Emergence Marketing: May 2005 Archives

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May 31, 2005

You tag that... I'll tag this...no wait... let's tag it together

Another post about tagging. Pretty soon, I'll rename my blog "emergence tarketing". But what can you do? This stuff has big implications on the way we will share, publish and organize information and conversations - so I cannot stop thinking about it (I know...I need a life). The other reason I felt compelled to write about it again is that there have been quite a few good entries around tagging lately.

Over at Feedster, Scott Rafer brings us his latest views on tagging after a week of doing it (and comments on issues raised on Brian Del Vecchio's blog - here). He believes that anonymous tagging is going to be important and that the arguments for someone to own up to a tag in order to avoid tag spamming is overrated. His posts also touch on some of the copyright issues related to tagging (here).

Ericka Menchen (here) and Ryan King (here) debate the differences between reader-based tagging and author-based tagging. Ryan argues that reader-based tagging have a distinct advantage over author-based ones.

As I wrote before (here), people will use tagging for different purposes - some to alert others of new content (author-based tags, much like people technorati tags), some to share new found information with others or merely organizing their own information for later retrieval (reader-based tags). They both have a purpose in life and as such I am not sure whether it makes sense to add more value to one than the other. It would be nice to have a system that would cluster these tags as related (i.e. the author-based tags and the user-based tags on the same content). I am starting to be convinced that Folksonomies in general will only have real value with some form of clustering.

The issue of anonymity goes beyond accountability and tag-spamming (the act of associating inaccurate or bad tags with an entry anonymously) - it goes all the way to affecting the "credibility" of a tag. If you tag anonymously and tagging is now widely accepted (so we have "tag chaos" and we all become selective about which tags we subscribe to) - can you build credibility for that tag while being anonymous? I am not a big fan of anonymity in general, but I don't think this will work. It would be interesting to see how many people at del.icio.us subscribe to "people" tags (i.e., /plasticbag (Tom Coates), /linkorama (Ross Mayfield), etc.) rather than keyword tags (i.e., /marketing, /tools).

There will be more "tagging" related posts on this blog...not because of the hype surrounding it but because I truly believe that this is important to the way we market ourselves, build products, share stuff and get customer feedback. Just today, I had two lengthy conversations with ex friends and colleagues on tagging in the enterprise and in the new product development process.

[Technorati Tags: tag tagging folksonomies]

neat new collaboration solutions

Robin Goode talks about a few new collaboration/conversation systems on his site (here - specifically Conversate and Quick Topic). I played a little with Conversate and I really liked it. I would add one more idea to his list of thingies that would improve the product - some form of presence indicator.

[Technorati Tags: collaboration chat]

Blogging becomes a corporate job

According to a WSJ article today Blogging is becoming a corporate job (here - part of the free content today).

I can totally see that becoming a widespread trend. If corporate mouth pieces are to become better ways for them to participate in the ongoing market conversation, then blogs will have to become an integral part of that - if not totally replacing the existing static corporate web pages.

...which is exactly what I helped Blogbridge do. Granted for some large corporate sites something like this may never work, but I still believe that companies could do a better job at thinking through how to incorporate blogs within their corporate web sites rather than having them on the side.

[Technorati Tags: blogging corporate blog]

May 30, 2005

David Koch missing on Grouse mountain

Shel Israel over at naked conversations (here) is relaying a message from Garry Bolles about his friend, David Koch, missing since last week on a mountain near Vancouver. They are concerned about the lack of ongoing interest in finding him and are hoping that the blogosphere might help raise awareness for the situation. Here is a news article about the story.

I happen to be very familiar with the area - good luck David!

[Technorati Tags: david koch vancouver]

New site ready to go...

As I said before, I helped redo the BlogBridge web site - turning it into a hybrid blog/web. It is finally ready to go. Check it out and let us know what you think!

[Technorati Tags: blogbridge bloeb]

May 29, 2005

NextBillion.net - development through enterprise

If you want to contribute (words, thoughts, ideas...not just money) to a site that seeks to eradicate poverty through profit - go to Development though Enterprise - via business week's tech beat.

Their stated mission is:

"Our goal is to identify and discuss sustainable business models that address the needs of the world's poorest citizens."

[Technorati Tags: poverty]

May 28, 2005

Marketing and PR blogs I read and would recommend

I was asked to put together a list of 5-10 marketing and PR blogs I read and would recommend as part of the BlogBridge Expert program (link may change over the weekend - I will update when it does) and realized that I am probably missing quite a bit of good ones. Here are the ones I submitted for the Expert program - which ones do you think I am missing?

Marketing

Brand autopsy

MarketingVOX

Diva Marketing

Seth Godin’s BLOG

Fryer's Blog in the Mountains

BL Ochman’s whatsnextblog.com

tompeters!

a schel of my former self

Corporate PR

Flackster

The Bach Door

Nevon

Micro Persuasion

Musings from POP! Public Relations

[Technorati Tags: blog marketing pr]

May 27, 2005

[interesting] Graphing del.icio.us

Grafolicious looks at the evolution of a del.icio.us tag (for example the history of the Flickr map here)

It's cool, but I am not sure what to do with it yet (I admit that I can be slow)...

[Technorati Tags: tag history delicious]

Blogorrhea by a barking moonbat anti-idiotarian

You don't know what I am talking about? Look it up...(and if you do...get a life)

This is a hoot...as we were waiting for the meeting to start yesterday - someone found a blogging glossary on samizdata.net (here).

[Technorati Tags: blog glossary blogging]

Tag-poetry and competitive tagalysis

Last night I went to my second Berkman Thursday discussion (agenda here) . This one was led by Shimon Rura and was about tagging – a topic of great interest.

After reviewing the traditional tagging suspects (technorati, del.icio.us, flickr, spurl and furl) we talked about the whys and the hows of those emerging tagging services and the differences between folksonomies and taxonomies. A good example of the folksonomies would be eBay. A good example of taxonomies could probably be found in the technical documentation department of Boeing.

Why are emerging tagging services increasingly popular (somebody quoted that del.icio.us counts 45,000 users to date)? Is it because Google does not do what we need it to do? Is it because of the “shortcomings” of DMOZ (the open directory project underlying Google)? Will tagging conventions emerge over time (one non-profit organization mentioned that they use an arcane tag for all its members to use when they tag something that might be of interest to the rest of the organization)? How can you assess the “authoritativeness” of one tag vs. another? All great questions that made for an enlightening evening conversation.

We also discussed the need for simple clustering of tags so that it becomes easier to find “related” tags. Some of that is already being implemented by the various players – del.icio.us recently started an experimental post to delicious that recommends a tag when you post something. Technorati shows you related tags – including tags coming from furl and delicious. Spurl even has a search engine based on its tagging system – zniff.

Interesting was to hear how people use tags. Some use it to share information with others (when someone tags something which they want a group of people to see – which they do by “subscribing” to that particular tag). Others use it to “store” information for later reuse (using delicious for links or furl for “perishable” content as furl saves a snapshot of the page for you instead of the link). Some use it to tell others what they are writing about (bloggers tagging their posts with technorati tags), while others use it to discover new information (by subscribing to popular tags). A real interesting scenario was that of tag-poetry. Children blog poems and are asked to tag them with tags – then they follow the links of poems that are tagged similarly.

As I have said before, I think that tagging has a tremendous potential in the enterprise – even for those companies do not have agreed upon taxonomies. Think of using tagging to share content that sparks ideas about new products with employees, customers and prospect (you ask them to tag whatever makes them think of your product or service with a special tag), or using tagging to proactively do competitive analysis. Or should we call it competitive discovery? Nah... how about competitive tagalysis?

[Technorati Tags: blogging tagging berkman]

May 26, 2005

Readers' Choice Blog Awards

Marketingsherpa is holding an online survey on the quality marketing blogs (here). I wonder how they finalized those lists. As far as I am concerned, there are major marketing blogs which I visit every day that are missing (and I was not talking about mine ).

I will soon start a list of my favorite marketing and PR blogs at BlogBridge (over there - on the new site). If anyone is interested in becoming an expert there - let me know - I do have some good connections over there...

[Technorati Tags: marketing blog blogbridge]

People addicted to email

You find yourself hitting the send/receive button every 30 second on your email client? Not only will it reduce your IQ (yeah right - here), but a new study just found out that you are not alone (here - via techdirt).

[Technorati Tags: email addiction]

May 25, 2005

De-friending, de-endorsing and other online social behaviors

Last week I attended one of the Thursday meetings at The Berkman Center (here) where they were talking about Livejournal (which has more than 7M users!). From what I gathered, it is similar to MySpace, which now boasts 12M users.

One interesting part of the conversation was when they talked about friends. In most of those places, as well as in most online games, you can create friends’ lists. A difference with the real world is that in virtual spaces, a person can put you on their friends’ list without you putting them on yours. What kind of a message is that? The other one is what people do when their friendship falls apart. On Livejournal (there were many real users at the meeting), people often times start a new Livejournal without inviting the person with whom their friendship ended, and they let the old Livejournal go stale – as to not hurt that person’s feelings. On X-Box, my son usually has no problem kicking someone off his friend list – but the other day I did hear him tell some of his friends to turn their profiles to “invisible” and go play somewhere else – as to not hurt the feelings of a younger kid that was getting annoying.

This also reminds me of a behavior on LinkedIn. What do you do when someone asks you to endorse them and you don't really feel like it?

To me it’s fascinating to witness some of the new social dynamics that are emerging online.

[Technorati Tags: social behavior relationships]

Future of web sites when we have RSS?

Matt McAlister over at InforWorld wonders what the future of web site will be in the face of growing RSS usage (here). He is drawing an analogy between RSS and web sites and what the web did to print publications.

It's an interesting - although a bit alarmist - perspective from a traditional publisher.

RSS is full of opportunities. If you can believe Lockergnome, they are seeing a 5:1 ratio of click throughs on rss feeds vs. their email subscribers (according to marketing studies). But beyond that, the biggest opportunities for RSS may be in area of content personalization.

[Technorati Tags: rss email publishing]

May 24, 2005

[rant] Why is it so damn hard to buy stuff online in Belgium?

Being from Belgium and having family over there I tried buying a digital camera and a mic online for my brother. I could not use Amazon.fr or amazon.uk since they would not allow me to ship to a Belgian address (actually they did, but at the very end of the ordering procedure I got an error saying they could not do that).

So I figured I would try a few local shops with self-proclaimed online commerce presence (ColliShop, Photo Hall, Colruyt, Super Company, Intellihome, and Krefel) - only to find out that none of them could take my order. Some had forms that would not allow the buyer to be from another country, one tried to send me to paypal for payment but misdirected me, one required me to chose a local shop to buy from, and one said they were going to call me for payment (which of course never happened - and when I replied to their email to cancel my order, my email came back undeliverable 5 days later). I thought I was lucky when Krefel took my order, only to find out (3 days later) through an email that they want me to fax them copies of both sites of my credit card and a copy of my identity card (both sides as well). I have not had one of those is years!

What the heck is happening? Is online shopping in my native country really that backwards? Or did I just have dumb luck? I have bought online for family - wines, flowers, books, cd's - but now that I come to think of it, it was all through UK and French sites...

We're now six days later, and I will clearly miss my brother's birthday. If anyone has suggestions on how to buy this stuff, let me know...

[Technorati Tags: belgium online shopping krefel]

May 23, 2005

Becoming boring - daring - and getting dumped on

This past weekend, Joi Ito reflected on what he writes about these days vs what he may have written about a year ago (here)

"However, as I read criticisms in the comments and on other blogs about what I write, I have become increasingly sensitive about what I say here. The criticism is often valid. "Check your facts before you post." "Read before you write." "Don't be so self-obsessed." "That was stupid." "The tone of your post was offensive to me." "So this guy posts every time he's 'off' to somewhere new."

Because of that he feels that his blogging is maybe becoming too broad and boring. Hmm...I hope not!

That inspired Halley Suitt to write a pretty thoughtful and honest piece about her perceptions of rich and snobby suburbia and how she increasingly feels alienated by it all (here). As I was reading her article I was both laughing and feeling deep empathy for what she is going through. While for very different reasons, I too ask myself many of the same questions - and I am sure that lots of people do.

But then you get to the comment section and she gets dumped on...concluding that "The blogosphere has become so contentious, it seems like no matter what you write, people jump all over your ass." Maybe Joi Ito's idea of switching to autoblogger is not such a bad idea after all...

[Technorati Tags: blogging feedback]

Open source radio to go live next week

Chris Lydon is back - this time with Open Source Radio (here is the new blog - here is the announcement). They are looking for ideas:

"We’re figuring this out from scratch, but here’s how we look at it: the Internet is our beat. We’re looking to capture the way people talk to each other online, the way they record their own stories. The blogs and the podcasts and the Wikipedia are not the story; the people we find through them are."

[Technorati Tags: radio chris lydon]

May 22, 2005

More tagging

I just ran across this piece of code to let you add a "bookmark this" link at the bottom of your post. When a reader clicks that link it posts that posting to del.icio.us. You do need an account to post to de.icio.us.

With all this random tagging going on, I wonder if some kind of organizational hierarchy will emerge over time (much like Wikipedia's structure emerged). If it doesn't, then all this tagging will have little value. And if people try to impose it from the top down (through some sort of standard-setting activity), I fear we will run into the same issues that KM ran into in the corporate world - people just don't use it.

[Technorati Tags: tagging tag]

May 21, 2005

Building a new web site in "public"

As you know (see the bio if you don't), I have been involved with BlogBridge - one of my friends and ex-colleague Pito Salas' main projects.

In the spirit of participating in "market conversations" (after all, I was one of the very early cluetrain manifesto signatories) I have been tinkering with the idea of moving away from the "traditional" corporate web site metaphor and towards a more "conversational" web site for awhile - and finally decided to try out it with BlogBridge. I am sure I am not the first one to come up with this, but if you have some cycles to look at our work-in-progress, I would really appreciate the feedback. The new and experimental site still has some technical issues and lacks the "in-depth" content for now, but you should be able to get the gist of it and tell us what your initial reaction is.

[Technorati Tags: blogbridge corporate web cluetrain]

May 20, 2005

Playing around with Feedster tags

Feedster came out with a different tagging scheme - let the reader tag your stuff (see button below). More information on Scott Rafer's blog (here - via media guerrilla).

Update - after using it a few times, it turns out that the anti-spam scheme is way too hard. The last time I tried I had to re-enter the scrambled message 7 times!

[Technorati Tags: feedster tagging]

Blog survey results from Germany

Webpronews reports an interesting CRM agency Proximity blog survey done in Germany with 2,700 people (here - via AMA). The purpose of the survey, according to AMA, was to uncover "customers' perceptions about marketing/business blogs and the influence these types of blogs can have on the brand/company". Results:

91% of the blog readers expect a fast and appropriate reaction to questions and comments in enterprise blogs.
90% think it's important to make a clear difference between commercial and non-commercial content.
Of the blog readers, 54% form their opinions about products/companies on the basis of blogs.
51% of the blog readers visit product and/or corporate sites as a results of reading blogs.
58% of the blog readers, read them to find news and information they can't find otherwise.
57% of them are interested in the personal opinions of the authors, but only 43% are interested in the discussions.

Considering the very different nature of blogging in Germany I am not sure how well these numbers translate into other markets.

[Technorati Tags: blogging marketing brand]

May 19, 2005

Revenge of the "C"th

As I was driving to a meeting this morning, I kept thinking about all those companies that monitor their employees (see previous post) - and it reminded me of the proverbial A, B and C people that we find in companies.

The story goes something like this.

A people love people who are smarter than them and so they hire other A people
B people are intimidated by people that are smarter than them and so they hire C people
C people know that they have no right to be in the job that they are in, so they weave a web of processes around themselves as job protection (eventually it chokes the company)

You think that "C" people are responsible for all this monitoring stuff? No? So, do you think that 76% of the people electronically monitor web surfing at home as well?

Definitelly a far cry from what we envisioned in 2001 about the future of the workplace (see here - some people asked for those, which were part of the proceedings of the event)

[Technorati Tags: surveillance privacy workplace]

Corporate employee surveillance...

The American Management Association yesterday released its "2005 ELECTRONIC MONITORING & SURVEILLANCE SURVEY"(here - requires registration, but free). The numbers are awful - "76% monitor web surfing, 36% of employers tracking content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard, and 55% retaining and reviewing email messages". At least "fully 80% inform workers that the company is monitoring content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard".

Ok, I guess that means no individual rights in the workplace.I also wonder what would happen if companies would spend as much time and energy on innovation in the workplace instead - what do you think would happen?

[Technorati Tags: surveillance privacy individual rights]

Cannot get the attention of main media - try social networking

Article on Wired.com (here) talks about new bands who sign up 100,000 fans and sell 2,000 CD's using MySpace. Fascinating...

[Technorati Tags: MySpace social networking marketing]

May 18, 2005

Buzz, blogs and politics

The Pew internet & American Life Project just released a preliminary report entitled "Buzz, Blogs and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004" (here - via smartmobs). One of their conclusions is:

“The blogosphere is clearly a major addition to the national discourse...But we need to be cautious with respect to the power of particular political bloggers. That power waxes and wanes depending on the sort of information available, the behavior of other public voices, and the tendency of internet forms and formats to evolve in a very short time.”

I have not read the full report yet but it sounds like it contains lessons that are applicable beyond political blogs.

[Technorati Tags: buzz blog politics]

PR agencies and blogging - do you need a balance?

Jeremy Pepper over at POP! muses about whether there needs to be a better balance between PR agency blogging vs. client work, or whether some PR agencies are becoming too blog-centric. (here). From a recent exchange at the Syndicate conference he says:

"One person asked how I balance blogging and PR, and whether or not I am worried about my blog overtaking publicity for my clients. This is a growing concern, particularly as you have to explain to clients why you are getting press for your blog, but not press for them. And, it's something that we should never have to address, because at the end of the day it is about the clients."

As more PR folks are starting to develop meaningful online presences through their blog, that is a great question to ask yourself when selecting a PR agency (for the sake of full disclosure - I know the folks at PAN (mentioned in Jeremy's posting) real well - both as a former client and a friend of the company).

David Weinberger thinks that PR folks should get out of the way, "connecting passionate clients with the public" (here).

My view, which I expressed earlier (here), is that while conversations are happening in the marketplace - sometimes without the involvement of the company - a company should get involved in those conversations. I agree with David that PR agencies should facilitate connections and then get out of the way. But there is another role that they can and should play - that of coaching clients on how to engage in those conversations in generally acceptable ways. While many web companies already know how to do that, I suspect that a majority of marketing executives, who must be increasingly getting pressured by their CEO to do something with blogs, have no clue how to do it. Having a trusted PR agency show them the way may be something of real value. And how else can they know how to do it, but by doing it themselves.

[Technorati Tags: pr blogging pan]

May 17, 2005

Blogging for dollars

Guerrilla News Network reports that USWeb is paying people to leave favorable comments about certain companies on their blogs (here - via problogger). Reminds me of those shops that would post for dollars in online user groups and Usenet newsgroups in the mid to late 90's. Funny how these business models have a way of coming back...it also goes back to my posting yesterday - what "trust" mechanism will help the consumer filter what's paid advertising and what is not?

[Technorati Tags: trust blog consumer]

Consumer of 2020

An interesting study by Bain (here - via MIT lab for brand cultures) analyzes the consumer of 2020 and predicts:

"The top quintile of consumers will increasingly rank their time and leisure over their money, and reward businesses that recognize this. They will value products and services that are tailored to lifestyle and life-stage needs, particularly health and ageing..." as well as "Despite this growing disparity among incomes, consumers at every level will exhibit crossover behaviours."

In this day and age where people only have so many spare minutes but an increasing amount of pocket money - you better be prepared for cross-category competition.

Oh...and don't count on being able to put consumers into well defined market segments in the future!

[Technorati Tags: consumer behavior marketing bain]

May 16, 2005

Consumers, blogs and trust

Steve King from the Institute of the Future has a great post over at the IAOC Blog (here – via Corporate PR) about the impact of blogs, and the trust that consumers have in those blogs, on purchasing decision-making.

While his research does not find much impact of blogs on purchasing decisions yet – he lists the reasons why people “trust’ a blog. Not surprisingly, those reasons include:

their view of the credibility of the author and content;
the amount of traffic they perceive the blog to be getting;
the number of other sites linking to the blog;
how active the blog is;
the look and feel of the blog

The questions Steve has are “will blogs achieve high levels of consumer trust, and if so what kinds of blogs will be trusted?? What will this mean for corporations and how they communicate with their customers?? What role will professional blogs play in customer communications??”

What do you think? Let him know if you have an opinion. The way I look at it, blogs will increasingly play a role in market conversations. As such, they will have an impact on the buying behavior of certain products – especially those products that tend to generate conversations and buzz. Companies, therefore, will need to jump into the fray and start participating in those conversations. And when they are ready, they have three options to do that:

do it directly and in a controlled fashion – that is when companies have one or more executives or PR employees blog within strict guidelines (i.e., stay on message)
do it directly but in an uncontrolled fashion – that is when companies encourage their employees to blog and give them the freedom to say what they want (there are many examples of companies embracing such blog strategies – Microsoft, hopefully IBM, etc.)
hire outsiders to do it for you – that is when a company hires existing bloggers to write on their behalf.

The second option is clearly the best strategy to quickly gain trust for what is being said, but unfortunately I suspect that many companies will not be able to embrace such openness. There are instances where the first strategy works in being able to establish trust (i.e., GM, HP, etc.). In general, I suspect that those corporate blogs will increasingly face an uphill battle in terms of upfront credibility. The last option is my least favorite option. Many companies will hire professional bloggers to stimulate online conversations on their behalf. Even under full disclosure, I think that there are very few people that can establish enough trust for themselves so that their personal trust can carry over to the conversations that they are having on behalf of the companies that pay them.

Of course, there is always the option of treating bloggers like journalists and influence them to write about your company and its products. You should always do that! But in addition to that I believe that companies have to participate directly in the market conversations as well.

[Technorati Tags: trust blog consumer]

May 15, 2005

[interesting link] Blogging is hot!

Jon Stewart on blogging - ~~funny~~ hilarious (here - via the bach door)

[Technorati Tags: jon stewart humor blogging]

[interesting] IBM to launch largest corporate blog initiative

Silicon Valley Watcher announced (here) Friday that "Early next week IBM will introduce the largest ever corporate blogging initiative in a bid to encourage any of its 130,000 staff to become online evangelists for the company." (via mediations).

Wow...this will be fascinating to watch. Another interesting tidbit from the article is that this initiative will also include the rollout of a wiki. I wonder if and how that will integrate with their Notes collaboration platform.

[Technorati Tags: ibm corporate blog blogging]

May 14, 2005

Ranting about (anti)privacy in the workplace

Shel Holtz is ranting about Spectorsoft and Websense on is blog (here) - rightfully so! If you do not know what they do, those companies make "big brother" type products that monitor employee emails, web surfing activities, as well as their chats/IM. Their products also capture every keystroke and programs launched. Yikes - I sure would never want to work in a company that deployed those apps! And I suspect that few people would.

Shel goes on - on the topic of whether those anti-privacy tool companies are evil he says:

"Well, yeah. They’re profiting by creating unfounded fear and introducing products into the workplace that will suck the company dry of employee commitment.."

I could not agree more. I would go a step further and say that the companies that are deploying those tools are evil too...(ok maybe too harsh - definitely clueless). What kind of culture are you creating by deploying tools like that? I am sure there are abusers everywhere, but by and large, I would argue that letting people do personal stuff online while at work probably ends up having a positive impact on productivity. By letting people do some of their shopping or some of their banking at work, not only will you reduce their stress level about getting personal things done, you will also free up their time to think more about your company's problems. And if they surf seemingly random sites - guess what? You may actually increase the rate of innovation within your company. The web, just like conversations, is a great source of ideas. Monitoring employees with those software tools will clearly kill both their commitment to the company (as Shel argues) and the company's ability to innovate!

Shel concludes his rant with

:"The question is, how do we get this message into the heads of executives who are bombarded with the kind of pathetic, fear-mongering crap that companies like SpectorSoft and Websense shove down their throats? I certainly don’t have their advertising budgets. I’m open to ideas."

...maybe we can start a wiki listing the companies that deploy those solutions. This is one case where a reference list of customers can work against you rather than for you!

[Technorati Tags: privacy websense spectorsoft]

May 13, 2005

If they don't get it - how can we expect others to?

I got a new email from Marketing Sherpa (here - free for two weeks or so). I was surprised by the report, which includes things like:

"RSS challenge #1. No HTML graphics. You can't put your logo, or a product shot, or a photo, or any graphic..." (ed:I guess they never tried a Flickr feed, or the new business week feed)
"You can't send a newsletter with a variety of items in it for people to click on. You can only send one item, one article, one hotlink..." (ed:it must be hard to get away from that “sending” metaphor)
"You don't have much space to get your message across in a feed -- unless you can get the viewer to click to your site." (ed:they should subscribe to Dave Pollard's blog)
"To put it another way, an email newsletter is like a print magazine while an RSS feed is like a telegram." (ed:uh…)

They further quote:

"One typical RSS reader vendor reports customers sign up for 70 to 80 feeds each, use their RSS readers about 15 minutes a day, and don't necessarily check their feeds daily. (Makes us wonder how that typical customer can wade through 70-80 or more feeds in their in-box in just 15 minutes per day. We suspect your feed headline has to be exceptionally well copywritten to catch the eye in that overloaded box.)"

I wonder what box they are talking about?

The article also moans about the loss of tracking and measurement capabilities - "No deliverability, open rates, hard vs soft bounces. No a/b tests, no usability tests, no offer tests, no recency/frequency tests, and multivariable testing is not even on the map."

What the heck! Look - I have done a lot of email marketing myself - and I too like the metrics. But that’s not what this is all about. At the end of the day it’s about improving the quality of the dialog with you customers and prospects (ok...you can call it improve the quality of your leads), increasing sales or whatever other “end goal” you have. And if you have offers or ads in your feed, you count the clickthroughs - what else do you need?

It is disappointing to see how much dis/misinformation is being spread out there. I am sure that after the recent wave of publicity surrounding blogs and all these other new technologies - many CEO's have asked their marketing department to evaluate ways by which their companies can take advantage of that. The last thing a confused marketing exec needs is false ammunition on why not to embrace this new technology/medium!

[Technorati Tags: marketingsherpa email rss]

Trials and tribulations of using rss

Robert MacMillan over at washingtonpost.com writes an interesting article about his trials and tribulations in trying to get an rss reader and an rss feed to work (here - via micro persuasion). The poor guy downloaded 15 rss readers before he could find one that would work for more than 2 hours (he should have looked here - but I am biased as I work (unpaid) with those guys).

It is an interesting read which demonstrates that insiders can quickly become blind to simple usability and messaging issues which can actually turn into huge barriers to adoption. Here are a few from the article:

the "RSS" label itself - not exactly a term that draws you in if you are not "in the know"...
orange button with "XML" - what the heck do you do with that?...and clearly not a "one-click" action if you venture out and actually click on it
"feeds" anyone?

The end result is that he finally got it to work, fell in love with it, and can no longer live without his "feeds". But his experiences are probably not atypical for the mainstream user. As I have said before we will need to make things way easier to understand and use if this is to become broadly adopted.

[Technorati Tags: rss washington post technology adoption]

[off topic...maybe not] Humor sites for tweens

My son (a tween) just sent me an email with a link to a clip that he loves (here).

To me, it's fascinating to see what young kids get a kick out of these days. When it comes to politics, he and his friends can get laughs for (what seems like) hours watching (no endorsements here...) this.

[Technorati Tags: tweens humor]

May 12, 2005

We have a long way to go...

I mentioned Everett Rogers awhile back (one of the key researchers on "diffusion of innovations") – which got me thinking (I also upgraded my copy of the book to the fifth edition - which helps the thinking)…
The key variables determining the rate of adoption of innovations in his model are the perceived attributes of innovations - which are:

Relative advantage – the degree to which the innovation is perceived as being better than what came before it
Compatibility – the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being consisten with past experiences
Complexity – the degree to which an innovation is perceived as relatively difficult to use and understand
Triability – the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis
Observability – the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others.

(there are 4 others – including, type of innovation (buying) decision, communications channels, nature of social system and extend of change agents’ promotion efforts).

If you just take the perceived attributes of innovations and evaluate some of the new web technologies (tagging, wiki’s, blog syndication, etc.) against those attributes, you will quickly conclude that we have a long way to go (I guess that’s where good marketers come in the picture)!

[Technorati Tags: innovation tagging web 2.0]

Web based or desktop

This morning I was reading Richard MacManus' post (here) on web based rss aggregators as being a separate category from desktop aggregrators. While I do prefer a desktop aggregator myself (note my affiliation with BlogBridge), I do not think that we need to split those two in two different categories. They are one category - meant to help you aggregate content, sort through your content and hopefully discover new content.

The reason that I personally prefer a desktop version is because I like my information to come to me and be able to read it even when I am not online. A web based solution to me is a destination - I have to go somewhere to read it. At any rate - according to Jupiter, people are about evenly split on that one right now.

[Technorati Tags: rss aggregators rss reader]

May 11, 2005

Ready to sell real products in virtual worlds?

The latest Harvard Business Review has an article by Edward Castronova from Indiana University (HBR article here - requires subscription) talking about the market for virtual goods in virtual worlds - so, say you want to acquire a breastplate for a medieval online game and its too hard to get in the game, you go on eBay and pay hard cash for it.

According to the article - that market in the US only is estimated to be $30M/yr. In Asia $100M/yr. Some estimates go as high as $887M. That's for virtual goods in virtual worlds!

The article further posits that the best opportunity for marketers to sell real goods through these worlds (after all, you have to go where your customers go) is by doing product placements. But you got to do it right - "Coke placements in King Camelot would likely be socially transmuted into marks of shame or re-skinned as urinary aids".

I love it...how about buying the right to set up shop in those worlds? Now you could have a "real" virtual sales and marketing department!

[Technorati Tags: virtual worlds edward castronova]

Institutionalizing Repeatable great customer service

While picking up my coffee at Starbucks this morning I witnessed an act of outstanding customer service. A woman with a child – apparently a regular – was about to enter the store as she was talking on her cell phone. At the last minute she decided to hang outside for the call and finally moved away from the store. When one of the Starbuck employees saw that, he fixed her usual drink, ran after her in the street and gave it to her with compliments of Starbucks. WOW…

You may disagree, but I happen to think that this was not a random act of kindness. I believe that it reflects the hiring and training policies that Starbucks has with regards to customer service. Some companies are just better at ~~institutionalizing~~ consistently delivering excellent customer service than others. And I do not believe that you can only achieve that in luxury retail chains. There was actually an interesting article reviewing just that in the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review (here).

...hey Verizon...pay attention!

[Technorati Tags: starbucks customer service marketing]

May 10, 2005

I have been practicing this for years - laughter yoga...

But now I know that I am not alone (laughter yoga). I found this and many other very interesting links in Dan Pink's latest book - A Whole New Mind.

It's a great book about how people will have to be much more "right-brain" in order to get ahead. While I did not intend this post to be a book review - there are much better reviewers than me (as in here, here and here) - I did want to point to it because it is very insightful, and full of interesting facts and links.

Another example from the book that will calm many parents with video game-playing kids is when he says:

"Indeed, a growing stack of research is showing video games can sharpen many of the skills that are vital in the Conceptual Age (that's the right-brain thing). For instance, an important 2003 study in the journal Nature found an array of benefits to playing video games. On tests of visual perception, game players scored 30% higher than non-players."

May 9, 2005

Yikes - now what do you do?

Alan Meckler - CEO of Jupiter is mad at FTD - and he writes about it on his blog (via Micro Persuasion).

With customers now having blogs to voice their dissatisfaction and tagging services and other prospective search tools to discover those postings, bad news travels faster than ever. And if it is still true that dissatisfied customers are four times more likely to discuss their experiences online than satisfied customers (study here - free but requires registration) then companies have to be extra careful about debugging all their interfaces with the customers before launching new services.

It will be interesting to see how FTD handles the situation.

[Technorati Tags: ftd word of mouth marketing]

Am I missing something?

Awhile back I wrote a post about how idiotic I found Kodak’s move to rebrand Ofoto to Kodak Easy something something (sorry it’s a pretty long and hard name to remember).

Well, recently I got another chuckle from one of their funny behaviors. About three weeks ago I got an email from those guys telling me “The brand new catalog from the Gallery is in the mail! It's packed full of spectacular gift ideas for upcoming holidays like Mother's Day, Father's Day, Graduation, Fourth of July and more.” Not only did it not get here in time for Mother’s day; but why the heck waste money on a paper catalog with me?

They should know that I am a digital kind of guy. I take high resolution digital pictures, I upload them to their service, I share it electronically with friends and family. I have responded (as in bought) to electronic marketing messages in the past. What else do they need to know about me to ensure that they communicate with me through the most effective channel instead of wasting money on an expensive catalog?

...some people will never get it!

[Technorati Tags: marketing ofoto kodak]

May 8, 2005

New Digital Divide - a choice

Seth Godin blogged another great posting (here). A new Digital Divide is emerging between the Digirati (those that write blogs, use Firefox, read Boing Boing, use rss aggregators, etc.) vs. the "left behind" (who use IE, get their news from traditional media, don't know what rss means, etc.)

Seth argues that you should care about those nerds because

"your most-connected, most influential customers are part of the digerati. They can make or break your product, your service or even your religion's new policies."

They are the new "hubs", the new "connectors"...and their influence is growing! You can chose to be one or not, but you can no longer ignore them - they have to be an integral part of all your communications strategies...

[Technorati Tags: digirati godin pr]

May 6, 2005

More is better

I started this blog as an experiment – what better way to experience this entire new tech boom than by building and playing in the sandbox directly. But now that I am getting some real traffic, I figured I’d better start thinking about adding value for the reader without turning this into a full time job. So I decided to ask a few other marketers in the area to blog with me and turn this blog into a group blog (which, btw, I see as a viable model for many blogs).

One of the first people to come to mind was an early marketing mentor of mine who thought me a lot about the field of marketing – Gabe D’annunzio. Gabe, the self-proclaimed “marketing thaumaturg” - was my partner when we first organized InterAct’96 (the first large scale virtual event on the web), and he was also the person who introduced me to Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood (Everett Rogers – the father of the diffusion of innovation theory – see book here - which you may have been introduced to through the work of Geoffrey Moore – another one of my favorite authors).

As we move forward we may add other people – but for now there will be two of us blogging.

Teaching 4th graders business ethics

This is the third year that I volunteer for Junior Achievement - a program to inspire kids to value free enterprise, business and economics as a way to improve the quality of their lives.

After having done second and third grade I am teaching fourth grade this year. I was pleasantly surprised that this year's curriculum includes business ethics (starting with 4th graders). I tell you - those kids just loved talking about the balance between profits and doing what's right for a specific situation (i.e., environmental, etc.).

Kudos to the organizers of Junior Achievement!

[Technorati Tags: junior achievement ethics volunteer]

May 5, 2005

Lucky to be born today ;-)

I know, I know...good blogging practice calls for staying on topic...but who cares, I do have a "random brainsquall" category!
Today is 05/05/05...and that will not happen for another 100 years (ok, there are 12 such dates this century - still cool to have as a birthday).

no tags

Let's make the new web technologies more accessible

While many of us get excited about all the new technologies out there and their potential to change the way we do many things - work, archive, collaborate, innovate, market, sell, etc.- we need to realize that there are very few people that remotely understand what we are talking about. Business Week's Blogspotting blog today lists a few reader responses to their issue on blogging (here) that illustrates that point. They conclude that "the knowledge gap between the blog world's insiders and outsiders is wide enough for six lanes of Hummer traffic".

But even when a broader set of people will understand what this is all about, widespread adoption will not happen until the new tools become more "approachable" and more tightly integrated with one another. Have you ever tried editing a page at Wikipedia? Or tried to show someone how to add a bullet list in a movable type posting?

I know, there are great efforts out there to make a lot of these applications more user friendly. But its not just that, they also need to be seamlessly integrated with one another. With the same piece of information I may want to "social tag" it one day (i.e., save and share with others), "blog" about it another (i.e., provide commentary and share with others), or "wikitize" it (i.e., share and collaborate with others). Unless this all happens from within the tools through which we access that information only innovators and early adopters will tinker with it, and broad adoption will not happen.

[Technorati Tags: technology adoption knowledge gap blogging]

Forrester predicts US online marketing to hit $26B by 2010

Charlene Li over at Forrester just (ok…it’s been a few days now…this is not a news site!) released her US Online Advertising And Marketing Forecast (here). I am not going to rehash the whole announcement, but there are some interesting tidbits in there.

"Survey Finds That 84 Percent Of Marketers Plan To Increase US Online Ad Budgets In 2005."

Those are not new budgets, mind you – they are monies that will get reallocated from other sources!

“New advertising channels will draw interest and spending from marketers. Sixty-four percent of respondents are interested in advertising on blogs, 57 percent through RSS and 52 percent on mobile devices, including phones and PDAs.”

While search in going to continue to be important - it's not just about search.

[Technorati Tags: advertising marketing forrester charlene li]

May 4, 2005

80% of WOM happens F2F!

A recent national (US) study conducted by NOP World reveals that face-to-face (f2f) remains the strongest medium for spreading word-of-mouth (WOM) - in fact 80% of people make in-person recommendations (press release here via WOMMA)

Following f2f is telephone with 68%. Personal email comes in at 37%. Amongst the "Influentials" - those 1 in 10 Americans that tell the other 9 how to vote and where to eat, the number is even higher - 90% of recommendations are done f2f.

Perhaps most interesting in the study is what triggers influentials to make recommendations. After all, and from a marketer's perspective, that is the target group which needs to be "ignited". At the top of the list are magazines with 61%. The web comes in at 45% and email at 26%.

...very interesting...Those are consumer numbers. I wonder what those numbers look like in specific verticals.

[Technorati Tags: nop world word-of-mouth]

May 3, 2005

[Interesting] PR lessons we should all follow!

NevOn has a great entry on Jeremy Pepper's interview with Dan Gillmor along with a first hand account of what it's like to be on the receiving end of "blind" pitches from people you do not know (here).

Dan Gillmor - "If your mailing list is larger than 2 people, put it in an rss feed...email is broken..."
Neville - "DON'T send attachments...and please format for European paper..."

[Technorati Tags: PR rss]

The future of work - revisited

I was just reading Elizabeth Albrycht's report on the the future of work congress over at Corporate PR (here) which reminded me of a conference on the Future of Work which I organized with Rudy Ruggles and the Center for Business Innovation back in 2001.

We invited 56 or so thinkers from all walks of live (scientists, psychologists, business people, consultants, architects, urban planners, analysts, designers, scientists, etc.) to come and brainstorm together around the future of work, workers, workplace and working. Attendees included David Weinberger, Michael Schrage, Larry Keeley, Birute Regine, Chris Meyer, Bob Luchetti, Wanda Orlikowski, and 49 others that will now feel left out if they read this. The point in me writing about this is not so much to reminisce about an old conference, but to resurface some of the predictions that were made at the time.

In one of the last excersises of the day we split the attendees into groups and asked them to create the cover magazine which we would likely be seeing in 2010. Here is what they came up with (5 images - make sure to click through - and sorry for the poor quality - I have a pdf of the write-up of the conference with better pictures if anyone is interested):

[Technorati Tags: work future of work]

May 2, 2005

Business Week's Blog on Blogging

Business Week's new Blog - Blogspotting - is a great blog to follow. It's informative (as with the post on Pew Internet research claiming that 9% of internet users now blog!), well written and every now and then outright funny.

Funny as when Stephen Baker discovers that now that he is blogging, his family is thinking that what he's doing during weekends looks a lot like "work" (I am sure many bloggers go through this phase). Or funny as when he discovers that a new religion blog contains Google ads for meeting "sexy black people" (here). That is better than the one where Prison Pete's blog (here) shows Google ads for correctional furnishings and pcs inmate phone systems.

I have been resisting to write about why people blog, because so many people do just that. But if it is true that 9% of the US Internet users blog – then that is getting mainstream folks to blog. And that raises the question – why do mainstream people blog?

Some probably like to have their "live" resume out there for everyone to see, some others are probably seeking to build a reputation amongst people whom they don't know, some see it as part of doing business (e.g., PR professionals, writers, etc.) and many probably look at it as an experiment. When I was discussing this with my friend Pito, he suggested an interesting alternative reason. In this increasingly freelance economy, many are probably using blogs as their “virtual” water cooler. With no one else around to talk about your random brain squalls you post them on your blog and hope that some conversation emerges out of that. I like that!

[Technorati Tags: blogging business week]

Clustering in web conversations

There is a cool picture mapping the republican blogs vs. the Democratic blogs over at the AMA blog (here). I first read about this in the book Linked (a great book on social networks) but I had never seen the visual representation.

It is interesting how there is a high degree of cross-linking within each group but not so much between the two groups. If I recall correctly, the average percentage of links linking within the same group is 80% vs. 20% of the links linking across party lines.

It is surprising to me that there are not more cross-party links. After all you would expect people from one party to pick on statements and proposals from people in the other party more so than build upon one another's content...

[Technorati Tags: social networking networks]

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