What do you want to measure?
Sure, of course, you want to know how much online buzz equates to rankings, but what does that really tell you of true value? I don’t think that your advertisers (who pay for all those shows) really care about the number of eyeballs watching your show (whether real or on your PVR).

What they care about is people buying their stuff. This is what google figured out so well ten years ago.

What they care about is showing the right ads to the right people. Like P&G and Unilever sponsoring soap operas back in the 50s.

Market fragmentation
We’ve hit this point where everyone’s got 50+ channels of TV to watch. On top of that, they’ve got 4OD, IPlayer, Hulu, and others. People aren’t watching TV the same way. Media and advertising companies need to pay more attention to the engagement they can have with smaller, stronger audiences rather than beaming out to loads of eyeballs.

Landscape changes
Advertising’s gotta change, and I think it’s a bigger change than using the product placement ideas stuck into this article. The iPad, the web, smartphones, films, and Television create an ecosystem in which you can engage with people and build brands that last.

Go do it.

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What the heck is it?
It’s an extension to Chrome and/or Firefox that replaces the sidebar where the google ads turn up with information about the sender– specifically, their blog, twitter, linkedin, etc. You can also extend the extensions with what they call “raplets”– plugins that add functionality to, currently, Crunchbase (useful for tech-geek entrepreneurs), a couple of CRM systems, a booking system, and more.

Why do I want it?
How else are you going to keep track of all those people? Ever get a speculative email from someone that looks good but maybe is spam? You can find out loads of information by looking at someone’s twit-stream, linkedin, etc. right off the bat. It’s super useful. And handy. And fills in the blanks that you get when someone emails you and says “we met at the X conference…” and you can’t remember who they are.

And, it allows you to take (private) notes on them. And they have a dead-simple privacy policy (they essentially respect it and don’t share anything, ever). And it uses OpenAuth, which means that they never see your gmail password, so no hackety hackness.

It only works with gmail.

Enjoy your new productivity

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It’s not a huge amount of money, but might tip the scales in favour of hiring someone new.

Except.
Except that the jobs have a specified target for new hires: Those who have been out of work for 60 days or more. Now, I’ve been there, and it’s a rough road to get hired when you haven’t been working, but this doesn’t quite fit right, and here’s why.

The potential consequences aren’t well thought out
The best candidate no longer neccessarily gets the job. The tax breaks only apply to new hires, and those who have been out of work for over 60 days. This gives the employer an incentive to go after one employee over another equally qualified employee who’s either in work or recently unemployed.

There’s no incentive to keep people working. In fact, this is almost an incentive for churn, especially for low-skilled or easily replacable labour and early-stage professionals. If you had a whole lot of non-union, hourly employees who were machinists or mechanics or factory workers, it’d be awfully easy to let them go and start claiming 6.2% for the next 9 months on their replacements. Sure, firing is illegal, but if you just cut hours most of the time people will leave. Churn is costly in terms of lost productivity, but I wouldn’t put it past a number of restructuring “experts” who are incentivised over the short term to replace workers. There are loads of ways to let them go.

It’s heavily tilted to large businesses. The businesses who can comprehend and benefit from a small tax break like this tend to be larger businesses, but it’s smaller businesses that provide most of US employment, and who often take the lead in hiring on recession exits.

I hate to be a cynic
But I’m continually concerned by the way we enact laws. I hope this works out, but I’m very afraid it won’t.

Better strategies
More programmes to increase the rate of risk financing to new businesses. The Entrepreneur visa programme. Encouragement of growth capital (and, particularly, liquidity in that growth capital) for existing/successful businesses. Business advice programmes that work.

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I tweeted about it.

Here’s the funny thing
Potential Fire in a library? One of the world’s greatest? With three of the four courtyard exits closed tue to improvement works? Surely there should be some panic? Some worry?

Nope. Mostly eye-rolling, looks of disbelief, checking of watches to make sure it’s not just time for a drill.

Our modern life has made us feel incredibly safe. Usually.
I experienced much the same thing about ten years ago in Victoria station. This was before Sept 11th, but after London bombings had pretty much faded away. The IRA and ETA had gone fairly quiet. But still.

The odd thing, to me, is that act irrationally in these sorts of cases, where we may be in actual danger, but we personalise false dangers.

Most people are convinced that crime, and in particular, violent crime, is on the rise in Britain, but it’s been falling steadily.

The chances of an American being killed (or even endangered) by a terrorist attack are approximately the same as being eaten by a shark whilst simultaneously hit by lightning, but we still ran out of duct tape that one time.

The “best experts” provide a good image that they’re providing airport security, but fail to deliver improved security, again and again.

Why is this?
We seem to be rational in the face of danger– no fire, no smoke, no fear. But we’re irrational when facing the unknown. We rely on questionable expert opinion rather than analysing the problems ourselves and coming up with workable solutions, we give in to FUD, which, far from solving problems, creates hidden problems.

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That being said, they’ve always delivered in a closed ecosystem. Fair enough. They were niche players. I’ve owned macs at all levels– from 8″ black and white jobs right through G4 iMacs. I’ve always had slight niggles with them– having to load a command line for development from a dozen floppies, often and ongoing issues with build quality, and Apple’s poor response to these problems has made them some enemies– people seem to fall through the cracks of Apple customer service from time to time.

On the flip side, they’ve been building a litany of awesome stuff. I think even the much-maligned iPad has some legs in it, though no one’s quite sure why they want one– it’s made me reconsider the iPod Touch as an interesting platform– a pocketable iPad.

Signs of distress
The last three months, though, has seen an accellerating litany of un-Apple-like behaviour. Here’s the thing: Apple is an underdog. Apple is an innovator. Apple positions themselves outside the mainstream, but they’ve been using dominant market position, patent law, and arbitrary bullying techniques to get ahead.

This isn’t what Apple is good at. I say stick to the knitting. Stop alienating your developers. That $40 billion could be spent on far cooler things like innovative music distribution models that don’t annoy customers instead of legal fees.

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An excellent post by Valeria Maltoni discusses the importance of realising when you’ve lost sight of your customers’ interests and feelings. This reminded me of an ongoing struggle I’ve had with United Airlines, and how they’ve shifted significantly over the last ten years– to their employees as well as to their end users.

The United Experience – 1990s
To be fair, it’s hard running an airline. I wouldn’t do it, but someone does. I flew United a lot in the 1990s, and the experience was as I recall a pretty good experience out of a series of terrible alternatives– the difference seemed to be in the individual pride and power of United employees– they answered the phone as “employee-owners” and would often go the extra mile for you, particularly if something had gone wrong that was clearly their fault.

United in the 2000s
The Noughties brought some slippage– and, to be fair, we had an enormous overall price hike in oil, the troubled aftermath of 9/11, and the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Depending on when and what desk you called, you were likely to be handed over to an outsourced call centre which would have mixed rates of effectiveness. I had a couple of really miserable experiences when I missed flights, but– and here’s the interesting bit– the employees at the gate still had the visibility and ability to make the right changes and sort things out. If you got a bad agent on the phone, you could turn up at the airport 30 minutes or so early and get things sorted.

That, unfortunately, is no longer the case.

United at the start of 2010
I recently flew United from London to Sydney via LAX, four flights in all. I booked upgrades on three of them, and was re-downgraded on two of those. Two of the four flights had bad entertainment systems, and the flights had different baggage allowances (I had 2 bags from Sydney to LAX, but then had to pay USD$50 for my second bag from LAX to London).

Now, there was a terrorist attack. I am 6’3″, so flying in regular coach is a bit of a nightmare, but it’s not the end of the world. I spoke to everyone I could– the boarding agent, the gate agent, the ticket desk, the reservations desk, and the phone-in reservation system, spending, all in all, several hours trying to figure out how to simply get the upgrade difference refunded.

Several of the older United employees were very nice and understanding, but they had neither the time nor the ability to effect the refund. The general feeling was rushed and overworked, and in every United queue I’ve been in there’s been low staffing levels, so everyone is a bit overwhelmed. The only interface to refund this money is a web portal, which promises a 7-10 day working time (at this point, it’s been six weeks for two different requests with no return contact. I’ve contacted my credit card company to request a refund from them).

The dangerous side of customer aversion
1) You alienate your customers — you make it less likely to keep customers coming back. I have a lot of miles on United and generally would book through them on US-based flights. Keeping customers should be easy, unless you kick them out.

2) You undervalue (and devalue) your employees — I’m sure that each anti-customer decision made economic sense when doing it– outsourcing, driving customers to the web, etc.– but the employees– especially the ones who are on the front lines– are the ones who your customers think of you as. When they don’t have the tools to do the right thing, are disempowered, and are the ones that the angry customer will shout at (something I try really hard to do, as I know what it’s like to be an exposed cog).

3) You stop being able to hear your customers — The biggest danger of becoming customer tolerant (rather than customer seeking), is that you cannot engage your customers in a conversation and you stop knowing what’s going on. Once you route calls through an external call centre, you have to spend more time, money, and energy to understand your customers, and you lose some organisational memory and networks which inform you about how your customers feel towards you. You’re probably going to forget to do it (as outsourcing is often cost-driven rather than customer-focus-driven).

If you’re an airline, you’re likely one of the few games in town, and you’ll still get customers. It’s funny, however, how Southwest, JetBlue, and Virgin America can come up from nowhere and gain so many customers so quickly– mostly by listening to customers and treating their employees well.

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I grew up in New Orleans, whose Saints are headed to the Super Bowl this Sunday. You can’t really come from New Orleans and not bleed black and gold– even the most die-hard non-sports people in my family and friends are all excited for this Sunday. The Saints have always been a decent all-round team, but have never really been very good at anything– generally better offensively, but aside from the Morten Anderson years, never a particularly strong scorers or on defence.

Until this last year.

The Change
I’ve been watching mostly highlight reels (hey, I live in the UK, and with no TV, it’s easier). I noted one thing: Every game talked about a defense who scores, and a team turning over the ball, a lot.

What they’ve done is picked (or identified) a core competetive advantage: The Strip. The Who Dat boys have decided that defence is not about stopping the team moving forward but about getting the ball back, which means knocking it out of the hands of the offensive players and turning it over. This has an enormous effect on the opposing team: They suddenly have to play defensively and in many cases the defense has scored.

The Saints are now the highest scoring team in the NFL.

What’s this have to do with business?
I know, sports metaphors are somewhat overwrought, and American Football metaphors are lost on my heavily-influenced UK/EU audience. Sorry about that. American Football works so well because it lends itself to analysis as it’s a play-by-play game.

Entrepreneurs (and up-and-running businesses): What are you good at? Do that.
The great thing about entrepreneurs is that they are on top of the world, and feel they can do anything. The worst thing is that, particularly in the early days when revenue is scarce and as deals fly by because they’re “not quite right”, they feel they can do anything.

Here’s the thing: If you’re a decent team, say, a consultancy, the temptation is to diverge from your goals and do too many things. Pick one thing that you do really well, and do that one. Do it well. Pass on work that isn’t quite right, or better yet, tell the potential client how you’d approach it within your own framework. Be unambigious about how the game is played– that you focus on the ball (metrics, change management, ideas-to-market, etc).

We focus at the intersection of ideas, people, and technology, building organisational capacity to bring products to market.

There were a number of emerging themes through the conference, and not necessarily the ones you might think– access to finance, more capital, education.

Nope. What came up again and again was:

TIA
This is Africa. Sometimes problems can seem overwhelming. I have talked about this before, but it bears repeating. My take on it: Break the problems down, solve what you can. Innovate around what you can’t.

Open Source/Open Platforms
FrontlineSMS, Android, Ubuntu Linux– these give you the tools and abilities to build cost-effective, replicable platforms that won’t break the bank. For all the thrill of open source technology in Silicon Valley, the true innovation may come in Africa, where stuff like Microsoft’s failing ability to register its software (due, admittedly, to fighting rampant software piracy) may mean that the sotware is unusable.

Open platforms create frameworks and fertile ground for new innovations. Enough said.

Turn up and do something… and listen when you get there.
The power of doing something, getting over your own inhibitions, going, turning up, is far more important than your ability to make a big, great plan.

On the other hand, the developing world works differently than it does in the developed world. Teddy Ruge of Project Diaspora.suggests getting a member of the diaspora on your team. In whatever case, however, listening is critical. Go. Take a risk. See what works. Give yourself permission to fail, early and often, and learn from your mistakes.

Africans have the solutions to African problems.
You know a lot, but you don’t know the context. Africans can solve African problems– this is the difference between Busines Incubation projects around entrepreneurship and NGO projects– Incubators should offer mentorship rather than direction. The essential difference is that mentorship offers assistance to someone to help them do what they want to do, rather than demanding that they do what you think they should do.

The flip side to the TIA problem is that it’s important to believe that things get better, that the creative, innovative entrepreneur inside can find a solution to the problem. The flip side to mentorship is the encouragement, so that when your entrepreneur finds a wall, he figures out how to go under, around, or through it– or to turn that wall to her own advantage.

9th-10th Oct, 2009.

I’ll be speaking about, in general, the challenges that investors and entrepreneurs face in Africa, with a specific focus on my partner organisation Appfrica Labs. Come out if you can.

Details at Africa Gathering and on the EventBrite page.

I’m on at 11 AM on Saturday– and to be quite honest, the lineup of speakers puts me in pretty esteemed company.

Sorry this is late– I’ve just been indundated by the types of things that inundate your life at the end of five months on the road: I hadn’t slept in the same place (and mostly in the same country) for more than three weeks between April and September. A lot of laundry, email management, and general decompressing time needed to happen.

Metrics
MBA-ism is filled with metrics. In fact, there is some research on the impact of metric-heavy MBA thinking on entrepreneurship, and the basic idea is that the two schools of thought are are diametrically opposed.

Dr. Saras Sarasvathy from the Darden School of Business posts her findings at effectuation.org, which broadly suggest that for a certain type of entrepreneur, the whole idea of finding markets, estimating market sizes, and attempting to essentially pre-plan the value of a business is opposite to disruptive models of innovation where marekts are created– i.e., no MBA would have invested in an ice machine because the value of the harvested ice market was too big.

Metrics, Development-style
Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a tricky, hard thing. It’s a nightmare for lots of international NGOs as the data collection is done from far away, sometimes by people who don’t understand the value of the information they are gathering (Appfrica may be on to something with their new approach to this…).

Now, add to the difficulty of collecting metrics the ability to compare several projects:

- A clean water project
- A new ICT training centre
- A new delivery system for vaccines
- A new collective agriculture scheme

All of these may cost the same, and have variable outputs– some will have smaller effects on more people, others might be drastically transformational for the lives of a very few. How do you compare them? How you choose between them? How do you decide which was more successful after they’ve run?

Measurement metrics
There are a few different approaches to this, many of the latest (ish) are in things like Blended Value and SROI. These attempt to monetise the outputs, so if you increase someone’s productivity (training), then their increased productivity can be measured, turned into dollars, and compared against the increased sales prices that the agriculture scheme generates for its members, and then you report them along with your financial statements. You can add them so that you achieve “profit” in “social returns”. It’s crude but it’s something.

(if you have any better ideas, then by all means suggest away– I don’t think anyone’s particularly tied to these, although they do yield some kind of apples-to-apples comparisons, although the methodologies for each monetisation vary so they end up being apples-to-pears all to often…)

Operational metrics
These are, generally, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These should be the sorts of things that tell you what’s going on while you’re working– cost per vaccine delivery, cost per avoided pregnancy, cost per trained person. This lets you know if you’re on- or off-target, and then you can start to adjust your thinking and approach based on what’s happening in the field.

My question
The question I had with all of this was “What does it all tell you?”

Here’s the thing: Saying you trained 100 people to use the Internet is almost meaningless when you’re 5000 miles away. Saying that you created $50,000 worth of increased productivity is even worse. What you’re trying to get to is a deeper understanding about the effect thatyouvé had on people’s lives.

You want to get to people’s stories. You need the context to know exactly what it means to increase someone’s effective wage $100 a month.

There’s an important thing happening at and around SoCap about creating better, more comparable metrics, but it’s important to not just be stuck in the Excel sheet, but to also communicate what it is that you’re trying to change. There are too many “successful” projects on the ground that achieved exactly what they set out to on the Excel sheet, but didn’t create lasting change.