Category: Interactive Marketing

Being Dick Hardt is Hard

I’m trying to put together a powerpoint in the style of Dick Hardt’s legendary Identity 2.0 presentation at OSCON last year, but damn!, it is not easy. Here’s the link to Dick’s masterpiece.
The old laws of three bullets and a chart go right out the window when you try a presentation that has a slide per sentence and requires a carnival barker’s patter to keep it rolling.

I’ve seen one other person attempt the format — David Vivero at IDG — who got great laughs when he showed a stuffed animal in his explanation of “taxonomy, err taxidermy”, a style allegedly pioneered by Lawrence Lessig. Which reminds me, one of these days I must buy Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.

At Forbes.com, Lots of Glitter but Maybe Not So Many Visitors – New York Times

At Forbes.com, Lots of Glitter but Maybe Not So Many Visitors – New York Times

The Times slams into Forbes.com this morning on the eternal subject of squishy traffic numbers. This is an issue endemic to the online media industry, one that harks back to the days of Time-Warner’s Pathfinder when Gerald Levin would boast about millions of “hits.” Now that the industry has settled down and focused on unique visitors, there is still a vast discrepancy between the external traffic reporters — ComScore, Nielsen, Alexa, etc. — and a site’s own server logs, ostensibly the only true measure of traffic, yet one wholly dependent on what filters and analytics are being applied to the raw numbers.

With no equivalent to the magazine industry’s third-party audit structure in place (BPA, etc.), online media has been able to play a game of squishy reporting since 1994. Take a good stat, lead with it, and let the rest of the numbers fall where they may.

“But a closer look at the numbers raises questions about Forbes.com’s industry-leading success. For its claim of a worldwide audience of nearly 15.3 million, it has been citing February data from comScore Media Metrix, one of the two leading providers of third-party Web traffic data.

“There are several problems with that statistic, though, and comScore has since revised the figure downward to less than 13.2 million as part of a broader revamping of its worldwide data for many sites. Jack Flanagan, executive vice president at comScore Media Metrix, said the new figures were released “a couple of months ago” after it changed its methods for estimating global audiences.”

While bragging rights are nice — “We’re the biggest” is always a nice marketing message — the advertisers are the one’s who are best placed to develop the metric that measures and that comes down to conversions. Forget CTR (click-through rates, forget reach (monthly uniques, visits), and focus on what happens to the referred traffic once it arrives in the form of generated leads, shoppers, etc. The notion that any media buyer would give more than a passing glance at gross tonnage metrics is risible. It’s their own metrics, how they measure what they’ve bought, that determines whether they’ll renew a campaign or drop it.

Carr on the economics of selling (and supporting) PCs direct

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: When “direct” becomes a disadvantage

Smart post by Nicholas Carr on Dell’s financial woes. He nails the economics of customer support — while selling direct cuts out the middleman and reduce the hang time of inventory, it doesn’t cut out support costs, indeed, it assumes them rather than passes them on to a distributor or into the channel. Result: Ouch.

“So there, perhaps, is the flaw in the direct sales model, particularly when it’s applied to a commodity product like the PC: You have a cost disadvantage in customer support, which is hidden as long as support represents a fairly small portion of the each product’s overall cost. But as the price of your product falls, due to savings on the production side, support begins to represent an ever larger percentage of its cost. At some point, you cross the line: The direct model’s cost advantage disappears.”

On blog monitoring …

I’ve developed a routine for scanning Blogistan for hits on keywords of interest. Technorati is my primary tool for ad hoc monitoring — I would dearly love an RSS feed of those searches — and when I am ultra paranoid or inquisitive I turn to Google Blog Search and Pubsub for a quick scan.

The company does subscribe to a blog monitoring service — I won’t disclose who — and they ping us when they detect a post of interest that may deserve a response. Surprisingly, a lot of “alerts” come from friends who happen upon items of interest to me. In fact, some of the more substantial interactions I’ve had with bloggers has not been due to tools or my own detection efforts, but from direct referrals.

I am beta testing an exciting tool — again, I won’t disclose the details — but in theory it should transform how corporate communications and customer service groups attack the monitoring issue.

The tough nut to crack is triage and multi-language monitoring. Technorati does a great job finding stuff — unfortunately I can only understand half of it, which means I need to find “watchers” in multiple languages to keep an eye on the buzz in Mandarin, French, whatever ….. Triage is knowing how to direct a detected post to the right owner inside of the organization … a tall order if you don’t have a lot of institutional knowledge and know precisely who is the person to deal with a specific complaint or issue.

While a lot of Naked Conversation type of discussion focused on how corporations should blog and comport themselves online, not a lot has been devoted to the monitor, detect, and react element of the equation. I suspect a lot of home grown systems — such as my own, are in deployment, a lot of accidental discovery occurs, and a lot of money is spent on professional monitors which may or may not detect issues soon enough.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is using blog monitoring to establish a sentiment benchmark of positive or negative comments about a brand, product, or person. There has to be a simple way to rate blog posts and the subsequent comments on a happy or sad continuum.

This is the most demanding stuff in interactive marketing as it crosses a lot of departments, many of whom may not want to hear that there are issues being discussed out in the aether.

The dawn of the online metric revolution

The Internet Knows What You’ll Do Next – New York Times

This morning’s (Wednesday 7.5) New York Times carries a David Carr Leonhardt column on Battelle’s meme of the “database of intentions.” In that column, Hal Varian, probably the smartest media and content economist in the country, predicts that online metrics are about to do to advertising what the spreadsheet did to corporate finance in the 80s. I wholeheartedly agree. The precision of the medium and its measurements will drive online advertising to the top of any marketer’s bag of tricks over the next two years. While this promise has been held since 1995, it’s coming into fruition now thanks to easily accessible tools such as Google Trends, and high end metric services such as Omniture, Coremetrics, and Hitbox.

“Hal R. Varian, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who advises Google, predicts that online metrics like this one have put Madison Avenue on the verge of a quantitative revolution, similar to the one Wall Street went through in the 1970’s when it began parsing market data much more finely. “People have hunches, people have prejudices, people have ideas,” said Mr. Varian, who also writes for this newspaper about once a month. “Once you have data, you can test them out and make informed decisions going forward.”

Naked Conversations: Why Support Matters

Naked Conversations: Why Support Matters
Shel Israel continues to confirm that customer support should be marketing driven and not regarded as just another cost of doing business:

“I go so far as to believe support should be a part of an enterprise marketing organization. It should not be treated as an ROI-depleting expense, but an opportunity to generate word-of-mouth marketing champions. For me this is an issue of emerging passion. In a world where companies and customers are having fewer and fewer face-to-face or voice-to-voice encounters, the imprint of the support line conversation is eclipsing the 30-second spot, the full-page ad and the ten city media tour in terms of perceptions and brand.”

Michael’s Thoughts: Sampson Kids, Powered by Lenovo

Michael’s Thoughts: Sampson Kids, Powered by Lenovo

Thanks to Michael Sampson at Foldera for the nice plug:

“My boys asked for a new Windows-based computer so they could run some of their Lego software. I had purchased a Mac Mini last year, but it’s the variant that doesn’t run Windows. So I rang my reseller (Michael Burry at TLC) and asked what he would suggest. Lenovo, said he.”

[full disclosure, I sit on Foldera’s advisory board and hold shares and options]

Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger » Peter says podcasting is inefficient

Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger » Peter says podcasting is inefficient

Scoble on the inefficiencies of podcasting. I have to agree. Maybe it was a confluence of iTunes embracing podcasting, a new Nano, and a commute long enough to want to fill the time with something other than the BBC and NPR — but I don’t listen to podcasts anymore.

With time the most inflexible commodity at all, multitasking mediums have a shot at succeeding — e.g. listening to music while reading. Serial mediums do not. While I can watch some forms of television and work on email, neither activity get full attention. Podcasts are useless while reading or emailing.

So, is podcasting hosed? I dunno. Anything that lets a user accelerate consumption through a skim is fine — e.g. a text blog. Anything that requires full attention better have enough impact to deserve it.

ForbesOnTech — How to turn clicks to sales

ForbesOnTech

The esteemed Jim Forbes writes a good essay on how notebook vendors should use their online presences to drive web sales. The punchline: get away from spec sheets and speeds-and-feeds and talk to the customer in terms they understand, telling them, if you want to do this, in this environment, then you want this model. Hit them with legal disclaimers, engin-nerding, and what I call “drag-net” marketing (“Just the facts, mam”) and you will stun them in the headlights of too many choices. Jim says Apple is best, followed by HP.

“In today’s fast-paced notebook market, the way to turn clicks into sales is to move away from static data sheet based web pages and jump with both feet into online displays that show how a portable can be put to work immediately, solving real world problems by providing a useful and highly targeted out-of-the box experience.”