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Recommended: Scarborough Fair Bed and Breakfast, Baltimore, MD

Recommended: Scarborough Fair Bed and Breakfast, Baltimore, MD

There are few places in the world of hospitality that I’d actually recommend. Most of the places I’ve stayed – and there have been many – were sufficient to be a place where I’d get some sleep and a bite to eat, but nothing else.

Hotel chains are valued precisely for the consistent mediocrity, just like fast food – you know what you’re going to get the moment you see the sign on the road. You don’t have to ponder whether the Big Mac or the Holiday Inn will be significantly different in Topeka or Trenton. It won’t be.

As a result, most of the places I’ve stayed are sufficiently mediocre, which means I usually can’t wait to get home after a few days, and if someone asks for a recommendation for a certain city, I’m hard pressed to come up with one.

Except Scarborough Fair. Bed and breakfasts are not my thing, and to be perfectly honest, it wouldn’t have been a place that I searched out. But this particular one happens to be co-owned by a Blue Sky Factory employee, and is within slow walking distance of the Baltimore office, so it made perfect sense to stay there.

Wow, am I glad I did. I stayed in the lavishly appointed Edgar Allan Poe room, which was a lovely, if gothic, room decorated to evoke the themes of Poe’s life. An electric fireplace, a writing desk with Poe’s literary works on it, a giant private bathroom – it literally felt like home rather than a hotel.

The breakfasts were amazingly good, too. For the road warriors among us who are used to the standard rubber eggs and cardboard biscuits under the hotel lobby heat lamps, Scarborough Fair’s fare was a considerable step up. On my last morning there, breakfast was a cheese and crimini mushroom omelet with sage, vanilla oat parfait, blueberry and white chocolate biscotti, and of course coffee. Try getting anything like that at a hotel.

The innkeepers, Barry and Jeff, run an awesome little home away from home, and I’d definitely recommend staying there versus a regular hotel if you’re in the Baltimore area. It’s at 801 S. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD. How much did I enjoy staying there? They get the highest compliment I can think of from me, an optimized outbound link from an AdAge Power 150 blog, that’s how much.

Find their web site here: Baltimore Bed and Breakfast.

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February 19, 2010
What World of Warcraft's Lunar New Year Can Teach You About Growth

In World of Warcraft, there are seasonal holidays that roughly correspond to real world holidays. One of these holidays is Lunar New Year. In the Warcraft version of the holiday, in addition to fireworks, there’s a quest to defeat a gigantic two-headed demon named Omen.

Last year, I and the friends I play with took a beating trying to kill Omen. I know I took a number of tries just to defeat him, with my character dying over and over again.

This year, as I rode to Lake Elune’ara, I wondered how the battle against Omen would go. I found out quickly:

The demon had lost his bite.

I was able to tank Omen solo with just one healer and a random mage with ease. He went down faster than the stock market after a Federal Reserve meeting.

After the initial celebration wore off, I wondered how it was that Omen was so easily defeated. His abilities and capabilities were the same as last year…

… but I and my character were not. Quite the contrary. Omen hadn’t changed, but I had, significantly for the better. What killed my character last year was barely even worth mentioning this year, and what relatively insignificant damage I was able to do to Omen last year was replaced by a venti quadruple shot cup of whoopass with a twist of lemon.

It’s difficult for us to see how we’ve changed. We change slowly, over time, and in many cases are the last to get the memo on anything. Things like Omen are a good way to realize just how much we have changed, just how we’ve transformed from year to year. If you don’t have an Omen-like challenge in your life, look for one as a way to diagnose who you are and how you’ve changed. Find something that’s a challenge for you this year, win, and then see how the challenge feels next year. Have you grown? Have you changed? Have you become more proficient?

Bear in mind the challenge needs to be somewhat static. Maybe it’s an annual photowalk, a half marathon, a creature like Omen – whatever it is, make sure it’s something where you’ll see the difference in yourself while the challenge itself remains mostly the same.

Omen (and his meaning) is summed up best, oddly enough, by Nelson Mandela:

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

May your Lunar Festival grant you the insights you seek.

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February 18, 2010
Three Nearly Guaranteed Moneymaking Twitter Words
Ever notice the giant pile of social media “experts” who don’t have two nickels to rub together? Ever wonder why?

They spend a hell of a lot more time talking than listening.

They labor under the mistaken belief that the more you talk, the more money you’ll make as a social media expert, and I suppose as long as you’re good at duping the gullible, that’s true until the market is tapped out. Once the suckers have been skimmed, though, they have to move on to find the next big thing to latch onto. (just wait for the Google Buzz experts!)

For the rest of us, for the folks who actually want to do a sustainable business in social media, the secret is listening. Not a big secret in and of itself, but the bigger, less-asked question is “What do you listen for?”

A lot of companies are doing defensive listening. They listen for things like “XYZ Company SUCKS” and other brand mentions. This is a good start, a good entry point for retention and reputation protection. However, this is only a start.

The second tier of folks, the community engagement folks, listen for things like industry jargon. In financial aid, for example, the word FAFSA is a buzzword of the industry. No one goes to a bar on Friday night and chats up the attractive person of their choice with, “Hey, have you seen my FAFSA results?”. That never happens. Community engagers build reputation and presence of mind by participating in conversations, honing in on the right conversations to participate in using the buzzwords and inside jargon of the industry.

The third tier of folks, the folks who want to do business and make money in social media listen for intent.

Sound familiar? That’s what made search marketing so revolutionary a decade ago. Search was a red flag of intent – when someone searches for, say, email marketing, they’re exhibiting at least a casual interest in the subject matter. Focused, targeted questions asked to search engines belie even more intent. Searching for email marketing is one thing. Searching for “what is the best email marketing company in Reno, Nevada” displays clear intent, and search marketers have learned to make the most of these long-tail, deep, obscure queries. (they convert like crazy, too)

So how do you detect intent in social media? Let’s use Twitter as an example. What questions belie intent? Think about your own use of language and then start playing mix and match with these keywords:
- recommend
- suggest
- anyone
- [your keyword]
Try it. Try it in Twitter search with your industry keywords and vertical.

Look at a couple of results for “anyone recommend social media”:
- ianrbruce: anyone recommend a good book on social media metrics & measurement?
- splashrafting: anyone recommend free social media measuring tools? Looking at some at present need to start to use more
- hellaPR: Can anyone recommend any good cases or articles on hotels using social media, on a large scale preferably.
Each of these are home runs for a book publisher, a listening company like Radian6, and a socially-engaged hospitality chain. It would take mere seconds to respond and likely convert better than any cold call.

How do you listen? Take your top SEO keyword list (you have one, right?) and combine your top keywords with recommend, suggest, and anyone in various combinations. You’ll be amazed at the number of people blatantly flagging intent to buy your products or services, if only someone were listening.

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February 16, 2010
Why Google Buzz is brilliant and deadly to social media 1.0
From the moment it launched, Google Buzz generated buzz:
- OMG another social network to manage
- OMG there’s too much noise
- OMG this is so redundant
And for the early adopters, it’s exactly that and more. It’s noise. It’s clutter.

It’s brilliant.

Here’s why. Google wants the best of the best data. Remember this. They are a data company. They are a data quality company. They are algorithmic in their approaches to solving problems.

For a lot of the social media crowd, the moment Buzz turned on, our valued inboxes became insanely cluttered as we linked up all our social media sites, networks, and properties. We discovered that frankly, we didn’t want the firehose of social media in our inboxes.

We realized quickly, if we didn’t already know, that most of our “friends” are in fact valueless robots spewing garbage at us all day. On services like Twitter and Facebook, we don’t really notice because it’s bite size garbage that passed by quickly. When it piles up in the inbox, we notice. Fast.

So for the early adopters, those who keep Buzz on, we’re pruning back hard. We’re not following back. We’re dropping auto-follows. We’re down to just a handful of people, close friends, that we REALLY want in our inboxes. How many of the self-proclaimed social media gurus are you actually allowing inside your inbox, in Buzz? Exactly.

Buzz is working as intended. Google wants data quality. We immediately filter out completely all the noisemakers who bring no value to the table.

Buzz also incentivizes us in a couple of ways. It tells us to prune back our own spewage lest our friends, the ones we care about truly, unfollow us and eliminate us. It tells us that redundancy of information is of no value to anyone using Buzz, since you can get blog posts and status updates already from FriendFaceTwitterFeedBookSquareWallReader service (now with more blatant self-promotion from social media experts!). So we share and discuss only the stuff that’s either super high quality that we just can’t afford to miss, even if it’s redundant, because of the quality, or we share stuff that’s not being shared elsewhere.

Google figures out from our activity in Buzz that either there’s new stuff to be examined (remember in the initial presentation that Buzzed stuff gets indexed the moment it’s shared, and Google wants to find EVERYTHING to index) or there’s stuff that’s so important and so good that you’ll let it into your inbox even if you can get it elsewhere.

By placing Buzz so close to the incredibly precious, valuable territory that is our inbox, Google is forcing users to reveal what we truly value, what we’re willing to let into a very private space. It’s the perfect walled garden, because instead of enforcing the walls on us, Google simply lets us build the walls for them.

The lesson for marketers and content creators is this: social media 1.0 is drawing to a close. Social Media 2.0 is about relevance, value, and authentic connection, because you will never, as a marketer, get through the gates of the walled garden with a boring-as-crap press release or product announcement. No one cares about you. All of the services, but especially the big ones, are giving users more tools to screen out anything they don’t care about, anything that doesn’t engage them, anything that isn’t actually great quality.

Buzz is just a very visible demonstration of how much crap our “friends” spew out that’s of no value, and why we were so annoyed by it. Now that it’s under control, now that we’re isolating actual friends from “friends” and our networks are getting trimmed, we’re starting to get more value out of it.

And you can bet Google is paying VERY close attention to us and what we do with our Buzz.

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February 11, 2010
The 3 Benefits We Care About
Tony Corinda, the famous magician and mentalist, wrote in his classic textbook 13 Steps to Mentalism that there are three general topics which nearly everyone wants psychic predictions on. Knowing these makes the job of a mentalist on stage incredibly easy, as just providing the hook into any of the topics gets people talking about what they really want.

The three things most people care about and want to know more about?
- Love/Relationships/Sex
- Health
- Money
You could have probably guessed that right off the bat. To no one’s surprise, business is no different. Decision-makers in business – including you, if for no other role than decision-maker of your career – want three general things, too.
- How can I save more money?
- How can I save more time?
- How can I make more money?
Again, no surprise, right?

So why is it that legions of salesmen and saleswomen never actually answer these questions? Take a look at any product spec sheet, from industrial toilets to iPhone apps, and you’ll see features listed by the dozen. This toilet uses 1.4 gallons per flush. This iPhone app can switch between 3G and WiFi seamlessly. This CRM offers RDBMS support for 8 of the most modern RDBMS systems.

So what?

When I talk to vendors, I’m exceptionally blunt. Some appreciate it, some get derailed from their carefully crafted pitch. How will your product save me money? How will your product save me time? How will your product make me more money? If a vendor can answer those questions quickly and intelligently, I’m very likely to just pull the trigger right then and there, as long as their math is sound. If a vendor tries to defer those three questions until later so they can finish their pitch, the phone gets hung up with a polite but curt “not interested but thanks”.

Classic sales books and training materials always advocate answering “What’s in it for me?” as the key question to answer in a sales presentation. Throw those books out, or at least put them back on the shelf. If you can prove a strong case for any one of the three questions – time, money saved, money earned – you’ve answered a core WIIFM question. If you can prove a strong case for more than one of the three questions, prospects will be buying YOU lunch. If you can prove a strong case for all three questions, you can pretty much retire your sales department and just replace them with order takers, because word of mouth alone will be flooding your call center.

Take a look at your own sales and marketing materials today.

Will you save me time?

Will you save me money?

Will you make me more money?

Prove it, and I’m yours.

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February 10, 2010
What World of Warcraft can teach you about customer quality

One of my favorite parts of World of Warcraft is the in-game marketplace known as the Auction House. Inside the AH, you can see relatively free markets at work with minimal regulation by the game’s owners. You can especially see how market forces create supply and demand, and if you’re good at understanding human nature, you can make a fair bit of virtual money.

Right now, there’s an in-game Valentine’s Day event going on. Below is a picture of the Auction House and the price of a Buttermilk Cream chocolate. The current asking price in the marketplace is $54, and demand is so high that none are currently being sold – the marketplace is empty of this item.

Yes, $54 for a single chocolate. Suddenly the real world holiday doesn’t look quite as expensive. My character here is about to sell 3 of them for $163.

Here’s the funny part: the in-game quests needed to obtain this item take about 5 minutes, total. (dropping off a charm bracelet to another character and offering 10 characters some perfume samples) So why does the price of this chocolate seem so very high compared to the relative amount of work needed to create it? This marketplace item can teach us a lot about customer quality and behavior.

Some players may not know how to obtain it besides the marketplace. They simply buy everything in the marketplace. These, however, are long-term poor customers, because the moment they get clued in, they will stop buying from marketers and start creating their own items. True, as the old gangster saying goes, you can’t wise up a chump, but that’s not the sort of customer you’d want to rely on or build a business on.

Some players like the convenience of one-stop shopping, and will pay a premium just to be able to buy everything in one place. These are better customers because they have a persistent need (convenience). This makes them a better long-term prospective customer as they have a need that will always need to be met. The downside is that these folks are usually very price-sensitive, so a competitor who prices the same goods at even a penny less will beat you to the sale. If supply is a greater issue than demand, unless you’re always the lowest price, you won’t sell anything.

Some players just don’t like questing, period. They pay a premium in the marketplace – sometimes a very high premium – to not spend a single minute in the game doing things that aren’t fun for them. If you can provide exactly what they need, when they need it, you’ll develop a reputation in-game for being a useful sort of marketer to have around, and the kind of person who they will approach directly whenever they need to buy something. These folks will even ignore marketplace prices and just pay you obscene premiums directly because they know you’re reliable and can get them exactly what they want. It almost goes without saying that these are your very best customers in the long-term.

We have, in short, three kinds of customers – the sucker who may or may not even buy, the customer who wants convenience but is super-sensitive to price, and the premium buyer who wants to outsource everything they don’t want to do.

Which do you want as a customer? Common sense should dictate that if it’s long-term maximum profitability you’re after, you want the premium buyer. It will require more work on your part to develop reputation in your community for being the go-to marketer that has exactly what someone needs, but if you put in the time and effort in your marketplace, you can escape the always-lowest-prices race and make a ton of money.

Now, would anyone like to buy a Buttermilk Cream? Only three left…

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February 9, 2010
The danger of the dabbler

Reading this blog post by Mr. Brogan, something bubbled up from years of martial arts training.

Chris argues that the goal is the focus, not the method. Kenpo karate is the method, kicking the other guy’s ass is the goal. If you threw out all your methods, the goals would still be there.

Well, sometimes.

There are goals which are intimately tied into methods. How you get there is part of getting there. Abandon the method every so often for what seems to be a faster, easier, cleaner, newer, better method results in you becoming a dabbler. You’re reasonably okay at a lot of things. You’re not excellent at one thing. You never actually get to your destination, because you keep changing roads, cars, outfits, maps, GPSes, traveling companions, and take every detour imaginable because it seems faster.

Ever done this? You see a traffic jam ahead, get off at the next exit, and spend 30 extra minutes on side and back roads to go around the jam… which in reality is only a 10 minute traffic jam? I have. My hand is up. Guilty. This is the dabbler. This is the person who fails too fast.

The problem with the perspective of goal, goal, goal only (which isn’t what Chris is arguing, but which a lot of people will take away) and books like Seth Godin’s The Dip is that it’s too easy to quit early. It’s too easy to give up soon, to fail fast, when in fact you may not be failing at all, but working through your own limitations.

The other day I tweeted about the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which incompetent people are so limited by their abilities and lack of competence that they don’t realize they’re incompetent. The converse, that the competent are the last to get the memo, is also true. When it comes to goal-only perspectives, here’s the thing – your lack of meta-cognitive awareness about your limitations means that if you give up all the time, if you abandon ship too fast, you will NEVER reach excellence. Ever.

This is the danger of the dabbler. Before you give up, consider whether you’re not actually generating results because the method isn’t working, or because you haven’t amassed sufficient skill yet to make the method work for you. Admitting that is hard. Admitting that means forfeiting some ego and being willing to accept that you still have work to do, you still have more time to put in to achieve excellence…

… and as the Dunning-Kruger effect proves, you may be the last to get the memo about your excellence. Keep going!

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February 8, 2010
Why you should install MY iPhone app
Yes, folks, download my iPhone app! (iTunes required)

It’s got some AMAZING features that will make it stand out from every other iPhone app out there:
- It will regularly track your movements via GPS and silently upload them to my Google Earth master map, letting me watch wherever you are on the planet in real time.
- It will silently disable the airplane mode so I can track you in flight. Take that, TSA!
- On a regular basis, it will silently sync your contacts to my secret mailing list database and mark them as double opt-in with your phone’s IP address as the confirmation IP for verification purposes.
- Your phone will automatically sort through all the photos in its library and using a brand new algorithm, will mail me the most incriminating ones. As a bonus, you’ll find them all in iPhoto tagged with “blackmail”.
- Taking advantage of the iPhone’s powerful GPS and media capabilities, any time the phone detects that it’s some place important, like Congress, your bank, or your corporate headquarters, it will silently activate the microphone and camera, record everything that’s going on, and mail it to me.
Of course, all of these innovative features will happen behind the scenes, so to make sure YOU get some benefit out of my iPhone app, it will randomly display pictures of adorable kittens. Meow!

Yes, I’m joking (or am I?). That said, every time you install an app on your iPhone, you have absolutely no way of verifying the codebase or knowing what you’re putting on your phone. You don’t know what the app does behind the scenes.

If you have anything of importance on your phone, personal or corporate, think real carefully before loading it up willy-nilly with third party applications, even ones “blessed” by Apple, Google, or others. If you don’t need it, uninstall it. Better yet, don’t install it in the first place. From time to time, back up your device, format it, and restore your data and current applications only.

Enjoy the kittens.

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February 5, 2010
BBC Commentary on the news

Outrageously funny and sadly true.

Hat tip to Mr. Brogan.

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February 5, 2010
Your ACE in the hole: Energize!
We talked last time about what marketing, sales, and product & service groups are supposed to manufacture. Let’s talk about the verbs that go with them, so that you have an idea if what you’re doing is in alignment with those verbs, and one verb in particular. Quick review:
- Marketing takes audience and makes qualified leads
- Sales takes qualified leads and makes customers
- Product design and customer service takes customers and makes evangelists
So let’s take a look at the verbs of this funnel. In short: ACE.
- Attract.
- Convert.
- Energize.
Attract is what marketing does. Create demand for your ideas. Attract attention to what you have to offer. Assuming it’s good, people will pursue a line of inquiry and become a qualified lead. Attract also helps filter out some stuff – is what you are doing likely to attract leads? Billboards attract eyes, but unless they’re hyperlocal (Eat at Joe’s Next Exit), their value is questionable. Are you attracting the right people? You may be getting all the buzz in the world for your event, but if no one can afford to attend it, those thousands of visitors and millions of pageviews are worthless.

Convert is what sales does. Convert puts the emotional and rational values on the table with the qualified leads, the prospects, and helps them to convince themselves that your product or service meets or exceeds their needs. Again, convert is a useful verb. Is a sales practice converting? Do you know what converts and what doesn’t convert?

Energize is what product design and customer service do. We used to call this retention, but when you think about it, retention kind of implies that your customers are fleeing your products and services. It implies they want to run away as fast as they can, and you have to pull out all the stops to keep them from doing so. No, if your product doesn’t suck and your customer service actually cares about its customers to any degree, then you’re not talking about retention as much as you are talking about energizing your customers.
- Energizing them to use the product or service to its full potential.
- Energizing them to give you unsolicited suggestions about what would make it even more rave-worthy.
- Energizing them to tell everyone who will hold still long enough about your product or service as your unpaid word of mouth marketing department.
Energize is where all your profit is, long-term. If your product sucks, it will not energize customers to do anything more than pay the bills – if that. If your service sucks, it will only energize customers to hate you, very publicly and very loudly. Energize is what will destroy the other two departments, marketing and sales, because marketing will not be able to attract audience due to your stigma in the community. Sales will not be able to overcome fear, uncertainty, and doubt in what few prospects you have. Eventually, you’ll either have to make even more ethically questionable marketing and sales choices just to keep the lights on or go out of business.

The flip side is the fun part. Products that are raveworthy and service that is insanely great means that marketing just has to get people to the web form to sign up. Marketing can clock in at 10 and clock out at 2 with an hour martini break in the middle of the day because existing customers are raving about what you’ve got and forcibly dragging friends into your showroom. Sales has to triple its manpower just to process the paperwork, and prospects need little guidance except perhaps what color ink to sign on the contract. All of this comes from energizing your product design to be great and your customer service to be the best thing anyone has ever experienced.

Unsurprisingly, energizing product design and customer service is really, really hard. You as a company must be committed at every level, in every way, to putting your customers first and foremost. Everyone from the janitor who answers the phone late at night while cleaning to the CEO must get it, must understand that the vast majority of your long-term focus must always be on doing right by the customer. The moment that you lose that focus, you lose your ACE in the hole, and until you get it back, you’re on the path of the corporate death spiral.

Attract. Convert. Energize.

Profit.

Photo credit: DotBenjamin

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February 3, 2010

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