11 articles tagged ‘Attention’

StoryComplete.com: Helping you re-enter the game April 27th 2010

While playing the software game was lucrative, this blog helps software companies sidelined by innovation to re-enter the game and to win.

Once upon a time it was lucrative to play the software industry game. We sold functionality at excellent margins. Annual maintenance was steady money for (rather) little work. Technology advanced at a manageable pace. The peer community dispensed recognition. Growth was steady and life was good.

But then the software game changed. In many niches FOSS has turned functionality into a commodity. SaaS upsets perpetual licensing, while annual maintenance is increasingly suspect. The community scattered as global players bought and consolidated. Innovation quickened. New business slowed.

Seth Godin: Inspired by “All Marketers Are Liars” April 12th 2010

Seth Godin’s book ‘All Marketers Tell Stories’ inspired me to share what I’ve learnt in 30 years of the software business.

Software companies often find themselves stranded on islands of excellence, serving a small group of customers but unable to grow. Opportunistic sales result in a few more islands from time to time.

It’s depressing to see companies with excellent technology shipwrecked. A love-hate relationship with marketing is often a contributory reason. We love having many qualified leads, but hate getting our hands dirty with marketing.

Why’s marketing hated like this? In my experience the cause is often the developer background of many managers. Developers equate lead generation with advertising. And developers hate advertising even more than marketing!

37signals: Boring office video’s a story? April 9th 2010

37signals added some mystery to what could be a boring office video. To tell a good story, keep the ending until, well, the end.

37signals has strong opinions about work. But how should an office look if you’re an international team? That often works from home? With a 4-day week? That hates interruptions? For the moment, they’re not saying.

To tell a good story, keep the ending until, well, the end. You can see this in a series of videos from 37signals about their new offices.

Clang compiler: Remarkable spell-checker April 6th 2010

The Clang compiler recovers from unknown tokens using a spell-checker. Something small can be remarkable and worth spreading.

Being remarkable doesn’t always mean you have to develop something large. Sometimes remarkable is small, as this Clang example seen today on Hacker News demonstrates very nicely.

Clang is an open-source compiler front-end for C, C++ and Objective C. The project builds on the LLVM compiler back-end with the goal of replacing the GCC tool chain. Their worldview accepts that programmers can and do make mistakes. Amazing feats of Clang Error Recovery shows how they’ve woven this worldview into the compiler.

What caught my eye was how Clang recovers from unknown tokens. Instead of unhelpful error messages (like GCC), the Clang team chose to do something remarkable: they added a spell-checker to guess what you mean:

VaultPress: Paid-only story weaved into beta sign-up April 2nd 2010

Because millions of users associate WordPress with free, the VaultPress team wove their paid-only story into their beta sign-up form.

A post about VaultPress on Mike Davidson’s blog reminds us that weaving a story into software can be easy. VaultPress is from the great team behind WordPress and is a real-time backup service for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Most WordPress products are freemium. VaultPress is paid-only: a high-end product for high-end users. Or: VaultPress is for people whose worldview leads them to expect to pay for backups. That covers me, and I don’t consider myself a high-end user!

WordPress is very visible company with millions of users. Many of these will notice VaultPress and take a look. Because most users associate WordPress with free, the VaultPress team wove their story into their beta sign-up:

Worldview: Embrace an existing one to be noticed March 21st 2010

Target people sharing a worldview, already paying attention to your domain. They notice newcomers; are you sure they’ll notice you?

We view the world differently based on our biases, assumptions, values and experience. Our worldview filters what we pay attention to; what we believe.

Our worldview underlies the story we tell ourselves about what’s happening. It drives the guessing machine we use to predict future events.

Your target audience is a cluster of people who share a worldview and who are paying attention to your domain. But, while they notice newcomers, will they notice you?

Target audience: They’re waiting for you to show up March 20th 2010

Talking with people paying attention and seeking you out is a lot more fun than continuously interrupting people who’ll ignore you!

Don’t waste your time interrupting people not paying attention. Instead, focus on those few special people who are paying attention.

Those few special people are discussing your domain on forums, blogs and newsgroups. Your first job is to find and join these continuing conversations.

Don’t barge in, interrupt and start selling; that’s the best way of ensuring they’ll ignore you. Instead, start by listening for a while before contributing.

Lessons: Selling tools to developers who hate tools March 19th 2010

Selling to developers who hate tools is a quick way to waste lots of money. We targeted the few whose worldview embraced tools.

As application tool vendors we convinced prospects with metrics and ROI. Adopting tools, we thought, was a no-brainer. Even so, selling to developers who didn’t want to use tools was difficult. Time and again developers successfully blocked tool adoption.

Our problem: their worldview didn’t include the idea tools are useful. Our solution: we focused on the 1 or 2 developers whose existing worldview did include a positive attitude towards tools.

Whether or not these developers had formal authority, we got our tool into their hands so they could reach their own conclusions. If they thought our tools worthy, they’d start spreading the word internally. Having someone who developers trust spread our story for us made all the difference.

Credibility: Not enough to approach prospects directly March 18th 2010

Prospects pay attention if they hear about you from someone they already trust. The bad news: that person can never be you.

Prospects won’t hear your advertising message; they simply are not listening. However, if a miracle occurs and they stumble across your product, you have a credibility problem: you don’t have any!

Website cutting-edge? Brochures tip-top? 30-day free trial awesome? Great, but it doesn’t change the fact we simply don’t believe what vendors say. Don’t take this personally. It’s not you specifically; we’ve all learned the hard way not to trust what vendors say.

So, prospects ignore your advertising and assume what you say is untrue. How, then, can you reach out to prospects and win new customers? Simple: personal recommendation.

Advertising: Stop the economic nonsense!

Doesn’t matter how clever your advertising is nobody will see it. Spending more money just isn’t going to help.

How many adverts do you recall from web sessions? What about magazines, newspapers and blogs? For most people the answer is: none at all.

Ignoring advertising is not some superpower unique to developers. We’ve all picked this up to avoid sensory overload as we make our way through life.

We’re exposed to thousands of advertising messages each day. Consciously ignoring each one would be too expensive. Instead, we’ve learned that subconsciously ignoring them is the only sane way to get through the day.

Demolish walls: Software developers and marketers March 17th 2010

Traditional advertising was about interrupting people to steal their attention; marketing is now about creating stories that spread.

Ask developers about marketing and they’ll tell you they hate it. This negative attitude assumes marketing is just another word for advertising.

While there was some truth to this in the past, those days are long gone.

Advertising was about interrupting people to steal their attention; marketing is about creating stories that spread.

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