Brass Monkey Time

I’m off tomorrow (Wednesday) on the Brass Monkey – an annual event where… well damn it – let me bow tothe description writen by Mod from the incomparable Mod’s Motors:

This weekend some of the more fanatical of New Zealand’s motoring aficionados will begin their annual pilgrimage to Central Otago’s stunning Maniototo plain. Like Saul on the Road to Damascus, Oturehua is a site of many an epiphany for those motorcycle enthusiasts who ride the icy roads of cold clarity to the infamous Brass Monkey Rally. This year is the 29th running of the Brass Monkey, a gathering of maladjusted motorcyclists from all over the country.
It’s held just down the road from Ophir, which holds the record for the coldest still air temperature ever recorded in New Zealand: a brain-numbing 23 below zero, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, hence the name. This is my 15th Brass Monkey, but there are plenty of attendees who have attended all of them, sleeping out under the Southern Skies. The question most often asked is, “Why?” Everyone has their own answer, but for me it’s the opportunity to reconnect with my regular Monkey crew along with the religious atmosphere of midwinter Oturehua. You feel like a royal in exile.

It’s fair to say that not everyone who attends the Brass Monkey is in the middle of the bell curve, but that has to be a good thing. It’s the looneys and the mavericks that have contributed so much to the world of motoring, from John Britten to Boyd Coddington and the mad doctor, Dr Roger Freeth.
This month in MOD’s Motors, I step outside the mass produced world of mainstream vehicles to look at some of the truly mad and eccentric vehicles we have on the site. Vehicles that have no rational explanation but 100% emotional connection.
Plus the normal assortment of anarchy from the faithful, a superb Reader’s Ride and a competition for those who know their balls from their monkeys. Time to fire it up..

If you don’t subscribe the Mod’s Motors – then I strongly suggest you do so, if not for the writing or the vehicles then at for the best example that I know of a monthly newsletter. Happily I understand that Mod will continue to write these missives after he departs from Trade Me in a month or two.

Meanwhile I’ll try to blog or at least twitter some of the journey. Follow it here or @lancewiggs on Twitter.

Let’s make it happen

On Tuesday last week I was lucky enough to listen to an interesting range of cool people give 5 minute talks on the topics of their choice. (ok – only one person hit the 5 minute market exactly, and he had a giant clock on his chest) It was Webstock‘s 3rd birthday and exit from rehab.

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.

Tuesday Three: 3 ways to improve your business

Introducing a series of posts where I’ll be suggesting three simple (or not so simple) ways to improve your business. Here’s the first installment:

Reduce the big costs – and the little ones

  1. List your major suppliers in descending order of spend, then figure out ways to reduce price and quantity for each of them. Renegotiate everything.  On the way you should understand their own costs and price pressures, so you can give them a fair margin but no more.
  2. Clean your own kitchens – and drop the frequency of vacuuming by half.
  3. Move to smaller offices – things are much more productive when you sit near other people anyway.

Well done Trade Me, but the threat remains

There’s an interesting article over at eBay strategies, which talks about how eBay lost the market for classifieds and mentions that Amazon is taking out the top end. (If you work at Trade Me then you should have eBay Strategies in your RSS reader)

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.

I’ve joined Equip – a Better by Design consultancy

Better By Design is a NZ Government sponsored program that seeks to help high growth companies become design-led – and thus turn into great companies.

The end goal of Better by Design is for New Zealand companies to generate more export sales by selling better-designed products and services.

It all came out of a 2003 paper and kicked off at a 2005 conference, and it’s part of NZTE.

There’s an impressive advisory board, led by Jeremy Moon (Icebreaker) and assisted by Rick Wells (Formway). Those are two great design led companies – and another one is Apple. It’s no coincidence that I’m typing on an Apple computer, sitting on a Formway Life Chair and wearing 3 separate pieces of Icebreaker clothing. These are companies that understand what I need before I need it and make beautiful products that fit those needs – products that are more addictive than caffeine.

Better by Design’s primary vehicle is the Design Integration Program – a six stage process that identifies high growth export led companies that would benefit from the program, audits them to assess their gaps to being design-led, writes a plan and then helps the company get the plan done.

BBD uses three external consultancies to perform the audits and write, with the client company, the plan to become design led. BBD’s own internal consultants, who each boast an impressive private sector CV, identify and bring companies aboard, guide them through the process and then help companies get the plans done.

Oh – and the audit and plan are free to the participating companies.

It is, however, really rather difficult to get into the program.

Well over 100 companies have been or are going through the process, and there have been some notable successes. Check out the case studies for OBO and Bendon, each of whom has transformed their business in recent years. There are other case studies as well.

The primary measure is dollars earned from exports, and I am told that the results are well above expectations.

I recently joined the team at Equip Design, one of the three external firms that companies can choose to perform the Design Audit and Plan (called a Design360). I’m joining Equip founders Ray Labone and Peter Haythornwaite along with Andrew Jones.

Ray has been in this program from the very beginning, and is a (or the) leading branding consultant. He co-founded Designworks and he chaired the Design Taskforce that created the work that ended up as Better By Design.

Peter has a similarly stellar career in the Industrial Design field – running his own design company for many years and, well if you are in the field you know who he is.

Interestingly one of my cousins (Mikkel Johannessen) worked for Ray years ago, and another (Nils Johannessen) for a design company that Peter founded. They both went through what was then the Wellington Polytechnic School of Design, and I remember Nils’ class designed MP3 players – in about 1990.

Andrew is an engineer and has far too much production process consulting experience.

So I’ve joined a very strong team – and I’m there not because I love caressing gorgeous  Apple products, agonizing over website design, or because I derive a perverse pleasure from helping production processes get better. Instead I am there to provide a business perspective to the team, as the audits and plans tend to go to the very core of what a company does and how it does it.

I bring with me a pretty ruthless approach to the process of growing and improving businesses, one that has always stayed clear of chasing government money just because it is there. I believe in the BBD program as the participating companies are very well screened, it’s free, the BBD team and external consultants have great CVs, and the track record is peerless.

I’m really looking forward to this work – it’s only a handful of days a month, but it means I get to see and help some great companies all over New Zealand. The BBD team has not focussed on web-based businesses, and so I will extend my reach and hope to be able to do some cross-pollination between the two worlds.

I will also learn a lot – from Ray, Peter and Andrew and from the companies that I get to see, and get to apply that to other things that I am involved with.

There is a chance that things will change a bit after the forthcoming budget, but I sense a confident mood given the track record of the program.

Hopefully you will read here about the great companies in the program, but only  if all parties (BBD, Equip and hte company itself) are comfortable.

Red Bull is a tobacco company

A scary article in the NZHerald on how a Brooke Robertson lost 55 Kg of weight by abandoning foods and solely drinking Red Bull.

“I managed to wean myself off it by being in hospital for that long but I had severe withdrawals – sweating, nausea, shaking. It was an addiction. The doctors stated that.”

We get the occasional odd story here in New Zealand, but I want to concentrate on the quote from a Red Bull spokesperson who

denied the drink was addictive and said there was “scientific evidence that caffeine is not addictive”.

That’s exactly the sort of disingenuous statement that the tobacco companies made for years about nicotine. There may be scientific evidence for one side and the other of an issue, but the overwhelming preponderance of evidence is that caffeine is addictive.

I don’t know whether this was a misguided spokesperson, an external lawyer or whether the Red Bull organization truly believes there is a chance that caffeine is not addictive. The fact is they are selling stuff which contains an addictive ingredient, and they should have acknowledged that, say that they recommend one can a day as part of a balanced diet and move on.

They didn’t – instead they tried to infer imply  that caffeine is not addictive – according to ‘scientists’.

But even without the scientific evidence we all know that Caffeine is addictive – it’s not even a debate in society. The world consumes about 120,000 tonnes each year of caffeine, and it’s consumed in the full knowledge that it is a stimulant and it is addictive. It’s like alcohol and tobacco – a legal way to send a mind altering substance to your brain.

So I’ve purchased my last drink of Red Bull, will not support their crazy sports events (which are brilliant way to do marketing) and will sneer at the Red Bull and Toro Rosso Formula 1 teams.

I also recommend that Red Bull spokespeople read Wikipedia – the Caffeine article is excellent – well written and with plenty of footnotes for those in denial to follow.

Withdrawal symptoms—possibly including headache, irritability, an inability to concentrate, drowsiness, insomnia and pain in the stomach, upper body, and joints[71]—may appear within 12 to 24 hours after discontinuation of caffeine intake, peak at roughly 48 hours, and usually last from one to five days, representing the time required for the number of adenosine receptors in the brain to revert to “normal” levels, uninfluenced by caffeine consumption.

And now I’ll go make myself a coffee. I forgot to this morning and I can sense a headache coming on.

Let’s deliver mail once a week

From this great illustration of the average US Postal Service residential customer’s mailbox we can glean some interesting facts. Amongst them is numerical evidence as to why I don’t check my mail very often.

delivermagazine

There are almost 200 billion pieces of mail delivered to the (and Wolfram Alpha couldn’t deal with any of this) 111 million USA households each year. That’s an average of almost 1,800 each, or 5.7 items a day* or 34 a week (with 6 day delivery). I recall it was around 24 in 1999, so times have been strangely kind to the USPS.

Here’s the problem – 5.3 of those 5.7 letters each day are “unwanted”, and the only 0.5 are not. I’m including bills in the unwanted, as nobody really likes getting them. Moreover in the USA in particular, bills are used as just another way to deliver you junk mail.

Meanwhile the average household is getting about 1 personal letter a month, and  1 card or invite a week – though many of those cards will also be junk.

<update – the legend is wrong – red is not wanted etc.>

It’s really hard to define the size of the junk market in the USA, or anywhere, as companies for some reason get really defensive about their mail being classified as ‘junk’ or ‘unsolicited’. Also in the USA the junk mailers get around ‘no junk’ signs by personally addressing much all of their materials – those are the catalogs, direct letters and so forth in the graphic above. Moreover it is often difficult to distinguish junk (‘get a pre-approved credit card’) from bills (‘Here’s your credit card bill – with a pre approved offer!’) – and sometimes that is deliberate, so you will open the junk.

Sadly, no matter what you call it, it is all just so much wasted paper (the occasional beautifully crafted wedding invitation aside.) What is particularly strange are the 15 Billion catalogs sent out each year. That’s a whole lot of paper in the internet age.

We all belong to the internet age – paying bills online (usually automatically), sending and reading thousands of emails, twitters, blog posts and so forth each year and reading our news online. We only use snail mail (the name says it all) when we deliberately want a slower and more classy process, such as for those elegant wedding invites.

I last sent a personal letter when I was in Pakistan. In 1998. Or was it Europe in 1996? Either way – it’s long past the time when the mail was something I cared about.

Yet we still have the Pavlovian instinct, much like when a phone rings, of checking the mail when it arrives. I often do as well, but what could be in my mail box of any importance?

Well – the only things that matter to me at the moment in that box are The Independent and The Economist, which as newspapers have a time element to them. (I should also get the NBR but they make it a bit hard.)

Everything else can wait. I’d prefer to do bills in batches (I usually wait until the 3rd letter then overpay for a few months) as it is more efficient, and junk gets binned. (Powershop wins awards here – no paper is involved in the purchase of electricity)

So why do we as a society insist on a service to deliver our mail every day? Can’t we reduce it to once every 2 or 3 days, or even once a week?

Businesses can perhaps have more frequent deliveries, but they can pay for it, and besides – this will prod them into going fully online.

How about we offer a dual service – one service that will get me The Economist yeserday (e.g. by print on demand and hand delivery) instead of Monday/Tuesday and that will  deliver the Independent to me before I wake up on Thursday and another service that delivers letters once a week?

We can take the savings, and use them to contribute somehow to the roll out and maintenance of decent broadband infrastucture. We could even give the ownership of that broadband infrastructure to the NZ Post, just like it used to be.

Why are Harcourts not yet on Trade Me?

There’s a fun discussion happening over on the Unconditional Blog – which if you have not found it yet is well worth following. I commend Alister Helm for not only his writing, but also for balancing the real estate industry (and their archaic ways) and the dot com approach to things.

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.

Let there be light

A simple idea – cover a 55,000 sports stadium with solar panels, and use them to power (75% of) the lights. This is in Taiwan, ready for the World Games, and, more importantly, Rugby sevens.

When there is no match then the power is fed into the grid – to the tune of 1.14 Gigiwatt hours per year. New Zealand uses about 42,000 GWh per year, so it isn’t a huge amount of electricity – but it is wonderfully sustainable. (I guess in wellington we could use windmills instead)

They built this with no recordable accidents – which is also a stunning achievement.

Plenty more photo goodness, and even a video, at deputy-dog and at the Worldgames09 site.

Make it easy for me to leave you – unsubscribing

Like Rowan, I’ve been unsubscribing from a lot of list emails recently. Let’s see what we can learn from the process.

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.

Stuff – remove the TVNZ video on Bridget Saunders

I’d heard about the Close Up interview with Fairfax’s recently departed Sunday Star Times About Town gossip columnist Bridget Saunders. It looked like it was a bit of a hit-job.

The last place I would have thought to see it was on Fairfax owned Stuff. I found the link to the video from the homepage – just beneath the banner.

The video itself has a one line article attached – leading me to infer that this is just one of many pulled over from TVNZ:

I understand that Bridget has made a few people uncomfortable over the years, and I guess TVNZ relished the chance to do a bit of an ambush on her. Close Up asked her bluntly about plastic surgery (yes botox), whether she had slept with a married politician (no married man ever) and whether she was fired or chose to leave (she called the meeting). To her credit she answered all the questions, though it was clearly a difficult interview for her, and the editing room did her no favours at all.

I think it was a bit over the top by TVNZ, but I guess I can understand that they wanted ratings. However the interview was amateurish – confronting Bridget with unsubstantiated gossip instead of substantiated facts, and thatapproach backfired for me as it looked like TVNZ was trying to smear Bridget, and she came across as very human and open.

It wasn’t journalism though – it was a fishing expedition, and they came home with an empty bucket. For Bridget, well I guess that’s part of the game of being a gossip columnist – you get to take some licks as well as give them. Shame on you TVNZ though – you could have done a lot better.

But I feel strongly that Fairfax, through Stuff, overstepped the mark tonight by placing this online, and by linking to it from the front page.

Bridget is not only a former Fairfax writer, but Stuff itself publishes Bridget’s work in her About Town blog. You can still read the blog – with the last post  on 6 May – yet sadly there was no goodbye from Bridget.

I’m guessing (hoping) that the night editors at Stuff just grabbed the TVNZ videos and placed them on the site.The ‘article’ is just the video description. I’m hoping they didn’t realise that Bridget was in their shoes a week earlier.

The video even ends with a victory salutation to the new Queen of gossip – who works for rival APN’s NZHerald.

I have absolutely no idea about the circumstances surrounding Bridget’s departure and I’m not too clear on how you balance the news-worthiness of an item versus loyalty to your own contributors. I believe that publishing this was unintentional, but this is unacceptable to Bridget, and must raise questions amongst other Fairfax staff and contributors.

Whatever the cause, the effect of seeing this on Stuff must be pretty rough on Bridget, who could feel that Fairfax is disowning her with prejudice. That’s not a nice way to end a seven year relationship.

I feel for her. I did meet Bridget once or twice during my tenure at Fairfax and she was delightful. I wish her luck in her new venture – writing a book on bad sex.

Oh – and I think it would be wise for those with sharp knives to remember that being included in a gossip column is a minor inconvenience compared to a starring role in a book on bad sex.

Negative political tactics make you look dull

I admire democracy – after all the alternatives are much worse. I also believe that a robust ‘loyal’ opposition is a necessary part of a healthy democracy.

But it all falls apart when an opposition chooses vindictiveness and obstruction over constructive opposition and collaboration.

Two recent examples:

The US Republican party apparently plans to add 450 amendments to a climate change bill, in order to slow it’s progress down to a crawl. This is a climate change bill – a rather relevant piece of legislation for the entire world. So why not engage in a constructive debate and work out the best solution – rather than simply opposing it?

The second case is closer to home. NZ’s Labour party just used the same tactics to obstruct and delay the passage of the Local Government (Auckland Reorganisation) bill. If you happened to tune into parliament in the last few days it was a sad indictment of the system, and morever an appalling way to use the Maori language as Labour and colleagues used the language and resulting required translation to slow things down even more.

Sure Labour wants to get the bill to committee, but their petulant behaviour in this instance makes them lose face, and though they may crow about parliamentary victories, to this listener they just sounded like ignorant obstructionists.

And yes National didn’t do the ‘right thing’ by operating under urgency, and they could have accepted an offer for a fast committee pricess.

The parties have argued themselves into a corner on this one.

It’s particularly galling as clearly both sides clearly want a single Auckland council. They differ on the details, but the situation is exacerbated by the Mt Albert by-election and the adversarial tactics used by both sides.

So please – both sides – grow up and govern.

eBay UK stacks it high and watches it fly

eBay have taken a leaf out of 1-day‘s playbook and have launched a Daily Deal on their UK website. The idea is simple – offer a compelling deal from the homepage, drive traffic to the site each day and sell the bargains by the thousands.

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.