The Dawn of the US Postal Service

By Brigid Schulte - Washington Post

Dorothy and Andrew Yankanich moved into their $18,000 brick rambler in Wheaton in 1966 and soon began what would become a daily ritual: Walking across the street to the squat blue mailbox and dropping off bills, birthday cards, letters, catalogue orders and whatever else needed to be sent on its way.

For 43 years, in rain and s hine, through the raising of seven children, the friendly box they could see through their front window's lace curtains was always there.

Until, one day at lunchtime a week or so ago, it wasn't. Yankanich, 82, watched as postal workers hacked at the rusted bolts and hauled the box away for good.

Across the country, stalwart blue "collection boxes" like the one on Flack Street in Wheaton are disappearing.

MORE THAN HALF OF ALL U.S. POSTAL SERVICE BLUE MAIL BOXES NATIONWIDE ARE GONE

In the past 20 years, 200,000 mailboxes have vanished from city streets, rural routes and suburban neighborhoods -- more than the 175,000 that remain.

In the Washington area alone, half the blue boxes that were on the streets nine years ago have been pulled up and taken to warehouses to molt in storage or be sold for scrap, leaving 4,071 mailboxes remaining in the District, Northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs.

"It was a nice-looking box," sighed Dorothy Yankanich, 77, looking out on the empty concrete slab across the street. "That was my exercise. Going across the street with the mail every day."

FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE IN THE WAY AMERICA COMMUNICATES

Although some communities have mounted protests -- angry customers in one Maine town planted a snowplow and backhoe in front of a threatened mailbox -- the vanishing boxes are only the most visible sign that something fundamental is changing in the way Americans communicate.

The boxes are disappearing because most of us, unlike the Yankaniches, no longer use the mail as we used to.

The U.S. Postal Service says it removes "underperforming" mailboxes -- those that collect fewer than 25 pieces of mail a day -- after a week-long "density test." Snail mail is a dying enterprise because Americans increasingly pay bills online, send Evites for parties and text or give a quick call on a cellphone rather than write a letter.

LARGEST DROP IN MAIL VOLUME IN 234-YEAR HISTORY OF U.S. POSTAL SERVICE; LARGER THAN DURING GREAT DEPRESSION

Combine the impact of new technologies with the gut punch of the recession, and in the past year alone, the Postal Service has seen the single largest drop-off in mail volume in its 234-year history, greater even than the decline from 1929 to 1933 during the Great Depression.

That downward trend is only accelerating. The Postal Service projects a decline of about 10 billion pieces of mail in each of the next two years, going from a high of 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006 to 170 billion projected for 2010.

POSTAL SERVICE SEEKS EMERGENCY RELIEF, WITH $6 BILLION REVENUE SHORTFALL

The situation is so dire that the Postal Service, which is projecting a $6 billion shortfall by the end of September despite a recent postage rate increase, will go to Congress this month to seek emergency relief, looking to cut home mail delivery from six days a week to five.

Already, the Postal Service has cut hours at hundreds of post offices across the country, including 56 of the Washington area's 386 outlets. It has consolidated routes, dropping 158 delivery routes locally, offered workers early retirement and imposed hiring and salary freezes.

POSTMASTER GENERAL: POSTAL SERVICE IN "ACUTE FINANCIAL CRISIS"

Still, said Postmaster General John E. Potter, the service is in "acute financial crisis."

"We're like air," said Postal Service spokeswoman Deborah Yackley. "People just take it for granted that we're always going to be there. Well, if you want to keep your collection box, would you mail a letter, please!"

Back when the Yankaniches were courting, the world was different. They met in 1952 at a turnpike diner in Pennsylvania when Andrew Yankanich, a World War II veteran, was on furlough. They knew each other all of two weeks before he shipped out.

LETTER-WRITING AGE GONE FOREVER

So they wrote each other while the U.S. Navy sent him around the globe. "That correspondence went on for two years," he said. "You can't imagine how exciting mail call was every time we hit port." On the strength of what they wrote in those letters, the couple married when he returned and have stayed together for 56 years.

Even now, Yankanich buys a stack of cards every month to mail to family and friends with birthdays and anniversaries coming up. He has a computer and could pay his bills online, but Dorothy doesn't know how to. They're the kind of people who have always known their mailman's first name and leave him presents at Christmas.

But other than holiday cards, they rarely get letters anymore. "A lot our age is gone," Dorothy said. And they were the ones who wrote.

PayPal Case Study: Social Media Ignorance

By Axel Schultze, Social Media Academy
Paypal was one of the first online payment services and had a great start but over time lost the edge. The company seems to struggle with their internal administration and adjusting their business processes to meet customer needs.

Company Background
Paypal has 160 million customers
Their support centers work shifts and deal with approximately 60,000 support cases every day.
Over 1,000 support people handle on average 60 calls per day.
You cannot email or use other ways of communication than phone, fax or post.

Support team
To deal all day long with frustrated customers is not a very pleasant job, so fluctuation is rather high and the level of competency very low. It takes on average three calls to find a competent person. Some customers suggest you don't use a case number as you don't want to get back to the same person.
Most of the support calls are very low level issues with routine answers, nothing special, simply based on lack of user help and a pretty confusing system administration (a user voice nails it: "This is done by a bunch of engineers and never reviewed by business people"). Many functions are even unclear to the internal teams. Support staff admits it is not very intuitive if it is anything other than pushing the pay now button. Everybody can read that in great detail in thousands on public complains.

Customer Experience
People still really like the product. Some even donated a website like http://paypalsucks.com/newforums/. Lots of discussions with thousands of valuable inputs that - as it appears- non of the paypal people ever read. Paypal instituted a feedback form that customers are asked to fill out after each and every support case. Even so many people probably are too angry to even bother, some do, I did. But that source of customer feedback evaporates in the dysfunctional organization.

More Market Research?
Now the latest hit was that I received an invitation to participate in a survey - yet I have to be "elected" to join. However I get $200 if I participate after I am elected. But it looks like I have to drive to Mountain View to do the in person interview. A "market research institute" actually is doing the gigg. I don't want to know what that cost in total.

So here is a company that has free feedback from millions of users and thousands of cases but just doesn't bother to care - instead pays a research institute to create yet another source of feedback?

Paypals Social Web Presence
There is a paypal account on twitter, mainly tweeting "please follow us so we can DM you" - 63 updates, following 123 people
There are hundreds of paypal groups on Facebook from paypal fans to paypal frustrated customers
There are 18 groups focusing on paypal on LinkedIn with over 3,000 members
There are paypal customers on MySpace and many other sites, the feedback is priceless.
Yet paypal seem just not to care.

Even internally people know what the issues are: A support person inside paypal (very nice and very professional) "...I know, we asked numerous times to fix those issues but nobody seem to listen".

How to actually fix the problem
Social Media for Paypal could become a life saver. Not as a marketing gigg but to improve and fix a dysfunctional operation.
1) At first a company team would aggregate and distill the customer feedback using established assessment methods and available reporting tools.
2) Then develop a customer supported advisory board and rigorously execute - fixing the top issues.
3) Tackle more problems and just grind through the list from top to bottom.
4) Ask the folks from "paypal sucks" groups and sites to HELP.
5) Using the, by then established, processes to figure out how new features need to be developed (co-creation)
6) Get feedback in a structured way through groups and networks rather than through useless questionnaires
7) Create forums where customers help customers, supported by maybe even less but better educated paypal support people

Non of the above has anything to do with sales or marketing - just building a better company.

Who Is Responsible?
Is this the responsibility of Dickson Chu Vice President of Global Product and Experience? Or is it Ryan D. Downs Senior Vice President, Worldwide Operations? Or is it Scott Guilfoyle Senior Vice President, Platform Services? Or Barry Herstein Chief Marketing Officer? Philipp Justus Senior Vice President, Global Markets, responsible for growing the company? Everybody has his/her fair share.

But No, Scott Thompson, the President is the one who need to engage his executive team in a cross functional initiative to fix the dysfunctional organization.

Social media is not a cool marketing gigg - it is a strategic engagement to react to the major changes in our society reflected by changing customer behavior and an ever more demanding market.

What Really Makes Your Customers Loyal?

If you’ve seen the results from a survey of your customers’ satisfaction, you probably walked away with three things:
1. Findings – good and bad – that were close to what you expected.
2. Data that surprised you – ratings that were higher or lower than expected or issues your customer had not previously raised.
3. A lingering question – “Now what?”

What leaders really want from customer satisfaction surveys (or customer focus groups, or any customer feedback collection methods) are answers to those “big” questions. What levers can their organization pull to retain their most profitable accounts and turn customers into raving fans?

Loyalty versus Satisfaction
While measuring satisfaction is a valuable practice for many reasons, research shows that customer satisfaction ratings aren’t necessarily a clear indication of whether your customers will be loyal. In other words, satisfying your customers’ requirements might not be enough to maintain your competitive edge.

However, there is also research that shows that how willing a customer is to recommend you is a good indicator of future loyalty. If your customer is willing to put their own reputation on the line to recommend your product or service, chances are they’re going to be loyal.

Tracking your customers’ willingness to recommend can help you predict which customers are most committed to your organization, but it takes a combination of key questions to get to the drivers of what makes your customers loyal.

Kano’s Analysis: How it Works
Using a method first introduced by Noriaki Kano, regression is used to show which parts of the customer experience are most critical to increase their future buying behavior. A simplified example is shown below:

Step One: Measure customer satisfaction for key performance factors
Step Two: Measure how important each factor is to your customers
Step Three: Measure customers’ willingness to recommend you to a colleague
Step Four: Determine the strength of correlation between the following:

Independent variables (key performance indicators)
and
Dependent variable (willingness to recommend)

This analysis will give you a plot of your key performance factors based on a customer’s stated importance (what the customer says is important) and derived importance (what the customer’s behaviors show to be important through the strength of the correlation).

By looking at the relationship between stated and derived importance, each area of performance can be categorized as follows:

Key Drivers: High stated importance and high derived importance
Key Drivers represent areas that customers say are important to them and are closely linked to loyalty. Simply put, high marks in these areas are essential to sustainable competitive advantage. On the flip side, not living up to customers’ expectations in these areas will have a negative effect on loyalty.

Value Add: Low stated importance and high derived importance
Value Add areas are the unspoken motivators or opportunities to delight your customers. Often these are unexpected features or services that excite customers. These aspects of the customer experience can be what builds a unique value proposition and can differentiate a product or business from the competition. Identifying and excelling in these areas drives customer loyalty.

Expectations: High stated importance and low derived importance
Expectations are the areas in which poor performance can lead to dissatisfaction, but good performance will not necessarily raise loyalty. An example of this is seen in the temperature of coffee or tea. Hot is expected but won’t cause someone to be a raving fan. Cold, on the other hand, will leave a lasting negative impression. Conforming to expectations is critical, but you cannot rely on these areas alone to increase customer loyalty.

Low Yield: Low stated importance and low derived importance
Low Yield factors have a small impact on overall customer satisfaction; the customer states these things aren’t that important to them, and they don’t drive loyalty either. Taking a close look at the areas that are Low Yield can help you divert resources to things that actually matter.

What’s Next?
No matter how satisfied your customers are with your performance, there are bound to be opportunities for your organization to improve. But not all efforts to please your customers will have equal impact. Using the methods shown above, you can decipher what really drives customer loyalty and allocate your scarce resources – people, capital, time, energy, and creativity – toward efforts that will have the highest potential payoff.
(source: Nick Wassenberg- Customer Think))

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet Marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management system and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spam dexing use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

Striking the Internet Oil

Prosperly Way

If you’re like me you have the dream to own your own internet business. That was my dream many years ago. I could tell that working for someone else was not for me. I had a very hard time with authority and people telling me what to do and when to do it. I literally went through a new job on average every 3 months. I’m sure it concerned my wife a little but I was not willing to accept the misery I was feeling working for other people.

During that time I had educated myself in search engine optimization and decided to take the plunge and start my own SEO company. The company quickly became a financial success for me as I was making over $10,000 a month. The company was also taking up a lot of my time and was very labor intensive. If I wanted to make more money, I was required to take on more clients and work more hours. I didn’t feel successful because I was working a full time job the time for the income I was making. I was self employed but my clients were my boss. I needed to become a business owner.

Success for me is measured by freedom. Not just financial freedom but freedom from obligations like work and other time commitments. I want to come and go as I please and work on my schedule. If I want to go to a movie during the day then I think I should be able to. If I want to go home and spend time with my kids then I should be able to. I like to golf and if I get the desire to golf on a beautiful day that happens to be a weekday I should be able to do it. That is the freedom I am talking about. I believe in working hard and getting things done, but I want it on my terms.

I quickly realized that although my internet company was a success I knew there had to be a better way to earn a great living online. Through much research, many pitfalls and a lot of hard work the Prosperly Way was born (It wasn’t called that back then). I figured out that I could run one or more internet businesses that would make money for me whether I was sitting at a desk or not. I knew I was onto something life changing and over the years I developed a system that allows me the freedom I always wanted with the income that I deserve. Now I want to pass this priceless knowledge onto you.

Prosperly Websites

There a millions of ideas out there that you could use to start an internet business. And everyone I talk to has at least one idea that they would like to take online. I always encourage everyone with an idea to try it out. You have so much to gain and so little to lose. In order to live the Prosperly way, we have come up with a list of specific characteristics that define a “Prosperly Website”. You should always try your best to implement these characteristics when purchasing or starting an internet business.

First let me explain our philosophy. Our philosophy is that the real value of a website is not how much profit it makes, but how much profit a website makes divided by how much time it takes you to run the website.

Let’s say you own two websites. Site A makes $4,000 a month and it takes you 40 hours a week to run. On the other hand Site B brings in $1000 a month and only takes you 2 hours a week to run.

The Real Value of the Site A is $25 per hour worked.
The Real Value of the Site B is $125 per hour worked.

This may or may not seem obvious to you bu

t Site B is much more valuable. Think of it this way, if you owned 4 sites that performed just like Site B you would have revenue of $4000 a month but only be working 8 hours a week to accomplish this, instead of the 40 hours a week that Site A would require. That means you would have an extra 32 hours a week making the same income as Site A. What would you do with the extra 32 hours a week?

Site B is a Prosperly Website.

Our goal at Prosperly is to teach you how to take your existing website or create a new internet business and turn it into a website that is a Prosperly Website. If you can create a full time income online with Prosperly Websites, then you will finally have the freedom and live as you want to live. You can travel the world, spend time with your family and do everything you wanted to do in life. Our guide will help anyone with any type of internet business, but our goal is to help you get the freedom as we define it to live life as it should be lived.

Exit Strategy

We have come to realize that Prosperly websites have a very high resale value. It seems that everyone wants to get their hands on these automated money makers, and they will pay a premium too. Within a 1 month span of 2009 we sold 3 of our Prosperly websites for a total that we are to embarrassed to even talk about (it was that high).

We have created some awesome website flipping tools that we have used over the last year to find these websites that were in major need of TLC but had the right traits to quickly fix them up and turn them into Prosperly websites.

These tools allow us to quickly evaluate websites, find hidden gems on the verge of being big money makers, and tools to help us optimize and increase rankings of websites we buy.

Whenever I show friends these tools the first thing they say is “can you send me the link to that?” We have never made these tools available to anyone else because we never really thought we should and because we have been too busy developing them and using them to make money for ourselves.

You Can Get Access To The Prosperly Tools

Now that we see how useful these website flipping tools are and how much success we have had using them we are seriously thinking about making these available to all of you in the near future.

If this is something you would be interested in, enter your email below and we will let you know when we are ready to make them available to you.

Step 1: How to make Money Online

Almost every single person who has not started their own website asks me, “what can I do to get started.”

This is the answer to that question. We are going to teach you exactly what we suggest to anyone who wants to build a successful internet business. Whether you want to flip websites or just build valuable internet businesses I think this will help.

Here is the first List:

1. Evaluate Your Interests and Skills - One of the first things we tell people when they come to us wanting to start an internet business is this:

1. Get a piece of paper.
2. Draw a line down the center of it.
3. On one side write “Interests” on the top of the page.
4. On the other side write “Things Im good at” on the top of the page
5.Now fill in the list on both sides.

The “interests” list should be things like hobbies, things you really enjoy doing or reading about.

If you are starting an internet business, you definitely want to go into something you have an interest in. One person I was helping get started came to me and told me they had already started 3
websites and we’re looking for more. One of the websites was a site about dogs.

I asked him why he started that website and he told me he thought there was potential there. “Well are you a dog lover?” I asked. He said not really. “Do you know anything about dogs?” “No.”
So I asked, “then why would you start a website about dogs?”

When you start working on a website you are going to spend many, many hours looking at the same website. You will spend many hours thinking about the industry, coming up with new ideas to make the site better. Choose something you are interested in or you will end up hating your internet business, and that is not good for long term success.

The Second List

The second list “Things I’m Good At” should be of things you are good enough at or know enough about that you could teach other people how to do it. Everyone is good at something. In your life experience you have gained knowledge that not everyone else has. That information can be valuable to other people.

For example it could be how to make rocking chairs, how to replace a variator on a scooter, how to increase your vertical leap etc.

Now that you have this list completed, look at it. These are the industries you should look into when deciding what internet business to start.

I recently spoke with an old friend who called me to tell me he hated his job and wanted the lifestyle I had. (I get these phone calls a lot) I asked him to make this list and since he used to work selling and installing plumbing fixtures I told him one of the things he could put on this list is he knows how to install all types of plumbing products. This is something he could teach other people.

I have a brother that runs a fire restoration company. He has learned the ins and outs of the business and knows what it takes to be successful. He could teach other people about this business.

You will use this list to choose the niche of your website. This list will be the guide as we go out looking for potential websites to buy or a website to start from scratch.

Lookout for step 2 to how we make money online coming soon.

(Adam & Jesse: prosperly)

Step 2: Evaluating Prospects

All right, you should have your list completed from Step 1. Now that you have decided the areas you want pursue we need to find out if there is any money to be made in those industries. For example if collecting donkey socks made your list, there may not be a market for that online right now.

So in order to make sure that all of your internet marketing efforts don’t go to waste we have created a video that explains some of the things we do to evaluate whether there is demand in a certain niche and if it is worth our time to pursue it.

Check out the video below and leave a comment and let us know what you think.