Shower ambassador!

A shower company called Grohe came up with a brilliant Social networking strategy that has people talking about their products.

They began by setting themselves up with a Grohe facebook fan page, with a competition. 1000 people would become "shower ambassadors" for the company - sent one of their stylish rainshower icon showerheads as long as they filled in the standard "tell us why you deserve to be a shower ambassador" forms.

I dutifully filled it in - I thought they looked kinda funky, and free stuff is always neat... and then forgot all about it, until yesterday morning when the postie arrived at the door with a shiny new shower head!

Awesome!

So, I've tested it and I think it's good. It's very stylish and would look right at home in most bathrooms - you can pick from a wide range of colours to suit. It's definitely a "rainshower" style head: very gentle; and eco-friendly as it uses less water for a very broad effect. It even has an extra-eco-friendly button that lets you use even less water... and the head comes with this set 'on' straight out of the factory - so they seem like they're serious about being eco-friendly.

Of course the really clever thing about this was the campaign itself. From the information they've posted me, it's clear they intend to get the message spread far and wide. The shower head came with a page of information suggesting that you share "thoughts, pictures and videos on our facebook page... your blog or your Twitter account".

Through the competition, they've made it a fun thing to do and share, and I wouldn't be surprised if they picked people solely on their social-media-integration. Apart from running their competition through facebook I vaguely recall they also had fields for your other social media accounts... which I'm sure is why I got picked.

Clearly these guys are switched on the the power of viral marketing - and aren't afraid to ask people to do it... but it's more than that. They also seem to realise that the best way to get people to spread the message is to put their actual product in the hands of the people most likely to spread the idea.

They've also got the be remarkable idea down pat. They clearly picked a product that was wroth talking about: an iconic, shower-head with a vibrant colour and notable green-credentials. Part of their success here, was making it *personal* to the individual participants. When filling out the competition-form, you got to pick your favourite colour[1] showerhead. This is such a small thing to do - but with great effect as it lets people feel they have the power to choose. I don't think most companies would think of doing this when it comes to items that they are, remember *giving away for free*. But it's such a powerful and brilliant strategy, when you think about it.

Grohe want people to talk about their product - and especially they want them to talk about how much they *love* this product... Letting a person choose their preference (just like they were buying it), means that it isn't just some random item that rocks up at your door, but something that *you chose* and is already personal before it even appears - thus increasing the likelihood of giving it a thumbs up...

All in all, I'm quite impressed by their strategy. Moreso even than the shower-head itself - which is, btw, quite funky.

[1] I picked their dark-blue - I like blue bathrooms.

Truth vs Harmony

People live on a spectrum of preference. Some prefer to hear the hard truth, regardless of whether it will hurt their feelings. Some prefer a comforting lie, feeling that harmony is more important than being right.

Both views have their pros and cons, and different situations generally call for a different balance on this particular scale. Still, people tend to have a preference for one or the other.

People often prefer different levels in different circumstances eg when we're more emotional, we tend towards comforting lie, and people will generally react to that - keeping any harsh truths for when a person is more able to bear it. Lying to children is often rationalised in this way - falsely in my opinion.

People at opposite ends of the spectrum often simply can't understand what the other people want. What motivates them to prefer a way of dealing with truth so different from their own?

Harmony people can't understand why a person would tell the truth if it might be more hurtful. They'll say, with perplexity "what they don't know won't hurt them, but the truth will hurt their feelings, so why do it?"

Truth people feel like they have no control if people keep lying to them, they'll ask: "They deserve to know the truth, after all, how could I make a decent decision if I can't trust what people say to me?"

Harmony people believe it doesn't matter as long as everyone gets along. Life is about getting-along, after all. Often-times, telling the truth causes them to lose face, which doesn't help anybody. But are they just trying to avoid fixing a problem that's their responsibility to fix? Are they avoiding a truth within themselves because they're too lazy or ashamed to face it?

Truth people feel robbed of a valuable chance to learn something if not told the truth. They feel that they are doing a service to another person by giving them a chance to see themselves and learn something. But are they just nitpicking, poking at wounds or being too lazy to be tactful?

In a bizarre twist, many people will say they prefer truth, but are actually lying. It's more comforting to believe you are a hard-hitting, strong person - able to handle any truth... it's much harder to face up to the truth that you are in fact not able to face up to the truth.

Personally, I've always preferred the truth. Yes, it can be hurtful. Yes - its embarrassing and sometimes degrading to know the negative effects of you impact on the lives of others, and there are definitely times and places where it's better to bite your tongue; but unless pressed, I'll always opt for the truth.

Both giving and receiving.

This can be hard for harmony-people to understand. Just as it's hard to explain that introversion[1] is not actually unhealthy, just a different way of being.

I'll usually get a response along the lines of: "but life is about enjoying yourself, not being right". Saying that I cannot enjoy myself if I know there's something I'm doing wrong, or even "It's just the way I am" generally doesn't help much. Harmony-people still often shake their heads and seem to think there's something unhealthy about the whole thing.

I've had more success when I explained that for me, improving myself is something I like to do. I work hard at it, and try to strip myself of self-delusions (though I'm under no delusion that I've got rid of them all). I am not on the quest for hedonism, but the quest for self-improvement...

So how does that fit with truth? Well - if I do something wrong, and you tell me it's ok - just to keep the peace... you're depriving me of my right to learn from my mistakes. That makes me feel upset.

I can appreciate that others prefer the opposite. They are trying to enjoy life and get through with a minimum of fuss and anguish. Most people seem to feel that if there's something nasty, it's better to coat it in shiny mother-of-pearl so that it's not all sharp and spiky in your side.

I can't help feeling, though, that it'd be much easier in the long run if they just faced up to it and spat it out to begin with. Then whatever it is would be gone from their lives and they could move on...

It often seems to me that people make their lives much more difficult by not facing up to hard truths, but by trying to ignore them or put them off. To convince themselves of the comforting lie in a misguided effort to "make it all go away". We all recognise these in other people... "I'm just big-boned", "I'll get around to it someday", "maybe it'll get better"... but when it comes to ourselves it's much harder, because we realise it's *us* that has to do the work to get past whatever it is... instead of somebody else's time/effort (which is as easy to spend as other people's money).

I am not immune to this myself, but whenever I find it happening in myself I tend to make an effort to getting rid of whatever it is I'm deluding myself about.

Obviously both can be abused. Lying to somebody can lead them into trouble, and telling too harsh a truth can indeed be needlessly hurtful - especially if a person is vulnerable, and simply needs comfort. Telling the truth about a person in front of other people can degrade their worth in the eyes of the others (and themselves). This is a Bad Thing.

Still, covering for another person's bad behaviour can mean that a person is not stopped from doing something they shouldn't - or never realises that they're being inappropriate (no, they don't always know!).

There is a place for truth and a place for tact, and it's a hard line to walk between the two.

IMO, though, society currently seems to place a heavy burden on the "play nice" aspect, and not enough on "keeping each other accountable".

The other argument about this is the lash-out defense of "it's none of your business". Who am I to tell other people to shape up? Especially since I'm so flawed myself. is this a "log in thine own eyes" situation?

To a certain extent this is the case. I certainly shouldn't feel high and mighty simply because I see a speck in your eye... but neither should I let you needlessly destroy your vision if you aren't aware of the issue.

It's absolutely my business to tell somebody that they need to learn to pick up the phone if leave me waiting for hours in the middle of nowhere, after they said they were going to pick me up. That situation doesn't have much of a grey area - but there are a lot of areas where it's more cloudy.

It's none of my business that a person is deluding themselves that their latest fad diet will work just as badly as all the others... unless they happen to be a friend that I care about and don't want to see them being unhealthy and eventually unhappy when their diet fails to work... again.

Is it my business? Yes and no. Should I find a tactful way of telling the truth? sure thing... but it will be the truth. The comforting lie will actually by more hurtful in the long run, to her health, to her self-esteem, to her chances of success at the very goal she has chosen for herself. In this sense, the comforting lie seems to only be less-hurtful in the short-term.

I believe this is true of most comforting lies. They cover-up a hurt to make life easier in the short-term, but the long-term harm is far more pronounced. On balance, I believe that only the truth will set you free.

Notes

[1] Introversion in the Myers-Briggs sense, an introvert is a person who regroups and regains their strength when they are by themself, rather than an extrovert who does so when in company. It is not actually the same thing as "being withdrawn" or even "being socially backward" - though these can be a consequence of too little interaction with others.

[2] Lying to children I think children are just as capable of bearing truths as adults, so long as they aren't frightening. Things that may make an adult fearful need not be so to children. eg death is a fact of life, but it needn't be something feared - of course you don't explain the scary details to a child as that will make it fearful.

ActiveRecord - find in random order

So we wanted to be able to find a few, random products to put on the homepage of one of our client's sites. I went looking for solutions, and the most commonly spouted one is to do a find with "order by 'rand()'"...

Now, this does the trick, for sure, but the problem is that it will order the entire table by the random amount... and we have a table with many thousand products, and this leads us towards a less-than-optimal query-time - every time somebody hits the homepage. :P

Given we only wanted a handful of products each time - I figured there just had to be a way of pulling out a small set of randomly-selected products without killing the load-time.

then I stumbled upon this article on Random records in rails. It provides a quick-trick fix that will pull out a single random record without all the fuss of ordering the entire table...

...but it doesn't provide a complete, extensible solution. We need it to pull out more than one - and I don't want to have to hit the database multiple times, if I can find a way around it.

Also - we don't just want *any* random product. Some of them are archived or out of stock, and so we need to be able to pass in other finder-option or use our nifty named scopes (eg "in_stock" or "best_sellers").

So here's my new solution. It lets you choose the number of random records to return, and pass in options, and plays nice with named scopes.

 
    # pull out a unique set of random active record objects without killing
    # the db by using "order by rand()"
    # Note: not true-random, but good enough for rough-and-ready use
    #
    # The first param specifies how many you want.
    # You can pass in find-options in the second param
    # examples:
    #  Product.random     => one random product
    #  Product.random(3)  => three random products in random order
    #
    # Note - this method works fine with scopes too! eg:
    #  Product.in_stock.random    => one random product that fits the "in_stock" scope
    #  Product.in_stock.random(3) => three random products that fit the "in_stock" scope
    #  Product.best_seller.in_stock.random => one random product that fits both scopes
    #
    def find_random(num = 1, opts = {})
      # skip out if we don't have any
      return nil if (max = self.count(opts)) == 0

      # don't request more than we have
      num = [max,num].min

      # build up a set of random offsets to go find
      find_ids = [] # this is here for scoping

      # get rid of the trivial cases
      if 1 == num # we only want one - pick one at random
        find_ids = [rand(max)]
      else
        # just randomise the set of possible ids
        find_ids = (0..max-1).to_a.sort_by { rand } 
        # then grab out the number that we need
        find_ids = find_ids.slice(0..num-1) if num != max
      end

      # we've got a random set of ids - now go pull out the records
      find_ids.map {|the_id| first(opts.merge(:offset => the_id)) }
    end