Archive for the 'Marketing' Category
July 17, 2006
Shark Attacks Silver Spring!
It’s not every day that a large building in your town sprouts fins, tail and head full of very sharp teeth. This is a pic of the Discovery Channel HQ building in Silver Spring, MD. They are using the shark to promote shark week on their channel.
I think this qualified as a Purple Cow, except it is a Big Shark.
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June 26, 2006
Member ROI for Sharing Via the Association
John Robb posted last week about how he thought that a lot of these Web 2.0 companies are taking advantage of their most active users by not providing the ability to invest beyond their participation in the social services. My guess is that John feels they are not compensated with enough value from the services themselves compared to the value they are contributing to these companies.
This made me think that associations are uniquely positioned to address this issue. They don’t have shareholders, so value created for the organization can be channeled into creating more value for the members. This is something we should explore and talk about with our members. Sharing via your association can return more value to you and your field than it will via commercial services.
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June 18, 2006
How Spam Web Sites Are Created
Here is an informative post on how one person can create billions of pages, get them listed in Google and then plaster it with pay per click advertising to make serious money. This is the kind of thing much of the spam comments and trackbacks to blogs are attempting to create links to.
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June 13, 2006
Attention Economy for Associations Podcast
As promised, here is the podcast that Ben and I recorded this morning. It runs just shy of 17 minutes.
One note: In the recording we mention that the Attention Trust sells attention data. I believe this is incorrect in that they offer a service for storing your own attention data online but do not sell that data. What benefit this offers to the individual is unclear to me. Maybe Ed Batista can chime in here on the comments on what benefit you would receive from loading your data into one of their providers.
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June 10, 2006
Investing in the Attention Economy
Ben Martin and I will be facilitating a session at the upcoming ASAE & the Center Membership and Marketing Conference. We had a short article in an ASAE newsletter recently on this very topic as a lead-in to the session. You can read the full text of it below. Ben and I will also be recording a short podcast on this topic early next week. Check back here on Tuesday to listen in.
Hope to see you at the session!
Investing in the Attention Economy
By C. David Gammel, CAE, and Ben Martin, CAE
The amount of available information is growing exponentially, but human attention seems to be a limited resource. We each only have a finite number of hours in the day with which to live our personal and professional lives. The same is true for our members.
In fact, associations compete with each other and thousands of other organizations for the attention of their members. People are distracted by millions of inconsequential information sources and must filter them out in order to recognize the things that are most important to them.
To cope, many of our members work in a state of continuous partial attention. Often they divide their attention among several things at once, such as scanning e-mail or news headlines while talking on a conference call. Your latest carefully crafted newsletter might only receive a cursory glance before hitting the electronic version of the circular file. The implication: Your members must be able to quickly scan and discern the value of your communications if you want them to invest a higher level of attention.
This has significant implications for membership recruitment and retention. Members, for instance, base their decision to renew their memberships on the basis of their feelings of connection and engagement. That’s why it’s crucial that you get an appropriate amount of your members’ attention. Generally speaking, a prospect’s attention must be 100 percent captured for at least a few moments in order to complete any financial transaction.
The study of attention is called attention economics–a combination of economic analysis and data about the things to which people give their attention. Steve Gillmor, a popular writer and podcaster on Web technology, turned this research into a trend by gathering data on what people are paying attention to on the Internet and leveraging that data to provide better service and content.
Attention economics raises many questions for associations. How much of your members’ attention do you receive? How much do you want? What will you need to give to your members in exchange for their attention? Does an increase in attention per member mean that your revenue per member will increase as well?
To help answer these questions and further explore this topic, be sure to come to “The Unsession: How to Invest in the Attention Economy� at ASAE & the Center for Association Leadership’s 2006 Marketing & Membership Conference. This “unsession� will be highly interactive and driven by the participants. We’re limiting attendance to the first 40 participants, so be sure to arrive early!
Update: Ed Batista, Executive Director of the Attention Trust, posted some more details about Steve Gillmor’s role in developing the idea of the attention economy. Thanks, Ed! (Ed’s personal blog was just added to Tom Peters’ blogroll. Nice!)
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May 5, 2006
The Art of Customer Service
From Guy Kawasaki in early April, The Art of Customer Service:
If you put in a policy to take care of the worst case, bad people, it will antagonize and insult the bulk of your customers.
Read that sentence above 3 times. Put it on your wall. Give it to HR and your CEO. I believe this is a universal truth for both customers and employees. Managing via exceptions creates a negative focus with very people for whom you should be providing value.
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May 4, 2006
When Your Long Tail Gets Lost in the Mail
Kevin Holland posted an amusing story about what happens when you don’t change your Netflix address when you move.
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April 15, 2006
Messaging Bloggers: Doesn’t Work
Advertising Age has a great article on why marketers must really understand blogging before they engage in that space: Resist Corrupting Blogs With Messages. Those who start sending press releases to bloggers will only incite ridicule, if anything.
So, if marketers enter the blogosphere by messaging, they will stand out like an ad on a birthday cake. Messaging simply won’t work in the blogosphere because bloggers have gotten too used to the sound of honest talk with other customers. Worse, messagers will suffer perhaps irreparable harm to their reputations. Besides, blogs are much more interesting than marketing messages.
The opportunity is not for marketers to pick off the chickens one by one but for marketers to unlearn what they have spent so long teaching themselves. The blogosphere is a vibrant human conversation. If marketers can learn to enter that conversation as humans first, talking honestly about what they care about, identifying themselves and exposing themselves, then they will be welcome in the blogosphere. But, of course, that means they cannot enter it as marketers.
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March 6, 2006
Purple Search
Google has posted a video of a talk that Seth Godin, my favorite marketing guru these days, gave to Google employees recently. It is a synthesis of material from many of his books and is great stuff. Seth has been following up with several blogs posts, going into more depth on points he discussed in the video.
I spotted this via about 30 feeds I subscribe to. When something shows up multiple times in several feeds in a short time frame, you know there is something to it.
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February 12, 2006
Usability and Branding: You Can Have Both
Kevin Holland provides a thoughtful response to my critique of the Chiptole web site. Here is his summary:
David raised a very good point about the importance of making key functionality usable. I’m just saying it’s not the only point. The purpose of a website is not just to make it easy to find things. It’s representative of the whole experience offered by an organization or company. It is, in fact, your organization. As we are giving our organzation’s website a much-needed redesign, that point is very much on my mind.
I don’t disagree that the web can be an extension of your brand and/or experience for your customers. However, I think you can have both usability and brand consistency (whatever that may mean to you) with a little thoughtful design. Chipotle fails in this area, I still believe.
In fact, Kevin’s post actually contains the core of my rebuttal. He discusses the experience of going to Chipotle as part of their brand: simple, easily understood food selections; rapid service; and a tasty product. All in all, a highly ‘usable’ restaurant experience that is presented in a ‘hip’ way. Why can’t the site mimic this core part of their brand while being hip at the same time? Answer: It could without having to limit its usefulness by burying key features under gee-whiz flash animations.
See Apple’s web site for an example of a company that makes its big margins on the hipness of its highly usable products. No flying iPods, you’ll note.
In reality, this discussion is a bit of a shot in the dark, since we don’t know what Chipotle really wants their site to contribute to the organization. I do assume that selling burritos is in there somewhere, however.
It would be interesting to see a survey of their web site visitors, asking why they came to the site that day. I would bet a free burrito that the single biggest reason is to find a restaurant and/or place an online order, not to see what this hip burrito experience is about. I don’t see how an organization is doing itself any good if the branding gets in the way of providing core services.
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