the [non]billable hour

How to Geek Out with your Technology Clients

Lawyers could learn a thing or two about communicating with clients from this explanation on the Stake Ventures blog:  Why the LLC is the Ruby on Rails of legal entities. 

I Believe that Children are our Future ...

At the Conferenza Blog, they just posted a great recap of the TED Conference.   One of the three trends that emerged at the event was really fascinating, and its something I’d like to talk more about at our LexThink! Lounge event and maybe even at LexThink! 2020. 

Youth, Innovation and 'Upgrade Paradox’. A variety of speakers addressed the issue of innovation, creativity, educating youth and our future. Sir Ken Robinson argued creativity is as important as literacy, and said we train it out of our youth. Zany astronomer Clifford Stoll suggested those who want to know the future 20 years out should ask kindergarten teachers, not technologists or futurists. Neil Gershenfeld of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms described how his $20,000 mobile fab labs are used by young children, who are often bedazzled and spend hours learning to build complex technical systems. Finally, NYTimes tech columnist David Pogue described the "upgrade paradox" by which well-meaning, consenting (presumably) adults work to "improve" a piece of software so many times "you finally ruin it."

 

WWJDTMAC - What Would Jesus Do to Market a Church?

Do you think legal marketing sucks?  Then read Church Marketing Sucks, a great new blog focused on — yep, you guesed it — church marketing.  Great blog design too!

Client Experience Matters

Found this article (via Digg) titled Why Features Don’t Matter Anymore: The New Laws of Digital Technology.   In the author’s words, “user experience (along with a strong brand, and clever marketing) is much more important for the success of a device then technical specifications.”  There is much to be learned here for all service providers as well, so I encourage you to read the entire article with that in mind.  Here are the author’s 10 fundamental rules (read the article for his explanation):

1) More features isn't better, it's worse.

2) You can't make things easier by adding to them.

3) Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.

4) Style matters

5) Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.

6) Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.

7) Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use.

8) Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.

9) Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience.

10) Less is difficult, that's why less is more 

Technorati Tags: client+service, experience, marketing

links for 2006-02-28

• "The Word" Style Of Presentations from the Colbert Report
  Another interesting presentation style
  (tags: presentations powerpoint)
• Interface to WikipedizeText
  Takes text and searches for wikipedia entries.
  (tags: wikipedia hacks blogging)
• Tricks of the Trade: Marriage Counsellor
  "When you have an angry couple it is often hard to get them change to a positive, workable emotional state. So ask them how they met. They inevitably smile and become physically more relaxed. Once they've told their story you've got five to ten minutes of
  (tags: mediation)
• X-Entertainment - Spider-Man Reviews Crayons! Part 1 of 3.
  Funny!
  (tags: fun humor spiderman)

Twenty Questions to Build Your Business

Sam Decker shares Twenty Questions to Develop Your Business that every small business should be able to answer.  Really worth a read.

Technorati Tags: small+business,

KM for Law Firms

Jack Vinson summarizes the two days of a legal KM (knowledge management) conference he attended.  Check out his posts about Day One and Day Two.

Technorati Tags: km, knowledge+management, law

links for 2006-02-25

• Seed to Spread - Connected Marketing
  (tags: marketing business hawthorne+effect)
• Tom's Future of Web Apps, Translated for Product Managers
  (tags: web2.0 design project+management)
• Charlotte Friis Design Studio > Children's Paper Chair
  A too-cool chair/easel/toy for young kids. My daughter would die for this!
  (tags: design chair children)

Join Me at BarCamp

I’m going to be hanging around a lot of people waaaaaaaay smarter than I am at BarCamp Los Angeles next weekend (Saturday and Sunday, March 4–5, 2006).  I’ve tentatively titled my session “UnConferencing for Normal People — Taking the UnConference Mainstream.” 

While everyone else is building cool web2.0 applications full of ajaxy goodness (I don’t really know what that means, either), I’ll be working to build the perfect conference.  I’ll post my presentation up here later this weekend.

Come join me!  Have a Beer.  Don’t cost nothin’.

Technorati Tags: unconference, barcamp, barcampla

Seed your clients for better marketing.

Could a law firm bring in its target clients and ask them for marketing advice?  Here’s an introduction to how it just might work:

Rather than simply offer free samples, previews, test-drives etc to opinion leaders, the idea of seeding trials is to create goodwill, loyalty and advocacy among the opinion-leading 10% of your target market by putting the product or service in their hands and giving them a say in how it is marketed. By involving opinion leaders in this way, by effectively inviting them to become part of your marketing department, you create a powerful sense of ownership among the clients, customers or consumers that count.

The reason this works is called The Hawthorne Effect.  Here’s a fascinating example from the article:

Back in the 1930s, a team of researchers from the Harvard Business School were commissioned to run some employee research for the telecom giant Western Electric (now Lucent Technologies). Conducted as the company’s production plant in Hawthorne, near Chicago, the research program involved inviting small groups of employees to trial various new working conditions before rolling them out to the general workforce. To the researchers’ amazement, whatever was trialed the participants seemed to like, to such an extent that their productivity increased! For example, when researchers invited participants to trial working in brighter lighting conditions, productivity increased. But then when they trialed dimmer lighting conditions, productivity also increased. In fact, productivity kept increasing in successive trials of working under progressively dimmer lights, until the lighting was no stronger than moonlight! In another trial, the research participants were invited to test working shorter hours, and sure enough their productivity increased again. Indeed, subsequent trials showed that the more breaks the research participants were given and the less time they worked, the greater their productivity. But then, when the researchers asked them to trial longer hours, productivity went up again – to an all time high.

Technorati Tags: marketing, seeding, professional+services, law, hawthorne+effect