I was in a job interview the other day. Yes, I’m looking for a job. I want to work for someone else for a while, since it wasn’t quite as fun playing with my own money/life/future at stake. And if I’m having fun, I am actually more productive, more creative, happier, and, well, I’m having fun. It kinda justifies itself.
The interviewer asks me, “Tell me your three favorite web sites.”
Three favorite web sites? Odd question.
I haven’t thought about what were my favorite web sites in years, any more than I put energy into thinking about what was my favorite color since I was in 2nd grade.
I realized that of all the criteria that I could use in choosing a favorite site — visual appeal, gadgets, etc — the one that mattered to me was how useful it was. Does it accomplish things that I want to do?
And I realized there’s one site which does most of the things I want, and does it quite well.
Google.
They have the best search — that has been a given almost since day one. Google Maps has the best map interface around. Google Earth is great. Google Docs has proven incredibly useful. News search and alerts. One of the best newsgroup viewers around. I used Adsense in my recent business, and Google Analytics. Picassa. Google Video and YouTube. And then there’s applications I haven’t tried, and know only by reputation — Gmail, and GOOG411 chief among them.
Every one of them guided by two basic principles: make it useful and make it easy to use.
Other sites I visit are single use — I might go once a day to find the latest from my social networks, or the latest content from a blog or daily cartoon I follow.
Visual design is great. Gadgets are great. Things that go bump and whirr and zing can be, well, fun or annoying. Usefulness and ease of use never go out of style.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, in prior blogs, but I keep going back to the title and premise of Seth Godin’s book All Marketers are Liars. After the reader opens the cover he retracts the statement, saying marketers are really just storytellers who get people to make themselves believe things which aren’t necessarily so. (In other words, they’re liars.)
He cites as an example Fiji Water — basically filtered tap water, sold at an outrageous price. But the bottle tells a story of a tropical paradise — all things good, all things pure, and hey, its expensive so it must be worth it.
There are a couple of recent lies, er um, stories propagated by recent ad campaigns that really caught my eye for the audacity of the tales they tell.
Life Takes Visa
A series of ads for Visa shows the wheels of commerce running along smoothly and efficiently until, horror of horrors, someone tries to pay without using a credit card. With the card, everyone is happy, buying and selling is fun and efficient. People using the card are smart, sophisticated, and part of a fast, fun, and efficient process. Everything is good. Without the card, everything stops. Things crash to the ground. People stare disapprovingly at the person without the card. And if he doesn’t use a card, he is shunned by those around him, slinking out of the store.
Never mind that in the real life, often the opposite case is true — paying by card is often the slowest method at some places of business.
The message is simple. Card good. Cash and check bad. The card means acceptance. The card is easy. Everything else is bad. It is an obvious fantasy, and presented with cartoonish absurdity. But the message is there, and is absorbed through repetition until it becomes a lie the viewer tells himself.
Free?
Everybody, sing along…
They say a man should always dress for the job he wants.
So why am I dressed up like a pirate in this restaurant?
Its all because some hacker stole my identity.
And I’m stuck here every evening serving chowder and iced tea.
I should have gone to…
Then there’s the quiet fast talking man at the end who says “Offer applies with enrollment in triple advantage.” Roughly translated that means, “it will cost you $15 per month to get this credit report.”
F - R - E - E, that spells “Free”
Credit Report dot com, baby….
They actually never say the report is free. It is free, when you buy their service. And all that repetition of the word free? Well, its part of their name, so they have to repeat it. If the viewer happened to convince himself he was going to actually get a credit report without paying anything, well, that’s his own fault.
Beyond the intentional confusion over freeness, is the basic tale told. The poor man’s story, in so many words, is that a hacker stole his credit info, ruined his credit rating, and he can’t get a good job without a good credit rating, so he’s stuck at some Long John Silvers style restaurant. But it all could have been prevented if he’d gone to their web site.
Fear, of course, is a great motivator, and the tale inspires it in abundance. This could happen to you. Never mind that not that many jobs run a credit report on new employees, and never mind that getting your identity stolen by a hacker is still a rare event, and never mind that the major credit agencies will provide a genuinely free credit report to everyone once a year, and never mind that the credit agencies have provisions to fix erroneous information.
Oh, and never mind that the kid in the commercial stuck at a fast food fish place probably can’t afford the $180 a year this free report will cost him.
But hey, they’re just stories being told. Its up to the viewer to decide whether to believe them. Its up to the viewer to tell himself the lie, right?
There were 100 people signed up for the weekend — the largest startup weekend turnout yet. That’s 1.5 person-years being spent in a weekend. For people, like me, with mild agoraphobia, this was a bit daunting. I imagine it was for others as well. The flow of ideas is fast and loud, and missing one word could mean being two steps behind.
I floated between groups. Business Development, User Experience, Marketing…. In each, everything that needed to be said was already being said, and extra voices would only add to the din. So I contributed where it was needed, but stepped back for the most part.
By Friday night, there was a plan — though it was really, and continued to be, an amalgamation of two plans, for the most part incompatible.
Saturday morning, I sat in with the Developers. The product was to be developed in PHP, but most of that part of the weekend was concentrated on setting up servers, and version control software. As one who has always worked with hosted sites and as a department of one, I was familiar with the concepts but playing catchup on the specifics, and the acronyms were flying fast and furious, leaving me generally two steps behind. I gathered a list of things to get more current on for working in that sort of environment — note to self, set up a box with a current version of Linux — but decided I would likely be more of a drag than an aid from getting caught up to that specific setup.
After that, I ended up with Marketing, writing copy. They had lost some of the people from the first part of the weekend, partly, I’m sure, from frustration over not knowing exactly what they were marketing. But as the weekend went on, the product came into focus, and marketing’s job became more defined. Finally, a place where adding more people would help, rather than hurt.
Sunday, I continued with marketing, hammering out copy for various pages for the site. By late afternoon, we had everything but the home page. With everyone tired, a bit punchy, and perhaps a bit grouchy, we bounced between good copy and bad copy, between serving some needs of the business, and serving almost no needs of the business, and probably had something worse at 10PM than we did at 5PM.
The product did not launch, for a number of reasons — and I am interested to see what future is attempted for it. For myself, I learned, met, and had fun. So my ROI is met.
Friday night of Bloomington Startup Weekend — 20 minutes till building closes.
The room has been organized into groups — Business Development, User Experience, Design, Marketing, Developers, etc. I have hats in several corners.
The event is, by its very nature, chaotic. I’ve been floating between groups — business development, user experience, marketing. The group has settled on an idea, but its still really two ideas, not clearly differentiated. Business Dev and User Experience are huddling together to try to define what we really have here. I’m hanging back — there are too many voices with too many choices, and sometimes the best choice is silence.
I will be participating in Bloomington Startup Weekend, this weekend, February 8-10. About 75 people (at this point) get together and conceive of, plan, market, code, and implement a startup company in a weekend. Interesting idea, a great place to learn, and a fine place for a generalist.
Not sure what role I’ll take, probably several. Should be a lot of fun!
After recently closing a business, the problem arose of how do I describe myself as I looked for my next career option. I am a man who has always prided himself in doing many things. As the owner of an online catalog I did everything from programming the shopping cart to designing the web site, to writing and designing print ads, to selecting product, to designing the order processing work flow, to fulfilling orders, to customer relations, to… well, you get the idea.
At a previous job, working for a CD Manufacturer, I started as an audio engineer, but confounded the management by constantly coming up with new things I could do. I finished my time there as Director of Multimedia Services, and I designed the web site, designed multimedia CD-ROMS, wrote the company’s anti-piracy policy, researched CD testing equipment for the new manufacturing room, wrote marketing materials, wrote manuals, and became a sort of go-to guy for anything outside of what had previously been, for that business, ordinary.
I like education. I love learning new things. By the time I graduated college, I had about 100 more credit hours than I needed, and had two degrees. On top of that, I’ve taken some additional two dozen hours as what they call “graduate, non-degree.”
I’ve programmed in a dozen languages, including some now long dead. I do design, and am pretty decent on the professional design software out there, though, I must admit, I can’t draw a straight line.
I do not consider myself some sort of renaissance man. I am adept at many things, but complete master of few — though I admit my own criteria for mastery is mighty high. It has often been the case where I have had to consult with people claiming expertise in one field or another, and I find myself the person with the greater knowledge, though I would not deign to call myself an expert. It is not ego or lack thereof — I am simply smart enough to know how much there is to a particular subject that I do not know.
And that may be why I chose to consider myself a generalist — I’m never satisfied enough with my own master of a particular area to call myself a specialist, though in some cases I might qualify as one.
I don’t want to dis specialists, either. I’ve known some people whose knowledge and abilities in their area make me want to go start a cult dedicated to them. I am awed by these people. I want to listen at their feet and be a fly on their walls. And part of me would like to be them… but part of me wants to be several other people too — so I’m a generalist.
But mainly, this is called the “Generalist Blog” because I want an excuse to comment on anything and everything. And I likely will.