March 1, 2003
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Thought
Your web experience is your brand.
This ClickZ article uses Google as an example of the user experience trumping all the fancy graphics and flash intros that people think equal brand online.
I must agree.
January 27, 2003
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Thought
Interesting to note that Jupiter Research has set up a weblog area for their analysts to pontificate in real-time.
Considering that Jupiter makes it’s living selling in-depth reports by these analysts, I see this as a very smart move. The analysts can add insights into the overall blog culture, picking up links and being included in blog-rolls. This will help a lot more people see that they know what they’re talking about (hopefully) and therefore build an audience for the paid research.
I think this is a good example of the business use of blogs by content-heavy companies.
November 1, 2002
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Thought
“The legit e-mail marketing companies…are really going to hate this feature,” Smith continued. “They use e-mail Web beacons…to gather statistics about e-mail advertising campaigns.”
Will they ever hate it.
A recent CNET article called New Outlook to give spammers the boot details changes to Outlook (the most used e-mail application) that default to NOT loading HTML images from remote servers when a message is shown. It’s not entirely clear if this only related to “preview windows” or all windows, but for legitimate marketers this is really going to mess up the move to HTML messaging, and along with it muddy e-mail tracking stats further.
At the same time, it’s a boon for people tired of HTML-laced spam, so it will be interesting to see how this all shakes out between now and the launch of Office 11 in the summer of 2003.
October 23, 2002
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Thought
Well, it looks like the “DMA giving in” on Spam is not exactly what it seems. From my understanding of reports I’ve read over the last day or so, the DMA is calling for legislation, which is good, because we’re at that stage now.
But they are suggesting (as they always have) that unsolicited e-mail is okay as long as you have a real From and Subject line and provide a street address.
The idea is that this law would get rid of all the dubious spam that gets sent, but would also clear the way for “legitimate” companies to spam anyone they wanted to. This was always their position and it is dead wrong.
The DMA should follow the strategy of the CMA which has had a very enlightened policy since 1997 (disclosure: I was one of the authors of the CMA policy).
This Wired News article called “Spam So Bad the Spammers Balk” gives a good overview.
October 22, 2002
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Thoughts on Spam as a Marketer and a Human
Alexander Bosika wrote recently about the DMA’s decision to “crack down” on spam. Since he baited me to comment, I’ll fall for the trap.
Spam is a big issue that I tend to look at from two vantage points.
1. As an individual.
2. As a marketer.
As an individual, spam is certainly a huge issue for most people. I think the issue has been somewhat exaggerated by the fact that the people comment on spam (journalists, pundits, those active online) also tend to have the most exposure of e-mail addresses online and therefore tend to have their e-mail addresses harvested and passed around a bit more. Good luck using your inbox effectively if you used your main e-mail address to register a domain.
Still, for those less highly involved in online issues, spam is still a big problem for them. And certainly, the rise of hard-core spam with really raunchy subject lines doesn’t give anyone comfort that things are getting better.
As an individual, I use Spamnet by Cloudmark. This is the best solution I’ve seen to date, building on the P2P concepts of Napster and some clever pattern recognition algorithms. The software is still buggy (it’s in beta), but it is getting close to primetime and more and more I’m seeing it listed as one of the options people list when talking about “fighting spam”. My guess is that 9 months from now (if not soon), Cloudmark will be the Google of spam-catching.
So as an individual I see Cloudmark as a gift from above and use it constantly, even with the bugs in the beta version.
As a marketer, Cloudmark scares the crap out of me. Because it allows users to determine what is spam, it has a tendency to give “false positives”. A False Positive in this context is a legitimate opt-in e-mail marketer getting labeled as spam. Cloudmark tends to be better than most, but the false positives it gives are very interesting. Because people vote on each message in real-time rather than identifying in advance which IP addresses or domains to block, you see the internal workings of people’s feelings on e-mail marketing.
When the NYT sends me a book or movie updates, they always get through. As soon as they send a “special offer to NYT subscribers”, it invariably gets dumped. Amazon new release listings tend to get through Cloudmark, but the “affiliate updates” which contain a lot of promotional information, some of it for partners, gets labeled as spam.
This means that marketers need to live in constant fear of having any given message deemed as low enough value to be spam, even if every name is legitimate. And the problem will only get worse as these tools become more prevalent and more effective.
My guess is that e-mail marketing will change radically in the next 9 months as Cloudmark hits critical mass. When it tips, everything will change.
October 16, 2002
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Thought
Usability (and Google) fans might enjoy this Good Experience interview with Marissa Mayer, Product Manager at Google. She was their first full-time usability person and offers interesting insights into how Google has managed to stay simple while adding features.
October 12, 2002
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Thought
Jakob Nielsen is of course always a sharp cookie. But in this recent article he focussed on the usability of e-mail newsletters and came up with a must read for any e-mail marketer or online publisher.
Keep it simple!
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Thought
Here’s a NYT article called Online Fans Start to Pay the Piper.
The article covers the increased acceptance of paid online music services like listen.com. This makes total sense as Listen is making baby steps to the musical nirvana — the day that we have a true celestial jukeboxes — all the songs you’d ever want, easily and instantly accessible via a simple, powerful interface.
October 4, 2002
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Thought
I stopped attending Internet World in 1998. (I started attending in 94). So this ClickZ article called “Internet World — R.I.P.” wasn’t a shock to me, but it did make me a bit sad.
While the need for a universal “everything Internet” conference is probably not realistic anymore, I pine for the days when I could know pretty much everything important about doing business online.
Here’s a representative quote from the article:
“The economy” is too simple an explanation of why visitors and exhibitors alike stayed away in droves. From a marketing perspective, Internet World makes no sense.
“It’s simply not targeted,” Topica CEO Anna Zornosa shrugged after surveying the sparsely populated hall, “everyone here is only talking about how empty it is.”
October 3, 2002
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Thought
If you’re not from Toronto you may not know that our “New York City run by the Swiss” is often used as a body double for major US cities, particularly NYC. In fact over 1,365 films were shot in Toronto in 2001.
One of the more disconcerting aspects of Toronto substituting for NYC is that it is not uncommon to be driving down the street and see a classic NY Yellow Cab driving down the street followed by an NYPD cruiser. Occasionally you’ll step onto an otherwise ordinary street in Toronto’s financial district and see street signs in MPH instead of KPH, or USA today newsboxes on the corner.
For those of us who have spent any time in New York, this can cause a bit of vertigo. There are times where you have to stop and think why what you see isn’t quite right.
September 24, 2002
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Double Opt-out?
Many e-mail marketing experts recommend “Double Opt-in” as the best approach to building your e-mail marketing list. Double Opt-in means that the subscriber must respond to a confirmation e-mail before they are put on the list (i.e. you sign up at a site, get an e-mail saying “confirm subscription”, and only if you reply to that confirmation e-mail do you get put on the list). This is done to ensure that there is no abuse of an open e-mail list (for example, some people have been known to sign up enemies to lists they know they will hate — like baptists on the Barbie Fetish list.)
Yahoo seems to have taken this to some perverse extreme by introducing “Double Opt-out”.
I just unsubscribed from the Tom Tom Club mailing list (don’t ask), and got this reply from YahooGroups (where the list lives):
Subject: Please reply to unsubscribe from tomtomclubnewsflash
Hello,
We have received a request from you to unsubscribe from the
tomtomclubnewsflash group. Please confirm your request by
replying to this message. If you do not wish to unsubscribe from
tomtomclubnewsflash, please ignore this message.
Regards,
Yahoo! Groups Customer Care
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
While double opt-in is good because it keeps consumers off lists they might not want to be on, double opt-out is bad because it keeps consumers on lists they clearly want to get off of. Another move by Yahoo! that shows that they just don’t get the ‘Net anymore. Very sad.
(And the pop-up ad for a casino on the Yahoo!Groups homepage didn’t help much with my opinion either.
September 22, 2002
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Thought
The world’s favorite statistic about phone use is no longer true. Clay Shirky debunks the myth that 50% of the people in the world have not made a phone call in this short Wired article.
September 19, 2002
September 18, 2002
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Thought
This article from the Washington Post (via BizReport) talks about another effective use of the Net I don’t see covered much — micro-commerce sites. By focussing on incredibly small niches and keeping costs tight, a small company can build a nice business online. Instead of thinking about e-commerce as producing the “next Walmart”, I think it is more interesting to look at its potential to create the next “corner barbershop”. i.e. a nice business for two or three people to profit from that serve a specific need of a community.
Of course, online, that community is not defined by the neighborhood they live in, but more likely by an obscure passion.
Here’s a quote:
“In many ways, the very same aspects of the Internet that benefit the largest global marketers can also offer benefits to the smallest outfits,” said Dan Hess, vice president of ComScore Networks Inc., an Internet research firm. “It offers an unmatched, unparalleled ability to reach niche groups of consumers. There is no other medium that can do that.”
September 14, 2002
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Thought
I always find Clay Shirky’s writing insightful.
The posting on his site called Broadcast Institutions, Community Values talks about the problems that publishers can get into when they start hosting communities. Communities look like natural extensions of what publishers do, but they live by different rules, and this is what Shirky points out.
For example:
Media people often criticize the content on the internet for being unedited, because everywhere one looks, there is low quality — bad writing, ugly images, poor design. What they fail to understand is that the internet is strongly edited, but the editorial judgment is applied at the edges, not the center, and it is applied after the fact, not in advance. Google edits web pages by aggregating user judgment about them, Slashdot edits posts by letting readers rate them, and of course users edit all the time, by choosing what (and who) to read.
This also applies to blogs which seem to be to be like online communities without an organizing body or software of any sort.
September 11, 2002
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Thought
Good article by Clay Shirky on why it is often hard for broadcasters to develop true communities (as opposed to calling their audience a community):
Shirky: Broadcast Institutions, Community Values
September 10, 2002
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Thought
I rather sheepishly did something today in the AIMS ADL that I don’t normally do — point people to my own site.
In general I’ve preferred to keep my personal opinions out of my moderation of the ADL as much as is possible (which is not entirely of course). But I included a post about blogs in this issue and I felt that my blog was a good example because it IS NOT the perfect blog. I don’t get to it nearly as much as I should to make it a really vibrant and living thing. And I don’t feel I’ve found a definitive “voice” for it (although you may hear it when you read my /opinions).
In any case, if you got here from the ADL, thanks for following my humble link. And if you didn’t get here from the ADL, here are the links I provided in my post:
Articles on Weblogs
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/13/megnut.html
http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/logged_in/ekrimen_blogs.html
Weblog Examples:
For those of you now hooked, you can read Chapter 8 (Weblogs in Business) from the book “We Blog” here:
My questions to the ADLerati out there:
Do you Weblog? If so, why? Business or personal?
Do you see business advantages to Weblogs?
Do weblogs replace or supplement other communications?
August 24, 2002
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Thought
Many people focus on the personal and journalistic uses of blogs. But they are also very useful for companies to use to enhance (or establish) communications between themselves and their customers.
A great example of the power of weblogs in business is Oddblog by Oddpost.
Oddpost itself is an amazing company that I’ve mentioned before, but I found that I loved them even more after finding their idiosyncratic blog, which on the face of it tells you about bug fixes, but in reality, if the personification of their brand.
Cupcakes!
August 23, 2002
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Thought
Hit Charade — The music industry’s self-inflicted wounds by Mark Jenkins is one of the best articles I’ve read on the problems with the music industry these days. As a former music industry insider, this all rings true. One of the main reasons I left the music business was the anti-fan, litigious nature of the industry’s approach to the business. Hopefully there is something that can do for the modern music malaise what MTV did in the early 80s.
August 17, 2002
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Thought
A good New York Times article on the foibles of voice recognition.
For example, here is a list of “wordos” that author David Pogue’s software created (some quite funny):
bookmark it -> book market
Motorola -> motor roll a
modem port -> mode import
a procedure -> upper seizure
and then stick it in the mail -> and dense thicket in the mail
movie clips -> move eclipse
I might add -> I my dad
inscrutable -> in screw double
hyphenate -> -8
suffocate -> Suffolk 8
a case we summarily dismissed -> a case we so merrily dismissed
or take a shower -> Ortega shower
the right or left -> the writer left
oxymoron -> ax a moron
ArialPhone guy -> aerial fungiStill, I can’t help thinking that voice input is inevitable — as are translation errors. I wonder if it is possible that humans will modify pronunciations to accommodate the machines. This would be analogous to Newton failing in writing recognition but the Palm succeeding because it used “Graffiti” a made up alphabet. It was easier for the humans to learn to deal with the ambiguity than the machines.
August 13, 2002
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Thought
“Eight by Eight” looks like it is going out the window.
This NPR audio stream counters pretty much every myth about water that you didn’t know was a myth.
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Thought
Jim Sterne, who is always a great read, has an article on Boxes and Arrows called “Customer Experience Meets Online Marketing at Brand Central Station.”
The only weak thing about the article is the title. Jim starts out discussing branding in general:
“A brand is the culmination of all of the interactions that all the people in a marketplace have with the firm.
He then goes on to talk in more detail about how this plays out online and what measurements you can use to judge your effective you are at reaching those overarching branding goals.
August 10, 2002
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Thought
More reasons to love the Internet:
“Silophone is a project by [The User] which combines sound, architecture, and communication technologies to transform a significant landmark in the industrial cityscape of Montréal.
Located in Montréal’s old port, Silo #5B-1 was built in 1958 and has been cited by Le Corbusier as a masterpiece of modern architecture. The structure, constructed entirely of reinforced concrete, is 200 metres long, 16 metres wide and approximately 45 metres at its highest point. The main section of the building is formed of approximately 115 vertical chambers, all 30 metres high and up to 8 metres in diameter. These tall parallel cylinders, whose form evokes the structure of an enormous organ, have exceptional acoustic properties: a stunning reverberation time of over 20 seconds. Anything played inside the Silo is euphonized, made beautiful, by the acoustics of the structure. All those who have entered have found it an overwhelming and unforgettable experience.
Silophone makes use of the incredible acoustics of Silo #5 by introducing sounds, collected from around the world using various communication technologies, into a physical space to create an instrument which blurs the boundaries between music, architecture and net art. Sounds arrive inside Silo #5 by telephone or internet. They are then broadcast into the vast concrete grain storage chambers inside the Silo. They are transformed, reverberated, and coloured by the remarkable acoustics of the structure, yielding a stunningly beautiful echo. This sound is captured by microphones and rebroadcast back to its sender, to other listeners and to a sound installation outside the building. Anyone may contribute material of their own, filling the instrument with increasingly varied sounds.”
Can you imagine explaining this to someone 10 years ago?
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Thought
Tessa Wegert disagrees with me on the iVillage pop-up ban in her ClickZ article “Why Nix Effective Formats?”
I think the reason to “nix effective formats” is to preserve the long-term value of the iVillage audience. If iVillage keeps going against the strong disapproval of over 90% of their audience they won’t have much of an audience before too long.
The problem here is that a lot of things that work for marketers (at least in the short run) are not good for the Net (in the long run). We all need to work on ways of making money online that let the Net work well for all concerned. I can’t see how Intrusion Marketing will fit into this (in the long run).
July 31, 2002
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Thought
O’Reilly Network’s article “What We’re Doing When We Blog” by Meg Hourihan is a great overview of what makes Weblogging different from having a personal home page. I appreciate people who are getting back to “deep thoughts” about what we are doing online. It seemed over the last few years that new ideas and analysis of them had fallen out of fashion.
My guess is this will be a heavily linked to article (I found the article via Davenet)
July 30, 2002
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Thought
A great article on ClickZ by Vin Crosbie called AOL Time Warner: It’s a New Media, Baby hits the nail on the head. The Internet is different than other media, primarily because it allows people to communicate with others and explore niche interests.
Most big media companies miss this entirely.
July 29, 2002
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Thought
iVillage is doing the right thing.
Pop Go Those Blasted Pop-Up Ads, iVillage Decrees says the New York Times.
It’s good to see one of the original niche content sites setting a positive trend and formally moving away from pop-up ads:
Now, iVillage, a network of Web sites for women, says it is heeding its readers’ complaints and plans to eliminate most pop-up advertising by Sept. 30 on all its sites.
IVillage said a survey of its readers in March indicated that “92.5 percent of iVillage women found pop-up advertising to be the most frustrating feature of the Web.”
It seems that more and more these days, publishers’ desperation to make an ad dollar is turning them into carney hucksters, using any tactic they can to foist whatever product they have on an unsuspecting public.
Hopefully, other publishers will follow iVillage and we will see the emergence of more contextual, likable advertising online.
July 27, 2002
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Thought
Ooh, it’s 1998 again!
I thought I’d taken a ride in the way-back machine when I read this InternetNews article (Miller Launches Branded Calendar)
Here’s a quote:
“Miller Brewing Company is extending its brand to a free online entertainment calendar that it’s hoping will become a central part of consumers’ social outings.
… the Miller Time Network online calendar offers local information on music, bars, clubs, sports, food and movies. The calendar also lets users download local maps, buy tickets for events or send invitations to friends.”
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea — it just seems that the appetite for these funky branded apps has decreased considerably. Hope it works for them so I can brush of my “misheard lyrics” site business plan.
July 25, 2002
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Thought
Fascinating article in the New York Times on the increasing elusiveness of privacy in a world that continues to move online.
Here’s a quote:
These days, people are seeing their privacy punctured in intimate ways as their personal, professional and online identities become transparent to one another. Twenty-somethings are going to search engines to check out people they meet at parties. Neighbors are profiling neighbors. Amateur genealogists are researching distant family members. Workers are screening co-workers.
In other words, it is becoming more difficult to keep one’s past hidden, or even to reinvent oneself in the American tradition. “The net result is going to be a return to the village, where everyone knew everyone else,” said David Brin, author of a book called “The Transparent Society” (Perseus, 1998). “The anonymity of urban life will be seen as a temporary and rather weird thing.”
July 19, 2002
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Thought
For you “data junkies”, After the Dot-Bomb might be worth a look.
Here is the abstract of the in-depth article that follows:
In the excitement of the “dot-com” rush of the 1990’s, many Web sites were developed that provided information retrieval capabilities poorly or sub-optimally. Suggestions are made for improvements in the design of Web information retrieval in seven areas. Classifications, ontologies, indexing vocabularies, statistical properties of databases (including the Bradford Distribution), and staff indexing support systems are all discussed.