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June 30, 2005
New product development & entrepreneurship
Joe Kraus has a great post on how it took $3M to start Excite and only $100K to launch Jotspot (here - via O'Reilly Radar). The reasons he lists are hardware being 100X cheaper, software infrastructure being free, greater access to global labor markets, and search engine marketing.
That is so true! The new environment also allows for "micro-businesses". I know many people that have self-funded and launched online applications that would have required a full staff, funding, and offices before.
$50-100K gets you a long way these days!
[Technorati Tags: entrepreneurship startups]
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great conversation on blogs and politics on the connection
Rebecca MacKinnon from the Berkman Center is chatting with Dick Gordon on blogs in China (here), Iran and other places - very cool!
[Technorati Tags: blogs politics]
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links for 2005-06-30
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Paper on motivations for bloggers
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Interesting stats from CMO magazine
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Interesting perspective on the negative effects on privacy by moving data to the US
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June 29, 2005
Baby Gender Mentor
As I was driving to a meeting today I heard Robin Young at Here and Now talk (here) about this new product - the baby gender mentor. The product costs less than $300 and reveals the gender of a baby with 100% accuracy only five weeks into the pregnancy. Oh - and its like a home pregnancy test - it only requires a finger prick.
Having read about the horrible results of sex selection in countries like China - my first reaction was one of disgust. How could a company be so unethical as to launch a product that could eventually lead to wars. That is indeed one of the accepted potential outcomes of a society with a large imbalance between the number of males vs. females.
But as I thought about it some more, I realized that if that company were not to do it, someone else probably would - concluding that there must be a better way than expecting "self-policing" on the product manufacturers' part. So maybe this is where we should have our Government step in? Nah...look at the stupidity of the stem cell research "virtual" ban imposed in this country. Referendums? Probably too complicated. Economic boycotts - maybe... at first, that seems to be the best form of self-regulation - relying on the intelligence of crowds to not buy goods that they do not approve of. But in the face of big corporate ad spending and its opinion-forming capabilities, somehow that solution seems to be flawed as well.
When your ethics are not the same as mine - that makes for very difficult conversations...
[Technorati Tags: ethics product innovation]
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links for 2005-06-29
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Group blog on the future of work
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Another sad decision by the supreme court
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mapping movies and music visually
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humor
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VC Wiki
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June 28, 2005
Funny...
Check this out...
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Corante launches Futuretense blog
Futuretense, a group blog on the future of work edited by Elizabeth Albrycht went live today. Contributors include Dave Desforges, Jim McGee, Regina Miller, and Jim Ware - a great team and a great topic!
(I was in the know on that one as I have been doing some work with those guys, but it is still fun to see it come online.)
[Technorati Tags: future of work corante]
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For most software companies hosted offerings are the way to go...
I was chatting with the new CEO of a software startup (a restart really) who was complaining about the fact that his product team never realized the importance of having their product available as a hosted solution rather than as an installable one.
In most cases I believe that software startups should offer their products as a hosted offering. In this case especially - where the application is primarily used by sales and marketing departments. The reasons for that are pretty straightforward. First let's look at the main barriers to adopting new technology (see here for more details - based on Rogers):
- perceived risk
- triability
- complexity
- compatibility
- observability
One interesting dilemma about hosted applications is whether they should become your only offerings. I am of the opinion that they should - especially if you are an emerging company. First of, and if you are a startup, you do not have the resources to manage two business models. But perhaps more importantly, I do not believe that the two models can coexist under one entity. The needs and characteristics of both offerings are too divergent - both internally as well as for the customer - to be positioned as "alternatives."
Back in the late 90's, when the 1.0 ASP models came out, there was a lot of religion about not outsourcing or hosting mission-critical data outside the firewall. That issue has largely gone away by now. Most companies' IT departments have developed certification programs for hosted applications. Which brings up another great advantage for hosted applications - they do not need to become a part of the IT roadmap - giving you and your customers a chance for speedier adoption and demonstrating faster that you can do well on the last bullet as well.
[Technorati Tags: asp hosting]
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links for 2005-06-28
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Mary Matalin and James Carville on communications
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continuous partial attention comments
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June 27, 2005
I took the MIT weblog survey!
And when you do, you get to choose one of those little logos.
[Technorati Tags: blogging mit]
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The message vs. the tools/channels
Shel Holtz blogs about a speech given by Mary Matalin and James Carville on communications at the IABC conference (here). It sounds like an interesting talk.
They distinguished the message from the tools to distribute the message - and find the message to be the most important part of communications. They took a shot at blogs - questioning what the hot tool would be in 5 years. And they also talked about the importance of soundbites, clarity of the message, and the power of storytelling.
While it is true that the audiences control the message these days, Shel believes that it should not stop organizations from putting messages out there.
I buy all of that. Of course blogs are important, but they are only one channel. And of course it's important for organisations to put out messages - it's way easier for people to re-tell a story than it is for them to create one.
Posted by francois at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
links for 2005-06-27
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Return on investment for Google
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Great post on PR and candor
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Tool to simulate pagerank
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June 26, 2005
Boston Globe picks on USWeb paying bloggers
The Sunday Globe today picked up on a story which Media Guerrilla reported a while back (here - Globe Story here). The story is that USWeb pays bloggers $5 to write favorable blurbs about their customers on their blog with a link (to increase "google juice").
[Technorati Tags: blogging transparency]
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links for 2005-06-26
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Traditional PR tools here to stay
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Attention...notes/comments on Linda Stone speech
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June 25, 2005
links for 2005-06-25
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Live 8 is a day of action that calls on the leaders of the world's richest countries to put an end to poverty and debt when they meet on July 6
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Different ways to follow your blog
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KM infrastructure at the BBC
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MIT Project teaching computers common sense
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June 24, 2005
Is it time to move?
If this is true, it is scary. Big brother spy in our new computers?
Update - this was a hoax. See Buzzmachine...
[Technorati Tags: homeland security patriot act]
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links for 2005-06-24
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Another tagging site
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June 23, 2005
Maybe you can help me
Think of this as a "virtual water cooler" conversation with me looking for some inspiration. Hopefully you will engage - and if not, that's ok too - I am used to talk to myself...
As you may know - I am helping the BlogBridge open source project with their marketing, positioning and go-to-market strategy. This morning, my friend Pito, who runs the project, asked me a simple question - If I were to spend more time on the project could we generate more "buzz"?
Considering that I want to keep a healthy balance between my paid engagements and my free engagements (did I mention BlogBridge is open source = free), I thought of pulling a classic consultant trick on him and overwhelm him with the "fundamental" differences between buzz, microbuzz, metabuzz, ebuzz, ibuzz, sbuzz... you get the point. But since that is not really like me, I decided against this strategy and instead launched into an exercise of dissecting the problem right there, and with him.
At the risk of exposing my ignorance, I want to share my thoughts here and see if perhaps you have anything to add.
Let's start with the product (RSS aggregator with a backend service). I will not get into too much detail, but I do believe that we have the right product for the market - it is easy to use, it helps people sort through the information they already subscribe to, and it helps people discover new information. In a world of information overload and chaos, this sounds like the right set of problems to solve. Trust me for a minute, forget that I am a marketer and assume that I am right on this and let's continue the analysis.
Buzz happens when people spontaneously tell one another about a great product experience they've had - and go as far as recommending that product to others. That buzz gets really amplified if you have some super network connectors who talk about your product as well…still with me?
The issue with spontaneous buzz is that people first have to try the product in order to get the "experience" from which they will recommend it to others. So the first thing we have to do is to reconnect with our couple thousand real users to ensure that they are having a positive experience, help them understand and use the increasingly rich feature set and ask for their help in spreading the good word. Long term, we have to continuously make sure that the product is easily “triable” (which probably means getting rid of Java Webstart…but let’s table this discussion for now).
In terms of the network hubs you can get them to give you some mention like David Weinberger did here (we know he is a user), Dan Gillmor did here, Robert Scoble did here, or like our friend and BlogBridge topic expert Jeff Clavier did here. These people are very busy and they probably don't have the time to actually play with too many products. And just like with other users, there is no way that they would give you a ringing endorsement without having a real positive experience with the product. Knowing that, what if we were to offer our time (whatever it takes) to set them up with our product with the promise that at the end of the exercise they would be better off than when we started.
What do you think? Do you think we're missing something? Are there other issues that are standing in the way which we are perhaps missing? If you have some other brilliant ideas, email me or post a comment...I will continue to keep you posted on our progress! And - did I mention it's an open source project, so if you want to get involved - feel free...
[Technorati Tags: blogbridge buzz marketing open source]
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Is your boss a psychopath?
The latest issue of Fast Company has a whole article on Psychopath bosses (not online yet- will link as soon as up). The article also comes with a quick quiz to help you calculate the extend of the problem:
- Is he glib and superficially charming?
- Does he have a grandiose sense of self-worth?
- Is he a pathological liar?
- Is he a con artist or a master manipulator
- When he harms other people, does he feel the lack of remorse or guilt?
- Does he have a shallow effect
- Is he callous and lacking empathy
- Does he fail to accept responsibility for his own actions?
Then compute your score.
- 1-4....be frustrated
- 5-7....be cautious
- 8-12....be afraid
- 13-16....be very afraid
It is amazing to me how companies can function with people like this in prominent positions (see also the revenge of the "c"th). Or maybe it just tells us something about the resilience of companies as social organism...
[Technorati Tags: hr corporate]
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links for 2005-06-23
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June 22, 2005
Internal communications - broken
Corporate blogging today relates the results of a Scandinavian survey (surveyed 12,000 people in 24 companies) about internal communications (here). The results are pretty poor - and I am sure that if we were to run a similar survey in the US or broader Europe, the results would be pretty similar.
Check this out:
- Top management is neither visible nor credible. Just 4 out of 10 think the top execs do what they say.
- Strategic communication doesn't succeed. Only 50 % of the employees say they know the goals and strategies of their company.
- 50 % feel that they are not enough informed about changes in the company.
[Technorati Tags: employee communications internal communications]
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links for 2005-06-22
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Social bookmarking usage at IBM
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June 21, 2005
More on folksonomies
By now you know that I am very interested in this topic and that I believe that this is one of the potential cornerstones of making KM finally work. That being said there are a few interesting developments that crossed my aggregator today.
First - here is a great article on folksonomies vs. taxonomies that will be presented later this week by Emanuele Quintarelli (via coporate blogging). The author does a good job of explaining where taxonomies fit vs. where folksonomies fit. He also takes you through the good and the bad of folskononies and specifically addresses the use of it within the enterprise - citing as one of the benefits the bridging of silos within companies where the same thing sometimes goes by a totally different name.
That reminded me of a large medical devices company I used to work with. The terminology used for product innovation between the different product groups was so dissimilar that a product manager from one department simply could not be transferred into another! Talk about barriers to cross-product innovation...
IBM is also rolling out enterpise usage of folksonomies - check out James Snell's post on that yesterday.
[Technorati Tags: tagging folksonomies]
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Awesome new release of BlogBridge
BlogBridge today came out with an awesome new release (you got to be willing to sign up for the weekly version to get it). Note that I am affiliated with those guys in a non-paid capacity...
This release really did a great job in helping you sort through your information clutter (if you don't have David Weinberger's problem - I do). Basically this release let's you create "smartfeeds" - collecting posts from within your own subscribed feeds based on specific criteria in one new feed. That is in addition to smartfeeds that can be created from delicious, flickr, findory, feedster and technorati...very cool!
Next job we will tackle tagging from within BlogBridge - if you have any brilliant ideas - let us know.
[Technorati Tags: blogging rss]
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links for 2005-06-21
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What goes through a consumer's mind when he walks into Circuit City and sees 250 different televisions in all shapes and sizes
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interview with the starbucks ceo on creating an emotional tie with your customers
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Feedster CEO writes about turning on customers to your brand through blogs.
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Tag plugin for MT
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Collaboration and the future of work...
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June 20, 2005
Marketing to older people - lock-in opportunities
Based on non-scientific data it seems to me that older people have a lower tolerance for change than younger people. They like the comfort of "sameness" and familiarity when buying products and services.
If that's true - and with the upcoming wave of retiring boomers - there are tremendous "lock-in" opportunities for a variety of consumer goods. And as long as those companies don't screw up, they'll enjoy huge switching cost benefits over their competitors.
No? Am I perhaps missing something or starting from a wrong assumption?
[Technorati Tags: baby boomers marketing]
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June 19, 2005
links for 2005-06-19
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More feedback on the Ketchum announcement
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Free photos
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June 18, 2005
Teaching 4th graders business ethics...
I truly enjoyed the last of my junior achievement classes - this one teaching 4th graders "business ethics."
When I ran the examples from Seth Godin's latest book by them (i.e., Johnson lying to congress to get funding for Vietnam and Prudhomme's promotion of red fish which almost led to their extinction), they had no problems distinguishing the ethical from the unethical. When we talked about the fictitious pencil company needing trees to produce pencils - they understood why in the long run it makes sense to take less profit upfront in order to re-plant trees. And when they role-played being on the board of directors of a company that polluted the air to the point where their workers became sick - they made the right decisions...
But then I tried to come up with an example that would be a bit closer to their world. The question was - what would you do if your best friend tells you that he or she is about to hurt some other kid?
- Answer 1 (majority of the kids) - go tell someone else (teacher, parent, etc.)
- Answer 2 (1 kid) - try to convince my friend not to do it before telling someone else
- Answer 3 (1 kid) - never tell on your best friend
- Answer 4 (1 kid) - it depends on who he or she is about to hurt...if I don't like that person then I would not tell
[Technorati Tags: junior achievement ethics]
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links for 2005-06-18
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goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other.
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YubNub is a command-line for the web.
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European blogosphere summary page (wiki)
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Google pagerank factors from their patent application
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Don't try to fool the reader with a sales pitch or by disguising your blog as a press release or advertisement.
Posted by delicious at 4:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 17, 2005
[off-topic]How can we afford people like that
I was speaking with a good friend of mine who works for the state. She was totally stressed out about a problem employee she has had to deal with for months. Apparently the person in question is totally inept – only good at screwing things up and screwing other people in the process. She calls in sick all the time. Once she called in sick on a Saturday (that group does not work on Saturdays) – twice! The second time she called (20min after the first call), she said she could not remember whether she had already called or not.
Of course, the impact on the morale of other team members in her group are predictable – people are getting fed up, people are sick of having to work extra time to cover up for her, etc.
The amount of fully documented cases of incompetency for that person are apparently very high – and she has even been given an official warning through HR and been put on ‘trial’ or whatever term hr uses for putting people on probation.
Problem is – my friend is unable to fire her! And there are apparently tons of people like that on our state’s payroll… it's not fair to the taxpayers and not fair to the good employees that work for our government
Posted by francois at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
links for 2005-06-17
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The Internet may be entering a new phase that will decentralize control inside companies, enable employees to collaborate more easily, and drive efficiency
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great essay on the new internet - tagging, ajax, etc.
Posted by delicious at 4:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 16, 2005
Rescuing Social Software
David Pollard at How to Save the World has another post on the problems related to the first generation social software applications (here). He basically feels that his blog provides him with a much more robust social network that all the other SNA's.
What he would like to see is some sort of environment in which you could list what you have to offer, who recommends you and what you're looking for. And if someone is interested in contacting you - he would like to see a much richer virtual presence solutions - think of it as Skype with video, document viewing, chat and white-boarding all in one.
While I too would like to see a richer virtual interaction environment integrated with my SNA, so far the application which I have been using - LinkeIn - has proven useful to me. True, there are maybe more sellers than buyers and there are truly lazy networkers who try to abuse or waste the precious social capital you have with your contacts - but by and large I have had no problems ignoring those pests and make the app work for me.
[Technorati Tags: social software linkedin]
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Dark Blogs - a case study
Suw Charman over at Strange Attractor and Corante Research released a case study on the use of dark blogs (blogs used inside corporate firewalls) in the enterprise. This one is focused on a pharmaceutical company and can be downloaded here as a pdf and distributed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons licence.
The first application for dark blogs within the pharmaceutical company was for Competitive Intelligence and the new blogging platform (from Traction Software) replaced static web sites as well as some Lotus Notes apps.
It won't be long before many companies start realizing the benefits of blogs, wikis and tagging software solutions to perform collaborative tasks like competitive intelligence, customer needs gathering and other knowledge management activities.
[Technorati Tags: dark blogs knowledge management]
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links for 2005-06-16
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Analysis of blogging behavior of three A-list bloggers
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Cool blog with bad UI's
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The goal here is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger
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Through the central blog dashboard at the intranet W3, IBMers now can find more than 3,600 blogs written by their co-workers
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Yahoo! buys blo.gs and joins FeedMesh
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June 15, 2005
This time, it's for real: Save NPR and PBS
(Via whatsnextblog) - the following text from Moveon.org:
You know that email petition that keeps circulating about how Congress is slashing funding for NPR and PBS? Well, now it's actually true. (Really. Check at the bottom if you don't believe me.)
Sign the petition telling Congress to save NPR and PBS:
http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/
A House panel has voted to eliminate all public funding for NPR and PBS, starting with "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," and other commercial-free children's shows. If approved, this would be the most severe cut in the history of public broadcasting, threatening to pull the plug on Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Oscar the Grouch.
The cuts would slash 25% of the federal funding this year—$100 million—and end funding altogether within two years. The loss could kill beloved children's shows like "Clifford the Big Red Dog," "Arthur," and "Postcards from Buster." Rural stations and those serving low-income communities might not survive. Other stations would have to increase corporate sponsorships.
Already, 300,000 people have signed the petition. Can you help us reach 400,000 signatures today?
http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/
Read the Washington Post report on the threat to NPR and PBS at:
Update 6/24 - cut rejected 248 to 140 to maintain funding for the corporation for public broadcasting! Moveon sent notice that they got over 1M petitions...this works.
[Technorati Tags: npr congress]
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Beware of "top down" disruptive innovations
Nicolas Carr over at Strategy and Business (here - free, requires registration - via Ideaflow) argues that companies should not just be paranoid about bottoms-up disruptive innovations as those described by Harvard Prof. Clay Christensen in his innovator's dilemma set of books, but that they should also be on the lookout for top-down disruptive innovations.
Unlike bottoms-up disruptive innovations, which requires an incumbent player to give up their high-margin products and markets in order to capitalize on them (an unlikely event according to Christensen) - top-down disruptive innovations are higher end than what is currently in the market and therefore come with higher margins.
Examples listed in the article as top-down disruptive innovations include Fed-Ex, Wang, iPod, and satellite-radio.
While I buy the Fed_ex story and perhaps also the Wang story, I am not sure that the iPod is a top-down disruptive innovation. Isn't it the logical outcome of the bottoms-up disruptive innovation that MP3 players have been going through in the last decade? Doesn't it follow a classic innovator's dilemma curve? I think so...
[Technorati Tags: innovation innovator's dilemma]
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How to get your blog discovered
David Pollard over at How to Save the World has an interesting post on how to get your blog discovered (here). He draws analogies with getting a book discovered.
Some of the things he recommends are:
- that blog software developers add the capability for bloggers to add standardized blog-jackets to their blogs
- that Amazon get in the game and list all blogs as they list books
- that blog software developers incorporate simple ways to create samplers that make sense when printed for the f2f crowd
- partnerships with hard copy pubs that cater to the same crowds
That also reminded me of a post that Mike Manuel over at Media Guerrilla (here) wrote about the importance of knowing those folks that have blogs in the long tail.
[Technorati Tags: long tail blogs]
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June 14, 2005
More on brain - neuromarketing
Here is an interesting article about using MRI brain scans to fine tune your marketing messages (here from cbc - via Agenda Inc.)
$7,500 gets you a single experiment with 12 subjects...soon, IBM might do the simulation online "submit your test messages to blue brain" (see previous post).
[Technorati Tags: human brain neuromarketing]
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IBM simulating the brain
The Connection on NPR had a great program yesterday on the ethics of simulating the brain (you can listen to it here). Besides the obvious questions about whether the machine will develop some sort of "self-awareness", I am curious to know if this will be able to simulate the brain close enough so that giant steps forward can be made in everything neuro-.
Scary to think that perhaps soon everything we do are will be "simulatable."
[Technorati Tags: human brain ibm]
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links for 2005-06-14
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Sometimes the best presentation is... no presentation. Ditch the slides completely.
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How most products have crappy user interfaces and too many features
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June 13, 2005
Left wing and right wing arguments in virtual worlds
Hey - check this out - they have right wing/left wing arguments in virtual worlds as well. Very cool...
[Technorati Tags: virtual worlds property]
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PR agencies getting involved with new media
Today Ketchum announced their new global 'personalized media' service (here). They will basically provide consulting services to their clients on how to use blogs, wikis, SEO, mobile text messaging and the like as part of their overall communications strategies.
B.L. Ochman rightfully asks herself (see comment below) the question whether they can credibly do so without having blogs or RSS feeds of their own (here). Steve Rubel over at Micropersuasion wonders why this should be delivered by a separate group (here - with good discussion thread).
The reason for my interest in this topic is because I am in the process of helping a PR agency incorporate new media into their messaging and service offerings.
[Technorati Tags: pr blogging]
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links for 2005-06-13
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Spin Off software business or not
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Super-hyped social networking is exploding, with new ways to link up to others being added daily
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June 12, 2005
links for 2005-06-12
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Business Week: Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business
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THE AMOUNT SPENT ON SPONSORED search listings will increase 47 percent this year--to around $5.1 billion
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reputation hack
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marketing intern: I, too, am unsure of the chain of command.
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June 11, 2005
Wiki Spam
I got some SPAM on my WIKI (here)...wonder if that is done by some person or some automated system?
Posted by francois at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
links for 2005-06-11
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time focussed content (better for blogs) and subject focussed content (better for a wiki if the content is evolving, or just PDFs for snapshots in time)
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Technorati’s tag feeds will be a great boon to the folks who are already using tagging as a collaboration tool
Posted by delicious at 4:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 10, 2005
Update - Technorati beta now with tag search and tag rss
Technorati just came out with their own search engine (based on what they tag) and also with rss feeds for tags (here). This is very interesting...
[Technorati Tags: tags tag folksonomy]
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Started using tags differently again
As you may have noticed (I know I am not the first), I am having del.icio.us post the things that I save to del.icio.us on my blog every day. That caused me to use delicious tagging differently than I used to.
In the past I would tag stuff at delicious primarily for my own use. Now I use it to bring stuff that if of interest to me, and which I think will be interesting to you as well, to your attention. They are articles and web sites that fit with what I am writing about but for which I do not have enough original commentary (delicious lets me add one line of extended comment - which I have to start using better). In effect its a little like the Technorati tags except that if the links are of interest to you you can tag them yourself and put your own commentary on it.
[Technorati Tags: tags tag folksonomy]
Posted by francois at 7:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
links for 2005-06-10
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The idea was to take wikis plus blogs and add tools, and support, to make it easy to use by enterprise customers for collaboration
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I’ve been thinking about the knowledge work as craft idea for a while now
Posted by delicious at 4:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 9, 2005
More than 50% of permission emails get filtered away by SPAM filters!
WOW - Marketing Sherpa just released a paper saying that "54% of Permission Emailers Are Filtered as Spammers: Including AOL News, Wal-Mart, IBM and the Feds" by Yahoo, Hotmail, and GMail (here - free through June 19th).
I guess it's time to switch to RSS marketing!
[Technorati Tags: email rss marketing]
Posted by francois at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
You too own advertising real estate!
I was having lunch with a good friend of mine who told me about this latest marketing fad - body advertising. Corporate tattoo's on your body!
I know that Harley Davidson never had to pay people for them to "wear" Harley's brand on their birthday suit. But that people would go through very intimate and deeply personal interviews with corporate sponsors in order to qualify to get money for the company to put some sort of corporate or product tattoo on their body blew my mind.
I did a quick check online (although I do trust my friend), and found tons of sites. This one TatAd.com says:
"Tell us everything you feel comfortable with! It makes sense when you think about it, the companies will want to ensure you have the same interests as their customers so you can talk about their company with your friends."That site has pictures too, but I was not sure that I was ready to become a member yet - which you need to be in order to access the profiles.
About.com has an interesting article on their tattoo site saying that tattoo advertising "insults" the tattoo trade (here). How the heck did I miss this whole new and innovative way of marketing.
Wonder about pricing? ...a quick Google search found another article with some prices (here). This guy got $510 to permanently engrave "Save Martha! It's a good thing. SaveMartha.com" (Martha Stewart), and $500 for engraving "pilldaddy.com" on his arm.
I'd love to see an insider pricing sheet - that must be pretty complicated. I guess that the increased real estate which I gained in the last 15 years would not result in a higher revenue potential than if I did not gain that. And if someone lives in a warm place, that probably brings up the price. And I bet you that single people get more than married ones...all not fair.
On the positive site, this new trend has to have a positive impact on the thong industry - maybe time to buy some stocks!
[Technorati Tags: advertising tattoo marketing]
Posted by francois at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
links for 2005-06-09
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Intrade is a trading exchange for Politics, Current Events, Financial Indicators, Weather & other Unique Contracts.
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we are releasing preliminary results from two survey questions
Posted by delicious at 4:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 8, 2005
Approach marketing as an investment instead of an expense
A great article for all marketers to read was just published in the McKinsey Quarterly (here – subscription required but free - thanks Hylton for the pointer).
It starts with the marketer's doomsday scenario:
“Today's chief marketing officers (CMOs) confront a painful reality: their traditional marketing model is being challenged, and they can foresee a day when it will no longer work.”
Ever had that sinking feeling – what are you going to do next? Or in the gig after that?
The article continues by listing the challenges that we as marketers will increasingly face – declining effectiveness of advertising, lack of trust by the buyer in our messaging, multitasking of our audiences, proliferation of channels to reach buyers – to the point where TV advertising may just be a waste of time and money.
You don’t buy that? Think about it – there are now 1,600 broadcast channels in the US. While surfing the web, a typical teenager does 2 other things, and even 80% of business people multitask! And according to a Yankelovitch report people are also switching off – 69% would like some sort of product to avoid marketing and 55% would avoid buying products that overwhelm with advertising…wow.
“Marketers need a more rigorous approach to a fragmenting world—one that jettisons mentalities and behavior from advertising's golden age and treats marketing not as "spend" but as the investment it really is. In other words, it will be necessary to boost marketing's return on investment (ROI).”… now there is a novel concept.
But marketers seem clueless. While the effectiveness of TV advertising in 2010 is estimated to be 35% of what it was in 1990, and while TV viewership has plummeted by almost 45% between 1994 and 2003 – TV advertising spend has continued to rise!
The article further posits that the answer lays in approaching the different marketing investments (not expenses!) like an economist
“For CEOs, the key to economic leverage is allocating capital to the businesses generating the highest returns. For marketers, economic leverage comes from aligning messages and spending with a brand's most compelling elements.”
They further recommend that marketers allocate 20-25% of their budget on “well-structured” experiments. I suspect that the actual number for smaller and younger companies will probably be way higher – but the key is “well-structured” experiments – much like what VistaPrint did (see MarketingSherpa)
There is no question that we marketers will have to do things differently as we move forward. Besides building predictable brand creation and brand maintenance machines as described in the article, we will also have to demonstrate more innovation and be willing to take on more risks while trying new ways of doing things.
Also, and as I have said before, marketing will have to start taking responsibility for "all" the ways in which a company behaves in the marketplace. Too many CMO's are just too focused on the brand creation and maintenance while forgetting that their help desk, customer centers and distribution partners are pissing us off to the point where we make promises to ourselves never to buy their products again.
[Technorati Tags: customer marketing advertising cmo]
Posted by francois at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
links for 2005-06-08
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Feedback asymetry for positive and negative feedback on eBay
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a disproportionate amount of attention is placed on bloggers in the front (or head) of a news cycle
Posted by delicious at 4:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 7, 2005
New ads coming up soon...imbued with "trust" hormones
I heard it on the radio yesterday and now just read on redherring.com (here) - researchers have found a "trust" hormone - inhale it and you will trust more.
I can just see it happening...print ads or direct mail pieces that release the trust hormone as you touch it. Now here is something that could revamp the print advertising industry ;-)
[Technorati Tags: trust advertising humor]
Posted by francois at 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
Phishing...
It's interesting that in the last week I received two phishing emails - (one pretending to be from eBay and one from Paypal) both using the new email address posted on this blog and only used in the context of this blog (i.e., to respond to comments on this blog or to comment on other blogs that are worth commenting on).
I guess that from now on I will use 'destinationwebsite' at emergencemarketing when I leave comments on others' blogs and see whether the phishing continues with those new addresses.
[Technorati Tags: phishing]
Posted by francois at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
links for 2005-06-07
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Corporate blogging policy comparison
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The War Over Innovation
Posted by delicious at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
Taxonomy for cooperation technologies
Howard Rheingold and a few of his colleagues created a report and a visual map (here) on technologies of cooperation for the Institute for the Future (announced here on the feature).
They categorize the emerging cooperation-amplifying technologies into 8 categories. I really like some of their categorizations – such as “knowledge collectives” to talk about social bookmarking sites, or “social accounting” for sites like Epinions.
The report concludes with 7 guidelines:
- Shift focus from designing systems to providing platforms
- Engage the community in designing rules to match their culture,
objectives, and tools; encourage peer contracts in place of coercive
sanctions by distant authority when possible - Learn how to recognize untapped or invisible resources
- Identify key thresholds for achieving “phase shifts” in behavior
or performance - Track and foster diverse and emergent feedback loops
- Look for ways to convert present knowledge into deep memory
- Support participatory identity
[Technorati Tags: taxonomy cooperation]
Posted by francois at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 6, 2005
Best Buy?...maybe not in the store!
Apparently, if you check bestbuy.com in a Best Buy store the web site shows a different price than if you check bestbuy.com from home (here - via tech dirt)
It will be fun to watch how Best Buy handles this pr hot potato...
[Technorati Tags: best buy transparency]
Posted by francois at 6:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
more on tagging...
Tom Coates over at Plasticbag has another view of how different people use tags (here). Some use it as folders to organize their stuff while he uses it to annotate a post.
It's really interesting to see how different people tag differently.
[Technorati Tags: tag tagging folksonomy]
Posted by francois at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
The importance of full disclosure
Michael O'Connor Clarke over at Flackster exposes the guys from Blogworking in a great post on the need for full disclosure in blogs (here).
[Technorati Tags: disclosure blogging]
Posted by francois at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
Clear link between employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction and improved financial performance
A study published by The Forum for People Performance Management & Measurement at Northwestern University (here - via Nevon) found that: "There is a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and between customer satisfaction and improved financial performance."
The study looked at the impact of organizational culture, organizational climate, human resource systems, and market characteristics on on employee satisfaction and employee engagement (which they define as the degree of employee motivation and sense of inspiration, personal involvement, and supportiveness). They then gauged the downstream effects of these employee attitudes on companies' market performance.
Other interesting conclusion include:
- The key organizational characteristic for explaining employee satisfaction is organizational communication (a measure of the downward and upward communication in an organization)
- Organizational culture was another significant driver of employee engagement, where employees must be expected to cooperate and work together, but also to take charge and provide a voice for the customer within the organization
- Organizations with engaged employees have customers who use their products more, and increased customer usage leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction
- It is an organization’s employees who influence the behavior and attitudes of customers, and it is customers who drive an organization’s profitability through the purchase and use of its products
- In the end, customers who are more satisfied with an organization’s products are less expensive to serve, use the product more, and, hence, are more profitable customers
Bottom line - you have to give your customers a strong voice within your organization by enabling ALL employees (not just the customer-facing ones) to have a voice representing them within your organization.
While not discussed in the report, developing an open corporate blogging culture probably helps achieve that goal as well.
[Technorati Tags: customer satisfaction corporate culture blogging]
Posted by francois at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 4, 2005
It's not the product they buy but the company?
I was talking about innovation and new technologies with an old friend who works for a very large company and he told me that in his company product innovation is no longer that important - most of their customers buy because of the company and not for reasons related to product innovation...
You think I should short the stock?
[Technorati Tags: innovation]
Posted by francois at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
Now that is cool...
Vistaprint files for IPO (here).
[Technorati Tags: ipo]
Posted by francois at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 3, 2005
All marketers are liars
I started reading Seth Godin's new book, "All Marketers Are Liars" - as usual a good read. A few things in the book caught my attention as worth commenting on.
First is when he says that marketing is not about pitching products but about telling stories. That is so true, my friend Gabe (btw - where the heck are you Gabe? if blocked use autoblogger ;-)) used to say “its not the better product that wins it's the product with the better story”. The story has to be powerful enough so that people want to retell your story but also simple enough so that they can retell it with some degree of consistency. Sadly enough, too many companies do not yet understand that. Nor do they understand the fact that the story about the product travels separately from the product itself and that those channels need to be managed separately.
The other major statement that caught my eye was:
"marketing is about spreading ideas, and spreading ideas is the single most important output of our civilization".As you know, I believe that marketing it broader than that. Spreading ideas happens after you invented and built the product. And once you have the product and you successfully are able to spread your stories, you have to train the organization as a whole to behave in accordance to the story that you are spreading.
More later...I am enjoying this one.
[Technorati Tags: marketing seth godin]
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June 2, 2005
Is somebody stealing my content?
As I was looking though my log I found a referring link (creative-mobs.com) from a site I was not familiar with. When I checked it out it turns out that this guy is just copying other peoples' posts on tagging and running them on a site with some Google ads. Now I have not bothered with putting a Creative Commons license on my site, but I know that Micropersuasion has it and this article was one of many of his posts on that same portal, so was this one from Media Guerrilla, and I can go on and on.
I don't see the benefit of creating a site that aggregates the posts belonging to a particular tag in the first place, but even if that person saw a benefit in doing that shouldn't he a) not run ads on other people's content and b) give proper credit?
[Technorati Tags: fraud tagging ccl]
Posted by francois at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
Interesting view on social software from the gaming world...
Over at Terra Nova, Ren Reynolds writes about "Lost in s-Space" - an interesting perspective on how MMOG's (Massively multiplayer online game) would benefit from social software capabilities like those found in services like LinkedIn and vice versa how some of those "flat" social software services might benefit from things that are being done in MMO's. He also talks about the potential benefits of tagging his profile to see nearby people that share the same interests (tag) as you do...
[Technorati Tags: mmog tagging social networks]
Posted by francois at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 1, 2005
Competent Jerks and Lovable Fools
The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review has a great article titled "Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks". They categorize the different types of employees into a 2X2 matrix with competence as one of the axis and likability as the other (so they end up with four profiles - (going clockwise starting from the bottom left)the incompetent jerk, the competent jerk, the lovable star and the lovable fool). Boy, does this bring back memories...
Interestingly enough - but perhaps not so surprising - likability is the stronger factor in the development of social networks within companies. The lovable fool is mildly wanted while the competent jerk is mostly avoided (with the incompetent jerk is desperately avoided)! That means that competent jerks are a total missed opportunity for companies unless they can "correct" their behavior...
[Technorati Tags: competence employees social networks]
Posted by francois at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
[funny] Confusing the heck out of people
A little while back I wrote a post about how confusing all this rss/xml stuff can be for the non-initiated (here). This morning I was laughing out loud when reading the post from Marc on the O'Reilly Radar (here) about the same topic...it is very confusing.
We should be able to develop a standardized "auto-discovery" mechanism for this problem. BlogBridge (disclosure - see my affiliation with them) does a nice job of autodiscovery (here) but we should be able to have something universal...no?
[Technorati Tags: rss xml technology adoption]
Posted by francois at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
