I was happily working along when I noticed the talk make it to the TED podcast and decided to watch it again… On a Sunday.

I think there are a lot of steps between the world today and that hypothetical but for now my position on this is that within 10 years a new profession will peer its head into the business community, one of game theory/dynamic advisory. Universities will offer courses in game dynamics/theory optimisation to meet a growing need for professional game theory advisors. Why be a business advisor when you could specialise in game theory? But for the most part, right now the only people looking to apply the methodology are game designers and selective “Internet” start-ups and entrepreneurs.

GoDaddy, easily one of the largest brands in the domain name business is the latest to fall victim to their own success. I will bore you with the details of the seemingly basic change they made later, for now I want to focus on the underlying change that makes my jaw drop.

GoDaddy has for the moment anyway, adjusted their home page strategy from selling their domain registration services and earning trust from new and old customers to something that sounds similar but is in fact extremely different.

GoDaddy’s home page today is still focused on selling their domain registration services, but in place of earning trust they have made what I believe to be a critical mistake. Rather than earning the trust of their users from their core focus, they are leveraging (and I would go as far as saying “SPENDING”) their trust.

The home page of GoDaddy today has selected by default the .co extension rather than the widely known .com extension for their domain registration availability search. If this all sounds like about the same thing to you then you are one of the many not educated in domain names but might think surely when I go to the biggest domain registration service to check a name it would be for the one everyone knows.

The point being GoDaddy’s trust is what gets existing users to refer their friends to GoDaddy. But if GoDaddy spend that trust to make short term gains, by selling .co names to people that don’t know the difference between .co and .com they are making people question if sending friends to GoDaddy is still a wise move.

The CEO of GoDaddy (Bob Parsons) has a list of rules for success in business and life in general. I would suggest adding this one to the list:

Earn Trust, but never spend it.

Trust is difficult to earn. But once it is spent it is difficult to start again.

Now if you know me then you’re probably thinking: How can I (the personal that will wear ‘crocs/flip-flops’ to well… anywhere) make the world a sexy place?

There are a great deal of ‘things’ out there that have been cast aside and ignored purely because they are not known to be all that appealing. It is this lack of sexiness I hope focus my attention.
These boring ‘Things’ take many shapes. Problems to professions, products, places and dare I say it people are susceptible to being boring.
I have seen lots of examples where people are re-engaging the boring to make them interesting from the X-Prize Foundation that I have posted on within my Blog through to my own experiences in making Wine literally more sexy (Kama Sutra Wines, which I must remember to post about one day).

The recently made sexy ‘thing’ that pushed me over the edge and to set this mission into stone was a simple video (now a series of videos) aimed at making Science sexy. See video below:

These videos would not have taken a considerable amount of time to produce. However, they have repackaged something known not to be all that sexy (Science Documentaries) into something that the millions can enjoy in their own time. This is an example of someone making the world a sexy place and in the process educating millions. It brings to light another interesting question. What else could benefit from being just a little sexier?

Clay Shirky is a great evangelist of collaboration and believes that taking advantage of “spare” brainpower will change the way society works.

The audience is becoming more and more engaged. Engaged and empowered to contribute on anything from local news and politics to helping resolving issues big and small.

One thing I would like to focus on is that one person can easily be very, very wrong but the average of the majority is a path to greater accuracy. When these innovations empower the majority to contribute this sets the groundwork for a magnitude of improvement.

It’s a bit repetitive but I think it is justified: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy Why you do it.”

I sometimes forget that not everyone is aware of what has happened around the world. Rarely do I speak to anyone that does not access the Internet on an hourly basis (or more).

Ps. My summarizing things into one sentence is proving a challenge, but more efforts will be made. I know beyond a doubt that if you allow a text string to be 160 characters it will be used at some point.
So by design your typical wordpress installation (such as this one) provides a lot of freedom. Freedom to expand well beyond what may be necessary at times.

The first was that the speaker Bob Ansett referenced “Think Global but act Local”, which I could not agree with more especially considering we are about to launch Local.net. Bob is a great speaker; it was a great pleasure to listen to his fun and fantastic on the job and life experiences.

The second was a brief talk by Andrew Meyles of Forsythes that referenced the “United Breaks Guitars” music video, highlighting just how important customer service is and how the Internet can effect your business even without your being online.

I imagine the people at United Airlines would be following this (with over 5 million views at the time of this blog). But if you or an employee was to do something that resulted in such a response then you really need to really look at things in-house and you would really want to know of and engage with those effected in aid of a solution. Customer service in the web world very much requires business to keep a pulse on social interaction related to their business. Web2 people would much prefer spend 4 minutes typing up a blog post that tells the world about an experience then spent for the third time over twenty minutes on the phone explaining in very simple English without being understood and little hope for a solution.

It also intrigues me that people think it will not happen to them because they are not as big as United. Just remember this, not everyone you have a negative effect on is going to upload such an enlightening video, but as soon as someone does you can safely guess there would be lots of people willing to comment and share it within their own networks. That video has 5.4 million views but 22,000 people have added their comments to the story and 35,000 have rated it highly.