Success for Foursquare is in the Cloud

I enjoyed Caroline McCarthy's questions about Foursquare's sustainability.

But let's not limit the definition of success to the Foursquare product as it stands-the API is where the real action is.

Venue and advertiser innovation will drive the platform's success, as with Twitter.  Businesses and marketers can leverage the Foursquare platform to create engaging experiences wherever people gather, and they don't need to wait for Foursquare to make this a default behavior.

Marketers are dipping their toes in to the water of location-based social networking, using the game elements of Foursquare to enhance their marketing programs, but few are creating brand-relavent and ongoing experiences that add value for the user.

As users tune out broadcast messages, marketers will turn instead to memorable, high-ROI experiences in the real world that leverage Foursquare, or Yelp/Facebook checkins, or Gowalla, or the application we are all going to be using tomorrow.  Each of these is just another doorway to reach today's hyperconnected audience- and all their Foursquare friends.

Spontaneous Joy in Social Advertising

I spent the day with out of town visitors - my girlfriend's friends from college- and had two experiences in large groups that tell us much about the power of video experiences.

At the Manhattan JCC's Multisport Expo, Rachel and I attended a seminar on stretching- the new thesis in sports medicine seems to be that stretching before activity is not recommened, and that pre-activity warm-ups - a set of exercises was demonstrated- was preferable. 

The practitioners demonstrated two sets of warm-up exercises- meant to combat the idea that it's hard to fit the warmup into every workout.  At the end of the session, there was a phone number, a web site, an address, but no URL for the video.  Several people asked - we were all thinking it.  "Not Yet" the doctor's reply.  A completely disappointing missed opportunity to get all of us attendees- 100 people or so - to forward the experience of a great presentation and a real-take away, to our networks.  While it may be that the sports medicine practice didn't need the extra business- it was almost MEAN that we couldn't take the workout with us.  We'd have remembered that moment far better, to everyone's benefit.

I had lower expectations of the American Museum of Natural History, but this is a place that in many ways "gets it."  While parts of the museum are dark, scary places that likely haven't changed decor or content since the 1970s (I'm guessing about the latter but not the former), the dinosaur exhibits on the fourth floor were great.  I was definitely a dinosoaur-loving kid.  My favorite book at my granparents' house was Dinotopia, in which mankind discovers, and lives in harmony with, a lost world of dinosaurs.

I am prone to wandering a bit in museums (especially with dinosaurs involved) and I showed up  a few seconds too late to find Rachel and friends running in place and driving an imaginary car in front of a freestanding kiosk.  In fact, this was a camera-equipped video-production experience, which inserted video of the museum guest into a NYC Taxi being chased by T-Rex.  As though I was not already humming the Jurassic Park theme song!

The kiosk shoots video for 30 seconds or so, and prompts the user to send it, by email, to anyone you want!  Smart.  Part postcard, part email signup form, all fun, and sent at the perfect moment- this was exactly the kind of advertising the museum ought to be doing.  Don't sell me on the museum, sell mee on MY museum experience.  We came home and watched the video, and of course it offered some nice Museum of Natural History branding along with frantic T-Rex evasion.  I smiled, and my marketing self is still coming up with ways to enhance that experience. 

Capturing someone's spontaneuous joy is a powerful thing.

Learning from Ninjavideo.net- Give Me What I Want

The last decade has seen information technology  increase productivity and the measurement of marketing, and this has primarily been a gain in efficiency.  I think social technologies trend in the opposite direction by making marketing more powerful, insightful, and satisfying to the target audience.  Having the people's affirmation as a lynchpin of success has done wonders for the quality of many marketing program's.

At a recent NY Tech Meetup, I was introduced to Ninjavideo.net and finally had a chance to try it out.  While the site seems to be hitting its stride in terms of ad monetization, it's possible all this ad-revenue will be clawed back by a copyright infringement lawsuit.  From a usability perspective, the site is great, and THAT is what people want. [side note: consumers (ok, I) will click on nearly anything to get the content we  (ok, I) want].  There is literally no telling what the "Ninjavideo.net Helper Applet" is doing after you're done with it.

Conclusion: The site is one a huge missed opportunity for the major media companies and studios- this is where the people are, and they'll watch ninjavideo.net or its successors until they figure out how to serve the audience rather than enslave them. 

Top Five things from SXSW 2010

1. Great impromptu meeting with the guys from @Foursquare
2. Dachis Group Social Business Summit and the copy of @rushkoff's book in the goodie bag
3. Valerie Casey Keynote @designersaccord
4. @Jmspool's Design Treasures of the Amazon
5. @Boxee party

I will post more about each as they marinate, but really really a great event.

Operational Transparency

In his Buzzmachine blog, Jeff Jarvis writes about a Continental Airlines choice of transparency over secrecy after flights were cancelled:

Continental is practicing operational transparency. It opened up information is already has to us, the customers, so we can be informed and empowered. This way, I’m not cursing the airline and its employees. I’m well aware that our flight might be canceled and that’s entirely out of Continental’s control, so I wouldn’t blame them. But every time this has happened in the past, I hated being in the dark; I hated being lied to by airlines; I simply want more information. And now an airline is giving it to me. Bravo for Continental.

Operational transparency is only possible when someone has sat down and calculated the benefit of the true information vs. the costs of its absence. Good on Continental in this case, and we should all look to say more when there is no serious competitive disadvantage to secrecy- hiding behind “approved messaging” will just keep your customers from taking your side.

Kraft should show its Human side

I've written a new post in my "Human Marketing" series about how Kraft's way out of a PR and ingredient quality crisis is by reinforcing the trust relationships we used to take for granetd, and now question.  Let me know what you think.

Lessons of selling less for more

In Duane Reade this afternoon, I stopped in for some batteries.  After that bewlildering purchase, (Buy 16 get 2+2 free? I think all these packages were designed to get you to use a calculator which...you guessed it, eventually needs more batteries) I was wondering what ultra low price Coke products were going for.  I purchased a few 12packs of Coke Zero myself when they were 2 for $7 last year (that's right, 24 cans, $7).

Now what?  Well, look at these cute little cans of coke! 8 ounces!  AWWWWW.  Except eight, 8oz cans is 4.59 and the 12pks below are $3.99!  Did you know that this little genius of a gimmick increases the price per ounce by 158%????

It's only 100 calories worth of Coke- I get this phenomenon but find it to be wasteful, an admission that we are unable to make healthy and wholesome decisions about food.

But it's far worse than that. The cans themselves are like little bits of wasted ingenuity.  What else could we have done with those resources?  With the energy to manufacture, distribute, ring up. label, formulate, and market this product?  Would we be closer to housing the homeless?  Empowering community entrepreurs?  Powering the country with wind or solar power?  Coming to a consensus about health care reform?  Understanding the causes of cancer?  Understanding each other?

Wasted effort.  The free market, in its obsession with immediate gratification, trades short term incentives for a slower, sustainable vision.  Easy credit, fragile products, unaccountable corporations victimize the global economy.

We all have choices - I'm searching for long term value creation and seeking to consume in a sustainable way.

I'll write in the future about this from the corprate strategy perspective.

Heartfelt Marketing scores - Griffin and Dave Delaney

This is the kind of multi-media experience I believe any brand can undertake with the right people approaching a high-profile event.  While you would do lots of things differently to reflect your brand, the skeleton is here.  Chris Brogan's post on Griffin is excellent, here are excerpts:

Summary:
Dave Delaney and his company, Griffin, put on quite a great little project with CESBound. They took an old VW bus, after hours, and restored it, and then drove it from Nashville all the way to Las Vegas for CES. Along the way, they made media, met friends, told stories, shot photos, froze a bit, played music, and had a blast.

Key takeways (from the bottom of the post):

• Tell a story and tell it well.
• Capture the story in multiple types of media.
• Involve people by communicating and relationship-building.
• Tie it to your core theme and beliefs (Griffin is a lot about art, design, expression).
• Build a meaningful online presence around the experience. Don’t call CESBound a microsite.
• Do it inhouse. Near as I can tell, they had no external agency help with the project.
• Share the spotlight. Griffin also partnered with Threadless to create a special CES iPhone case, with BrightKite for location services, and more.
• Bring it all home. The team did a great job of telling a story that also strengthened the brand.

Kudos to Dave Delaney and thanks as always to Chris Brogan for calling out a rockstar story.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just in case I don't post over the holiday, Happy Thanksgiving!  Or, Slapsgiving!

Relationships: your ticket out of Social Media Slave Labor

Are social media sites the agents driving us all into slave labor creating the means for marketers to oppress us?  Or can marketers be smarter than that?

Instead, I would argue that only marketers who fail to create relationships need slaves.

The Internet as Playground and Factory conference explored these issues recently, and at first blush, an excerpt like this gives us all the willies, doesn't it?

Only a small fraction of the more than one billion Internet users create and add videos, photos, and mini-blog posts. The rest pay attention. They leave behind innumerable traces that speak to their interests, affiliations, likes and dislikes, and desires. Large corporations then profit from this interaction by collecting and selling this data.  Social participation is the oil of the digital economy. Today, communication is a mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives and it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor. 

Am I a slave right now, blogging and tweeting and mentioning brand names and leaving a trail of data crumbs all over the interwebs?  True, all the data the "slaves" create is fodder for data-driven marketing. Tracking people across social media, .com properties, searches and video views, it all becomes the cloud that companies are seeking to profit from.

Many of these approaches create highly interesting optimization problems.  However, I would claim that we cannot reduce all marketing to an optimization problem.

1. You can't optimize awareness- if you want people everywhere to know what you are doing, this will cost you in terms of money, people, or time, or frequently all three.

2.Once a user finds you, marketing strategies must combine the use of personalized offers with actual relationships and content.  So no matter how many times you test your banner creative to see whether people who saw the "pizza hut and taco bell" video like your banner ad better than people who saw the "Peanut butter jelly time" clip from Family Guy, these correlations do not get people to like you.  They're just data. 

3. Data in marketing organization often reduces perceived uncertainty about a tactic without really proving it's the right strategy.  It's just a better use of money, but spending money without creating relationships is a first class ticket to lowermybills.com.

4. Optimization-driven marketing creates perceived value for middlemen and service providers, and moves dollars around between ad nbetworks, exchanges, publishers, advertsiwers, agencies and niche service providers:  it does create valuable relationships with customers.

The Human Relationships  forged when your product or sales force take care of the customer, however challenging, last longer than an ad campaign or an agency retainer agreement, and are forgiving of mistakes but not impervious.  It's a long-term value play.  Some companies play this game well, and many, many, do not.  Patience is a virtue.

Hat tip to @kcheyfitz for giving me something to think about this Sunday morning.

You keep using that word, Targeting- I do not think it means what you think it means

Dear, Mycriminaljusticecareers.com ad team,

REALLY?

I know you didn't mean to target me with your ad.  You did?  Hmmmm.

Ok, I'll play along.  I have read Rainbow Six (the BOOK) twice.  I have two legs and all my fingers. I am not averse to wearing riot gear and breaking up WTO protests.

Is it just me or is a Facebook ad for law enforcement taking the wrong approach by luring people in with the SWAT Team - literally enticing people to apply for law enforcement positions with all the cool weapons you can only get with lots of virtual gold in Mafia Wars or at that level of Doom II I could never reach? If this is really best accomplished THROUGH FACEBOOK then their ad inventory must be even cheaper than I thought.

The the kind of law enforcement assitance you're likely to get from Facebook is more along the lines of an SNL Sketch than anything else.

You know what, this ad is  hell of a lot better than a credit score ad or something from lowermybills.com, so I take it all back.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Bloom

Keywords vs. people in creating your marketing strategy

Charlene Li was quoted in mediapost suggesting that marketers should seek to test the effects of their campaigns and understand the experience and reactions of people to those keywords, rather than only looking at the numbers. 

I agree in principle, and it remains true that if you are going to talk to a conference of search marketers, you have to temper your words a bit so you don't lose the attention of the people who spend their days in an Excel/SQL driven quest to "optimize" their keyword buys or ad targeting.

Finding out what keywords drive the most revenue for your business is an interesting challenge and one that many businesses need to do.  But at the end of the day, you'll find me building a relationship with a customer, not the keywords that he types into Google or Bing or ...Bing :). 

Those relationships are about more than keywords, they are about an experience and delivering value. As more businesses shape up to this reality, they are sure to reap the rewards.  As I have been chronicling in my Human Marketing series, I think creating a connection with a customer, even during short transactions, is what delivers long term value to the enterprise.

Been Saying it for years

No one clicks on Ads.  I don't.  My friends sure don't.  We're looking for engaging and useful expeerinces. and can't wait to find a few from your brand.  Ad Age reports that the data is event WORSE than it was 2 years ago for display advertising (at least as a standalone Direct Response medium):

The number of people online who click display ads has dropped 50% in less than two years, and only 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks, according to the most recent "Natural Born Clickers" study from ComScore and media agency Starcom. As the pool of people who click on banner ads rapidly decreases, it begs the question: Is the long-used click-through rate now officially useless?

Fast Facts

• 85% of clicks on ads come from 8% of web users
• Only 16% of web users click display ads (down from 32% in 2007)
• Consumers exposed to a display ad were 65% more likely to visit the advertiser's site
• Banner exposure correlated with search volume and length of microsite interaction (minutes)

Ok, so that's better than nothing.  The clicks people are counting on aren't coming from the people you think.  Facebook and Twitter aren't dominated by early adopters any more.

So what are the ad plays that work?  Are we left just with off-site retargeting?  With remessaging based on search engine activity?  Profiling and social network analysis?

When working with major brand dollars, you've just got to think  bigger than clicks, and more holistically than conversions.  I'll be writing in the coming weeks about how that perspective among the industry's biggest spenders needs to evolve.

Who have you hired and what have they done?

Enjoyed reading the interview of Cisco CEO John Chambers in the NYT, and I'm glad to take away this point about hiring. I've been on my share of interviews, but I have not been asked this question, which Mr. Chambers says is one of his barometers for successful candidates:

Who are the best people you recruited and developed, and where are they today?

Most organizations expect leaders to recruit and retain high-performing employees,  and the question of "What do you look for in a new hire?" might seem to substitute for this.   Judgements about teambuilding style are important, but I think Mr. Chambers question gets at 2 critical issues:  Success at maintaining a professional network and generostiy of character.

Maintaining a Professional Network

In an age where workers change jobs more frequently, perhaps every 2-3 years, By the age of 40 most of my peers will have had a half-dozen or so jobs.  Some of them may have been self-employed for some of that time.  They'll very likely have left companies a few times.  I'd look to hire employees who left on a positive note and are able to grow and maintain professional relationships; these are the people who are feeding new information to your potential new hire, and who may be the key to new business opportuntiies or partners.  While sales professionals may be expected to "bring a rolodex" across jobs, we're all smarter for the people we know and connect with.

Generosity of Character

The ability to nurture someone else's career and to sustain a professional relationship over time, even across different firms, also speaks to a generosity of character that I think goes along with a successful employee.  If you've hired a young whippersnapper and helped them to become a stronger employee, I know exactly how you will approach junior tema memebers of my company, and that you will contribute to their success as well.  Clearly, you're focused on helping the orgainzation succeed, not just watching out for your bonus.  

A lesson for me

The best people I ever hired have gone on to great jobs in finance,  venture capital/private equity, IT consulting, academia, and marketing.  I can name many people I would be pleased to have define my role as manager over the years, and that's just off the top of my head.  I wish I kept better track of them, and I will make an effort to do so.

Who have you hired?  Did they make a difference for your organization? 

Airlines bring human contact back to marketing

NYT image of a Delta Red shirt assiating customers

Travel just stinks.  While airlines thought that we didn;t want to talk to a person, and set before us phone trees and incomprehensible kiosks.  This NYT story is about bringing the personal back to airline customer service, such as Delta's revival of the Red Shirt program which previously was b. 1969- d.2005

Cue mobile checkin, print at home boarding passes.  With merger after merger creating a mess of backend systems that won't talk to each other, and the overloaded ATC systemwe're stuck with.  Sometimes, automated customer service either can't keep us happyor can't keep up with the problem.  Or it IS the problem. 

Very exciting to see airlines realize that by focusing on the customer experience in total and attacking the morass of air travel with people and love rather than phone trees, something brilliant could be happening.

Learning from Jeff Bezos

One of my favorite things Jeff Bezos says here is "Invent on Behalf of Customers."  Right on.

TalkingPointsMemo funded- promises to whiten teeth of influencers?

Funding for news outlet TalkingPointsMemo. I'm interested in the bsuiness of online journalism, indeed, in proving that there even is one. So to hear "between $500k and $1 million" in angel funding going to TPM, with the niche outlet interested in monetizing its audience of savvy professional news junkies with high incomes. They're hiring, and have had 200 applicants for 7 positions. Founder Joshua Micah Marshall noted, "They are the best group of applicants I have ever seen...when I see some of their applications, I think I should be applying to them.”

So what business besides invetsing that angel cash in commodities is going to pay these 7 lucky hires? I ventured over to the site for the first time in while (I think during the presidential election I mostly visited the TPMuckraker Youtube channel) to find out.

I've never seen a stronger argument for micropayments. I took this screen shot of the TPM home page using Aviary, and have highlighted in red the ads for THE SAME teeth whitening or work at home garbage in FIVE different configurations and placements on the home page. Really TPM? Is that the ad that's going to engage your audience of "affluent, educated ...influentials" in your audience of 1.6million monthly visitors?

I think not.  These ads are the same ignorable garbage that the internet is filled with.  Scary.

Get thee to a subscription model, or something close to it, and FAST.  While we may all contribute our comments, our stories, our attention, and even our dollars via paypal, we of the online influence probably won't do much for TPM's business seeing those kinds of ads all together.  Sigh.