Archive for June, 2011
In preparing for my next trip to China in a few weeks I’ve been consuming all kinds of China related intelligence and information. Believe me there’s no shortage of things to read and learn. One feed I’ve been receiving is from China – People’s Daily Online – here is a sample feed/post – http://bit.ly/ma3SH5.
The posts (and there are seemingly continual posts) are well written and completely from the perspective of the CPC (Communist Party of China). From the perspective of a non-Chinese American most of the posts appear overly China promotional and slanted toward the CPC point of view. Yes I know – big surprise. The free press we enjoy here in the United States is a founding principle. Yet when the U.S. government (or either of the two major political parties) provides information on a project or initiative we all know there is a point of view – we tend to call it marketing or spin.
So what’s the difference? Well an obvious one is the repression of dissenting thought and commentary. What’s happening to recently released Chinese activist Ai Weiwei http://bit.ly/lB3uFp at the moment is a prime example of that. While the CPC claims that he owes millions of dollars in back taxes, it appears that a condition of his release and subsequent house confinement (as opposed to wherever the government was keeping him before) is for him to remain silent and make no comments. Many people feel that the back tax charge was trumped up and that would seem to meet a propaganda campaign.
Yet U.S. political policy position papers from both parties are far from even handed and are obviously designed to sway opinion and convince people of their point of view. If it were not for the two-party system here in the United States, I contend much of what is written in public policy papers is not spin or marketing but propaganda as well.
Even in today’s New York Times http://nyti.ms/kXjmME and article regarding the 90th anniversary of the forming of the Communist party centered on what it termed propaganda related to repackaging revolutionary classics.
I’ve noted in previous posts that a U.S. style bi-cameral legislature in China is not only a long shot but likely won’t work. Governing 1.3+ billion people is vastly different than governing 309 million. What I am suggesting is that all governments ‘market’ their positions in some form or another. Call it spin, rhetoric or whatever you want but in that way China is no different than any other developed nation.
It’s the populace’s ability to refute government positions that they do not agree with that makes a ‘free’ democratic nation a paragon. It was Winston Churchill who said ‘Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others’.
Was that marketing, spin or propaganda? Or was it and is it just simply true?
I wish all here in the U.S. a great holiday weekend – I’m going to take a little break myself.
I know I’ve felt it coming on for quite a while now but a report from DM News on June 27th http://bit.ly/junPy3 offers some pretty sobering metrics on open rates, overall email deliverability as well as unsubscribe rates.
The suggestions on how to rectify the problems are solid if not unspectacular (not that they could be spectacular). But underlying it all is the long and slow decline of email marketing in general. The primary reason given is competition in the inbox which if you are anything like me makes total sense since I receive well over one hundred emails per day (closer to 200+). And I don’t receive all that much spam!
I wonder what email marketing will look like in two years. It won’t have disappeared and I am not suggesting it ever will. Yet it concerns me that there has been little innovation in this channel over the twenty years or so (a guess) email marketing has been employed.
Most marketers are aware that acquiring customers via email marketing has never been more difficult and is in large part futile. Retention and existing customer engagement emails continue to be effective but the overall curve is definitively on the downside.
I’m not going to offer any primer on best practices for sending emails to better engage customers. They exist in many places and there are no shortcut tricks to creating email marketing that works every time (despite what some people will tell you). I do know how I feel about email marketing that works for me personally. I am ok with three or four communications a month, offers for things that I actually might want to buy or learn more about. That’s about it. Are you different?
What really is of interest to me is in predicting the direction subscription marketing messages will go – i.e. emails you have opted in to receive. Where will Facebook be in the mix? Will Google be a player in leveraging search queries into relevant direct messages and offers? How about location based marketing services like Foursquare? It’s no secret that email has replaced traditional postal mail for a substantial amount of business communication. Personal communication (i.e. the art of letter writing) has also migrated toward email to some degree but also to SMS texting, FB messaging and web based messaging like IM and even Skype messaging and calling.
How many email messages do you receive? How many email accounts do you have? Have you set up an email account like a Gmail account (I did this) to use when you sign up for various things so that marketing messages all end up in one place – not your work email?
With all that social networking is supposedly offering I would have expected referrals to be more popular and effective than what I have experienced. For marketing agencies, marketing consultants and marketing service agencies referrals are the real gold standard.
People that know me have heard me say referrals can only go bad. I say that with my tongue in cheek to a degree but there is an underlying seriousness to my observation. If you ask me to suggest a company or individual to perform some sort of service you are counting on me to give you a good reference. So if it works out you will not be surprised nor will I really receive any credit since that’s why you called me in the first place. However if the referral does not work out I can then only look bad. It’s all the more reason why a genuine and honest referral can be so powerful.
So referrals would be better offered without solicitation. This is a bit of an odd concept I realize in that it is not often in practice. LinkedIn attempts to do this with their ‘write a recommendation’ feature for your contacts (highlighted whenever you make a ‘new’ connection). Yet often I find that while I know the person that I have LinkedIn with, when I first connect with someone new, I am not immediately thinking of or able to make a recommendation or referral.
We all know referrals are extremely powerful. They can help cut through a great deal of red tape when they come from a trusted source. So how can people make professional referrals be part of your resume without being overly cheesy or promotional?
Here are a few suggestions:
1) Only write a referral for someone you have personally worked with more than once.
2) Go through your network and think about writing a referral or recommendation for as many people
in your network as you feel truly merit one. This could represent quite a few people so it might
take some time.
3) Take the time or offer to speak to someone who wants to know more about the person you are
referring or recommending.
4) Don’t ask the person you are referring or recommending to write a corresponding referral for you –
let it happen organically. It should not be a tit for tat thing.
With companies changing CMO’s and marketing service companies the way people change socks, referrals and recommendations have never been more important. Associates that I have informally polled noted that there are increasingly fewer engagements gained through recommendations and referrals. I think it should be the other way around.
How about getting started on writing a few referrals/recommendations today?
I read Wednesday morning that 75% of all Foursquare activity is performed by 5% of its members. So it’s safe to say that Foursquare has a long way to go to attain the type of regular usage it desires. Since its launch I have been a somewhat regular user of the check-in feature on Foursquare. I have remained interested in how people might use the platform.
What I have noticed recently is that Foursquare has enhanced the platform by offering specials (25 often) in the general area in which you are checking in. I think this is a potentially game changing asset and just may be the launching pad for a meteoric rise in use of the Foursquare platform. On Thursday Foursquare Labs Dennis Crowley announced a partnership http://nyti.ms/iHp6WX with American Express http://bit.ly/mDmbiW to further offer value to Foursquare users.
Up until this point Foursquare has not done much more than offer the ability to show friends within the network a person’s actual location, (or close to your actual location) when you check-in. If you check-in to a particular place multiple times each future check-in brings you closer and closer to being named ‘Mayor’ of that particular place. Being a ‘Mayor’ could possibly bring you some free drinks/gifts/offers so there is some possible intrinsic value. Overall the entire Foursquare platform was not very compelling.
The growth of nearby deal offers once you check in on Foursquare provides some of the missing ingredients for a more robust and compelling reason for people to take a new look at Foursquare. I wish I could say the same for the daily deal sites led by Groupon.com and Living Social.
A very interesting research paper written by Utpal M. Dholakia an associate professor of management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University focuses on a survey of 324 business that conducted a daily deal promotion between August 2009 and March 2011 http://bit.ly/jTsEj1. Nearly half of the business polled indicated that they would run another daily deal promotion which means more than half the businesses would not.
I’ve questioned (as have many) the effectiveness in driving positive transactional customer behavior through daily deal promotions. The unknown metric is the increase in consumer awareness (branding) via the use of daily deal promotions. As with any advertising campaign a certain amount of immeasurable faith has to be considered to be part of the equation (see broadcast television).
There are other reasons a business might continue to use daily deal promotions such as keeping its staff busy during slow periods rather than risk losing them to other establishments. Professor Dholakia further points out that 5 sites – Groupon, LivingSocial, OpenTable (which I would not have considered a daily deal type site), Travelzoo, and BuyWithMe (I was not familiar with this one), that have the largest market share show no real statistically significant differences in incidence of profitable and unprofitable daily deal promotions. While the sample is smaller than one would like to see the data appears to be pretty rock solid.
Groupon.com and other daily deal sites will end up merely being another advertising vehicle and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you are like me you might want to question the legs of a prospective $15 billion valuation in its upcoming IPO. Meanwhile Foursquare is sort of under the radar a bit while it builds its platform on what I feel is a better value proposition.
Last month on Kara Swishers excellent AllthingsD blog http://www.AllthingsD.com Liz Gannes reported that Foursquare and Groupon were planning a distribution deal – http://bit.ly/kjuUIA – but no further word has been heard about it. The longer it takes for a deal to happen I think the less likely Foursquare would have interest.
What do you think? Is Groupon a darling or a dud-to-be? How about Foursquare?
I had read about the long overdue M8 rail cars and heard about them from some NY area commuters but until last night on the 9:37 New Haven line train I had only been able to wonder what the fancy new MTA rail cars were really like.
First of all there is a lot of red. Red faux-leather seats, a red floor. Since the New Haven line has red as its base color scheme that would make sense and I imagine any new M-7 rail cars on Metro-North line trains would be correspondingly blue. The train aisles are wider (good) and the seats a bit wider as well. The cars are built by Kawasaki and will replace the current fleet of over 200 M-2 rail cars some of which are nearly 40 years old.
The air conditioning worked well (I have been on a few regular trains recently where there was little or no A/C) and the restrooms (I had to see for myself) were clean. Outside the restrooms there was a little indicator to show whether or not they were occupied or not. I noticed the restrooms received a lot more traffic than is normally the case. I guess people were curious and more comfortable with the new facilities as opposed to waiting to avoid using the train restroom.
While the M-8 trains can reach speeds of 90 MPH my journey took exactly the same amount of time that it always does. On the ancient New Haven line at least I will never expect the trains to approach 90 MPH. There are storage hooks for bicycles in the disabled rider area of each rail car.
There was no Wi-Fi availability. I was somewhat aware of that but held out faint hope that there might be a few cars testing Wi-Fi access. After all on airplanes the Wi-Fi units are relatively heavyweight and thus cause an increased use of fuel. But the airlines are soldiering on offering more and more Wi-Fi connections while flying. I cannot understand why new train rail cars would be built without Wi-Fi access – can you?
There are no power outlets either. How difficult would it have been to install a half dozen power outlets in each car?
There’s no doubt the new M-8 cars are a much needed improvement over the 1970’s and 1980’s cars currently in use. But I cannot help thinking there were a few things left on the drawing board that could have been implemented but were not.
How long will it take before the aura of newness wears off?