The Immigrant Song

New Life for the CueCat Breathed by Kindle Advertising Model

New patent filings reveal some of the Kindle's Ad-Supported plans via this article in MediaPost. One patent:

Filed December 2006 and granted last month, the patent would give consumers who purchase a print book an electronic copy of the physical version, too.

I started thinking, what could you do to use physical media to drive digital sales?  And I just thought,m barcodes, barcodes, barcodes, barcodes.  There are books all around us, and a lot of them might be worth reading, but book discovery takes some work.  However, what's great about most books is the barcode/ ISBN number, guaranteeing a wealth of available metadata...if we could only get to it. 

I immediately thought of the CueCat, which represented gadget-hungry tech hubris in a way that made it memorable forever- including prominent placement as one of the ten worst tech products of the past decade by C|net, (I wonder what CueCat inventor Dave Matthews is up to these days.) It was closed and limited, but there was something alluring.  For a certain generation, the CueCat has something to offer as an idea, and this was NOT a failure of technology so much as timing, product, and business.

So how about scanning a barcode, or taking a photo of one, and getting a quick license to read that book on your kindle, ad supported?  That sounds like a business to me.  Users are engaged, publishers get a new audience that otherwise would have flipped through a book and then put it down- it's too easy to let it go away.  Not sure if you could also use this for triggering ancillary book content but that would also be interesting. 

Go for it, AMZN!

Earned Media and the need for chatter

AdAge asks, Is No Chatter Worse Than Negative Chatter? Good question- for many brands, the passion that drives affinity is just as desirable as the passion that drives hatred.  I'm reminded of this Scion ad, which really drives the point home: stand for something or go home.

Such is the challenge of Earned media- you have to attract attention while still being YOU.  If there's nothing worth saying about your brand, then you're beyond help in any advertising medium.  Stick with the paid stuff.

But when there's something or someone to love, to hate, to act as an ally or fight as an enemy, you've got your in. 

You can't force people to tweet your brand or your hashtag- you're going to have to do something to create the emotion behind those actions.  Are you talking to #BlameDrewsCancer? Are you finding what's funny about your product and getting that on video?

Look.  Listen.  Plan.  Blow it up big.  Measure.  Repeat.

Don't use a Social Media Hammer on a Business Nail

Just a hammer.  Image via Wikipedia

Walking through midtown this morning, Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters Conference is still on my mind.  I had many folks agree with me that just because Twitter is hot now doesn't mean it's the right tool, or even a good tool, for many businesses.  Ditto for social media- you're not going to get anywhere just by betting that Twitter and Facebook will save the day when the public ignores your ads and hates your microsites.  "Enter the conversation" the evangelists say.  But what will you say? 

Social media is great when it brings out the real people in an organization and puts them next to customers and prospects for a conversation. 

Social media is not  code for "people waiting for my brand to tell them to spam their friends."

Consumers aren't any more interested in spamming their friends with your message than they are in watching TV ads with the same tagline.

The quality of conversation is not a social media problem, it is a business problem.  Putting a happy smiling "conversation" on a truly awful business situation won't resolve the business problem, and this fact transcends twitter or facebook or any tool du jour.  Does your firm listen to its customers?  Does it care about their experience with your product?

A webinar invite from Convergys detailed the following results from their research about communication service providers:

Surveys found that customer service is the key to customer loyalty:
• More than 67% of subscribers value first call resolution and knowledgeable agents
• More than 41% of subscribers will stop doing business with a company without telling the company why – but they will inform their friends and neighbors

The customer service experience is a business problem that many telecommunications and cable companies struggle with- but putting your best social media people on reach out to the aggrieved minority who speak up will not fix the customer service experience that was broken in the first place!

So the question you should ask yourself is, do you want to hit the same old nail with a new hammer, or do you want to change who is swinging it and how it's swung?  Gary Vaynerchuck's "scaling caring" idea is an interesting way of putting it, and gets at some part of the problem- if you cannot or will not change your level of caring for your customer, no amount of social media involvement will fix your company.

Check out how @zappos handles their customer service and brand presence on Twitter, and you'll find that behind the social media is a company that knows how to swing a hammer on behalf of their customers.

iPhone Customer Experience Retains customers, freaks out Monopolistic long-distance carriers

USA Today has a piece today suggesting that the new iPHone "gulps network capacity" in such amounts that AT&T is having having tough time keeping up.

According to Nielsen's Roger Entner, "the average iPhone user eats up around 400 megabytes of capacity each month. Average smartphone usage is 40 to 80 megabytes. "

Poor, poor AT&T...all these customers who can't get enough of your product and can't switch to a competitor!

But what's really happening with the claim that "network demands are only going to increase as pricing on the current iPhone 3G drops to $99"?  The article skips over at least one link in the syllogism by concluding that as price drops the number of devices increases in absolute terms (notwithstanding the millions of iPhone early adopters who will surely be buying their second or even third iphone, as loyal AT&T customers).  This is inaccurate rather than plainly untrue. 

Imagine it: a device manufacturer finally built a device that represents valuable customers who demand good data service (even though Sprint's network can probably deliver as much throughput as AT&T, there's no way I'm going to demand that much data on my Blackberry Curve- the browsing experience sucks, but the email is great).

The iPhone's competitive advantage is the customer experience, from the interface to the data connection, so AT&T's iPhone business goes to hell if they stop investing in the network.  Great customer experiences, at some pricepoints ("every purse and purpose" is not the play here) are what retain customers. 

AT&T likes locked-in customers, though- it always has, from back when AT&T was....(ahem) AT&T.  I don't know if I see that attitude changing at the company until my generation is managing it; people who have always had a cell phone but have switched six times before they turn 25.

Customer Service excellence, twitter and @comcastcares

The surest sign that a company has a bright future is when its employees are focused on the customer.  If the various Twitter customer service anecdotes (Comcast, Jetblue, etc) have done anything, it is to expose gaping holes in the lifeless void that most customer service operations force customers to navigate.

In the WSJ, I found Comcast’s Twitter Guru Speaks.

But unlike other marketers using the service, Mr. Eliason said he’s unconcerned with how many followers he has. “When people follow me they’ll see me say ‘Can I help you?’ 150 times in a row,” he said. “I wouldn’t follow me either.”

Amen to that- he's not trying to build a community of influencers, he's trying to fix a broken customer support system.  There aren't that many communities with multiple cable companies- people know Comcast is the local monopolist.  So this is not about finding people who don't know about Comcast and convincing them to buy, this is about loving your customers...forever.

What is sad is how recent this phenomenon is.  Airlines, telecom companies, cable companies, all use enormous call center operations to deal with the inflow of customer contacts.  And they usually do it very, very badly.

The fact that Social Media approaches find so much low-hanging fruit is more a testament to how bad the other systems are at dealing with customers.  Should we be rewarding Comcast for NOT screwing up this time? 

I'm digging into the CRM Magazine's June 2009 issue entitled, Who Owns the Social Customer and will be posting a few thoughts about how CRM is both an integrated customer relationship function and a marketing function, but also a recognition that the world's largest firms MUST change the way they do business.

Monetizing User Karma

A Twitter direct message from a friend suggested to me that I check out Spymaster- a twitter based game that asks you to participate in a global covert espionage war against your...twitter friends.  You won't need a new video card or a crazy detailed mouse for this.

The game is played both on the web and also in the twitterverse, as you can interact with the game via twitter, and the game will update twitter when you do certain things.  Helpfully, the game not only tells the user up front about the possible notifications it will send to twitter, but also lists the rewards available for this permission.

As the user grants permission for more frequent access to his social graph, and a more prominent role for the game in his life stream, the game grants him more points and a more enjoyable (at least theoretically) game experience.

Wouldn't it be nice if more services worked like this?  Told you what kind of engagement they were looking for (for Spymaster, say, it's getting users to both enjoy and publicize the game experience) and amplified the site's response and reward for these activities?

Heavy doses of WIIFM here, to be sure.  Don't you wish your bank thought about this occasionally?

I took a look at who is behind thes site, and it appears to be classifieds site Ilist.com, which had this to say in their blog post called  Got Karma?

What is it?
Karma is the unique point system used by iList to reward users for their activity in the community. Click on “Karma” at the top of each page for a quick rundown.

How do I get it?
Earning Karma on iList is easy: treat others the way you would like to be treated. You want as many people to see your listings as possible, right? Well, so does the rest of iList. If you help others promote their listings they will likely do the same for you. Then, not only will you be rolling in Karma, but you will also have more people viewing your listings.

Other ways to receive points include completing your profile, posting listings, and inviting friends to join the iList community. The more the merrier.

What do I do with it?
You tell us. Now that you’ve got all these points, we want to know what you think you should be able to do with them. We already have a  few of our own ideas simmering on the back burner, but we’d love to hear from you as well. So, if you know you’ve got some great ideas and want your voice to be heard, get to sharing and leave us a comment.

I like firms that understand the value of rewarding visitors, making engagements, even the small ones, matter.  The marketing is part of the user experience-the product isn't just a classifieds site; it's loving customers.  Producing customers who love you?  Now THAT's good Karma.

Cuil vs. Google and the DOJ

My dad emailed me a link to  search upstart Cuil, which I had come across before but never adopted.  It got me thinking about the Obama administration's antitrust hounds barking at GOOG, and now maybe a credible competitor might be important.  But the standard- for being a credible competitor- is really high, I think.

Google's dominance stops when it's not useful, or as fast, as competitors. I think it's doubtful they will lose on speed, but utility is a maybe. Whether the Wolfram Alpha product solves the same problems, or solves some other ones may also affect this determination. 

In the long run, I think Google knows that it's don't be Evil motto really translates into "Don't be useless." 

• it wouldn't be useful to force users to download Chrome in order to search Google or check their gmail
• it wouldn't be useful to prevent people from embedding Vimeo videos in their blogspot blogs
• Google Docs kills Microsoft Office by being Useful for group collaboration
• Even if Google buys twitter, if they make it less useful, they'll have a problem

 

If they stick to that, they're probably in good shape.  The DOJ may wonder: is Google's ubiquity anticompetitive?  I think for the bulk of its interaction with the world, Google is just a bunch of nice guys who offer a free utility, or maybe a phone.  For those few (relatively speaking) individuals on this Earth who do some form of business with Google, it can seem like a monolithic, and scary, creature.  It's the latter group who want antitrust scrutiny of Google, not the former.

Facebook's Long-term Bet on the User Experience

Thinking about the news that Facebook is introducing an alpha test of a payment system, I keep thinking that the one thing facebook has left is to make a play for the wallet.  They've earned the attention- around 30 billion minutes in the first quarter of 2009 (comScore)- of the world's internet users, and an intimate relationshoips with those users's entire online life.  Facebook lives and dies by the assent of these clicking masses, as revolt afetr revolt has shown, over site design, privacy, and even its esoteric terms of use.

Facebook's reach is exploding- but monetizing attention hasn;t worked especially well.  With display ad rates plummeting, an unproven social ad model, and a long term growth strategy, Facebook deserves some wiggle room.  Itchy investors calling for an IPO In 12 To 24 Months don't make it easy to bet the way Facebook has, but the company expects to be cashflow positive by the end of the year.

Amazon IPO'd early and grew explosively, provoking skepticism that it would ever turn a profit (big hat tip to the still-poignant satirewire.com).  Founded in 1994, opening in 1996, going public in 1997, and finally turning a profit in the fourth quarter of 2001.  The company is unquestionably a juggernaut of commerce, logistics, and long term business strategy.  They've lasted all the way into web 2.0!

I'm drawn to the analogy between the two firms - can the industry at this point allow for the possibility that Facebook can build loyal users now and the profit later?

Without a doubt, the engine for Facebook's profit in the long term is a ubiquitous social graph, to be the identity that users take with them to sites across the internet.  If an e-commerce site fears abandonment, drop offs at the registration page, visitors who don't return, Facebook fears that its users will stop finding it useful.  As long as the Facebook on-site and off-site experience makes the web experience easier, social, trusted and secure, it can be an infrastructure player.

Amazon's constant optimization work, its willingness to please customers and create long-term value, as well as its back-end infrastructure plays, should suggest there is light at the end of the tunnel when you bet on your customers.

Freelancing opportunity and the future of the labor force

I did a lot of work at Columbia on the mobile workforce, seeing labor in firms as units dividing their time between mutliple employers on an engagement basis.  The endgame there seemed to be the end of the traditional labor force.  I even suggested ata  conference last month that it would be interesting to create a real-time job index- jobs that need to be done in the next X hours or Y minutes.  Not sure we're there yet.

Reading a post on Please Feed The Animals, the post title speculates that perhaps there are Fewer Advertising Jobs, But Greater Opportunity.  The post links to a great WSJ article on freelance employment in the downturn.

I think the data are interesting to think about there. The ultra-mobile (where mobility is also lateral between firms) workforce is a chaotic place to be, and strategically, I think this robs many firms of the opportunity to differentiate through talent acquisition. Perhaps this really doesn't matter as much as it once did, and a firm having access to a network of talented freelancers is the talent differentiator these days.

I wonder: is this is a long term spike that will re-make the firm, or perhaps just an example of how firms cut way past the fat in their layoffs, and are burdened with cost structures that don't make sense anymore?  Could agencies have fixed that instead of laying people off?

Hospital TV spots offer real stories of patients

This piece from yesterday's NYT seemed to be heralding some great TV ads for the health and wellness industry.  The drama of real stories at akronchildrens.tv is powerful and real.  The spots break throguh because they are about people, the drama of trying to get better, and not exaggerated claims about the quality of service.

What I really liked the "commandments" that NY ad shop DeVito/Verdi crafted for its hospital campaigns, that sounds like it's got a few things to say for other ads:

“No pictures of doctors,” it begins, “no smiling people, no fancy machinery, no over-promises about medical care, no complicated medical terminology: just truthful expressions of critical care and breakthroughs.”

It's about selling the environment that the hospital creates for its patients, not the cliched descriptions of 'teamwork' and dedication.