andrea ong pietkiewicz

Getting Black Ink from Pixels

More and more newspapers are finally starting to see the writing on the wall about their future survival in our brave new digital world. Some have even begun their struggle to re-define and re-invent themselves, for better and for worse.

Rupert Murdoch seems hell bent on re-tracing the same unproductive, not to say destructive, path that the major music labels. Newsday, a Long Island daily, tried the Murdoch route by putting up a paywall. The result: After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site.

Others are thinking through the potential of applying the iTunes model to the news business: sample before you buy, coupled with an insightful pricing strategy (cents or dollars per article, bundling options): the route of choice for a number of high profile magazines (The Economist, Harvard Business Review). How well they do in the long run remains to be seen.

The real challenge, though, is the decimated state of the newspapers' talent pool of content producers. With staff writers being replaced with syndicated content produced by the few lucky enough to keep their jobs, I'm not sure what content these papers will have to sell that's valuable enough to pay for. To re-invent themselves in the digital age, some of these papers will have to re-invest in themselves; and stockholders will have to take a longer-term view of returns or be prepared to lose it all now.

Lest We Drywall the Cat into the Wrong Side of the Wall

Social media seems inherently the ultimate pulpit for the self-important. While a site like TweetingTooHard.com invites us to out the self-important, most of the tweets are so mundane, they're forgiveable. Twitter critics like to deprecate navel-gazing tweets about breakfast foods and sundry itches, and while such esoterica of the flotsam of life might not be of "real value" to society and the economy, they too are forgiveable. They're forgiveable because they are, ultimately, harmless.

What I find more disturbing are the tweets I see from self-inflating types who brag about busy-ness. Some of these folks' to-do list per tweet would be longer if more than 140 characters were possible. Even within the 140 character limit, some of these lists test the limits of credulity.

There is a long Christian tradition concerning the notion of busyness into which this post isn't intended to delve.

What I'm wondering about is whether there's a cost to real personal relationships? By real, I mean those deep emotional relationships with friends and family, rather than business relationships. Is there a risk that social media offers an insidious avenue of busyness to connect and broadcast online, to be so busy that there's little time left in a day for family and friends who are not immersed in the online world.

The always-on world of online socializing enables a wholly different level of busyness. At least in the old-school, offline paradigm, there was still some level of social pressure to spend time at home. In our new world order, even when we're not at work, the means to stay tethered are readily available. Some of these electronic tethers are ever so alluring, and the affinity of the social media types for technology makes it easy to rationalize away the increasing encroachment on personal lives.

It brings to mind the modern morality tale of Martha Stewart in which we all reveled. She who built a profitable and mighty myth of ideal family life at the cost of her marriage and family. We enjoyed the delicious irony.

My husband and I have but two or three hours every evening in which we're both awake and in the same physical space. Rather than actually share experiences together during these precious few hours each day, we often find ourselves on message boards, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, websites, etc., only peripherally aware of each other. Luckily, we're aware of our tendency to wander away, and like the person who nods off while driving but wakes with a start, we do also snap out of our reverie and consciously shut down the laptops and smart phones.

Are we at risk of being so tuned in to our online lives that we live our offline lives in a fog, so connected online as to become disconnected offline? How connected is too connected? I'm prepared to concede that there are super-achieving men and women who manage to balance it all. For the rest of us mere mortals, it may take a constant watching and self-awareness to walk this tightrope between two worlds, lest we unconsciously drywall the cat into the wrong side of the wall.

Or is this notion of an offline and an online world merely a false dichotomy constructed by the under-achieving?

The long tail of data sales

In doing some client-related research last week, I approached eMarketer to find out if they had relevant data sets for me and about their pricing structure. Predictably, their business model continues to be based on the large enterprise model, not unlike the blockbuster model that drives the movie and book industries. The all-you-can-eat buffet pricing structure at eMarketer serves their mental model, but it serves neither their potential customers' needs nor eMarketer's business needs.

In their undated Harvard Business Review article, Rethinking Marketing, Roland T. Rust, Christine Moorman, and Gaurav Bhalla commented on the fact that many firms are still managed, as if we were still in the 1960s world of mass markets, mass media, and impersonal transactions. The inertia and/or unwillingness of many to stop the cycle of insanity and to accept the new reality is nothing less than stunning. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's witnessed the disastrous results wrought by this affliction.

The authors points out the distinction between a traditional company and what they refer to as a customer-cultivating company: the former is organized to push products and brands, while the other seeks to serve customers and customer segments. For a data company such as eMarketer to so completely miss this point is disappointing, though perhaps predictable.

As a customer needing Canadian data, eMarketer is of limited use to me, but when its data sets are of relevance to me, does it make no financial sense to provide on-demand self-serve access to their online databases? We may have been liberated from the tyranny of buying entire music albums for the pleasure of one song, but clearly, we're still at the frontier of this brave new world.

Social Gaming: the next frontier of spam?

For the past week or so, I've been getting irritated by Mafia Wars updates in my Facebook stream because, apparently, my having blocked the app in my settings did not, in fact, stop this spam stream. Curious, I started digging and came across this November 2009 article in TechCrunch: How to Spam Facebook Like a Pro, an exposé of online social network scam schemes, tricking unwary players into parting with their cash. What the article doesn’t discuss, however, is the way these games spam the players’ social networks in the hopes of luring new victims.

Since tis the season for reminiscing and looking forward, I started thinking through all the unwanted, unsolicited messages that mindless and thoughtless businesses have assaulted us with. First, we had to contend with door-to-door sales people peddling their myriad wares; we were unsophisticated consumers, then, so it was hard to distinguish the real deal from snake oil. Luckily for most of us, we started leaving home for the office, so this foot traffic sales approach became less effective since no one was home.

We might escape them during the day, but we still had to come home at some point. Enter telemarketing and junk mail, rammed down our throats through our phones and mail boxes. We thought we could escape both when we moved online, but alas: junk mail found their way into our email and voice mail boxes, too. In 2009, Canadians won the right not to be assaulted through Canada Post and on our phones: as a condo dweller, I could exercise my option of declining unsolicited, unaddressed mail with a simple sticker on the delivery side of my mail box; and I could go to the trouble of registering myself on the national no-call list. Awesome.

Of course, like viruses that always find a way to adapt, the Spammers found a way: social networks. Ostensibly innocent good fun, social games harbour insidious ways to fill the spam stream through automatic notifications and updates from its players. The “everyone’s playing it” siren call can be powerful. Those of us too jaded and wary for this sort of thing did the obvious: we opted to block these updates, but the updates continued to stream through.

I’m not certain if this is a known Facebook glitch or have these social gaming outfits simply found an unwatched door – something for further investigation – but my sense is that social games are the latest front in the Spammers’ Borg-like assault against consumers. Yesterday, @davefleet wondered in a blog post if Spammers have become smarter. Pardon my cattiness, but I suspect that Spammers are like the flower beetles that survived the Mythbusters' extreme irradiation experiment. They didn't survive due to smarts; they're just wired that way.

Makes me long for the good ol' days of simple junk mail.

Saying goodbye

Today, I said goodbye to the blog I've maintained on and off for the past two years at beyondthebuzz.wordpress.com.

Wordpress has been very good to me. It's just that I wanted nicer themes and the potential for customization, none of which Wordpress allows me to do easily. Having to find a host and install my blog, map the new domain that I just set up, and mess with the Thesis theme (which I like but requires an amount of work and time that I don't really have)...well, I'm afraid I just couldn't face it.

So here I am at TypePad, which has pretty much most of what I need right out of the box. I'm looking forward to this experience.

Moo.com | a great experience

I just ordered my personal calling cards from moo.com, and I loved every minute of the user experience. The site has a clean interface that's easy to navigate, the designing process was fun, the ordering process was easy, and (here's the geek in me) best of all, the confirmation email was cute beyond words. Here's an excerpt of the email I received from Little Moo, the Print Robot:

Hello I'm Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I'll let you know when it's done and on its way to you. Flickr users, listen up: Please do not remove the photos from your account, or change their privacy settings, until your order has been printed, or some pictures may come out blank. <snip> Remember, I'm just a bit of software. So, if you have any questions regarding your order please first read our Frequently Asked Questions at: http://www.moo.com/help/ and if you're still not sure, contact customer services (who are real people) at: https://secure.moo.com/service/ Thanks, Little MOO, Print Robot

Such a great human touch to an automated message.  I just love that! It's what I tell clients to do all the time, but somehow, very few are willing to add that human touch. PS A word about my personal cards. I created a series of four cards, each card representing one of my four core values. I hope their recipients like them. :)

Google's Fast Flip - a statement on the future of print?

Google has recently introduced a new experimental product in Google Labs called Fast Flip. It's a news reading service that allows users to scan pages from the sites of Google's print partners. The idea is to replicate the experience of physically flipping through magazine or newspaper.

Fast Flip's mission is  interesting to me in our so-called Web 2.0 world where the hyperlink reigns primary and the static experience of print is re-imagined as a secondary form of information consumption. Could it be, perhaps, that wehuman beings are still attached to the tactile pleasure of holding a printed artifact?

My personal opinion has always been that the printed artifact will never go away. It will simply become a secondary way to read. We'll see where Fast Flip ends up; after all, not everything in Google Labs gains traction to make it onto the primary features list on Google.com. If I were a betting (wo)man, I'd wager that Fast Flip won't make it. It's just another version of all the rest of the quickie publishing tools out there that convert print pdf's into flippable digital pages. That it's Google providing the additional service of aggregating the information is a mere nicety that doesn't fundamentally alter the fact that it's an existing technology that creates a silly digital version of a printed piece. Magazines and newspapers that are no more than digital copies of their printed pieces deliver poor online experiences that take advantage of little that the digital medium has to offer. I'm not sure what value Fast Flip has as a news aggregator that RSS feeds do not provide and in a more relevant way. Google's ostensible motive for Fast Flip is to find a middle ground with print publishers who complain that Google makes money off their content without compensating them. I wonder if somewhere in Googleland, someone is taking a stance on the future of print.

Your versus You're

This belongs to the same class of errors as it's versus its: a simple mistaking of a contraction for a possessive pronoun. "Your" is a possessive pronoun used to indicate ownership; e.g. "When your membership expires, renew it online." "You're" is a contraction of "You are", used in casual writing; e.g. "When you're finished with your meal, please pay at the counter." To summarize, you're = you are, whereas your = your.

It's versus Its

This one is so common, it makes me wonder if anyone actually gets taught the difference between them by any educator they've encountered since Grade 1. It's is a contraction of "It is". Use it in casual writing; e.g. It's a great day. Its is a possessive pronoun. Example: The dog is chasing its own tail. To summarize, it's = it is, whereas its = its.

Still talking about putting the cart before the horse

It amazes me that in 2009, marketing professionals are still seeing and decrying the unevolved approach to marketing we've been seeing since the dawn of marketing. Yep, that's right: talking tactics before strategy. Seth Godin recently summarized this sickness in a recent post. His example of the attraction to tactics over strategy is noteworthy: "Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, "I'm going to post this." If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure."

The current obsession with measurability plays a large part in the seemingly inexplicable allure of tactics. Nothing wrong with measurability: if you're going to invest good money in something, you want to know whether it actually worked. William Lever famously said, "Half my advertising money is wasted. The problem is that I don't know which half!" We're all still trying to find him that answer.

What many fail to realize is that the answer can't be answered unless there's a strategy in place. In statistics, we define the universe before we can gather data, let alone conduct analysis. Kinda like asking "How many people are there?" when the only question that can be answered is "How many people are there in that room/city/country/etc.?" Will we ever outgrow this juvenile approach? Is there an antidote?