A Wider Net

UPDATE 7/308 - see below

I love it, I hate it, and it’s my favorite Outlook plugin. The Xobni toolbar scans all of my email, including all of my old Outlook PST files dating back almost 10 years, amounting to nearly 100GB of data, and makes it astonishingly easy to find things. More than a simple indexing search, Xobni allows you to identify social networks within your email structure by helping you identify frequent connections, conversational threads, topics, etc. Conversational threads become far easier to find and read. For each person, sender or recipient, you get an at-a-glance profile of how often you send and receive mail to that person, what conversations you’ve had recently, who else has been involved in the conversations with this person, and what files you have shared. You can even tell what time of day they are most likely to send email and divine the best times to reach them! They also provide detailed analytics so you can look into your own email habits, how long it takes for you to respond to emails, how many emails you get and receive each day, and so on.

Xobni has been a bit of a system hog, resulting in about 10 minutes of frustrating startup in the morning when keyboard response frequently drops from “snappy” to “10-year-old-cat-who-is-proudly-ignoring-you”. Today, that appears to have taken a big step in the right direction with the release of version 1.4 which contains, among other improvements, performance boosts. I could not be more thrilled by any incremental release of a plugin. Ok, I could… and I’m talking to YOU del.icio.us.

The biggest addition in version 1.4 is the integration with massively useful business social network LinkedIn. Thank the social network gods that they chose LinkedIn over Plaxo because my Plaxo profile simply says “Find me on LinkedIn”. Xobni now pulls in updated information from LinkedIn for any of your contacts within your email thread, including photo, company, and phone number. Have you ever attended a meeting with seven people you’ve never met, only to get home and not remember which person was which? Oh man, that happens to me all the time and this feature is my foggy brain salvation! Hopefully more people will add photos to LinkedIn now. Outlook just got a lot more useful!

Update 7/3/08 - Xobni now sucks down my processor constantly. I can’t type a single email or word doc or blog post without constant pauses and delays. I recommend staying away from this new version for a while, based on my experience

Last January, Apple deflated the giant CES press juggernaut by launching the iPhone a few hundreds of miles away at Macworld Expo. This year, a year after it’s unveiling, CES suffered the same scene-stealing effect, and Macworld hasn’t even happened yet! Dozens, and it felt like hundreds, of new cell phones were unveiled at CES and almost everyone one of them was compared to the iPhone. Surprisingly, the general consensus seems to indicate that not one of them beat, or even matched, the iPhone.

You have to admire Apple’s brand strength and the game-changing ability to shake up an industry that Apple had no prior experience in, and according to some technical analysts, no business being in at all. If you perform a Google search for “compared to iphone CES” you will find pages of search results showing a sample of the comparisons being made between the products at CES 2008 and the iPhone from Macworld 2007 (which, I seem to recall, had more features than the version that ultimately hit the streets).

Perhaps the most astonishing thing is how crappy the phone really is as a phone. Similar to the iPod, it falls short compared to its competitors in many ways. No support for Exhange or Lotus Notes makes it terrible for enterprise users. The browser can’t play flash movies so they conned YouTube into making special versions of their most popular videos just for iPhone users. The memory is very limited and it has no expansion capability. It has zero physical buttons - a mistake that pretty much every wanna-be at CES was not willing to make. And most importantly, it’s stuck on AT&T which, according to most users and Consumer Reports, is in a dead heat with Sprint for the bottom of the barrel for quality and service. Not to mislead - it’s a marvelous product in many ways, too. Its combination of small combined with easily the most intuitive user interface and robust media capabilities make it a delight to play with.

I am particularly grateful that Apple entered this market, even though I will never get one as long as they are stuck with AT&T. The changes in the phones that have already resulted form their entry are remarkable, even though a little short of being truly competitive from a gadget sexiness perspective.

What can we, as marketers, learn from this? Two rather obvious things:
1. Customer loyalty can too easily be undervalued. Oddly, Apple built that loyalty with great products and great marketing but to my knowledge, they didn’t do it by publicly listening to them. You may find it easier and better to do it in plain sight.
2. Recognizing a market that is completely saturated with second-rate products like the previous generation of cell phones is good business. It’s easier to stand out when everyone else is wearing the same shade of gray.

Photo from All About Symbian

At the recent Exhibitor show I visited a few booths devoted to lead retrieval and lead management that puts more power in the hands of the exhibitor. Often times the lead retrieval systems offered by show management are overpriced and offer little customization features to help with campaigns and post-event follow-through.

Owning your own lead retrieval system and taking it from show to show allows you to make the most of this sensitive piece of customer interaction. For example, you can swipe their badge and write notes on a strip of cash register receipt, or you can have the user swipe their own badge, answer a few questions on a touch screen, select the information they want to receive, and even download materials to their USB Memory drive. You can control the amount of information you want to gather, build a question structure that is sensitive to the customer’s job title, buying power, or readiness to buy. You can also automate the fulfillment of materials and speed up the sales follow-up cycle.

Once you have the leads, you have to do follow-up. At least one vendor was offering to take all your leads and deal with them. They sort, scrub, and transmit the leads to appropriate people in the sales force, and offer a variety of fulfillment needs as well.

Here are the vendors that stood out to me, in no particular order:

Capture Technologies offers a software package that enables companies to develop their own lead retrieval systems, including self-service kiosks that can deliver personalized content and follow-through.

Lead Wizard offers a PDA-based lead retrieval system that can handle bar codes and magnetic stripe badges. It does not transmit the leads as you get them but it stores them locally for easy import into Salesforce or several other CRM systems.

CardScan, the business card scanner people, had a neat Lead Qualifier package. You order a customizable pad of mini surveys which feature self-adhesive areas to which you attach your prospect’s business card. They fill out the survey questions on the sheet and feed the whole thing through one of their slick little scanners. In a couple of seconds you have all their contact information and their survey data in an application that you can use to deliver additional information on screen or automatically fulfill their requests. I like the paper backup it provides, and the fact that it not only circumvents the expensive lead retrieval database fees, but it even works at shows that don’t have coded badges at all.

Event Technologies will retrieve your leads, then manage and distribute them, following up directly with emails as directed.

This morning I fed my fossil-fuel-depleting Hondacar at a local Sunoco. The experience of pumping fuel at this particular Sunoco was downright Evil. Let’s take a look at how the customer experience has changed since the days of full-service.

You used to stay in your car. A reasonably friendly person used to pump your gas, check your oil, wash your windshield, and more. I remember - although the memory is about as foggy as the memory of when I was four and my brother-in-law bounced me off a ceiling (yes, that explains a lot). Both were a long time ago.

Now you have to get out of your car and risk spilling the most foul-smelling liquid ever on you. It stays with you like garlic, and unlike garlic it has this nasty tendency to explode. The gas stations are nice enough to place a roof over your head to protect you from the elements, although they’re usually so high up and so small that even a gentle breeze will allow a hailstone to target your noggin.

And you have to have a credit or debit card or you’re faced with dragging your credit-challenged soul into the building where a nervous cashier awaits, one hand on a trigger.

But the real evil is the way they work hard to confuse the customer experience at the pump in order to extract more money. Rather than designing an intuitive friendly experience, they place controls out of order and ask confusing questions that cause you to think, and who wants to think when they’re commuting?
Logically, they should order the gas choices from left to right, from cheapest to most expensive. Sometimes they go backwards, and I can forgive that. But this pump ordered the fuel choices in this order: Most Expensive, Cheapest, Middle. In no state in America can this possibly make sense, except maybe the ones still reeling from their hanging chad problems.

So they push you towards premium or middle-grade - you have to hunt for the cheap stuff, which my car specifies as it’s preferred libation.

Next, you insert a credit card - and the first thing it asks you is “Debit Card Yes/No”. I stared at it, dumbfounded, and wondered what marketing genius whipped up this scheme? It knows it’s a credit card. It could ask Credit/Debit, or simply assume you want to use a credit card as a credit card but no - it asks “Debit Card Yes/No”. The question, answered positively (the most common response to a hurried buyer) will help the gas station avoid credit card processing fees and the bank gets to charge cash advance interest.

I imagine that Sunoco has determined that most people won’t notice. That the minor inconvenience introduced by rearranging the pumps and asking illogical questions will go forgotten the moment the driver leaves. Maybe that’s true - maybe the consumers ONLY care about price. Personally I find good user experiences are a way to win customer loyalty. And to that point, I’ll pass on Sunoco for a competitor every time.

Confabb launched recently, providing a comprehensive online index of over 16,000 conferences (and rising). Using Confabb, you can “search, track, discuss and review any conference, speaker, or session.” This is one amazing tool. A coworker tipped me off to an article on Techcrunch that describes it quite nicely. It does a nice job of gathering information and assets from other sites, as well as building a community of users who provide first-hand accounts and ratings. If you manage a conference or are thinking of launching one, then you will want to leverage this site extensively. If you’re a compulsive conference attendee, unable to resist attending any conference remotely related to your field, then bookmark the site as your homepage and prepare to burn all your miles and points.

WillItBlend

For those who have ever had a bad day on the course – check out willitblend.com and see what happens when golf balls are put into a Blendtec blender.

I saw a link on youtube and clicked through to watch a pseudo-scientist show us how this consumer blender can mince up golf balls. Beyond the fact that the power of this blender is quite astonishing, I am blown away but the simplicity of this marketing effort. This video alone has been viewed 1,371,935 in the last 5 days. Now, I realize that a lot of that traffic is not ‘the right audience’ for the proto-typical blender buyer but, at the very worst; Blendtec has definitely used youtube as an engine for creating awareness. I picked up the video front the front page of youtube.

We discussed in our Ad 2.0 session at Innovation Day the concept of ROI in this case. Specifically we asked, does this type of media have a better ROI than a Superbowl ad? The answer of course is that it depends on the purpose of the campaign. Each medium connects to another (tv to internet to internet to commerce) but I would argue that the willitblend approach is interesting as it all ties into an end point to purchase the blenders within 2 clicks – pretty compelling. Of course, for mass awareness, 90M plus impressions during the Superbowl (400M pre and post) is going to be hard to beat but I am not sure that’s exactly what the blender folks had in mind. Plus, I am only guessing here, but the price tag of the Superbowl spots may be a little expensive for a division of this size company (82M gross revenues for KTEC, Blendtec’s parent company)

Regardless of the marketing goals and tactics chosen, pretty fun to watch someone throw things into a blender.