Customer Crossroads

Conversations become markets: The rise of online marketplaces and monetization of digital content

When Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger told us in The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) "Markets are conversations" we should have readily seen the corollary would not be far behind: Conversations become markets.

The first web marketplaces democratized the ability to sell physical goods, such as E-Bay  (founded 1995) and Etsy (founded 2005). 

Amazon, started in 1995, launched third-party selling as Zshops in 1999. That change, along with services to independent publishers, really made Amazon a marketplace rather than just a retailer.

Digital goods marketplaces got going with photography. The one that comes to mind (there were likely others) is iStockPhoto, started in 2000. Typography, icons, and other graphic elements are all now available in marketplaces such as Creative Market (founded 2011.)

Top 10 customer experience trends: The future of customer experience

In this post, I talked about where customer experience thinking came from. This one is about where I think we are headed.

1. It's all about the customer. Still

Yes, that seems obvious. But it needs constant repetition. Control is not going to go back into the hands of the marketer. The diversity around us in styles and choices is just mind boggling. Customers are driving that, with the aid of new technology.

Personalization, check. Customization, check. Co-creation, check. None of it is going away.

2. Brands are powerful

Consumers are overwhelmed by choice and information. A brand can help you narrow things down. A brand can help you, as a person, tell your story. Only if the brand HAS a story, of course. See #8 for more on that.

3. Touchpoints will continue to expand

The number of mediums in use just keeps growing. The old stuff is still with us (newspapers, for example), and new channels pop up every day (like apps). As a marketer, you need to try to pull this herd of cats into something that looks like a coherent brand message, customized to deliver what your customer is looking for, and responsive to what they are telling you. Sound difficult? Absolutely.

4. If anything is going to replace consumption of goods as the thing that defines our culture, it will be consumption of experiences

There is evidence all around us that we value experiences as much as, perhaps more than, stuff. Which could be good for the planet. Stuff is not going away, but it might be dropping in importance. What is social media, after all, but an experience? Sponsorship marketing delivers experiences. Digital media delivers experiences. Great packaging even delivers an experience. If you aren't delivering an experience, you are going to have problems competing. [Yes, I feel your pain, wondering how the heck to do that as a consultant.]

5. The service + experience economy is going to produce a lot of tension. Show a little respect

The person serving you your coffee today is getting served by you on an airplane tomorrow, going in to your bank branch during the extended hours, and calling your support centre tonight after dinner. And vice-versa. Despite growing income inequality, the tolerance for being treated like a nobody -- even when you are buffing a toenail -- is low, and I think, decreasing. The 1% didn't get the memo on this. There's a lot of people out there feeling disrespected.

When you design a service experience, don't assume you will be able to find staff who can be trained to be obsequious. They're not growing those folks any more. [Except in those odd environments where people are highly paid to be obsequious.Your barista is not highly paid, regardless of what you think.]

6. We're going to expect better experiences in places that have never had to bother before

The last bastion of the bad experience will be anything that looks like government. Are petty bureaucrats still wielding power over people -- of course they are. We hate it, but we haven't figured out how to change it yet. We're all working on health care first. But when all of the commercial/consumer world is oriented towards creating a better experience, everything that doesn't try too hard is going to really stick out, and not in a good way.

7. The drive to improve experiences is going to improve efficiency

Oddly, most people think better efficiency and greater productivity comes from taking things away from customers. Not necessarily true. You can take away stuff that no one wants anyway, like delays in service, out of stock inventory, difficult check-out procedures.

It's not all about high-touch -- sometimes it's about just letting me get on with it. Consider self-serve gas. For most of us, doing it yourself is just a lot easier and faster, and therefore a better experience. Cheaper is a bonus. The same thing has largely proved to be true in transactional banking. [Now if we can just bring that to public transit!]

8. Faking authenticity is going to get harder.

There's no place to hide. Even for Apple. Instead, why not go for genuine authenticity? It's cheaper and more fun.

9. The perfect targeting solution won't help you if you don't have a story and an experience to offer

Will big data solve your problems? Maybe somewhat. But more likely it will be to the 2010s what CRM was to the 90s and 00s -- a lot of money spent for a lot of disappointment. Your perfect algorithm will only help you if you have a story to tell and an experience to back it up.  [Surely that's a relief, isn't it? Just hollering "buy, buy, buy" won't work better because of big data.]

10. No one will be paying attention

You think it's hard getting attention today? I think it's going to get harder. All that stuff about localization services that will drive traffic into your store. It will just feel like more spam for most. All those apps? Well, how many apps can you really use? Three? Five? Ten? Certainly not 30 or 40, not 100 or 1,000.

The only solution is to insist on relevance. Relevance might not mean utility in the conventional sense, it might mean amusement or charm [just look at Pinterest].

The bright spot here is that local businesses with some savvy will have an easier time of it, I think. People will be walking by your store anyway, right? 

 

This is what I see, at least today. What do you see?

Paper to digital: evolving quickly

There are more and more indications that we still want paper and handwritten things.  You can't beat it for portability. And there are few version compatibility problems with paper -- it pretty much works with all human readers.

At least two methods are now available to synch your actual paper to your digital life.

Livescribe SmartPen is one approach -- a digital pen can link to your computer and upload your notebooks into various forms. (My earlier post on SmartPen here, and a piece I wrote about using a Livescribe as a research tool is here.)

You need the pen, which is actually a small computer. And you need special paper. But you can then hook into a number of other sending and sharing methods.

Moleskine's new smart notebook is another. Image and more about this application here, on PSFK. For this one, you need an app designed to upload pictures you take with your phone into Evernote.

 

I have high hopes for continued developments in this area that will eventually make the paper to digital translation go easily in either direction.

 

Everyone is a creator and the new tools keep getting better: 3D printers, DIY apps

3D Printers, which must have seemed like a sci-fi fantasy only a decade ago ("Earl Grey, Hot"), have gone the way of so much technology, and are now no more expensive than a laser printer.

This recent Businessweek story says there are now models available for as little as $1200.

I did a trendwatching report for a client a few years ago and told them this would happen. Not because I am brilliant (I so wish this were the case), but because all things flow down the food chain over time. Something only available in jet planes today will be available in your car in the future. Innovations cascade from the most exclusive markets to retail markets. GPS was a military creation, then it was a commercial thing, and now we all have it.

At a copy shop near you?

I have a prediction for you now -- just like copiers and printers before them, it wont be long before there will be a 3D print shop near you, perhaps in a corner of the Home Depot (that's where I'd put it, anyway) or perhaps in Staples, or in Kinkos. You'll be able to rent time on someone else's 3D printer instead of having to buy your own. You might be able to get help building your 3D digital model to feed to the printer. They might have 3D scanners where you can get a scan of your broken widget to reproduce (say, an broken part for an appliance that you want to repair.)

Make your own app

Improved coding tools are bringing the act of digital creation into the realm of ordinary folk as well. Take this development, for example: TheAppBuilder (written up by PSFK here)

 

The apps look to me a lot like a personal portal of sorts, where you can track sites, rss content, and similar things that have been built elsewhere. (I can't build a game this way. Not yet, anyway.)

For the creative human -- which is essentially all of us -- times could not be better.

Mobile money - it's that land grab, gold rush thing all over again

Sorry I've been away for so long -- these days, when you have good work to do and are busy, you can't take that lightly. So I have pent up ideas, pent up writing. In my head, I'm talking to you regularly. It's been fun, but somewhat one sided.

One of the things I've been watching is the development of mobile this and mobile that, as part of my trendwatching duties.

What I'm specifically interested in is the financial stuff -- that great marriage of digital money and digital platforms. Credit cards, then debit cards, ATMs, multi-branch banking, telephone IVR, then internet. Wow, internet, what a lot of possibilities THAT opened up, and still being explored. And now mobile. Not just mobile access to internet, but things you can only do on a mobile teleconnected computer aka a smart phone.

It feels to me like a gold rush, where everyone is trying to get a stake a claim as quickly as possible.

Announcements are being made practically daily. My favorite source is Finextra -- it reads like the racing form these days, or the sports pages (pick your metaphor) -- telling you who's up and who's down, who's breeding with who, who's out of the season.

We're not talking about simple financial apps here, or simply internet via mobile access to your bank account. We're talking about being able to buy a burger and pay for it with your phone, and have that transaction integrate into your financial management software immediately. That kind of integration -- although it scares people -- seems to be what we want.

Depending where you live in the world, this is either old news or bleeding edge stuff. And there's a good reason for this -- it relates to when your current legacy infrastructure was created, and who is most invested in it. If you happen to live in Sweden, or Japan, or many other places, some of this is old news.

Here in Canada, where I am, we were fairly advanced in things like ATMs and debit cards -- but the lines were drawn then, and these lines are getting in the way of development now. No one in the regulatory business some 30 years ago could have easily envisioned that a telecommunications company might want the ability to execute payments on your behalf. Without paying a bank every time. Which is exactly what they want to do now, and are trying to do. And so are a bunch of other people.

And PayPal, bless their hearts, is going exactly where I always thought they wanted to go. They are becoming a true digital bank, and they're doing it in classic disruptive fashion.

Another thing that is interesting, is that the technology folks, who kind of thought they were going to sweep in and show those dusty old banks how things are done, are finding that the settlement process is much much much more difficult than they thought. Gee whiz, there are all those different currencies. And different regulatory structures! People want interoperability. Who knew it could be so complicated!?

Throughout history, when new land was settled, the immigrants changed things. This time will be no different. The old players will have to adapt to new neighbors, and their different ideas. The new participants will also have to adapt, change their plans, and learn a new language.

The technology may not actually be the biggest thing, it may ultimately be the marketing of the technology that really changes things up, as new players get creative to be heard. 

For the rest of us, we can be fairly confident, (I think), that at the end of the day, there will be a lot more functionality for consumers and small businesses than we ever thought possible. We will truly have control over our money, in the same kinds of ways that global corporations have had for years. But instead of having to invest in a CFO and a treasury management department, we will have it all on our smart phone. And won't that be fun.

That's my take. What's yours? What developments do you think are most exciting, or most scary? Best analysis you've seen? Company to watch?

Research industry trends: under the covers in marketing with the GRIT report

Marketing is a function that runs on information much more than most people realize. From the outside, it looks like a beer commercial -- lots of cool people doing creative things. Under the covers, it's much more analytics driven.

Research is a big part of that analytics process -- so research trends tell us a lot about what's going on in the world of business.

Greenbook's Industry Trends Report (GRIT) comes out twice a year and tells the story. There's a wonderful infographic with the current issue, available here. The graphics below are extracted from same - the red circles are things I added.

Marketing wants results -- if innovation gets there, fine. If not, forget it

Innovation is on the list, but not if it compromises feasibility, budget and speed. Nobody in corporate life can afford to take a lot of risks these days -- so they're not trying out innovative methods unless they solve some other problem in a big way.

Social media analytics aren't just buzz -- it's happening

The longstanding buzz about social media measurement is finally warranted. People are using it. Which means that business is taking it very seriously indeed. Everyone is still learning, it's all still changing, but it's here to stay.

Budget isn't everything -- because research questions are getting tougher

Businesses are adopting some very expensive approaches, one of which is MROCs (aka insight communities). MROCs are an innovation that IS solving a problem for clients -- these communities provide more in-the-moment access to people as they go about their actual lives. But they require real skill to set up and manage, and they are anything but cheap.

They may be difficult and costly, but they are working and they are gaining traction. Clients are finding real value there, which is why their use is growing. The growth in MROCs also shows the need for deeper insights -- when you are swimming in data (as most large organizations are these days) what you need is deeper insights. Simple questions can be answered from all kinds of internally available data. What's left for research are relatively difficult questions.

I think Gamification is a trend that suffers from sounding "bigger" than it is -- it is really just making surveys more fun. Focus groups and other qualitative methods have been moving in this direction for a long time -- mostly we call this "projective techniques".

Mobile research is also coming of age, because it is solves a problem for clients (better insights in the moment) and leverages a technology that is ubiquitous. Unlike some of the other methods discussed, however, mobile research promises to be inexpensive (eventually). Mobile will include surveys, in-the-moment reactions on site ("how did we do today?") and mobile qualitative ("take a picture of what's happening right now, and send it to me with your thoughts about...")

This infographic is evidence of another important trend affecting everyone -- we all want information that is easy to consumer and easy to find.

Another great job from Lenny Murphy and the GRIT team.

 

Launching a new look and a new name: theIdeaStudio

It's been 6+ years, a gazillion posts, and lots of fun. It was time for renovations, so today is the start. We tore off the old wallpaper, stuck a dumpster out back and threw in a bunch of widgets, and then got the sledgehammer out.

So today is the launch of a new look, and a new name for this space: theIdeaStudio.

Word for the day: Transmedia

Transmedia is the new word people are using to reference the process of telling a story through multiple media.  It's a nice, short, evocative and useful word. Throw it out in a few meetings this week and see what kind of reaction you get.

Dungeons and Dragons may be the original transmedia story, according to Lucas J.W. Johnson at Silverstring Media. Star Wars is also an excellent example. What D+D can tell us about Transmedia

Transmedia is kind of the new convergence.

When intellectual property is the product as well as the raw material, and we are all creators

Wikipedia is going black for a day on January 18, 2012. They state their reasons here.

The words that prompted this post follow:

But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

Intellectual property law is entering a new phase. It's been around for years, but in the past, it was lawyers for big companies arguing with each other, for the most part.

But now, in this age of the democratization of the creative process, the processes associated with creation have changed.

The future of computing according to Microsoft: too much StarTrek, too little reality

Future of computing according to Microsoft video

I was reading @techrepublic's take on Microsoft's video of the future of computing, which was interesting, but left me incredulous about a couple of things. 

All of this cool information at people's fingertips -- no reference at all to the creation of content, just the usage of it. When I looked at all this information that businesspeople were manipulating, totally absent were the folks slaving away to create all these awesome graphics. Also absent were the links to information gathering that would need to be present in day to day operating systems of all sorts that would gather this in-the-moment useful data.

Where's the advertising?

More to the point, from the marketer's perspective, none of these applications had any obvious commercial involvement, such as sponsorships or advertising. People in this video search and find with no spam, just useful and well-formatted information organized in highly logical ways. Like the recipes, for example. If only.

So, this version of the future is kind of the StarTrek future -- remember how money never seemed to be an issue for anyone at all? No advertising present anywhere. No intrusive interruptions with sales calls or unwanted messages. Consumer culture had disappeared.

What about biometrics?

Another major trend that is missing for me is the biometric connection. A lot of people are tracking their own biometrics, and there are apps and online communities dedicated to this topic. I would have thought I would see some evidence of my devices helping me track these things automatically -- such as the woman travelling being reminded about her jet-lag strategy, or something like that.

What about smart films?

The see-through refrigerator door was nice (especially when your fridge is as tidy as theirs!), but not as interesting to me as window film that can be adjusted as to opacity (not there). Smart films are something that we would expect to be seeing a lot more of soon, but not present in this world.

So for me, it was all about "what your handheld and tablets might look like". [Okay, those looked like smart films, maybe] Sad to see that keyboards and the accompanying ergonomic strains are not expected to improve.

Antiseptic

Is the future of computing really going to be this antiseptic? I sure hope not. [Except for maybe the translating-enhanced-reality glasses, which were pretty cool.]

If you really want to see the future of computing, I think you would be better off checking out some of the best scifi and speculative fiction. It's still way more out there than this video.

Co-creation strikes again: Everyone wants their own charity now

I have been noticing a trend of people launching their own charities and aid foundations lately. 

The narrative goes like this. It starts with a story about someone who has just returned from a trip to [pick one: Africa | Nepal | India | Middle East] and discovered people there who could benefit from some aid.

They then announce that existing aid organizations don't seem to be working, for whatever reason, and so they are starting a new one.

This story is followed by a letter to the editor of the [pick one: newspaper | magazine] decrying the launch of yet another charity by a celebrity or otherwise noteable individual, who should instead be working with existing charities. Said letter is often from a director of an existing charity.

Here's what I think is going on.

• Existing charities want your money, not your ideas
• People want to contribute more than money
• They particularly want to feel connected in a personal way, to make a personal impact
• When faced with personal knowledge of problems and a compelling need to help, their efforts to become directly involved through existing channels lead nowhere
• So they launch their own organization

Net result is a fragmentation of aid efforts that is likely to continue. The number of new private foundations is skyrocketing.

Here's a good example: socks for Japan. A more serious effort is Room to Read  New ones are popping up constantly.Selena Gomez wants to start her own charity. Christina Applegate launched one. We could probably come up with about 50 similar organizations without too much effort, right?

There are now programs to teach you how to do this, such as this one offered by Global Volunteer Network. You too can "be the change" and "become a social entrepreneur".

A few organizations seem to have found ways to engage people more directly without losing effectiveness. Habitat for Humanity is one -- they actively engage donors in real activities beyond the chequebook.

Political parties, by the way, appear to be having the same problem -- no one wants to just give money. People want to be heard, have influence, be part of creating the ideas. But few organizations are set up for that, and probably most don't really want to be that collaborative.

Co-creation. It's not going away, it's spreading.

Image: The image above is Colin Glassco, who started his own charity.

Electronic gift giving: the challenge of the e-reader

My husband is an avid reader, and always likes getting a book as a gift. Selecting said book can be a challenge at times, but at least I always have a fall-back category.

I gave him a Kobo e-reader last year for Christmas, after watching him lug around the 1,300 page doorstop that is A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth.

I was delighted to find that Kobo has ffigured out how I can give a specific book as a gift.

 

My only gripe is that I need to be logged in to an account to figure out how to do this. Except I do not have a Kobo account, because I don't (yet) have my own e-reader. And GIFT is not on the top menu, which of course it should be... I had to actually choose a book to figure out I could give it as a gift. These are minor problems, however.

This is still not quite as nice as being able to give the physical thing, like a card that looks like the book, but it's an excellent start.

I would prefer to pass a physical object as the gift, and then get the excited look, hug and kiss I deserve. Instead, I will have to say, "Sweetie have you checked your e-mail yet today?", which is not nearly as much fun.

 

 

The future of social media for customer loyalty

A really good question was posed on the Focus Network about where social media and customer loyalty is headed.

“What's the role of social marketing in customer loyalty today? What about a year from now?”

Here's what I think, and what I posted -- what do you think?

Permit me a short anecdote first:

This week I experienced problems with my e-mail and Blackberry synching. I use a hosted exchange service, and went to their web site to see if there was a notice about a system outage (there wasn't, or at least not where I was looking).
After wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on, including being abandoned by their chat support, i finally searched the company on Twitter. There I saw any number of people grumbling about the server outages.
The company was not responding very rapidly to the Twitter talk, and chose not to engage with any of the individuals who posted about problems. They posted about once a day, saying they were working hard to fix the problem. I noticed that others who were irritated were posting links to review sites where they had newly created negative reviews about the company's service.

This kind of behavior is surprising in 2011, but it will be toxic in 2012.

Service problems are one of the opportunities that any organization has to demonstrate that they put some commitment behind their brand promise, whether that promise is appliances that work, friendly flight attendants, or excellent hosted server support.
Every business needs a strategy to respond to customer issues and problems expressed in social media as part of their loyalty strategy.

The larger the business, the more rapidly an issue can escalate -- remember the Domino's pizza YouTube debacle way back in 2009? Domino's had done nothing -- it was two employees -- but they nevertheless experienced damage to their brand and their business.

The communications environment is now a social environment. Thinking about social media as somehow "different" is no longer a productive point of view, because it is completely pervasive. Even your print campaign has a QR code in it, which is likely linked to a site offering social possibilities of some kind. Hotels have QR codes on their front doors with "Like" stickers. So the physical environment has become a virtual link as well, and we will see many more examples of this.

One critical first step for organizations: Ensure you can respond quickly and effectively to problems that arise where your customers are communicating about problems in social media channels (Twitter, Google+, wherever). Implicit in this is needing a real-time monitoring strategy which usually involves putting a listening platform in place (e.g. Conversition, Radian6, etc.)

In the future, social media efforts in larger organizations are going to become much more mainstream in terms of media planning and measurement. They won't be in a cubbyhole by themselves in the leading organizations, they will be part of integrated brand and customer communications.

Opting out isn't an option, because it will create negative impressions. When you see a business with no website today -- even a small business, like an upholstery shop, you form an immediate impression of them as somewhat backwards.
A major enterprise with a poor presence on major social media platforms will soon communicate that they are behind the times.

We are so used to communicating through multiple channels, that I do think customers will start to wonder why they can't communicate with their bank or telecomm carrier this way. So the call centre of the future is likely going to have to figure out strategies for other kinds of channels, not just telephone, e-mail and chat on the company's web site. It might be chat via Facebook, for example.

I don't see the complexity of the environment diminishing at all. There will be more options, as well as greater risks. But also, greater potential rewards for those that choose to invest in experimenting and learning. It's still the frontier, and the patterns of behavior are shifting rapidly.

If you want to follow the thread on Focus, click here.

Computer tinkering is dead: The new digital divide

In the previous post I confirmed that personal computing isn't really dead, it's just a popular headline.  However, something else is changing. Computing is so pervasive, that a new digital divide is becoming more apparent. It's the divide between users and experts, which is getting bigger all the time.

Computer tinkering may be dying.

Let me put forth a couple of observations, and see if I can pull them together.

Nugget #1: Parents of anyone under 18 often assert that their children know a great deal about computers and how to "program" them. They say this because their kids showed them how to use basic features on a device.

Nugget #2: In research projects with teens and young adults, I have often found that teens are not actually better at "programming", they are just more comfortable. They are equally, if not more, frustrated by web sites that are badly organized, for example.

Nugget #3: Devices with poor user interfaces continue to baffle most. My favorite example is the portable projector, (now that nobody seems to have VCRs anymore.) Before a meeting where there will be slides projected, there is always a tense moment when we learn a) how to turn on the projector, and b) whether it will project what is on the laptop.

In the last century, when I got my first PC, you had to develop some facility with DOS to use the device. I had an early version of Windows (3.0 I think), which I hoped would remove DOS from my life, but didn't.

It's very complicated, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Software executive Ray Ozzie said in Dawn of a New Day, that the personal computing environment has become hugely complicated for all of us:

as the PC client and PC-based server have grown from their simple roots over the past 25 years, the PC-centric / server-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity.  This is a direct by-product of the PC’s success: how broad and diverse the PC’s ecosystem has become; how complex it’s become to manage the acquisition & lifecycle of our hardware, software, and data artifacts.  It’s undeniable that some form of this complexity is readily apparent to most all our customers:  your neighbors; any small business owner; the ‘tech’ head of household; enterprise IT.

Pinnacle of complexity reached

Things have reached something of a pinnacle of complexity, to the point where even backing up your data (a modern moral imperative) has become a major challenge, far from the point and click simplicity promised.  And that's just one example. I recently tried to move my iTunes from one desktop to another, and was astonished at the difficulty of this task. We could come up with hundreds more examples easily.

We can no longer hope to resolve any significant computing issue ourselves unless we happen to have advanced training.

Young people are no different. They do not know how to "program" their devices, they are just more comfortable using them. They are willing to poke at things until they work, rather like kicking a vending machine. Their parents may believe this is "programming" because the parents are unable to figure out how to use basic functions of devices, such as texting, especially when models change.

Cloud computing to the rescue

There was time you could tinker with your car -- that is long gone, because cars are far too complex, and are stuffed with computers.But driving, actually using the car, is getting easier. And the cars are getting smarter, so they look after us better -- they help us manage braking in slippery conditions, for example.

I think the time where us normal folk could do much tinkering with our computers is fast disappearing, and this is likely to be a great relief to many. Cloud computing options have shifted the complexity to someone else, which is as it should be.

The net result is this, however -- actual ability to "program" things -- to tinker and such -- is going to become even more of a geeky specialty than it is now.

Implications not clear - what's your take?

I'm not sure what the implications of this are, actually. But would love to hear your take.

Personal computing isn't dead, it's just gone pervasive

I've been seeing a flurry of articles on the future of personal computing -- they bubble up on a regular basis -- that say something like "The PC is dead." You have to admit it's a great headline.

The latest to catch my attention was this one: Engineer of original IBM PC declares end of PC era, in TechRepublic. Mark Dean, the engineer in question, is quoted thus:

PCs are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of device — though there’s plenty of excitement about smartphones and tablets — but by new ideas about the role that computing can play in progress.

Author Jason Hiner's take is that:

computing is no longer about a box but is being absorbed into everything and is now about creating experiences that connect people and enable them to do work wherever

Fox News already reported the death of the PC in early 2011 from the Consumer Electronics show. Others had reported it earlier, and still others (such as Steve Ballmer) argued that it's not really dead.

So is it really dead or what?

I'm not sure anyone cares. The real debate seems to be about the form of a computer, which is probably not something that consumers think about much.

What we are really experiencing is such a pervasive presence of computing ability that we don't even think about it as computing ability. Cars that lock their doors on their own, and keep their lights on while you go in the house, for example. Information accessible from so many devices, that when we see a screen of some sort, we kind of assume it is connected to the web.When it isn't, invariably you see someone pushing the screen looking for a reaction that isn't forthcoming.

Form factors (fancy term for the way stuff looks and works, what components it has to use) are changing, definitely. I don't think things like keyboards are disappearing though. I don't think big screens are disappearing. What is disappearing are the limitations of devices -- we're going to be able to go all mix and match.

What is likely changing is that the divide between users and engineers is becoming more entrenched, and more permanent. More on that in the next post.

Resources:

Early computing in pictures - Royal Pingdom, kind of an interesting technology site

The PC is dead - Fox News - January 2011

The PC (as we know it) is Dead - MSNBC - June 2011

Dawn of a New Day, Ray Ozzie's blog - Chief Software Engineer at Microsoft from 2008 to 2010 -- this is a more nuanced article. Long, but interesting. October 2010

 

 

The post-consumption era: this is the real end of the world you need to prepare for

There was lots of collective fun-making when the recently predicted end of days did not come to pass. "Rapture photos" were posted (empty clothes in amusing places), and there was a frenzy of Facebook status updates monitoring the fun.

The real Armageddon for most of us will creep up more slowly -- it's the shift many are predicting to a post-consumer culture.

Consumer Culture is the water we swim in daily

If you live in the affluent societies of the first world, the dominant culture is a consumer culture. A nice definition is available on the AQR website:

A culture may be understood as a pattern of beliefs, values, meanings and customs shared by a group of people, often existing at an implicit or taken-for-granted level. Consumer culture suggests that consumption - the act of buying goods or services - is a cultural activity, one imbued with meaning and driven not just by practical or economic factors. Mapping and exploring the business implications of these cultural meanings is one of the principal functions of qualitative market research.

Consumer culture is not the only thing going on, but it's a big part of our individual and collective mission to make meaning.

If you doubt this, here's a simple self-test for you -- name the first 10 brands that come to mind.

For most people, this exercise quickly becomes complex, especially if done in a group. Are you a Tide person? Are you defined by Crest? By Apple? By Mercedes? By Prada? By Black + Decker?

Global Alarming -- the forces driving change

There are signs that things are changing. Terrorism and the uncertainties it has brought to all of the first world (we now get to share the terror with the rest of the world, who never stopped experiencing it), is thought by many to be an important driver of cultural change.

Our increasing awareness that the planet cannot indefinitely support this level of abuse is another important driver.  It's not just air pollution now, or the holes in the ozone layer -- we have an abundance of environmental issues that are concerning: overfishing, extinctions, climate change, water shortages, melting glaciers, and peak oil, to name a few.

The global recession is another key driver here, adding an immediate need for many to look at their individual lifestyle and decide what is important.

What it all means for business and marketing

A nice piece of work from David Carlson called "Closed Wallets, Closed Minds" looks at this phenomenon from the designer's perspective. "We are increasingly suffering from consumption fatigue", says Mr. Carlson. Companies that want to be part of this change, rather than a victim of it, will need to "listen to what the consumer wants, rather than tell them".

Mr. Carlson posits that a relationship economy is forming, but admits none of us can really see the future.

Only the future will tell if the climate of anti-consumerism is genuine, or if we are only on a pause between mad bouts of bag filling.

It's a beautifully constructed report, as always, and will get you thinking -- as it did me.

What's your take?

What signs of change are you seeing? I love to hear your comments, thoughts and observations.

Keeping things in context: what can happen in 5 years, and what it means for planning

I was doing a client debrief today related to a long-term technology project. Things in the planning stages will take years to build and launch -- 3 to 5 years, most likely. I wanted to help the client team remember that our research looks at where people are at today -- their expectations and experiences. But the planning needs to be out where people are headed, not where they are today. Such a cliche, right? But true.

Customer expectations are constantly moving. These days, customer expectations are moving fairly quickly.

We did a little exercise together to think about what has changed in the last five years. Here was the list I prepared for them.

5 Years ago: May 17, 2006 – what has changed since then:

• Netflix introduced downloading of video Oct 1, 2008
• Kindle launched Nov 19, 2007
• iPhone released June 29, 2007
• Nintendo Wii – November 19, 2006
• Facebook opened to non-students – September 26, 2006
• Google bought YouTube for $1.65 B October 9, 2006 (YouTube launched Feb 14, 2005)
• Twitter launched July 2006

When you think about what you or your company needs to deliver in the future, you might ask yourself what has changed in the last few years in the relevant dimensions in your industry. Then springboard from that into the future.

Some of these changes were so profound that it's hard to believe they are so recent!

What would YOU add to this list?

New Qualitative 101

Greenbook, in conjunction with my buddies at QRCA, have just come out with a directory of New Qualitative providers.

Quite apart from the fact that I am listed in it... you would find it useful for a few other reasons:

• Great basic articles telling you what you need to know about various methodologies. Well written by experts Betsy Leichliter and Jay Zaltzman
• Details and contact information for the major platform providers
• Listings for researchers experience in these methods

You can get a hardcopy for $29, but check out the digital version for free, here.

There's also a blog (I'm writing there too), which has some fantastic contributors, all people who've done a fair bit of heavy lifting in new methodologies, and will be sharing best practices, new ideas, and whatnot.

It's good news to finally have a resource in one place, and I'm sure it will grow as providers seem to be expanding continually. Many of these providers were simply lost in the giant directory that has everything from survey sample to focus group facilities listed.

So now we have resources in one place, plus information too. And that's just great news for practitioners and clients!

 

Old media learns new tricks to stay alive and relevant: case in point, HBR

The obituary notices for old media have been a bit premature - instead of dying as predicted, many have stubbornly tried to change to stay relevant. [And surely staying relevant is a key challenge for everyone, isn't it? - I think about it pretty much daily.]

Case in point: Harvard Business Review, that venerable institution of middle management information, was something I had read like a religion since business school. A few years ago, I found it dry, irrelevant, and lacking in user-friendly design. It was becoming the most costly recycled paper in my office. Bye, bye magazine.

A recent look at the paper version of HBR revealed a significant improvement in relevance and readability.

Here a few of the gems that caught my attention on a browse through a recent edition:

Art: Images from edge installation artist Leandro Erlich

Interaction: Recognizing the wisdom isn't all in the authors, it's also in the readers. Example: this reaction to a social media trends story: "In 2011 people will begin to realize there are few shortcuts with these sites -- it's 'social' media, not 'robot' media."

Relevance:

On-line sales leads: contacting potential customers within an hour of receiving a query is seven times as likely to qualify the lead as waiting more than an hour, and 60 times as likely to qualify as waiting more than 24 hours.(1)

Good effects of a vacation wear off within a week. [Okay, that one probably doesn't come as a shock, but at least someone is paying attention.]

Foldit is a game you can play to discover new ways to fold protein molecules. Now there's a crowdsourcing idea that is truly exciting! 

Semantic mapping technologies are rapidly growing in sophistication: Quid Software

Case studies based in other countries and cultures besides North America!

Thought-provoking columns by people like Roger Martin and Dan Ariely -- almost always worth reading.

My Take

It's harder to turn some of these bigger ships, but if they pay attention to their customers and to emerging trends, they can turn, and they can mobilize, and they can stay relevant. Nobody said it was easy. But they're not dead yet.

Resources:

(1) The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, by James B Olroyd, McElheran, Elkington, HBR, March 2011

(2) Don't Get Blinded by the Numbers, by Roger Martin, HBR, March 2011

 

 

Trendwatching: Software as a service goes big: Bell launches business apps

Most of the stuff I get from Bell can safely be ignored, but this letter announcing "business apps" caught my attention.

 

So much is moving to the cloud, and this offering is quite interesting -- a set of curated applications that cover a wide range of business needs.

Possible Benefits:

• Instead of looking all over the web for an application that might be what i need I get a pre-sorted list
• Reasonable assurance about the stability of the underlying company -- compared to usually none if I am just buying software online
• Simplified billing potentially? One bill with supporting documentation that doesn't have to be downloaded from separate suppliers (one of my current irritants)
• Looks like quality stuff from what I can see

Possible Concerns:

• Like any SAS (software as a service), it feels fairly costly over the long run unless there is a collaborative element which would require me to have a server, instead of just networked PCs
• Long term worries about stuffing critical business applications into the cloud

The service I highlighted in the picture, for example, is something I would potentially use -- a service that converts digital audio into typed notes. I have seen services like this before, but without much assurance of quality, I have stayed with my trusty independent supplier.

I also noticed a mobile service scheduling application -- something I wish more delivery and maintenance services used. It might seem expensive as a service, but I'd guess that buying a license and keeping it updated is likely an expensive option too.

If I think about it, I'm buying quite a few SAS solutions already, and keep thinking about buying more. Some help to choose the right solution might be welcome to many smaller businesses.

My take

With the constant growth in new offerings trying to get our attention, a curated approach offers some potential real value to businesses. 

Is this really a utility trying to turn itself into a value added provider?? I'm amazed that they could launch something so potentially awesome and innovative.

What's your take?

Are you happy to move to the cloud and the SAS model? Or do you worry that it will be just one more chance to be on hold with a call centre for support? What other companies could do this credibly -- your bank, for example? What about someone like Staples or Yellow Pages?

Customization and personalization trend just keeps growing!

Looking around online to see what I might buy as a new carry-on luggage bag, I came across this gem from Heys.  It's called DOTS, and the case is designed to let you put your own design on it.

Consumers do not want boring black in anything anymore. They want color, design, style and personal statements.

If you love all things personalized, you can get a regular feed from MilkorSugar, the blog of all things customizable.

MadMen shows us a stratified society: things HAVE changed

I am a MadMen addict, and with the start of the new season, I was marveling at how much our society really has changed since the 60's.

We have more social equality, but actually less economic equality

Although many of the show's characters are very affluent, the post WWII decades were an era of unparalleled egalitarianism in North America. At the same time as economic equality was within reach, socially society was still quite stratified.

A brief vignette when our protagonist, Don Draper, walks into his office and practically tosses his briefcase and hat to his personal secretary, followed by his coat for her to hang, really highlighted this for me.

Today, the reverse is true. I live in a world where people are largely unwilling to acknowledge social stratification, but economic opportunity is highly stratified. A few people -- entertainers, sports figures, financial engineers -- gather a disproportionate amount of the total wealth in society.

I'm just as bad as you

In terms of customer experience expectations, this change has a couple of very real world implications.

The person who buffs your nails in a salon does not think of themselves as a lesser being. In fact, the clientele at the spa may well include those who have saved up for this kind of a treat: Baristas and others in relatively low paying positions.

It's hard to identify many occupations or professions that are still held in high esteem, regardless of their earning power.

For service cultures, this societal flattening means that many people are not prepared to engage in the kind of role-playing that dedicated personal service requires. So when you ask for something, you hear "no problem" instead of "I'd be pleased to get that" or "yes ma'am", or some similar nicety.

When we don't think others are better than we are, it changes the service dynamic. And I don't think we have really come to grips with this.

Because not only has the cultural environment changed, but corporations are resistant to paying good wages for front line staff, and aggressively automating wherever possible.

Isn't it ironic

This situation creates some serious irony. In our roles as customers, we wonder what has happened to service. But in our roles as service providers, we demand a level of respect, we don't want to grovel, we don't want to deal with people who are rude and impatient, and we resist any behaviors that would imply something less than equal status. 

What's your take?

Am I imagining this? Or have you observed this too?

The battle for your attention in social media

Markets for interesting ideas

I liked the title of Michael Bungay Stanier's latest e-book, Stop the busywork!, so I went to the download site. Which turns out to be ChangeThis, another creation of marketing maestro Seth Godin.

I knew about ChangeThis, but was curious to see what they are up to, so I browsed around a bit. Not only have they got some impressive design work happening here, but some impressive stats as well.

We know that 30,000 of you subscribe via email and RSS feed, and that you download around 500,000 to 700,000 manifestos a month

The site publishes four to six manifestos each month, based on reader voting on proposals. Submit a good proposal, get it voted up, and then you will be invited to submit the 2,000 to 4,000 word document. Manifestos remain up indefinitely, so can reach very high download numbers if popular.

The ChangeThis site is now managed by 800-CEO-Read, a site that sells and reviews business books. Many of the manifestos posted on ChangeThis are actually extracts or themes related to business books, so there's a bit of a fit there.

Their submission criteria are interesting, too:

Passion. Conviction. Knowledge. Education.
Thought. Persuasion. Freedom. Appeal. Change.
Point of View. Self-Betterment. Inspiration.

I believe one reason their e-books are so successful is that they control the presentation, and the e-book format they use is gorgeous and highly readable.

A point of view is the price of admission

Although ChangeThis is about disseminating ideas, those in the idea business find it a useful place to support their brand building efforts. For example, Tom Peters has seven manifestos published.

You can only get your manifesto published when you can take a point of view in a highly engaging way, and offer thoughtful and useful information to readers. This is a tough thing for a larger organization to do, and there isn't a lot there published by a large organization. Notable exception: Amnesty International has something called Stop Child Executions. 

This kind of point of view is very difficult for corporations to take, but is pretty much essential if you are going to attract readers. And not just on this site, but in most social media. 

To win attention you must be interesting

In our information-laden world, if you want people to pay attention to your message, you must be interesting.

• You can be interesting by having a point of view on an important topic. e.g. ChangeThis
• You can be interesting by being funny. e.g.YouTube
• You can be interesting by being informative. e.g.Instructables

I personally believe corporate messaging -- aka advertising -- can be interesting. But most of it simply is not.

When you hear/see/read a lot of hand-wringing about the challenge of winning eyeballs, this is what it really comes down to. You win eyeballs by being interesting.

Boring only works in the interruption model

Last night I was watching 24 on tape. I confess, I fast-forwarded through most of the advertising. Not because I hate advertising. Just because nothing caught my attention. And boring only works if you are forced to watch.

Social media takes the attention stakes up -- way, way up. Even though a lot of social media is drivel, it is often funny drivel. Which beats boring.

Talking e-mail: An interview with Adam Piandes of Goldmail

I wrote about an interesting product called GoldMail a while back, which triggered some correspondence with Adam Piandes there. He kindly agreed to be interviewed for the blog, and here's the result.

Adam, can you remind me what GoldMail is again – it’s kind of an audio e-mail with a slide-show, right?

GoldMail is a publishing tool that lets you quickly and easily create an audio-visual message. As an example, we say that GoldMail allows you to put your voice over Powerpoint because it resonates with the business user. But you can put you voice over any content – or combination of content - jpegs, PDF’s, screen shots, etc.

Once the slideshow is arranged in a compelling manner, it’s time to record your voice over the slides and then share the message, which you can do by posting it on your blog, sending it by e-mail or putting it on Facebook and other social media sites. It’s about conveying emotion, connecting with the viewer.

Combining audio (voice) with visuals touches upon two different learning styles and retention rates skyrocket versus just sending an e-mail or leaving a voicemail … it’s a simple process: Create, Record, Share.

You can view a quick two minute GoldMail I created for this interview here

Wow, I love that you were brave enough to put yourself out there for us like that. Thank you!

Can you give me a snapshot of the company’s history? Who started this thing and why?

The idea of GoldMail was “birthed” by Tom Hakel, our CEO and David Simpson, our president in 2006 as an audio-visual messaging platform. They were investors in a “more complicated” collaboration software project and discovered two things:

1) People are “over contacting and under connecting,” as live meetings were getting harder and harder to get; general business communications (i.e. email and phones) were not nearly as effective as in the past.

2) Most people don’t have much time to learn new software and they are not technically oriented – they just wanted simple tools that have an immediate impact. 

From the on-set, GoldMail has been affiliated with a non-profit organization that runs summer school programs for middle school youth called Aim High. This organization is a shareholder of GoldMail, and this relationship is a big piece of who we are and what we represent. Also, the founders – at the outset -- wanted to create a tool that would help all non-profits spread their message. It’s cool for me because I feel connected to a great organization and because I’m a huge believer that we will have a long-term impact on fundraising efforts by non-profits everywhere, as we’ve already proven so in several instances.

I had no idea of the not-for-profit connection!

Adam, I know you see this as a product that anyone can use. Which may be true. But every product has a sweet-spot, a natural market of people who really appreciate the benefits and drive usage. What or who is the sweet spot for GoldMail?  I’m guessing sales people working in B2B sales, but who is it really?

Yes, it’s true, GoldMail can be used by anyone who is looking to humanize their on-line communication and wants to easily send messages that people remember. B2B sales is a key area, and this has been one of the early sweet spots for us.

Sales people use GoldMail to get their value proposition across in a personal manner; it enables them to inject their personality and to connect with a prospect or client. It’s nice because a sales person can send out a GoldMail message and the recipient can listen to it as many times as they choose and then can share it with others.

Most of our conversations, at GoldMail, with partners/clients get started with a GoldMail message. I can send a GoldMail message to the recipient as a way to introduce myself and the partnership opportunity or to follow up from a previous conversation. The end goal is to get a meeting or to take a conversation another step further. The response has been great, as we’ve formed some great partnerships using this approach.

One of our partnerships is with Constant Contact. GoldMail now enables their customers to better connect with their recipients, whether it’s to drive sales, to send out a marketing campaign, for fundraising, send a celebratory message or advocacy. Regardless of the intent of the message, GoldMail adds the human element that is so important in establishing relationships and is missing in today’s on-line communication.

I use Constant Contact (as do many), and noticed that they had announced this feature. It seems like a natural fit. Anything else?

We also see a lot of people using GoldMail for internal communications. I create a two to three minute GoldMail message for my CEO at the end of the every week to give him an update on all of my happenings on the business development side. He receives a GoldMail message from all of our departments and in 15 to 20 minutes, he has a great understanding of what’s happening in the company.

Of course, he is involved in the company on a more intimate level, but these GoldMail updates save him a ton of time. On the flip side, he sends the company internal updates on GoldMail’s progress and provides our investors with updates as well.

I love getting a GoldMail message for company updates because it makes me feel included and I always have a general sense of “who’s doing what” but more importantly, “why” they’re doing it. I know that our investors love getting these messages as well.

I hadn't really thought about the internal communication angle, but it makes sense. I think we're all hungering for some human touch, and corporate communications can certainly use humanizing.

What about your raving fans -- what can you tell me about them? Any compelling anecdotes you can share? 

We have fans from all walks of life. From the CMO at Accenture who uses GoldMail to add impact to his most important messages going to their broad management community and senior leaders to an area manager, working out of her home, for a well respected direct-selling company, who uses GoldMail to “increase sales by $2,000 in two days without picking up the phone.”

We’ve had so many incredible stories of how GoldMail has helped people communicate and improve their business; there’s one that sticks out for me.

One of our customers sent out a GoldMail message to notify their customers of some changes to their website. They received a bunch of requests for more information and one of these requests led to a conversation with a project manager that landed the company a $200mm project. They claimed that this never would have happened if they had not been using GoldMail to stay in touch with their longtime and new clients. Not bad for a $10/month investment.

A $200 million project, and they leveraged Goldmail. That's a pretty amazing story! I may have to rethink this ....

You and I chatted about a freemium model. And I see you have now launched this.  Dare I say "What took you so long?"  What kind of impact is this having on usage right now? What do people get for going from free to paid levels?

Ha! Yes, it has taken us a while to realize that people want things for free, hasn’t it! We sort of went about things in an atypical order to how you see things unfold these days. For a few years, we charged people for GoldMail by either a monthly or annual rate and in doing so, it forced us to learn more about our customers. We’ve been able to refine the product and get it to the point of where we are today. We have thousands of paying customers and recently launched our free version; we know that people will pay for our business version and for our enterprise version, which we’ll officially be launching in the coming weeks, so the upgrade path has been proven.

With the launch of the free version, the doors have opened for more partnership opportunities and the downloads have gone up significantly. As the word starts to get out on GoldMail and more and more people receive and see GoldMail messages, I believe the downloads will go up exponentially. GoldMail is unique in that it has proven to be an extremely useful business tool and also has a viral feel to it, as more often than not our customers come to us as a result of receiving and/or seeing a GoldMail message. 

That makes sense to me -- that people would experience it, then be interested in trying it.

The upgrade from the free (personal) version to the business version gives the end user longer recording time, unlimited active messages, full branding capabilities, reporting and tracking on the back end, the ability to administer multiple accounts and 24/7 phone support. For our enterprise version (GoldMail Synergy), a company has the ability to preload templates into multiple GoldMail accounts. For example, a marketing team can create the images and scripts for their sales team and then upload and edit these templates into each sales person’s individual GoldMail account. This way, the sales person can login to GoldMail, select a template for their message, record their voice and send it off to a prospect or client.

Well, I can't say that I'm a big fan of scripts... but I know organizations often are. No doubt many sales people do not have your skill or finesse, Adam.

To wrap up, what do you think the future of this market looks like? What will GoldMail be offering in a few years, and what will we all be doing with e-mail (or whatever replaces it)?

Our goal when we started GoldMail was that “one day, everyone who communicates across the internet will use GoldMail.” Our focus is to provide people with a tool that is easy and non-threatening and enables the creation of a personal and powerful message in minutes. GoldMail gives people a wonderful publishing platform to express themselves and to stay connected to others.

I think we’re going to see a lot more GoldMail messages being created by people who have “something to say,” an idea to share and will use the tool as a means for creating interesting content.

I’ve always believed that GoldMail is the perfect tool for the blogging community. Firstly, when used selectively, a good blogger can insert a GoldMail to connect with their readers and to add a voice to the person behind the blog. 

More and more bloggers are using video these days and video can be cool and a very useful tool, but I often find it difficult and not very appealing or engaging to watch a person talk into a camera. GoldMail differs in that it doesn’t “force” someone to get in front of a camera and it allows the recipient’s mind to effectively be stimulated and to retain information with the voice and visual combination. It also allows the creator of a GoldMail message to speak over graphs, pictures, data and other content that isn’t easy to share using a video camera. And, most of all, it’s very cost effective and very easy to use.

Getting in front of a camera is indeed a whole bigger level of commitment than just recording to slides.

We anticipate launching both a mobile version within the next few months, and GoldMail will add other requested features, but will always maintain the product’s simplicity and ease of use.

There are so many different means of collaborating with people these days; it will be very interesting to see what we’ll all be doing with e-mail. We’re excited because regardless of the platform people use to share information i.e. e-mails and social media, GoldMail will always enable people to communicate and “connect” with others with a personal touch.

Adam, this was great. Thank you for your time, and for telling us about the business. Personally, I'm getting so much sales-oriented e-mail that asks me to do all the work, that this could be a relief. I and the readers here will be interested to see how this evolves. Good luck with the business!

I’m not a regular blogger but thought it would be fun to demonstrate how GoldMail can be used in a blog. Thank you!

Adam provided a link to his blog, where he has embedded a Goldmail message. Click the image to see/hear it.

Social media is just one big ad

Something terrible has happened -- people have been telling everyone to use social media for brand building and visibility and everyone's listened.

The result isn't pretty. My e-mail is filled with spam, and the rest of social media seems to be going the same way.

My Facebook status feeds, which used to be filled with witty quips from business buddies and personal friends, has now become overwhelmed with advertising. I really like some of these folks, and used to find them interesting, but now all they're doing is promoting their latest business venture, often itself a business promotion of sorts, such as a book. [Publishers are pretty much insisting on this now, from what I hear.]

I suspect I've been guilty of this stuff myself, which doesn't ease the annoyance at all.

I've had to take the drastic step of turning off status updates from a few people. Some of my actual real-world friends have disconnected, which I was sorry to see. Others never log in any more, and I can't blame them. I rarely log in myself.

Twitter is overwhelmed with self-promotional material.

All of us 'brand of one' people have been told we need to get out there posting links to interesting articles. So we are. And my feed is no better, sadly.

The thing is, you pretty much have to engage with some of these media, or I do anyway:

You simply can’t ignore a communication medium that has enjoyed a growth rate in users of more than 700 per cent over the past year and is used by people to talk about anything including your brand.

[This was actually Neville Hobson being quoted by Chris Abraham but I found it on Abraham's blog ... that's what things are like out there in social media content now.]

Now that I see people are getting their accounts hacked, so that I am getting tweets about Viagra and such, I'm having serious doubts.

Linked In itself is still useful, thank goodness.

It's OK to ruthlessly ignore people you've never met or heard of. And not that many people have figured out how to get their Twitter feeds to show up there.

But the e-mail bulletins advising me that "X is now connected to Y" have got to be the pinnacle of almost useless information.

The discussion groups are still useful, likely because they are all moderated. Not that people aren't trying to insert blatant calls to action, they just haven't been that successful.

Some really clever people invited me to participate in Wave, Google's new collaboration tool. Now there's Buzz, Google's new competitor in the FriendFeed battle for eyeballs. There are a gazillion other lesser players.

It's true, there are some bright lights on the horizon. Like people building truly useful applications on the Twitter platform. I don't personally need to know when my local bakery has something fresh -- several times a day I presume -- but this is a good start.

If you actually found time in your day to read this, I thank you. Please follow me @susanabbott.

[Should I keep posting these to Facebook? Or is that just so much more feed spam in your world? What to do, what to do...?]

Co-creation watch: Hackerlabs and the democratization of creation

Human beings are by nature creators and builders. The evidence of this surrounds us. We have created many, many tools to support this enduring enterprise, ranging from oil paints and violins to concrete and laser-cutters.

In the not-too-distant past, the act of creation was highly stratified. There were fine artists, or those striving to be. There were craftspeople, like Gepetto the shoemaker (aka Pinocchio's father, who dreamed of having a real son). There may have been many stonemasons, but there were few Berninis, and they lived in an elite place.

This segregation of high and low creation has been pervasive throughout the world of work and in recent times too. I recall being told in no uncertain terms by a senior executive that I was not a creative person, only some people were creative, and that when creativity was needed, it would be hired, thank you very much. I doubt that was an isolated conversation. Even in creative industries, the true creatives were housed in special cages.

This is all changing. 

Crafts used to be denigrated as "low art", somehow a lesser act of creation. The same was true of graphic design -- if it was produced for commercial reasons, it shouldn't be framed an hung on a wall. There is a shrinking community of people who actually care about these distinctions now. Case in point: Etsy, an online craft market and community. Yes, some of this stuff is perfectly hideous. But much of it is charming. Anyone can get in on the act here, including children.

Although many strive to make a living with their shops, I suspect that many more just want to share their creations with the world. This motive is surely part of what drives Instructables, a place where you can share your approach to making Lego shaped gummy candies.

 

In fact, these communities have their own ideas about what makes something wonderful.

Customized manufacturing is another sign on this creation highway. You can go questing for amazing sneakers in your local hip neighborhood, or you can quest for them online, or you can design your own. And it's not just sneakers anymore.  (Levi's tried to pull off something like this more than a decade ago, but they didn't quite get it right, or perhaps were also a bit too soon. It was custom fit, not custom design, for one thing.)  If you are an actual designer in the sneaker world, keeping your job may depend on being at least as good as the free stuff coming in.

And it's not just sneakers. The tools of big-time industrial creativity are fast becoming available to people. 3D scanners and printers -- and the aforementioned laser cutters -- are now within the range of affordability, just as desktop printers became affordable. And they are going to get more affordable. The real question is whether you'll buy these things in the tool corral at Home Depot, or in the electronics section at Best Buy.

Today, I discovered another wonderful sign of these times in Hackerspace. 

 

Here's how my local Hackerspace describes itself -- "a community space with a diverse membership, including artists, computer programmers, web designers, and hardware hackers. It is inspired by the philosophies of the global hackerspaces movement which encourages people to socialize, share knowledge, and work together on their projects."

 

Hackerspaces reminds me of the unconferences that have sprung up all over the place -- loosely organized groups of people getting things done.

New communications technologies is what has made all of this possible, in many ways, but it is as much a servant as a driver of the change we are seeing. Tools, access to people, and now access to physical space, are all becoming liberated from their place in the stratification.

The change is the great democratization of creation.

Resources

3D Printing and scanning: Wikipedia has a good overview here, Jay Leno wrote for Popular Mechanics on this topic, and there is a delightful YouTube with a demonstration.

Related posts

Creation and customization: here to stay and growing. Susan Abbott on CustomerCrossroads blog, Sept 29, 2009

Where customization is going. Susan Abbott on CustomerCrossroads blog, Oct 30, 2008

Get your own car logo, make your own stickers. Co-creation is everywhere. Susan Abbott on CustomerCrossroads blog, Mar 31, 2008

People don't always know what they want: the suburban dilemma

I live in one of those old-fashioned grid-street neighborhoods, where many of the houses are on narrow lots. Although it was built as a suburb, it was built before 1950s suburban cul-de-sac design became the norm.

When we moved here we wanted to be walking distance from a destination neighborhood -- that was our key criteria in a home. Which meant we paid much more for much less space than we could have had living farther from the city core. But we love it, as most people do who live in these areas. But cities stopped building neighborhoods like this.

Enter the cul-de-sac: what buyers want

The suburbs built in the last several decades are filled with large lots and dead-end streets. They are the suburban ideal, bucolic and pretty, where families play together in the backyard, and neighbors smile and wave as they leave the house to drive to work. At least that's the picture we are shown in advertising and developer marketing.

Developers continue to justify these community designs based on consumer demand. A few progressive cities are trying to stop these kinds of neighborhoods, and meeting a wall of resistance from real estate developers.

Surely developers know what their customers want. They know what sells, too -- the pie-shaped lots on culs-de-sac are the first to sell. Buyers say they are safer for their children. And they look pretty.

The problem

Here's the problem with cul-de-sac neighborhoods. The houses work great, but the neighborhoods don't.

You can't cut through those neighborhoods, so the congestion at rush hour rivals the downtown core, even on multi-lane arterial boulevards.

You can walk, but there's no where to walk to. So you have to have a car for everyone of driving age. The densities are too low to support public transit without massive subsidies.

All this driving affects health, according to some researchers -- not just from atmospheric pollution, but from lack of exercise and the stress related to driving in traffic. (I note one study below that disagrees, but only looks at physical activity.)

Stay-at-home moms without cars can find themselves completely isolated and dependent.

It turns out that these neighborhoods aren't actually safer. Because there are fewer people, some crimes are more likely, and all crimes take longer to report. There are more traffic accidents in keyhole neighborhoods than there are on grid-streets. (Probably because driving all those curves makes people nuts after a while.) Getting help from ambulance or fire departments also takes longer.

In addition to all this, these neighborhoods cost much more to service for municipalities -- more to collect garbage, more to snow-plow and clean.

So why do we keep building them?

I would argue that people do not always know what makes them happy.

A few social scientists have investigated this, among them John Helliwell (not in terms of real estate, just to be clear). He says you can teach people to make better economic choices that make them happier with their decisions. But left to their own devices, people often make poor decisions.

I think this is the problem with the suburban neighborhood. If we did some straightforward consumer research, we would probably find that people prefer the cul-de-sac approach.

Raw purchasing power is also a factor, of course. People choose among the options they have, and few young families can afford the joys of a single family home in a city core, even if they see the merits. 

But this is starting to change. Some realtor sites now provide walkability scores with their listings.

As we start to really address our environmental and economic problems in the coming decade, we will need to figure out how to market things like better neighborhoods and higher densities.

Resources:

Fast Company blog: Death to Dead-Ends - Will the New Suburbia Omit Cul-de-sacs?, by Michael Cannell, Dec. 29, 2009 

John Michlig's blog: Sprawled Out: the Search for Community in the American Suburb. The whole blog relates to this topic, and has some great articles and links.

StatsCan research that suburbanites are just as active: Life in metropolitan areas Are suburban residents really less physically active? (based on 2005 data)

Find your neighborhood's walkability here: Walkscore

CEOs For Cities commissioned a study relating walkability to home value. Read the results here: Walking the Walk

It's a mobile, mobile world: can your customers find you via smart phone?

As more and more people get web-enabled handheld devices -- aka smart phones -- your web site will be getting more visits that way.

And what will people find -- tiny little print that is hard to see even on high zoom? Probably.

This is why I decided to launch a mobile web site. It's a question of "marketer, take thy own advice." How can I be telling clients they need to pay attention to this trend, if I am back in the last century with my own web site?  Plus, virtually all my clients have Blackberries.

Check it out if you wish -- if you key in my regular web address on your mobile browser, you will be served the mobile site. [Don't you love how some of this stuff really IS getting easier and smarter?]

What are the fundamentals of mobile for your customers? Well, we know they aren't at a desktop, for starters. And they are going to want fast loading. But what else?

The basics:

• How to find you. For restaurants, businesses, retailers or anyone else in the face-to-face business, people need to be able to find you. Especially if they are late for their lunch date and no longer clear exactly where you are. A tiny map could be really good, too.
• When are you open? Hours of operation come next to location.
• Phone numbers, of course.
• E-mail. Also makes sense, if you interact via e-mail

More stuff:

• Social media connection points could be a good idea. Your LinkedIn address, your Facebook address or page, Twitter ID, etc.
• A link to download your app. For example, if you have a personal financial management solution that works on a handheld, can I find that app via your web site, or do I have to go to the app store?
• Other basic interactivity. Basic account information might be nice.

Extras:

• We threw in a few extra goodies just to keep things interesting, and to support the brand. I'm hoping it makes it easy for people to introduce me to someone else, by quickly loading the site in their mobile, instead of promising to send a link later.

Susan's take

If you think about how the web evolved from static brochure-ware to the rich environment we enjoy today, you can see how mobile is going to evolve. We're just at the beginning!

Mobile is not going to unchain us from our computers and our addiction to instant information -- but mobile is going to feel like jewelery instead of a ball and chain.

I don't think people will want a separate app to deal with every commercial relationship. (Every bank, for example). They will want a more "open-source" kind of feel to things.

Wouldn't it be nice to have blog posts more accessible via mobile, too -- so we can make better use of those down-time moments.

Thoughts on this, anyone? Good examples to share?

Resources:

The evolution of mobile: waiting for mobile 2.0 to arrive. An earlier post on this topic.

The credit for the work on the mobile site goes to B.W. in our offices and the good people at Snap Design. Thanks guys!

If you want to see my mobile site from your desktop, use this link: But make sure you drag your browser down so it is small like a handheld screen. http://www.abbottresearch.com/mobile/

"Why mobile is the new web, and why you should care". An interesting list of things to consider mobil-izing from Miriam Schwab at Illuminea.

Image is from istockphoto

BTW:

I've really been loving the comments lately, thank you to all the commenters. ♥

Twitterati vs the banks

Twitter is one more thing that somebody said of it: "this changes everything". [656 hits for that exact phrase on Google, and probably bigger now]

One of my favorite reads is Bankervision, and author James Gardner had the audacity to go public with a Twitter-is-a-stunt-for-banks stance, releasing a firestorm in a teacup as Twitter defenders and bank bashers both rose to the challenge of commenting.

Some of the points made are interesting, though, so let me see if I can distill the main arguments.

From James:

• Banks that hang with the cool kids want to be first on everything. They like getting attention from social media mavens and marketing gurus
• Unpaid media is a compelling value proposition, but you have to be first to get any benefit
• Twitter is not economic for reaching thousands of customers with relevant messaging, because you'd need a roomful of people tweeting to do it
• It's a lot like virtual worlds -- looked important, but off the radar at the moment
• To invest real development time, banks need to see a real money business case
• Twitter experiences a lot of user churn - a lot of people go dormant after a few weeks
• Bank innovators should focus on mobile

Commenters:

• Twitter is more about listening than talking, if you are an institution. Case in point here.
• Twitter may not have reached critical mass, but it's way too soon to write it off
• Twitter is part of social media, and if you are going to be relevant to your customers, you need to find a way to be relevant in social media
• Twitter opens a channel to pass on good stuff, and limit the damage from bad stuff (Remember the Domino's viral video situation)
• Twitter has more utility when you add a bunch of other tools like Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Twitscoop, Monittor, etc
• Bankers just don't get it
• Virtual worlds that require a huge software download and big investment of time are not comparable to razor-thin Twitter apps that take almost no time and are totally mobile

Okay, I think you get the picture.
Among the more interesting remarks made on both sides is the challenge of scaling up such a system to communicate with customers.

Let's consider customer wants

The part that I think is getting short shrift here is the underlying desire, need or want. [I know, I do go on about that, don't I?]

Yes, banks and others need to monitor Twitter. But if that ever became a primary communication channel, something is seriously wrong. I do think that the banks running a help line on Twitter are probably doing a good thing. I monitor a few of these, and I don't see them getting that much traffic, and what they are doing is redirecting the enquiries, for the most part.

Long before the internet, a disgruntled customer could call their local newspaper columnist or local TV consumer reporter with their gripe. And the company would get right on the problem and fix it. This did not mean it was a primary communication channel.

Since that time, banks have made many changes. They have standards of customer service, much better quality control and quality tracking, faster decision turn-around, and many other service improvements at banks. And ombudspeople as a last resort.

Social media have a democratizing effect: it means small voices can more easily be heard. They help balance out the power imbalance of one customer versus a big institution.

The scaling thing is still a big issue

Regardless of what the communication channel is, people want more access to institutions. They want it fast, and they want it convenient. They don't want to be on hold for half an hour. Call centres were certainly scaled up to provide more convenient access. And a few institutions do a good job with e-mail, which has got to be a demanding operation, and fraught with potential problems.

Twitter seems to offer possibilities for alerts

Relatively few banks offer customers feed services for things like rates. This would appear to be a good application for Twitter. What about campaigns and promotions, announcements of new locations, all that sort of stuff.

Or maybe an automated system should tweet me about the status of my application.

Lots of other innovations are possible using these new channels.

[Note that what I am suggesting here would also work well or better on mobile. And probably be more secure]

Most consumers expect banks to innovate first in helping them stay on top of transactions and money. They expect a lot less in the 'cool' department than they do of brands like Virgin Atlantic or Pepsi.

We are all trying to figure this stuff out, for ourselves and our clients. Thanks James for putting on a nice show over there.

The evolution of mobile: Waiting for mobile 2.0 to arrive

 

Remember the early days of the www? People shared good sites to "surf to". We still talk about surfing, but it's not some heady "let's sit down after dinner and surf the web" thing. It's now part of our everyday lives.

Early web sites were called brochure-ware. They were digital versions of print brochure content.  There might be lots of it -- many of thousands of pages of it, in fact, on many corporate web sites. But the first people to put rich media content on their sites were lauded as visionaries.

Well, current mobile communication is the same. You have a device that can go on the internet, so you can read the same stuff, but very tiny. It's just so much web-ware for the handheld, the brochure-ware of our era.

We're now getting some interesting standalone applications. We can interact with the web from our mobile, like posting to Twitter. The whole concept is still largely about using the tiny screen in a highly visual way. For example, there aren't many mobile sites that have voice-driven interaction, for example.

And the real power of mobile -- to leverage location context and location technologies like GPS -- that's just starting. So the customer experience should get a lot better soon.

It should be fun. Remember those heady days of the dot-com bubble? Well the mobile bubble is going to reach a much bigger crowd, because it will reach the unwired developing world.

 

Improved local search is coming soon to a smart phone near you

 
I was looking for maps of local meeting places (aka Starbucks) one day recently, and found this great little tool called FindbyClick. It looked like something I could really use, and I was excited to see it had mobile download availability. Just not for my Blackberry. Darn.

This prompted a quick e-mail to the company, which resulted in a delightful conversation with Kevin MacDonald, head of the location-based product group at developer Pentura.

FindbyClick was a media darling for a brief period when it was first introduced, but is not the main line of business for this IT development company. Nevertheless, it has a place in the hearts of the team, and is still in line for some development.

"My dream is to tap into the community, to help take content that would be of interest to others, and to use this content to create a social network on a map," Mr. MacDonald says.

He observed that a challenge for all mapping services, whether Google Maps, MapQuest or TomTom, is that "they have a lot of stale data."  He had hoped to build enough of a community that people would go in and correct incorrect data. This did indeed happen in some instances. "We had one guy who had a Wal-Mart obsession," who did considerable work tagging and moving points around to their correct locations. Another individual provided many of the locations and tags for Starbucks in Hong Kong.

Mr. MacDonald believes that the launch of FindbyClick was "a little ahead of the curve." IPhone had not yet been released, and mobile device capability was constrained. At the time this service was built, only Nokia had the capacity to put such an application on their phones.

Subsequently the firm has worked with a number of major organizations on location-based applications, including Google.

Maps as information sources

You can learn a lot from mapping. For example, Mr. MacDonald notes that Manhatten is covered with Starbucks, but New Jersey has almost none. We speculated that perhaps New Jerseyites were more of a Dunkin Donuts crowd. Or perhaps they get their Starbucks at work, not in their home neighborhood. You can tell alot about the people in an area by the stores and services in the area.

The future of mapping is definitely bright

Mr. MacDonald agreed with me that push marketing to your mobile device is not likely to be appealing to many people -- the "turn around now for a great deal" kinds of applications that were forecast a decade ago.

Instead, what he sees is the potential for predictive functionality based on an individual's own tags. So my phone might tell me about things that are similar to what I have already expressed interest in. If I have tagged a lot of delicatessens on my maps, my phone might find additional delis for me from the lists of things others have tagged. This feels something like Del.icio.us functionality brought to a map, and that would be excellent.

Another limitation has been the lexicon of descriptions available to tag a given location, which Mr. MacDonald likens to working with a limited vocabulary. In the future we will have more free-form searching, instead of being limited to a specific set of tags.

FindbyClick will launch a new version in 2009, "with more data, more content, and content more personalized to you."

Experience design implications

So many of the things we want are local. And the web has not been very good at local search. When we are looking for a hair salon, we want one that's convenient. Even more for a drycleaner. Same thing for a daycare, a dentist, or a framing shop. Sometimes it's urgently local, as is the case with a gas station or a bank machine.

With local search and mapping getting better, and with smart mobile devices ready to help, we will all be able to get out from behind our desks more and find the places we need. If your company has any kind of physical presence, you will want to be considering how you will take your place in these interactive maps.

Resources:

Pentura Solutions Inc.-- an IT consulting firm that developed FindbyClick

Google Maps Mania --  a blog about Google Maps. Here's their story about FindbyClick

FindbyClick the blog -- Kevin MacDonald's blog

How consumers are reacting to the economy

Using GPS to build customer experience: yes, it's another Harley-Davidson story

GPS device maker Garmin is launching a specialized version of the Garmin Zumo - the Road Tech Zumo. It will come pre-loaded with all the Harley-Davidson dealerships, as well as a program to share rides. These will be the kind of rides motorcyclists love, of course -- with windy roads, good scenery, and an absence of express-lanes.

As GPS becomes ubiquitous, I expect to see a lot more innovation of this nature. Read more on the GPS Lodge story.

Resources:

Harley-Davidson Zumo GPS - the Road-Tech Zumo, on GPS Lodge, Aug. 4 08

More than Scrabulous: Credit unions, P2P lending and payments now on Facebook

While some of the major FIs have garnered publicity for their pages on Facebook, others have been starting to offer actual transaction capability. So when I take a break from playing Scrabulous, I can check out account balances or send money to a buddy. Soon, I'll be able to apply for a peer-to-peer loan, or check out my loan portfolio.

Credit Unions leading the charge to transacting on Facebook

SEFCU is a credit union with 160,000 members serving New York State, and is the latest to announce transactions on Facebook. MShift, a provider of mobile banking solutions, built the SEFCU application, as well as the KeyPoint Credit Union Facebook application, launched November 2007. KeyPoint's 80,000 customer base is heavily weighted to technology professionals, and it only makes sense that they would be at the forefront of access innovations.

FiServ, the giant solutions provider for financial processing technology has launched the MyMoney application (screen shot above) that offers access to a number of credit union accounts. And possibly the ability to aggregate from multiple credit unions, although that wasn't entirely clear to me after researching this. Although the application was built with credit unions in mind, Fiserv says they can work with any operating platform.

[One thing I didn't care for too much were the gushing testimonials from Fiserv employees on the comments page.]

The driver behind this initiative is simple -- bring the banking to where the people are, especially Gen Y potential customers. But not only them, of course -- other demographics are rapidly adopting social networking as well.

P2P Lending

Lending Club has a Facebook application that is really just a page at this point, with redirects to their web site. But they are in a quiet period while awaiting their SEC approval to issue another 600 million in notes. So I'm guessing things will look quite different here in the near future.

Prosper, another P2P lender, is also live on Facebook. Prosper's application appears much more interactive inside Facebook, adding items to your feed about opportunities you are following, etc. Transactions still occur inside the Prosper web site.

Sending money around

A few operations are now launching that promise to let you send money around the web via Facebook as well. PayMe promises to let you use PayPal from inside Facebook. OneClick Pay is already live, as is Moneybookers.

Is Facebook taking over the world?

Most of these applications have users in the dozens. So there's no need to panic if you're an FI without a strategy in place yet. However, exponential growth curves do tend to look slow in the beginning.

Some buffing up is needed in the customer experience

One thing I noticed about these Facebook apps and the associated pages is that the companies are not doing a tremendous job of interacting with people. For example, the KeyPoint page has a question about the app dated April 1, 2008 that has no response.

Here's my tip: if you launch a social networking application, you need to build communication protocols and revise job descriptions to ensure that ongoing communication occurs. What's the point of opening a dialogue with your customers  and then failing to talk? 

Resources:
Finextra: SEFCU taps Facebook, July 10, 2008

SEFCU press release about Facebook

Credit Union Journal, Fiserv units unveil  financial platform for users of Facebook, April 2008, PDF file

Bloggers writing on this topic: CU Tomorrow; NetBanker, Inside Facebook

The "me" portal: Why you need a Facebook portal strategy, not just a viral/WOM marketing strategy

Finextra reported on a survey that says about half of Facebook users (25 to 34 year olds at least) are interested in banking on Facebook.

The sponsor of the study, Worklight, builds secure Web 2.0 applications. (Such as, presumably, banking on Facebook. But also corporate collaboration on Facebook).

While I am skeptical of the value of some of the findings, in the absence of a lot more detail, this is certainly a clear indication of where things are headed. I'd like to put this in context for you, because we look at far too many of these things as isolated events. They aren't.

I did a major trend study in 2001 on wealth management on the web. At that time, banks were still hoping to become portals, a strategy I predicted would fail. (And it did.) I also predicted Yodlee and its aggregation strategy would fail, because of the security and privacy fears expressed by people. Despite, I might add, the real interest people had in aggregation. Well, Yodlee didn't fail.

Yodlee, as we now know, changed tactics, and became a platform for trusted front-end providers like Citibank, thereby neatly solving the security and privacy concerns for many. The build in the area of aggregation has taken a lot longer than many thought it would, however. Seven years later, it's still kind of leading edge. Perhaps because the FIs themselves are wondering what the real benefit is from their perspective.

We also investigated stock trading on your cellphone. There was a surprising -- at least surprising to me -- amount of interest. It wasn't high, but it was a lot higher than I expected for 2001. And everyone had the usual concerns. But this was before the smart phone as we now know it had really arrived. Cellphones are quickly becoming a communication hub for many, especially youth. As time goes by, people will wonder why they can't get SMS alerts on interest rates, stock price movements, and many other financial things. They'll want to transfer money to a friend by phone, instead of just by e-mail.

Small payments are a natural for the cellphone, and are hampered in their growth largely by existing stakeholders. Where there are fewer entrenched stakeholders, lower barriers to entry, and less built-out infrastructure, cellphone payments have taken off. Seriously, why would you want to dig around in your wallet for coins or cards for a can of liquid refreshment when you already have your cellphone on your hip or in your hand?

Finally, the ME portal

Facebook, and it's cousins, are becoming a kind of portal. As meatier applications are added, it's easy to envision a time when your Facebook account is open at least as often as your e-mail/calendar manager. Indeed, would I want Outlook if I could get that kind of functionality on something like Facebook or LinkedIn? Although some of the features on FB and its cousins are kind of clunky still, the trend is definitely moving in this direction -- the "me" portal.

Why wouldn't I want package tracking for FedEx in Facebook, instead of having to log in somewhere else? Sure I get e-mail, but then I have to manage it.

Why wouldn't I want E-Bay watch-list tracking in Facebook, instead of having to log in somewhere else? Again, the messages would be there when I want them, but I wouldn't have to wade through them.

Surely we could make this "Why wouldn't I" list longer. [What's on YOUR list?]

Will Facebook be the winner? Who knows. What we do know is that these applications are picking up steam, not slowing down. If you aren't thinking about social network strategy, you need to start. Because it isn't all about viral marketing. It's also about real functionality and access points.

Resources:

Facebook users want web 2.0 banking, Finextra, June 4 2008.

You know advertising is hot when it's displacing IT among IT research houses

I always thought of Forrester as an IT-oriented research house. And then they were on stuff like supply chains and outsourcing. However, they are now getting talked about for their thought pieces on where advertising agencies are going.

This suggests two things to me:

1. Forrester is good at figuring out what's hot
2. Marketing, advertising, and brand building are hotter than they have ever been, but also under more scrutiny than ever.

I have other evidence of this trend.

The Globe and Mail, my daily must-read newspaper, never deemed marketing topics worthy of business coverage. [Well, any kind of coverage, actually.]  Not long ago -- within the last 18 months for sure -- they have added regular material on this topic. It's thin, but it's there.

Friday, I heard Terry O'Reilly speak at a conference on qualitative research. Mr.O' Reilly is a regular feature on CBC radio, and known for his expertise in advertising, as both a creator and a commentator. Here's one of the notable things he said on the topic of insight and advertising:

"Creative ideas born of intuition are the last legal means of gaining a competitive advantage over your competition."

I thought this was a) brilliant, and b) true.   

Forrester seems to think that advertising agencies are not helping marketing people connect with consumers and customers in a meaningful way. This is the summary of their recent research report, The Connected Agency: Partner With An Agency That Listens Instead of Shouts

"Today's agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand-loyal and more trusting of each other. To turn the tide, marketers will move to the Connected Agency — one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations. Over the next five years, traditional agencies will make this shift; they will start by connecting with consumer communities and will eventually become an integral part of them."

I have not read the whole report, but I am having trouble seeing this as news. And it's far too easy to just blame the agencies, who are under tremendous pressure to deliver results these days. But they can only do what they get a mandate and a budget to do from the marketing people. Surely marketers themselves must take responsibility for connecting with consumers.

And so must executives.

Being in the insight and intuition business myself, I can only agree with Mr. O' Reilly: we need better strategies. We need insights. We need innovation in marketing and advertising.

At the same conference where Mr. O' Reilly was a headliner, I presented with a client a case study on some innovative research we did together. When we got to the Q&A, the biggest question that came up -- which we brainstormed as a group -- was HOW to convince executives to do something less conventional than a focus group or a survey.

These researchers and marketers -- they want to deliver innovation, they want to deliver category-changing insight, but feel challenged to sell it into the organization.

We came up with a flip-chart full of ideas of how to do this. Things like: start small, start with intractable problems where there is motivation to try something different, and so on.

But as one of the research buyers said, "We want innovation, we want to do something new, and we want amazing insights, but we only want it once it's been done before. How do you sell this into the organization?"

Of course, we on the practitioner side have another challenge. Having promised these category-changing insights, we need to stand and deliver.

I only wish these insights that can change the landscape could be produced on demand. [I'll be hunting for a good one this week, wish me luck.]

Web 2.0 Watch: Facebook as the new collaboration tool

I started a new Facebook group recently, and am finding the groups application a bit sluggish. When I went searching on Google for a way to upload a document to Facebook, I discovered a whole new set of collaborative tools.
Here's a few of the ones I found:

Scrib'd -- a free service that lets you upload and publish any document on the web, and also embed it in many different formats. To solve my problem with Facebook, for example, I would upload the document, then link to the document's permalink in Facebook. Problem solved. Read their FAQ here.

ThinkFree Docs -- they describe themselves as YouTube for Office documents. They have a Facebook application already set up, and are working on iPhone integration, according to the ThinkFree blog.

Adobe Share -- discussed on Tim O'Reilly's blog. Adobe Share will be a place to upload or download any digital object, and share it with either a specific group, or the whole digital world. Mr. O'Reilly also referenced  Adobe's recently acquired Buzzword, which is an online word processor that also allows collaboration.

It turns out that I'm not the only one who wants better group functionality on Facebook. Some companies are starting to use this platform for business purposes. Serena Software in California reports that they are launching Facebook Fridays (part of their recruiting and profiling strategy), and also launching an employees-only Facebook group. Reported in Businessweek, second BW story here.

My take
Web 2.0 is really about working together online, not just putting up information. It's not just two-way traffic, it's more like multi-dimensional traffic. It's the brain xynapse model on a computer.

Social networks may be a starting point, but they are going to morph into work networks as well. This means -- once again -- that weensie enterprises will have access to similar capabilities as huge enterprises. Such as collaboration tools.

I spent a lot of money on a collaboration tool for the client part of my web-site a few years ago. It was only a qualified success. I will soon be able to supercede it's capabilities for free, or very close to free.

And this development of document sharing online is also another major democratization to publishing, just as web sites initially were, and blogs now are.

I recently conducted a study [on my own dime, or I couldn't tell you this] on teens and technology. Canadian teens are fully expecting to be amazed and delighted by the new technologies that come their way. And I'm 100% with them on that. It's just really cool. Our challenge as business people is [a] staying on top of this stuff and [b] figuring out how to leverage it. Equally cool, but somewhat more difficult.

What's your take?

Web 2.0 watch: how to build your own anything

You may think you have heard altogether too much about web 2.0. But in fact, it's like seeing a big boat slowly move across a lake -- you can hardly believe the size of the wake when it finally hits shore. In my usual Agatha Christie / Miss Marple way, I hope to draw some interesting ideas from some applications you've seen or heard about.

Instructables
Here's a personal favorite:  Instructables.  There are instructions from ordinary people here on how to do everything from avoid having to sort laundry to building your own Computer Numeric Controlled Router from scratch. I'd really love to have one of those, but it's a bit beyond -- actually WAY beyond -- my assembly abilities. Here's my own modest contribution to the pool of learning.  The site is extremely easy to use. Explore only at your own risk, because honestly, if you have a creative bone in your body, it will take you half the day.

This site is primarily built around visual instruction for things that have a physical world presence. Like laundry, lathes, earrings. I haven't seen any instructables yet about how to set up a trust fund. But why not, really?

Imagine cross-breeding Instructables with banking and investments. What we see today are a lot of bulletin boards that have disjointed information provided by investors and home budget gurus. What if this kind of information were more carefully harnessed and structured?

Implication of all of this: as information about how to do things continues to get easier and easier to find, by itself, it won't have much market value.
What this means for you and your service business:
--> you need to keep raising the bar on the knowledge and skill you are selling. Because low level knowledge and skill is free
--> you should be thinking about ways of taking existing platforms and leveraging them for your own content. Get out there, get in the conversation!

Idea City wrap-up: The science of aging

Dr. E.E. Baulieu spoke to Idea City about the science of aging, and the challenges of a world population that is aging.

No one signs up to get old, he says, because it means "frailty, vulnerability and dependence." Not exactly a marketable brand promise, as it were.  He hopes to change this to "autonomy, freedom and independence." 

He showed us that the maximum life span is not going anywhere, but the average life span is longer. What this means is that the aging and lifespan curve now looks more like a cliff, with many people living to an older age, and then dying within a relative small age range.

The implications for us here, however are this: as aging becomes a healthier experience, we will need to think very differently about the business and marketing opportunities presented by consumers in the last half of life.

This is a mega-trend that has already started, and will continue to pick up speed for decades. We simply must abandon any notion that everyone over 65 is in the same segment -- they aren't. We need to map out some entirely new life-stage models and look at ways to engage these consumers quite differently.

Idea City wrap-up: Greenification of everything

g As concerns about the environment continue unabated, we need to start thinking carefully about how consumption patterns can be changed. I have a bald assertion to make here: almost no one will be willing to change to something significantly LESS appealing just to be environmentally friendlier. The people who are prepared to make personal sacrifices for the environment have already done it, and there aren't that many of them. Unfortunately, the rest of us are going to have to change. And how will we motivate changes short of legislation?  I believe we are actually going to have to offer benefits -- emotional and rational -- that go beyond feeling good about being green.

With opinions like these, I was naturally very interested to hear the presentations of ZIP Cars and ZENN cars at Idea City this year.

ZIPcars

Zipcar is a shared-car company, very similar to AutoShare. Scott Griffith, CEO and president spoke. Here are a few of the facts he shared that interested me, based on their research:

• One Zipcar takes 20 cars off the road  -- these are shared autos, and that's roughly the ratio of usage of customers to cars
• Users save about $5,000 per year through not owning a car (full cost of ownership, including insurance)
• Once people sign up for Zipcar, they use the car less. He attributes this to the need to make a financial decision each time you drive. Because you pay each time, you think about car travel differently. Zipcar users take transit more often, walk more often, bike more often than they did before they were Zipcar users. Lots of good impact, and no public money involved.

Their operating model is all about making the booking and use process very seamless and simple, with a minimal need for staff support.

It seems that many of the benefits Zipcar users experience have little to do with the environment: they save money; they don't have to maintain a car; they can drive a Mini sometimes; they don't have to find or pay for home-base parking for the car, which can be a challenge if you are an urban dweller.

ZENN Cars: Zero Emissions No Noise

ZENN cars were completely new to me. Ian Clifford, CEO of Zenn Motor Company spoke to us. They are a Toronto- based manufacturer of fully electric cars that use a standard 110 volt plug.  These are two-seaters that have a top speed of 40 km/h (25 mph) and can go about 56 kilometres (35 miles) on a charge. 

The reason we've never seen these cars in Toronto is --- they're not street legal here yet. [jeez..!] So ZENN is mainly exporting to the U.S.A. Most of their dealers are in Florida and California. The cars are ideally suited to gated communities where you might otherwise zip around in a golf cart. They are inexpensive, wierdly cute, and they are quiet. Compared to a golf-cart, they are also a lot more luxurious, in addition to weather-proofing the occupants.

Mr. Clifford believes that most cars could be electric powered by using off-peak generating capacity. He noted this wouldn't help much if we are still making power from coal. And batteries are not a very efficient method of storing energy yet.

However he told us about an interesting development in energy storage that might change things a bit. ZENN has invested in EEStor, an Austin, Texas company that is developing a new type of highly efficient energy-storage technology. He showed us an object not much bigger than a free-standing hard drive, and suggested that this type of object would in the near future be able to power a car. 

Conclusion: electric vehicles could suddenly get a lot more interesting, along with other electric stuff.

One of the images Clifford used stuck in my mind -- if you have energy storage that is highly efficient, you could gather energy in very different ways. You could build large boats with solar collectors, send them out to sea, and bring them home with batteries fully charged, then transfer that power. And wouldn't that be cool?  Business 2.0 wrote about this here.

Vendor Relationship Management -- what the heck is it?

Vendor relationship management -- VRM of course -- is something new on the technology horizon.

"VRM provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties."

As a definition, this is a bit vague, but a look at some of the ideas this group is bandying about is helpful. The idea is to create tools that help empower individual customers / consumers / viewers etc. to manage out from ourselves our needs and wants, thereby giving us better tools to support our recent empowerment in the information age. So instead of just feeling empowered and overwhelmed, we feel empowered and in control.

There's a very good diagram here that helps to understand how a VRM system might work.

Examples of VRM

• Instead of having to deal with telemarketing and mail efforts to support public broadcasting, perhaps having provide us with a way to donate directly on our own, revealing only what we want to reveal. This one is a project of the VRM Project at Harvard (see resources below)

• Being able to generate offers -- sort of like consumer RFPs, but less cumbersome -- instead of lead generation. So perhaps I could put out an offer for a bookkeeper, or a house painter, for example, and be able to effectively manage the responses to that. I would identify myself as a lead, and vendors would respond to my offer

• You want to buy a server, so you use Technorati tags to identify your needs and the stage of your purchase, and monitor the incoming expressions of interest using an RSS reader

Essentially, VRM feels like it could be like a want-ad on steroids, a combination of Craigslist and virtual agent. We never really got CMR (Customer Managed Relationships), we got stuck with somebody else's CRM. So we can't really tell them what our needs are, what segment we are in, or anything else that might help both parties. We have to engage on the terms of the vendors only.

VRM is a concept about creating the tools to turn this CRM/lead generation formula upside down.

It reminds me a bit of the electronic invoicing and payment systems introduced first in the 1980s by companies like GM, and embraced on a much wider scale in the early 2000s. Companies were faced with miscellaneous invoicing formats from their thousands of suppliers, and were forced into a very inefficient process. Technology changed that, ultimately for the benefit of the suppliers and the buyers, although it was the large buyers who drove the development and adoption of the process. Just-in-time inventory really only became possible because of the infrastructure established around invoicing and payment, which could then be extended to ordering.

Zopa and Prosper -- the non-bank intermediaries in personal lending -- clearly share some genetic material with the VRM meme.

All rather exciting. And just when you thought the information age was starting to look mature and predictable. Surprise!

Resources:

Thanks to the Computer Assisted Management for Performance list at GoogleGroups for the heads up on this.

The Harvard VRM wiki portal is here, hosted by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and led by Doc Searls. The public broadcasting VRM initiative is here.

The RFP idea came from Phil Windley, here.

The server purchase example came from Don Marti, here.

More examples of other people writing on this idea are here on the wiki.

People with a problem are a gift to marketers: new business opportunities in travel and tourism

The glamour and excitement has definitely gone out of most air travel, between the general withdrawal of services by the airlines and the increased security. This is just the sort of environment where there are NEW PROBLEMS FOR PEOPLE! UNSOLVED PROBLEMS!  In short, a marketing gold mine.

Check out some of the new businesses that have launched to address our travel-related problems.

Beep Tech Inc  provides beep-free products like belts so you don't have to disrobe at security. They also have leather travel accessories to make the presentation of ID and boarding passes more convenient.

If you hate lugging luggage around, you can get it shipped for you by several different services such as SportsExpress, LuggageExpress, Excess Baggage, and so on.

You can go one step further and avoid packing the bag in the first place. Flylite will give you a virtual closet that you can use to select the items you want for a specific trip. You send them the items you usually take when travelling, and they store, dryclean and ship these items for you.  Perfect for the chinos and sports-shirt consultant that's on the road a lot.

When you see a sector where there are unhappy people, you are looking at a sector rife with opportunities.

Co-creation watch: Make Your Own Wired Cover

I missed the chance to get my real July issue of Wired issued with my own picture on the cover. But we can all have fun making our own Wired cover just by going to this link.

Fun promotion, and a good way to get a story into a blog or two.

"Technology is the New Intimacy:" Blackberry matchmaking and porn-by-phone

Online dating goes mobile with Dateberry

Rasool Verjee is the founder of Dateberry.com, an online dating service for the Blackberry brigade.  The concept is intended to bring like-minded people together. You can join by being invited by others, who have to provide some information and a recommendation about you. Men can only invite women; women can invite men and women to join.

Since it's a new service -- official launch date is April 2007 -- it looks like you can probably wangle an invitation just by requesting one from the site.

I guess this was an inevitable evolution. And given the cost of maintaining Blackberry devices, perhaps this approach will limit the network to those with a certain level of economic means. I think Mr. Verjee is right when he says that "Technology is the new intimacy."

Or if you can't get intimacy... try cell-phone porn

Telus is loved for the warm and friendly advertising that makes use of crisp, intensely colorful images of flowers, insects and animals, often in a whimsical way. No doubt this corporate capability with graphics will stand them in good stead as they dish up web-based porn.

Apparently we've been lagging behind here in North America, and cell-phone porn is well established in Europe. Nevertheless, I wonder to what extent this will diminish their brand, since they have had fairly negative response.

References:

"But only the Berry crowd need apply: mini-keyboard Casanovas have a new dating service to find the perfect match" by Dierdre Kelly, Globe and Mail, Feb 10, 2007. [subscription required 7 days after publication]

"Telus defends cellphone porn offerings", CBC, Feb 2, 2007.

Intelligent agents are among us

A buddy just suggested I install the Firefox music player, FoxyTunes. It's a wee little control bar that allows me to adjust the music without switching over to the player window. Cool and kind of fun.

What's really interesting, however, is the sheer number of little add-ons now available for Firefox. Over 1000 according to their site.

I cruised around a bit to see what was there, and picked up a nice little information bar called Forecastfox that allows me to monitor the weather anywhere. So I picked Barcelona, a city I'm hoping to visit soon.

*** This feels like an intelligent agent to me. I can sit here doing other things, while the agent goes and gets information for me, in the case, the weather.

When I first heard about this idea years ago, it sounded like something very complicated that only a true geek could program. But in fact these things are now all around us in the web world.

It might be a stretch to call these intelligent agents.  A truly intelligent agent could monitor the web and let me know when it has found -- and booked -- flights to Barcelona. But this is a great start.

A few of us oldsters might remember "push" technology -- applications that would allow companies to push advertising to you. This stuff has had a relatively quick death, for the most part. [And thank goodness!]  Because we've got the power now, and we ain't playin' no push. We playin' pull.

So if you want to talk to me... or pretty much anyone else now... you had better have something interesting enough to tell me that I want to pull it in.   This will be like the difference between RSS and e-mail: I'm in control with RSS, so you can't spam me without my permission.

As we get more intelligent agents working for us, how will this all play out? Will advertisers buy the right to push things at us disguised as pull?

I went looking for an illustration for this article, and found Verbots. This thing does look a little too complex right now. But I bet it won't be too long before even us non-geeks will be able to get someone else to monitor things and get back to us.  [Now if I could just figure out how to virtually deal with expense receipts, we'd really have something....]

And oddly enough, as these things become more animated, they feel like company. Like my office cat, pictured above.  Sometimes I forget to turn it off when doing a presentation. But -- surprise -- people usually find it quite amusing and engaging.

Intelligent agents. Coming soon to a computer near you.

Keeping up with the connections

Sean Moffit at Buzz Canuck has created a wiki to enable more connectedness among the Canadian bloggers, called the 1 percent army. (Aren't lists fun?) Now someone has proposed that we have a virtual meeting in Second Life. [Which means I need to visit again soon, and re-learn how to walk, fly, and talk...Just as soon as I finish my GST return...]

The wiki has a wonderful quote attributed to Victor Hugo, and totally appropriate not just for this wiki, but for this year:

"One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas." (Victor Hugo / 1802-1885)

At the same time, a client said to me today that "blogs are so passe ... it's all about podcasts now." Indeed, she may be right. It's hard to keep up. People keep asking me how I keep up. If only...!

Dunbar's number: or why you can't have all the coffee dates you want

I was thinking about something called Dunbar's number recently, which seemed to fit one aspect of this keeping up issue: I can't keep up with all the people in my network.

Dunbar studied primates and their social networks, which had an average size of about 50. Based on this work, he predicted the average size of human networks would be 150, based on our brain size. [whatever...]. Turns out that he was pretty close to right.

I heard an O.D. consultant describe that number as the campfire circle -- the number of people who can form a ring, and still feel like part of a shared bonfire experience.

In an actual coffee date with a very interesting person today, we discussed the formation of networks of resources among entrepreneurs, and how one might facilitate more of that kind of good thing. So people can find a good lawyer, a good banker, and so forth. The challenge is, if you're not careful, you reinvent the Yellow Pages. And it's been done.

But you can't have coffee dates with that many people, or even exchange e-mails regularly with them, no matter how interesting they are. Not if you want happy clients, at any rate. Eventually you just have to let go, and hope you bump into them at a conference somewhere. And hope they don't think you're a snob, or arrogant, appallingly disorganized, or just a plain old jerk of the first order.

I have had e-mail replies to notes I sent to people who I imagine to be much busier and more connected than me, such as Seth Godin and Warren Bennis. How on Earth do they do this? Do they have a small army of executive assistants? I can't even keep up with my comments page, and let me just apologize right now if I've offended you by not sending a personal note, as I used to be able to do.

What is the Dunbar's Number for brands?

With all this connecting going on, who's got the time for strategic thinking out there?

And why do you think anyone has the time or interest to read your lame advertising, listen to your direct marketing call, open your multi-page PDF brochure, or anything else that isn't completely compelling?   

Indeed, why should anyone develop a connection to your brand? If you aren't in the inner circle of brands, maybe you'll just be disconnected, like a friend we used to have that we don't have time to have coffee with anymore. We still send them the Christmas letter, but it doesn't have a personalized PS. It's a lingering remnant of a past relationship, a memory, a memento of something that used to be relevant.

This is the joy, and also the challenge of social networks and all the cool technology that enables them. I am now in touch with researchers around the world, but didn't have my neighbors in for coffee. [And what with global alarming, we may not even bump into each other shovelling snow this year]

And somewhere in my inbox is at least one invitation to coffee from December that I still haven't answered, from an interesting person. If only one could make a living going for coffee, e-mailing and of course writing blog articles.

References:

Dunbar's number, according to Answers.com is here.

Amusing version of Dunbar's number and what it means for man's inhumanity to man is here. 

Buzz Canuck's list of Canadian bloggers is here.

[Imagine what such a list would look like if it were U.S. bloggers... I think it's called Technorati?]

Obligatory New Year's Predictions

We're still single digits into this new year, so I hope it's okay to make a few trend predictions. I'm counting on the curmudgeons in the audience to remind me to check back later and see how we did.

Second Life and Avatars:
As noted in an earlier post, Second Life is not the end point, but the beginning. Yes, we will see lots of marketers climb aboard the virtual world. They'll be doing it to keep in touch with the evolution of the virtual world, and to learn, because there isn't going to be a lot of ROI there for a while. But it's well worth doing anyway. The ROI will all go to the designers, script-writers and consultants.

Innovation Gets Real:
Innovation is not going away in any meaningful sense -- the pressure is on everyone to be more innovative to compete, and if you happen to live in the developed world, even more so. For many, the real thrust of innovation will be on the next trend, the environment, and that's what we can expect to see on the covers of magazines.  Meanwhile, in my little corner of the universe, the Innovation project at Schulich will be launching the final phase of research, as well as a conference. [Reports on the research are available here]

The Greenifying of Everything:
The environment will be the real star of everything this year, and you can expect all the innovation stories in the business press to relate to the environment. The cool kids will all be looking to show how their organization, product or service is environmentally friendly. A lot of this will not be true green, it will be "greenification". 
Consumer culture abhors inconvenience, and truly being green sounds highly inconvenient. [Which of course is why we must push for government action, because as individuals, we'll never take big enough steps.] We don't want inconvenience, but we want to feel good about ourselves, and smart marketers will be coloring everything green, or at least making it out of bamboo.

Personalization and Customization Continues:
This major trend will continue, and probably pick up speed.  Consumers want the ability to get exactly what they want, not what you want to sell them. They'll continue modifying and tweaking, and if you help them tweak, they'll love you for it.
We want anything that makes us feel like individuals, without necessarily wanting to be too different than everyone else. To understand this phenomenon, watch the high school kids on the bus. They're all different, while being all the same.

Boomer Life Changes Aging:
There's little doubt that the boomers will exert tremendous impact on everything they need as they age.  In fact, their parents already started the movement. Most recently, I've noticed a lot of really cool reading glasses around. Sample packets of anti-wrinkle formulations are stuffed into all manner of magazines. I see more men at the hair salon getting a color than ever before. I bet you could add about a dozen items to this list with almost no effort.

Organization Life Keeps Changing:

Just as Boomers are changing aging, everyone under 35 is changing the definition of a career and an organization. There are a whole lot of forces at work here, from globalization and the loss of long term job security, to the culture of young people who want to be hired where their friends are hired.

For geezers like me, work-life balance meant having enough space in each box. There was even a book, called "The Three Boxes of Life", that told you how to get there. For the twenty-somethings I meet now, they want it all mashed up together, not neatly divided into boxes. There still needs to be a balance, and the fun can't all be after hours.

Not only that, but these folks aren't prepared to wait ten years to get roles with impact and interest.

At the same time, there are a lot of people in their early fifties that are tired of working so hard, and want much more flexibility and much more variety in their lives. They'll want to contribute their wisdom and managerial talent, but they don't want a conventional role definition either.

Any organization that can figure this stuff out and do it well is in great shape. Everyone else will continue to whine about the lack of managerial talent and other such blah, blah. But don't expect to see the organization man anytime soon, I think he's dead, and resting in peace.

Customer Experience Gets Funded:

When I started writing about customer experience here two years ago, a lot of people didn't know what I was talking about. There were only a few of us consulting and researching in this area. Now everyone is in on it.

And for good reason: to compete as a service business, you have to put real resources behind customer experience. That's finally starting to happen, and we will see a lot more thoughtful effort in this area in the coming year.

And it will take the form of cross-functional work that brings marketing and design thinking into contact with operations and front line delivery. [Could be exciting!]

One last prediction: Apple loses its cool

I have the sense that Apple is now so pervasive in the iPod and music space that they may not be the coolest kid on the block soon. We'll still love them, but we won't think they can save the world anymore.
 

So happy new year, dear reader, I think we are in for an interesting ride in 2007. How lucky we are to be born in this age, when there is still time to save the planet, and we can do it carrying a pink Razr and wearing a bamboo t-shirt.

Trendwatching: world of avatars

Make an avatar in your coffee break with SitePal

This is my new Sitepal avatar.  I can change the way she looks, what she's wearing, and add a short audio message. It's pretty easy to take the HTML and embed it in a web site.  And every time you change the original character, the link updates itself.

Sitepal is intended for supporting sales on your web site, however it clearly has a lot of other potential uses. When you click "play", the eyes blink and the mouth moves, and it gives a credible imitation of a real person's movements when speaking.

Let your avatar try on clothes

I got an avatar while shopping at LL Bean one day [pictured].   I don't think they have these anymore, as I haven't seen this option for a while. They have more shots of the clothes on a human model, which feels superior to me, actually -- because everything looked good on my avatar, which is a problem. But it was fun taking my measurements and building the avatar. [I tried gaining and losing weight to see what would happen -- amazingly, she still looked great in LL Bean jeans, even at 300 lbs.]

Start a secret life with the avatar of your dreams

I have a Second Life avatar as well, called Trif Sixgallery. My Second Life avatar has very ordinary clothes, and a body shape that is reasonably close to my real self. I wear a leather jacket and an orange t-shirt with brown jeans. [not pictured]

Most Second Lifers appear to be going the cosmetic enhancement route, however, and my ordinary appearance has clearly marked me as a newbie. A lot of Second Life is clearly adult-only -- the clothing you can buy in boutiques would more than challenge anything you can envision from Frederick's of Hollywood. In fact, Frederick's should probably have their own Second Life boutique, since clothing design was among the first things to be monetized.

In my newbie-ness, I thought that the Second Life environment might be an interesting place to conduct research. Turns out that at least one organization is already doing it.

It's Time to Experiment

If you don't have anything happening in Second Life, you should probably start. And get someone exploring a few other ideas along those lines as well.

You will likely hear a bunch of dismissive stuff about this. And here's what you need to say: "It's not about making money in Second Life. It's about learning how the virtual world is evolving, so we can keep up". Think of Second Life, and other applications of this type, as a university where you can experiment and learn.

Second Life is not the pinnacle, any more than Pac-Man was the pinnacle of electronic gaming. It's clunky and hard to learn. Like, if you want to build a house, you have to learn a bunch of scripting stuff. If I want to design my own clothes, it's definitely harder than it was to do it for my Barbie doll when I was 10 years old. Second Life is not the pinnacle -- it's the beginning!

When we gave the world automated transactions, we made things easier, faster, cheaper. Now we are going to make the virtual world please our sense of aesthetics, and feel more like the real world. Or at least the real fantasy world.

The green-screen is gone for good, and we're heading toward something that looks more like the metaverse envisioned by Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age is coming.

Fun with Finishes: making personal statements with functional objects

I noticed this display of jungle-themed mice recently. I don't think there's any cachet anymore in bragging about your mouse, unless you have something exceptionally cool. So if you don't have a drawing tablet, or something like that, then maybe you want something colorful and fun.

Mostly, we define ourselves by our stuff. That's what it means to be a consumer culture. 

Check out this image below of colorful briefcases. This is a high-end stationery store that sells mostly pens, planners and portfolios. Their displays used to have nothing more radical than oxblood in the midst of a black and brown sea. Two years ago, when I bought my last briefcase, I searched high and low to find one in a nice color. This year, they are everywhere, even in Staples.

I don't think this is just about color. This is about defining your personal style in things that used to be uniform. In particular, women don't want to look like imitation business-MEN any more. They are a lot more comfortable being feminine, regardless of the role.

My take: consider how you can give your consumers/customers room to define their style within the confines of your brand. Your brand doesn't just have to stand for a color. You can give people a choice of colors, and still be distinctive.

Chanel, Nike, Volkswagen all use distinctive colors and looks, within a well defined brand.  A large percentage of the Mini-Coopers are customized, but you'd still never mistake one for something else. Customers love it when it's all about THEM, not all about YOU.

Just as much as the customer defines the brand, the brand also defines the customer.
Great brands are great because they help consumers reach for something they want. It's all about them. Is your brand saying that?

Trendwatching: Managing the Infoglut and the Info-guilt

Drowning in the Infoglut

Infoglut arrived as a new and powerful word for me in this morning's e-mail box. And doesn't this word just capture the problem nicely?  We all know the problem... and it's getting worse all the time.
There's just too much information, too many cool sites to visit, too much e-mail to read, too much learning to absorb. None of us can keep up.

Suffering the Infoguilt

Personally, I have info-guilt: a deep concern that I'm not adequately keeping up.

Wonderful magazine articles not yet read are stacked around my office. [Including the thing you sent me from the NY Times, Herb, it's here somewhere, and probably I will love it when I get to it]

Blog items not yet read are accumulating like dust-bunnies in my Bloglines account.  I stopped by Flooring the Consumer this morning, because of a Google alert, which led me to a couple of blogtipping posts at Converstations and Business Blogwire, and thereby found a whole bunch of cool and interesting blogs that I didn't know about.  ARRRGH!!! 

Potential interesting speaking events are dutifully noted in the calendar. If they are free webinars, notwithstanding my interest level, or their relevance, I might not manage to attend, and the guilt-o-meter surges.

If you're like me, and insight is what you sell for a living, keeping up is crucial. And in fact, let's admit it, we're being honest here, it's a joyous activity for many of us, if only one had enough time.

Of course this is just in my professional life. In my personal life, I can't keep up either. Don't even get me started about the over-choice problem...  How about you?  Are you stroking confidently through those waves of information, or just staying afloat and trying to keep your head up?

Helping people filter the infoglutter

If you are a marketer, you will need to rise above this noise. You need to help people through the info-glut, not add to it. If you have a service that helps people stay on top of information or manage it more effectively, your future is bright.

And watch how much choice you throw at people. It's a short trip from 'having options' to 'drowning in options'. Even better, give them only the best choices, and make it easy to be smart.

The future is bright for brands, advisors and expert help

This infoglut, infoglutter problem is just about the most important trend I know of right now. It's so pervasive, we can hardly see it for looking at it.

In the early days of new information technologies, it looked like brands might lose out when consumers could go find anything on the net. Well, brands are advisors to a large degree. We expect our favorite brands to do quite a bit of filtering for us, and only offer up choices that fit the core values of the brand. And what could be more important now, when faced with overwhelming options? 

In the early days of online stock trading, many suggested that financial advisors would soon disappear. Guess what... that's another place where overwhelming choice and abundant information mean that the future looks bright for those that actually provide filtering and advice.

New parents now are apparently obsessed with making the perfect parenting decisions, utilizing all the complex information available to them. They've got no excuse right? It's not like the information wasn't out there. It's the perfect environment for a parenting coach.

References

The press release that started this post: The press release from Panasonic that started this post is here. Panasonic is offering help to anyone who needs it in making decisions about plasma TVs. Seems like a good idea.  Whether it works or not, I do like the thinking behind this, of providing expert help. They're cutting this off on Dec. 31, which is too bad. And I guess you have to figure out that it's a plasma before you call, and not some other kind of flat screen... (just let me do a little research on that first, so I know the right question to ask).

A previous post on this topic: Choice and the Role of Advice: how advisers change the customer experience

An excellent book on the topic of choice: The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz.  Excellent explanations of some of the science about choice and decision-making and easy reading. Guaranteed to get you highlighting key passages.