Why hasn’t the whole cell phone industry exploded?
I don’t mean the "use a portable phone to call people" market. That market is doing great, because everyone knows how to use a phone and a cell phone is just a better solution to that problem for a lot of uses.
I mean the entire "data in my pocket" or "fundamentally different kind of interaction" business. For years, everyone has been talking about the coming goldmine in mobile.
I think the problem is that we’ve been trying to solve the wrong problem.
Ten or fifteen years ago, when I was working with the folks at Prodigy, just about all the functionality of the web was known. And yet almost no one was working on the right stuff–the stuff that ended up working. Take a look at virtually every giant online success (except for Amazon) and none of them were obvious in 1992.
I think we’re going to discover a whole new universe of cell phone services that people want to pay for, things that we won’t be able to live without. Like… ringtones.
Mobile doesn’t have a problem. We (the marketers and the entrepreneurs) do.
May 15, 2006
I just passed a house for sale. The sign out front was from a mass market realtor, but from their higher end "estates" division. A fancier sign, a fancier name.
It wasn’t, however, a fancier house.
In one industry after another, premium brands (Tiffany) are becoming the standard. Why list a house with a regular realtor? Why buy jewelry from a regular store? Why wear regular clothes? As brands learn how profitable it is to go from Class to Mass (Wolfgang Puck and Armani come to mind), consumers are being trained to abhor not the cheap but the middling.
Zales for your anniversary anyone?
For the first time ever, Craig’s List didn’t come up with what we needed. So here, at the last minute, is a neat educational opportunity for the right student.
Megan Casey, editor in chief at Squidoo, asked me to post this notice about a summer internship. Small stipend, plus bonus possible at end of summer.
1. need someone in our office a few days a week. work from home some days is okay. hours pretty flexible.
2. office on the hudson river, 45 minutes from Grand Central in NYC. we pay transportation.
3. report to editor-in-chief. sample projects: new feature testing, pick shortlists for lens of the day selection, make prototypes for partners, research passionate communities, jump up and down in forums, day-to-day maintenance of the site, learn new hula hoop tricks, research lensmaking trends…
4. you can basically set your own role depending on how hard you work and what you’re good at
5. number five is up to you.
6. we have an espresso machine, but no ponies.
You’ll probably learn more than you imagine, I think. Drop a note to Megan if you’re interested or if you know someone who is. Contact: Megan.
So, here’s your choice:
You can have a billboard in Times Square (seen by 2 million people a day), or you can be the keynote speaker at the Allen & Co. annual millionaire media mogul retreat, listened to by about 150 people for an hour.
A no brainer? I hope so.
Of course, it’s not just the demographics. I think it’s the quality of the interaction.
Here’s a comparison between two hot properties (MySpace and Facebook) and Amazon.
Should Jeff Bezos be in mourning? After all, MySpace is killing Amazon in traffic.
Of course, this is all irrelevant. Not surprising, but irrelevant. It’s not surprising because it’s just human nature to measure a simple metric, and to want to improve it. It’s human nature to believe that the more people get exposed to your idea, the better you’re going to do. It’s human nature to want to ‘win’, however you define winning.
The problem here is that Amazon users visit to buy stuff, and MySpace users visit to flirt.
Last time I checked, flirting was a fairly unprofitable activity.
There’s a long list of high-traffic sites (beginning with theglobe.com and extending to hotmail and many others) that couldn’t monetize. They were stuck because the bait that got them the traffic had no room for a reasonable hook. You could use a TV like model and interrupt with irrelevant ads, but it doesn’t work so well.
All a long, long way to say something simple:
Whatever your website, I think you want better traffic, not more traffic.
You want to figure out why the right people will come, not build a sideshow that attracts exactly the wrong people.
At trade shows, there’s always a few booths with magicians, fire-eaters or bikini-clad models. And post-show, there’s no evidence at all to indicate that the noisy attractions did very much to improve the actual metrics of the booth.
So, maybe it doesn’t matter how your site does compared to a site in a different category. What matters, I think, is how your site does compared to last week or last month, and what’s happening to your conversion.
May 14, 2006
Alex Krupp points us to this neat post from Jackie & Ben: Church of the Customer Blog: The 1% Rule: Charting citizen participation.
The upshot is that for many organizations, the top 1% do 80% more of the contributing. The fascinating Wikipedia example (fascinating for me, anyway) points out that after about three and a half years, Wikipedia had just 15,000 contributors. But 4,000 or so of them did almost all the work.
Often, it’s easy to imagine that big companies like Hallmark and British Airlines and Coke are selling lots and lots to everyone. In fact, a tiny slice may very well be the difference between success and failure.
Listening to Car Talk over the last few weeks, I’ve heard a similar refrain. Something like, "my car is paid off so I’m ready to buy a new one." Today, it was, "We need to decide which car to sell–my husband’s or mine, because we need a minivan. But mine is paid off and his isn’t."
Of course,
a. when making the decision to buy a new car, it’s irrelevant that your old car is paid off. Just because you’ve finally paid it off doesn’t mean you should automatically go into debt again.
b. and debt is fungible, so you can sell either car and pay off whichever debt you need to.
American consumers have persuaded themselves that buying something is one thing, going into debt something totally different.
May 13, 2006
Just got a phone call from someone in the UK. He was in Buffalo, NY, excited to share the news about a meeting he just left. This was the beginning of his breakthrough, he said. 400 stores around the country would be carrying his new product (up from zero). It was (about to be) a home run.
Except it hadn’t happened yet. He hadn’t gotten final approval from some executive that he hadn’t actually met yet.
The home runs you almost hit don’t count. The home runs you almost hit don’t add up, they don’t accrue. As marketers, most of what we see are the home runs, the appearances on Oprah or the Facebooks of the world. The giant home runs that change everything.
Except that marketing success stories almost never happen that way. They happen on the back of singles, one after another. That’s how Wal-mart became Wal-mart and Boingboing became Boingboing.
Singles are less thrilling and require way too much work, but they build on each other. Over time, if you grow by 10 or 15% every week or month, you grow, reliably. And that steady growth transforms into every faster growth.
Any marketing plan that is nothing but a series of attempted home runs has a problem. The problem is that the odds don’t get better as you go along.
May 12, 2006
"Can you show me all our error pages?"
That’s what you might ask your web team.
If you have one that looks like this, perhaps you could fix it. Usually, it takes just a few more words of text, or some clear navigation instructions, or a little kindness even.
Five minutes, you’ll be done. Worth a shot.
May 11, 2006
Racquetball is a fast game because a ball shot in any direction rebounds and bounces off one wall after another.
Marketers often talk about silos with some disdain, because they represent disconnected thinking and broken communications networks. But silos are also like racquetball courts.
Because your idea is far more likely to bounce around, it’ll spread faster. Everyone inside the silo is going to learn about an important idea faster, precisely because they are inside the silo.
It’s so tempting to create products and services that link silos, that jump outside prescribed definitions.
But it’s not that easy.
An idea that might resonate inside of a silo might just wither away.
