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November 24, 2007
MyCokeRewards.com requires you to register with them before you can check the code under the cap. Is that even legal? Well, yeah, it probably is since Coke can probably afford to hire a lawyer or two. But it’s bad marketing. Well, it’s probably good marketing since Coke can probably afford to hire a marketer or two, but it annoys me.
November 21, 2007
Jessamyn West, who has been putting the rarin back in Librarian since 1999, posts about the fact that someone she respects has started doing pay-per-post postings. And then she goes all meta on the topic. Quite amusing. As she concludes: “Ten dollars well spent, I think. Don’t you?” [Tags: jessamyn_west, mat_honan pay_per_post, blogging, blogosphere libraries -berkman]
November 20, 2007
Jeneane writes:
The Award for the best tagline goes to Skype for “take a deep breath.” Why? Because it’s the only tagline I’ve seen that ISN’T about the company at all, but about ME. It’s something that’s good for me. Has nada to do with chatting or videofoning or the internet. It’s about: hey, we’re people too. Let’s all take a deep breath. Wait. Don’t jump into the next thing. Stop clicking. Wshew. Ok. There. Good.
I like it, too, but I’ve never quite understood it. Are they saying we should take a deep breath because what’s about to happen is breathtaking? Because we’ll need the breath for all the talking we’re about to do? Or is Jeneane right, that Skype is reminding us to pause in the hyper-flurry of life on the Web? I’m not sure, which is the main reason I like Skype’s tag line.
Jeneane suggests tag lines for other Web sites. Here are some more, assuming Skype’s tries to remind us of the bigger picture:
Wikipedia: Go outside. Engage. Come back neutral.
eBay: The best things in life are free aren’t for sale.
slashdot: 6 – Moving
November 15, 2007
My Berkman colleagues Ethan Zuckerman and Wendy Seltzer both have great posts up about the Facebook ad infrastructure that I blogged about yesterday.
October 22, 2007
Scott Kirsner has a terrific post about why trying to control PR can hurt PR. After arguing with a film company about its policy of requiring a password to log into the PR site, Scott actually went through the process of trying to get a password. It happened at postal speeds. Making it hard for people to talk about your film is probably not the best way to market your film.
October 19, 2007
Loic Le Meur‘s startup, Seesmic, seems to be off to a twittering, buzzing start. Mike Arrington likes it. It’s in a closed alpha, with 150 people in it, and I haven’t seen it, but you seem to be able to record and post videos, with some stuff to make it easy to find videos. Arrington talks about it as a video twitter.
Loic (who is a friend) is recording a video a day, marking the progress of the company’s launch. Overall, this is some fine Web marketing. [Tags: seesmic marketing]
October 4, 2007
Berkman.TV has posted a video in which Wendy Seltzer and Angela Kang explain why the Harvard Coop was deliriously wrong when it used copyright to justify its kicking out a student for copying down book prices.
September 25, 2007
I’m in Aarhus, Denmark, listening to the only English presentation of the day (besides mine), which is a terrific talk by Mark William Hansen about Lego’s embrace of Web 2.0. E.g., four days after Lego launched MindStorm, the software had been completely redone. “We could have gone after them with a lawyer,” he says, but instead “We embraced the changes.” The adult hobbyists, who had been a “shadow market,” with Web 2.0 have become key because they drive enthusiasm and stretch the product. Lego is working on “Lego Universe”: A social world in which you can build with virtual bricks and play with them online with others; the planes will fly and the boats will sail.
September 19, 2007
I keynoted Shop.org this morning and then walked up the long aisles of their exhibit hall. I was (and am) pooped, so what caught my eye was more random than usual.
I thought PermissionData.com was going to be one of those phony permission marketing companies that are all too happy to spam you. Nope. They show you (at your request) a page of offers. None of the boxes are pre-clicked and none are pre-clicked and below the fold. The idea is that if you trick people into giving you permission to spam them, they are remarkably bad leads. Bad leads cost money. So, good for PermissionData!
3B.net looks like a combination of Second Life, the early Wolfenstein, and LL Bean. They render the entries in your product catalog as posters along the wall in a 3D space. Your avatar and your friends’ avatars can wander together, talk about what you see, and click to be taken to the normal merchandising page. The guy in the booth (lost his name…sorry) and I bonded over our days playing Doom, Duke Nukem, and the under-rated Painkiller.
I met Rousseau Aurelien, CEO of SecondRotation, which aims at being the place you sell your stuff when you’re done with it. If the item is one of the thousands on SR’s list, SR buys it from you and arranges to have it picked up. It then refurbishes it and resells it or donates it. Rousseau says they pay about two thirds of the going rate at eBay. But, boom, you’re done. I asked how many people say their item is in one shape, but when it arrives, it turns out to be broken or damaged. Rousseau replied that 95% of the stuff is in the shape claimed or better. “People are generally good,” he says.
I kept running into people from Bazaarvoice. (Brett Hurt, the CEO, introduced me when I gave my talk; he said some very kind things. Thank you, Brett. It meant a lot to me.) Bazaarvoice creates customer review pages. The booth had one of the more effective marketing gimmicks: a rack of irreverent sayings you could attach to your name badge, like the “speaker” and “media” tags. I saw a whole bunch of people with “More cowbell” tags from Bazaarvoice.
I met with Daniel Wright, CEO of mporia, which does “m-commerce” (= e-commerce for mobile phones). Interesting space. It’s not going to get smaller over time. The actual transactions are handled via PayPal, or by sending the merchant an encrypted message with the credit card info.
I stopped in at Broadvision because they bought Interleaf years ago, a company I worked at for eight years. (I was long gone by the time it got bought.) Interleaf was way ahead of its time, with a structured document editor, electronic publishing system, document management system, and program-enabled documents. I often wonder why there’s no market for high end document systems for managing the creation and management of large, complex document sets. Broadvision is still selling the Interleaf system, and the maintenance stream is strong. Good to see the product is still around.
I also visited briefly in the Endeca booth because Endeca is doing great selling faceted classification (they call it “guided navigation”) systems, and I like what they’re doing. It’s been fun watching the company go from just about nothing to having an amazing client roster.
So, that was a truly random assortment. Now it’s off to the casinos to use my patented and proven Lossless Las Vegas System(tm): I don’t play. Well, I will drop $20 into gambling machines and wonder why people consider this fun.
[Note: I had a stupidity glitch and ended up deleting and then rewriting from memory what this post said. The original was up for about 15 mins and this one is as close as I could come to the original. If you noticed the change, I didn’t want you to think there’s anything nefarious going on. Just stupidity.]
September 15, 2007
A couple of days ago, my friend Francois Gossieaux (whose name in my address book is marked with a big “THIS IS THE CORRECT SPELLING”) interviewed me (phoninar format) for his marketing group called MarketHum. The mp3 is here. [Tags: marketing cluetrain francois_gossieaux markethum]
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