Jesse Schell game his gamepocalypse presentation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last night. As expected he had the crowd engaged and enjoying the presentation. I personally enjoy his presentations and think he should be considered in the same class as Will Wright when it come to best presenters in the games industry. You can view his presentation here. Enjoy! 
Visions of the gamepocalypse
View more presentations from Jesse Schell.
I’ve told a number of people about the awesome Woot video on the Amazon acquisition that I figured I’d post it here. While Zappos and Tony Hsieh get most of the media attention on the next generation of customer service, Woot is a great example of an emerging type of company culture – fun! Think of the 150K + users that saw this video and shared it with their friends.
People like to be associated with COOL COMPANIES. If you deliver a great and valuable benefit – in this case sales – then users will be satisfied and YOU will be satisfied.
Watch the video, its awesome!
I don’t understand why so many of the traditional media sites still don’t get the Internet. They think because they have an online website or blog or “ooh, a facebook page” that they are now net savvy marketers. Not so fast guys. Just because you are placing your content on this new medium (to you) does not mean you have all the the skills mastered. Even more importantly, Internet advertising is not just about technology or tactics. It’s about connecting with people in a way that no other medium has ever afforded. I wish these traditional media guys would start thinking how to make those affordances more available and give people more symbiotic advertising methods.
To truly be Internet marketing savvy one needs to understand the spirit of the medium and what drives people to use it. Not only understanding their intent but knowing the best ways to help them accomplish what they came to your site do do in the first place. How does a site provide an “authentic experience” that provides people not only with what they came to do but a memorable experience so they will want to come back. Especially if you are one of many sites in the google search results displaying the same story or similar content. People in the hospitality business get this, brands like Apple get this and companies like Nordstrom built their brand on delivering an incredible experience. The medium does not take away the importance of delivering something people will remember as a positive emotion.
What brought me to write this post was my “experience” today with Inc the business magazine. A colleague had referred me to an article about facebook about companies selling product from their facebook fan pages. I decided to check out the article and I have to say the experience was horrible!
After the initial superstitial ads when the site was loading I finally got to the page. Not a fan of superstitials but fine, not a big issue. But then, as I was trying to read the article I get the survey popup ad, dancing right in front of the text of the article I was reading. No thanks, click and go away. Then another, larger ad pops up and blocks the text I was reading. This last one had no cancel button and no way to get it out of the way of the text I was reading. wtf?! See the picture below. I thought this might be a bug so I tried the same page with three different browsers and all did the exact same thing. In the words of Metallica, “sad, but true”.
Here’s a screenshot of what I’m talking about. Has anyone experienced similar? On Inc or other sites? Maybe we should start collecting all of these and media companies might get the point and stop trying to ‘throw ads in front of us so we can see them’. It’s actually worse than turning the volume up on tv ads.
Inc throws ads in your face
I think I’ve watched this a few times now, Jesse is brilliant! Needed something for my blog since I’ve been so busy with work (I’ve not touched it in a LONG time). Thought this would be a good one to post – even if it’s not my own content. Enjoy!
The simplest model is web based media that basically has 1-3 revenue streams – ads, leads and info (data for market research). Measuring the number of mentions on twitter, facebook, shared links, word of mouth, RT’s, widget installs, etc. and plotting a time line that maps these against the business metrics (clicked ad, provided some demo data, etc.) that contribute to your revenue. Also don’t forget to include the users off your website if you have widgets or distribute your content to other sites.
A more complex type of business to measure the ROI of social media would be a retail chain with physical stores as well as a website. Since I’ve not been in the physical retail industry for a very long time (pre-internet ) I decided to see what others have been doing. I found this great presentation given by a marketing consultant named Olivier Blanchard. This was given at a small conference in South Carolina called Social Fresh. It is not only very helpful but its also quite entertaining as well. I would have loved to have been in the presentation. Thanks Oliver, this is great!
Check it out here:Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi
A friend and mine, Rob Ellison (CEO Cucku), and I were at the Old Pro in Palo Alto the other day, drinking some beers and talking about social media amongst other things. One of the topics was around the benefits of social media and trying to assess a value for different types of business models. So I was curious what data was out there on this so started searching. I came across an article on eMarketer that included a Poll from the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG). While it didn’t have the exact data i was looking for I found one of the responses very surprising. Only 42% of US marketing executives thought social media provided market research benefits.
Now in fairness I don’t have access to the question so it could be how it was worded explains low response, but I’ll assume it was worded clearly, probably something like “select the Main Benefits social media provides (or can provide) to your business. Pretty standard right?
Why so low? I mean think about it. When you want to make a product or service you have a target customer profile. You spend a lot of time and often money on research to learn what they want, you spend a lot of money to advertise and get your message out to them, you build your products and services based on what they want, so doesn’t the ability to engage directly with your audience (customers) give you direct access to finding out interest in a product and valuable data to assess market size and demand? So why then would only 42% of marketing executives think social media provided any market research benefit?
I’ve not found an updated version so am curious if this has changed and by how much. With all the visibility of facebook and twitter and the growing increase of marketers venturing into social media over the last year I have to believe this will be much higher. Sure, it’s not the only source you’ll need but it’s a pretty darn important one.
Do you use social media for testing product ideas and willingness to use/pay?
The headline in the New York Times didn’t really say it so I will – AT&T points fingers at their customers for the slow network performance we’ve all experienced with our iPhones. Because we iPhone users actually USE our devices as they were designed (well except those features that have been blocked by the carrier), AT&T wants to claim that we are just a bunch of selfish bandwidth hogs causing such a strain on their 3G network that it’s affecting not only other iPhone users but ALL users of their network.
Here’s what I find most interesting, AT&T’s CTO John Donovan made the statement “It’s been a challenging year for us. Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones. There’s just no parallel for the demand.”
Overnight? WTF are you talking about? The iPhone 3G had been out for over a year and you even had the orig iPhone that provided some indication of a NEW type of smartphone. But the last quote is really the most interesting and why I believe AT&T failed badly – “There’s just no parallel for the demand.” No parallel?? How can this come from a CTO of such a large company?
So why do I think this is incompetence? Think about it. You have the exclusive carrier deal with the hottest phone from the super brand Apple. The iPhone is not like any other smartphone, it’s more like a laptop – yes AT&T, a laptop. You’re telling me that AT&T did not factor in data usage from net users and that they only looked at other smartphones? Clearly they did not think this through or really understood what the iPhone was about.
The iPhone represents a paradigm shift in mobile communications. People want to be connected wherever they are at all times. They don’t just want to just talk to someone or check email – they want to explore, discover, keep informed and even be entertained. Just look at the macro trends over the last 5 years. Always on connection growth, online video consumption, social games, texting and of course social networks. And over the last year twitter opened even Google’s eyes to the consumer demand for real time information. All of this data was available to AT&T had they taken a step back and really appreciated what they had. 
Now some of you may say that AT&T did consider all of this to which I would retort then they either had really bad forecasting or they ignored this data and decided to screw us iPhone users and squeeze out as much profit as possible by oversubscribing the network and not worrying about delivering the experiences they market.
Both are very viable but let’s say they DID foresee this demand yet chose not to start building out their network ahead of the curve as that would cost money and drain the monopoly profits they would get from this deal. How could they get away with this?
If we weren’t consumers but rather a business customer AT&T would be held to an SLA (service level agreement) and be liable for compensation when their services fell below the SLA threshold. Now I don’t know about you other iPhone users out there but I’ve personally not had any adjustments to my bill to credit me for their poor network. Maybe there’s an opportunity for a clearinghouse or type of business that monitors carrier network service levels and gets us a credit when the carriers fall below the threshold. Assuming they could get the cooperation of the carriers it might have enough demand from consumers. Eh, who am I kidding. As long as the carriers have their exclusives and continue to force locked in contracts they have no incentive to honor what they sell.
Click here to read NYTimes article
I’m a start-up executive with over 14 years experience creating innovative products and marketing programs for ecommerce, advertising and digital distribution solutions. I dig new tech, gadgets, games (social games, casual games, core games - all of 'em! :-), and more. I believe social networks and Internet TV will be the dominant platforms for entertainment and engagement within 10-20 years. I also have a lighter side and appreciate good humor and a variety of interesting topics.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with social media (twitter, facebook, others) observing its impact on traditional media, advertising, branding and overall social influence. Maybe I have a defect or something but I find discussing media and advertising trends interesting :-)
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