Mark Kolier’s Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Wall Street Journal’

If you’ve been paying rapt attention to the social media space, then perhaps you are aware of www.Klout.com and/or www.Twitalyzer.com (I was aware of the former but not the latter). The sites offer you a measure of your social ‘influence’. That is to say that based on a person’s publicly posted data on sites like Twitter, your measure of social influence is derived and scored.

Other social influence measuring sites exist like www.Peerindex.com and www.Topvoice.com as well. (Full disclosure – I have met the CEO of Top Voice and the Chairwoman is a business associate and friend).
In an article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal http://on.wsj.com/hZoFDb a 25 year old woman was given access to a ‘swanky holiday party’ on the basis of her tweets being ‘influential’. The woman was surprised. That would not have been my reaction but I’m far from being 25 years old.

I became aware of Klout several months ago and signed up for an account (my Klout score is a lowly 32 – even Hosni Mubarak has me beat at a 43). 70 is considered a pretty good Klout score and Justin Bieber has a Klout score of 100 (Bill Gates has a score of 76 BTW – I myself don’t find Bill Gates to be less influential than Justin Bieber but hey that’s me).

So the next question is (at least for this marketer) – “Where’s the revenue model?” While the WSJ article does not outline the revenue model , theoretically by using Klout consumer brands could reach out to top influencers by having them talk about the brand – positive or (dare it be), negative. Maybe it could work and I am probably missing something so help me out if you have a better idea.

Top Voice is also a new entry and they are working through the challenges of being a start up with regard to interface and site usability. I understand the Top Voice revenue model much better than that of Klout. People Tweet or post about their favorite brands and are rewarded with points which can then lead to them receiving merchandise for becoming a Top Voice influencer. So both the brands and the individual can benefit.

Social media influence is here to stay whether people want to accept that is important or not. Even if you personally feel it is a waste of time (as I often do) we marketers should be very aware and watchful of trends and developments. The authenticity of conversations from consumers will continue to gain traction.

So have you checked out your Klout? Will you?

It’s a bad thing for retailers. We’re also being told that it is a bad thing for job creation. More than half of all jobs are created by small businesses and many small businesses have used worldwide recession to teach the lesson of doing more with less.

Yet at its core, the prospect of people cutting spending on things like apparel and inessential big purchases – like automobiles and giant flat screen televisions, should not be seen as a bad thing. Weren’t we told that Americans HAD to increase their savings rate? That rate is now up to 6.4% from the latest report about three times greater than 2 years ago. An article in today’s NY Times highlights the challenges of retailers and the economy in general – http://nyti.ms/9ylhPl

Economists never agree but there does seem to be consensus that consumer spending which represents 70% of the American economy has to move forward in order to enable a real recovery to take place. Since retail sales were so bad a year ago, John Long, a retail strategist at Kurt Salmon Associates noted “that should have made this July’s comp a layup”.

An article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week http://bit.ly/ayAGVe noted that sales of technology and electronics are bright spots but those sales appear to be coming at the expense of items like clothing and appliances.

I cannot for a moment imagine that returning to the ways of the recent past – profligate spending and people spending money they did not have in the first place – will result in economic salvation.

We run a marketing agency and our primary focus is helping our clients gain and retain customers. Consequently consumer (and business for that matter) spending is critical to our mutual success. However I am not disappointed that Americans are being more careful about how much they are spending while at the same time increasing their savings.

The big problem for businesses like ours is getting banks to loosen up their purse strings and actually lend money for expansion and growth for small businesses. But if a return to spending money one does not really have is the answer we are in a lot more trouble than I ever could have imagined.

Agree? Disagree?

On May 28th Kodak CMO Jeff Hayzlett will leave Kodak to pursue a television career. He has recently published a book, The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing? His new television show is likely to be centered on offering business advice. Mr. Hayzlett has done a remarkable job in keeping Kodak relevant. The fact that he is leaving may be a signal that Kodak is again headed for troubled times. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal http://bit.ly/bmu4DP it was noted that Kodak relies heavily on payments from intellectual property lawsuits to bolster revenue as it waits for the new initiatives to take hold. That does not strike me as an ideal business model.

Under Mr. Hayzlett, the company created the roles of Chief Listener and Chief Blogger and launched a social media team. Kodak also landed a central spot on NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice, where viewers vote for their favorite Kodak Moment of each episode. Kodak also recently launched a new advertising campaign, emphasizing the “share” capability on its cameras, which allows users to post pictures directly to Facebook and other websites.

Having joined Kodak in April of 2006 as SMO and VP of Graphic Communications, Hayzlett was instrumental in helping Kodak gain a foothold in the digital printing marketplace. Competing with HP’s Indigo and Xerox iGen, Kodak’s NexPress is a very solid performer both for print resellers as well as Kodak.

I visited both Xerox and Kodak back in 2006 and toured their facilities when an associate asked me to help him decide which machine to purchase (the NexPress was $ 3.2 million at the time). I was more enamored with the Kodak technology than the Xerox but both platforms were impressive in their own right. And Rochester, NY is lovely in mid-March after all.

Moving into the digital printing arena was a smart move by Kodak. After all, Instamatic cameras were long gone, film cameras a novelty, and digital cameras were being relegated to special occasions as consumers increasingly used their phone or PDA cameras to take photos. So what’s the next play for Kodak? I would not consider the digital print marketplace to be rife with new opportunity.

Kodak CEO Antony Perez will not replace Mr. Hayzlett, who noted that in staying four years at Kodak it was the longest he had ever stayed in one spot. His resume while at Kodak will read well and I suspect he got out while the getting was good.

What kind of future do you think Kodak has?

For those of you that do not live in the Northeastern United States you may be unaware of the aftermath of the ‘unnamed’ hurricane that occurred over this past mid-March weekend.  Hurricanes by definition have sustained winds over 75 MPH and there were several reports of winds in excess of that.  Whether they were sustained or not is not the point.  What is important is that millions of people were impacted – some tragically and 2 ½ days after the storm thousands of people remain underwater and without power. 

It’s obvious that national newspapers would not cover local events, (to any specific or significant degree) like the impact of a storm in the suburbs of New York City.   But our local paper (the Norwalk Hour) is there precisely for that reason.  When I opened my paper on Monday to read articles about the impact of the storm locally there was exactly one article on the storm.  No data.  No rainfall or wind amounts.  The website had little more to offer and did nothing to help people without power who could not access the internet anyway.    Although I did not intend to pick on the Hour, I’ve been monitoring both their printed and web coverage of local events for several years.   

Why do we even get a local paper?  For me (and many people) it’s to cover local events.  News, weather, sports, local politics and issues related to schools and services in our immediate communities.    I realize that some people may only get one newspaper and the local paper may be it.  But many people receive either national newspapers like the New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal or read them online.   But those papers will not cover local events such as high school and youth sports.  Nor would they offer detailed local weather records or stories from people in the community.   I suspect that most people are not looking for in depth reporting of national and international events in the local paper.  

Their website can take on much of those added functionalities and offering full website access to subscribers would be added value.  Contextual advertising could be created to serve up ads during weather events that would offer services such as snowplowing, services for helping after a flood, tree removal and generators.   You get the idea. 

There are some local newspapers that are marrying web and local content very well even now.  But far too many are miles behind the curve.  If they don’t change their approach I fear that they will be extinct sooner than later.  That would be not only a loss of employment for those that work on the staff of local newspapers; it will be a huge loss for the local communities.   

I’m not naïve.  It’s terribly difficult these days in the newspaper business.  People want access to information for little or nothing.  But if local papers are not going to cover local events in a timely fashion their audience will disappear completely.  It’s happening every day.  By the way today’s paper did have three articles on the aftermath of the storm.  A day late.  

Agree or disagree?

Two articles today one in the NY Times and the other in the Wall Street Journal cover location based mobile advertising. 

Using a tactic called Geo-Fencing a company called Placecast (http://www.placecast.net) has a platform of ‘location-triggered’ mobile marketing solutions.   They ‘fence’ areas in cities and if you walk inside the fenced area and have signed up to receive messages from a marketer (in the case of the NY Times article the retailer The North Face is used as an example) the marketer by the use of the platform can text message offers, events and promotions.  Visit http://nyti.ms/a5xLoR  for the NY Times article. 

The Wall Street Journal article also covers the combining of social media and marketing.  Using a variety of platforms retailers can offer one-day promotions and offers.   Visit http://bit.ly/9a1MKx for the Wall Street Journal article. 

A 2008 start-up called FourSquare (www.foursquare.com) is a free application that allows participants to ‘check-in’ via a mobile application to essentially let their friends know where they are and in addition to racking up ‘points’ with individual retailers they also can be rewarded for frequenting eating and drinking establishments – even becoming ‘mayor’ if they go there enough. 

I will readily admit that I don’t personally see the value in alerting my friends to where I am at any given moment.  But I don’t live in the city and have not for some time.  And when I was living in New York I was often surprised to run into people I knew at places and on the streets – not necessarily something one would think in a city of 8 million people.  

For me I also don’t see myself signing up with retailers/merchants to receive offers from them when I step inside their geo-fence.  But then again I’m a buyer not a shopper.  And I personally am not so brand-driven but understand that I am in minority there. 

Yet in terms of overall marketing strategy and engagement I think all these location based services are interesting, relevant and will shake out such that a few will emerge as regular every day parts of people’s lives – first primarily in cities but it will evolve beyond that as well to include people outside of cities. 

2010 may not end up being the year of mobile but that ‘year’ is getting closer and maybe it does not make sense to anoint a year at all.  After all why would we really care about which year is the year of mobile anyway?