Matt Quirion

LinkedIn E-Mails Addressed to Top 5% are Directed at the Other 95%

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:39:00 -0500

There’s been a ton of conversation in social media circles about LinkedIn’s new marketing campaign. LinkedIn has been notifying users that they’re among the top 5% (and even 10%, now) of viewed profiles on the social network. Some mentions of the campaign bemoan it. Other mentions seem to make attempts at a “humble brag” about it. And still others seem to genuinely think it’s pretty cool. But what I love about the campaign is that these e-mail notifications aren’t aimed at the receivers of the e-mails at all. These congratulatory messages are targeted at the LinkedIn users who aren’t getting them.

One of LinkedIn’s most valued assets is the data it possesses about each of its registered users. As of January 2013, LinkedIn has 200 Million registered users. Most of them have at least indicated their current career situations and probably their work history. But there’s so much more a registered user can do with their profiles, accounts, and activities. And as LinkedIn constantly likes to imply while it encourages those activities, doing these things could help a user’s career.

So when 2(0) Million LinkedIn users start talking about the congratulatory e-mails they’ve received about the interest in their profiles (which, presumably, has some notion of career benefit attached), it leaves the other 95% who never received such an e-mail to wonder: What can I do to enhance my profile on LinkedIn and help my own career? After all, even after people realize 5% of 200 million is 10 million, the other 95% must ponder what they’re failing to do to be among that massive pool of “better” profiles.

LinkedIn’s answer: Add more data about yourself and get more active on their social network. (Read: Give us more data.)

It’s a brilliant move. It’s Judo Marketing. And yet I can’t help but recall this Onion’s piece on “personal branding” even as I enjoy this gambit.

"This movement has been gaining momentum for more than a decade. Human beings who make investment..."

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 17:09:21 -0400

“This movement has been gaining momentum for more than a decade. Human beings who make investment decisions based on their assessment of the economy and on the prospects for individual companies are retreating. Computers—acting on computer-generated market trend data and even newsfeeds, communicating only with one another—have taken up the slack.”

- Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading | Wired Business | Wired.com

Why Are We Still Consuming News Like It’s 1899? | benhuh!com

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 08:59:07 -0400

Why Are We Still Consuming News Like It’s 1899? | benhuh!com:

shaneguiter:

The limited amount of space on news homepages and their outmoded method of presentation poses big problems for the distribution of news as well as consumption by the public. Even though it’s been more than 15 years since the Internet became a news destination, journalists and editors are still trapped in the print and TV world of message delivery.

The traditional methods of news-writing, such as the reverse pyramid, the various “editions” of news pose big limitation on how news is reported and consumed. Unfortunately, internet-based changes such as reverse-chronological blogging of news, inability to archive yesterday’s news, poor commenting quality, live-blogging, and others have made news consumption an even more frustrating experience.

"When the country elected Barack Obama just four years ago, Twitter was a fledgling startup. During..."

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 14:42:57 -0400

“

When the country elected Barack Obama just four years ago, Twitter was a fledgling startup. During the campaign, Obama overtook Kevin Rose as the most followed person on Twitter, passing him at 56,482 followers.

Five years ago, according to Pew, less than half of Americans used email daily; less than a third used a search engine.

YouTube was founded in 2005 and Facebook in 2004 — and it would be a while after that until they became such integral parts of our day-to-day Internet experience.

Today nearly half of Americans own a smartphone. The iPhone is five years old.

”

- Technology - Rebecca J. Rosen - 59% of Young People Say the Internet Is Shaping Who They Are - The Atlantic (via infoneer-pulse)
Sometimes you have to stop and look back to appreciate the rush.

Why Google Wants You To Look Geeky

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 22:01:52 -0400

Last week during Google’s big I/O event, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, “interrupted” the keynote of the event’s first day in order to show off his personal pet project: Google Glass. Glass is a technology integrated into an eyeglass frame to allow “wearable computing.” Brin’s means of showing off Glass last week was by way of an impressive, muti-person, multi-modal stunt involving sky-divers, stunt bikers, and people abseiling down the side of a building to show off the sharing capabilities of Google Glass. The stunt impressed a great deal of folks, and it was followed up by an opportunity for members of the media to actually briefly experience wearing Google Glass for themselves. Quite a few of those folks are leaving the experience impressed, going so far as to exclaim that they’ve seen the future of computing. And, conveniently for Google, they’re buying the humanistic marketing pitch for Glass; the project moves technology out of the way of communications and experiencing life. But that’s not really why Google is racing towards a dominant position in wearable technology. The real reason is that if Google can get “technology out of the way,” then Google can marginalize Apple’s primary competitive advantage.

Last month, Apple unveiled their newest version of the iOS operating system, and much was made of the fact that Apple has dropped Google Maps for their own proprietary mapping technology in partnership with a smaller online map purveyor. That step, along with the previous introduction of Apple’s “Siri” technology - a voice activated digital assistant that essentially can search for answers to your questions on the iPhone and iPad, are moves by Apple designed to negate Google’s influence over their iOS technology. And given Apple’s market dominance of mobile computing, those moves also provide them with opportunities for market dominance in the search and mapping service industries. You can imagine how Google must be feeling about being cut out of the dominant mobile computing platform.

Read any single review of any smart-phone or tablet computing device of the last 2 years, and the benchmark against which all other machines are judged is Apple technology - the iPad and the iPhone. And very rarely do any non-iOS devices make par. Rarer still are the devices that might make a reviewer gush that they’re better than iOS options without any caveats. And the reason for that is the massive competitive advantage Apple enjoys in the realms of design and human-computer-interaction. With the slick, tightly controlled iOS environment, and the existence of only 2 form factors for iOS devices, no technology maker can build a device that will be as pain free and enjoyable (not to mention sexy) to use as the iPad or iPhone.

In the smart-phone and tablet computing world, the winner of the game is the competitor who makes the most beautiful, elegant device. That’s why Google wants to end the beauty pageant. Sure, the current iterations of Google Glass are “geeky looking.” No beauty contests are going to be won by them. But for centuries, people have been wearing glasses. And over time Google will be able to minify the technology backing the Glass product until it looks like any other pair of fashionable frames. Who knows, maybe a pair of Google Glass contact lenses isn’t out of the question. At any rate, eventually, nobody will notice the glasses. Which means nobody will be noticing the device. Which means nobody will care about the form of the device any longer. All anyone will care about is the service the device provides. Given its history, that’s a game Google’s got to look forward to playing.

Google Glass and its successors wont eliminate tablets and smart phones. Brin has already conceded that point in his discussions over the project. But there are still only 24 hours in any day, and any day only involves a finite number of times that a person actually needs or wants to seek information, exposition, or entertainment. By providing Glass, Google will be offering people a way to get that without having to pick up a tablet or a phone. From Google’s point of view, if Glass takes off, Apple can hang on to it’s market dominance when people care about how the tech they’re using looks and feels.

Apple Killed the App Store Star (And the App Era Too)

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 21:46:58 -0400

Right, sorry for the link-baity title. But the thesis holds true. Long term, anyway.

Today the key note of Apple’s WWDC was presented, and a slew of new Apple products from hardware to software were unveiled. Despite the fact that the hotly anticipated Apple Television (not to be confused with the Apple TV box unit) never did make an appearance, anyone who followed the presentation or at least read up on the results would find it hard to argue that Apple didn’t come out with guns ablaze. The pricy new hardware is as beautiful as it is expensive. The slick new OS Mountain Lion features are as pretty as the retina displays on the new Mac Book Pro. And the new integrated apps in the soon-to-arrive iOS6 look brilliant… and really familiar. In fact, those new integrated apps are so familiar because they mimic a great deal of functionality of some of the most popular third-party-created apps in the iOS ecosystem. And by taking the ideas that were germinated and then perfected in those third-party apps and integrating them tightly with iOS 6, Apple killed those apps and the entire ecosystem too.

First, let’s just accept that there is no finish line in this game. There’s no eventual winner. Apple’s the king of the tech and business world in so many ways right now, it’s not worth trying to argue that what’s coming is Apple’s demise. But this matter is bigger than Apple anyway, and Apple will do just fine finding its way in the post-app era. It probably just wont be too eager to see that era arrive.

Today, by eating the best apps cultivated in its own ecosystem, Apple made a few declarations: 1) Even though Apple creates beautiful objects with beautiful interfaces, they’re pretty unclear about what people actually want to do with pretty little things. 2) Apple feels no qualms about snatching success from its ecosystem developers, even when those developers show extreme loyalty to iOS. And 3) Apple sees no reason not to annoint winners in Software as a Service categories, and then integrating them tightly with their own applications as partners, the rest of the ecosystem be damned. iOS is not an open playing field or a level one. It’s just a playing field where the rules are up to the hopefully benevolent dictator, and all the players are at the mercy of that dictator’s market analysis and app store rankings.

For a time now, a common meme among web development professionals is that the web is the most hostile development environment in the history of computing, all because of the various takes on “standards” by the array of browsers on the market, the seemingly endless niche scenarios exposed by the seemingly endless tool choices, and the exposure to the population at large with only rudimentary access controls made available by the web platform itself. But for all its flaws, the web has never been hostile in the way that iOS is today. With the declarations Apple just made, the iOS platform (and really any other proprietary OS) is hostile to innovation. And that hostility will kill the ecosystem.

The iOS ecosystem wont turn into a pumpkin at midnight tonight. It will continue to thrive for some time, and the extrapolation of near-term data of iOS development and usage will make for easy arguments that the app era is only just beginning, but the signs of strain are easy to find. There’s already a dedicated piece of lingo for the notion of having Apple take your software idea and ship it with their iOS out of the box: “Sherlocked.” It’s been around for a couple of years now. And today there was a seemingly endless font of the “s-word” springing from the twitter accounts of various well known iOS developers who had, for a time, found a happy little niche market that made for a nice living until Apple came in and ate it. The cracks are starting to develop. No doubt some of these highly capable iOS developers will just look to create another clever iOS app, but it’s just as possible that folks with such skills might choose to now apply themselves to an ecosystem not wholly owned and dictated by the monster that just ate them.

One admirable quality of many of the best iOS app developers is that they treat their work like a craft. They often seek to find elegant, beautiful, and innovative solutions to common problems. Many of them are prolific writers on the problems they’re solving and the efforts to do so. And while the monetary payoff is a prime motivation for these people, it’s clear that the creativity and innovation involved in their work is what keeps them going. That innovation has value to these developers too, and Apple’s been keen to let them go right on innovating until they see fit to take all that innovation and use it for themselves. And all it cost Apple was 70% of the third-party apps’ purchase prices from the App store. That’s a heck of a ROI on market research and development.

And when such people, with their clever ideas, come to an intersection with better tools for developing advanced applications on the web, that’s when those cracks in the app ecosystem are going to give way. Ideas are malleable on the web in a way they can’t be on a proprietary OS. The ever popular “pivot” is something that can be executed at relatively small cost on the web versus the OS. There’s no need to conform to an albeit beautiful but restrictive set of UI guidelines on the web. Nobody worries that one’s web app ever need meet some form of “approval” except whether or not users find value in it. And on the web, as long as you put in the work, your app will always be discovered by someone.

Oh. Yeah. Discoverablity - the gaping wide hole in the proprietary OS ecosystem’s polished armor. Funny how everyone waited to hear if Apple was getting into televisions when they haven’t managed to solve their biggest problem yet - the ability for users to easily, intelligently, and at times serendipitously discover great apps on the ecosystem. Apple has now reached 6 full iterations of their iOS platform and still have nothing better than a few small improvements over the years to its base App store. And Google Play? By the company that provides the de facto standard in web-based search? Yeah, forget it.

The gold-star standard for application discoverability was invented years ago by Tim Berners-Lee before apps were even really a consideration. That standard is the web, and that standard will be the benefactor to generations of web-based applications that learn to harness that power. No proprietary OS ecosystem will ever match it because to do so would be to implement an internal, proprietary version of the web that would be too hard to get third party app creators to agree to implement. And so discoverability will not only remain a weakness for app platforms, but a major competitive disadvantage.

Proprietary app ecosystems wont fade because developers explicitly leave them. The getting for so many app developers is so good - for now. But the ecosystem’s best developers are being chased away. The web app ecosystem will simply begin to thrive as the tools improve, the skills advance, and the opportunity to be discovered remains open. Eventually developers looking to build something will seek open spaces where their innovations may grow without need to agree to the indentured servitude of the digital age.

Cutting The Cord

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 21:27:36 -0400

With relatively rare exception, I turn on my television and my DirecTV box every night to see “what’s on.” Note that I’m rarely turning it on with “appointment tv” in mind. I’m almost always disappointed. Who could blame me? For about $90 a month, I pay DirecTV for the privilege of taking up about 85% of my DVR space with Sesame Street, Super Why, and Dino Train for the kids (all from PBS). And as an added bonus, the best thing I’ll see on TV that entire week might be something like The Killing - a show that (ask any of its regular viewers) clearly hates its audience. This sort of behavior is unhealthy, but more importantly to me, it’s bad economics. Near as I can tell, I’m paying about $90 a month for about 300 channels that almost never interest me, so I’m ending that now.

There’s been a lot of discussion about consumers “cutting the cord” from cable and dish television providers. Yesterday an entire site dedicated to a sort of social-media form of petitioning HBO for a stand-alone HBOGo cropped up. And recently, during the All Things Digital 10 conference, quite the kerfuffle was made over various comments by Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel that essentially boiled down to “ala carte models wont work” and “people don’t want to pay for anything.” And along with that, he made a lot of misinformed comments about magical anti-piracy technology that the likes of Google could and should implement if they were really willing to help protect his industry. (Yep, his biggest angle was protectionism.)

I’ve seen a lot of numbers on the subject lately, and the ones I tend to believe more tend to support the argument that the “old models” of Hollywood are dying, but I’ll grant that those holding the opposite opinion have their own data too. Instead, I’d rather just speak to my own logic for deciding to cut the cord from these old models of televised entertainment. When it comes to money I spend on entertainment, I’m seeking value. When I’m connected to the old model via a cable or dish subscription, I’m paying money for entertainment that’s ostensibly available 24/7. If I turn the TV on at any hour, there’s something I’m paying for displaying on the television. Of course, whether or not it’s actually entertaining or informative is an entirely different question - one that’s often answered with a resounding “no.” So in essence, I’m paying $90 a month to have by-and-large non-entertaining, non-informative noise pushed to me, whether I’m trying to receive it or not. What’s worse, when I do just give up on trying to find something compelling to watch, but choose to watch “something dumb” on television using the old model, I’m paying for it both with my subscription money and my time. And time’s my most valuable resource in this equation by far. Cable and dish network television make it entirely too easy to waste my resource of time.

So instead, I’ll save that $90 bucks a month, and use services like Netflix to provide childrens’ entertainment when I (God help me) want to have the kids watch tv. Luckily we’ll still have PBS available as well - Sesame Street is actually better today than it was when I was a kid. And for my own entertainment, I’ll be using things like Apple TV to occasionally purchase things I really want to watch, like the Game of Thrones series. At a pure, per-unit rate, such viewing might cost me more, but at least I’ll feel like I’m getting some sort of value for both my money and my time, and I’m not subsidizing things like Operation Repo on truTV. I don’t even really know what either one of those things is, but I know I don’t want to help pay for it.

So here’s a warning to all the moving picture content companies seeking to protect their old business models. It comes with no malice or ill intent: I am not the consumer type you want to dismiss. I am not an early adopter. I’ve never pirated a single movie. Throughout my life, from AOL to broadband, from Napster to Spotify, from wine appreciation to craft brews, I’ve proven to be part of the “early majority.” If I’m making the move, it might not yet be too late to change your models, but it will be before too long.

This evening, while scanning Twitter and not watching TV, I saw this tweet re-tweeted many times over…

HBO faces the same issue that studios do with premium VOD. At what point do youset yourself up for the future while you shiv the past?
— Jason Hirschhorn (@JasonHirschhorn) June 6, 2012

It’s a tricky question, but there’s a deceptively simple answer, provided by the music industry: You shiv the past before the future shivs you.

"Let’s put it this way: if you can build a $100 billion company by using the Internet to replace the..."

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:24:33 -0400

“

Let’s put it this way: if you can build a $100 billion company by using the Internet to replace the college yearbook—imagine what you can do if you use the Internet to replace college.

That’s what is just beginning to happen. It all became official when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology appointed as its new president the guy who is responsible for MITx, the school’s free online education program.

”

- RealClearMarkets - Bigger Than Facebook (via pieratt)

The Difference Between Square and Google

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 19:39:30 -0400

parislemon:

dbreunig:

A textbook example of what is disruptive, and what isn’t:

Google Wallet installs new credit card readers at Walgreens

Square sells new credit card readers at Walgreens

Which could change the world?

Quite right.

To disrupt, you’ve got to democratize your space.

Brands, Own Thyself

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 13:41:00 -0400

This week Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins unveiled her annual “Internet Trends” presentation to the world. To web trend geeks, this presentation has become sort of mini web holiday, as it usually provides a fantastic mix of easily digestible information, great high-level insights, and occasional ephemera that make for good copy on blogs and media sites that cover the business of the web. Yesterday, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic explored a particularly key piece of information regarding consumers’ time spent versus ad dollars spent across types of media, and came away with 3 key learnings…

— Takeaway #1: We still love TV.
— Takeaway #2: Advertisers still love print.
— Takeaway #3: Audiences move faster than advertisers.

That last takeaway is the most important one for any brands or marketers to consider, but not quite for the reasons stated in Mr. Thompson’s piece.

According to Meeker’s data, we spend 42% more time consuming media on mobile than on print while advertisers spend 25x more dollars on print than on mobile. As Thompson reasonably surmises, there’s quite likely some lag between the growth of popularity of mobile media for consumers and the movement of ad dollars towards that medium and away from print. But that’s not the really important way in which audiences move faster than advertisers today.

In traditional print media, advertisers are forced to stand still. They pick their publisher platform, buy ad space, and expect their customers to come to them. While on the web, customers may come to find your brand, but whether you’re advertising or engaging in social marketing or not, your customers are on the web talking about you. And they move so fast, whether you like it or not, as brands, you’re not just in competition with other members of your industry, but with every other brand on the web.

Case in point, yesterday I saw this rather amusing tweet in my time-line that was in response to one of the users I follow…

@cwilk ORD experiencing Air Traffic Arrival delay over 2hours. Can’t leave till we get clearance. Silly weather control machine NOT working
— JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) May 31, 2012

Personal, responsive, engaging, and funny. It was so good, that even though the customer was annoyed about the delay, he retweeted Jet Blue’s communication. Which allowed everyone who follows him see the engagement as well. Honestly, at a brand-building level, it worked on me.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one to follow @cwilk and notice. Because a bit later, this happened…

So @cwilk asks @JetBlue ONE question and gets immediate reply. I ask @Nikon_USA the same question 20+ times…ignored. Who wants a Canon?
— Matt Cashore (@mattcashore) May 31, 2012

Not only are your audiences - your customers - not standing still on the web, waiting for you to push messages to them, but the speed of their communication and the level of their interconnectedness is such that every brand is competing with every other brand on the web at real-time.

Whether you like it or not.

This dynamic creates a demand on brands to own themselves. People are on the web, both in mobile and on the desktop. They’re already there much more than they are on the unidirectional medium of printed media, and that trend will just continue to grow. Whether brands decide to start spending the proportionate ad dollars on the desktop and mobile web or not, they’ve got to be in the web space and representing themselves in such a tight-knit way as to be responsive to current and potential clients needs at web speed.

That doesn’t necessitate more ad dollars be spent on the mobile and desktop web, however. It just necessitates that brands re-think the way they understand and communicate with their audiences and do so very quickly.

"Up until May 1862 Lincoln had sent, on average, a little over one telegram a month. But things..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 06:49:10 -0400

“Up until May 1862 Lincoln had sent, on average, a little over one telegram a month. But things changed when a telegraph office was opened next door to the White House, in the War Department. On May 24 the president had his online breakout, sending nine telegrams. That week he would send more than all his previous messages, combined. From May 24 — 18 years to the day since Morse had first tapped out “What hath God wrought” — forward, Lincoln and the telegraph were inseparable. The new telegraph office became the first Situation Room. Several times a day the president would walk into the telegraph office, sit down at the desk of its manager and begin going through the copies of all telegrams received, whether addressed to him or not. During great battles the president would even sleep in the telegraph office, just to be close to his oracle.”

- The First Wired President - NYTimes.com
Abe Lincoln, Internet addict.

"When I look at Kickstarter, I see small businesses that have been funded by their customers. I see..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 21:37:49 -0400

“When I look at Kickstarter, I see small businesses that have been funded by their customers. I see the acceleration of this shift away from the industrial manufacturing ideology to more of a maker economy. And I also see an idea so powerful that the company name has become a verb.”

- @om

Kickstarted: my conversation with Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen — Tech News and Analysis

(via fred-wilson)

"We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 21:37:25 -0400

“We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense.”

- Jonathan Ive (via dbreunig)

Startup Act 2.0: A Great Idea That Won't Work

Wed, 23 May 2012 21:05:00 -0400

Today a set of senators on both sides of the US political spectrum introduced the Startup 2.0 bill. It’s a generally good idea…

Startup Act 2.0 would essentially create two new types of visas, one for foreign students who obtain graduate degrees in science- and math-related fields from American universities, and another that offers permanent residence to immigrants who start successful companies and create jobs in the United States.

But it’s built on a false premise; That by simply importing more “brain power” into the country, the United States will manage to “out innovate” the rest of the world, and thus “win” in the global economy. The problem is, any innovation within the U.S., imported or otherwise, is being seriously hobbled by the U.S. patent system, particularly as it operates and interferes with software technology.

Naturally, “winning” in the global economy really means having happy, employed constituents in the eyes of Washington. And given the current economic climate, “innovation,” is the favored path to creating those happily employed voters. But as Vivek Wadhwa points out, many of those innovating jobs are being eaten by patent trolls.

In the smartphone market alone, $15-20 billion has already been spent by technology companies on building defenses, says Stanford Law School professor Mark Lemley. For example, Google bought Motorola Mobility for$12.5 billion—mostly for its patents. An Apple-Microsoft-Oracle-Nokia consortium bought Nortel’s patent portfolio for$4.5 billion. Microsoft bought Novell’s patent portfolio for $450 million and some of AOL’s patents for $1 billion. Facebook bought some of Microsoft’s new AOL patents for$550 million. Lemley estimates that more than $500 million has been squandered on legal fees—and battles are just beginning. This is money that could have been spent, instead, on R&D.

The larger players can afford to buy patents to deter the trolls, but the smaller players—the innovative startups—can’t. Instead, they have to settle out of court. Patent trolls take advantage of this weakness.

Invite all the innovators you want, few worth their salt will actually want to come into such an environment. Meanwhile other nations, like Brazil and China have much more friendly policies for small start-ups seeking to navigate the tricky issue of intellectual “property.” At the very least, such countries have seen fit to limit software patents to specific methods of solutions to problems while software patents in the U.S. seem to manage to wield an umbrella over any solution to a given problem. Innovators, the people who both have new ideas and actually build something around them, aren’t going to want the hassle.

And more countries - already developed countries - will figure this out too. The U.S. and “U.S. Companies” can exert all the pressure they want on countries in Europe and South America to “strengthen” their respective patent systems, but consider the turmoil in the Euro-zone today. Consider how particular European nations might begin to act if they see an opportunity to import technical talent as a means to a healthy economic end, particularly if a break-up of the Euro-zone were to occur. Then many 1000s of technically talented innovators will be faced with the choice of moving into the U.S. with its absurd software patents, or moving to a much friendlier environment in Europe.

The U.S. will lose that battle.

Online Marketing - It's not that Difficult, it's just that Different

Tue, 22 May 2012 23:43:00 -0400

There’s a really well written, well argued piece by Michael Wolff in MIT’s Technology Review currently circulating around the business/tech world that considers the challenges Facebook and the rest of the web face in trying to make a viable business of enabling marketing on the internet. It misses the boat entirely.

For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web.

False. Facebook is just one of multiple web-based platforms available to brands and marketers, with it’s own select set of capabilities. Any supposed “collapse,” (won’t happen) would never sink the web. The web is already hosting platforms ahead of the game Mr. Wolff describes.

Granted, all of the points Wolff makes about online advertising are probably correct. However, it treats advertising as the only web-based means to an end - that end being effective and valuable marketing for brands, the real customers of Facebook. That’s missing the “disruption” you hear so much about caused by the web, and thus Facebook, completely.

When another industry is completely overturned, it’s disruption. When it’s your industry that’s flipped upside down, it’s a disaster. The root of all problems with marketing on the web of today is a failure by brands and marketers to understand the disruption caused by the web, and thus the nature of the internet. And that nature is one of malleability. The web is the cloud. The cloud is the app. The app is the video. The video is the content. The content is the publication. The publication is the web. The web is everything - so long as everything can be digitized - plus something more. And that something more is the inherent communication capability and artifact discoverability of the web. Yet when the web showed up as a new marketing channel, marketers and brands didn’t first view it as a grand new opportunity. They saw it as something to be dealt with; Another channel through which they must push a message. They’ve tried to treat the internet as some digital analog to things they already know. They’ve tried putting “display ads” up on websites in the same fashion as they put ads in papers. They’ve tried bookending video clips with ads like they do on television. But you can’t depend on television or newspaper analogous advertising on the web of today and expect to perform any better than if you were to depend on road-side billboards being transmitted over FM radio.

As a brand, your best marketing is your product or your service. That’s the foundation. In the age of the web, your product or service can’t be inferior. The web will know. But every product or service needs voices singing its praises, letting the world know about it. And every foundation will suffer cracks. Occasionally your beloved tablet power adapter melts down. Or your employees screw up a latte order. Or your client fires you because your team was so busy creating a greener planet it forgot to finish the project on time. Things break at scale. On the web, every business is dealing with scale. When those cracks show up, people talk. The web lets you listen. The web lets you react. Even better, the web makes it entirely possible for you to discover customers who are actively seeking your solutions. Even better than that, the web makes it possible for you to identify customers who are already dissatisfied with your competition’s solutions. But how are you going to act on all that potential with a dependency on display ads?

The web doesn’t require more or tougher work for marketing. The web just requires different work. Is it really going to be that much more difficult to effectively communicate bidirectionally with your customers and build relationships than it is to attempt to create perfectly optimized, unidirectional campaigns across a large audience while completely ignoring the bulk of the information that those consumers willingly give to you? Seriously? The data is there! Use it! More importantly, the communication is there! Participate in it!

If you’re a marketer, this prospect shouldn’t scare you. It will challenge you, but those challenges have answers. Don’t put up objections over scale. Worries over scale require a solution to be scaled, and you probably haven’t even figured out the solution first. The solutions are available. The web (and by the way, the entire web is “social” these days) doesn’t just put you in the consumer’s car or home. The web doesn’t just put you in the living rooms of the world. The web puts you right in the laps or palms of the world; Right on their sofas, and in their bus seats, and their train rides, and their beds. The web gives you reach during customers’ lunch breaks, after dinner, during the work day, mid-workout, while they’re watching TV, and before they fall asleep. The web lets you know what those consumers are thinking. And the web is equipped with platforms to enable you to listen and respond.

All that data and all that knowledge brings great power, and great responsibility. There’s the obvious and oft-discussed matters of responsibility around privacy concerns, but there’s the less talked about matter of smart utilization too. Marketers, brands, and publishers all have tools available to them today that can and will allow them to tie together massive amounts of data, enabling them to be ever more responsive to customers. Consider all the customer relationship management systems deployed in the world today, from small businesses to global corporations. Now imagine all that data being tied together with offline and online audience segment data. Imagine all the knowledge you can gather about not just where to pitch your next customer, but how best to approach that next customer, how to keep her, and how to get her to do some of your marketing for you. All this knowledge demands smarter utilization than just trying to bid for the chance to throw a few display ads her way.

That’s not to say display ads are dead. It’s just to say that relationships between brands and customers have more value than impressions. Brands and marketers should determine what their customer acquisition and retention budgets should be, and then act on both “traditional” web advertising and relationship-based marketing accordingly.

The web, with platforms like Facebook, is the facilitator of those relationships. Facebook is a behemoth in the game of “engagement,” but it’s only one relationship facilitating platform of many. Some platforms, like the one I’ve helped to build at Lotame, can and will allow you to tie together all kinds of data about audiences and segments across all kinds of devices and inputs, to create dream marketing scenarios like the one described above. What law is written that says that brands and marketers should only seek meaningful and valuable connections with their customers when those customers log in to look at their friends’ baby pictures? Perhaps that B2B relationship is better built when your customer is reading an online tech journal. Maybe you’ll do better finding that avid traveler on a web forum. It’s just possible that some other interaction could be more valuable than a “like.”

The web is a platform - a platform of platforms. It’s time to stop thinking of anything on the web as a “site” anymore. Nothing is “just another ad-supported site” on the web today - not for brands and marketers using the right platforms. The organizations that come to understand that will be the organizations that flourish on the web and beyond.

Smiling

Sun, 20 May 2012 14:35:42 -0400

Smiling

Moving on Up

Sat, 19 May 2012 20:51:00 -0400

I’m officially posting longer thoughts in text here on tumblr rather than on my previous Posterous site starting now. Ultimately it doesn’t really make much difference to me, as all of my rambling gets pulled down out of this service (and any other I use), and saved to my personal data store. You can see a great deal of that data on a stream over at my personal site: mattquirion.com. That’s sort of the point of my data-store. I can use whatever “in” service is currently, um, “in,” get all the “social” benefits of being where the crowd is, and get to keep whatever data is important to me, even after that “in” service becomes “out.”

To integrate my data storing service with tumblr, I used a the tumblr API to request the data. It’s returned in JSON format, and ruby (the language I used to build my personal site) makes it a relative breeze to parse out what’s relevant to me. Took about 45 minutes to work out and lay into my app.

I will need to figure out exactly how to display the non-text posts from Tumblr on my personal site, but I’m not even sure I care to do it. It’d just mean data running through my server. For now, anything I’d really want seen by others can be displayed perfectly fine (and probably prettier) on tumblr, so I’m happy to let it be.

Got lots of ideas for posts coming up. It’s a fun time with big ideas in the tech world.

This is a test 1

Tue, 15 May 2012 23:13:00 -0400

This is just a test. I’m getting ready to move to tumblr from posterous.