Audience size: everything old is new again

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.

Why Doesn't Everyone Do This?

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)?

Can You Measure the Value of Integrity?

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.

BT Wants You to Give it Away

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.