The Opinionated Marketers

Just a reminder...

2008-02-05T10:03:00.001-06:00

... if you're still following the Opinionated Marketers here, we've moved!

The new site is http://opinionatedmarketers.com and the new feed location is http://opinionatedmarketers.com/feed/.

See you there!

Housekeeping Note

2008-01-25T11:45:00.001-06:00

We've moved the blog to our own domain and WordPress. So, if you're seeing this post, please go over to the new blog and check it out. All of the existing posts and comments have been migrated over. We're still rebuilding things like our lists of links, but all new material will appear over there. WordPress will also let us add information pages like background on us, resources, and so on, so we're excited about the upgrade.

The new RSS feed is here.

The template we're using was designed by Nathan Rice, who has some great stuff available free (in the finest open source tradition!) and who also does custom WordPress work. Have a look at his stuff!

See you in our new digs.

Starbucks-for-a-Buck. What's that all about?

2008-01-25T00:25:00.000-06:00

For openers, I have to admit that I rarely drink anyone's coffee, let alone Starbucks' coffee, which I really don't like the taste of. (Some people I know claim that one of the reasons that Starbucks junks up its coffees with the latte-sugar-whatever stuff is to disguise that taste.)

As for coffee, sometimes I have a cappuccino - generally when I'm out to dinner or am taking a walk in Boston's North End and stop in at the Caffe Vittoria for a cannoli and to play oldies on their juke box.). Sometimes I drink iced coffee (generally from Dunkin' Donuts).

When I do go into a Starbucks, mostly it's to meet someone. I really do enjoy the coffee house ambience, and laud them for that (although, quite snobbily, I'd always rather spend my time and money in a stand-alone, non-chain place like Caffe Vittoria or Athan's Bakery in Brookline, Massachusetts).

Once a summer, or so, when I'm in a calories-be-damned mood, I have been known to indulge in a Frappaccino. Although when I'm in that kind of mood, I'm more likely to indulge in a Mochaccino at DD. (While I give Starbucks props for providing places to hang out in many of their stores, I'm just more of a DD kind of girl. Maybe it's that they're local, and I grew up with DD. Every Sunday, after Mass, my father would stop in at the DD in Worcester's Webster Square, just down the street from our church, and pick up a dozen donuts. Or two.)

Wherever I am, I mostly drink tea.

Which is a long-winded way of bringing up Starbucks testing an 8-oz. cup of joe that will retail for a buck. (In typical Starbuckian fashion, the 8-oz.-er has a cutsie name. It's called a "short.")

As reported in the Boston Globe the other day (Following up on an article that appeared in the prior day's WSJ),Starbucks is facing some caffeinated competition from McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts, which offer premium (and frou-frou) coffee for less than the $2 or so something similar costs at Starbucks.

While the company issued a statement that their small gulp "short" is "not indicative of any new business strategy," you've got to ask yourself just what it is.

As a tactic to recession-proof themselves from regulars who might start questioning the wisdom of spending large for a "grande", I can't imagine that it's going to work. Someone who's become addicted to the Starbucks' experience is probably not going to feel relieved and grateful that they can keep buying there without spending big bucks. I'm guessing that they're going to feel short-changed, miffed, and tiny bit humiliated. (Now all the world can see: I can no longer afford to buy my coffee at Starbucks.)

They may already be doing this, but what might work better to secure their base is the buy-10-get-1-free cards that some places employ. (Two that I frequent are Cosi, where I buy salads for lunch a couple of times a week; and Copley Flair, a small local card store chain where I buy all of my greeting cards, not just because they carry a good selection, but because I get my card punched each time I buy one.) Loyalty programs do work.

As a tactic to bring in new customers, I can't imagine that this will be a big draw for McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts patrons who like the coffee they're getting there just fine.

Last year, Starbucks' Chairman Howard Schultz warned against Starbucks "'watering down' its brand." More recently, he stated that the new offerings Starbucks has been coming out with aren't "'exciting'" enough.

The short strikes me as both watering down the brand and as decidedly non-exciting.

Is anyone over at Starbucks listening to their own Chairman?

Some People Just Don't Get It

2008-01-24T05:27:00.001-06:00

The other day I wrote about my furnace repair guy who had an instinctive understanding of how to monitor and measure his marketing activities. It might have sounded like an overstatement to say that he was better at this than some marketing pros. Not really.

Just after the furnace fun I put an ad on Craigslist looking for somebody to do SEO work. The ad explained what we were looking for in a couple of paragraphs, how we'd want to relationship to work between us, an SEO person, and our clients, and requested that people in a specific geographic area only respond.

Five minutes later I got my first response: someone sending me his graphic design portfolio, with an LA phone number. (LA was not the location specified.)

His work wasn't bad... but I wasn't looking for a graphic designer, and he apparently hadn't read the ad. (The response came so quickly that I wondered if he had some method of monitoring Craigslist postings and sending automated replies.)

Then I got something from somebody else, in the wrong place, that instead of telling me anything about him, said basically "Why did you specify that location in the ad?" (Um, because I want someone in that location?)

Last night I got something from a company in India, and this morning I got something from somebody with a Yahoo address that told me about his or her SEO work, but did not have a link to their site, a name, anything.

People who do SEO are, one would presume, marketing oriented people. Wouldn't you think they'd have some idea how to present themselves?

Here are the basic, Marketing 101 rules that they broke.

When you're pitching for business, have a name on your email. If the "From" field reads "Big Honking SEO Company," I don't feel like I'm hearing from a person, I feel like I'm talking to an autoresponder, and I don't want to do that.
If I mention specific things I need someone to do, tell me about how you do them, have done them, and are prepared to do them again. A sentence or two would be fine.
Give me some option besides contacting you. A link to your site, a portfolio, or your blog would do it. Let me find out more about you.
If I say "Houston area only" and you're in California, Idaho, or Bangalore, don't reply. Or, if you do, tell me why: "I'm in Los Angeles, but I work with clients all over the country, and I'm sure I can help you" is actually enough to tell me that you at least read the ad. "I'm in Miami, but I have some clients in Houston and visit once a month, and I'm sure I'd be able to work with you long distance." Just let me know that you heard what I said, you understood it, and you have some reason to think that maybe I'll be interested anyway. If you ignore what I say, what's going to happen when a client tells us what they need?

This is not complicated stuff. I just want to know that you heard me, you understood me, and that you are responding to what I asked. But it's very important. If you can't comprehend what I asked you and reply appropriately, do you think I want you with a mile ofmy clients?

And these are people who are supposed to be providing marketing services. Scary. I'd rather have the furnace guy take a crash course in SEO and put him to work on it; knowledge can be acquired, but the ability to listen and think is usually either there, or not.

The Age of Specialization

2008-01-23T00:03:00.000-06:00

Not to take anything away from polymath geniuses like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, but it sure must have been a whole lot easier to know everything when there wasn't all that much everything to know.

And not to compare the average marketing person of yore to Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, but I'm sure there was a day and age where an experienced marketing person could pretty much know just about everything there was to know about the elements of marketing.

But as with everything else these days, those days - if they ever really existed - are likely coming to a screeching halt.

I started thinking about this when I read one of John's recent posts in which he wrote,

So here's a recommended new year's resolution for 2008: don't throw out the past and don't forget history. Old media still matter (and in some market segments, matter more than new media). For marketers, the trick is to remember the whole picture - not just the most exciting shiny and new parts of it.

While John's post had a specific angle to it (he was talking about audience size), the more general point can be made that marketers need to incorporate "the new" (online advertising, social networks,SEO, e-mail blasts...) into their bag of tricks, without letting go of "the old" (print advertising, direct mail, live events....). Just because there's new stuff to know doesn't mean that we can or should toss out the old.

This makes life more demanding for marketers.

There's a whole lot more to know about these days - and as the pace of change accelerates, it's just going to get harder and harder to keep up with everything. Thus, we will see more and more specialization within marketing.

To some extent, this is nothing new. Most of us have specialized in some way shape or form: We do B2B, or consumer, or non-profit marketing. We develop expertise in PR, or direct marketing, or marcomm, or product marketing.

But I have a sense that it will become less and less possible for people to utter the words I've spoken on more than one occasion: "I've done everything on the marketing continuum, from write specs for a product to assemble the trade show booth."

In fact, as more and more gets added to the marketing continuum, it becomes less and less true for me. I've done a bit of SEO and e-mail marketing, but virtually nothing with - say - building an on line community.

Say, maybe "they" were right and the Internet does change everything...

So what's a marketing professional to do?

Whether you're a solo practitioner, individual contributor, or marketing manager, you need to make sure that you keep up with what's new and exciting in marketing.

No, you don't need to become an expert in everything that's new and exciting. You just need to know a bit more than that it exists. You need to know what "it" is and what "it's" used for. You need to have at least a vague idea of whether you even need "it." And you need to know who would do "it" for you if you needed "it" done. In other words, you need to know what you don't know. (And not draw a complete "duh" blank when someone asks you about one of the new-fangled ways of doing marketing.)

Clear enough for you?

The point is that there's a growing body of things to know about in marketing, and not all that much that has (yet) fallen off the table.

Sure, there are virtual trade shows - but there are still physical trade shows, and if you pick your spots and work them well, they can be excellent venues for finding new customers. Sure, there are online communities - but there are also user groups, where your most rabid customers gather in the flesh, and want to hear from you about what's new and exciting. Sure, there are opt-in e-mails, but there's also good, old-fashioned paper-based direct mail campaigns.

In fact, I can't think of one thing that I was doing twenty years ago in marketing - other than print thousands of copies of the new brochure - that I wouldn't also consider doing today. Trade shows. Direct mail. Breakfast seminars. User groups. Collateral. Sales tools. Advertising. PR. They're all still in the mix - it's just that mix has gotten more intricate and more complex.

If you're a marketer who's been around for a while, make sure you keep your awareness level of "the new" high, but don't necessarily abandon the areas where you're the expert. You never know when a twenty-something will need your help, say, assembling that pesky trade show booth.

Some People Just Get It

2008-01-22T05:25:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was a chaotic day at my house - the furnace died late last week, just in time for a weekend of lows in the 30s. Yes, I'm a New Englander, Houston winter should never be a problem, but come on - cold damp weather in a typically badly insulated Gulf Coast house is not a fun time. Long story short, an entirely new furnace and duct work went in today.

At one point I was chatting with the technician who was running the show, and we started talking about marketing. "I'm a marketing buff!" he said. And you know what - he sure is.

He was talking about how aggressive the salespeople for yellow pages ads were, and I said, "Are the ads worth it?"

"Oh yeah," he said, and explained why. And he knew his stuff. He had actually set up a system so that when new customers call, they track what ad they saw. He'd figured out what percentage of those calls result in business, how much that business is worth on average, and come up with a number for the value of the average inquiry from a yellow pages ad. So he could easily count the calls and decide if the ads were worth running.

Folks, I've worked at $100 million dollar companies doing B2B advertising that can't do that.

You don't have to be one of the big guys to get this stuff right. You just have to think about the process from inquiry to sale, and pay attention to how it's working, and attach some metrics. Yes, it can be more complicated that this. But the guy installing my new furnace today was brighter about this than some marketing execs I've known.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #14

2008-01-21T00:01:00.000-06:00

This is the fourteenth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #14: Look for opportunities to deliver the remarkable.

I'll have to admit, when I saw that word "remarkable" my first thought was, 'is this one of those annoying words like passionate and personal brand that pop up from time to time to test my gag reflex?'

But that first thought was fleeting.

This is, after all, Pragmatic Marketing we're talking about here, and they strike me as an outfit that's long on the clear, the thoughtful, and the practical - and blessedly short on the buzz-word BS.

And the PM folks are right on. As product marketers and product managers, we should want to deliver the remarkable in whatever we do - remarkable in the sense of wonderful, uncommon, and singular - all definitions that I just found in the nearby dictionary. (But not so nearby that I'm willing to go look up just what sort of dictionary it was. So there'll be no sixth grade essay "According to Webster" stuff going on here.)

Think about it for a minute.

If you settle for "good enough" in your product, and don't make sure that there are at least a few nice to have goodies, your customers will greet the news with "it's about time," and your prospects will greet the product with "big deal - you've just got what everyone else has."

Is this the type of response you want?

No, you want your customers and prospects to have some sense of delight - something they hadn't thought of, something that's a bit out of the ordinary, something that they'll find really useful - or at least interesting.

It could be something as simple as a last minute time or grief saving feature someone thought of. Maybe it's a smooth integration with some tool or application that everyone in your target industry uses, but which has never really connected up all that well with anything else. Or something that's all new, first ever, state of the art - but something that everyone is going to be clamoring for any day now. You just got their first.

(With product related "remarkables", try to make sure that they're real. The last thing you want is a "who cares?" reaction from customers and prospects.)

The first place to get remarkable should never be playing with prices or services, but, let's face it, your remarkable "thing" could be a couple of hours of installation support thrown in - not because installation is such a bear - let's hope you've solved that problem - but because every environment's different and anything can happen. Or extending the number of seats the license will support.

Don't forget that you can be remarkable in your sales process by really and truly listening to what your prospects and customers are saying, and responding to them. (Years ago, when sifting through vendors to design and build my company's new web site, I gave four companies a detailed outline of what I wanted them to cover when they came in and gave their pitch. Nothing all that radical or out there, just something that addressed the questions and concerns I had. From my point of view, I was handing them gold on a platter by telling them exactly what I wanted, and saving them the time of soliciting this information on their own. But out of four companies who came in to pitch us, only one used the information I'd provided them. The others just went through their standard sales presentation - not bad, but entirely formulaic and not what I'd asked for. Do you have to ask who got my business? I didn't think so.)

You can be remarkable in your customer service process as well. Maybe it's a check-in phone call to follow up on whether last week's problem has been resolved. Or a call to welcome a newbie to the family.

Don't forget the finance side of things, either. Believe me, a lot of customers would find it quite remarkable if you contacted them to let them know you'd discovered an overcharge. Or that more attractive financing was now available.

It's a tough world out there. In order to get noticed - and get business - you need to do something to stand out. And it really doesn't have to be all that remarkable. Last week, I posted on the fine customer service I got at Best Buy/Geek Squad, capped by the original customer service person I spoke with seeing me wandering around the store an hour later, and asking me if I was all set. Maybe not all that remarkable in absolute terms, but compared to some of the don't make eye contact, gab with your fellow clerk, not to mention outright rude retail behavior we're all occasionally subjected to...Will I go back to Best Buy? You best believe I will.

So, don't forget to deliver the remarkable. It really does work.

Avis: Permission Granted

2008-01-18T07:18:00.001-06:00

Having recently joined the fortunate ranks of those not burdened with urban car ownership, I am now among the ranks of those who on occasion have the need to rent a car.

One such occasion occurred last week, when I had to go to Syracuse on business.

Now, Syracuse is not the easiest place to get to from Boston unless you're willing and able to drive, and I've always driven there. It's not a bad drive, if 300+ miles can be categorized as not bad. It's pretty much a straight shot out the Mass Pike to the NY State Thruway, and iPod in (one) ear, the drive goes by relatively fast.

But in order to drive, you must have a car. Which I no longer do.

Thus, I rented.

The closest-best rate-best pick-up and drop-off times was at an Avis about a 10 minute walk from where I live.

Avis it was.

The sign up on the web was fine. The service was fine. The car was fine. No one tried to ram collision (covered by my credit card - I called to check) down my throat. The hardest thing about the whole thing was trying to remember what a metallic green Taurus with Pennsylvania plates actually looks like in a parking lot. (Answer: pretty much like ever other metallic green car.)

A couple of days after I returned the metallic green Taurus, I receive the following e-mail from Avis.

Dear Maureen Rogers,

As you know, we at Avis think there's nothing more important than offering you an enjoyable rental experience. So, as we thank you for providing your email address on your recent car rental, we'd also like to invite you to receive email communications for future discounts, electronic receipts and money saving tips.

It's easy, simply go to avis.com and enroll in the Wizard program to create a profile. It will help you make future reservations even faster - and is just one more way we try harder to make your rental experience the best that it can be.

Be sure to include your email address in your profile and check "yes" to opt-in to receive promotional emails and e-Receipts so you can:

Receive automatic e-Receipts for easier expense management

Get the latest news, promotions and offers from Avis

We look forward to delivering you an even more enjoyable rental experience.

Sincerely,

Becky Alseth
Senior Vice President, Marketing

P.S. For an even faster rental experience, sign up for Avis Preferred® Service so you can skip the lines and go right to your car. It's free.

Just what do I like about this?

First off, the subject line indicated that they were asking for permission to market to me. No beating around the bush, just straight out telling me that they'd like to have me as a customer - a customer who gives them permission send e-mails.

Okay, I won't be letting me know about "the latest news, promotions and offers from Avis." Frankly, I only care at the very moment I need to rent a car. So I will never look at those e-mails - save your bandwidth for someone who will.

But I will probably sign up for the Preferred Service - which will let me "skip lines". And is FREE. Which means that I'll more than likely just go to Avis up the street, as opposed to Hertz across the park, when I need a car.

Pretty smart marketing, I'd say.

Maybe they do try harder. In this case, they succeeded.

How Marketers Lie to Themselves: "They Love Our Advertising!"

2008-01-17T05:40:00.001-06:00

Mary Schmidt has a post up about one of the great marketing delusions: the idea that people just love, love, love seeing ads all the time.

Commenting about Microsoft's concept of streaming ads to shopping carts in the grocery store, complete with RFID so it can tell you about Pop-Tarts when you're in the breakfast aisle - because heaven forbid you have a few minutes in the day to just be lost in your own thoughts! - she writes:

The corporate bla-blah speak justifying streaming video ads to shopping carts is classic: “This is not all necessarily about bombarding consumers, about targeting advertising,” said Scott Ferris, general manager of Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group. “It’s about also making the shopping experience better for the consumer.”

No it's not. It's about selling more stuff.

People are actually quite tolerant of advertising. They are, however, not stupid, and when you tell them that the reason your shopping cart is getting in your face with ads is to improve your quality time at the store, they are likely to think, "What kind of moron do you think I am?"

For example, does Forbes think they're fooling anyone with this?

"Skip this welcome screen?" It's not a welcome screen, it's an ad. I know that. I get it. Free content, ads. Fine. But every time I click on a link to a Forbes article and see that, I think - yes, that's right - "What kind of a moron do you think I am?"

This is what every marketer needs to remember:

1. When you're beaming a one-way message at someone to get them to buy something, it's an ad. I don't care how you send it, what the medium is, how much you drape it in trappings of social media, or how much you personalize it. It's an ad. That's OK, but don't forget it.

2. People don't really want to hear it. In the case of Forbes, they want to read an article, not an ad. In the case of the shopping carts above, people just want to buy their Cheerios and milk and bananas and go home.

3. So if you want people to pay attention to your ad, it needs to be useful, entertaining (or at least interesting), and not annoying.

People are remarkably tolerant of ads, even as they invade every bit of our mental space, and when they're very good they are treated like valuable cultural artifacts. But they are not tolerant of being treated like idiots.

You're a marketer. Don't delude yourself into thinking that there's a world full of consumers sitting there thinking, "I wish my shopping cart would tell me about the special on Acme Fried Sugar Crisps" or "Oh, Forbes is welcoming me - they're so friendly!" Just do your job and show some basic respect for peoples' intelligence.

Oh, and on that shopping cart thing - it's just the incentive I need to check out the farmer's market up the road I keep hearing about. It used to be that the worst thing about shopping was annoying muzak. Now, instead, a trip to Kroger is an assault on the senses. There are constant chirpy announcements about what I should be buying. There are screens on the registers showing videos and animations, and making beeps and boops that always make me think my phone is chirping at me - "Did I just get a text message? No, it's the $@#$#@ register again."

My big complaint about all of this is quite simple: everyone is so busy bombarding us with some message or another that there's less and less time to just be with yourself. You know - to daydream, to think about what you'll do later in the day, to suddenly wonder about that old friend you haven't heard from in years, to be struck by a creative idea. I am a marketer, but I do believe that all of these new methods of interruption marketing are basically making us into a group of stupider and stupider people.

I also think it's annoying people, and eventually the backlash will come. Professions that don't have the common sense to restrain themselves wind up being restrained by somebody else. We get what we ask for.

Let us give props to Best Buy and the Geek Squad

2008-01-16T07:07:00.001-06:00

A week ago Saturday, tired of keeping my HP laptop going by holding the overheating and poorly working power jack in at just the right angle, and worrying about whether the whole thing was going to turn into a not so towering inferno, I decided to get a new laptop.

Off to Best Buy I took myself, where we were helped by a very pleasant and knowledgeable sales guy named Doug, and a couple of very pleasant and knowledgeable guys at the Geek Squad downstairs, whom I paid to load software, remove bloatware, etc.

I no sooner got my new and beautiful Sony Vaio home - and, yes, I do know that I paid a premium for a laptop that looks nice, but amortized over the life of the machine (even if it's only 2 years), etc... - than it started flaking out. Big time.

We're not just talking blue screens of death the likes of which I haven't experienced since Windows 3.0. We're talking freeze ups when trying to do anything: write files to a DVD, work with a wireless mouse, write a blog entry. And not just any old freeze ups, but deep freezes accompanied by black outs. And ding-ding-ding's.

Scary stuff, especially when you're over 300 miles away from home - on business, of course - and you can't just walk back to the Best Buy on Newbury Street to return it.

When I started to experience all my laptop woes, it is little exaggeration to say that the top of my skull was about to fly off. (John and Sean are my witnesses here.)

I called Best Buy on Newbury Street and, since Doug wasn't there, I spoke with Bill and let him know what happened - and that I'd be in on Friday evening for an exchange.

On Friday evening, a perfectly pleasant young woman in Best Buy customer service - whose name I didn't get - listened to me rant and then went over to the Geek Squad with me. Soon we had Doug, Pete, and one of the other Squadders to hear my rant - and to quickly jump in and get that replacement for me - no questions asked.

They didn't even make an attempt to convince me to have them look at the laptop, which I was grateful for, since I wasn't willing to go that route. They just took my word (and my word.doc, on which I'd provided a running list of my week's worth of problems).

No, none of us thought this was a Vista problem. We all thought it was a hardware problem of some ilk.

While I wandered around Best Buy waiting for the Geeks to reinstall and deinstall files, I ran into the first Customer Service person I'd encountered, and she asked whether I was all taken care of, which was a nice touch.

In any case, I was soon on my way with a new working machine - yes, another Vaio - that has now gone 2 1/2 days without a freeze up or blue screen of death.

So long, bad little Vaio, you were beautiful on the outside, but rotten on the inside...You are going back to Sony-Land, where you belong (once they wipe out my files, which the Geeks assured me they would do).

Props to Best Buy and their resident geeks, the Geek Squad. Whatever experiences others have had there, mine was a good one.

P.S. Maybe it's just another pretty face, but I do like the look and feel of Vista, as well as the 2007 Office apps, now that I'm getting used to where everything is.

Twitter: Cool, but Not Ready for Prime Time

2008-01-15T12:29:00.001-06:00

If you use Twitter regularly, you've probably noticed that it's not the most reliable of web apps. Yes, it's free, and sure, you have to expect some glitches... but compared to other services, it's pretty dicey.
We are getting a demonstration of that right now. I'm looking at ZDNet's updating blog page of Macworld keynote reports and I saw this shortly after it started:

Sure enough, a few minutes later...

(Twitter did indeed come back in a few seconds, as the message promised - but only in that there was a page there. No new tweets on it - it seems to just not be updating anymore, which frankly is no more useful than the error page.)

I like Twitter, but I have to say, I'd never make it the centerpiece of any time-sensitive social media strategy. You just never know when everybody is going to see an overly-cute "Oops! It's broken!" message instead of the application itself. Given that its makers appear to have no plans to make it into a sustainable enterprise (read: something with money to invest in infrastructure), this is unlikely to change.

It's a great concept, though, that will probably be implemented much better at some point. Maybe by Twitter, but quite possibly not.

Out With the Old New Thing, In With the New New Thing!

2008-01-15T05:14:00.000-06:00

Things move fast in the world of social media. So fast, in fact, that Tuesday's hot new thing is often Friday's old news. So I chuckled when I read my first Twitter is, like, so yesterday post.

I am SO sorry for writing this, I L-O-V-E Twitter. Love it! I’m just so sorry to say, Tumblr replaces it. It’s that simple. Tumblr is to the iPhone what Twitter is to the pager. I know, I know. I love Twitter and I have been obsessed with it for almost a year now so I KNOW what Twitter is supposed to be, thank you - it’s SUPPOSED to be like a pager, that’s the DNA of what Twitter needs to be to do “microblogging”…I once said. And Pownce (which I love too!) and Jaiku (which I neglect, Im so sorry!), are all not what I’m talking about either, Twitter does best what those other apps do.
Tumblr, on the other hand, is enhanced in the right way and thus, unfortunately, and yet also for the better, replaces the need for Twitter all-together. This is going to be hard for people to see because Pownce could be seen as an attempt to enhance Twitter but actually Powence further illuminated the superior simplicity of Twitter, i.e. that the kind of enhancement doesn’t work. Perhaps unwittingly, and more likely just consequently, Tumblr enhances Twitter in the right kind of way.

The missing piece here - the right kind of way for what? I like Twitter because it's incredibly simple and people I know use it. Tumblr does more, but it's nothing that I want to do or am not doing elsewhere. (Obviously, this isn't true for the writer above... and that's fine.)

I have a Tumblr account, by the way; I'm not linking to it here because I'm boycotting anybody who drops the "e" from "er." No, not really; there's just nothing there, so there's no point in pointing anybody at it.

Finding a use for the next social media tool is, to be blunt, not high on my list of priorities. The tools need to find my needs; if I don't have an unmet need, I'm not interested.

And that's the bigger point: the platform du jour for blogging, microblogging, sharing links and feeds, and so on will change tomorrow, and next week, and next month. As any IT product marketer knows, feature advantages are incredibly hard to maintain; fortunately, they're not usually the point.

Twitter, for all its popularity, is something that a couple of Google developers could recreate in an afternoon and have live in a week. (And it would probably be more reliable on day one than Twitter, which always has the feeling of being held together with duct tape and prayers.) What Google couldn't duplicate that quickly is the user base.

Here's what matters for all of these tools: do people find something useful to do with them? Do they have a critical mass of users? And finally, perhaps most importantly, are the information and network links in them accessible from the outside world?

The nice thing about most of these platforms is that if you don't care to become a hardcore user, you can still get what you need from them through search and RSS feeds. I think we're going to see people get less interested in investing time and effort into using them if that's not possible (hi, Facebook!).

The missing piece is the social graph. If you've got a network of links to others in LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter, that doesn't move easily somewhere else. That's got to change.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #13

2008-01-14T07:22:00.001-06:00

This is the thirteenth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #13: Every "product" needs a product manager and a business case.

In my experience, most B2B technology companies do a pretty good job with making sure that all their products have a product manager. Of course, sometimes the product manager ends up with multiple products - which is okay, especially if they're on the smallish side and in the same family, but which can lead to product attention deficit if the products are on the biggish side and not all that related. But, mostly, products tend to have product managers.

Which is a good thing.

But those business cases....

Products start out in many ways.

Sometimes the product gets developed by someone who thinks it's a good idea and just goes ahead and does it. (This happens with special regularity in the wonderful world of software.)

In this case, the product manager may find the product flying (metaphorically) over their (metaphorical) transom, and find themselves tasked with creating a business case. This tends to be a bad thing. Here you have a product that may have been a good technical idea. Or a good idea in general. But now you have to figure out the positioning: who it's for, what they do with it, and what it does for them. In a far, far better world, all this will be figured out before the product is created.

Sometimes a product starts out with a business case. Which is a good thing. But then, somehow, the business case never gets updated. It may never even get looked at. It is/was "just" the hurdle that product management had to leap over in order to get the darned thing developed.

This approach is a bad thing.

If you don't bother to regularly update - or even create anew - your product's business case you run a lot of dangers:

Missed market opportunities
Missed product enhancement opportunities
Pricing that leaves $$$ on the table
Putting too many resources on Product X - and too few on Product Y
Hanging on to a product that really should be end-of-lifed

We all know how easy it is to keep chugging along, doing the same thing quarter after quarter, year after year. If you're a product manager, you probably know this drill by heart. You do your job. You take care of all the basics and cover all the bases: product requirements - check; documentation - check; QA - check; project plan - check; product launch - check; sales tools - check; sales training - check; etc - check.

It's so darned easy to never take the time to critically examine your product's raison d'etre - and really figuring out whether there's enough raison to keep the d'etre going.

Product managers, it's never too late.

If you have products that last had a business case made for them in ought-four, time to create one. And trust me, you may have some tiny little fear that a business case will end up putting your product out of business, as it were. And putting your job at risk.

Truly, this is a remote, remote possibility and, in fact, the best way to make sure it doesn't happen is to make sure that the product(s) you manage have a strong case behind them.

So what are you waiting for? Get going! You should have a business case for your product, if not on you at all times, at least within fingertip reach.

The unexamined life is not worth living, and, in the end, the unexamined product is not worth managing.

T-Mobile Declares Customer Support Bankruptcy

2008-01-12T06:48:00.001-06:00

A while back I heard the phrase "email bankruptcy," which describes the state some people reach when their inbox contains thousands of messages that they simply cannot cope with. The mere sight of it is paralyzing, and so sometimes people simply "declare bankruptcy" and delete them all - then send a message to everyone in their address book announcing that all email is gone, and anything important was there, please re-send it. And then the hapless victim of email overload vows to do better.

Apparently T-Mobile is having this problem. A week or so ago I sent an email to their Hot Spot customer support group with an account question. It wasn't a critical issue; I signed up for the service with a term commitment, and I wanted to know when it ended. That's information that I should be able to see when I log into my account on their site, but they don't provide it, so I asked.

I finally got a response:

Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you for taking the time to contact T-Mobile HotSpot regarding.
I greatly apologize for the delay in response. We are currently experiencing a high volume of e-mails. Your comments, concerns and questions are very important to us and we would like to see your issue satisfactorily resolved. For prompt assistance, please contact our Customer Service Department anytime 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 877-822-7768. Again, I greatly apologize for the delay and for any inconvenience you have experienced.

Hello, T-Mobile? If you'd like to see my issue satisfactorily resolved, answering my question would be a great idea. And if you have people standing by to talk to me on the phone, couldn't some of them answer the email waiting for responses?

Here's the kicker:

Please feel free to contact us by email or at the number below if you have any further questions, comments or concerns.

So, they've sent me an email to tell me they aren't answering email anymore, and they're inviting me to respond to them by email.

It's not often that a multinational telecommunications provider is able to make themselves seem so completely amateurish. I get the feeling that T-Mobile is really Gunther and Inge in somebody's garage trying to keep the wheels flying off the whole enterprise.

Really sad.

A Teensie Little Note to Polaroid Marketing

2008-01-11T00:01:00.000-06:00

I saw a post on yesterday's Boston Filter on Polaroid's new inkless printer, the exceedingly cool Polaroid product that was announced at this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. It's so exceedingly cool, I wrote about it over on Pink Slip. It's so exceedingly cool, I zipped on over to the Polaroid web site to find out more about it.

Now, maybe this exceedingly cool new product is not all that exceedingly important to Polaroid. Or maybe, because the show opened earlier in the week, it's not all that exceedingly hot any more.

But there was no info on the home page.

There was a home page link to some info about Polaroid's presence at the CES, where the Digital Instant - that exceedingly cool new printer - was showcased along with a couple of other Polaroid products. And drilling down on the CES link there was a small fact sheet on the product, and a couple of pictures, but not much else.

So I clicked on the Printer choice on their list of Featured Products. Which led to an empty screen that told me:

There were no results matching your search criteria.

Well, that was no help.

Now, I would assume that a lot of people who attended CES, not to mention a lot of the people who saw product coverage, would be heading to the Polaroid site for more info. Maybe not. Maybe I'm the only one who wanted to learn more.

Now, maybe Polaroid has a rule about not putting much/any info up about products until they're officially released.

But wouldn't you think that there'd be some exceedingly easy-to-get-at info on this exceedingly cool new product.

Or is this a case of what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas?

You Can't Handle Sales

2008-01-10T05:11:00.001-06:00

Busy in upstate New York meeting with my fellow opinionated marketers this week, so I'll just offer you this video, which anybody who's spent time with salespeople should appreciate:

Blogger envy

2008-01-09T06:04:00.001-06:00

A few weeks ago, a client asked me to check out a blog post on a topic related to his technology. For the life of me, I can't remember what company the blogger worked for, but it was someone big - Microsoft, Cisco, that level.

The post was well written and informative. I looked at a few other posts by the guy. Well written. Informative. Regular commenters - not tons, but some.

Clearly he was putting a lot of time and effort into being "out there."

Clearly, it was a big part of this guy's job to create an online presence.

Clearly, my client was feeling a bit of blogger envy. He didn't exactly come out and say it, but I could hear it in his e-mail voice: "Why can't we have a blog like this? Wah, wah, wah."

Sorry, but unless someone of the folks already working 14 hour days wants to add a 15th blogging hour on "for free", and unless everyone else can add a bit to their work day to feed your blogger ideas, or unless you force everyone in the company to write one post every week (whether they can write or not): IT'S JUST NOT GOING TO GET DONE.

And it probably wouldn't be worth the effort to begin with. There's a certain size company (and customer base) where blogging will start to make sense, but that size is probably not 10 employees and 5 customers (or vice versa).

Even if you're God's gift to the blogosphere, you probably won't find that the people who matter - in your case, your prospects and customers - probably won't read you all that regularly.

But there's no reason that my client can't start moseying around in and exploring the blogosphere by:

Finding the bloggers/online columnists who matter to you. They might be writing about your industry, your product area, your underlying technology, but there are probably at least a few of them out there.
Commenting on their posts. Other than spam comments - "Hey, nice post. Your readers might be interested in discount Cialis...." - bloggers love to get comments. By providing intelligent, to-the-point comments, you may end up in a relationship with the blogger. Maybe it's someone who you can ask for advice, someone who'll refer a customer your way, someone who'll write about your company.

A few notes on commenting: No to thinly or not-so-thinly veiled sales pitches or product plugs. But do mention your product if there's something about it that's relevant to the conversation.

Also feel free to talk about why you have something to talk about. Maybe you know a lot about SOA because you're using it. Maybe you know a lot about what's happening in technology for mortgage lending because that's where your customers are.

Don't post as anonymous. Use your name, and, if there's no way to indicate your affiliation or leave your url, definitely mention your company in the comment, perhaps also stating your title, if it's your first time.

Second-hand blogging (or first-hand blogging, for that matter) is not going to be the panacea for all of your companies visibility and awareness raising ills. But by spending a bit of time up front figuring out where you want to start commenting, and minimal time each day/week reading and commenting on your favorites, you will begin to get your company's name - and yours - out there in a low cost manner that could well end up yielding your benefits.

And if there's no one person in your teensy-tiny company who wants to take on full commenting responsibility, how about putting blog grazing on the agenda for your weekly team meeting or group lunch? Many mouths, many brains can make light work of keeping up with the blogs that matter.

Video: Why?

2008-01-08T06:21:00.001-06:00

David Reich's MarketingProfs piece on blog video makes a great point: blog videos are often a great way to lose the attention of your audience.

Is it any wonder, then, that I find my mind wandering as I watch a blogvid that runs on? How many of us have the time, ability or budget to produce a slick video to post? Most of what I've seen so far have been talking heads, perhaps with some props, but still basically talking heads. Deadly on TV and, to me, hard to watch on a blog if it runs too long.
What's too long? To me, much more than a minute or perhaps two is it. Even if the verbal content is good and well-delivered, it becomes a challenge to watch as it gets longer. I start looking for the toolbar to try to zip it ahead.
For my online friends who have been doing vids, I say this with all due respect and ask your understanding. I'll still watch your vids, because I do want to hear what you have to say.
BUT, why can't it be said the old-fashioned way of blogging...in writing? If it's written, it's easy to re-read a sentence or paragraph for clarity, before I post a comment.

I'm with David. The written word is an amazing tool. You can use words to communicate all kinds of complicated ideas. They get subtle shades of meaning across. They can be printed out for later reference. They can easily be emailed to colleagues. You can read them on a plane. You can read them on your mobile phone. You can read them during tedious conference calls. You can read them without disturbing the person sitting four feet from you.

And they're a random access medium. The reader can skip ahead, go back and re-read something. She can skim at high speed or carefully focus on every word. They put the user in control and as a result are probably the most user-oriented medium there is.

Video has its place. Video can show you things that would be hard to follow in a written description; the video that Apple put on its site as a promo for the iPhone is a great example (it convinced me to buy one because it made it obvious how many features worked, and it served as a quick start guide when I got the phone home). I'm not saying video is bad.

I'm just suggesting that if you can't figure out why you shouldn't be using a simpler, lower-bandwidth, more flexible, and more user-controlled medium for your message, then you shouldn't be making a video.

At the risk of sounding judgmental, it's highly self-indulgent. Look, I can make a video! Look, I didn't have to bother to organize my thoughts and write them down; I'm just going to talk at you! When I'm on the receiving end of that stuff, my strongest reaction is that this communicator has no respect for me or the rest of his audience, and I usually stop watching.

Video has its place. It's just turning up in a whole lot of other places lately. A good maxim: use the simplest possible medium for everything. You will probably still find yourself using video - but the videos will be better and more meaningful for your audience.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #12

2008-01-07T00:19:00.000-06:00

This is the twelfth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #12: The answer to most of the questions is not in the building.

When I first began working at Genuity, a temporarily high-flying Internet Services Provider of the dot.com era, I was struck by the fact that rank and file marketing people rarely had access to customers and prospects. I came to Genuity from a small software company, where I had regularly gone on sales calls, spoke with customers frequently, and, in general, spent a fair amount of time poking around outside the building.

Genuity - at $1B a year in revenues (and losses) - was quite a bit larger than Softbridge, which in our last full year as an independent company did about $7M in business. At Softbridge, we all wore multiple hats. As VP of Marketing, I ran (and sometimes was) product marketing, marcomm, and product management). At Genuity, I just did product marketing. And product marketing just didn't get all that many opportunities to get out in the field.

In my three years there, I went on a handful of calls. Our sales model was multi-layered, and there were often 3-4 folks from sales alone on a call. No room in that clown car for another body! If sales brought another body along, it was typically a technical expert or a product manager.

I participated in many events, speaking on behalf of Genuity, and thus was able to have some engagement with customers and prospects, but it was limited. I also met with some regularity with industry analysts - another good source of insight and info. But I really craved customer and prospect interaction that I just wasn't getting enough of.

Several times I created customer surveys, but I was not allowed to speak with customers directly - I had to go through multiple layers of the customer support organization.

All in all, it meant for a very high frustration level in which I always felt I had my nose pressed up against the window glass, able to see but not communicate with the customers on the other side.

Fortunately, I developed good relationships with enough of the technical sales folks and sales engineers to get my questions answered, but it was not really the same as building good relationships with customers, or hearing first hand what prospects were saying.

You really do need to get out of the building to truly understand how people use your products and services, to appreciate the benefits they derive from them. You need to get out there to see what parts of your message customers respond to - and what parts draw blanks - or leave them cold.

Obviously, you also need to get out to gauge what's happening in the economy and technology in general, and with your industry, your market, and your competition in particular. (Some of this intelligence you pick up by being out and about with customers and prospects. But fortunately, even if you don't have access to them, you can still get this information, you can still find an awful lot out. [For purposes of this argument, let's assume that purposeful wandering around the Internet counts for getting out of the building.])

None of this is to say that there's not important "stuff" that you can and should find out within your own four walls. There are definitely people who know things within those walls, and you should know who they are - and how to tap their minds. But, when it comes to it, there's really only one question that can only be answered inside the building, and that's "how does it work?"

Social Networking: Focus Matters

2008-01-05T06:37:00.001-06:00

Kim Hart of the Washington Post wrote about niche social networking sites, and why they may be more appealing for marketers:

Overall, ad spending on social-networking sites is expected to grow 75 percent next year, to $2.1 billion, according to eMarketer, a research firm that tracks online advertising. With more than 110 million active profiles on MySpace and 59 million on Facebook, those sites still attract the lion's share of attention and money, winning more than 70 percent of all U.S. social-network ad spending in 2007, according to eMarketer.
But smaller sites' share of that money is growing. Of the $920 million spent this year to advertise on social networks, 8.2 percent went to niche sites, up from 7 percent in 2006, according to eMarketer. Next year, niche sites' share of ad revenue is expected to grow to 10 percent, according to an eMarketer report released this month.

That shouldn't surprise anybody. More focused online communities are likely to attract more targeted audiences. Users are also likely to spend more time there and be more loyal to them, whereas there's a flavor of the month feel to MySpace and Facebook. (Facebook in particular seems intent on alienating its users, whether it's through creepy tracking and public revelations of personal information like Beacon, using members' pictures in ads, or ham-handedly insisting that user's personal data belongs to them. I think the clock is ticking for them.)

Smaller sites are also more likely to have the flexibility to work with marketers to create customized advertising programs. Users are more likely to care who's supporting their beloved online forum.

The main value that large networks like Facebook bring is the ability to keep track of social connections. But we're already seeing others trying to build those capabilities into things like email, contact management, and calendar applications. That will continue, and the value proposition for something like Facebook for its users is likely to weaken. When social networking is an omnipresent feature, no a destination, those smaller networks and sites become even more important - and if you're already there, you'll be ahead of the game.

New Year's Resolution for Small B2B Technology Companies

2008-01-04T01:22:00.000-06:00

I work with several small tech companies with significant constraints on their marketing operations - not enough money (what else is new), and too few people (ditto).

Naturally, despite our constraints, we want to do everything, and if not everything, then "lots":

We want to keep our web sites fresh
We want to drive traffic to said web site
We want to blog
We want to get press coverage - online, offline
We want the analysts to know and love us - or at least put us in their Magic Quadrants, or Waves, or wherever they put the in-crowd
We want to work with great partners and maximize those relationships
We want to do the events all our competitors seem to show up at
We want to build our pipelines
We want to come up with just the right message
We want to do ads - online, offline
We want to do breakfast seminars and webinars
We want to do e-mail blasts and direct mail blasts
We want new brochures, data sheets, case studies, white papers (thank goodness for pdf's - no need to worry about big print budgets)
We want to prove that marketing matters - bring on the metrics!
We want tschotkes

Hmmmm.

What's a marketing person with not enough money and too few people to do?

Just where do you start?

First things first
I always start with the most fundamental fundamental of all: get your story straight. The medium is not the message; the message is the message, and yours had better reflect:

What your product is and does
What your customers do with it
What it does for them
Just who these customers are
Just why they should want to buy products from you

Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned girl, but to me, if you can't express the above in clear English, you really have no business trying to market anything.

Second things second
Bad news: there's no one right second thing to do.

It all depends on - your product, your market, where you are in the adoption cycle for the product, your budget, your customers, your past success, your future goals....

And we all know you can't get away with just doing this one second thing. Marketing is about multiple touches, multiple approaches. There's rarely if ever going to be one thing that miraculously changes everything for you.

Unless you're a very small business just starting out. In that case, one thing may well prove momentous: the marquee customer you met at the trade show; the analyst you briefed the day before their biggest client asked for advice; the promotional ad that struck just the right cord.

No, the success from the one shot event doesn't last forever, but I'm sure we've all seen it happen that it can put you on the road to success. But that road success hits a hairpin curve at some point, and you won't be able to rely on just one thing to keep working its magic for you.

But whatever it is that you choose to do, make sure you do it well - and wholeheartedly. Better off focusing your efforts in a few areas than trying to do everything at once - and doing it all poorly.

It's still early in the year.

No budget? No staff? No nothing?

Come on, where's your spirit? You can still get something done.

Figure out some things that you're going to accomplish in the first quarter. Keep it to a minimum number. And don't forget to think about results you expect from whatever it is you're going to do.

Then go ahead and do it.

Don't forget to get your message down first.

And if you're going to pick just one thing, here's a bit of free advice: don't let it be tschotkes.

Audience size: everything old is new again

2008-01-03T06:49:00.000-06:00

As characters are often saying on the television program Battlestar Galactica, "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." That's what I thought when I came across this post on evaluating your audience from Robert Scoble:

Chris Shipley’s Demo Conference proved to me it’s not the size of your audience that matters. It’s WHO is in the audience that matters. She has a micro audience. Usually about 1,000 people. But they include VCs, bloggers, journalists, and other influencers on whether startups get noticed or not. She usually has 60 companies on stage that each paid $18,000 to be there and most people in the audience paid more than $1,000 to listen to them.

That this is treated as some kind of revelation tells us something about new media's persistent case of amnesia. Scobe is absolutely right, of course, as anybody who was sitting there in the 1980s poring over BPA audits for print pubs in order to determine what the most efficient way to reach the right readers, rather than the most readers, was.

I don't mean to be overly critical here; I suppose it's a good thing that Scoble wrote about this, and I suspect that lots of people who hadn't given this much thought now will, and that's good. One of the great strengths of online media is the ability to create content that serves niche audiences cost-effectively; niches that never could support print are now served by content producers, and that's great news for marketers who want to reach them.

It's just that reading this stuff makes me feel like I'm watching a toddler figure out how doorknobs work.

It seems obvious that we'd turn to the lessons of old media to figure out how to make new media work - as publishers, advertisers, or consumers. Some things are very different, but a lot of things are not. It's been trendy to declare traditional advertising dead and insist that a revolution has changed everything; the truth, of course, is far less dramatic than that.

So here's a recommended new year's resolution for 2008: don't throw out the past and don't forget history. Old media still matter (and in some market segments, matter more than new media). For marketers, the trick is to remember the whole picture - not just the most exciting shiny and new parts of it.

Jacked by the HP Power Jack Problem

2008-01-02T08:03:00.000-06:00

I am, of course, old enough to be nostalgic for the good old days when things lasted. Sure, they'd break, but that's when you had them repaired - because you weren't going to just toss away something that still had some life in it - especially given that the the cost of repairing something was so much less than the cost of replacing it.

Most of the time these days, there's nothing you can do with broken stuff except replace it (and get indignant),

So you might think I'd be pleasantly surprised to find out that for only $298 I can ship my laptop to HP and, within 7-9 days, get it repaired.

I'm not.

I'm annoyed - annoyed that problem I'm having appears to be a fairly widespread one that points to a poorly manufactured component.

Here's my story:

A few months ago, I began to notice that the power jack on my HP Pavilion ze2000 was really heating up - too hot to touch - and that the power supply was flipping back and forth between AC and battery. Not to mention that the battery was draining like a bathtub that had just been Drano'd.

Since I have two power adapters, and two batteries, I tried all possible combinations.

No go.

The problem persisted.

Oh, if I wiggled and jiggled things, or, as I'm now doing, propped the connector up with my wallet, I can get it to stay on AC for a while at a time, but it still heats up. Burna, burna, as my mother used to say when a kid got near the stove.

I'm also seeing - or perceiving - performance degradations.

Time to shop around, of course.

But I thought I'd check out what HP had to say on their support site, which was mostly nothing more than I'd already done (take things out, put things in, turn things off, swap things out); and something that I wasn't going to do because it sounded like too much hassle, not to mention nonsense: reload the OS. (Say what?)

I asked a techie friend what he thought about the problem and he told me that info on the hotta, hotta HP laptop jacks had been burning up the blogosphere for a couple of years, and that there were class action suits about the problem.

Well, Eric was right. There is plenty of noise out there about the jack problem. And HP has certainly not acknowledged that there is one.

So I thought I'd give their live, on-line help a shout, and got to "talk" to "Kinsey" who, after a pleasantry or two, asked me to proceed with my "enquiry."

Which I did:

Here's a snippet of our exchange:

Maureen Rogers: I am experiencing power jack problems - the power is not stable, flickering back and forth between battery and AC.
Maureen Rogers: It's not the adapter - I have two. Nor the battery -ditto.
Kinsey: I regret for the inconvenience cause to you by this, need not to worry I will help you in this regard.
Maureen Rogers: I understand from the web that this is a persistent HP laptop problem. Are you doing anything about it - I couldn't see anything other than generic instructions on your support site.
Kinsey: Maureen, the issue will be caused by the usage of the Notebook.

Usage of the Notebook.

I really liked hearing that.

I then found out about the $298, and that HP would send me the packaging materials FedEx, and I'd get the laptop fixed and back in 7 to 9 days.

But I don't want to spend $298 that I could put towards a newer laptop - with more processing power (although also with Vista - ugh) - fixing something that really strikes me as not all that likely to be related to my personal usage. And even if it were my usage, do I really want to go without my laptop for nearly two weeks? (Even though I do have my trusty old Dell that's really only got one problem: the PCMIA slot got busted when I dropped the laptop with the card in it, so I can't use wireless - only ethernet - to connect.)

I pointed out to my friend Kinsey that I have used laptops for years - HP, Dell, Toshiba - and that I have never had a problem with burned out connectors until just now. I suggested that there might be a quality problem.

To which my friend Kinsey replied:

Kinsey: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?

And then - was it something I texted? was it a power flicker that ended our connection? - Kinsey was gone.

Which was fine.

He/she's not setting HP policy here, but it seems to me that one or two things is true.

Either HP is wrong, and they do have a poorly designed or manufactured component, which they should fix for free. Or give us coupons for purchasing a new laptop.

Or HP is right, and this is just a usage problem.And as for the untold thousands out there with flaming jacks, well, it's because we just wore them out, or don't connect things properly to begin with, or whatever. And, well, we ought to just shut up, rather than blathering all over the blogosphere and riling people up. But with all the talk out there, you'd think HP could at least put something on their support site about "rumors" about the HP laptop jack problem, and how their investigation has proven that they are not at fault, or whatever way they want to spin it. (If it's there, I sure didn't find it.)

Absent this, HP will not be on my list for this weekend's new laptop purchase.

Any suggestions? (And no, I'm not yet psychologically prepared to get a Mac.)

Everything's Social, Like It Or Not

2008-01-01T08:41:00.000-06:00

I've been a big fan of Google's Gmail service for a long time. Some of the reasons for my enthusiasm about it are obvious: the massive storage (a new idea when it was introduced), and the excellent search capabilities. Another big plus for Gmail: the interface. Whereas Yahoo Mail and Hotmail and AOL were making otherwise very good services quite unpleasant to use by bombarding users with ads, headlines, and all kinds of other extraneous information that had nothing to do with the simple task of reading and writing mail, Google gave us their standard text-oriented, plain as can be interface. And I loved it.

So I'm reading about some of the new features that are coming with dismay.

One of the reasons why the chat box can no longer be disabled in the new version of Gmail is that it will include some new features: updates from your contacts. Yes, they are the same contacts you barely know, but these updates will help you learn more about them.

I don't really want automatic updates from my contacts. I do want information that my contacts decide they'd like to share with me, because they know me and think I will find it useful.

Are any of us suffering from a lack of information right now? I don't think so. The big challenge of all of these tools is finding the good stuff. While developers work hard to figure out ways to create intelligent filters to accomplish just that - and often do some pretty ingenious things - I can't help but think that there's already a good social network filter out there: the human brain.
Specifically, the human brains residing in the skulls of people who know us. When I get an email from my colleague Maureen that says, "I thought you'd find this interesting," I pay attention. But I realize that Maureen has probably looked at fifty other things that did not make her think, "Hey, I should pass that on to John."

If I had a lot of time and not enough to do, I probably would enjoy sorting through those. I don't have that, and I doubt you do either.

Now, tools for sharing are great; the shared feeds in Google's newsreader are a great example. Those are resource that are out there for us to choose to go look at.

But I'm not thrilled at the idea of them appearing in my beloved simple Gmail interface. When I'm there, I'm there to accomplish a specific task, and I want to be left alone.

It seems that the trend in social networking is not to create tools to allow selective information sharing, but to enable to broadcast all kinds of information to their contacts - sometimes automatically. I think that degrades the quality of information one gets through networks. (Facebook's Beacon is a great and disastrous example of this.)

Am I hopelessly over 40 about this?

Social Media Connecting People and Food

2007-12-29T06:08:00.001-06:00

Over Christmas I read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (and wrote about it here on my personal blog). That inspired me to find out more about some of the food I buy. One item: Laura's Lean Beef, a line of organic beef available at conventional grocery stores. We've been buying it for some time now; it tastes great, and it doesn't give my partner (who's allergic to many antibiotics) an allergy meltdown the way a lot of typical grocery store beef does.

But there were two things that always crossed my mind when I'd pick up a package of it:

"This is better than the other beef in this store, but it's probably not really the best choice." (A lot of organic food is made using unsustainable industrial farming practices just like conventional* food; sure, it's better that it's not soaked in pesticide, but it's not exactly what the word "organic" suggests to most people.)

"I'm such a sucker. Some ad agency created this 'Laura' character."

Well, here's a pleasant surprise: the company seems to actually practice sustainable (not just organic) farming and production. And not only is Laura a real person; she's got a blog.

And it's great; Laura has gotten everything about business blogging right. The purpose of it is, of course, to promote her beef, but it's written in a personal tone. It talks about their company and their farming practices, but it also talks about daily life on the farm and her own life (including some entries about a riding accident).

There are plenty of comments - and Laura responds to them, so there's a real discussion between the owner of this company and her customers. While I was skimming it, I found a comment from a customer who mentioned that she was getting spoiled Laura's beef at her supermarket - and immediately, a response from Laura asking for details so that they could fix the problem.

This is a great market niche for blogging, of course; along with the many health and environmental reasons for producing meat in a sustainable way, there is usually a philosophical idea at work here: the idea that we have become totally disconnected from our food and its origins, to the detriment of our health, the planet's health, and the quality of our eating experiences. So linking a CEO to her market through a blog makes sense when part of the mission is connecting the customer with the food on her plate.

Still, given how often companies get this wrong - including people with resources far greater than Laura and her company have on hand - it just made my day to see a company whose products I like doing this absolutely right.

Check out the blog. And the beef.

* Isn't it odd that "conventional" means cows designed to eat grass being stuck in feedlots eating corn-based (and until a short time ago, cow-based - ugh!) feed which makes them ill, blows out their livers, requires them to be medicated constantly, and along the way helps evolve antibiotic-resistant bacteria and strains of e. coli that can survive the acidity of human stomachs (and kill human beings)... while apparently letting cows graze in pastures and eat the grass they are designed to digest is considered unusual?

Opinions on Hold

2007-12-27T05:04:00.001-06:00

This opinionated marketers is on vacation. The flow of opinions will resume in a few days when I return!

Maureen's Opinions Take a Holiday

2007-12-24T08:26:00.001-06:00

Not sure what my esteemed colleague is up to with respect to Bloggin' around the Christmas Tree, but this opinionated marketer is taking a break.

I'll be back with the New Year.

But before I go, I thought I'd share a picture of my all time favorite Christmas decoration:

I'm not entirely sure how old plastic Santa on reindeer with the broken leg (and the light bulb in its belly) is, but this dates to one of my parents' first Christmases, so it's from the mid- to late-1940's. In any case, none of the Rogers "kids" have any recall of Christmas without it.

Ah, the good old days, when plastic crap was Made in America, not just in China.

Happy Holidays to marketers everywhere (opinionated or not), and for those who still believe, I hope that Santa is very good to you.

A Simple Technology Rule: Use it to Talk to Customers

2007-12-22T07:08:00.000-06:00

This seems obvious, right? We've got all of this old technology (like phones), not so new technology (email, your web site), and cutting-edge stuff (social networks) available, and so we should use it to improve communications with our customers. Improvement means not just talking in more ways, but more useful ways. We can make it easier for customers to find the right people in the organization to help them. We can put useful information at their fingertips. We can help would-be customer evangelists spread the word.

Or, we could not bother. I experienced an example of this with Washington Mutual, the bank whose ads position them as the happy bank with a human face where you don't have to go through layers of bureaucracy to get help.

The other day I got an email from them about a business account, informing me that my phone number had been changed. The problem was, I hadn't changed any phone number with them, and the number now on my account was not mine. (It was a number of mine with one digit changed - weird.)

My first thought, of course, was that the security of my account might have been compromised. The email ended with a note that if I had not made this change, I should call an 800 number right away.

Which is precisely what I did. Did that 800 number take me to a security department that could figure out what was going on? Or at least to a person, because obviously this problem required human intervention?

Oh, no. "Welcome to Washington Mutual! Para informacion en espanol...."

I was at the top level of the main service menu. And a funny thing about WaMu's main menu: there is no option that sounds right for "I think my account security has been compromised." And there is no option to speak to a person. (Hitting "0" gives you a "bad customer, that wasn't a choice!" option.)

Is that really the experience you want a customer to have when they are sitting there wondering if someone's gotten into their account and is taking their money?

I eventually chose the option to find out about recent transactions, and then intentionally entered an incorrect access code, which bounced me from voicemail to a person, who had no idea how my phone number got changed (but did reset my password).

The very next day, I had an almost identical experience with them when I tried to activate a new ATM card on the web. I got an error message indicating that the information I entered didn't match what they had. So I went through the same "no menu option makes sense for what's happening" hassle, eventually got a person who activated my card (and verified that all the information I entered did indeed match what they had).

I am the customer who lets a company know when something is wrong, so I clicked the "contact us" link on their web site, and wrote a short message in the form provided to tell them that it's not okay with me that when there is a potentially serious problem, I'm shunted to a voicemail system offering me no useful options or a way to get a person easily. (How hard is it to set up a special 800 number?) And that these two experiences left me feeling very unsure whether any of their IT systems works properly and my money is safe with them.

I was pleased to find that form; far too many companies still have web sites designed to prevent customer feedback: no forms, no email addresses, or forms that are designed to let customers only submit structured information that the company wants to hear, rather than other feedback from customers who care enough to tell them what's going on. Okay, I thought, score one for WaMu.

And then I clicked send.

The form doesn't work. I tried in two different browsers in case I was having some browser-specific issue. You can't talk back to them.

This is such basic stuff. There are still a whole lot of companies out there who, before they try to tackle new media, or spend money on ads about how friendly and approachable they are, need to do the basics: create a web site that makes interaction with customers easier, not more frustrating for them.

Branding public spaces

2007-12-21T11:24:00.001-06:00

One of the more distressing advertising and branding trends of the last few decades or so has been the creeping corporate claim on public places.

We see it all the time now with sports venues. In Boston, The Boston Garden was replaced with the Fleet (Bank) Center, which has been replaced by TD North Garden. At least TD North had the grace to leave the word "Garden" in the name, so that we can all go back to referring to the new edifice on the site of the ancient Boston Garden as "The Garden." (Pronunciation key: The GAH-din.)

Ball fields/stadiums have a history, of course, of being named after the team owners: Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field in Chicago, Briggs Field in Detroit, Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro (former home of the Patriots). But the practice of naming the ball park after the family has been replaced by offering up the names to corporate sponsors. Comerica. Tropicana. QualComm.

I'm guessing that the majority of sports venues have sold naming rights to a corporation. Thus the stadium where the Patriots play is Gillette (a.k.a., the Razor), not Kraft (after the family that owns them, not the mac and cheese people).

Me, call me a sentimental fool, but I prefer the old time names to the corporates. Give me Fenway Park, Dodger Stadium, and - yes - even Yankee Stadium any old day. (And was there ever a better name for a baseball park than The Polo Grounds?)

Sports is one thing. Other public spaces are also up for grabs these days.

Adopt a highway, anyone?

And, while the signage is discreet, the Massachusetts State House has (or had - I'm not sure if they're still there) little signs on the front fence telling us who did the plantings.

Now, the state would like to give our august, venerable and quite beautiful State House - designed by Charles Bullfinch - an overhaul, and they're looking for corporate money.

I just hope they don't post little (let alone big) signs all over the place thanking the patrons for their largesse.

Whatever happened to doing something good without demanding recognition for it?

In any case, I thought this was a recent whine until I saw this picture from an 1885 edition of Punch on the incredibly interesting and wonderful Paleo Future blog, which covers futurist predictions over the years (starting in the late nineteenth century, right on up through the 1990's).

In any case, I was highly amused by this old cartoon of the Statue of Liberty tarted up with a bunch of fake advertising signs. (Note the quite prescient ad for "Suredeath Cigarettes" a good 80 years before the Surgeon General's report smoked the tobacco companies out.)

Here's my vote to keep some public spaces unbranded. Some things are sacred.

But the fact that advertising consuming everything was a reasonable fear well over 100 years ago? Plus ça change, no?

Social Media and Marketing - Cousins, Not Twins

2007-12-20T06:10:00.001-06:00

Chris Brogan has a good post up about why social media is not a form of marketing:

Here’s where I’m going with this: marketers trying to come into social media and rapidly become versed in the tools and believe what they’re doing is social media, are probably doomed to a lot of pain and disappointment along the way. Marketers who come into social media and feel that these tools will deliver the same kinds of clean stats and clear cut wins and campaign thinking overall are doomed as well.
Marketing is a discipline with lots of emphasis on channel thinking, on campaigns, on message shaping, on control and covering all the bases.
Social media is a set of tools that permit regular people access to potential audiences of shared interest. These tools give voice, give preference, give rise to individuality, give flexibility, collaborative opportunity, and a whole lot of other things that don’t resemble traditional marketing the same way gym class felt absolutely nothing like social studies.
Marketers have tools. They understand what they do very well. They understand lead acquisition, and brand strategy, and all kinds of things that the folks who use social media tools could really do to understand before knocking.

The other day I wrote about how Twitter is often used in ways that may be useful, but that take it outside the realm of social media - because when you use it to broadcast, it's not longer social, it's just a medium. That's something for marketers to think about as they wrap their arms around any social medium.

It all comes back, I think, to things Seth Godin was saying a long time ago about interruption marketing versus permission marketing. We marketers have an astonishing ability to turn everything into interruption; whether it's email campaigns that don't bother with personalization and - the ultimate email crime, in my view - deliver messages to which the user can't reply, or using YouTube to blast something out without paying attention to what viewers are saying, to using Twitter as a handy way to get ads to someone's SMS mailbox.

There's no question that social media are useful marketing tools. The challenge, of course, is using them as social media.

When you have a hammer, every problem is a nail; when you're a marketer, sometimes every problem is sneaking a message in front of an eyeball. From the user point of view, the most successful social media are likely to be those that let users take unwanted nails and jab them back into the marketer's eyeball. Those that turn into marketing vehicles (hi, Facebook!) are likely to be abandoned by users.

Here's the challenge for savvy 21st century marketers, or those that want to be them: how do you market in that environment?

Harley Ad: Bad for Badness Sake

2007-12-19T06:54:00.001-06:00

I find so many of the Christmas ads on TV cloying and/or annoying, that I was just delighted to see the Harley Davidson ad on Chris Mathews and/or Keith Olberman the other night.

A leather clad Santa in a black sleigh drawn by 8 Harleys comes into sight.

The message? He knows if you've been bad or good, so be bad for badness sake.

Not that I'm in any danger of going out and buying a Harley - or any Harley gear whatsoever - but the ad made me smile on a lot of fronts.

It's definitely a holiday ad, but doesn't compromise one iota on the core Harley brand. It's on message, and it's definitely got the right look and feel. Not one scintilla of soupy sentiment at all!

No "kiss begins with K", no skull mangling Lexus tune, no 'should I get my wife a power saw at Lowe's?' nonsense.

Harley is by far my favorite ad of the 2007 holiday season. (So far, I'd have to give the first runner up nod to the car company ads with the Duh choir. I'm not quite sure who the ads are for - Hyundai? - but the choral singing is good, and it's fun to hear all those carols sung without words.

This link isn't to quite the same Harley ad that I saw, but it's along the same lines.

Twitter: social networking or broadcast medium

2007-12-18T04:45:00.000-06:00

Shel Holtz wrote about how a newspaper is using Twitter and it got me thinking about Twitter as a social medium vs. Twitter as a broadcast medium:

A local newspaper has integrated Twitter into its news offerings, according to an article today in Journalism.co.uk. The Nashua Telegraph (New Hampshire, USA) has created a section of its website for breaking news; the news items are fed directly to a Telegraph Twitter stream with links (TinyURLs, of course) to a mobile version of the newspaper’s website.
A current look at the newspaper’s tweets shows weather information (including school and airport information), along with news about a local murder trial and other information that could be important to local residents...

I was an initial Twitter skeptic who dived into it to see what all the fuss was about. I'v found that it's a fun social application. For me, it's a bit like having an ongoing IM conversation with a bunch of people.

But there's always been an element to it that I'd call "broadcast." There are plenty of organizations using Twitter: media outfits like newspapers and television programs, as well as associations, non-profits, and presidential candidates. All of that leaves me cold.

First of all, it's not social. It nice that I can follow Barack Obama on Twitter but you know what? Barack's not following me. Well, maybe, but I doubt anyone is reading it (nor is there any compelling reason to). This is a use of Twitter to broadcast messages to an audience, not interact with them.

That's not necessarily bad, but it makes Twitter less a cutting-edge social networking tool than a new implementation of broadcast SMS or email.

And it adds a spammy aspect to it. It's one thing to get an email telling me that some fellow Houston blogger is now following me; hey, somebody new I might have things in common with! When I got an email that the Today Show was following me, however, I didn't see it as a new networking opportunity, but rather a way for the Today Show to spam me via Twitter to get me to look at their content.

Second, I wonder if this kind of Twitter use fails a basic test of any medium: is the timeliness, format, and intrusiveness of the messages matched with their utility to the user?

New technologies tend to find their place. Email is a great way to send detailed information that doesn't require a response immediately; if you want immediate feedback, pick up the phone. Or send an IM. Twitter is an ongoing conversation in which you can reply to something hours later.

Like Shel I give the Nashua Telegraph credit for experimenting with it; that's smart. As a user I can't imagine following my local paper, the Houston Chronicle, on Twitter. There's nothing there that I can't get more conveniently via RSS or on their web site, when I feel like looking at it.

I'm not knocking anybody here, but just asking the question: is this a good match between content and medium? I'm skeptical. It will be interesting to see how it works out for newspapers - and everybody else.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #11

2007-12-17T07:05:00.001-06:00

This is the eleventh in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #11: Don't expect your sales channel to conduct win/loss analysis.

If I had a dollar for every pipeline review meeting at which we knocked a few of last month's hot prospects into the "L" column, at which point someone (more than likely me) ask "Why'd we lose?"...

Well, I might not be rich, but I would definitely have enough money to buy a very good raincoat.

And I wouldn't know any more about why we lost a deal than if I hadn't opened my mouth and asked the question.

After all, there's only so much you can learn from "our price was too high," "our product sucks," and "they went with somebody else." The reasons I've heard salespeople give for their losses is right up there with the list of sins we used to confess in grammar school: I fought with my sister, I talked back to my mother.

Asking them why we won doesn't tend to yield all that much fresh information, either.

If this were one of the questions asked on Family Feud, the number one answer would surely be - Ding! Ding! Ding! - SUPERIOR SALESMANSHIP!

It's just not in the nature of most sales people to get all analytical about why something did or did not happen.

That's what you're here for. (Many years ago, I attended a sales kick-off during which they gave us some type of short-form Myers-Briggs test, and categorized us as Red, Orange, Green, or Blue. 99% of the sales folks were Reds - Extraverts, in Myers-Briggs parlance. The home office folks were about evenly split among the other colors, with the analytically minded introverts (including all the product managers) clustered in the Blue and Green groups.)

So the first reason you don't want your sales guys doing W-L analysis is because most of them probably won't be all that good at it. Just like a product managers/product marketers probably wouldn't be all that good at sales.

You also want and need your sales people to look forward, not backward. Obviously, you want your sales folks to learn from their mistakes, your mistakes, and everyone else's, but you also need them to be optimistic and positive. Okay, they really won't be very good salespeople if they are blinder-wearing Pollyanna's, but you definitely want your sales folks to be running on half-full, not half-empty.

Further, if you rely on your sales people for Win-Loss analysis, you're also going to miss out on the opportunity to find out whether there are aspects of your sales process that need work. (Guaranteed that no sales person is ever going to tell you "I got outsold".)

How do I like to go about Win-Loss analysis?

All kidding aside, I do like to have a mini-debrief with the salesperson and (more important) the sales engineer on what they think went right or wrong. Getting an initial impression by those closest to the sale (or loss) may yield a useful avenue for questioning the new customer (or prospect that got away).

I like to have a list of questions - about product, pricing, process - that I will run through. If there's a complex sales process, with many steps and multiple people involved - influencers, decision makers - I like to talk to a couple of folks. Realistically, this isn't always feasible - especially if you're talking about a Loss. (Just like salespeople, customers want to look forward, too.) Sometimes, the best you can hope for is a good, candid conversation with the person who was your prime sponsor or contact person during the sales cycle.

In addition to specific questions on aspects of our product, pricing, and process, I also like to ask flat out - in the case of a loss - what we could have done better, what would it have taken to win, where the competition outshone us. And, in the case of a winning situation, I like to ask those same questions about the competitor.

Win-Loss conversations - which should be kept to about 10-15 minutes (or, second best, an e-mail exchange) - should occur within a week or two after the decision is made. This is especially true when it's a loss we're talking about, but you want to get to the winners when the why's and wherefores are still fresh in their minds as well.

It goes without saying that the information should be kept in some sort of a system - not on your person hard disk, let alone in paper files (or, heaven forbid, in your head). And that you should really try to make some sense of it as a whole and not just look at disaggregate information points. This is not all that easy to do when you're looking at a data containing a large element of subjective matter, but there's no point in collecting Win-Loss data unless you're planning on drawing some general inferences from it.

What can your Win-Loss analysis help you with?

Determining what features you need to add to your product
Refining your pricing
Shaping your marketing message
Homing in on a more sharply defined target market
Improving your sales and marketing processes

Yes, lots of good things can and will come from it.

Just don't ask your sales folks to do the heavy lifting for you.

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Note: This goes for both direct and indirect sales channels, of course. For indirect, in spades.

Stupid Ideas Die Hard

2007-12-15T15:28:00.001-06:00

I just received a call - on my cell phone - that was a prerecorded message offering me a certificate for a discount on services from the Durrett Chiropractic & Natural Health Care Clinic here in Houston.

Apart from the little detail that this call was illegal - the number is on the national do not call list and I have no relationship of any kind with these people - I have to wonder: Who thought sending prerecorded ads to people's phones was a good way to get new customers? Did they think someone would say, "Oh, hey, I've been wanting to see a chiropracter and these folks must be good - after all, they called my cell phone with an ad!"

It actually annoyed me enough that I filed an FCC complaint (it's really fast to do it via the web).

My guess is that someone convinced them this was a good idea and charged them money to execute the campaign. And poorly - the ad consisted of rapid-fire speech with bad enunciation. I couldn't tell what the name of the practice was (but reverse lookup solved that). If you're going to get in people's faces in obnoxious ways, at least say your name clearly.

It's amazing to me that people still do this stuff. Dear Durrett Chiropractic people, people fire the folks giving you marketing advice ASAP.

Regional Branding: the KC Animal Health Corridor

2007-12-14T07:25:00.001-06:00

I saw a small piece in a recent Economist on Kansas City's attempt to make itself into the Silicon Valley of animal health.

My first reaction - foolishly - was that "Animal Health Corridor" was a not particularly catchy or interesting name.

Then I paused for a sec, and reminded myself that it's a pretty good name in that it's straightforward, no nonsense, and absolutely tells it exactly like it is.

And they've apparently got the facts to back their claims that, when it comes to animal health, they are, indeed the place to be.

I found all this out on the KC Animal Health Corridor web site.

OK, the paw logo may be a little hokey - and seems to leave out our hoofed and feathered friends - but they build their case quite compelling. Nice to see a brand that can back itself up.

The Kansas City area is plunk in the middle of live stock country, and they make the most of it. They're also nearby to top tier veterinary schools and headquarters to a whole slew of corporate head quarters for animal health related enterprises.

Living petless in a city in the Northeast, I'm about as far from animal health issues as I can possibly be. Truly, my major animal health issue is hoping that we have enough of a cold spell to tamp down the rat population lurking beneath our trees, sidewalks, and foundations.

But I really like the fact that, when we keep hearing that the central part of the country is emptying out, Kansas City has looked around and staked a legitimate claim here. They are/were, after all, a big stockyard center. So why not.

And animal health is a huge business.

KC is going for it. Everything seems to be up to date and complete on their site: facts, figures, testimonials.

Hey, if I were running an animal health company, I'd sure consider locating it there.

Just like I'd put Massachusetts on my short list for bio-tech.

Nice branding, nice marketing, nice getting a city slicker like me to take a look at what they have to offer.

Those Darn Customers

2007-12-13T05:18:00.000-06:00

From the "Customers, they are so annoying!" files, Pragmatic Marketing's Tuned In blog comments on Microsoft's response to customers having problems with Outlook 2007:

Yesterday Microsoft released an update to Outlook 2007 to help speed up the downloading of messages and reduce the annoying and highly criticized freezing associated with moving or deleting messages. Microsoft indicated that the problem stemmed from RSS feeds, email, and calendar files all being stored in the same .PST file which as one might imagine could grow in size rather quickly depending on the user. The problem lies not with the software, but how users are using the software. Jessica Arnold Outlooks Program Manager told ComputerWorld "Outlook wasn't designed to be a file dump, it was meant to be a communications tool...There is that fine line, but we don't necessarily want to optimize the software for people that store their e-mail in the same .PST file for ten years."

Except that, um, that's how customers actually use the software. Silly customers!

It's not unusual to find that customers are using your products in ways you didn't anticipate (and didn't design for). You can only predict so much while you're developing the product, especially when you are working with new technologies that lead to new user habits.

But once you find out what people are actually doing, the right response is to make your product meet those needs (or perhaps spin off a companion product that addresses the new needs and works nicely with the current product). The right response is almost never to complain that the customers are doing things wrong.

Then again, this is the same company that's been loading up its office suite with "helpful" features that almost everyone I know turns off as soon as they install it. Bad customers! No auto-formatted numbered lists for you!

A note to the toy companies

2007-12-12T07:23:00.001-06:00

I was going to say "toy makers" but, alas, most of the toy makers aren't here, they're in China, where a goodly number of them are apparently using lead paint, the date rape drug, and a lot of other nasty things to produce toys for our little ones.

(As Christmas approaches, toyland is certainly an Opinionated Marketing theme, as seen on John's post - and Mary's comment - yesterday.)

So, here's what I have to say to the toy companies who have been so blithely and blindly producing and MARKETING more and more, cheaper and cheaper, shoddier and shoddier, built-to-discard tomorrow (if not later today) crap:

Hah, hah, the backlash and losses that you're going to experience this Christmas serve you right.

(And I'm not letting American consumers off the hook, here, either. Our dazed, crazed, never satisfied desire from more and more, cheaper and cheaper, etc. etc., nonsense to shove in our maws - or, worse, the maws of our children - has been going on mindlessly for far too long. Time to think: about the implications of all this junk on children; about the implications of turning a blind eye to less than stellar safety, environmental, and worker-related practices in China in exchange for the devil's bargain of more crap. May this be the season when we all start to think straight on this.)

Now that I've got that out of my system, what constructive message would I send to toy companies?

Here goes:

Maybe you're already doing this, by why not establish a certification program and put it on all the toys that you, personally, will attest have been created with safe inputs; are of high quality; and have been produced under humane and decent conditions? Have it be like Sarbanes-Oxley: the CEO is responsible for ensuring that all this happens. Which will mean a lot more feet on those Chinese streets to make sure that standards are being met.

Parents could look at a toy and see that the CEO of, say, Mattel had signed off on it. Or else.

Sure, there might be illegal knock-offs that made their way into the country. And, sadly, they'd no doubt end up in cheapo-depot stores that sell to poor people. But at least some people would feel and be more protected.

Oh, and, by the way, as with SOX attestations, the CEO can go to jail if he/she signs off on something that ends up, say, killing a kid. That might put a little backbone in the system, no? (Of course, the toy companies are not likely to do this on their own, but it's really time for them to stop taking the Chinese middle-men to the middle-men to the middle-men's word for things. They really do need to take ownership of what's going on in their supply chain.)
And while you're at it, why not come up with some "built to last" products - and not just ones that you're going to market at a premium to all those high end, elite parents who can afford to pay extra for something made out of wood painted with non-toxic paint. How about a decent quality toy line for everyone. I'm not saying complete death to plastics, but why not a little less of it. (I'm guessing that a lot more little girls hang on to their Raggedy Ann dolls forever than they do to one of their two-dozen Bratz.)
Set up a Made in America product line. You will clean up. People may have to pay more, which means they may buy less, but is anyone going to buy less than they are this year?

As I said, the toy companies may be all over this already.

As for those who are shopping for kids this season, my advice is two-fold: books and less.

What to do with the left-over money?

Put it in the kid's college fund, or make a donation to a charity in the kid's name. By the time a child's seven or eight, they're perfectly capable of understanding that - greedy guts that they are - they have a lot more than some of the other children out there.

When Life Hands the Other Guy Lemons... Chinese Toys and American Toymakers

2007-12-11T05:00:00.000-06:00

Recent news about lead-tainted toys manufactured in China have been helpful to one segment of the toy industries: small companies making hand-crafted toys in the US. But it's hard for small operations to gear up to meet unexpected demand, so we see - for example - things like this from a toymaker in Maine:

This is probably a one-year bounce for these folks, and I hope they've made the best of it. One might criticize them for having to stop taking orders on December 6, but then again, I don't think anybody makes wooden toys in Maine by hand to dominate the toy universe; my guess is that that owners of this business do what they do for a love of their work and some lifestyle choices, as well as to pay the mortgage.

So here's hoping that after this busy season they're able to take a nice vacation. The one bit of advice I'd have for them: they should people who are interested in their toys to leave their contact information so that they can be notified when the company is ready to take orders for upcoming birthdays, special events, and of course next year's holiday shopping season.

It's very hard to turn a windfall from someone else's problems into a long-term gain, but there is an opportunity here.

An interesting note: as I was reading about this, I found this article about how European toymakers have also benefited. But the first toymaker mentioned in Playmobil - not exactly a mom and pop operation. Europe is not exactly a hub of low-cost manufacturing; how is it that Playmobil makes its toys so close to home?

Turns out that it's a business consideration:

Schauer said Playmobil, a family-owned company in Zirndorf, Germany, faced intense pressure to move production to China. Most of the industry was moving there, she said, and German banks did not want to lend money to companies to build toy factories at home.
What the companies discovered, though, was that while China's unit labor costs were a fraction of those in the West - the equivalent of $1.50 an hour compared with $30 an hour in western Germany - the distance between China and the companies' biggest markets eroded some of that cost advantage.
In addition, Lego and Playmobil need to respond quickly to fickle consumer demand. To speed up the production of a surprise hit - a Playmobil World Cup soccer player, for example - would be costly in China, where factories are set up to churn out vast volumes of toys with long lead times.
"Toys are not the fashion business, but they are like the fashion business," Padda said. "The need to be able to react to what is going on in the market made us choose" Europe.

And so if you give a kid in your life Lego this year, it was likely made in Denmark. Because when a company makes these outsourcing decisions, cost isn't the only factor.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #10

2007-12-10T06:42:00.001-06:00

This is the tenth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #10: Find market segments that value your distinctive competence.

I suspect that all technology marketers have, at one time or another, attempted to broaden their market to extend beyond whatever segment they find themselves in. Sometimes this makes absolute sense: there are adjacent markets which may be equally well served by your products. Or almost equally well served.

The problem occurs when you start convincing yourself that your offerings - as is - will work for everybody.

At the macro level of "distinctive competence", you're not going to sell bleeding edge technology into an industry where companies typically adopt new-fangled "stuff" with a 5 year lag. You're not going to sell a costly, hands-on services model to a company that prides itself on do-it-yourself. You're not going to sell expensive, nice-to-have bells and whistles to a company that's driven strictly by the bottom line and which operates on the thinnest of margins.

At the less grand, micro level "distinctive competence" may translate into a feature set (or singular feature) that is ideal for one market, and might seem like it should at least be somewhat useful for other markets, as well.

But unless that shiny new market really needs and wants what you have to offer, well, heading down this path will get you to the marketing equivalent of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams: more expense to attract fewer customers, longer sales cycles, more price resistance, less satisfied customers. You name it, you'll find it when you start drifting into territory that doesn't value your distinctive competence.

So before heading in this direction, you owe yourself and your product a critical examination of just how and why someone wants and needs what you've got that's different. Plain and simple, if you can't come up with an answer, those potential customers won't be able to, either.

Sure, you'll convince some of them to buy your wares by share force of will. But this is not the recipe for market success.

You, may, of course, be able to create that market success by tweaking your product, through creative pricing, by offering mo' better services. Just make sure that's what you really want to do.

Yes, focusing on your distinctive competence - or even on your simple, technical differentiation - may mean that you find yourself in a niche. Again, you need to make sure that being a niche player is what you really want to be.

If not, find yourself a distinctive competence, or means of differentiation that won't relegate you to a niche. (I know, I know. That's not going to happen overnight - nor should it.)

Hamming it up for Chanukah

2007-12-07T06:50:00.001-06:00

I was at a small gathering at my friend Susan's the other night, and she took a few moments to light the third candle on her menorah. Susan and her husband sang a song in Hebrew (which, as Susan pointed out, sounded just like the theme song for the old Western TV show, The Lawman. Those of a certain age - Susan and I among them - will sort of remember it: "The lawman came with the sun/There was a job to be done." Of course, I recalled the words as "came with a gun", which actually makes as much sense as "with the sun."). Susan then recited a beautiful poem by Rilke (yes, I had to ask).

It was a very nice moment, and nice to observe this bit of ritual with empty nester friends.

What's this got to do with marketing?

Not much, but I was over on Seth Godin's blog the other day, and he had this hilarious picture out there.

Maybe this is one of those urban legends, maybe not. I'm enjoying it too much to do my usual Scopes check.

Know thy audience.

It's really a Marketing 101, isn't it?

Sure, there are plenty of "cultural Jews", who eat treyf and celebrate Chanukah. As a "cultural Catholic", I get what that "cultural-name-of-religion-goes here" is all about.

But who came up with the idea of cashing in on a religious holiday by trying to push goods that are off limits to that religion?

Nothing, but nothing, is going to make ham Kosher for Pesach. Or Chanukah, for that matter.

So Happy Chanukah to those of you who celebrate it.

Is it the Season to Annoy Your Customers?

2007-12-06T05:59:00.001-06:00

Apparently. Well, it happens every year; it's the busiest retail season of the year, so retailers put their email marketing (along with all other marketing) into high gear.

I used to like getting my weekly Borders email. I often use the coupons they send. The emails work; they get me into the store.

But I hate their holiday emails for several reasons.

I get one every single day. There is no retail store in the world I need to hear from every day. I could not possibly shop anywhere enough to justify getting something every day. The emails that I used to like getting now register to me as borderline spam and it'll be a Christmas miracle if I haven't opted out by the time the holidays are over.
They bombard me with a ton of products, most of which don't interest me. I'm part of their rewards program; they know what I've bought. Maybe they could try targeted content?
They include coupons that are only valid for a day or two. Why even bother to save the email if I know I won't have time to get to the store before the coupon expires? DELETE.
There are so many different coupons that it becomes too much effort to even try to sort through them. Am I better off with today's 25% off (but only if you come in right away) or will tomorrow bring a buy two, get one free offer? This is one is just for books, but this one is for DVDs. Wait, this one is for holiday cards, but it expired. Wait... screw it, let's just shop an Amazon.

Here's what Borders could have done to get me into the store: send me an email with, say, a holiday gift giving guide - maybe a list of topics with links to suggestions on their site, something that would make me think, "Hey, Diane really likes mysteries, maybe I can find something nice for her there." Include a coupon or two that's good until Christmas. Put one in there for a coffee at the in-store cafe - seriously, it would make a holiday shopping trip more pleasant.

In other words, send me something that's useful to me. And don't bug me every day.

CitiBunk: what's with the irrelevant ads?

2007-12-05T04:26:00.001-06:00

Years ago, Citi ran an ad campaign in which "people" talked about how helpful CB was when they detected unusual spending patterns. I mean, they actually called the consumer to find out if they were actually consuming at the clip that their transactions seemed to indicate.

The folks in the ads were all over themselves praising Citi for protecting them - although, given a credit card holder's limited exposure on use of a stolen hard, they were actually protecting themselves.

I remember Saturday Night Live spoofing this campaign with a very funny riff on "First National Change Bank" that depicted customers grateful because they could go into the bank, give the teller a twenty dollar bill and get back a ten, a five, and five ones.

Citi, it appears, is at it again with another statement of the obvious campaign, in which they tout how people can and do use their Citi credit cards to, like, buy stuff.

Buy stuff? With a credit card?

Never would have thought of that on my own!

Admittedly, the ads are cute.

In one, there's a very cute mutt in bed with a stuffed poodle. Apparently, his owners tried everything to keep Max from howling. Figuring that their pup was lonely, the bought him a mirror. Then new dog food. Then a new dog bed. Finally, they settled on the stuffed poodle. All's right in the world. And they, apparently, could never have carried it off without Citi.

In another one, a non-cooking shopaholic turns her kitchen into a walk-in closet. Again, all with the help of her Citi cards. Now, if ever there's an ad that I can identify with, it's one about someone who doesn't cook. (Alternative use for my kitchen: solarium/reading room.)

What this has to do with a Citi card, well.

In the third ad in the series, the new mother-in-law of the vegetarian daughter-in-law puts a tofu turkey on the holiday table. Remind me never to eat a tofu turkey. It looks like either an uncooked turkey-turkey or a turkey molded out of Crisco. Yuck.

Yet again, Citi to the rescue.

Don't leave home without it.

Obviously, the ads were clever enough for me to read, and maybe that's what Citi is intending - it puts their name in front of an audience who might not ever read a straightforward, boring old ad for a credit card.

But is it going to motivate me to sign up for a City card?

No way!

What might motivate me is Frequent Flyer miles. (Actually, that would motivate my husband to motivate me.) A donation to a charity of choice. Accumulation of bonus points.

Sorry, just being able to spend with it doesn't exactly inspire me to want to learn more.

"Whatever your story is, your Citi card can help you write it."

Maybe I'm the American oddball, but, in truth, my personal story doesn't have all that much to do with the stuff I buy.

Chalk this one up to yet another ad campaign that I draw a major blank on.

Strategeries and Tacticizing

2007-12-04T05:21:00.000-06:00

If you've ever been to an emergency room, you know that waiting is part of the drill. Put two marketing types into one, add some interesting posters on the bulletin boards, and there's a new way to pass the time and for one of you to not think about the pain he's in. As we sat waiting for someone to come and draw blood from my partner, I said, "Hey, look... they've got a brand pyramid."

Not one that makes a lot of sense, though. How do strategies rest of initiatives? Why is the vision a tiny thing at the top? What does "best of the best" mean? (At least the brand promise makes sense, even if would probably apply to any hospital in the world.) To someone sitting there in pain - which would later turn out to be an appendix on its way to rupturing - is there really a brand promise besides "we will make you better" or "we will keep you from dying" which matters?

Here's the mark of a poorly organized strategy represented by any geometric shape of your choice: the documents that come from are even stranger. If the summary doesn't make sense, the things that arise from it will make less. And so next to the pyramid I spied this:

The first group isn't awful, although since the piece was tacked to a bulletin board in an area where patients sit and wait for care, I might have put "patient-centered" up at the top. And "competent." The second section, however, show signs of someone just giving up on sticking to the structure. "We are operational discipline?" And systemness? What the heck is systemness?

These characteristic lead to actual initiatives and something called "big dots." I'm not sure what "big dots" are and how they differ from initiatives...

Note that one of the items is to "maximize net revenue cycle." Now, we all know that hospitals are businesses, but as you're sitting in agony, or watching a loved one and getting scared because it's one in the morning and the pain is getting worse and something is wrong and you are not sure what, it's hard to take comfort from knowing that you're in a place that's truly committed to maximizing their net revenue cycle.

So perhaps lesson one is that these kinds of internal documents should not be stuck to bulletin boards where your customers (in this case, patients) should see them. But then lesson two is that they are often going to see them anyway, so perhaps you should be sure they leave people feeling better about you. And lesson three would be the ditch the strategy pyramid or obelisk or ziggurat and come up with a strategy that you could explain to someone in a few sentences while waiting for a bus and sound like a normal human being doing so, instead of like an MBA candidate with Tourette's Syndrome.

The good news is that when your strategy documents leads to this kind of stuff, if you've got good people, they generally just ignore it and do their jobs. That's precisely what seems to have happened at the hospital in question; while they should, perhaps, hire fewer people to think about strategy and more phlebotomists, the actual medical personnel were nice, caring, folks. My partner was admitted and had surgery is recovering, and fortunately everyone involved seems to be thinking about patient care and not the strategy doubletalk emanating from their management.

Clearly there's a disconnect between whoever is coming up with this stuff and the front line employees - and I am very glad about that.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #9

2007-12-03T07:20:00.001-06:00

This is the ninth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Rule #9: The building is full of product experts. Your company needs market experts.

There's nothing worse than a marketing person who knows little about the product they're marketing. Matters not whether you're "just" in marcomm, minimal fluency is required. The bar gets raised for product marketing and product management, of course.

But as the rule says, if you're in technology marketing: the building is full of product experts. Developers. Services folks. Sales engineers.

Nice if you can demonstrate your understanding of SOA, your appreciation of MDM, your giga-intimacy with bits, bytes, and all assortments of herz's.

What the company also (and really) needs from marketing is insight on what's happening in the market - in general.

What's the competition up to?
What trends - technical and business - do you need to keep an eye on?
What's up with the wonderful world of compliance and regulation? (Eek, it's everywhere.)
What's going on in the verticals of interest?

Not to mention what's happening in the market - in particular. I.e., your customers, your prospects.

What's lurking out there that might have an impact on your customers and prospects - and how they might benefit from your product at this particular time.
And just how do those customers use your product?
What connections are they making between the features and benefits?
What are they asking for?
What do they need that they aren't asking for?

Open Season on Political Logos: Republicans

2007-11-30T07:21:00.001-06:00

On Wednesday, I posted my opinion on the logos being used by the Democratic presidential candidates. In the interest of providing fair and balanced opinionated marketing, here goes for the Republicans (shown in alphabetical order, by last name).

Nice. I like the type face, the simple design, and lucky Rudy he's a household, first-name word.

And not to make this all about Rudy, but I really love this one which is such a nice play on the 'I Love NY' campaign, which is one of the most brilliant and iconic ever.

Well, Mike is mixing it up a bit here, and he's being a little gutsy with the use of the yellow, but I'm not wild about this. I do think the flag-ness is well done. I probably would have liked this one better with white lettering.

And not to make this all about Huckabee, but how's about this Peter Max-ish, salute to the '60's number. Yowza. (I believe Huckabee also has an I-Heart-Huckabee thing going somewhere, but enough's enough.)

I'm going to give John some props here for the use of the navy and gold. It distinguishes him from the pack, and reminds us that he's got an untouchable military background. Not wild about the Go, Navy! color scheme, but for McCain it works. Also like the (sans serif) font.

What can you say? The guys a straight shooter, and so's his bumper sticker. Simple, unaffected, boring even, but it does seem to speak well to the nature of the candidate, doesn't it?

Well, if Mitt doesn't make it as president, he may be able to run the US Postal Service since he already appears to be using a knock-off of their logo. Nice strong lettering, and a wise choice to go with "Mitt" rather than your given name of "Willard." (Who wouldn't?)

THIS TANCREDO SPACE LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK

Wouldn't you know I would have a devil of a time trying to download the Tancredo logo? Maybe he thinks I'm an illegal immigrant or something. I've already tried twice, with no luck, and since Tancredo has about as much chance of getting elected as, say, Paris Hilton, we'll just leave it at that.

When your biggest claim to fame is your recognition as an actor, I guess it makes sense to use your face. But I don't like it. Too much Fred's big ego going on. Nice balance in the Fred 2008/Thompson, however; and I like the upper-lower.

And not to make this all about Fred Thompson, but let's here it for this happening black and gold color scheme. But the tag line? Security. Unity. Prosperity. Hmmmm. At least he didn't use Prosperity. Unity. Security. which would have yielded an unfortunate acronym.

Well, Rudy's got my logo vote here. He wins the Republican field, with McCain and Paul tying for second runner up. And if I'm being honest, I think he's got the best overall look and feel, with Hillary coming in second.

Again, none of this is meant as an endorsement. I may have picked a Republican logo, but that's not quite the primary I will be voting in come February...

Starbucks Hits the Airwaves

2007-11-29T10:02:00.001-06:00

Over at Church of the Customer Blog, Jackie Huba writes about the first television ad campaign by Starbucks. You can see the spots here.

Jackie mentions the slight decline in store visits and asks:

Is that because Starbucks has finally reached a saturation point? Or is it more complicated, the result of a series of decisions that has compromised its roots of authenticity?

She thinks it's the latter, and I think she's right; another factor, however, is plain old competition. With McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts and others moving into the Starbucks space, things are tougher for the coffee giant.

But that said, the experience of going to Starbucks has changed; what used to be a reasonable simulacrum of an actual funky coffeehouse is now a gigantic ad. Walk in, and you're bombarded by CDs, cards, gifts, and employees pushing whatever almost-not-coffee-anymore concoction is the current focus. (No, I would not like an orange pumpkin eggnog macchiato with a shot of corn syrup; I actually like coffee.)

Jackie concludes:

Starbucks is a beloved brand because of the quality of the store experience. Period. End of story. Slurp! It took years for McDonald's to re-learn that.

Well, I'd say it's the predictability of the store experience. The coffee is OK, the atmosphere is OK, but you know just what you will get. They have degraded that experience a bit, though, and I think that's a big part of their problems now.

As for the spots themselves? Well, I can't get past how much they remind me of the segments in South Park when the proprietor of Tweek's Coffee would talk about his own store experience.

Open Season on Political Logos: Democrats

2007-11-28T06:31:00.001-06:00

Having just done some new logo work with a client, I've become more "logo aware", and have been sizing up the logos (or bumper stickers) for the presidential candidates.

I was going to do a logo appraisal of all the candidates at once, but they're are still too darn many of them. So I thought I'd break things up into two sections: Democrats today, Republicans on Friday.

Nothing I write here should be interpreted as an endorsement - especially if it turns out that my favorite logo belongs to a Republican.

First, a general observation: although I wouldn't mind seeing a little more green in there occasionally, candidates are generally wise to stick to the tried and true, red-white-and-blue color scheme. Anything else seems just weird. Unamerican, almost.

A few years ago, when Shannon O'Brien ran for governor of Massachusetts against Willard "Mitt" Romney, she chose purple and yellow as her colors. Now purple and white might have worked - I think that O'Brien went to Williams College, so there would have been a rah-rah connection to their colors - but the overall impact of purple and yellow was amateurish and cheesy. Do I think that the colors had anything to do with O'Brien's loss? Who knows? I don't think they helped her out any, and may in a modest way have given a boost to Romney's presidential aspirations.

Serifs are mostly in, too. Maybe what this country needs is a good, sans serif candidate. Maybe not an Arial or a Helvetica, but a Tahoma or a Verdana.

Another observation, some of the Democrats have green and/or rainbow versions of their main logos. I didn't find anything comparable on the Republican side. It's certainly plausible that a least a couple of the Republican candidates could make a green or rainbow connection, but that might be a path they'd want to avoid during the primary season.

Final observation, I've seen remarkably few bumper stickers out there yet. I've seen a few Hillaries, a few Obamas, a Romney or two, plus a Joe Biden belonging to a neighbor (with whom I had a recent conversation about hopeless causes).

So, here's the Democratic field (in alphabetical order):

Sorry, Joe, but this is boring. Safe but sorry. Strong font, but other than that. BOR-ING.

Not bad. I like the stylized flag motif, and the way the "y" in Hillary dips into it. Hillary's the only Democrat going with first name only, which I think works given her name recognition. (I was starting to type "broad name recognition", but figured I didn't want to quite go there.)

I kind of like this one, but the use of the red and white strips reminds me of the Polish flag. (At least I think it's Poland.) Good that he used both "Chris" and "Dodd", because "Dodd" looks too D'ODD standing on its own. I also like the navy blue.

Hey, John, thanks for having the guts to go sans serif on the font. And for going a little green, too. It breaks up the monotony. But the green looks like an afterthought. Better if you swap out the red lettering for green and go after those greens directly and head on. Remember, they do vote in Democratic primaries.

I don't think the flag works here, and I think with those two "I's" and two "C's" I might have gone with an upper and lower case mix, since I find this a little dizzying to read. And as for Strength through Peace - I like the sentiment, and it's something we really ought to be talking about, but is it just me or does it sound a little Chairman Mao-ish?

No guts, no glory, I guess, but this logo looks like it belongs on a box of organic cereal, or a slab of organic butter. The circle ("O" for "Obama") is kind of cute, but other than that. I do like the look of the Obama'08 and I think it works well.

Too much going on here for my taste, and I really don't think the logo works. What's with the powder blue on the star? Yuck. And my eye is just drawn to that red splotch of flag, so I lose the reset of it. Nice balance of the Bill/Richardson/President, however.

I hope I got them all.

In any case, I've got to say I have to give it to Hillary, with Chris Dodd as the first runner up (despite the Polish flag thing).

Again, this is not intended to be an endorsement.

At this point, I am still undecided....

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The other day, I mentioned that I had written a post on political logos, and my brother-in-law told me that The NY Times has just done something similar. Honestly, I didn't see The Times article. I know you're not supposed to admit it, but I rarely read The Times.

Stop, Thief!

2007-11-27T10:43:00.001-06:00

Dwight Silverman at the Houston Chronicle writes about how he had to call Microsoft and reactivate his copy of Vista because he made too many hardware changes to the machine it was running on. The twist is that it was a virtual machine (he's running Vista virtually on a Mac) and one of the benefits of virtualization is that you can change the "hardware" configuration of machine at will. (Got a memory intensive task? Bump up the memory. When done, reduce it again. Etc.)

This of course trips up Vista, which decides that the machine has been tinkered with too many times and thus is not really the same machine on which it was installed... so it stops working properly until you call Microsoft to explain that you are a real customer, not a thief.

I'm surprised people accept this so meekly (check out the comments to Dwight's post). Products that stop working when you buy them and use them legally are not well-designed products. It's a bit like having a car that periodically stops running unless you scan a copy of your title documents into it.

I understand Microsoft's wish to reduce piracy of its products; that's perfectly legitimate. But isn't there a better way than treating your customers like thieves, making them prove that they did not steal the product?

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #8

2007-11-26T07:14:00.001-06:00

This is the eighth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Rule #8: Your opinion, although interesting is irrelevant.

As marketers, we've all had to put up with the "everyone's an expert" syndrome, in which people feel free to second guess and take pot shots at everything we do.

Unveil the new logo? Someone will hate it - and, of course, let you know.
Name the new product? Guaranteed that someone will think the name is dumb - or inform you that they once had a dog with this name. (Come on, did someone really have a dog named OmniCentraSolvAll?)
Publish the list of new features? Why'd you pick those ones? Why didn't you put in the one I suggested?

Color of the golf-outing t-shirt. Trade show graphics. Target market. Partner strategy.

Doesn't matter how strategic, how tactical, how important, how trivial: people second guess what marketing does in a way that they don't typically second guess, say, accounting.

So in these circumstances, the rule holds.

But on this rule, I find that I have to somewhat part company with the folks over at Pragmatic Marketing. Or, at least, it's where I put a big, fat qualifier on this one. Because an informed opinion can be both interesting and relevant.

And sometimes the person with the informed opinion knows something you don't know. Or thinks about something in a way that you don't. Or just always seems to have an opinion that's worth listening to.

With any luck, you'll know who the Informed Opinions are and include them somewhere in the process before the decisions are made. (After you spent all that money on the new logo is not the time to find out that an underground fascist party - or the dumbest reality show ever - uses the same look and feel.)

What can the Informed Opinion do for you?

It can save you from making a mistake.

You might have fallen in love with the new color scheme. Come on, who doesn't like avocado and harvest gold? The Informed Opinion might inform you that two of your closest competitors are using the same colors, and you don't want to look too "me, too."

UniCentraSolvAll may sound like a swell - even a uniquely swell - product name. Informed Opinion may be able to tell you that it's actually the name of a heavily-marketed condom in Spain, or the highest grade street hash in Amsterdam. (This actually happened when I was at Genuity. Of course the product wasn't UniCentraSolvAll, it was Black Rocket, and these two little tid-bits turned up after we'd started a big, $$$ branding campaign.)

You may have missed an important and compelling product feature, and Informed Opinion may be able to tell you what it is and why it's so darned important.

Of course, Informed Opinion's opinion is not so darned important if you've done your homework. But you can't think of everything, so it's always good to have a couple of trusted Informed Opinions you can count on.

As far as your own opinions go: Offer your opinions only when asked for them. Try to eradicate (or at least minimize) any after the fact sniping and second guessing. (You hate it when it's done to you!) And keep in mind that an opinion that's informed by facts and market information is genuinely valuable and generally welcomed.

Attack of the Blog Scrapers

2007-11-24T06:58:00.001-06:00

Like most bloggers, I try to keep track of who's linking to us here at The Opinionated Marketers. And in the last few weeks, the number of "blog scrapers" - spam blogs that lift our content, run it in whole or part, sometimes with a link and sometimes not, usually with incorrect or no attribution at all - seems to have increased dramatically. The same thing has happened with my personal blog (puppy pictures, random notes and rants, etc. - if you're really curious I'll send you a link) and a news and politics blog I write for the Houston Chronicle.

Here's an example: Maureen wrote a post here recently on using church bulletins as marketing vehicles. Suddenly, this appears: something that looks (slightly) like someone saying "Hey, interesting post," except that this "blog" clearly isn't about anything at all and Maureen's name has suddenly become "Robert."

Every day my feeds of Google Blog and Technorati searches are crammed with this stuff.

I understand what these people are doing: they're gathering up content from all over the place and throwing it onto their own site as search engine bait, and then running Google AdSense ads on the page to make money off of ad clicks.

This is a problem in several ways. First of all, this kind of garbage makes blogs, blog search engines, and the web in general less useful for everybody. Second, as a content creator, I don't want to see my content being stolen and used as part of someone's spam scheme.

But what can be done? You could identify the host of each of these sites and send them a complaint asking them to remove the material; when I worked for a web hosting company, we actually did that when someone demonstrated that our customers were reproducing content they didn't own. Of course, we were a legitimate company, and I'm guessing when one of these sites is hosted by some tiny company in another country, it's unlikely that anything will happen. Google has a form for you to complain about advertiser behavior; if you complain about one of their advertisers stealing content, their response is that they will tell the advertiser. Google, I think they know that already.

This is Google's usual reaction to anything related to copyrights: "Leave us out of it, please." It's the wrong approach, because the more that these spam blogs turn up in search results, the more useless the search tools become; Technorati seems to be accelerating toward an advanced state of uselessness already, and if Google doesn't address these issues Google Blog Search will not be far behind.

Have any of you come across this? Is there anything to be done about it? Or do we all need to accept that when our content is out there in digital form, it's going to get stolen?

'Tis the Season - isn't it?

2007-11-23T07:50:00.001-06:00

And so, sometime in the next day or so, the really serious business of Christmas Shopping begins.

I already hate the vacuous woman in the Lowe's ad - or is it Home Depot - who pantomimes the garland, and the dancing turkey, the giant inflatable snow globe, the ornament hooks.

I've already seen enough of the Christmas Tree Shoppe flyers for bundt cake pans shaped like gingerbread houses, for fake Byers' carolers, for snowmen plates.

I've already averted my eyes from the candy aisle at CVS, with the red and green M&M's, Hershey's Bars, Reese's Cups, York Peppermint Patties - and every other candy that now comes wrapped in festive foils. Must have. Must have. Must have. Didn't Christmas candy used to be candy canes, ribbon candy, chalky hard candies in little cardboard cartons, and a non-specialized box of Whitman Samplers?

I've already tuned out the oldies station that plays nothing but (mostly bad) Christmas music between Thanksgiving and Christmas. (I mean, I never get tired of the Beach Boys' Little Saint Nick - and who could? - but some of the dreck they play is the flip side of the flip side.)

I've already had it with "Every Kiss Begins with K". And all those car ads! Who gives someone a car for Christmas?

There's much that I love about the "Holiday Season."

Christmas trees. Christmas wreathes. Christmas music (other than the terrible stuff on that oldies station). Wrapping presents. Writing cards. "Quality time" with family and friends. Left over turkey. Red and green. Cornball reruns of White Christmas.

But the incessant, relentless consume-consume-consume drumbeat. The buy-buy-buy or you, personally, will be responsible for drop-kicking the country into a recession. The complete and overwhelming crapification of the world.

Bah humbug!

Sure makes me glad I'm not a consumer goods marketer. I'd sure as hell hate to have to play a part in all this.

Helping shorten the sales cycle

2007-11-21T07:17:00.001-06:00

I have a client with a relatively high cost, enterprise level software product - and the usual attendant lllloooooonnnngggg sales cycle. I've lived through this before, and every time I end up scratching my head and asking myself just what marketing can do to help shorten the sales cycle.

Sometimes these things just have to run their course, things take time, the larger the organization the (likely) greater the purchasing bureaucracy, etc.

But here are a few things that marketing should make sure are on hand to help nudge that pokey sales cycle along:

Reference customers. Not just customer success stories, which have probably already been used in the mix to move the prospect to the stage they're at. How about a real reference customer. Sure, the prospect will ask for references when they're good and ready - often before you're good and ready, in fact - but how about the idea of offering to have a customer call the prospect to talk through any issues the prospect may have. Okay, this can be risky - you need a customer who's knowledgeable, articulate, and supportive of you. But if you have someone who you think might help close a sale, now might be the time.

Getting references out of the selling organization is often like pulling teeth. How refreshing when one gets volunteered?

Make sure that you don't over-use your good references. But if you have folks that know your product, like working with you, etc. - and they're willing to spend a few minutes with a prospect. Go for it.

Hint: if you have a User Group, these folks will be your best bet. Also keep in mind that, although many companies don't allow their name to be used in case studies, they are okay with talking to prospects on your behalf. So just because someone turned you down for a success story, doesn't mean they won't talk to a prospect for you.
FYI: Something in the news that might be of interest to your prospect? An analyst report, a survey, some industry finding? It doesn't have to be about you and your company and your product. If there's something that's genuinely germane, make sure that your sales folks are armed with it.
Newsworthy news: If there is something that's newsworthy and new about your company or product, make sure that sales has that, too. New release. Product of the year award. Big win.
ROI: I am not a big believer in ROI tools. Even when a "neutral" third party has produced yours for you, the answer always seems to be the same: buy this product and save BIG. But most big ticket decisions require some ROI analysis, and if you can provide some sort of calculator that at least illustrates where to look for savings, you'll be ahead of the game. Case studies that attest to savings and returns are also good to have on hand. In fact, I much prefer them to the ROI calculator.
Incentives: This is B2B enterprise sales we're talking about, so you're not going to start shouting "Buy One, Get One Free." Or "Order now and no payments due until 2009." But marketing may want to package up a few things - just so that sales doesn't start running amok with the discounts. (Not that I've ever seen that happen.) There may even be marketing-related incentives you can add to the mix. Maybe if they sign the deal by the end of the month, they can send two folks for free to the User Group meeting...

Remember, marketing doesn't end when the lead hits the funnel. You've got to stay right in there with sales. The longer the sales cycle, the greater the risk that the competition prevails - or that the prospect does nothing. Anything that marketing can do to move the sales cycle along will prove extremely valuable.

Real Estate Greenwashing

2007-11-21T06:15:00.000-06:00

Greenwashing - the practice of doing something that makes you sound environmentally responsible, but really doesn't amount to much - is not new, but Houston-area real estate blog Swamplot pointed out a new twist on it: an Arizona-based real estate developer is planning new "sustainable" communities around the Houston area. Except, well, there's a problem:

Why do we need the Grand Parkway? [That's a new outer, outer beltway being built on the fringes of the Houston area - just another step toward making San Antonio a Houston suburb! -JW] To connect all those new green-living communities spreading way out into the Texas prairie!

An Arizona development company is master-planning a master-planned community for a tiny 4,000-plus-acre plot in Alvin, linking the Grand Parkway, FM 1462, and highway 288. Yes, that’s bigger than Shadow Creek Ranch.

It’s called Inspiration at Alvin, if you believe the mayor, or Inspiration @ Chocolate Bayou if you believe the Aperion Communities website.

Alvin mayor Gary Appelt announced that the expected population when the project is built out — in 30 years — is 25,000 people. That’s just over six people per acre. No wonder they’re calling it green!

The Aperion web site includes some heady copy (and fairly insipid music - why, oh why, does anyone think a web site should play music without asking first?) like this:

The Inspiration Community family Life District and our Community Connections^TM program merge the best of the Internet with traditional social interactions . . . to celebrate life in a whole new way.

Because just talking to the people next door is just so 20th century.

I'm sorry, some marketer is going to hell for writing this stuff. Six people per acre is not sustainable, no matter how many buzzwords you wrap around it.

Good customers often behave badly

2007-11-20T06:09:00.000-06:00

Your best customers are sometimes the ones who give you headaches. Consider this survey of music piracy in Canada:

The researchers conclude that that people who download more music actually buy more CDs. They report: "We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year."

This basically means that if someone downloads 270 songs a year via BitTorrent, he or she will buy 9 CDs more than someone who only downloads 27 songs. So, in a way illegal downloads actually convert into more CD sales.

Overall the researchers found no difference between pirates and other people in the number of CDs they buy. They did not find a positive or a negative relationship between filesharing and CD sales. So, at worst, filesharing isn't the cause for a drop in CD sales. It might even be a boon to it.

The music industry's spin on this issue has been that there are good people who buy their music, and bad people who steal it - and bad people, the lawyers are on their way. But it turns out that the biggest downloaders might be the biggest buyers as well. Whoops! It doesn't seem to be that simple.

This happens in many industries. A group of customers behaves in a way that you didn't anticipate and which causes you problems. The rub is that these "bad customers" may be telling you something important about your product or business model.

In the case of the music industry, the message from downloaders was "we hate the way you sell us music and want something that fits our needs." The industry reaction has been elaborate technological schemes to prevent piracy (often irritating buyers along the way, until someone find a way to defeat the technology), or plain old brute force. The result? An industry that's gone to war with its customers. It doesn't really matter who's legally right; that just can't end well.

The right response, of course, was to understand why those "bad customers" were not acting according to the business plan. Because the people who push your product into new applications or insist on ignoring your distribution model and doing what they want are the ones telling you where the new opportunities are - or where you've missed the mark in satisfying customers.

After you finish cursing them under your breath, you need to embrace those bad customers and learn from them. They may give you a headache, but they also may be the key to your future success... or, in the case of the music industry, survival.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #7

2007-11-19T07:46:00.001-06:00

This is the seventh in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Rule #7: Be able to articulate your distinctive competence.

So why, exactly, should someone buy your product or service as opposed to the other guy's?

It may seem obvious that you need to be able to tell a prospect what's distinctive about you, too often as marketers we get caught up in just getting the features and benefits out there. Our product is really good, and we want everyone to know about it, so we'll just tell you what it does and what it does for you. It's particularly easy to fall into this approach when you've found yourself playing catch up with the competition. It's also particularly easy to fall into the trap of picking up on some minute feature that nobody cares about and making a big show about how and why this is a big differentiator. I've certainly done it: our product is the only one on the market that brings a smiley face up on each screen...the only one written in an obscure, arcane language...the only one that comes in a plain, brown wrapper.

Note to marketers/note to self: a differentiated aspect of your product, no matter how meritorious (or not) is NOT a distinctive competence.

No, your distinctive competence is something that you generally excel at - and that benefits your customer.

We all know that standard ones: you're the most efficient, and thus can charge less or provide more streamlined service and support; you've got the most advanced, the very best product; you're the most in tune with your customers and what they actually want, need, and value.

Everything under the sun that you can come up with as a distinctive competence may very well fall under one of these categories, but it may not sound exactly the same.

What might your distinctive competence be? Here are a few examples:

You may have deep-seated knowledge of an industry that enables you to develop products that solve vertical-specific problems in ways that generic, horizontal applications just can't do.
Your engineering approach may enable you to react to customer enhancement requests and other emerging requirements more rapidly than others.
Your implementation team may be so proficient that they can easily and cost effectively customize/integrate your application.
Your training approach may enable your customer to easily get new employees up and running.
Your automation strategy may let your customers painlessly and quickly purchase and implement new modules.

Whatever it is, you need to know - and, as the man said, be able to articulate - just what your distinctive competence is.

And it should go without saying that it's reality based. Prospects and customers will suss it out pretty quickly if you're blowing smoke here.

More on Apple and Social Media

2007-11-17T15:30:00.001-06:00

Following up on my earlier Apple post... after writing that I saw that Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim wrote an item called Apple’s Social Media Hell - Why it Needs to Repent, talking about Robert Scoble's outburst about his malfunctioning Mac.

Andy's point is that as Apple becomes more mainstream it won't be able to defend on a legion of hardcore fans to come to its defense. I'm not sure that's true; I don't think the fanboys are going anywhere. And I take issue with his example; he compares Scoble's post to the "Dell Hell" blog item of a while back, but there's a crucial difference; the Dell Hell item was someone complaining about specific Dell service policies, whereas it sounds like Scoble's Mac wouldn't start so he immediately fired off an obscenity-laden blog post. (Me, I would have tried a few things like booting from the install disks and then called AppleCare). That, plus working in a complaint that Apple doesn't give him free stuff, makes the Scoble post more like the screams of a toddler having a bad day than anything serious. If Apple were the most social media oriented company on earth, they still might want to skip responding to Scoble's post. (Or leave it to Fake Steve Jobs!)

It's an interesting question, though. Does increased popularity force a company like Apple to tune in to social media?

Tech Marketing Summarized

2007-11-17T06:24:00.000-06:00

I'm not a big fan of the "I'm a Mac" ads; mostly, I think they talk to the Apple faithful, not potential new customers. The Mac guy comes across as smarmy and smug, while the PC guy is more likeable. And in some cases, they're just not accurate. (And I'm writing this on my beloved Macbook!)

But I just love this one, for reasons that have nothing to do with Apple:

The PC guy is the typical techie; he just wants to talk about technology honestly. The PR person gets endlessly frustrated, because he just tells it like it is. Haven't we all seen this over and over? The Apple guy is, of course, an annoying marketing director, who wants to talk about his key messages without the engineers getting into irritating details. Haven't all of us who've worked in tech marketing lived this?

There's also a funny irony about this ad; Apple is terrible at having open conversations with its customers, and Microsoft is not. Apple is still caught up in carefully controlling the conversation and offering only calculated, filtered statements. While users are left speculating about what's next from the company, the Microsoft Mac development team is blogging about their work, including the upcoming Office 2008.

So it's a big funny to see Apple dinging Microsoft for PR spin. This funny post from Fake Steve Jobs is a bit closer to the truth. As a big fan of Apple's products, I'd like to see them take a lead from Microsoft on this count.

Majoring in History

2007-11-16T07:15:00.001-06:00

I worked for many years for a now defunct software company called Softbridge.

Softbridge had a long legacy (by software company standards) of technical excellence, and we traded on that legacy.

In our marketing literature, we touted the fact that we were one of the few companies that was on the dais with Bill Gates (at Windows of the World at the World Trade Center) when he released the first super-duper, truly graphical version of Windows. We were there because Microsoft had used a bit of our technology - the recorder - as one of the utilities that were part of Windows.

As I recall, we got very little money for it, but we did get a mention within the product. And we got bragging rights.

Which we used.

Well after our recorder had been replaced in their product, we still hyped the fact that Great God Microsoft had used a piece of technology from little old us.

For a while, this made sense, and it certainly spoke to our technical credentials.

But the recorder was no longer in use by Microsoft, and the techies who wrote the code were long gone, and still we included this piece of our lore in every presentation, proposal, and piece of collateral.

Similarly, when I worked at Genuity, we never failed to remind people that our roots were in BBN and that we had, in fact, invented the Internet. (Sorry, Al Gore, luv' ya and absolutely acknowledge that you had something to do with getting the whole thing off the ground through your legislative work, but "we" had a lot more to do with it than you did.) One of our engineers had, in fact, come up with the use of the @ in addresses. So, "we invented the at-sign."

Having an illustrious history is wonderful. It's something that you, as an employee, can take pride in, and it is something that can help underscore your bona fides.

But in both the case of Softbridge and Genuity, I think we made too much of our history, exploiting it well beyond it's "sell by" date. It was important to us, but what did it really do for our customers?

No, while we were leading with all our yesterdays, our customers and prospects wanted to know what we could do for them today, and what we would do for them tomorrow.

I've been thinking about this because I have a client with an amazing pedigree. Their history makes Softbridge's recorder and Genuity's @ look like party favors. They make a lot out of it, and are rightfully proud of it. And it is, of course, interesting to the market.

But just how interesting is it?

How closely tied is it to the day to day work they're engaged in now? How relevant is it to their customers? Just what is the connection between their history and their customers' business needs?

I'm thinking that the answer is "not very", which is an assumption that we will soon be testing.

No, they'll never lose their interest in their history. And why should they? It's there, and it helped make them what they are today.

But I'm thinking that at some point in the not to distant future, this company will no longer be majoring in history. Minoring, maybe. But majoring, no.

Whole Foods Makes a Whole Mistake

2007-11-15T06:12:00.000-06:00

I understand why the Whole Foods board decided to ban company executives from blogging or commenting on any non-Whole Foods site, a decision that Houston Chronicle business writer Loren Steffy talks about on his blog. But it's the wrong decision.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey got in hot water, you may remember, for posting about the company's battle to buy competitor Wild Oats without identifying himself.

Steffy calls the new policy "stunningly obvious," but it's not. Yes, it's stunningly obvious that executives should not be revealing non-public information or pretending to be someone else in their online activities.

But no online participation anywhere outside of the the company's own sites? That's a mistake. Don't you want your people to be establishing an online presence, networking, and showing their thought leadership in relevant communities?

That's like telling the Wall Street Journal, "Sorry, you can't speak to Mr. Mackey, you're not a Whole Foods publication." PR folks have been getting angling to get executives into publications forever, because there is a real benefit. The benefits in the world of social media are similar, and Whole Foods is making a mistake by locking up their top people online.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #6

2007-11-14T01:34:00.001-06:00

This post is the sixth in a series inspired by Pragmatic Marketing's 20 Rules of Product Management rules for technology marketing.

RULE #6: Product management should help sales channels, not individual sales people.

Obviously, when you're developing market approaches and sales tools, you're product and company will be best served by your focusing on those that can be widely deployed across an entire sales channel, direct or indirect. Take it from someone who has gone so far as to edit the (completely cretinous) letters to prospects written by a hapless sales person, we all would have been better off if I'd just created a prototype letter and made it available to everybody.

And like a lot of marketers, I'm sure, I've spent all sorts of time concocting presentations on demand, pitching in on last minute RFP responses, etc. - when the same time could have been spent making sure that the materials needed were available in a shared space, to be used by all. (Naturally, even when all that good stuff is out in shared-ville, you'll still get last minute emergency requests. But all you need to do at that point is direct folks to the url. Knock yourself out!)

Just say no to recreating a slight variation on the wheel every time a salesperson calls and asks you for something.

Similarly, when you're eliciting feedback and product input from sales, better to hear from many voices, rather than respond to the bleating of the lone sales wolf whose input is colored by the last lost deal.

But perhaps it's because I've spent so much time in small companies where there were only a handful of sales people, there are plenty of circumstances in which you want to work with individual sales people.

First off, there are some that you're just going to find more pleasant, helpful, and insightful. In my experience, these have also tended to be the most successful sales folks. You could argue, then, that they don't need your help. Maybe. But, as a marketer, you need to acknowledge that you might need theirs for reviewing sales tools, great feedback, access to customers...Yes, there are plenty of reasons why you want and need to develop relationships with individual sales people. And sometimes that will mean providing individual help to them. The good news? They're not the kind who'll ask for it unless they genuinely need it.

Of course, just as time spent helping out dunderheads detracts from working for the greater, common good, so does time spent working with the A students.

Hmmmmm. Maybe Pragmatic Marketing's 100% right here, after all.

BlogWorld Expo

2007-11-13T05:41:00.000-06:00

Last week I was at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. Lots of interesting stuff at the conference, and here are a few highlights.

There were apparently about 1500 people registered. I don’t think that many came, but it was busy. The crowd was an interesting mix; lots of bloggers, lots of business types, and then a whole cadre of political blogger (for one specific conference track), military bloggers, and Christian bloggers.

The sessions were... okay. One thing that became clear is that the knowledge level of attendees was all over the map; in one break, I spoke to a physician who just started blogging, an experienced podcaster who consults on building podcast audiences, and someone from an ad network. There were sessions where I thought I could have spoken and offered as much, and others where there were clearly knowledgeable people at the podium but things weren’t well organized. I did wish that the organizers had provided a little more detail on the sessions, so that it was clearer who the audience was; I was regretting some of my choices.

Here’s the question that I could tell people had, but no one seemed to have a crisp answer for: How do I do a social media marketing program? It’s clear that this is still somewhat uncharted territory, and there’s no accepted process for how this works - just best practices and mistakes to learn from. Which, in fact, makes it all more interesting and makes these types of conferences more valuable.

There was only one stinker of a session, and that’s pretty good.

The pay to promote people (Pay Per Post et al) were out in force, and I’m sure weren’t thrilled when a keynote speaker described their business as something that could cause the death of blogging. I have mixed feelings about that whole game, and really question whether opinions for cash is a good model or one that won’t just make people distrust bloggers the way they distrust everyone else.

One final note: the exhibitors seriously needed some basic training in how to staff booths. This is always an issue at shows, but I actually gave up on talking to a couple of vendors because the booth staff were deep in some internal conversation that I couldn't break into. Really, folks, aren't you there to talk to the people at the event?

But all in all, worthwhile, and I will think about going back next year.

What do you do if you're NaviSite?

2007-11-12T06:30:00.001-06:00

If you're a B2B marketer in the tech space, you've no doubt heard by now about the major fiasco that NaviSite, a web hosting provider, has been dealing with.

They acquired another company, and in the course of consolidating customers into their Massachusetts data center, hit a perfect storm of botched operations and bad luck. As a result, they've had a whole slew of customers with their web operations out of commission for days.

Now most web hosters can't and don't guarantee "six 9's" (99.9999%) of uptime, which computes to something like 2 or 3 seconds of downtime a month. Based on how much redundancy they're willing to pay for, customers are guaranteed varying levels of uptime - different 9's, as it were. But when you're in "one 9" territory of availability, well, you've got a problem.

Both Mark Cahill over on Vario Creative and Mary Schmidt are offering their usual sharp commentary on the NaviSite debacle - Mark from the added perspective of someone whose clients have been impacted by the NaviSite outage outrage. No one seems to feel that NaviSite marketing is responding all that well, I'm afraid. They seem to have lawyered up, likely on the advice of their lawyer. This is, after all, a big one. Hosting customers have Service Level Agreements that specify remedies when there are outages. As a veteran of the web hosting world, I've read a lot of those SLA's and I don't recall the redress for outages of quite the magnitude suffered by the NaviSite customers over the last week or so.

In any case, I've been doing some thinking about what I would be doing if I were NaviSite marketing.

It's pretty easy for me to put myself in their shoes because, for a while there, I was the director of product marketing for NaviSite's web hosting business. So it could have been my shoes that had stepped in this one.

What would I have done from a marketing perspective? Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Place information, including call numbers, prominently on the home page. I don't mean devote all the real estate to this issue. Just enough so that people impacted get the message that you're taking this matter seriously. Include in this message a "don't worry" statement for existing Navi customers who aren't impacted.
Update this every 4-6 hours, letting people know when you'll be posting updates. Stick to the schedule, even when there's nothing to report. However, if there's something big in the interim, don't wait to get it out there.
Also on the web site, have a video of the company President/CEO making a statement about the matter. No spin. No excuses. Facts, remorse, and a promise to get to the bottom of this.
Prepare lists of talking points for customers impacted, customers not impacted, prospects, press, and analyst.
Divide up the list of customers impacted and have someone give everyone a personal phone call. Use the talking points, but mostly have the callers settle in for an earful of abuse. Let the customers vent. They deserve to. Do not exempt senior management from making a few of these calls themselves.
Divide up the list of customers not impacted. Have senior management make a call to the Top 100 (or whatever the golden list of most important customers is called) and assure them that they're not in anyway impacted by this, that this won't happen to them, etc.
Send e-mails to all other non-impacted customers, assuring them they're OK.
Ask sales for a list of prospects who need a call from senior management.
Call an all-hands meeting so that everyone in the company hears first hand what's going on. This meeting should be brief - there's too much work to do. Update employees regularly via e-mail.
Have someone monitoring the blogosphere to see what people are saying - and who's saying it. (Obviously, it's more important to listen to customers and people like Mark Cahill, who has impacted customers, than it is to pay any attention to, say, me. Don't make defensive comments, but if there are misstated facts, correct them without making any excuses. Just make sure that what you're saying is correct. (And try to make sure that only "deputized" employees speak out on blogs.)
Reach out to key press and analysts, who will appreciate hearing directly from you, even if they don't cut you any slack.

Maybe NaviSite did all this. Maybe Navi marketing wanted to do all this, but management had other ideas.

Even if NaviSite - marketing and management - did everything right in response to this operational fiasco, I would be surprised if NaviSite can salvage 50% of the customers whose business they've botched. Whatever remedies they offer them, people will be pissed. They'll be suing. They'll be walking. Competitors are, no doubt, already swooping in.

Impacted customers aside, NaviSite has a lot to worry about. This is a big black eye for them. Prospect and renewal negotiations just got a whole lot harder, as customers and prospects will be demanding concessions. Employees have to feel like crap (or cynically justified because "they" f'd up). Navi is a small player, but they're a public company. I haven't looked, but their stock price may take a hit.

Good luck to the good folks at NaviSite - and there are plenty of them.

I don't see this one going away for a while.

BlogWorld Expo: Media Choices

2007-11-09T12:10:00.000-06:00

Good talk this morning by Leo Laporte on new media publishing, in which he talked about how podcasting has stalled out (in terms of adding users) in a way that blogs and online video haven't. He made some good points about which media work for what types of communication (video - emotional, audio - conversational, text - analytical) which make sense as general principles, albeit with plenty of exceptions.

But I wondered, as he spoke, if part of the problem with podcasting is just setting. Listening to audio at a computer is a departure from how we usually listen to talk programs, which is in the car. (In fact I do almost all my podcast listening in the car.) So I wonder if podcasters are just stuck because the opportunities for listeners to give them attention are much more limited than with video and text.

Church bulletin marketing

2007-11-09T07:27:00.001-06:00

The other day, I had lunch with my friend Peter. He lives on Boston's North Shore, and I went up his way. We went to a very nice little Greek restaurant in Peabody that was just about empty.

Peter has been there a couple of times and told me that, while it's not usually this empty, business is far less than the brisk business that the good food and charming atmosphere would seem to merit.

We started talking with one of the proprietors - the wife of the couple who own the place. (Maria is also an artist who's responsible for the decor and the art work hanging on the walls. Not to mention the waitress and hostess. Ah, the family run business...)

It seems to me that this little restaurant is a classic example of a business that could benefit from a little advertising in small local papers and church bulletins.

I don't know if all demoninations have church bulletins, but Catholic churches all seem to. And even with church closings, there are still a whole slew of RC churches on the North Shore.

What Maria needs to do is design a little ad - something I'm guessing she'd be quite good at - and float it in a few bulletins and I'd bet they'd get business. Throw in a "buy one entree, get one free" promo, a senior special, or a free appetizer. I'm pretty sure people would come.

Folks read church bulletins - sometimes even in church. Folks read local papers - they even read the ads.

And respond to them.

We don't read any church bulletins in my house, but we do read the little freebie local rags - and clip every lunch deal coupon we find.

I hope Maria tries an ad or two in the local church bulletins. Cheap. Easy. Read.

I'd hate to see this wonderful little restaurant fail because nobody knows they're there.

At Blog World Expo...

2007-11-08T18:27:00.000-06:00

Greetings from Blog World Expo in Las Vegas!

Interesting assortment of people, speakers, and vendors. This morning I attended a really good session on corporate blogging led by Debbie Weil, definitely a voice of authority on the topic. The panel included bloggers from Kodak, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and HP.

Here’s a question that I asked that I don’t think anybody has a definitive answer to: how do you measure the success or the results of a corporate blog? Is anybody in a large corporation turning to their blog team and asking that? My guess is that before long, having a blog will be an obvious necessity, and no one will be looking for specific ROI measurements... but still, there will likely be some measures that people pay attention to (traffic, links back, etc.).

How do you measure the success of your blog?

What's with the Geico Ads?

2007-11-07T05:33:00.001-06:00

First there were the clever little pay-attention ads with the gecko. Geco, Gecko. Get it? Pretty soon a company you may not have heard of was a company you couldn't help but have heard of.

Did this increase Geico's business? I'm guessing it did.

Then there were the cave men...

Not my favorites of all time, but reasonably well done, if you overlook the connection.

Geico. Cavemen. Get it?

Well, no.

And they were still running the gecko ads all along, were they not?

Now there are the retro ads - some in black and white.

Chatty Cathy dolls. Beverly Hillbillies. Cabbage Patch Kids.

And the greeting card for Dear Old Mom. Is that a Geico ad, too?

I don't get it.

Maybe it's just me, and this is way too much for my feeble little beebee brain to take in, but I find these ads a real mish-mosh.

Maybe if, like the cavemen ads, they were somewhat thematic, I would like them better.

Kids toys of the 50s/60s: Chatty Cathy. Mr. Machine. Tony the Pony.

B&W TV Shows: Beverly Hillbillies, Mr Ed, F-Troop.

Cabbage Patch Kids: Why stop with Ben Winkler? Weren't millions of CPK's with unique identities "born" in the 80s? (Arrabelle Louise. Destiny Maude. Gilbert Anton....)

Plus they're still running the gecko ads. (Don't know about the cavemen.)

I get that Geico wants to be known for their clever ads, but this current suite, I think, misses the mark in terms of how well they work together.

The good news is that, now that baseball season is over - having ended in an entirely satisfying way for those of use who live (and die) in Red Sox Nation - I will be watching far less ad-addled television.

Come April, who knows what Geico will be up to. I just hope it hangs together better than the current batch.

Web 2.0, Web Two Point No, and BlogWorld Expo

2007-11-06T05:08:00.000-06:00

I am heading off to the BlogWorld Expo this week; if you're going to be there, let me know. It looks like a good conference and set of vendors, so it should be the center of the world of blogging for a few days.

It's interesting, though, to note that while blogs have become absolutely mainstream, some companies don't get it. Have a look at Mary Schmidt's tale of complaining to American Airlines and mentioning that she'd blogged about her bad experience with them, and how they replied:

We have received your email, however, because of company online security procedures, we do not engage in researching online blogs. However, your perspective has been noted. Ms. Schmidt, thank you for your interest.

Because of security reasons, we can't look at a web site? Oh, okay. That was followed by the ultimate "Please drop dead, you annoying customer, you" closer:

This is an “outgoing only” email address. If you ‘reply’ to this message by simply selecting the reply button, we will not receive your additional comments.

The whole tone is "Look, we really don't want to hear your stupid complaints." It's hard to imagine why airlines like American are in trouble these days, isn't it?

How behind the curve is American Airlines? They still haven't figured out blogging and social media, and others are already getting over it. One of the biggest cheerleaders of all things Web 2.0, Steve Rubel, suddenly announced that he's realized that all these companies doing pointless things in overly complicated ways with no prospects of ever making money are kind of silly:

Let's face it, we're skunk drunk and it's because of money. It's almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together. This time, it's not stock market money but private equity, M&A, VCs and to some degree the reckless abandonment of logic by some advertisers who are perpetuating what is sure to end badly when the economy turns. Hubris is back my friends.

I don't disagree with Steve, but he's been one of the biggest cheerleaders of everything silly on the web. (And he admits that in the blog post: I give him a lot of credit for that.) He's not alone in this assessment; apparently the money guys at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have figured it out, too:

"We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies," says Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. He mentioned this during an after dinner conversation last week. He said he had recently told John Battelle, one of the organizers of the rapidly growing Web 2.0 Summit conference, that the term no longer had the same positive cachet it once had. In the VC community it clearly has a negative one.

But lest this be seen as sudden sanity onset, consider this commentary from Tom Foremski in that same blog post:

Web 2.0 companies will now have to reinvent and redefine themselves. And reprint their business plans. They should also remove any mention of "long tail economics." I have a bad feeling about the longevity of that term in the investment community. It sounds a touch too W2.

Nixing anything "long tail" is an easy way to future-proof a business plan for a few months longer.

"Social graph" is doing great right now, so make sure you pepper your business plan with that term. "Social platform" still has legs. And "attention economy" is a ricochet term with a bullet.

That passage makes my head hurt, mostly because he's right. But it leaves me wondering what ever happened to ideas having some relevance beyond buzzwords. The idea of Web 2.0 has not gone away. The long tail concept is an interesting and valid one, but the term became trendy and started being applied to all kinds of things that weren't particularly "long tail," and now it's pretty much just something to set off our BS detectors. The same is true of all the various social media buzzwords.

There are valid concepts behind all of this, and people will figure out how to make businesses based on them. Of course, for each of those businesses, there will be 99 hopefuls with half baked ideas vomiting out a stream of buzzwords in a sort of dadaist Word Salad 2.0.

Interesting times, anyway. Meanwhile, off to Las Vegas.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #5

2007-11-05T08:44:00.000-06:00

This post is the fifth in a series inspired by Pragmatic Marketing's 20 Rules of Product Management rules for technology marketing.

RULE #5: Product management determines the go-to-market strategy; Marcom executes it.

First off, much of my career has been spent in companies where product management/product marketing and marcom were housed under one very small group. Heck, I've been in places where they were all me-myself-and-I. I've also worked in companies, as a product manager, where product management was outward-facing to limited degree - establish requirements, go on sales calls - but leave most of marketing to marcom. These were places in which there was no such thing as a separate, specific product marketing function, and in which much of what product management focused on was project management during the development and roll-out cycle.

But when I worked at Genuity, we had separate product marketing and marcom groups, residing - for much of my tenure there -in separate organizations, connecting up on the org-chart level only at the president box.

This would have worked out fine if someone in the president box, or in the EVP boxes just below, actually agreed that there were two separate functions, with different roles, responsibilities, and expertise. And declared that the two different groups were going to get along.

Well, that never happened and, although the reasons had little to do with marketing, is it any wonder that Genuity went out of business?

Although I had many good friends and colleagues in Marcom, relationships between us (Product Marketing) and them were generally non-productive and rancorous.

Marcom was under sales, and much of what they did was what sales wanted them to do. Now, I'll get into why this is a bad idea at another time, but suffice it to say that sales wanted the short term hit, not the long term build. It never seemed to matter what the overall corporate strategy was, if sales didn't think they could easily sell it tomorrow it didn't get marketed today.

Marcom also owned all the budget, so Product Marketing was always in the position of begging if there was any program we wanted to do.

Sometimes the budget stuff played out in ridiculous ways. At one annual sales conference, there was an exhibit hall for the products. We all had draped tables, signs we made out-of-pocket at Kinko's, photocopied sell sheets, no lights, and lame-o promotional gimmicks to attract the sales guys' interest.

Marcom shipped in trade-show booths - beautiful lighting, nice signage - at which they showcased their new corporate brochures, ad campaigns, web site, and corporate giveaways.

We had the content, they had the stuff.

Shouldn't we have come together on this?

But, no.

The enmity between the two camps was just too great.

The rap on Product Marketing: no sense of the real world, i.e., sales.

The rap on Marcom, content-less big spenders.

Political battles at the EVP and VP levels - characterized by all sorts of sniping and such wonderful endeavors as trying to set up redundant, parallel groups in their own organizations.

Truly, I spent half my life at Genuity just trying to define organizational roles, unruffle feathers, make peace, and just try to make some sense out of things. (For most of my time at Genuity, I headed up Product Marketing across all products.)

I may not be Mahatma Gandhi, but if I couldn't get things to work out, ain't no one was going to.

What a waste!

So, I'd add on a bit to Pragmatic's rule: make sure that the roles are clear, and insist on an environment of mutual trust and respect.

You Have Got to be Kidding Me

2007-11-04T19:45:00.000-06:00

Next week I'm heading out to Las Vegas to attend BlogWorld Expo, so tonight I'm looking through the list of exhibitors to decide who I really want to make sure I see. And on the list is a company called Entrecard. I've never heard of them. When you click the link on the event site to find out who they are, this is what you see:

That's it. That's the whole thing. No links, no explanation, just "Hey, give us your email address!" (My first thought was, "Drop this, losers.")

Honestly, there are good landing pages and bad landing pages but there's also another category I can most kindly call "idiotic."

I don't know who these people are are, I don't know what they do, but I'm supposed to give them permission to bug me? I think not. Work with me here, people. I'm going to be there; all you have to do is pique my interest so I'll spend five minutes at your booth, thereby giving you the opportunity to wow me. You're not even trying.

Giving your Marketing Away

2007-11-03T08:57:00.001-05:00

Mack Collier has a nice piece in MarketingProfs about show social media changes marketing. It's a nice piece because it doesn't overreach and has some specific examples what companies have done and what you can consider doing yourself in this arena.

He notes:

There are risks involved. Letting your marketing speak in the customer's voice instead of your own can mean that sometimes your intended message isn't communicated as you would prefer. But if your marketing is spoken with the customer's voice, it will be more authentic and will better resonate with your target market.

This is the part that people often forget; give your customers power and tools to talk about you, and they might say things that aren't what you would have chosen. Still, for many marketers, the power of motivated customers outweighs the risks. It also, I think, keeps companies honest; if your customers start saying things you don't like, there's a reason, and you ought to be thinking about that.

Why Doesn't Everyone Do This?

2007-11-01T09:18:00.000-05:00

Mobile phones are highly personal objects, and as a result, getting a new one - no matter how great it is - can be traumatic in some ways. You have a lot to relearn. How do I add that person to my contacts? How do I swap calls when I get another call coming in? How does the conference calling work? Whoops, that button hangs up the phone (sorry, whoever I was talking to). What's that button on the side?

And when using an operating system designed to cram information into a tiny screen, and that relies on a couple of multipurpose buttons for input, it's obviously challenging for the developers too. So there are two problems: deciding whether you'll really like a phone, or wind up hating it after using it a couple of months, and learning all that stuff when you get a new phone.

I'm in the "now that I know it I hate it" phase with my phone and am thinking of getting an iPhone. And so I actually sat and watched the twenty-minute "guided tour" video that Apple's got on their web site.

You know what? Not only is it a good sales piece, it's something that I wish I could have watched for every phone I've ever used.

As I watched, I thought about thumbing through a Motorola phone manual once upon a time to figure out how things worked (usually finding that "this service is carrier dependent, so go figure it out yourself" for many of my questions), and thought, Why didn't they do this? (Especially since Motorola generally makes lovely hardware with demented software.)

Yes, it's a sales piece - but it manages to tell you how to do everything. Make a call, take a call, switch calls, conference people together, add people to your contacts, use other applications while talking to somebody, get your email, send a text message, and so on.

It's very handy for a potential buyer because it gives you a real sense of what using the phone will be like - not 100%, of course, but more than you'll get playing with it in the store for ten minutes. And if you've just taken one out of the box, it's the twenty minute "here are all the basics you need" primer that is notably absent from other phones.

I've railed in the past about dumb use of video to present information better communicated in text. This is the opposite; this is an excellent use of video to show you things that would sound complicated in print. If I get an iPhone the first thing I'll do is sit down, phone in hand, and watch it again and follow it along, and I think it will help me avoid the "first week of new phone" issues of hanging up on people, missing calls, and so on.

The thing is... it's so obvious. Why isn't there one of these for every phone that has more than basic calling functions (which is to say, pretty much every phone)?

Trick or Treat

2007-10-31T00:37:00.001-05:00

I've always loved Halloween.

When you're a kid, what's not to like about dressing up, roaming around after dark, and eating candy? As parochial school kids, we had even more reason than most to love the day: we got November 1st off. (They don't call it Halloween for nothing. The name means 'The Eve of All Hallows', another name for 'All Saints Day.' So you had to get up and go to Mass. Big deal. Well worth having a day off of school that the "pubs" (i.e., kids that went to public school) didn't. Ha, ha!)

So Halloween was a pretty big deal. But it wasn't that big a deal. Costume choices were homemade, or purchased at Woolworth's for $2.49. Those store-bought costumes of Snow White and Bugs Bunny were completely cheesy. Someone with a match got too near...Whoosh! Hey, that's a really neat "pillar of fire" costume.

Needless to say, we didn't go in for store bought.

Early on, my mother made witch costumes for me and my sister Kathleen. They weren't really witch costumes, they were long black dresses (with long hems, and plenty of room in the shoulders to let out).

In year one, when Kath and I were 6 and 4, we were witches, with purchased crepe paper witch hats and really scary rubber witch masks.

It was really warm and misty that Halloween. The dye from the black crepe paper ran down our faces, and the wonderful, scary masks - complete with big hook nose and facial wart - were too sweaty. We couldn't breathe. We couldn't see. We took them off.

But those black dresses.

Well, my mother got her efforts-worth out of them.

I wore that black dress when I went as a "college professor" (first grade), and as a nun (third grade). I think I wore it one other time.

It was also pressed into service when one of my brothers dressed up as a priest - Saint Isaac Jogues, I think, who was an intriguing figure, as he was a missionary priest who came to the New World to convert the Native Americans. He was martyred, and his fingers were gnawed off by some of those he failed to convert. Perfect for an eight year old boy required to dress up as a saint for the school Halloween party, wouldn't you say?

Anyway, in those years I wasn't wearing the witch costume for something or another, my mother pulled some costume together. (Gypsy was always easy and popular.) Or I came up with one on my own. One year I cut arm holes in some old green drapes, made a cone head out of cardboard, and went out as a pencil. At least I think I did. I remember making the costume, but - as with many of my crafty efforts - it may have been so terrible looking that I gave up and went another route. (Maybe that was the year I went out as the football player, wearing some old football pants that had been castdown to us from my cousin Robert, a sweater, and my brother Tom's helmet.)

Girls pretty much did some type of costume until 8th grade or so. After about 4th grade, boys went as hobos (beat up clothes, old man's hat, ashes rubbed on the face), soldiers (no lack of old WWII uniforms hanging around), or beatniks (pointy beard drawn on with mascara).

So, costumes were pretty minimalist.

So were decorations: whatever construction paper pumpkins and black cats you made at school were taped to the living room windows, augmented by brown lunch bags that you decorated to look like an owl and then blew up. (Whoooo.....Whoooo......) A few creative types carved pumpkins, or made scarecrows that they plunked on their front lawns, leaning against a tree.

In the last decade or so, however, Halloween has become a really big business. Of course, it still can't compare with gift giving occasions like Christmas in terms of spending.

Still, there are Halloween lights, banners, pumpkin carving kits, special dishware and serving pieces, all sorts of doo-dads and decorative pieces.

Halloween greeting cards, of course. I send out a few.

Costumes for kids. Costumes for adults. Costumes for pets.

For those of us who don't do costumes: sweaters, socks, scarves. (I will be wearing a black sweater, a candy corn scarf, and orange socks with witches on them.)

This is a big business, baby. Once again, American consumer marketers demonstrate that they know how to create demand. Once again, American consumers demonstrate that we know how to consume.

Well, Halloween has nada, zip, zilch to do with the B2B tech marketing I do, so I don't get to play as a marketer, just as a minor consumer.

But - despite all the commercialism, despite all the crap - I still love Halloween, and wish a Happy Halloween to all you marketers out there.

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I also posted about Halloween over on Pink Slip, if you care to take a look.

The Beta Joke

2007-10-30T06:08:00.000-05:00

It seems that every new web service that appears is in "public beta," and that granddaddy of these is Gmail, which has been in "beta" for three years. Last week Google announced that it was adding IMAP support to Gmail - a much needed improvement for anybody who accesses email from multiple devices - with the usual Google comment that it would activated in everybody's Gmail accounts "in the next few days."

It's turning out to be much slower than that, and at least once I've heard someone say, "Well, it is a beta product."

It's a beta product that is presented to the world as a finished product in every way but the word "beta" on the screen, and Google deserves some grief for this. Once upon a time, it actually meant something when a product was in beta. It meant that it was not intended for real-word use just yet, it was changing and being fixed, and you used it at your own risk. And it also mean there was a schedule somewhere for it to get out of beta, for a release candidate to be ready, and for it to become a real product.

I don't think you're going to find anyone at Google who will seriously tell you that they view Gmail as an unreleased product. Especially when it's a key component of their Google Apps service, which is not marked beta.

So, having gotten lots of individuals and now businesses (including mine) to use Gmail as their mail service, what does that beta mean? It's a joke, and it makes Google look very bad. Add to that the broken promise of an important new features being there in "a couple of days" and you it seems like at Google beta means, "not really supported, good luck to you!"

Gmail is a very, very good product, even in its "beta" form. I just with Google would be honest with its users, and drop the "beta" tag. It's a free mail service, the expectations for support are not that high anyway.

And, I think they've played a big part of creating this "everything is beta" craze, which is good for nobody except service providers who don't want to support users.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #4

2007-10-29T05:36:00.000-05:00

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Rule #4: In the absence of market facts, he who owns the compiler wins.

I've lived through this nightmare more than once and, all I can say is, even in the presence of market facts it's plenty easy for the guy with the compiler to win.

But when you're working with the developers, it is ALWAYS best to have the following:

Win-Loss analysis: If 19 out of 20 times, you hear that a key factor in a loss was ease of use, your developers can, in fact, respond that "The customers don't know what they're talking about," "We're selling to the wrong people," and "Our sales folks don't know how to sell." But you will have market facts to support your argument that the UI needs work.
Competitive info: The last thing you want to find yourself doing is playing competitive catch-up - especially when some of the features you're trying to catch up with are completely irrelevant. Yet it is always useful to know what you're up against. And if you can anticipate moves that your competition is going to make - through analysis of what they're saying publicly, who they're partnering with, where they're selling, etc. - so much the better.
Market trends: What are the analysts saying about your industry - or the industry you sell into? What's being said about technology trends. No, you don't have to listen to every 'Gartner assigns a probability of 0.8 to universal adoption of touchscreens by 2010", but people do place significant weight on what the "theys" of the world say. So dig up whatever data you can find on SOA, SaaS, MDM - or whatever acronym you think your product needs to accommodate. (Years ago I worked for a software company that - for a lot of reasons not worth going into here - was wedded to OS/2. I remember bringing a copy of InfoWeek (I think) with a picture of OS/2 in a coffin with a lily on it on the cover into a development meeting. It definitely helped us move along on our decision to convert to NT.)
Customer input: The customer is not always right, and sometimes they will ask for stupid things, or not so stupid things that are, in fact, one-offs that help them and only them. But your trusted customers - not your developers - are the ones actually using your product, so their ideas should be heard.
Sales engineering and customer service input: Your sales engineers tend to know better than anyone else what the technical obstacles are to selling and implementing your product. You need a forum for capturing their ideas. Customer service folks tend to know better than anyone else what the technical obstacles are to ongoing, day-to-day success with your products. You need a forum for capturing their ideas.

When product management/product marketing start talking product with the developers, they need to be armed with the richest possible set of market facts they can find. The above are useful sources of those facts. It's then up to you to put them in a digestible, sensible format to present them to the developers.

There is still no guarantee that a really stubborn guy with a compiler with balk at product ideas that don't spring full blown from his own head. But if you've got the facts, ma'am, it's far more likely that resistance will fade away.

Saturday Mishmash

2007-10-27T06:44:00.000-05:00

A few things from the ever-growing "blog about that!" list.

Blog search becomes useless: This item from Blog Business Summit matches what I've observed: blog search tools like Technorati and Google Blog Search are becoming pointless, because all you find is blog spam. I've about given up on them, and I wish someone would create a blog search tool that was able to distinguish the splogs from the blogs.

Getting retail right: Apple's slick retail stores have been a successful part of the company's strategy, and this Fast Company piece by a writer who went "undercover" and worked at a number of retail operations shows why:

Many companies fail from the start by talking down to their new hires and using training materials geared for the lowest common denominator. Gap started employee orientation on the wrong foot by showing us a video about the perils of employee theft. Starbucks handed out Orwellian handbooks telling us to "Be Authentic." Such approaches produce cynicism and engender a fake sense of belonging, if any at all. Apple treated us like adults.

Apple does a lot of other things well. Employees are taught how to work together because customers notice when employees don't get along. Apple floods its retail zone with staff because the bottom line suffers every minute customers wait for help. By the time I got to Apple (my last stop), I knew that dress codes (like Gap's) were bogus and uniforms that match a job (like at UPS) are critical. Apple requires staff to wear tasteful company-issued T-shirts and lanyards. Employees also hand out business cards as in high-end clothing stores, an act that calls them out as individuals in a way not typical of traditional retail.

The Apple retail experience isn't perfect (I actually once stormed out of their Houston Galleria store insisting I'd never return, though I did), but it's one of the better ones.

I thought the line about Starbucks was interesting; I'm so tired of thinking, "No, I don't want the pumpkin latte they're forcing you to push today in a really "authentic" way, because I actually come here to drink coffee, not candy." I'm not a jerk, though; all I say is "No, thanks."

What do do when life SUX: The Sioux City, Iowa airport authority tried to get their three-letter code changed, but they didn't like any of the alternatives, so they're sticking with what they've got: SUX. And they're making it part of their marketing. Their web site kind of screams small-city earnest charm ("Why wouldn't ya?"), which is totally appropriate. And you can buy SUX gear. "Go SUX!"

Enjoy your weekend!

Macy's Brand Killing Spree

2007-10-26T07:04:00.001-05:00

Since Boston's latest home grown department store, Filene's, closed down - a depressing and protracted affair - I've been doing my share of sniffily, nostalgic be-pissing and be-moaning. Oh, everything is becoming that same everywhere you look. Of course, the fact that there was nothing particularly unique about Filene's other than its name, logo, and brand association with Boston/New England. You could pretty much get the same merchandise in any other middle class, middle of the road department store anywhere in the country.

(The one unique aspect of Filene's was its Bargain Basement, which actually hasn't been an official part of Filene's for years, and which lives on, although not in its original location for the time being.)

Similarly, I rued the death of Marshall Field in Chicago.

Not that I did any shopping there, but my mother grew up and Chicago, and when we visited there, my she sometimes took us downtown. I remember going there as a kid - the nearby El, the filigree on the facade, the perfume counters.

I don't know that much about Marshall Field, other than that it had something of an upscale reputation, and carried some high end lines.

Now that Marshall Field is a Macy's, I understand that they've dropped some of those upscale lines, which has resulted in a fall off of business at the flagship store.

While I can sit here and complain about Macy's, and wonder why they didn't let the local stores keep their local names (Filene's...A Macy's Store; Marshall Field's....A Macy's Store), I also recognize that, from a brand point of view, calling all the stores Macy's makes sense.

It certainly makes sense when it come to advertising - the same ads can run untouched in every city where there's a Macy's. And that has to be pretty much every city in the country.

And it certainly makes sense when it comes to managing customer expectations. Macy's is Macy's is Macy's. Yes, I'm sure that they vary the merchandise based on location - surely they sell more winter coats in Boston and Chicago than in Houston. But customers have a right to walk into a Macy's in wherever-ville and find the Bali bra they're looking for.

No, the Marshall Field customers who wanted the upscale brands won't be back there. They'll be at Nieman's, at Saks, at Nordstrom's. But the core demographic served by Macy's in New York has got to be present in equal proportion in Chicago. And Boston. And Houston. Middle class. Middle of the road. (We have to buy our bras somewhere.)

Yes, it is a loss of identity and interest when iconic stores get gobbled up. I want there to be local color. I don't want everything to be homogenized into one undifferentiated, boring, massive lump.

Still, I think that in the long run, it will turn out that Macy's has done the right thing in enforcing the Macy's brand. Short term losses, short term pain. But the right thing.

And as long as they still run the "Macy's Day Parade" each Thanksgiving, I can forgive them if they've robbed the world of my store (Filene's) and my mother's (Marshall Field).

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Meanwhile, I haven't checked it out, but someone told me that Marshall Field fans in Chicago have been picketing to restore their store's good name. Shopadarity Forever!

Remember Who You Are

2007-10-25T06:08:00.000-05:00

Giving advice to Apple has always been a popular pastime in the IT and business press, even though most of the advice turns out to be wrong. One suggestion that I think is horribly wrong comes from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet, who thinks Apple should start selling Macs with Windows (only) as their OS.

At first glance there's a certain logic to it:

OK, but let’s get back to the original question - What could/should Apple do to take sales and profits to the next level? Simple. Release an Apple branded Windows-based PC. I know, I know, this kind of talk is bound to upset the hardened Apple fanatic, but it makes perfect sense. One of the things that’s undoubtedly helped boost Mac sales is Boot Camp. Now there’s no punishment for switching platforms because you can take your old platform with you, but just as some people got tired of paying the Microsoft tax when they wanted a PC to run Linux on it, people who want Apple hardware in order to run Windows on it will eventually see the Mac OS as an Apple tax. Why doesn’t Jobs and the crew at Cupertino just skip that whole Apple tax step and offer customers a choice of operating systems. Since Windows is the dominant OS at present, that’s a good place to start, but if Apple really wants to offer the customer real choice, Linux would also be great.

Here's the flaw in the logic: I think that very few people buy Macs to run Windows, as Kingsley-Hughes suggests. They (like me) buy Macs because they can run Windows when needed, but otherwise are Macs.

Apple's invested a considerable amount of effort into creating their brand and their product differentiators, and OS X is the heart of that. A Mac with nothing but Windows is a commodity product like a Sony, Dell, or HP PC. It's a very nice offering in that market, but it makes Apple just another computer.

It's very, very important to understand why your customers buy your product. In Apple's case, it's because they provide an excellent and non-Windows user experience. Now, I'm sure there's some segment of buyers who look at the new iMacs and think, "That's gorgeous! I want one!" but would rather run Windows. (And they can, of course, do that today.)

It's the same problem with the endless suggestions that they license OS X to run on other hardware. Both moves turn them from a company selling a complete experience to another hardware manufacturer, trying to out-do everyone else on cost efficiencies. It takes a specific set of capabilities to be profitable in that game... and it's not Apple's game.

When you forget who you are, you wind up playing someone else's game, and guess what? They're probably better at it. I suspect that Apple is happy to have their (growing) niche, knowing that it will probably never be bigger than the Windows segment - but that it will satisfy its customers and generate profit for the company.

The shock of recognition: baby boomers as "seniors"

2007-10-24T07:00:00.001-05:00

Over on Seth Godin's blog, he mentions that he will be speaking at an upcoming conference called "Marketing to Men, Women and Boomers". (Okay: are Boomers really a separate category from Men and Women? Come on: To the young men and womenfolk, we just look like we're out of play.)

In any case, Seth had an internal link to a post on marketing to boomers, in which he makes the argument that "traditionally" marketers haven't bothered marketing to seniors because of a belief that older people are closed to the new, just "trying to maintain the status quo." Open - presumed by marketers to be younger - people "are seeking out things that they believe will make their lives better."

Seth then suggests that because boomers have been open their entire lives, they will be worth marketing to:

Senior travel, senior fashion, senior experiences... it's all fair game, because there's a different demographic inhabiting that age group now.

First there's the shock of recognition (emphasis on shock) when I see boomer and senior brought together as equivalents. Hey, we're the baby boomers, the only senior we know is senior class. But the first baby boomers have turned 60, and while 60 is the new 40, I guess we qualify as seniors - or will shortly.

Whether we're seniors or boomers - and I'm still a proponent of the more youthful, buoyant label of "boomer, we're certainly seeing a lot of non-Polident advertising aimed at "us" - think the Dennis Hopper "Dream" ads. (Note that Hopper is a boomer icon to the first wave boomers but is, himself, a pre-boomer.)

A few observations on boomers:

One, we are obviously a huge chunk of the population, and thus it's just going to be difficult to ignore us. But within this huge chunk there are many sub-populations. Some of these are based on age. Let's face it, there's a big difference between a first wave boomer who remembers when the Beetles appeared on Ed Sullivan, and a last gasp boomer born in 1964 - the year the Beetles shook their mop tops on old Eddy's show.

It's not just the age subsets, either. There are obvious different groupings based on education, job, life experience, affluence, etc. The "classic" boomer that comes most commonly to mind is the group that came of age during Vietnam, protested on campus, spent a summer bumming around Europe courtesy of the $200 Icelandic Airline flight, didn't trust anyone over thirty, ended up getting a law degree, etc. (This is the group the Dennis Hopper ads are squarely aimed at.)

Well, for each boomer that fits this bill, there's the guy who actually went to Vietnam, not college, and made his living in manufacturing or a trade.

There's another point I'd like to make, and it's one that's consciously or unconsciously, alluded to when Seth writes about "senior travel, senior fashion, senior experience."

Because if there's one thing about people in their 50's and 60's, it's that they already have enough stuff. We don't need dishes. We have enough earrings. We have enough pictures on the wall, enough flower vases. We have our dining room table, our living room couch. Sure, we'll open the wallet for electronics - iPods, iPhones, flat screens. We'll buy new cars. (Actually, "we" won't: I'm about to get rid of my car and am hoping I can go carless the rest of my life. The pleasures of living in a city.) But, basically, we have enough stuff. Enough stuff to last a lifetime.

But, for the boomers with the money for it, there will definitely be strong interest in travel and "experience."

You may not need a coffee table, but that doesn't mean you aren't interested in a trek to Machu Pichu. (I'm not so sure about Seth's "senior fashion" angle - comfy clothing that doesn't look like the comfy clothing our parents wore?)

In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens with all the marketing that we'll be increasingly seeing that's aimed at the baby boomers as we enter what happens to all of us - men, women, or baby boomer - and that's the final shopping sprees of life.

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To read more on marketing to boomers, look here.

Disrupting Markets for Fun and Profit

2007-10-23T06:59:00.000-05:00

In a Wall Street Journal column on the US mobile phone industry, Walt Mossberg talks about the problems with the business models used by the big 4 carriers and why they're not good for either consumers or innovation. In doing so, he touches on some ideas that have crossed my mind in the past regarding that industry, and which can be applied to any market.

Mossberg's point, well-taken, is that mobile phone customers don't like what carriers offer them:

You have to buy your phone from the carrier. That means you're stuck with their choices, at their prices.
You are pushed toward a discounted phone with a service commitment. You might be able to pay a higher price for the phone without a commitment, but you'll be discouraged from doing so; information on those options is quite hard to find, and...
Handsets are not interoperable. Sprint and Verizon phones simply don't work with anybody else's service. T-Mobile and AT&T use GSM technology with SIM cards which makes it theoretically possible to swap carriers by swapping SIMs, but they put software locks on the phones to defeat that. They can be undone, but it takes effort.

Mossberg talks about the government's role in this, which is legitimate for the mobile market, because the entire business depends on being given use of something that belongs to the public: wireless spectrum.

Here's a thought exercise that requires ignoring that stumbling block: what if an upstart carrier launched with the following proposition?

You can use any unlocked GSM phone on our network. Bring your old one, shop around for one, or we will sell you one.
We'll charge you a reasonable upfront fee for the SIM and set up your account with no contract. You go month by month (or prepaid). Of course, if you will sign a contract, we'll give you a financial incentive (perhaps waiving the SIM fee), but you don't have to. And we won't extend the contract every time you drive within 300 yards of our store, like the other guys do.
Change your plan anytime. Change your phone by buying a new one anytime. Have more than one: your slim flip phone for a night on the town and your Blackberry for when you're in road warrior mode, whatever you want.

I think anybody offering that would do very well. They wouldn't even have to have the lowest prices - as Verizon shows, premium pricing is no barrier to market share. Lots of people would prefer the freedom.

Now, given that all of these companies have a business that depends on being granted access to a public resource, I personally think it would be appropriate for the government to say, "Fine, you can use that public resource, but you have to follow some rules that make you treat consumers properly." The political climate in the US and the tremendous lobbying resources of our telecom giants have prevented that, of course, but it would be a reasonable bargain to strike.

Mossberg points out that the iPhone, for all the complaints about lack of openness and its requirement that it be used with one specific carrier, is the first device to break some of these rules. You don't have to buy it from AT&T; in fact, you can buy a used iPhone from the Apple Store (when they're available) or on eBay and activate it like any other phone. Apple may have gotten into bed with AT&T on this product, but they certainly have kept AT&T on their own side of the bed - far from the product development.

Apple might, I think, have gotten away with more - perhaps getting hold of some spectrum and creating their own carrier, or worked out roaming deals with T-Mobile and AT&T. I don't blame them for not pushing that far - this is a new market for them.

But as I read about the expected Google phone and the idea of an ad-supported mobile phone, I wonder if Google's got it all wrong. Instead of pushing a new and untested model on people, would they be better off fixing what people hate about the current approach and creating something like the hypothetical service I described above?

And here's the more general lesson for marketers, particularly those who are upstarts in an established industry. We've seen lots of people try to do a basic resell of mobile services with service plans that copy the incumbent offerings - Virgin's mobile service comes to mind.

If you want to get toehold in a market where people are unhappy with what "everybody does, because everybody does it," do something different. Disrupt the status quo, and do so with the funds to stay in it long enough for people to see that there's another way.

It's not a guarantee of success - AT&T, for example, could shrug its corporate shoulders, give in, and start offering the very same thing in no time. In this particular market, though, incumbents are fond of welcoming their customers with gilded handcuffs, and there's an opportunity for someone who does something different to grab market share.

How about your market?

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #3

2007-10-22T00:25:00.001-05:00

This post is the third in a series inspired by Pragmatic Marketing's 20 Rules of Product Management rules for technology marketing.

RULE #3 Time spend on the strategic reduces the time wasted on the tactical.

There are books written, I'm quite sure, that define strategic and tactical, but here's my simple definition:

Strategic is where you want to go; tactical is how to get there.

Framed in those simple terms, it's pretty easy to see that you better have the strategic figured out first - or why bother with the tactical at all? Isn't going tactical without knowing strategic a bit like hopping in the car to go on vacation, without figuring out just what kind of vacation everyone wants?

Now, life can be one big adventure and all that - and I'm sure that there are occasional successful vacations that start out with hop in the car and go mode.

But for everyone who ends up feeling that they had the perfect vacation, there are a couple of dozen who feel cheated because they had their sand pails and shovels packed for the beach, and they ended up in the mountains where nobody really wanted to go. And I'm pretty sure that even the odd vacation successes are because the strategy was 'we just want to go on a fun vacation somewhere,' and the tactic was 'jump in the car and go.'

In business, however, this sort of strategy makes very little sense. Sure, you will end up somewhere, but is it the best somewhere for you? Or even an okay one?

There are a couple of recurring themes that pop into my head when I think about the implications for marketing of getting tactical before getting strategic.

One is that old favorite, 'if we build it they will come' approach, in which a product is built, then tossed over the transom into marketing, who's supposed to be waiting with open arms and closed mouths for the product toss. (Here you go. See what a nice thing we built for you to market. If you're any good whatsoever at marketing, I bet we'll sell a gazillion.)

So marketers are stuck with a product accomplit - and forced to come up instant tactics (and/or a retro-fitted strategy).

No, no, no.

You need to have a product strategy in mind that spells out positioning basics (who's going to use the product and why), establishes the pricing rationale, provides at least a rudimentary guidepost for where the product's going, etc., etc., etc.

Another thing we've all faced as marketers is the situation in which we've been goaded (forced?) to just do something, do anything. "Something" must be done.

The something, as often as not, is helping fill the big gaping maw at the funnel opening that feeds (eventually, one hopes) the pipeline.

Money for something materializes, somewhere, somehow.

Swell!

We can spend it on banner ads. Webinars. eMail blasts. Promotional deals. Guys with sandwich boards trolling the streets.

Just do something, anything.

If there is a strategy that you can call on, lucky you. But most of the time I've found myself in this situation, there's a readiness and eagerness to toss out the strategy because it's not working.

And who wants to spend all that time actually trying to figure out if the strategy's any good? Whether the problem is execution? Whether the strategy needs to be tweaked?

Matters not.

It's just not working.

Do something. Do anything.

Thus the campaign to nowhere begins. Someone's got an idea. Let's get going.

Activity, as my friend Sean says. Not action.

Waste of money.

You may get somewhere, but even that somewhere is going to feel like nowhere, absent a strategy.

There's a corollary to this rule:

In the absence of a strategy, people will go ahead and do what they think is best.

So the marketers will look at the product they've been given and make some sort of informed guess on where they can market it. Or they'll put on their blinders and latch on to whatever half-baked idea is floating around. They may do a bang-up of it. (Great! Two-hundred tuna-fishermen attended our webinar. Too bad our product doesn't really do anything for them. Not to mention that we really should be selling to tuba players. Tuna? Tuba? Close enough.)

Which is not to say that you shouldn't make occasional small tactical forays into new areas. Just as long as it's part of your strategy...

Strategy's hard. It really means thinking things through. It means taking a risk by declaring where it is you want to go. It means the discipline and strength to give it time enough to succeed before.

Tactics absent strategy? You might think you're getting somewhere, but you're really on the night train to nowhere.

Once More, With Lawyers (or, How to Kill Citizen Marketers)

2007-10-20T06:57:00.000-05:00

It's nirvana for anyone who wants to build a base of passionate customer advocates.

Imagine if people were so excited about your product that they not only bought it and spent time with it and talked to their friends about it, but organized gatherings to get together and enjoy it - gatherings that then generated news coverage because of the passion of the fans, and were copied all over the country! Who wouldn't want that?

The last thing you'd do is pull the plug on the whole thing and tell those excited customers to go home, right?

Well, not when your product sits at an uncomfortable intersection of entertainment, licensing contracts, and intellectual property law. The product in this case is an episode of the television program Buffy the Vampire Slayer from 2001. While the series has inspired all kinds of intense fandom, this one stands out - it's a musical episode called "Once More, With Feeling," in which the cast of the show breaks out into song and dance numbers (and the plot actually explains why this is happening).

Fans loved it (and yes, I'm one of them). A CD of the soundtrack to the episode was released. A little out of the way bar I used to meet friends at for drinks in Washington played it regularly. And, at some point, the phenomenon became a 21st century Rocky Horror Picture show, with people arranging screenings where fans would come in costume, with props, and sing along. Here's a web site from the New York City incarnation of it.

What's really striking about it is that this all started with no input from 20th Century Fox Television, the show's owner; this was just fans - customers - who took it upon themselves to do it. And that's where the trouble started.

As you can see from that site, the sing-along events have been stopped. This was not a capricious move by Fox; they had been handed a six-figure bill from the Screen Actors Guild for residuals for performers in the episode. Fox didn't even realize the events were happening, or theaters were making money off of them. So they didn't really have much choice.

Joss Whedon, the creator of the series, has told fans that he's disappointed in this and wants to see the events start up again; Fox says they don't want to stifle it, but they can't allow it to go on without paying actors; and there are disputes between everyone involved, from the event organizer on up, about who exactly screwed up.

All of which made me wonder, "Who isn't benefitting from these screenings?"

The actors, of course, aren't collecting their residuals; of couse, with no events happening, they're still not (and a number of the shows stars have said that they loved that these things were taking place). It seems to me that the events are likely to spur some sales of Buffy DVDs and CDs, as current fans get more excited about it and new fans discover it.

And there's a whole big business around the series, which is one of those television shows that inspires intense loyalty among viewers; there are books, comic books, music compilations, action figures, and the like.

Given that it seems to me that the net effect of these sing-alongs was to create more demand for all things Buffy, and generate more money for everyone on the business end, and more exposure for everyone on the creative side.

This is an area where I think our laws about content and citizen marketers are on a collision course. Buffy fans going to a sing-along event don't think they're stealing money from actors; they feel that they are participating in a celebration of a shared bit of pop culture. And while Fox owns the show and the actors need to be paid for their work, who owns for pop culture space that's sprung up around it? Whatever the law says, the fans believe they have a stake in it.

With any luck, all involved here will figure out a way to get this back on track, to everyone's benefit. But there's a lesson here for marketers: when your product becomes something that customers are so passionate about that they will write about it, talk about it, sing along with it, create their own variations of it, and dress up like it, it's no longer entirely yours other than in a legal sense. All in all you'll probably benefit from that... but it does means giving up some control, not something that comes easy to any business.

Another factor will make these kinds of disputes more common: the 1998 US law that extended copyrights, often derisively (and aptly) referred to as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act." Because there's big money in entertainment properties, copyright terms have been extended; things don't enter the public domain as quickly as they used to. Works with "corporate authorship," like movies and television shows, now don't enter the public domain until 120 years after they were created or 95 years after publication.

(As a side note, this is such a warping of the intention of intellectual property laws as they were initially conceived in the US that I would expect our country's founders to be horrified by their current incarnation. The goal was always to create a dynamic public sphere by balancing incentives for creators with public access to their work. Today, it's really about revenue protection.)

Without a vibrant public domain, citizen marketing is always going to be running afoul of the law, as the Buffy example demonstrates. Marketers who are serious about wanting to harness the passion of their customers need to be ready to not avail themselves of all the legal protections available to them; nothing kills customer passion like getting slapped down by the lawyers. Yes, you need to protect your intellectual property in reasonable ways, but you do need to factor your customer's point of view into your definition of "reasonable."

Return to sender: why I may not be reading the mail you send me, e- or otherwise.

2007-10-19T07:02:00.001-05:00

I get a lot of e-mail and snail mail, mostly from organizations trying to sell me something, or trying to get me to make a donation to them.

Some I open and read; most I don't.

Leaving the non-profits looking for my check (or credit card number) out of the mix, what makes me open the e-mail or the envelope and actually take a look inside?

I have a real relationship with you. Admittedly, we're stretching the word "relationship" pretty thin here, but in thin-speak, this will generally mean that I've purchased some product or service from you.
There's something in it for me.Which I can tell from looking at the e-mail header (30% off coupon!) or from the outside of the envelope (30% off coupon!) And remember, I'm only going to know if there's something in it for me if I can tell without opening whatever it is you're trying to send me.
There's something that I might want to know about. And please define 'something that I might want to know about' very narrowly. Everything in your catalog does not constitute something I might want to know about. Here's what I might want to know about:
- Peripheral products: If I bought the duvet cover, I might want to know about the pillow shams or sheets. If I bought the laptop, I might want to know about the mega-memory spare battery or traveling power adapter. For the most part, what I don't want to know about is the same damned product - or sort of product - I just purchased. Realistically speaking, just how many different duvet covers do you think I'm going to buy in a year?
- Product recalls/defects: Please do let me know if that duvet cover is going to burst into flames if I fall asleep reading a book while under it. Ditto for the laptop.
- Something interesting related to the product I bought: By all means tell me if that particular duvet cover won "Duvet Cover of the Year", or is going to make a guest appearance in The Office. I like fun facts as much as the next guy.
- Something I might find interesting based on other things I've bought. Or magazines I read. Or donations I've made. Or my zip code. Go ahead. Make an educated guess. I'm all for it. But in this day and age of micro-marketing, how is it that the Republican Party can't figure out that I'm not a Republican? (Although, in truth, I don't mind seeing them spending their money on me - plus I get to see what they tell insiders about evil, amoral, corrupt, weak-kneed, pro-terror, tax-and-spend Democrats.)

And as with the "what's in it for me", give me some clue on the outside of the e-mail or the envelope about why I should want to open it.

Also keep in mind that no body likes to feel suckered. For years, I got a big, important looking letter from a car dealership where I had my car serviced a couple of times. On the outside of the envelope, there was an important sounding message letting me know that someone important sounding was looking to buy 1998 Beetles. I thought, hey, maybe someone's making a movie and really needs my car so the hero can careen around Haymarket knocking over fruit carts.... Of course, what they really wanted me to do was trade-in and trade-up. No thanks.

Can You Measure the Value of Integrity?

2007-10-18T05:37:00.000-05:00

People don't like us much, and they don't trust us.

That's a hard truth for marketers: ours is not a much-loved profession. Lynn Upshaw of the UC Berkeley business school talks about this topic in a recent MarketingProfs piece:

A Yankelovich study a few years ago found that as many as two-thirds of Americans believe that businesses would take advantage of the public if those businesses did not think they would be exposed. As many as one-fourth of Americans agreed that there is literally nothing that business can do to recapture their trust once it is lost. ("State of Consumer Trust," 2004).

We live in a time of omnipresent scrutiny by citizen journalists, regulators, attorneys general, and virtually anyone with a computer and a point of view. The risks of shaky integrity have never been more real. Now would be a good time to measure how well a brand's marketing helps or hinders its perceived integrity, which is to say its ability to build and hold customer trust.

This is true, and any discussion of how to restore trust needs to start by accepting that consumers are not wrong about this. Consumers believe that businesses will trick them and take advantage of them because businesses regularly do this, from the kinds of shiftiness chronicled on the Mouse Print blog to blatant betrayals of public trust like dangerous products, pollution, and other misdeeds.

And while I hate to say this, marketing is particularly problematic area, and I am regularly appalled by what passes for acceptable behavior for marketers. Regular readers know that I have a serious problem with marketing to children, for example; I think it's nearly impossible to target kids with commercial messages designed to persuade without crossing an ethical line. (The fact that agencies hire child psychologists to design those messages and take advantage of kids' incomplete emotional and intellectual development only makes it worse.) Claiming to be "green" by doing some tiny thing that will have little effect on anything is questionable. Blanketing public space with advertising may be good business, but it's bad citizenship. And so on, and so on.

Upshaw shares some thoughts about how one might measure a "return on marketing integrity." I think that's a noble idea, but there are some problems here.

The first is that companies that have truly solid reputations for honesty can build those reputations in part because the average reputation. If the consumer's assumption is that everyone will rip her off given the chance, you can define yourself as one of the few organizations that won't do that. If the assumption was honesty, that wouldn't work.

I suspect that this only works for those who make serious commitments to the highest ethical business practices: in other words, the superstars of marketing (and corporate) integrity. That's a real investment. The problem is that if you only get halfway there, you've probably got nothing measurable to show for it, because your reputation is not yours alone.

Every time a spammer sends a phishing scam via email, your email becomes more suspect. Every time someone creates a rebate program which requires buyers to jump through hoops, wait twelve weeks, and still not get their check, your straightforward rebate program is tainted. Unless you've got great brand recognition and a sterling reputation, in the consumer's eyes, you're just part of that undifferentiated mass of shifty bastards who can't be trusted. Making some incremental improvements probably won't change that.

So should we just forget it? No, and that's why I welcome Upshaw's ideas though I am skeptical. I doubt that you'll ever be able to show much in the way of financial return on something as subjective as "integrity."

There is, however, something else, something harder to measure and less easily traded and leveraged, which is knowing that you're doing the right things in your professional life. Perhaps that needs to be an end in itself.

Facetime

2007-10-17T06:48:00.001-05:00

I had to laugh the other day when I came across a web site for a company that made web conferencing software and saw a big ad for their annual User Conference splattered across the top of their home page. Join us in Orlando!....

After all, their value proposition was all about saving time and money, improving efficiency, increasing productivity, and growing green by replacing costly, pesky, jet-fuel consuming in- person meetings with online versions.

But - of course - even in this day and age of second lives and virtual everything, human contact matters.

When I worked at NaviSite, my two closest colleagues and friends were my fellow Opinionated Marketers, John and Sean. (John, of course, you know from his opining here. Trust me, Sean is just as opinionated.) NaviSite, when we were there, was an agglomeration of small Internet services companies, pretty much scattered all over the place: Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, Texas, California. John, Sean, and I communicated daily - sometimes incessantly. We would e-mail periodically, and pretty much IM throughout the day. If we found that our IM conversations were getting to long, we'd get on the phone.

We also saw each other in person irregularly - Sean drove from Syracuse to Andover (where NaviSite HQ was) every couple of weeks, John flew in from DC (and, later, Houston) every month or so. Yes, our working relationships were forged through a lot of IM-ing and conference bridge calls. But our friendships were guaranteed when we saw each other in person.

What did facetime get us that virtual didn't?

Hang time: When John and Sean were in town we'd have at least one lunch and one dinner together. We also go to take walks around the parking lot (more fun than it sounds).Here's where we really got to know each other, and learn what made each of us tick.
Nuance time: I don't care how good the audio and video are, you really miss the facial expressions, body language, and intonations that help you understand what people are saying - and just who they are.

We were all in the same group, so we were working together pretty closely, participated in a lot of the same meetings, etc. But if you're not in the same group, and the only time you're with people is for an official meeting that's conducted virtually, you'll never get to know the people you don't have to know. No running into someone in the kitchen or caf. No getting to meet the guy in the office next to the person you're there to see. Business might be conducted more efficiently when it's all virtual, but sometimes you're going to miss out on the spark divine that gets struck during a more casual encounter. Creativity, communication, networking, you never know...

If it works this way with internal colleagues, it certainly works that way with customers.

Obviously, it's more a business "thing" than it is a consumer "thing." I don't really need to know L.L. Bean's grandson now, do I?

But if you're in high ticket, B2B - or doing consulting work - it's absolutely essential to put a face on things once in a while.

Not for every encounter, or course, or even for every other one. There's much to be said for virtual meetings. If nothing else, they're far easier to cancel and reschedule if something comes up. And there's no question that without travel time on either end, they're more cost and time efficient.

But sometimes you - especially in the early going of a relationship - you want to be eye-to-eye. You want to know what your customer looks like, what's on the office walls, what they take in their coffee. You want to get to know whether that pause in the conversation means they're thinking about what you said, rolling their eyes, or staring off into space. You want to see how they interact with others around them. And the customer, of course, wants to size you up, too.

John, Sean, and I haven't worked together for over 3 years. We were, in fact, all pink slipped on the same day when "our side" lost out in a major post-acquisition political shoot-out. We were all laid off via phone calls. We let each other know the news via IM. We got together on the phone that afternoon.

But - thanks to those non-refundable airline tickets from Houston - we all got together in Andover the next week for our final farewell dinner at The Chateau - attended by about 50 or so of our former colleagues, and with the tab picked up by a couple of Navi VP's. It was a lot more meaningful that we got to say our final good-byes with hugs, rather than emoticons.

These days we keep up with each other - and work on projects with each other - virtually. And with phone meetings. And - blessedly - with occasion "reunions". One's coming up.

IM looking 4ward 2 c-ing u both. (:))

Yet Another Advertising Obituary

2007-10-16T06:58:00.000-05:00

Does a week go by without someone announcing that advertising is dead, and now we must shift all of our marketing efforts to social media (even though half the country isn't even using these media)? Not usually. I thought that this MarketingProfs piece was going to be another of these premature obituaries for advertising, but it turned out to be a new twist: advertising is dead, advertorials rule!

Generally, when I read anything like this:

Advertising is dead. If you're a marketer... save your money.

Consumers have been over-advertised to and over-sold.

Unless you're conducting a white sale, fire sale, or going-out-of-business sale—and halving or quartering your prices—advertising won't get you a bang, a whimper- or a nickel for your buck. Not anymore.

... I move on, because the writer has established that they don't know what they're talking about. Yes, traditional advertising has lost its dominance. Yes, the media landscape has changed. Yes, marketers need to adjust their spending.

In this case the writer goes on to tell us that we should do lots of advertorials, because - in a nutshell - consumers aren't smart enough to figure out what they are.

The advertorial delivers valuable, documented information that relentlessly leads readers to the inevitable conclusion that the solution to their problem or need is... whatever it is you're selling.

It doesn't look, taste, or smell like an ad, and the consumer's anti-ad third eye will never see it coming.

Well, at least it's a change of pace from someone telling us to spend our whole budget on Twitter or Facebook.

Here's the obituary I'd like to see: one announcing the death of "this is the perfect tactic!" pieces, as if any one tactic would ever be the solution to every marketing problem. Here's another: the death of marketing approaches that assume that consumers are too dumb to know when they're being sold.

I really like MarketingProfs but in the last couple of weeks I've read a piece from a multimedia producer explaining that video is the solution to all problems, and now a piece from a copywriter announcing that advertorials (which, hmm, require a copywriter) will solve everyone's problems. I hope this is not a trend.

It's fine to see people talking about the benefits of the type of work they do, but these pieces have read more like... well, advertorials... than useful content. A case study on how to use advertorials? Great. Examples of how video has enhanced sites? Cool. Pieces like this? Can we find a good burial plot for them, please?

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #2

2007-10-15T06:24:00.001-05:00

This post is the second in a series inspired by Pragmatic Marketing's 20 Rules of Product Management rules for technology marketing.

RULE #2: An outside-in approach increases the likelihood of product success.

Pragmatic describes this approach as:

...developing solutions in the context of the total customer experience. Product managers, executives, and marketers in technology companies regularly meet with people in the marketplace and observe how they do business in order to understand the full scope of their usage requirements and their most significant obstacles to adoption.

The most important thing they do is to live in the prospect’s world and look at all the touch points that matter.

Can I get an "Amen" here?

Let's face it. However brilliantly, presciently, and uniquely imagined a product is; however seemingly a product idea springs full blown from some Medusa's head, there is no substitute for solving a real problem experienced by real people in a way that will really work for them.

How do you get real?

The key is in those five little words "observe how they do business."

That means looking at the current processes in place, at the input, the outputs, the end results. Who does what to whom? How do they do it? Where do they hit roadblocks? Little snags? Where does the ball drop? What happens when that happens?

There are a number of ways you can do this.

One is to actually go in and observe. This is more easily done with a customer (who's already using your product) than it is with a prospect, but some of the most informative hours I've spent in the field have been spent dogging the heels of a customer.

Years ago, when I was product manager on a mainframe financial support and reporting system, I spent the night at AT&T in New York City when they closed their books for the month to see how they used the system. And I do mean spent the night. I started hanging up with them sometime in mid-morning on a Friday, and parted company at 4 a.m. on Saturday.

Boy, was I exhausted.

And, boy, did I see some areas where that system could be improved.

I've done this a few times since, and it's been a very effective way to figure out where your product needs to go. (I've never done it for a from the ground up, from scratch product, but I can certainly see where knowing the actual process people go through beats your imagination, common sense, limited knowledge, and intuition - no matter how wonderful they all are.)

Another technique I've used pretty effectively - again, with existing products, not newbies - is open-ended interviews with customers/prospects, in which you get them to talk about "things": business, processes, behaviors, wish list, druthers, etc. When I've used this method - based on Voice of the Customer - I've employed both detailed note taking and recordings. (Voice of the Customer was quite in vogue at one point. I'm not sure if it's still au courant. When I was using it, they suggested having two people on every interview, one to ask the open-ended questions, another to take notes. It also called for the interviews to be transcribed, and reviewed looking for key themes and ideas. I'll have to check and see if V of the C is still around and about.)

A third approach I've taken is coming up with "A Day in the Life" scenarios, in which you construct the hour-by-hour activities your target customer goes through, and figure out where your product can be inserted to relieve some of the pain that invariably occurs in even the happiest work day. (And, no, you don't have to include bio-breaks and lunch - unless you're product solves the need for either.)

The bottom line is that the product has to "fit" the customers needs and desires. Your products should always solve a true problem and provide a true benefit - not just benefits-on-paper that may be sold to the economic buyer, but that never materialize for the actual users. You never want your customers to be stuck with exchanging an existing problem for a new one - using your product. This won't happen if you build a product outside-in.

BT Wants You to Give it Away

2007-10-14T08:30:00.000-05:00

Generally speaking, telecoms don't like it when you share a wireless network. If you're sitting in an apartment building and decide to make your home wifi network open and unsecured, then the neighbor can use it - instead of paying a monthly broadband fee. In fact, your terms of service likely prohibit doing this, though it's unlikely that your provider can really tell that it's somebody next door, not a family member in the next room, connecting.

That makes BT's decision to encourage this, by way of the offerings of a Spanish outfit called FON, really interesting. Here's what FON does: you buy a router from them that creates two wireless networks - a secure one for your use, and an open one that others can use.

If someone else wants to use it, the can, but there's a catch. If they are also FON users, it's free. If not, they pay. The idea is to make wifi more available by letting users create their own hotspots - and you can make money doing it under some of their plans (clearly intended for, say, a coffee shop owner or other such commercial enterprise).

Here's what BT is doing:

BT will encourage its three million broadband users to pick up a FON router and start sharing signals. The router provides two channels: one for public access, and one for access by the owner. The public channel is bandwidth-limited so as not to disrupt the user's own connection. Other "Foneros" can access the public channel for free, while non-Foneros can pay a few dollars a day to use the access points.

FON has signed a similar deal with Time Warner in the US.

I love this, because it shows telecoms thinking like marketers - real marketers, who see services in terms of customer benefits and appeal. That's been quite rare in that industry, and so I think this is a notable change:

For BT, the move makes its broadband offering more useful to customers, who can access the Internet from more places, and BT doesn't need to build out a new wireless network itself. BT's Gavin Patterson, a managing director, holds out hopes that the FON scheme can someday "cover every street in Britain."

Making their service more useful to customers? Now there's an idea! I hope this kind of thinking spreads through the telecom industry, whose focus has usually been limiting users in order to create more opportunities for revenue collection.

Skype: Doublespeak over IP!

2007-10-13T07:23:00.000-05:00

Apparently Skype isn't just for free phone calls, it's the cost-effective way to spread untelligible business babble! Forbes writer Daniel Lyons, in his Fake Steve Jobs persona, comments on Skype founder Nikklas Zenstrom's weird comments on Ebay's acquisition of his company - in which, it's become quite clear, Ebay paid far too much:

Zennstrom says Ebay “overshot in terms of monetization," which the Journal translates to mean, "eBay overpaid" and which FSJ translates to mean, "I robbed you big-time, frigtards." Then comes this doozy: “We had to chart the trajectory of growth and how fast that would run, (but) we found out that was a bit front-loaded.” Yeah. Front-loaded. See, they thought by now they'd be doing a zillion million free phone calls by now, but instead they're only doing a billion million free phone calls. Key thing when you're selling free stuff is you gotta have volume. And scale. So you can leverage synergies and distribute empowerment across multiple platforms freeing up resources and effectively achieving economies of scale ...

Lyons/Fake jobs calls is "bullshitspeak," which is pretty accurate. It's easy to understand why Zennstrom wouldn't want to say "Ebay paid way too much for my company, because we aren't producing the revenue we said we would," but everybody knows that's just what he's saying. So now on top of looking like the guy who fooled Ebay, he looks evasive, too.

No Web Dessert Before Dinner

2007-10-12T13:40:00.000-05:00

Back in the 90s, many marketers dreaded the inevitable web eye-candy request from an executive. You remember them: "Can't we have... I don't know, something that moves on the home page? It's so boring." Yep, the well-crafted copy that explained what the company was about and why a visitor should care, the images chosen to bring key ideas to life... boring! Let's add a stock ticker scrolling across the page! Now we are the web elite.

You would have thought that the success of sites like Google and Yahoo! (before they tarted themselves up and became the current visual nightmare) would have demonstrated that well-organized content that meets a user's needs is the most important thing on a site. No, not really.

But technology has advanced and it's not scrolling stock tickers (or the hideous Flash headers that were on one corporate site I was involved with - I'm sorry, they made us do it), it's video. Video is hot. Video is now. Video will solve all your problems!

That's kind of the message of this MarketingProfs piece by Jerry Bader, who is a senior partner at - surprise! - a firm that does multimedia for the web.

Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not anti-video. You can do great things with video. Video can bring concepts to life, put a more human face on your staff, demonstrate product features, and - of course - entertain.

What it can't do is correct fundamental problems. So when I read this:

A well-crafted, expertly presented marketing message is like a seduction: If you're not generating any excitement, don't expect to produce any sales, either.

Boring mission-statement gobbledygook and keyword-laden palaver are not the same as an enticing video. An engaging business story, well told, is like a juicy wet one planted right on your audience's lips.

... I find myself thinking, well, no kidding. Yes, good video is better than bad copy. Also, good movies are better than terrible books, and big things are bigger than small things.

If you haven't managed to articulate your message in words, guess what? A video is going to provide the same confusion in an exciting new way.

It's also important to remember the limits of video. Video demands more of the user. It means they need to be visiting your site from a location where they can play your video without annoying everyone around them. (Unless your target market is jerks.) It's content that they can't scan while they're on a boring conference call. It's content that will be more challenging for users with mobile browsers. It's content that might do something simple and annoying like make them turn off the music they're enjoying in iTunes just to hear what you have to say.

There are two unforgivable multimedia web sins. The first is automatically playing audio - this makes me me leave a site, never to return, especially if it's in an ad. The second is content that you cannot get without listening to an audio clip or watching a video. If you're going to make me work that hard to hear what you have to say, I'm leaving. These are both especially horrendous mistakes on B2B sites - and, by the way, you'd better hope none of your potential buyers are blind or deaf!

Video is a great extra, but it does not replace copy. If copy is bad, fix it. If your site is really boring, it means that you probably have content that's off-target or design that obscures important information - fix it.

Bader uses the analogy of a whipped cream on your dessert at the beginning of his piece... and I wish he's followed it through. You site architecture, graphic design, and most of all copy are the main meal. Make sure it nutritious and tasty for your visits. Then, serve up a great dessert in the form of multimedia.

If a rat head is "rendered commercially sterile," does that mean it's OK to eat if you find it in your green beans?

2007-10-12T07:04:00.001-05:00

It is always instructive to see how a company responds when they're in the negative news.

Earlier this year, Bigelow Tea did an excellent job using their web site and blog to communicate to their customers during the Don Imus flap. (Bigelow had been a sponsor of Imus' show, before it went down in inglory for his untoward comments on the Rutgers University women's basketball team.)

So, I wondered just how Allen Canning was doing in response to one of its customers finding a rat head in a can of green beans.

Not so good, I'm afraid.

First, they offered her $100 as a "gesture of good will" if she signed a liability waiver.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I found a rat head in a can of green beans, I think I'd be looking for a little more than a hundred bucks. Who knows what the going rate is, but it's got to be more than that - even if it was just the head.

Allen Canning is country folk - they're located in Siloam, Arkansas, in the Ozarks. So maybe the odd rat head in the green beans isn't that big a deal. I'm guessing that Siloam may be hunting country. Maybe even squirrel hunting country. People eat squirrel (which, no doubt tastes like chicken). A squirrel is a rodent. A rat is a rodent. Thus....

Or maybe Allen just likes to low-ball. Apparently when Marianne Watson found an "amphibian leg" in green beans, she was offered $25 and a cookbook. (It's unknown whether the cookbook had recipes for frog's legs, or rat-head stew. Who knows? Maybe the head is the best part.)

Not that there are a lot of ways to make this better, but the Allen spokesperson made things worse.

"There's no way that product could have hurt her," Allen Canning spokesman James Phillips said in a telephone interview. "This rodent was rendered commercially sterile. We cook each can individually at a temperature up to 265 degrees"...

Phillips says that the incident is rare and that the company produces millions of cans a year.

"If you would calculate the frequency of this on a calculator, it wouldn't fit because the number's so small," said Phillips.

All this may be true - and oh, what a relief it is - but Allen Canning may have been better served if they'd offered a bit more 'we hate when this happens, but here's why a) there was no danger, and b) it rarely happens.

However awkward the above factoids were, they were no near as off the mark as Phillips insisting that Allen Canning is the victim here, not Marianne Watson.

"You can be assured that the people who've been hurt by this is us. She's trying to ruin us through the media."

No doubt Allen Canning has been hurt, but it doesn't appear that Marianne Watson has any particular motivation to "ruin" them. (She claims that she doesn't intend to sue for damages, but that she went public so that no one else would find a rat head - or the remaining, unaccounted for parts - when they went to put supper on the table.)

But who knows? Maybe Allen Canning smells a rat here. They have asked Watson to send the head to a lab for testing - presumably to figure out whether the rat head was actually canned, and not an ingredient added after the fact by a fortune-hunter. After all, wasn't there a story a while back of some woman claiming to find a finger in a taco, only to find that she's put the finger there herself so she could sue for big bucks? I can't remember where the finger came from.)

Watson may send the rat head in - but to a lab of her own choosing. She's in Utah. Maybe she could send it to CSI: Las Vegas, and they can figure out whether the rat had actually been cooked at the requisite 265 degrees. (And just in case I ever need to cook a rat head, are we talking Centigrade or Fahrenheit?)

Allen Canning's web site doesn't do a much better job than their spokesman. When I looked, there was no mention of the incident, just this unfortunate content on their News page:

Wondering what kind of news we’ve got in the can?
Click on the links below to find out!

In this day and age, when everything is "news" within a few minutes, it's crazy for a company to respond (and not respond) this way. Something that, a few years ago, could have been shoved (or vomited) under the table, makes its way to everyone with Internet access. And that's a lot of folks who are going to think twice before they open a can of Veg-All, or Popeye's spinach - both Allen products - let alone a can of green beans.

This may be unfortunate, but this is The Information Age. Even a small, out-of-the-way company like Allen Canning - especially a company like Allen Canning, which is in just the type of industry where everyone who's ever wielded a can opener will identify with the story - needs to be better prepared for this type of incident.

Just as every company needs a business continuity plan, they need a "how we'll respond" plan. Obviously, nobody can anticipate every bad thing that could possibly happen - darn, we were all prepared for another amphibian leg, and instead we get a rat head - they can and should have a checklist ready - not just who will respond, but how they'll respond.

No to blame the victim/we're the victim. No this "product can't hurt" - sure, you may not die from eating it, but I'm having nightmares about it, and I imagine Marianne Watson may be too.

Yes to providing assurances and facts (which Allen Canning did). Yes to pushing for testing - it's certainly understandable in an era a false and attention getting claims, let alone specious lawsuits. And yes to combing your web site, ads, etc. for a LOL howler like "Wondering what kind of news we've got in the can?"

Obviously, the answer to that particular question can only be 'not any longer.'

-------------------------------------------------

Information/quotes used in this post comes from an article in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Another Twitter List

2007-10-11T05:52:00.000-05:00

And not a dumb one this time. I've complained before about some of the ridiculous "marketing via Twitter" lists that have turned up; Ann Handley at MarketingProfs offers up a pretty sensible one that serves as nice place to start thinking about how Twitter can be useful.

I still am skeptical. Twitter is entertaining, and I use it myself, but most of these ideas are things that work better when they are primarily done via other media (like blogs). Twitter does, however, provide a nice adjunct to that.

At the same time, I've discovered that some Twitterers use it mainly to say, "Hey, look, I wrote a blog post!" That's something I find tedious; that's why I use an RSS reader. And there is, of course, Twitter spam now.

A couple of specific issues and questions I have...

1. Has anyone ever studied how Twitter users actually interact with the service? When I signed up I had tweets going to my IM, and that stopped within hours - it was just an irritating annoyance. Now, I mainly see tweets through the Twitterific Mac Twitter client. (The idea of them going to my phone just gives me a headache.)

This makes me wonder how many others do that; for me, Twitter is very ephemeral. It's useful for quick notifications of some things, like what Woot is offering right now, but - to pick an application one commenter on Ann's post mentioned - terrible for things like job postings. People could easily miss them.

It would be helpful to see some statistics on where tweets are actually going - the web? phones? IM clients? other desktop clients?

2. Twitter's infrastructure is, frankly, not ready for prime time. There are outages, things often don't work right, there are constant display problems. This is not surprising for a free service with no clear plans to be profitable, but it's something a marketer should bear in mind if he or she is thinking of making Twitter the centerpiece of a campaign. Will Twitter be working correctly the day you launch? Probably, but...

3. Twitter is a very select subset of early adopters who like these kinds of things (and yes, I'm one of them, once I go through my obligatory "Bah! Humbug!" phase). Twitterers are probably not your market, and almost certainly not representative of your market. Which is why I get chills when I hear people talk about using it for marketing research.

There are, of course, some research activities where this doesn't matter. Brainstorming? Floating trial balloons? Sure, it's a handy thing. But the day someone says, "Well, we floated this on Twitter and everybody thought it was a hit!" you need to eject them from your office and send them to a seminar on research to go learn something. Twitterers are not a good sample of anything except Twitterers. When I hear the "Twitter for research" concept, I never hear the necessary qualification after it, and that's a recipe for bad research driving bad decisions.

If your market includes tech-oriented people, you certainly should be paying attention to Twitter. Just keep it in perspective.

What is it you guys do again?

2007-10-10T06:16:00.001-05:00

In the course of my travels, I came across a web site that had a name similar to that of the company I was really looking for.

I paused for a moment to try to figure out what exactly this company did. Well, that was quite a pause - and it wasn't exactly the pause that refreshes.

I am going to disguise this company (and their messaging) because my guess is that they're small and trying to make their way in the world, and probably the last thing they need is some smartier-than-thou marketing consultant moaning and groaning about their web site. Microsoft: fair game; little guy, play fair!

I know what it's like to be small - and criticized. Years ago, shortly after my company had unveiled a new web site, we interviewed a fellow for the job of VP of Engineering. Although it was pretty clear that I was in charge of marketing and, thus, had likely had something to do with the web site, this guy - who looked just like Mr. Bean - launched into a monologue on how terrible our web site was. How the images were ridiculous, the navigation clumsy, the content devoid of content. Furthermore, our collateral was out of date and misleading. He waved a fistful of our old collateral that he had gotten somewhere along the line.

Despite his criticism, I like to think that I would not have been so thin-skinned and eager to reject this fellow if he hadn't clearly written on the top of his resume that his prime attributes included the ability to see all sides of an issue, operate as a conciliator, and defuse friction-filled situations. Hah, I say, hah.

He didn't get the job.

Of course, maybe his criticism was exactly what I needed. And it may be exactly what the nameless company needs. So, what I'll do at some point is drop them a note and let them know what I think.

Anyway, here's what they say about themselves for starters.

Nameless, Inc. has achieved tremendous results for our customers by offering software solutions that really work for them. Nameless also delivers large and measurable returns on the major investments our customers are making in our technology.

Admittedly, I have rewritten their copy, and theirs is actually better and more interesting. But this is the rough gist, and the point is that I read this intro paragraph and came away with absolutely no idea what these guys do - other than it's software. (This is no small something, of course. I've read home pages without learning whether a company provided hardware, software, or services. All I knew was that the offered "solutions for something.")

On to exactly where Nameless customers achieve their phenomenal results. Why through productivity (leverage those resources!), scale (watch your business grow!), greater efficiency, customer satisfaction, better decision making....

Then we start getting a bit more of a clue about what Nameless actually does, because we now we're told that they help make sure that the information that their customers need in order to make those better decisions is going to be right where they can get their hands on it.

Now I get it. Or at least I think I get it. Nameless develops some type of data management software.

Wouldn't it have been easier if they'd just said so to begin with?

Nameless makes data managent software.

There, was that so hard?

Marketing Delusion: "They Love Our Ads!"

2007-10-09T06:32:00.000-05:00

Over at Church of the Customer Blog, Jackie Huba rightly calls out self-absorbed marketers who think the world just wants more ads. The quote, from a Yankee Group analyst, is too great not to share:

"The day is coming when wireless users will experience nirvana scenarios -- mobile ads tied to your individual behavior, what you are doing, and where you are."

Ads on my mobile phone - now that's nirvana! I hear people complaining all the time that all they can do with their phones is talk to friends and family, or sent them text messages, or surf the web. No ads. It's a total bummer, you know?

The safest assumption is always that nobody wants to see your ad, nobody cares, and more than likely they'll view it as an intrusion. That means it had better be relevant and well-produced and useful. Will that lead to "nirvana?" No, it will lead to people not completely hating you, and thus perhaps paying attention. But it's like the DMV: the biggest compliment you're going to get is, "That wasn't too horrible."

If you click through from Jackie's post to the article on the expected Google Phone, you find that the scenario is actually that you get ads, and then you talk for free. I think there is a market for that, perhaps among young people or others who otherwise couldn't afford a mobile phone.

But frankly, the whole thing makes my monthly AT&T bill a great deal. Pay that, and just talk to people? Great. That's why I have a phone. Google's plans are interesting, but I think they're fundamentally different than what they've done elsewhere. Pay-per-click search ads work becaue they fit with what the user is doing - I'm searching for something, and the ads provide things that are often better than the organic search results, especially if I'm looking to buy something.

When I'm using my phone, I'm in a completely different frame of mind. The ads, rather than an enhancement of my search experience that also happens to make money for somebody, become a barrier to get through to do what I reallly want to do. That's a critical difference, and why I think the Google Phone's market - as the device and service have been described so far - is just for a "can't/won't pay the phone bill" niche.

And given the history of Google search and AdWords ads, even if they get it right initially - providing such useful information and services that you don't mind the ads - I think it's likely that an army of marketers will be there figuring out how to game the system. Google's search results, once excellent, are now as cluttered with useless links as everybody else's. AdSense results are often similarly unhelpful. If the phone is a success, expect the long decline to begin there too.

But hey, I could be wrong, and there may be some important details about this that we haven't heard yet. But until I learn about some innovative twist to this, I'm with Jackie: that "nirvana" sounds more like something out of The Inferno to me.

Silliness and its Metaphors

2007-10-08T13:54:00.000-05:00

Metaphors are useful. People often think in metaphoric terms, so a well chosen metaphor can help someone understand a concept quickly and clearly in a way that long-winded explanations often cannot.

But there's a danger to metaphors; no metaphor really provides a complete explanation of anything, but it's a human tendency to stretch them a bit too far, assuming the things we are comparing are more alike than they are. This can lead to bad decisions.

It's can also lead to sheer eye-popping silliness, like this this blog post from Jason Calacanis offering the "official" definition of Web 3.0.

Web 2.0 is a metaphor. There is no real taxonomy of web services placing them into "1.0" or "2.o" categories, and people will debate what makes a site a 2.0 vs 1.0 site, a conversation about as useful as the old saw about angels dancing on the head of a pin. The nice people at Wikipedia - that would be all of us, by the way! - actually provide some wisdom that appears to have flown right over the head of Calacanis and the people he says are asking him for such a definition:

In alluding to the version-numbers that commonly designate software upgrades, the phrase "Web 2.0" hints at an improved form of the World Wide Web. Technologies such as weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, web application programming interfaces (APIs), and online web services such as eBay and Gmail provide a significant enhancement over read-only websites. Stephen Fry (actor, author and broadcaster) describes Web 2.0 as "an idea in people’s heads rather than a reality. It’s actually an idea that the reciprocity between the user and the provider is what’s emphasized. In other words, genuine interactivity if you like, simply because people can upload as well as download"[6]. The phrase "Web 2.0" can also refer to the transition of websites from isolated information silos to interlinked computing platforms that act like software to the user. Web 2.0 also includes a social element where users generate and distribute content, often with freedom to share and re-use. The result is a rise in the economic value of the Web as users can do more online.

Get that? It's an idea. There was no Web 1.0. There was no Web 2.1 bug fix, Web 2.0 SP 1 service pack, Web 2.5. There will not be a beta of Web 3.0 before its release nor an upgrade path from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. Moreover, there never need to be any such thing as Web 3.0, unless it becomes a useful metaphor for describing some major shift in the way the web is used.

The problem with stretching metaphors too far is that it's sloppy thinking that leads to sloppy conclusions, and one need look no further than the "offiicial" definition of Web 3.0 to see just how sloppy thinking can get:

Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.

Essentially, it will be Web 3.0 but the people making content will be smarter! That's not a bad dream but as a definition for the next major paradigm shift on the web, it's pretty dumb.

And it's hard not to miss the irony here; after hearing about the "democratization of content," which is a nice way of saying that people with expertise and skills will be displaced by amateurs, it's pretty funny that in the definition Calacanis has come up with is the suggestion that maybe that wasn't the best thing ever.

Web 2.0 is a somewhat useful metaphor (but not nearly as useful as some people think, given how much out there is not clearly old web vs. 2.0 web). Should someone manage to define an actual major change in web use that's so different that it merits a new metaphor, and is really happening among users, a metaphor to describe it would be useful.

Personally, though, I hope "Web 3.0" isn't that metaphor, because it sets us on a path toward someone like Calacanis someday deciding to tell us what Web 4.0 is, and the carnival of silliness will just continue.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #1

2007-10-08T06:41:00.001-05:00

Pragmatic Marketing has a very astute set of Product Management rules for technology marketing. (What they call Product Management has a mega-overlap with what I consider Product Marketing, by the way. But in some companies - especially smaller ones - there is no separate product marketing role.)

I'm going to be working my way through Pragmatic's 20 Rules. This post is the first in a series.

RULE #1 If product managers don't do their jobs, the other departments will fill the void.

When I was a Product Manager, I used to say that everyone else involved in the product cycle walked around the table and picked off what they wanted to do, and what was left was Product Management. And at times this was unfortunately true. But good Product Managers aren't just pragmatic, they're proactive. And here are a few of the things that can happen when those other departments fill the void:

If you don't provide clear and supported input to the process, the engineers will develop what they damn well please. Hey, it's your responsibility to talk to your customers (and your prospects), check out the competition, listen to the analysts, learn about your industry, learn about your customers' industries, find out what your sales engineers and customer support reps are encountering, look at those RFPs, and glean market intelligence N.E.C. And it's your responsibility to translate all this "stuff" into product requirements that you communicate to your engineers.

Yes, there will be stuff that your developers come up with on their own - and a lot of it will be great. Plus, with all the other info you need to gather, you may not want to also have a viewpoint on nit-picky underlying technical choices. (You'd better have something to say about platform, however.) But you need to be the driving force behind what goes into that product, or you could end up with a magnificently engineered product that nobody wants or needs.

If you don't provide clear direction on who the target customers are, sales will go wherever they damn well please. Your products should have been built with some use and customer in mind, shouldn't they? Please let sales know. Now, we all know that they may ignore you, but they really do so at their peril.

It may, of course, be the case that your products are somewhat generic - every company can use a database and a word processor, no? So why can't we, with our generic "solution", go wherever we damn well please. (Sniff, sniff. Whine, whine, whine. I really want to sell to GE. And WalMart. And BofA. I really want to sell to CEOs. Why are you telling me not to go there?)

Here's why largely horizontal products need to be targeted to specific customers (where, depending on the product stage you're in, can be individual user types, industries, etc.):

Especially if you're a small company with limited resources, you have to start somewhere. By choosing a best-bet for your largely horizontal product, you'll build knowledge and expertise that will enable you to sell to others.
Once the early adopters have completed their early adopting, you need to ride the next wave. These folks tend to want to know who else in their industry/neck of the woods is using your product. Much easier to sell to Get-a-Life Insurance if One-Life-to-Live Insurance is on your customer list.

By the way, take a look at how most of the major generic technology providers are organized. Yep, it's by vertical markets. It may happen by accident or intent, but chances are that you're going to end up with customers clustered in certain industries. Make the most of it.

You can't, by the way, make sales do anything they don't want to do. Even if you're trying to make life easier for them, they may persist in going and doing what they want to do. Of course, sales being sales, they won't do this unless they can make money at it. And the world being the world, some sales folks will have some success going where they have no business going. Too bad the success won't come easily - and probably won't be repeatable.

And I've seen cases where a company strategically wanted to move in one direction, but couldn't get sales aligned behind them. Here's a hint: make sure the sales compensation plan maps to the strategic direction.

If you don't establish pricing, sales will make it up. Personally, I don't think there's anything that product management does that's more difficult than figuring out pricing. And you absolutely need to listen to what sales has to say on the matter. But it's up to you to determine the price that will work, that's commensurate with the value provided, that's not out of whack with the competition, and is what the market can bear. If not, you'll be in the wonderful of world of sales cannily figuring out what the customer has in their pocketbook, and establishing that as the price du jour. (Just watch out when customers get together and compare notes....)

If you don't provide clear direction on who the target customers are, and what the message is for them, marcomm will go wherever they damn well please and say whatever they damn well want. Like sales, if you're not providing guidance to marcom on who the target customers are, they will come up with the programs on their own. These programs may make spectacular sense, they may not. Best not to leave things to chance.

Similarly, if marcom doesn't know what the product is and does, they will come up with their own story. Their story may make spectacular sense, it may not. Best not to leave things to chance. I worked in one company that was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy when I saw a banner ad for one of our services floating by that touted our financial stability. I immediately called the ad person in marcom and pointed out that this wasn't exactly our strong suit. "But that's what our buyers are most interested in," she told me.

The people who will be filling whatever void you leave won't be evil or stupid. You may even want, need, appreciate their suggestions and advice. But if engineers are figuring out what's in the product all on their lonesome; if sales is pulling prices out of their ear on the way to a company that is not in a million years going to buy your product; if marketing is claiming that your product solves world peace when it really doesn't - they're all trying to do something that is neither their expertise nor their responsbility. It's yours. Take it and use it.

Your Right to be a Pain in the Ass

2007-10-07T07:03:00.000-05:00

When the federal Do Not Call registry came into being, it was a long-overdue victory for consumers. While telemarketing trade associations predicted dire consequences if they were not allowed to annoy people who do not want to hear from them and do not want to buy anything from them over the phone, consumers were utterly sick of them, spending money on services like caller ID and anonymous call blocking to keep them at bay, and legislators finally listened.

Well, sort of. Because guess what? If you put your number on the list when it was new, you're about to be dropped from it. You see, when you add a number to the Do Not Call registry, it only stays there for five years. This was, supposedly, in order to keep the list accurate - people move, phone numbers are reassigned, and so on. Except that the list is already regularly purged to remove disconnected numbers.

Of course, nobody's going to remember that their five years are up, and they'll start getting more annoying calls. The FTC doesn't see it that way, but at least one member of Congress is a bit smarter:

"It is incredibly quick and easy to do," Lydia Parnes, director of the FTC's bureau of consumer protection, said in an interview with The Associated Press this week. "It was so easy for people to sign up in the first instance. It will be just as easy for them to re-up."

But Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., says people should not be forced to re-register to keep telemarketers at bay. Doyle introduced legislation this week, with bipartisan support, to make registrations permanent.

Sure, it's quick and easy if you know you have to do it. Unless the FTC is planning on sending postcards out to everyone on the list before they're dropped, nobody is going to remember to re-up.

Smart marketers will support Doyle's legislation, because smart marketers don't want to waste their money having telemarketers call people who aren't interested in talking to telemarketers. Unfortunately, this is an area where marketers often aren't very smart.

It's always frustrating to see marketers react to consumer attempts to shut them up by trying to find a way to weasel through. Pop-up blockers? We'll come up with new formats to make you look at our ads. Do-not-call list? Our associations will lobby to make sure names drop off of it. And so on, and so on.

My rule with telemarketing is quite simple: Do not call me, ever. Do not call me if I'm your customer, or if I'm not. Just don't do it. I hate being interrupted by phone calls. Friends, family, and clients can call me. Businesses can if the reason is "we suspect fraudulent activity on your credit card" or "we want to tell you that your order is delayed" or "we are confirming you appointment next week."

I'm a marketer, and I think the legal standard for telemarketing should be opt-in only. And real opt-in, not "by opening this bank account you are telling us we can bombard you with offers by mail and phone."

It doesn't help the phone companies are in on the racket: you have to pay them not to give out your phone number.

I'm skeptical about the new conversational, user generated, only welcomed messages marketing simply because I think marketers kid themselves about what is really welcomed by consumers. Do not call registries with this kind of hole in them are a great example. I'd love to see marketing organizations be good citizens and call on Congress to make numbers on the registry permanent. It's good business and it's just the right thing to do.

Fake News Notes

2007-10-06T13:51:00.001-05:00

An interesting pair of stories...

Fake Steve Jobs (Forbes writer Daniel Lyons) has been giving the One Laptop Per Child project a hard time on his parody blog (which is actually one of the funniest commentaries on both Apple and the rest of the Silicon Valley crowd you can find). And so someone from OLPC's PR firm started commenting on blogs claiming to be Fake Steve. And got caught. Whoops. Aside from all the reasons that this is stupid and plain wrong, if you're going to do something bad, at least do it competently so you don't get caught.

Whether you think the criticism of OLPC is fair or not, they just look bad, bad, bad here. Though I do appreciate the trippiness of someone pretending to be someone who's pretending to be someone else. (In fairness, Fake Steve Jobs has always been clearly fake; there's a "fakesteve" in the blog's URL, and now we all know who's writing it.)

Then there's this "look, you don't have to buy an iPod!" "news" story, talking about how fab all the non-iPods out there are, with nice pictures of Zunes and appearing on... MSNBC, a news outlet co-owned by Microsoft. With no byline - not surprising, would a journalist want their name of this kind of corporate hummer piece? Just incredibly embarrassing. The piece gets a harsh dressing-down from tech journalist Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle on his blog today:

And, as Fake Steve Jobs points out, there's no byline on it, just a vague "MSNBC staff and news service reports". Anyone who's been in the news business for any length of time knows what that kind of credit line usually means: This assignment came down from On High, and the writer is too embarrassed to put his or her own name on it, as well he or she should be.
Hey, as every reporter knows -- or will find out at some point in his or her career -- it happens.
The problem is, of course, that no one's fooled. If this story was indeed mandated by a Microsoft honcho, he or she should be smart enough to know that it's not going to sell more Zunes (or fewer iPods). Readers will see it for the infomercial it is and move on to more credible sources.
Instead of benefiting Microsoft, more damage is done to MSNBC's reputation as an independent purveyor of news -- at least where personal technology is concerned.

Considering that the Zune sounds like a decent product, even if it is a me-too entry to the digital music player market, and it's backed by a behemoth who can stay in that market for the long haul until they start eating away at Apple's market share - kind of inevitable, considering how insanely large that share is, there's nowhere to go but down, you have to wonder who thought it was smart to adopt the tactics of faltering also-rans.

What's really sad about it is that they went to the trouble of doing it, and couldn't get anyone to give them a rationale for choosing something other than an iPod than the stunningly uncompelling "I appreciate obscurity." That has the makings of some strong positioning, doesn't it? (I have an iPod and love it and I could come up with better reasons not to buy one than that.)

News should be news. When you find yourself doing something to corrupt that, just stop. Aside from the bad karma, it's unlikely to work well, and when people figure it out, you're likely to wind up with egg on your face. Or, horrors, a Zune in your Christmas stocking.

Rally round the team

2007-10-05T07:04:00.001-05:00

As I've said before, and I will no doubt say again, there are few marketers as deft as those marketing professional sports teams. Maybe because I live in a city with big league teams. Maybe because I live in a city that's got a particular affinity for its big league teams. Maybe because these folks have actually moved me to purchase a bit of Red Sox merchandise. But all I can say is, these guys are good.

Witness last Monday's City Hall rally for the Boston Red Sox to celebrate their making it into the Major League Baseball play-offs.

Now, as excited as I was to be at Fenway Park for the game in which the Red Sox clinched their division title, and as hoarse as I remained 5 days later, it's actually not that stupendously big a deal to get into the play-offs. Eight teams out of 30 manage to do so, and while many of the races came down to the final weekend, that's still a reasonably high percent age (over 25%) of teams playing in October. In contrast, in the olden days of eight (later ten) teams in each league, only one team in each league moved on.

There are more teams now, so you do need to have divisions, but all this play-offs to get in the play-offs to get in the play-offs is largely a marketing artifact. More teams are winners. More teams play longer. There's more fan interest. There are more things to buy: divisional and wild-card caps and t-shirts. League championship caps and t-shirts. Tickets. TV revenue. DVDs of the games. Pennants. Cups. Bobble-headed dolls.

As I said, these folks are geniuses.

Back to the rally.

Now, the entire idea of a pep rally for a professional sports team might strike you as a bit odd to begin with - especially when said team hasn't won all that much yet. But MLB instituted the practice a while back of encouraging rallies in all the cities where a team has made it into the playoffs. This year, all of the cities obliged with the exception of New York, which is either too sophisticated and above it all to play this game - or which wisely figured that in a city where half the fans root for the Yankees (who made it to the play-offs as the AL Wild Card team) and half the fans root for the Mets (who rolled over, played dead, and squandered a big league to fall out of the play-offs entirely), it was best not to provoke anyone.

So, here we have a rally for professional sports team, to which thousands (maybe 10,000?) people show up to hear from the mayor, the owners, the players, the Standells ("Love that Dirty Water", played after games), the Dropkick Murphys (local Celtic punk band, with two Red Sox anthems in their repertoire, "Tessie" and "Shipping up to Boston", which was in the movie The Departed), and some country and western guy I've never heard of.

The Red Sox and Major League Baseball get to whip their fans into even more buying frenzy. (I wasn't there, but I'm guessing that there was stuff for sale, there or nearby.)

When I worked at Softbridge, we used to give the customers who attended our user group some sort of shirt on day one, and we'd be pleased as punch when on day two, most of them showed up wearing it.

How must it feel to walk around Boston - or, I'm guessing, any other city, including New York - where there are teams in the play-offs, and see that every other person is wearing a Red Sox cap, t-shirt, or jacket. Or, in my case, a nice little lapel pin that my sister got me a couple of years ago.

Sure, it's easy to push the goods when you have good product, but I'll say it again: these guys are marketing geniuses.

Humanize Your Email

2007-10-04T06:24:00.000-05:00

So much marketing email is written in the dreadful "Hi, I'm a corporation!" voice. Apart from being a bit painful to read, it blows a big opportunity to make a connection with the recipient and thereby increase the chances that they will respond in some way (for example, visiting your site, making a purchase, signing up for your event). That's the point that Nick Usborne makes in a MarketingProfs piece in which he offers some very simple suggestions on how to humanize your email messages.

(You have to be a premium member to read it - and being a premium members is worth it! MarketingProfs specializes in this handy pieces that give you some great tips you can put into use immediately, and you're bound to find a couple of worthwhile webinars out of their packed schedule... my big complaint is that I just can't participate in as many as I want. I recommend it.)

The tips are straightforward: write in a one-on-one style. Make sure the message comes from a real person, whose name is in the body and on the headers. And include contact information.

That last one is a pet peeve of mine; nothing will make me less interested in doing business with you than getting an email from a "send-only" mailbox. If you are going to email me, be ready for me to email you back. So many companies do this, and it's like calling a customer on the phone and then saying "Wait! Don't talk to me! This is a one way phone line!" Dumb, dumb, dumb.

If your email volume is high enough that this seems unmanageable, invest in software that will analyze inbound messages and take a first pass at classifying them or auto-responding with helpful information. (I am not annoyed when I get a message that says, "We think this might answer your question, but if not, just reply again and someone will get back to you." That's just a good time-saver for everybody.)

Nick's tips are great and if you're not doing these things already, you should start with your next email campaign.

Followup: CBS Doesn't Get It

2007-10-03T11:02:00.001-05:00

A quick followup to yesterday's discussion of free content...

Mark Cahill at Vario Creative linked to a YouTube clip from CBS News about buzz marketing. It's a good little report. As I clicked the link to YouTube, wondering why he didn't just embed it in his post, I got an immediate answer to my question:

CBS News says, "If you want to see our content, you have to come to our YouTube page." No doubt so that they can collect stats and show you other CBS News content.

I can see why they'd do that, but my reaction to it as a user is "Why are you making me leave the site I'm on to see this?"

Which is why I'm not linking to them (but of course you can go to Mark's post and follow the link). I suspect the video would get more play if they allowed embedding.