Information Squid

I was stopped on my walk home today by a gentleman who thought I looked like a person who reads newspapers. We had a friendly conversation:
Him: Do you get the Washington Post at home?
Me: No, I read it online.
Him: We have a new program where you can get a free home subscription to the Express [free tabloid sibling of the Post]….
Me: Sorry, not interested.
Him: If people don’t subscribe, there won’t be an online paper anymore.
Me: But there isn’t an online subscription.

I don’t want the physical version of the paper because I hate newsprint smudges and I like reading articles online (normal procedure: open lots of tabs, read through them in turn). And asking people to pay for online content doesn’t have a great track record (Slate subscriptions, TimesSelect, etc.), although some organizations have managed it (the Wall Street Journal, Salon Premium, the Financial Times, etc.). But there ought to be something else the Post could ask me besides “help us kill more trees to get our circulation numbers up.”

I have a lot of brand loyalty to the Post. I’ve been reading it pretty much daily since seventh grade, first my parents’ paper subscription and then online when I went to college. I’m used to the way its writers think – I know who writes the most entertaining Style stories (Monica Hesse), who consistently likes the opposite movies from me (Ann Hornaday), whose analysis I trust on the health care debate (Ezra Klein).

So why don’t I have a convenient way to support the Post that doesn’t involve acres of newsprint? I think they’re still stuck in a commercial model, and wish they’d adopt a bit of thinking from the nonprofit world – even if becoming a nonprofit isn’t the way they choose to go. I already see the benefits of their work, I’m a supporter, so let me participate in the mission. I can imagine seeing a message one day at the top of the homepage saying “Following our international stories? Support our foreign bureaus.” A couple of months after that, I’d see “Whether you love the Kennedy Center or the 9:30 Club, support our local arts coverage.” I’d give them $20 or $30 every so often, happily. That has to be better for them than the costs of delivering a free Express every weekday. It’s probably even better than my paying $1.50 a week for six months for weekdays plus Sunday home delivery of the Post.

The idea isn’t perfect. First, with advertising costs dependent on subscription numbers and online ads not nearly as lucrative as paper ones, my eyeballs aren’t as valuable as my blackened fingers. Second, it takes a good bit of effort to run an effective nonprofit fundraising program, and a for-profit fundraising program would require the same message crafting and analysis. Third, especially in a town where so many people are transient, my brand loyalty may be quite the exception.

But some of the blogs I read have Donate buttons in the sidebar, and if the blogger says “hey, I need help with my car repair / my hospital bill / getting to a conference” I’ll probably throw something into the kitty. At the moment the Post can’t figure out how to ask.

We have car dealerships, because you want to try driving a car before you buy it. We have mattress superstores, so you can lie on the bed before sleeping on it for the next five years. But apparently we’re killing off refrigerator displays in favor of online appliance shopping.

This is odd, because it seems computers are going the other way. Dell had taken over the world with online shopping and customization, but now retail is newly popular. Apple created its own boutiques (all white and shiny), which took off. Now even Microsoft is planning stores.

And it’s not just the branded stores that are doing well; Costco puts its displays of televisions, computers, and cameras at the very front of my local store. They’re interested enough in the electronics market to have recently announced a program for recycling your old electronics – presumably in hopes that you’ll use your Costco Cash Card trade-in money on a new toy to replace the old.

So if we like buying consumer electronics in stores (whether at Apple or at Costco), why are the refrigerators going away?

Apple’s and Costco’s big advantage is their selective product lines. Apple sells only a few configurations of computers. Costco picks a few products that it thinks will be popular and on which it can get volume discounts. The Sears website tells me “1033 products found for ‘refrigerator’.” How much space is that on the floor? How much space is that in warehouses? Isn’t it easier to tell people how wide the fridge will be and make them measure their own space to make sure it’ll fit?

It’s a do-it-yourself age. Shop online, base your decision on other consumers’ reviews, and check if your vendor has free return shipping. The best tip I learned when shopping for a TV was to cut out a piece of cardboard so you could see if the screen was actually the right size in your room. Now I’m starting to wonder if there’s a market for sets of plastic images of refrigerator insides. “Look, with this one you’d be the right height to see into all the shelves.”

Maybe virtual worlds or augmented reality can step into this gap. Maybe we’ll rely on architects and interior designers, who have memberships to professional showrooms that aren’t so decimated. Maybe someone will notice that people want to know whether the corner of the freezer door is going to hit them in the head, and a new boutique refrigerator store will be born. But it’s a good thing I’m not planning to design a kitchen soon: I’d want to pull open the appliance doors myself. Unlike my next computer, no one’s interested in helping me try a refrigerator out.

My recap from BlogPotomac is now up on the company blog.

The short version:

1. Shel Holtz: I don’t know how you establish a long-term community around a movie.
2. Shireen Mitchell: Watching on TV is different from being there in person, and social media can fill some (but not all) of the gaps.
3. Shireen Mitchell: The way Congress responds to advocates who use social media will determine how it’s used.
4. Scott Monty: Your network is a social media monitoring tool.
5. Scott Monty: Social media can serve different purposes for different departments and in different regions.
6. Liz Strauss: As soon as you’re hired, you’re no longer a customer: learn to listen.
7. Amber Naslund: Using company resources but only building your own brand means both the company and you suffer when you leave.
8. Scott Monty (yet again): Have a social media succession plan.
9. Shashi Bellamkonda: Reach out to other internal evangelists.
10. Doug Meacham: Invite your community to spend downtime with you.

Go read on Advocacy Avenue to find out what they all mean.

If you write a book called Personality Not Included (Amazon link), you’d better include your own personality in its pages. Rohit Bhargava has definitely succeeded in that – and in writing an entertaining book with some serious advice about how companies can attract customers.

First the disclaimer: I enjoy Rohit’s blog, and I met Rohit at (and got my copy of the book in the swag from) Blogger Social earlier this month, so I’m predisposed to like it. In addition, Rohit ran a brainstorming breakfast there around ideas for marketing the book, which was a lot of fun – and an excuse to visit Greenwich Village – so I was invested in the book’s success before reading a word of it.

However, I’m sure I’d have enjoyed Personality Not Included if I’d picked it up because of the chickens on the cover. It’s written conversationally, more in the style of a blog than a formal business book, and it includes stories from a wide range of industries to illustrate its points. The main chapters are a smart description of why facelessness used to be an advantage, why it isn’t now, and how you can reform your company.

One of the best things about Personality Not Included is the footnotes. Again probably influenced by blogging, Rohit has included references to other books, magazines, and blogs where they’re related to his points, not just in a bibliography at the end. He’s willing to be the authority for some ideas but to send readers elsewhere when it will benefit us to hear from someone else. And good number of the footnotes are funny asides that make him seem like a real person, perfectly demonstrating how sounding authentic gains the sympathy of a customer.

The part I’m expecting to be most helpful to me is the Techniques, a list of ten “stylized ways of marketing” that can show off your organization’s personality, including Participation Marketing, Insider Marketing, and Useful Marketing. None of the techniques is a new idea, but it’s great to be able to run down the list and think “Would that suit this next campaign?” for each one. Each includes a “step by step” section as well as examples. Bonus techniques will be posted on the book website soon, and I’ll be keeping the list close to hand.

On the other hand, I’m not really sold on the Guides & Tools, the last 50 pages of the book. Too much of that seemed repeated from the chapters – though that may be by design, as the Note to the Reader at the beginning of the book suggests you don’t have to read from front to back but can skip around. The Guides & Tools do expand on the earlier material; I was just hoping for more concrete advice (maybe a blog series on rewriting backstories?). The chapter five set on Beating Roadblocks is the exception, with excellent suggestions.

This book is written for people who want their organizations not to be ordinary. As it says, “There are millions of profitable, ordinary businesses around the world.” But ordinary businesses are vulnerable to extraordinary ones, and extraordinary businesses are the ones with a “soul of your brand that people can get passionate about,” a personality. If you aspire to be loved and not just profitable, you’d be smart to pick up Personality Not Included.

I’ll be going to Blogger Social in New York in a week, and in preparation I’ve been reading (and helping write) Steve Woodruff’s series of Socialite profiles. Now, for easy downloading, here are:

The 48-page full-size PDF (5MB) and the booklet PDF (4.8MB).

The booklet (courtesy of my new software toy CocoaBooklet) can be printed double-sided and stapled in the middle to make a cute little pocketable guide.

Enjoy!

My first post on my company’s blog: User Diaries in Community Software.

Bathroom blogging at Diva Marketing – when was the last time you thought about “the importance of bathrooms in the customer experience”? And how often do you judge an organization on its hygiene factors because they haven’t even gotten the basics right? When we clean up our acts, the bathrooms are a good place to start.

Humans networking – a presentation making the point that B2B marketing is about convincing people, and so is an excellent fit for social media efforts. More interesting than the presentation was where some of its insights came from: Greg Verdino used his own online resources to ask his network for their ideas.

What Jeremiah Owyang has learned in a month as an analyst – purely because of the quote at the end, “it’s just amazing that it can take nearly 24 months for work to come to fruition.” The web makes timelines shorter (i.e. Marc Andreessen’s comment on serial entrepreneurship, “when you start company #2 you can assume that it won’t necessarily consume the next 10-20-30 years of your life — you can probably build something successful over say 5 years, maybe 8 years max, and so you’re not committing the rest of your life.”), but sometimes it’s amazing just how much shorter.

In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger’s thesis is that digital objects aren’t stuck with one type of organization. Instead of an item being on one particular shelf in a given store, items can be found by many different characteristics. Last weekend I was reminded that’s one reason I rarely shop in physical stores – but the online ones haven’t solved my problems either.

I was in Macy’s, looking for a coat. Since it’s fall, I’d have expected there to be an outerwear section in the store where I could look at all the possibilities. No such luck. Instead the coats were scattered by designer: a clerk explained that the Ralph Lauren coats are over here, the Nautica ones are over there, and there are a few more scattered on the floor.

Certainly that can be the right organization. If I’m shopping for myself, I often look first at brand, then color, then size. But in this case, when I wanted an overview of all the options within a particular category, the fact that the store hadn’t sorted by that category made it nearly impossible to shop effectively.

At macys.com, I can see all the coats. Sorting by type of apparel is even listed in the left navigation above sorting by brand – bricks-and-mortar stores, take note. Once I’m looking at coats, I can narrow my view further by brand. Some stores (i.e. Nordstrom) will let me sort by brand also, so I can still see everything but can easily compare within each line. But I’m still not happy with my shopping experience.

Why? I still haven’t seen a department store that will let me search only for “brands I wear”. Simple customization, right? Checkboxes in my profile when I register, and if I’ve filled out that section, offer me a personalized search. Then the store can also target its email marketing to me, meaning I’ll enjoy receiving useful emails (branding) and will buy some of the “five Nine West items on sale in our shoe department!” (direct response). Is anyone out there doing this? Am I just not registered at the right online stores?

There are advantages to being famous. Not many bands can challenge the whole worldview of the music industry with one act. Radiohead is releasing their new album in a rather unusual way: as a digital download for which fans can choose their own price. They’ll certainly undercut piracy. They’ve gotten plenty of press attention. But they won’t be succeeding because they’re famous. This will work because the internet is still psychologically a gift economy. If we find your contribution valuable, we want to give in return.

Jonathan Coulton can make $3000-5000 a month with a website that explains

There are lots of ways to get music from me, whether you’re a cyborg from the future with an iPod in your skull, or a little old granny in Idaho with nothing but an antique “CD Player.” Lots of it is freely available depending on how technical you are – you can get all of it for free if you really try. But please remember I do make a living this way, so you like what you hear I’d certainly appreciate you throwing a little payment or donation my way. If you can’t afford it, for goodness sake please send copies of everything to all of your friends.

John Scalzi wrote a novel to prove he could and then decided to post it online. The Agent to the Stars introduction says: “People could read it, and if they liked it, they could send me a dollar, or whatever sum they liked (even if that sum was zero). If they didn’t like it, well, clearly, they wouldn’t have to send me anything.” He made about $4000 over six years, and today the introduction says, “I’m no longer soliciting a dollar if you enjoy the novel; the story has long since proved its worth in that respect.”

So you don’t have to be famous to survive on voluntary contributions. You just have to be a little bit famous. You have to have fans who not only will give you money for your creations but also will spread the word. The free sample that proves someone should buy is the entire work. Not so different from a book sitting out on a bookstore shelf.

Interestingly, according to Charlie Stross, in the old shareware scene they expected about a 4% registration rate out of the people who downloaded software. According to his sales increase after Accelerando was posted online, about 3-4% of the people who downloaded it then went and bought a copy (Time Traveller Show, 4/22/07: Stross, Scalzi and Buckell on International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day). In this case the audience demographics are probably similar (others might vary considerably); opportunities change, people’s willingness to give back doesn’t.

ETA: Wired’s take on Jonathan Coulson and giving music away, 10/12/2007

ETA part 2: NYTimes on how creating and releasing the album affected the band, 12/9/2007

ETA part 3: Wired interview with David Byrne and Thom Yorke, 12/18/2007

Ebooks seem to be hot again, at least for slightly warm values of hot. I’ve seen more articles mentioning them in the past month than I had for quite a while before that. Most prominently, both the Washington Post and New York Times had survey-of-the-industry articles, the Post’s pegged to a review of the Sony Reader.

The more interesting development was that the Times article and a BloggingStocks post bring up the idea of iPhone as ebook reader. One of the difficulties for the industry has been that current devices and before them the Rocket eBook cost real money, $300 and $500 respectively. Most people don’t want a separate, expensive device just for reading on pixels. iPhones (or future iPods with a similar screen) could make ebook readers widely available – at which point more people would start using them.

Then the problem becomes the cost of the books. Charles Stross, science fiction writer, pointed out in March that “the economics of the commercial ebook market are sick”. Ebooks are sometimes being sold for almost the cost of hardcovers, which is crazy. Audio editions I can understand being worth that much, since they have added costs in the form of voice actors and sound editing, and they still have media and packaging costs. Ebooks? The simplest way to produce an ebook is to distribute the Word document you’re working from. You’ll still have costs for editing, promotion, distribution channel, etc., but none for paper and printing. How can that require charging as much as for a hardback?

I like physical books because I can see them and be reminded to reread, which (even with something like Apple’s CoverFlow for book covers) is unlikely to happen with ebooks. I like physical books because I can decorate my apartment with them. I like physical books because I can easily loan them to friends – and given the fog of DRM around most ebooks (there are exceptions like Baen), that’s not going to be possible any time soon. Ebooks aren’t worth as much to me as dead-tree editions, and I’m not sure what price would be right.

Some publishers are starting to think about the price problem. Baen’s ebooks cost a little less than paperbacks. Toby Buckell notes that Stross’s publisher was persuaded by his arguments to price his books’ electronic editions at three pounds. And of course the romance e-publishers have consistently kept their prices comparable to series romances, less than single title paperbacks. But most traditionally published books aren’t available as ebooks for anything like an appropriate price. Hopefully that will change soon.

Note: this is about ebooks-as-purchased-content rather than ebooks-as-freely-distributed-marketing. The latter strategy is going strong, with HarperCollins expanding its sample pages program to an iPhone-compatible website, authors posting first chapters on websites, and ebook authors expanding their work for traditional publishing deals.