Am I, or Am I Not, Your Friend?

Remember back in school when someone would come up to you and ask

‘Do you want to be my friend’

Didn’t that feel awkward?

Friendship is something that grows between people. It is not a black and white thing. With real friends you don’t have to declare your friendship. You feel there is a bond between you and someone and maybe one day you will describe this person as ‘my friend’ and suddenly realize that you have become friends!

These days I receive several ‘Friend requests’ every day. From Hyves, Flickr, LinkedIn, Plaxo and the other Social Networks I am registered on. 95% of the time I spend on these social networks is spent accepting friend requests. The other 5% I spend updating my profile.

And yes, I feel awkward most of the time. Most of these people aren’t friends but just people I might have met once, or twice or maybe even every day but I wouldn’t call them friends. Or maybe I would.

The Social Networking world is too black and white right now. I either connect or I don’t. This is not how real life works.

In a perfect world a social network won’t force me to make choices and make me label my relations. It would simply quantify contact points. Other people would be able to see that I once met Bill Clinton but we don’t actually exchange email. It would see that some people I only meet socially and other people I work with all day. And some of those people I work with I also regularly have beer with.

In a less than perfect world Social networks will stop asking me to connect with people. They will only ask me whether we have met before and if so how often. It would allow me to click the ‘Met once‘, ‘Didn’t talk for longer than 5 minutes‘ and the ‘Would like to meet more often‘ button too.

Facebook asks me to enter the type of relationship I have with someone. But only AFTER we are connected. Same with Hyves. They should both take the next step and just ignore the whole connecting step. Simply ask: how do you know this person?

Just don’t forget the ‘I did not have sex with that women‘ button…

Catching Cats VS Catching Mice

My cat is pretty quick but I am smarter so I can catch it if I want. My cat can also catch mice. I’m not sure if mice are dumber or smarter than cats but they CAN be caught by cats. But I can’t catch a mouse with my bare hands. They are simply too fast for me.

I can catch my cat and my cat can catch a mouse but I can’t catch mice.

Are you following me?

This makes sense, right?

But it doesn’t make sense to big companies. They figure:

‘We have enough money to buy this little start-up that offers this solution to this problem so we sure as hell can just build this solution ourselves and save us the trouble of buying it’

But the ‘Buy or Build’ decision is slightly more complicated than that. The fact that you can buy a company doesn’t mean you can also build what they can build.

Being a cat catcher doesn’t make you good at catching mice.
Scale DOES matter.

More mental ammunition for you if you ever find yourself negotiating with a big company.

But wait! It also works the other way around! Catching a mouse or catching 100.000 mice is not the same. When you catch one mouse you are dealing with one mouse. If you are catching 100.000 mice you are dealing with mousecatchers. Herding mice or herding mousecatchers are two very different things.

But you knew this.

Maybe you didn’t know this: cats don’t play with mice for fun, practice or out of ignorance. They play with mice because the terror of being eaten alive by a cat makes the mouse’s meat taste sweeter. Apply that to the cat & mouse games that are played during negotiations and you can figure out what I could blog about that.

The Ultimate Diet Formula

I love diets.
They are the ultimate self fulfilling prophecy.
Once you start following a diet to lose weight, you actually start losing weight!

How incredible?
Not really!

It is just the Hawthorne Effect doing its magic:

An attempt was made to measure the difference between two methods of management during the 1930s at the Hawthorne plant. The attempt failed because the workers impoved their efforts immensely for both methods. This was because they knew they were being watched carefuly. Since then, the term Hawthorne effect has been used to describe the improvement in a situation that occurs just because an experiment is being run.

The same appliesto diets. There have been hundreds (maybe even thousands. Dieting dates back to the stone age) of different types of diets. Every two years or so a new diet becomes popular that everybody swears will work and which actually works for a while.

That is, until everyone stops paying attention to his or her eating habits, gains weight again and a new diet is invented.

I’m working on my own diet. I’m going to launch it in a year or so and trust me, I can guarantee you it will work and it will make me rich! No need to mark my words, they will be right here.

The reason I am mentioning this is because the Hawthorne Effect might also be a factor to think about when it comes to your own business. Just consider the facts: if you change something, it will make people pay attention to, and aware of, their habits. What can you change about your business to make people aware of it?

Could you change your name?
Your logo?
The way you interact with your customers?

How can you use the Hawthorne Effect to YOUR advantage?

The Power of Repetition

Yesterday I told a story about innovation during Sprout ChallengerDay. It wasn’t a new story. Normally I try to come up with a few new stories for each presentation. But this time I relied on an old anecdote I thought was appropriate for the occasion.

The story I told is a story I blogged about before on this blog and a perfect example of how big companies THINK they work and how they actually work in reality. Check it out if you want to know what I talked about:

http://bomega.com/2007/06/09/big-companies-vs-small-companies-on-innovation/

After my presentation I was talking with another speaker about his performance. He said:

‘I should really update that one part of my presentation because I have been using it for a while now and I’m afraid people know about it”

I told him not to worry about it.

Everybody knows the power of repetition and it also works for presentations. If you tell a good story that some people already know they won’t be disappointed! They will be proud that they already heard and and glad that they can hear it again. Its similar to the situation of a few guys standing around where one tells a joke. One of the guys listening will say ‘Oh I know this one, this is great’ and he will be grinning as the joke is told, enjoying the fact that he knows where it is going, and feeling smug about it.

In fact, he will be the one most likely to laugh the hardest.

So, don’t be afraid of repeating yourself. Often people didn’t really take in the information you presented the first time you presented it to them. I have one more example to illustrate my point: Yesterday I told a story about innovation during Sprout ChallengerDay. It wasn’t a new story. Normally I try to come up with a few new stories for each presentation. But this time I relied on an old anecdote I thought was appropriate for the occasion.

The story I told is a story I blogged about before on this blog and a perfect example of how big companies THINK they work and how they actually work in reality.

After my presentation I was talking with another speaker about his performance. He said ‘I should really update this part of my presentation because I have been using it for a while now and I’m afraid people know about it’. I told him not to worry about it.

Everybody knows the power of repetition and it also works for presentations. If you tell a good story that some people already know they won’t be disappointed! They will be proud that they already heard and and glad that they can hear it again. Its similar to the situation of a few guys standing around where one tells a joke. One of the guys listening will say ‘Oh I know this one, this is great’ and he will be grinning as the joke is told enjoying the fact that he knows where it is going and feeling smug because he knows how it will end. In fact, he will be the one most likely to laugh the hardest.

So, as I have said before, don’t be afraid of repeating yourself!

OpenIdea: Give Spammers What They Want….

You have no idea how much I hate spam and spammers. I’m generally a friendly guy but spam makes me aggressive.

And with 85% of ALL my mail being spam (19.648 Good Messages, 111.961 Spam Messages (85%) on 405 Spam Messages Per Day) I spent a lot of time thinking about how to prevent any more from coming in.

Since January 2007 I have been using a fairly good Spam filter. It is 99.1% correct which means I have to wade my way through hundreds of spam messages every day to make sure I don’t miss stuff. So far I have rescued 869 messages from my spam folder our of a total of 111.961 spam messages.

Today I came up with a ’sort of’ solution to the Spam problem. Maybe. Probably not.

It occurred to me that one of the reasons spam still works for spammers is the low cost of doing it. After all, it costs close to nothing to send millions and millions of spam messages and if only 0.001% of receivers click through you still make some money.

So what if we would give spammers what they want?

What if we would ALL start visiting every link in every spam message? The cost of sending out millions of spam messages would suddenly start to rise. Servers would go down, pages would become unresponsive and bandwidth costs would go up.

Spamming is cheap BECAUSE people DON’T click on the links in the spam messages!

I don’t propose we actually start buying v!@ggra (how DO you actually spell that?) and cheap Rolexes online. But how about a mail plugin that loads every link in every spam message I receive, oh, about 10 times? How about making this plugin free and easy to install? What if a few thousand or hundred thousand people would install this plugin?

I imagine a spammer one day sending out a few thousand spam messages and before he even gets one order for his product his server goes down.

Yeah I know, what if a legitimate message accidently ends up in the spam folder? Well, if it only ends up in 1 spam box there wouldn’t be any problems.

So is this a real solution? Probably not.

But one can dream, right?

Doing business in… Zeeland?

Later today (October 16) I will be driving to Zeeland to talk about entrepreneurship and officially open the ‘mediaplein’ at the Zeelandhallen in Goes. I will be interviewed together with Mr. Wiersma who is resposible for Economic affairs in Zeeland.

We will be talking about what effect technology has on business and whether it matters (pro or con) to do business in Zeeland compared to other places in the Netherlands, Europe of maybe even the world.

The event is held in the Zeelandhallen in Goes which is a good 200 km from Amsterdam so I will have a lot of time to think about my opinions on those matters.

UPDATE: the result:

Free Ticket & Huge Savings: Sprout ChallengerDay

On Thursday, November 1, 2007 I will be a speaker on Sprout’s ChallengerDay. I am looking forward to this day a lot and not just because I am speaking but because the other speakers are all very inspiring people. I intend to be there the whole day just listening to what these challengers have to say. I also offered to host the Speakers Dinner the night before at my house which will be extra cool because I will get to meet all the speakers personally the evening before.

You can see who all the speakers are on the official website but here are a few examples of the challengers that will speak: Marc Schroder and Michiel Muller who founded Route Mobiel and are challenging the ANWB. Pim Betist the founder of Sellaband who is challenging the music industry with a better model to promote talent. Igor Kluin who is the founder of Qurrent which is revolutionizing the energy business. Bob Kuijs who is constantly challenging Funda with Jaap.nl, all the way to court.

I have asked the Sprout people if I could do something special for my blog readers and they came up with a great deal! The first 20 people who contact Marianne van Leeuwen will only have to pay €199 instead of the usual €599.

And it gets better.

On top of that I can take ONE person with me for free! Absolutely free! And you will also receive an invitation to the speakers dinner the evening before the event. How cool is that!

Since I can only give away ONE ticket I want you to describe to me why YOU deserve this one free ticket and how you will get more value out of this day than anyone else. Use the comments form here, your blog, Twitter, Flickr or any other means to persuade me to take YOU with me.

I will post the winner here in one week from now:

The winner: (Will be announced on Monday October 22)

Small Change?

As a kid I always carried a small magnet with me. It was attached to a long cord and I used it to grab small coins out of fountains or street ventilation shafts.

One day I stopped doing that. Maybe because I figured out that it wasn’t a scalable business. Not many €1000 bills can be found in fountains.

People always tell you to focus.
Focus is important.
Unfortunately nobody is able to tell you WHAT to focus on.

Let me rephrase that: everybody has a different opinion on WHAT you should focus on.

So do you focus on small change?
Would you stop for this coin?

I noticed this 20 euro cent coin this morning on my way to work and stopped to take a photo and pick it up.
(Click on the photo for a larger view of the coin)

What would you have done?
Was that a waste of time?
Should I focus on the bigger picture?

I guess there isn’t one answer to the question.
Focus is important, the big picture is important but the devil is in the details.

This morning I decided that, in this particular case, it was worth my time to stop for 20 cents.