A Wider Net

Here’s an insightful piece about a recent flak in the gaming industry concerning the rumored firing of an employee from top-tier gaming site Gamespot because he gave a game a bad review. The rumor contends that the game’s publisher offered a six-figure advertising deal in return for the reviewers head on a platter. Regardless of exactly why he is no longer with Gamespot, the piece really discusses the relative value of “professional” reviews versus the reviews and opinions of actual consumers. From the article, and the comments, it’s clear what this group feels - user reviews are far more valuable anyway.

While there are quite a few articles about companies scamming user reviews by paying people to pose as users in order to skew the user ratings, ratings from large volumes of legitimate users tend to overpower those efforts. At the end of the day, there is nothing more trusted than the direct recommendation of a trusted friend. That’s where everyone is headed - finding ways to connect buyers with the opinions of their friends and peers.

You can apply this to most any marketing and communications program - not just B2C campaigns. Attendees of a conference will find value in peer recommendations of breakout sessions, exhibits, hotels, and evening activities. Sales employees will appreciate knowing which tools and techniques have worked best for their teammates. A webcast audience will more readily choose to watch archived programs if their friends or coworkers recommend them. Building in the ability for people to rate, recommend, and review content as well as the ability to track the opinions of people they actually know, will ultimately benefit you as well as your audience.

Now, on a B2C note, I would be willing to buy this amazing robotic critter, only if I could find anyone I know who bought and loved it.

Does anyone else find it ironic that our government is planning to scrutinize marketers for making false Green marketing claims? Is this the same organization that has been trying to market Global Warming as a hoax? Regardless of which theory you believe, the FTC is planning to update their “Green Guides,” guidelines to help marketers avoid over-bending any laws, which are now almost a decade out of date old.

According to this Business Week article, they plan to pay special attention to carbon offsets. These are environmentally positive activities that are used in conjunction with environmentally negative activities in an effort to claim that a product or service is “carbon neutral.” For example, a company selling pesticides may, in turn, plant trees and recycle and so on. It’s sort of like eating a Snickers bar with a Diet Coke. You can drink all the Diet Coke you want but it won’t take away the fat and calories in that candy bar. It doesn’t work that way. It is easy to see how these claims can get out of hand.

Marketers are often accused of spinning and distorting the truth to sell products and create artificial demand. Lawyers are accused of the same thing and they’re universally despised for it. (They obviously need better marketing.) For us, it makes sense to pay attention to this FTC investigation. We’re better off keeping our act clean, while we proudly highlight the clean acts of our clients.

Image courtesy of this guy.

or not.

moar funny pictures

Thanks for sticking with us through the first 221. It continues to be a blast.

What do you want?

In the era of always-connected digital marketing, are you taking the opportunity to really ask this question and listen? Here are some examples of ways to encourage feedback from customers that you may find inspiring.

Nintendo launches Wii Marketing Channel:
Nintendo just launched a new capability for their product-of-the-decade, the Wii gaming system. Launched only in Japan so far, the “Minna No Nintendo Channel” is a marketing outreach program that offers users tremendous value while simultaneously funneling volumes of marketing data back to Ninty headquarters. The “channel” (software and services on the Wii are largely grouped into “channels” to appeal to the general consumer TV mindset) appears to have three primary features: Delivering promotional videos, gathering feedback in the form of polls, and delivering demo versions of games for the DS Lite handheld gaming system.

The promotional videos look to be rather uneventful, but I imagine that Nintendo is capturing the viewing history of all of its users. You see, over the last year, Nintendo has been cleverly amassing data about it’s user base. Starting with registration data, they already know something about each user associated with the serial numbers of the consoles. From there, they have been pushing poll questions through the loaded-with-trivia-appeal “Wii Vote” channel for months now, and probably have been storing that data as well. Some votes were seemingly vapid, such as “would you prefer to travel to the future or the past” but could easily be used help make product decisions. A runaway preference for the “future” on this question would push a developer towards futuristic games rather than historical games, as obvious as that may sound.

The polling question part of this new service is, therefore, the real marketing panacea. The “Wii Vote” channel is delightful and fun, but the pure and obvious marketing questions may not have as much replay value, especially since you don’t get to see the results. The clever aspect of this implementation is that the system will check to see what games you own and ask you targeted questions based on them or their implied impressions. The diehard fans will answer them because they want to have a role in shaping the products they get to buy later. This community pool of highly focused users will be free to Nintendo and worth a fortune.

But what do users get for watching these promos and answering these marketing questions? The answer: Free demo downloads for their DS Lite’s. Something that, until this launches, they can get only by bringing their DS Lites to their local retail stores and McDonalds. You give, you get. Providing value in return for providing marketing data or watching an ad or promo is the best way to make people tolerate it.

Communispace: Focus groups on steroids:
I recently visited Communispace, in Watertown, MA. They will build and maintain a vibrant active community of passionate users to meet your specific research needs. They make sure the community is always busy with active discussions, polls, brainstorming, and other activities around a topic. This gives a product manager the opportunity to really get to know a large crop of users and rather than get simple polling answers, they get ideas and insight into where to take their product or service, as well as ideas for new products. The folks in the community tend to love it because they are hand-picked based on their enthusiasm and interest in sculpting the future of their favorite company/product/service.

Blogs: Two ears, one mouth.
A corporate blog is a great way to bring your customers closer to you and give them an opportunity to respond to your ideas and the way you think and do business. If you haven’t already gotten that message, please refer to these two great books that inspired me a little over a year ago to get this sucker going: Blog Marketing and Naked Conversations.

The effects of Second Life on individual websites and desktop applications is starting to show in dramatic ways. Here are three examples:

First, retailer Brookstone has announced that they plan to launch a 3D Second-Life-like store using technology from Marlboro, MA-based Kinset. According to a ComputerWorld article, Brookstone plans to be the first to deploy the new technology, followed soon by Tweeter. It appears, however, that you may not be able to see or interact with other customers which would be a real shame since that’s much of the 2nd life appeal.

Next, Doppleganger has created vSide, a social network for music lovers that has a 3D nightclub front-end. Users can buy credits and use them to buy outfits, just like in Second Life, but the goal of this site is to bring music fans together, help them discover new music, and click through to the iTunes store to buy. Additional neighborhoods are being built for “after parties”.

Last, here is an email application that produces three different intricate and clever 3D visual metaphors - your 3D Mailbox. First, you can elect the “airport” metaphor where your email is depicted as airlines flying in and out of a massive airport. Email with attachments always fly in on a carrier like Fedex or UPS. It has sophisticated spam and junk handlers, too. In the second example, a beach scene, your email is shown as bathing-suit-clad beach-goers. If they don’t pass the spam filter, they literally get thrown into the virtual water to be eaten by virtual sharks. That just feels right. I may download it just for that experience alone.

I’m sure there are others and many more to come. Some analysts feel this is just the tip of the iceberg - that sites will all go 3D over time. It sounds crazy, but so did the WWW with all it’s heavy graphics and dependency on a visual “browser” to those of us who remember the days of Arpanet and Bitnet. And Peter Gabriel. And Vinyl Records.

Found Doppleganger’s vSide via Wired.

The Livescribe, shipping in a few months, is a pen that records your handwriting, records the audio from the room, and synchronizes the two. When reviewing your notes, you can tap on a section of your notes and hear back what was said in the room when you wrote that section. Sweet beautiful context. How many times have you wished you had that context a few days after a grueling stakeholder interview or information download and your notes no longer make sense?

Apparently it can also figure out what you’re doing and help you a bit. If you sketch a math problem, it will solve it and display the answer on it’s little screen. Cooooool.

At $200, every single person I’ve shown this to has said they will buy one - if it does what they say. And they want it now.

Found on Everything USB (yes, I love that blog)

Newsmap: How to turn a news feed into a compelling intuitive at-a-glance newsmap. How can you re-organize your content?

Key:
The larger the story the bigger the news, based on traffic
The darker the color - the older the story
The different colors refer to news segments - world, sports, business, etc.
Click the image to enlarge or the link above to play with it yourself:

The Kindle electronic book reader features many new exciting advances and a few serious limitations over it’s predecessors and competitors. I think this could be a very exciting device for corporate communications if only….

First, the background - The Kindle, launched today, is a small incredibly light electronic book reader that uses electronic paper instead of a backlit LCD screen to create it’s images. Electronic paper uses very little power and produces a natural looking easy-to-read image. It needs the same kind of lighting that a regular book needs. Sony released an e-book reader this year using electronic paper but the Kindle has three killer features missing from the Sony unit: Wireless book download using Sprint EVDO cellular networks (with no monthly fee), the inclusion of newspapers and blogs, and a small blackberry-like keyboard. You can also transfer your own files to the device for viewing later.

Two shortcomings hamstring the device in my opinion - lack of support for all book formats and standards, and lack of support of RSS feeds for free. I track 100 RSS feeds (mostly from blogs) and while this device could have been an interesting way to read them, most of the blogs I read are not even available on the device and they cost around $1 a month per feed.

I have sent an inquiry to Amazon to see if there is a way for corporate communications folks to be able to transmit documents to a sales force or other employee segment privately, and bill the company for each download rather than the recipient. If this were possible, a $400 (or less in quantity, presumably) wireless device that can pull in the latest sales sheets corporate information while in the field would be a pretty compelling offer.

For more information about authoring content for the device, see the Amazon Digital Text Platform page.

P.S. The whole idea behind these things is to make your life easier and slaughter less trees… not to over-technify the world, but I will admit that the trees vs. plastics devices in the landfills argument still applies.

Google’s Open Social announcement last week has potentially significant ramifications to marketers trying to tap into the social networks of Facebook, Myspace, and others. First, let me explain what Open Social is and then we’ll go into the “why it matters” part.

Open Social is best explained on the official Google Open Social page and on this terrific “Open Social for Dummies Executives” page. Open Social is a Google-led initiative to bring some open standards to social networks that will allow applications/widgets to work across networks, and possibly utilizing and sharing the data unique to each. The new application standards will have immediate effects.

20 or so companies are on board with Open Social already. This list includes MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, and Orkut. If you noticed that Facebook is missing from the list then you noticed the very reason that this is big news. Google seems to be intentionally fragmenting the social network business and preventing the dominance of a closed-environment player like Facebook. Google can’t sell ads to Facebook users (now that Microsoft bought those rights) and as more and more developers are devoting their time to building Facebook applications, Google is seeing too many people spending too much of their time away from the Google ad ecosystem (search and iGoogle). So, just when you may have opted to spend some marketing dollars building a cool Facebook app, Google goes and lobs a massive cluster bomb at you.

But you will soon have the opportunity to pay for a killer mini-application that can be developed once and deployed across all those other social networks. Most app developers are expected to develop each application twice - once for Facebook and once for the Open Social consortium. As a marketer, you will probably find better results in the Open Social sites which allow you far greater access to data mining and measurement.

Mark Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and recent co-founder of Ning, is apparently a major proponent of Open Social and Ning appears to have launched the greatest support for Open Social on day 1. Recent comments from tech analysts seems to indicate that Ning has tremendous momentum and a fairly unmatched toolset for creating feature and media-rich social networks.

I also recommend the analysis at Forrester.

At the Mobile Internet World show today, I saw a company that made a really cool electronic coupon device. Ecrio is offering Mobeam, a keychain device that connects to your computer and downloads all the virtual coupons you can eat. You take it to the store and point it at the cash register barcode scanner and press a button to beam all your coupons into the register. Whatever coupons are “valid” (you bought the item(s)) will ring up on the register. Cool. Much better than clipping and sorting, saving and lugging.

I’m still trying to come up with a way to use this technology at a trade show or museum exhibit. And I’m also wonder what they were doing at a mobile internet show. Regardless, it was a claim on their brochure that made me write this post:

“…a Chance to go ‘Green’”
“Approximately 340 billion coupons were distributed in the US in 2006- most via free-standing inserts in daily newspapers. That translates to about 2.5 million trees - including the ~40% use of recycled paper in newsprint! Since MoBeam coupons are distributed digitally - and redeemed digitally as well - coupon providers can save money and the environment at the same time.”

Notice how they didn’t mention what those little metal, plastic, and battery-filled devices will do on our landfills (sit there for a gazillion years and poison our groundwater). This is a great device and if they get it off the ground, I’m in for two. But when it comes to marketing copy, I’m a big fan of green marketing only where the “green” is real.