I was on a roll this afternoon working from home getting quite a few projects done when a knock came at the door. The young lady with clipboard in hand told me they were opening up a new store near the local McDonald’s in which they were going to be selling a “new cleaning product.” I should have know better. I knew it was probably a carpet or vacuum cleaner sales person but heck, we needed our carpet cleaned. I don’t mind giving another business the benefit of the doubt and spending a little time listening to their sales pitch, after all we are selling a service and product to customers in our community as well.

No, an hour or so would have been fine as I usually take that amount of time out during a break anyway. This afternoon the lady giving the demo dropped by around 3pm. It’s now 8:41pm and she is still her packing up after her manager showed up as basically pressured us to buy this high dollar vacuum cleaner/cleaning system. They gave us a price at about half of what their retail price is but I turned down their offer on principle. To tell the truth I would have loved to have had the system. As far as I can tell it’s a quality product but their sales methods of invading homes and pressuring home owners is despicable not to mention they took over 5 hours of my time I could have used to be more productive and service my own clients yet I had to sit their and listen to her describe ever single attachment and tell me how “dirty” my house was. Kirby vacuum cleaner, you may have the best vacuum in the business (I don’t know for sure) but you’re not going to turn me into a customer for the following reasons;

• You stole 5 hours of my valuable time
• You pressured me to purchase outside of my budget when I was not expecting you
• You insulted my previous buying decisions (I still love my Oreck, I don’t care what you say)
• You made me do a lot of the work when I was told your sales rep was going to do the “cleaning” and be my “maid.”
• Without going into great detail your sales people, both the initial canvasser and the person who did the demo along with her manager were not dressed appropriately. From very revealing tops on the females to totally unprofessional and bummy looking clothes on the men.
• Towards to end the manager invaded my house without even waiting from me to answer the door. I should have called to police right there and had you arrested for unlawful entry.  I don’t care if your sales person was already in the house.

What is the Conundrum? It may be a quality product and my life and house may be a lot more cleaner (I can’t 100% verify that) but your sales methods and taking up a big chunk of my day turned me off from ever being a customer. To be fair the girl giving the demonstration did an excellent job and she was very gracious. I could tell she was being forced to present stuff they way she was because of her manager or corporate policy. If could suggest things to Kirby to make their lives easier and to keep people like me from writing posts like this I would do the following;

• Keep your demonstration to no more than 1 hour - even if someone is at home it doesn’t mean they have a lot of free time. Some of us are working from home and even if we aren’t working Don’t stay past my supper time! I was about to pass out from hunger! I can’t make a buying decision in that state!
• Don’t give me some story about opening up a store selling a new cleaning product and then come in my home telling my how Kirby has been around since 1914!
• Don’t ask me to tell my friends and family how great you are before you make your sell. Yeah, I’m going to tell my friends, family and anyone who reads this blog how you wasted half my day and insulted me in my own house.

I wasn’t an entire loss. I knew they may be a good blog post in this either way which is one reason I permitted the encounter. Later in the evening I did a search and found a very long string of recent similiar complaints on the consumeraffairs.com web site. I speak often about what a valuable tool blogging is but is your business prepared to be “blogged about?”

When companies first started setting up web sites they were static and for the most part were nothing more than online versions of their print marketing materials like business cards, brochures, etc. A funny thing is happening however - It’s going in the other direction and I’m excited about it!

I saw two things today in my news reader that prompted me to write this. One was a 2009 Calendar from the folks at Cute Overload. Cute Overload is a blog that features constantly updated content of animals of all types doing cute or funny things. I like to check it out on a regular basis as a kind stress reliever. Now fans of the blog, Cute Overload can share the “cuteness” with their friends and family in the form of this calendar.

A also read an article today about how one can repurpose the content in their blog as an eBook they can distribute and sell with advice of course on how to format it for that media.

I was immediate reminded of a local entrepreneur, Ashley Cuttino , who founded the Scrapbook Blogger Company.

If you have a blog, remember it can be the starting point for innovative ideas, new business relationships, defining your products or services with greater clarity but it can also be a jumping point where drafts of future prints products are born.

If you don’t have a blog for your business or organization we would love to talk with you about this great internet tool.

I was watching a recent episode of NOVA, a science show on PBS. The episode, called Car of the Future focused on advances in automotive engineering. One segment stuck out with me and it wasn’t because it involved a radical design or fuel but rather using carbon fiber materials for it’s frame. This not only makes the car itself more lightweight thus saving fuel but also reduces production costs in terms of machinery needed. I’m totally fascinated by the uses of carbon fibers and my town, Greenville,SC could potentially be a “new textile capital of the world” because of initiatives like ICAR and the automotive companies located here like BMW and Michelin. As a company that has “spinning silk” as part of it’s name I am excited that the new carbon materials are practically a new “silk” that is lightweight yet very strong.

What kind of ideas are you coming up with in your company or personal endeavors that solve multiple problems at once? What kind of things are you investing in that make your efforts work for themselves? One reason we say we are “New Media Developers” rather than “web designers (about 80% of what we currently do) is while the web is the hub of our expertise we also recognize that as time progresses people do not want to be forced to sit in front of a laptop or desktop computer to access information or conduct transactions. I have some visions to do some radical things with photography and audio recording via the web. It’s more than showing family pictures on an iPhone or similar device. I want to explore innovative ways images and sounds can be captured, transcribed into searchable data and organized with minimal manual work. Online services like Evernote and Jott are already doing some of these things.

Some everyday “two-bird” thinking examples are;

• Cleaning house, having a yard sale and investing the income
• Getting some exercise and listening to educational podcasts at the same time
• Printing to PDF instead of paper - saves space and is searchable too.
• composting appropriate organic waste and capturing rain water to help with a home vegetable garden
• Blogging as a way to “draft” a book or other collection of compiled information

Take a little time to make your own list of ways you can be more efficient in your business? Can a web site, blog, podcast, online photography, etc. help with that? Just asking because that is what we do and wonder how do it better for ourselves and our customers.

No birds were harmed in the writing of this blog post.

I was reading Seth Godin’s blog this morning and the article of the day was called, Should you ignore the N00bs? It’s really the perfect follow up to the article I wrote yesterday called, The Struggle Between “Dumbing Down” and Educating the “Non-Technical“. Before I go any further I do want to point out the the “word,” “n00bs” is not a major misspelling but rather insider language in the tech/geek world for new users or “newbies.” This refers to people who often “don’t get” what to the “tech savvy” are relatively simple concepts. Seth gave an example of the old “Any Key” joke from the DOS days where you would receive a command to press, “Any Key” and often people who asked where the “Any Key” was.  It sounds silly to experienced tech users but we do have alt, ctrl, fn, and esc keys.  I can see the confusion to a point. Maybe the command should have read, “Press any key on the keyboard.”

I think that would have been enough to avoid any confusion for a number of people. However Seth also makes a good point when he said,

The problem with this approach is that you can never be simple enough. And of course, the bigger problem: Once you dumb it down so every single person gets it, you bake out the magic and the mystery and the elegance.

As I mentioned in my previous article and Seth reiterated, great design should be intuitive and eliminate confusion. I definitely believe in the concept of being “user friendly.”  Another strong point he made was to make it easy for people to ask for help or to see see the meanings in terms.  Does your web site for example have an FAQ section? Do you have a glossary of unfamiliar terms or link to definitions elsewhere on the web? At the least do you have a contact form, e-mail address or phone number others can contact you with?

One final but important aspect of a modern web site we stress having is a blog. Yes, a lot of web site visitors or people in general will not “get” a blog in terms of what it means but it gives you and/or your company or organization the opportunity to teach others on a frequent basis what you are passionate about and what makes your company remarkable.

It took me a long time to get some of the things I am most passionate about like RSS, Blogging, layers within graphic design programs, etc. No one dumbed down those ideas for me but once I “got it” it’s about all I talk about these days. I know they are some people who will never get or rather “care” about what we do and that’s fine but how can we reach out better to those who will get it?  What is your experience?

A topic I don’t see addressed near enough is where do you draw the line between dumbing down or simplifying technical concepts to the typical “non-techie.”

Of course I believe anything technical should be as “user-friendly” as possible. I hate most TV remote controls and despise a web service that requires a complicated login procedure. Their is however a difference between making something easy to use and the attitude of not wanting to use something in the first place because it’s “technical.”

In the course of history we have seen many technological advances and during those times we have seen resistance. This is not specific to the “information age” or “computers.” As many seem to say they know nothing about.

At one time radio and television were new and strange. We still for the most part have to deal with “tuning to a frequency” or channel or station which uses a number or call letters. With that which now seems more “geeky?” tuning an FM radio to 90.1 (my local NPR station) or going to a web browser and remember to type in npr.org?

I remember in high school taking a class called, Typing on an ancient and unwieldy device known as a “typewriter.” To this day having to remember “picas”, manual carriage returns, and the madness of figuring out how to center a headline or paragraph still makes me scratch my head but I’m still glad I took the class because even know the principles I learned help me with the software equivalents I use.

I suppose this is an area I struggle with because I crave learning new things, especially in the areas of technology and multimedia be it new devices, software, techniques, etc. It almost pains me when I get blank stares when I mention podcasts, blogs, RSS etc. Those are things I love and have experienced great value using. I have often been “warned” by the leadership of groups I was going to speak to on those subjects to “not get too technical” at the risk of “speaking over their heads.” Are you a business person who desires to learn the value of new technologies but are often lost in your understanding? Have you been to computer user groups where they seem to constantly rehash the “beginner stuff?” What topics in the technical field do you think business people need to be better educated about? If I could focus on just one topic on this blog for the next week or so which topic would you like to see addressed and explained how it could benefit your business, organization or personal productivity?

• Business Blogging?
• Social Networking (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Forums, etc.)
• New Media
• Podcasting
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Digital Photography
• Video
• Online Virtual Office

Can you think of anything else?