Month: May 2009

Remarketing abandonment

Randall Stross in the Sunday New York Times, profiles an Andover, Mass. company called SeeWhy and its forthcoming product Abandonment Tracker Pro.

As a digital marketing guy who was responsible for getting people into an online store, I also led a team that tried to “remarket” to those potential customers who came, looked, and left without purchasing. The remarketing concept reminds me of a shopkeeper who keeps an eye on a customer perusing the goods on his store’s shelves, watches them leave the store without buying, and then follows them out the door onto the sidewalk to say, “Hey! Hey! Come back!”

It’s creepy, but theoretically, if the ecommerce operator is willing to do something dynamic – like lower the price, extend the warranty, sweeten the deal – the benefits can be compelling: close the sale, gain a customer who can be retained into a repeat customer, and keep the virtual cash register ringing.

From the article: “When asked about possibly alienating prospective customers with overzealous remarketing, Mr. Nicholls said: “Tone and manner are important. The message should be something like, ‘Oops, was there a problem? Can we help?,’ versus an out-and-out hard sell, which will just wind everyone up.”

I think the reality is far different and requires a telepathic connection between the vendor and the customer that simply doesn’t exist. The first contradictory behavior in the ideal world where all-clicks-convert-to-a-sale is virtual comparison shopping where the customer fills a cart and configures it with goods, accessories, and services to simply build a price model for comparison to others. Pricing “homework” is a key behavior on my part – where I take the time to seek out the possible pricing permutations of a car or durable good before arriving at a dealer or brick and mortar store for a face-to-face negotiation with a salesperson. Many ecommerce sites, in my opinion, are research tools, not a means to an end, and as such as not going to be converting every customer every time, no matter what incentives are placed before.

The creepiest thing in Stross’ piece, is the disclosure that sites can now capture keystrokes typed into an input filed with relying on a “submit” button. That’s going to bring the FTC down like an avalanche of bricks and is evil. SeeWhy is not going to implement dynamic keystroke capture as a default. This is the technology that lets Google guess ahead on search queries (a good thing).

Ecommerce, in general, is a tired paradigm that needs to be blown up. Think about it. What was the latest significantly new online shopping experience you’ve seen? For me it has to be the Kindle – the ultimate in instant gratification – but on the whole, the cart metaphor is dead and needs to evolve to something different and built around empathy, not the finality of buying and the regrets of the merchant chasing their customer down the sidewalk shouting, “Wait! Wait! Can we talk?”

2 Yellowstone workers fired after peeing into geyser

via 2 Yellowstone workers fired after peeing into geyser | CapeCodOnline.com.

“Two seasonal Yellowstone National Park concession workers have been fired after a live webcam caught them urinating into the Old Faithful geyser.”

It’s not like anybody drinks out of the thing …..

Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: J.D. Lasica

Thanks to Mitch Ratcliffe for suggesting I read Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing, by J.D. Lasica, the result of a roundtable on the topic convened by the Aspen Institute. I strong suggest downloading and reading by anyone who is involved with cloud strategy, Web 2.0, or social media. There are some very strong kernels and insights I’ll share as soon as I finish the piece.

It gives an excellent set up of what the cloud means, what its implications are, but gets very interesting when it talks about personal definition online, and the extent to which we can control and not control our personal identity. One great anecdote: a guy who made his fortune in online porn hired some PR people to create content about him to bury the porno past deep in the Google results. Ta da — identity management.

Dirty Water

I spent a rainy Saturday in a wobbly chair in a lecture hall at Cape Cod Community College because of a newspaper headline that said words to the effect of “Cape Coastal Cleanup Could Wind Up in Court.” My curiosity piqued by the organizing presence of the Conservation Law Foundation – a non-profit that literally sued the shit out of Boston Harbor – turning one of the nation’s worst polluted bodies of water into one of the cleanest – I did a little homework, crawled into the back row, and watched a panel muddle their way through a well-intentioned discourse on the disgusting state of Cape Cod’s estuaries, bays, harbors, and coves.

Dead harbors make me mad (after all this blog is devoted to clamming strategies).   Flush a toilet on Cape Cod and eventually, not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, the result is going to make its way into the water. There, the waste over-nourishes the environment and promotes algae blooms, which in turn cloud the water, blocking sunlight from hitting the bottom. Lack of light and the suffocation effects of the algae kills off the  eel grass where the scallops live and breed. Eventually, over three or four decades, the result is a turbid soup of slime and inedible spider crabs.

The situation sucks and is getting suckier, despite a well intentioned panoply of studies, proposals, committees and coalitions.

Enter the Conservation Law Foundation, a non-profit environmental advocacy group that does one thing very well – it sues polluters and gets stuff cleaned up. When the CLF starts talking about litigation, politicians pay attention, and now the selectmen and town councilors of Cape Cod’s 15 towns are realizing that they may not have decades to figure out how to get the nitrogen out of their harbors.

Yes, sure, there are reasons to let the Cape figure this one out on its own. (There is a pool of zero interest cash available to fund these projects, cash that goes away if the borrowers are under court order) But the implications of a massive “big pipe” sewer system, one built regionally to pool the effluent from those 15 towns, is both expensive and staggering to behold. To say taxpayers aren’t going to like it is an understatement. Residents who live inland, away from the Gatsby mansions of the waterfront, are going to be hard pressed to accept any responsibility for nitrogen loading – yet, as we live on a so-called sole source aquifer – a giant sponge of sand, everyone, including me and my septic tank, are going to have to buck up at some point and pay to have our houses connected to a big pipe that will route our personal emissions inland to a big treatment plant. It’s the only way. We can haggle over in-ground nitrogen mitigation solutions, we can blame lawn fertilizer, birds, and dog poop …. But in the end it’s all septic and it’s got to go.

The CLF can accelerate that. It would start by convincing the EPA that the Cape is broken, in violation, and in need of a cleanup. Then the screaming starts. The municipal bonds, the massive infrastructure disruption, the trenches, the plants, the equipment ….

And, even if a massive sewer is put in place (and the voters of Chatham are moving closer to becoming one of the first towns to go down that road to save their beloved Pleasant Bay), it will be decades before the benefits are realized. In the department of unintended consequences, when you take away septic tanks and their discharge as the gating factor in land use, you can suddenly argue that a 12 story condo with 90 units is okay on that little patch of waterfront scrub pine. Can you say Florida or Long Island? The Association for the Preservation of Cape Cod is right – this is a big infrastructure issue and it’s cheaper to treat a cluster of customers than a lot of sprawled out ones.

I’m voting with my checkbook and joining the CLF. I want them to be the catalyst that binds the 15 towns of the Cape together in a truly regional compact and gets my harbor cleaned up.

This is the first time I have written about sewers since I covered the town of Salem. NH for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune in 1982. I vowed then it would be the last. It isn’t. Sewers remain the most tedious topic on the planet, and yet, one might argue, one of the more important.

Chris Buckley: Losing Mum and Pup

Christopher Buckley’s encomium to his parents, socialite Pat Buckley and intellectual conservative author William F. Buckley, Jr., should be mandatory reading for those of us riding the caboose of the baby boom with aging parents in their twilight years. It is, by and large, a book about death; about the deaths of two parents within one year, and one man’s brave passage through their decline and passing with grief and good humor. While the details of their public lives are interesting, Chris spends more time in the sick rooms, the ICUs, and the funeral homes than he does on memory lane recounting the past glories of two lives lived large.

He’s taken heat for this book – the letters to the editor of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, some reviews at Amazon.com … yet I disagree. This memoir doesn’t leverage the fame of two (to leverage the over-leveraged cliché) larger-than-life personas, but it does reveal some details that others might be uncomfortable sharing in public about their own parents. I see courage where others might see exploitation.

The book made me think, a lot, about the passing of my own father my senior year of college in a car accident, and how that surprise left me beached and bereft of words for nearly a decade. I realize, now, as my eldest son is 22, that I have somehow managed to “outlive” my father, and have surpassed his shortened record by a few years, leaving me — in some strange way — without an old man to model and compare myself to as I roll into my days as a future old man. Chris Buckley, as an only son, wishes at one point that he could turn to an older sister and say, “There, it’s your turn now.” But there is no one but him, and he faithfully puts in his time, coming out of the process with nothing less than the best book about parents and their children, life and death, that I have read.

Disclaimer: I am not a political creature, and admired William F. for his nautical non-fiction, teaching myself how to navigate celestially through the pages of Airborne. I interviewed him once for Forbes on something to do with word processing – he was a geek manqué – and knew Chris from my efforts to put ForbesFYI online. From him I developed the courage to wear pink and green argyle socks and owe him for the introduction to my good friend and former colleague Charles Dubow, now at Businessweek.com.

 

Time lapse shipping

I found this time-lapse video on gCaptain.com, one of my favorite nautical blogs. This was made by a Houston Ship Channel pilot, Lou Vest (who is an amazing photographer) by setting a Nikon D300 to take a photo every six-seconds.

[flickrvideo]http://www.flickr.com/photos/oneeighteen/2733197801/[/flickrvideo]