The Boston Globe reports (here today, gone tomorrow-ish) that Carl Jablonski, president of Shaw’s Supermarkets and Star Markets, does a monthly, live, unscripted video broadcast for employees. He talks about what the company is doing well and not so well, interviews a guest, and reads customer letters. On a recent show, the guest was a manager who poked gentle fun at Carl. Said Carl to the reporter, Keith O’Brien: “You’re human. They see that human side of their president. And quite frankly, I think you work better for somebody who you understand.” Nice. But then he also said:

“A 20-minute broadcast with the right individuals generates the message quicker, faster, and more to the point,” said Jablonski.

Insofar as it’s about communicating a message, it’s still alienating. As Doc said succinctly so many years ago, “There’s no market for messages.” It’s still a broadcast, the one in charge speaking to the many who are not. Why not open it up? Let the employees speak — we’ve got lots of ways of enabling that now. [Tags: management carl_jablonski cluetrain ]

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Yesterday I gave a talk at the Mass Technology Leadership Council‘s Social Media Cluster — 30 minutes followed by 90 minutes of questions and discussion. Paul Gillin, who’d suggested me to the group (thanks Paul!), and is the author of the just-published The New Influencers, made the point (relevant in context) that traditional direct mail marketers are thrilled to get a 3% return rate. “I don’t know of any other case where a failure rate of 97% is considered a success.”

From the front of the room Dan Bricklin responded instantly. “Sperm,” Dan said. It made me laugh. But, as Dan points out, it’s a common strategy in nature.

BTW, Dan’s posted a podcast of the session. [Tags: nature direct_mail marketing sperm dan_bricklin paul_gillin mtlc everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The Boston Globe has a good article by Marcella Bombardieri about colleges using students to blog to give prospective students a sense of what life is like there. About 25% of colleges do this. Some pay, some don’t. Some see the blogs before they’re posted, some don’t. All say they have a high tolerance for negative or embarrassing posts.

Wouldn’t a prospective student do better to find students who are just blogging, rather than ones who are sponsored by the school admissions department? On the other hand, have you tried to find, say, MIT blogs at Technorati? Let me give you a hint: The “related tags” listed for “mit” are “technology, und, der, zu, den, das, von, ein and auch.” Who tags anything “zu” or “von,” the equivalent of tagging an English-language post as “to” or “of.”

(Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors.) [Tags: college conversational_marketing marketing cluetrain blogs everything_is_miscellaneous]

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I’m at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association meeting in New Orleans where I sat a lunch table with Scott Anderson, CEO of Union Diamond, the second largest seller of diamonds over the Internet. His company’s phone policy is that if a telephone rings for twenty seconds, that’s ten seconds too long. Everyone in the company is charged with answering calls and seeing them through. I asked him how he’ll manage this as the company gets bigger. He said he’s like to continue the policy but perhaps have a set of numbers that would direct calls to the right group within the company.

BTW, Scott says that they support the Kimberly process, and only buy from suppliers who certify that they are not selling conflict diamonds.

Nice guy, good policies…I’m ready to buy! I wonder what of mine would look good studded with diamonds…

Here’s a random sampling of topics (Day 1 Day 2) at the WOMMA meeting:

JetBlue: Inside the Cockpit of their CrewBlue Brand Ambassador Network

General Mills: Using Community Outreach to Build Buzz

TheFind.com: Tapping into the Web’s Power Influencers — Women

Yahoo!: Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest with Yahoo! Video and Jumpcut

Flying Dog Brewery: Leveraging Your Brand’s Intrinsic Values

CASA: Honing Refer-A-Friend Word of Mouth Tactics in a Not-for-Profit Setting

Cold Stone Creamery: Using PR as an Integrated Marketing Tool

O, The Oprah Magazine: Driving Brand Advocacy with Special Events

Here’s the WOMMA code of ethics. They take it seriously. I talked with the group this morning about the importance of respecting not just the “consumer” (as their first principle states), but respecting the conversation as well. What would marketing look like if it took the ongoing customer conversations as paramount?

[Tags: womma marketing union_diamond ethics business ]

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Paul English blogs a plausible theory about why Microsoft drastically changed the placement of controls in the IE7 tool bar:

…maybe Microsoft is trying to quickly (even if painfully) retrain its large market share to use control layout of IE7, so that when that mass-market first tries Firefox (and they will), they will find Firefox the one with the “odd layout”, and thus be more likely to stay with IE7

Is it a conspiracy or just canny marketing? And why is it so often so hard to tell those two apart?

If I had to guess — and I don’t have to but I’m going to anyway — I’d guess that Microsoft did usability studies that favored the new design (once we unlearn the old way, as Paul points out), and they were aware that it’s an opportunity to de-train us on the Firefox UI.

(Yes, someone could and probably has done a Firefox skin that makes it look like IE7. But Microsoft’s ploy — if that’s what it is — is aimed at people downloading the out-of-the-box version of Firefox.) [Tags: microsoft ie7 firefox markeing browsers]

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I quite like Yahoo Local, and use it frequently. But try searching for “bargain department store” in “toronto, ontario, canada” (without the quotes). The site tells you that it couldn’t find any stores in Toronto (because it only knows about the US), but perhaps I’d be interested in Kohl’s Department Store near Marion, KS.

If you zoom out on the map, it becomes clear what’s guiding this seemingly random choice: Marion appears to be dead center in the US. Thus, it is statistically most likely to be near any randomly chosen point in the country.

While this may make probabilistic sense (Or maybe not: I was a Humanities major), it makes no common sense. Yahoo would satisfy more query-ers if it picked an area dense with population. Or it could just say, “Yo, moron! Toronto isn’t in the US…at least not yet, bwahahaha!!” Although I have to say, I find something charming about being redirected to a small town of geometric significance.

(Disclosure: Years ago I was on a little Yahoo Local advisory board that met once.) [Tags: yahoo local marketing maps]

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The totally brilliant Hillary 1984 ad is so effective because it highlights the gap between her calculated rhetoric about her campaign being “a conversation” and the tight top-down control the campaign exerts. Her campaign is no more controlled than every other campaign in the past 50 years — since TV became the single best way to reach voters — but that level of control is no longer acceptable, thanks to the Web. This ad marks the day that the old style of campaigning looks its age.

But her response today was good. She made a self-deprecating joke: “I’m just happy if it is taking attention from me singing,” she said at a press conference…thus, of course, diverting attention to her singing. Which is to her benefit. The fact that Hillary can’t carry a tune only makes her more fallible and thus more likable. The Internet will expose every foible. Candidates that can’t deal with that are doomed.

From now on, we will never elect a president who is not at least a little bit goofy.

[Disclosures: I will happily vote for Hillary if she’s the nominee. There’s lots I like about her. At this point, I’d more happily vote for Edwards or Obama. And I’m doing a little volunteer advising to the Edwards campaign on some policy stuff. End o’ disclosures.] [Tags: hillary_clinton politics fallibility 1984 barack_obama]

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Usually the first economic argument presented for the importance of the Long Tail is that the area underneath the tail is far greater than the area underneath the Short Head. And since that area represents people with whom the point on the curve communicates, the Long Tail represents a far greater economic opportunity. But, that argument thinks of the points as mini-broadcasters and markets as homogeneous aggregations of consumers. Such a simplistic vew misses the knotty nature of the Long Tail. The points are engaged with one another and with their readers (as Chris Anderson makes clear in his nuanced book, The Long Tail). Yes, Long Tails are conversations, too.

Britt Blaser puts this differently and quite nicely in his most recent post: The People Law trumps the Power Law. Here’s how it begins:

There are five principles I’m playing with lately:

1. The size of your audience confers limited power 2. A network’s value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe)

3. Network nodes are significant only when they’re verbose 4. Most conversation is among nearby nodes

5. Only interactions count, and the richest count most

He goes on from there…and ends it with a nice motto:

Where there’s folk, there’s fire.

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Berkman‘s Vendor Relationship Management site now has its own blog, which is off to a good start with a posting by Doc… [Tags: vrm doc_searls berkman]

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Peter Swire at Ohio State U and former privacy advisor to the Clinton Admin explains why he thinks Yochai Benkler gets it wrong. Benkler overstates the shift from market to non-market, and Peter will explain “why an economics-based alternative is pragmatically useful.”

Your laptop is an information factory. Consumers own the means of production, which sounds pretty economic, he says. He says he’s a big fan of Yochai, but not with the major thesis that says it is “social rather than proprietary and market relations that create all the big effects — freedom, equity, etc.” (p. 92). But the shift to non-market is not proven, and there are pragmatic reasons to employ an economics-based approach.

Is non-market overstated? It’s defined too broadly in the book, says Peter. And Yochai is observing the early adopters, but as the niche grows it may well go commercial. The amateurs give way to marketized professionals. The Internet itself has shifted from non-commercial to highly commercial.

He says that the production costs have gone well down, so we’ll get more production. There should be a market response, not that we’ll go to a non-market environment.

Why adopt economics as a second way of explaining what’s going on? It’s not clear that Yochai is right that the big change in tech will result in a shift to a nonmarket economy. That’s not what happened with the industrial revolution. It’s simpler (Occam’s Razor) to apply the usual economic view that a reduction in costs will lead to an expansion of production and a bigger market, says Peter.

Yochai responds: It’s important not to confuse markets with economics. My claim is exactly that people own the means of production. But the point that the supply curve shifts outward is not inconsistent with what I’m saying. It means the supply of zero-priced goods increases. You’re using the term “market” as a metaphor and a seucrity blankie. You need to include the pricing mechanism. My claim is that the price mechanism is of smaller importance in directing action. If you want to affect action you have to accept that there is a unique system that is outside of the price system. And that’s what I call nonmarket. To claim that I’m not using economics in this book is surprising.

Second (Yochai says), I thought to say that when you change the costs of the physical capital necessary to act in economically significant ways you get changed behaviorial patterns is not technological exceptionalism. It’s like saying the same thing about the steam engine. Costs matter, the combination of physical human etc. capital all matter. One cost component has declined to a point that a whole set of behaviors that were peripheral to the economy are becoming central.

It’s not that the market disappears. Rather, the addition of nonmarket actions adds a degree of freedom that can solve some of the problems of the purely market-based system (Yochai says).

Peter: The amateurs are likely to get professionalized.

Yochai: Could be. But what will the policies be?

Yochai says there’s a wiki at benkler.org to talk about this type of thing…

[Excellent.] [Tags: f2c yochai_benkler peter_swire economics ]

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