Ramblings of a Marketing Gurl: 2011

Occupy Amazon? LMAO...

Other retailers are just angry with Amazon because they didn't think of this idea sooner. Instead of wasting valuable holiday retail time being angry with Amazon, maybe the other retail bookstores should spend the resources to develop their own inbound marketing funnels. Physical storefront owners are just perturbed that customers enjoy the tactile experience of shopping even though many will ultimately make their purchase online.

There would have to be a significant break in price or some other incentive (e.g., free shipping, bundled products/services) that would steer a customer away from that purchase. A $5 perk is insignificant if the item purchased retails for less than $25 since 3rd party shipping costs via Amazon would most certainly gobble up that benefit. This begs the question of how steep of a discount would be enough to lure a customer who is already at a physical retail store location to change their mind and shop elsewhere if the product were in stock.

Amazon.com is not the only online purveyor of goods with comparison shopping features for its customers. Many big box retailers have in-store product location websites which on-site employees can access via store terminals to find in-stock merchandise by nearby store location: Home Depot, Barnes and Nobles, Wal-Mart, JcPenney, etc.

What is lacking here is awareness that customers do shop this way. Having a cozy atmosphere and sweet aromas piping in from a coffee kiosk is not going to pay the overhead costs, let alone the staff wages of a brick and mortar store. Brick and mortar bookstore owners can compete with a powerhouse like Amazon by closing the information gap that forces customers to seek outside sources for reviews, purchase validation, or price comparisons.

Frankly, I don't see my local Ace hardware store going out of business any time soon, even with several big box retailers (including a newly built Costco) located just a mile away on the same street. Maybe bookstores can learn something about local area marketing from this hardware store.

Best App Deployments of 2011

Google+ Hangouts enable free audio/visual conference calling with a group of up to 10 people. There's a 45-minute timer on the hangouts, so if you intend to be on it for longer than that, be sure there's a warm body who can let the app know that you're still around even when you're busy cooking up a holiday dinner. Check out the "Hangouts with extras" beta features.

Amazon's Price Check lets shoppers at brick and mortar retailers use a smart device (iPhone, Android O/S) to enter the barcode of an item and purchase it from Amazon.com with a $5-off incentive. This takes comparison shopping to a whole new handheld level.

Move over iPen. Wacom has you beat with its Bamboo Paper app (for desktop or iPad) and its ergonomically-designed stylus for the iPad. Not only does it handle notetaking with handwriting recognition, it can also be used for sketching and presenting notes, ideas and sketches with others. Download these from Wacom's Bamboo Dock.

JPM Chase and Wells Fargo are among the front runners of the banking industry that are creating apps to make it easier for customers to transact with them using smartphone apps. Wells Fargo's Mobile Banking app allows users to check their available balances, view account activity, pay bills, make transfers between accounts or to other Wells Fargo customers, and locate the nearest Wells Fargo or Wachovia ATMs and office locations from an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Chase QuickDeposit allows customers to deposit checks with an iPhone, iPad or Android device with just two camera clicks. Whatever online banking features customers already use to manage their finances with desktop systems, the momentum within the banking industry for secure, mobile banking apps is bound to increase significantly.

Happy Star Rewards (available on iPhone and Android platforms), a location-based rewards app by parent company CKE Restaurants, invites users to check in when they dine at either Carl's Jr or Hardee's. The first check in earns the user a spin on the "Wheel of Awesome" for a chance to win free or discounted food, gift cards, and merchandise from participating partners. Winners can immediately redeem the prize or within seven days. While the location-based app released early last year, it still totally one-ups Foursquare, Facebook Places, and other check in apps. File this one under retention marketing.

Runner-ups:

Unable to sell off its mobile operating system webOS and no longer a manufacturer of the tabletware that houses this code, HP's webOS and its support resources are now part of the open source community where devs can use and modify freely.

Popplet, a web-based collaborative mindmapping tool. Think of popples as little buckets containing text, photos, and whatever else people share online. Free version only allows you to edit one popplet and the paid version allows you to create unlimited popplet. Downsides: Flash-based for desktop computers, still in beta, clunky interface.

CarrierIQ's hidden app collects device performance data from millions of Android, Blackberry, and Nokia mobile phones. Is that really a bad thing? What R&D entity wouldn't want to know more about their users and how their devices are being used? It is a gray area in US wire tapping laws since CarrierIQ's app engages in passive wiretapping for monitoring/recording data traffic. Unless these class action lawsuits can prove that CarrierIQ deliberately altered the traffic with the app, there's really not much that any user can do about it besides buy a mobile phone that doesn't have CarrierIQ's rootkit installed such as a Windows 7 Phone. So it tracks location data, big deal. How else would a mobile device be able to triangulate the best celltower reception or allow a user to check into their favorite retail shop?

Psychology of Sharing, a NYT study

The Consumer Insight Group of the New York Times did a study on the Psychology of Sharing. Its content has disseminated in some form to various marketers involved with social media. If you were curious, these people are responsible for the "study" which has been quoted with the same subject title. A summary presentation appeared on SlideShare.

Methodology:

In-person interviews in major metropolitan areas (New York, Chicago, and San Francisco)
Quantitative survey of 2,500 medium/heavy online sharers

Observations:

Sharing is not new, but in the information age we share more content with more users from more sources with more people, more often and more quickly
Sharing acts as information management

85% say reading other people's responses helps them understand and process information and events
73% say they process information more deeply, thoroughly and thoughtfully when they share it

Motivations for Sharing:

To bring valuable and entertaining content to others
To define ourselves to others
To grow and nourish our relationships
Self-fulfillment ("We enjoy getting credit for it")
To get the word out about causes or brands

6 Personas of Sharing:

Altruists - share content to be helpful to others, and aspire to be reliable sources of information; prefers email and Facebook
Careerists - well-educated sharers want to earn a reputation for bringing value to their networks, preferring content that is more serious and professional in tone; prefers LinkedIn and email
Hipsters - younger sharers “have only known life in the information age” and share cutting-edge and creative content, and they focus on identity-building; prefers Twitter and Facebook
Boomerangs - sharers after validation and will respond to positive or negative responses; no strong preference but will share using Facebook, email, Twitter, and blogs
Connectors - sees content sharing as a way to stay connected with others and make plans; prefers email and Facebook
Selectives - put more thought into what they share and with whom they share it. Because their sharing is more personalized, they expect people to respond to and act on their content; Prefers email

I actually laughed at this part of the study: Email is the #1 factor that influences sharing since it's perceived as more personal and private.

$199 is the new $249

Just a couple years ago, $249 was the magical number that a consumer could purchase any product for themselves without having to justify the expense to their significant other, spouse, or household budget. Whenever I see manufacturers conforming new products to a specific price point, I have to wonder if they are looking at just the short term benefits for the price cut or at the long tail benefits of having the product out in the market.

Magazine Technology

While pulp-based paper is not that expensive and a lot of Pacific Northwest lumber is shipped overseas to developing economies, print has gotten rather pricey and not just for advertisers. And, with new(er) media in play, this opens up a largely untapped digital space for consumers to get information about your products and services. NPR had mentioned today that direct mail catalog publishers are making their content friendlier to tablets and other mobile devices. HTML5 is on the right track but it is hardly the end destination to how digital content consumers will be viewing the Internet in the near future.

Beyond all the pretty pictures and color-rich graphics, what remains the constant is the requirement of increased bandwidth and storage. For consumers to readily adopt such a technology and use it in their daily lives, content has to stream as fast as a plain text email.

There are a few approaches to how customers can view catalogs:

as a physical mailer (pros: can customize pre-filled order forms with a customer's past purchases or giftees; cons: ultra-old school circa 1774, seen as junk mail, customers who shop online don't actually want a printed catalog since the catalog is the merchant's website, lead time requires a lot of planning and all your publishing components being on-time)

with a web-friendly viewer (html or Flash, pros: a content standard; cons: limited to bandwidth contracts, Flash content can't be shared in the same way of just clipping out the content that a user wants to share rather than sending the entire presentation, requires specialized knowledge and software to look good)

as a PDF (delivered as a web download or email attachment; pros: easy to use, many complementary "PDF" services to Adobe's standard from 3rd party vendors; cons: device manufacturers are slow to bring PDF-compatibility on-board due to licensing, software, and privacy concerns, limited or nil tracking capabilities for links embedded within PDFs)

served up as email or web content (old school method circa 1995, pros/cons: easy to use, anyone can do it, an industry standard, not all email service providers allow rich-content to be served within an email, bandwidth/hosting limitations)

within a rich-media, portable device-friendly reader (iPad, e-reader, smartphone, tablet, etc.; pros: new digital space, no standards for how or how much ad content should display; cons: closed ad networks with exorbitant pricing, few established software content builders, dual-payment system for advertisers and consumers--advertisers pay for ad content to be hosted/delivered to portable devices, consumers pay for the device, bandwidth, and hosting fees to get content, consumer mobile devices are not ad-free)

What is surprising is that all these methods still survive in conjunction with each other. Although, advertisers and publishers of different media standards will tell you that global revenue share has shifted from print to digital to 24/7 streaming.

Here are a few examples of sites using online magazine technology:

Edible Portland
Visit Vancouver USA - 2011 Regional Visitor's Guide
eDrive Magazine (an industry publication for electric motor and drive technology)

Notable Guides (and Blogs) for Small Business Owners

These guides are awesome resources for getting started with a new business or learning about how the tech and social media savvy non-professional marketers get the word out for their products and services.

The Etsy Seller Handbook: All Our How To's About Selling

OPEN Forum (hosted by American Express)

Harvard Business Review Blog

Bootstrapping a Startup (hosted by Businessweek)

SmartBrief - industry news

HubSpot Blog and eBook guides for:

Infographics by Visua.ly - not a guide per se, but a good reference site for how different types of datasets can be represented as graphics.

Holiday Marketing Ideas

And so it begins with Target announcing that it'll open its stores at midnight on November 25 (Black Friday).

Maybe you're just a small business or sole proprietor with limited shelf and store footprint, or you have an online business that's just starting up. Here are a few thoughts about making the upcoming shopping season the best experience for your customers:

Ease of use - make it easy and simple for customers to get in contact with you (telephone, email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook) or to shop at your store; make the research of the product with your online storefront easy to read on multiple formats (this means, no heavy use of graphics or Flash presentations); and add the personal touch of having a live person responding to these inquiries.

Comparable benefits - if you can't match or beat a competitor's low pricing or free shipping offers, then the next best alternative is to have better qualitative benefits such as superior customer service, faster turnaround times (from ordering to delivery), or alternative methods of shipping (maybe time isn't that big of a factor just as long as it gets to its destination within a reasonable amount of time; there is however, a big difference in shipping costs between FedEx, UPS, and USPS).

Get and respond to feedback whether it's positive or negative - Publishing a customer satisfaction survey link using Google Spreadsheet Forms or SurveyMonkey are a cost-effective way of capturing things you want to know about your products and the consumers that use them. You can use a free URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl to save on character printing space. Bit.ly even allows you to make custom urls if you have an account with them, for example: http://bit.ly/mktgurlblog

Final note:

Take industry revenue estimates with a grain of salt before comparing the potential of its impact to your niche market. In 2005, Forrester Research estimated that online retail sales would grow from $172 billion in 2005 to $329 billion in 2010. Then, in 2010, Forrester Research suggested that US online retail sales would grow by an average of 10% per year until 2014 from $172 billion to $248 billion. However, the US Commerce Department reported that 2010 e-retail sales in the US to be $165.4 billion.

ComScore draws on online purchase data from its panel of about 1 million U.S. online shoppers. Commerce Department estimates are based on a quarterly survey of more than 11,000 U.S. merchants.

Fast & Frugal Webinar - Running a Lean Startup with AWS

This was a multipart webinar series that Amazon AWS hosted. I thought that the speakers would shed some light into a few notions that are critically important to small business owners, primarily what a lean startup is, how these startups are using AWS for their business, and how to take this knowledge from webinar to execution. Some parts were way too technical for a mixed business audience.

"A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty." --Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup

"Lean" is a concept that is closely associated with manufacturing, and according to Wikipedia it is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work.

The Toyota Way, an example of a lean process

Recommendations for Lean Startups:

Use innovation accounting with three learning milestones. (1) establish the baseline to build a minimum viable product and measure how customers behave right now. (2) tune the engine and experiment to see if we can improve metrics from the baseline towards the deal. (3) pivot or persevere when experiments reach diminishing returns, it's time to pivot.

Leverage AWS. Why? Your server infrastructure needs will change. If you are able to run on the same infrastructure at launch and a year later, you overbuilt your launch infrastructure, or even worse, your business is not scaling. Goal: find a Scalable Business Model.

Build your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Toss the vanity metrics (ones use in frilly reports to senior management, shareholders, or key stakeholders) and instead measure key assumptions that answer what we are trying to prove with this startup. Use 3rd party SaaS metrics or Amazon's elastic mapreduce. Goal: learn from the process, iterate or pivot in a new direction.

Use the building blocks AWS provides. It is on demand, available, elastic (use as much or as little as needed), pay as you go, low cost, no contracts, no upfront payments, and no cap-ex.

Vertical scaling - increase hardware, cpu, memory
Horizontal scaling - increases instance number, master/slave replications
Database sharding - indexes partial customer datasets

Goal: stay lean by using only what you need and reduce costs.

TED Talks "How to spot a liar", Oct 2011

"Lying is a cooperative act. A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie." --Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting

Attitude indicators are just behaviors. They're not proof of deception. They're red flags which don't mean anything in and of themselves. However, when you see clusters of these red flags that's your signal.

Patterns of Deception:

#1 non-contracted denial (e.g., Clinton's public statment about ML)

People who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language
Use of distancing language to distance self from another person (e.g., "that woman")
Use of qualifying language discredits the liar

#2 body language (use science to temper your knowledge)

Fidgeters freeze their upper bodies when they're lying
While smiles convey honesty and sincerity, a real smile is in the eyes (wrinkled crows feet can't be consciously contracted)

honest person: cooperative, show they're on your side, enthusiastic, willing and helpful to getting you to the truth, willing to brainstorm, name suspects, or provide details

deceptive person: withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, their story is peppered with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places, blink rate changes, point their feet towards an exit; will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them; will alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower

Related articles:

"The Truth About Lying" by Allison Kornet, Psychology Today
"Lying in Everyday Life", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [PDF]
Radio Lab: Into the Brain of a Liar

Infographics 101

While text and data are standard methods of communicating concepts, infographics do it better. Many infographics shared through social media sites are often intended for humor or satire, and others illustrate market or demographic trends. One should keep in mind how that research was generated because the dissemination of data from a poorly constructed research study is still bad data, regardless of how pretty of a graphic it can be turned into. An infographic can be as simple as showing the different types of clouds relative to the elevations they are typically found at. Infographics can be used to illustrate any data set with meaningful attributions. More data on a picture is not necessarily better or adds more validity.

Notable Infographics

Data Viz Challenge (Google partnered with Eyebeam to sponsor the Data Viz Challenge: Visualize Your Taxes using data provided byWhatWePayFor.com)
Infographic World's The Life and Times of Steve Jobs
Interactive Map: Costs of Hunger

Social Media / Marketing

Randall Munroe's xkcd illustration about Online Communities
Michael A. Stelzner's How Marketers are Using Social Media in 2010
Social Media Facts & Figures for B2B Sales (2010)
NetProspex Social 50

Dear Valued Customer

In some messaging campaigns, it is appropriate to use this addressing moniker when a customer's name is not know. Many small and large sized businesses are afflicted by incomplete customer profiles. While using "Dear Valued Customer" as a salutation within a bulk email is indirect and lacks the connectivity marketers strive for with their customers, it still has value when used appropriately. Consider these two bulk email examples where the customer's name is not known. One used "Valued Customer" in the subject line of the email. In the other example, no data validation was used prior to the send. If the salutation or subject line is the first impression a customer sees in their digital inbox, the email could be less personalized if those details aren't known. Frankly, both of these emails are unappealing, impersonal, and simply not the kind of email that conjures up warm, fuzzy feelings about their respective firms.

Review: Knowing Your Value

I've been on this binge with the public library and checked out a lot of books on topics that I thought I'd never get around to reading. I just finished Mika Brzezinski's Knowing Your Value,

5 things learned from reading this book:

Leadership is gender-neutral.
When negotiating a salary or raise, do your research and know what you're worth.
Don't get emotional (Men don't. Why should you?).
Don't work twice as hard as men. It's apparently from the 235 years of income disparity between men and women that this work ethic and strategy has never worked to propel women to the top 1%. (I made that one up. Not in the book.)
Women hold other women to much tougher standards than men in the workplace.

Intuit's Love a Local Business Promo

If you didn't already know how to promote your business using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, Intuit incentively recruits newcomers by offering a $25,000 small business grant each month.

How it works:

A business owner nominates their business (based on company name and location) through Intuit's sign-up page (if the company name doesn't appear, e.g., if you're not registered with your city with an active business license or lack a D&B DUNS number, you can still nominate your business by filling in the appropriate information where prompted. Manual nominations will not show up on the locations map, but do count as valid votes).

If you are concerned about spam and privacy when posting your contact information; say, you have a home-based business. Sign up with Google Voice using your existing mobile or landline telephone number and get an Internet number assigned to it. That way you can collect legitimate business inquiries via Google Voice voicemail. Get a PO Box from your local post office, or a 3rd party mailbox service. If you happen to pair the PO Box with your home address, it will really confuse data processors for direct (junk) mail. But, make sure that Intuit is able to contact you, regardless. Banks and clearing houses use the POB method for marketing campaign targeting, you could too.

Local fans of the business can vote for you. Each vote counts as a raffle ticket. If you look at the previous months' results, Mid-Michigan Kennels won with only 1341 votes.

Deadline for submitting nominations/votes: September 30, 2011

Facebook Places Enables Random Edits

This could be bad news for any company who wants to keep their online reputation clean and typo-free. It's interesting to note that Facebook doesn't have any means in place so that a company's site admin can monitor or reject recommended changes by random strangers. A competitor could log into Facebook and modify your Facebook Place page for the worse and no one would be the wiser, except you. Site settings have been like this for more than a year. But then, Facebook isn't interested in fixing petty details.

This is not to be confused with a Facebook company profile page, which appears to still be secure.

A rant about webinar content

HubSpot webinars are starting to suck. Today's webinar was supposed to be on "The Competitive Edge: Social Business and Competitive Analysis". Now there's 25 minutes of my life I can't get back. If you're going to use marketing buzz words in your presentation agenda to attract an audience to your webinar, at least cover them in the webinar with sample campaign data and/or qualitative facts.

Tracking QR Codes with Google Analytics

Start by going to Google's URL Builder.

Step 1: Fill in the campaign information in the appropriate fields.

Step 2: Shorten the generated URL with bit.ly or other popular link shortener

Step 3: Feed that shortened URL into a QR Code Converter
Step 4: Use generated image in print, online, or mixed media campaign

Renewable Energy - Solar

The Pacific Northwest is not known for its abundance of sunlight nor wind power and yet both types of renewable energy are growing in popularity for residential and commercial use. In southwest Washington state, most of our electricity comes from BPA's 31 hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River.

When considering the switch from natural gas to solar electric water heating, I would have to replace a natural gas water heater with an electric solar water heater. This involves a) finding a unit that will fit the needs of this property, b) finding a supplier and c) having a certified vendor install the unit. As a residential customer, I don't really care about the qualitative benefits (see pros and cons of solar below) of using sustainable energy. At the end of a billing cycle, it's all about the monthly bill and the lifetime cost of ownership of the unit. If I can get the meter to tick backwards, that'd be a big plus, but it's not the primary driver for research into this household appliance.

The case for solar

Year	Cost of Gas	Gas avg/month	Cost of Electricity	Electricity avg/month
2010	$614	$50	$249	$21
2011 (thru July)	$385	$55	$155	$22

To look at actual water heater consumption, one would probably have to compare summer months to winter months. It does snow here and only a few days a year. During the winter, the thermostat is set to 62 degrees F. During the summer, it's been so mild, bordering on chilly, that I haven't turned on the a/c. The graph below shows annual natural gas and electricity costs; where energy consumption is a direct correlation to cost.

When I think about it in this context, I don't really have a data-justified case to add a solar water heater since I'd still be consuming natural gas to heat the home. Natural gas consumption has already declined month-over-month since installing the programmable thermostat (a unit that has paid for itself in energy savings vs regular usage). I haven't done nearly enough calculations to proceed further.

Pros:

Zero emissions; no pollution
Quiet energy production
Installation in remote locations more cost-effective than high voltage wires
Able to use existing footprint (e.g. angled or flat rooftops)
Unlimited energy eventually pays for the installed unit(s)
Less dependent on fossil-fuel-dependent energy (e.g. coal, nuclear)
SmartGrid, NetMetering eligible
Cash incentives from regional utility providers (see below)

Cons:

Steep (initial) cost of the solar cells and/or panel array
Pollution in dense metro areas can affect collection efficiency of the panels
Effective during daylight hours; significantly less available "energy" during winter months
Collector efficiency is affected by severe weather conditions (snow, hail, blizzard blackout conditions)

Data Fluke

This looks suspicious...

Within Blogger's dashboard, there's an option to look at a blog's stats. I believe this is a defunct app that is separate from Google Analytics. What is peculiar about this graph is that there's no data history prior to July 2009 even though I started writing this blog in 2005. The fact that 24,700 PV were registered on a single month is another oddity. I'd speculate that whoever originally coded the stat function within Blogger (or BlogSpot) did something to mucky up how stats were generated and wiped out all historic data for this site when the feature went live. The number of pageviews could be an accumulation from 2005 to 2009. Maybe?

Reminder: Canada's Anti-Spam Law

Scrub those databases and marketing lists. Enforcement of Canada's anti-spam law begins September 2011. Read about the basics here.

LinkedIn and User Privacy

Perhaps you were among the 100 million users who got automatically opted into LinkedIn's ad network, or perhaps you read about it through some social media site. Not terribly interested in having your demographics used within ad targeting? Here's how to opt-out:

Click on your name on your LinkedIn homepage (upper right corner). On the drop-down menu, select "Settings"
From the “Settings” page, select “Account”
In the column next to “Account”, click “Manage Social Advertising”
Un-check the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising”

You could also turn on/off Enhanced Advertising, Partner InMail, data sharing with 3rd party applications, invitations to participate in research, and LinkedIn announcements.

I'm a bit surprised that LinkedIn didn't have any Home dashboard messaging about the mass opt-in change to user settings. At least users have the ability to opt in and out when they want to. Options are always good. We make better decisions when presented with many options instead of few or none.

At age 102, get targeted for age 65+

Based on Yahoo profile information and other clever marketing tactics, this would explain how I had gotten onto AARP's postal mailing list. The retired and elderly are sent morbid publications. Brochures for funeral and cremation services, cemetery plots, and hearing aid ads are just the starters. Back in 2004 when I created a primary Yahoo mail account, I may have fux0red on the birthday question. Peeking at my profile info, it says "born in January 1909". *laugh* How much should you glean from a user's profile for marketing promotions anyways, and should you treat all the user-input fields at face value?

What is interesting to note about Yahoo's ad targeting engine is their data table for IP address location lookups. It seems to be a bit b0rked. France, really? If Yahoo's targeting is off by an entire continent for what seems to be an elementary use of scripting code, would you trust them with your geo-targeted ad content and budget?

Lightning May Be Hazardous to Your Cloud

Typically data centers are in places where the land and facilities are cheaper than say in a windowless building in downtown metropolis. You'll find yottabytes data centers twiddling away in remote places like Fargo ND (Microsoft), The Dalles OR (Google), Allen TX (Cisco), and internationally in locations such as Ireland, China, India, or Japan. Remember virtualization? Well, it's more or less the same to marketers as cloud computing. Regardless of what you call your online data storage method or how your firm accesses it, that data still resides on a physical machine plugged into an electrical grid.

A lot of data bits we use in our daily lives are making their way to the cloud. Name any online service (Flickr, Google Docs, Amazon AWS, Office Live, Adobe AIR) and some or all of its data is hosted virtually. Businessweek notes these two primary risks of using cloud computing:

Risk #1 - your data could be exposed to third parties
Risk #2 - data and apps may only be available when you are connected to the Internet AND when that service is up and running

A simple act of nature can blow up backup generators, disrupt electricity, and take entire systems offline and require manual operations (actual human technicians) to bring those systems back online.

With that in mind, is your business ready for the cloud?

Sears Rewards Program #FAIL

Thanks a lot Sears, I really didn't need to be spammed by all your eCommerce entities all at once. Sears is typically where I go to get tools and appliances for the home; although, in today's age, Home Depot wins out on in-store price comparisons and Lowes wins on customer service; at least in southwest Washington anyways. The customer experience is probably different where you live. Regardless, this post reflects upon the poor execution of what could have been a good retention marketing campaign by the Sears rewards program.

Google's Community Standard #FAIL

Twice now this week my Google profile has been suspended (this means, it's a dead URL to anyone searching for you on the Internet). First time, I can see that they're trying to push out people who are posing as business users from using the personal use version. I had to nix my "mktgurl" persona which I readily use just about anywhere I want a social, online presence. I hope all this name rearranging doesn't mucky up how my blogs are configured. Second time, I got suspended for using my real name. Really now, the usability of Google+ is poorly thought out. I mean really, mixed products users are getting bumped off the grid and are complaining about it. There's even a forum thread on Google Groups about people using real names and getting blocked.

[ To prove that I'm me I have to send them a link
where this name is me, or send them a copy of a photo ID. ]

[ This is what others see when your profile is suspended. ]

So far, Google+ has only communicated one thing about its new social media site...stay away and don't sign up because frankly, we don't believe that you're really who you say you are.

Are you winning the Zero Moment of Truth?

If you're a frequent visitor at LinkedIn, you may have noticed some very brightly colored ads yesterday pointing to a newly published e-book by Google's Jim Lecinski (LinkedIn, Twitter). An engagement threshold must have been reached because the ads aren't displaying anymore.

ZMOT is "the moment where marketing happens", according to Jim, "where consumers make choices that affect the successes and failure of nearly every brand in the world."

Linked InMaps

This feature is brought to you by LinkedIn Labs and makes a graphical representation of how your network is connected. It's not surprising when I look at my own LinkedIn network how very few people cross-pollinate to other circles. Someone should build an add-in for G+ so that data junkies can see what 2.3 billion +1 transactions look like in the three months that +1 has been available.

What is interesting to note is that this visualization only takes into consideration 1st degree of separation connections.

Color code: The upper left of the spiral (orange and purple, banking industry), bottom (green) represents colleagues from a recent employer, and the large upper right cluster (blue) are all the people I met directly through LinkedIn.

a short url for a G+ profile

Thank goodness for third party app devs. If it weren't for them, we would probably have to type more characters than normal, like whole words and real sentences.

Here is mine: http://gplus.to/mktgurl

Create your own here: http://gplus.to

Need a G+ invite? I can probably hook you up with one if the invite feature stays up. The site seems pretty fragile at the moment. Up, down, up, down. This is what happens when you rush a product out the door.

A stranger added me to his circle; although I can't tell if they are a he or she. I promptly used the "block user" feature. I can imagine that when G+ goes off beta, managing all those random circle adds will be quite cumbersome. Too bad we can't set our profiles private to just our circles or extended circle users. G+ is retiring user profiles set private. Sux0rs!

Google+ Hangout

A workaround for the 10-person limit:

I wonder how many concurrent video sessions a single user can be a part of? If a hangout session is started by one user, wouldn't it then be possible for the other nine people to start hangout sessions of their own. In effect, this could create a daisy chain of connections. I bet someone on the Net outside of Google is already testing to see if this is possible.

Google's Hangout feature, a competitive advantage?

Google+'s hangout feature is one of the few aspects of Google's attempt at social media connectivity that sets it apart from and perhaps makes it better than other competitors. You might say that it is a competitive advantage when compared to other companies that offer similar or substitute products.

Let's see what's in this space already:

Mainstream multi-person text conferencing: Any mainframe system, internet relay chat (IRC), instant messaging (IM)
Single point audio/video conferencing (site-to-site, peer-to-single-source-to-peer, one-site-to-many): any IM app with a video chat component, XBOX, Cisco, etc.
Shared immersion user environments: MMO (massive multiplayer online; typically refers to games), MUDs (multi-user dungeons)

Hangout looks to be a bidirectional multi-input audio/video conferencing, but is limited to up to ten people; though this is probably a bandwidth or capacity limiter. Here are some things you might not have noticed from using the app:

Each hangout generates a unique URL which can then be shared to invite others to a hangout; but, multiple hangouts that share the same circles of users cannot merge into a larger hangout.
It's browser-based, so like MMORTS (massive multiplayer real time strategy games), there's no software client to download, drivers to update; except for maybe the browser plug-in that Google chat and video also runs on.
It's also cloud-based, so having uptime, refresh rates, and latency issues like other multi-user environments are probably not an issue.

There's only one service that one-up's Hangout, and that is Second Life (and most other virtual 3-D audio/chat and motion animated worlds).

Is it sustainable? Depends on the total number of global users and who is going to pay for all that hosted bandwidth and live video streaming. Currently in the United States, the Internet is a shared cost system and everyone "pays" for it in some context.

Will it normalize the fee-based video conferencing costs for businesses? Probably not, especially if you want to v/c with more than 10 people.

Is it practical for mobile devices? At the moment, hangout doesn't support mobile devices. Though, if someone can create a video compression capability that can cache multiple streams of video content in a way that is cost-effective for the device user, then perhaps; but I don't think even commercially available technology is quite there yet.

Ughly, all or nothing on Google+

At least you are able to select multiple contacts by dragging a select box with an input tool to a circle. I really don't want to see what the interface looks like for mobile Google+. First impressions are like this:

the UI is horrific
there is a linear path for sign-up after clicking on the invite (referral) email

You can either sign-up all the way and opt-in to everything that Google wants you to have public, or quit the process. Who thought that one up?

it's like the devs have taken the LiveJournal interface, made it worse, then opened up site privs to everyone on the web (which, thankfully can be configured for less Google-generated spam)
surely the FB flip-flopping on privacy issues could have made Google a better learned student on the matter, but no... Google wants everything public and searchable on the web whether you're a Google accounts user or not
this project should have died at inception or stayed in beta a lot longer
uhh, I like my privacy and you probably do

Like any site config page for notifications.. you could probably turn them all off unless you really love getting pinged by email alerts. Isn't that what an RSS feed is supposed to filter for you?

Google devs, please leave my online personas alone. Obviously, I don't want my business "mktgurl" persona mixed with the food-oriented "mad scientist baker" persona. Don't just base them off of the funky "name" associated with the email account. Ugh, geez... it's like monkeys suddenly took over the dev of this app.

O mein Gott! Es gibt ein axt im meine kopf.

Ahh finally, the end of the month. I can post something silly.

When you catch tv episodes online, you often get to watch the same ad over and over again. The AXE ads that have been playing during the commercial breaks for MasterChef are pretty amusing, even with multiple views. The meat poncho ad is darn hilarious too. Looking deeper, the ads are well executed and memorable.

The first impression before the actual product shot had two other brands come to mind: the Energizer bunny and Victoria Secrets. The former had a history of ads in the 80s that looked believable enough but totally threw you off when the Energizer bunny skated by. The latter used the angel theme before; though the style of the ad isn't what they typically promote.

Google+ invites on eBay

*snerk* *giggle* I remember when Gmail was by invite only. Read about it on WebProNews or see it in action.

The cloud, it poked me in the eye

Is there any data that isn't compromised by the US Patriot Act?

I thought about writing an intro series for marketers to the Cloud (as in cloud-based apps and marketing), but I'll jump right in here. Imagine if you would, your personal hard drive (from a computing device: say, an iPad, laptop, netbook, desktop monstrosity, server, etc.) with documents (e.g., text, photos, presentations, spreadsheets, notes) that you share with your colleagues or clients in an online platform where you presumably control access privileges and file privacy rights. On zdnet.com, Zack Whittaker highlights an interesting perspective on how Microsoft is dealing with privacy with respect to law enforcement requests for documents shared on a cloud.

The Microsoft statement: "Any data which is housed, stored or processed by a company, which is a U.S. based company or is wholly owned by a U.S. parent company, is vulnerable to interception and inspection by U.S. authorities."

Not only do companies have to worry about hackers breaching a cloud platform like what happened to Epsilon and its customers in March 2011 (Kroger, JPM Chase, and a long list of others), but now your data could be seized at any moment without due process by the US government, regardless of where that data is if it is managed by a US-based company.

Read more?

Microsoft's whitepaper on the data protection policies of Office Live 365
PC Mag's article on "Epsilon Data Breach: What Can You Do to Protect Yourself?"

Gee thanks Amazon, I feel so unloved

If you've done business with Amazon.com or have aStore or affiliate links embedded in a blog or some other website, I'm sure you've read about the sales tax troubles Amazon was having with the state of Illinois and now with California. Granted I used to live in California when I signed up with the Amazon Associates program, but even when I changed my payee residence to Vancouver, WA where I live currently, I received the affiliate termination letter TWICE! Once for having a California address, and again for having a Vancouver, WA address. So, does this mean Amazon is unilaterally severing affiliate relationships with all other states, or just California? It's really unclear.

I was just doing it for fun, mainly for the cooking blog so that readers could see a product shot of a particular cooking utensil or kitchenware that I used for making a particular recipe. Now it seems like it's just a wasted extra step to embed those links in, even though Amazon affiliates is an add-on within Blogger.

Have Data, Will Target

Coremetrics, featuring a real world case study with Estee Lauder, hosted a webinar today on retargeting emails based on behavioral triggers. Beauty products are a tactile product, meaning customers like to touch and feel the product at a store counter before purchasing; and one might assume that customers would rather do that at a brick-and-mortar place than online.

Estee Lauder's toolbox includes:

Coremetrics for enterprise web analytics
Coremetrics LIVEmail (not to be confused with Windows Live email)
Experian's CheetahMail for email delivery metrics (opens, clicks, opt outs) and automated email campaigns
Online display ads paired with cookies and search keywords with select ad networks
A network of more than 250 websites, 50 of which are e-commerce sites
An in-house list (does not use 3rd party lists at all)

EL's approach for retargeting emails:

Determine segments and top performing product categories
Customer service-oriented messages to customers
Free shipping plus samples; call-to-action embedded in the ad itself
Use registration confirmation, cart abandonment, and cookies that track categories browsed
Segmentations based on visitor engagement, category affinities (serves up specific ad displays), referral sources (Google, Facebook), site tools (product reviews), level of engagement, and customer value

The results:

Remarketing email open rates were 3-5x higher than broadcast emails
Revenue per email was 6x higher than broadcast emails

When asked in the Q&A section about the open rates for broadcast emails, Estee Lauder commented they were average for the industry. This suggested that for the beauty and personal care segment, open rates were roughly 15% with a 3% click-through rate. Open rates this low usually means that the data hasn't been cleansed in a few years, there's plenty of duplicate customer records, fake customer records from users wanting to take advantage of single-use offers multiple times, or there's simply GIGO in their database. But, I digress. Back to the webinar...

Re-messaging for online display ads looked at customer behavior while visiting EL's website(s) or partner websites, specifically targeting customers who interacted with the site but did not purchase which triggered an ad to appear via browse cookie on the ad networks used.

In context, ad serving in the example of Clinique ads went like this:

skin care shopper gets a skin care ad
make up shopper gets a make up ad
abandoned cart shopper receives and offer ad

Re-messaging (targeting specific tailored ads to specific product interests) for display ads resulted with significant ROI improvements such as more impressions and click-based revenues.

On the whole, EL has few challenges and they are common to just about everyone who transacts and tracks marketing spends online such as privacy concerns, measuring ROI, or determining the number of touch points within a 24-hour period.

If you're getting higher quality responses (more clicks, higher revenues) from your customers because you've now sent them a targeted email specific to their interests instead of one intended for all audiences, of course you'll get a higher response rate.

EL has either a really good design team or a great ad agency that can produce color-rich imagery that sticks to each product's brand. They aren't really challenged with lack of content like the rest of us. This chart shows some of the challenges faced by content marketers in the US:

Don't let the lack of content stop you from setting up parts of the process for demand generation or automated email follow-ups. Estee Lauder uses one creative per branding ad campaign and rotates it with fresh content every few months. This insight didn't happen overnight and takes careful market planning for budgetary spends and execution.