Everyone knows someone who has come up with a good idea and who has not acted upon that idea. Or started working on the idea… and not finished.

Perhaps you can even personally relate to that.

People come up with good ideas for new businesses all of the time. Unfortunately, many of those ideas are never acted upon and most are never brought to market.

This is tragic, because it’s not a matter or whether or not we can. In 2010, an average person of average intelligence can come up with a good idea and bring it to market – thanks to a democratization of the tools of production, distribution and sales.

But not everyone will.

Why do you suppose that is?

Lessons Learned

I’ve made it my focus over the past 20 years to turn ideas into products and businesses. Most recently launching Spitter.com, and working with other companies such as Rivals.com, RealNetworks, Turner Broadcasting, Ustream.tv, and Zazzle to bring their revolutionary ideas to market.

What have I learned that can shed some light on what makes the difference in going to market with your ideas?

There will be obstacles along the way. Distractions. Problems. Frustrations. Doubters. Skeptics.

The single greatest way to overcome those obstacles is something often overlooked in execution: having a big enough reason why.

Big Enough Reasons Why

Chris Klaus, founder and CEO of Atlanta-based Kaneva explains why this is so important.

“Part of the secret sauce of a successful startup, is finding a vision and mission that you and your team are passionate about,” Klaus told me. “Every startup has incredible challenges. The teams that are passionate about their mission will be determined to learn from their mistakes. They have the desire and energy to overcome these obstacles.”

Reasons why are the fuel that will get you to follow through.

Big enough reasons why can help get you through anything.

Pamela Slim, business coach and author of ‘Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Employee to Thriving Entrepreneur’ explains:

“Knowing why you are starting your business — how you will impact others, or even change the world — will fuel you through the inevitable periods of struggle as a first-stage entrepreneur,” Slim told me. “Your customers will feel the meaning and purpose behind your business, and your marketing position will be much stronger.”

What Do Most People Do Instead?

As entrepreneurs, we love our ideas – often to the point of irrational exuberance. And being excited about our ideas, we often focus so much on “what” we are doing (the product) that we don’t define - or we lose sight of – “why” we are doing it.

And without big enough reasons why to motivate us through the hard times, we’re more likely to get stalled – when we really need to be putting in the extra effort.

“The difference between success and failure might be the difference between calling it a day at 7 pm or midnight,” David Payne, founder of Atlanta-based Scoutmob, told me. “Only a strong mission will cause you to feel good about working those hard extra few hours.”

A Powerful Approach to Getting Important Things Done

Start by answering these time-tested four questions:

1) What is your desired outcome?

Most people answer: “I don’t know”. Perhaps that explains why so many ideas are never acted on.

Think about what your desired outcome is, what do you really want? And write it down. Be as specific as possible. Set a specific date for that outcome.

2) Why do you want that outcome?

The power is in why. When you get enough reasons you can do just about anything, you can find the way.

A big enough reason why is where you get your drive to follow through.

A useful way to frame this question is to think about why you must do it (as opposed to why you should do it). Think about what matters most to you, what do you most value?

For example: so you want to make a million dollars? Why? Dig deeper. Ultimately, what do you value most?

3) How am I going to make it happen?

Think about – and write down – the most important actions you need to take to accomplish your desired outcome.

Bonus: take it one step further. You are more than your to-do list. Think about and write down the answer to these questions. What kind of person would you need to become to accomplish your outcome? What skills would you need? And become that kind of person. Develop those skills.

4) How will I know when I’m getting my outcome?

Sometimes we can be winning – and feel like we’re losing – because we’re not keeping score. How will you measure it? How will you know?

Not All Reasons Why Are Created Equal

I’m not here to tell you which reasons are the right reasons for you. The “big enough reason why” is unique to each person. (Although some reasons that are often cited by aspiring entrepreneurs are misguided at best – and really bad reasons at worst – and I’ve written about them here.)

But the reasons that drive you could make the difference between success and failure.

What Have You Learned?

So, what do you want to remember from this article?

Before you get started with your to-do list, be clear about what it is you really want and why you want it.

You’ve got to be clear about your outcome and your purpose. The “why” is what will get you to follow through on your decision.

And as you’re bringing your idea to market, remember that Purpose = Power.

What do YOU think? What gives you your drive to follow through and launch new businesses and products? I’d love to hear about your experiences, in the comment section here.

Coming Next Week: Lessons for Aspiring Entrepreneurs, Part 2: “Goals Alone Are Not Enough”

I recently interviewed serial entrepreneur Brian Moore. Brian founded: Constructware (acquired by Autodesk for $46 million); Compliance 360 (ranked as one of America’s Fastest Growing Companies by Inc. Magazine); and most recently iglued.com.

In this video Q&A conversation, Brian talks about: lessons learned starting new businesses; why he does what he does; the one thing you MUST do to build your business; motivating partners; and about his newest startup, iglued.com.

(Disclosure: I have been an advisor to iglued.)

“People will not always remember what you said or what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was recently a guest on High Velocity Radio, talking about “Innovation in Customer Experience.”

Show hosts Stone Payton and Todd Schnick had the show professionally transcribed. Read on…

Stone Payton: Alright. Well next up on the High Velocity Radio Show – I am delighted to introduce to you technology entrepreneur, David Eckoff. I met this jean-clad, t-shirt wearing entrepreneur some weeks ago.

Todd Schnick: He’s our kind of guy.

Stone Payton: Yeah, he’s got the backpack and the whole bit and we talked about all kinds of things that really interest me and, candidly, sometimes befuddle me. I just have to admit up front you’re going to find out very quickly, this guy has got several IQ points on you and me. I can’t wait to dive in and find out what he’s up to and learn what we can about where this world and where the business environment is headed with respect to technology. So with all that said, please join me in welcoming David Eckoff.

David Eckoff: Hey Stone, it’s great to be here today and hear you remarking about my t-shirt and jeans-clad entrepreneur dress. I really enjoyed hearing Steve and your start of the segment today. I got my start at IBM also, and after too many years wearing white shirts and red ties, it’s great to be an entrepreneur and I spend a lot of time in the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and it’s I think standard dress for the black t-shirt and jeans.

Stone Payton: Well we all have an IBM connection. That’s how my mortgage gets paid. My wife has a real job with IBM as a consultant, so thank you IBM, our second sponsor. (laughter) I think mostly what we want to talk to you about this morning is innovation in customer experience. Can you expand on that? Tell us what that means to you.

David Eckoff: People ask me all the time, “So David Eckoff, you’re a technology entrepreneur, why are you so interested in customer experience and why is it so important?” Well, a decade ago there was a big gap in product quality between the Number 1 and the Number 2 and the Number 3 players. And today that gap has closed. So the key question that we need to ask ourselves as business people is how are you going to differentiate your product or service? I believe a great opportunity is to differentiate based on customer experience. Jeff Bezos who is the founder and CEO of amazon.com, he makes the distinction between customer experience and customer service. He says “Customer experience at Amazon includes having the lowest price, the fastest delivery and being reliable enough so that you don’t have to contact anyone.” That’s their customer experience. And he says “You save customer service for the truly unusual situations when things go wrong with the customer experience. This is when you as a customer interact with Amazon employees.” And he views this, and his company executes on this, as it’s the exception not the rule. So customer service is a subset of the overall customer experience. And Bezos said something that really got my attention. This is so important, what I’m about to tell you. “Fixing customer problems builds loyalty with people.” Think about that. It’s so important I’ll say it again. Fixing customer problems builds loyalty with people.

Todd Schnick: That’s my favorite thing about social media, David, is that my clients say, “Oh, I don’t want to get involved in the social media space because I’ll rope myself up to getting criticized on line.” I say, “That’s the best opportunity you have to build a long term loyal customer, when you can publicly fix and solve that problem. You’re more likely to build a loyal customer long term than if they came in and had an average experience that you never really knew about.” So a lot of people talk about customer experience and there’s a lot of ways to impact that. How does technology play a role in there?

David Eckoff: So technology can play a role in multiple ways. A couple of examples, and I’ve been paying a lot of attention to customer experience just as myself, as a customer, so I’ll talk about things from my own personal experience. I’m interested in hearing from your experience too, what you’ve seen. So technology, a couple of examples…I just ordered an item on amazon.com recently and before it had even arrived, the price had declined. I got in contact with Amazon and on the technology side, they’ve got something on their website where they make it easy to get in touch with them. They don’t just publish their phone number, but all you have to do is enter your phone number and click and bang, they call you right back.

Stone Payton: Oh that’s cool. I didn’t realize that.

David Eckoff: But it gets better, Stone. It gets better because at this point you can imagine as a customer I’m not too happy that the price went down. I didn’t even have the item yet. So I asked them “Could you issue me a refund for the difference.” And I didn’t really think they would but I figured it was worth talking to them anyway since they made it so easy to get in touch. And you know, they did. They said “Hold on. This particular item is with one of our divisions. We want to connect you to somebody from that division.” And of course what happened when the person connected me, they disconnected me. (laughter) So technology can have its ups and its downs but here’s where it gets really so much better is within a few seconds I got an email automatically kicked off to me from Amazon saying “We noticed you just had a customer service call with Amazon. Did this call resolve your problem? Click here for Yes. Click here for No.” So of course I clicked here for No. And then an amazing thing happened. They gave me the opportunity to call them back on line or they called me back and I was connected automatically. Because I clicked “No, the problem wasn’t resolved” I wasn’t just connected to a first line customer service rep. I was connected with a specialist who handled customer service problems that had not yet been resolved and she, on the spot fixed it.

Stone Payton: Nice.

David Eckoff: How impressive is that with technology to have that happen so quickly? And Amazon is clearly a company that’s thinking through that customer experience and how to win people over when things go wrong.

Todd Schnick: What do you think about Amazon buying Zappos?

David Eckoff: I’m a big fan of Zappos. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, he spoke at South by Southwest this year and I’ve been studying what he does and a couple of things that… we’ll talk about Zappos in a minute but how do I feel about it? I’m a passionate fan of Zappos. Zappos for those of you who don’t know, they’re an online ecommerce site, they’re primarily known for selling shoes but they’ve branched off in other things like clothing, accessories like sunglasses, etc. My own experience with Zappos, I went to buy a pair of sunglasses. They’re really cool sunglasses. I couldn’t wait to get them. Being the cheap SOB that I am, and as an entrepreneur, I did not put the most expensive shipping. I opted for the slowest shipping. And guess what? Zappos, one of the things they do for the customer experience, they want to wow people and they surprise upgraded me to overnight shipping. How cool was that?

It’s things like that that win customer loyalty. So it’s not just when things go wrong that you can win loyalty, but also it’s when things happen unexpectedly, positive surprises. So just in this room, how many of you like surprises?

Stone Payton: I do.

Todd Schnick: I do.

Stone Payton: Right.

David Eckoff: So Zappos is all about good surprises. At South by Southwest, so if you really want to understand how to do customer experience, you really want to study zappos.com. There are some great videos online from South by Southwest that you can watch. One thing I learned at South by Southwest from Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, is he talks about how Zappos doesn’t just sell shoes. They don’t think that they just sell shoes. Zappos sells happiness in a box. Put yourself in the position of the person who is ordering those shoes. Of course they want the shoes, but at the end of the day, what do they really want? They want to be happy. They want to feel happy. So Zappos makes sure that they sell happiness in a box.

Compare that to other businesses. Cold Stone Creamery, have you ever been there? It’s ice cream.

Todd Schnick: Yes.

David Eckoff: Do they sell ice cream? Of course they sell ice cream. As a customer do I go there and get ice cream? Sure. But at the end of the day what do they really sell.

Todd Schnick: Happiness in a cone. (laughter)

David Eckoff: Happiness in a cone or a cup. You got it. I spent some time this past week talking with the president of Cold Stone Creamery, Dan Beem, who’s a great guy and who has a great vision for their customer service and customer experience and he talked about how their goal is to WOW you at Cold Stone and to make sure… We talked about that with Zappos. He thought that was so cool. He was like “Happiness in a cone. Yeah. That’s it.”

Stone Payton: So you’re finding rock stars in this arena that are doing it well and that what? You’re going out to your client base and helping them replicate that success in helping them develop some of these strategies?

David Eckoff: Well Stone, I divide my time between a couple of things. One of them is that as a tech entrepreneur I’m developing and launching my own technology business. In fact today the open beta for my newest startup Spitter.com is launching.

Todd Schnick: That’s what I want to talk about.

David Eckoff: We’ll get to that in a minute. I figure less people are interested in Spitter unless they’re sports fans but spitter.com, think of it as a great place for sports fans to be able to get all the news and all the fan discussion. There’s so much of it and it’s so spread out over the web, we aggregate that into one easy to scan page stream. So think of it a little bit like sports, maybe a little bit like Twitter, that’s Spitter. That’s open data starting today at spitter.com. Great place for sports fans.

Stone Payton: I thought it was just solely dedicated to baseball when he said Spitter. I didn’t know. (laughter)

David Eckoff: The other part of what I do, I divide my time between that and I work with select high technology start ups, in particular high potential start-ups. I’ve worked with companies like Zazzle, Kleiner Perkins company in the Bay Area, youstream.tv which is kind of like youtube except it’s all about live streaming video. Great group of people over at youstream. And Chris Klaus here in Atlanta. Great local entrepreneur with 3D Virtual World Kaneva. I’m really impressed with what Kaneva is doing and Chris is an outstanding entrepreneur.

But I also work with them in some ways with customer experience but my focus on customer experience is really about learning best practices and going out and putting them into play in my own businesses. You mentioned social media before. Social media, you also mentioned Zappos. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, he’s on Twitter ALOT! More than anyone I know, he’s a Twitter rock star. So you guys are all on Twitter, right?

Todd Schnick: Yes.

Stone Payton: Yeah, I think so.

David Eckoff: And out there in radio land, if you’re not on Twitter really check it out. It sounds like the dumbest thing. I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of when I heard about it. Like “Why would you want to Tweet about what you’re doing?” But it turns out it’s an ultra powerful way to connect with people. Jack Welch, the CEO of former CEO of General Electric, even he’s on Twitter and he said something “Twitter makes me smarter.” Well, I’ve got a lot of respect for Jack Welch and when Jack Welch says “Twitter makes me smarter.” I think there’s something there.

Todd Schnick: The cool thing about Twitter is that people like you and I can connect with Tony Hsieh.

David Eckoff: Yeah.

Todd Schnick: He’s active. He’s very engaged in Twitter.

David Eckoff: And not only can you connect with him, but Tony Hsieh, how cool is this in terms of customer experience? He goes out there on Twitter and he says, this is like last year sometime, and he says “Hey, if you’re a Zappos fan and you’re going to be in Las Vegas anytime over this weekend” that’s where their company is headquartered “We’re having our company picnic on Sunday and we’d love for you to come by to our company picnic.” Now how amazing is this.

Stone Peyton: That rocks.

David Eckoff: If you’re a fan of the company and the CEO says if you’re going to be here come to our company picnic, I mean this is just like unprecedented.

Todd Schnick: It might be the coolest office working environment I’ve ever experienced or ever seen. If you ever get a chance to get online and see digital pictures of the Zappos headquarters in Las Vegas, it’s a pretty amazing place. Talk about building happiness, it’s a fun place to be.

David Eckoff: Not only can you see it online, but Tony makes this promise. If you come out to Las Vegas and you’re out there, get in touch with them and they’ll take you on a tour. They’ll even pick you up at your hotel and bring you there. This is a company that’s dedicated to building great relationships with their customers and I read that Jeff Bezos said he was so impressed with Zappos and how they do things and that’s one of the things that he liked a lot.

So what do I think about the purchase from Amazon, I think it was about 800 million roughly, I think that’s a great combination of companies. I’m a big fan of both companies.

Stone Payton: Okay so how does the guy with the little 3 million dollar consulting firm that really buys into that whole approach, what kinds of things does he do to replicate or she do to replicate that same type of practice that you see with the Amazons and the Zappos.

David Eckoff: I think it’s looking at each point of interaction that you have with your customers and looking at it from the customer experience. I’ll give you an example. Cold Stone Creamery, this is how I end up talking with Dan Beem, the president of Cold Stone last week… as I see things go right “I’m interested in understanding that and replicated it.” As I see things go wrong “I’m interested in understanding what things led to those things going wrong so we can learn from that and maybe avoid them.” So it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and there’s this one ice cream from Cold Stone that I just love. It’s a creation called Mud Pie Mojo and I’ll tell you what, I just love this Mud Pie Mojo.

Stone Payton: Sounds good. Sounds so good for you too. (laughter)

David Eckoff: I’m sure it is. Those folks on the air that know me know that I eat a lot of organic salads and I pretty healthy, but I’ve got a weakness for this Cold Stone Mud Pie Mojo. So all day long, on my birthday no less, I’m thinking of what? That Mud Pie Mojo and I’m just like “I can’t wait to get in there.” I looked up online at coldstonecreamery.com to see the little store near me what time are they open till. They’re open till 10:00 at least according to the website. I show up at 9:30 and the door to the store is locked. I reach out and pull the handle. I tried a couple of times. I tried it again a couple of times. And it’s still locked. Can you imagine the look on my face? And of course the people at Cold Stone Creamery employees are in there closing up and they’re like “We don’t want to open the doors.”

So, this is part of the customer experience. It’s not just when you’re in the store, not just when you’re getting ice cream in this case. It’s really the whole end to end customer experience. If you look at that WOW factor from Zappos that they’re trying to have, or from Amazon, you really don’t want to be disappointed customers like that, particularly not on their birthdays. On your birthday, you can spend your birthday anywhere. So out of the infinite number of places I could have spent my birthday, I decided to spend it with Cold Stone Creamery to get my Mud Pie Mojo.

I had a good conversation with Dan Beem about this and some lessons learned from this is Dan Beem, president of Cold Stone nationally, he has a vision for the customer experience that’s dramatically different than that. I think what we see there is one of the things that can go wrong it is the classic example of the executive and the executive team that has a vision for things being one way, but then the execution of that plan either being a lot different or a wide variation. It goes to show that it’s important, it’s critically important, to have the communication channels open so that you understand when things go wrong so you can make them right.

In this case I thought “I’m going on this radio show with Stone talking about customer experience. Let’s try this out. Let’s see if it happens like Amazon or not, just as an experiment. And what can I learn from this that I can go back and apply to my own businesses?” And here’s what I found…So Dan said that I have three lines of defenses or three pillars. The first thing is the person who’s at the front line. The person who’s the staff person making ice cream. They should be able to solve any problem and make things right on the spot. If that doesn’t happen then the store manager or the franchise owner should be able to handle things and turn things around on the spot. They want you to have a WOW experience, not a what happened experience. And the third line of defense is they have a national 800 number and you can call into and they should be able to solve things and turn things around on the spot.

My experience in this case is none of those three worked. All three of them failed. So again further disconnect between their vision and the actual execution. But having spent a lot of time with the folks from Cold Stone over the past week at an executive level to talk with them more about this and seek to understand how things are going with that, I have no doubt in my mind that they are absolutely committed to changing the execution of their plan. That’s impressive and I have a lot of good things to say about the folks from Cold Stone at the executive level and the focus they’re having.

So what can we do as entrepreneurs? I think it’s put yourself in the shoes of the customer. What does the customer really want? They’re looking for that happiness in a box, the happiness in an ice cream cone. I read this recently. I thought this was great…I wrote this down and highlighted it in yellow. I recommend that you write this down and highlight it in yellow yourself. Put it somewhere that you can see it.

Stone Payton: We’re going to record it. (laughter)

David Eckoff: Outstanding! “People don’t always remember what you say to them but they almost always remember how you made them feel.” So again people don’t always remember what you say to them, they don’t always remember what you do, but they almost always remember how they feel. So how do you want your customers to feel before, during and after their interactions with you?

I’d say start with that and then design everything in your execution to make that happen. Have some methods in place so you can know if that’s on target or not on target. A few ways that you can know if it’s on target or not on target is there’s something called Net Promoter Score. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this. This is a customer satisfaction measure. When I was at IBM, Steve you’re from IBM also, we put a lot of focus on customer satisfaction and measuring it. We measured it quarterly, we looked at the scores. We put a lot of focus on that. Well a funny thing, some smart consultants at Bain, Bain Consulting, studied us extensively. Statistically they found that customer satisfaction does not necessarily statistically correlate with profitable growth. That’s interesting.

What else might you want to focus on as a metric to measure? How about customer loyalty or intent to purchase? Well it turns out, none of these things statistically correlate to profitable growth. But the folks at Bain, these smart rocket science kind of guys, they did discover one metric. There is one metric that they found that consistently statistically correlated to profitable growth for the company. When I heard this and heard that GE is focused on this and I heard great companies like Intuit focused on this, I thought “Maybe I should learn about this and focus on this.” This metric is one thing. “Would you recommend this product or service to a colleague, family member or friend.” When you measure that, all you have to do is ask that one question and the follow up question was “Why do you feel that way?” If you can understand that you’ll know pretty much everything you needed to know.

Now a quantitative person like myself, MBA, so not just mega bad attitude but also the degree. (laughter) I put a lot of focus on measuring. I’m kind of a detail oriented person and so when I thought “You can only ask one question to find out everything you need to learn?”, that’s pretty amazing. I like the simplicity of that. It’s simple. It’s powerful. You can have that as an operating metric for your business.

But what does this mean for your business? The score is from ten to zero, ten being: Absolutely, you’d recommend to friends, zero being: not at all. How does this work? You take the percentage of people who said ten or nine, those are called promoters. Those are people that are out promoting your brand. You want these promoters. Then the people that are eight and sevens, these are neutral. Throw those numbers out. It’s not that they’re unimportant customers but they’re not promoters and nor are they the next step which is six, five, four, three, two, one, zeros. These are people who are detractors. These are people who are out, they’re so unhappy with you.

Stone Payton: We’ve got to hush them up. We’ve got to quiet them, right? (laughter)

David Eckoff: Well it’s not so much that you have to quiet them, we want to listen to what they have to say. There’s that great commercial from Direct TV, I think, where they’re poking fun at saying “Those customers who are trouble makers, we need to quiet them down” or something like that. Well it’s not so much we need to quiet them down, we need to learn from them. But we want to turn them from detractors into promoters, so turn things around.

But to use the metric you take the percentage who are promoters, minus the percentage who are detractors, that’s your net promoter score. A perfect growth engine for a company would be having what percentage promoters? One hundred percent. For every customer you bring in, they’re out recommending to friends and bringing more people in to your business. That’s a perfect growth engine. What would be a perfectly bad growth engine? What percentage being net promoters?

Todd Schnick: Zero.

David Eckoff: Zero. Correct. So Steve, a surprise to you? (laughter)

Stone Payton: Can you tell who in the audience is educated? I mean I’m really enamored with this concept. I’m really glad we decided to record the algebra. But we love the idea.

Todd Schnick: Yeah, we’re not into the math thing. That was a problem. (laughter)

David Eckoff: Do you know any companies that have perfectly bad growth engines with like 0% promoters? Or even like negative net promoter score meaning they’re creating more detractors than promoters on a daily basis. I know some companies, I know some entire industries like that.

Stone Payton: Huge government agencies maybe.

David Eckoff: Yeah, maybe industries like airlines. Maybe certain cable companies that should remain nameless at the moment. I think in all our experience we see this. What does that mean for business? It means you’re always having to spend a lot of money on marketing and you’re having to work really hard and spend a lot of money with marketing to attract new customers all the time because you have a leaky bucket that’s constantly losing customers. Why would you want to do that? Wouldn’t you prefer to have a bucket that’s constantly filled up with customers who are going out getting more customers.

So this is something that I’ve experimented with since I was at Real Networks in Seattle, implemented at Turner Broadcasting when I was VP for new product development at Turner. All my clients I work with use the net promoter score. Chris Klaus, a great entrepreneur here in Atlanta with keneva.com. When I explained that net promoter score to him, he’s a brilliant guy, he instantly saw the potential for this. As a consultant, one of the things that just makes your heart – you just feel really great, is when you make a recommendation and the client company actually goes out and does it and they do it in a big way. So they’ve put a lot of focus on the net promoter score. They’re learning. It becomes a metric, it’s a benchmark. And no matter what your score is, good, bad or indifferent, no matter what the score is, every quarter you try to increase it. So wherever you are, and just like in life, no matter where you are in life, keep improving. If you can improve just 1% everyday in anything you do, by the end of the year, just do the math on that, you’ll make tremendous gains. Same thing with net promoter score.

Todd Schnick: I love this concept. Let me tell you, David, an example of how one of my clients puts it in action. I do marketing for a local restaurant and we solicit customer feedback. We have cards on the tables and they are invited to fill those out and put them in the confidential box. It’s my job to go through those and measure and quantify the data. Every now and then someone has an experience that’s not up to their satisfaction. We naturally take steps to address that and solve that problem. But fortunately for us, more often than not people say “This was a wonderful experience and we’re going to tell all our friends about it.” Well we take steps to encourage that. We then just don’t say “Thanks.” We send them Buy One Get One Free cards and we thank them and we take other steps. We don’t just want to reward people who are complaining. We want to reward people and say “We’re going to take the next step and help facilitate them to be promoters.” So it’s a phenomenal concept. So I thank you for sharing that with us.

David Eckoff: I really like that and as we were talking about you put a lot of focus on listening to your customers, there are two companies I wanted to call out as great examples that I’ve seen during the past year. I’ve worked with them as customers myself. They provide a great example I think we all can model. They’re both on Twitter. One of them is Dell, Dell Computers and the other is Comcast. So I’ve got to say my experience with both of those companies with their standard customer service channel has been abysmal. Michael Dell are you listening?

Comcast, I already know you’re not really listening but…

Stone Payton: They’d listen on Twitter though, right?

David Eckoff: But standard customer service channels are so abysmal. Everyone I talked with in preparation for this radio show asking about companies that do it right and companies that don’t, I mean there are certain companies that happen pretty often to come up in conversation, but those two, their standard customer service needs a lot of work. But they’ve got some folks who are pioneers doing some great things. So at Dell, Richard Bernier, who’s on Twitter at rich_@_dell. Rich, though I had some issues that weren’t being resolved and I said “You know what? I bet Dell has got some folks in social media. I’ll get in touch with them and see if they can help?” Rich is just out there on Twitter all day long and what’s he doing? He’s looking for people who have problems with Dell computers and their Dell experience and he’s like, along with the rest of his team, he’s helping people one at time to solve their problems.

Stone Payton: How cool is that?

Todd Schnick: That’s great.

David Eckoff: So when I had problem with my laptop and standard channels weren’t helping, in fact it was a miserable experience, he said “You know what? I’m going to help you get this done and here’s how we’re going to do it.” And I thought that was tremendous.

And Comcast, a company that I just gotta wonder with their standard customer service, they’ve got somebody who is like that. I think everyone of our companies needs someone like this. At Comcast, they’re on Twitter at comcastcares. His name is Frank Eliason and he is Director of Digital Ecare. If you just say anything about Comcast like “I’m having a problem with Comcast.” So last night, the season premier of Mad Men was on, so one of the people on Twitter who I follow was having some problems with his Comcast service and he’s upset because he’s not going to be able to see Mad Men. He put something into Twitter of course saying “You know, problems with Comcast.” What happens next is something that completely surprised him. Comcastcares on Twitter gets back in touch with him, just out of the blue, they’re monitoring what’s going on Twitter with the conversations looking for opportunities to help customers and they said “How can we help.”

Stone Payton: That is awesome. David we’re about to run out of time but before we let you go, a couple of things. One, how can people get in touch with you to learn more about your work, about innovation in customer experience and maybe apply some of these ideas and strategies to their own work. What’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

David Eckoff: You can get in touch with me via email at davideckoff@gmail.com. That’s D-A-V-I-D-E-C-K-O-F-F @gmail.com or my blog davideckoff.com or you can check me out on Twitter. On Twitter I’m davideckoff.

Stone Peyton: Or just howl at the moon and you’ll be there, right? (laughter)

David Eckoff: Something like that and I do monitor Twitter for people talking about me and I’ve got alerts on Google if you mention my name out on line, I’ll see it and I’ll be in touch. I like to be real accessible and would love to hear from folks and talk business.

So I’ll leave with this closing thought. Another area where companies seem to go wrong is with, and I see this, is how they treat their employees. Think about this. How you treat your employees, your employees will never treat your customers any better than you treat your employees.

Stone Payton: Wow. You’re so right.

David Eckoff: So raise the bar on how you treat your employees. Zappos does a great job with that. Amazon does a great job with that, and many other companies. If you’re looking to have those WOW experiences for your customers, think about how you treat your employees and that can make a big difference.

Stone Payton: Well said. Hey one last thing. We’d love to put you on the hot seat for a moment if we can. Of course you heard us as we were asking Steve Bistritz to share a mistake that he’s made at some point in his career and what he learned from it. Could we get you to do that? A personal mistake that you’ve made in your career and what you’ve learned from it.

David Eckoff: Yeah. Since we’re talking customer experience, do I have 60 seconds to tell the story?

Stone Payton: You’re good. Go ahead.

David Eckoff: Okay. So I just told someone about this the other day. It’s kind of funny I think for customer experience. So I used to publish a sports magazine called Inside Carolina, covered University of North Carolina basketball and football. A great way to go to a lot of games and a great fun business to have. It actually put me in an entirely different path in my career that I never could have anticipated. But I owned the domain name northcarolina.com, a pretty sweet domain name to have.

Stone Payton: Yeah, really.

David Eckoff: By owning the domain name northcarolina.com, surprising things happen. You get people who are thinking about going to the Outer Banks on vacation. They email you, just email into info@northcarolina.com “Can you tell me about the Outer Banks.” Or little Timmy in Jr. High is doing a book report and he emails info@northcarolina.com saying “Can you tell me the state bird of North Carolina.” (laughter) People say “I’m moving to North Carolina, can you tell me more about housing?” And I’m thinking can’t they see on the website that it’s a sports website. It’s about basketball and football. They don’t see this? So then I put down frequently asked questions, I actually put answers to “What is the state bird?” “What is the state capital?” “What’s the population?” “Tell me how to get in touch with people about travel and tourism, etc.”

Stone Payton: (laughter) That’s funny.

David Eckoff: Everyday these would come in, everyday for like seven years. By the end of seven years this was starting to be kind of comical. Except I really didn’t have a lot of time to be dealing with all these questions. I did my best to point them in the right direction. Well one day I got an email from someone and it was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I must have been real busy and aggravated that day and who knows what and she asked me a question about the Andy Griffith show which is set in North Carolina. I thought “It’s a sport site. She’s asking me a question about the Andy Griffith show? Are you kidding me?” And against all the best judgment I hit reply and I wrote a scathing email back and hit send. Of course you never want to do that but after seven cumulative years of entering little Timmy’s book report questions and…

Stone Payton: They wore you down, huh?

David Eckoff: Two minutes later I got an email back from this person who is probably like a senior citizen and it’s probably like her first time getting on the internet or doing email and she said “You don’t sound like a very nice person.” (laughter) I felt so badly and I wrote back to her and made that right afterwards. The lesson learned from that is everyone has a reason why they do things. Some times the reasons don’t make sense to us but there’s always a reason and I think having empathy for other people and treating other people as you’d want them to treat you, no matter what the situation, is the way to go. It’s something we all know and sometimes I think the lesson learned is that even when you’re in the most stressful situations, take a deep breath, think about how you respond because there is a real person on the other end of that even in the impersonal communication channels that happen online. I think I come across pretty sociable most of the time but it really showed that every interaction that we have with people, everyone one of them, is a real human being on the other side of that no matter what the experience is. I think we want to have our actions consistent with how we’d want our own personal brand known. My own personal brand I’m really looking for people to have those WOW experiences and for people to say “That was spectacular.” So your execution has to be consistent with your vision. I’ll throw that out there as a time something didn’t go right, but I’ve hopefully turned that around.

Stone Payton: Well for what its worth, David, having you on the show today has definitely been a WOW experience. We have thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope you’ll come back sometime.

Todd, anything else to add? What did you think about this show?

Todd Schnick: Oh, it was a good one. It was a good one. I look forward to listening to it again. Two wonderful bright guests.

Stone Payton: Well we have to go back and listen to the Algebra anyway, right?

Todd Schnick: That’s just not worth my time. (laughter)

Stone Payton: Until next time this is Stone Payton, Todd Schnick and the entire Radio X family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.

SAN FRANCISCO – I attended the Social Gaming Summit this week, and here is a digest of the most interesting things that I learned.

• Justin Smith, editor of Inside Facebook gave a state of the industry. He defines social games as “casual games designed to be played with friends on online social platforms.”
• Facebook has created an environment where there is no catalog, therefore “quality drives distribution.” (With no distributor, users are responsible for distribution.)
• The web is the gaming platform, therefore the cost of production can be lower.
• iPhones and other smart phones will make social gaming more accessible for people who have time on the go (vs. in front of a desktop).
• Because there isn’t yet a social network imbedded in the mobile experience, distribution is more important. Much of the distribution from iPhone is driven by the Top 25 list.
• Sebastian de Halleux of Playfish says: “For us, Facebook is the gaming platform. iPhone is an access device to that gaming platform.”
• Companies like Zynga focus on cross promotion between games in their network. But it isn’t required for success. de Halleux notes that a game like Restaurant City achieved 5 million users in 5 weeks.
• Most important: quality is the key driver, along with a link to invite a friend to the game.
• As Jeremy Liew, of Lightspeed Venture Partners summarized: “Manipulating users to spam their friends is less powerful and effective than building a game experience that users will willingly tell their friends about.”
• Zynga is ultra focused on metrics. In contrast, Playfish is ultra focused on fun. de Halleux notes that when everyone in the company can only do one thing, play the game all the time (!) they know they have the right game. In the end, “quality is the driver of distribution,” says de Halleux.
• If you design a game in which it is more fun to have your friends involved, it drives distribution.
• According to Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, social games need to do 3 things: 1. Give you a feeling of playing with your real friends; 2. Give a way to express yourself (about your unique personality); and 3. Give players the opportunity to invest in the game over time and have something of value.
• Demographics: While the industry has sold to the same demographic, male age 25, de Halleux says that Playfish demographics are 50/50 M/F, and age 18-34. Most don’t talk about them as “games”, but rather as social experiences with their friends (“I just spend 2 hours decorating my restaurant with friends.”)
• de Halleux says that games are not a science and that fun cannot be modeled. “There is chemistry with small teams of developers with full creative freedom to do something that will impact millions of people. “
• When games go live is when the real work starts. This marks a long relationship between the user base and the developer team. Weekly releases nurture the game, and it is essential to listen to what the audience wants.
• Pincus talked about the phenomena in which people are spending more money on virtual Christmas tree ornaments than on real Christmas tree ornaments. His theory is that people are increasingly disconnect from their friends in real life and they are staying in touch by social networks, so relatively few people see their real Christmas trees. In contrast, many people see their virtual Christmas trees.
• As a culture, we’ve used up all the time we have, we don’t have any unallocated time. Social games enable people to have fun and justify that time by staying in touch with friends. The analogy: each touch point is keeping another spinning plate spinning.

Photo credit: Via Mike Trigg, Hi5.

RELATED LINKS:

• Social Gaming Summit: In-Depth On The State Of Social Gaming (Gamasutra)
• Crowdsourced Summary: 70 Tweets that Summarize it All (@MayankDhingra)
• In recession, social gaming comes of age (VentureBeat)
• Metrics for Social Games (Presentation slides by Siqi Chen and David King)
• Social Gaming – Where’s The (Creator) Fun? (Gamasutra)
• Social Gaming, Virtual Goods Discussed In SF Summit (Virtual Game News)
• Observations from the Social Gaming Summit (Mike Trigg)

BONUS: State of the Industry…

• Justin Smith, editor of Inside Facebook gave a state of the industry, with some interesting stats.
• 14,000+ games on Facebook in the past two years.
• Usage distribution across those games: 5,000 games have 1+ monthly player; 1,000 games have 1,000+ monthly players; 300 games have 10,000+ monthly players; 100 games have 100,000+ monthly players; 30 games have 1,000,000+ monthly players; and 3 games have achieved 10,000,000+ monthly players.
• Companies make money by a combination of user payments, offers (from third party companies such as Offerpal, Super Rewards, Peanut Labs, AdParlor, Gambit, and Sometrics), sponsored items (advertiser pays for distribution) and ads.
• ARPUs: Top rates are $1.00-$2.00/month; and a good MySpace ARPU tends to beat Facebook ARPU’s ($0.60-$0.70/month vs. $0.30-$0.40/month).
• Direct payments are increasing share of total revenues.
• Top industry trends: free to play games on social networks, however a crowded monetization ecosystem; companies are focusing on monetization earlier; new games are bridging mobile and social; and copycat IP issues continue to be an issue.

]]> http://davideckoff.com/2009/06/social-gaming-summit-what-i-learned.html/feed 2 http://davideckoff.com/2008/09/google_at_10_my_qa_with_mariss.html http://davideckoff.com/2008/09/google_at_10_my_qa_with_mariss.html#comments Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:28:13 +0000 David Eckoff http://davideckoff.com/?p=117

I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, and with Apple’s scheduled iPod announcements today, here’s what Marissa had to say about Apple and Steve Jobs.

DAVID ECKOFF: I understand you admire Steve Jobs and Apple, how do you study and model Apple?

MARISSA MAYER: One of the things I do on the side of the Search Products business, is I run an associates program. I hire people right out of school with computer science degrees and teach them how to be good product mangers in the Google sense. Part of being a good product manager is being able to think and talk about and launch your products.

We do a series of field trips during the year and one of the field trips is to Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote in January where he unveils a lot of the products for that half of the year.

And it’s really interesting, because it’s almost like a football coach watching the opposing team and trying to break it down into X’s and O’s. On the bus back from San Francisco, we’ll break down, how did he talk about that, what worked, what was clever about it. A lot of insights can come out of that in terms of what can help build excitement about a product, what can build understanding.

There’s a lot of interesting insights the team has had into the way he talks about products and how he makes really complicated principles easily understandable.

DAVID ECKOFF: Are there any other companies you study who you think do a great job with innovation?

MARISSA MAYER: I think 3M is a great company where it is clear they do a lot to incent new innovation and ideas. We look a lot at start ups. How people are incented. How they guarantee a fast innovation cycle.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credits: Marissa Mayer: dfarber; Steve Jobs: Danny Novo

Related posts:

I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’m publishing excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: If you were to go to work at a company more mature in it’s lifecycle, what would be your approach to innovation and new product development?

MARISSA MAYER: I think a couple of things transcend. I think 20% time, letting your employees know that you trust them and that they’re empowered to work on the things that they think could have the biggest impact on the business or that they think could be most impactful for the world is an important idea and I think works largely everywhere.

And there are key elements that we look at in terms of overall metrics and trends that you want to coach the organization towards. One of them is small teams.

When I joined Google, there were 9 engineers and we organized in 3 teams of 3. And we knew we were going to add 9 engineers by year end, so there’d be 18 of us. And Larry and Sergey said, “You know what? By year end, we don’t want to have 3 teams of 6, we want to have 6 teams of 3. Let’s keep the core team at the size 3. Because if we have twice as many engineers, we don’t want to be doing all the same things twice as well, we want to be doing twice as many things.”

So there’s a conscious decision to sacrifice some element of quality and polish for the sake of doing more things and having more of a breadth of efforts going on.

The other nice benefit this has is it keeps the culture much more entrepreneurial and much more motivated. Because when you’re working on a smaller team you have a much greater sense of ownership. You’re not sitting there thinking, “If I don’t do X today, someone else will pick up the slack or it can wait for tomorrow.” Because it’s important enough for one of the 4 of you to do it. Or it’s not. So I think by creating a culture that has those small teams, you’re much more likely to get innovation.

That’s true in start ups, that’s true in large companies.

And then there’s the concept of leapfrogging. We’ve noticed that as Google has matured as a company, some teams, while they may be structured in smaller teams within them, they’re large teams. Our search team is a large team. We have more people working on search now than ever. The same is true for ads.

What we’ve noticed there is when we add a small disrupter team, that’s supposed to think about things in a new and different way, two bad things happen.

One, the large, experienced, mature team wants to talk with the disrupter team, and say, “I know that seems like a good idea, because it seemed like a good idea to us too. But we tried it, and it was a waste of a year. So please, don’t bother to do that. Skip that idea and move onto the next thing. So they’re trying to influence what the disrupter team does.

The other thing that happens is usually that big team is successful, and they have a lot of tools and infrastructure that the disrupter team wants to draft off of. So as a result, in a big company with a large successful team, it’s difficult for the disrupter team not to get sucked into the larger team over time.

So what we started doing as we rolled out leapfrog initiatives, we structure them organizationally and from a communication standpoint where they’re out of touch with the core team. They’re in a different reporting structure, a different engineering VP. And also physically diverse.

We’ve had a bunch of attempts at leapfrogs, such as in search, with a team in Kirkland trying to build a better search engine than Google itself. And I’m not allowed to talk with them [laughter]. And that’s a good thing, because I know they’re wasting time. I know they’re doing things we tried that just don’t work [laughter].

I’d love to talk with them and I’d love to save them that effort. But that very action of me doing that would ultimate change their outcome and change how disruptive they can be. So it’s really important that I not talk to the Kirkland search leapfrog and let them do their thing.

And who knows, maybe they’ll build a better search engine. But we do think that with a few years under their belt that they will have different features and different ideas that maybe could stand on their own and be stronger than Google itself. Or maybe it [the features] should be folded into the main search engine after they reach a level of maturity and have proven their value. We have similar efforts in Maps and Advertising.

Again, you want to keep a small team. But you also want a disrupter to be far enough away that they don’t get overly influenced or voluntarily pulled into the larger, more successful team.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credit: eirikso

Related posts:

I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’m publishing excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: Could you talk about the product management process at Google, how you go from idea to product, a high level overview?

MARISSA MAYER: Every product has its own genesis. But we gather ideas from all over the company. Some of the ideas are top down, us realizing we have strategic holes in what we’re offering our end users. A lot of the ideas are bottoms up, engineers and other employees coming up with ideas and prototypes of what they’d want to build.

From there, there definitely are phases of a product.

For example, a prototype at Google is worth 100,000 words. It’s one thing to talk to someone about an idea; it’s a whole other thing to be able to show a series of mock ups and/or a functioning website that illustrates your idea.

From there we try to put a small team on it, sometimes a volunteer effort with what we call 20% time. 20% time is a notion we have at Google that we want employees to work on whatever they want to work on regardless of it is part of their core assignment with about 20% of their time. So some of the times the prototype is developed voluntarily, other time by a small team. But generally it’s a couple of individuals who develop the prototype.
And then we launch it. We try to send it out to Google Labs as quickly as we can.

We try to launch early and often and then change the product, iterate it based on user feedback, adding more resources as something gains strength and popularity.

DAVID ECKOFF: What kind of return on investment do you see with 20% time?

MARISSA MAYER: We call it 20% time, that’s our slogan that provides our employees with a creative license to know they are empowered to spend 20% of their time to do whatever it is they feel most passionately about. Because we believe it is that kind passion that creates really great and beautiful products. At the end of the day it’s about building something that you think will be particularly powerful.

What we’ve found is that often supports the core and gives us a disproportionate return on investment.

Someone once asked me to quantify the outputs of 20% time, and I looked over our launch calendar which had all our historic launches for a 6 month period, tagging where the different ideas came from. And we realized over that 6 month period, over 50% of the products and features that had launched, came from 20% time. So it was disproportionate by a factor of about two and a half. So for us, it is very worthwhile.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credit: jwowens

Related posts:

I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview with Marissa Mayer of Google last year, filmed before a live studio audience. Marissa leads Google’s product management efforts on search products. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’ll be publishing more excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: What cultural attributes makes Google special when it comes to innovating and developing new products?

MARISSA MAYER: People like to question the status quo and they like to think about doing things in new audacious ways. If the standard in the industry is to give away 4-6MB of mail space, let’s not make it 20 MB of space, let’s give them a gig.

Try to have big and audacious goals for how to do something and how to approach new problems. Larry and Sergey will talk about, as we start off new ideas within the company, we really want a new idea to have a billion dollar revenue run rate opportunity. That doesn’t mean we think about monetization all the time, what we really think about are the end users and what they ultimately want. But we want them to be big opportunities, things that really matter to people that they will use every day. Because when you work on really big important problems that matter and that are fundamentally useful to people’s everyday lives, you’ll find a way to monetize them. Either it will be so valuable that users will pay for a subscription and/or there will be a way to have advertising.

DAVID ECKOFF: Google has seen tremendous growth in the number of employees. How do you maintain the culture of the company?

MARISSA MAYER: I started when there were 18 people and now there are about 18,000 people. I think we were very lucky when we were small, the people we hired were all likeminded they were all interested in working on products that mattered they all wanted to do good things for the world and work on problems and projects that their friends and family would use every day. As a result, we had a very stable culture then.

As new hires come, you make small talk with new employees. I’d ask “What drew you to Google?” At around 1200 employees, I heard this interesting answer I’d never gotten before: “the culture.” I thought, that’s such an odd reason to go to a company. For me graduating from school and deciding to go to Google, it was about working on really interesting problems involving artificial intelligence and how it gets applied to search. It was the intellectual challenge that drew me to Google. So going for the culture seemed like an odd answer. But then I started hearing that answer all the time. And I noticed as we went from about 1200 employees to 1500 employees, almost 50% of the new people I talked with started citing the culture.

And I realized that the culture was having a very interesting reinforcing effect. There’s the point of maintaining stability up to 1200 employees. But once we hit 1200 employees, the culture became very self reinforcing. Because when you have a majority of employees joining a company for the culture, the last thing those employees want to do when they arrive is change it or screw it up. They came there to experience it, to participate in it, to benefit from it. And as a result, the culture has become very stable.

I think that what one of the most stunning things is how similarly motivated the early Googlers are to today’s Googlers. The conversations that happen every night around the foosball table or in the snack kitchens, you hear the same kind of aspirational language: what could Google do, what would be possible, what’s interesting in technology and how could we combine that with the infrastructure we’re building? What would be a big and audacious goal in this area? Those same conversations happen every night. The people who come now are inspired by the same principles that we had early on.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credit: Esthr

Related posts:

This Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, I will be a judge for the semi-finals of the GRA/TAG 2008 Business Launch Competition.

Applicants, then semifinalists, then finalists are competing for a prize that includes a $100,000 cash award and services valued at an additional $200,000, for a total grand prize of $300,000.

This event is conducted by the The Georgia Research Alliance and the Technology Association of Georgia with the goal of supporting the creation and growth of new technology companies in Georgia.

In addition to the cash and services award, entrants have an option to work with a mentor to further develop and refine their business plan. A group of Georgia’s most successful high tech entrepreneurs has agreed to serve as mentors.

A preeminent panel of judges consisting of business leaders, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists includes:

Semi Final Judges: