Relevance. It's what matters.

Referendum 1 in Utah- What People Are Saying About School Choice Vouchers

2007-10-26T13:07:00.000-07:00

Utahans all want the best quality education for our children, but disagree dramatically about whether Referendum 1 will facilitate or deter from that objective. Though it's hard to avoid the 30 second commercials and yard signs, voters who want to accurately understand the issues need more than sound bites. Below you will find more *substantive arguments for and against the Referendum 1, without wading through the irrelevant websites about other referendums.

Here's the abridged context. In February 2007, the Utah Legislature passed and Governor Jon Huntsman signed two bills into law (House Bill 148 and 174), creating a voucher program that gives parents with children in public schools between $500 and $3000 toward private school tuition. Soon after, Utahns for Public Schools gathered enough signatures to file a referendum and are urging voters to repeal the program before it starts.

One last word- it was helpful to me to take 5 minutes verbalize my initial thoughts about key questions and priorities before I started researching. It helped me to more clearly discern and note the arguments that I found relevant.

Text of The Parent Choice in Education Act
Impartial legislative summary of Referendum 1

Primary Websites, For and Against
http://www.utahnsforpublicschools.org/about/ads/index.php
-Includes commercials, fact sheets, research, and voting pledge.
http://www.votefor1.com/
-Includes commercials, fact sheets, research, yard signs, and voting locations.

Supplemental Websites, For and Against
Choice in Education FAQs
NAACP
Friedman Foundation
Utah Education Association
Utah Amicus
Wall Street Journal

Extended Media and Debates
Cost of School Vouchers (1:58)
Hinckley Institute of Politics Debate (2 files)
KSL Debate, Editorial, and Truth Test (3 files)
Oreo Analogy Extended (6:55)
Public Teachers for Referendum 1 (2:13)
Spending "public" money on "private" endeavors (3:30)
Vouchers by the Numbers (10:00)

*In this context, "substantive" does not mean accurate, consistent, principle-based, or even logical. It means there's more material. Let the reader judge the validity of the statements, arguments, and conclusions.

Making Rudy Giuliani Relevant in Utah

2007-08-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

At his home in Alpine, UT, Rick Keorber graciously hosted several hundred capitalists from his network of the producer revolution, and his personal guest, Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

In some ways it was like other political events I've attended- with the fanfare of campaign signs, flags, and (of course) donation tables. Rudy had an inside VIP discussion and gave speech that was broadcast outside to the large crowd. Discussion points included several items taken from his 12 commitments platform, including smaller government, adoption/abortion, health care, and being on the offense against terrorism. A well-targeted comment that he made was regarding “capitalists” and his belief that the best things that happen in America come from individuals unfettered by government. He suggested that one evaluation of a politician's legacy should be whether it left a smaller government than it inherited, like Ronald Reagans. He also asked for the prayers of the group, who jokingly asked if he meant right now. He then gave a short speech outside, in which he talked about families, especially children, of which there were many.

It was a uniquely relevant event in several distinct ways. The crowd was more family-oriented and lively than I've ever seen at a political event. Maybe it was because of the kids running around on the party slides, trampoline, swings, etc, but there was notable buzz and one-on-one discussion of issues, political and economic. I believe these individual discussions are tremendously relevant, memorable, and powerful. Props to Rick Keorber for bringing together such a group. And I've got to give the Mayor props for the clarity of his platform:

fighting terrorism
illegal immigration
fiscal discipline
cut taxes
government accountability
energy
health care
adoption/abortion
constructionist judges
emergency preparation
school choice
global economy

Using online classifieds for local search, specifically, to rent a home in Utah

2007-06-30T13:29:00.000-07:00

A couple of quick things I learned about renting a home in Utah.

As KSL lists the most recent ads first, don’t renew your ad after 30 days- take the few minutes to delete it and create a new one.

The search engine does not proactively isolate queries to categories. For example, a search for “home rental” includes an ad for carpet whose description says “would be wonderful for your home or your rental property”.

In classifieds, especially homes, locality is everything. It seems that this local search uses not only the description text, or even the physical address (which is truncated in the listing) but possibly another hidden field, like the seller’s address. My experiment was to search for “lehi home”. Most listings matched lehi in the location field, but somebody smart included names of surrounding locations in their ad descriptions. One listing didn’t match my location on any visible text. Another possible explanation is that this listing meet the “home” part of the query only.

This search engine is smart enough to handle permutations- For example- the query “rental home” does include my listing, although only the word “rent” is found in the title of the listing. Again, list is sorted by recency, not relevance, so my listing trumps those with the word rental.

Seth Godin in Utah -Predictions on Marketing and Advertising

2007-06-08T15:08:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin. What a thought-provoker! I recently heard him speak in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a group of 400 professional online marketers, bloggers, internet types, etc. I've enjoyed his books for some time now. His latest, The Dip, uses typical Godin edginess to forward the thesis that we should be quitters, way more often, way earlier. (so that we can not quit what it's most important). If you know someone who went, they just may be able to hook you up with one of the 5 books they bought at the door.

The highlight for me was his ability to engage a live audience with his Q&A riffs. For you who attended, the included notes will probably make sense. My apologies in advance if they don't.

-On Marketing and Advertising

Advertising is dying, but marketing is more important than ever
Successful marketers will take the BMW “marketing in design” approach
A high-school marketing teacher's curriculum should be:

No-one cares about you, get over it.
Learn to ebay
Get good at telling stories

For JetBlue, marketing and training were the same department
The “anonymity” of Web 2.0 is going to blow up. Because reputation matters, people will circle the wagons, and only trust sources they know.
Don’t think “how can I take advantage” but “how can I serve”

I'd like to expand the last bullet above. Someone in the Q&A session was talking about all of the Internet viewers of a particular Web content, and began to ask “how can I take advantage of those viewers...” Seth cut him off to make a subtle but compelling point. He emphatically said that this was the wrong question- the wrong frame of mind. He said it would be like Tony's Pizza Parlor saying “how can I take advantage of a sunday school class?” The appropriate question is “how can I serve” that group, or what do I have that is relevant to them. There is so much power in basing our marketing strategies on relevant service. In my opinion, that is the reason that advertising is dying and marketing is more important than ever.

So, why does a blog matter to me?

2007-05-19T14:12:00.000-07:00

I'm a firm believer in the power of documentation. So many times, we are only as good as what we've written down. I have also realized that when I need to articulate an idea to someone, my own thinking is much more thorough and productive when it is mapped out. Therefore, I am going to start blogging concepts that I either want to refine or explain. If my experience with documentation holds true, this will absolutely benefit me, as well as the patient people with whom I communicate.

It may be a mistake, but my first topic is going to be one of the most powerful marketing concepts of which I'm aware. See if you can guess what it is (without going to wikipedia, like I did for the following clues):

The economist John Maynard Keynes saw the importance of defining ________ to the problem of calculating risk in economic decision-making.
It the 1960's it was a popular buzzword in the social revolution crowd.
In logic, though ‘iron is a metal’ may be implied by ‘cats lay eggs’ it doesn’t seem to have ________ to it the way in which ‘cats are mammals’ and 'mammals give birth to living young’ does have _________.
As search engines created enormous indexes of data, their key to success became how ________ their search results were to the question that the searcher had in mind.

And the answer is...

...

Relevance! It's what matters. It's why anyone cares. It's what marketers don't think about enough, and it's an idea that I think is “relevant” enough to be the bedrock principle upon which I could build a pretty amazing consulting business.