by cameron | Oct 14, 2006 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
My Torrent of the Week this week is The Rolling Stone Magazines 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time. Lots of tracks in here I have never even heard of before. Lots I already have too but it doesn’t hurt to have them collected together into a single playlist.
Had a surreal morning today. Was in the city at 8.30am having my photo taken by Julian Kingma, one of Australia’s top celebrity photographers. We shot some stuff in Hosier Lane and some more behind Federation Square. I asked Julian what the favourite photo he’d ever taken was and he said this one of the late Rene Rivkin which he won the 1997 Melbourne Press Club Quill Award. We talked about the some of the people he’s met, including Jamie Oliver, who he shot recently at the opening of Melbourne’s Fifteen restaurant and says is a really nice bloke, and Samuel L. Jackson. What an interesting line of work. For the record (for you, Scott Sherman), Julian prefers shooting on non-digital cameras, although today he was using a Nikon D100.
by cameron | Oct 13, 2006 | Uncategorized
Tom Reynolds (the now infamous sacked Telstra blogger) sent me this link today to Scott "Dilbert" Adams’ blog post on "Knowing When To Quit". It has some great advice.
So how do you know when to bail out of a losing idea?
I heard a useful rule about predicting success during my (failed) attempt at creating a hit Dilbert animated TV show. While watching the Dilbert pilot being tested on a focus group, an experienced executive explained to me the most non-intuitive way to predict success. Since then I’ve observed it to be true a number of times. It goes like this:
If everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will not succeed.
Think about that for a minute before I explain why everyone liking something predicts failure. If you get this answer right, I’m guessing that you are already successful yourself. Tell me in the comments if I’m right about that.
The reason that a product “everyone likes†will fail is because no one “loves†it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10% of the consumers have it. For example, I’m willing to bet that when the TV show Baywatch was tested, 90% of the people rolled their eyes and gave it a thumbs down. But I’ll bet 10% of the test audience had tents in their pants. Bingo.
Dilbert was the same way. From the very beginning, the vast majority of people who saw it didn’t care for it. But 10% who saw it not only liked it, they cut it out and mailed it to friends. They talked about it. They hung it on walls. They were passionate about it. Before the first Dilbert reprint book was sold, I heard stories of people making their own Dilbert books from newspaper clippings. Bingo.
Anyone who knows me well will recognize this story. I always say that when I speak in front of any large group of people, it breaks down like this: 10% of the audience think I’m a complete wanker, 10% of the audience think I’m terrific, and the other 80% are just bewildered. So I focus on the 10% who "get" me and don’t worry too much about the rest. I’m also now working on a plan to try to get more of the 80% to at least remember my name. You learn very early in a sales career that success is all about the "doing the numbers". My first sales job involved lots of cold call selling. You would ring 100 people. 50 would meet with you. 25 would be interested in your product. 15 will tell you they are going to buy your product. 5 actually will. 5 won’t. 5 will just keep stalling you indefinitely because they are too scared to tell you they are a "no". As we used to say SWSWSW – Some Will, Some Won’t, So What.
by cameron | Oct 13, 2006 | Uncategorized
Hugh Martin reports "The Australian Press Council has just released The State of the News Print Media in Australia Report 2006…… I can’t help but think there’s a lot of wishful thinking going on in this report. The authors are by and large working editors, with a couple of academics thrown in for good measure."
I haven’t read the report yet but this graph above (click on it to bring up the full size version) pretty much tells the true story. Look at the graph on the right. Look at the decline in circulation since 1999. Now grab a ruler and extend that line downwards. If you are so inclined, make the decline exponential.
Face it, my friends in the newspaper business. Things are changing faster than many of you care to admit. I know Hugh isn’t one of those. Neither is Mark Jones at the AFR. Don’t forget to buy a copy today to read about Telstra v Tom Reynolds.
by cameron | Oct 12, 2006 | Uncategorized
This Tom Reynolds vs Telstra story I broke last week is just getting funnier by the moment. Mark Jones reports that Tom’s blog has been completely pulled down off of Telstra’s "Now We Are Talking" blog. Even more interesting is that I can’t find a copy of it on Google’s cache! What’s up with that? Mark says you should all buy a copy of the Australian Financial Review tomorrow because he’s written an article on the whole deal which contains lots of quotes from Tom and Rod Bruem, Telstra’s spokesman, who still denies Tom’s dismissal had nothing to do with his blog, even though Tom says his blogging was specifically mentioned when he was informed, by an external employment agent, that Telstra didn’t want him back in the building, effective immediately.
So, as if Telstra’s NWAT experiment hadn’t already lost a heap of credibility (and it didn’t have a lot to start with) through this exercise, taking down Tom’s blog altogether, hiding the evidence, as it were, just lowers them another notch in my book.
Now I don’t know Rod but I have met Paul Crisp, one of the Public Affairs guys at Telstra involved in the NWAT experiment and he’s a smart guy. Paul – why pull down the blog? Obviously we haven’t heard Telstra’s side of the story yet, apart from short dismissives which I am struggling to believe, but I think you would have been better off handling this a different way.
And what did you guys do to the Google cache????
by cameron | Oct 12, 2006 | climate change, Uncategorized
So far I’ve had about 94 responses to the TPN survey I put up last week. Any suggestions why the responses are so low and what I can do to get more?
Oh and to the person who answered the last question with "See, this is why I have trouble with TPN. I was happy to help you out by filling out a survey, but now you are wasting my time", I’d say "GET A SENSE OF HUMOUR". Jesus. Mind you, this person isn’t subscribed to any TPN podcasts, so I guess he/she isn’t our target market which is obvious anyway from that answer. Bloody hell.
For those of you WITH a sense of perspective about how important you are, you might be interested to know that 79.5% of responses were for The Beatles (which means I have to get rid of the sunnies and get a long wig), 72.7% are worried about climate change, 72.4% think the "War On Terror" is a shame, and only 36.8% of you have offered me a spare bed. Can those people please email me with their location because I might need it soon. Especially if you live in LA or San Fran.
<a href="http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=826122623222">Click here to take survey</a>
