Mark Kolier’s Blog

Archive for May, 2009

Unilever announced that they are beginning a trial run this weekend of mobile couponing for specific products like Breyers Ice Cream, Dove soap, Hellman’s Mayonnaise, and Lipton Tea. (You can read more about it at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124354778510364127.html). The test is being conducted at a ShopRite store in Hillsborough, NJ. From today’s WSJ article – ‘To get the coupons, customers must visit the Web site Samplesaint.com, from which they can transmit the Unilever discount offers to an Internet-enabled cellphone. At checkout, the cashier scans the bar code on the phone’s screen, redeeming the coupon and deleting it from the phone’

Good idea on being able to get the coupon on your phone. In fact in 2009 (this exists in other countries already) your airline boarding pass will also be downloadable to your mobile device and you will have the TSA and gate agent scan the barcode displayed on your phone – good-bye paper.

But why is Unilever limiting coupon download to a non-Unilever website? Looking at how people use the internet I searched Breyers, Dove Soap, Hellman’s Mayonnaise, and Lipton Tea and a couple of the sites had an area for coupons but they were not intuitive to download (check it out for yourself). This is a test promotion so while having the portal to get the coupon on the home page is not possible I believe the test will not be representative since who will remember Samplesaint.com? This simply is not how people use the internet to get what they want and it almost seems like a branding opportunity for Samplesaint.com and not one of the noted Unilever products.

CGSM advises our clients that one or two clicks work best when trying to create an action or response. Downloadable coupons will be the standard very soon – I suspect the Unilever test will be inconclusive mainly due to asking the consumer to work a little harder.

Do you agree?

By now those of you who have read some of my posts know that I have no real use for Plaxo (although I am a ‘member’) but am a regular user of LinkedIn. I have yet to become what I see a number of people are which is what I call a ‘serial networker’. Those with more than 500 contacts fit this moniker. I have over 300 and personally know and have met almost every single person in my network. This is unlike Twitter on which I have nearly 600 followers but have met under 30. More on following large groups of people on Twitter in a subsequent post.

But I really think LinkedIn provides are great tool and service for business people. Since the information is self-provided it is generally accurate if not a bit embellished. (Save for the prevaricators that are no doubt members as well but hopefully not in my network). Whenever I am given a new contact via referral the first thing I do is type their name into the search function of LinkedIn. It does not work every time since there are still many folks who are not on LinkedIn or there are times when there are too many John Smiths to figure even if you know the geographic location. Since the information is what people provide on their own and when you do get a proper profile you get a snapshot of their location, career path, education and even a few interests. This is BEFORE you have even LinkedIn with them. And answering questions in specific areas does build your standing and reputation as a resource which has helped me and our company gain business.

But it gets better than that. Search by company can provide position locations for job searches. Industries can be investigated by category. And people with whom you have lost touch can be found (yes this is done on Facebook and other social networks as well). Of course you can get great information via Google and Yahoo but I have found LinkedIn to be faster and quite reliable.

Did I mention that Linkedin is free? They do have a revenue model for enhanced access and the ability to send messages to people with whom you would like to be in touch but have no contact. More importantly introductions via people you are connected to work out really well as there is a level of inherent trust built in.

I don’t understand why anyone would not want to be listed on LinkedIn. The days of reveling in ones anonymity are over. People can find out things about you in many other places. Just ask and read about Justice Scalia this past week. Wouldn’t want them to find out things about you from your own perspective?

Have a great holiday weekend.

As the old saying goes if I had a dollar for every time I read a fellow Tweeter’s throw down about them guaranteeing you will ‘DOMINATE TWITTER’ I could retire fat and happy. I have been using Twitter for about 10 months and somehow have acquired more than 550 ‘followers’. However I have no desire to ‘dominate’ them or anyone else in the Twitter Universe.

From what I can gather by dominating Twitter and having large amounts of followers (Ashton Kutcher got to one million followers recently – proudly he noted) offers you a database for you to push your products or services. My sense is this is not a sustainable business model in any way. It may work for a while but eventually I see people ‘following’ smaller not larger amounts of people. And following people that you actually are interested in will dominate.

How can you possibly follow 500 people much less 40,000? The answer is you cannot. Since Twitter is still new building large followings may seem like the thing to do. But since most of us have limited time for just about everything the only way to monitor large numbers of followers is to be on Twitter all the time. If you look away for 15 minutes tweets can be buried pages back. And I sincerely doubt there are many people that are looking back at tweets they might have missed.

Where is the value in Twitter? There is great value in the ability to monitor conversations about a brand. There is also value in tweeting or re-tweeting things that interest you that you want to share with your followers. Real time news reporting at the events has a great impact and can get important information out to people as fast as it happens – and that’s never happened before in human history!

But Twitter domination is a pretty obnoxious concept as far as I am concerned. I want to work with people. And I don’t need to beat down others who are trying to exchange ideas and information. So give up you Twitterific Dominator ‘professors’. How about you try to collaborate and work with others to make business and the world a little bit better. Now there’s a dominating concept! What say you?

Look even though I am an inveterate marketing guy I am tiring of the move to advertisements on most all social networks. It’s gotten to the point where friends of mine are using social networking to advertise their own businesses and ideas to their friends (like me!). Yes I realize social networks need a business model. But it seems to me that the direction in which social networks are heading is to just be platform to sell more stuff. This could prove to be the undoing of social networking.

Several months ago I wrote about World of Warcraft as perhaps the most effective social network of them all. Why? Because the folks at Blizzard Entertainment do not refer to it as a social network in any way! WOW has more than 11,000,000 paying ‘members’ who get true value and engagement for their dollars. Second Life tried this model (sort of) as well but it has not worked out nearly as well.

How could things be changed? Well for one thing let’s say you had to pay $ 5.95/month to be a Facebook member to not be served advertising. How would that make you feel? Would it be any less engaging? I don’t think so. And there is a pretty good revenue model opportunity for FB with more than 200 million members. Just do the math. (Hint – You may need to use a calculator.)

Just this week the Wall Street Journal (and other publishers are thinking the same way) floated out the idea of micropayments (i.e. charging for some content) since giving the content away for free devalues the very content itself. There was also a study saying the 97% of people would pay for content. http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/11/newspapers-paid-content-survey-technology-paidcontent.html

Obviously we are still in the nascent stages in the evolution of social networking (and marketing for that matter). But the perceived golden goose may be inflicted with swine flu if things do not change soon. People will tire of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc. . . There will be a new and better platform to replace it unless the model changes to serve the ever-changing needs and desires of social network members.

Of course I am not sure if I believe it or not. Last night a flight attendant did do something unusual. When admonishing a passenger for not turning off his phone she explained that mobile phones are operative to about 10,000 feet.

When a passenger is on a mobile phone control tower instructions in their headphones are accompanied by a high pitched noise. Apparently this is not bad if one person is on the phone but if there are a plane full of people the cacophony in the pilot’s headset makes it difficult to communicate with the control tower.
This sounded strangely plausible to me. But what was best was the flight attendant’s willingness to lift the curtain a bit and let passengers (i.e. customers) in on what should not be a secret.

Why have I never heard this before? I know that should it be true (and I have no reason to doubt it but somehow do anyway) I would not want the pilot of the plane I was flying on having noise and consequently an inability to hear instructions from the people who are watching little blips on the screen all day.

Airlines are hardly specialists in communicating with their customers. On countless occasions reasons for delays go unreported or worse when you get information it’s something like – ‘ATC has put a hold on air traffic so we have to wait to hear back from them before we can take off. Thanks for your patience.’ Then they offer no communication (or water or food) often for an hour or more! This is how mutinies are born!

So to have an explanation for something that we all have been thinking about for a long time (or at least I have) was refreshing and I can go with it. For now. I still cannot figure out why or how an Ipod or headphones would interfere with communications so maybe that will be explained on my next flight. But I am not counting on that.