Zappos. I’ve heard so much about their legendary service, and had a chance to experience it first hand today. The short version is that I bought a pair of boots there, that I’ve been dreaming about for years, and when I got them a zipper was broken. It was terribly sad, but you don’t find out about a company’s service until something goes wrong, and at that point Zappos transcended all my expectations.
Ideas
books. Stories. Things that make me think differently
How to Be Good
After finishing “How to Be Good
What is libel?
The standard defense against any statement accused of being defamation, libel or slander, is the truth of the statement. Some even define libel as “An untruthful statement about a person, published in writing or through broadcast media, that injures the person’s reputation or standing in the community.”
However, a new ruling, reported in several places, is raising eyebrows throughout the publishing community because it suggests that if you’re saying bad things about someone, you could be successfully sued, even if what you wrote is absolutely true. Not that I’m in the habit of writing bad things about people, but if you ever needed another reason to follow the old adage “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all” this would be it. But it also got me thinking about the consequences of saying nothing at all.
Predictably Irrational – the TED presentation
Predictably Irrational is a book by Dan Ariely that I have been absolutely itching to read for a long time now. Tom read it while he was in VT, so I’ve gotten a few sneak previews, and this most recent discovery on TED.com was the last straw. I’m ordering the book. In the video, Dan … Read more
Sixth Sense – like Minority Report, but better.
The internet has given us an incredible amount of information, all at our finger tips – if we’re sitting at a computer or using a cell phone. What if there was a product that allowed you to conveniently get that information as you interact with your environment? Researchers at the MIT Media Lab are getting … Read more
YouBar – the Search for the Perfect Bar
For my part, it’s pretty hard for me to stomach most of the commercially available bars out there. Never mind that they are a convenient source of calories packaged nicely for consumption on the trail. They’re mostly … well… yucky. If I were going to design the perfect trail bar, it’d look, taste, and function … Read more
Buy-ology
I just finished listening to Buyology by Martin Lindstrom yesterday morning while I was running on the treadmill. A decent book, but this kind of book is really better to read in a paper version so that it would be easier to flip back, and look through the interesting bits again. Having gotten to poke around a friend’s Kindle
The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the concept of using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to look inside the brain for activity in various regions, to gain some insight into the ways people are really responding to your input and how they will behave. Unfortunately for me, the science was ‘popularized’ for the book, and so I ended up having a lot of questions about methodology and the interpretation of results.
It’s a little sci-fi big-brother creepy to find out that in many cases looking directly at brain activity can be a better predictor of someone’s behavior than what that someone actually says they will do. But Martin suggests that by knowing how your brain responds to various inputs, will at least make you aware of the tricksy things that Marketers are trying to pull.
Everything is amazing and nobody’s happy…
Some things can be over-explained, so I’m just going to tell you that if you’ve ever been grouchy about anything, you ought to watch this great video clip of Louis CK with Conan O’Brien, called Everything is So Amazing and Nobody’s Happy. It made me laugh out loud, and brought me some sense of peace … Read more
Leaning In or Leaning Back
Seth Godin is my marketing hero. The author of a dozen or so books, including “The Dip” and “All Marketers are Liars”