Yelp through the Value axis

VPEC-T is a thinking framework, useful for teasing out different perspectives between stakeholders/participants in a "system". Not necessarily a computer system (in fact many of the thinking models are expressly about the non computer parts of a system). The V (Value) filter helps in understanding the value of the desired outcomes to both the individual and the business.

Applying that filter to some of the more interesting pure-playweb properties (illustrated with examples from yelp and Groupon), we can look at some of the value offered and value received, helping us peer into the business models.

First, yelp. Yelp is a restaurant review site - the slogan being "Real people. Real reviews". The idea being that people like you and I can visit places, and review them - from a non-professional perspective. A nice idea indeed, but really to what purpose - especially what business purpose?

Yelp allows businesses to sign up and somehow advertise.  The purported value proposition being, "yelp has all of these people reviewing places, do you want to make sure that your establishment is properly placed?" There may be other models too. But I suspect that isn't where the real value lies. So let's look at yelp from the perspective of the individual "yelper".

A person signs up with yelp. Has to provide an email address and a (small) number of demographic details. A yelper then interacts with the site by chatting with other yelpers, or reviewing service providers - mostly, but not exclusively restaurants. In other words it is social media for the eating out crowd. Yelp provides inducements (elite status) to provide aspirational goals, and an air of exclusivity for its most prolific posters.

So for the privilege of belonging to a social media site - centered around people's favorite thing to do (giving opinions) yelp is able to collect a large amount of quite well targeted data, that can then be used/sold on or whatever for targeted advertising. Knowing that I travel a bit, which restaurants I eat at, buy certain kinds of furniture, etc. is the most valuable asset of all. It is self reported information, where there is no reason to lie with a very precise perspective on my behavior.

The Value exchange in the relationship is that the yelper gets a strong social group in exchange for letting yelp have great insight into the yelper's habits. Is this appropriate? Absolutely, but you always have to understand what value you are exchanging with another entity when you sign up. Similarly a company like yelp has to make the value proposition enticing enough, so that it can attract the mass it needs in order to sustain a valuable advertisement based business model.

Forced opt-in and opting out

In the current political climate in the USA, "individual rights" have been brought sharply into focus. The whole "what should the country provide, vs what should individuals provide?" debate is in full swing.

Everything seems to be up for grabs and discussion. For example, vaccination of children against childhood diseases is public policy, but there is a group of people (highlighted on the radio yesterday) in Washington State (not the US capital, Washington, DC.) who won't vaccinate their children for several reasons. Individual choice? For sure. Good thing - the medical community doesn't think so. My view, I side with the medical community.

Then we come to some real sacred cows. Charities. There is no doubt that many charities do fantastic work. There is no doubt that many people are comforted by their Churches, that their faith sustains them. However, each of us is somehow forced to contribute to their upkeep, How? Because charitable deductions are tax-exempt - at least here in the US of A. So if I have a marginal tax rate of 30%, then every $100 that I give to a results in a reduction of my tax burden by $30. Yet the charity gets all $100. So where does the difference come from? Presumably the general fund. And where does the general fund get its money? Er, um, from taxes.

Ergo, we are each paying for each other's favorite charities. I am not saying whether we should or shouldn't have the instituions, but let's value them properly/transparently.

Make it a matter of public policy to explicitly show where from general revenue the funds are going, and if people want to give more to support others - in times of crisis or whatever, then let them. I don't want to support mega-churches, I don't want to support super-mosques. I don't want to support giant synagogues. I don't want you not to be able to support these things.

Let's get the government of of the charities business, drop the administrative burden (reducing government cost) and let those who want/use the services pay for the services.

Knowing the purpose of communication

How hard it is for the news media. This morning's post from the mangling of information department comes from our local ABC affiliate, Channel 8 in Dallas, Texas.

It is pretty common to have a "crawl" going at the bottom of a screen - giving some highlights, quick overviews of what's happening, etc. So one would expect clear, crisp writing that is able to be understood easily. After all, the viewer is being forced to multi-task while watching the show, listening to the speaker/interview or whatever, and to read the crawl. That's a lot of brainwork - especially at 0500.

So imagine my horror when these 2 gems showed up this morning. "Michelle Bachman's campaign chief is stepping down, along with his deputy, Ed Rollins, who is 68, cites health reasons." and "Forecasters say it is less likely that hurricane Katia will hit the US. It is now a category 4 storm with 135 mph wind speeds."

So what's wrong here? There is so much it is hard to know where to start.

First, the format is just not suitable for a crawl. Especially with all of the commas. But more importantly, the message is just plain hard to tease out. In a crawl, by definition some of the message is not available to the reader. So, imagine that part of the hurricane crawl had gone by and all you saw was the piece that said "hurricane Katia will hit the US. It is now" - which is what I saw when I glanced at the TV this morning. Exactly the opposite of the intended meaning.

Writing for this medium is different than writing long form. We as writers need to understand the form that our message will be delivered in (yeah, I know, dangling preposition), and craft the message accordingly.

Oh and is it Ed Rollins who is the campaign chief? or is Ed Rollins the deputy? I don't know. I can guess, but am really not sure.

For whose benefit?

I keep seeing systems where "automation" is applied to benefit the wrong people - and where that automation actually leads to a much worse state of affairs. John Seddon of  Vanguard would have a field day with some of the horrors that we see. I suspect tha tRichard Veryard might too - applying the POSIWID (the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does) principle to some of the horror shows.

Let's take a couple of old chestnuts. HR systems. HR systems are generally designed for the HR department and not for the majority of poor suckers who have to use it - the employees. Somehow to be an employee, I have to be an expert in labor law, an expert in health plans, and expert in company labor policy, a mind reader - when do I have time to work?

Then expense claim systems. 2 (major) constituencies here. The people who need to be reimbursed for expenses they have incurred and the accounting (usually accounts payable) department, rolling up to management. Every expense system that I have ever used (except that of MomentumSI) seemed to favor the accounting over the employee. For sure there are corrupt employees, so lots of processes have to be put in place. Fiddling expenses = fraud = dismissal for cause in my book. So again taking a POSIWID view is the purpose (really) to get the employees their money back quickly or to manage the accounting? Actually there is a third possibility - make it so hard that employees would rather not claim than endure the pain.

And the last piece of idiocy comes from professor evaluations. It used to be the case that towards the end of the semester, the students were asked by the professor to fill in a paper form evaluating the professor against some predefined criteria. The professor would leave the room while this was going on. It took about 10 minutes, the forms were placed into an envelope, sealed and handed in. The data were entered somewhere and the scores tabulated and handed to the professor some time later - often at the beginning of the next semester. It worked pretty well. Most students filled the forms in and good data were obtained. Enter the internet, direct entry, etc. Now the students are pointed to a website whee they can fill in the scores. Of course there aren't computers in the classroom, so the students have to do it out of hours and it conflicts with the many other tings they have to do. And of course they have to remember. So now we have a much lower participation, a tendency to towards the extremes. Only people with strong views at the positove and negative ends tend to fill these in. It is so bad that some classes are bribed with extra "points" to fill them in (and what does that say about ethics and education), the data aren't as valuable as they used to be, and aren't even ready as soon as they were under the old system? Why you might ask? I can't come up with a great answer to this - except maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Moral of the story - just because you can "automate" a process doesn't mean you should.

OK - So its not technology, but it is in some senses a system

I have been puzzled by the way that corporate travel works. It seems to be a classic case of sub-optimization and I have never had a convincing story from corporate travel managers. I'll use some examples from my past to illustrate.
First comes from when I ran a consulting business. I figured that since my employees would often have to travel to the customer sites, I would quote rates to the customer that were inclusive of travel and then manage the travel down. I'd make some assumptions and then quote an all-in daily rate. Of course our rates looked higher than some of the competitions' rates, but the TCO was better. And then as a bonus to my employees, I would reward them at the end of the year with some percentage of the "saved" travel costs - assuming that they would normally have to pay $0.50 per mile on a trip for the airfare portion. Some of the more creative consultants were getting $0.20 or less, so there was lots to share.  I typically bumped the hourly rate factoring in about $0.35 per mile. So all were happy. Except they weren't! This was very difficult for the bean counters at some of our customers. They needed to see expenses accounted for differently.
Fast forward a few years. I was walking with a large travel agency on some modernization projects. This involved some of us commuting to the customer site, and staying the week.  Of course, since the customer was a travel agency, we had to use them for booking. Round trip airfare + 4 nights in hotel = $1300. We could book on Travelocity (and did a couple of times) getting the same flights, same hotel, same durations for about $700. We offered that to the customer - no deal. And then they had the gall to not renew the contract because "our expenses were out of control".
Fast forward to now. Texas education is in a budget crunch. There are important conferences that people need to go to - especially the people in Industry Studies kinds of programs. People have travel budgets to do these. How these budgets are calculated, I have no idea. What I do know is that accommodation and transportation have to be itemized. That's the policy, there's a travel department that does this. So, again, it is impossible to use the low cost mechanisms (like Travelocity) to book trips. Travelocity bundles airfare and hotels into a package, and is often a whole lot cheaper than booking the parts separately.
In corporations that I have worked for, it has almost never been acceptable to book the cheapest options - even when that is more convenient as well as cheaper. As a traveler would I prefer a package allowing a cheap non-stop flight or paying more and having to change planes in order to apply with (misguided) travel policy.
So given that there has to be some benefit to the current expensive, nonsensical approaches we have to ask where the benefits accrue. There are several candidates:

• Corporate travel can look like heroes because they have negotiated special airfares with preferred carriers. Except of course that's a false economy.
• Corporate travel gets all sorts of perks and inducements for the deals it does. Hmm, that doesn't look too helpful either.
• Travel policy can more easily be enforced up front. Well, that;s probably true, but employees who make unauthorized trips should not have the cost of those trips reimbursed.
• Fraudulent refunds - using an employee's own credit card, getting the trip changed, refund comes to employee and the employee makes some extra. That's really bad news and the employee should be fired for fraud.
• Being able to track travel independently of the travelers' own reporting. yes that might make a difference.
• No business class/first class generally available on packages booked on Travelocity. Well maybe there's a cheaper way around that.

The bottom line for me is that I don't see how corporate travel agents can really be justified - unless they facilitate the booking of all inclusive bundled packages. That surely has to be the way to save $$$$$

Video when you should use audio

I was reading one of Jeremy Shoemaker's excellent SEO posts, but was struck by a strange use of media. He has an interview with Levi Horowitz from Link Wheelers on the site, But the annoying thing about it is that it is a skype video. The video adds no value - a pair of talking heads. So it means I can't (easily) play it while driving, I essentially have to consume a bunch of extra bandwidth (and with the mobile carriers charging for bandwidth that's going to get expensive) to consume the valueless pictures.

Wise up folks, use video when you have valuable pictures to add. Use audio otherwise. Processing video (at least in my head) takes a whole lot more brain energy than processing audio. At least with audio I can do something else. And then use that great concept the podcast so I can listen to the audio in the car or in other off line situations

The Openness of Open systems

I was having a spirited conversation with a friend (involving beer of course) yesterday evening. We got around to discussing the sham of "Open Systems" - especially as applied to the travel industry. My belief is that the Open Systems marketing term was coined to attempt to break the stranglehold of TPF (transaction Processing Facility) on IBM mainframes. Now TPF is an unbelievably reliable system, but without a lot of flexibility. Maybe that's what makes it reliable. So when you want the system to be rock solid, run on TPF, otherwise do something else. That all comes at a price, so "Open Systems" were used as a way to beat up the TPF crowd with the promise of cheaper and more agile computing - and supposedly the promies of being able to switch - i.e. not be beholden to any single vendor. So *NIX systems were the darlings. Well kind of. Solaris, HP-UX, AIX were all candidates. But realistically how easy is it to switch from one flavor of OS to another?
That led me to draw an analogy between Operating Systems and DNA. A pretty woolly analogy, I admit, but it came out kinda fun. Let's imagine there is somehow a bit less than 2% difference (whatever that means) between a pair if UNIXes (UNICes?). That's about as different as the DNA differences between humans and chimpanzees.
It doesn't take a lot to see that the ~2% difference at the DNA level leads to some pretty major incompatibilities. That's true in the "Open Systems" world too. 2% different? Not much will switch easily.
So I continue to suggest that the openness of "open systems" is still a crock.