nijaswrites

[nijaswrites]

Don’t Compare It To The Flu

President Trump has done it. Other leaders have done it. All the contrarians to appease their social media followers have done it. Done what? Compare the Coronavirus to the flu.

To me it just didn’t add up. I was yet to hear anyone who died because of the flu in my two less than forty years of existence. Was it a very American thing? So I decided to dig into the numbers with my limited mathematical capabilities.

Lets check the year 2017-2018 where the CDC has made final estimates.

The CDC got 293,995 tests positive for different flu viruses that year.

They then used their modeling tool to estimate the following:

- That around 44.8 million should have gotten the flu with symptomatic versions of it. - That around 808,129 people should have been hospitalized because of it. - That around 61,099 people died because of the flu.

The next important question to ask is that how many people are asymptomatic for the flu. Essentially how many people walk around having the flu virus but without having any signs or symptoms for it. A study in 2011 showed as much as 75% cases were asymptomatic. (https://www.jwatch.org/fw108600/2014/03/17/most-flu-asymptomatic))

So only if 1/4th of the population were symptomatic then we can estimate that at anywhere between 16% to 60% of the American population had the flu.

So what then is really the mortality rate of the flu virus - anywhere between 0.03% to 0.13%

So compared to that we can look at how lethal the flu is compared to the Corona virus - in Italy the mortality rate is 12.79% (for all active cases, a wrong metric but a conservative metric while I think it will be closer to 14% and in Germany it is 2.2% (deaths/all positive cases while I think it will be 4.1%)

So really the Coronavirus is anywhere 17 times to 463 times more lethal than the flu virus. Maybe even more. Remember flu cases are spread out at least over 6 months, which means 125,000 hospitalizations per month. The Covid has already around 160,000 in hospitals already.

So next time anyone compares it to the flu ask them to sod off. Or better, ask them and their loved ones to volunteer in a hospital.

Note: 

Source for numbers: (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm)

I have not yet checked the numbers on the asymptomatic flu study but I am going with it for now.

[nijaswrites]

Stories Engage.

The numbers on the speedometer had fooled me, for a while, into thinking that the Ferrari 308 was made to go fast. But I was wrong about that. A lot of cars will go fast and I have driven most of them…But I have never driven anything that I would dare to put through a five-mile stretch of downhill S-turns at 100 miles an hour in the rain on a two-lane blacktop highway from 10,000 feet above sea level to zero in less than ten minutes.

The drop is so steep that every once in a while, at 100 miles an hour, you get an eerie sense of freefall. It is almost like flying, or falling off a cliff. All the outside noise fades away and your eyes feel big in your head and the focus gets very, very sharp.

We had already broken the record - or at least I thought we had - but I couldn’t be sure and Ackerman had gone rigid in the passenger seat, no longer keeping track of the stopwatch. He had been yelling numbers at me every ten or fifteen seconds for almost an hour, but now he was getting nervous. His eyes were wild and his hands were braced on the black leather dashboard. I could see that his confidence was slipping. What he wanted now was a handle, but that was out of the question. We had left all our handles at the top of the hill, in the shadow of Hilo Prison, two minutes ahead of the record time and miraculously still alive.

Concentrate, I thought. Stay on the fall line, don’t touch the brakes, use the gears and don’t blink…This is dangerous, we are almost out of control.

But not quite, and the car had amazing balance. It was finally on its own turf, functioning at the top of its form, and I didn’t have the heart to slow it down.

Hunter S. Thompson in The Curse Of Lono shows us how stories and words can engage the reader. Until now, Ferraris to me were just a phallic extension.

[nijaswrites]

Social Media Video Will Add More Bucks To Your Bottomline. Period.

According to video services company Ooyala, mobile video viewing has grown 719% from 2011 to 2013. It grew 10 times in 2013 alone. That is exponential growth, and looking at the technology advancements in both hardware and data there will be no slowing down.

So what does it mean for a marketer?

Not using video to engage your target market is a marketing shortfall.

And please don't get the word engage wrong. It doesn't mean firing up your youtube page and uploading a commercial ad you have paid a lot to produce. Engaging can mean a lot of things. But engaging does mean to keep it real.

How can you engage?

Re-assert your positioning by reinforcing the reasons why someone already made a purchase. Engage means educate the market about your products and its features. Engage means show real examples of how your products have made a positive change. Engage means encouraging how consumers can interact with the brand to make better iterations of a product for a better design. Engage means to keep it doing consistently throughout the year and not just to spend budgets or before product launches. To quote Gary Vaynerchuk, you got to keep jabbing to land the right hook.

What does it mean for agencies?

Your social media does not mean just strategizing. It doesn't mean just posting content and giving your client a detailed analytics report. It means you got to have a proper team that churns out well produced content out of a mind factory. In the U.A.E, the Dirhams spent on social videos might not be huge now, but without a doubt it will change, and if you have don't have a team that can deal with the change, somebody else is going to get those Dirhams.

[nijaswrites]

Your Brand Is Being Redefined Online By Your Users.

I have started reading the book marketing in the groundswell (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Harvard Business Press) that lays a very interesting perspective on marketing in the age of social media.

They say that, to which I agree, that the brand you painstakingly create is being redefined by people. Traditionally you created a brand and what it stood for, developed products to position it accordingly, paid lots of money to communicate what it stood for. But in this modern world, your brand is being redefined by your users and people that if you don't reflect the brands personality (or maybe even if you do), the brand positioning is being re-engineered to stand for something absolutely different.

It shows how important then it is to ensure that you have to take into account the conversation that is happening online to not only see how people are talking about you but to steer their conversations to the value you are trying to define. Or if people perceive your brand differently, but still love it, then to be honest to even consider changing what your brand defines (you might hate to do it). So you might be selling electronic products that scream out exclusivity, but if you're selling because people think you are cool, then be cool and not exclusive. You might be an airline that is trying to make travel a part of your lifestyle tomorrow, but if your people think its about connecting people then stick to that, because a message that is more apt sticks longer than a message your users cannot grasp.

So instead of trying to tame your users you should just tap them.

[nijaswrites]

The new business model. Online to Vending Machine? Amazon is growing. Smartly. http://t.co/jLzLB9OC7d

@nijazsalim on twitter at January 13, 2014 at 02:18AM

[nijaswrites]

great post on the 37 signals blog about true empowerment of people in organisations. http://t.co/WNUfgNWf0z

@nijazsalim on twitter at January 09, 2014 at 03:32AM

[nijaswrites]

Don't Ask Them To Smile, Make Them Smile

After having worked on the front line in a business that tries to differentiate itself on its customer experience, and being part of a team and then also leading teams of different people everyday, there is an important lesson that I have learnt - do not ask people to smile. But rather make them.

A smile is an integral part of someone involved in customer service and is an important part of the customer experience. I would take the liberty to state that we don't want to interact with someone grumpy, colleagues or even worse, from someone who is a touchpoint for a service that we have paid for.

So it feels quite counter-intuitive when a manager states in a meeting with a team that he or she expects that everyone should smile. It becomes worse when the manager says this with a straight face. It also has the opposite effect when the employee is someone that is not willing to smile that day for whatever reason that is. Before I get to how to deal with them I will further state some research done in this matter.

They Know When It's Fake. It Affects Customer Satisfaction.

It is well known that people can differentiate between different types of smile. More importantly the genuine and the fake. If you are wondering how, its the eye that gives it away. The movement of the orbicularis oculi muscle causes the eyes to close when someone is smiling genuinely. A set of researchers also found out that 21% of genuine smiles were responded in less than 200 millisecond as compared to 7% of polite smiles.

Social scientist Alicia Grandey and her colleagues conducted an experiment to find out if the authentic and non-authentic smiles made a difference to customer satisfaction. They found out that when the service was good, in the situation where employees smiled genuinely the reported satisfaction was much higher than the non-authentic one. They also found out that if the service and products were bad, the smile didn't make a difference to satisfaction. In a restaurant setting though they found that with servers that smiled authentically the perceived service was better.

Make Them Smile

So how do you get your team to smile genuinely. This is where the emotional skills are quite important. There is a need to train employees to better regulate and improve their moods. According to Noah J. Goldstein, Steve Martin & Robert B. Cialdini in their book YES! states that

unhappy employees, when forced to smile for their employees, may engage in lower quality interactions, which will ultimately lead to reduced customer satisfaction.

They suggest that if training for emotional skills is going to be expensive then a better approach would be to use the Benjamin Franklin quote,

Search others for their virtues,

meaning we should always try and find a virtue in someone else who makes it difficult for us to smile. I will go as to even extend that saying to make up scenarios and create an empathy based on a scenario we have just created in our head. So if someone is rude to us while we are in the act of service delivery, think that the the person is having a bad day, the spouse has become unreasonable or the person has paid for the service after saving up for a while. This will help employees better deal with difficult customers but not affect their moods so as to affect their interactions with other customers.

As a leader though it becomes imperative that you don't try and force that smile but rather find ways to motivate them or equip them with skills to better manage their moods. Trust me, you can hold your employee's head to the pay check gun but then they in turn hold a bigger gun of the customer experience which is detrimental to your business. So make them smile, don't force it upon them.

[nijaswrites]

Apple files for patent for their Maps app. No. of users have increased to 35mn while google maps users reduced to 57mn from 81mn.

@nijazsalim on twitter at January 05, 2014 at 04:38AM

[nijaswrites]

Polaroid branching into a 4K 1000$ TV. Smart diversification? Can it compete with the big brands?

@nijazsalim on twitter at January 05, 2014 at 04:27AM

[nijaswrites]

Take Stock & Other New Year To Dos.

In its true essence, today is no different from yesterday. If you exclude the possible hangover that is. The critics of the commercialised New Year will call it just another day. The proponents, the ones that partied into the new year of the Gregorian calendar, the all singing all dancing people of the world celebrates an occasion that their bodies do not realise, which is the completion of the revolution of the planet earth around what George Carlin once called his God, the sun.

What is the big deal then if at all it is a big deal? Human beings are built to work on a mechanism of feedback. We are more reactive than proactive. So let us take stock. Completion of something, anything, though not as a result of our direct influence is indeed a remarkable achievement. Nuclear weapons exist and the human nature that is capable of being hurtful and dark has survived without indulging in it in a manner that is detrimental. So let us celebrate. Things might not be ideal but we have survived in the pure animal order of things.

So let us take stock. Better today than put it off to tomorrow. Try and gather the instances where we have faltered. Where we have let our egos, our worse selves take over for a result we never wanted. See if we can change something. Even small. A butterfly in your life now can be the winds of change tomorrow. Take a piece of paper. Write down all your accomplishments. If you can't think of anything write down that you survived. Then write down how in the coming year we will more than survive. How we will evolve and in that process of evolution how we will try to grow. Growth is a never ending process. It is more internal than external and one can never stop. One should never stop. That leads to stagnation.

If we want the world in which we want to live become better, we have to become a better version of ourselves, an endless iteration of polishing, struggles, so that we can contribute to the place we want to live in. There are more win win situations in this world than win lose situations provided we get our ambitions right. The pillar of birth is hope, so let us hope, and not just hope, let us act. A grain of sand you might think is inconsequential. But when you amass a billion grains, you come head first into a sand structure. It is our choice of how we want it to look. But it is in our nature that is should be beautiful.

Happy New Year.

[nijaswrites]

The thousand expressions of a new year morning.

@nijazsalim on twitter

[nijaswrites]

A man is, in the long run, his circumstances.

Jorge Luis Borges’ The Aleph and Other Stories.

Can anything be more true.