December 13, 2012 · 11:46 am

Playing Nice

I had a completely different post written this morning but it’s off in the digital ether.

Cougar / Puma / Mountain Lion / Panther (Puma ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s gone as a result of a misbehaving computer.  Yes, I save as I go but in a burst of prolific writing I got a lot text on the page in between autosaves and when what I’m about to describe happened, the brilliance I spewed was lost.  The topic was the balance between large audiences as measured by TV ratings vs. buzz as measured by Facebook.   As it turns out, they’re not one and the same.  According to a list published by Facebook the other day, most of the widely discussed shows on their platform don’t have large ratings.  Maybe I’ll come back to that another time.

Instead, I want to spent today dispelling what I’m suddenly finding to be a myth – that Apple stuff “just works.”  Ever since I installed Mountain Lion, my MacBook Air has something called kernel panics every day.  Chrome and the OS aren’t playing nicely, and I’m not the only one having this issue.  In fact, enough people are having it that when you search for “chrome and mountain lion crashing” you get nearly a million search results.  Yes, I’ve tried nearly all of the suggested fixes (as have many others on the product support forums I read) but none of them seem to solve the issue.  Honestly, I (and many others) am not even sure where the issue is.  Apple says it’s Chrome and we should switch to Safari, but other browsers seem to cause crashes including Safari.  Google says it might be Flash or an extension or Apple.  The only thing different is the new OS (which has all the updates installed as well).  Putting aside the walled garden ecosystem discussion for a minute, what I think of a lot is kindergarten.

We all learn very early on in our lives to socialize.  For me it was really around the time I began school (no pre-school 50 years ago!) and the message to “play nice with the other kids” was reinforced by my parents and teachers all the time.  Why the hell can’t that lesson get through the skulls of hardware and software folks?  It’s a good one for the rest of us as well – very few businesses exist on their own.  We process payments, we deal with suppliers, we (hopefully) have customers.  Play nice with the other kids if you want to succeed!

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December 12, 2012 · 11:25 am

Click Here

We’ve discussed the disconnect between marketers and consumers here on the screed more than once and I had set aside a research study a couple of weeks ago to do so again.  It’s a document from the Adobe folks called “Click Here: The State Of Online Advertising” and it makes for a brief, interesting read.  As one might expect, consumers don’t exactly rave about their love for advertising.  That said, they do seem to recognize the need for advertising and prefer professionally created ads over user-generated marketing:

Consumers and marketing professionals agree that marketing is valued, strategic to business and paramount to driving sales.  Professional advertising is the most effective form of advertising, but 27% of marketers believe that user-generated content is the most popular form of online advertising.

Of course, 53% agree that most marketing is a bunch of B.S. (the study’s term, not mine).  The key to me is, as eMarketer reported:

Marketers and the consumers they are trying to reach disagreed on the effectiveness of a wide variety of ad types, according to the survey. Though both groups thought the best ads were those created by professional marketers, nearly half of marketers said this, compared with just 36% of internet users. There was large disagreement about the effectiveness of paid search ads (touted by marketers, played down by web users) and outdoor advertising (the reverse). Internet users were also much more likely to say there were no good or effective ads—positions which marketers were extremely unlikely to hold, for obvious reasons.

Why are the senders so out of sync with the receivers?  As the study shows, people prefer to get information from people they trust.  The issue, then, is how does a brand penetrate that circle?  Does anyone believe it’s through fake “likes” on Facebook where we see friends (even dead ones!) shilling for stuff they wouldn’t ever use?  Maybe we need to be less lazy – tell better stories, do better creative – since 68% of consumers find online ads “annoying” and “distracting” and 54% say banner ads don’t work. I suspect this dichotomy has ever been so to a certain extent.  For people in the market for various products, marketing messages are important and welcome.  For everyone else, they’re an annoying fact of life.

Here’s the thing – EVERYONE is in the market for something nearly all the time.  Food and entertainment, for example, are daily “purchases”.  As the research shows, until we on the marketing side do a better job of connecting, our ability to influence those decisions will always be less than it could be.   You agree?

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December 11, 2012 · 10:16 am

The Fog

It was foggy all day yesterday and that resonated with me.

Fog

(Photo credit: rchughtai)

Maybe because it was the start of another week and like an old car I’m getting harder to start and was a little foggy, or maybe because all I keep hearing about is the uncertainty of financial markets, the economy, and lots of other things that are near and dear but not very clear.  Either way, a December day that was warm and foggy was unusual enough to give me cause to reflect.  Of course, it prompted some business thinking I’d like to share.  Let me digress, however, for a minute.

I like playing golf in the fog (no I did not play yesterday).  I know – “you like playing golf period.”  True enough.  But playing in the fog has a unique set of challenges, the most obvious being that tracking the ball once it leaves your club face is impossible.  Because of that, I find I have an increased awareness of all the things that tell me what shape the shot took – where on the face did I strike the ball, was it solid contact, was the face open or shut, my swing path – and where I might go find it.  I can see it go off in a general direction but without an awareness of if I hit it to bend right or left or how far it might have gone, finding the ball is almost impossible.  I pay more attention to what I’m doing in the here and now.

Back to business.  Like golf on a foggy day, the business landscape can be obscured.  Ask anyone in digital for a five-year outlook and you’ll get a lot of shrugged shoulders.  Maybe five months is clear, like the first 50 yards of the golf shot.  After that?  Who knows.  Then again, as with golf, the uncertainty makes us focus very clearly on every little aspect of what’s going on now, since there are a hundred things that can affect where the ball – and the business – ends up.  Rather than complaining about an obscured future, our job is to examine what we’re doing now that will bring about the possibilities that future holds.

While I liked the foggy day, I much prefer the sun.  We can’t, however, control the weather.  Business is another matter.

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