General Business

Over at All Things Digital, Peter Kafka thinks Apple's iAd scheme is headed for total (or near-total) domination of the ad space on the platform:

I’ve talked to some mobile ad companies that are more hopeful. They think Apple will let them compete with its iAd platform in a fair fight.

Maybe they’re saying that because they have to appear optimistic. Maybe they really believe it. But I think they’re wrong. I think Apple intends to own the ad market for its app ecosystem.

Full Article at All Things Digital

For those who need a refresher, here are some first-look observations and some interesting strategic thoughts from Hill Holliday. Sample:

The big thing that iAd really does is it brings new thinking into the capabilities of mobile display advertising and it wasn’t brought to you by Google. Google has been badly lagging in all aspects of mobile and Apple probably saw the lack of innovation in the mobile advertising market and decided to put their stake in the ground. Let’s also be clear here that mobile display advertising isn’t yet a billion dollar business, this isn’t about the money for Apple but reshaping the industry as they saw fit.

The bottom line for Apple is the continuing creation of new and free apps for the App Store while everything else, like being the innovator in mobile advertising, sticking it to Google, pre-emptively blocking Adobe are just bonuses.

Full post at Hill Holliday

And thanks to MIT Advertising Lab and Ilya Vedrashko.

Heading out in the morning for Philadelphia, and the 2010 OnDemand Expo.

This year I'm on one panel, and giving one presentation (along with my buddy Mark Van Duinen from TracyLocke).

Here's the panel info:

Title: Making Digital Workflows Pay Off
Date: Tuesday April 20, 2010
Time: 1:00-1:50 PM

And here's the presentation:
Title: Creating a Multi-Channel Marketing Center around a Web-to-Print Storefront
Date: Wednesday April 21, 2010
Time: 4:00-4:50PM


If you're at the Expo, swing by one of these and say Hi.

See you in Philly!

Google Docs will soon be supporting uploads of up to 250MB, in all file types.
Google's Docs and Wave products are starting to look like a real collaboration solution, especially for loosely allied or ad-hoc teams which may not have any need for a real infrastructure of their own (I work with a shifting coalition of collaborators, in just such a scenario).
Does that mean that workflow or asset management within an organization is no longer necessary? I don't think so - I see Google as a better solution at the fringes, where organizations interact, and where the greatest communications difficulties typically are.

In other news, YouSendIt is looking a little green around the gills...

Google release

If you can handle the academ-ese, here's a journal dedicated to online advertising.

Fortunately, they have an RSS feed, which streams abstracts to your reader - and these may perhaps be a bit more readable than the full articles.

At the very least, sticking a few pages of this sort of thing in your consulting report will handily keep your customer from actually reading it, and help ensure that they take your word for whatever conclusions you've drawn:

Advertising value provides an overall representation of the worth of advertising to consumers (Ducoffe 1995). Existing literature suggests that consumers view advertising's ability to supply information as a primary reason for approving of it (Bauer and Greyser 1968). Research in online advertising also shows that advertising can offer value to Internet users in the form of more relevant information (Ducoffe 1996). When online community members possess a distinct group intention about the need for advertising, they should be able to internalize the notion that advertising benefits the community. As a result, these members should be more inclined to develop favorable evaluations of the advertising. We also hypothesize that they perceive a higher degree of value of advertising in the community:

H6: Group intentions to accept advertising in online social networking communities relates positively to perceived ad value in community sites.

Finally, cognitive studies of associative links suggest people tend to regard relevant information as more accessible in their attitude formation (Rodgers 2004). The more community members perceive advertising as relevant to the community themes, and thus more relevant to community members, the more likely they are to find such information useful, which should result in a higher level of perceived ad value. In turn,

H7: Perceived ad relevance relates positively to perceived ad value.

Come to think of it, slogging through this stuff is how I earn my rate.

Journal of Interactive Advertising

I've always intuitively felt that all-nighters and such lead to poor performance - ever since high school actually. So it gives me a small thrill when I find some scientist waving around studies that support the idea.

In this case, Psychology Today's Kelly McGonigal shares findings that show how cognitive function is disrupted by irregular sleep patterns - not just not getting enough, but not getting it regularly can, apparently, severely inhibit performance.

Here's the executive summary:

Getting enough sleep, on a regular cycle, may make us a better version of ourselves. And even though my greatest wish is usually more time in the day, I'd rather feel good and perform well than get to be a crankier, impulsive, sick version of myself for a few extra hours a day.

Full Article

Our friends at Brainloaf, a development shop specializing in Marketing Technology, posted on the subject of integrating tactical technologies with a more comprehensive strategic view - something that is surprisingly lacking in online marketing today.

Here's a key point:

The explosion of possible channels for businesses to reach potential customers has made it difficult to know which will be most profitable. In order to manage multiple, fragmented media channels, you need to have a clear plan on how you're going to spend your money, where to place your media and how to measure your results. All too often in our new fast paced media world, the driving focus is to move and do something immediately. In Social Media, there is a low barrier to entry, that companies approach it as a low cost channel that will yield huge profits. As a result there are many poorly designed and executed ideas. You need to set goals. You need to create a strategy. Then build a plan of tactics to execute that strategy. Did I mention you should have goals and a strategy to reach them?

Not that any of this isn't quite obvious to anyone looking at online marketing today - but when was the last time you heard a programmer talk about strategy like this?

Not for nothing, the main Brain at Brainloaf, Mike Rogers, worked with Seth Godin in a past life. Now THAT makes for an interesting skillset.
Full Post

Seth Godin's Squidoo project allows anyone to build a page about any subject, complete with news feeds, visitor feedback area, and other ways to pull a community together around a topic.

Squidoo's user-created pages are called "Lenses". This is a pretty good metaphor, since the page essentially gives visibility to content around a topic, pulled from all over the web: Amazon titles relevant to the topic, news feeds from related sources, etc.

Here's my lens for Xinet (the Digital Asset Management system, not the Unix internet services daemon): http://www.squidoo.com/xinet. Note - I haven't touched this page in a long time, as the Xinet user's group has dissolved.

While it's not a full-featured social networking portal, it does empower ordinary web users to create a location around a topic.

So what if that topic is your brand? Or, for that matter, what if the Squidoo lens is just a small part of the discussion about your brand on the web? (This is likely to be true!)

That's where Brands in Public comes in. Here's Seth's précis:

You can't control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.

But how?

Over the last few months, we've seen big brands (like Amazon and Maytag) get caught in a twitterstorm. An idea (one that's negative to the brand) starts and spreads, and absent a response, it just spirals. Of course, Amazon can't respond on their home page (they're busy running a store) and they don't have an active corporate blog that I could find, so where? How?

Enter Brands In Public.

Squidoo has built several hundred pages, each one about a major brand. More are on the way. We'll keep going until we have thousands of important brands, each on its own page (and we'll happily add one for you if you like). Each page collects tweets, blog posts, news stories, images, videos and comments about a brand. All of these feeds are algorithmic... the good and the bad show up, all collated and easy to find.

Of course, these comments and conversations are already going on, all over the web. What we've done is bring them together in one place. And then we've made it easy for the brand to chime in.

If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month. And once [we build] the page, the left hand column belongs to you. You can post responses, highlight blog posts, run contests or quizzes. You can publicly have your say right next to the constant stream of information about your brand (information that's currently all over the web--and information you can't "take down" or censor). You can respond, lead and organize. If a crisis hits, your page will be there, ready for you to speak up. If your fans are delighted, your page makes it easy for them to chime in and speak up on sites around the web.

If you have the tools and wherewithal to build a page like this on your own site, you should consider that. The challenge is getting it done, regardless of where the page lives.

I sincerely hope the ease and convenience of doing this sort of thing enables marketers to get past the wallflower-like shyness that has kept many out of the public forum thus far. Really, it's time to get up and dance, folks.

Seth's Post

Squidoo

Brands In Public
Home Depot's Brands in Public page

Socialnomics has a brief but interesting piece on using social media for B2B.

While it seems many B2B companies see Social Media as only appropriate for consumer interactions, in fact the ability to hear and listen to what the market is saying is just as important for B2B companies.


Here's a snippet:

Listen First

This is a major maxim for B2C companies in social media, and it’s just as important in the B2B realm. Each B2B vertical uses social media differently, so it’s important to determine not only where the conversations are taking place, but what the conversations are about. Many tools can help a company collect this conversational data (including Radian6 and Filtrbox).

You will be able to better determine the needs of your most important clients by listening. Good B2B companies have always listened to their clients. Great B2B companies have always taken it one step further and listened to their competitors’ clients.

Full Article

B.L. Ochman has a pointed, if brief, article on why customer service is where your business will be won or lost.

When you come right down to it, it's almost always the hourly employees who have actual contact with actual customers who create your bottom line results. It makes great economic sense to empower them to solve a problem with one phone call...
In case some companies haven't noticed, we are in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Customers count. Treat us like you know that. We'll all be a lot happier. And more prosperous.

Full article

I've come across a few other instances of this kind of thing in the last few days. A friend on a music site I'm part of noted that the Intellitouch tuner company cheerfully replaced his broken tuner, even though his kids had stomped it - not the company's fault at all.
As a counterpoint to Ms. Ochman's experience, you can't beat this kind of story. Intellitouch has made a customer for life - more so, an evangelist.
Here's a snippet of a similar, if more widely read, account, from BoingBoing, detailing KitchenAid's remarkable service:

The operator asked for my serial number, asked me to describe the problem, then asked if I could be at some address the next day to receive my replacement unit and ship back the defective one. I gave her my office address, and yesterday at around 2PM, a DHL guy showed up with a brand new espresso machine in its package. I lifted it out, replaced it with the defective one, watched as the DHL guy slapped a return sticker on it, and then he left, leaving me a shiny new coffee machine that I brought home in a cab (two people on the street and the cabbie all stopped me and asked me about this beautiful coffee machine and whether it worked as good as it looked and where they could get one of their own). This morning, I enjoyed a perfect cappuccino with breakfast, and ruminated on just how damned good the customer service from Kitchen Aid had been, and I figured, man, that deserves some public approbation.

Now, that was worth it for KitchenAid - BoingBoing's readership is enormous, and everyone now knows how good KitchenAid is. All because their CS team "got it". Now, what happens in the opposite case? Do you really want some widely-read blogger telling the world how atrocious your service is? Wise up, everybody.

CMS Wire's Gerry McGovern has a deliciously snarky reminder of how silly it is to expect that anyone cares about your "newly-redesigned-to-serve-you-better" little web-turd.

Here's Gerry:

Your customers couldn't care less about your new look, your new design or whether your dog has just had kittens.

I love a short-and-sweet puncture to the marketing hot air balloon. Thanks, Gerry.
Full article