in the Streets

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

That's one of my favourite Warren Buffett quotes. I've learned a lot from him (indirectly, of course), not just about investing but about business and life in general. For those of you who don't know him, he's the richest man in the world, and has made his money from finding and investing in great companies.

I subscribe to the Motley Fool and read many of their great articles. They're champions of the Buffett style of investing. It's not all "buy buy buy, sell sell sell!" Charlie Sheen style trading. It's about owning great companies, with great business models, that care about their customers. It's about being in it for the long run and the big win, not the quick buck. As Mr. Buffet himself remarked about his company Berkshire Hathaway "Our favourite holding period is forever. "

One recent Motley Fool article that I liked was called Learn From Buffet's Patience - in reference to his billion dollar investments in Goldman Sachs and General Electric and his Op-ed piece in the NY Times saying that he was personally buying American stocks & shares last October (read: as the world Economy headed into a depression). An excerpt from the Fool article:

On the other hand, this is Warren Buffett, and he's made these sorts of predictions before. The years 1973 and 1974 were two very bad ones for the market. Over those two years, the S&P 500 plunged by 42%. It was then, on Nov. 1, 1974, at the height of the pessimism, that Buffett made his first well-publicized bullish market call : "Now is the time to invest and get rich." 

Buffett himself was buying shares of The Washington Post. He paid just $11 million for an investment worth nearly $1.4 billion at the end of 2007 -- a 127-bagger! Of all the stocks listed, Washington Post is the biggest gainer -- by a factor of 12. While relatively small in dollar terms, it'll certainly go down as one of Buffett's greatest investments. 

But do you know what happened to the stock right after Buffett began buying shares in 1973? Shares plunged 20% and stayed there, not for a few months, but for three years. It was 1976 before Buffett was in the black, and it was 1981 before WaPo traded at Buffett's estimate of its 1973 intrinsic value.

Think about that: What ultimately became one of Buffett's greatest investments began with three years of double-digit losses and mind-numbing stagnation. Patience pays, Fools.

It encapsulates the two of my favourite meme's I've learned from him: Bucking the trend, and 'being in it for the long run' are two vital ingredients for success.

And this doesn't just hold true for investing. When I look, I see it in all the great advice I get about business, about how marketing is about building relationships with customers, how successful business appreciate the life time value of a customer, how the best executives think past the next bonus check or year-end KPI.

Where I see this as very applicable right now is in recruitment. In an environment when every day there's a new headline about head-count reductions and redundancies left, right and centre, who has the courage to zig when everyone else zags? If you're in HR, or in the position to hire staff, are you brave enough?

Uncertainty is the friend of the buyer of long-term values.

I'm 24. I was out for drinks with friends over christmas and we got to talking about job hunting. 1 has a PHD, 2 have masters in marketing, 2 have degrees, none can get jobs. Think about it, there is a pool of young, enthusiastic, well educated people yearning for a job in your company. The labour market is saturated with talent. Uncertainty has crippled the jobs market, and "long-term values" (people) abound, are you a buyer?

The company that seizes on this opportunity will be the one that emerges from this recession stronger (in leaps and bounds) than when it entered. People are the core of your business, that's true of every business. So are you bucking the trend, are you willing to take advantage of opportunity to lay the foundations for you success over the next 10, 20 years? Are you ready to forsake the quick win of saving small costs and go for the big win? 

Are you ready to be greedy when others are fearful?

If not, why not?

A Real-Time-Micro-Social-Forum Application

This is part of a series of posts on the Journey of a Facebook Application.

I think that title bears repeating, I'm almost proud of it - A Real-Time-Micro-Social-Forum Application. That - expressed in the most buzzword filled description I could think of - is the application I'm going to build!

My Inspiration
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not overly creative. If this does slightly lack in originality (although I don't think it does!) then I hope I'll make up for it in hard work, tenacity.... yadda yadda so on and so forth. I'm not sure where the idea came from, but I know there have been a few services that have inspired my thinking on how I should go about implementing it:

1. Twitter - I like twitter. It's the inspiration for the micro element. It's great for connections, for sharing good links for discovering new things. One thing I’ve found it doesn't do well is group chats. For every time I see an event being live tweeted, I see countless people complain about reams of commentary in their feed about an event that they're not at, or a match that they're not watching, or a TV show they're not interested in etc.

2. Live Blogging - The answer to that twitter problem seems to be live blogging. But for the life of me, I just don't get it! Admittedly, that's probably just me. What I gather so far is that it's one person posting updates of an event, with time stamps etc. If that's the case, then I can definitely see it's uses, e.g. I love reading the engadget or wired live updates from each Macworld event. But they're a one way flow of information, usually from a journalist/blogger in an event. I can't see how they work in a social/group discussion way. Again, maybe it's just me missing a trick here.

3. Discussion Forums - Speaking of discussing Macworld, I found the best place to do this (live) last year was on boards.ie. That was my inspiration for the forum element of the application.

Put your hands together...
So with all this in mind I thought it would be really handy to have a place to chat about an event as it was happening, with twitter-esque sized comments. Twitter is great for what it does, but it's centred around people and connections. This application will be centred around events.

If I'm being ambitious, which I guess I am, I would hope this application could be to discussion forums what twitter is to blogging. Don't get me wrong, I'll still use forums for debates, discussions, analysis etc., but I think this application could be great for quick discussion and live commentary on events as they happen. A thread on a forum takes too long to trawl through when you want the conversation to be quick and free flowing (and half the conversation is taken up by witty and image filled signatures!)

The Use Case
I'm building this as a Facebook application (at first), for many reasons which I'll explain in a late blog post, so the initial user experience will be something like this:

1. I log into Facebook and go to this application
2. I'm going to watch Barack Obama's inauguration that night, but no one's free to come over and watch it with me.
3. So I set up a new event (micro-thread?), and call it "Barry's Inauguration" and set the date - "19th Jan 2009”.
4. I invite a few friends. Some more people browse to it (e.g. under the category "politics") and maybe invite some of their friends.
5. The event starts
6. I say "So what do you think of this Rick Warren guy, a bit too bigoted for my liking".
7. People agree
8. And the real-time-micro-social-forum is born!

So..... What do you think? Would you use it!?

A Fresh Start

This is part of a series of posts on the Journey of a Facebook Application.

There has been a fair bit of progress so far on this Facebook application that I decided to make (and blog about). It has been a month since my last blog post on the application (which is waaay too long) but there has been a few things going on that were just too boring to merit posting about!

A brief synopsis of the past few weeks:

1. I tried to start building an application.
2. I wanted it to be simple, so that I could build it myself, and so that I wouldn't look like a fool trying to do something new or that I wasn't capable of.
3. I also wanted to do something basic so that I could talk about it openly here, but without the fear of someone stealing a "great idea" of mine.

The end result of all this was a boring idea, that no one would use, or bother reading or talking about (never mind trying to steal!). It also felt like I was building a Facebook Application so that I had something to blog about. That wasn't what I wanted. What I want to do is work on an idea/ project/ plan/ application that I'm passionate about first and foremost.

So I scrapped all that.

I've now decided to go with an idea that I like. It's something slightly too complicated for my very limited, self-taught, programming skills, so I'm going to try something I've never done before and outsource it (via elance).

I'm not sure if I've done enough research or put enough planning into this, but I'm going to dive in head first for fear of losing my motivation by overthinking it.

I didn't intentionally time this post for today, but I guess it's as good a day as any for a fresh start. I'll consider this my kick-start to 2009 post too, and my predictions for the year ahead: that I'll make a mess of this, but that it will be an interesting journey all the same!

Next post: I'll try to explain - as best I can - the idea for the application, how it came about and how I hope to develop on it in the future

Wants, Needs and the Spectrum of Desire

I enjoy reading Seth Godin's blog. He often has really clever insights and ideas about marketing and business, and his books are very good too.

Recently he wrote a post entitled Hungry. An excerpt:

By any traditional definition of the word, she wasn’t actually hungry. She didn’t need more fuel to power her through an afternoon of sitting around. No, she was bored. Or yearning for a feeling of fullness. Or eager for the fun of making something or the break in the routine that comes from eating it. Most likely, she wanted the psychic satisfaction that she associates with eating well-marketed snacks.

It got me thinking about the distinction we draw between needs and wants. From a practical point of view I can see the difference. We all know the definition of the two: Food, shelter and water are items that we cannot live without, they are necessities, they are needs; wants are anything above and beyond this.

But from a biological point of view, I wonder do our bodies draw as clear a line in the sand? Evolution teaches us that organisms that felt the strongest compulsion to survive and replicate would be the fittest. Survival of the fittest ensures that after many generations the only organisms that are left will have strong compulsion to do/get/eat/drink/find that which helps them survive.

Plants don't have brains. They can't decide or know what they want or need. They have instead evolved tropisms which ensure that each plant "desires" or "wants" those things that make it survive, but in a very mechanical way. Geotropism involves anti-growth hormones in the stem, which are pulled to the bottom of the cell by gravity, ensuring the plant grows upwards. Phototropisms are chemical reactions to sunlight, spurring the plant to grow towards the sun. Were we to personify plants, could we describe these physiological reactions as needs or wants?

Evolution has resulted in similar mechanisms in us animals. To be a successful animal, our ancestors would have had to 1) survive to reproduction age and 2) reproduce!

For the part 2) we all understand sexual desire, and how important it is in the survival of a species and the passing on of genes. We also understand that there's a spectrum of desire involved here. There are ranges of emotion we can feel: Having a crush, a fantasy, a sexual encounter or falling in love. Do we need a relationship but want sex? (Or vice versa!?)

And then when we look at part 1) - surviving - I don't think our bodies have evolved to distinguish a clear cut distinction between a need or a want. Biologically speaking, our reactions are based on a spectrum of desire.

The reaction process (e.g. a plant growing, a dog eating, a human wanting) has been fine-tuned by evolution, so that the intensity of the desire is matched by it's benefit. Think of it as an algorithm of sorts. This is why we feel thirst as a more intense desire than a hunger for chocolate, or sexual desire more intense than the desire for friendship. I think of it like a mental tropism - the stronger the sunlight the more a plant grows towards it - the greater the benefit to my survival, the more I subconsciously desire it.

The way we use language always gives us a good insight into the working of the mind. The fact that we use terms like "she had a thirst for knowledge" or "he had a hunger for results" are great examples of how our mind processes this spectrum of desire. Even though hunger and thirst are supposed to be for food and water, our mind can instinctively understand what is being said. This simple sentence construct is further support for the theory that our mind treats desire as a spectrum. There is no cognitive leap that the mind has to make between understanding hunger for a need (food) and hunger for a want (results).

Which brings me back to Seth's post.

People don’t need Twitter or an SUV or a purse from Coach. We don’t need much of anything, actually, but we want a lot. Truly successful industries align their ‘wants’ with basic needs (like hunger) and consumers (that’s us) cooperate all day long.
....
yet most of them aren’t needs at all. That’s because the industries that market these items have done a brilliant job of persuading us that they are needs after all.

A lot of people make the claim that Seth is alluding to here, that marketers make needs out of wants. That they exploit basic needs such as hunger and thirst, and build new wants around them.

I wouldn't give marketers that much credit! Something like that sounds difficult to do, and yet millions of products are successfully marketed, and not all these marketers can be way above average ability, right?

The reason this is so do-able, I suggest, and the reason that there are thousands of new products each week which attract customers' desire, is because us consumers don't mentally divide every purchase into a need or a want. We operate based on our spectrum of desire. And just as it's possible for me to tell you that "Jane had a thirst for knowledge" without you having to make a cognitive leap to understand it, so too is it possible for a marketer to position a product so that you subconsciously desire it almost as much as something else you consciously define as a need.

As a marketer I don't try to create new needs, or trick people into needing something that they barely even want. That sounds complicated, elaborate and quite frankly not something I have a desire to do. As a marketer I try understand what people desire and I try create products and services to satisfy those desires. Advertising shouldn't be used as smokescreen or a ruse to con people into thinking my product will meet a desire that it won't, or a need that they don't have. Advertising should be a display, a way to demonstrate how it can satisfy their desires. Branding can be used to help my product meet multiple desires, and move it up along the spectrum. Sure, Nike fill their customer's desire to be clothed, but also to feel cool, to feel athletic, to express something about themselves etc.

Are these needs? Or wants? Or wants in needs clothing? I don't know, but they're definitely desires and meeting them as best they can should be every marketers goal.

Some Background Info

This is part of a series of posts on the Journey of a Facebook Application

I'll start with an apology! I thought I would have been able to post updates on this more frequently than I have, but I've just had a frantic week in work, so apologies to those of you who have been waiting on an update.

Also, welcome to all new subscribers - most of whom I'm presuming came from Damien's Fluffy Link (thanks!)

Even though I haven't had time to post about it, I did make some progress this week. I've picked an idea from the shortlist in my head and I've started thinking about how it might work. To pick the idea for this little experiment, I wanted to make an application that is:

1. Simple - not necessarily the most original or innovative idea, but something that's easy to explain and create
2. Easy to understand (and blog about!)
3. Social - i.e. something that makes good use of facebook, that helps friends connect or interact

Now that I have the idea in my head, I'm going to spend this evening and tomorrow registering the application name, looking at similar applications that exist and a few other small pieces of preperation.

More updates to follow!