Benjamin Bloom - thoughts and analysis of digital strategy, cloud based marketing solutions, and consumer experiences.
Apple's identity (account and Touch ID) stategy comes into focus here in this Chart via BusinessInsider.
The meta-battle is now:
# of exclusive SKUs, Total SKUs, and ease of purchase. Apple might have the digital content piece (apps, movies etc) but Amazon and Paypal have the physical (and second-hand) universe on lockdown.
TouchID certainly is going to help with ease of purchase, and the rest of the battle is: how can we get consumers to buy ____ with Apple.
About a month ago, some of my customers got upset that they were ineligible (US sweeps rules being what they are) for a promotion I designed around an event they planned to attend. They complained on Facebook, and I thought they had a good point.
I looked them up in our database and sent them a handwritten note and some brand swag, just thanking them for being a Facebook fans and customers.
The couple hours I spent on that was 100% worth it. One of them even posted an Instagram photo of my note on our brand page.
Every marketing manager, VP, or exec should try this. But don't wait for a reason to apologize.
Sit down and thank 10 customers. They'll love it. Reflect on why you do your job, whether you really value their business, and keep that moment close to you.
Relatisonhips matter, and having a great relationship with every customer should be your goal.
I hadn't really spent time checking out Wedpics. I know that when I heard about it, I thought it would be a hit. When I was planning my own wedding, I thought that the obvious place we were going as a country was that instead of a wedding web site, we would have wedding apps.
The wedding app would manage RSVPs, tell guests where to be and when, make last minute announcements and adjustments and customize all this info down to the guest level. Obviously this would take a lot of the drab paper and social hand-wringing out of it.
Enter Wedpics. Check out their take on wedding photography, which couples can spend thousands of dollars to pay a professional, when most of the enjoyment is the Facebook album you create of the pics you get right away. I think this is the future of event photography - beyond weddings - where the most meaningful photos are captured, viewed and showcased in real time.
Nick Bilton writes, "Internet Pirates Will Always Win" and provokes some interesting ideas: is preventing piracy just a game of whack-a-mole? Certainly, in the current paradigm, it can seem that way.
I wrote to colleagues in 2007, when Razorfish was in discusions with NewCo (the nascent NBC/Fox JV that would become Hulu) that fighting the desire of content to be easily available (even if not free) was not a viable business strategy.
Then, as now, this is a matter of ideology, because the people with the biggest ideas about content are rarely in charge of setting its price or licensing terms.
But in the multi-channel world, with connected devices now a threatening alternative to STB-connected distribution, content players should not forget the power of an engaged audience. They are a monetizable asset, and even if watching for a far lower prixce, creating a low-price tier with identifiable audience members can produce email opt-ins, social discussions, merchandise/DVD/other revenue, and tune-in for other programs.
Mr. Bilton quotes Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, in the article:
The hit HBO show "Game of Thrones" is a quintessential example of this. The show is sometimes downloaded illegally more times each week than it is watched on cable television. But even if HBO put the shows online, the price it could charge would still pale in comparison to the money it makes through cable operators. Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don?t really want to solve the piracy problem. "
"If every TV show was offered at a fair price to everyone in the world, there would definitely be much less copyright infringement," he said. "But because of the monopoly power of the cable companies and content creators, they might actually make less money."
Mr. Holmes is not wrong about the exciting power dynamic in play - it certainly could be empowering to do something the "man" doesn't want you to do. Nevertheless, exercising our inner Che Guevara is neither an effective mechanism of revolution against the industry nor a stricly pleasurable experience (corrupt and low quality BitTorrrent downloads mostly waste our time, if not our money). Wouldn't a low-price on-demand stream or download just be...easier?
It's myopic to think that adding many more low-revenue streams is going to lose money; it certainly will if the HBO/HBO Go are your only revenue source. The MSOs and the premium TV providers have to work together to create experiences and tiers whose scope is beyond the cable system, and where even if the price is lower, the experience is better than piracy, which is, after all, a pain in the butt. But I'm just an idealist, I know.
USA Today reports on a non-story: Teens turn from Facebook to fresher social-media sites
Drawn to niche sites such as Foursquare and Tumblr, teens appear to be expanding beyond Facebook. According to market research firm YPulse, 18% of teens prefer to "check in" on Foursquare instead of Facebook, and 10% say Pinterest is a better site for browsing.
These behavior networks have experiences rapid growth largely because they ride atop identity networks like Facebook. These networks do not challenge the core business of Facebook, particularly because: Facebook, and its advertising platform, are everywhere. There are glimmers of what the Facebook Sponsored Stories will be on Zynga, while playing games like Words with Friends:
iden·ti·ty. noun \ī-ˈden-tə-tē, ə-, -ˈde-nə-\: the distinguishing character or personality of an individual -Merriam-webster.com
I suggested in my previous post about identity networks that Behavior Networks have certain properties.
But what about Identity networks?
Identity networks are primarily networks of connections, not content. Even though content rides on top, identity (friends, co-workers, classmates, teammates etc) is defined by connections between users are the primary organizing principle.
Behavior networks don't need to or even really care to store your data of this variety. To some degree, this is about the maturity of the network itself. Path is well-funded, and doesn't necessarily need to generate revenue - it is focusing on creating a product people love. It is also riding the tide of people who think identity networks are too powerful.
This property of identity networks is quite interesting. Who is the customer, from Facebook's perspective? Depending on your point of view, the customer is the one who pays (the advertiser) or the user (the person who registers an account for their identity). What if those two groups do not want the same thing? So identity networks are constantly seeking to grow revenue without alienating users, who produce the inventory for sale to advertisers.
The inventory is connections, and content, and the trackable data within the network, and we are now at the point where users have more control, but also less power in this equation. They have more discrete levels of control over their information, but less aggregate power: their information remains on the site. The business of Facebook marketing seeks endlessly to grab data from users, turn it into inventory and find willing bidders for that inventory.
LinkedIn is Facebook's strongest rival identity network. LinkedIn has added many more content behaviors than I really thought possible, but it has proven its staying power and has a commanding advantage in terns of data that is increasingly an opportunity for display advertising and the emerging corporate pages that employees are now connecting to. What remains under-leveraged is the extension of LinkedIn's identity network into the physical and corporate IT environments. I'll do a separate post about some strategic opportunities along those lines for LinkedIn.
The value of a network increases exponentially with the number of people (nodes) and the number of connections between them, but as users become aware of the power dynamic in which they stand, value is being drained out of the network. This is first reputational damage done by privacy scandals and the like, and subsequently by users who defect to behavior networks or leave the social world altogether. this is why Facebook runs aggressive re-engagement campaigns for users who have not logged in regularly.
Path is somewhere between a behavior and identity network, and seems chastened by the address book privacy scandal from just a few months ago. In fact, if you go back to the launch of Path's app "With" which had a very simple photo sharing mechanic for sharing who you are With, Path lets us know they are in the business of building networks:
as we continue our quest to build new types of networks which maintain their quality over time, we have been fascinated by the idea of an interaction network. Or, as we enjoy calling it, the With Graph.
Interaction networks, or behavior networks, can be discrete products, to test features and bring a feature set clearly into focus before adding it into a product. It's clear that this ethos is infused within Path, as many have discovered. Check out Path's About web page - which I have labeled below; the lesson: don't build when you can get all of the functionality without woorying about the infrastructure?
These are just some of the issues that companies struggle with. Do we build our own networks, or extend others? Do we have the ability to trust business partners to host our content, and critical utilities, when they are focused, precise, but not under our control? One of the side effects of a services-oriented world, in which marketing services are delivered by a multitude of vendors and in-house solutions, is that identity and behavior networks can be easily adopted into the marketing ecosystem - will it be you, or your competitor who gets there first?
Foursquare has a better shot at being a location-enabling platform, and it is doing a great job of expanding the behaviors - from check-in to discovery - that can be built with the network. It could become a centralized clearinghouse of your place in physical space, enabled with your permissions and enriching digital interactions. Foursquare's connections are transmit location information, which has different sensitivities, and it's been harder for other social networks to effectively create location-sensitive content filters. The rich opportunity for serving deals and enriching merchant relationships arising from actual, physical visits and commerce. Perhaps Foursquare could a platform for retail commerce, featuring payments and offering retailer CRM opportunities..but it will have to become a stronger Identity network in order to do so.
I will address ways to profit from this tension between behavior networks and identity networks, and how to effectively leverage behavior networks, in a future post.
I just received the below, purporting to be a friend approval from a name i din't recognize. It's a phising scam, hoping you all try not to open. Not sure if the sender knew my foursquare account was attched to a specific email address, but they had me going, for sure. If anyone wants the full headers, I will happily share.
My dad sent me a link to a story on the SF BUsiness times site, and after logging in and seeing the story, I found myself wandering. I saw side by side ads for Verizon and AT&T careers, and I was curious about how these ads were related to the destination content. My, was I surprised. The sites both linked to the homepage of the respective career pages. I'll show AT&T and then Verizon's. Both companies are so large, and nationwide employers, it is interesting that they approach things so differently.
With AT&T, I felt welcomed by a gallery of faces of actual humans, and there's enough happening on the site that everyone from recruiters, to college students, to experienced professionals should be able to find what they are looking for. You have to hand it to the company for using the .jobs TLD (the site is http://att.jobs) yet the branding feels spot on for what I expect to see from the other touchpoints I regularly use as a customer.
By contrast, I found Verizon's careers site mystifying, wit so many links to so many things, and so many groupings.
Remember, no matter how much your site's success depends on organic search, and regarless of the desperation of your target audience to "convert" (whether a job application, tshirt purchase, or other action) someone will actually, eventually, with human eyes, look at your site.
I'm seeing more and more the paradox of organic search and the site design below, which seems to put everything but the kitchen sink as a text link on the homepage. This won't last forever, and the increasedinfluence of social content and participation on link relevance will hopefully limit the impact of these usability-killing visual mazes.
UPDATE: In fairness to Verizon, it seems like the page I landed on wasn't the home page. The home page, below, shows off more of the corporate identity that I saw on AT&T's page. I'll stick to the point about the SEO contrast, but I also think the landing page choice for Verizon was not the best. Choosing the right campaign landing page is a question for another day.
No, no, it's ok, I have everything I want. You don't need to get me anything. Really? What's this? Socks? (Actually, I just bought new athletic socks for running, no joke
But what I'm really exited about, gift wise, is this page used by Staples email marketing to promote thier Twitter comtest. Let's face it, brands usually need to give prospective followers something exciting to do - classic what's in it for me.
Things I like about this page:
What are your favorites this holiday season?
Noticed this morning that the YouTube logo was not as exepcted:
The Museum half of the logo execution above links to the YouTube Play channel. I'm not sure if I somehow missed this in previous years, or if this is a Biennial that begins now, but the custom YouTube channel execution is interesting:
This is leading up to a Live Stream event tongiht at 8pm from the Guggenheim. Presumably, watch there or live online at 8PM ET: on YouTube Play.
UPDATE: I just went to Foursquare to link to the Guggenheim, and discovered a special!
"Check in at the Guggenheim’s Art After Dark: YouTube Play event on Fri, Oct 22, 9pm-midnight and enter to win a YouTube Play prize, while supplies last. Show your check in at the Info Desk to win!"
If the Guggenheim can do it, with funding from HP and Intel, can your brand do something this interesting?
Reading The dirty little secret about Google Android, I've been enjoying the insightful analysis of how Apple's decision to free the device from the restrictions of the carrier were key to the identity of the device, and seem more in keeping with what Google originally promised with the Nexus One.
Unfortunately, the Nexus One flopped. The non-Apple customers buy their wireless devices and service very differently. Mass-market phones, even smart phones, need marketing spend behind them, and those campaigns are linked to carrier restrictions and modifications which compromise the "open" vision. The upshot, according to the article:
the consequence of not putting any walls around your product is that both the good guys and the bad guys can do anything they want with it. And for Android, that means that it’s being manipulated, modified, and maimed by companies that care more about preserving their old business models than empowering people with the next great wave of computing devices.
I think this rolls back into the S-Curve of technology adoption.
[credit: Wikipedia]
As the market matures and a it becomes a mass market product, smart phones and apps become both more standardized and more understandable for the average community. We see and hear idiotic advertisements exhorting us to be "twin texting turbos" with the Droid 2. And this is great for Verizon's bottom line, for marketers and developers launching Android apps, and for mobile web content growth. But it basically sucks for the innovators who want to be able to get a great device and move from carrier to carrier in the US market.
Other perspectives: Nic Brisbourne of DFJEsprit writes
[T]he longevity of the app paradigm versus open web standards will depend in large measure on who wins the hardware battle. Open standards at the software level probably will probably only prevail if hardware manufacturers with a PC mindset prevail over those with a preference for closed ecosystems...
Unfortunately, the principles of openness have been interpreted to mean an open app ecosystem, and haven't changed the economics of the closed carrier/device model in the US. Google wants a big market for Android apps and as many users as possible, and that motivation is at cross-purposes with the open-ness that geeks want.
I grabbed this just now on my Facebook home page: a sponsored Link with the Gmail/AOL/MSN logos, and my email address in bold, Thanking me?
I normally would have ignored it, but frankly I was curious. I clicked. The result, however, was insidious:
So now I can see what the plan is- Facebook wants to keep an eye on your Google account to make sure you don't connect to someone by email without also connecting them to Facebook.
It's hard to know what the cumulative effect of constant authorizations, approvals, and stored passwords really is, but I predict one day it sneaks up on you, an accidental overshare or ads that seem to insidiously follow you whenever you want? A friend who lands on a site they hate, to find out that you praised it before you knew how much it would offend them?
Or will it be merely the insidious, price-discriminatiung ad where you get to fly to Fort Lauderdale for $389, but your friend flies the same itinerary for $250 with a free checked bag?
Scary? Only sometimes. But it all started with one click.
I will post more about each as they marinate, but really really a great event.
Charlene Li was quoted in mediapost suggesting that marketers should seek to test the effects of their campaigns and understand the experience and reactions of people to those keywords, rather than only looking at the numbers.
I agree in principle, and it remains true that if you are going to talk to a conference of search marketers, you have to temper your words a bit so you don't lose the attention of the people who spend their days in an Excel/SQL driven quest to "optimize" their keyword buys or ad targeting.
Finding out what keywords drive the most revenue for your business is an interesting challenge and one that many businesses need to do. But at the end of the day, you'll find me building a relationship with a customer, not the keywords that he types into Google or Bing or ...Bing :).
Those relationships are about more than keywords, they are about an experience and delivering value. As more businesses shape up to this reality, they are sure to reap the rewards. As I have been chronicling in my Human Marketing series, I think creating a connection with a customer, even during short transactions, is what delivers long term value to the enterprise.
AdAge asks, Is No Chatter Worse Than Negative Chatter? Good question- for many brands, the passion that drives affinity is just as desirable as the passion that drives hatred. I'm reminded of this Scion ad, which really drives the point home: stand for something or go home.
Such is the challenge of Earned media- you have to attract attention while still being YOU. If there's nothing worth saying about your brand, then you're beyond help in any advertising medium. Stick with the paid stuff.
But when there's something or someone to love, to hate, to act as an ally or fight as an enemy, you've got your in.
You can't force people to tweet your brand or your hashtag- you're going to have to do something to create the emotion behind those actions. Are you talking to #BlameDrewsCancer? Are you finding what's funny about your product and getting that on video?
Look. Listen. Plan. Blow it up big. Measure. Repeat.
Just a hammer. Image via Wikipedia
Walking through midtown this morning, Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters Conference is still on my mind. I had many folks agree with me that just because Twitter is hot now doesn't mean it's the right tool, or even a good tool, for many businesses. Ditto for social media- you're not going to get anywhere just by betting that Twitter and Facebook will save the day when the public ignores your ads and hates your microsites. "Enter the conversation" the evangelists say. But what will you say?
Social media is great when it brings out the real people in an organization and puts them next to customers and prospects for a conversation.
Social media is not code for "people waiting for my brand to tell them to spam their friends."
Consumers aren't any more interested in spamming their friends with your message than they are in watching TV ads with the same tagline.
The quality of conversation is not a social media problem, it is a business problem. Putting a happy smiling "conversation" on a truly awful business situation won't resolve the business problem, and this fact transcends twitter or facebook or any tool du jour. Does your firm listen to its customers? Does it care about their experience with your product?
A webinar invite from Convergys detailed the following results from their research about communication service providers:
The customer service experience is a business problem that many telecommunications and cable companies struggle with- but putting your best social media people on reach out to the aggrieved minority who speak up will not fix the customer service experience that was broken in the first place!
So the question you should ask yourself is, do you want to hit the same old nail with a new hammer, or do you want to change who is swinging it and how it's swung? Gary Vaynerchuck's "scaling caring" idea is an interesting way of putting it, and gets at some part of the problem- if you cannot or will not change your level of caring for your customer, no amount of social media involvement will fix your company.
Check out how @zappos handles their customer service and brand presence on Twitter, and you'll find that behind the social media is a company that knows how to swing a hammer on behalf of their customers.
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The surest sign that a company has a bright future is when its employees are focused on the customer. If the various Twitter customer service anecdotes (Comcast, Jetblue, etc) have done anything, it is to expose gaping holes in the lifeless void that most customer service operations force customers to navigate.
In the WSJ, I found Comcast’s Twitter Guru Speaks.
But unlike other marketers using the service, Mr. Eliason said he’s unconcerned with how many followers he has. “When people follow me they’ll see me say ‘Can I help you?’ 150 times in a row,” he said. “I wouldn’t follow me either.”
Amen to that- he's not trying to build a community of influencers, he's trying to fix a broken customer support system. There aren't that many communities with multiple cable companies- people know Comcast is the local monopolist. So this is not about finding people who don't know about Comcast and convincing them to buy, this is about loving your customers...forever.
What is sad is how recent this phenomenon is. Airlines, telecom companies, cable companies, all use enormous call center operations to deal with the inflow of customer contacts. And they usually do it very, very badly.
The fact that Social Media approaches find so much low-hanging fruit is more a testament to how bad the other systems are at dealing with customers. Should we be rewarding Comcast for NOT screwing up this time?
I'm digging into the CRM Magazine's June 2009 issue entitled, Who Owns the Social Customer and will be posting a few thoughts about how CRM is both an integrated customer relationship function and a marketing function, but also a recognition that the world's largest firms MUST change the way they do business.
I read about Scoble thinking of killing his Twitter account, and it seems more and more like the anti-commercialism backlash that we hear with each new service- Going back to Canter and Siegel- the couple in who sent their Green Card spam to thousands of usenet groups in 1994.
I keep seeing outrage posted on Twitter, in the form of "Why is [company] using twitter to [perceived spammy practice]? [hateful judgement]" It seems to have grown worse with the advent of bots for automating a corporate/for-profit twitter presence. The ghost-writers/celebrity tweet phenomenon (seriously, Guy Kawasaki?) didn't seem to help.
The tools to automate an external social media presence (e.g. marketing or PR) are getting some traction but it's becoming painful to the user community. Should we get mad at the brands, or Twitter?
It seems like a much better response to attempt to influence the strategies employed by firms to manage their social presence. If Twitter doesn't want us to leave, the ads will be tasteful and/or relevant. Not to mention that at the enterprise level, the opportunity to drive internal morale/knowledge should be just as large as driving brand love and PR externally.
But can we remedy the corporate, pretend to be a person presence? Is this a possible business for Jeff Dachis new venture? I'll keep an eye on that.
Harsh words by C. Edward Brice about mystarbucksidea.com and Starbucks social media efforts at The Marketing Gimbal. I couldn't agree more with the general proposition that a Youtube channel for Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts is basically just going to be filled with video press releases.
I don't know how well an outsider (even one as brilliant as I) can evaluate whether mystarbucksidea.com achieves Starbucks strategic business goals or solves its business problems, but I would suggest that the goals are close to these:
Compare to [share-vote-discuss-see] as the consumer call to action- I think I'm probably close.
If I were Starbucks, I'd be investing the most money in harvesting from the idea exchange, and trying to identify high-value ideas; I wouldn't just implement the most popular idea, though customer enthusiasm for an idea might be one important factor. The Starbucks audience might be too broad to vote a really effective lid idea to the top, but how about posting that idea as a challenge somewhere else- there are lots of crowdsourcing innovation forums out there.
The engagement Starbucks can cultivate-online, outside the store environment- has intrinsic value, which is amplified by acknowledging this community and responding to its needs.
Brice's point about getting the service element right is taken- there's no substitute for getting my coffee order right. But assuming that problem is addressed through training, and that there is some other avenenue for testing its effectiveness, aren't we back to where we started? Finding ways to engage Starbucks customer online, beyond advertising, ought to be seen as the major challenge.
I'm not personally a fan of the product (I'm a Peets drinker), but this element of the Starbucks marketing strategy always struck me as the right idea.
If anyone wonders about the relationship between PR and marketing: how many of your customers will take the time to write a blog post acknowledging your greatness? Are you working as hard as you can to make sure your customers Keep on Loving You? Clif Bar & Company is. Sometimes your company, or your agency, will make a mistake. How you handle that situation is a crucial part of marketing at any level. My quick lessons:
I purchased a box of Clif Bars on January 28, only to learn on February 6 that my Chocolate Peanut Crunch bars were being voluntarily recalled by Clif Bar & Company as part of this peanut business.
While there was no evidence that the product was affected, the company decided to recall the product. I was a little annoyed that I would be throwing away food, but I went to the Clif web site and requested a refund. I received a very nice email in return, which included this letter from Gary and Kit, which was nice but every bit expected.
I'm just going to retype the note I received in the mail from Clif Bar and Company, along with 12 coupons for single free Clif or Luna bars.
We appreciate the effort you have made in contacting us about this situation. Though coupons won't buy back the time or energy you may have spent dealing with this situation, we hope that they will at least minimize the expense. As you shop, please know that 91 Clif Bar and Company products are currently available for your enjoyment and are not impacted by the recall.
Gary and Kit
My emphasis in bold on the part I liked the best about this note-I wish my 401(k) provider was as generous. I found this note a delight to open up and read. I'll be buying Clif Bars in the future. I'd give them 'kudos" but don't want to encourage the competition :)
I enjoyed the Clif Bar web site as well- not sure I need to review it but I encourage you to check it out at www.clifbar.com.
