Just an app away from awesome

I really had to bite my blogging tongue during the iPad hype machine of the last few months, but now I feel like I can say something about it. Like most people, I wanted it more before Steve Jobs presented it in January than after the big announcement. I had an expectation of iPhone proportions and came out laughing at the very name iPad.

Come on, we were all laughing at that one.

Beyond a name, however, I’m still not on board the iPad train and its for a very simple reason: practical use. As of this writing, the iPad has introduced no new functionality that justifies the purchase.

It grabs email.
It plays videos.
It runs iTunes.
It opens and edits documents.

Well, so do both my iPhone and MacBook.

What made the iPod a success was not the iPod. It was the functionality that allowed it to open the iTunes application.

What made the iPhone a bestseller was not the iPhone. It was the functionality that allowed it to make calls and download a slew of apps that enhanced the functionality even further.

So when Apple unveiled the iPad, they were selling a sexy device with a sexy interface but nothing more. Only a few companies can actually do that and get away with it at the same time. Thankfully for Apple, they are one of them. That kind of consumer capital can’t last forever and sooner or later, they will be forced to turn this (or similar products) into something of functional value that is clearly distinguished from other Apple products and other tablets in the market.

Perhaps Apple is relying on the strength of third-party developers to submit kick-ass applications to the app store. That’s certainly a strategy for staying competitive but I don’t think they can lean on that alone to stay relevant. Plus, crowd-sourcing and open development haven’t been Apple’s strong suit, well, ever.

Until I see that one app that makes the iPad worth using, I will keep my wallet to myself. But all it takes is that one app.

Sorry, Cupid

You know what I’m not feeling this year? Valentine’s Day.

Call me unromantic, unchivalrous a love Scrooge or what have you but I think it has nothing to do with that. In fact, I’m in love, love being in love and just plain love love and believe a day created by Hallmark hardly defines the way I feel about someone.

OK, that sounds a little harsh and maybe it is. I get what makes the day so great. I mean, who doesn’t want an excuse to get dressed up for a hot date? Also, it’s downright heartwarming to know that someone’s thinking about you and cares enough to call you Valentine.

I guess the reason I’m just not feeling it this year has a lot more to do with the fact that my wife and I are headed to about the most unromantic place in the world this Valentine’s Day weekend: Fresno. That’s right, we’re spending America’s one day-o-romance on a road trip to the armpit of the butt crack of California.

At my mom’s house.

the funny thing is this is the second straight year we’ve accidentally booked a trip on Valentine’s Day. Sure, Portland was pretty awesome and we wouldn’t trade that for the world’s largest heart-shaped box of chocolate. But how did we settle on Fresno this year?

So enjoy your candlelit dinners, flower bouquets and boxes of chocolate this weekend. We’ll be watching it from afar from the fertile ground of the Central Valley.

Tragic hero of the here and now

I’ve been dwelling on the idea of failure so much lately, I’ve thought about taking my name off this blog and just calling it #FAIL. While failure has been a thing I’ve been coming back to time and again this past week, I know I can’t obsess over it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about failure, it’s that living in one’s own mind is the greatest failure of all.

Steven Pressfield calls this the Resistance, an invisible force that stands in the way of turning the inner creative energy of your mind into something tangible and real. It’s the Resistance that tells us we need to be inspired in order to start something. It’s the Resistance that tells us to fear the outcome of what we create.

It’s the Resistance that puts us in danger of becoming a true failure.

F. Scott Fitzgerald created the character Gatsby to show us that money and wealth does not protect us from becoming a failure in the love department. Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman characterized the failure of a destined common man obsessed with greatness. Both are the tragic heroes of their generation and are still relevant today.

If I had to add one more tragic hero to the list, it would be the person who succumbed to the Resistance and refused to fail. It’s the person who never acts on behalf of himself or others to achieve the incredible potential that he has. It’s the person who stays confined in his own mind, fearing that an obstacle in his path means the end of his road. It’s the person who has great intentions but never does anything to make them happen.

That’s the greatest failure I can imagine and the greatest tragedy that’s being written every day.

A frugal failure

When it rains, of course it pours. This week, however, it’s is raining failure and I love every bit of it.

OK, not literally dancing on top of the people that fail but you get what I mean. Right?

Yesterday, I wrote about failure as a required step for success. Just hours after posting my thoughts, Google Reader fired up another new post by Penelope Trunk that continues the failure streak.

And, Just a couple days after writing about time being the necessary factor in becoming an expert at something, Trunk writes yesterday about the need to be frugal in order to achieve success:

So I guess what I’m saying is that being an expert in something requires frugality. It’s not just a spending frugality. It’s a focus frugality. It’s the recognition that spending money is actually a distraction from the passion at hand. So the less you spend, the less you’re distracted.

Even though she stops short of calling it out by name, the bigger point for me is sacrifice. Filling in “sacrifice” for “frugality” you can see what Trunk is getting at: getting what you are after requires risky choices that may or may not pay off in the end.

Read also: In order to win something, you will probably have to lose something.

So, yes, it really does point back to failure. Andre Agassi gave up his childhood to swing a tennis racquet two million times before he won his first slam. Wilco had to give up their recording contract to release the album that made them famous. The list goes on and on.

Yesterday, I asked myself what I want so much that I would be willing to fail before getting it. Well, today I’m asking a similar question: What do I want so much that I would sacrifice nearly anything to get it?

Still no answer.

Agassi, Baldwin and why failure is an option

Over the last few days, I’ve been pushing my way through Andre Agassi’s new autobiography, Open. Unlike many Gen X-ers, I was too young to follow Agassi’s rise to tennis stardom, particularly the mullet, denim and “Image is Everything” era in the early 90’s. Most of what I know about Agassi comes from watching his later years, so I am appreciating the context I’m being given up to that point.

I get a lot out of autobiographies, which is why I love reading them. The thing I get most out of a good one is that failure is a required part of success. I am certain I’ve never read (or seen, for that matter) the story of someone who rose to success without a whole heck of a lot of missteps along the way. And if I have, I certainly don’t remember it because it was probably a sleeper of a tale.

The story of Agassi is no different. The book is a little more than 300 pages and took me more than half of them to get to his first gland slam victory, Wimbledon 1992. It’s not until page 200 that he even gets ranked Number One in the world. Up until then as a trial of losses, mistakes, obstacles, near-retirements, injuries and just plain bad luck.

Not what I expected from one of history’s best.

In fact, I am taken aback by the amount of losing that is covered in the book. Several times, I’ve found myself checking how many pages I have left and wondering if he has enough space to cover the incredible amount of success he has in his career. I’m still not sure he does.

Failure plays an integral role in Agassi’s story. He retells so much detail of so many losses that it’s almost uncomfortable, but at the same time it’s a very revealing look at the secret for success. It’s the same thing that has made Penelope Trunk write about what makes an expert and why Alec Baldwin has been a hot topic for Men’s Journal and Wired Magazine in the last couple of months.

The willingness to fail is not just part of the path to succeeding, it’s required.

Which gets me thinking. What am I willing to fail at time and again in order to achieve it? What am I passionate about that would drive me from point A to Z if it meant making 24 annoying stops along the way? What drives me?

Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything. Besides family and marriage, I have not engaged myself in anything that even remotely challenges me. Looking at my easy job, easy home and easy daily routine, I can honestly say I’m not driven; I’m coasting.

Having an easy life has never felt so wrong.

Where faith meets analytics

As a manager of a church denomination’s website, I often get asked how I measure success.

We don’t sell products on our site. We don’t take donations. We don’t consider other denominations “competitors.” So how do I tell whether or not our site is getting the job done? Or any job for the matter?

There’s no short answer but I can at least tell you where I start and break it down from there.

Figuring out an online identity

When I first joined the Communications team at Foursquare, we were lots of things and none of them were extremely clear from a visitor’s standpoint. We were a children’s department, a church planting department, a missions department and so many other things under this one banner that indicated we were some organization that believes in Christ.

Yeah, lots of things but nothing in particular. We were a conglomeration of departments moving in different directions with different ideas of what “success” means.

It’s taken a couple years, but Foursquare has been able to hammer down who it wants (and needs) to be online. I won’t bore you with the details but it boils down to this: one church with one voice.

What’s your niche?

Having your online identity pinned down is like your road map for the rest of the ride. Knowing who you are enables you to define what your objectives are which—wait for it—gives you something to measure!

And if you don’t think a church can have objectives outside of communicating service times (which is a good one) and increasing the tithe dollar (another decent, though self-serving one), think again.

Try considering:

• Plugging individuals into a small group
• Connecting people into a church ministry
• Centralizing information for multiple campuses
• Making sure all pastors have the resources they need to do the work of their ministry
• Telling stories of real-life people in the church making real differences in the community because of their faith

I mean, really, this list can go on and on. The point being that in order to exist online, a church should consider what they are adding to the Interwebs so it has a clear direction of what to do and how to measure it.

So, what are we doing?

Glad you asked. Knowing what you want to accomplish online tells you nothing about what to actually do online. So that’s where strategy comes in.

What’s the best way to motivate people to join a small group using your website (or some extension of it)?

Here’s a hint: there may be more than five correct answers and each one is just as good as the others. Or one may be better than the others. Maybe worse.

How do you know?

Measure, measure, measure!

Finally, where faith meets web analytics. Having come up with several ideas for communicating online, a church can safely put them to test.

And this is where I believe a lot of organizations (not just churches) can get analytics flat wrong. When no one opens those email newsletters or the Twitter account hasn’t immediately equaled Ashton Kutcher levels, companies tend to blow off the strategy as a #Fail.

Remember, an objective does not fail just because the method did.

So back to the original question that opened this little diatribe…how do I measure success for the website of a church denomination?

I have a set of key performance indicators (KPI) that tell me certain things.

For example, I care a lot about bounce rates on my site. But not the one I see when I first log into Google Analytics that has the word “Average” in front of it. I care about which pages bounce more than others and why people saw that one page then ditched me for someone else, so I look at which keywords and referring sites brought them in. If I know what brought them in, I can know what they’re looking for; and if they didn’t find what they were looking for, then I know how that page needs to be fixed.

Another thing I really care about is how many phone calls and emails we get into our office asking for a church recommendation in their area. Yes, phone calls and emails are KPIs because I want people to be able to find a local Foursquare church online, so if they call or email saying they could figure out our church locator, then I know something needs to be fixed.

Yeah, sure, the person calling could be the thing that needs fixing, but I can’t always blame it on that. :)

I also really care about the stories we tell online. We’re a pretty big denomination and keeping the Foursquare family feeling connected to another is an important objective for our website. We do that by telling the stories of people, church ministries and even world events as long as they are told through the lens of Foursquare.

So posting articles to our site and measuring pageviews is one thing, but we also see how social networking leverages our storytelling ability by stirring up conversation or how many people are referred to our site through our Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Vimeo accounts.

Can’t think of how to measure the effectiveness of your social networking tool on your overall web strategy? That could be topic for another post, but there are a lot of tools out there.

Wilco will love you, babe

I had heard of Wilco before, though had never given them much of a chance until seeing them last summer.

It’s very rare to fall in love with a band after seeing them for the first time. Ironically, thanks to the internets, it doesn’t seem to be rare to find footage of the exact moment you fell in love with a band after seeing them for the first time.

Enjoy. I did.

2010: The Year of a Better Story

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what effect story has on my life. After reading Donald Miller’s latest book and talking about the concept with friends, it was brought full circle during last week’s sermon at Parkcrest, where Rachel Oblon asked one simple question that will be my mantra for 2010:

Is my life worth paying $14 to see in a movie?

Rachel illustrated her point in many ways while clutching the base of a balance beam, comparing life experiences to riding the Disneyland tram and even citing Miller’s book. It was the aforementioned question that stuck with me most, however, and it will be something I ask myself over the next year (or more), whether it be for something as small as the coffee I drink to something as large as whether or not to go back to school or start a family.

Because, if I’m honest with my myself, my life has not been worth anywhere close to even the matinee price admission of a movie. No, not even close to the re-releases of Gigli or Glitter on a good day.

Everyone loves a good story. Even more, people love being a part of a good story. So what would you give up (or take in) today if it meant someone would actually pay to watch your life at the end of the day? This isn’t about a popularity contest or how to get the more attention. Instead, it’s a tool to gauge the success of living the life you were meant to live.

So here’s to 2010, the year of the better story. Hope to see you at the red carpet premier.