iAmoeba
Allan sends over a riff about iDogs and other oddball addons for the iPod. I write back and tell him I’m waiting for the iAmoeba. He builds one.
It doesn’t do anything much. But every once in a while it divides, and then you have two.
“It’s just business”
Nope, actually…
"It’s just life."
Anyone who is willing to lie to you, cheat you or treat you with disrespect because it’s just business is doing more damage to herself than to you.
Work takes too much time and too much emotion for it to be just work. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to spend time or money with anyone who has this particular attitude disfunction.
The manipulators
Nobody likes being lied to or manipulated. Marketers have done it for generations, and now they’re doing it online with more skill than ever before.
Where is Tania?
She just sent me the following note (slightly edited):
I am an intern at …My boss Laura just asked me to get the word out about our Podcast interview with … a Sausalito agency that is putting brands like Toyota, American Eagle and Adidas into the virtual world.
Laura told me that if I was cool about it then you might actually check out this Podcast at…
Look, I like this job so any help you can give me would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Tania
Is this spam? Of course it is. Targeted spam, but still spam. I wrote back to Talia… her email bounced. Is there really a Tania?
Then I found a blog that had hit high on Digg today. It was a rant about flooding YouTube with spam. The thing is, the rant was sort of dumb and ill-thought through, and the blogger had more than 20 comments, with more than 95% pointing out what a yutz he was. Yet he had hundreds of Diggs. How? He had manipulated the system, pushed himself up to the top of the chart in a successful attempt to get a bunch of traffic to his site (and probably to promote the very videos he was ranting about).
If you only need to influence 500 people (or 10 people pretending to be 50 different people each) in order to show up on the screens of tens of thousands people… that’s too tempting for most capitalists to ignore (politicians are next, for sure).
Every day, there are literally hundreds of ad agencies working hard, trying to figure out how to slip corporate ideas into the system under the guise of it being homemade and real. They don’t have remarkable products or services, they don’t have clients willing to reconsider what it is they actually produce, so they’re busy trying to break the community systems online to help them (selfishly) succeed.
When a kid in New Jersey does the Numa Numa song, it’s poignant and funny and yes, remarkable. When an ad agency creates 100 variations of a gimmicky video hoping to hit the Digg jackpot, it just feels wrong.
As the ‘bestseller’ lists on YouTube and Reddit and other places become more and more important, they’re also going to become less useful. Less useful because the manipulators are way more focused and earnest than the typical consumer, and they’ll figure out a way to get under whatever radar gets installed.
At some point, it’s going to come down to who we trust. We didn’t trust Beechnut after we find out they put water in the apple juice. We didn’t trust Audi for a decade, even though there wasn’t anything actually wrong with their car. And we won’t trust Enron, Worldcom or Adelphia with our money for a long time to come.
It’s not just that this sort of deception is morally wrong. It’s also stupid. It’s stupid because it poisons the water supply for everyone, including the marketers who are busy doing it. Instead of realizing that they have an incredible playground in which to launch things that are truly innovative, they’d rather kill it by bending (or breaking) the rules.
It’s too bad, really.
And the upside? The upside is that individuals (and organizations) that don’t stoop, that manage to figure out how to have influence without trying to profit from it, those brands are the ones that will last, that will thrive and that will bring the rarest commodity–trust–to the table.
The 249% solution
Usama Fayyad is a genuine rocket scientist. He now runs the Strategic Data Solutions (which includes data mining) division of Yahoo, and he shared some astounding numbers with me today.
There’s one big insight that ought to change everything for anyone who buys clicks online. Here goes:
If you run banner ads, one study for Harris Direct shows that you can increase your brand awareness about 7% after a reasonable buy of banner ads. That’s just fine, though I’m on the record as saying that most banner campaigns are a waste of money. The kicker? In the study, Harris did the banner buy and watched the number of clicks to their contextual ad (you know, the text ads) go up by 249% over the next week.
Pow.
This means that someone answering the ‘brand awareness’ survey says, “no, I never heard of them,” but then, two days later, is more than twice as likely to click on their text ad.
More than twice.
I think that’s very cool.
Clarifications
Three things to add to recent posts:
1. In Small Is the New Big, I’m not saying that only small companies will thrive moving forward. Instead, I’m saying that any organization that acts small has an advantage over those that insist on acting big, regardless of size.
2. In response to my post on baby bottles, several readers pointed out that the writer has an Amazon affiliate account. So what? She’s not recommending Amazon, she’s recommending a product sold on Amazon… out of the millions to choose from. Amazon’s affiliate deal is brilliant precisely because it enables you to make strong recommendations without feeling like the commission has anything at all to do with it.
3. And finally, just because I note something on my blog (like a marketing program that might be a little scammy for example), it doesn’t mean I’m recommending it. Just noting it! Your mileage will certainly vary.
Shadows and Light
So, Bob Dylan’s new show on Broadway is getting panned by the critics. Probably because it’s terrible.
Terrible because it illuminates Dylan’s best work. And light is not always a good thing, especially if you’re a storyteller.
A ghost story in a dark cabin in the woods is very different from a ghost story on stage at the United Nations, under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights.
Sometimes, marketers try to tell people everything. Everything implies rational decisions by computers. Human beings don’t want to know everything–that’s why sausage factories don’t give tours. I don’t think you can expect to hide your unsavory secrets, but I also know that the shadows are just as important as the light.
The next million dollar home page
The thing to understand is that unlike TV and magazines, sites like this are going to keep changing the rules: mmmzr: double your traffic.
More or less of me?
I called Motorola for some tech help last week.
The first tech person did everything she could to get me off the phone as fast as possible. "You don’t have a Moto phone, so we can’t help you make it work with a Moto bluetooth headset. Call Nokia!" I persisted, to no avail. The only option seemed to be to return the headset to Amazon.
I called back. The second person spent exactly two minutes more on the phone with me and fixed the problem.
Which strategy is more profitable?
At some point, you need to make a decision about whether or not you want to interact with prospects and customers. Either you do or you don’t. If your goal is to reduce the cost, then get me off the phone (and stop advertising too, because advertising only leads to interactions). On the other hand, if your goal is to maximize the benefits, get me in the door and don’t let me leave. Play movies in your furniture store for impatient husbands. Hire talkative smart people for the phone. Support competitive products. Talk talk talk, listen listen listen.
Who wins?
Where did it all go?
According to a recent report, more than two-thirds of recent immigrants to the USA send money home regularly. The worst-paid, poorest people in the country manage to save enough to send some back to the old country. The US Ambassador from El Salvador says that the two million Salvadorians in the U.S. sent enough money home to account for 13 percent
of the GDP of his country.
At the same time, nearly two-thirds of American households are in debt. Many of them in serious debt. If the housing market falters, all those triple mortgages and home equity loans go under water, which means that people will have to sell their houses to get the money to pay off the loans, and the cycle starts.
Several people have pointed us to the rich calculator, that reminds you just how insanely rich your indebted best customers are. There are millions of Americans who make more than $200,000 a year. That’s 2 million dollars a decade, five or ten million dollars over the course of a career. Add it up, then look at the number. All you can do is shake your head and say, "where did it all go…"
What it means to be remarkable
It’s not about hype. It’s about non-compensated third parties writing stuff like this: Cool Tool: Dr. Brown’s Baby Bottles. Could (would) someone say this about your stuff?