Facebook time

I was poking through some of Seth Godin's eBook What Matters Now this afternoon (apparently, in my case, it didn't matter until 6 weeks later). I like this message from Howard Mann:

There are tens of thousands of businesses making many millions a year in profits that still haven’t ever heard of twitter, blogs or facebook. Are they all wrong? Have they missed out or is the joke really on us? They do business through personal relationships, by delivering great customer service and it’s working for them.

How much time are you spending with your customers?

Book: The Long Tail

I found myself in a bookstore the other day and the limited selection of English books made it seem like time to check out The Long Tail (note the link is not to the same edition that I read).

The thesis is interesting: that consumer behaviour is changing due to increased selection, decreased distribution costs, better filtering and recommendation tools, and expanding access by amateurs to creative tools. The idea is that selling a few each of a million different things can now constitute a sizable and legitimate market. The history of mail order and consumerism in the United States also held my attention and there were pearls of interesting information about particular industries and companies thrown in.

Those were the good parts. But man do you have to wade through an enormous heaping pile of repetition to find them! I mean, I complained about the repetitiveness of Don't Think of an Elephant but The Long Tail makes that slender tome look like a particularly succinct haiku.

Anyone near me while I was reading will be able to confirm my level of frustration: every chapter or so I would snap, get up, and complain to whoever was nearest at the time (sorry!). Right down to the last chapter, we were still being treated—in every subsection!—to a paragraph-long definition of "long-tail economics" and its effects on commerce and consumers. Yes! Ok! We get it already!! The book should ha... I said we GET IT!!! The book should have been called The Long Read[1].

Basically The Long Tail should have just been an essay. In fact, it was just an essay so I wouldn't waste your money on the book. And if the original essay leaves you wanting, you can always try Wikipedia.

Don't Think of an Elephant also came out of a collection of essays so maybe this is a lesson for me (though it ought to be a lesson for authors). I bought Freakonomics at the same time as The Long Tail and I see it is also a collection of essays; so that doesn't thrill me with enthusiasm. Can anyone give me any comfort on that one? At this point even boring would be ok as long as it isn't repetitive...

[1] Credit for the title goes to Andy Stote. ;)

Framing

After reading this article, I ordered a copy of George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant. The book examines the use of language to "frame" arguments to your advantage. Take, for example, the phrase "tax relief". If there is relief to be had, tax is obviously a burden. How can anybody expect to succeed in arguing against something called "tax relief"? If you enter into the debate without reframing the issue, you lose.

Lakoff draws his examples largely from the context of the US political system and he makes no effort to conceal his Democratic leanings. Certainly not unbiased, the book is in fact a call to arms for Democrats, who Lakoff claims are decades behind Republicans in their understanding of these issues. All this means I take his words with a grain of salt.

Nonetheless, the discussion of mental framing and its effects fits with my observations of the world and seems broadly relevant. His analysis of the progressive and conservative movements themselves and their origins was also intriguing: I have no idea how accurate these theories are but I was able to look at conservative policy in a new light.

I was annoyed throughout by his repetition, both within and between chapters. In a few cases, I discovered several-paragraph-long sections that were taken almost verbatim from an earlier chapter. I discovered part way through that the book is a collection of essays and I have the impression they were thrown together quickly to get the book published in time for the last US election. This is partly to blame for the repetition but I think Lakoff is also overapplying one of his own messages: that mental frames are adopted through repetition.

That said, the book is short (100-and-some pages), cheap ($8 on Amazon), interesting, and a quick read so I recommend picking up a copy even if you only make it through the first two chapters.