Daily Reading 06/01/2008

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  • Social Media and E-Mail Spending to Rise

    Quoting:
    “More than three-quarters of marketers surveyed said they will increase their social media spending during the next three years, according to Eloqua’s “State of the Marketer” report. A full 74% said they plan to increase their direct e-mail spending while about two-thirds will spend more on mobile texting and SMS.

    “Respondents were bullish on online ad spending overall, with nine out of 10 saying they would continue to increase their direct online ad budgets. The spending increases are likely to come at the expense of print ads, since 55% of respondents said they will probably decrease print ad spending in the next three years.”

    tags: daily_reading, social_media_research, advertising

  • Worried About Bloggers Dissing Your Company? Read This

    Marketers fret constantly about the risk of negativity in the blogosphere. Read this uplifting story of how one entrepreneur engaged with a critical blogger and turned her into a valuable alley.

    tags: daily_reading, blog_attack, blog_culture

  • ‘Personality Not Included’: A Podcast with Rohit Bhargava

    In this podcast, Paul Dunay interviews Rohit Bhargava, whose book Personality not Included is about how to regain a brand personality.

    tags: daily_reading, marketing

  • Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s Intros Avatar, Social Net Campaign

    Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants will turn their social networking pages into virtual outposts. Myspace members will be able to download a branded application and create custom avatars that live in the virtual outlets or a burger-themed living room complete with mechanical bull.

    tags: daily_reading, virtual_worlds, viral_marketing

  • Google CEO Eric Schmidt admits Web 2.0 advertising is small opportunity

    In an interview with a German newspaper, Google CEO Eric Schmidt admits that the company has not yet figured out a way to monetize Web 2.0 as an advertising vehicle and may never do so. Quoting:

    “MySpace did not monetize as well as we thought. We have a lot of traffic, a lot of page views, but it is harder than we thought to get our ad network to work with social networks. When you are in social network, it is not likely that you´ll buy a washing machine. It is not a long term problem but it is taking us longer than we thought. We are trying new ways, new approaches all the time.” (via Media Post).

    tags: daily_reading, advertising, social_networks

  • Hydrox Redux: Cookie Duels Oreo, Again

    Spurred by more than 1,300 phone inquiries and an online petition Kellogg Co. is bringing back the Hydrox cookie, if only temporarily. The company had killed the Hydrox five years ago, ceding the market to competitor Oreo. However, some people missed the Hydrox, and their online agitating convinced Kellogg to give it a try. The revival is only temporary for now, although Kellogg left the door open to a permanent reintroduction if demand is there. (via WOMMA blog).

    tags: daily_reading, viral_marketing

  • For Coors Light, a Night Out That Begins on MySpace

    Coors has a new campaign called “Code blue” that’s built on the new feature of Coors Light beer bottles that turns the color of the mountains pictured on the labels from white to blue when the beer gets cold enough to drink. Facebook users will soon be able to send friends “Code blue” alerts inviting them to meet up for a beer. They can even set a meeting point using Facebook maps. (via WOMMA blog).

    tags: daily_reading, facebook

  • Branding In An Age Of Authenticity

    Dave Morgan says marketers are too focused on using social media as an advertising opportunity and disregarding the impact that blogs and social networks have on brand image. Today, almost nothing is secret, which means that efforts to deceive customers almost always backfire. In addition, a host of competitors are lurking out there, waiting to jump on every bad customer experience and make it into a public indictment of your company. In the new world, businesses need to focus on delivering outstanding experiences to all their customers.

    tags: daily_reading, marketing

Daily Reading 05/30/2008

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  • Time Inc. Tries Hand at Reader-Generated Issue

    Another publisher – this time a unit of venerable Time, Inc. – tries its hand at a print publication composed entirely of user-generated content. 8020 Publishing and the Hartford Courant are doing the same thing. Editors say the quality of ideas contributed by readers is remarkably good, although the copy needs a lot of work. They all plan to keep the conversation going.

    tags: daily_reading, citizen_journalism

  • This Blog Post Is Available At No Charge!

    Tim Lee writes in the Atlantic about the creeping economy of free. Content providers will increasingly find themselves under pressure from competitors who offer similar information at little or no cost. The challenge is to develop new business models around ancillary services. Chris Anderson is big on this topic right now. He notes that the value of commodities falls quickly to the cost of production and in the content world, that’s zero.

    tags: daily_reading

The Collaboration Paradox

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

I’m a big believer in the value of social media, enough to have written two books on the subject.  In the spirit of practicing what I preach, I posted the draft of the first book on my blog 18 months ago with good results.  Several thousand visitors read the chapters and several dozen contributed meaningful feedback.

So when I was writing the second book this spring, I thought I would go one better. I posted the entire draft on a Wiki and used my newsletter, blog and personal contacts to invite people to contribute to the finished product.

Few did.  In fact, over the course of six weeks only nine people joined the wiki and only three or four made meaningful changes. It turned out that a blog, with its limited capacity for collaboration, was far more effective in achieving my collaborative goal.

This got me thinking about the paradox of group collaboration. There’s no question that wikis can make teams more productive. Yet they are probably the greatest disappointment of the suite of Web 2.0 tools.

I’m involved in three or four organizations that use wikis to coordinate people’s activities. Not once have I seen them used to their potential. Of the few people who actually contribute to the wikis, most send a duplicate copy of the content by e-mail to make sure everyone is in the loop. Many public wikis survive only because a small number of members maintain them. Few have many active contributors.

Yet there are some phenomenally successful examples of wiki technology.  The most famous is Wikipedia, with its 10 million articles in 253 languages. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recently started Wikia, a library of 2,500 special-interest wikis in 66 languages that allows people to create reference materials from the perspectives that are important to them.

There’s also evidence that Wikis are enjoying good success behind the firewall.  IBM has said that wikis are its number one social media tool, making it possible for a widely dispersed workforce to collaborate.

Why are wikis such a disappointment when they have so much potential? I think the reason is that productivity has nothing to do with it.

Wikis succeed when the interest of every member is served by participation. Projects that mainly benefit individuals or organization offer few compelling reasons for others to get involved.  It turns out that people are more than happy to comment upon another’s work, but getting them to actively contribute requires an extra measure of self-interest.  People were happy to comment upon my book, but the incentives to get them to actively contribute to someone else’s work were insufficient.  On the other hand, people who are passionate about coin collecting have an incentive to make the numismatics section of Wikipedia an accurate public record.

Productivity is often held out as an incentive for people to use new technology, but I believe that’s only a minor factor.  People continue to use spreadsheets when databases would do a better job.  They fumble along with e-mail, despite its many limitations, because that’s what they know.  The most successful new technologies have been those that enable people to transform their work or their way of life. Incremental improvements are never enough to sustain meaningful behavior change.

An Online Video Strategy That Hits The Mark

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I just returned from my second trip to Toronto in the last two months and was again impressed with the Web-savviness of the Canadian audience. Did you know, for example,that Canadians are the world’s most active users of Facebook? Or that Canadians spend, on average, two morehours per week viewing online video than their counterparts south of the border?

And don’t give me that “Of course! It’s cold up there!” cliché. Canadian homes are wired and its businesses are doing some very innovative things to reach those web-savvy customers.

Take FutureShop. Canada’s largest consumer electronics retailer is using online community not only to learn more about its customers, but to help sell products and support customers. It has built an online advisory and customer support service that is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

“Ask an Expert” is formulated on a high-touch model in which sales associates are taught to be valued customeradvisers. The company has come up with a strategy to duplicate that real-world experience online. The screen shot shows “Aaron,” one of the video avatars who guides customers.

Since mid-2007, visitors to Future Shop’s website have been greeted by a video image of a sales associate who offers to help guide their experience. Customers can ask any question of the avatar (he’ll even dance for you) and get results from a growing database of advice contributed by sales associates and customers. Future Shop created the video front-end itself and bound it to a community portal from Lithium Technologies.

“We’re trying to blur the lines between the offline and online experience,” says Robert Pearson, Future Shop’s director of e-commerce. “Our goal is to become the largest technology community in Canada.”

Future Shop is well on its way to that objective. In less than a year, the site has signed up 50,000 members, which would be equivalent to about 450,000 members in the much larger U.S. market. But the community isn’t just a discussion forum. Future Shop co-developed a ranking system with Lithium that lets customers provide feedback on each other and on the quality of information offered up by sales associates. Customer contributors can earn discounts and status in the community. The most helpful sales associates can earn cash.

Next up: Facebook-like functionality that gives contributors their own personal spaces and ties sales associate profiles to store locations. Success is measured by a survey of customer affinity with the brand. It’s still too early to draw measurable conclusions, but all the trends are pointing in the right direction. “We’re getting about 250,000 visitors a day out of a population of 33 million,” Pearson says. “That’s many more than come into a store. We actually see people walking in with printouts and asking for specific experts they’ve met online.”

Future Shop isn’t using video to be cool. It’s using video to reinforce an in-store experience that is essential to its business strategy. It has also bound its customers to the company in a way that is rewarding for both parties. The company is now owned by Best Buy, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar capability showing up on a retail website near you.

Old PCs Pose Environmental, Regulatory Threat

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

We all know how great it feels to have a new PC plunked down on our desktop or in our briefcase.  But for IT organizations, that exhilaration is increasingly compounded by anxiety.  What should they do about disposing of the computer that’s being replaced?

This issue is gathering importance as the number of old computers grows.  Gartner has forecast that consumers and businesses will replace more than 925 million PCs worldwide by 2010.  And that’s just one category of computer.  Gartner expects another 46 million servers to ship during the next five years, and about one billion mobile phones to be discarded yearly beginning in 2010.

There are obvious ecological concerns that attend this problem, of course. Most personal computers contain chemicals that can poison water supplies and old CRT monitors have lead linings that should never make their way into a landfill.

But the risks to businesses these days can hit even closer to home.  Discarded computers can contain proprietary data that, if disclosed, can open a company to a host of legal and compliance problems. Among the regulations that provide severe financial penalties and even imprisonment for improper data protection are the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and Sarbanes-Oxley Act.  There are also a host of local regulations to consider, the result of Congress’s decision many years ago to make environmental rules the domain of individual states

Companies have gotten by for years on ad hoc approaches to computer disposal.  Often, they sell old machines to employees, give them to charities or palm them off on trash hauling business that dispose of the equipment in places unknown. But regulators don’t buy the “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy. Most place the onus of insuring data protection on the original owner. That means that if a PC or cell phone containing protected information turns up in a landfill overseas somewhere, the firm that captured the data is on the hook for any legal obligations.

A particular concern is the trash companies, who often piggyback their computer disposal services on top of their basic business of hauling away Dumpsters full of refuse. While many of these companies are no doubt legitimate, some tried to cut costs by piling IT equipment into containers and shipping them overseas.

In some cases, this equipment is simply thrown into open holes in the ground, causing unknown public health concerns. Many Third World companies also of the have subcultures of entrepreneurs who to disassemble equipment and sell the piece parts on the open market. In 2006, The BBC bought 17 second-hand hard drives in Nigeria for $25 each and recovered bank account numbers, passwords and other sensitive data from them. Under many regulations, the original buyers of that equipment could be liable for any security or privacy breaches that resulted.

Nearly every business should have a plan for disposing of end-of-life computers.  If storage equipment is to be repurposed, it needs to be thoroughly erased. The Department of Defense’s 5220.22-M erasure standard insures that media is completely cleansed of recoverable data. A simpler approach is to take a hammer and smash the storage media into smithereens. Whatever tactic you use, you need to document the data destruction using the appropriate compliance forms.

A new practice has also emerged called IT Asset Disposition (ITAD). ITAD vendors essentially outsource the disposal process and provide tracking, verification and even insurance against liability. Some firms can also remanufacture components and sell them, thereby reducing costs for their customers.  Research firm International Data Corp. has published a good study on the market. The site Greener Computing also has helpful advice.

Daily Reading 05/17/2008

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  • Web start-up unveils semantic Wikipedia search tool

    Powerset searches Wikipedia using conversational phrasing instead of keywords. It’s one of a new breed of search engines that tries to get at the underlying questions that Web searchers are trying to answer.

    tags: daily_reading, search_engines

  • EMarketer cuts social media ad spend forecast

    Social networks are still having trouble coming up with compelling ad models. EMarketer predicts ad spending on those networks will be just $2.6 billion by 2012, about five percent of the overall market. MySpace and Facebook collectively command 72% of social network ad spending.

    tags: daily_reading, research

  • Facebook backlash develops

    It was inevitable that Facebook growth would slow and critics would turn out to start talking about all that’s wrong with the social network. This CNet blog points to a developer’s observation that fewer people are developing Facebook apps than a year ago and extrapolates that Facebook may be in crisis. What’s really happening is that the market is becoming more mature and competitive.

    tags: daily_reading

  • Why Twitter Matters

    BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker updates the Twitter phenomenon, explaining why microblogging is becoming an intrinsic part of people’s lives and how businesses are tapping in to the conversation.

    tags: daily_reading, twitter

  • Blogs Blossom into a Big Business

    “By 2012, more than 145 million people—67% of the US Internet population—will be reading blogs at least once a month. That is up from a readership of 94 million in 2007, or 50% of Internet users.” Ad spending is forecast to grow to about $750 million by 2012, which is nearly triple today’s total but still a small number overall.

    tags: daily_reading, research