Some days it’s easier to just show the shiny object and talk about engagement. This is one of those days. Enjoy!
Content + Communications Consulting
UPDATE: November 10, 2010 – we have removed the Amazon affiliate link in this post. All other text remains unchanged.
If you think about the book “Game Change” you can learn quite a bit about when it makes sense and when it doesn’t make sense to use the term “Game Change” or its variation, “Game Changer.”
First, a layman’s definition, in plain English. Obama won not because he defeated John McCain, or even Hillary Clinton. He won because he campaigned against George W. Bush and Washington as usual. He was an outsider, outsider equals good, good equals electable. If you run a political campaign that accomplishes one of these things, congratulations: you have successfully created a Game Change. (BTW, if you want to get a copy of the book, our affiliate link to it is below. Rock on.)
In business, if you create a product or service that is a category unto itself (what they used to call a “category killer”), you are a Game Changer.
In fact, let’s use the 2010 elections and the holiday shopping season to give you a very short list of people, places and things that are right now “Game Changers.” For instance:
The Tea Party: Game Change. What’s most interesting about the Tea Party movement, to this reporter, is not its ubiquity but its lack of a concrete message. The seminal moment of this Tea Party is widely considered to be a rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli. Yet, hardly present in this current movement is any mention of derivatives, securities laws, mortgage-backed bond trading and stuff like that. (“Stuff like that” is a technical term.) The Tea Party appears to be about change – back to the Constitution in pre-bailout mode, where “Don’t Tread on Me” is a way of life.
iPad: Game Changer. It’s not a phone, it’s not a TV. It’s somewhere in-between. Gartner predicts that 19.5 million units of “tablet computers” will be sold this year. 54 million units are projected to be sold in 2011. The rules of the game changed: don’t sell people a phone, don’t sell them a computer, sell them something in-between.
Think about it in the context of what you’re doing in business: unless you are coming up with a new way of computing, or a new way of positioning candidates as you enter an election, you’re not a Game Changer.
We’ve bumped into literally hundreds of folks whose businesses are not in the middle of a Game Change. But they are watching the rules change and shifting their own strategy to follow along.
This can mean restaurants that tweet deals, or lawyers who blog, or fundraisers who abandon the old way of doing things and try something new.
You don’t have to be a Game Changer. But you should watch the rules of the game, and play along.
The “strategy” thing can be tricky – and it’s not as easy as just saying “let’s get onto social media because everyone else is.”
SO that’s why we’re doing a webinar next week, on the 28th to be exact. More info at this link – http://socialstrategy.eventbrite.com – and you can sign up by clicking this nifty button. See you there!
Payday loans get a bad rap: exorbitant interest rates, bullet-proof glass, cries of predatory lending. However, a team led by a former Google CIO (Douglas Merrill) and a former Capital One Chief Credit Officer is poised to change how the world thinks about the industry.
Area 224 sat down with Shawn Budde, Co-Founder and Chief Risk Officer of ZestCash, to get the story.
224: What’s it like to get “TechCrunched?”
Shawn: The reality is that we just launched Wednesday night. So, between the attention from TechCrunch and the fact that we’re making sure the operation is ready, it’s been a busy week.
Editor’s note: See last week’s TechCrunch coverage here.
224: How does traditional payday lending work, and how will ZestCash be different?
Shawn: Most payday loans work rather simply: you get charged $20 in interest for every $100 you need. You write a post-dated check and, when you get paid, you pay back the loan and the interest. However, when someone gets into trouble and can’t pay their loan off in time, they’ll roll it over and pay what they can against the balance.
The traditional payday loan requires that you pay off the balance or roll it over – and, if you have to roll it over, you pay down the interest first. Principal comes afterwards, and that is where the interest can get quite high.
Where we’re different is that, with our loans, we’re letting customers who fall behind pay down on the principal and interest. The result is a loan that is structured in a way that isn’t as onerous.
224: Your storefront for these loans is the Internet. Why?
Shawn: We’re looking to have a connected relationship with customers, but we want to avoid having real estate costs. We’ll still be very connected to customers – our team handles customer interface from start-to-finish, working directly with those who take out loans. We’ll also communicate with customers through phone, email, text messages – but we’re looking to differentiate ourselves from payday loans.
224: Why this industry, and why you and Douglas?
Shawn: Douglas started looking into this industry a couple years back and realized that it is not terribly sophisticated. He also has a passion to do better things for people – and, having been at Google, he knows how machine learning tools can help make this process better for customers.
On the other hand, I’ve been in sub-prime credit for more than 20 years – so I’ve done everything in lending but the IT component – which is where we complement each other nicely.
224: On your timeline, where are you compared to where you’d hope to be?
Shawn: It took us 4 ½ months to get out into the marketplace with the product, which is quite good. Now that we’re in the marketplace, we hope to do a lot of learning over the next couple months.
If that doesn’t make any sense, well, neither does “engagement” to a lot of people.
Case in point: had a great dinner with a friend whose startup is kicking a%%. I told him there’s something called “Blog World.” His eyes rolled back in his head.
We then went back to talking about how his startup is kicking a%%.
I had another chat today with a leading provider of software to an industry that thrives on social commerce. They’re engaging just fine – companies, brands, people who sell stuff are doing the “customer service” thing correctly.
I emailed another friend whose business is doing just fine, with a Twitter page that has more followers than Area 224 does.
#bwe10 would not be happy, since this company’s Twitter page does nothing to engage followers.
But hey, if you’ve got objectives – like you know why you’re in business – the engagement will come. Or it won’t.
That’s the point, kiddos.
Whether my engagement is better than your engagement is irrelevant.