Return on Intention

Location based social networking is on the rise, with Twitter‘s relatively new location API and the social networks Foursquare and Gowalla leading the charge. The review site Yelp also started location based services, and the augmented reality apps like Google Goggles and Urban Spoon, where you are is now becoming a source of filtered content. Social networks and “Web 2.0″ have long given users the ability to find the content they we’re interested in, but relied mostly on relationships to expose them to things they may not have known or initially thought was interesting. Now with location based services, users have a new avenue of finding content that they may be interested in.

Imagine that you go to your favorite coffee shop in the morning to get your super tall non-fat decaf mocha latte. When you get there, you pull out your iPhone or Andriod phone and check into a location based social network like Foursquare. You immediately discover that your friends are just a few blocks away, but you also see that the local paper has written a few articles about the coffee shop, and that there is a concert there tonight from a popular local folk duo. Its unlikely that most people would have thought to ask all those questions to their favorite search engine that morning. This new functionality is making relative content more accessible through the actual actions of the users. Just wait, you know the target ads and coupons are on the way.

This change really signifies another important lesson for businesses. If there was ever any hesitation on getting a companies digital strategy figured out, this is another reason to get into high gear. As location based services become more popular, this content filter will be a very important part of the marketing mix as it has the potential to become some of the first brand touch points for consumers. When a mobile device gives information about a location and its surrounding business then that may be the first place new customers come into contact with the brand. If there is no online content for that company, then through that lens the company doesn’t exist. Ignoring the online conversation won’t help either. Many companies have been ignoring what is going on online and pretending that it doesn’t effect them. The market is talking whether the brand is there or not, but now that lack of participation can hurt even more. There is only so much information that the average mobile user will be interested in digesting as they stare at their phones screen waiting for a cup of joe, so staying on top of the conversation is now more important than ever.

What would your customers phone say you are all about?

Advertising, and marketing communications are generally viewed as an unwanted intruder. If you get it in your mail box it’s called junk mail. If you get it in your email it’ s spam. This view is not based on marketing communications being inherently bad, but rather it has come about from years of marketers and communication professionals sending irrelevant messages to us. If it’s irrelevant it becomes irritating. Basically, as marketers we have done this to ourselves. Most often I don’t think this was done intentionally and certainly not maliciously, but rather because we had mass media, so we got used to (and rewarded) for getting the message out to as many people as possible. The industry got too focused on quantity over quality.

Email is a great example. Email is so easy and inexpensive to use that spam has gotten out of control. When you are judged by the size of your list it becomes more important to blast out to 5 million than it is to blast to the 5 thousand that should get it.  As it stands, email is a fantastic medium. Social media is the new hot thing, but you don’t always want to talk about doing business in the middle of the party. Look at email as “Private Media”, the corner of the room where you and your buddy go to get away from the rest of the party just for a few seconds to really engage with each other. Email can be powerful, but not if its just a conduit for spam. Here is how to make sure you do it right.

Clean your list

Forget quantity. Go for quality. Look at your open rates and systematically cut out the bottom 10%. If they aren’t opening your emails then sending it to them makes no sense. Its a good idea to send them a plain text only email first, making sure they still want to be on the list. If they don’t, or don’t respond, remove them.

Segment your list

Not all your customers are the same. There are groups in your list that  have different interests. Segmenting your lists, and then sending different emails to each group that has more of the types of content they want will make your email more valuable to them. When the information is valuable, then its not considered spam. This is easiest, and most overlooked part of good email marketing, but it can make all the difference in the world.

Henry Ford once said “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Henry believed that innovation needed to come from inside because most people don’t really know what they want, just that they want out of the options that already exist.

Craig Newmark has a very different story to tell. Craig said that he essentially never made any decision about Craigslist, his users told him what they wanted and he implemented it.

Both Craigslist and Ford are successful companies, so which way is right? Do you get your ideas from customers or do you innovate internally? Both. Innovation often comes from insight, and that can happen both inside and outside the company. Here are few quick tips to help you create the potential for insight, and hopefully innovation.

Listen

A good start is to listen to your customers. Its a good idea to NOT rule out the feedback of your customers, it can’t hurt. This may not lead to the next great innovation (although it might), but at the very least it can point out some of the pain points they have that can give you a good idea of where to look for the innovation. Understanding how your product or service fits into your customers lives can help you find new and innovative ideas that can really make a difference.

Eat your own dog food

This point is related to the point above, but from a new perspective. To really understand the highlights and short comings of your product or services you have to experience it. I don’t mean drive your companies new car for an afternoon. Live with it for months. Fully integrate your offering into your own life as best you can.

Get to you know your place in the ecosystem

Your product or service fits into your customers live’s not in isolation, but in the midst of all the rest of the stuff in their lives. A coffee mug is not an isolated experience. The “user” of the coffee mug uses it in conjunction with their coffee pot, coffee grinder, milk, creamer, sugar and their morning newspaper to create an entire morning routine experience. By understanding your product or services place in this larger experience you can then try to see how your offering can  increase the pleasure or effectiveness of the overall experiences. That’s innovation.

Look at other industries

Every industry has gone through wrenching changes that have created amazing innovations to deal with the crisis.  While this can be challenging, if you can identify the current state of your industry and match that to the state of another industry before a time of change, you might find some insight into your  industries next innovation.

Apparently, I am not alone in using YouTube as a jukebox. Its pretty convenient to load up a few songs in YouTube and listen while working, as long as you have the bandwidth to do it. Over the past month with all the running around and frantic schedules, I let iTunes do the work of playing tunes until today when my dear friend Daniel Lyons sent me an instant message that read:

“Take on Me” by Reel Big Fish just came on my Pandora. This is your fault somehow.

I don’t have that song in my iTunes library, and now being reminded of its existence I went to YouTube for my ska fix. Boy was I pleasantly surprised.

On December 6, 2009 a new service owned by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, EMI and Abu Dhabi Media Company, and developed and hosted by YouTube, Sony, and Google Videos went live. The service is called VEVO that hosts music videos for record labels. The quality of the videos (while not HD … yet) is pretty high quality compared to the default settings of YouTube videos. These videos are the kind you would find on MTV back when MTV played music videos. Somewhere along the way from its fantastic birth to today, MTV seems to have forgotten what it was. I can only assume that MTV found they could make more money by creating reality tv programming than by playing music videos, and some marketing guru convinced them that their brand had outgrown “music videos” and had become a “lifestyle brand” that directed pop culture, so expanding into foreign territory was a good idea. I don’t mean to suggest that the aforementioned marketing guru was wrong, necessarily. This strategy could very well have been the right thing to do for MTV, but either way they are not the place to go for music vidoes anymore. The place to go was YouTube, and now its VEVO.

The reason VEVO was created seems to be more about satisfying a business need than a market driven, or so most of the stories I have read seem to point to. If that is true, then this is a good example of unrequested innovation that meets the business needs and consumer expectations.

Why did they launch VEVO?

The business reason to create this is because many advertisers (the revenue stream for YouTube and Google) are weary about their ads showing up next to user generated content. The fear is that if something offensive, or “off brand” occurs on the video, some people might carry that association over to the brand whose ad is showing next to the video. Its also a nightmare for the music industry trying to figure out how they are going to make money with the internet when new channels pop up all the time that give their product away for free. VEVO helps in both these areas.

By keeping control over the content that is posted on the site, VEVO can assure advertisers that the quality and content of the videos are more controlled. This will help  nervous brand conscious advertisers to feel more assured that this is a good property to spend ad money on. VEVO also shares its ad revenue, so some money will come back to the labels for the use of their content. This model should be appealing to them, after all, thats how radio worked. We got to listen to the radio for free while the advertisers paid for it. This model should seem comfortable.

So what do the users get out of this?

There amount of frustration I would feel when searching YouTube for a specific music video was becoming too much to bear. It would take a bit of time to go through all the user generated content that used the song I wanted as a sound track, or sifting through the really bad live recording taken from someones cell phone at a concert. It was getting hard to find “the good stuff”. VEVO has solved that problem for me. Now my only problem is what to do when VEVO doesn’t have the song I want, but I’m sure that it will get better over time, if this model proves successful. As a user I now have YouTube for funny videos, clips and the user generated content I want to see, and VEVO for the music. I also don’t have to pay for it. The ad sponsorship allows me to check out the music I want to see without having to shell out some cash for it.

The interface is more designed for music as well. There is a lyrics button, so you can see the words while the video plays, as well as the ability create playlists. Of course there is also links to iTunes and Amazon so you can buy the tracks right from the site. This is much better than the few seconds I get on iTunes to preview a track. Now I can hear the whole thing, and see a professionally produced video all before I spend the buck to buy the song.

It seems like a win all the way around. I hope it sticks. I wonder what MTV is doing now?

When you’re building a website, it doesn’t matter what the strategy is or who the site is intended to reach, the design, markup and programing processes will share some pretty standard activities. Knowing how to create a semantically correct website doesn’t have much to do with what the website does. Because of this it is very common to find information about the “How-To” then it is to find the”Why-To”. Most searches for web related activity centers around the how-to, and most content out there is too. This isn’t necessarily bad, its important to have good tacticians and skilled professionals that can actually take a plan into action, but the success or failure of a website, or any other business venture starts with a good strategy, not technical skill.
There seems to be a shortage of people talking about, or in a manner than can help people think about the plan and strategy, so to get this new year started off right, here’s my top 3 list of resources focused on getting the strategy right.

Six Pixels of Separation
This is a blog and podcast produced by the president of Twist Image, a great digital shop in Canada. Mitch was (or I guess still is) a journalist, so his blog is very well put together. Mitch is also the author of the book, also titled Six Pixels of Separation.

Around the Net with GrokDotCom
This is an RSS feed that comes from the fine folks over at Future Now, Inc. Future Now, Inc. is home to Bryan and Jeffery Eisenburg, the authors of the books Call to Action, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?and Always Be Testing. This feed is a list of other blogs and websites that the staff at Future Now, Inc. come across that they believe is worth sharing with the world.

Marketing Over Coffee
This is a blog / podcast put on by John Wall and Christopher S. Penn. This is a very well rounded show where they talk about strategy and tactics of marketing online (and off). Both John Wall and Christohper S. Penn also have their own blogs, Ronin Marketeer and Awaken Your Superhero that are also worth checking out.

It’s new years eve, I’ve had my annual sushi fest with friends, and now it’s time to start thinking about what to change next year. Before you break out the pen and paper to make your to do list, take a few minutes to make your don’t do anymore list. Often times we get confused into thinking that being busy is the same as being productive. If you are anything like me, you spend a lot of time telling people to step outside their comfort zone and stop doing what they have always done because that’s that way it’s always been done. This new year is a good time to step back and practice what we preach.

There seems to be a rash of meaningless slogans going around. Don’t get me wrong, a good slogan or tag line is hard to craft. It should be meaningful and serve as an accurate indicator of what you or your product stands for. Often a good slogan or tag line is aspirational, and can call out the unique selling proposition of a brand or organization. It can be a hard to encapsulate so much meaning into a short, memorable phrase that is clear to both the market and the members of the organization. This is really easy to get wrong. All this aside, there should be some pretty obvious indicators that can point out when this process has gone awry. The first indicator that a tag line should be reconsidered is, well, if the phrase actually doesn’t mean anything. “The Difference” is a good example. I saw a sign on the back of a truck today that read “Our people make the difference”. What does that even mean? What difference? It could be a bad difference. Really all this sign conveys is that they have people, and that creates a difference. That is hardly unique or even slightly compelling. That slogan will not help me remember or choose a service provider. If you have a difference, say what it is in terms that are meaningful to your customers. Just a thought.