This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Tradeoffs of Today -- Overheard in a Facebook comment thread...
"The sole reason for Facebook's existence is to sell users to advertisers. The sole reason we are here is to be tracked and used as data. The trade off is getting to have this virtual playground."
Nicely put.
Reminds me of one of Scott McNealy's realistic zingers from a few years back
Digital Darwinism - Good article from Booz & Co's strategy+business site on evolution of the marketing and media ecosystem:
"...The marketing and media ecosystem has arrived at an evolutionary threshold. Old structures and ways of working persist but are fundamentally challenged by newer, more dynamic, more innovative alternatives. Numerous developments have brought the industry to this transition point. Consumers have more control and choice. Their media usage has fragmented. Many more advertising platforms exist. And marketers are insisting on greater precision in targeting and accounting for their ad spend.
"The recent economic turmoil only accelerates this evolutionary transition. Companies across the ecosystem have to acquire or develop three dominant traits to survive: relevance, interactivity, and accountability..."
"Publicity is the act of getting ink. Publicity is getting unpaid media to pay attention, write you up, point to you, run a picture, make a commotion. Sometimes publicity is helpful, and good publicity is always good for your ego.
"But it's not PR.
"PR is the strategic crafting of your story. It's the focused examination of your interactions and tactics and products and pricing that, when combined, determine what and how people talk about you."
If a lot of "PR firms" actually do Publicity, as Godin suggest, then a lot of "Marketing firms" probably just do Advertising, making pretty pictures and websites and getting them out there, but leaving the strategic development of market offers to those who own the offers - the clients. Maybe that's as it should be, maybe not, but should they be calling themselves marketers or advertisers?
And if you're looking for expertise in getting your message out into the world, be sure you ask your prospective service providers 1) how they see the difference between publicity and PR, and marketing and advertising, 2) what bucket they see themselves in, and 3) what in their service confirms their answer.
again mobile - The Blog -- OK, our blog at again mobile has gotten past the "here we are and who we are and look at our new digs" stage and now has its first real live content-filled rant.
Yes, we're focused on mobile, but not exclusively, and not in a vacuum. Mobile is but one tool to include in the quiver of your complete marketing toolbox. Fortunately we know how to strategize and implement other complementary channels as well, so even though mobile might be an effective hammer, at again mobile, we know that not everything is a nail.
Mobile vs desktop at Sonic -- This is what I've been posting about this week...
Check out (from your cell phone, ideally), the difference between Sonic's mobile site, sonicdrivein.mobi and their desktop web site, sonicdrivein.com. On the road, you don't need all the "engaging" flash frou-frou on the .com version. What you need is information, presented in a straightforward fashion. Where's a Sonic?, What are today's specials? The menu. Nice added touch is the nutritional content for menu items.
Maybe a little location awareness for phones with that capability could simply the location search process.
[via the Mobi Blog, where there's a few more ideas for Sonic's site.]
"Many investors would likely be very surprised at the scale of the mobile content industry in comparison to online advertising. The mobile content market may even be larger than online advertising right now. Not only that, it is likely that the mobile content market will show sustained growth higher than the online advertising market over the next 5 years. As well, its sheer potential is probably over 10x greater due to the number of mobile subscriptions worldwide (based on stats from IDC)."
It makes sense. Despite the excitement over smartphone capabilities from Apple's iPhone and RIM's Blackberry, not to mention up-and-comers Google (G-Phone) and Palm (with their new Pre), there's still a huge number of basic cell phones out there just ripe for upgrading, and thereby becoming new potential users of mobile web and apps.
Even without relying on full-on smartphones, this week's big Mobile World Conference in Barcelona has news of new moves toward better mobile web browsing on basic phones as well. The trick, however, for publishers of web content will be to make sure that your sites are set up appropriately for the small screen (funny how that used to mean television). Check out your website from your cell phone. If it looks like most, you'll want to get someone mobile savvy involved to help develop the optimum site format for mobile screens. (Having been only a minimal cellphone user until joining again mobile, this bit has been a real eye-opener for me. Never too old to learn, I guess.)
And this isn't only about presentation. It's about content in the mobile context as well. People (potential customers, by the way) coming to your site from their phones probably have a different set of interests than those surfing from their desks or their couches (although the bulk of my own couch-surfing has moved from laptop to iPhone recently). If you throw your entire internet-based web offering at them, it will only complicate the navigation needed to get to the subset of info that your mobile prospect is looking for. Again, a bit of mobile-savvy strategy is called for.
Tell Me How You'll Measure My Conversations...and I'll tell you how I'll converse.
From AdWeek, Conversation Quotient talks about the difficulty in measuring the infant social media channel for reaching interacting with your potential customers.
Even for online advertising, there's always a constraint -- A potential problem for online advertising, which is made possible by high-speed internet access, lies in the bottleneck constraints uncovered by higher-speed internet access. From Doc Searls: Subtractvertising
"If you’re going to be in the advertising business, either as a site or as a service that puts ads on sites, at least make sure that the damn server gets the ads on the pages.
"Now that our home is served by a Verizon FiOS connection that gives us 20Mb both upstream and down (and a big high five to Verizon for being the first in symmetry as well as speed), it’s getting easier to tell where the bottlenecks occur. And it’s usually not in the pipes. It’s in the ad servers...
"...Here’s a bet. As more people get faster connections, tolerance for time- and space-sucking advertising is going to go down.
"And eventually the advertising-pays-for-everything bubble will pop."
Something that advertising systems will need to address.
...there are different types of design. The one, we can call it the cynical design, that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the '50s, who said, what is ugly is a bad sale, La Laideur se vend mal, which is terrible. It means the design must be just a weapon for marketing, for producer to make product more sexy, like that, they sell more, it's shit, it's obsolete, it's ridiculous. I call that the cynical design.
After, there is the narcissistic design; it's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers. [laughs]
After there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it.
It's all about the users' needs. Take care of them, and the marketing almost takes care of itself.
Then, again...isn't marketing merely the process of 1) understanding the needs of potential users of your products/services, 2) making sure those products/services truly meet the important needs they're designed to address (the connection between marketing research and product design), 3) crafting compelling offers around the satisfaction of those needs, and 4) communicating those offers where those potential users might be found (where marketing meets advertising and selling, which are different things).
(Of course, putting it all in perspective, this is from a guy whose own site annoyingly takes over the user's browser window size to land-grab the whole screen.)
Another line that grabbed me from the talk…
Nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate.
Not sure why, but it grabbed me nonetheless.
Whole transcript and video version at http://blog.ted.com/2007/12/starck.php, although be advised he rambles off into a more metaphysical direction about us all being mutants, and designing stories for a future we really can't know, and that the best we can do is leave blank sheets of paper and the "best tools" for those who follow us.
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