Solid Thinking

First Rate announces exclusive New Zealand and Australian partnership with SearchIgnite.

New Zealand Online Marketing scene just about to get a bit busier.

How do we apply ethics to business, especially in making sure the staff can function as best as they can?

Let’s start with three different outlooks:

• Consequentialism: derives the rightness or wrongness of an act from the consequences. “The ends justify the means”. How you do things is not as important as why you do it.
• Deontology: derives the rightness or wrongness of an act from the character of the act itself rather than the outcomes of the action. You are right or wrong based on how you do things.
• Virtue Ethics: focuses on the character of the agent/person rather than on the nature or consequences of the individual actions themselves.

What do these all mean? Consider the act of telling a lie. Each of the concepts above would have a different interpretation on the rightness or wrongness of telling a lie:

• Consequentialism: telling a lie is wrong, but sometimes it is required for a greater good. For example, to protect a person from torture by saying “No, I have not seen him”.
• Deontology: telling a lie is wrong and is a sin from a religious point of view, regardless of the reason.
• Virtue Ethics: emphasises less on the rightness or wrongness of the lie, but looks more into the character of the person. The outcome may be different between a priest and a murderer.

How would these affect your business leadership?

Take for example your staff selection. Different types of people may suit different staff position. Let’s imagine a decision maker (CEO; or judge, marketing strategists, etc):

• Consequentialist: Would emphasis on results. A frivolous person may simply set long term goals and hope they are achieved. A wise person may break the goals down to milestones and monitor the milestones. Staff will most likely be relatively free to do their jobs. If there are no parametric rules (e.g., boundaries), system abuses may happen. Staff of creative/strong-leadership/effective-slacker background may highlight themselves with achievements. Industrious/highly-technical/heads-down type of staff may be slightly lost in directions at times due to the relaxed control. Key to success: milestones and periodic evaluations.
   
• Deontologist: Would emphasis on how things are done based on his value of right/wrong. The person may choose to closely monitor activity progress, and insist on things done in his/her way. At times, focusing too much on how things are supposed to be done may result in forgeting why things are done. Also, rigid framework may limit creativity and becomes a barrier to business evolution/growth. Staff of creative/strong-leadership/effective-slacker background may struggle with this type of leadership and relationship may be marred with conflicts. Industrious/highly-technical/heads-down type of staff will be very productive according to the leader’s master plan. Key to success: never forget the purpose of every action, have an external team to recommend creativity and evolution, careful staff selection.
   
• Virtue Ethicist: Would emphasis on staff characters. The person would spend a large effort in making sure the staff are as trustworthy as possible. Usually very trusting nature to the staff, and some which may become an ‘inner-circle’. In the extremes, a “my guy can’t be wrong” view may develop and become a fertile breeding ground for cliques and favouritisms, something that is very counterproductive to teamwork. Key to success: advisory roles filled with honest/trustworthy and impartial people to balance the very-subjective nature of virtue ethicist, continuous introspection to ensure the virtues are upheld uncorrupted.
   

Apple iPad

Apple iPad was revealed yesterday and the initial reactions seem to have split the market. There are those that were awed and drolled over the beautiful slimline pictures of it, and there are those that are disappointed and disenchanted very quickly.

So, do you want an Apple iPad? Are you wondering where to get an Apple iPad? When is Apple iPad going to be released? Before that, have a look at the good things and bad things about it.

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A night in the city.

Not too shabby eh?

Supra - Jellicoe Wharf 1

Supra - Jellicoe Wharf 2

Supra - Jellicoe Wharf 3

Thanks to Ash & Russell.

NZ Herald article: Yahoo backs Google’s response to China hacks

What I read:

Spotted today in the NZ Herald: Kiwi Data Warehousing Soars.

What does  mean to us?

If anything, recession taught us something by looking at the trends faced by the advertising industry. Most pronounced in the offline advertising, companies are rushing to cut their marketing budget by a large amount. They chose to hunker down in the bunker waiting for the artillery barrage of credit crunch to pass away before poking their heads again.

Interestingly, some went exactly the other way around into panic buying mode. They base the sales on percentage concept, where if the conversion rate goes down then in order to maintain the sales volume the base audience number must go up. This “panic sales defense” move lead to massive increases in marketing spend that returns no sales increases.

Why exactly these things happened?

The primary cause is that a lot of businesses, especially in the “calm New Zealand where time forgets”, neglect the importance of information. In particular, a lot of them do not bother to try to know their customers. For most conservative businesses, any sales is as good as the other. For instance, a lot of businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars on their websites without bothering to spend a few hundred dollars to get good analytics software such as Google Analytics.

But knowing your customers is paramount to your marketing efficiency. Google Analytics, for example, can be configured to attribute your sales to where the customers are coming from. With this you can recognise which source is valuable and which is not so that when it comes the time to cut down some marketing budget you can be sure you are cutting the right one.

Other useful analysis include customer behavior, such as what do they buy, what are the most favourite products (= promotion opportunities), what are they searching for that made them leave your shop (= product gaps), etc. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook also allow you to engage your customers to gain their trust, and most importantly, feedbacks. Not only that, they also form a free 3rd party data warehousing, where you can conduct data mining to see what people are talking about in relation to your, or your competitors’, products.

With free tools such as these and storage data space becoming cheaper every day, data warehousing and data mining should become a common business practice. It should even be a crime to run a business without thinking about who your customers are.

If you can snipe your enemy from a distance, why blindfold yourself and charge with a short rate inefficient scatter gun?

I’ve read a number of Avatar movie reviews and was intrigued by the variances despite the overall good ratings. So, last Tuesday I decided to swing around to the city cinema and watch the Avatar movie to find out what the hype was all about. It was available in 3D Imax and normal digital 3D. I chose the digital 3D since I dislike the humongous Imax screen which sometimes give me neckpain.

Avatar Movie

Going in to the Avatar screening theatre, the glasses took a bit of getting used to. These glasses are much more bulky compared to your usual crappy red/blue 3D glasses. They are more sophisticated, well made with plastic component and polarised (?) lenses with red/green tint. Noticeably you can see quite normally while wearing them. But the weight is something to get used to, and I found during the over 2.5 hours I had to take them off a few times to give my nose bridge (and eyes) a little rests.

What do I think of the Avatar movie?

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You see them all the time, and you can’t help but wonder where do the birds flock by night.

If you happen to live in Wellington (NZ), Stuff.co.nz has the answer.

I find it fascinating, especially for the little sparrows.

Two words: WHAT THE….???

www.moanMyIP.com

WARNING: bordering on not-safe-for-work

This brings a new twist in trying to find out what your IP address is.

Or not.

Damn, I just checked my IP address 7 times within the last 5 minutes and I already forgot what it is. Let me check it again….

Facebook Demographics 2009 Age Distribution from Google Ad Planner data - notice the red rectangle.

Notice the red rectangle

Facebook Demographics 2009 from Checkfacebook.com, showing purportedly 60% of Facebook global population from 8 different countries - notice how 18-24 age group is mostly higher than the other age groups.

By Checkfacebook.com

Facebook 2009 US Demographics shown by Facebook Ad demographic targeting tool roughly confirms the data given by Checkfacebook.com, lending strong credibility to it.

Facebook 2009 Demographic for United States

Good food for though. Google Ad Planner data is highly inaccurate? Anyone has any information on how Google Ad Planner data is compiled?