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creativity

6 Sure Fire Scenarios to Make Business Travel Suck Less

I get to do a good deal of travel annually, both personal and business – but at least 85% of it is business and I continue to make B-team mistakes when it comes to living out of a bag. Travel train wrecks are no fun and for some reason things that happen are more annoying when you’re traveling. I suspect it’s the hurry up and wait thing which exasperates this weird travel “hectic-ness vibe”.

So I’ve spent time identifying a couple of reoccurring scenarios I find myself getting into as a business traveler which need a resolution.

Damn it’s too late/early to call!

I often find myself on other times zones and get goofed up on my schedule and forget to ring home. This scenario’s resolution plan is fairly straight forward – Microsoft Outlook. By using outlook timezones, meetings, and whatever might get in the doesn’t because I have a reminder to call home now. All I did was put an outlook task on my calendar every day at 3:00 PM. I may ultimately need to adjust the timing, but should work everywhere – Europe to San Francisco. The daily task even has utility when I’m home. It becomes the “Do I need to stop and buy something” call.

Holiday, what holiday?

With the near reliance on Outlook for nearly a decade and even more so with the call home task, I hadn’t noticed that US Holidays aren’t enabled by default which has caused me issues multiple times. I attempt to schedule my travel a min 6 weeks out and all I see is a clear calendar, no holidays. Not any more! I was able to easily enable US Holidays in Outlook by going to tools>options>calendar options>add holidays without issue.

With holidays visible now on all of my devices I shouldn’t end up forgetting to plan for long weekends or to not be aware that I’m accidentally traveling on say Mother’s day. It’s not like you have much flexibility on btravel, but it’s helpful to know such context earlier rather than later, just in case you have to buy a bigger gift.

I got my iPhone, I’ll find it

As a geographer and a male, I sometimes find it difficult to acknowledge that paper maps are required at all. Especially if I have already been to the city a couple of time or I have my phone with me. I’ve used my iPhone a couple of times and I can’t seem to orient myself with it while driving. On a recent trip to IAD, I made 1 wrong turn which ate up 8 minutes of time and $6 in unneeded tolls so I’m not to confident in the iPhone as my map/directions provider. So it’s paper directions for me going forward, I’ll just print them out when I print my boarding pass.

A 7:00 am Flight is never a good idea

This concept of taking 7:00 am seems reasonable and actually tempting more often than not, but in practice it never works. You have to wake up at like 3:45 AM, get to the airport and you now catch a hour delay. So I just asked myself 1 question: How cool does one need to be to roll into Mid-Town for a 11:00 am meeting from Atlanta. Quick answer, I’m never going to be that cool so it’s a flight the night before for me.

NOTE: Each region will have a similar scenario – just substitute the city most appropriate for your location to internalize this spatial scenario – 9:30 meeting in Chicago from Detroit. A 10:30 meeting in LA from SFO.

Don’t be the weird old guy at a concert

Sometimes with business travel you get this rare open evening, late morning or an afternoon where you can catch a moving, a leisurely lunch or live music at a local venue. My preference has historically been music on the road as a great way to consume downtime, today I mainly opt for hotel wireless and delivery.

I’ve seen some really good music by happenstance on the road – String Cheese, Sound Tribe Sector 9, Widespread, Derek Trucks, Disco Biscuits….. so it’s your call. I’m just not sure I’m in for hanging with a bunch of kid’s, which is what audiences have essentially become to me.

So why have audiences become a bunch of kids to me? Well I’ve recently noticed that I’m trending towards the weird old guy standing in the back of the venue checking his blackberry.

Dude, I lost my “X”

Let’s just get a baseline on the stuff I’ve lost during travel in the last 3 years or so:

  • 2 iPods – 1 was the victim of a airplane seat pocket and the other a cab I think
  • 3 pairs of sunglasses – 1 hotel, 1 rental car and 1 plane pocket
  • 1 pair of prescription glasses – not really sure
  • 1 jacket – forgot I had it in the overhead compartment, didn’t realize until the next day.
  • 1 set of headphones – combination iPod loss as well in a seat pocket
  • Socks galore

The only common thing each of these scenarios had was some sort of distraction like being on the phone or a quick turn connection to my final destination. It’s not like I generally don’t like losing stuff and it annoys me for a while. So I’ve decided my Zen-esque path forward is to at peace with my losses. On the pragmatic side I’m going to just budget for losing $600 worth of stuff a year in flight and hope to stay under budget.

May 10, 2008 by
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It’s official! I suck

That’s right – honesty is the best policy. So in full disclose this is Just a traffic update, yesterday was the worst traffic this blog has had since I’ve been paying attention! (Nov. 07). That’s right, celebrate the little things, because it appears y’all are transitioning to rss readers. Thanks team!

Maybe it is that no one is searching of relevant terms for what I’m writing about, so let’s highlight the top 10 search items, since we have analytics.

  1. bob’s ichthyosaur – A Great book and apparently the top search term.
  2. what is scientific management – High school students everywhere are googling.
  3. twing – Very cool, cool people
  4. mbifm – A made up acronynm, which apparently means Member of the British Institute of Facilities Management.
  5. calculating gross margin
  6. danielle pribbernow – Chick on the Check out blog, wonder if it’s just her searching on herself? Way too much traffic for a Wal-Mart employee. No I mean WAY TOO MUCH.
  7. dijouri – I made up this name for my second son, 12 years old. I think this IS my son searching on himself or people trying to figure out if I made up his name or people looking for movie made in 2003.
  8. things i am thankful – This is encouraging.
  9. afro – Right on.
  10. giggly quotes – Who searches on giggly quotes?

So if you don’t find anything interesting above interesting, perhaps one of the top 10 “trafficked” pieces, mainly produced via keywords – which you will notice via the relationships between keywords above and titles below. That being said,I REALLY am partial to the Stuck in the Middle series — and — I like the Mosaic piece the most, mainly because it plays well in my head. Yup, I’ve sucked you into a replay post, but a replay of posts everyone else seemed to like too, or at least this is 10 most visited posts here.

  1. Lessons Learned: What is scientific management
  2. 100 Things I am thankful for… – A thanksgiving post
  3. Spatially Relative: A community’s place… – A piece about a book I read
  4. About – Self-explanatory
  5. 5 Ways YOU can launch a Twitter stream remediation program – geeky thing I wrote and scoble called it geeky, that scoble effect is a real thing.
  6. Lessons Learned: How to calculate Gross Margin
  7. 10 Themes and concepts for YOU to blog on
  8. 10 Tips for dealing with the fact that you will never leave your Job
  9. WANTED: Social Media Antagonist
  10. The Death of Marketing? Mix it up.

Hopefully the new folks that have added me to your reader find some of these interesting. Cheers!

April 16, 2008 by
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It’s the economy stupid – package up, package down

Hugh’s recent I quit Twitter initiative took me back to his blog again. Hugh’s renewed focus on writing and creativity is refreshing to hear about. While browsing I again ran into the image below, which reminds me of the importance packaging a software product for the a given market segment and within the then current economic context. As I talk to product managers and technology marketers there is considerable churn and angst about managing their businesses into a tight spend cycle. Packaging up into value and down into customer acquisition with planned out year up sells are two themes I’ve been seeing in the marketplace.

Are you simplifying, enriching or repricing your solutions?

0804enrich.jpg

From my limited experience, economic states and packaging are temporary, price maybe not.  Thanks for the reminder Hugh!

April 12, 2008 by
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5 Incomplete Thoughts on Social Media

Remember the title….

1. Manufactured Market?

There is so much noise about the market opportunity and the necessity to fund community initiatives for enterprises but little has materialize in respect to direct revenue and meaningful metrics. This is a challenge for traditional marketers on many levels and the type of topics I suspect are being at the Forrester Marketing conference. There is a after the show workshop that asserts the following which might be close to revenue:

Experiments with rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks show how dynamic marketing techniques can touch on buyers’ emotions, educate and persuade them, measure interactions more effectively, and generate additional business.

2. Perpetual Social Markets

Shel’s interviews of Jeremiah Owang and the Sea World folks are both emblematic of the challenges of linking social media investments to a return. How can you effectively measure and manage social media as a growth engine? Examples exist where a specific event or a series of inferences can be leveraged to assume the impact of social media, as evidenced in the description of Sea World video at Fast Company:

Measuring social media is one of the pain spots for the enterprise. As Kami Huyse, says in this clip of her client SeaWorld San Antonio. “It all depends on what you measure.” …

What to measure indeed – hits, downloads….. Ultimately most businesses measure revenue from Marketers, so perhaps Sea World is an anomaly and most businesses know how to convert the social media marketing budget to revenue and understand how to successfully deploy/develop a community. Let’s see if this is the case from Shel’s interview of Jeremiah, you probably only need to listen for say, the whole thing:

3. Social Media as Infrastructure

With the metric challenges and elusiveness of revenue is social media a function of retention more so than demand? If marketers are unable to deliver/verify incremental new revenues base on investment, should the metric hunt move to revenue retention and customer satisfaction?

Cool technology should never be relegated to the “post-transactional” budget fight…..

4. Platforms as Markets

Is Twitter a market? Facebook? Myspace? With increasing platforms for exchange more and more opportunity appears to emerge as populations flock to platforms. Where people gather transactions happen right? There are many example of this in the physical space – Burning Man, dead shows and in the parking lots of panic shows. So if people are gathering, there has to be transactions to be had – right?

Information as currency and messaging as a service continues to be the key commodities being exchanged on social media platforms….

5. Community as a Commoditizer

The transactional efficiencies of social computing by it’s very nature puts downward cost pressure on goods. Ease of comparison, ease of purchase and ease of access to other consumers/product customers. Ease of discovery. Product differentiation through a cost center represents…

Maybe the title should have been 5 Incoherent Thoughts…

~cheers!

April 11, 2008 by
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