Generation C

Guy Kawasaki on building community

Guy Kawasaki has some straight forward advice for creating community that would serve use well to revisit. And, he does refer to the Photoshop community as an example of how to do it right.

In his posting, The Art of Creating a Community, he explains his eight steps in detail.

1. Create something worth building a community around.
2. Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately!
3. Assign one person the task of building a community.
4. Give people something concrete to chew on.
5. Create an open system.
6. Welcome criticism.
7. Foster discourse.
8. Publicize the existence of the community.

                                                                                              

New Metrics for Measuring Engagement

A New York Times article makes an interesting point about how we measure traditional media performance vs. engagement metrics.

The author, Mr. Plummer, notes that engagement "happens inside the consumer, not inside the medium."   "All the measurements we have now are media metrics: ratings, readership, listenership, click-through rates.  What we need is a way to determine how the targeted prospect connected with, got engaged with, the brand idea," he added. "With engagement, you're on your way to a relationship instead of just a sales transaction."

Customer Engagement

One of the most important changes occuring in marketing is the shift of power from the company to the community. Company controlled communications with as email, direct mail, and telesales and being replaced in importance by customer-driven interactions.  In his book, "Communities Dominate Brands" Alan Moore articulates these dynamics nicely.  His blog for his consulting firm XMLXL catputres the essense in his posting excerpted here.

"Engagement Marketing is about brands, becoming, for example part of the fabric of entertainment - enhancing it, not interrupting it. Put simply, it is about getting out of the ad break and into the world of content, assets and properties. Brands that create engaging content are being welcomed by consumers as enhancing their daily lives rather than interrupting them. And with the explosion of new technologies, in particular digital TV, web and mobile phones - there is an ever increasing array of new tools with which marketers can can surround their consumers with new types of engaging content. But do not think Engagement is purely about lowest common denominator entertainment. Far from it.

"The new engagement communications tools include...

• Branded content or Brand related content
• Entertainment, Info-tainment, Edu-tainment properties
• Media properties
• Meaningful brand experiences
• Information Service brands that specialise in edited choice
• Embedded sponsorship vs. passive sponsorship

"These front end properties assume that there is a value equation for both businesses and customers. They are also premised on the fundamental principle that marketing should be conversational rather than a top-down, one-way interruptive message which de-personalises the relationship and becomes a barrier to communication, the very opposite of a conduit to valuable customer relationships.

"These tools are new, and consequently not well defined at present. But there is a growing band of real life case studies that are already showing how brands can 'get out of the ad space' and into the fabric of consumers' lives - giving them new and compelling multi-media content that they enjoy, value and thus welcome into their lives. And why is all this of value? Because these properties as 'assets' can be judged by metrics such as revenue, share and margins. Interruptive communications one could argue, is about 'buying' revenue. The marketing industry still prides its 'wins' on media billings, not on the benefit of their clients business.

"These companies are building engaging brands at a fraction of the cost of the old interruptive methods. What follows are number of documents which explore cross-platform branded assets and properties plus some of the technological and strategic business and fiscal issues surrounding them....

"... Conventional interruptive marketing no longer has the benefit of authenticity and therefore retains very little credibility. The messages have no real substance and the format is defective - marketing is 'interruptive', it can make customers angry and increasingly such messages get screened out. The result is the damage to the perception of marketing and to the communication between companies and their customers. There needs to be a closer link forged between strategy and operations...".

In his piece "Co-Creation Connection," C.K. Prahalad supports many of Moore's points.

 

The Rise of Corporate Ethnography

From MIT's Technology Review

Corporate Ethnography.
High-tech companies are deploying ethnographers and anthropologists by the score to study how people actually use technology.

...High-tech companies are deploying ethnographers and anthropologists by the score to study how people actually use technology.

... Today corporate ethnography is a blossoming field, as evidenced by the first-ever Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC), organized by ethnographers at Intel and Microsoft and held at Microsoft's campus on November 14-15. The conference drew more than 200 working ethnographers from high-tech firms, specialist shops such as IDEO, and technology-intensive businesses such as Wells Fargo.

Over two days, the participants held a series of workshops and presented papers with titles like "The Worst Technology For Girls?" and "Who We Talk about when We Talk about Users."

... ethnography is gaining credence in the corporate world as a form of market research. Ethnography focuses on a qualitative examination of human behavior. In a corporate setting, ethnographers typically examine how people treat a product, say, a mobile phone, in the context of their lives. Ethnographic researchers at the EPIC could be divided into seven general types: sociologists, human factors and computer interface specialists, computer scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, MBAs, and design specialists.

New uses for QR Codes

You probably know about the QR codes in Japan — these are the barcodes that redirect you to a URL when you take a photo with your cell phone.

Now, Northwest is using this on a billboard....

“In Japan, Northwest Airlines is running a billboard campaign which contains QR codes, small image tags on the billboards which contain an embedded URL. When a camera phone user takes a picture of the board, they are directed to a website that features a game where airline coupons can be won. A company called Semacode makes the technology behind the QR codes. Many phone manufacturers are adopting the technology which may make billboards finally serve a purpose other that simple brand awareness or physical directionals.

 

Qwest is sponsoring a multi-person, man-on-the-street game using this technology.  It's a bit like a high tech, QR-code enables photo scavenger hunt.

Upsurge in analyitcs

One of the most important developments in marketing comes from the customer analytics front.  Companies like Web Side Story, WebTrends, Google, and others have been working in web site metrics but few have done a strong job in integrating web analytics with offline transactions.

The key to understanding customers lies in the comabination of:

• Behavioral.  what they do -- when, where, and what they buy
• Demographic. what they look like -- gender, geographic area, age, income, etc.
• Attitudinal.  how they think -- Classic Boomer vs. Thriving 30's vs. retired in luxury

Leading companies approach this from two angles:

• Supervised.  In which you're asking something of the data.  For example, we believe that customers who buy online are those that live further from a retail store.
• Unsupervised.  Let the tools -- such as a random forest analysis -- run wild on the data to identify the non-intuitive clusters and opportunities.

My prior company, Loyalty Matrix, is leading with interesting work in this area with examples that include:

• Consumer @Risk scoring and contact triggers for one of the world's largest health clubs
• Merchant @Risk scoring for a leading provider of online transaction systems
• Behavioral and attitudinal analysis for a boutique cruise company that ranged from purchase window analysis through to an exploration of t-shirt sizes with purchasing patterns.  In other words, what can we learn about someone based on the size of their t-shirt. 
• Developing an in depth understanding of which in-trial behaviors contributed most directly to conversion.

The goal of all of this is developing deeper customer loyalty as defined in attitudes not just behaviors.

Evil gift for the iPod world

This was too good to pass up. iPod Nano cases can be found at CoolHunting

Photo stamps are back

Zazzle is one of several companies that has re-entered the market for creating custom stamps and other products.

Newcastle Brown on Office Space

Fans of the cult classic Office Space will respect how Newcastle Brown Ale has sponsored a re-release of a special edition DVD.  Newcastle Brown's Office Space website is filled with links and video from the classic.

This is a great example of two very different brands coming together to reinforce and refresh one another.  Very nice and entertaining work but the San Francisco agency, Real Branding.

Also a great example of what Macromedia's Flash can do.

Classic Harrah's HBR piece

Gary Loveman had been a prof at Harvard Business School before leaving to run Harrah's casino.  The article, Diamonds in the Data Mine is an entertaining classic about the ways in which Harrah's drives their business through customer analysis and data mining.

Another favorite is the piece from the journalist who spent a week as a waiter-in-training at the Ritz Carlton, My Week as a Room-Service Waiter at the Ritz.

From CPM -> CPC -> Pay-per-call

The MIT Advertising Lab reports on the move to Pay-per-call paid search from Google and AOL.

They site from Google's FAQ: "We're testing a new product that gives you a free and fast way to speak directly to the advertiser you found on a Google search results page – over the phone."

"The premise behind pay-per-call is that not every company is prepared to measure clicks. Some that currently participate in search engine marketing are in over their heads, some are too intimidated to begin with, and others still don't have a Web presence to speak of.

"Here's the gist of how it works. An advertiser enrolls online, listing their phone number, description, market (e.g., city, miles from ZIP code, national), categories where the ad should appear, the bid price-per-call, and daily budget. Ingenio assigns a unique toll free number to each advertiser, and this number is displayed prominently in the paid search ad. Calls are forwarded to the advertiser's original number. The highest bid nets top placement in search results.

"Ingenio is the pay-per-call company. Right now, they can rightfully be referred to as the pay-per-call company since it's the only known entity in the space. Ingenio isn't only a pay-per-call company - it's been in business since 1999 and has a number of other technology solutions, platforms, and services. According to Barach, pay-per-call is now the locomotive powering Ingenio, and everything else is along for the ride."

Trailer Crashers

New Line Cinema has come up with a terrific viral way to promote their new comedy, Wedding Crashers.  By allowing visitors to crash a trailer -- i.e., inserting names and photos that appear in a re-cut version of the trailer -- they are generating great buzz and viral traffic.  Very enntertaining.

ACLU on the pizza business

A must view for anyone in the realm of data-driven marketing.  The ACLU's anti-surveillance piece is a compelling vision of where data-driven relationship marketing is heading.

Stanford on iTunes

I spent the day working on the fence in the backyard and listening to a stream of great talks from Stanford  on iTunes.  The open, public site has great content and is worth a visit.

Stanford on iTunes provides university-related audio content via the iTunes Music Store, Apple’s popular music jukebox and online music store.  Stanford on iTunes gives alumni and the general public free access to a wide range of Stanford-specific digital audio content. The project includes two  sites:

• a public site, targeted primarily at alumni, which will include Stanford faculty lectures, learning materials, music, sports, and more.
• an access-restricted site for students delivering course-based materials and advising content.

Cutting edge @ Grey?

Grey Interactive is on the cutting edge of meeting room design.

Blogs going corporate

Major companies are starting to let employees write blogs with some very interesting results.

Adobe blogs
Intuit Quickbooks Online
Microsoft developer blogs
Sun Microsystems