Rule #6

From The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander (paraphrased):

Two prime ministers are discussing grave matters of state when a staffer for the host minister bursts in, screaming hysterically, gesticulating wildly, whereupon the minister admonishes him, “Peter,” he says, ” kindly remember Rule Number 6,” whereupon Peter is instantly restored to calm, apologizes and withdraws.

The ministers resumed their discussion, but were interrupted again by another high-level aide, apoplectic, pounding on the desk. Again the intruder is greeted with the words, “Marie, please remember Rule Number 6.” Marie is instantly restored to calm, thanks the prime minister and apologizes to his guest, and withdraws.

The visiting prime minister says, “My dear friend, I’ve seen many things in my too-long career, but never anything as remarkable as this. Would you be willing to share with me the secret of Rule Number 6?”

“Very simple,” replies his host. “Don’t take yourself so goddamned seriously.” Ah, says his guest, “A very fine rule.” He ponders it for a moment more, then asks, “And what, may I ask, are the other rules?”

“There aren’t any.”

Is America Falling off the Flat Earth? Competitiveness measures say, “Oops.”

The U.S. is like the man falling from the 25th floor, asked how he was doing as he passed the 15th, “Fine so far.”

Well, that’s not news to frogs in pots all over the world.

Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, chairs the “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” committee for the National Academy of Sciences. He wrote the report the committee issued last year under the title I used for this post. His not very politically-correct conclusion: “It is unreasonable to expect that in a broadly prospering world any single nation can maintain indefinitely the broad dominance that America has enjoyed in recent decades. But America can, if it wishes, maintain a position of considerable strength, overall prosperity and constructive leadership.”

Um, “if it wishes?” To be fair, Augustine and his anonymous committee (members not named in the report itself, or on the National Academies site) apparently can take credit for legislation passed and signed into law fast fall, complete with funding. On the other hand, the report itself says, “during the past 3 years alone, at least 16 significant reports on America’s growing competitiveness disadvantage have been issued,” and those were preceded by many more.

But America doesn’t need to be number one, do we? Here’s some of the evidence:

<ul><li>The U.S. share of the world’s leading-edge semi-conductor manufacturing capacity dropped from 36% to 11 percent in the past 7 years. </li>

<li>There are now 12 energy companies in the world whose reserves exceed those of the largest U.S. energy firm, Exxon-Mobil.</li>

<li>Nearly 60% of U.S. patent filings in information technology originate in Asia.</li>

<li>The United States ranks 17th among nations in high school graduation rate and 14th in college graduation rate.</li></ul>

The NAS convened a followup meeting at the end of April to report on progress, but I haven’t found any coverage of the meeting. In an article in “Innovation” Augustine notes that the media also did not cover the hearings and the passage of the America COMPETES Act.

“Online Community ROI” conference notes

Centers for Disease Control trying just about everything. About to open island in Second Life. Fred Smith

Trish Barber: iBelong Networks. “Lead, involve and organize your active group.” Keywords in your profile trigger news feeds, can share anything by widget; hierarchy of groups, 4 levels deep.

Online Community Research Network: Online Community ROI Models, 150 responses.

Lithium: rating/reputation system, SAAS: Sprint combines multiple services in single.

Jenna Woodul, LiveWorld: old-timers get out of control: best practices: feature best of comments, behavior; offer old-timers new place; announce stricter rules: turnover of core posters, increase in posts.

Mzinga: Barry Libert. Starbucks  has 48 people triage 100,000 suggestions within week or so. Wrote a book: The Idea Share Tool: “Wearesmarter” site: vote along with comments. Get cred for doing what people really want. (Dell: put Linux on desktop.)

Solutionset, Mike Lee: widget platform: surveys, tips, video, articles, highlighted posts, promotions: measurable.

David Silver: author of Smart Startups, angel investor, www.sfcapital.com. Offline group revenue streams: exhibitors, admission fees, sales of recordings, sponsors of cups, etc. Online revenue streams: sponsorships (static); affiliate ad networks (Scott’s affiliates are retail seed sellers, etc.), TV and Web Content, set up a  non-profit; subscription newsletters, tip-jar, review/recommend, (“Sermo” (sp?) sell stream of comments to companies); JD Powers (slice and dice stream and beat JD), Currency Exchange, Affinity Credit cards.

Loyalty-builders: great theater => great passion. Must be passionate to bring in new members, keep paying. “Lockers” keep stuff; voting records kept; alerts.

Aaron Strout, Mzinga: just acquired Prospero, ran ABC site for “Lost.” Theories board.. during writers’ strike. Sponsored by Jeep. Also Tripadvisor: All user-generated content, sell advertising.

BestBuy: community for employee to find out what customers are saying, then discovered 8% turnover for engaged employees, vs. 60% turnover for all employees.

Question: how about ranking resumes publicly?  (For those whose searches are public.) A. sure!

Q: combine social lending with community?

A. Great idea.

Q. Will users feel ripped off?

A. Must give value back. Don’t have to get all of public valuation if get enough value.

MQ. network fatigue? A. Opensocial? Friendfeed, social feed…no more walled content — widgets “disintermediation of site from content.”

Deepen relationship with customers: will be willing to work with you. P&G working with Tremors (mothers) and teen groups. 42% products from outside, 80% success rate because talked with community throughout process.

Portable social graph will help, but Facebook ad problem. Caution!

When all you really need is exponential growth

How do you get there from here? This is the issue as understood by newspapers, for example. Their web revenue is growing smartly, but is at least one order of magnitude away from being meaningful to the future of the company.

Or perhaps you have a blog business with a trickle of Google AdSense revenue, but it’s hard to justify the time it takes to write the blog on the basis of the revenue stream.

Or you’re working on a plan for a new business, and you’re stuck at the five-year projection worksheet. Are you like most first-time business venturers?  You might just figure, “Since everyone in the civilized world is a potential customer, that’s what, two billion people, and if only one percent actually buy…” — not appreciating that someone has to tell that one percent that they’re the designated buyers.

So, class, can anyone tell me what’s the key word in that last paragraph?

The key word is “tell.”

Okay, it’s a trick question– there is at least one more key word: “if.”

And it’s even trickier than that. The keys to success include:
1. A great product or service
2. Brilliant, focused, determined execution.
3. Marketing. That’s the “tell” multiplied by the “if” — who and where are your real prospects?
4. Sensitivity to your customers — mood, “mode”, motivation. By “mode” I mean what they’re doing at the moment you reach them with your marketing. Are they bored (mood), looking for distraction (mode)? Are they in the midst of a quest, trying to find a solution? Take me, the car shopper: My car’s working fine right now, but I love to dream about the next one. Oops, my car just broke down, I need a new one now! There are more modes, of course.

So back to the original question. In our next chapter.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Web marketing job description

When the boss can’t find your site in Google, or discovers AdWords, or reads an article in the Wall Street Journal or runs into some smartaleck who asks about MyFace or SpaceBook, it’s time to add to staff. Because the web programmer doesn’t have time, the marketing gal has got a full-time job doing print ads or direct mail or TV (or all three), and although so much online marketing is “free” or cheap, someone has to take the hours to do it. So a job description and a list of tools will give some depth to your dangerously flip answer to “Well, can’t you just get some links or something?”

First, check out Jeremiah Owyang’s list of web marketing tools, 36 items long, updated for 2008 (because, amazingly, new tools continue to be invented). Jeremiah’s blog on Web strategy fits well with his current job as senior analyst at Forrester.

Then compare it with this list of duties in an Animal Planet job posting :

“The marketing specialist will work closely with the VP, executive producers and producers of Animal Planet Interactive to develop and execute marketing campaigns designed to drive visitation and loyalty to the Animal Planet web site. The Marketing Specialist will focus on grassroots, viral, and word of mouth marketing to drive visitation to Animalplanet.com. The marketing specialist will also work closely with the Animal Planet network communications team, programming, production, marketing and new media to implement marketing strategies; collaborate with other internal departments, including network’s research, ad sales, affiliate sales, corporate communications and other network U.S. communications staff; and working closely with outside producers, agents and talent for Animal Planet.

“Responsibilities:

1. Promote Animal Planet’s overall digital content portfolio and specific digital media content offerings (blogs, widgets, games, online video, etc.) in online media.
2. Build and maintain relationships to secure coverage with key entertainment and vertical bloggers, magazines and websites.
3. Secure editorial placements on major online portals (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc.).
4. Submit content offerings for awards and lists (i.e. Online Journalism Awards, Best of the Web).
5. Secure mention of Animal Planet in major trend features covering the web.
6. Build awareness, buzz and affinity for Animal Planet’s talent on social networking sites (i.e. MySpace).
7. Develop and maintain presence of Animal Planet’s video clips on major user-generated content sites (i.e. YouTube).
8. Serve as a liaison with marketing, online, interactive media and programming departments to leverage all digital resources and assets.
9. Monitor and evaluate new technologies and promotional vehicles to ensure that Animal Planet is on the cutting edge of new innovations in the digital media space (i.e., the next YouTube/Facebook).
10. Collect data and evaluate performance of promotional vehicles and provide reports on successes and trends using key measurement techniques on the web (i.e. BlogPulse, Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz Index, etc).”

Oh (I think at this point I would be justified in saying “oy”)– and don’t forget the basic outlines of the marketing job in any medium, as defined by Forrester and Jeremiah (and annotated by me):

1. People (listen, observe, question, understand)
2. Objective(s) — define
3. Strategy/plan
4. Tools — select, prioritize to fit strategy and meet objectives
5. Integrate with other parts of the business
6. Measure
7. Improve

Great. I’m trusting you to get this done for our new product launch Monday.

Don’t advertise — featuretise! ™

If David Koretz hasn’t trademarked the term (or patented it!), he should. His company Bluetie.com started with a free online suite of email, spam filter, calendar apps, but instead of running text or banner ads, he offers seamless integration with these functions to selected advertisers. Orbitz was first: drag the time and route you want to fly onto your calendar, and Orbitz will deliver the results right onto your calendar. (Etickets are taking a little longer to integrate — but they’re coming.) My first notice of Bluetie was in Advertising Age, August 13, 2007, but a ZDNet blog entry from February  reported a handful of clients active now and 19 in the pipeline. Bluetie also offers “tagline” advertising through a partnership: “Tagline advertising from Adknowledge provides the ability to insert tagline ads into user-generated peer-to-peer e-mail, weather alerts, flight notifications, e-cards, and newsletters.”

This is a promising second act for a company that was one of the first to offer ad-supported online services, in 1999, but which has never quite caught fire like some of its competitors. Next up is API-platform tools for featuretisements to be offered elsewhere.

Don’t do this at home — email is for professionals

It’s so easy to run afoul of the CAN-SPAM Act provisions, and even worse, simply to attract the attention of the guardians at the major ISPs, that it’s simply not worth the savings to try to do serious email marketing yourself, easy as it might seem in Outlook Express. And by serious, I mean as few as a few hundred customers — just $15/month at Constant Contact. A nice roundup of a selection of vendors is in Inc. Magazine, March issue.

You can get as much or as little help as you like. And by the way, email is still the number one activity of Internet-connected people. Spam and all, it’s a very effective and cost-efficient way to stay in touch with your customers and find prospects. Very measurable too.

Do you talk TO your customers and prospects? Talk WITH is better.

Consumers are already talking about you behind your back. Better to turn around and join the conversation than to ignore or complain about it. And if they’re not talking about you, inviting them to join a conversation with each other — and with you — will pay off for you.

This is the message of  an essay in Advertising Age, January 7, 2008, by Patrick Hanlon, founder-CEO of Thinktopia, and Josh Hawkins, corporate communications for Brightcove.

“Opportunities to reach out even to those who don’t like your brand can have powerful positive consequences. Reaching out conveys confidence, accessibility, respect and authenticity to people both inside and outside of the brand community…Even if you can’t always control the conversation, you can join it. This lets you project an image of authenticity and transparency.”

It’s not just the hip brands — Apple computers, say. Stop & Shop Supermarkets used videos of real customers, and a microsite (site just for this purpose) – stopandshop.tv.

Video to reinvent your business

Fast Company’s March 2008 issue, featuring the 50 most innovative companies, also carries a column by blogger extraordinaire Robert Scoble on how you should be using video:

Cellphone video: capture the new competitive product and while showing it to your team, chat with them about it.

Global video: dotSub adds “captions to your videos, which can then be translated into dozens of languages.”

Email video: “What’s the worst part of email? Wondering if the sender is being sarcastic or not. Check out Eyejot.com.

Interactive video: Add clickable hotspots to video clips — Asterpix.com.

“No matter which services you choose, the important point is simply to use video. Too many companies don’t have clips showing their products, their philosophies, or simple news announcements by their CEOs.”

Web to phone in one

Sew a Bango Button on your site, and make it easy for visitors to get to your site on their mobile phones–the WAP version, at least–without having to laboriously type using the number keys. Adage.com reports that you could stick them in ads, spread pictures virally, and learn about the users.