Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Getting off the dime

Removed background, cropped, and converted to ...

"'Even' is the new (in the) black", a friend in financial services told me the other day. He was referring to his clients' portfolios, bailed out banks, automobile manufacturers. A world where losing a billion fewer dollars than you had been expected to is seen as positive news for the market.

In a time of powerful financial gravity, 'even' is safe. 'Even' is acceptable. Except when it is not (for ancient historical reference, see Matthew 25:14-30).

The origin of the term to 'get off the dime' comes from old dance halls, when floor managers would see dancers and their customers barely move from a small (dime-sized) spot as they held tightly to one another. In the morality of the day, this was unacceptable.

Today it isn't dancers but companies and their executives that can't seem to unwind from their tight hold on whatever brings them security: cash, "the old way", the bird in the hand, or whatever was done a year ago when things weren't so dire. When Larry Young, CEO of Dr. Pepper-Snapple reported earnings last month, he stated, "Even though the majority of Americans are still working, the fear factor that has gripped the nation is having a significant impact on consumer psychology." That psychology is real, and it doesn't just impact sugared drinks. It carries itself into offices and boardrooms where it impacts a whole host of decisions based on the paralyzing fear of the unknown.

Such destructive emotions are common among all companies, large and small, and the longer they go unchecked, the worse the impact, as they create a flywheel of negative emotions throughout the organization, building, building, the cycle destroys any chance of a recovery.

In his book Confronting Reality, written with Ram Charan, former Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy outlines a process for executives to begin to see the forest from the trees, and the symptoms from the cause. Companies that recognize the symptoms, recognize the cases, and, critically, take action to overcome them can recover. It just takes a little insight, a little courage, and a bit of forward strategic thinking.

And that's my two cents. I only wish I had as much as a dime.

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Thursday, April 23, 2009

This is broken.

amazon.com

If I can be so brazen as to add to Seth Godin's excellent 2006 Gel presentation, This Is Broken, I'd add an additional category to his list of broken things called "It made sense to us at the time" (something I discuss here) and suggest that an earlier blog post of my own hints at one of the possible solutions.

What's broken in your experience?

I had a broken experience yesterday on Amazon. I purchased four MP3s files from three different albums by the same artist. I was forced to check out four times, and further, when I pressed the back button, it returned me all the way to the main page, not the sorted list I had created. Took me close to twenty minutes.

Broken.

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Friday, April 17, 2009

Know when to fold 'em.

The Pirate Bay logo

I know. With that title, I've put a tune in your head you'll not get out for some time. Still, you could do worse than a 70s classic from Kenny Rogers. In any event, my point, and I do have one, is that that lyric has never been more appropriate in a business context than it is to the changes made possible by today's electronic media.

The Pirate Bay case (click here if you are not familiar) came to a conclusion today, complete with jail time and seven figure fines for its founders. So now the entertainment industry has a win in their column based on foggy reasoning, short-sighted strategy, and a desperate effort to hold on to their buggy whip business plans. Now they just have to leverage that surprising win by filing the same suit against thousands of copycats.

Good luck with all that.

The newspaper industry is no different. Teetering on extinction, there has been no shortage of attempts – legislative and otherwise – to support the newspapers' clearly flawed business model. Think of the effort to start a newspaper today with new investors: The ten-second pitch for venture capitalists? "We deliver news and opinion late, in a cumbersome and environmentally suspect format to individuals whose iterative feedback takes days and requires postage."

Well, sign me up!

From efforts to reduce regulation (rarely a bad thing in my mind) to subsidize newspapers through tax policy (rarely a good thing in my mind) the concept of a newspaper is so central to our culture, or so it is argued, that its simply 'too big to fail'.

Like banks. Or car manufacturers.

It's long past time to simply face the reality that newspapers, records, movies and other media are competing not just with new media, but in a brand new context. Traditional distribution methods for everything from news to music to movies are obsolete, and there isn't a tort or an injunction or any lawyer in the world that can stop it.

One of my favorite quotes on the subject is from US Army General Eric Shinseki: “If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less."

Or perhaps more succinctly put by that other sage, "You gotta know when to walk away, and know when to run."

Susan Boyle

UPDATE 4-23: Excellent opinion piece regarding Susan Boyle sensation that indicates that the amazing viral nature of the clip has yet to monetize for YouTube or ITV as a result of the battles between old, new, and newer revenue models.

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Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Of Babies and Bathwater, Part II

Social Media Marketing Madness Cartoon by HubSpot Image by HubSpot via Flickr

Given that any job opening today one step above entry level generally requires three to five years of experience in the field to be considered merely sufficient, what does it say about the plethora or Social Media Experts flooding the marketing field today?

In a field barely five years old, it is difficult to suggest that even Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the accidentally successful social media site Facebook, knows enough to consider himself an expert at how social media should be efficiently added to a traditional marketing mix.

"Traditional marketing mix? That’s because social media breaks all the rules! It isn't traditional!", will say my distracters, and by doing so, prove my point.

Didn't we hear this, a dozen years ago, when Internet entrepreneurs suggested that those of us still relying on P/E ratios didn't understand that 'click-thrus' and 'page views' were the new currency? "That’s because the Internet breaks all the rules! It isn't traditional!", I seem to recall them saying.

The blog entry below this post, linked by Zemanta, explains just one of the reasons that marketing in this environment isn't as simple as latching onto the latest marketing tool. Saying you 'do' marketing is easy. Actually doing it, and doing it well, is far more challenging.

Social Media is a new tool for marketers, a potentially efficient way to accelerate personal conversations with a brand's 'tribe', as Seth Godin would describe their most vocal and active consumers. A new tool, and just a tool, like the web, television, radio, newspaper, town criers, and signs etched in sandstone that came before it. It is not a revolution - no matter how successful political activists were last year in leveraging the media to communicate with… other political activists.

Twittering, blogging, actively posting on Facebook, sharing photos on Flickr, posting on Digg, are all experiential. Experiencing it doesn't make an expert. I'm on my fourth dog, yet I still feel compelled to take it to the vet for treatment. That's the critical difference between having an experience and being an expert.

Even Social Media Experts at established firms like Agency.com tried it with client Skittles and succeeded only in spiking discussion of the candy's brand in a negative light, visits to the site equally mixed between social media "experts" blogging on the ill-fated experiment and giggling preteens excited to see their indiscriminate use of foul language posted prominently on the site.

Integrated Marketing Communications remains a proven and successful strategy for developing and executing successful marketing campaigns. Integrating Web 2.0 and Social Media will most certainly be a critical part of this planning. But it cannot be done effectively in a vacuum by self-proclaimed social media experts lacking essential marketing skill sets and an understanding of basic, proven marketing concepts that can leverage these new tools to even greater influence. That’s babies and bathwater, experts and experience.

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