Tag: marketing

Killing credibility

One dumb campaign can hurt a brand

Microsoft’s Smoked by Windows Phone Challenge aims to show their mobile phones are the fastest on the market.

Unfortunately if you beat them, it appears you might not win the prize as Sahas Katta discovered.

Going back on a prize in a competition that already looks somewhat biased doesn’t just hurt Windows Phone’s credibility but it hurts the whole company’s – it looks cheap, lame and petty.

Realising the damage this does Microsoft’s brand, evangelist Ben Randolph offered Sahas a laptop and phone, although already the botched promotion has probably already hurt the product.

Windows Phone is a “must succeed” for Microsoft and that company would stage poorly thought out stunts with high chance of backfiring is disappointing given what is at stake for them.

Trust and reputation and the hardest things to earn and the easiest to squander, Microsoft’s management needs to be careful with this.

Hopefully Microsoft will show us some compelling reasons to buy an alternative to an iPhone or Android handset beyond dodgy marketing stunts.

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Overstuffing the social media goose

Businesses are struggling with too many online services

“Small business has to get on Pinterest” urges the social media advisor.

“Oh no, not another of these social media thingummies” thinks the business owner or marketing manager.

Pinterest is just the latest of a dozen online services that businesses have been urged to join in recent years. An incomplete list would include the following;

  • Pinterest
  • Google Plus
  • Facebook
  • Facebook Timeline
  • Quora
  • Color
  • Yelp
  • Tumblr
  • Google Places
  • True Local
  • Blogging
  • LinkedIn
  • LinkedIn Groups
  • Twitter

The question for the time poor business owner or under resourced manager is “where do I find the hours for all this?”

It’s not just smaller businesses either – most corporations don’t have the resources to dedicate to all of these services, let alone provide the 24×7 coverage many are beginning to expect.

When it comes to online services and social media businesses owners and managers are like geese being stuffed for foie gras, they’ve had so much stuffed down their necks they can barely move.

Like the foie gras ducks, businesses have become glassy eyed – when someone tells them they have to sign up to another online service they just switch off.

We’ve reached the point where are too many networks for event the most underemployed social media expert to handle.

For those advocating social networking or other online services for business, it’s time to start acknowledging the time poor reality of most businesses and consider exactly which services are best suited for the organisation.

In businesss it’s not time to switch off, that could be the worst thing to do as so many new ways of talking with customers are developing.

Instead of feeling overwhelmed, it’s time to start carefully considering which services will work best with your markets, products and staff and choose carefully.

The days of just charging into the latest social media sensation are over, these services are growing up and they have to prove its worthwhile for businesses – or individuals – to invest their time.

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Overselling technology

Do technologists promise too much?

“We’d like to allow remote band members – say a violinist in the Australian outback – be able to participate in an orchestra as if they were there. We hope the NBN will be able to do this.”

When the band organiser said this at a business roundtable all the technologists, myself included, choked.

There are many things the Australian National Broadband Network will deliver but the ability to teleport a violinist from the outback to downtown Sydney or Melbourne isn’t one of them.

One of the problems with technology is we tend to oversell the immediate effects; as Bill Gates famously said “The impact of all new technologies is overestimated in the short term but under estimated in the long term.”

Because we tend to sell the immediate sizzle, customers are disappointed when our promises don’t eventuate. In the decade it takes to win them back, those initial benefits we didn’t deliver in six months have become commonplace.

This is probably one of the reasons why businesses are reluctant to invest in new technology or online services; they’ve heard the promises before and they don’t trust what they can hear.

In the late 1990s businesses spent tens of thousands – sometimes millions – establishing websites that didn’t work. Those financial scars still hurt when they hear talk, some of them are still paying off those sites. So it’s barely surprising they are reluctant to return to a sector that has now matured.

Perhaps it’s best to underpromise; instead of cloud computer vendors committing themselves to 80% savings and social media experts promising millions of customers from their new viral video, it may be better to be more realistic with the expectations.

Customers have become deaf to wonderful promises, they are expecting us to deliver. Promising the world is no longer a business strategy.

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Knowledge and power

Can we use the data revolution effectively and well?

In the 16th Century English courtier Sir Francis Bacon declared “Knowledge is Power”, something certainly true during the conspiracy prone reign of Elizabeth I.

Today the data available about ourselves and our communities is exploding along with the computer power to process that information to turn it into knowledge.

We see that knowledge being used in interesting ways – US shopping chain Target recently described how they used data mining to determine, with 87% accuracy, to figure out if a shopper is pregnant.

That 87% is important, it says the algorithm isn’t perfect and bombarding a false positive with baby wear advertising could prove embarrassing, or in some families and societies even fatal.

A good example of data misuse are the two unfortunate Brummies (alright, one’s from Coventry) who were deported from the US for tweeting they were “going to destroy America and dig up Marilyn Monroe”

For the US immigration and homeland security agents, they ready the jokey tweets by the Birmingham bar manager through their own filter and came to the wrong conclusion, although it’s likely their performance indicators rewarded them for doing this.
This is the Achilles heel in big data – used selectively, information can be used to confirm our own prejudices, ideologies and biases.
In 2003 we saw this in the run up to the US invasion of Iraq with cherry picking of information used to build the false case that the ruling regime had weapons of mass destruction that could attack Europe in 45 minutes.
For businesses, we can be sure data showing the CEO is wrong or the big advisory firm has made the wrong recommendations will be overlooked in most cases.

Despite the Pollyanna view of a world of transparency and openness driven by social media and online publishing tools, the information is asymmetric; governments and big business know more about individuals or those without power than the other way round.

In a world where politicians, business people and journalists trade on their insider knowledge rather than competing in the open, free market we have to understand that filtering this data is essential to retaining  powers and privileges.

Usually when the data threatens the existing power structures it is repressed in the same way a dissenting taxpayer, citizen, employee or shareholder is discredited and isolated.

At present there’s lots of data threatening existing commercial duopolies, political parties and cosy ways of doing business.

The fact many of those in power don’t want to see what their own systems are telling them is where the real opportunities lie.

Entrepreneurs, community groups and activists have access to much of this data being ignored by incumbents, it will be interesting to see how it’s used.

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Exposure exposed

Giving away freebies in return for exposure rarely works

A few years back a client of mine was delighted to receive a phone call from a television producer offering exposure for his business on a national TV program.

The offer was Jeff, who is a builder, would donate his company’s work to a television home improvement show and in return Jeff’s business would get a mention in the credits as well as some coverage in the program.

Jeff agreed, had new t-shirts for his labourers printed and they did three days work helping celebrity gardeners refurbish a backyard.

The guys had a ball, the labourers chatted up the presenter and the pretty production assistants and for a day or so Jeff felt like he was in Hollywood.

A few weeks later the show went to air – there were a couple of glimpses of Jeff’s guys doing stuff and if you were quick with the freeze button you could pick out part of Jeff’s business name and phone number.

When the show finished, Jeff’s business appeared for a split second which was difficult to read if you were lightning fast with the remote control. Not a great return for several thousand dollars of labour and materials.

That was an expensive lesson for Jeff.

Recently I heard of a business that was asked to contribute some of products to a newspaper – they wanted an ongoing commitment that would cost the business quite a bit of money.

For the newspaper this is a great deal – they tie in a promotion for their readers that costs them nothing. The business is left out of pocket with little upside except for some “exposure” of dubious value.

We see this repeated every day by dozens of businesses being seduced into offering fat discounts for group buying sites. The salesman’s spiel is that a prominent offer will get exposure on their email that goes out to thousands of people.

Most of these promises are nonsense; giving away your time or work for free is the most expensive thing a business can do and if it’s going to work it has to be part of a strategic plan.

It’s been said all publicity is good publicity, but that’s not really true if there’s no return on a substantial effort.

Blindly giving things away in the hope of getting some free publicity isn’t a good business practice and those who urge you to do so aren’t acting your best interests as Jeff learned.

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Successful Sources Will Not Be Paid

The free myth is biting us in many ways

The whole world wants a freebie, and many of us are giving our ideas, intellectual capital and service away to online magazines in the hope of getting a link or a little bit of publicity.

Bringing the idea undone is the unfortunate reality that web is awash with free pointless material that adds little value. Your contribution, however valuable, gets lost in the static of PR driven articles and SEO optimised fluff.

This is why Google are trying to tie social recommendations into their search results, although it’s hard to see how your cousin’s LOLCat posts are going to add any more value than the generic garbage served from services like eHow.

Yet every day there’s more callouts for  free content – desperate journalists and publishers beg for our ideas or labor in return for some ‘exposure’.

And that ‘exposure’ floats away into the ocean of noise and irrelevance filled with the rest of the ‘free’ content.

Giving stuff away for free isn’t working well anymore and for those of us who are trying to build a business around that model, we’re struggling to get found or heard in the morass.

Along with the wasted time, the danger is we start giving away our best, most valuable work in order to get attention and then we have nothing left to sell.

Consumers are waking up to this and beginning to focus about what they read online. We should too.

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The business of baffling choices

Why do computer and phone companies offer so many plans and models?

In his Daring Fireball blog, John Gruber’s takes to task the view that Apple suffers through not having a wide product range.

John makes the valid point that Samsung seems to stealing market share from HTC rather than Apple but the whole theory of offering too many choices strikes to the heart of two industry’s business models.

Those two industries are the mobile telco business and the Windows personal computer sector.

In the PC world, the wide range of models has been both an advantage and a weakness; it’s allowed Dell and others to create custom machines to meet customer needs but also leaves consumers – both corporate and home buyers – confused and suspicious they many have been taken advantage of.

All too often customer were being had; frequently buyers found they’d bought an underpowered system stuffed with software that either was irrelevant to their needs or an upgrade was necessary to get the features they hoped for.

The entire PC industry was guilty of this and Microsoft were the most obvious – the confusing range of operating systems and associated software like the dozen version of Microsoft Office was deliberately designed to confuse customers and increase revenue.

For the PC industry, the “baffle the customer” model reached its zenith, or nadir, with Windows Vista where Microsoft deliberately put out an underspecced ‘Home’ edition designed to push sales up the value chain.

Compounding the problem, most of the manufacturers followed Microsoft’s lead and put out horribly underpowered systems in the hope that customers would upgrade with more memory, better graphics card and bigger, faster hard drives.

Most customers didn’t upgrade and as a result the Vista operating system – which was horrible anyway – enhanced its well deserved reputation for poor performance.

In the telco sector, consumer confusion lies at the heart of their profitable business model; a bewildering range of phones and plans often leaves the customer spending too much, either through an overpriced plan or paying punative charges for ‘excess’ use.

Having a hundred different types of Android phone adds to the confusion and, by restricting updates, they can cajole customers into ‘upgrading’ to a new phone and another restrictive plan every year or so. This is why you get phone calls from your mobile phone company offering a new handset deal 18 months into a two year plan.

Apple’s model has been different; in their computer range there has never been a wide choice, just a few configurations that meet certain price points. The same model has used for their phones and iPads.

For Apple, this means a predictable business model and a loyal customer base. They don’t have to compete on price and they don’t have to fight resellers and telcos who want to ‘own’ the customer. It’s one of the reasons mobile phone companies desperately want an alternative to the iPhone.

Companies using the baffling choices business model – Microsoft, HP, Dell and your local mobile telco – may well continue to do okay, but that business model is coming under challenge as new entrants are finding new niches.

For all of us as consumers all we can do is make the choices that are simple are reject complexity. Warren Buffett has always maintained he doesn’t invest in businesses he doesn’t understand, perhaps we should have the same philosophy with the purchases we make.

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