Twitter vs The Dark Ages

I just learned that there are quite a few small business owners who have revenue in the 1 to 2 million range, maybe more, and they don’t even have email. This really shocks me. I guess it’s naive of me, but knowing how easy and cheap it is to set up a website and an email account, I am really surprised that there are still businesses that don’t avail themselves of this basic business tool.

For $5 per month and a few hours with the free software that many hosting services give you, you can create a simple brochure website about who you are, what your business is all about, and how people can contact you. Forget about getting on the first page of a google category search, someone should at least be able to type in your business name and find out some basic contact information.

This revelation came from a conversation I had today with a friend who is a business broker. He’s like a real estate broker but instead of homes, he helps people sell their business. He was telling me that quite a few of his clients don’t bother with setting up a website and a surprising number don’t even have email (or if they have email they rarely check it). These small business owners do virtually all their communicating face-to-face or with the postal service, faxes and telephone. That’s the way they have been doing it for 30 years and they see no reason to change.

Backing up a little bit, while driving to meet my friend for coffee this morning I caught a few minutes of a segment on NPR about technophobes. They were talking with Daniel Shore about Twitter and how people use it. I missed the first part of the show so I’m not sure how they define a technophobe, maybe anyone who isn’t into social networking. Now, I certainly don’t consider myself a technophobe, far from it. I love technology. My first computer was a 128k Mac that I bought in 1984. It wasn’t long thereafter that I signed up for a dialup AOL account and have been using email ever since.

However, I do not have a posse who anxiously await a tweet about what I’m wearing today, or which Starbucks I’m sitting at this very instant. I guess if you’re that much of an extrovert and can’t operate without constant reinforcement, well, to each his own. But what I find amazing is that the spectrum has broadened so much that there are young people now who are literally in constant electronic contact with their crew, and I mean constant, and at the other end of the spectrum there are people running multi-million dollar small businesses without even an email account much less a website. They probably just recently broke down and got cellphones.

Part of the reason I avoid things like Twitter is I can relate to this sense of being too “available” at times. When I have to travel to Asia for a project, the flight is about 12 hours and I’m usually flying alone. The week or two just prior to the trip is always hectic with prep work, meetings, emails and phone calls to China. When I finally get on to the plane and get in my seat, I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s a rare time when you have a 12 hour period all to yourself when no one can contact you, you can do whatever you want, sleep, read, write in your journal, whatever. You are not expected to call anyone and you don’t need to worry about someone calling you. Unless you foolishly left work to do on the plane, this is the ultimate free time.

Maybe we have already gone too far with the whole “being connected” thing. Maybe these last holdouts who eschew email and the internet are to be admired. I for one am not ready to be implanted with a communication chip that can interrupt whatever I’m doing 24/7 with a beep in my ear signaling to check my email.

How To Increase Perceived Value Without Redesigning Your Product

The market value of a product is all about customer perception. You can have the best product on the market but if people get it home and they only grasp half of what it can do, or they have trouble getting it set up, you’re sunk.

If you’re like me, before you make a big purchase you often go online to read the reviews. I tend to be suspicious of glowing reviews, wondering if the manufacturer hired people to write them. We all know that people are more motivated to complain than to praise but it seems like 90% of the reviews you see online are positive. It makes you wonder.

So I tend to pay more attention to the negative reviews. Some I discount if the person seems unreasonable, but I read them all. If enough red flags go up, I start checking out other brands, widening my search.

The point here is that a few negative reviews can really hurt your business. You need to pay attention to the whole experience of buying and using your product, not just how to get it into the shopping cart.

Let’s assume that you’ve put a lot of thought into the design of your product, it stacks up well against the competition and sales are good. Now your customer has it home but things are not going smoothly.

How many times have you yourself been frustrated while trying to assemble a product or trying to get it hooked up? You’re sitting there reading the manual and you get confused and annoyed.

One of two things has probably happened. The manual uses jargon or diagrams that are hard to understand making you feel stupid, or the manual is so poorly designed that you form a negative opinion about the product.

What happens next is 1) your customer takes the extra time to figure it out himself, 2) they spend an hour with the call center or 3) they return the product to the store.

In each case, you just lost someone who could have joined your virtual sales force. You transformed a happy customer into a dissatisfied customer, or worse, a guy who goes online and posts a bad review.

So, what are the attributes of effective product documentation?

1. Clear language that explains the product without being condescending.
2. Effective use of graphics. People comprehend and remember graphics quicker than words.
3. Engaging page layout that doesn’t intimidate. A good layout makes it easy to read or scan the content and leads you through it in a logical sequence.
4. Effective balance of content and white space. Huge blocks of text put people off.
5. Links and navigation aids in electronic files.
6. Advanced functions separated from the commonly used ones so people can learn the basics first.
7. Separate sections for each language. If you mix languages in the same section, people will miss important facts.
8. Safety issues highlighted and located where they make sense, not just listed in a big block at the beginning.

If your customer quickly learns all the features that they need and a few that they love but didn’t know they needed without getting frustrated, you’ve won.

Don’t let half of the cool features in your product go to waste. You need to find a way to maximize your product’s perceived value by staying with your customer after they get the product home.