Archive for the ‘Communication’ Category
Now that Motorola has its Xoom on the market, and RIM is ready to take orders for its new PlayBook tablet in April, Apple’s iPad will have to stand up to some competition after having the market all to itself for just over a year.
As more and more magazines utilize digital tablets as a method of distribution much has been made of the reader experience in reading magazines on tablets. Despite the killer technology few publications have truly embraced the tablet medium for all it is worth by using video links, photo links and in so doing providing a much more rich experience for readers.
I don’t yet have a tablet (but I am thinking about it and getting the iPad is most likely) but have seen a few of the magazine applications on tablets and often they look like magazines on a digital flat screen. Nice but nothing earth shattering.
One advertising medium that many people will not be sad to see go is magazine insert cards (there are two kinds 1) the bind-in which is either stapled into the book or glued to the spine, or 2) the blow-in which really is blown into the magazine with air so that it floats loosely inside). The cards have been a part of magazines for as long as I can remember- that’s more than forty years and I bet it’s longer than that. In fact I tried to find out when magazine insert cards were first put into newsstand and subscriber publications and had some difficulty finding any information I could be confident was correct.
Our company has produced more than a billion insert cards (both blow-in and bind-in but almost no smelly ones for fragrance companies) over the years. Clients like to use them because – they work. Those of us in the business know that the magazine (or book as we like to call it) is ‘broken’ which is to say it opens where the cards are inserted and stops the reader even if momentarily. A corresponding advertisement with the bind in offers the reader and opportunity to respond in a number of ways. By phone, over the web by using a landing page or personal URL (PURL), or even to call a phone number listed on the card. Different phone numbers are frequently used for different publications so that we can accurately track response by individual publications.
But that cannot happen in a digital publication. Of course ‘interruptive media’ like a bind-in card can be done as a pop-up in a digital magazine but the effect is decidedly less impactful. As more and more people adopt tablets to read publications what will be lost to marketers is an opportunity to stop the reader and allow them the chance to reply when they want – now, later or never. The plus side is that people will no longer have to complain about ‘annoying bind in cards’ that are seen as a waste of paper (true if you are not interested in what is being offered). But I bet people will complain about something else. They always find something.
Have you ever responded to blow-in or bind-in cards in magazines?
Maybe they are on vacation. After travel agencies and travel agents themselves are vanishing one by one and have been for a long time. Like most people I had thought of this many times before although I don’t frequently arrange for my own travel but sometimes I do.
The internet killed the travel agency business right? Well sort of. One recent blog report on ‘That Said’ http://bit.ly/hBnSOZ noted that less than 1 in 10 people use travel agents. That figure probably does not surprise anyone especially me.
At a Rotary club meeting today one of our charter members (almost 30 years now) Judy White spoke about her travel agency – Wilton Center Travel www.wiltoncentertravel.com which she started in 1978 as part of her ‘third career’ as she put it. As I listened to Judy list the virtues of why she is the lone remaining travel agency in town I thought ‘I wish I would have known her story sooner as it likely would have had me sit down with her and have her help arrange a past family trip or vacation’. That’s not to say that I won’t do that now but I feel as if we might have missed some opportunities to make great past family vacations even greater.
Having been to all seven continents (and at 70 plus years young she is soon off to the Galapagos Islands with her granddaughter – what energy!) and having been to every destination in the brochure she handed out, the level of Judy’s credibility is virtually unsurpassed in the travel business. She also noted that people’s misperception of travel agents is rampant. She related that from a pricing standpoint travel agents normally can match the lowest prices found on the internet nearly every time. The message is – you will not pay more to use a travel agent. How many people have received THAT message? The travel industry does a lousy job supporting the legion of remaining travel agents.
And experience counts. Big time. People that think they want to go to particular destinations because they look nice in the pictures on the internet are using hope as their strategy for picking the right place. Travel agents like Judy KNOW about the destinations people are considering. They can advise you of what’s really going on with their inside connections. When is the last time you got that kind of information over the internet? And if you have a problem with a reservation you made over the internet exactly who are you going to call? Good luck with that.
People seem to think that ‘beating’ a travel agent out of their fees is to be worn as some sort of badge of honor. But what they don’t realize is that there are very few fees paid directly to a travel agent (air fares are one exception as that is a turnover fare the airlines charge travel agents so you are probably better off buying airfares on the internet in most cases). So by surfing it up on the web looking for your vacation you are probably not ‘winning’ that game at all and while all the time you spend rummaging through a myriad of travel and vacation sites may be an enjoyable experience and even exciting, it probably is not the most practical way to go about booking hotels, cruises, tours and the like. After all time is money isn’t it?
It appears to me that the travel agency business is poorly represented by ASTA (American Society of Travel Agents) their association since key attributes as I’ve described are hardly promoted at all (if at all). Perhaps ASTA could use a new marketing agency (sorry I could not resist)?
Are you running your business like a travel agency? If you are running like Judy White does then I think that’s a good idea. Here’s hoping people like her hang around for a really long time.
What do you think?
Last week I posted that I thought Facebook was heading toward being the new telephone. Social media is now the ‘party line’ platform where people are congregating both personally and professionally. In the last few weeks I have received many LinkedIn invitations which makes me think that the business side of social networking is becoming a mainstream channel and is still maturing.
What I am finding is that in both my personal and business life the telephone is being used less frequently than ever. I don’t know about you, but contacting people by telephone (in business) has become increasingly difficult. In fact I know a number of people that intentionally leave their voice mailbox full so they don’t get any additional messages. This is particularly true if these people have any buying responsibility as they are often assaulted with constant phone calls by salespeople.
On some occasions I send a business contact an SMS message on their mobile to try to get their attention. This is because sending them emails appears to get lost in a sea of hundreds of emails they (and I) receive daily. Sending SMS messages is not always possible as I don’t always have a mobile phone number for a business contact. And I am noticing that response to SMS messages is declining rapidly as well.
I am also LinkedIn with a large number of my business contacts. But I find sending a LinkedIn message can be no more effective in generating a reply than sending an email. And while I am not connected on Facebook to any substantial number of my business contacts, (I had the idea of trying to keep business and personal contacts separate but it’s a losing battle), when I send people messages on Facebook I am surprised at the rapidity in receiving a reply.
So what I have learned is, if I cannot get you to reply to a phone call, email, or SMS message because you are too busy, I can send you a Facebook message and it appears I have the best chance of receiving a timely reply. What does this mean? To me it means that accepted entry into one’s Facebook circle warrants a reply over just about any other channel. The trust factor compels people to respond.
I wonder how long that will last.
With a dizzying total of more than 2,200,000Twitter followers in a little over a week Charlie (aka Tiger Blood) Sheen has reset the bar for attracting attention and gaining social media status. Now terming himself “Born small…Winning…Now Huge…Bring It!…unemployed winner…”, the apparent slow moving train wreck that was Charlie Sheen appears to have been a rocket ship in disguise.
Since nearly all of us know the story I’m not going to explore how Mr. Sheen got to this point other than to say that prior to last week he was more in the running for ‘celebrity moron of the year’ than he was ‘marketer of the year.” BTW – In my book Mel Gibson still has a good chance of retaining his title as celebrity moron of the year. But Mr. Sheen has been able to parlay a bizarre anti-hero status into an endorsement business and is now a paid promotion’ engineer’.
Mr. Sheen would have you believe that he – much like Jessica Rabbit ‘isn’t bad – I’m just drawn that way’. An article in Tuesday’s NY Times http://nyti.ms/hFYt3G highlighted the idea that Mr. Sheen has been ‘coached’ and directed. So what? If Mr. Sheen is smart enough to have professional marketing people help him leverage his newfound super-fame I suggest he is far from crazy. Now that he has been fired from ‘Two and a Half Men’ (does this mean Jon Cryer is now starring in ‘One and a Half Men’?), he is free to make movies or whatever he wants to do on Twitter or anywhere else. And the $ 10 million owed to him for the balance of his CBS contract for ‘Two and a Half Men’ will probably have to be settled since his agent claims he is ready, willing and able to work. And for what it is worth he has always shown up for work despite whatever trials and tribulations he has suffered. So he is likely to get paid a substantial sum for NOT doing the show unless CBS has a change of heart. Talk about the catbird’s seat.
I don’t admire Charlie Sheen. He’s obviously got some issues going on but the notion that he is out of his mind is out of bounds. But I am intrigued with this case study on how to maximize your reach in the shortest amount of time. He has leveraged recent events about as much as could be possible and I am betting more opportunities will come his way. Will he be able to answer the bell? Nobody knows for sure least of all Mr. Sheen. But in terms of increasing awareness and becoming his own brand sensation (might he be the anti-brand?) Mr. Sheen appears to be thumbing his nose at just about everyone while having a very good time doing it.
Is Charlie Sheen a marketing genius? What do you think? Mr. Sheen has had way more than his fifteen minutes. My question is what will he do for an encore?
Since I am of a certain age (I was born when Ike was President of the U.S.), I have friends that refuse to engage on Facebook. While that is of course their right I cannot understand or even accept their reasoning behind not engaging in something that more than 600 million people find relevant. There are obvious benefits to being ‘connected’ on Facebook. And yes there are privacy issues and permission problems that are ongoing. But for me, and for most people I presume, the benefits far outweigh the detriments.
I suspect this situation is not all that different than when the telephone first came into popular use. Limited use of the telephone occurred starting with its invention by Alexander Graham Bell (or at least attributed to him) in the 1870s. Usage increased rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s as phone technology developed and central exchanges were built. It’s not difficult to imagine that there were many people that said and felt ‘why would I need to talk to anyone over a wire?’ And there were probably those that felt telephones would prove to be intrusive, (as anyone that has ever taken a telemarketing call during dinner can appreciate) and at times a general nuisance. But because the benefits far outweighed the detriments the telephone not only survived, it flourished. And today people carry telephones around with them wherever they go and they are nearly always ‘on’.
Is Facebook the new telephone? I am here to argue that in fact that’s exactly what it is. Telephone conversations are necessary at times but time consuming and cumbersome. It’s mostly a one-to-one dialog as opposed to the more open platform of Facebook. Don’t go thinking that I have drunk the Marc Zuckerberg Kool-Aid (I haven’t) or that Facebook has paid me to write this post (like that would ever happen).
Our children use Facebook the way party lines were used over fifty years ago. They post photos, music, share articles, suggest friends, have conversations and interact in a way that allows for faster and more than Mr. Graham Bell could have ever imagined. Ask any teenager if they’d rather speak with someone or text them over their mobile device. I think we all know the answer to that one.
So for my friends who feel that they are making some sort of statement by not engaging in Facebook’s communication platform the only statement they are making to me is that they prefer to remain unconnected to the world and in so doing are Luddites. Since the fastest growing Facebook segment is people over 40 these Facebook holdouts are truly in the minority. My prediction is that eventually they will
succumb and then wonder why they didn’t join in sooner.
It’s over folks – Facebook has won the game of connecting the world. You are either with the program or on the outside looking in.