Posts Tagged “pants”

And so, midway through the journey of  life, I found myself printing out a dark forest’s worth of marketing emails so that they could then be scanned and the resulting file burned on a CD to be sent probably via FedEx.  Indeed, I had strayed.

The task was irritating enough as I started at the present and began working backwards, but when I starting finding material that predated my joining the company, it got a little more interesting.  And then, just before the end – or rather, the beginning – I found this.

This is the sort of stuff that drives me mad.  it sets my teath on edge.  No, I’m not complaining that “A sneak-peak at what’s inside” is not a sentence.  I’m pretty much at peace with the use of pieces and fragments in headlines and email subject lines.  It’s the simple error of using “peak” instead of “peek” that gets me. I’ll take a couple of extra irritation points for gratuitous-hyphenation, too.

As deftly explained by Paul Brians with some handy mnemonics, a peak is the top of a mountain, a peek is a glimpse, and pique is irritation or excitement.  For extra credit, we can also find that pique is a type of polo shirt, and a peke is an ugly little dog also known as Pekingese.

Anyway, that message would never have gone out like that on my watch.  It made me think of the time I had to correct “security breeches” to “security breaches” in a press release at a company selling software that helped prevent data theft, not a company selling adult diapers.  Sure, it’s not exactly the decline and fall of Western civilization, but please folks, proofread with your brain, not just your eyes or your computer.

Today’s Social Media Breakfast at Ryles in Inman Square was packed.  Packed with social media types looking for work and some free pastry, but also packed with meatier than usual discussion of ROI.  You can follow much of the live twitter chatter on the hashtag #smb10 even though hashtags are sort of obsolete.

After the schmoozing, Shift’s Robert Collins called the session to order, acknowledged the generosity of sponsor Hubspot, and introduced the topic, social media ROI.  Angst about the return on marketing investment is nothing new, and social media marketing has turned out not to be immune to the question, especially in strummy und drangy economic times.  Maybe it’s a meme I’m not hip to, but the possibly rhetorical question, “what’s the ROI of putting on your pants?” came up more than once.

The first speaker was Hubspot’s Brian Halligan who opened with the point that people are getting better and better at blocking out traditional (and non-traditional) interruptive marketing.  I guess that’s part of why Hubspot sponsors SMB, eh?  In any case, Brian showed how Hubspot uses content creation to bring in web traffic and then organizes that traffic by source into funnels leading down to leads and business.  A refreshingly pragmatic approach, I think.  On the other hand, there is an element of “give away interesting content and they will come” airy optimism here, but he advised us all to ask if we were generating “wonder bread or wheat bread” with traffic from social media sites.  I’m a little skeptical of the “intangible ROI” on one of his slides – if its intangible, is it really Return?

Next up, Matt Cutler of Visible Measures (also a Hubspot customer, hmm) talked about his company’s business of measuring online media, sort of like an Arbitron for the YouTube set.  My favorite factoid from his presentation was that the #1 predictor of the viewership of a given video is if the artist has just come out with another new video.  Apparently, the coattails of a new video, any new video, can carry along older videos by that artist, or – I speculate – other related videos by any artist.  He also pointed out that the “how did they do that?” factor contributes to more views as people watch it again and again to figure it out.

Matt also showed some word cloud analyses that I must blog about separately.  I love the look of word clouds but have some issues about how people are starting to use them more like tag clouds and thereby overestimate the amount of actual information in them.  This vintage limepost tells part of the story.

I also learned from Matt that primetime TV advertising carries a cost in the range of $25 CPM.  Interesting to compare that figure to my guesstimated price of $15 CPM for advertising in my twitter stream.  Hmm, indeed.

The third speaker was Andy McAfee, an HBS Fellow (with an HBS blog) who was the only one presenting without slides.   He began by pondering why you never see ROI figures of less than 100% on those slick documents you get from vendors.   Hmm.  It turns out, to my surprise, that Andy advocates a more realistic and relaxed view of technology (not just marketing, not just social media) ROI.  The says that the chain of cause and effect is so tenuous and attenuated, that it’s an “intellectually bankrupt exercise.”  What you can do, Andy says, is you can measure what you can measure on the Investment side – generally how much money and time you spend -  and for the Return side, you have to use a different method.  You have to tell stories and create scenarios.

McAfee went on to say that conventional “sharp pencil ROI” (the sort Sloanies like me enjoy) is a bit of a lie, and a lie that actually insults people’s intelligence since everybody knows there’s no way those numbers are that accurate.  He suggests that we should come to terms with the possibility that costs and benefits could be comprehended in dissimilar terms.

I like it.  But will the boss buy it? I hope the social media tweeps in the crowd down’t misread Andy’s talk as permission to throw ROI out the window or to stop measuring things.  It’s a call to add some flexibility (agility?) and judgement back into the mix, and I welcome it.

In the Q&A, Sanjay from LuckyCal asked about the relative yield of different media funnels.  Hubspot answered that they see less efficiency in the social media funnels, but much higher volume.  And Hubspot believes that the volume levels in social media might be made even greater with less effort.  Not all web visits are created equal, I guess.

Another Q&A item asked about the valuation of a social media asset, such as a number of facebook friends.  The suggestion was that you could value them by estimating what it would cost you to acquire permission to message those people by some other means.  But remember folks, your facebook friends are not really assets, you don’t own them, you just have the temporary privilege of communcating with them, revocable at any time.

See you next month at Social Media Breakfast 11, which will be about social media in the nonprofit world…

Tags: #smb10, breakfast, cambridge, hubspot, inman square, pants, ryles, social media

I got a message from Si in London recommending that I check out this upcoming TweetUp in Cambridge.  Turns out it was at Andala Cafe, home of my favorite hummus plate and barely a block from limeduck world headquarters.  Once again, the internet pwnz geography.  The TweetUp, called OpenCoffee, happens Wednesdays at 8:30ish, and seems to be a global phenomenon that has somehow landed right in my back yard.

This week, OpenCoffee was pretty Twitter-centeric, with Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital and Sanjay Vakil of LuckyCal leading a loose discussion of location-based apps, twitter platforms, and using twitter either as a start point or an end point for aggregation of what can only be described as your “stuff.”

The session was well-attended with some 40+ tweeple stretching the limits of Andala’s front room.  You can catch up on some of the chatter via this twitter search.

There was some debate about the utility of hash tags as opposed to unhashed tags, and taxonomy vs folksonomy.  I came down on the side of getting it mostly right and keeping it simple, which seems to be the guiding principle of twitter.  And then I fell off a chair while trying to explain Pants Status to the assembled masses.  My point, such as it was, is that there seems to be apps (if you can call Pants Status an app) that use twitter without any special action on the user’s part.

On a side note, the frothy beverage pictured above is an Andala specialty, fresh apple ginger juice.  I highly recommend it.  iPhone not included, but if you come to OpenCoffee, I promise you’ll be near one.

I did it again. I sent an article around to a bunch of people at work. Some of them work for me an probably feel obligated to read it or maybe even act upon it. I’ve become one of Those Managers – the ones who pass along trendy thought pieces to people who have more than enough inbound email. But this one was just too timely, too pertinent, too zeitgeisty. Here’s the quickest possible overview:

More choice is sometimes worse; less choice is sometimes better.

There. I said it. I voiced a repugnant, anti-democratic idea. I stepped on The Long Tail . I declared myself an enemy of choice and freedom and curly fries with cheese. Well, almost.

Let’s start with some material from the proximate source of my outrageous statement:

If some choice is better than no choice, and more choice is even better than that, then how can still even more choice — a seemingly unlimited array of choices in fact — not be a kind of decision-making nirvana where people make both better decisions and are happier about those decisions? Do not more choices and a greater number of options lead to better decisions? And if so, why then are people unhappy with their decisions even when a decision is a good one? Why do people feel regret even when they choose well?

And then there’s some more stuff and an excellent video going into some detail on why too much choice can lead to customers feeling ill-served even when they might be served better than with less choice. And then the design thing kicks in with the “learning to love constraints” thing. You should check all that out, but I want to pull the discussion back to the marketing and economics world where we can geek out.

I remember something from business school. I know, that’s shocking. I remember Prof. Drazen Prelec saying, with his rock-star hair and droopy slavic accent,

In the future, everything will feel like it is free.

What this grand statement meant is that marketers will figure out how to separate the pain of paying for things from the joy of receiving the things, not necessarily in time (although that helps a lot) but in mental space, and thus consumers will feel awash in free goods and services. Even though they won’t be free. Anybody offering something that doesn’t feel free will have a hard time selling against a competing offering that feels free, and so soon enough, everything will feel free. That was only 2001, and I think it’s well on its way to being true. Consider interest-only mortgages, free night and weekend minutes, Starbucks cards, EZ-Pass/FastLane, 0% financing, and $2,410,000,000,000 in consumer debt.

OK, let’s try to steer this ship back into port. I dragged Drazen in here because I want to riff on his formula and his ideas about hedonic utility in my rant about the goodness of restricted choice. I know, if I do that one more time I might have to start paying my alumni dues, but that East Campus project just rubs me the wrong way, it looks like it’s turning its back on Kendall Square.

Barry Schwartz says people with lots of choices are wracked with buyers remorse wondering if they made the right choice. Prof. Prelec says that people will be happier if they feel like they’re getting something for nothing even if they’re not. So I say that people will feel best if they get what they want but don’t have to make a lot of choices to get it. My formula is this:

The ideal number of choices is just one: exactly what I’m looking for.

But since different people look for different things, and some people don’t even know what they’re looking for, it falls to marketers and designers of information to engineer the choices to feel as close to this ideal as possible for each individual customer with the smallest possible number of alternatives – mass customization, extensive (but not invasive) customer profiling, recording and research, dynamic stores and product segmentation.

I want to walk into the Gap and see only clothes in my size. And only clothes in colors that will look good on me. And they should all be on sale. I’ll have a lot fewer choices and I’ll be a lot happier.