Pricing Innovation at the Post Office

I rarely expect marketing innovation from the US Postal Service, but I think that their "Forever Stamp" idea is a winner. (And yes, it's marketing - remember your Four Ps!)

Postal officials pitched the idea of creating a "forever stamp" that would be good for sending first-class mail no matter how much -- or how often -- the cost of a postage stamp goes up. The announcement came on the same day that the Postal Service said it would seek to raise the price of a first-class stamp for the second consecutive year.

The forever stamp, which would cost the same as a first-class stamp, would provide a hedge against future postal rate increases and end the search for 2- or 3-cent stamps that usually follows a price increase. The stamps could pose unusual challenges for the Postal Service, however, and officials say many details still have to be worked out.

No more 2 and 3 cent stamps! That's a great thing.

The risk, of course, is that people will stock up on the new stamps to avoid paying more in the future. I think it's a small risk. For most of us, the hassle of a postal rate increase isn't the money - sending a piece of first-class mail remains an incredible bargain - it's suddenly finding that your stamps are now useless  without the annoyance of getting smaller stamps to make up the difference for the new rate.

If you're like me, you don't send much by mail anymore. Bills are paid online (in fact, I don't even get paper bills from most of my utilities and such), most correspondence goes via email, and stamps are these things that sit in the drawer for those times you actually have to use postal mail. I certainly can't see buying more than 20 or so at a time - that's about a one-year supply (not counting Christmas cards), and I'd probably lose them in the back of a drawer before I actually used them.

Technorati tags: US Postal Service, stamps, Forever Stamp

B2B or Not B2B : Getting the Right Message Out

I think we've all pretty much got the distinction down between B2C (business to consumers) and B2B (business to business). But B2B is by no means a monolith, and, just as with B2C, you need to know your audience and respect the distinctions within that audience.

B2C actually does a pretty good job of knowing their audience. At least with their advertising, it's generally pretty easy to see who they're  after. Thus, when I see Dennis Hopper telling the baby-boomers that the generation that was born to be wild is now going to redefine retirement, I know that the add is aimed at me and mine. (Of course, we really have no choice but to redefine retirement, because most of us don't have pensions. But that's another story.)

And when I see the iPod ads, with their cool, contortionist, dancing silhouettes, I know they're after the young folks (and that they don't mind selling a few to the "forever young" brigade, either).

B2B is trickier, especially when it comes to technology sales. In fact, I've kiddingly "invented" categories for G2G (geek-to-geek) and T2T (techie-to-techie).

Kiddingly aside, you're really lucky if you can get away with pure G2G/T2T. If the techies are buying - and don't need sign-offs from the business or financial folks - you may be able to get away with having just one story line and set of messages. If you're just selling to technologists, you know that you'll have to focus your message on a lot of technical detail. You'll need to tell your audience what it does, how it's built, how it works.

Where marketers sometimes go wrong in their messaging is when they try to make B2B.

B2B

Somewhere along the line  - if I'm remembering correctly, it was in the 1990's - there was a complete about face with respect to marketing messaging for technology. No one, we were told, wanted to know about the product features, the nuts, guts, bolts, bells, and whistles. No, we were told, nobody buys features, they buy benefits. I don't know how many debates I got into about why you need to talk about both, and my mantra soon became "Someone, somewhere in the organization is going to want to know what the product actually does". That is, what the product actually does besides improve productivity, increase effectiveness, yield 90 day ROI, and all the other things that the business and financial buyers (supposedly) wanted to here.

Now, there is no denying that people - especially on the business side of a technology purchase - want to learn about the benefits. But sometimes the benefits are so high level and abstract that they mean nothing. The same benefits statements could be equally applied to SFM, CRM, ERP, compilers, testing tools,document organizers. You name it. Every technology-based product out there will save you money.

What marketers sometimes fell down on was explaining how their whatever-it-is provides these benefits. Now you may not be able to make a direct connect the dots in which every feature links to a benefits statement, but if you can't lay out your features right there next to your benefits and tell someone how the feature supports a benefit, you've got a problem.

What's the nature of the problem? Well, you may or may not have a features problem. But if you can't support a benefits statement with some level of features statements then you definitely have a benefits problem. (I.e., you may well be kidding yourself.) Even when you're selling to a business user, you need to make the connection to features. (And even when you're selling to the business user, in most cases IT will be involved in any technology purchase, so you need to have all the platform-security-scale-performance-features info at the ready.)

B2T

Where some marketers fall down is in selling to the technologists themselves. I've yet to meet a techie who wanted me to tell them what the benefits of a product are. The benefits they can figure out for themselves - and sometimes the benefit is just "this is cool." I've yet to meet a techie who didn't want me to supply all kinds of technical information.

In most cases, a B2T sale will also involve business/financial decision makers, so you need to make sure that you do have information on benefit and expected return that will help your techies justify their purchases.

The B2B Bottom Line

Nothing earth-shattering here. Just another reminder that, in B2B sales that are technology based, you need to make sure that you have messages and information that appeal to different audiences. And you need to make sure that those messages tie together so that people understand how benefits are derived from features. 

Slowbucks

I see I'm not the only one who's noticed this trend at Starbucks - getting coffee there is slow, slow, slow. (Link to the Boston Globe's Business Filter blog.)

I think they need to have an express line in which no drinks over three syllables in name length can be ordered.

I love coffee - good old coffee. I also like traditional espresso drinks like cafe latte. I'm always kind of stunned to hear people order a peppermint no-whip skim latte with extra foam. What the heck is it?

Part of the brilliance of Starbucks is that they have so many candy-in-a-cup drinks that they can now appeal to people who actually don't like coffee very much, but like that coffee shop experience (in the sort of bland way that Starbucks provides it). It does, however, make the order process a bit long.

Part of the irritation of Starbucks is that they're so focused on those drinks that at my most-frequented Starbucks (in Houston's Montrose neighborhood) I can't order a latte without getting a full press sales effort to "upgrade" it to the latest flavored concoction (which has led me to explain to the employees there, "I like coffee. Real coffee. That tastes like coffee."). 

I think they see me as a crank.  

Blogtalk: Mary Schmidt, Doc Searls

Technorati tags: coffee, Starbucks, freakish coffee beverages

Letting Customers Set the Price

This is fascinating: in Kirkland, Washington, the Terra Bite cafe operates on a "voluntary payment" system, the Boston Globe's Business Filter blog reports:

The Terra Bite Lounge in Kirkland, Washington has no prices on the menu and gives away free WiFi. "It’s up to the cafe’s customers to decide how much to pay, or whether to pay at all." Founded as a non-profit by Ervin Peretz, a Google programmer who says he's in the business of "good karma," the goal? To "finesse the largesse of well-off latte lovers to cover the tabs of the less fortunate." So far they've served 80 customers a day, who pay an average of $3. He says he needs about 100 a day to break even.

It sounds, of course, like idealism bound to end in financial ruin... but it sounds like they are approaching breakeven.

I don't have trouble believing that there are people who will happily pay - if they like the place, they understand that if they don't pay, it will go away and they won't get to go there anymore.

In a way it's citizen marketing to the extreme - people not just promoting somebody's products, but tossing the money into the till even when they don't have to because they like what they are getting.

And everyone paying must realize that there will always be those who don't - because they can't, or because they are just there for the quick hit of a free coffee.

Can it survive? Could this work for another kind of business?

Rats! All-time Marketing Challenge

By now, of course, you have no doubt seen the videos of the dozens a rats having an off-hours spree at a KFC-Taco Bell in Greenwich Village last week. Apparently, someone tipped off a TV station, which dispatched an indie videographer to run rat patrol and check the scene out.

I know that rats happen to restaurants. Many years ago, when I was in college, I waitressed at a rat-ridden restaurant. On occasion, that rats would appear on the floor while there were patrons in the restaurant, and we were warned that if we screamed at the sight of a rat, we'd be fired. Mostly, however, they came out when the place was emptied out and the waitresses were doing the final clean up. (A task that involved, for some reason, wiping the wooden tables down with hot coffee to cut the grease.)

To keep the rats at bay, we would pitch soup spoons at the rat holes after the last customer had left, on the assumption that the rats would hear the noise and stay away. But some nights, the spoon tactic didn't work, and the bold and brazen rats would start coming out while we were cleaning. Occasionally, the manager would come up with a little hand pistol and fire a couple of shots at them. Mostly we were left to fend for ourselves. If things got really bad, we were allowed to leave the clean-up until the next day.

On one occasion, one of the sinks was clogged up. A dishboy known as The Animal managed to unstop the sink by pulling a dead rat out of the drain.

As I write this, I can't imagine how I didn't just walk out the first day, other than to say that it was only for the summer and I really needed the job. I will also say that this restaurant is still open, and I shudder every time I pass by it - and laugh to myself as I see the patrons queued up outside. My guess is that it has cleaned up its act, but I would not venture in to find out. The idea of eating there is unfathomable to me.

But I worked at this joint in a time long ago, when there were no video cameras or cell-phones. The Greenwich Village KFC-Taco Bell was not so lucky.

Newsday reporter Carl Macgowan chronicled the KFC-Taco Bell story, which was widely picked up. (As, of course, was the ultra-appetizing video.)

The camera man, Rafael Garcia, got right into the spirit of things. Macgowan quotes him as saying:

There were enough creatures in that room that they could have devoured a human being…. It was a frenzy. They were going up walls. They were jumping up and down.

I-Scream. You-Scream. We all scream for KFC.

One of the kickers, of course, was that the restaurant had actually passed inspection the day before the rat fest. Back for a redo on Friday, inspectors found:

...many violations, including rodent droppings, holes in the floor and ceiling, stagnant water on the floor and lack of heat, the department said.

Sometimes when you approach things with a fresh eye...

Yum! Brands - parent company for KFC and Taco Bell - is, according to its web site, "committed to go the extra mile to make our customers happy. Customer Mania!"

Customer Mania, alright.

Understandably, yum's  - make that mum's - the word on Yum!'s homepage, and they had a little less than a mouthful to say in their terse response to the incident:

This is an isolated incident at a single restaurant at 331 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village, New York and it is totally unacceptable. The restaurant is closed and we will not allow it to be reopened until it has been sanitized and given a complete clean bill of health. We want to assure our customers that nothing is more important to us than food safety and their health.

Well, just suppose this restaurant does get "sanitized" and receives that clean bill of health. Can you imagine the challenge of getting anyone in the City of New York to actually come back and eat there? Just trying to think of any other company that's been faced with quite this level of market challenge gives me both a headache and a stomach ache.

What's a marketer to do when the doors re-open?

I suppose that they could tout that it's opened under new management. (The rats that were running this place are gone.)

Or they could come up with a new motto. How about KFC: return to finger-lickin' good. (It's not just paw and whisker lickin' good, my friends.)

And how unfortunate a choice is it that the Taco Bell mascot is a Chihuahua, a dog who many consider to be the canine equivalent of a rat.

Yum! Brands will obvious try to put this story behind them, but I can't imagine that anyone will be going into any of their restaurants for a good long while without thinking just what is in this batter-encrusted, bony, salt infused morsel of deep-fried gunk?

From a marketing perspective, I guess this is just a story that Yum! Brand marketers have got to pretty much ignore from this point on. Although I think they would have done themselves a bit of good by announcing that they were closing down their Greenwich Village restaurant forever.

RSS readers dead? Depends on how you define "reader."

Here's a headline that grabbed my attention: The RSS reader is dead.

I'm a big fan of RSS in general and readers in particular; my reader of choice (Google Reader) has had a huge impact on my ability to find and sort through all kinds of information, from blogs to news.

Ed Bott offers some statistics to support that claim, and they're interesting... except that I have an issue with his definition of "RSS reader," which seems to be standalone reader software, but not web based applications (like the aforementioned Google Reader).

That is, I think, a distinction without meaning. What I see in the stats is that most people are consuming RSS feeds through web apps like Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator Online, browser tools like Firefox's Live Bookmarks and IE7, and portals like Google and Yahoo home pages.

I'd say those are all RSS readers. Now, I agree with the idea that the standalone reader is dead... sort of. I don't think it was ever alive; they serve a niche, but for most people, they weren't ever appealing, and probably never will be.

So the "reader" is dead, but the reader rules! Long live the reader!

Technorati tags: RSS, Atom, feed readers, RSS readers

Dr. Pepper Guerrilla Marketing Gone Awry - And In Boston, No Less

Well, Boston is not just the home of the recent uproar over the Aqua Teen Hunger Force "bomb scare," we're now the site of a controversy over a Dr. Pepper promotion. According to an article by Raj Mishra and John Ellement in today's Boston Globe,   treasure hunters hoping to win $1 million dollar prize stormed the gates of a 347 year old cemetery in downtown Boston looking for a coin that all clues suggested was hidden there. When no one showed up to open the cemetery, anxious treasure seekers -  who had begun gathering at the cemetery at 3 a.m. when the clue was released - called City Hall and demanded entrance. That's when the city found out about the promotion - and decided to keep the Old Granary Burial Ground locked.

Those who thought the coin hunt was in the cemetery were right.

Cadbury Schweppes canceled the Boston portion of the 23-city coin hunt promotion yesterday after acknowledging it had stashed the coin, in a leather pouch, amid the remains of Samuel Adams , John Hancock , Paul Revere , and other historic figures.

"The coin is inside the park," Cadbury Schweppes spokesman Greg Artkop told the Globe. "We agree with the Park Department's decision to lock the gates. We wouldn't do anything to desecrate this cemetery."

And, as it turns out, the Boston coin was worth only $10,000 - the $1 million coin was in Houston. The Boston coin has, meanwhile, gone missing, so Cadbury will randomly draw a Boston winner from among those registered as contest participants on their web site.

As with the Aqua Teen campaign, Dr. Pepper's parent, Cadbury Schweppes had farmed out the on-the-ground marketing to smaller firms which made the decisions on where to place the clues. As with the Aqua Teen campaign, this one pushed the edge of the envelope a bit to far. (For those who've already forgotten Aqua Teen, guerrilla marketers placed electronic signs with dangling wires and batteries beneath an overpass above a transit station. While the signs - aimed at the young hipsters who watch this cartoon - had been around the city for weeks in places young hipsters frequent, the guerrilla marketers had decided to step things up and put the signs in slightly edgier places. Someone called the bomb squad and Boston was in the midst of a million dollar terror alert.)

It's interesting that both the Cadbury spokesman ("The coin is inside the park") and the spokesman for the marketing company said ("We had no intention of creating any problems within the park") referred to a cemetery as a park. That's a dandy little euphemism. (The Cadbury  spokesman did also say, "We wouldn't do anything to desecrate this cemetery.")

Well, here's some news: a cemetery is not a park. It's a place where dead people get buried. In this case, it's a 347 year old place where a lot of famous dead people got buried. It's a beautiful old cemetery with some large granite monuments and many fragile old slate markers. I can only imagine the damage that dozens of people, hoping to win $1 million (since they didn't know that the Boston coin was worth a piddling $10K), could have done rampaging around - especially if, when they couldn't find the coin in plain site, they'd started digging. ("Oh, crap, I was hoping to win a million bucks and all I got was Paul Revere's ulna. Wait, maybe it's worth something on eBay.") And digging aside, this is not a location that could handle a large group of people pushing and shoving and racing around to find "it". The cemetery is small, fenced in, and, as I said, contains many very old, very fragile, very historic grave markers.

Edgy marketing is one thing, this is quite another. Come on, hide the coin where no one would mind if you did a bit of looking around, maybe even a bit of digging. But a cemetery? This is one idea I'm dead set against.

It's not as if I'm going to boycott Dr. Pepper, which is one soda I would only consider drinking if I were on my hands and knees crawling through the Sahara Desert searching for an oasis. (To me, Dr. Pepper is second only to Moxie, a local New England drink that tastes to me like a combination of boiled tire and tobacco juice.) But I'd like to see these guerrilla marketing companies do a little "what if" analysis when they come up with their brilliant ideas.

In this case, "what if" someone on the hunt destroyed something irreplaceable? "What if" people started digging? "What if" some old crank thinks it's a bad idea to desecrate a cemetery in general, and an historic cemetery where  Sam Adams (the man, not the beer), Paul Revere (the man, not the bowl), John Hancock (the man, not the signature), and the parents of Benjamin Franklin (the man, not the Mint), are buried.

I'm sure that, as with the Aqua Teen brouhaha, this will be all over the hip blogosphere as yet another example of how Boston can't take a joke.

Well, I can take a joke, and here's one of my favorite ones.

"Why do they put gates around cemeteries?"

"Because people are dying to get in."

In this case, people were dying to get in to find a prize in a soft drink company contest. That's not quite the same price of admission.

A Second Life Census

Yesterday's Second Life post was just a bit of snarky fun, but here's something more useful: Matthew Stibbe at Bad Language takes a look at what's really there in the virtual universe that's getting so much hype, commenting on this article from The Register.  

Matthew provides a nice summary, the gist of which is this: there's aren't many people there, and the Second Life "economy" is a sham.

This doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Second Life itself; I'm sure the people who are big users of it are enjoying themselves, and no doubt there are some types of businesses that will benefit from reaching those folks.

But a mass branding opportunity? Critical to your success? For most of us... sorry, no. Don't listen to the hype - take a hard look at it, and figure how much attention it deserves for your business.

Technorati tags: Second Life

Advice to Companies Blogging

Over on Marketing Profs, Mack Collier had a post yesterday entitled Company Blog or Online Brochure.

More and more companies are adding a blog to their marketing efforts. That's the good news. The bad news is, many of these companies aren't using their blogs as a tool to engage their customers, but rather as an extension of their Web site, as a way to simply promote their products and services.

Mack makes a good point here. If the "company blog" becomes the "company store," people are only going to visit when they want to buy something. No one will get in the habit of dropping by to hear what your company has to say if it's the same old, same old they can download in a pdf.

I work with a number of technology customers (mostly small companies), and only one - the least techie and most "youth oriented" -  is into any sort of blogging at all.

What I do advise my customers when they ask about blogging is the following:

• If you're going to do it, you're going to have to commit resources to it. Most companies I know that commit to a quarterly newsletter are tearing their hair out by the time the third edition comes around. Blogging may require less formal content, but what it does require is frequency.
• If you're going to do it, you're going to have to commit resources to it. AND I REALLY MEAN IT. Responsibility for keeping the blog fresh and useful means that blog-master has to become a function equivalent to web-master. It's real, it's part (or all) of someone's job, and not an afterthought or "while you're at it." And being the blog-master doesn't just mean pumping content, it means searching for interesting topics to post on, commenting on other blogs, etc.
• Make sure the person blogging is knowledgeable. If you're providing technology to business users, the person blogging should be aware of what's going on in the users' business domain, as well as having understanding of your products and how they're used. Providing domain-relevant content is obviously easier if you're providing products in specific, more narrowly defined niches. For office productivity tools with broader scope and audience, the blogging will be more feature-focused.
• Make sure the person blogging is knowledgeable. AND I REALLY MEAN IT. If you're providing technology to technical users, you will have zero ("0") traffic and build zero ("0") interest if you, say, have most/all of the content coming from marketing. Techies want to hear from other techies - and not just about your products. They'll want to hear what your experts think about Linux, search engines, Microsoft...Tips, work arounds, etc. are always welcome - for your specific software or for companion products: utilities, OS, networks...
• Consider mixing it up a bit. If it's too much to ask one person to be your blogger, set up a regular schedule (and post it). Have Terry Tech post Mondays and Thursdays, Gary Geek on Tuesdays and Fridays, and maybe let Marky Marketing have the floor on Wednesday to introduce new features, post on customer successes (with useful tips).
• Line up customers to act as "guest bloggers", especially if they're done something interesting with your products, can attribute real value to them, etc.
• Use the blog as a forum for product suggestions. Have your product managers and engineers use the blog as a forum for laying out the product roadmap and solicit customer feedback. (Obviously you'd want to keep these sorts of sessions protected from the prying eyes of competitors. But have a regular "user group" meeting on your blog is a great idea.)
• Lay out ground rules (no strong language; no caustic comments about customers or partners, etc.), but don't filter your blog into a boring, canned, antiseptic, and predictable space. Let your bloggers develop a voice and personality. That's what will get your customers engaged.

If you're going to be blogging, you're going to be doing so to develop a relationship with your customers. As Mack writes, blogs work

 ...when you respect your customers enough to tailor your content so that it appeals to them. That builds readership, and loyalty.

And it gives those readers a reason to want to interact with the company through their blog. That's when a blog's true potential as a communication tool can begin to be realized. But that potential can't be reached until the company is willing to examine its blog from the reader's point of view.

Before much longer, company blogs will no longer be a "nice to have", they'll be a "must have." Even those companies who aren't testing the blogging waters quite yet will be doing so sooner or later. And it's never too early to start thinking about what your blog strategy should be.

Second Life Ennui

Via wavLength, I found the best description of what Second Life feels like that I've seen. Funny. 

Technorati tags: Second Life, boredom

Making Lists

 Blogger Todd And has put together his "Power 150" list of "Top Marketing Blogs." (Nope, we're not on it, and no, we're not bitter, really. We haven't been at this as long as many of you.)

People love lists. We want to know what the most popular books, movies, blogs, and web sites are. Every year we see lists of the best cities to live in, the best companies to work for, and so on, and so on. Human beings have a propensity to rank things... even when ranking isn't terribly functional.

Todd's list is worth checking out because there's lots of good reading there. I intend to go check these blogs out when I have free time (OK, well, that could take a while). But as I read about his methodology, I started wondering, does this make sense in the context of blogs, and highly-customized web content and web communities?

Google PageRank (0 to 10) – Google PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. High-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. The Power 150 ranking uses the actual PageRank as part of its algorithm.

Bloglines Subscribers (1 to 20) – Bloglines displays the amount of subscribers each blog has to its feed(s). Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 20) that was used as part of the Power 150 algorithm.

Technorati Ranking (1 to 30) – Technorati ranking relates the number of sites pointing to a particular blog. The more link sources referencing your blog, the higher the Technorati ranking. Similar to the Bloglines Subscribers value, Technorati ranking ranges were determines (i.e., top 9,000, top 10,000, top 20,000, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 30) that was used as part of the Power 150 algorithm.

Todd And Points (1 to 15) – As the only subjective measure in the Power 150 algorithm, 1 to 15 opinion points were assigned to each blog. Todd And values frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content. The use of audio, video and graphics is also heavily weighted in the Todd And Points.

Kudos to Todd for using some relatively objective measures. And bigger kudos to him for recognizing the subjectivity of this with that last category.

Because, let's face it: this is even more subjective than most lists. What makes a blog the "best" on your personal list? Let's be honest: many of are, on any given day, talking about the same things. "Best" often means "I love the way this author tells me the same things as everybody else."

And people read "marketing blogs" (talk about a category that covers a lot of ground) for different reasons. Some of us are looking for practical tips about how we do marketing. Some of us are looking for the kind of professional chit-chat that we used to get around the coffee machine, but now that we work solo there's nobody near the coffee machine to talk to but the cat. Some of us want to see what big advertisers are up to and what our peers think of it. (For most of us, it's some of everything.)

The nature of blogs is that they don't have to appeal to mass audiences: it's hundreds and thousands of content creators building small communities with thousands and occasionally millions of readers. Who are often fellow creators. Top 150? I'm not sure what that means.

But yes, I'm as fascinated by everybody else by what everybody else is looking at, so I'm having fun looking through Todd's list. Honestly, though, it's more meaningful to me if somebody like Mary mentions two or three blogs, because I have the context of reading Mary's blog, and if she recommends a small number of blogs, I believe that she's places real value on them.

Which reminds me - Maureen and I really need to pay some attention to our own list of favorite blogs on the right, because we haven't updated it in ages. Bad bloggers!

Technorati tags: marketing blogs, lists

Ads in Email: Yet More AOL Cluelessness

AOL has started  attaching ads to email messages sent by paying subscribers (that ever-vanishing breed) who are using their AOL 9.0 software:

The change, which began Tuesday, affects e-mails sent from AOL accounts using the internet provider's AOL 9.0 software, which is available to AOL's 13 million paid subscribers and others who have downloaded the program.

E-mails sent through AOL's Webmail service, which is available for free on the company's Web site, have had the ads attached for about eight months, said AOL spokeswoman Anne Bentley.

The 34-word tag suggests readers check out free AOL services at the company's Web site.

People understand that when something is free, you might have to put up with this; if you use Yahoo, you get an ad at the bottom of your messages. If you use Gmail (as I do) you have the contextual ads at the side of the screen (and your correspondents don't have to look at them; a major plus, I think).

The idea that people might not like having ads tacked onto their messages when they're paying for the service doesn't seem to have occurred to the folks at AOL:

Bentley said the ad is a reminder to people, especially those paying for AOL service, that many products like e-mail are now available for free. She said the current plan is to use the ads to promote AOL services.

She said AOL received "a smattering of e-mails" complaining about the ads but said the company plans to continue using them.

Yes, they're a handy reminder. This is somebody who's drunk the "ads are just helpful information" kool-aid and asked for seconds.

I'm sure they've only gotten a smattering of messages; after all, it's not their users who are seeing them, it's the people to whom they write. It will take a while before everyone notices it.

It's a stupid move that shows disrespect for customers.

Technorati tags: AOL

Personalized Advertising: It's all about ME

Sunday's Boston Globe had an interesting article by Scott Kirsner on personalized advertising, which focused on how marketers are coping with the "DVR problem". I.e., with so many people recording shows for later replay, they're zapping right through the ads. (Kirsner also deals with another ad phenomenon: people voluntarily watching ads they like on YouTube and other video sites. Hard to believe but the wretched Super Bowl ad for Emerald Nuts - the one in which Robert Goulet appeared as a cadaver - has been viewed 1 million times. Make that 1 million and one, now that I've gone back to confirm how terrible the ad was.)

Marketers are dealing with the DVR problem in a variety of ways. More advertising online. More product placements in movies and shows. More "citizen marketing."

But the principal focus of the ads was on personalized and particularized advertising.  Some of the ideas mentioned in the article were quite interesting. Taking advantage of all those Big Brother data bases out there, carmakers could gear sportscar ads to kidless homes, while beaming ads for SUVs and mini-vans to households with children. The premise, of course, is that the more geared to YOU the ad is, the more likely you are to pay attention to it.

Ads could further be personalized down to the most micro of levels. Again, the example Kirsner used was for carmakers starting to move in on you when they learned that your current car lease was up in a couple of months. As long as they don't get too personalized. I'm fine with Dennis Hopper and his baby-boomer ads for Ameriprise, but I really don't want him saying, "Come on, Maureen Rogers. You really haven't saved enough for your retirement now, have you." When that day comes I will find my old camping axe and hack the TV set to death.

Among other possibilities mentioned in the article was the concept of having ads that link to the day's events, what's happening on Wall Street, the weather, the score of the game you're watching. Kirsner cited an experiment that Wendy's was running in which when the temperature was over 60 degrees, they promoted milkshakes; under 60 degrees, they flogged chili.

Spookily, there's now technology available that can let your cable/satellite provider tell with 95 percent accuracy whether a man or a woman is in command of the channel cruiser. (Guess which gender does more hyperclicking?)

Thus, by observing the clicking patter, the broadcaster can discern that the person watching that two-hanky real-woman movie on Lifetime - you know, the ones where Lindsay Wagner plays a wronged woman trying to find new meaning in her life as a single mom with a handicapped child  who meets this really nice guy who likes long, soulful walks on the beach, only to find out he's got 6 months to live, or worse that he's an axe murderer capable of destroying his TV when an Emerald Nuts ad comes on - was actually a man, not a woman.  Armed with this intelligence, they could swap out the ad for Oil of Olay or tampons for one for Old Spice other manly thing.

All of this personalized advertising is a response to the pressures on broadcasters to demonstrate that TV advertising is still  a good way to go. As Kirsner notes,

Until the targeters can trot out data that show how much more effective their approach is, and making the case that it can effectively combat ad-skipping, ad dollars may continue to migrate elsewhere.

Of course, all this technology is a two-way street, so people could filter out ads that they don't want to see. (First on my list: Emerald Nuts.)

The Apple Product Cycle

Just something funny. A brief excerpt:

The haters offer their assessment. The forums are ablaze with vitriolic rage. Haters pan the device for being less powerful than a Cray X1 while zealots counter that it is both smaller and lighter than a Buick Regal. The virtual slap-fight goes on and on, until obscure technical nuances like, “Will it play multiplexed Ogg Vorbis streams?” become matters of life and death.

In Houston, We Don't Have a Problem

There are familiar phrases that are useful tools in your writing; they get a point across in a way that's familiar to readers, they illustrate something perfectly through cultural references. Then there are phrases so worn out that they need to be given a rest. And one of those is "Houston, we have a problem."

Maybe I'm just especially tired of it after hearing it used repeatedly because of the recent "astronaut gone wild!" news story. But this morning, when I was scanning ZDNet's tech update email, I saw a link to a story titled, Houston, Wii have a problem!

(By the way, the whole "Wii"/"we" thing is already getting tired.)

There's actually nothing in this story about Houston. If you do a Google News search on the phrase, you find similar pointless uses of it.

Enough, really. Houston has enough image problems without that phrase being the most common use of our city's name.

As a Houstonian, the name of our city conjures up all kinds of other things, all more appealing that that: Summer evenings sitting on a patio enjoying a cool beverage surrounded by foliage, muggy air, and the electric hum of the city. Watching the arcs of the bridges over the Southwest Freeway slowly moving through their color changes at dusk. Downtown silhouetted against the sky with two entirely different kinds of weather happening at different places in the background. A sudden heavy rain releasing the armies of frogs into my narrow street as the storm ditches overflow - before it all disappears ten minutes later. Bungalows in Montrose tucked among tropical trees. The median on Heights Boulevard crammed with people preparing for the Art Car Parade. A quiet moment in the Rothko Chapel, escaping a busy day for a few minutes of solitude, watching the light change as clouds pass overhead. Running over to 19th Street to get a sandwich taking twice as long as I planned because you have to catch up on neighborhood news with all the shopkeepers. People-watching on the patio at Cafe Brasil as the traffic starts and stops along Westheimer. Coming home at night past rustling palms listening to trains in the distance.

But for most of the world, it's "Houston, we have a problem!" Yes, it's a bit of sore point for us down here; we realize that this big sprawl of a city makes a horrible first impression, and visitors often leave having missed the soul of the city. We know that the world sees us as a big polluted sprawl.

Mostly, that's okay; it can be our little secret that this is a fantastic, dynamic town, that the people are the nicest ones you'll meet on this earth, that it's a mecca of diversity in an often polarized world, that if we tend to be large it's because there's just so much good food everywhere you go, and that if sometimes people are brash here it's because their city always makes them feel like they the world is just endless possibilities waiting to be seized.

Sure, we know our problems, but the soul of Houston is that they don't define us. Or, as a someone commented on the Houston, It's Worth It site:

If Houston were a dog, she'd be a mutt with 3 legs, one bad eye, fleas the size of corn nuts, and buck teeth. Despite all that, she'd be the best dog you'll ever know.

So please, enough with that tired old phrase. It's a long way to express a short idea. And if you have a problem... well, it's not Houston's.

Technorati tags: Houston

Paradise by the CRM Dashboard Light?

Some marketers love metrics, and happily slice and dice numbers - the open and click-through rates from email campaigns, Google AdWords reports, sales reports that tie back to marketing campaigns. Others look at them as an unpleasant necessity. I think that reflects the different ways we all found our way into marketing careers - some of us from the analytical end, some from the creative end, all meeting somewhere in the middle.

But no matter how you personally feel about marketing metrics, they're important, and you need to understand them... and that makes "Lies, Damn Lies, and Dashboards" by Su Doyle at MarketingProfs worth a read:

Watching CRM dashboards is like monitoring stocks online—it's easy to get mesmerized by the merest up tick or downturn in lead flow. But like savvy investors, savvy marketers need to do the legwork to understand what's really being measured—before getting seduced by graphs and charts.

Marketers have never been more metric-driven. We obsessively check our CRM dashboard, and we know that the CEO and sales team are doing the same. How do we stay ahead of the numbers in a real-time world?

There's something important to understand about measuring any process: you have to have a solid underlying process, or the measurements are meaningless.

Here's what my experience with CRM systems tells me: the marketing and sales processes are almost never as tight as they should be, or as anybody thinks they are, and CRM systems usually show us that - if we know how to look at what they tell us.

Doyle gives an example of two groups within a company looking at the same numbers, and reaching two entirely different conclusions about marketing results. What she describes is all too common: people don't agree about what leads are. The handoff process from sales to marketing isn't working.

If you can, the time to figure this out is before the new CRM system is online and everyone is looking at reports and pointing fingers at each other. I won't repeat Doyle's good suggestions, but just offer this thought: much of this boils down to sitting down with your sales team and agreeing to how things will work.

Define the difference between an inquiry and a lead, and agree on it. Define the process for handling both (inquiries go into a marcomm-based nurture cycle, leads go to an appropriate part of the sales team for action) and agree on it.

If you do that, you won't have your CRM system pointing out the dysfunction in your organization, and reviewing reports and looking at dashboards may become an occasion for collaborative problem-solving and improvement rather than an agita-inducing fight over who's screwing up.

Technorati tags: marketing, CRM, marketing metrics

Marketing's from Venus, Sales is from Mars

Through twenty-odd years in high-tech marketing, I’ve come to appreciate the healthy tension that can and should exist between sales and marketing. Sales professionals are to be admired and respected. After all, they’re responsible for the revenue that makes everything else possible. They’re actually out there, every day, on the front lines, battling the competitors, hand-holding (and sometimes battling) the customers, and, in many situations, making up for all the product’s deficiencies. And as often as not, sales can bring back reasonably good product ideas, reasonably good marketing ideas, and reasonably good feed-back on what works and what doesn’t. Marketing is also to be admired and respected. It’s marketing, after all, that’s looking out for what the product needs to be not just now, but in the future. It’s marketing that’s watching out for what the competitors are doing, and where the market’s going. It’s marketing that’s making sure that all those prospects are aware of the company and its products. It’s marketing that’s providing sales with the ammunition they need to go out and sell.

So why does the relationship between sales and marketing have to be so antagonistic? Why can’t we all just get along?

I’ve come to the conclusion that the root of the problem is as fundamental as the differences between the sexes. Sure, we all share the same DNA, but when it comes right down to it, Sales and Marketing view the world, and each other, differently. It just comes down to the sheer fact that Marketing is from Venus, and Sales is from Mars.

Perhaps the key to understanding the great divide that exists between sales and marketing is trying to understand how each group’s perception of themselves might be at odds with how the other group views them.

If you’re in sales and marketing, does any of the following sound familiar? (Sorry the format isn't clearer, but I can't figure out how to get a table in here.)

What Sales Is Saying:

1. We are the mighty, mighty warriors
2. We’re out there fighting day to day
3. We keep this place afloat
4. We’ll do whatever it takes
5. We earned our way to Winners’ Circle
6. We can’t sell this product unless we get some new features
7. We get nothing from marketing; we generate all of our own leads
8. The leads we get from marketing suck
9. We’re extremely appreciative when someone helps us out when we’re under the gun
10. We’re the only ones around here with any sense of urgency
11. Nobody respects us;they think we’re just a bunch of mercenaries
12. Sales is brutally hard

What Marketing's Thinking:

1. You’re way too aggressive
2. Swagger on
3. You make 4 times what we do (you don't see a Rolex on my wrist, do you?)
4. Sleaze balls
5. Spoiled, pampered babies; it's not enough you make all that money, you need stuff, too?
6. Tomorrow, it’ll be something else you can't sell without
7. Your idea of a lead is us telling you to go to the 13th floor reception at the First National Bank and pick up a signed contract
8. If the leads we give you are so dreadful, then why do you keep asking us for more?
9. Thanks for the flowers, but how come you don’t recognize me on the elevator a day later
10. Does everything have to be last minute with you guys?
11. Whiners
12. With our marketing, my parakeet could sell this product

And then, of course, there's Marketing's self-perception - and Sales' take on that.

What Marketing's Saying:

1. We keep asking for feedback, but all we get from sales is complaints
2. We found that customer for you
3. We think long-term and strategic
4. You’ve got to sell the products we have
5. We’re the creative force in this company
6. We work hard all year long and nobody appreciates us
7. We need planning and lead-time
8. In this environment, it’s hard to grab - let alone keep - customer attention
9. Nobody respects us; they think we’re just a bunch of lightweights
10. Marketing is really complex and challenging

What Sales is Thinking:

1. You either ignore what we say or you get all defensive
2. He’s my brother-in-law
3. You have no grip on reality
4. With this crap, we have to sell futures
5. Marketing’s all fluff. And can we have logo golf balls this year?
6. Why are you being so sensitive, didn’t we just send you flowers?
7. No sense of urgency around here
8. Grab their attention? How about trying to sell to them
9. We wouldn’t say lightweight exactly…
10. Marketing? I could do it blindfolded

Yes, I’m sure that somewhere out there, there’s some Elysian Field where Sales and Marketing May-pole dance and bask in each others' glow. But I’ve never managed to find one. We’re not going to resolve the battle between Sales and Marketing – after all, it’s almost as old as the battle between the sexes. But it does help to stop for a minute every once in a while and get in the other guy’s head, to acknowledge that we’re all in this together, and to recognize that you really can’t have one without the other. I know that all the Marketing folks reading this agree with everything I’ve said. I can almost see their heads nodding. As for the Sales folks - naaaaah, they didn’t read this far. They don’t have time for any of this tripe.

Radioactivity

The old familiar international symbol for radiation:

... is being supplemented by this:

According to the International Atomic Energy Association and the International Standards Organization, this is a clearer way to tell people to run! Run! Run for your lives!

The new symbol is aimed at alerting anyone, anywhere to the potential dangers of being close to a large source of ionizing radiation, the result of a five-year project conducted in 11 countries around the world. The symbol was tested with different population groups - mixed ages, varying educational backgrounds, male and female - to ensure that its message of "danger - stay away" was crystal clear and understood by all.

"We can´t teach the world about radiation," said Carolyn Mac Kenzie, an IAEA radiation specialist who helped develop the symbol, "but we can warn people about dangerous sources for the price of sticker."

The new symbol, developed by human factor experts, graphic artists, and radiation protection experts, was tested by the Gallup Institute on a total of 1 650 individuals in Brazil, Mexico, Morocco, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, China, India, Thailand, Poland, Ukraine and the United States.

The new symbol does, indeed, make it clear that something bad is around and one should get away. It's not terribly clear about what the bad thing is: a strange object will fire worms at grinning skulls of people with no teeth, and at you? So best to run and ask questions later?

They're right, of course, that the plain old radiation symbol doesn't mean much if you've never seen it before. I'm not sure the new graphic tells much more than a sign saying "DANGER" in the appropriate local way would.

Of course, looking at this collection of hazard signs, there are quite a few that don't really scream "hazard" unless you know that yellow triangles mean to be cautious. (The "machines start automatically" sign is particularly mysterious.)

While my instinct is to hate the sign because it's klutzy and ugly, I see why it would be needed... sort of. I wonder where they will actually be placed?

Seems to me anybody working in a power plant, or other facility where radiation is likely to be found, will already understand the old radiation symbol. Where is it that an ordinary person who doesn't know the symbol might accidentally come across deadly radiation and have to run away - and is there perhaps a bigger problem than bad signage there?

(Blogtalk: WhyBark.com, NerdWorld)

Technorati tags: radiation warning, radiation symbol

Pay-per-Click and Pay-per-Call

A recent article about pay-per-call advertising in online yellow pages tickled me, because it's a great example of how new ways of doing business online can filter back and change more traditional models:

Three-year-old Rhode Island-based roofing company AS Enterprises had a big, albeit common, problem: not enough customers. Owner Ann Marie Appleton had tried offering free estimates in local circulars and flyers, but her competitors were doing the same, and the resulting leads were lukewarm at best. She considered an ad in the SuperPages yellow pages, a division of Verizon spin-off Idearc Media, because of its large distribution and solid reputation, but the next edition wouldn't be delivered to homes for eight months.

Eventually, Appleton's sales representative sold her on the idea of a monthly agreement for the company's new Pay For Call service, where businesses pay for each call made to their business via SuperPages' online local search results.

Appleton couldn't be happier with her choice. The service costs around $600 a month, depending on how many times her ad is served and how many calls she gets. AS Enterprises totaled more than $240,000 in sales in 2006, up from just $60,000 the year before, and Appleton says a good 70% of that business came directly from her pay-per-call advertising.

I do think that the Business Week article above about pay-per-call gets off track when it talks about whether this is a threat to pay-per-click. I see them as two varieties of something similar; the idea of performance-based advertising fees being extended from general search to other places where potential customers go looking for businesses.

Here's the obvious next step, I think: pay-per-call in the physical Yellow Pages. Maureen and I have talked about those old dead-tree directories and how they have become archaic, but are still useful if you need a somebody local to fix your roof or unclog your kitchen sink. (Far more useful than the online versions, I've found.)

So instead of today's "place it and pray" model of advertising, why not do the same pay-per-call approach? A special number goes into the ad, and the advertiser pays if somebody actually dials it. It would bring the accountability we expect from sponsored search to the long-in-the-teeth Yellow Pages, and would make them a far more attractive ad option.

Technorati tags: pay-per-click, pay-per-call, Yellow Pages

Online Marketing Predictions

MarketingProfs, those masters of the handy list, have published their Top 10 Online Marketing Predictions for 2007 (article by Ryan Buchanan).

It's a pretty good list, and how relevant any particular item is to you depends on your industry and its dynamics; for example, while I think we will see greater integration of video into web sites, I think a lot of it will be an annoying mistake. I think that the idea that cause-related marketing will be big is questionable; done right, it's very powerful (and socially beneficial) but I expect there will be a lowest-common-denominator effect that results in more greenwashing and similar phenomena.  

As for #4, well... we'll see!

I'd add one to the list: measuring results will become ever more important. Ryan hints at this with his comments on email list segmentation and pointless viral campaigns (that is, most of them) but I think it merits a place of its own on the list - though it's never as easy as we'd like.

What do you see in your particular corner of the marketing world?

Technorati tags: online marketing, marketing analytics

Fear and Loathing in Cupertino

Apple reveals its stunning cluelessness about the emerging user-controlled marketing environment with the latest attack of their flying lawyer monkeys: a bar in Des Moines running an "iPod Night" where people shared their iPod playlists was warned to cut it out.

"Please choose a name for your product that is consistent with Apple's guidelines (that does not include iPod or any other Apple trademark or variation thereon)," reads a letter from Apple representative Pete Alcorn to Curtis. The e-mail refers to the event's Web site, ipodmonday.com, and related podcasts and online broadcasts.

Curtis is still in disbelief.

"I do this little thing called iPod Monday in a little bar in Des Moines, Iowa, that attracts 45 people at most," he said. "Why is this billion-dollar corporation worrying about iPod Monday?"

Well, if you had customers who loved your product so much that they planned a regular night of entertainment around it and told the world about it, wouldn't your first thought be to threaten them?

It may sound like I have it in for Apple lately, and that's not the case; I am just struck by how they can be so good at some things (like making technology simple and great industrial design) and so awful at others (marketing, dealing with customers).

They've always been a controlling outfit, but that tendency seems to be more evident than ever these days. No matter how many great products they launch, that will hurt them.

Meanwhile, I bet if the bar in Des Moines called their event Zune Monday, they wouldn't get quite such a cold shoulder from Redmond.

(Blogtalk: Mary Schmidt wrote about this yesterday.)

Technorati tags: Apple, iPod, black turtlenecks

Pricing: The Oft-Ignored Marketing P

As marketers, most of us "get" the product-place-promote aspects of marketing, and a good deal of our time and energy focuses on these elements. Sometimes, however, we forget to give pricing equal time, and this is especially true for those of us who work with products and services that aren't "off the shelf" and that aren't sold to a wide market. This is the B2B, T2T world I've generally lived in and, while it seems as if it should be reasonable straightforward to set prices in this world, it's not really. In fact, on the rare occasions when I did work on more "mass market" items - where we sold in the 1000's, rather than in the 10's or hundreds - it was actually easier to pick a price and stic with it, even if we pulled the price out of thin air. 

Not that we didn't have a price in mind when we brought new products to our non-mass market.

We did.

And that price was more likely than not a result of doing the arithmetic on our cost structure. We knew that we invested X to build the product. We figured that it was going to cost us absolute Y + marginal Z to market and support it.  We took some SWAG at how many customers we could sell it to and divided by the most conservative number of customers we could get away with.

Voilà! We had us some pricing.

Cost-based pricing, of course, makes perfect sense. Why bring a product to market at all if you'll never be able to cover your costs of production?

Isn't this just Business Duh 1.01?

Not so fast.  I've had quite a few adventures in pricing, and I've done quite a bit of time in what I call the "here's what we gotta sell it for" school of pricing, and learned the hard way that life is not so simple.

For starters, a cost-based number may bear no relationship whatsoever to what your competitors charge for a similar product, or to what your customers are willing to pay. Maybe your competitors are more efficient. Maybe they're willing and able to play race-to-the-bottom pricing chicken in order to "buy market share." Maybe your customers just don't see the value quite the same way that you do.

Of course, in places where we've done this form of pricing, it's generally been intertwined with the need to develop a product that's going to be sold at  a high-price point to a smaller audience because the company lacks the financial resources to take a lower-end product to a larger audience. 

As often as not, the higher-end product is sold at a price that's an order of magnitude higher than the low end product, even though the lower-end product provides at least half as much of the benefit. (For services the, the "price delta" between low and high end tends not to be this steep, but it's still been significant.)

At one small software company where I did quite a bit of time, we had a clunky old software product that we lacked the development resources to do much improvement to. Making lemonade out of this lemon, we charged a lot for it. Here I learned one of the miracles of high pricing: in and of itself, a high price confers an aura of value and worth. This product costs so much, it must be good. (Note: this company was acquired and put out of its misery.)

With a high-price product in hand, it generally comes down on marketing's head to come up with positioning and differentiation (real or faux) that can explain why the higher price means higher value, and on sales' head to sell the customer on this.

I worked for one Internet Services Provider that have prices and costs that were well above the industry norm. Our differentiation basically came down to "our techies are smarter than everybody else's." In the early days of the Internet, this was actually good enough to win us a lot of  business. But as other ISPs found smart engineers of their own - plus built a lot of efficiencies into their operations that we didn't have - they undercut us on price, big time. And we started losing big time.

Oh, we still won some deals at our higher price - which we "couldn't afford" to lower - but we didn't win all that many. And as often as not, we won them with sweeteners that made the deals more costly than if we'd just lowered the price to begin with. (Note: this company went bankrupt. Shards of this shattered failure still exist here and there.)

This all lead me to develop Rogers' Rule: Good sales and marketing can only make up for a 10-20% difference between price and true value. (And the rule's corollary: Even so, the market will catch up with you eventually.)

Now that we're well onto value-based pricing...Like cost-based pricing, this is a reasonable and good idea.

You figure out what value the customer gets out of using your product - how much time and money they save, or what great things they can do with your product, or how much fun they can have with it - and charge them some proportion of this amount. (Hopefully enough to cover your costs.)

The trick, of course, is to figure out just what that value is.

If you're lucky, it's pretty clear cut and obvious. Your product will help your customer do things cheaper, faster, better. Yep, it's worth it.

In other cases, it's not so obvious.

Once again, it comes down to marketing and sales to make the case.

What to do about the pricing dilemma? No cheaper, faster, better set of guidelines here. Just some common sense:

• Know what your competition charges (and be honest with yourself about the differences between your products and theirs).
• Let your cost structure inform your pricing, but not dictate it.
• Don't indulge in wishful thinking about the value of your product. Be honest with yourself.
• As early on in your product/market planning cycle, spend quality time with likely users of your product and work with them to help you figure out what's a fair and reasonable price.

All of this will help you develop pricing that's more defensible and reasonable. Even so, you still need to recognize that, for high-end, B2B and T2T products, whatever price you establish is a guideline, and the point at which the deal starts getting negotiated.

Web 0.0 at United Airlines

Passwords are a pain in the neck. Having good password recovery on a site in a necessity.

I almost never fly United Airlines anymore - I live in Houston and Continental is almost always the best and cheapest way to get anywhere. But I have some miles with them, and when I got an email warning me that they'll all expire at the end of the year, I thought it was worth seeing how many there were and whether there was a good way to use them through some non-travel offer.

What's my United password? How should I know? So after trying to most logical candidates (none of which were correct) I clicked the "forgotten password" link and saw this:

My reaction: are you kidding me? Write a letter? Maybe I'll have the butler put it in an envelope, seal it with our family crest in wax, and deliver it United's door.

Would it be so hard to put a button that says, "Click here and we'll mail a new password to your address of record?"

Apparently. I realize that miles are valuable and there are security issues... but it's not this hard to get a password reset from my bank, for Pete's sake.

Someone let us know when the 21st century dawns over at United.

Technorati tags: United Airlines, web usability, Web 0.0

Executive Interviews and Sending the Right Message

Putting your executives in the public eye is a standard, and generally effective, PR technique. Some executives are more media-ready than others. I happened to hear one of the best executive media appearances I've come across in a long time while listening to a podcast of "Tech Tuesday" on the Kojo Nnamdi show from WAMU in Washington, DC.

 The executive was Ben Fahti, who heads Microsoft's Security Technology Unit. Given the beating Microsoft has taken over the years, his position is a pretty critical one. His performance on the show was impressive. Some of the things he did right:

1. He owned up to the company's past problems, talking frankly about how security was not part of their development process and the problems it caused.
2. He didn't get dragged down into discussions of particular incidents and problems.
3. He did present a coherent, articulate picture of how Microsoft is making security a fundamental part of their development process. He sounded like someone who knew his stuff and was making important changes that will benefit customers.
4. When callers brought up very specific problems ("My PC is doing this and that..."), he couldn't answer the specifics... but asked for their contact information so he could get them help offline. A small thing but an impressive one.
5. He didn't bash Apple.

News about security issues at Microsoft continues, of course. But Fahti left the impression that not only was the company making major strides, but that it's addressing the problem in a systemic way.

Contract that to what one hears from Apple about security. Apple executive appearances are designed to be a bit like a visitation from the turtlenecked gods, and the main message is "We're better, nyah nyah," complete with advertisements poking fun at Microsoft.

And while Apple has set the bar high for security, it's not as high as they'd have you believe; there are a steady stream of issues and patches. Moreover, their attitude inspires a sense of dread - if these guys have a problem will they even know it? Consider this eWeek article about the Month of Apple Bugs project:

Wil Shipley, the CEO of Delicious Monster Software, said he agreed that there is a greater good in reporting OS bugs. "First off, I'll say, as Apple does, that finding bugs in Mac OS X is really good for all of us—Apple, third-party developers, Mac users—and so, you know, bully for those guys," he said.

But Shipley said he also questions how the MOAB project is going about its goals.

"The only unsavory bit in all this is that originally, when I read about MOAB, it was positioned as a response to Apple being 'smug' about security, which is childish and inane," said Shipley.

"Apple has a right to be 'smug' about an area in which they are better then their competition, even if they are not totally perfect."

Wrong. Smug doesn't play well. Smug plays especially poorly when you're talking about security. And smugness keeps a company from seeming serious. Consider this Apple response:

A spokesperson for Apple said that "Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users. We always welcome feedback on how to improve security on the Mac."

Microsoft's got an executive talking frankly about their problems and what they're doing on a local radio show. Apple's got a spokesperson giving a non-answer and TV ads with a gloating Mac guy laughing at a PC with the sniffles.

Apple may be very good at security, but the smug way they talk about it leaves the impression that they're simply not a serious company.

Smug's rarely effective.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Apple, public relations, Windows, Mac, security

I Hate Captcha

Can we crown captcha one of the most poorly-implemented spam prevention techniques ever?

What do you think is the right thing to type in for this captcha image?

If you said 5e3d18, you're wrong.

This happens to me so often it's not funny, and while I have my moments, I'm not an idiot. And I just got new glasses recently.

Funny thing is, this is one of the easier-to-read ones. Or so I thought.

There must be a better way.

Technorati tags: Captcha, comment spam

Pimped Out John: Roto-Rooter's Fresh Idea

What do you do with your product when it's been around forever?What do you do when your product meets a need that while definitely necessary isn't all that fun and exciting (and the details of which are quasi-unmentionable? What do you do when everybody's heard of you, but that half of them know you by the tired jingle that ran for years on TV? What do you do when you want to appeal to a younger demographic?

If you're Roto-Rooter, you come up with a fresh idea.

There's takes advantage of shows like Pimp My Ride  and - though not explicitly - of trends like the movement towards "man caves" (set-aside places in the house where there's nothing chintz, flouncy, pink, flowered, or white-winey, and where a guy can be a guy) and you have the Pimped Out John Sweepstakes.

Announced, appropriately enough, on the anniversary of the death of Thomas Crapper, an inventor credited with a number of the elements that made indoor plumbing feasible, the Pimped Out John contest has it's grand prize, a fitted out toilet that electronic junkies in particular will flip their lid for.

Among the fixtures:

• Xbox
• DVD player
• Laptop computer ("with fully articulated robot arm")
• iPod (with stereo docking station equipped with toilet paper dispenser)
• Tivo recorder
• Bike pedal exerciser

For toilet traditionalists, there's a magazine rack (plus subscriptions to Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and GQ - the latter of which seems like quite a peculiar choice).

But wait, there's more....

As if all of this "stuff" wasn't enough, there's also a stocked fridge (drinks and snacks) with a beer tap, and a cup warmer/cooler. So you'll never have to leave. (Here's where I really draw the line - eating and drinking while taking care of business.  Waste not, want not? Garbage in, garbage out?  Way too much of a straight line connection here for me.

This is one part of the prize that I think they could easily have eliminated.

The flourishing touch is an emergency call button that summon's up Roto-Rooter, just in case something happens - presumably to the plumbing and not to the electronics or the Internet connection.

All and all a fun way to work with an old, unglamorous brand and attract some attention.

It sure beats, "Call Roto-Rooter, that's the name. And away go troubles, down the drain. Roto-Rooter. Sewer service. Roto-Rooter. Sewer service." That's their old jingle which, since seeing the article on this sweepstakes I can't get out of my head.)

You can enter the contest (up until April 2 - drawing's later in the month) - by going to the Roto-Rooter site. I'm debating entering. I wouldn't mind winning the stuff, but I sure wouldn't use any of it in my bathroom.

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Thanks to my sister, Trish, who saw an article on this in The Boston Globe.

Should Marketing Feed Sales?

No, says Sirius Decisions (via dmnViews).

In business-to-business marketing, should sales get most of their leads from marketing? Market research firm Sirius Decisions recently benchmarked successful B-to-B marketers and found that "feeding sales" was NOT the optimal approach. Instead, marketing should focus on nurturing low-probability prospects.

I felt like I was listening to myself at any one of a number of meetings over the years.

Marketing communications is a great way to turn potential customers into likely customers. One of the best ways to short-circuit a good marketing program is to send the salespeople after prospects who are at the "Hmm, that's interesting" stage. A great way to waste money is do the nurturing for two months, and then stop because you haven't gotten enough sales yet.

We've all seen it - usually followed by the "marketing's not giving us any good leads!" / "salespeople aren't following up properly" pissing contest. (Which in its worst form ends with pink slips all around!)

Technorati tags: marketing, sales, benchmarking, marketing vs sales

Email Newsletter Mistakes

Email newsletters aren't exactly the most current marketing topic, but I think it was worthwhile for MarketingProfs to recycle an old piece on email newsletter mistakes. As I read it, I noticed that I still see many of these mistakes today - especially #4 (bad headers) and #5 (making it hard to unsubscribe).

As usual I have a nit (I guess I'm like that...). Their mistake #1 is "confusing newsletter with promotions" and they write:

Many marketers don't make the distinction between an email newsletter and email promotions. The latter are action-oriented; designed to provoke some kind of (immediate) response through a click, a sign-up, a purchase, whatever. They're what most people think of under the term opt-in email marketing.

Email newsletters may contain action-related elements, but their real potential lies in building, over time, a lasting, long-term relationship with the reader. Which means they may not try and induce any kind of immediate action at all. Instead, they create a climate, an environment, a relationship which predisposes the reader to taking such an action at some other time.

I don't think the distinction was ever that clear; I think it's less clear now, with things like blogs taking on more of the relationship role. And frankly, for some consumer-oriented newsletters, I expect a promotion; the day that Borders starts sending me newsletters without coupons is the day I unsubscribe.

Still, it's worth thinking about the basic mistakes they identify next time you're putting an email newsletter together.

Technorati tags: email marketing, email newlsetters, marketing

Search marketing: B2C vs B2B

If you do business-to-business search marketing, this MarketingProfs article is worth a read. There's lots of good stuff there (and it's the first in a series) but there's one great point I want to call out: the challenge of measuring conversion for B2B searchers:

While the ultimate goal of both B2C and B2B marketing is to create a sale, the goal of B2B search engine optimization couldn't be more different from its B2C counterpart. SEO's goal in the B2C environment is usually to generate an online sale in a single visit. Ideally, searchers find a high-ranking site in the search engine results and navigate quickly from the landing page through a prescribed channel, and ultimately through the shopping cart and checkout process.

This, however, is unrealistic for most business-to-business marketers, whose products and services are generally not acquired in an e-commerce environment. The goal of search engine optimization for most B2B marketers is not an immediate sale but, rather, inclusion in the consideration set, the short list of preferred suppliers from which the ultimate provider will be selected.

Conversion in the B2B realm is usually not immediate; nor does conversion typically occur online. In B2B search engine optimization, getting found is merely the beginning.

That makes measurement much harder. (It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who had a housewares/giftware business. He was going to his trade shows, while I was going to IT shows. He said, "Yes, we broke even on the show at 1:30 on Tuesday. I was so jealous - we were trying to analyze our ROI for months after the event.)

I'll just toss out one technique that's useful if you're using something like Adwords, which gives you simple conversion tracking. B2C marketers can use that to see which searchers bought something. B2B folks can't do that, but you can come up with some kind of interim conversion - downloading your white paper, signing up for your seminar, etc.

It's not the ultimate goal but it at least gives you a discrete event to track as you map out the whole purchasing process and try to measure results at each step of the way.

I'm looking forward to the next article in the series.

Technorati tags: SEO, search marketing, B2B marketing

Credit Where It's Not Due

Maureen wrote about those endless credit card offers that many of us get; like her, I am unimpressed (or even annoyed) by them. I dutifully shred them, and when they appear, I always think, I really need to call that bank and tell them to stop it. (I did this once; it worked.)

Now I'm getting a set of them that particularly bug me, though. Last fall I became the treasurer of a non-profit group. Naturally, this meant that we had to go the bank so that I could be added as a signatory on the account and others could be removed. We updated all of the information, and as part of this the bank needed my home address (the group has a PO box). Fine.

Since then I've been getting credit card solicitations from that bank once or twice a week... addressed to a former officer of the organization at my home address.

This is not so much about the stupidity of it; it's a great example of how cavalier banks are with customer information. I've had several issues with this over the years, from a bank that randomly changed my address to somewhere in Maryland and started sending someone else my statements, to another bank that swallowed up a smaller bank (of which I'd been a customer years earlier, in another state) and then kept repeatedly changing my address back to the one from years ago.

Banks are, apparently, incompetent at managing databases. They also make a lot of money off of the information in them. It's a recipe for problems.

The marketing part of this? You can't expect to deepen a relationship with a customer when you behave in such an untrustworthy manner. There's a reason that most people have, at best, neutral feelings about their banks; they're aware that the bank is eager to nickel and dime them, they see the barrage of junk mail from them, and they often know that the bank is selling their name to more people for more solicitations. Would you feel good about doing business them someone like that?

When an industry is as bad about this as banks are, it creates a market opportunity. I was shocked to get a privacy notice from ING Direct that informed me that they didn't need me to opt out of anything; they simply don't sell their customers' information, period.

I don't know of any other bank that does that, but now that ING is offering checking accounts, I'm considering moving everything over to them - even though I'm so entwined with my currect bank (thanks to bill presentment and payment services) that it would be challenging.

Take a look at the approaches of your competitors toward things like customer privacy and then don't match them - beat them. And talk about it.

Technorati tags: direct mail, banking, banks, credit cards, privacy, ING Direct

Gem of an Idea? Verizon's Jewel Concert

Not long ago, I wrote a riled up post on the arrival, on my doorstep, of a forklift full of Yellow Books. At the time I noted that we had not yet gotten our dump of Yellow Pages, and I was hoping that Verizon had decided to stop distributing these noxious books in such great volume.

Would that it were so.

Last week, our building was "gifted" with a pile o' Yellow Pages that nobody who lives here wants. I will give them another day or so of rest in the vestibule, then I'll cart them out back with this week's recycle. There they will join all the other Yellow Pages and Yellow Books that meet a similar fate. When I walk around my neighborhood and see all those blue recycle boxes overflowing with Yellow discards, I wish that Verizon and whoever produces the "other" would just eliminate me as the middle-man and just bring the books directly to the recycling center.

I understand the reluctance of the people at Verizon YP to give up on a way of life that has stood them in good stead for decades. And I also understand that it actually is sometimes easier to look things up in the book rather than on the 'Net. And that some people don't have Internet access to begin with. So the YP's and the YB's do fill a need. But since they no longer fill that need for as many people as they used to, they also fill a landfill site with their unwanted tomes.

Verizon could, of course, start pulling back on its VP business - allowing people to opt out or opt in to the directories. I'm sure they fear that this would cost them in advertising revenue, but at the same time it would enable them to assure their advertisers that the people who make a place in their homes for the books actually want them as something more than a doorstop.

They could pour more of their resources into the online version, rather than trying to keep something alive that's buggy-whip dying.

Instead, Verizon yesterday brought in pop star Jewel to give mini-concerts in train and T (subway) stations in Boston. They hired Jewel to promote the YP, in hopes, as The Boston Globe put it, "working to make its product more hip in response to competition on the Internet."

Hip? The Yellow Pages?

If I were in marketing at the YP, I think I would be trying to drive the young folks to the online version, and IM-enabled search. I don't think I would be trying to reach a generation that claims not to read anything that doesn't fit on their Razr screen by touting the joys of curling up with a fat, yellow book.  I mean, this is the generation that lets its thumbs do the walking, not its fingers. (For those too young to recall, the YP's tagline used to be "let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages.")

A singer that would appeal to the average Yellow Pages users? Patti Page would be closer to the mark than Jewel.

The marketing point - well, round up the usual suspect: Know thy audience.

In this case, if they want to appeal to the Jewel audience, Verizon should think about changing their product, not adding a spokes-singer.

Wikipedia on the precipice?

Revenue is such a drag:

In a rather extraordinary example of begging for money, Florence Devouard, Chairwoman of the Wikimedia foundation has told an audience at the Lift07 conference that Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for another 3-4 months, and that without further funding Wikipedia “might disappear”.

As the article notes, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the web, with tons of traffic. It's also influential, with users depending on it for all kinds of information.

And it appears to have no particular model for generating revenue. Culturally, this has got to be difficult for them: the usual approaches (advertising, subscriptions) are foreign to the Wikipedia DNA.

But a Wikipedia with ads on the page or a subscription fee for unlimited use is better than no Wikipedia at all.

Technorati tags: Wikipedia

In Which I Join A Blog Pile-On

 Okay, you've probably all seen this in a dozen places, but I can't resist, because I (like many other marketing bloggers) just found this so astonishing:

What were they thinking? $500 for some ads you can see on YouTube?

I got a real chuckle out of the copy: the DVD has a menu! Wow! That's a bit like advertising that a car's windows roll up and down.

I am, however, tempted to call Bacon's and ask them if they have it on Betamax. Or 16mm film.

Thank you for indulging me in this. We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Technorati tags: Super Bowl advertising, Bacon's, Web 0.0

The John Edwards Blogger Controversy

This past week's controversy over two bloggers who are now staffers on the John Edwards presidential campaign was fascinating on several levels.

First, there's what it tells us about a world of citizen communicators. In any political campaign (or organization) you've got a bunch of people who hold a lot of different views and express themselves in all kinds of way - from polite to throwing firebombs - who come together for a task (get our guy elected, launch our product). To the outside world, most of these people are just parts of the organization, without any history or background.

No more. Now they've got their blogs and web sites and their YouTube videos for everyone to pick through. In politics it's going to be explosive, because who gets involved in political campaigns? People who are passionate about things.

Right now there are young people all over the country tapping away at their keyboards, and someday some of them will be working on campaigns, and someone will dig up those blogs.

In a political culture so focused on finding anything, however trivial, to use to change the conversation from what people care about to what can make your opponent look bad, this is a giant pile of live ammunition just waiting for a spark. What we saw this week will happen again, many times. And somebody's going to have to  figure out with a better response to it than what the "lets try to please everybody and make it go away" we heard from the Edwards campaign.

The second aspect of it that was interesting was seeing this through the eyes of someone immersed in the world of free agentry. My initial reaction to the idea that Edwards had to answer for every world a staffer had ever blogged was, "That's really stupid." Those of us who live our lives working on our own or in ad hoc teams understand that we work with people because they have skills and talents that complement ours and fit client needs. And we know they have other skills, talents, and interests that aren't relevant to us at all.

Finally, the controversy raises the whole issue of controlling conversations - something that's very important in politics. I thought one statement from Bill Donohue of the Catholic League was fascinating (and, as a citizen, kind of horrifying):

“We will launch a nationwide public relations blitz that will be conducted on the pages of the New York Times, as well as in Catholic newspapers and periodicals. It will be on-going, breaking like a wave, starting next week and continuing through 2007."

He thinks he's going to control the conversation? Well, he did for a few days this week. I've got news for him, and every other political operative out there; it's something marketers have learned already. Controlling the conversation isn't that easy these days. I doubt that either Edwards or Donohue are going to be the final arbiters of what the national debate is.

Technorati tags: John Edwards, blogging, politics

Should This Bother Me?

A local marketing organization sends regular email messages about events and news. I'm on the list (and I like getting them). But each time I open one of their messages, my email program tells me that the sender has requested a return receipt, and asks whether to send one.

It bugs me every time. The messages are HTML messages, so it should be pretty easy for them to get an open rate and track who's actually reading without the little "Hey, bud, we're watching" reminder.

When I was first on the list I always clicked "no" for the receipt. After a while I stopped getting the messages. I don't know for a fact that those two things are connected, but I suspect so. When I rejoined the list I clicked yes and there's been no interruption.

It annoys me. Am I being hypersensitive about it?

Forging Leaders for the 21st Century

It's easy to get behind in keeping up with The Economist, which I've recently begun subscribing to. Not only are the articles well-written and interesting, but they provide an outsider's take on American politics and business (the magazine is British), as well as far more coverage to the doings of "foreign countries" than you'll find in most American news/business magazines.

But it's also hard for me to get by reading all the interesting little black and white quarter page ads that appear in them.  (Over on Pink Slip, I recently blogged on an ad for an Assistant Private Secretary to the Queen, Buckingham Palace. (In Her Majesty's Service.)

One ad further back in the magazine caught my eye as well. It was a simple little ad from a Massachusetts prep school congratulating and extending "warmest wishes to Cushing 1999 alumnus Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck on his ascent tothe throne of Bhutan." The school is Cushing Academy, and the tag line they used  is "Forging Leaders for the 21st Century."

I thought I'd take a stroll over to their web site which, curiously has an "org" designation, not an "edu," to see how well their web site synchs up with the promise of the tag line.

First, I must disclose that I am not a total stranger to Cushing Academy. I live in a small condo building (6 units) in downtown Boston, and the unit above ours is absentee-owned and rented out. A few years back, this condo was rented out to a German family whose son was a senior at Cushing. They used it as a pied a terre for their trips to Boston to visit their children, all three of whom were at college/prep school in New England. The pied a terre was also used as the unsupervised weekend getaway for the son from Cushing and his friends.

The high point of this family's tenure in our building occured on a rare occasion when I was home alone. I was awoken at 2 or 3 in the morning by noises off: the sound of someone clamboring over the wrought iron spikes that top our back gate. Bravely, sleepily looking out, I spied a tall young man whom I did not recognize and who appeared to be trying to break into the building. Swiftly dialing 9-11, I reported the B&E and a cruiser was sent swiftly to my rescue.

Not so swiftly, however, that it didn't dawn on me what was going on, and confront the Cushing student who had just let his weekend guest - who had been partying elsewhere and gotten himself locked out - into the building.

They denied that the guest had been outside at all, claiming that they'd been home all evening doing laundry.

The police left laughing, my heart stopped racing, all was well. I don't remember who contacted the parents - me, my husband, or the building manager (who also manages the rental). Ratting out doesn't seem my style, nor that of Jim. My guess is that one of us shot an e-mail to the building manager complaining about the "incident" and he dimed the kid to his folks. We got a nice apology note from Mutti and Vati, and an in-person apology from the kid.

So, what I know about Cushing Academy's mission to forge leaders for the 21st century is that their real mission is probably the more humble "boarding school for kids" some of whom are royalty, and some of whom are just plain rich kids.

Well, other than Jigme's ascension to the Bhutan throne, forging leaders doesn't appear to have been a big part of the Cushing value proposition.

On the Home Page, we learn that Cushing believes in challenging courses and small classes. We learn that the school exists for students, their academic growth and their personal development - which is a relief, given that it is after all, a school.

We also learn from their mission statement that they:

...are dedicated to educating the mind, shaping the character, and nurturing the creativity of young men and women. In a community that is academically and culturally diverse, we challenge each individual, support excellence in every aspect of the learning process, and promote active participation in all areas of life and learning. We offer a demanding college preparatory curriculum, teach skills that build confidence, and instill values that endure.

That's all good, too, but their really doesn't seem to be much about forging leaders.

Of course, who among us hasn't done a bit of opportunistic marketing? Win some obscure award as "Application of the Year" from the National Society of Brickyards, and all of a sudden you're all over brickyards as a vertical. Learn that one of your customers actually thinks they have proof of and ROI from using your product, and your customers "typically experience ROI within three months of deployment." When I worked at Genuity, one of our lead technology architects was named "Sexiest Geek Alive" and we had some fun with that. Although it never altered our mission or appeared in our messaging, given what happened to Genuity, maybe it should have.

At Cushing, they only seem to use it in the tagline and in the press release touting King Jigme's elevation.

In any case, my advice to Cushing with respect to "forging leaders" is use it or lose it. If leadership is truly an important attribute you're committed to fostering in your grads, by all means, have at it. If not, I'd stop using an ad hoc tagline as if it were your motto.

And the same advice goes for business advertisers, as well. If some concept is so important that you'd put it in a tag line or prominently feature it in a press release, please have something on your web site to back it up.

The good news is the Jigme may be the real thing.  Cushing's press announcement, citing a Boston Globe article, notes  that Jigme "is committed to his father’s plan to surrender much of the monarchy’s power in 2008." And the king himself is quoted as saying,

Our responsibilities will always be, first and foremost, the peace and tranquility of the nation, the sovereignty and security of our country, fulfilling the vision of Gross National Happiness and strengthening the new system of democracy.

Peace. Tranquility. Security. Democracy. And a fulfilled vision of Gross National Happiness.

The Cushing mascot is the penguin, and I'm guessing that their new Emperor Penguin will do the Academy proud.

Spam, Junk, and Consumers

If you use email in your marketing (and you probably do) it's worth having a look at Return Path's holiday email consumer survey, which you can download as a PDF here. There's lots of interesting stuff there, but one point in particular that I think bears repeating:

Almost half (44%) of respondents say they receive high volumes of "junk" from marketers - defined as "email from companies I know that that is just not interesting to me."

It's not too hard to set up spam filters, and many of the consumer email services have good ones. But if you're sending junk (vs spam) you're not doing yourself any favors; customers notice. And they take action - according the survey, half of them go to the trouble of setting up filters to delete such mail. And many also report junk marketing messages to their ISPs as spam - which can cause the sender a lot of trouble. If customers do that enough, your mail is likely to start getting caught in spam filters.

Too often, email marketers have set the bar too low. If someone has opted into a mailing list, we think anything's okay. The problem is that the most important spam filter is the one in the recipient's head. If you send things that seem like junk to them, it doesn't matter that you had a good opt-in process - your messages are going into the trash, and quite possibly damaging your sender reputation along the way.

There's lots more in the survey - download it and have a look.

Technorati tags: Email marketing, spam, junk mail, spam filters

BLT 2 GO: IM Dining

A Boston University student, sick of being placed on hold when he called his favorite pizzeria, concluded that it would be a lot easier if he could just IM his order in. This led Keith Nowak to bag the idea of law school and focus on a product - IM Dining - that enables texters to add restaurants to their buddy lists and IM away when they get the urge for a large pepperoni or a meatball sub.

Once the IM-er makes the connection, they're put into an interactive menu. If they have special requests or questions, they can text message with someone at the restaurant - U WNT FRIES W THT. The restaurant then confirms the order and lets the order-er know when it will be ready.

IM Dining is already in use in a couple of small outlets in the Boston area, and Nowak is talking to a few chains.

For anyone whose been put on endless hold at their pizza place on a busy night - say, when the Super Bowl is on - this sounds like a great idea. (Upper Crust Pizza on Charles Street: R U LISTENING?) Obviously, busy is busy,and, just as there needs to be someone to take your order, there needs to be someone to monitor the IMs (although it seems that the order entry can be pretty well automated, so that an online order could be immediately communicated to the kitchen crew). But the idea of not being placed on hold is very attractive. And with IM Dining you're likely to have greater assurance that your order is going to be right by being able to make the selections online, where there's less chance for human error and mis-hearing. ("I said my name was Dan Hovey, not that I wanted anchovies.")

I'm sure that there are plenty of kinks to be worked out - have "the young folks" already concocted all the abbreviations for fast food items and add-ons that they're going to need: Is TOMA tomato or Take Over My Arse (a term, I will admit, I had never heard until I went to look up IM for tomato. Plus I have no idea what it really means - hope it's not too vile.)

But all in all, this sounds like a good use of technology - and a recognition that, for many of those in their teens and twenties, IM is the preferred mode of communication. IM Dining exploits this trend.

LOL to Keith Nowak and his IM Dining product. (That's Lots of Luck, by the way, not Laugh Out Loud.)

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Note: The source of information in this post is The Boston Globe.

Apple Talk to Itself... Again

I've been meaning to write something about those "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads for a while, and this funny piece from the Guardian (UK) finally motivated me. The ads have reached Britain, almost identical except for using local talent:

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

Indeed. The ads are quite clever; I really question how effective they are at making any PC user actually want a Mac, though.

Many of claims are simply wrong; particularly the claim that Macs are for "fun" stuff like photos and music - things that millions of PC users happily use their computers for. They tell PC users that they are boring geeks who made a stupid purchase. And the Mac guy (in the US version, at least) is so annoying that even when the claims are right (for example, the virus spot), you still want to smack him.

As someone who's used both flavors of computer extensively, the ads make me laugh - and then make me never want to buy another Mac, because I just don't want to be one of them.

Apple's doing what it so often does: preaching to its choir, while the rest of the congregation gets bored and leaves. The ads probably do have some customer retention value, helping convince current Mac users that they are cool and smart and that the dock is actually a good idea, not a UI travesty.

Maybe that's enough; maybe they even knew that when the planned the campaign. Like so much of Apple's advertising, though, it stinks of sadly misapplied creativity. Too bad.

Technorati tags: Apple, advertising

Houston's METRO Gets on the Blog Bus

A month ago, METRO, Houston's public transit agency, launched its Ride On Metro blog, and it's been an interesting case study in public agency blogging.

Some background: METRO, like all public transit agencies, is supported in large part by tax oney and thus needs to be accountable to the public. Blogging is a natural fit for an organization that needs to think not only about customers, but about public support that leads to funding. And this is Houston; we don't have the kind of broad-based support for public transit that you find in cities like Boston or New York or London.

It's also an interesting time for METRO. Houston has traditionally grown up around automobile transportation. Thus the first thing visitors to our crazy sprawling city see is freeways and our less than pristine air (to put it kindly). However, the city is growing fast - and, more importantly, the city is getting more dense. Infill development in our central neighborhoods has been strong, and so there are more people occupying the same space, which means there's less room for cars, but public transit starts working much better.

But none of this comes naturally to Houstonians. While voters approved a referendum for a whole package of transit projects, including 72 miles of light rail, a few years ago, METRO's had a real challenge keeping that support. There's been an ongoing controversy over the alignment of the next rail line, which is perhaps the most critical component of the system.

When I heard about the blog, I was surprised - METRO's never struck me as particularly innovative when it comes to communication with the public - and eager to see what would happen.

The blog itself is okay. METRO hired a new communications staffer (Mary Sit, a former Houston Chronicle reporter) to write it (along with some other duties). The blog launched... and then things got interesting.

The entries are boosterish, but come on - of course they are. That's the point of the blog. There are some human interest pieces (talking to some of the bus drivers about their experiences on the job, for example), and that sort of thing. It's all about what I'd expect from a METRO blog.

Of course, there's a political dimension to this. As soon as the blog launched, a local blogger who's written extensively about why he hates METRO launched a parody blog - which is sometimes funny, though you can only drag out the joke so long, I think. More seriously, someone dug up information on the new staffer's salary and local blogs began accusing METRO of wasting money on her (I didn't think it was an outrageous salary, based on what someone could make in the private sector).

There was also some criticism that the blog read too much like press releases, and there wasn't enough dialog. I think that's inevitable when launching; until you build an audience, there's not going to be a lot of feedback. That takes time, and I'm inclined to wait and see what happens.

My one criticism of the blog: it requires people to create an account and log in to comment. I know a fair number of blogs to this; I think it's a terrible idea. It keeps occasional readers from commenting. I know that it's meant to prevent abusive commenting, but I think the damage it does to the dialog is too high. Yes, moderating comments is a pain in the neck (I do it for a blog I write on the Houston Chronicle web site, and when you get a lot of comments, it's drudgery) but that's part of the job.

Yesterday, Mary did a post looking at the first month of blogging. That was a good idea. In it, she identifies one of the challenges of any kind of online community:

In the first blog I wrote, I said that our goal was to “spawn a community of interested readers who will engage in lively discussion.” But unfortunately, the conversation has been dominated by three critical voices whose response to each post is predictable: You’re incompetent, METRO is incompetent, and everything METRO does is a huge waste of money.

The attacks are often personal, both toward me and any commentator who defends METRO or writes something positive about METRO. Rather than encouraging friendly, healthy debate and conversation, these few are poisoning the blog environment and discouraging participation.

Jerry Springer meets the blogosphere. I personally prefer Nightline.

These individuals have posted 122 of the 390 comments, if my quick count is correct. That’s 31.28 percent of the comments.

I'm not surprised. There's one local blog that whose obsession with METRO is legendary; METRO could could launch a system to teleport us all to our offices, and they'd write a blistering complaint that we no longer get to listen to our favorite radio stations while stuck in traffic jams on I-10 anymore. It was obvious some of those folks were going to start haunting the METRO blog and that it wasn't going to create any great dialog about transit services in Houston.

I think that the restricted comment policy contributes to this; only the most interested people will bother to comment, and some will be doing it to grind an axe. Some might see her complaint about "poisoning the blog environment" as defensive, but she's right.

This is always a challenge when you're creating an online community (and a group of blog commenters is just that) - how do you deal with these folks?

I have a suggestion for Mary: open up the comments, using one of the systems that holds first-time commenters' submissions for approval, but then lets them comment at will. And kill anything that's way off topic.

I think there are two big lessons from the METRO blog:

1. Put on your asbestos sweater. When a public agency starts blogging, everybody who's mad is going to come out of the woodwork. Your job will be to keep the online community working anyway, let the personal criticisms roll off of you, and identify the people with a genuine beef and respond to it. It can't have been fun for Mary to read local bloggers calling her an overpaid hack. But I think this comes with the territory and anybody in her role has gone to be ready for it.
2. Give it all time. Nearly every blogger needs time to find her voice, settle into a posting schedule that works, and establish some consistency. A month is a very short time. I think everybody needs to take a breath and wait and see where the METRO blog goes in the coming months. I suspect the blog will look a bit different later this year.

I don't know Mary, and I'm not sure if she's reading, but any other tips or criticisms? (I'm curious to see if she sees this and makes any comment; I hope that she's got her Technorati searches set up to find everyone linking to the blog and talking about it, but I don't know if that's the case.)

Technorati tags: blogging, METRO, Houston, online community

Bad PR: Beat up on Churches, Don't Let People Talk About You

Some organizations are just so caught up in the "we're in control!" paradigm that they do the funniest things.

Take, for example, the NFL, which cracked down on a church in Indiana for planning a Super Bowl event:

NFL officials spotted a promotion of Fall Creek Baptist Church's "Super Bowl Bash" on the church Web site last week and overnighted a letter to the pastor demanding the party be canceled, the church said.

Initially, the league objected to the church's plan to charge a fee to attend and that the church used the license-protected words "Super Bowl" in its promotions.

Pastor John D. Newland said he told the NFL his church would not charge anyone and that it would drop the use of the forbidden words.

But the NFL objected to the church's plans to use a projector to show the game, saying the law limits it to one TV no bigger than 55 inches.

The church will likely abandon its plans to host a Super Bowl party.

"We want to be supportive of our local team," Newland said. "For us to have all our congregation huddled around a TV that is big enough only for 10 or 12 people to watch just makes little sense."

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said the league's long-standing policy is to ban "mass out-of-home viewing" of the Super Bowl. An exception is made for sports bars and other businesses that show televised sports as a part of their everyday operations.

"We have contracts with our (TV) networks to provide free over-the-air television for people at home," Aiello said. "The network economics are based on television ratings and at-home viewing. Out-of-home viewing is not measured by Nielsen."

 Wow. "We know you'll be there watching, but we can't measure it, so you'd better not do it."

Sports are often an excuse for communal get-togethers, but I guess it's more important that everybody sit home alone so that Nielsen knows what's up.

Then there's the National Pork Board, the folks who gave us the phrase "the other white meat." They were not too happy when a web site about breastfeeding used a play on their slogan:

Pity the National Pork Board. In order to fulfill its perceived obligations under trademark law, the pork producers association on Tuesday issued a demand to a breastfeeding Web site to cease selling T-shirts that say "The Other White Milk," a riff on trademarked pork industry slogan "The Other White Meat."

...

Laycock recognizes that companies need to look after their trademarks but takes umbrage at the National Pork Board's approach. "What I'm ticked about is that rather than taking two seconds to send me a nice e-mail to request that I remove it, they came in guns a blazin' with a lawyer-crafted nasty gram"

And the National Pork Board's position isn't helped by its attorney's insinuation that Laycock is engaged in some perverse campaign "to promote the use of breast milk beyond merely for infant consumption"

Lee Carl Bromberg, co-founder of Bromberg & Sunstein LLP, a Boston-based law firm specializing in intellectual property issues, observes that the National Pork Board might have tried other approaches before firing off a cease and desist letter. "A lot of discretion can be applied to a trademark policing program," he says. "Some things you decide you have to go after because they're so close to the bone that you have to protect you turf." Others, he said, can be dealt with in other ways or ignored.

"The underlying issue is confusion," says Bromberg. "Are consumers likely to be confused? It seems kind of a stretch."

I haven't heard of any tragic examples of consumers confusing pork chops with breast milk. The Pork Board's ham-handed approach (sorry!) has bloggers abuzz, and generally the whole thing has been handled poorly.

It's hard to see your campaign become a part of the general culture (just ask the "Don't Mess with Texas" folks) but really, going after a blogger in a heavy handed way is seriously clueless.

 (Thanks to Jackie Huba for pointing out the pork story. Jackie also pointed out that the California Milk Processor Board has been more tolerant of satires of their "Got Milk?" campaign, without disastrous results.)

Technorati tags: Citizen marketing, copyright, Super Bowl

Superblah versus Citizen (Anti) Marketing

Here at Opinionated Marketers, we decided that we should all say something about the Superbowl ads. Maureen took the lead with liveblogging it all; I was driving down I-10 somewhere in western Louisiana when it was all happening, so I went and watched them on YouTube.

Wow.

All I can really say is, poor Sheryl Crow. And poor Robert Goulet.

These are the most hyped ads of the year, and it was an astounding display of ordinariness at a time when you'd think the big creative guns were being pulled out. (I will give the CareerBuilder spots some points for cleverness, although I think by know most people know that CareerBuilder is a way that jobhunters can send out resumes and get ignored.) Instead, we had a GoDaddy ad that recycled a joke from a ten year old Dilbert cartoon. Wow!

Is this the best the ad world can do? Is there a compelling reason to watch any of these ads, instead of going to the bathroom?

Actually, I saw a lot more creativity with corporate branding on Saturday night... but that was on the streets of New Orleans, where Krewe du Vieux kicked off Mardi Gras season with their usual pointed (and very bawdy) satire in their parade. The theme was "Habitat for Insanity" and among those getting skewered were insurance companies, with some clever logo manipulations. (I tried to snag an "Allfake" sticker but wasn't quick enough.)

I wasn't quick enough with the camera this year (hey, I didn't want to drop my cocktail!) but this followed nicely from last year's look at the utilities:

I would suggest that some of these advertisers hire Krewe du Vieux to come up with ad concepts next year. Sadly, while the ads would probably be a hundred times better, they also probably couldn't be shown on television.

Technorati tags: Superbowl, Superbowl advertising, New Orleans, Mardi Gras, Krewe du Vieux, citizen marketing

Super Bowl Ads - Play by Play

Pre Game:

I don't generally watch the Super Bowl - even for the ads. (And, by the way, doesn't watching Super Bowl for the ads sound like the guys who in olden days read Playboy for the articles? Just thought I'd offer that.) In any case, I've avoided the Super Bowl - except in those years when the Patriots are playing - because I just find everything associated with it run-up, pageantry, head banging hoopla, music, aftermath, etc. way too over the top.

This year, though, I'm watching for purely professional reasons: so that I can post on Opinionated about it.

And, since it's just plain no fun watching a sports event if you're not rooting for someone, I'm going with the Bears. Not, as some might surmise, because the Colts beat our boys or because I find Peyton Manning both wildly annoying and boringly bland (go figure). No, it's because, while I grew up in New England, my mother is from Chicago and I have lots of family out there. As long as the locals aren't in it, I'll always cheer on the Chicago guys. My parents became engaged at Soldiers' Field, so there's a special resonance with the Bears.

So, onto the ads.

I went into SB with few preconceived notions about what I was going to be seeing, and only a vague idea about who would be advertising - Budweiser? a car company? Monster?

The only ad I'd seen was the Kevin Federline one, but I'd only half-watched it. I thought it was for McDonald's (which would have required such a feat of corporate wit and self-deprecation, plus an acknowledgement that 99.99% of their front-line employees would rather be doing something else).

Tabula rasa - or empty blog, I settled down for a long winter's evening of ad-watching, interspersed with what I hoped would be some decent football not unduly and stultifying accompanied by color commentators droning on about how the Divine Mr. M. deserves to win/or has to win to put his rep as someone who can't win the big ones to rest for once and for all. Or about Rex Grossman's battles with the Chicago press for respect. Or how clutch (the adorable but turncoat) Adam Vinatieri is, with his golden and amply compensated toe.

Let alone about the presence of not one African-American head coach in the Super Bowl for the first time, but two African-American head coaches in the SB for the first time, a situation that would bring on keenly insightful "analysis" about how we would now not only have the first African-American SB winner, but the first African-American SB loser.

On my mark, get set, go - my real time impressions of the ads (ignoring those for TV shows and movies), and not incidentally, the game:

First Half:

Chicago kick-off TD run-back: Bears 7 - 0. Go, Bears!

Bud - Rock Paper Scissors: I didn't actually see what one of the guys threw. They had to tell us "rock". Amusing concept. Should've used a bigger rock!

Doritos - Guy driving car, girl next to it: Couldn't really focus on this, but my impression was that it was terrible.

Blockbuster - Animals in the pet shop for Blockbuster: Deeply disturbing.

Sierra Mist - guy with the hair and the cutoffs: Oh, no.

Salesgenie - how do you do it: OK. They made their impression with Mr. Slick. Now I know they exist. Plus 100 "free" sales leads. Not particularly good, but not bad.

Sierra mist - karate: Mildly amusing, but I still haven't forgiven them for the guy with the hair (or for the Christmas hawk). At least they're on an up tick.

Note: This three-at-a-time is hard to keep up with.

Manning bombs away - oh, boo hoo. There goes that early lead. Hey, not so fast. Bad snap. Missed the point after. 7 - 6 Bears.

Toyota - Tundra truck braking over the canyon: Nice little thrill piece.

Fed Ex - Moon office: Loved the guy trying to drink the coffee. Good concept. Nice reminder that Fed Ex changes to accommodate a changing world.

Bud Light - auctioneer wedding: OK concept, but I really lost the idea that this was an ad for beer. (Was it?)

Messy back and forth, but "We like it, we love it, can't get enough of it." Bears 14 - 6.

Snickers - Man love with the guys in the garage munching (frenching?) the Snickers bar. No thanks.

Schick - folks in the gym, German "scientists": Cheese-ball.

Chevrolet- mixing it up, "we're not the jet-set": A little choppy, but nice appeal to multiple ages and demographics. Still won't get me to by a Chevrolet.

Bud -Light - English language class: Amusing idea.

Bears fumble. Sloppy game.

GoDaddy - marketing babes in the back room: Well, as a marketing pro (and a woman) I find this one a little off-putting. Are that many GoDaddy customers guys that they don't care to appeal to women? I'm a customer, what about me?

Coca Cola - video game ad: Graphically very nice. Don't quite get the 'give a little love thing'.

One quarter into this game, I'm exhausted just trying to keep up with the ads. And, frankly, most of them aren't worth keeping up with. No wonder I've been avoiding Super Bowl all these years.

Bud light - slap happy: I only liked when the guy slapped his boss, but my husband laughed during this one.

American Heart Association - "you gotta have heart": talkin' about my generation.

Maybe because I didn't listen to any of the pre-game, or maybe because I'm not paying that much attention, I've heard blessedly little of my predicted can Peyton do it? disrespected Rex, and two African American coaches.

Bud - Life gets better when you're a dalmatian: Whatever.

Garmin - Paper map monsters - champion of navigation: Well, now I've heard of them at least. Plus, technically, the ad was pretty well done.

Bears - 14-9, game tightening up on an Adam V field goal.

Careerbuilder - guys in the jungle: Funny spoof on corporate training sessions. Loved when they lemming'd off the cliff.

Doritos - check-out girl and guy buying multiple Doritos: Very funny. Loved it.

Chevy - college ad with guys stripping and cleaning the car: Spare me ever seeing this one again.

Colts - 16-14. Ouch.

GM - robot that dreams of getting fired: GM on quality. Fun ad, but would that it were so...Or are they signaling a real commitment to quality.

Coca Cola - black history tribute: Low key and sweet.

Gotta think that crappy weather favors the Bears, but Manning's looking pretty good.

Sprint - connectile dysfunction: nice parody Cialis etc. ads, but wouldn't want a steady diet of this ad, thanks.

Motorola - making of a champion: Combines old fashion ad-ness with a nice demo of their technology.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy, but Indy's definitely got the edge.

Doritos/Tostitos/Fritos - Black fans watching "the first": Low key and sweet, but not so sweet as the Coke ad. So, it isn't the announcers who are making all that much about two African-American head coaches, it's the advertisers.

Coke - old man with his first Coke, etc.: Fun, but come on, who hasn't had a Coke?

Did I really just see Adam V miss a field goal? Oh, baby. Could be the lift the Bears need.

Half time:

I really don't have to watch the halftime hoopla, do I? I mean, I didn't even watch the halftime shows when the Pats were in it.

OK. Now I know why I don't enjoy Super Bowl. (Although the marching band from Florida A&M was kind of fun.)

Half time score for the ads: Gotta go with Fed Ex. First runners up: Coke and CareerBuilders. (And truly, I've liked the local ads - Eastern Bank and Hood Creamery - as well as any I've seen so far.)

Second half:

Field goal by Adam V. Colts 19-14.

E-Trade - bank robbery: Fun and makes the point that they're cheaper than banks, but I may have missed the point. Is E-Trade positioning itself as a bank, or are they competing with people who trade through their banks. Who trades through their bank?

Coke - bottling madness (what goes on behind the Coke machine): technically slick and visually very interesting.

Bud Light - gorillas in the mist: I mean, I love anthropomorphism as much as the next guy, but bor-ing.

Revlon hair color - Sheryl Crow: Right. I'm sure that Sheryl's stylist came around to using an off-the-shelf dye job. "Not fade away?" This ad will. (Though I like the use of a Buddy Holly tune).

Career builders - guys fighting over a promotion: not as fun as the training ad, but pretty good.

Taco Bell - Talking lions trying to pronounce carne asada: I like anthropomorphism, but the idea of a couple of animals - and carnivores at that) commenting on a meat dish.

Van Heusen shirt - "our guy": Yawn. Is this really on Super Bowl? Didn't I see this ad, like, 30 years ago?

Game's lookin' poorly for Da Bears. Colts are opening things up a bit here. Meanwhile, one of the announcers just compared a player to John Havlicek - 6th man in basketball, 12th man in football. I guess. Sports is sports.

Another AV field goal: Colts 22 - 14.

Toyota Tundra - something about torque: Maybe it's a guy thing.

Emerald Nuts - Robert Goulet flitting around an office: I always hate Emerald Nuts ads. Always. But what were they thinking here? Robert G. looks like a cadaver. And he also looks like he could use Sheryl Crow's hair colorist, using the Revlon or ground up tea bags or melted crayons. Anything would be an improvement on what's on Goulet's pate in this ad. Nuts to this one.

T-Mobile - ad with Charles Barkely and some other guy: Mildly amusing. Who's the other guy?

FexEx Ground - everyone agreeing with the boss: Not up to their other ads.

Nationwide - Federline as the fast food worker: Can't stand K-Fed, but find this ad very funny. I really don't see how this is insulting to fast food workers. Come on,who doesn't fantasize about doing something other than what they do for a living, let alone guys working the Fryolator all day?

Bud Light - pick up the hitchhiker with the axe: Very, very funny. Didn't need the chain saw tack-on, but so far, best of the half.

Bears just scored an FG. Colts 22-17.

Bud - Crabs worshipping beer: Maybe I'm missing something, but, while the animation's clever, this didn't do it for me.

Prudential - rock solid retirement: Nothing new here.

Honda CR-V - Hotta, hotta burning love: Notta, notta very interesting ad.

Interception. TD. Colts 29-17.

HP - Motorcycle shop doing their thing with HP: by the time you figure out it's for HP and not for Harley Davidson...

Izod - Beautiful young couple between beautiful, young, and athletic: Quite lovely, but I think I've seen this one before. Not so instant replay.

Bud - Don Shula (?) playing a simulated football game: Nice special effects, but other than that not much of anything.

FloMax - Buncha guys enjoying life with the Flo-master: Not much that could make this one a winner. Way too geezer-zone to be of much interest. (Not that being in the geezer zone means you can't be funny and interesting.)

E-Trade - What you can do with one finger: Tell your expensive broker where to go. Very funny ad. Hit's all the right notes. Clever and definitely speaks to their value proposition.

CareerBuilder - walking on coals and other tortures associated with the performance review: OK, but the training ad is still their best so far.

Honda - fuel efficient autos: Very attractive. Timely point, given the U.N.'s report on global warming.

Snapple - green-tea: Clever and fun, but boy, am I flagging.

The final: Colts 29 - Bears 17. It's certainly a lot easier to take a loss if you really don't have any emotional fan involvement.

Michelin - tire production line: technically very nice, and the tire guy's still cute.

Post Game Analysis:

Other than the sheer concentration of ads, very few of the much touted Super Bowl ads really impressed me. Maybe it's the inevitable letdown after such a foaming build-up.

My winners are E-Trade, Coke, Fed-Ex, and Nationwide (because of/despite K-Fed). Also liked the Snapple ad, and the look and feel of the Honda fuel-efficient ad.

My losers: GoDaddy. Snickers. And, the grand prize loser: Emerald Nuts. I wouldn't open a can of Emerald Nuts if they were the last snack food on earth.

Overall, I'm a bit disappointed. With all the pre-game build-up about the great ads, few if anything struck me as something you don't see normally. Maybe a bit more technical virtuosity in a few of them (Coke). Other than that...

Does any one actually calculate the cost vs. benefit of the Super Bowl ads? I'm sure that there are metrics somewhere, and I'd be curious about whether the production and placement costs actually translate into anything meaningful for the advertisers.

Renting an Office

Microsoft Office, that is; the software behemoth is testing a pay as you go rental scheme for the must-have (whether you like it or not) suite.

Would you pay $15 a month to use Microsoft Office 2003?

Some users, who are helping Microsoft test whether renting Office might be preferable to buying it for certain groups of customers, say they would.

Microsoft has been testing quietly a new "pay-as-you-go" rental program for Office 2003 in South Africa, Mexico and Romania, and will decide in the next couple of months whether to extend the program to include Office 2007.

A couple of observations:

• Pay as you go is a smart idea. Office's pricing is a problem for home users (who often need Word, and maybe Excel) but don't want to shell out the rather high cost for it. A monthly charge is easier to bear.
• It's clearly a response to competition from things like OpenOffice and Google Documents & Spreadsheets, which are reasonable alternatives for those who don't want to pay for Office.

That said, I don't think they've gotten it right.

First of all, the scheme is not exactly simple:

In the "Office Prepaid Trial," Microsoft is relying on system builders to sell users cards that provide them three months' worth of Office 2003 usage for a set fee, said Chris Capossela, a corporate vice president with Microsoft's Business division. With FlexGo, an entire PC system — hardware and software — is leased; with the Office Prepaid Trial program, only Office (either Office Small Business or Office Student and Teachers Edition) is rented out, Capossela explained.

Under terms of the Office Prepaid Trial, users must return to the system builders who sold them their original PC in order to purchase another three-month incremental of Office-rental time. If a user decides against re-upping, the version of Office 2003 that is on the user's PC goes into reduced functionality mode, providing users with nothing more than the ability to view documents.

You need to be able to go to Microsoft's site and sign up for it to work, I think.

Second, the price is too high. I think Microsoft can probably get away with charging for something that others are giving away free, because theirs is the standard that everyone has to coexist with. But $15 is too much - $180/year - for this. Maybe $5. Maybe less.

Third, it generally stinks of missed opportunity. Why not bundle some additional services for extra charges so that a small business can get things an entire suite of business apps for a monthly fee?

In fairness to Microsoft, they're in a tough spot; Office revenue is very important to the company, and a software as a service model that's too appealing will cut into that revenue. But competitive pressure might force the issue.

How's the trial going?

Capossela said the four-month-old Office Prepaid Trial has been really successful in South Africa and Romania, but not as well received in Mexico. He said he wasn't sure yet what accounted for the differences in user reception of the trials.

Capossela added that Microsoft will be reviewing some time in the next couple of months the feedback it has received as part of the trial and will decide then whether to extend it to other countries and whether to add Office 2007 to the list of rentable Office SKUs.

It will be interesting to see if this takes off, and how well Microsoft can respond to competition in this area.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Office, software as a service, software rental, pricing, Google Documents, OpenOffice

More on the "Adult Swim" Marketing Fiasco

On Wednesday evening, I wrote an agitated post on an ill-conceived Turner Broadcasting marketing effort that turned the city of Boston on its ear. Brief recap:  Turner outsourced a promotion its Aqua Teen Hunger Force cartoon to a guerrilla marketing firm in NY, which in turn outsourced some of the work on the ground to local just plain folks (but young, edgy, and hip just plain folks) in the targeted cities. The campaign revolved around a placing iconic LED signs (an abstract cartoon "character" giving the finger) all around town. Someone in Boston spotted one attached to a girder beneath a highway overpass, and we were off to the first responder races.

There has been an exceeding amount of media attention paid to this - especially here in Boston - and all kinds of people weighing in on whether Boston authorities over-reacted, can't take a joke, are just irredeemably unhip, and didn't even notice something that looked like a bomb for the 2 weeks it had been sitting there. And on the other side whether the morons who put something that could be mistaken for a bomb in a place that could be considered a good target for a bomb should spend the rest of their lives in jail.

I'll concede that Boston authorities are unhip which, as far as I'm concerned is actually a good thing when it comes to handling a terrorist threat. When it comes to public safety, who wants someone who's jaded and blasé? I want people who will take it seriously.

But over-react? Now that more information on "the day" is coming out, it appears that there were reports in several other cities of suspicious devices found, so Boston police were on alert. It also seems that two non-related suspicious devices (fake pipe bombs) had been found, one under another Boston bridge, the same day.

And by daylight, something that glowing at night might have been seen as "a joke", looked like a circuit board with exposed wires and batteries. Hmmmmm. Is that a bomb? Nah, it's probably just a joke.

As to the criticism that the sign had been there unnoticed for 2 weeks: untrue. An original set of signs - put out in places where they were seen/cadged by the target audience, places like Urban Outfitters and comic book stores, had been up for a couple of weeks, but the up-the-ante signs placed in infrastructure had been up for a day.

As for the two guys who placed the signs - having been "hired" by a guy one of the met in a bar and paid $300 - I'd like to see the jaded, blasé smirks wiped off their faces, but I don't think they need to go to the Big House.

On to the marketing aspects, Turner may have been right to outsource the marketing for this type of show (edgy, hip) to a guerrilla marketing firm (edgy, hip), but they either did not provide guidelines, did not provide oversight, or just plain didn't want to know what was going on. They get a black eye for looking stupid on this one. And they're out some big bucks (around $1M) to re-imburse Boston and surrounds for their costs.

Cost/benefit? Will a lot more people go see the movie as a result of this effort? Maybe some of the targeted audience who otherwise may have taken a pass on this will put it on their "must see" TV.  But as for attracting a wider audience, I can't imagine that anyone outside the demographic of interest is so captivated that they'll get in line. (As one of our news guys said, it'll turn out that the only bomb here is the movie itself.)

The marketing group that comes out looking the worst is Interference (the guerrilla marketing firm behind this campaign). Not only did they use questionable judgement in designing the sign - come on, if you wanted it to look entirely innocent, would you leave exposed wires and batteries on it - not to mention in the placement of the signs (whether done by their ad hoc agents or themselves). But where they've really been caught out is not owning up to the stunt until hours after the "situation" started. In fact, one of the fellows who put the signs up apparently sent friends an e-mail early in the day saying that Interference had asked him to keep his mouth shut about it.  Either Interference was panicked and was trying to figure out what to do, or they wanted things to play out as long as possible. Neither is going to do much for the firm's reputation.

But I'm guessing that Interference comes out pretty well in this, given all the publicity they're getting. Maybe they won't get much more work from Turner, but I'm guessing they'll get plenty from those who want to reach the 20-somethings.

So, from Interference's point of view, it's probably mission accomplished.

Unless, of course, "the authorities" go after them for not coming forward, and sitting on information that they had for hours longer than they should have.

Apparently, it wasn't just the Boston police who were running around here the other day. The FBI was involved, too.

When we were kids we used to challenge other kids who were making a big deal out of nothing by asking, "What are you trying to do? Make a federal case out of it?"

A federal case? That's exactly what could happen to Interference.

The guys who placed the signs? A couple of weeks of cultish hero martyrdom and drinks on the house from their peers. No jail time - especially if they turn on Interference (and just how fast would you bet that will happen).  Their picture in People. Then a rapid slide back into oblivion.

Incoming!

Not a week goes by when the credit card companies aren't after my patronage, when my mailbox isn't chocked full of incoming matter when AmEx/Discover/MC/Visa. There is, apparently, no end to the credit card outfits that want me as a customer. Or that, once they nab me, want to up my credit limit. (Do I really need or want a $40,000 credit line from Visa? Seems to me, the higher the credit limit, the greater the damage a thief could do.)

As a result of all this incoming mail from credit card purveyors, I have calculated that, by conservative estimate, I spend at least an hour a year shredding invitations to sign up for new credit cards and/or those sucker-play "balance consolidation" checks with my name and address on them.

Maybe I have no complaint here.

It's not as if I never sign up for new cards. In fact, I probably do it more often than most normal people.

My husband's hobby is accumulating Frequent Flyer Miles without ever actually getting on a plane. Much of this finagling involves signing up for new credit cards and getting 10,000 or 15,000 "free miles". Jim is constantly darkening my office door to tell me about some new deal he's found.

The good news is, when we do fly anywhere, the tickets are free. (As long as you don't factor in all those hours spent figuring out Frequent Flyer programs and applying for credit cards.)

The bad news: every few years I have to spend an hour or so canceling out this dizzying array of credit cards, and cutting the pieces into teensie-weensie little pieces. (I don't trust the shredder with the actual cards.)

So I would concede that much of the onslaught of credit card "invitations" is brought on by my own willingness to sign up for new cards...except that everyone I know gets the same tonnage of credit card invites.

And so, because some/many of the missives we get from credit card companies contain personal information, we're forced to take special care to get rid of them. An unwanted catalog you can just toss into your recycle bin. An unwanted solicitation for a donation can be jettisoned (before or after you take the hokey address labels out).

An unwanted offer of a new credit card has to be taken care of somehow, or you run the risk of identity theft. (Or at least think you run the risk.) It's as if when you get a legitimate e-mail marketing piece you had to worry about whether it was introducing a virus.

From a marketing perspective, these "congratulations, you're pre-approved" programs must be working or everybody wouldn't be doin' it, doin' it.

But personally, most of them leave me cold.

Not that there aren't enticements that would work for me. Other than the Frequent Flyer lures that my husband manages to get me to fall for hook, line, and sinker, I also like the ones like the LL Bean card that give you freebies: free shipping, free monogramming. And I think I could fall for one that was connected to a charitable institutional that I support. (Note to prospective credit card enticers: I actually have enough cards, thank you, and in fact canceled three of them just last week, so just because I give to a charity, well....enough's enough.)

But, let's face it, many of these credit card mailings put the customer or prospect at financial risk. That sounds like plain bad marketing.

How about sending out letters that don't contain any personal information? That don't tie your name, address, and serial number together so conveniently. That don't make you feel that you have to be paranoid about opening every unsolicited piece that comes your way, scan it for signs of danger, and then go and shred it.  Maybe the letters could contain a code that you can use online to sign up for your pre-approved, million dollar credit limit. Maybe they could just tell you what the deal is and send you to a micro-site to sign up - offer only available to those whose name and address match up with a letter that's been sent your way.

Once you suck in all those naive college freshmen that haven't figured out that plastic eventually has to be translated into paper, I suspect that marketing credit cards is not all that easy in this day and age. The market for people with good credit is likely saturated: we all have enough cards, thank you. The market for people with bad credit may be infinite, but how good can you feel about yourself as a marketer trying to give offer more credit to folks than they should be due?

Credit card marketers could do themselves a big favor by not ticking off potential customers inundating them with solicitations that are not only unwanted, but are unsafe.

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Thanks to my friend Peter for suggesting a post on this.

Web 0.0

Let's take a little time out from all the buzz about Web 2.0 and talk about Web 0.0. What's that? It's an online business model that's alive and well, and it consists of continuing to do things that probably seemed reasonable in 1997.

Here here in the marketing wing of New Blogshire we tend to talk about what's new and hot and interesting. But what real marketers are actually doing lags a bit behind that... sometimes painfully so.

I'm not going to knock anybody who's got a good informational web site with lots of ways to contact them for more information, who does basic email newsletters with content that customers value, or any of those standard but un-sexy things. For an awful lot of people, that's exactly right. They should be paying attention to all of the news things coming along, but not everyone needs to be an early adopter.

But there are things that have just become bad ideas that nobody should do anymore. These are things that aren't even Web 1.0. Thus they get ticked down another digit.

A few I've noticed recently:

1. "Welcome to the Web Site California." You can sign up, but you can never leave.

Sorry, this doesn't fly. If you can sign me up for services online, you can let me turn them off from the web site too. In fact, I want complete control of everything that doesn't really require human interaction, right there online. Maybe that's demanding, but the technology's there, and that's how I want to do business with you.

Some offenders I've stumbled across this week:

• Sunrocket, where not only can't you cancel service online, you can't even get through on the phone. After several half-hour on hold experiences with them, I played a game of email chicken ("I'm not calling. You call me." "You have to call us!" "OK, but I'm billing you for hold time at $150/hour." They no longer had a valid credit card from me, so it was sort of a game to me - they couldn't really charge me anymore! - and eventually someone did call me.)
• Cingular Wireless. You can add features to your mobile phone from the web site. You can't ever remove them, though. Stupid. I know whether I no longer need discounted Canadian calling, and your agent isn't going to talk me out of it dropping it, so stop wasting my time and let me change it online.

2. "OMG, like, you'll send me email? Really?" Folks, signing up for an email list was sort of cool and futuristic once. Today, not so much. Consider this offer from the Houston Business Journal:

The Houston Business Journal invites the HTC [Houston Technology Center] Community to receive breaking local business news every weekday afternoon around 3 pm FOR FREE. Hot off the press Houston news headlines about local businesses would be emailed to you. Get the breaking news before it hits your mailbox on Friday morning.

I can join the mailing list for free! Nifty! Nobody ever offered to send me email before!

Even worse, I already get that 3 PM newsletter. (I like it.) Really, de-duping isn't that hard.

Yes, email newsletters with solid content are good. But we expect them to be free, and the "FOR FREE" under a subject line about a "special opportunity" is kind of dumb. (Especially because HTC has lots of good events, and the subject line had me thinking that perhaps they were going to have HBJ editors speaking at a breakfast, or some kind of roundtable, or perhaps some opportunity to pitch stories. I was quite let down.

3. "We know you want it. Now just relax and it won't hurt a bit." In an age where smart marketers are figuring out how to connect with and motivate communities of customers to engage them in dialog, an email informing you that you're getting email, and you're going to like it, dammit, is pretty strange. Apparently GM didn't think so; David Berlind at ZDNet talks about getting an email from GM telling him that he's about to start getting advertising via email from them - with a nonfunctional opt-out system, for bonus fun!

Of course, it did inspire some user-generated content; it motivated David to talk about the crappy experience he's had with one of his GM vehicles. And to pledge never to buy a GM vehicle again. (Though I would have thought owning a Pontiac Vibe would have had that result.)

When email marketing was new, you could forgive these mistakes. Everyone was still figuring it out. Now, we've figured the basics out. Somebody tell GM, please.

4. "It is better to look good than to feel good!" Or work well. It's fascinating to me to look at some of the most successful things on the web - Google, YouTube, Yahoo! - and notice one common factor: they're really freaking simple.

Whenever I come across one of those Flash-based monstrosities of a web site with some kind of strange navigation that makes me put down my coffee cup, squint and the screen, and think, "What the hell am I supposed to do now?" I think about Google. Whenever I find a site that makes gratuitous noises, I think, "Why did they think it was cool to interrupt my music that way?"

And then I click over to my Google homepage and say, "God, that's good." (This is what I do when a web site makes me work too hard to figure out how to use it - I decide it's time to go see what the headlines are and what's popped up in my RSS reader.)

Guess what - one of the nice things about the web is a common "language" of layout and navigation. It makes it easy for us to find what we want. It makes us feel like we're in control of our experience. It makes it easy for us to talk back to you. If you decide to tinker with that, have a good reason for it.

I'm not opposed to sites that are completely off the wall. It's just that 99% of them have no reason to have disrupted everything and made me have to work so hard to use them, other than a bored designer.

Again, when the web was newer and we were still figuring things out - and when sites were more like an unconnected bunch of billboards - this was more acceptable. Now it's about interaction and letting the user create her own experience. She's driving. Don't rearrange the damn dashboard, OK?

There's always someone at the tail end of the adoption curve, and that doesn't make them stupid or clueless; it means that their business hasn't required them to be on the cutting edge. No shame in that.

But there are things that have dropped off the back end of the adoption curve and gone to the marketing history graveyard, where they are lying next to big piles of corporate videos on VHS, piles of mechanicals with type (from the typesetter, delivered in their little truck!) spray-mounted on to them, and stacks of outdated corporate brochures.

Any other Web 0.0 practices still hanging on?

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