Mark Kolier’s Blog

Archive for the ‘Marketing stuff’ Category

I’ve been ‘using’ Foursquare’s location based application for about 9 months now. People ask me all the time WHY do I use Foursquare to let people know where I am at a given moment. My standard answer is that in order for me to understand how this technology might be useful I had to be a user and experience it for myself.

Well after 9 months of ‘checking-in’, having received 9 different ‘badges’, being the ‘Mayor’ of no less than 6 different places – including the Acela Club at Citi Field where I have been only 5 times, I am here to tell you that I personally don’t have any real use for Foursquare.

I have received comments from my Facebook friends (you can link your Foursquare status to FB); on different places I’ve been that they went to at one time or another – that’s a little bit cool. But I have yet to ‘check-in’ at a place and have someone nearby let me know that they are in the area and maybe we could get together.

Granted non-20’s people like myself (ok mea culpa I am more than double that), don’t normally go hopping around in the suburbs from place to place and when I am in New York City and check-in most of my Foursquare friends are either not in the city or not going to the same places that I am.

Occasionally Foursquare has offered me a coupon for an establishment nearby to the one in which I just checked-in and I even used a coupon one time just to test it (coffee). But as I wrote in a previous post http://bit.ly/9AWboS Foursquare’s GPS location is not very good and I can often check into no less than 15 establishments at the same time within as many as 1,000 meters (why it’s in meters I have no idea). In fact frequently it says that I am closer to a place down the street than the place that I am actually in.

An interesting article by Todd Woody in the NY Times from October 20 http://nyti.ms/dwjcRh did a nice job in linking Earthjustice – a non-profit law firm, to a campaign in which $ 10 would be donated to protect endangered species by ‘checking-in’ at Foursquare at ‘Earthjustice ad’. Clever campaign but I don’t know if that’s enough of a business model to sustain Foursquare. And now Facebook has been running its own location based platform – Facebook Places.

As far as I am concerned the road for Foursquare leads directly to be acquired by Facebook. And they better do that fast. Time is running out. You can check-in on that.

What do you think?

Since I will be traveling from Connecticut to New York more frequently now that we are opening a New York City office (Soho here we come!), the need for my being ‘connected’ has never been greater. Up until now I have ‘managed’ remote internet access by ducking into Starbuck’s or other establishments that offer Wi-Fi access – be it paid or free.

The object here is to be 100% connected anytime I want. Yes I am well aware that laptop cards (and iPad’s for that matter) afford nearly universal connection. The cost was off-putting from $ 40/month to over $ 70/month often times with a 2 year contract. Until recently I was not out of the office all that much that I could not get by but those days are over.

This week I was in Raleigh for a day with my high school daughter visiting NC State as one of her prospective colleges. We arrived back at the RDU airport with nearly 2 hours to spare before our flight left. I brought my laptop for a few reasons not the least of which was to log on and pick up email and answer a few longer ones that my handheld was not well suited to do. I found a few wireless networks including one named ‘Free Wi-Fi’. Pretty good signal. Only I could not connect. Even the AT & T signal was good. I could not connect even though I was willing to pay. To say I was frustrated was an understatement.

Yesterday I was in New York and again had a half hour to spare and tried to connect to the internet. I found another ‘Free Wi-Fi’ network. And again I could not connect. I began to think that somebody up there didn’t like me.

Earlier this month I was at the SFO (San Francisco) Airport and was able to log on to their free wireless access with no problem. Why SFO does not charge but LaGuardia, O’Hare and other airports do is a mystery to me. There does not seem to be any consistency in this area at all. Of course it’s all about a revenue opportunity for companies like Verizon, AT & T, and Boingo just to name a few. But how much money could they possibly be making? It’s bad enough that many hotels charge you $ 300 per night and then whack you $ 14 or more a day for internet access. I simply am not in love with living in this a la carte world.

In order for Americans to be more productive there has to be a movement to have a nationwide free internet access system. It could not come soon enough for me. In the meantime I am in the process of getting the wireless all the time access (likely from Virgin who has a very interesting program as noted by David Pogue of the New York Times in a recent post http://nyti.ms/bsOAl5). Their program is no contract and $ 40 per month. I will let you know how it works out.

Free Wi-Fi access. It was a nice dream. Do you use on the go wireless access? How is it working for you?

Now that the 33 men trapped in a mine in San Jose, Chile for 69 days have been rescued the world has breathed a collective sigh of relief. I watched much of the rescue yesterday both at my hotel and on my Jet Blue flight back to JFK from San Francisco. It was a remarkable and unforgettable experience just to watch it live.

Already there have been reports that the miners would be paid as much as $400,000 each for the rights to the movie about their ordeal. And it is likely that not one of those miners will ever go down a mine shaft again.

I’m not sure that they can be referred to as heroes although they certainly are being treated as such. While it’s true that the camaraderie and teamwork displayed by the miners was quite likely responsible for their survival, the ‘heroism’ sure to be dramatized on film may be more of a testament to Chilean resolve than actual heroism.

But how about the families of these men aged 19-63? And in particular what will happen to the wives who were shown waiting anxiously as the men were slowly raised one by one up the 2,300 foot metal encased shaft. The fame, notoriety, and fortune apparently heading the way of the miners and their families will be nothing like they could have ever imagined. While the miners might have the right tools to operate 2,300 feet below the ground, I thinkit may be less likely that they are equipped with the tools to handle the media onslaught much less the gold diggers (no pun intended) that will be calling all the time.

The beauty of the story has likely had its pinnacle and from here on the denouement very well may end up making the miners look like a bunch of past lottery winners. I don’t mean to be a downer here but the raw emotion and purity of spirit that existed throughout the ordeal as well as immediately afterward will wane all too quickly. The marriage proposal by one of the miners while he was trapped was poignant, as are many of the statements we heard yesterday and today.

But fame has a huge price and the media will have its way with these brave men and their families. I think that’s kind of sad and I actually feel a bit sorry for all of them. And that does not seem right either.

What do you think?

Those that know me know that I hatched an idea almost 15 years ago to have people customize a ‘fake’ magazine cover that would help them celebrate a significant life event. At the time it was an idea that was interesting but not practical since printing costs would be hundreds if not over a thousand dollars (keep in mind that in January of 1996 digital printing was in its infancy and four color digital printing was just being rolled out).

But by 2000 digital printing had made production more affordable so we started YourCover (www.YourCover.com ). People came to our website and saw what we could do and then requested information which we would send to them along with a questionnaire for them to fill out which they would send back to us along with some photos for us to scan. Our artist would put it together with my copy and we would send them back a uniquely and completely personalized 4 page fake magazine cover. The price was $275 for 25. And it was $275 for 1 also.

Over the years we’ve refined the product, the offerings, and the way our customers can engage to purchase the product. We’ve generated much of the traffic through both organic (SEO) and paid (SEM) search. We’ve tried most every channel on a somewhat limited budget except for broadcast or cable television and radio.

YourCover is modestly successful but it never has been a huge money maker. Mostly because we’ve not had the resources to throw brand advertising dollars at the product and I wanted us to retain total control. Yet as my Vistage group pointed out several years ago (when I was mulling over our inability to make a big impact) that what we really had was a very cool and effective research and development lab. I had never looked at it that way but they were so right.

By treating our own product as a ‘client’ we’ve learned many things over the years. What works, what doesn’t, and why. We’ve created a unique blogging strategy that our agency has turned into a product. We’ve learned that affiliate marketing is not the right tactic for our business and which businesses might be more apt to have success with it. We take the knowledge we have gained at our own expense and bring that learning back to our clients and we all benefit.

We realize that YourCover lacks big brand identity and that is a huge stumbling block. Direct response is a great medium but there has to be an excellent brand positioning to make it work as well. DR people sometimes lose sight of that. I’ve learned that and much more.

Today we launched the newest version of our site at www.YourCover.com . My wife Michele, our Creative Director Nader Ashway and the entire YourCover team (thanks Kristina and Jessica) have done what I think is a terrific job in making it an easy to use and more engaging site. But I will let you be the judge of that.
So we are an agency that has itself for a client. While that may be unusual now, I see a time when agencies will own products on a much broader basis. It makes sense to me because a marketing agency that has its own product truly has ‘skin in the game’.

So does our agency have a fool for a client? It’s fine if your answer is yes but what do you think?

Our agency has migrated from using traditional direct response channels to a host of new media vehicles including social media. While we continue to employ direct mail (particularly to identified prospects and customers), television, print, the three S’s – SEO, SEM, and Social Media are fast gaining in overall marketing usage.

An article in emarketer notes that social media marketing has not gained share even faster due to a lack of marketer confidence in its effectiveness to move the proverbial needle. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007974
It’s not that marketers don’t believe social media is a viable channel. But clients (and rightly so) want to have empirical evidence of the effectiveness of Social Media marketing not to mention SEO and SEM.
I’m currently in San Francisco for the Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference. I was at the DMA Agency council breakfast this morning where this topic is a constant at our meetings over the past two years. As marketing agencies add to their tool kit the term ‘media agnostic’ is often used. That is to say agencies are not to care which channel is used as long as it is effective. I pointed out (with a nod to my associate and friend David Adelman of OCD Media) that we are better served being media cognostic. To know about all the various channels and make the right choices for our clients so that we can truly serve them in the most effective way.

Even if a channel falls outside of a core competency our job is to find the appropriate partner and bring that partner to the table on behalf of our clients. But what’s needed even more are attribution models that more clearly demonstrate how all the channel moving parts are working together. These are complicated models and requiring of substantial amounts of research. The payoff is a better understanding of how social media (and other channel) efforts contribute to actual product sales.

Intuitively we know that conversations on Facebook and Twitter centered around products and services increase brand identity and in turn sales. Yet we also know the customer is in control of where that sale occurs whether online or at a retail location. And the customer buying paths are not necessarily linear.
So as we build our own attribution models we expect to have that hard evidence that social media is directly contributing to product sales as well as consumer awareness. Just saying it works and expecting your client to buy that is why the adoption curve has been so slow.

What do you think?