Archive for Marketing
by Rob Paterson
March 31, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Artisanal Economy, Barriers, Brian Hurlburt, Business Model, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, Long Tail, Marketing, Metadata, MicroBrand, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Networking, Trusted Space, WalMart, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, Wikinomics
Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted – he wanted to be a retailer – but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!
My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields – not the least in Social Media – tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there – how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!
My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of – who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.
My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.
Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site – it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.
Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care – Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out. So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.
So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web – he has experienced himself.
Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is – an open and vulnerable man – is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.
He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.
Is this not the Craigslist model?
What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.
The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.
In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.
This is more than Google Local or Craigslist – this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.
A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.
Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision – the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.
This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.
For me the lessons that I have gained from looking at Brian are these:
- Niche is where the energy is – the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
- Aggregation around niche is where the value is – the more personal the better
- Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
- Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated
I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”
by Tom Matrullo
March 5, 2008 at 12:18 pm · Filed under
Commercials, David Weinberger, FASTforward08, Marketing, Search, Social Computing, Social Media, Story, TV, Trust, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, advanced search
The other day I was driving with my 16-year-old at a certain speed down the highway. We needed to get her to her new job at the pizza parlor on time, and were making the usual desultory conversation along the way. She had opened her Macbook and started editing photos taken earlier that day. She was also surfing six or seven radio stations looking for songs she liked, and texting three or four friends.
Suddenly her dispersed attention sort of gathered itself into a rising column of interest. Her neck craned, her body turned, her eyes peered intently as we passed what seemed to me to be a perfectly nondescript van.
“Did you see that?” she said excitedly, adding that the vanity plate said something about Elvis — I’d not noticed. She was peering intently into the van. I tried for a quick look, but entirely missed seeing the driver — a woman, according to my daughter, encumbered by one of those giant hairdos of yore, brilliantly blond, genus fanatica, species elvisia, ca. 1958.
All I saw was the van. All my kid saw was the Elvis attributes — Elvis happens to be one of her longest running crushes — on the license plate and inside. The thing is, given the way her attention had been deployed moments before, I have no idea how it pulled that particular bit of data from the parallel lines of traffic we were passing at 84 mph.
This jogged my memory of a theme surfacing at FASTForward08: How JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott and others had talked about how multi-tasked kids are, how their synapses seem to have been rewired to do things we can’t do.
We — ok, I – am of the generation of the single node receptor, the seemingly receptive eye/I, waiting idly to be served up something whole to look at, to take in. I turned off my TV off in 2000 and have not looked at it for more than 210 minutes in toto since; nevertheless, I remain a sort of virtual reclined potato, lying in wait for something to actively consume my vacancy.
My daughter and her peers are not like this. They seem constantly pre-occupied, moving between ongoing processes — mySpace, texting, photoshopping, searching — and yet, somehow, they catch more. Not “more” as in all that is going on, and perhaps more worryingly, not more as in the big picture. More within that ambiance that is vital and relevant to their current and ongoing passions and curiosity.
One other thing that seems worth noting: we Boomers are voice-oriented — we listen to voices, discourses, “messages,” till we grow utterly sick of them. Kids excel in tuning voices — and not just those of their parents — out, and in. They instead have selected conversations, not via the paths of the larynx, tongue and ear — exchanges proceeding against a silent, or music-filled, background. The “openness” of the couch potato is not their openness, but they aren’t closed, either. Just differently available.
To address this sort of optative “user,” a mode of address that attempts to fill up all the space with its active, grandstanding, vocal presence is probably not going to get far.
Something moving sidelong and not so showy — less big, less direct, less controlling — might be more suitable. Something decentered, linked to or associated indirectly to what is already moving them.
The battle-cry of this mode of address could be, “It’s the metonymy, stupid!”
Where are these links to be found? In the messiness of what David Weinberger calls the “unowned order” — the unpredictable realm of data and metadata, or, in his metaphor, amid the wild hedgerows before the topiarists arrive — the realm of advanced search.
[photopress:topiary.jpg,thumb,pp_image]
I should mention that my five-year-old, who has not yet begun to surf, twit, or google, demonstrates thinking and attentional processes that are linear, Aristotelian, and complete. We have great old-fashioned conversations, as humans once did, in the wayback days. It’s pretty cool.
by Paula Thornton
February 18, 2008 at 9:05 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Marketing
One key axiom of 2.0 thinking is “Shortening the Distance”. Advertising does not support this thinking. It is inefficient. A free-market economy will continuously adjust itself to eliminate inefficiencies. The advertising model will eventually be eliminated or minimized into some other predominant form.
I read models – I’m not prophetic. I don’t know what advertising will be replaced by, nor do I know how soon, but I do know what is more efficient: direct brokering or agents. On the internet today, the model that makes the likes of Google so successful with advertising relies heavily on bots (internet or web robots). This, at least adds some relevancy to the advertising. Bots were purported to be the kind of technology that could better serve our personal needs by delivering more relevant content – instant delivery, replacing the need to ‘find’. But we’re bombarded with these instant deliveries when we’re not ‘looking’ for them. [BTW, to avoid ads during search, I recommend using Clusty -- it was the first engine that helped me understand the power of FAST technology, almost a decade ago.]
In discussing this issue with the lawyer sitting next to me on the plane yesterday, he reminded me of the typical buying scenario: we’re looking to make a purchase, we tap into our net. We either talk to friends or we literally get online and leverage the ‘advisory’ model. On Amazon and other ecommerce sites, we read the ratings/reviews of others. We put those reviews into our own context, and draw our own conclusions. In that way, the collective of reviews serves as a brokering mechanism.
Advertising may incite awareness or interest, but it is no longer the ‘buying’ factor it was during an era of consumption most influenced by a ‘need to belong, fit in’. How many advertisements do you not act on in a day? Whether you acted or not, someone paid for the fact that you ’saw’ the ad — even if you really didn’t ’see’ it. How often are you in a buying/need state? When you are, how often is that act influenced by advertising (either past or current)? Where it may be influenced at all, did advertising cause the act or reinforce it? For all the millions of advertising dollars spent on SuperBowl XLII, how relevant were any of the products to you and did you act on any of the ads?
The only reason advertising continues to survive is that it is ‘familiar’ and it is monetized. Amazon, however, understands the value of brokering. They continue to add more and more infrastructure and facilities/services to provide incentives to those who can facilitate buying directly through their Associates model, or direct brokering. Far more efficient, their model only pays for results.
Even Forrester has been suggesting that marketing is ‘broken’ and that marketers should reinvent themselves. As part of that advice, Forrester suggests that marketing needs to take back control of their investment from agencies:
On average, agencies will influence nearly 60% of the marketing budget in 2007. The combination of anticipated spending on agency fees and measured media cover the bulk of marketing communications activities.
Marketers reported allocating an average of 17% of their budget to ad agency fees and 41% of their budget to measured media.
Advertisers spent a total of $271 billion on domestic US ads across all measured and unmeasured media channels in 2005, a 2.8% increase over 2004.
Marketers aren’t convinced that their agencies can formulate new media strategies, and agencies aren’t fully convinced themselves. Huge gaps exist between marketer and agency perceptions of ability to deal with changes in TV, Internet, and consumer-generated media
Almost all agencies (93%) believe their contributions drive their clients’ marketing success, while only 63% of marketers feel the same.
Despite the fact that agencies wield influence over a majority of the marketing budget, 76% of marketers do not measure the return on investment of their lead agency relationship.
So the majority of marketing dollars are spent on ‘outsourced’ services for which there are limited measures of success? That all sounds pretty inefficient to me.
Amazon even has a book that addresses this subject: Marketing Without Advertising, Inspire Customers to Rave About Your Business to Create Lasting Success. Ah, but if you read the reviews, one individual suggests other guerilla marketing titles.
Guerilla marketing? Described as “an unconventional system of promotions on a very low budget, by relying on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets”, the term itself seems to be well positioned for the likes of a Consumer Revolution.
P.S. Monetization was a hot topic during table discussions at last year’s FASTforward. I’m looking forward to some of the deepest conversations, with some of the smartest people I’ll get to have all year…see you there. Or, stay tuned on this Bat channel for updates and conversational relics.
by Paula Thornton
February 6, 2008 at 3:44 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Culture, Marketing, Social Computing
There is a shift in Marketing toward behavioral marketing that shuns classic marketing approaches and embraces ‘newer’ forms of research (all fundamental to the practices of Experience Design). A great newsletter/blog that deeply covers this phenomenon is Behavioral Insider.
Today’s post was particularly relevant in that it:
- Calls out specific shifts in marketing, many of which have very 2.0 implications
- Highlights a business model that taps into the behaviors/preferences of a very specific youth market.
- Tells a more compelling story by comparing and contrasting ‘differences’
Supporting quotes — pay particular attention to the last two:
Behavioral targeting has widely succeeded in changing the rhetoric and terminology of marketers. Rare indeed is the self-respecting behavioral advertiser who doesn’t speak in terms of having a one-to-one dialogue with customers. Yet, as Ryan Okum, president of StreetWise Concepts and Culture, explains below, moving beyond the habits of the older impressions-based marketing paradigm requires more than talk. It demands the cultivation of a new skill set.
Okum: Our focus is on online conversations and community building. We’re working with clients who are moving away from, or at least re-thinking, the ideas that behavioral targeting is strictly about serving advertising….The goal is to build a two-way environment where consumers actually go to participate.
Okum: The difference between our behavioral approach and more conventional approaches is, there’s a much more transparent execution in what we do. It’s not, as behaviorally targeting impressions is, a ‘two-way mirror’ where the marketer just looks in and eavesdrops on where consumers go online. We use analytics tools, yes, but to focus in on not just where they go, but what they do.
Okum: What marketers are shifting toward is that promotion is fundamentally more about creating conversations than reaching impressions.
Okum: [The digital channel] takes [a] philosophical as well as tactical shift. There’s a huge difference between accepting and living inside the paradigm where audiences and consumers are passive impressions to be reached with your message, and the new, conversational paradigm. The new philosophy is, you listen to the target market and give them what they want rather than making guesses about their interests and serving them up impression-based ads.
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