Information Squid

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.

BBDO Netherlands, working for Chrysler, recently created a viral video ad for the new Dodge Nitro SUV. The ad showed the car electrocuting a dog. Chrysler was not pleased. (And they’ve had problems with BBDO Detroit’s ads before.)

Chrysler apologized and tried to have the video pulled from YouTube - apparently without initial success (it’s now down, “due to a copyright claim by DaimlerChrysler”). And the video has spread, to the Detroit Free Press, Jalopnik, SpikedHumor.com, and probably elsewhere.

It’s hard to pull an ad these days. Anything controversial will spread. Even if your ad airs once in an obscure market, or is placed only on a few low-traffic websites, if it’s interesting then someone’s probably made a copy to put online - and they’ll be rewarded with plenty of hits for doing so. (The most prominent example of a small ad buy provoking amazingly more free media coverage is the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry in the 2004 US presidential election.)

There have been media stories about ads being squashed for a long time, but the new element is that people can read the story and see the ad for themselves. It’s not one-day news. An ad you pull can still go viral, being forwarded from one person to another and being copied to too many sites too fast to stop.

But isn’t this what the advertiser wanted in the first place? Chrysler noted in its apology that “European commercials — especially ‘viral’ ads like this one — are often edgier,” so it seems likely that BBDO Netherlands knew its market. The comments at SpikedHumor are mostly amused. The previous BBDO Detroit ad, where a car gets a jump from a Nitro and is blown into the sky, seems different in degree of attack by the Nitro rather than in kind of attitude of the car. Even if this isn’t the brand message Chrysler wants (and if it’s not, they apparently haven’t conveyed that to BBDO anytime in the last six months), hasn’t this controversy helped reach the Nitro’s target audience?

Well, Apple’s iTunes has finally given in to variable pricing pressure - a little bit. iTunes’s new “Next Big Thing” section lists albums for $5.99 and $6.99, instead of the normal $9.99. While it’s not the per-song variability the record labels have been pushing for, the door has cracked open.

The labels would love to sell new, hot songs for more than iTunes’s standard 99 cents, since their price elasticity is probably pretty low - people will buy them regardless of how much they cost. And the labels want to sell older, less popular songs for under 99 cents, since they hope more people will buy if they’re cheaper. So far Apple has resisted. Their only concession has been to price the EMI tracks without digital rights management (DRM) at $1.29, since they’re both transferrable without DRM restrictions and encoded at higher quality.

But now Apple has set up the “Next Big Thing”, and it’s producing results for the featured albums. Sara Bareilles’s Little Voice hit the number one spot for albums with about 14,000 downloads. The Wall Street Journal compares that to “albums from Paul McCartney and the White Stripes [which] sold around 16,000 digital copies during their first week of release earlier this year,” and mentions, “Atlanta rapper Unk’s 9-month-old album, which had been down 1% the week before the promotion, enjoyed a 152% spike in digital sales.”

Apple is coy about who picks the abums to showcase, saying, “Just who decides what the Next Big Thing is? Is there a committee? A grand jury of elite tastemakers who have the power and influence to push something into the arms (and ears) of the pop marketplace? Honestly, there’s nothing of the sort (we hope). … Well, we’re halfway through the year and iTunes has a fine selection of artists who we think have the true grit (or pure luck) it takes to beome the next big thing.”

Absent any actual information, I have to assume this is like bookstore coop, as described in an AIGA Journal of Design article: “You may have thought the books on the front tables at B&N were hand-selected by a local book-loving manager, or that the titles on view are “bestsellers” or the books being talked about in the press. In actuality, the publisher has paid the store for this placement in a deal known as “co-operative advertising” or cost sharing between the retailer and supplier. Those books on the table often do end up being bestsellers, in part because of this positioning in the store.”

So have the labels paid for coop? If they have, so far they’re probably getting their money’s worth. And will this satisfy them, or will they keep pushing for per-song pricing? Universal is currently renegotiating its contract with Apple and trying not to sign anything long-term, and the labels have been more insistent about variable pricing each year iTunes has stuck with the flat 99 cents price. Will Apple be able to keep all songs in lock-step? Or what interesting concessions can they wring from labels for letting them break the ranks?

ETA: It has been pointed out to me that album prices have historically been somewhat flexible (the White Stripes album is $10.99, for instance, and T.I. versus T.I.P. is $12.99), and iTunes has run sales that look like this before, with a special page of “these things are cheap”. This seems to be the first ongoing discount program, though.

Following up on the concerns about how to use Yahoo SmartAds, the answer is probably to use a souped-up creative optimizer, ideally hooked into the ad serving system itself. That way you can analyze your results and then show your most effective ads most often (or modify the less effective versions). Creative optimization has been around for a while for search campaigns, trying to improve performance for certain keywords. Advertising.com in November 2006 released a study of keyword performance using three optimization techniques.

It’s harder to find information about optimization solutions for advertising, perhaps because everyone is trying to keep their methods proprietary. WPP’s (Ogilvy’s) mOne developed a tool called mEuclid and publicized it in 2005. That seems likely to be the same tool mentioned in The Quest for the Perfect Online Ad (Business 2.0, 4/3/2007). The Atlas Institute of aQuantive has done some writing about creative optimization (also in 2005), though the referenced white paper says to worry more about ad placement than about exactly what’s in your creative.

Still, given the option to have potentially thousands of combinations of ad components, agencies that take advantage of SmartAds will need a way to manage and analyze the data they collect. Erick Schonfeld’s The Next Net picks up the same concern about how many items marketers will need to juggle. Seems like Ogilvy has a good setup already - I wonder whether the other agencies are behind or just quiet?