Doing Things Right

OK, first of all, it would be impossible for an electronic file to have the capacity of actually hating anything. Secondly, even if it could, I don’t know if it actually hates blind people so much as it doesn’t consider blind people. I mean, after all, Adobe PDF’s aren’t bad people… er… documents… they just don’t take into consideration that a portion of the folks out there that would like to read them can’t… because they’re blind (not unlike many web-developers out there… ehem.).

Here is a quote from Bruce Maguire, a blind employee of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission(HREOC) during his speech at WebEssentials’04 recently…

”…the ADobe Portable Document Format (PDF) is becoming the subject of complaints on the grounds that it is inaccessible to people who are blind or vision-impaired.”

“Wow.” I thought. I guess I didn’t realize that. Come to find out, PDF’s don’t compile text in a text-flow fashion… they simply grab blocks of text left-to-right and chunk them out for display… with little or no regard to how they might be read with a screen-reader device. Something to keep in mind when you are developing to make your content accessible.

Oh, by the way… in Australia… having an inaccessible website is illegal. Wonder if that mentality is going to become prevalent in the States?

Have you ever dreamed of being able to control things with your mind? My 6 year old daughter thinks she discovered that if you stare at someone really hard, they will “feel” you staring at them and then look at you. While explaining this scientific breakthrough to my wife, she said, “Watch, mom… you look out the window and I’ll stare at you.” She did look, and Kelsea did stare. After a few seconds my daughter asked, “Can you feel it?” My wife laughed.

While we may be far from controlling other people with our mind, British scientists have just recently implanted a chip into the brain of a quadriplegic that allows him to control his computer with his mind… simply by “thinking” what the computer should do.

This implant enables the 24 year old to control his television set and even his computer… doing things like changing channels, surfing the Internet, playing computer games and checking his email.

I wonder if there’s an “off” switch so you don’t actually send that nasty email in your sleep?

Last night during a vision-casting meeting for our church, I was presenting an outreach method to our staff, and heard this phrase that I don’t think I had before. The outreach method involved offering a free dinner at a restaurant with, “no strings attached”. “Statistically the greatest sales hook of all time,” Garret said, “the ‘no-obligation’ obligation”. It appears that in the sales world, people feel even more obligated to perform when they see that there is no obligation involved. Sounds like something my mother used to do when I was little.

“Why don’t you just stay out all night and catch a cold, OK?” Not that she wanted me to, but there is something in that reverse psychology that makes you say, “Hey… I don’t think so!”

It’s a psychological trigger that basically gives you the permission to do something you might have been inclined against (like going in the house instead of staying out and catching a cold).

The outreach method we are trying is a 11”H x 8”W x 8”D registration box like you would see on a store counter somewhere. On the front is a full-color picture of my family with the logos of some nice restaurants along one side, and the text, “Free Dinner? Yes!” in bold at the top.

The rest of the text reads something like this…

“My name is Pastor Jay Jones, and my family and I would like to take you and your family to dinner for FREE. We don’t want to push our religion on you, or obligate you in any way, we just want to make friends with people in this city and do something nice for you. No strings attached… honest!”

So, that’s the pitch. It also invites them to drop a slip of paper in the box with their name and number, or call me directly. But notice the unintentional hook at the end… “no strings attached… honest.” This was merely straight from my heart, but at the same time, I will be delighted if people accept the invitation.

Someone asked me how I’m going to afford such an expensive method of outreach. I’ll let God worry about that… after all, we’re doing it for Him, right?

update: I added a picture of our box… let me know what you think. As a follow up, I put the box out in a laundromat, and in 2 days, had 12 names. We have pulled the box for the time being to give us a chance to react to this great response!

Ok, here’s a quick question… what’s an easy way to save yourself $300? My answer last night was, “Change my own brakes!”

I couldn’t believe it when I called a local auto service center for a quote on a brake job on my ‘01 Alero. “Well, bring it in and we’ll take it for a test drive, then give you a quote.” “That’s all good and well,” I said, “But the reason I want a quote is to decide if it’s worth my time to even bring it over to you.”

“Oh, ok.. well for blah, blah and blah it will run $360.”

Talking about putting the brakes on.

“Errr….. thanks.” I said. Click.

A quick trip to Advanced Auto parts and $60 out of my pocket got me everything I needed to complete the job. It took me about 2 hours to change all the brakes and put a spanking shine on my aluminum alloy wheels.

I have to say, it was quite a treat turning a wrench again… it’s been a long time, and was long overdue… I forgot how good it actually feels to bang my knuckle on the underside of a car and get grease underneath my fingernails. Since my trade involves working at a computer all day coding award-winning websites[grin], it was very refreshing to build something physically tangible again. I need to do this more often!

Recently asked by a professional web developer friend was this question, “How do you measure ROI [in relation to cold-calling]?

It got me to thinking, exactly how do you calculate ROI for a personal marketing avenue like cold calling? Especially when you are trying to perform outside of your occupation… which is web development. Freelancers who are constantly trying to find work often resort to this type of contact-generating, but is it worth it? I think the answer is pretty complex.

You can never really know what your ROI is for this type of marketing until you can look back over a span of time and compare failed calls to successful calls, and then determine if the cost was worth the time you spent. So, first of all, it will definitely take time.

Remember, though… if you are doing your own marketing, you are losing more than just time for each lost call… you are also losing money from development (assuming you are taking time off of existing work to do sales calls). Every hour you spend on the phone is also an hour you are not spending developing, designing, etc. Therefore, your loss per hour is actually double!

In this case, I would suggest partnering with a company who specializes in doing telemarketing to businesses, and will only charge you for closed deals… not just leads. This way, you can be busy about what you are good at, and let someone else worry about their effectiveness in cold-calling.

If you do decide to do your own cold-calling, though, be prepared to invest a significant amount of time (money) up front until you learn how to be effective at this difficult marketing style and turn a true proft from the results. Only then can you really look back and see if the Return on Investment was worth the effort.