Category Archives: Thinking Aloud

December 19, 2013 · 11:42 am

It’s The Pipe, Stupid

Any of us who consume content via the Internet are aware of how profoundly that consumption has changed over the last few years.  The advent of smart mobile devices and tablets has freed that consumption from the tether of the desktop computer and has started to fulfill the promise of “always on, anytime, any place, any screen.”   From a marketing perspective that has been incredibly frustrating as brands try to keep up with the ever-changing consumption patterns of their intended customer bases.  From a user perspective, it’s gloriously liberating.

From eMarketer.com

Some statistics from the good folks at eMarketer with respect to that change are over there on the chart.  You can see online – desktop – time spent dropping even as consumption of video and social increases.  Look, however, at the rapid growth on mobile devices.  There is a similar pattern to the type of content consumed but the time spent has gone from negligible to half of that on desktops and laptops.   But I don’t think that’s the real story.

Just as important – maybe more so – as the growth of these mobile devices is how all that content gets on those devices.  In other words, the pipe.  For tablets, a lot of the usage is in the home where it’s reasonable to assume the pipe is the home wi-fi network that’s drawing from the basic internet connection – the cable or DSL provider.  For phones and some tablets, it’s the mobile network.

The issue in my mind is that usage of these devices is artificially depressed by the usage constraints placed there by those carriers.  It’s hard to get an unlimited data plan with many carriers and those of us who have those data plans grandfathered in still get hit with bandwidth caps – usage points at which the data gets slowed down.  The carriers often say it’s about managing network capacity.  Which means, of course, it’s about money.

Building a wireless data network is a huge, expensive undertaking.  The carriers have every right to earn back that investment and have an obligation to do so to their shareholders.  The wireless business defends itself from undercutting by municipalities that attempt to install free public wi-fi.  Google, however, has proven it’s possible to roll out an uncapped very high-speed network at reasonable prices.  Admittedly so far this is not a wireless network.  Does anyone think it won’t be at some point?

If not Google, something else will break the dam of bandwidth restrictions.  That’s when the world really changes.  Just as improved cable networks have made HDTV ubiquitous (something like 75% of all homes have HD now), and just as that same bandwidth into the home has made cord-cutting a growing trend, a freed-up, uncapped pipe for mobile will drastically change the landscape.   You agree?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Thinking Aloud, What's Going On

Tagged as , , , ,

December 17, 2013 · 10:53 am

What’s That Sound?

For our TunesDay installment this week I want to write about a style of music rather than a particular song.  As with most musical styles, nearly any song can be rendered this way although I’m not completely sure why anyone would want to do so.  That style is what many of you would call “elevator music.”  Don’t confuse that with “easy listening.”  The folks who created the latter meant you to listen.  The former, also known by the main practitioner of the style commercially – Muzak – is meant to create a mood while staying in the background.

In the late 1930’s and 1940’s, the sound of Muzak was used as “stimulus progression” to improve productivity.  The music wasn’t meant to be listened to, just to set a mood.  The increasing pace of the music  was meant to keep workers energized and was popular through the 1960’s.  It was background music – the stuff you heard in elevators: comforting, unobtrusive, and inoffensive.  By the mid 1980’s, background music had gone out of fashion.  Besides on-going accusations of “brainwashing”, the fact was that musical tastes has changed.  Music was more a part of people’s lives and the stimulus part of the program died.

The music we hear today in malls, airports, restaurants and, yes, elevators is meant to be in the foreground.  The mood music we hear can often be anything but comforting, unobtrusive, and inoffensive.  It can be hard to ignore.  Maybe that’s what many people just opt out by plugging in to the ubiquitous ear buds and creating their own aural environment.  Which raises the business point.

If you’re trying to move your marketing from being “elevator music” that plays in the background to being front and center, you run the risk of people opting out altogether.  I’m not advocating staying in the background.  There is too much marketing noise, I know, but standing quietly in a corner hoping a potential customer will take pity and bring you a glass of punch won’t work either.  The real challenge is to attract attention the way a skilled teacher does in a noisy class: by continuing to do your thing at a volume that requires people to pay attention and delivering information that people find important when they do so.

Is your marketing going to be Muzak – forgettable background sound that attempts to alter people’s moods –  or is it going to be something people hum to themselves because it’s had an impact?  Which sound is yours?

Enhanced by Zemanta

1 Comment

Filed under Music, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , ,

December 16, 2013 · 9:04 am

You Never Walk Alone

Here we are, winding down another work year, and I thought this might be a good time to look at some food for thought on leadership.  Why now?  Well, at this time of year there are frequently year-end reviews going on and employees hear from their leadership as to how the employee has performed in the manager’s estimation.  Much more rare is the manager hearing from the subordinate with respect to the manager’s performance.  I suspect if the worker bees could speak up, they’d talk a fair amount about how the boss lacks interpersonal skills and a sense of mistaking pushing their employees in the right direction for leading them.   It’s a critical distinction.

It really boils down to character.  Many people get promoted into leadership roles and forget that they didn’t get there by themselves.  In fact, they lose sight of the fact that the single greatest skill a boss can possess is, in my opinion, the ability to motivate others in a positive way.  Turns out it’s not jut my opinion:

The flaws most commonly tripping up our at-risk leaders were related to failures in establishing interpersonal relationships. Far less frequent were fatal flaws involved in leading change initiatives, driving for results, and — we’re happy to report — character. That might explain how they’d managed to get as far as they had. But past a certain point, individual ambition and results aren’t enough. As they climb higher in an organization and the ability to motivate others becomes far more important, poor interpersonal skills, indifference to other people’s development, and a belief that they no longer need to improve themselves come to haunt these less effective leaders the most.

That’s from the folks at Zenger Folkman who do leadership assessments and training.  The good news is that bad leaders can become good ones if they’re willing to accept that they have issues.  The biggest of these may be the premise that they are somehow isolated from the team – above them in more than rank.  Bad leaders confuse who they are with what they do and substitute a title for earning respect.  None of us walk alone in the world and especially not in the work world.  Only when we acknowledge that and learn to work with and through others do we reach our full potential.

Make sense?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Growing up, Reality checks, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , ,