Love’s Links – December 7th Show

Great show tonight!   Our panel dealt with Jack Dorsey’s new venture www.squareup.com Janet did a great little piece on them.    I found a great write up on them at PC World’s Business Centre

Our guest tonight was Craig Tomarkin.  Craig works as a data analyst for Acxiom.  It’s their site where Allan got the opening line, “You don’t even know I’m one of your best customers.”   The site is worth checking out even if only for that.

My takeways from tonight’s show:

• You don’t negotiate with a computer. Craig talked about the way people will accept a price from a computer where they would try to negotiate with a person.
• Let Your Customers Tell You Easily – Thumbs Up/Down or Heart/X  are two things that Craig likes on sites that help you listen to your customers.
• Wish Lists – Great observation.  What is on a wish list and not purchased is too expensive for the customer.  Instead of offering a discount, find a cheaper alternative and suggest that.
• Anchoring – where you get someone to think of a number and then to make an offer.  How high that offer will be is related to the number that they imagined.  Try it.  It also explains why you won’t drive across town to get 5% off on a $100 dollar product and save $5 — but you might drive across town to get 50% off a ten dollar product – with a saving of (you guessed it) – $5
• Free – Craig maintained that free is so compelling that we will behave irrationally, especially when the offer is time based.  He cited the Halloween experiment where someone established a trading value of 3 candies for a large chocolate bar and 1 candy for a small bar.   Under these conditions, most chose the large bar as a bargain at a price of 3 candies.  When he changed the price and offered the same chocolate bars with the large one for 1 candy and the small one for free the dynamics changed and more chose the small bar that was free despite the bargain that the large bar was for only one candy.  The power of free.

Craig also is the founder of baseballguru.com where you can find everything you wanted to know about baseball.

His book pick was Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariel.   Dan made mention of Allan Hoving as a resource that you want to know about if you are interested in what happens on Linked In.  Allan’s modesty keeps him from bragging, but he built one of the top groups on Linked In.

What were your links?  What were your takeaways?  Leave us a comment and let us — and others know.

As always, if you have comments or suggestions for a future show this is the place to let us know.

Enjoy — and see you next Monday night at 8 pm ET with another great pick from the web by Janet and another special game changing guest!