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The dictionary defines “insidious” as something that insinuates itself so stealthily and so subtly that you don’t notice it’s there – and potentially causing harm – until it’s too late. A software product that insinuates itself into your life is one that you use without questioning, or really thinking about, because it does what it’s supposed to with ease. When selling software products, whether B2B or B2C, “intuitive” and “easy to use” are basic to making the sale. But does your product also need to be insidious?

I thought about this recently while pondering the iOS vs. Android question. Being someone who considers a physical keyboard a necessity for getting work done, it took me until January of 2012 to trade my old netbook in for a tablet device. At first, it seemed a foregone conclusion that I would purchase an iPad as my Shelf-Of-Too-Many-Electronics already held an iPhone and a MacBook. Yet, as my finger hovered over the “check out” button, something inside of me rebelled and I emptied the cart. Three days later, I was the owner of an Android Tablet.

When I ripped away the cellophane and opened the box, I was already thinking about all the hacks and customizations I could install on my shiny new toy; of all the ways I could bend the device to my will instead of all the ways I’d have to cave to its dictates. Before doing so, however, I had to get to know the product as it was.

First, there were all the pre-installed apps to consider: Some were background processes necessary for the running of other apps, (such as the skin that sat on top of Android), others were poorly thought-out corporate partnerships designed to sell me features and products I might or might not need. But almost all of them, each and every one, required me to sign in separately with my Google Account and give it certain permissions before I could give the app a trial run and decide whether or not I needed it.

The permissions made me hesitate. Whether apps wanted “full Internet access” or not didn’t really bother me; most of the time, it’s easy enough to root a device, install a customized firewall, and control Internet access from there. But did apps 1, 2, and 3 really need to read my contact data? Did apps 2, 3, and 4 really need to access my calendar? Why did app 5 need to “modify global system settings”? As I paused to think about these things, my “Shiny New Toy” suddenly seemed a great deal less like a toy and a great deal more like homework I hadn’t done. It also made me give my iPhone the fish eye.

The beauty of my iPhone was that using it had never required me to think. The device was as simple as it was dictatorial. Installing an app required little more than typing in my password and clicking the “install” button. Backups, file transfers, and updates were conducted however Apple wanted them conducted. And while I dearly missed features such as being able to simply drag and drop photos on and off the device, doing things “Apple’s way” didn’t really tax my brain either. So I’d never thought about it. Until now.

Did my iPhone respect my privacy more than my Android device? Probably not. Were the Apple store apps accessing less of my information? Unlikely. But by giving me less information (or possibly by rolling it all into the miles long iTunes license agreement that I never read), my Apple device behaved more insidiously and got me to use more of its apps and features by preventing me from thinking about how apps worked and thus circumventing the, “What will it cost me, in terms of privacy, to get to that functionality?” question. In short, the Apple device was far more insidious than the Android.

But does that insidiousness really drive user adoption? Two years ago, 50% of iOS users purchased at least one app per month compared with 21% of Android users. As of 2011, Android’s app downloads per user “still lagged behind Apple’s by 2-to-1”* despite Android devices now owning greater market share. Without more granular data, I can’t tell you “why” this is true. But it certainly makes you think and it makes me, for one, ask whether a software product might sell better if it were just a little more insidious.

* ABI Research Associates: http://bit.ly/tEgRpZ

The canvas asks:

• What value do you deliver to the customer?
• What key activities do you need to perform to deliver that value?
• What key resources does your value proposition require?
• What type of relationship do you have/want to have with your customer?
• What are your go to market channels?
• What are your key customer segments?
• What does your cost structure look like?
• What makes up your revenue stream?

These questions are by no means exhaustive, but you’d be startled how often founders and CEOs can’t answer them or haven’t thought about them. That’s a problem, because being able to describe your business in these terms signals to potential investors that you’ve thought about how your business activities align to aid you in achieving your goals.

Osterwalder’s Canvas also helps you to identify any gaps that may exist in your plan and where an opportunity may lie for a potential innovation or pivot.  Try it out for yourself, and let me know what you think!

image provided by: sixninepixels / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A couple nights ago I met a group of young entrepreneurs (mostly recent grads) at a networking event and (over too many cups of coffee) realized that despite the vastly different businesses they were starting, many of them had incredibly similar viewpoints when it came to which business expenses were “splurges” and which were “saves”:

1. Office Space – Splurge
   - The consensus within the group was that office space is worth splurging on because, as one woman put it, “you basically live there.”  While I do understand her viewpoint, I have to disagree. Unless location and appearance are central to your core business — for example at a retail store — impressive office space is a luxury rather than a necessity.  No one wants to work in a basement, but real estate is expensive and, at the end of the day, you’re probably better off spending your money elsewhere.
2. Office Equipment – Splurge – Going back to the “you basically live there” mindset, the group agreed that while you don’t want to spend money on equipment you don’t need, you should never skimp on the things that you do need.  Ergonomic chairs, computers with adequate processing power, and sturdy tables that won’t fall apart on you are all fairly basic necessities. I’m somewhat torn on this. On the one hand, if you try to skimp on these things you’re likely to pay in other ways,  (think “visiting doctors for back pain.” and “had to scramble on my sales pitch because my laptop died”), on the other hand, you’ll have a hard time convincing me to spend $500 on a chair.
3. Marketing Budget – Save – I was actually fairly surprised that “marketing” fell into most peoples “save” basket. To me, getting your name and your business out there seems like a core function and thus a core expense. However, the group at large seemed to think that social media email, and viral marketing would be “good enough” in beta stage and earlier.

What’s your take?

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#3. Posting to the wrong Twitter account

The beauty of Twitter clients is that they let you manage multiple accounts. Unfortunately, they also make it easy to post personal messages to professional accounts by accident.  In 2011, Twitter accidents included the American Red Cross #gettingslizzard at work,  Chrysler complaining about how no one in the #motorcity “knows how to f****** drive”,  and (former)  Representative Anthony Weiner tweeting photos of his genitals.  While two out of these three incidents were easily resolved with a retraction and an apology, the third led to a career-ending scandal. The lesson here is to make sure you have safeguards in place so that tweets are read by a second party before they’re posted. (This also prevents your interns from tweeting their meltdowns in real time on your corporate blog.)

#2. Offending the person you’re selling to.

When executed well, humorous and edgy campaigns are great for generating buzz. Unfortunately, “humorous” and “edgy” campaigns, are sometimes just plain offensive. If the person you’re offending isn’t in your target demographic then it might not matter much to the bottom line – but when the people you’re offending are the people you’re selling to, you’ve effectively just shot yourself in the foot.  In 2011, American Apparel found itself doing damage control after it tried to launch a plus sized clothing line by making fun of plus sized women, Doctor Pepper saw its approval and “buzz” ratings decline by half after it declared a diet drink “not for women“, and Jackie Magazine had to fire an editor after they decided that “N**** B****” was an appropriate term for a black woman.

#1. Underestimating the Power of Social Media.

After seven years of Facebook, six years of YouTube, five years of Twitter, and approximately $2.7 Billion of Social Media Marketing spending in 2011 alone, some people still don’t seem to grasp that the Internet is a great place for bad behavior to be aired and public ire to be roused.  Anything you text, tweet, or email to a customer can and most likely will be posted by someone somewhere – especially if it’s discriminatory or insulting. Paypal learned this the hard way after it shut down a Christmas toy drive because, according to a customer service rep, “You can use the donate button to raise money for a sick cat, but not poor people.”   The customer running the toy drive posted their correspondence with Paypal to a blog with a moderate readership and the story was soon picked up by Reddit, Gawker, and numerous other blogs. Paypal found itself not only issuing apologies, but also matching donations to make amends.

At the most basic level, don’t pretend the problem doesn’t exist or ignore the customer having the problem.

Sounds simple right?

Surprisingly, a large number of firms have yet to learn that ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away.  For one thing, pretending that you don’t have a problem makes you appear either negligent or incompetent.  For another, the longer you fail to address it, the more time it has to spread through social media sites and to the traditional media.  Toyota, BP, and Goldman Sachs have all flubbed this in recent memory –  and all of them have more or less recovered from their missteps. But billion dollar companies have billion dollar budgets and the PR departments to match.

So what happens when a smaller firm ignores the basics?

A good example of “the bad” comes from LiveJournal, Inc., a  blogging and social media site owned by Russia’s SUP:

• At 9:21pm on the 24th of October, users began complaining to the site’s release blog about various features that no longer worked after the most recent update. Among these were various broken buttons and a timed, automatic log-out that redirected users to the homepage at every-few-minutes intervals.
• At  9:29 pm on the 24th, one irate user pointed out that when they logged in they were being connected to another user’s account. More chimed in, some pointing out that they were able to see information such as home addresses, Paypal account information, and whatever other data the user had stored .
• At 11:20 pm, A customer service representative responded that the logging out and redirecting was a feature, not a bug, meant to drive away spam bots. The customer service rep ignored the many posts regarding the privacy issue.
• Over the next two days, hundreds of user complaints piled up in LiveJournal’s release blog and were all ignored. Responses to the continued silence ranged from a very polite, “I’d appreciate more information”, to the less patient, “Communicate, dammit!”,  to numerous assertions that users would be closing their paid accounts and taking their money elsewhere. No response was received to any of these comments and one user relayed that her attempts to contact the company had been met with the response that reps had “no authority to make an official statement”.
• At 12:45 on the 27th, four days later, the company finally posted an update to their maintenance blog wherein they buried a statement that the login/account mismatch error had only existed “for 3 minutes” on the 24th and that there had been “no affect on security”.   No statement was ever issued on the blog post where customers complained. Customers were never addressed directly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly,  the site’s traffic has dropped 15%  since October. (This entry posted 12/16/2011.)

It’s not hard to see what LiveJournal did wrong here. From ignoring customers, to pretending the problem didn’t exist, to dismissing whatever problem did exist.

What might be harder to spot is just how much LiveJournal lucked out: No one started a Facebook campaign,  passionate rants were confined to LiveJournal itself, and no one in the media (digital or traditional) thought the company was interesting enough to pick up the story despite the four day lag.

And yet, still, they lost 15% of their traffic.

So, if I may make a humble suggestion: When your customer perceives a crisis, don’t ignore them.