In the first episode of the Jobs-To-Be-Done radio show, Doug talks with Bob and Chris about how LinkedIn and Quora compete for the job of getting questions answered online.
The discussion includes some tactial-level ideas on how LinkedIn could better understand the job, and how the timeline of consideration and consumption could be constructed using Jobs-To-Be-Done interviews.
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Coming Up Next Week
Next week we’ll discuss 5 Hour Energy Drink, and the challenges that come with targeting a ritualistic job (morning coffee).
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Image via CrunchBase
One of the great joys in sifting through the social networks in search of meaningful discussion partners is the arrival at a great resource for a specific subject area. I found that in Cody Boardman, a sales specialist I discovered in a conversation group in Facebook. Putting out compelling content often brings compelling people into the fray, and this was the case with Cody, whom you can follow on Google+. Put him in your circles.
Cody and I exchanged a few messages, but this particular message stood out for me, before I have even had a chance to talk to him in great detail. I wanted to know how he viewed sales, because the Jobs to be Done theory suggests that sales is not a solution pushing system. It’s about finding opportunities within problems that consumers / customers experience.
Perfect for a sales person, and something that seems an inherent part of the sales function.
Cody proved me right. He is able to solve problems, and find opportunities. He’s not there just to complete an equation of Boss needs this + Well, i got this, do you want it = We’ll buy it. He tells me in this message that sales is really about finding out the Why behind a purchasing decision, and filling in the blanks with meaningful opportunities linked to the product being sold — AS THEY RELATE to the business that will be using it.
I’m a sales person by trade so let me break my response to your post down in two ways (again):
Professionally, I sell various analytic solutions to marketers now but have sold in other industries the last eleven years. In present context at Webtrends I help solve problem in SEM, site/social/mobile analytics, custom dashboards for executives etc… it’s in this space that I find people working on initiatives (all the above) with little more for a business case than their ‘gut’ and a handful of soft business requirements driving them. This goes for the ma/pa boutique all the way up to the global brands. It’s magical when someone can effectively answer the question ‘why’ as in why they are engaging in a project/initiative etc…
Personally, I listen to people from all walks and talks of life. Bodybuilders, Powerlifters, husbands and wives, men and women, Christians, Mormons, Buddhists etc… the ‘channels’ are most often in-person and via Facebook but I’ve spent a lot of time conversing in forums and a couple of blogs too. My experience, regardless of the context is that when a specific objective is set, one that is based off fact and not opinion initially, is most likely to achieve the goal/resolution etc… When it’s an organic discussion, that’s good for personal conversation but horrible for anything originating from a person with an agenda/point, one that was not well stated enough that people could ‘get it’.
If I had to establish a specialty, it’s in getting people who know they want to get from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ but don’t know in many cases ‘why’ beyond “My boss said this is where we need to go” even when their boss is also (and secretly) unsure why too. I’ve worked in various capacities (some as an interviewer others as a problem solver) with the General Counsel, Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Compliance Officer’s, VPs of Audit etc… of some of the worlds biggest companies (Kraft, Cargill, Alcatel-Lucent, Yahoo, Apple, Kodak etc…).
A sales person is a person looking for specialty in what he does, but also he is someone looking for the meaningful touch points that consumers experience in their emotional experience in the world.
Cody is an excellent conversationalist, and if you have the chance to engage with him on these social networks, including the comments on this blog, you will find that he’s very good at teasing out ideas by offering feedback, stories and suggestions.
Consummate sales!
Wahooly Logo, company created by Dana Severson
If you have not heard about Wahooly yet, you will. It is the first “social” incubator to use the registering of quality followers as a strategy to help startups build brand value and equity. The company launches its initiative tomorrow at midnight.
What does it do? Users trade their social influence to act like beta users for new startups. At exit, there is a conversion strategy that will convert that particpation and influence-sharing into equity that is paid out at the company’s exit. An example from the Wahooly web site.
Let’s say that a new socially-driven photo sharing service is in need of initial users. They would contact Wahooly. We would ask them a series of questions, determine their potential in the marketplace and negotiate a percentage of equity that they’ll provide to these initial users.
Once the details have been ironed out, we send the opportunity for you to check out. If you like it, you signup. If you don’t like it, you do nothing and wait for the next one.
For the sake of the example, let’s say you liked it.
Now, this new startup offered up 5% equity for 5,000 users. That means that you, along with 4,999 other users all own an equal share of that 5%. Not too shabby for simply signing up.
What if you wanted a bigger piece of that pie?
As a shareholder, you hold the key to how much of that 5% you own. These startups are looking for active users, but more importantly, users that are willing to become advocates for their brand. So, using our secret formula (aka: a real geeked-out algorithm), we track how big of a brand advocate you are. This is real-time tracking that you can monitor at any time by accessing your personal dashboard on Wahooly.com.
Your dashboard will provide you with the latest information on all of the startups you have a share of, along with your piece of pie. (Tracking it will be your new addiction.)
How did the team at Wahooly come to this conclusion and what did they do to shift the company’s offering to do this? The story line is interesting. We pick this journey up at the Wahooly Google+ page. Through trial and error, the Wahooly team learns, or decides, that “numbers of users” is really not that useful to a new company. It’s actually the quality of the users.
Version two came together about the time that a Minnesota business plan competition (MN Cup) was accepting entries. We submitted a plan that essentially did the same thing as version one, however we incorporated the notion of social sharing. In other words, if you signed up, you became part of an equity pool. But, you could increase your portion of the equity by sharing it online. Again, there was a problem with the idea. The notion that sharing is valuable is based on the assumption that influence can truly be measured by RTs and follows. We’re not convinced. By the way, we never made it past round one of the competition. What a shame.
It wasn’t until a bit later that we realized that we weren’t actually proposing to deliver users at all, in fact, that really isn’t all that valuable to companies. I mean, ultimately, that’s what they become, but our value proposition is that we’re delivering acceleration via advocates. It’s a quality not quantity equation. We needed to build a system to bring the best out of influencers, which is what most companies struggle with. The key was the power of combined influence, which is how trends begin.
Most worthwhile companies get a fair amount of tweets, mentions, posts, etc., but the tipping point is when those actions can occur concurrently and repetitively. In general, there is little sustainability when it comes to brand advocacy in users, attention is fleeting. Just like in traditional advertising, messages need to be repeated before actions are taken. What we’re talking about is delivering 1,000 mentions over a single day rather than over a year. And then repeating that behavior.
In the end, we decided that, we’re not delivering users, we’re delivering acceleration in the market.
Image via Wikipedia
The Wahooly post doesn’t say how they got to this idea. That’s the thing we would want to know, since that would tell us something about how their values found a sweet spot in the market, in a place where there was non-consumption. we know the place of non-consumption. It’s in the place where they realize there is a quality vs. quantity differential that is not being taken advantage of. But what was the feedback?
We’re not into guessing here, but understanding this will tell us something about the value that went into this equation to come up with this ingenious idea.
Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr
There have been incredible changes to knowledge frameworks in social media, and one of them has been the development of a trend that pushes knowledge away from a static site operated by a company or an indvidual to a social platform that is geared towards conversation and sharing.
Chris Spiek, a partner at the Re-Wired Group, has created a topic area in the Q&A site Quora for Jobs-to-be-Done Theory and it’s starting to thrive, with 11 answers and more than 20 followers.
Visit the Quora topic for more information about how people actively use Jobs-to-be-Done Theory to manage innovations and find opportunities in areas of non-consumption ( and more ) in different industry verticals.
About Quora:
Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web. We organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.
Image via CrunchBase
Zynga, the company that brought Facebook users Farmville, spent $120 million on marketing in 2011, inside the world’s biggest self-service marketing platform.
Efferman Ezzel looks at why Zynga should be focused on why and how their users play social games and not on how to use more marketing dollars to keep them engaged. As new user retention numbers slip, Zynga has started spending $300 — or losing $150 — for every user to marketing costs.
I had asked him earlier this weekend, why would any company spend that much money per user, or any money at all, re-socializing the marketing in an already social system?
He writes:
Why is Zynga spending that much money to market a “social game”, and why are they spending that much money to market a “social game” on Facebook? I believe they’re doing it for two reasons: 1) because they don’t understand why new user retainment is falling (why user growth is plateauing, why there’s a low conversion rate of users who become paying customers, why new user engagement is shrinking), and 2) because they assume increasing Zynga’s market presence will assure new user retainment upon trying their games. As was said in the Edge Magazine article, “The really hardcore [players] are, perhaps, finding themselves trying FarmVille, Castle World and CityVille. The newer audiences are trying and finding that this is all the same and leaving”. It is obvious Zynga needs to redirect their focus from new user retainment to new useradaptability, because they appear to be approaching user retainment from the same understanding they had when user growth skyrocketed, and that was when it was attached to the rapid growth Facebook experienced.
Zynga was supposed to be a dramatic re-imagining of gaming. Social and baked into the world’s largest social graph platform, Zynga offerings seemed like a capstone on any problems that might have been created when a new gaming company had to tackle distribution.
Image via Wikipedia
But the one constant thing about Facebook is that user expectations of what it does for them will change. And that’s without even factoring in that Facebook itself changes all the time.
A gaming company like Zynga that depends on Facebook is going to be out in the cold. And it looks like they have been.
Read more of Ezell’s post to find out what he thinks the company should be doing. Basically, find out what has changed for users. I would put a finer point on it. Find data, take down some narrative, and use the Jobs-to-be-done approach to find out what is causing non-consumption inside Facebook. Is there non-consumption within Facebook, in general?
Facebook Suscribe Button and the Rise of Streamed Feeds
My hunch is that Facebook users are becoming much more interested in using Facebook as a platform for understanding the real world and the world around them.
I have 18,646 subscribers to my public Facebook feed. Many of these people are people outside of the United States. They want a look into someone else’s life.
Facebook is moving away from a platform will you will have fun with friends. It’s trying to fashion itself into the place where each individual is a media hub for publishers and advertisers. It’s challenging every company it can think of, from Google and it’s Google+ offering, to Yahoo! Search and branded content.
As it moves in that direction, say goodbye to Farmville. That experience is way too static. It’s not real. And it doesn’t keep people interested or engaged in finding new people with different lives.
Today Apple came out with a slew of new technology products for education. They will surely do more to provoke change, if they don’t do enough to help teachers improve their impact on children’s lives.
I had only one really big bone to pick with TechCrunch writer Matt Burns, who argued that iPads have no relevancy for teaching things like math or sentence structure
Image via Wikipedia
.
He misses the point, and I say so in this radio broadcast, where I argue that it’s never been the case that tech was supposed to teach. Teachers teach. Educators will always be the deciding factor in a child’s learning curve, not the technology. Quit making it about the technology.
More radio rants and musings to come via the Douglas Crets Flipzu channel.
Others on Google+ have made similar arguments that it’s the teaching and the way we use technology that matters. This great discussion about whether the iBooks 2 launch will be cumbersome reveals that people are using ebooks differently. It also points out that our understanding of school is a structural one. We are never that concerned with the meaning being created in school. We are always focused on how it’s done.
That’s because when we were younger, I would bet that 80% of our learning was spent learning how to exist in the education system.
My argument with tech innovations in education is that tech innovations will free all of us up to do what we want to do in education, and find the sources of our own learning, which is a hybrid of ourselves, our teachers, our communities, and the things we are passion about.
Ready to start learning? Credit to Steve Kovach and David Brennan for a great Google+ discussion.
Image via CrunchBase
Vadim Lavrusik, the journalist ambassador at Facebook, today pointed to a well curated media expereience that focuses on the #SOPA fiasco.
I think the curation was a great idea, but I have concerns about how Facebook manages curation and how it organizes search to find curation.
Right now, Vadim and I are talking this out in a comment thread on his profile, but I want to take my points and put them here.
This is what I expect if I am seeking a curated moment in media. Notice that my comments evolve in to ideas about how Facebook could be better at search, what I believe to be a key component to curation. How will you find what you need to find?
There are several expectations that I have as an audience or a participant in curated themes, news, items, or content:
1. Relevancy: is it easy for me to discern at what point in time this is relevant? Was this from an age ago? Is this now? Is this later? (Search rears its head here, because Search allows me to filter backwards in time in some cases)
2. Is the content meaningful? Curation handles his well.
3. Structurally, is it easy for me to identify that the curated media is about the theme? Or, is it about the curator? In Facebook, it’s usually about the person filtering, because things are classified primarily by personal identity. The ticker highlights both the person curating and the comments around the curation, but not often the thing curated. Notifications serve to deliver people to a person so that people are constantly reinforcing a personal connection. I believe this is the marketing language around much of Timeline when Mark Zuckerberg spoke at F8, and later.
4. My other expectation is that I can constantly visit a theme or a curated idea. In FB, I find that hard to do. I can’t — here is search again — go back to a specific point in time easily. I don’t know where to look. If I had a search capability that would allow me to input “theme” and find the themes, rather than the people, being discussed I would have an easier time locating a curated experience. Facebook actually doesn’t have to choose
Image via Wikipedia
between being about people or being about media content. If they are trying to make people in to remote controls for video and TV content, or music content, or if they are trying to make people hubs for publishing legacies, then they need to find a way to blend it so that it can be approached form both sides of the fence. You are doing really well at being a marketer for the journalists who need an audience. This will eventually pull much of the media content from legacy publishing platforms into Facebook. But the experience and the “searching” for that experience is disorderly.
Right now, I found out about SOPA curating through you. You are a person. Unless you are on some robotic schedule I can’t depend on any person to consistently deliver me to the right thing every time. But if I search for it, I will find it every time. IF it’s set up to be searched.
And Lavrusik responds, roundly, with a good point, though I don’t think I am missing the point. My point is that the average user may not know these expectations because they are not given the ability to experience the result of having them. Says Lavrusik:
You’re missing one of the big points here. Much of the discovery happens through people you’re connected to and not search…for the average user. You’re not the average user, so it’s important to remember how the average user interacts with content. It’s usually not the same way we do 
An MBA grad might look at the retail business and define success as increasing revenue, decreasing overhead, eliminating cost overruns, etc. The casual observer might even look at stories about the decline of retail and make the judgement that online is beating offline to death simply by offering price satisfaction and ease of use.
Image via Wikipedia
It turns out that maybe these are not entirely clear lines in the sand. We have had a series of conversations online and offline with some retailers, consumers and analysts, and we have created a collection of interesting perspectives on the jobs that retail (online and offline) get done for people.
It turns out that success will come to retail box stores and even retail online through the practice of relevancy, something that online media does well and that retailers everywhere are learning how to deliver.
In the offline world, relevancy is the emotional core of choice. It’s like content, but it’s normally delivered through people. It’s subtle. It’s based on a gentle push and pull of asking questions and seeking answers.
What relevancy in shopping does is it shifts the job of retail shopping from one of just getting a product to one of resolving an emotional “why.” We found this out by asking people about their experiences.
We asked Quora members following the Jobs-to-Be-Done Approach what was missing in the current retail experience in big box bricks and mortar stores, and we found two great answers. I also talked to Alexandra Mysoor, co-founder and CEO of online retailer Generation Orange, an online-only retail store for natural products.
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Angry commenters get a lot of air time, and they can drain you. But what if you are looking for just smart and helpful people?
Imagine if you could conduct a global search for anyone commenting on anything in any comment field on any blog or web site with a content engine built into it. Imagine if you are not looking to have an argument about baseball or truffles, but you are actually looking to start a business, or figure out a line of code?
Can you do that by trawling through the billions of comments on the web? Maybe you will soon.
Type in your search query in a search box, and then suddenly you see all of the people who have commented on, say, “education.” You not only see who said what, or where they said it, but you also see the commenting context around it.
It’s coming. William Mougayar has created the beta test for this in engag.io. And it’s remarkably prescient design, as it focuses on what I believe will be the central task of web engagement in the next few years — finding experts you know you want to know, but whom you don’t know you know.
I interviewed him today to figure out what is going on with engag.io. In short, they are soon to move from beta to something more global, though specifics are scant. What I can say is that he’s the inspiration for my thoughts here. I include some writing about what we talked about, and at the end I tack on a Q&A I sent him.
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Image via CrunchBase
Jason Calacanis has it right: Amazon Prime is a cult, but it’s a highly efficient cult that is revamping how consumers get the job of retail therapy done.
We need to look at two things here. If we re-visit the blog post from yesterday that said Best Buy is not experiencing impending bankruptcy, we might have to revise our thesis — that Best Buy has a long way to go before the end of retail as we know it knocks them into retail’s version of urban blight.
Image via Wikipedia
Calcanis tells us why online retail works so much better. In addition to giving people 250 hours of their life back each year, it also gives them ease of ordering, and a slew of products that stuffy-nosed irascible retail guinea pigs prevent us from seeking.
“Let’s call it four to six hours of retail experiences a week, or 20 to 25 hours a month per household. Including holiday shopping you’re looking at 250 hours a year you’re inside a retail location experiencing some combination of time-regret, stress, boredom and/or annoyance.
Cult members understand there is not only no joy in traditional shopping, but that it’s filled with annoyance and wasted time.
Cult members understand there can be joy, and time savings, associated with intelligent consumption.
Prime gives you the joy of consumption without the pain of acquisition.”
The Pain of Acquisition?
I like this phrase. yes, there is pain there.
The pain comes when consumers, who kind of know what they want are assaulted visually and sensorily by a marauding salesperson disguised as a customer service teenager, or grousing middle-aged resentment-filled employee, who is not careful enough, doesn’t care enough, isn’t well trained enough, or not aware enough and maybe even not experienced enough to look at retail shopping as a optential relationship-building experience.
Image via Wikipedia
Of course, how could retail shopping be such a thing?
It’s different than a grocery store. Most people go to grocery stores regularly, they get to know the cashiers and the clerks.
Not in things like electronic goods retail. It’s an in-and-out experience. Drop in, get what you need, sortie back at the house. As Larry Downes showed us yesterday, there is a mismanagement of the customer experience in retail. People are not trained well to help consumer’s discover that which they didn’t know they seek.
Of course, as we also said yesterday, consumers don’t necessarily come into retail with the best of moods. Well, whatever, not much we can do about people’s pouty faces.
But if a cult exists, then that cult must be helping people get a job done — for Calcanis this is the easing of the pain of acquisition.
The problem is there is also a pain of retail trade-offs. If we move to Prime and follow that cult, somebody suffers. It’s not the managerial talent. It’s the retail masses, the people we should be training to be better at customer choice and consumer innovation.
Retail outlets and fast-moving consumer companies should be employing a “jobs to be done” framework to train their staff to be jsut as good in person as semantic search, SEO algorithms, and cataloging of products is on the web.
If not, there’s an economic cataclysm about to happen, much worse than a single Best Buy chain going out of business.
Now, the only downside to Prime’s ascendancy is that it’s going to wipe out tens of thousands of retail jobs that are currently filled by the least employable of our workforce.
It’s not a jump to say that many of these retail jobs are filled by folks who have *already* taken a huge career nosedive from the middle class to the just-above poverty level of retail workers.
They’re going to get fracked twice in 20 years: first getting knocked from the white collar or blue collar middle class to the retail working-class jobs, and then to no jobs.
I guess you can’t get massive efficiency like Amazon is building without wiping out massive amounts of jobs.
And I think Amazon’s massive growth will actually crater the real estate business as malls and main streets are faced with unfillable retail spaces. What do we do with the malls, turn them into office and loft spaces? university space?
Playing out the scenario, does this new flood of new office and living space put downward pressure on traditional office space?
The Re-Wired Group helps companies and, by extension, these employees, out of the rut of consumer choice gone unadressed.
Take a look at some of the writing from the Re-Wired Group, which could guide you through this kind of thinking. Also, remember Clayton Christensen, the father of this movement. His work on consumer innovation is eye-opening, to say the least.
