Web Strategy

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Food Brand Site Done Right: Kashi

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In the wake of the Skittles dustup, what can a food brand do?  I wanted to comment on Charlie's post, but I decided yesterday that I didn't have anything to add- Charlie said it right. I  knew that I didn't really like the site, thought it was derivative of Modernista's home page...but what was Skittles  supposed to do?  What can the web do for food brands until mind control beams?

Skittles_at_bsbnyc

After seeing a Kashi ad on TV, enticing me to visit their web site and get a free frozen entree, I said, let's just see about this. Conclusion: Kashi did something very cool. 

As background: I love Kashi.  I didn't always.  Kashi used to be these crazy rice puffs my friend Matt would eat, and I wasn't really up for that.  After I started trying to eat better about 18 months ago, I discovered Kashi frozen entrees, and shortly thereafter the GoLean cereal.   In my apartment right now I have Kashi GoLean cereal on the shelf and a Southwest Chicken frozen entree in the freezer.  I am a loyal consumer.  I tell people about Kashi products.  A lot.  The products work in my lifestyle: whole grains, protein, and trying to avoid artificial sugars.  But not everyone is as vigilant as I am :)

Now, as a comparison, it might not be fair to suggest that Skittles can claim any kind of identification with me, because hey, when was the last time I bought candy?  OK.  However, what Kashi executes is something that is relevant, connects you to the core of the company, and gave me something in return. Here's the Black Bean Mango Frozen Entree.

Kashi1

See the additional contest on the right?  You better believe I want a year's supply of Kashi food! 

I decided to join their community, which actually has some very interesting things about reaching goals, whatever they might be, in wellness and mind/soul health, not just nutrition.  How about: Challenge yourself to sanitize your sponges?  I think this site does great things for the brand.  Is it personable?  You bet.  Here's the Kashi Customer Relations staffer's profile:

KashiCommunityManager Anjanette  

If you're wondering what at thoughtful company Kashi is, check out their registration Captcha.  I'm not opposed to ones like ReCaptcha, which I think works rather well, but this was fantastic, and so refreshing:

With the Kashi Captcha, You could request a verification email instead, but why would you want to?

You could request a verification email instead, but why would you want to?

I willingly entered my home address three times on Kashi.com because I realized, if there is one food brand I wouldn't mind hearing from, it might be Kashi. The TV campaign Kashi is running, which offers a free frozen entree, and encouraging visitors to join a well thought-out community site is at least a viable alternative to creating a social media firestorm just so people will talk about Skittles.  Instead, try Kashi.

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Facebook Deal-breaker

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I have now seen this "Get Your Obama Check" ad about 30 times in the last 48 hours.   ObamaCheck

As a resident of planet internet I've gotten used to the morass of spam that hits my email account, with offers from every salacious, medical, impossible, fraudulent, Canadian, or just mis-spelled offer in the land.  I'm fine with my mental state, my body, and my darn watch for now, thank you very much.

I don't really see the value in the display ads on Facebook thses days.  The dating ads were under my skin for a while- they just seemed to have mean ad copy that took advantage of my profile to target me and be mean.

And now, in this climate, the "Get Your Obama Check" is beyond the pale, a scam sending in $2.99 to "get $12,000" is ridiculous. It's the kind of late night drivel we've seen for years.  I implore Facebook to get rid of these ads, and for my fellow citizens to report such ads as tasteless, opportunistic scams. 

Where will Facebook build significant advertising value?  Does such a thing exist when most people I know deploy a combination of resentment and unconscious filtering to ignore the ads we see?  Did you think that I didn't notice your addition of a third ad slot in the right gutter, Facebook? 
Even at 150 million monthly active users, I'm skleptical of the long term advertising value proposition if Facebook is going to let these kinds of ads destroy what little positive perception Facebook ads enjoy.

Perhaps the pro version of Facebook polls and Facebook's Lexicon utility are where the real money is- if that's so, why should Facebook still be taking these scammers' money?

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Network Effects, Attention, and Twitter

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A Twitter presence is getting harder and harder to manage.  Charlie O’Donnell’s “how to manage a professional network online” podcast on BlogTalkRadio gives some interesting guidance in this area for those starting out.  I know Charlie limits himself to following 250 people, but it’s not uncommon for superstars on Twitter to be following thousands.  I don’t know what the number should be, but following 210 people feels very different from when I was following 50.  Why is that?

Twitter is an attention aggregator.  The best conversations on Twitter take place in close to real time, and evolve FAST.  Taking advantage of mobile web or SMS updates to tweet from an event or while away from a computer adds a lot to the experience.  My RSS reading dropped dramatically once I started using Twitter, because I was getting MORE of the folks whose blogs I read: more of their thought process, their likes and dislikes, a bit of their lives…and attention from them.  If Twitter is a network of status messages, its biggest achievement may be to confer status (or as Nate Westheimer put it, the paypal of social capital).  Attention is an input for distributing social capital.

But not everyone can stay on Twitter, all day every day.  While we’re asleep, doing our jobs, even making eye contact with people in real life, living life, we are usually interacting with the world without writing it down.  We get value from Twitter when we pay attention TO it, and everyone pays a little different amount.  Twitter's effects are normally distributed, too.  There is some minority of people it hurts, a great many who get little to moderate value, and some other minority who get supercharged about it.  Twitter changed how I view a lot of events, connected me more closely to co-workers, and made it clear that instantaneous responses from marketers could have an impact on brand reputation.

My next post on this topic will discuss how the necessity of filtering affects social network and community growth.

Cable television execs aren't in the experience business - but they should be

Advertising Age has an article which surveys some Cable TV execs on their perspective on going in the direction of Hulu: a site which has done fantastically well selling ads along with high-quality online video. The article's title asks, Will Cable Networks Get Their Own Video Site Like Hulu?.


The speculation is that they are not interested, for fear of cannibalizing their exisitng revenue streams. Scary. The article quotes David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Communications:

We don't want to train [viewers] to watch our best shows on [free online] platforms. Most of our research shows if we move our content mostly in clips, we can create an environment where we can mostly satisfy our viewers with consumer content on other platforms but do it in a way that doesn't take away from our core business.


Train them? Why is the broadcast business about keeping viewers in a cage that protects the content producer? While you build the cage, you force your most motivated fans to seek it elsewhere. Hulu's greatest long-term asset will be eliminating the need for those fans to do that.


The reality is that the model of watching TV that provides that "core business" for the MSOs is just broken. Buying CDs clealry broke in the late 90s, and the death spiral of the record industry is proof of that. Hulu approaches things from the user perspective, with the goal of creating an experience that people want. The MSOs create an experience that makes them money, and they know that whatever maze they put between the user and their content, some people will navigate it.

It's just antitheical to the MSO or the cable networks, really, to approach the deployment of services as something to undertake from the user's perspective.

They built it, they came, now what?

Reading Ana's post about what news sites like Politico.com can do next to "own" political debate content, I think it is interesting that a site with even fewer resources or infrastructure at its disposal, namely fivethiryeight.com, became so big.   The founder of FivethirtyEight.com, Nate Silver, a statistician with BaseballProspectus, speculated about his own fate and the fate of the audience:

“That’s the paradox,” he said. “You would think that you elect this guy and you want him to effect change, and then he gets elected, and people don’t care about bills being passed.”

He suspects that Nov. 4 was the height of his popularity, and that producers will not be phoning as frequently any time soon. Publishers have been calling about a book, and he will continue with FiveThirtyEight, using it to predict Congressional votes during the Obama administration — if anyone cares.

That is, sadly, the state of our fickle attention.  For all the interest built up in the election, I think there is a now-what element to a lot of people's reading habits.  The Obama transition team's Change.gov is a good start to focusing the attention of the electorate on the business of governing, and it just so happens that much of the Web 2.0 technology suite is well-suited to organizing people.

But we will eventually have to take part, to build something real and true and beyond the walls of our social networks. 

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CMO strategy in a downturn

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My newest contribution to the Razorfish Headlight blog is now live.   I tried to look at many of the different elements affecting sales and marketing decisions online and in America; I have a very strong perspective that there MUST be a strategic opportunity somewhere for a company seeking to create value.  

These recommendations could translate to other industries, particularly durable goods which are typically financed.  See CMO strategy in a downturn at headlightblog.com.  

Also this month are excellent articles on digital advertising by my colleagues Neal Gorevic, who writes about dealers using video advertising, and Blake Kimball, who writes about new media planning tactics.

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Why Nothing is Easy until it's Tough first

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In a recent article I wrote for the Headlight blog, I wrote about data portability, but I was largely describing a world we're not quite living in yet.

What will happen first among a lot of services is that we will have lots of innovation, and many solutions to the same problem.  The strong solutions, and the solutions created by smart people, will coalesce into standards that arer adopted for the future.

We are at the point where the IETF isn't the standars body people are looking to now- instead of data communications standards, the battleground is at the application level.  Creating web applications with good interfaces is now a totally democratized effort.  his will mean chaos, probably for a while.  Competing standards.  Facebook vs. Google.  Social graphs vs. brute force indexing.  But eventually there will be shakeout.  It sure took a long time for the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray wars to be over, buit that's what we are in for.  the only thing that is encouraging aboutt his on a web servicrews level is that from a cash perspective it is  easier for a user to make a choice among competing web services (typically because they are free).

But the subsequent shakeout shows us that even if the service is free, user attention and effort which goes into the serivce has value.  Users in a community create value for each other; they are paying for this servie one way or another. It is at this point, ewith userr value locked up somehwre, that the questiuon of portable data becomes important.  What now?

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Twitter Test- Are You a Bot?

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I'm having a lot of thoughts about twitter.  There are plenty of good primers on twitter, and lots of discussion of how the API traffic far exceeds site traffic.  There's plenty of discussion about web metrics that suggests that such a service really can't be accurately measured by panel based or site-side analytics services.  What this post is about, though, are the twitter use cases, the experiences of using the service.

One thing that I have observed from a conversation about a rash of new twitter followers coming out (apparently a couple of days ago the twitter mail queue held its breath and then burped out a whole bunch of notification e-mails) that in many cases these followers had a kind of artificial quality- particularly in cases where they are following dozens and being followed by far fewer.   That irks a lot of people, because it suggests that you are not contributing as much as listening, or dare I say, stalking. 

Twitter, to my mind, will lose value if it moves toward to the 90/10 rule participation - Twitter is no fun if you never send anything, as many people have pointed out to me.  What twitter really does is force you to think about the balance...unless you're a bot.

When is it best used?  When  you send a lot and listen a lot.  Charlie and Nate's video about Jamba Juice and Twitter or Michael Arrington's Comcast Outage or HR Block experiences are perfect examples of this.  There is of course the infamous @jasoncalacanis passport debacle. 

The twitter audience is kind of fickle..and the twitsphere really centers around tech right now, with @jasoncalacanis kind of the king of twitter self promotion.  He can cause weird stuff like this to happen:

One mention by @jasoncalacanis and I get a torrent of new friend requests. Howdy folks!

I probably  err on the side of being too human, in that I follow too few people who are following me.  I try to exercise judgment about how much information I can reasonably consume- I am noticing that if you follow enough high volume twitter users, you can miss a lot of stuff, even @ messages from real-life friends. I try to make my tweets a mixture of the immediate, the insightful, the random and the humorous.

I've never met @mikedoe in person but I really enjoy his tweets. Most of thew original people I followed on twitter were NextNY people like @innonate @ceonyc and @quirk.   Jason Calacanis sent a whole bunch of people to follow @alanataylor- I'm sure she's gonna go far.

So, if you got here from twitter, say hi here in the comments or D msg me- er, do they have bots that do that?

 

Am I the only one who remembers PeoplePC?

Unfazed by the misery that sent PeoplePC into idea purgatory,  Zonbu launches bare-bones subscription laptops .

"You're going after a market that's wide open and hasn't been addressed yet," Milman said. Components prices are cheap, so it is possible for a vendor to build such a PC, he said.

Really?  Untapped?  At $279, how much are their customers really saving?  I had my last laptop for 4 years, but by the end it was in rough shape.  If you figure these customers keep their laptops for three years, that's $819 total.   You've gotta be better off financing a $1,000 laptop for three years...or buying a $500 laptop for cash.

This is to say nothing of the fact that all their value adds could all be had for free pretty easily. 

 

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The End of the Diversified Media Company?

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How valuable is is to have assets over a variety of businesses?  Do economies of scale and especially scope really exist?  I think it is interesting what is happening this week.

Previously I blogged about IAC breaking up- essentially this is a vote for "yes" and a vote for "no" because the breakup into five separate companies suggests that the value of the parts individually is higher than the value of the whole.  Barry Diller also said that IAC

needed [the transactional businesses like Ticketmaster] earnings to allow us to invest in emerging Internet businesses. Now that we have real scale in the pure Internet units, it makes nothing but sense to me to reorganize the whole.

So essentially, having TV, internet, real estate, and retail assets all together under one roof wasn't maximizing shareholder value after all.


CnbcNbccom What are other firms doing?  Try GE. General Electric's NBC Universal unveiled a sweeping campaign last night during the Sunday Night Football broadcast of the Eagles-Cowboys game aimed at  "entertaining, informing and empowering Americans to lead greener lives."  But was anyone watching?

I would be surprised if this was not one of the top games in ratings this season.  The campaign, NBC Green is Universal, will turn the NBC logo on virtually all of its TV channels (cable and broadcast) Internet properties(excluding MSNBC),  green for one week to coincide with eco-awareness programming.  I don;t know what Matt Lauer was doing near the arctic circle, but apparently the earth is getting warmer :)  It's "Green Week" at Claire's high school on Heroes. 

The models on Deal or No Deal will be  wearing recycled parachutes.  Jay Leno shows you how to clean a green sink in an eco-friendly way.  Even as CNBC was reporting that Citigroup stock was probably headed lower, there was Eco-Awareness brought to you by NBCU. GE announced this on October 23, apparently.

It's going to be hard to avoid all of this, as NBC is everywhere, but I think the only thing this proves is unified campaign launches across platforms can be done well, with the added benefit that we decide to tell all our bosses to buy that $2,000,000 GE HVAC unit for the office park because it's 20% more efficient and uses 16% renewable resources (i made those figures up- all of them).  GE  named Ann Klee Vice President for Environmental Programs today!  All this seems more to be happening for corporate PR value and brand equity than any DR/commerce advertising.

Times are just as challenging for other large media companies.  The AOL/TW merger never produced the kinds of scale and scope ecomies and leverage promised to investors. Viacom spun off CBS radio in an apparent loss of faith  in the radio business's  fit with its other assets. 

Maybe all of these are examples of businesses with strong positions but weak strategic frameworks.  Are software/tech companies like Microsoft and Google doing this better than others?  In some sense, it seems like their model isn;t much different- using a cash cow (Windows OS/office software for Microsoft, search for Google) to lever into other lines of business.  Time will tell.