I wrote about Spirit Air‘s “our way or the highway” hijinks last year around this time. While in this post I spoke about the airline’s death by a thousand cuts mentality (maybe “death” and “airline” aren’t good in the same sentence), Spirit has taken things to a new low and I’m betting that this is the final straw in many consumers’ minds. Continue reading
Tag Archives: marketing
Your Algorithm
I was reading the article in Wired on the Google algorithm. Interesting stuff even if you’re just a web searcher, and for those of us who talk about SEO from time to time, it’s fascinating.
One statement stood out:
The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,” Singhal says. “Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning
My immediate thought was that he was right about most businesses, not just that of search. The Wired piece details the hundreds of ways Google’s formula manipulates a search to try to get precisely to the point of the user’s question. Their algorithm is a highly refined way of doing just that. My theory is that we all need one.
Many firms go about their business making few or no attempts to gain this kind of in-depth understanding of user wants and needs. You can rest assured that you can count those that have an algorithm to do so based on customer input on your fingers and toes. Yes, I’m aware of marketing dashboards and monitoring of social buzz. Those are both great but think about Google’s formula applied to all that social content, feedback cards, surveys, and other customer interaction. I wonder what nuances would surface?
How about you – got an algorithm? How do you figure out what your customers, partners, and prospects want based on the information you gather?
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Filed under digital media, Thinking Aloud
Tic Tac Toe
The media business is, in part, founded on the medium’s ability to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. Obviously the ability of any one medium (and I mean, for example, a TV channel, not all of TV) to do that on a large-scale has been diminished over the years. However, there is an expectation, in my opinion, on the part of advertisers that somewhere at the end of the media equation is a sale.
Part of what we used to sell in TV was the fact that there is only one ad on the screen at a time and your product is front and center. And while that’s still true, a few other things have changed which show how dumb we TV folks have become in many ways. Continue reading
Filed under Reality checks, Thinking Aloud
Consult Keith 