I find it interesting that most of us are trying to maintain at least a couple contrasting personas at once, a professional work image versus personal life for example.  But really it’s just a silly cultural practice of hiding something everyone already knows about.  School teachers swear, your parents have had sex, police officers have played Grand Theft Auto, and your girlfriend has to poop sometime.  No matter how professional you pretend to be, for every level of seriousness there is some joke just funny enough to make you laugh and break character.  We are always susceptible to crack up at some distasteful, raunchy joke and that, in my mind, brings the whole concept of formalities into question.

Often we sympathize with people who are offended by something of questionable taste.  I believe society is catering to these people when we tend to cleanse ourselves of personality at business meetings with people we don’t know, and when TV blurs nudity or bleeps swear words (even though that really calls more attention to it).  But masking these realities doesn’t make them go away, and it seems to me those objecting to them may even be asking quite a lot of us to shield them from the truth.  I don’t quite understand why being intolerant of the F-word is a more honorable flaw than being someone who uses the F-word, except that this is just the way we’ve come to accept things.

We all try to come to terms with the world in our own ways, and that may involve a skewed or selective perception of facts, but I think it works simply because we view things through a consistent lens, distorted as it may be.  It causes problems, however, when we have to communicate with people who have views that conflict with our own.  We try to reach a compromise to make ourselves compatible with each other, but isn’t the result just a lens of its own that’s not quite in alignment with the way anybody sees things?

Sometimes merely being compatible isn’t good enough, sometimes we really want to make a great impression on people, to sell a product or catch the attention of a cute girl.  So we invent a persona that we assume appeals to our target audience’s general model of what someone ideally ought to be like, even though our assumptions about other people’s views must be in some way grounded in our own.  Perfectionism is narcissism.  Nonetheless it may work, and if it does you’ll have your personal views and the history that refined them to thank, ironically the very same views and history that you may be hiding in an overhaul of your image.

When we reinvent ourselves for a certain audience, I think we’re often a bit more concerned with covering up what we were than being fully forward-focused.  Certainly hiding the past seems to be the main concern Dr. Schmidt is expressing, rather than, say, flooding the internet with the new you, which is more along the lines of the usual goal when we talk about Google.  I really think it’s true our pasts and our mistakes are what made us who we are today, but then why is it we don’t tend to feel others would be very accepting of our histories?

There are mistakes and events that we’ve accepted and there are mistakes and events that we regret, whether they made us better people or not.  The more preventable and higher the cost, the more likely we are to regret a particular mishap.  I’m as qualified as anyone to say it, having made a fool of myself on plenty of occasions.  It’s especially hard to get over when you indulge your imagination in denial with hypothetical “what if” and “had I only” recreations.  Finally accepting a mistake, learning from it and vowing not to make it again, but accepting that what happened is what happened is one thing; however, seriously admitting to somebody else not only that it happened but also why, in all of its you-wouldn’t-understand detail, is a whole other level.

How many times have you explained a mistake to somebody and admitted, without quickly brushing it off or changing the subject, but with the sincerest intention to improve, that it was because you got lazy, because you were an asshole, because you were overconfident or underestimated the project?  These aren’t exactly issues people sympathize with, like “I got nervous” or “I let personal feelings interfere with my job,” too bad we don’t always have such emotionally riveting excuses.  As awkward and uncomfortable as it may be, I don’t think we can move on until we’ve explained the most embarrassing and ugly aspects of our mistakes to another person and listened to their feedback.

This not only probably breaks out of your comfort zone, but I bet it’s well beyond theirs too (depending on just how personal you have to get).  Those who aren’t blind to the harsh realities of life will hear you out.  Something wonderful can result from an injustice or a bad deed, but we tend not to think about it, and we certainly don’t try to create such instances.  If something bad already happened, then it’s too late to change the fact and we ought to have the inclination to make the most good come of it as possible.  We don’t have to like that it happened, but now that it has perhaps we have a responsibility to make the most of it, on behalf of all that could have been.

No one has a perfect past, and pretending that’s not true or ignoring it may be denying a responsibility.  I think if our whole pasts really were knowable by everyone, we’d be generally less judgmental and more benefit than harm would come of it.  Changing your name to hide your past, whether you’re burying mere “youthful hijinks” or bigger problems, is saying you won’t make yourself worth it.

These science fiction stories take the side of the outcast and make you think there’s something wrong with the masses, that the satisfaction they find in the status quo is superficial and they’re missing out on something important.  (John Stuart Mill sums it up pretty well with “Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”)  For those of you not inspired by fictional stories and lasers, here’s where I try to persuade you that it’s okay to be the underdog with only a handful of followers, likers, subscribers or whatever they start counting next so you can deal with social media without a prescription for Prozac.

I find Twitter most interesting to look at since following is not necessarily mutual (one person can follow another without reciprocation).  You see behaviors like people following you one day and then unfollowing you a week later if you don’t follow back… and then next month they do it again.  Some people even include in their bios “I follow back.”  And some people send out tweets like “I guess I can follow a few more people now since I got more followers this weekend.”  They view their number of followers as an allowance to increase the number of people they’re following because people seem to think it’s a big status symbol if they follow fewer people than are following them.

It’s intuitive to try to compare numbers.  The friend counter frankly does look like it’s keeping score, and I can’t deny that.  But people get carried away with this number when the important things, like who is actually following you and why, are complex and not so easily quantified.  In the case of a business, their number of followers or likes probably is actually a somewhat representative measure of how large that business is, but how often is size an indicator of quality?  Often the largest company in an industry is just mediocre because they have such a broad audience to appeal to.  For individuals, I know a lot of my followers on Twitter are just spammers and the number fluctuates all the time because they unfollow me when I don’t follow them back (or they get banned).  Spammers are an ever-present reminder that the number of followers isn’t nearly as important as who is following me.

I also find the objective of having more followers than you follow to be a little odd.  This means you want to be followed by people who you don’t want to follow, but I think most people probably don’t think about the implications of it because they’re just looking at a number.  Businesses who do this are missing out on an opportunity to show customers (and potential customers) they care about them.  Businesses make the most out of social media when they use it to listen.  I know you’re probably searching for your company’s name, but you could still be missing important details and following people demonstrates your commitment to hearing what they have to say.

Here is the honest truth about social networking websites:  Numbers don’t matter so much and context is key.  A small number of followers who like or trust you are infinitely more valuable than a large number of followers who have no idea who you are and only followed because you promised to follow them back.  When it comes time to make purchasing decisions, your number of followers won’t turn out to be such a great selling point after all, and the way you interacted with people (listening and responding or blindly spitting links at them) will make or break the deal.  Scaling out isn’t always the best plan for a business, and you don’t have to be a huge company to be profitable and highly successful.  Likewise, having a lot of friends on a personal account doesn’t actually mean you literally have more friends than someone else, nor does having more friends guarantee that you will be happier or enjoy life more.  Social media is about people, and the whole point is that this is a use of technology that isn’t purely driven by a bunch of anonymous, impersonal numbers.

Patents are supposedly intended to encourage innovation by ensuring an inventor’s company gets a head start to reap the full benefits of a new discovery.  As if not for the promise of exclusive rights, Google would never have thought up its patented homepage?  Clearly all the hard work and effort to think of centering two buttons below a text input wouldn’t have been endured if not for patents.

It is a requirement in the patent application process that the invention be non-obvious.  According to Wikipedia that means “a ‘person having ordinary skill in the art’ would not know how to solve the problem at which the invention is directed by using exactly the same mechanism.”  Who are we considering the standard for ordinary skill in the art?  My grandma?  ”Programmers” who click buttons in Visual Studio?

Sometimes people point out that because a patent requires companies to disclose their designs, once the patent expires other companies benefit from having the design.  Again though, people are patenting a lot of stuff that’s so basic and, in truth, obvious that it’s not even worth looking at because everybody knows how to do it.  But supposing there is something remotely complicated about a design, a patent grants exclusive rights for 20 years, and that’s more than enough time for most computer software or devices to become obsolete.

Patent lawsuits seem like they are often countered with the company being sued claiming the other one is infringing on its patents too.  Legal and public relations departments keep the world posted on their progress in protecting their hard work and intellectual property, but none of it is really affecting us users who just want a damn phone with the typical features!  If you take two or more patented features and combine them in one application or device, that should count as a separate thing because the convenient combination of other features is in itself a feature.

Alas, all that being said, I have no idea why I even decided to write this post.  Probably anybody who reads this is already as pissed as I am and in equally little position to do something.  But if I had my way, and on the off-chance that somebody important cares, the following would be added to the patent laws:

• Inventions must actually be non-obvious (for real!)
• Applicant should be able to demonstrate that a substantial investment of effort was required to arrive at the invention, and that this work was far beyond the bare minimum just to create an instance of the thing (with perhaps an exception for extremely novel ideas)
• Term length should be dependent on some measure of speed of innovation in the market, like the rate of patent filings in the industry
• Patent owners should be required to offer licensing options to other companies and a maximum price of some sort put in place to ensure that market demands can override patent protection

One of my favorite websites of all time was imeem.  It was the perfect social network for music.  Users uploaded their music, and if the record labels approved anybody could listen to it, but often users uploaded songs they had recorded or remixed themselves.  Then everyone could listen, rate, comment, and recommend music to others.  You could friend other users and join groups just like any social network.  Here’s the magic part of it though:  By joining groups of people with similar tastes in music, essentially every day you could get a full list of songs hand-picked by people who like what you like.

We have a long way to go before an algorithm can identify my personality type and know how to recommend music cross-genres when even I’m not yet aware I like a certain genre.  The music I was introduced to on imeem was often not well known nor a style I had ever heard before.  When faced with something new and different, an algorithm has to aggregate the data before it can make a suggestion, but we’re caught in the middle of a bell curve and everybody’s only listening to the most popular of the popular songs so it will probably never get that data until you already know about it.  Only other people, with all their complexity and imperfection, can make such precisely targeted recommendations after hearing new music for the first time.

Imeem ended up getting itself into a lot of debt to record labels and was ultimately shutdown and its memberships bought by MySpace.  I must insist that this isn’t because it couldn’t have driven music sales.  It’s debt was to the record labels for streaming their music for free.  First off, I found the usefulness of the site had less to do with its offering of free mainstream content than it did with the community and its recommendations and the lesser known music.  But secondly, I am among many users who claim we would have paid to use it.  Grooveshark manages to stay in business with an optional premium service that costs only $6 a month.  Imeem had a VIP service too, but frankly it didn’t include features I cared about nor was I aware they were in such dire need of money at the time.

Just a note:  Perhaps a bit unfairly, I have not tried using MySpace music.  I cannot deal with the dozens of simultaneously auto-playing flash objects on every single page of the site.

A site that’s still around and useful is the Hype Machine.  Some people have described Hype Machine as being just like a Google for music that crawls all of the web; in fact, it’s more refined than that.  Essentially, the staff chooses specific sources to include, written by people who are experts at picking music.  The result is a continually updated selection of new and unique music.  If you just browse down the latest songs on the homepage, you probably won’t like everything you hear.  But you can follow specific music reviewers and categories, and what I find interesting is the possibility that the personality types for music taste may be easily exhaustible and could perhaps be well represented by a finite number of reviewers selected by the Hype Machine staff.  I don’t think it’s there yet, but the implication is that a single reviewer, or much smaller combination of reviewers, could epitomize my experience with imeem from a larger group of people.

There are tons of sites out there claiming to help people discover new music, but far too many are taking an algorithmic approach when really there ought to be much more emphasis on the people.  Humans are still good for plenty of things, even with all our technological advances.  ”Apps” are ruling people’s decisions when it should be the other way around.

If you haven’t picked up on it, this entire post is also a bit of a metaphor for all the discussion regarding Facebook friends providing personal recommendations being a threat to Google.

I’m writing this post kind of late in the game.  I’ve already heard many times that my generation just assumes music ought to be free.  There are plenty of opinions floating around that make the music business seem just absolutely hopeless, even coming from major executives in the actual industry.  But I think mistakes can be corrected and the major companies just aren’t taking any positive initiatives to improve their situation.  (Suing individuals for illegal downloads is only reactive and pathetically uncreative.)

I think it is true that record labels have generally failed to justify the cost of music.  We know once you have one digital version of a song it costs nothing to create an infinite number of copies.  If a friend has a song on his MP3 player that I like, why would I put in the effort of looking it up, purchasing it (not just spending money but also taking the time to go through the process), and downloading it when I can have the same thing faster and for free by copying his?  Sure, creating the initial recording of the song took time and money, but as a consumer experiencing only the end product I have no sense of that, which is a far more important factor in my decisions than my knowing logically that those expenses had to have been incurred at some point.  It’s no surprise to me that musicians and record companies are now making their money from live concerts.  The cost, effort, and quality is immediately apparent to the consumer, and I can’t produce an even near equivalent experience in my own home.  But I don’t think record companies should abandon trying to sell music and only concentrate on live entertainment.

At the most basic level all a business has to do is solve a problem.  To give up on record sales and blame illegal downloads is to assume the only problem that ever existed was in distribution, and worse that this problem was artificially imposed by the distributors themselves.  I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but I still have a big problem:  I can get free access to almost any song ever recorded, but I don’t even know what to listen to!

Top 40 radio stations are a big part of why the music industry can be so make-or-break.  If an artist can’t get a song in the top 40 most popular songs, which are played on almost every contemporary radio station, he or she probably isn’t going to get the level of mainstream attention necessary to be really successful.  Whoever decided that I only care about 40 songs at a time?  Well unfortunately when you have a medium as widely popular as a typical contemporary radio station, there isn’t much choice but to ensure the appeal is as broad as possible.  They can’t risk playing a song that listeners won’t like because we’ll change the station.  So why are record labels relying on radio stations to get their music out?  This, I think, is a very basic, fundamental problem that record companies seem to completely lack verticals such as a means of exposure.  They depend on other companies at all the different levels leading up to a purchase, but those in the middle don’t share the same primary interest of selling more music and the labels are paying them lots of money they could otherwise be investing in creating their own solutions.

I think for starters record labels shouldn’t be so exclusively interested in signing artists who are expected to be hugely successful.  By scaling back their typical spend per artist, perhaps investing in smarter advertising rather than expensive and old fashioned tactics, they could afford to sign more artists and experiment longterm (just because initial market research indicates a miss doesn’t guarantee that outcome when the right audience finds out about it).  Then they need to take control and create their own channels to promote and sell their music.  Why are record labels paying Apple to sell their music for them?  Is iTunes seriously the best shopping experience the music industry has to offer?  Most online music stores, iTunes included, don’t even allow you to listen to a full length demo of the song you’re buying.  If you haven’t heard the song elsewhere, you have no idea what you’re buying!  They could likely be preventing more sales than illegal downloads this way.

Even with the ability to download just one track instead of buying an entire album at a store, the pricing model just doesn’t work.  Ninety-nine cents isn’t a whole lot to pay for a song I know I like, but when you consider experimenting and buying music just to see if you like it that can add up to a sizable amount of cash really quickly.  At this price level you’re paying a huge percent just in payment processing.  I should be buying credits in $15 increments to cut down on the costs.  I don’t think people are unwilling to buy music so much as they are unwilling to pay so much for music (especially when, as I mentioned, we’re paying largely for convenience), so buying credits wouldn’t be a big disturbance to the customer; plus people would almost certainly be more likely to impulsively spend those credits after they have them.

I think packaging tracks together could be a huge success in music sales.  For example, if I’m buying one track at full price, why not offer me a similar track from a different artist at a discount to get me to try something new?  I suspect this isn’t done because the music stores don’t have the freedom to offer a substantial discount like that, nor would they necessarily be the ones benefiting from it longterm if I happen to like the suggested artist.  If record labels were more involved in the way their music is sold, maybe we could create our own compilation albums and we wouldn’t be dependent on other sources (some of which turn out to be illegal) to find out about their less popular music.

The whole industry in general just hasn’t been very conducive to helping me find new music.  You’d think, since they seem to consider it such a threat, the record labels would have learned a thing or two from the Internet’s open culture.  Like that there are a lot of people with a passion for their various tastes in things like music and are quite interested in learning new things.  They could very cheaply host free events to help people discover new music and interact in person with other people who share their same taste in music.  Or even just publish their own articles that help suggest new music at the bare minimum.

I have no motivation to go to a brick-and-mortar music store because the people working there have less information readily available than I can find online in a few seconds.  Music stores really should have been focusing on creating a fun and engaging experience a long time ago.  Employees need to be absolute music enthusiasts who add value just by being there instead of overly trained drones who barely interact with customers and only know how to ring up purchases or lookup inventory on a computer.  Record labels need to take a look at the present state of the music stores and decide whether they need to be supplying them with more information and tools to sell their music or if they need to launch their own chain of stores and take over.

In my next post I’ll discuss what I think are some good examples of websites that are on the right track to helping connect people with new music they’ll like.  (Update–That post is available here:  Pirates Pt2: What’s Good About Online Music?)  I hope to find a brick-and-mortar store I can say the same for in the near future, but at the present time I cannot think of one and I’m sure any good examples are small, little-known shops that don’t get enough credit for it.

I have never had the privilege of peeking at any big brand’s AdWords dashboard, but I can speculate!  The first thing I want to bring up is that when we tech-savvy people think “user” the first image that comes to mind is likely of someone who has no idea what the address bar is and googles everything, including “GMail” because they have no idea that Google’s homepage has links on it.  But there are plenty of non-website-having ordinary users who are quite aware of their surroundings and can make the conscious decision to click on an ad while in fact knowing that it’s an ad (I’m sure that’s hard to believe for the majority of the scammer SEO guys who’ve never sold anything somebody actually wanted).  So my point is that a little survey could go a long way in combination with looking at the AdWords numbers and not all users need us to figure out what they’re doing for them.

Growth of websites always seems to be exponential.  Sometimes you hit a maximum and things level out for a while, but the more visitors you get usually the “even more” visitors you get.  And the more people who find you the more people are probably talking about you, and posting links or increasing the activity on your website, which in turn boosts your search engine rankings which then of course continues to boost your traffic.  What this means is if someone were to sponsor a search query for which they were already ranking organically, and then find that click thrus on the organic result were increased, it may be due to this sort of spontaneous growth rather than the direct influence of the sponsored listing.

Another factor worth mentioning is that Google calculates the position of sponsored listings (how close to the top your ad will appear) based on a combination of things including a quality score and the click-thru-rates of your ad.  If you’re sponsoring a query you already show up for, that’s probably relevant and likely to have a high click-thru-rate organically, and I would presume in most cases that will carry over to your ad as well.  So sponsored links probably do have higher click thrus if they appear on the same page as an organic result, but I think the reason has more to do with relevancy and targeting, and the actual fact that there is an organic link as well may have no direct effect.

I skimmed through an article called “Sponsored Search: Do Organic Results help or hurt the Performance and under what conditions?” (Agarwal, Hosanagar, & Smith, 2010) that found click-thru-rates on sponsored links were increased in the presence of an organic link, but that conversion rates from the sponsored links decreased in the presence of organic links.  I was intrigued that conversion rates were actually lower.  I think in plain geek talk essentially this study used a cookie that expired after some specific amount of time for tracking conversions from users who clicked on an ad.  Cookies can be deleted or never accepted in the first place, not to mention are usually specific to a single “installation” of a browser (i.e. not transferred to other users of a shared computer nor usually other browsers); so there are several ways they can get lost or fail to serve their purpose, but one would expect this to level out over the data.

The study focused on an online retailer for pet products, and selected keywords that had previously generated orders.  For websites that I’ve worked with, the keywords we use most and get the highest returns out of tend to be very much focused on driving an actual purchase; then we occasionally use a few more general “throwaway” keywords just to build the brand a little that aren’t really expected to directly result in immediate purchases so much.  But these more general and less purchase-focused keywords also tend to be where there’s less competition and we usually have higher ranking organic links.  I suspect that in the case of users doing a little pre-purchase research who initially enter via a more general search query and later return to make their purchase, they may be more likely to search for the specific product they want the second time around, and if in doing so they click an ad, that new ad will most likely overwrite the cookie causing the conversion rates to be slightly skewed.  That combined with the general tendency of more general keywords to be less purchase-focused could result in significantly lower conversions being tracked when sponsored links appear by organic ones.

One last thing to consider is that there’s a lot of free information out there on the web, and that’s great and all, but when I’m actually trying to buy something I pay a lot more attention to sponsored results because I know they’re actually selling it and not just telling me about it.  Conversely, if you’re not looking to spend money organic results probably look more appealing.

These are just some theoretical explanations to consider (well, Agarwal et al. have some numbers you can look at), but the beauty of these ad campaigns is that you can change them in just a few clicks and optimize for whatever really is turning out the best results.  Trial and error has been made liberatingly cheap on the Internet.

While looking for hints on what to write about, I stumbled across this tweet from the professor that gave me an idea:

I told my classes (300+) that they could follow me on Twitter…only 4 did so…I just want to go back to sleep.
6:45 AM Jan 12th via web

All the things I want to say about that… does Dr. Feinberg obsess over his number of followers?  And what causes some people to do that while others don’t seem to care?  What reasons aside from a true desire to read tweets do people have for following other users?  Why don’t more college students use Twitter?  Yet, I feel a little reserved because we have to blog quite a bit and I might want to save these questions up for my next past-the-deadline posts… and why am I late and how do I know I will continue to be?  I need to write these down!

I’m going to look at just the college student part of it for now.  According to this Pew report, as of October 2009, 33% of “online adults” 18-29 years old use a status updating service like Twitter.  But I recall seeing some numbers that almost made Twitter look like it’s for old folks (relatively speaking).  After a little digging, I realized that’s because other reports show the demographic separation of the Twitter users, whereas the Pew report is the opposite:  What percentage of the demographic uses Twitter.  This post from the Nielson Wire blog shows the former (as well as population size), which indeed makes Twitter look pretty old if you look only at the composition.

It really does seem misleading to say Twitter is less popular with young people, because that dodges the important fact that the younger age demographic is dwarfed by all the baby boomers.  For evaluating this question, “coolness” really ought to be determined by share of the population of young people, not just a number of young people using the service without more perspective.

Speaking of perspective, let’s have a look at some other social networks to compare.  Another Pew report from 2007 says right at the top of the article “55% of online teens use social networks and 55% have created online profiles.”  Yes, 2007 is almost a decade in Internet years, but I suspect this number has only increased.  Reading on it sounds like telling his students to friend him on MySpace would have yielded much better results for Feinberg.  According to the article, 85% of teenagers with an online profile reported updating MySpace the most frequently.  I don’t think many would doubt Facebook has probably cut into that number pretty deep.  But what’s most important here, given the problem at hand, is that in 2007 most online teens had some sort of profile.  Is Twitter just slow?

Note that we are dealing with different age categories because the first Pew report did not include the 12-17 (teen) age group that the last one looked at.  However, I think that Twitter adoption is a little slow among the younger age groups when compared to Facebook and MySpace.  The 2007 Pew report also asked teens what they do on social networks.  While 80+% use the messaging features, only 61% say they send group messages to all their friends (which is pretty much what Twitter is for).  Also, Twitter has a unique culture of its own in the way people seem to use it that’s different from other social networks.  It’s much more information focused than Facebook.  Ironically, people say sarcastically “Who cares what I’m doing all day long?” about using Twitter, yet in my experience that’s all people do on Facebook, while the people I follow on Twitter are usually posting some comment about the news or links to articles they’ve read.  Frankly, most college students and teens probably would rather hear about what their friends are doing all day long (Facebook) than get the latest news and share articles (Twitter).

Twitter reminds me of the old days before the dot-com bubble burst.  Not that I’m old enough to remember it, and unfortunately my parents evidentially didn’t invest my college fund in e-Stocks or I wouldn’t have to be writing this post, but its culture and some people’s opinions of it make me think about other people’s accounts of the Internet.  First off, people used to say the Internet is for Silicon Valley techies by Silicon Valley techies.  Many people I think would describe Twitter as being for techies.  Also, the web was a new era of openness, which is something Twitter brought to the increasingly closed and private culture Facebook was introducing to social media.  Maybe it just needs to crash and burn before it really catches on.  Or perhaps it already did when the plague of Fail Whales came and went, and perhaps we’re just now entering its mass adoption and moving on from the innovators and early adopters.

Unfortunately, Pew and Nielson don’t seem to have much info on the average consumer research student.  But that would be the last thing to check to find out if Feinberg just had the wrong audience or if his students really don’t want to follow him on Twitter.  (For the record, I followed.)

Presuming you shop at Walmart on occasion, consider specifically why you go there. For me, if I need something specific, it’s not worth going all the way to Walmart and navigating a gigantic store just to save a couple bucks. On the other hand, if I’m buying groceries, and not just a quick midnight run for milk, if I go to Walmart I know they are going to have everything I need. I don’t recall a time when they’ve ever been out of something I wanted.

The store is generally free of fancy displays, but frankly I consider grocery shopping serious business and I don’t get sidetracked. I’d just as soon be rid of the clutter. All the Walmart stores I’ve been in have had the appearance of being very clean (I’m not sure if they really are, but I at least feel good knowing they look clean). Even the color scheme is extremely plain and simple.

When we talk about “creating a retail experience” usually we mean something that would seem elaborate, like developing a certain theme in the decor, service, and products. Even though it seems so plain and boring, Walmart is a great example of this. Psychologists have observed that men and women shop quite differently: Men tend to be highly focused and women are more prone to get sidetracked. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’ve only ever heard women complain about Walmart’s appearance or apparent lack of decor.

In my honest opinion, Walmart is actually a really, really big niche market with a specific, but abundant, target audience. When I think of Walmart, “cheap” and “savings” are not the most prominent words that come to mind. Instead I think of bulk and getting a lot done in one trip. In general, groceries already tend to be cheap. But in order to appeal to people who want highly efficient shopping experiences, having reliable pricing, that I trust is reasonable, is a must to deliver a complete solution.

It’s also worth mentioning that, personally, groceries and household commodities (light bulbs, soap, etc.) are the only things I buy at Walmart. Even though Walmart sells clothes and hardware, “extremely efficient” and “bulk” are not my idea of the best way to buy clothing or other products. I would rather go to a store that has a style or theme that somehow compliments the style of clothes I buy. And I’d rather take some time to decide exactly what to buy.

Walmart is just satisfying “wants and needs.” Anyone could have made an efficient grocery store. Anyone can still improve upon the model or drill-in on an even more specific market. The very fact that anyone complains about Walmart also goes to show that Walmart’s market is not “the world” and small shop owners should seek out opportunities to create different shopping experiences. Otherwise, businesses are trying to compete on price with a company that, from my point of view, isn’t even successful solely because of it’s prices… of course they’re not going to win.

Note: I am aware that Walmart was supposedly founded based on providing low prices. This is not a post about what I think Sam Walton was secretly scheming; this is only my theory on why the stores have been so successful.

Image from Walmart Press Room

I’m a Linux guy, but I use Windows on the rare occasion that I need an application that only works on Windows.  So I really only use it a handful of days out of any given year.  Unfortunately, the couple applications I do use Windows for happen to need Internet access, so consequently even though I use Linux I still have to pay a full annual subscription for Norton just so I can be the least bit confident that Windows will still be there when I try to boot into it those few days of the year.

Alright, so onto the rant:  Windows boots up and Norton tells me my subscription is expired and I’m not protected from basically anything because when you install Norton it tells you to turn off the Windows firewall… awesome.  It’s a shame it couldn’t just maybe turn that firewall back on before it stops working.  I’m about to yank out the network cable, but I figure aww screw it, if I get a virus I’ll just fix it from Linux or if somebody hacks in all my important stuff is on on an ext3 partition to make it at least an extra several steps to get to from Windows.  So I click the big, shiny “renew” button that Norton is flashing in my face and obviously seems to think I ought to click.  It opens up my web browser, which is Opera, and takes me to the Symantec site, cause you know, now would probably be a pretty great time for me to type in a credit card number or something… now, when I’m not protected… yeah, that’s definitely cool.

But instead of taking me to the renewal center, I get an error message from Symantec that says “Your browser is not supported because it is not considered secure enough to conduct an online transaction.  Please upgrade your browser and then begin your session again.”

I’ll have you know, Norton, that Opera has the best security track record of ANY other major browser (sorry Firefox junkies).  It would have been nice of you to suggest what you think might be a more secure browser rather than just telling me I need to upgrade something that seems to be perfectly fine.  Why do I get the feeling this wouldn’t have happened if I were using Internet Explorer (the browser with the worst security record)?  This is just so obviously not thought out that I don’t have anything more to say about it.

Okay, so that’s pretty dumb, but so far doesn’t impair my ability to fix the situation because that’s what other computers are for!  (Sort of.)  So I grab my laptop and head over to Symantec’s website intent on logging into my account.  There is a renew tab, but it wants you to put in your credit card information and all that good stuff.  I don’t see any reason for doing that all over again when I happen to know that my credit card information is saved on my Norton account because it always sends me e-mails when the credit card is expired (which led me to believe it would actually just renew automatically, but I guess that was expecting too much).  But there isn’t a single link in that whole freakin site that says “Login.”  In fact, looking at the link titles, their site is much better optimized for a search engine than a user…  So I get the fail-proof idea to google it and found out you have to login at a whole other site.  I login to my account, find the product that needs to be renewed… but there is not a renew button on there anywhere!

Foiled again.  So I go back to the Norton site and click on that renew tab and go to the checkout page.  I really like how when I click on the ONE item that I want, Norton, a security company who’s future business depends so strongly on trust, adds products to my cart that I did not want or even imply that I wanted to buy, which I have to remove before checking out.  If you owned a brick and mortar store would you hire people to walk around and put things in customers’ carts while their backs were turned and expect them to trust you and come back in the future?

Just before I checkout I happen to notice that I have two different sets of e-mails and passwords for Norton, so I figure I’ll check the other one really quick, now that I know where the hell I’m supposed to login at.  What luck, I happen to have a remaining activation key!  So back on the desktop I open up the Norton Security Center with my new key… but there isn’t a freakin place to update the key.  In fact, the only thing I can do is click that “renew” button with the vague error message, and I am not about to use Internet Explorer at a time like this.

So I file a support request (which you have to do to get their phone number off the website) and call the number, and then I listen to a long message telling me to make sure I have my credit card handy because support isn’t free for everybody.  Is this a joke?  But you know what, it would have been worth paying to yell at somebody about this!  So I stayed on the line… and I kept staying on the line… and now I’m writing this blog post and I still haven’t heard a real person talk and I am about to hang up as soon as I push that big blue “Publish” button.

Somebody from Norton had better give me a pretty good explanation for this, or if not that then at least some freakin coupons for something cause I am pissed!

I notice a consistent problem that seems to hold many people back from reaching their goals. I think we can do anything we set our minds to, but it seems clear that we cannot do anything in any WAY that we want to. For example, you can say you want to fly, and even before the air plane was invented that would have been an achievable goal. But if you were to say that you wanted to fly by growing wings, you’d have added one more variable that makes it impossible.

My example might be a little bit too unusual to show how this is really applicable to real life. So here’s something more reasonable: A lot of people can come up with an income goal. It is a practical and achievable goal to say that you want to make $10,000 this month. And it’s even possible to add on to that to say that you will make $10,000 this month by selling cookies. It might be a tough goal, but possible. So all is well up to here, but then many people would add on just one more provision: I want to make $10,000 this month, by selling cookies, and by working only two hours per day. That’s what makes it impossible, and a lot of people don’t even notice when they’ve done this. In order for this goal to be achievable, it would be entirely dependent on you being willing to put in the amount of work required to make that $10,000 from selling cookies.

Here is a very simple way to think about reaching a goal. You can represent your plan by the formula XY = Z. Now notice that you can define any two variables whatever you want, but not all three. I see a lot of people who have a plan, but who aren’t going anywhere with it, and I believe the reason is because they’ve defined too many variables to their liking and maybe just one of those values makes their formula not work out. So instead of correcting it, they just wait on it to work itself out, maybe because they aren’t stepping back to look at the whole picture and see their variables, or maybe they just failed algebra, who knows why, but if you want to achieve a goal you have to be willing to accept that the variables under your control are limited and act accordingly to conform to the variables that aren’t.