Marketing Type

'Yes, We Can' vs. 'The Scream'

Via a piece in the NYT, I just watched a video remix of Barack Obama's New Hampshire Iowa primary victory speech on YouTube. Assembled by Jesse Dylan (yes, that Dylan) with the help of a lot of entertainment industry folks, it really is worth a watch:

After watching it and feeling inspired despite my innate skepticism I couldn't help but recall the remix (series of remixes, actually) that marked the collapse of another campaign notable for having inspired a lot of young people -- the Howard Dean Scream remix:

 

Ozzy Osbourne's Crazy Train (Dean's Aboard)
• Hey YEAAAAHHHHH!! (Outkast remix)
• Dancin' Dean
• Funk Mix
• Welcome to Dean's Jungle
• Dean Megamix
• Dean (Flash) Gordon
• Deansane in the Brain

• Dean Twilight Zone

This one is past the point where it might have collapsed, I think. But what really  happens next remains an open question.

Demographic Targeting In PPC Campaigns

This is funny enough to warrant a short note:

Experimenting today for the first time with Google's demographic-targeting option for Adwords campaigns (site-targeted), I requested available placements for sites visited by men or women over 65 years old, of any ethnicity and with annual incomes over $25,000.

One of the first sites suggested by Google? xboxcheats.com

Musty e-Books? [Scratch & Sniff Marketing]

CaféScribe, a web site that offers e-textbooks and free software for sharing and annotating PDFs and other documents, has announced plans to offer the world's first smelly e-book, providing every e-book purchaser with a scratch & sniff sticker with a "certifiably musty, old-book smell," according to Reuters (as well as Teleread and other outlets). The company commissioned a Zogby poll of college students that found 43% consider "smell" to be the thing they most love about books. Other findings from the study will be announced in coming days, according to the web site.

Hmmm. How... unconventional.

[Disclaimer: I serve as a consultant to CaféScribe.]

Are you annoyed yet?

You can catch me tonight (or any other day should you choose to download the podcast version) on the David Lawrence Show on XM Radio (about an hour from now) talking about the Internet-spawned terms most likely to annoy people. In a throwback to a previous incarnation, I am appearing as a spokesperson for the Blooker Prize.

Survey Tools: Comparing SurveyMonkey and SurveyGizmo

Like it or not, a high percentage of marketing projects will require doing some sort of survey at one point or another.  For simple needs, I've generally used SurveyMonkey for the past few years. It's quick and easy and I've always found it sufficient, but on the other hand I'm not a terrifically sophisticated survey designer. A colleague whose survey experience dates back many, many years prior to the Internet tried SurveyMonkey recently and told me he found it limiting. In the interest of experimentation, I'm about to design a survey using a relative newcomer to the scene, SurveyGizmo. Specialized tools like these may be somewhat obsolete given the expanding functionality of CRM applications like SalesForce.com, but they're still tremendously useful to service-providers like me.

For a more or less side-by-side comparison of SurveyMonkey and SurveyGizmo, see these two feature charts:

SurveyMonkey                            SurveyGizmo

Three Books For The Entrepreneur

Starting a business, like writing a book, requires more than a good idea. It also requires more than talent. The most elusive component of success is knowing what not to do. In that vein, below are three books you must read if you run or want to run your own business.

Concept:

Getting Real: the smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application, by the team from 37Signals

Design:

Beautiful Evidence, by Edward Tufte

Marketing

Selling the Invisible, by Harry Beckwith

Online Polling Creeps Toward Respectability

Polling, focus groups and the pseudo-science of customer research have been the bread and butter of many, many marketing companies for decades. As with other  industries, the Internet has chipped away at this market in various respects -- not least of which was establishing a culture of permission marketing that has made phone calls to your house during dinner from strangers a socially unacceptable practice (unless it's your local school district calling).

With an unnecessarily cutesy headline, the NYT today reports on the next assault on the consumer research racket in a story that focuses largely on the British company YouGov:

About Online Surveys, Traditional Pollsters Are:
C) Somewhat Disappointed

This is promising arena, I think. Traditional survey companies can charge upwards of $50 per respondent. Don't think for a second that equally sound (or unsound) results can't be had for much cheaper.

See also:

Polimetrix
SurveyMonkey
Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk
SurveyGizmo

 

More Mechanical Turk

Following up on a previous post about Amazon.com's investment in "artificial, artificial intelligence" -- which I skeptically titled "Mechanical Turk Is A Mechanical Dud" -- Jason Pontin of the NYT recently published a terrific piece on MTurk and the general lay of the land in the "crowdsourcing" arena:

Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans

Excerpt:

Harnessing the collective wisdom of crowds isn’t new. It is employed by many of the “Web 2.0” social networks like Digg and Del.icio.us, which rely on human readers to select the most worthwhile items on the Web to read. But creating marketplaces of mercenary intelligences is genuinely novel.

By way of an update on my own experiment with the Turk: 

After the transfer of funds to my Amazon MTurk "Requester" account was FINALLY completed (a transaction that took the e-commerce giant over a week to complete), setting up a series of multiple choice survey questions proved to be quick. I offered $.09 for the completion of each of four questions, and $.10 for the completion of a fifth. Shooting for 1,000 responses to each I discovered that the initial pace of completions proved quite misleading. The longer the questions, or HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), were up, the slower the responses arrived.

After a week or so, however, I did have 1,000 responses to each of the four $.09 questions. Strangely, the fifth (and most remunerative) question, STILL has not reached 1,000 responses 2 weeks later.

The other salient observations I can offer are these:

1) Despite MTurk's ability to allow individual respondent accounts access to each HIT only once (thus presumably preventing duplicate entries), responses submitted for one of my questions make it clear that  there are a fair number of individuals gaming the system by using multiple accounts.

2) The geographic breakdown of respondents to my survey ( self-reported) was as follows:

• 60% - US
• 23% - India
• 2.5% - UK
• 2.9% - Canada
• 11.6% - divided among 19 other countries  (the Philippines highest among them at 1.4%)

I'm not, by the way, discouraged from using the Mechanical Turk again, just a bit wiser about its best application. If you can use Amazon.com's Turk API to design a HIT that calls your own survey form, it does offer -- compared to most of the available methods -- an amazingly cheap way to gather impressions from a large, if unscientific, sample population.

Amateur Writers Make Good: More Blooker News

Following last week's tsunami of Blooker news (...blews?), the Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS) offers a brief but very entertaining interview with Julie Powell, one of the Blooker judges this year, author of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously,  and last year's Blooker Prize winner:

   "I Was Just So Relieved the Zombie Didn't Keep a Blog" (Interview with Julie Powell)

I like Julie Powell a lot, but it's ironic to me that even someone like Julie --  whose book (blook) came about (and did well!) thanks to the possibilities of blogging -- feels the need to make a snarky aside (as did another judge, Nick Cohen, a couple of weeks ago) about the generally poor quality of writing online. Who cares!

The quality of blog writing doesn't matter in the slightest. The Internet is a perfectly free market. It makes no difference if the market is inundated with bad writing because unlike, say... poisoned dogfood, a lot of bad writing  on the Internet does no one any harm. What people have an interest in reading -- good or bad -- becomes popular. What people don't want to read does not.

And, frankly, when we talk about writing the discussion of what is good and what is bad very quickly becomes a silly argument. Is "Harry Potter" good writing? Let the earnest folks fighting over tenure argue about that sort of thing. The rest of us have better things to do. Like blog.

Blogola: Where the Smart PR Money Is Going

The WSJ reports on TV marketers' experimentation with blogola, or the practice of lavishing gifts and attention on bloggers as a PR strategy: "To Create Buzz: TV Networks Try A Little Blogola."

At the risk of sounding like a slimy PR guy, marketing money spent in the blogosphere is money well spent. As the communications guy for Lulu,  I worked with journalists from all over the world to provide the material for stories. The media-bashers among you may have a hard time believing it, but in my experience the most skeptical group of reporters on the planet -- the most hyper-sensitive about being influenced by PR in any way -- were American journalists. To a person they like to think of themselves as above the filthy fray of commerce.*

Bloggers, despite the widespread self-perception that they are more independent than traditional media, are comparatively easy to flatter and to influence. Having said that -- and probably pissed off quite a few readers in the process -- I don't think there is anything wrong with the kind of blog-directed PR being described in the WSJ story. A few bloggers are allowed to get an inside look at the production of tv shows.... how cool is that?

The value of blogs as a new branch of media arises NOT from their emulation of the values and standards of conventional media, but from the genuine individual perspectives blogs can offer: a powerful, if anecdotal, window into the pool of consciousnesses in which we might otherwise swim oblivious.

If the blogger in the WSJ article who met Julia Louise-Dreyfuss writes something about how cool the actress turned out to be, as a reader I am capable of seeing that sentiment for what it is  but still finding it interesting. A professional journalist can't be transparently starstruck,  but bloggers are free to remain true to their own raw reactions, complete with biases, flaws, and insights.

I don't go to Amazon.com's customer reviews for the same information that I expect from ConsumerReports.org, but as a consumer I want access to both. And as a PR guy, I'd want to have a strategy for each of them.

[Blogging Journalist Munir Umrani expects a controversy, but my guess is that not enough bloggers subscribe to the WSJ to arouse one...]

[* British journalists, on the other hand, were much more likely to reproduce entire sections of our press releases and to take in general a much more collaborative approach to writing stories. At Lulu we also had lots of cases where UK journalists came into interviews fully intending to savage the notion of self-publishing and left with those intentions intact, which is  just as inane as the opposite approach.]