Here are my answers to these questions, but I’m interested to know what you think.

1. There have been long known security concerns that consumers have that keep them from buying online. But these concerns are likely to be less over time.
2. Many products sold on the web are experience goods – meaning you need to experience them (touch, try them on, etc.) to really evaluate them. Its a lot easily to experience these products off-line, and buy them off-line.
3. Online retailers are still losing people by not having clear checkout processes. Shopping cart abandonment rates are still relatively high as people are not clearly seeing the total cost of a purchase until they get to the end of the purchase process (oftentimes you only find out the total cost – including shipping – when you are putting in your credit card). So, this, I think reflects some frustration with online shopping.
4. Delayed gratification…we live in a culture that is marked by increasing levels of need for instant gratification (real time search, Twitter, etc.). In contrast, online shopping results in delayed receipt of items purchased (whereas you can go to an offline store and bring what you bought home immediately). Online retailers have tried to respond to this by giving customers more options for fast delivery, but this comes at a cost to customers and thus levels the so-called cost advantages of buying online.
5. Online shopping is best for goal driven purchases, but not as good for simple browsing. If you’re looking for a specific book, online purchases are great (assuming you don’t want instant gratification – which of course, Amazon and other are trying to get around with Kindles and other readers). But in a wide variety of categories, I think people actually enjoy the shopping experience where finding unplanned items is the norm.

So, maybe online buying will hit some high point and end there, rather than end world ending up where everything is bought online. But all of this is now just predictions. What do you predict?

Whether or not Twitter gets sold to Google, or whether it gets valued at more or less than $1B, this will likely be a bad financial investment for Google, or if it isn’t, its probably a bad deal for you. Here’s why.
The basic idea behind this whole discussion is that Twitter search is the new frontier and will be the future of search in general. Therefore, Google (the king of search) wants to make sure it owns this property (or would purchase it just to keep it out of the hands of Microsoft). Most of the discussion I’ve seen about this is about synergies, antitrust talk and “business pundits” who advocate one or the other search giants to “snatch” up Twitter.
All of this sounds good if you think that most of the world will be interested in searching Twitter posts rather than searching the internet. Personally, I don’t. But that’s not the point.
The problem that seems to be dismissed in all this talk is that Twitter was consciously helped along in its tremendous growth by a whole bevy of independent developers and a host of APIs that allows these developers to make cool applications that people, like you, use.
So, while people talk about whether Google’s AdSense (i.e, paid search) can make enough money on Twitter (since it doesn’t make that much money on MySpace, evidently), few are talking about the how the openness of Twitter changes these dynamics. An you can bet that if Google buys Twitter, paid search is how they’d monetize it (since that’s its main business model).
Right now, for example, even I can write a cool little copy of the Twitter search function by simply using their APIs (which is something you could never do with Google). Try it out here. If text ads were splashed all over the Twitter Search page, I could make my site free of ads (and with a little viral campaign, get lots of people coming to my site instead of Twitter’s site). Even without this, the APIs allow iPhone and other mobile developers or widget developers to bypass the web site and do the searching on their applications.
So, what’s a Google (or Microsoft) to do if it wants to monetize Twitter search? Close down the APIs. Hmm, what incentive, then do developers have of making applications that rely on search anymore? You think developers will like having open access yanked away from them (the old “bait and switch”)? Oh yes, I guess Google might be able to stick ads in the search stream instead, but it’s trivial to strip out ads using simple code.
No, my bet is that the APIs will get restricted, using restricted terms of service, etc, and thus the makers of cool applications you use now (TweetDeck, etc.) will start to think about how they are not making money but text ads are appearing in their applications. Of course, maybe developers will get free access, but only for a fee, so get ready to shell out some real money for Twitter apps in the future since those fees will be passed along to you – the user.
Another way Google could use its paid search tactic is to put it all over your Twitter home page. Wouldn’t that be nice? The clean page that you control by putting up your nice pictures and personal branding information, will be plastered with paid search ads (a la MySpace).
I would like to see Twitter find a business model that works (although I’m still skeptical they can find one), and I think that the statement on their site, namely “Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started” is a great sentiment. I don’t know how they’re going to do this, but if Google (or Microsoft) buys them, watch out for less functionality in those apps you love, higher prices for those apps, and lots of ads plastered around your pretty Twitter pages.

Here is the basic idea that sparked hundreds of comments – advertising is failing on the internet. The reasons for this, according to the article is that consumers don’t trust advertising, don’t want to view advertising and don’t need advertising. This was followed up by some comments about other business models, which, as expected, includes more targeted advertising (like people haven’t been trying to do this for decades, which they have).
As point of fact, these are not even vaguely new ideas. Firstly, it has long been known (at least since I started teaching marketing 20 years ago) that advertising messages from commercial sources are less trustworthy than other sources (e.g., friends, independent rating agencies, etc.). Second, there has never been any doubt that consumers don’t want to view advertising. Except for the Super Bowl and certain magazine advertising, people have long found advertising to be intrusive …. unless of course it is there to provide information at a time when people need it.
Finally, do people need advertising? That depends. Some do and some don’t. Sure, they can get information about product offerings from rating sites (like the TechCrunch article says), but they have always gotten it from lots of others sources as well. Beyond this, however, is that advertising has many roles, only one of which is to inform. Advertising can be useful for brand loyalty, brand awareness, etc.
There are two points I’m trying to make. First, technology sites should stay focused on technology and not venture into marketing since, well, they tend to recreate the wheel and confuse people. Second, and more interesting, is that history shows us that predictions and dire warnings are likely to be either wrong or overly pessimistic. Remember how paper was going to disappear computers came along, or that every company would be disintermediated, or that radio would disappear (along with bookstores and pet food stores). I know people like to scare people with dire, end of world warnings (it makes for great book sales – remember “The End of Marketing as We Know It” or lots of internet comments), but it doesn’t help marketers or companies market their products and services better.
As an example of dire predictions, at least 7 years ago people said that banner ads were finished. I wrote my skeptical reaction to this, which you can read here. Of course, banner ads continued despite the dire warnings.
Note, that since YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, for example, rely on ad revenues (which aren’t that big, according to this article), if internet advertising fails, social media sites will lose their ability to survive.
So, what’s your take on this (at least I know I’m talking to marketing – rather than a technology – audience)? Is advertising on the internet failing? Is it going to die? If so, what will replace it?

Economists, in fact, don’t see the relevance to speaking with people to find out what’s in their minds because of their theory of “revealed preferences”. That is, why ask someone what they think, just watch their behavior and that will reveal to you what they were thinking.
When I was trained in marketing research this type of approach was considered, well, quite a stretch. For most marketing concepts (except for purchase behavior or cold hard cash), what you’re trying to measure is just a concept or idea. There is no one-to-one relationship between the concept and something you can measure. Instead, people take the hard data and imbue it with meaning.
So you might not find it surprising how perplexed I’ve become over the explosion of available data on the web and the inferences that are currently being made about archival data. The biggest sensation is how data can reveal how much influence and authority you have. Technorati, for example, has an “Authority Index” for measuring a blog’s importance and authority. You can now find several website that will calculate your influence, how “hot” you are, etc., using Twitter data. It’s really gotten out of hand.
I think most of these measures are going way beyond the data into something that borders on wishful thinking. Here’s why.
Most people don’t know this, but as an academic researcher, and one who had to publish to get tenure, the golden rule has not only been getting a lot of publications but also being cited by a lot of other researchers. The key indicator of this is the “citation index” …. or the number of the other people who have cited your research in their research. This citation index is basically the idea behind Google’s rankings. You might think of this as equivalent to getting a lot of follower’s on Twitter.
What academics love to do is imbue this index with meaning, such as a high index means a person’s work is really important, or even innovative or, better yet, path breaking.
The problem with this index is the incentives that call the meaning of the index into question. For example, you might cite somebody else’s research because you found a flaw in it, or because you want to make your research look more scientific by citing someone else, or because you want to support a finding and need to find someone else who said it first (in academics, unlike the real world, you have to make sure what you say hasn’t been said before). The point is that there are several reasons a person might cite the work of someone else that has nothing to do with how innovative, important, or path breaking it is.
So, you can see the problem I have when I hear about an Authority Index, for example. This index is defined as the number of blogs linking to a website within the last six months.
This is the same as a citation index. It’s just a number (number of blogs linking to a website), which is then imbued with meaning (authority). By calling it “Authority”, people will naturally think about how important the blog is, and how pathbreaking and innovative the ideas are. But nobody talks about the incentives that call this meaning into question.
The big deal these days is using the “retweet” and “follow” data in Twitter to measure how important and influential you are. For example, someone is now offering $125,000 in order to lock in a way to gain hundreds of thousands of new followers.
This is just a marketing ploy, of course. Nonetheless, the idea of having thousands of followers has taken on a grandiose meaning, well beyond the simple fact that it’s just a simple number.
In fact, from what I’ve seen lately, I’ve received hundreds of followers who are basically scam artists where they are trying to get you to come to their twitter page where they’ll show you how to make a million bucks on some gimmick. Hmm, are these the followers that will add to a number that other people will assume means my tweets are really valuable?
This problem of archival data and placing ideas on it has plagued marketers for a long time. There are ways of dealing with this, but that’s not the point of this post. My purpose is just to make the statement that before believing what archival data means, we might all just pause a moment and remember that inferring ideas from archival data is a risky business and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
So, what do you think?
Is having more followers really a measure of how important and influential a person is? Do you use this as a “cue” that informs you about someone? Do you think people who retreet other’s posts really believe they are influential? Do you change your behavior and do marketing in a completely different way (which is really a measure of influence) based on a high follower person’s tweets?

Whenever I said something would take long to adopt (like e-books, for example), I got tons of hate email saying a) I didn’t know what I was talking about, and that b) the upcoming generation would look at the technology completely different than we did and readily adopt it. That I didn’t know what I was talking about wasn’t surprising, but what was curious was this faith that once younger people came along, everything would change.
Well, last week I had the chance to talk to two classes of undergrads at a major university about Internet marketing. After explaining search engine optimization, web analytics, paid search, etc the subject turned to social media. I gave them the typical talk about listening, participating, having a dialog, giving up control, etc, and how social media is a big deal (you know, the standard rap about if you’re not on a social networking site, you’re not on the internet). Then I showed them the various social networking platforms and asked them which ones they participated in.
Now, just a bit of background here. These are juniors and seniors in a business school. When you look at them, you know these are the kids who aspire to move into the business world very soon.
So, the first class told me that MySpace was considered pretty passé, and they were all on Facebook and almost all on LinkedIn. When I asked about Twitter, however, only 4 (out of 40) in the first class used it.
I immediately posted a tweet about this and heard back from several people. Matt Collier, for example wondered whether many of them had even heard of Twitter (perhaps this was about non-awareness, rather than a disinterest in using this platform).
So, during the second class I asked this question again. It turns out almost everybody had heard of Twitter, but only 1 of 40 was using it. When I asked them why they were so disinterested, they explained they got most of this experience on Facebook and didn’t see the value. Frankly, the general comment was “why would anybody waste their time on this?”
When I showed them what TweekDeck looked like, I got almost pained looks and comments about information overload (this from a generation that has grown up with information overload).
Now, some people think that when relationships and business are important, these people will flock to Twitter. Hmm. Business is important to them right now and they are obsessed with finding jobs and building relationships. So, what does this platform mean for their future?
Other people think this is about being “ahead of the curve”. But whose curve are we talking about–the curve of people who are in business right now, or the younger generation that isn’t living in the land of curves?
As many who heard me talk about this subject know, I have no proverbial dog in this fight. I’m not an evangelist of any platform, just trying to understand what is going on. But one thing I know is that you can’t have it both ways. If you believe that looking at younger people give you an idea of what will be popular in the future, then you have to seriously consider what this group of future business people are saying about the technologies they feel are valuable to them.
So, what do you think? Well, it turns out if you’re over 20 years old, what you and I think isn’t relevant here. But look through a really objective lens (no evangelism, please), and what do you see for the generation about to enter the working world?

You might not remember XDrive, but it was a quintessential fast growing internet company that provided FTP services so you could store your personal computer data on their servers. This was a big deal back then. XDrive wasn’t the only company providing this service, but it was a high flyer with a lot of venture capital behind it. As I recall, they had about $120M invested by the time I arrived. One other thing about XDrive, it was free (“The Free Hard Drive”). They made a splash by giving away condoms and getting mentioned on Howard Stern’s show.
I went to XDrive because 3 of my students who were working with the CEO there asked me join them. One of these students, Chris DeWolf, went on to found MySpace. It was an exciting time, fueled in part because the user adoption rate at XDrive was so fast. 30M users scrolled across a colored ticker tape display when I arrived and increased as each new user signed up. It was easy to get caught up in the excitement.
It wasn’t until the end of my sabbatical that I attended a major meeting with the CEO and all those in the upper management. Aside from learning that XDrive was losing money faster than was previously known, I also learned that while more than 30M users had signed up, only a small percentage of people actually used the service. Most of these were pornographers who stored large images which cost dearly in bandwidth charges.
That people would sign up and then not use a service is a well know fact that academics have long studied. We just separate adoption from usage. Research has shown that these are very different things, and you can have high adoption with low usage (Customer Relationship Management software was plagued by this). Essentially, usage can mean many things …. used a lot, used a little, used sporadically, used a lot a long time ago but not now, etc..
What does this mean today? Think about all the stories going around about the signup rates for high flying social media sites (to take a current example). While I don’t question the usage rate, I tend to be skeptical of the usage rate. So, last week when I heard, for example, that Twitter was used by 11% of adults, I tend to ask “what does usage mean here”.
Call me a skeptic, but I think marketers need to be objective and not be quickly taken in by the latest hype. I suggest always asking “what do they mean by that” when they hear words that convey extremely fast growth. For me, I just think about XDrive and it gives me good reason to pause.

So, let me premise this on my firm belief that social media is here to stay. I say this because humans have always been social, and have tried various ways of socializing throughout human history. When I think social, I must say I imagine at least two-way interactions, not just one person talking and the other passively listening. To me, being social also means interacting with others in more than just two way conversations. This makes sense, and we’ve all had these experiences with friends, family, and fun social gatherings.
So, how does Twitter deliver on this expectation? My experience is quite mixed. On one hand, it is true you can “meet” many people and hear different voices. And when I’m not overwhelmed by the amount of data coming in, along with the information streaming in from the offline world, this can be quite fun. But the extent to which this plays out as “social” is best illustrated through some specific experiences I think we all share.
To experience Twitter, the first thing I did was get an account (@allenweiss) and download TweekDeck and started following some people I thought would be interesting. It didn’t take long before it was clear this wasn’t going to be social experience I liked in the past. That’s because there is a whole narrative about followers and following. A lot of people I followed seemed to be obsessed with having as many followers as possible. In fact, there seems to be a strategy (I credit Leigh Duncan-Durst – @livepath for this word) called “Twitchers” …. people who follow you, so you would follow them, and they would unfollow you …. all in an effort to beef up their follower numbers. This reminds me of creepy people from high school who were devoting their lives to a popularity contest.
Another interesting thing is that people you follow don’t necessarily follow you back. I find this interesting as well. How “social” is that? It’s like hearing someone speak who isn’t interested in what you have to say. For all the talk about how this is supposed to be different than mass media (where elites talk to you but aren’t interested in what you have to say), this seems to me a giant step backwards.
One other thing I find most strange is watching the action on my TweetDeck. A constant stream of one-way conversations go by. Here’s just one example of hundreds that went by today.
@iThinkMedia I’m enjoying all the creativity & wit that @literacyadviser and @CaryRN added!
Hmm–what do I do with that? What I’ve learned is that to find out what is going on I need to click on everybody’s link and then search to find the thread that linked this conversation together. Could you imagine doing that in a real life social gathering? Ok..I know there are tools that are trying to make this easier (Tweetree, for instance), but it’s like being in a really crowded party and just getting bits of conversation. You really need to love puzzles and fitting broken bits of conversations together to make any sense of what’s going on. Sure, you can jump into their conversation – I imagine this as barging into other peoples conversations at a party, but this requires a personality that I don’t have (it clearly works for others, however). Is this what is required to be social?
Finally, what I’ve noticed is that this medium (at least as it pertains to marketing topics) seems to be turning into a pure selling tool (often veiled under the cloak of helpfulness) for many people. I have no problem with that, but I would suggest we call it something other than social media, and just say what it is: it’s “selling media”. At least, this would be the transparency that every social media expert talks about as necessary in this new world of social media.
So, this has made me think a lot about what social media is. It definitely is media, but I’m still wrestling with how social it is. Do I need to change my definition of social?
To get one angle on this question, I asked my 15 1/2-year-old daughter (who is desperately anticipating her driver’s license) about her experiences with social media. She was an early adopter of MySpace (and now an obsessed Facebook devotee) and is probably the most social and connected kid in her school. She’s on her computer and Blackberry all the time. I asked her what she thought about all this stuff, and how driving will change (or not) her use of technology. She said technology has really helped her stay in touch and meet new friends, but once she starts driving, she sees this as far less important. Why? Because to her, being social means meeting personally up with her friends, chatting one to one or in a cohesive group. Wow, how old fashioned is that?

It seems to me, and of course I could be wrong, that there are only so many business models you can choose from. Most of these have been around for centuries and will likely be the set that these companies must choose from (since there aren’t likely to be any new business models that come out of thin air).
If you look around the web, you can easily find a list of business models, which looks something like this:
Merchant …. selling somebody else’s products or services
Manufacturer …. selling your own stuff
Affiliate …. making money referring people to somebody else (pay-for-performance)
Infomediary …. money is made by selling customer data
Community …. everybody pitches in (not sure how money is made)
Brokerage …. brings parties together and takes a cut of the action
Advertising …. you know
Subscription …. paid, metered, pay as you go, etc.
This pretty much sums up the world of possibilities. Sure, you can find variations on this list of models, but those are typically a small tweak of the more general concept.
Since social media sites (let’s use Twitter, as the example) aren’t selling products they manufacture (or reselling them), that eliminates the first two models.
I’ve heard some talk about the Affiliate model, where Twitter would get some money by getting a commission on traffic sent to a merchants site, but this seems very tricky since so many people use clients (like TweetDeck) and likely the benefits would come to the people who post tweets, rather than Twitter.
Community models tend to be open source and they don’t typically have a business model that pays a lot anyway. The brokerage model doesn’t really seem relevant in a world where the people involved are supposed to be friends, openly sharing information (imagine if Twitter were going to start brokering that relationship and taking a piece of the action!)
The next possibility I’ve heard about is the Infomediary model. The argument goes that since Twitter has so much data, maybe they sell this (say, as insights on consumer behavior). This seems reasonable, except that the competition for Infomediary products is pretty intense (think every marketing research company in the world and every company that has access to the same data through Twitter’s APIs) and anyway, the data will be fairly biased (only generalizable to that subset of the world who uses Twitter). In any event, it seems to me that selling their data isn’t exactly what this whole social media platform was supposed to be about.
So, we’re left with basically advertising and paying money for a subscription. It seems to me the payment model would be very tricky. Imagine if Twitter started charging, say, $5 month to use it. Hmm, some people would pay, but I could easily imagine a competing free service (let’s call it Fritter) would show up immediately and even provide a way to port most of your data (followers, etc.) for free. Sure you could try a metered model (pay as you tweet, etc.) but all of these could be easily taken over by a free service.
So, we’re back to the old standby of advertising. If people are searching for a new business model, then this is the oldest model you can find. I haven’t seen any ads these days on Twitter (on some Twitter clients, yes, but not on the service itself). Nobody really knows how successful an advertising model is in the context of social media. I’m betting on the fact that most big brands would try it, and then see that it doesn’t really pay …. the reason is simply because people aren’t using Twitter expecting to see ads interfere in their personal relationships and communications.
So, what do you think? Is there a business model that I’m missing here? Am I being too pessimistic (will advertising save social media)?

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Sure, you can set up a strategy and see if it succeeds or not. But could you gather data from hundreds or thousands of companies and compile the results into proven strategies? The answer is “no.” Here’s why.
In my other life as an academic, I have to write scientific papers which are subjected to a rigorous review process. Like all academics in the social sciences, I have to gather data from many companies, use the most rigorous analytical tests of theories, and control for all possible alternative explanations of results. When these results show up in a paper, you are only allowed to say that such and such “suggests” some outcome, such as this marketing tactic suggests it might work.
The reason for this hesitancy is due to Karl Popper who, in brief, advanced the concept of falsification. Using the marketing tactic outcome example, you could show that 2,000 companies followed this particular marketing tactic and it was successful.
You could conclude that this tactic was proven to be successful. But, when you understand the concept of falsification, then you realize that all I have to do is show one example where the marketing tactic failed — and poof! — there goes your successful claim.
As a result, social scientists (those who study corporate and consumer behavior), are much more circumspect about any results.
So, the next time you see the words “proven strategies,” you might stop and think about what somebody is trying to sell you.
It certainly cannot be something proven, I can guarantee you that!

This is the headline from a just-released report by DoubleClick and the e-tailing group, Inc. What I find most interesting is how this will undoubtedly make headlines among various media outlets without any serious thought into what is going on here.

First and foremost is the question of price and consumer loyalty. The impression given by such a headline is not that most people are price sensitive (we don’t need research to tell us this), but that price is the MOST IMPORTANT factor when deciding which online store to buy from.
Personally, I find this nonsense. It is true that for some people price is the most important factor, but not ALL people. This is simply a matter of segmentation.
I’m always confronted by this question when I work with technology companies, and especially engineers, who tend to think that people are completely rational and thereby purchase based on the lowest price. To confront this mistaken thinking, I ask the company who in their market has the lowest price (which they readily tell me) and then I ask why doesn’t that competitor have 100% market share.
The point is this: You can’t have price be the most important factor in consumer purchase (and loyalty) and at the same time not have the competitor with the lowest price have 100% market share.
Anyway, if the lowest price is the most important factor in consumer loyalty, than you have another problem. All a competitor has to do is come up with an even lower price and consumer loyalty should vaporate (you see, you can’t make someone loyal totally on the basis of something, like price, that can be instantly changed).
Finally, since the study was conducted using an online survey methodology, you run into an additional problem. Consumers are well known to use implicit theories to explain their behavior. So even if they are loyal to a retailer for service, breadth of products and other factors, many will attribute their loyalty to something more easily identifiable and logical, like price. Most academic research shows that the implicit theories that consumers use can be quite misleading.
So, consumer behavior is far more complicated than this headline suggests, and indeed the specifics of the DoubleClick study suggest this. Here is the essence of their findings:
* Seventy-one percent of shoppers “browse multiple online stores prior to completing a purchase.”
* Four out of ten (42 percent) shoppers “price shop a product via comparison engines.”
* Nearly half (48 percent) of the online shoppers surveyed described their loyalty to merchants across channels (store, Web, catalog) as “somewhat loyal to certain merchants based on a combination of good value, superior service and the right mix of product.”
* Seventy percent of respondents surveyed belong to a frequent buyer/loyalty program.
* More than half of the respondents (53 percent) ranked “discounts or exclusive offers for members” as the most important feature of Frequent Buyer/Loyalty Programs.
* When deciding to go back to a Web site, “online order tracking” was rated as very important by 56 percent of those surveyed.
* Shopping patterns vary by gender, with men less loyal and women more apt to register or be influenced by promotional mail.
* “Poor service” ranked most likely to deter shoppers from becoming loyal to a Web site by 41 percent of respondents.
* Rewards’ customers (those belonging to 2+ programs) are less apt to be focused on price, utilizing more features and tools to enhance their multi-channel shopping experiences.
* At least half of the shoppers surveyed indicated purchasing clothing, books, music, computerware and toys online.
* Free shipping continues to be the most important enticement to drive customers back to sites.
Read the full press release.
So, reading the above findings, would you conclude that “price is the most important factor in consumer loyalty”?

They are peddling all sorts of stuff, but mostly it’s questionnable hard luck stories or grammer school campaigns that are supposed to trick you into having a conversation and eventually part with some money. I especially dislike certain solicitors who try to convert me right on the spot to their religion.
So, I’ve tried various tactics to end our conversations quickly. You know, like telling them I’m not interested, or I gave at the office, or any number of other possibilities.
The problem is that when you do this, there is always a counter-argument. For example, you might say that you are not interested in what they are selling, but they will take that as a great starting point for trying to convince you otherwise.
I grew tried of these selling games a few years ago and started using a different tactic… this is one that always works. And so while I still get door-to-door solicitors, I haven’t spent more than about 20 seconds dealing with anyone.
Here’s what you do. When the doorbell rings and you know you’re about to engage with someone who is going to try and sell you something, open the door, but only a little bit. Once you hear the beginning of their talking script, put a distressed look on your face and quickly glance back and forth between the person at the door and some imaginary person inside the house. Then say in a low voice that this is horrible time to talk right now because you’re in the middle of a “major family problem.”
This always works. I find that solicitors will always disengage at that point. After all, they came to sell you something, not to get involved in some marital dispute. The more distressed you look and the more imperative it looks like you need to return to the major family problem, the faster the person will leave. If you can convince them that divorce is imminent, even better.
Yesterday, I got this person who was clearly selling bogus baseball tickets to leave within 10 seconds after I started my little act.
Ok… well, maybe this is dishonest (and it is), but sometimes you have to take strong measures to keep marketers from hassling you.

Go ahead, type in marketing, or finance, or philosoply, cooking, or even Buddah and you’ll find wikipedia comes up on the first page (often in the number 1 position) on a Google search.
At a time when I’m not allowing my students to use Wikipedia as a reference for anything (they always use it as a cheap way to get serious information), it’s also making me wonder about the use of any search engine that will rank Wikipedia high. (After all, if the search engine is reference-link based or keyword-based — as Google is — how can you compete?)
Ok…they say this is for the good because, well, it’s the wisdom of crowds. (Although I question the wisdom of the people who vote to always pick the best politicians!) But I’m not convinced.
Are you as troubled as I?

Of course, marketers are salivating at this possibility. Nobody really knows if this venue is going to work, but, according to the NY Times, the central theory seems to be that ads placed on mobile phones could create an intimate bond with consumers.
Say what?
While consumers may have an intimate relationship with their cell phones, since when is this going to transfer to an advertiser? Tell me one other context where consumers have an intimate relationship with anything, and then have this intimacy transferred to an intruder.
Affect transfer does occur in many other situations (use of personalities in advertising is one example), but these are expected situations that occur between consumers in typically non-intimate settings.
Anyway, I would expect that Verizon is going to tread lightly here. According to the NY Times, “Carriers have also been concerned about annoying cellphone users with obtrusive marketing messages.”
The potential for making more money, however, will be way too tempting, and eventually such ads are going to be commonplace.

After all, you can’t prove anything in science. What you can do is provide a growing number of studies that tend to support a theory. But as any scientist knows, a theory (or the eternal viability of any marketing tactic) can be “falsified” by one test that doesn’t support the theory.
Since human behavior is certainly as difficult to understand as, say, chemical reactions and physical interactions, it seems quite silly to believe that anything related to customer reactions can be proven. In fact, in my other life as an academic, you won’t find one piece of research that has been published that will use the word “proven.”
So, while this looks good in a press release, I would caution people to be quite skeptical of this claim. In other words, while this might work to get people to read the articles that purport to show “proven tactics,” I would look at them as entertainment and not something to be seriously believed.
What’s your view on this?

Lots of Web sites make changes to improve the customer interface, but it’s service that is still at the heart and soul of customer experience. And in that regard, Technorati still has some growing up to do.
We recently moved this blog to a new url (to www.mpdailyfix.com, so as to not get it confused with our main www.marketingprofs.com site). And I have been surprised at receiving no support from Technorati when I tried to claim our new domain. The message instructed us to contact technical support. Which I did. Over 5 times. I started trying over a week ago, and have sent 5 different emails to follow up (just like they say), plus filled out another customer support request.
So far — no luck. It appears to be a service black hole.
This imight be a typical situation where a company grows very fast, but misses the mark of basic service. This is one of the reasons I really don’t like a single company starting to dominate any aspect of the internet (remember Microsoft?).
Maybe you have some more positive experiences that might help me out of this funk. I’m not really interested in celebrating Technorati’s achievements until, well, someone follows up to help us claim what is ours.

Whenever I see these words used by the business press, or more likely, on various Web sites, I always think of the warlocks in the HG Wells classic The Time Machine, where a horn sounds and all these people move like zombies towards some mountain entrance…. In a sense, they all look like they are following some guru or some thought leader.
I ask this because, well…take the concept of branding. Did you know that if you plug the words “branding + thought-leader” into Google, you’ll find about 148,000 pages?
That means there are a whole lot of thought leaders out there–.but how can that be? If there really is an idea that is cutting-edge and advanced, how can so many people have the same cutting-edge thoughts? Or maybe each has a different cutting -dge thought (which means there are thousands upon thousands of new branding concepts emerging all the time)?
My sense is that all of this thought-leader stuff is really just for selling something. The same goes for the word “guru.” That’s fine, I guess, if you want to characterize yourself in some new age words in order to sell books. But I find it results in a lot of confusion–which is something that marketing professionals don’t need.
Here is one typical example. I was at a conference awhile back when some self-professed thought-leader-branding-guru stood up and said that a brand was “a promise you give to your customers.” Ah, well, that’s not quite true (a brand is actually just a thing, like it was originally with the brand you put on cow–a visual or word based symbol). And if a brand is a promise, then what is a positioning statement? Well, that could be a promise, too. So these brand gurus can get you a little mixed up if you start thinking about it.
Finally, it turns out this need for having thought leaders and gurus is even apparent in the hard sciences (“physics guru” turns up over 2 million pages on Google).
So why do we need these thought leaders and gurus so much? I don’t have an answer for this myself, and frankly I can’t find a guru who knows the answer.

This, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune by Alex Beam. The evangelists believe, as did those who pushed the original SoftBook back in 2000-2001, that people will now want to read books on their iPods and cellphone screens.
It turns out I wrote an article we published here on MarketingProfs almost 6 years ago that, based on the history we know about the adoption of new innovation, argued that e-books wouldn’t take off as pundits predicted. The article was also published on the now defunct Upside.com and, as a result, I got tons of emails from people who said I was nuts. Of course, they said, e-books was the way of the future and that kids who grew up playing video games would embrace the idea. Really?
Anyway, don’t take it from me. Read the IHT article and decide for youself. As for me, I’m a great believer in new technology, but not techologies that purport to be solutions for non-existent problems.

As a result, the survey results they will get from me (and everybody else who fills out the survey) will be relatively useless as well.
Here is the list of characteristics they wanted me to use when judging the computers from various manufacturers:
* Quality
* Reputation
* Service/support
* Reliability
* Ease of integration with other technologies
* Value for the dollar
* Ease of operation
* Unique and superior feature(s)
* Breadth of options
* Price
The problem with this list starts with top characterisitc: Quality. What does that mean? I have no idea.
Perhaps they mean the computer is reliable (but that characteristic is also on their list, so is there any difference between Quality and Reliabilty?), or maybe they mean it works well so that is doesn’t need service and support (but that also refers to Reliability, right?).
Esentially, “Quality” means all those things… and so it means nothing. That’s one problem with the survey.
Here’s another….the word “Reputation.” What does that mean?
Maybe it means the computer company has a reputation for quality (but then what do I do with the word Quality?). Or maybe it means they have a good reputation for providing service and support (but that’s another characteristic on their list). Or maybe it means the company has a reputation for a great price (again, that’s another word on their list).
You see, this is a very confusing survey to fill out…and that was just on the first page!
The point is that words like Quality and Reputation are almost meaningless words in marketing (their not actually meaningless, but in fact refer to something else). This is just an example of the confusion that marketers run into when they start using ill defined words. It confuses not only their strategy, but the consumers that they should base their strategy on.
Don’t even get me start with the word “Value…” since that is also convoluted with the word “Price”. In fact, I’m not sure what the word Value stands for here…do you?

One is in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, where some level-headed thinking is exposed on how companies jump from consulting fad to fad, which one exec calls the “flavor of the month.” Jeffrey Pfeffer (a former colleague of mine at the Stanford Business School) tells execs to me more independent and to “systematically examine evidence about what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong instead of following what everyone else is doing.”
This is essentially why I don’t like case studies…because they focus on what some other company has done right (or wrong). That’s fine for some other company, but how does that relate to what you should do?
Another good article appears in the current Atlantic Monthly.
After reading these two articles, I’m once more convinced that marketers should be very, very wary of people who are touting the “new rules” of marketing. It seems like someone is trying to sell you something more than trying to help you market better.

Yes, you are the only one who thinks about this
Are you crazy, this drives everyone nuts
If this bothers you, rake your own leaves.