The Immigrant Song

Conversational marketing: The art of talking with your customers, not at them

My post on the Avenue A Razorfish Headlight blog is now live.  It is called  Conversational marketing: The art of talking with your customers, not at them.

Comments welcome! 

Twitter Test- Are You a Bot?

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. 

 

The End of the Diversified Media Company?

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.

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.