Now the idea of calculating how much money Trade Me makes may not fill most with a sense of fun, but I have to confess it’s something that I did for fun way back in the day, and then did for real while working at Trade Me. We liked to ask potential business oriented candidates how much they thought Trade Me was worth – but the usefulness of that question fell apart after the sale.

But the wording is a bit iffy on that ad. I’m confused – do I include a photo of me on the back of an envelope with the working of how much money Trade Me makes?

or do I take a photo of an envelope which has my workings on the back?

or do I just put any old photo on the back of an envelope and include my workings?

or do I include a photo of an envelope with workings on the envelope inside my CV?

Whatever it is I feel that this is a test I would fail spectacularly (and now have). The model bit is easy (it’s the one in the pictures) but the instructions are a nightmare.

But if you can figure it out, and are qualified, then I would recommend applying for the CFO role at Trade Me. There’s an IPO to get through, quarterly reports to the market and all sorts of awesome people that work there.

Not many have. Just 6500 visitors a day visit Autotrader, a lot less than the over 140,000 per day average that visit Trade Me Motors.

Autotrader lost because everything was just too hard and too expensive. Their business practices were inherently expensive and unfair to dealers, and the process was painful to sellers and customers versus the ease of Trade Me. They were unable to adapt to the arrival of the internet, and when Trade Me deigned to pay attention to the market they soon faded away.

Ticketek is in the same situation. They sell 10 million tickets each year across in Australia and New Zealand, and do so in a way that seems to make people hate them. I certainly resent ever having to give any money to Ticketek – they seem to go out of their way to make the buying experience painful and expensive.

You represent a band. Go ahead – get Ticketek to represent you. Start with the website.

I can’t find a way. It seems Ticketek signs venues not acts, but even as a venue I can’t find a way into that site. And there is plenty else wrong with that page, even if you like a lot of blue. The logo refers to Ticketek.com, which is a gateway site – ther eis no real site at Ticketek.com, just some faded dreams.

The links at the top of the homepage are over two lines and with two different designs. Moreover they link to MSN, Bing, and, incredibly, Autotrader.

The buying process is disingenuous. First there is the note underneath ticket pricing that states “service fee may apply.”

What it should say is “We should include our outrageous fees in the advertised price under NZ law, but this little sticker says we don’t have to. Oh – and we’re kidding when we imply that fees may apply – fees always apply”

The first fee is delivery fee, which you have to pay as there is no online option:

Because it costs $8 to print a ticket out and put it into a stamped envelope. Automatically. And it costs  $8000 to hire people and print tickets for the 1000 tickets that people pick up at the venue.

Finally there are all the other fees. I declined to find out what they were because I had to register to continue – and was confronted with this screen of transaction death:

Enough.

Ticketek dominates the space because they have the contracts with the event holders sewn up. Their usability and values can be horrific but if their venues get the acts we want to see, then we will suffer accordingly.

But Autotrader used to have all of the motor vehicle dealers sewn up as well. Trade Me, through Autobase, had to approach every one of them – and slowly they moved away until the floodgates opened. They moved away because Autobase and Trade Me were easier to deal with, cheaper and a lot more effective at selling cars.

Enter EventFinder. They have been around for a bit, and it’s a friendly experience to use their site as a buyer:

They charge just $2 service fee for this Phoenix Foundation gig.

However they still want me to register, though the screen is not so intimidating.

So I gave up as well. I won’t get to see the SF bath house just yet.

A quick aside – a while ago I wrote about not making customers register as they go through the buying process, using Ascent as the case study. Well MightyApe actually tried this out after reading that article, and saw sales rise by a significant percentage. (Dylan said I could not quote the actual percentage, but it was a good one).

If you’ve read this far and you have a register screen on your site before allowing customers to buy, then why not A/B test this? Give it a go, and do let me know down the track how it works out for you.

I suggest the folks at EventFinder try it as well. The trick is to ask only for the details you need to deliver a ticket, and to do that at the last possible moment of the transaction. Get my email address for sending the voucher, my street address for the credit card authorisation and that’s it. When all is done you can whether I would like to add a password to save details for next time. Don’t call it registration though. You can separately ask whether I want to be spammed, I mean, added to your email lists.

Anyway – the feel of EventFinder is a lot lot better than Ticketek, but the real news is that they have made it dead easy for event providers to sell tickets. Introducing EventFinderPro, which is at the url of SellTicketsOnline.co.nz for now.

It feels right. It feels fair.

It seems the sites are providing a better service to sellers, lowering the costs of delivering that service and providing a massively better customer experience for buyers. (They syndicate the event listings through several other sites) They are aiming at the smaller sellers first, but getting increasingly professional. Sound familiar?

They charge sellers $1 per ticket sold. I have not reconciled that with the $2 that the customer is charged for the Phoenix tickets though. Will they still charge customers that fee?

They are implying that Ticketek is taking money from sellers in a variety of ways, and not all of them pleasant. Meanwhile EventFinder is front and center about their value proposition to sellers and are attacking Ticketek at the point of customer pain:

On EventFinder free means free. I hate to think what comped tickets cost on Ticketek.

EventfinderPro also seems to have lovely tracking charts for sellers, and pay the next day. They also appear to be able to ramp up their product for bigger venues – with scanners and the like available. I’d use them if I had an event to sell.

So Eventfinder seems cheaper, faster, simpler and a darn sight more fun to deal with than Ticketek.

While Ticketek has the venue market now, they have been treating buyers and sellers poorly, and the tide of frustration is getting ready to break. If Eventfinder plays this right, and Ticketek, as I suspect, are institutionally incapable of changing, then it is just a matter of time. They can rect, but that reaction will need to be to move to where EventFinder alredy is, and they will see a loss of revenue as they do it. The alternative is to hang on to a business that slowly fades away.

Ticketek has just 225 venues across Australia and New Zealand, and it will get progressiviely easy to switch those venues over to EventFinder as time goes by. EventFinder will need a strong sales effort and patience to make this happen.

EventFinder’s cost to serve venues is lower, and they take less money from customers and venues and their website makes it easier to buy and sell tickets. If they win they will help reduce the real cost of tickets for customers, put more dollars in the hands of venues and acts and fill the clubs and stadiums. And wouldn’t that be a good thing.

At some stage the economic model of Ticketek will collapse, they will thankfully disappear, and we can all start going to concerts again.

However Trade and Exchange were the Trade Me of their day. They seized an opportunity to grab and extend the classifieds market away from newspapers, and in doing so created a large business and a headache for the papers.

Then Trade Me then seized the opportunity to grab and extend T&E’s business, and finally Fairfax completed the circle when they purchased Trade Me to get their old line of business back.

On the way through T&E and Trade Me the classified’s business grew tremendously in size and usefulness, to become the e-commerce engine of New Zealand.

There are a number of lessons to be learned:

1. Don’t be afraid of destroying your own business by launching a new one. If you don’t then someone else will.
2. If you accept that you are not capable of destroying your own business, then pull out your check book when it looks like someone else will. Once you have purchased them then leave them alone and let them grow independently of your own systems and processes.
3. Know when to lose – exit a market when you stop making money, and not a moment before of after.\

(disclosure – I’ve consulted Trade Me, Fairfax and WAN’s Quokka)

There is a great summary of everyone over on Shadowfoot’s blog.

Unfortunately (for me and for the audience) I was also asked to give a 5 minute talk, and as I was placed last I had to follow in some big footprints. I was filled with confidence after there was a cheer as I was introduced, before I realised that it was because I was introduced as “the last speaker before the drinks”.

I’m re-writing what I spoke about at Webstock from an early version of my notes. Sadly I don’t have the annotated notes from the event, so I am missing some of the extra pieces that I had gleaned from previous speakers.

Choosing your own topic is a peculiar type of torture – so I asked organiser all round good person Natasha for advice, and she informed me, and I quote verbatim, that she was expecting:

“a ballet recital followed by your rendition of Broadway show tunes followed by your 5 min talk on why Tash is awesome”

I’d left my tutu behind, so instead I chose instead to to add a bit of context to the last time I was up in front of a similar audience – when I affirmed with two sturdy comrades in arms at Foo Camp that “The Future of New Zealand is Fucked”. It was a convincing display by our team, but sadly the audience voted with their hearts – indicating that they preferred to believe the opposition.

So I decided to join the crowd, and spoke this time about “Why are we here?”.

Not “why are we here?” in the Dalai Lama, Catholic Church or Douglas Adams sense, but “Why are we here in New Zealand, in Wellington and at the Webstock event (or even reading this blog)”

I believe that we have a choice in all of these matters (except you Mum – you have to read my blog, even if you don’t actually do so)

By definition, anyone that has the get up and go to attend Westock, to read blogs and twitter about what is going on, also has the get up and go to do so – to leave New Zealand and head for the gold paved roads of the UK, USA, Europe and Kathmandu.

Indeed many of us do, including myself. I’ve been offshore several times now, the first time lasting about 10 years, and the last few times a year or two each.

So why do we come back, why do we stay?

After all in New Zealand, and in Wellington in particular there are three compelling reasons not to be here:

The weather sucks. It really does. As I draft this on Saturday morning the rain is lashing against the house, Cook Strait is closed to the Ferrys and the latest flight from Sydney was diverted to Auckland. Meanwhile in Perth it’s sunny and warm, in Europe summer is nigh and we are consigned to short days, rain and cold.

We are miles away from anywhere - we were the last decent place to be permanently colonized by humans (discarding Pitcairn Island and Antarctica), 4 hours away from Australia and 10 hours way from anywhere interesting (11 from Wellington).

And we have a crappy Internet connection to the rest of the world, a connection seemingly controlled by rent maximising companies (shame on you Telecom) rather than stakeholders determined to open up access to the rest of the world.

It means I’m cold, days and too many dollars away from the great friends I have around the world and my broadband sucks.

And yet, and yet – I am still here – we all are. Why is that?

Again, I believe there are three answers: The weather really sucks, we are miles away from anywhere and we are connected to the rest of the world through a crappy internet line.

In New Zealand, and in Wellington more than anywhere, we expect the unexpected. This Saturday morning the weather forecast was all doom and gales, but some friends and I grabbed and hour of relative stillness to go for a quick bike ride. Meanwhile the day before the Webstock bash, the weather was shake your house from the foundations wash the green off the leaves horrible, and yet canny Wellingtonians knew to put suntan lotion on, for lo and behold it was crisply perfect that afternoon.

It means that when Vaughan Rowsell decided to go for a bike ride back in January, he didn’t wait until next summer, but took off for an April to June journey- knowing it was going to be cold, wet and miserable at times. He’s (almost there) succeeded. It’s the same urge that will guide hundreds of motorcyclists (myself included) to ride to the Brass Monkey this weekend, which is in freezing central Otago and deliberately held at around about the time of the year when the first big dumps of snow come through.

All this adds up to a people that are ready for anything, that accept no excuses and just get stuff done, regardless of what else is going on.

You can see it when we Kiwis land work in London, study in the USA, crew boats in the Med and work in charitable organisations in Africa. Kiwis arrive and depart with a deserved reputation for being able to handle anything and everything with no fuss.

Our society helps create these people with an excellent education system, a great social welfare system that means we are kept healthy, off the streets and trained, and political parties and a system that generally allows logic and fairness to guide decisions rather than a hackneyed partisanship system. Generally.

A word on education. Not only do we have places like Wellington’s Massey Design School, which is a truly great place, but more importantly we have a very high average level of education, and a very high 10th percentile level of education. That is – the least educated amongst us are far better off than their equivalents in other countries.

I’m not trusting comparative statistics for this – I’m trusting the excellent service levels across all sorts of organisations, from airlines to banks, rental car companies to restaurants and lunch bars that we receive relative to other countries. While the systems may sometimes (often) be less than stellar, invariably the people are polite, smart and able to deal with a variety of situations.

And finally that lousy wet weather means that we live in a beautiful place, one that encourages us to get out and enjoy it, and that attracts others from around the world to do the same.

So we are resourceful and smart, a fair people, have a decent corruption free society and we can do anything.

And yet we live miles away from anywhere

Not for us the intense deal making and energy of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where anything is possible and nothing is too expensive.

However that vast distance also means that we avoid the Wall Street of today, the excesses that crushed an economy and the deal making and loans to business and individuals that abruptly halted.

And while we do leave New Zealand by the thousands to take advantage of London and New York, we gain valuable experience overseas and then we bring it back – either on loan when kiwi stars appear at conferences and on boards, or more permanently when we return home.

We come back because it is home, but also because it is easy to live and do business here. It’s trivially easy to start a business, to open bank accounts and to pay tax here.

We have thriving local competition, even amongst start-ups. We have DonateNZ and Givealittle, Thinksmall, MadefromNZ and Bizchat, Fishpond and Mightyape, Phil & Teds and Mountain Design Buggies, and the Jobs Summit, Foo Camp and Entrepreneurs Summit.

We all want to give it a go, and that competition means that the winners (be they a single winner or, often, a merged entity) combine to be a great, and hopefully, export led company.

To be sure we also have our problems, stuck here at the end of the world, but we are pretty good at identifying them, and we are pretty good at marshaling attention and energy on them until they are fixed. The number of pre-emptive summits for the economic crisis, the reports and government moves on the lousy broadband, the likes of Cactus Kate railing against the NZX governance and the rise of the NZ Institute all give hope.

But it is that crappy internet that is the final advantage we have. Not the lousiness of it, but the fact that it is there. (And yes – please please improve it with urgency)

Decent internet reduces costs, reduces pain and reduces cycle time. It means that we can build businesses in the cloud (basing them offshore to avoid the thin pipe) and address the world.

It lowers the trade barriers between us and our customers and suppliers, and it makes the world our market.

Our Government is helping as well.

We have signed Free Trade Agreements with China, Australia, Brunei, Singapore, Chile, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines and Vietnam. That’s an astonishing 1.9 billion people – or 25% of the world’s population.

We are also in negotiations with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman and South Korea. That moves it to a free trade addressable market of 2 billion people – a market of about 480 people per New Zealander, or 4 million people per reader of this blog today. Who cares about the anti-free trade USA subsidies when we have this market?

That’s plenty enough to share.

Finally, why were people at the Webstock event, and why are you (still) reading this?

When I returned to New Zealand in 2003, I’d realised that my ideal job was to
help find and found start-ups, to help growing businesses grow faster and to help their owners and employees perform better. It’s fun.

I met the then existing VC and private equity firms, but they seemed to be on the slow train, and many were mired in government hand-out bureaucracy. The tiny average investment size, the small size of the funds and the slow velocity of transactions all counted against the industry and their funded companies. I wanted better.

I was lucky enough to land at Trade Me, just before they hit the mainstream, and the energy was there. Now, six years later, and after stints overseas and here in New Zealand, I realise that times have changed across the board.

Trade Me, Xero, Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor, amongst many others, have all demonstrated that you can be good guys and start, run and make money from (the jury is waiting a verdict on Xero) excellent and cool companies.

Meanwhile the internet generation is hitting their stride. The 22 year olds of today have always been online, and they intrinsically get the space.

There are older returnees that are bringing energy, experience and cash back to our shores, and, most of all, there is a sense of opportunity.

The opportunities and energy is real. After landing back here in March, after selling up in Fremantle, it took only two weeks before I had over 20 opportunities of one description or another, and I am now part of two new companies.

Almost at the same time I received a call from Equip Design – who consult as part of the Better By Design program. I’m now on the team, and have visited the first of a series of clients that will build off a rich NZ history of successful transformation into design-led export-driven companies. I’ve toured Formway Design (unbelievable) and looked at from afar at the success of Obo, Phil and Teds and other successful graduates of the program.

We are good at this stuff – product design, anything internet based, branding, lean and flexible manufacturing – indeed the entire product development process.

Our local economy is strong, our addressable economies of the world are in varying degrees of trouble, but our export volumes are trivial to them, and our products are often clever and cheaper solutions to problems that they are just starting to look at.

So we have the people, the experience, economy and education. People are giving start-ups a go, and we have a huge market to address.

There are plenty of roadblocks on the way, but we Kiwis can do anything, regardless of the weather outside.

Let’s make it happen.

I’ve mentioned it here before, and it bears repeating: Trade Me is different.

Trade Me has captured the Motors market, is well ahead of the incumbent in Property traffic and just behind the incumbent in Jobs. They are also in flats ( and have been for years) and rental property.

Meanwhile Trade Me’s free listings and simple localization meant that they have always been in the local classifieds game – things like sofas and so forth that require a face to face transaction.

The overall effect was a business that left no space for the well executed Zillion and Finda to get traction.

So well done Trade Me, but the threat will always be there – screw up and someone will take big chunks of the business. This will happen, for example, if Trade Me attempts to increase fees too much or if usability is lost in a host of features. If so then Craigslist, Gumtree or say Zillion will be right there to pick up the volume.

Sadly for the competitive threat Trade Me is still following the path to usability, and while I’d like to see lower fees in tough times they are probably at the right level for now.

It’s the same at the top end for eBay with higher quality product sellers moving across to Amazon.

Indeed while a substantial percentage (say 40%) of Trade Me’s listings are new, there does remain a bit of a gap in the market for direct selling of quality new products. It’s the one Ferrit was so hapless at finding, and I’ve mentioned how you can take advantage before. The gap is pretty tiny, but between New Zealand and Australia (where eBay is also screwing up) there is plenty of scope.

I’m saddened at just how eBay have managed to lose the plot, but respect Trade Me and how they are still showing the way after 10 years.

However Alistair write a post on Harcourts that was just a wee bit too fluffy for my sensibilities – so I asked the question “.. are these change leaders <Harcourts> even on Trade Me yet?” (I knew that they are not – and they are missing out on 600,000 browsers each month)

If you go to that post now then stop reading – I’ve just copied and pasted. Indeed join the conversation over on Alistairs blog raher than starting s new one here.

To his credit Alistair gave a comprehensive reply, but it does not fly with me.

1. Realestate.co.nz – the most comprehensive single property portal in NZ – 95% of all listings by real estate agents are featured, the site receives 370,000 unique browsers per month with over 120,000 of these from overseas. This single portal provides the most comprehensive source of real estate – test it on Google which is were the majority of real estate searches start – type in “property in …” on Google NZ.

2. Harcourts.co.nz – the number one company website with over 160,000 unique browsers per month, close to double the web traffic of any other company website.

3. Google adwords – the opportunity to promote property online with pinpoint accuracy and cost effective visitor traffic.

Harcourts have never used Trade me property for all of their listings, they are not alone. At this time realestate.co.nz would have over 20,000 more listings than trade me property. As well there are over 200,000 unique browsers a month who go to realestate.co.nz who do not visit trade me property. (these are all Nielsen Stats)

Harcourts judge that their clients properties would not be presented in the best manner on a website that focuses on second hand goods auctions after all do real estate agents in Australia or US use eBay? – certainly not. Harcourts have adopted this strategy and it has not effected their market share – their share is growing.

I would judge that Trade me is not the sole answer to advertising anything in NZ – just look at jobs, Seek is still the number 1 jobs website – some high value items like jobs and houses may not long term fit the image and profile of trade me – cars, beds, shoes, CD’s and mobile phone – certainly core for Trade me.

My reply was as follows:

Realestate.co.nz had 354,357 UB’s in April, of which 145,000 odd also went to Trade Me. Another 621,080 went to Trade Me and not to Realestate.co.nz.

Harcourts.co.nz had 161,891 UB’s in April, of which 83,500 also went to Trade Me. Another 679,945 went to Trade Me and not to Harcourts.

These are total traffic figures- I should have used domestic, but actually from memory the total numbers make realestate.co.nz look better. I would say though that the impact of those overseas browsers is pretty minimal – after all how many houses are sold each month to overseas buyers?

While UB’s are over-counted (e.g. I have multiple browsers and computers so count many times) this is still a pretty compelling market that Harcourts misses out on. There must be more to it.

And there is – Realestate.co.nz is partially owned by Harcourts, and the Harcourts CEO is the chairman of Realestate.co.nz. Isn’t this a more likely reason for them not to list on Trade Me?

Almost every other real estate agency on Realestate.co.nz is on Trade Me. The last hold outs were/are the shareholders in Realestate.co.nz.

I have no problem with Harcourts holding out, but the reasons are clear, and they are not based on statistics but on ownership.

There are 365 Harcourts listings on Trade Me right now – placed, I understand, by individual agents. If I were a Harcourts agent I’d be pretty annoyed that 600,000 Kiwis were not able to view my listings, and I can understand why they would do an end-run behind the corporate policy.

Meanwhile Barfoot’s have over 2000 listings on Trade Me. Do we think that Harcourts are looking at Barfoot’s recent success in Auckland and wondering just how much of that relates to their presence on Trade Me? Remember that Trade Me attracts sellers, not just buyers.

Actually I’d love to see a chart of sales by agency versus number of listings that month on each of the sites. It would make interesting reading for the entire industry. I suspect you’d better be on both main sites to maximise your chances of a sale.

I do believe there is a place for both Trade Me and realestate.co.nz, but if Harcourts are really scathingly positioning Trade Me as a 2nd hand goods market then they show a very poor awareness of what exactly Trade Me is to Kiwis.

eBay is a poor cousin to Trade Me – they never figured out how to do Motors or Property, and certainly not Jobs. In Australia the market for cars is pretty fragmented, but is mainly on independent listing sites. Similarly the market for property is all over the place, without one dominant player (it varies by region and realestate.com.au is pretty good).

Not only are 40% odd of Trade Me’s items on sale new, but Trade Me is the marketplace for cars and bikes (due to poor online competition back in the day), getting close to the same for property (where realestate.co.nz is good competition), and still in progress for Jobs (where Seek was a very strong incumbent).

As an aside (and red herring) – what happens to the other 5% of real estate agent listings that are not on realestate.co.nz? Are they listed anywhere?

Disclosures: none – I have not worked for Trade Me for quite a while, and I know both Alistair from Realestate and Brendon from Trade Me Property, and they are both good guys.

The Good

The best email subscriptions are easy to unsubscribe from – requiring a simple click from inside the email, which bounces to a web page with a confirmation message.

This is exemplary – at the bottom of each WSJ news alerts message is a one click “stop this now” link. (There is also another link where you can go to the website and manage all of your emails)

Next best is a return email to unsubscribe – something like this from the OECD.

Less good but still ok-ish are email lists that give you a unsubscribe link, direct you to a page and make you hit a confirm button on that page, sometimes answering a question while you are there. This is painful, but I guess you can spend a few more seconds to help them understand why you are leaving, and you don’t have to remember a login or password.

I had to laugh at this “why did you unsubscribe” pick-list from a sporadic email list that I signed up for some client research.
This drop down list actually made me feel a lot better about the particular organisation, even though I never read their spam. I’m guessing that the information they gather isn’t really  that valuable, but it is clear that the list owners understand the state of mind of people that have resorted to unsubscribing.

This is an important lesson - by the time you want to unsubscribe you are annoyed with the cumulative impact of all the messages, and therefore you don’t really like the senders. You are not happy, and want out.

It also means that email senders don’t want the customers anymore either. The recipients  are not reading, and if they are reading then they are not enjoying – so advertisers will get negative vibes.

Therefore it is important to do three things as an email sender:

1. Make it really easy to unsubscribe, so messages will never annoy customers again
2. Try, even, to make customers enjoy the process – so the last taste is a good one, and they will consider signing up again later or for something else now.
3. Ask for feedback – so you learn and customers feel they have their say. Do make it optional though.

The Bad

The bad unsubscribe links aren’t what they advertise – they send you to the website, make you do something and then send a (one or more) “are you sure?” email, which is doubly annoying as you’ve just told them never to send me messages again.

The worst offenders are links that direct you back to the originating go to their site, require you login and then ‘manage your email options’.

This is simply unacceptable today. I’ll often be on a computer (e.g. the iPhone) where I don’t have my password for that site stored, or maybe I’m simply too lazy to go through the process so I won’t unsubscribe.

While some ‘email marketers’ may want to keep expanding their email lists, I say “NO – you do not want me on your list”, and here’s why:

1. The cumulative annoyance directed at your company will continue to build up until I am mad when ever I see your contemptable unstoppable spam
2. I will desperately try to consign your crap to oblivion in my junk mailbox, and thereby never see any of your messages again. Your email list is vapour.
3. I’ll get really mad and tell people about it, and maybe even blog about it…

So let’s name and shame, and I’ll direct this to a company that actually does know better: Trade Me, and specifically OldFriends.

The Old Friends emails have been getting spammier* and spammier, and I am getting really annoyed*, angry even at the spambot* that keeps sending them* – so I want to remove them.

*refer to above three points for linguistic context

However to remove myself from the OldFriends spambot requires a login:

OldFriends is not a site made for constant hanging out – so chances are that the login screen will draw a blank when it comes time to remember your details:

Of course we know the email address – it was just spammed – and so we can ask for yet another email to send you your password. Umm – no thanks – that is going to take too long.  (and I won’t mention the giant page-long “do you know these people” brick wall after you log in)

It’s the same with FindSomeone**

so I’ll keep getting spam from Findsomeone as well.

**(are you single, cute, smart, ridiculously weathly and have low standards? – get in touch :)

Trade Me can do it right though, as you’d expect.

Here’s how easy it is to unsubscribe from Mod’s Motors. First – click on the unsubscribe link in the email:

and that’s it – done.

Trade Me also make it trivial to sign up again for the email – which I quickly did.***

***I hope I never have to do this for real – Mod is leaving Trade Me but I trust that the appeal of 250,000 righteous readers will keep his classic quotes coming:

The thrill of fettling a neglected beast and turning it into a minter is special. Some people try to do this with the opposite sex and get disappointed when they fail.

Summary

So what have we learned?

1. Make it easy to unsubscribe
2. Make it easy to subscribe
3. Make it fun

To me the best unsubscribe approach is:

• a link that unsubscribes me instantly
• lands me on a professional, branded and fun page
• that thanks me, tells me I’m now unsubscribed and offers me an optional one to three question survey to fill out.

Which is just common sense.

Meanwhile once you arrive at eBay.co.uk each day, why not check out the rest of the site – this should increase overall sales.

For once this is something that Trade Me could actually copy from eBay.

There are 3 key questions that remain to be resolved though.

1. How do you select the products? They have to be real bargains from sellers that will deliver fast. It’s also an administrative burden to manually select those products, so it there some sort of auction each day for the space?
2. How do you compensate Trade Me for the home page slot when  the margins are so tiny? The home page slot could be sold for cash, but Trade Me does clip the ticket on the increase sales of the bargain anyway. Do you offer lower fees to get the prices even lower?
3. How do you manage the fallout from smaller sellers who compete (poorly) with the products on offer. This is especially bad if the front page sellers get a cut on fees, but bad even if their fees are standard and they pay a home page placement fee. This could even cannibalize entire categories as members wait for the deal rather than shopping.

Examples: How not to twitter.

@NZStuff (sorry) sends through groups of news, either at 530am or during the day. The 530am news is from when the news is posted to the Stuff.co.nz website in an overnight process. The news sits unreleased until the morning so that the newspapers are not scooped. I don’t agree with this approach as to me news fails to be news when I can read it somewhere else first.
The ones during the day are the ‘most popular’ (I think), and also released by a bot (I think). By definition they are already out of date when they are tweeted, and almost by definition the audience of active twitterers will have already read them.

Rather than @nzstuff’s automatically redundant articles, instead follow @NZStuffEditor, who is not very prolific but at least sends out news that is timely – and timeliness is a vital component of the definition of “news”.

Examples: How to Twitter
While the Wall Street Journal (@wsj) also twitters articles, it does so very rarely in groups of three, and most often the tweets are through the day. Almost invariably their tweets are before anybody else’s, and are therefore news in the truest sense. @NYTimes is not quite as quick, and will sometimes deliver in clumps, but they tend to beat the local alternatives and like the WSJ also link to longer articles on interesting and topical things.

What all so far are missing is the human element.

I’d really like to see @NZStuff reply to people’s twitters, and to give a bit of extra juice that we don’t get from the website. Stuff and others need to remember that their customers are not just people that read the news, but people that evanglise their services and want some inside scoop, people that want to send them news (but need to know it will be looked at) and, most of all in these times, people that are thinking about buying advertising,

Rather surprisingly the best corporations at Twittering in New Zealand are the telcos. I’ve had conversations in public and private with @TelecomNZ, @VodafoneNZ and ISP @orcon. They reach out to customers and help them – often walking down to the customer service folk and asking them to resolve an issue. Indeed they have each helped solve (or at least help me understand) a personal customer service issue, and their corporate reputations with me are all a lot better for it. Here they are earlier today each helping someone out:

I’d like to see them extend this beyond the corporate communication people – especially to Customer Service and also to the real tech-heads.

Air New Zealand’s  @flyairnz does well – sending out specials, but also being a human – replying to questions and making comments – such as welcoming @johnkeypm to Twitter.

Trade Me has  unleashed a few people – with twitter names like  TradeMe_Ross , TradeMe_Jay, TradeMe_Jobs along with Trademe_NZ and Travelbug. The latter has a combination of background tweets and specials. Kudos for this topical tweet:

This stream from TradeMe_Jay is an exemplary example of how Twitter can extend your corporate PR reach well beyond what a PR team can do. In four tweets Jay helps a member (and ex Trade Me employee admittedly), personalizes the continuous development work that Trade Me does and links to an ‘expose’ video that most corporations would cringe to see appear on YouTube.

However Trade Me’s main twitter account is dormant, and we have yet to see Motors, Property or Customer Service make an appearance.

Google allows their staff (it seems) to twitter as they like – here’s Webstock speaker Pamela Fox announcing the release of Google’s new analytics Data Export API – something that I think has tremendous potential to change the advertising scene in NZ and elsewhere.

I’ll point to @powershop and @lingopal as two other examples, but to be fair I am involved as a supplier to the first and shareholder with the second. That shouldn’t stop you following them though :-).

Enough of the examples – what should you do if you are thinking of twittering?

How to take advantage of Twitter

The real power of Twitter is the 1-1 interactions, and yet there are only so many people that sit in corporate relations units. Moreover their job should not be to look after every tech nerd’s customer complaint, nor to understand every bizarre happening on the internet.

To me a great corporation would have three things on Twitter:

1. A corporate voice – run by the corporate relations unit and staffed by a person. They would tweet press releases, reply to tweets that discuss the bigger picture (investor, employee relations, big stories) and generally have a slower beat but positive and official response.
2. An active Customer Service voice – this would be staffed 24/7 but owned overall by a single person. That means that while a number of people will answer the tweets, the owner would make sure that there is consistency, speed and humanity behind it. The CS twitterer would continuously search for good and bad experiences from the organisation’s products and give thanks or help accordingly. They are the front line and so would have a very quick response time. They would deal with problems in public, take them to Twitter direct messages and ultimately call the customer directly.
3. Unleashed individuals. Great companies would unleash everybody inside their organization to tweet about what they are doing, engage in conversations and show a genuine human face (warts and all) to the company’s customers and the public.This last one is scary.

   However if you are concerned that some employees will somehow destroy your company and brand then perhaps instead you need to do some serous internal navel gazing – and ask yourself “why would they do that?”. Even if some employees do tweet negative things, then see it as a fine way to take the pulse of your staff – and also fix the underlying problems.

   While I would put in place simple guidelines, most of those would already be in any employee contract. The main things not to tweet would be things like investor-level commercially sensitive information, competitively sensitive pricing and Apple product development news.

The progress made by the companies above is pleasing – and I hope we will see more of this as the use of Twitter and other tools expands.

It’s basically about why we don’t behave as rational consumers when faced with economic choices.

If you don’t want to wait, then there’s an excerpt from the book – the first chapter, which you can read over at Yale MBA’s Financial Crisis website.

Here are the five animal spirits – emotive things that often dictate our economic behaviour.

• The cornerstone of our theory is confidence and the feedback mech­anisms between it and the economy that amplify disturbances.
  
• The setting of wages and prices depends largely on concerns about fairness.
• We acknowledge the temptation toward corrupt and antisocial behavior and their role in the economy.
• Money illusion is another cornerstone of our theory. The public is confused by inflation or deflation and does not reason through its effects.
• Finally, our sense of reality, of who we are and what we are doing, is intertwined with the story of our lives and of the lives of others. The aggregate of such stories is a national or international story, which itself plays an important role in the economy.

Just those five statements make for interesting pondering – so here is my quick take.

Confidence is everything – it is the difference between buying something (on credit even) and choosing to hunker down and not spend. When a depressed or optimistic feeling rolls out to entire populations then it causes and exacerbates busts and booms.

It’s true that we care most about parity and fairness when setting wages and paying prices. This is particularly evident in New Zealand where we tend to look down at those with unhealthily large incomes and spending habits and where we have a nationally loved TV program called Fair Go that goes after companies that rip people off. Interestingly the feeling of fairness to members was the overriding thing that governed our thinking in the days when I was involved in setting prices at Trade Me.

We also score pretty well as a country on corrupt and anti-social behaviour – scoring at of near the top of the list in the annual Transparency International surveys as a result. On the other hand we are a little divergent on our strong norms about what is anti-social behaviour – though we tend not to shoot each other and mostly we don’t rip each other off.

It’s true that we all tend to compare our income now to our income years ago, and fail to understand that $1m now is worth a whole lot more than $1m at retirement. This is the money illusion – where we look at the dollar figures and not at the real worth, the nominal not the real. Having grown up through inflationary times it did improve my own approach to this versus, say, my grandparents generation who often didn’t change the dollar value of their Christmas presents to grandkids (mine were a bit different). The trick is to constantly reset the current value of everything.

Finally I am guessing “stories” refers to the formal and informal coverage of things like bubbles and busts. Everyone was talking up dot coms in 2000, real estate in 2007/8 and stocks in 1929.  Fast forward a couple of years and the picture was (and will be) diametrically opposed – the media coming down hard on what were correctly seen in hindsight as speculative investments. I try to be contraian, using taxi drivers and ultimately my mother as the unfailing barometer – if Mum says buy, then I go ahead and sell.

They use these five animal spirits in the rest of the book to answer eight questions – such as why do economies fall into depression and why do real estate markets go through cycles?

Interesting stuff to be sure – I recommend just reading the first chapter and having a ponder – the answers may not be that difficult to work out, and if we can be internally aware of those “animal spirits” then perhaps we will make better decisions.

Now I need to decide where to buy it from. Fishpond don’t have it but Amazon who do. However I am really annoyed with them as most of the things I want (electronics, accessories) are not shipped to New Zealand.