defenestrate99

Vonage: Biting the nerds that feed it

I think Vonage is a neat company. Their VOIP product is at least as good as anything else out there. I tried it about a year ago and found a) it was a bit too clunky at the time, and b) I was so used to living without a land-line at home that I used my VOIP phone all of twice over the first month. Not worth it, even for a cool new toy. Still, 800,000 people or thereabouts disagree with me enough to use the service, and for that I say to Vonage "Well done!" I attribute their success to a significant amount of smart, very targeted, marketing programs on high-volume sites.

Which is why when I see these types of ads, I wonder how they got this far.

Question for you, Vonage: Why are you advertising at the expense of people who are really computer savvy? See, Vonage, the super-educated computer people, or nerds as you refer to them, are what we call in our marketing team "early adopters." Why? Well, because they are inclined to adopt things earlier than most people (see how that works?). You need these people. It is not the Cribbage aficionado on his dial-up AOL account who is the first person ready to throw away his POTS line for your service.

I get the idea, Vonage. Your CEO, Mr. Citron, said in an interview that it's time to open up the VOIP market to non-techies, and even hired a shiny new ad agency for its help. By saying "No Nerds," you are trying to tell people who aren't particularly patient or gifted with technology that it is easy to set up your service (you are wrong on that, by the way, but I'll forgive- marketing allows for this type of "poetic license" sometimes). And I will admit that you are targeting an audience that is very attractive and much bigger, in that respect. But why in an effort to solicit this much bigger market, did you elect to alienate early adopters from ever wanting to use your service? Do you honestly think that you're "done" with early adopters now that you have been around for a few years? With Skype and Google Talk scratching and kicking for your customers, have you decided you can afford to never launch a new product again?

Maybe I'm taking this too seriously. Perhaps the nerd bit is funny even to the nerdiest of nerds, and I need to lighten up. Fair enough.

But what's even stranger about this campaign is that, as bad as I happen to think it is on principle, the execution is even worse. Find one of these ads on the Internet (I saw mine on CNN.com). Click on the add. You should be taken to this page. Notice anything strange? Like the fact that it has absolutely no reference to the banner ad at all? Whither the "no nerds is good nerds" mantra? Where is emphasis on how easy the service is to install and use? How does a hero shot of an attractive 20-something make me feel like I won't be frustrated when I'm installing your stuff?  I don't see the link at all- and I bet the abandon rate on that page demonstrates I'm not the only one who is confused. Vonage is throwing good money after bad by picking a campaign that puts off a valuable market, and then failing to follow through with the pitch they used to get the click. Amazing.

Not sure I will be first in line to buy Vonage stock if this is how they plan on spending their money.

Will Google Product Marketing Eat Itself?

Why, oh why did Google launch a new Instant Messaging service? That's like someone coming in right now and deciding that the world needs another social networking gig, or maybe a new browser or something. There is already too much of this. My poor Trillian can barely keep up with existing clients as it is, and I certainly don't need a fifth standalone IM client on my desktop.

There are all sorts of theories posited on why Google has perched itself precariously on the bleeding edge of 1997 technology. Are they going to buy or kill Skype? Are they playing catch-up to AOL and Yahoo in a never-ending effort to give customers exactly the same thing? Or do they really think they can googlize the design of an IM client to the point where it really IS better than everything else. That's a tough hill to climb. Ripping out features that customers use to simplify an interface does not always map to success.

It is a little frustrating to know that even in beta, Google probably already has tens of thousands of people trying to use it. Google has made such a game out of having the technorati (not in the blog-searching sense of the word) try to be the first on the block to discover its next moves and end-game, that it has a built-in launch strategy for practically any product it releases. How brilliant was it for Google to limit trials of its mail app to people with invites? People are reading Google patent applications, checking out Google public statements, and looking into Google job postings and new hires just to be the first (or 1001st) person to say they are predicting or (even better) using the latest Google thing. Total Geek Cred is yours for the taking.

I'm so jealous of this I could explode.

So few companies have this- people literally whipping themselves into a frenzy to get the newest stuff a company can produce (and in BETA, no less). Apple is one (despite Steve Jobs' efforts to alienate his evangelists). Skype is probably another. I wonder if Google is squandering its opportunity by releasing products that have all the novelty of Courtney Love being in rehab. Of course, so long as we see thing like Google Maps jump out every now and again, it will probably be enough to keep us all interested. But at some point, perhaps just after the release of Google Word Processor, or Google Desktop Wallpaper, will the earliest of adopters sit back and question why they care any more?

A Cautionary Restaurant Tale

I'm a big foodie. Love to cook and love to eat out. I will do everything in my power to not let this, a marketing blog, devolve (or evolve) into a food journal. Stay with me on this one- it is relevant, I swear.

Yesterday, Kim and I went to LA to see Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright at the Wiltern LG. Since we rarely have the motivation to navigate the wilds of LA traffic, we thought it would be nice to find a restaurant with an LA vibe in the area to make an evening of it. After checking out some options, we settled on the Opus Bar and Grill, primarily because of its close proximity to the theater, but also because the reviews indicated that the food was good and the atmosphere was very hip and trendy. Exactly the thing we were looking for (given how rarely we fly at hip and trendy altitudes in Santa Barbara).

The restaurant itself was fashionably decorated, very minimalist, and full of attractive waitstaff. Everything we were expecting. They sat us in the "lounge" as opposed to the dining room, given that I called for Friday night reservations at the last minute. This was fine, as "Lounge" still oozes "hip and trendy" in our minds, and the menus were exactly the same anyway.

We were seated at a cozy little corner table and, fresh cocktails in hand, felt like we were just about to get what we wanted out of the LA dinner experience. It was at that point when the hostess walked over right next to our table and turned on the wall-sized projection TV right over our heads so that the entire "lounge" could watch elimiDATE. I should make two things clear at this point: 1) We were the ONLY people seated in the "lounge" and certainly did not ask to have the television switched on right on top of our heads, and 2) Context aside, elimiDATE may, in fact, be the worst television show in all of creation. Seriously. Someone should be arrested for this. Within 30 seconds of their having turned on the television, all of the "hip and trendy" was summarily sucked out of the room.

After 20 minuted or so of this, the channel was mercifully changed to football, with bossa nova jazz providing the soundtrack. But the damage was done. Every time I think of Opus now, I will remember elimiDATE.

Why would a restaurant that so clearly caters to the fashionistas of the world even have a TV in their lounge, let alone use it to play such an irony-free piece of crap like elimiDATE? The people at Opus promised lured me in with "LA chic" and switched to "Hooters" for no apparent reason.

How many times do we do this to our own customers? Get them in the door and then do something right off the bat that thoroughly deflates their expectations. Given how often the emphasis of the marketing department is to acquire customers exclusively, I imagine this happens a lot. With a seemingly innocent afterthought like turning on a television in a near-empty bar, how many potential evangelists do sucker-punch back down to the ranks of the one-time visitor?

Let the threat of 20 minutes of elimiDATE inspire us all to reflect on our products and brands to make sure we are being consistent both before and after we acquire customers. If anyone needs me, I'll be reviewing the welcome letters we send to our customers right after they sign up......

Incidentally, the concert was amazing- hearing Rufus and Ben perform a cover of Wham!'s Careless Whisper was a life-affirming event.

Geomarketing and learning that "Home" is where you hang your hat.

I was answering my wife's cellphone last night for her, and could identify that it was her parents calling from San Francisco because her Caller ID had the number listed as "Home." This made me laugh a little bit. My wife lives with me in Santa Barbara and her parents are 300+ miles North in the Bay Area. She hasn't lived with her parents for almost 10 years. Furthermore, growing up, she lived in a number of different locations for extended periods of time before ending up at this one house where her parents live now. And I would surmise that should her parents move to some random farmhouse in Arkansas, for example, my wife would dutifully update the number in her phone, but would still leave the Caller ID notation as "Home."

With the advent of a variety of presence management and GPS related technologies, we are getting smarter at being able to find people we need to. As marketers, isolating individual customers to a particular place is an invaluable tool. Services such as Akamai allow online companies like mine to serve a gallery of different home pages that caters to the specific "wheres" of our customers. Change language on your site on the fly so that you refer to "y'all" in Tennessee and "You Guys" in New Jersey. Present customers with stock photography of models that are representative of their communities (anybody ever wonder why the weatherman in Miami is Hispanic, while the weatherman in Santa Barbara is whiter than Vanilla Ice in a snowstorm?). In a market where it is now expected that websites know you personally, this kind of customization is key.

That being said, we will soon need to get more philosophical with locations. Just as "Home" reflects way more than a specific set of geographic coordinates for my wife in her cell phone, one wonders if geo-marketing won't have to recalibrate itself to keep up with the times. More than ever, people are literally taking their geography with them, whether it be through a Vonage number that allows you to make calls from a Losa Angeles area code while you travel to Toronto, or an eFax number that lets you do the same with faxes and voicemail. IP addresses and cookies are quickly becoming the last vestiges of real location online, and with cookies going the way of the dodo (depending on who you believe), we could have even less real data to use to localize offers to our customers.

That's why it will be the marketer that figures out this geotagging thing who will eat all of our lunches when it comes to selling things on the Web in the coming years. And I don't mean just by letting customers know where YOU are. Get customers to find utility in telling you where THEY are at any given time and you will make bank. I don't know if anyone's hit this out of the ballpark get, but folks are getting closer every day.

An ethical duty to market?

About six people forwarded a post to me from the cats at 37Signals entitled "Marketing as an Ethical Duty." (note: I'm not sure what they are trying to tell me- I'll assume the best) The gist of the post was that you, as a marketer, should be representing a product that is in your own mind the coolest and most useful thing ever, or you're really wasting your time. From that, you can logically assume that if your product or service is indeed so life-alteringly rad, it is your ethical duty to spread the word about it.

I like the idea of loving your product to the point where you feel a personal stake in making sure that not a single one of the 6 billion people on this planet should have to live without it. I just don't think it's particularly realistic for any more than a small minority of very lucky folks to be in this position.

What if you sell Sanford Expo Dry Erase Markers (to pick a random thing in my office)? Not to disparage the good people at Sanford, but it's hard to get terribly revved up about a whiteboard marker, although to look at their site, they appear to have many competent people in the marketing department who busy themselves daily with ways to sell this product. You are not changing the world here if you are a marketer for Sanford, nor would you be invited to many parties if you approached people with an ipod-like evangelism of your writing implements. Some products just aren't all that transformative but still need to be differentiated and presented to a customer base all the same.

I think that if you are in a position where you are selling legitimate products that are perhaps a bit too mundane to change the world with then is is your responsibility to get jazzed up about marketing itself. Take toilet paper, for example. With the exception of certain institutional varieties that are made out of card board or flash paper, most premium TP blends are utterly fungible. I think it is ok for the marketing team to accept that fundamental concept deep withinin the recesses of its collective soul, so long as it continues to devote all of its time, energy and passion to creating new and interesting ways to present its specific brand of toilet paper to customers in innovative ways. Like, say, a video with cartoon bears taking a poop.

I get wary when people add an ethical slant like this to my job, even though I think they are coming from the right place. Corporate ethics should involve following the law, not targeting children for cigarette sales, telling the truth to customers and investors, and giving back to the community wherever possible. Outside of that, just sell good products. Enjoy what you do. Help your company succeed. Everything on top of that is gravy.

Just because I sneeze on you doesn't make me a Viral Marketer

The good people at BoingBoing recently posted a fascinating story about how the BBC allegedly posted fake information on Wikipedia about a boy-band themed (?!) alternate reality game they gear towards teenage girls.  Immediately, red flags were raised, and dirty pool was alleged, and other sports-related metaphors were drawn, accusing the BBC of deceitfully devaluing a knowledge source by knowingly adding false information in an effort to attract visitors and (in theory) game customers. Critics artfully (and accurately) compare this tactic to the wave of fake blogs that are similarly designed to drum up buzz through deceit and which are being pooped out by some of my none-too-intelligent marketing peers with reckless abandon. Ahhh, deceit. The perfect way to start a relationship with my customers, isn't it?

On a side note, I had to grit my teeth a little bit every time one of the articles reporting on this tidbit mentioned that the BBC was doing this in an attempt to draft off "viral marketing." I respectfully suggest that Jeff Nolen add this term to "Moore's Law" and the "Long Tail" in the list of catch phrases that many people misapply on PowerPoint slides. Viral marketing is NOT coming up with a really neat, underground campaign to which your customers will flock through word-of-mouth by the zillions, thereby sturdily affixing a hockey stick graph to your annual growth charts until the end of days. This is, by definition, word-of-mouth marketing (and, arguably, a pipe-dream, but that's a different post).

Viral marketing references, by comparison, a service or product that, through it's very use, encourages the spread of the offering to other potential customers. Hotmail's free email product that appended its own ad at the bottom of each outbound email is a good example of this. Every time you use the product, you are subconsciously attempting to infect (no judgment here- just trying to keep the analogy going) all of your colleagues with a promotion for it. Anyone who signs up for it then becomes a carrier and the cycle continues.

So let's review:

LinkedIn - Viral - to use this effectively, you have to invite your colleagues to join.
Subservient Chicken - Word of Mouth - Fun? Yes. Popular? Indeed? Viral? No. (even asking the chicken to "advertise for Burger King" will only get the chicken to give you a thumbs-up)
Plaxo - Viral - To keep my address book up-to-date, the people in my address book have to opt-in.
Fake boy-band member listing on Wikipedia - Word of mouth (and frankly, but for the publicity the detractors are providing, this is a staggeringly misdirected word-of-mouth campaign. Who at the BBC thinks that 14-18 year old girls spend their time on Wikipedia?).

That is not to say that word-of-mouth doesn't factor into the viral play significantly. Obviously, no one would send promotions on behalf of LinkedIn or Plaxo if they didn't think the products had innate worth. And I've probably told about as many people about LinkedIn as I've sent emails through their system (not that many).

But still, a little accuracy please.

AOL Marketing Breakdown

My friend David is a smart programmer and cursed tragically with a good heart, so he often finds himself playing the role of general IT guy to the world. Unlike many other good programmers I know, however, David will withhold judgment even if you (the helpee) insist on using technology that he considers sub-par for his own purposes. It was this situation where found David himself yesterday desperately searching for a CD with an AOL free trial on it:

After I checked with everybody at work (figuring someone would have one lying around), I went to a strip mall with a Radio Shack, with the thought that they would have AOL CDs next to every cash register. Nothing. Had to go help my friend without the CD. Of course when I got home, I had two, not one, but two AOL trial CDs (one Gold and one Platinum) waiting for me in the mail. Do you want `em?

I think this is gorgeous stuff. This represents a Complete and Utter Marketing Failure on the part of AOL.  They are guilty of the worst kind of shotgun marketing, and I love the anecdotal evidence that supports this. AOL has wasted so much by including idiotic free-trial CD offers with every can of Cheez Whiz or package of disposable diapers in the supermarket while simultaneously sending every social security number with a known postal address at least a dozen of the wretched things, that when you hear about them failing like this, it has to make you giggle a little. As more people flee the bloated service for greener pastures, I wonder if we aren't beginning to see AOL realize that they can't afford to waste millions of dollars on marketing campaigns that generate this (1) kind (2) of (3) response (4) from the very people they are trying to reach.

Marketing Rule #74: Just because you have a lot of money to spend, doesn't mean you should flush it down the toilet to acquire customers inefficiently.

Wikipedia: "Sure we said 'anyone' can edit, but let's not go crazy..."

What is my favorite encyclopedia Wikipedia telling us when founder Jimmy Wales announces that there may be some more editorial review and the possibility of freezing submissions that have reached a point of "stability?" I thought the beauty of a constantly evolving knowledge source was that it could, well, constantly evolve.

I understand where Mr. Wales is coming from. Yes, there are credibility issues inherent for a knowledge base where any prankster can jump in and swap out the picture of the current Pope with a headshot of the Emperor from Star Wars (regardless of how funny it was). Admittedly, I can't count the number of times when I've relied on a Wikipedia article (say, for a pub quiz, for example) only to discover later that the facts I relied upon were either incomplete, grossly biased, or utterly and totally WRONG in every objective sense of the word. Nor am I the first person to suggest that wikipedia has had errors on occasion. On the other hand, that suggestion hasn't stopped me from using wikipedia virtually every day that I'm online. Still, the prospect of having a stronger or more formal review board is not necessarily a bad one.

The idea of freezing pages that are deemed stable is what really concerns me, however. I get the gist of the argument (either hydrogen has an atomic number of one, or it doesn't), but the specifics of it elude me.  Who decides when content is fixed enough to be frozen? What are the criteria? Does the criteria for freezing content change depending on the subject matter (e.g ancient civilization  vs. current celebrities)? How does a page unfreeze (say, for example, if scientists discover that hydrogen really had an atomic number of 47 all along, and whoops, aren't we embarrassed)? Someone needs to explain how an entire article could ever be frozen without fear of it becoming more inaccurate through dust and neglect than if the occasional bored ne'er-do-well jumps in and decides to add a factually suspect allegation of a romantic tryst between Jerry Falwell and Tinky-Winky. I'd be interested if anyone out there can come up with some strong counter-examples to help ease my mind.

An odd banner

Someone needs to help me with this one:

I need to understand where we're headed with this, because I use banner ads to sell things, and if bright, goofy-looking peacocks with call-to-action tailfeathers have supplanted the more orthodox "happy consumer" as the default image for selling things to people, then I want to know where my copy of the memo was.

This banner was on Yahoo today (I have seen permutations on other high volume sites), which leads us to two very simple conclusions.  1) Somebody believed in the peacock strongly enough to spend tens of thousands of dollars on it, and 2) It is surpassing more...erm...conventional ad images in conversion rates (or otherwise it would have been replaced).

I understand the trend of using "fun" if utterly irrelevant images for an ad, although it has been my experience that one ends up seeing an increase in clicks but static total  conversions. I'm just surprised that it's working well enough to maintain a foothold in the banner inventory I've been seeing lately. Let's play a little game....

Take the following three images (sorry about the fuzziness) that I pulled directly from Yahoo Mail's left navigation sidebar: 

 

 

 

Now match them to the following text ads with which they were associated:

 

Not easy to do. In truth, the images are matched to the text ads right below them, but this makes about as much sense as a peacock getting me to investigate mortgage services. Yet, these things are all over Yahoo and hotmail, as if they are the most natural associations in the world. That being said, any good online marketer follows the numbers, and if a headshot of Ernest Borgnine will give my conversion rate a half percent lift over an image that makes sense, then I'll more likely than not put him up. We're all willing slaves to the numbers, to some extent.

I just can't help but feel a little silly about it. People, us, we, are smarter than this, aren't we? These ads shouldn't work at all. We should look at a peacock ad and say out loud "Wha-huh?" for a split-second before we ignore the banner utterly and move about our business. But evidently we don't. And that both fascinates and scares me a little, because I have no idea where this line of reasoning ends. I suppose these random image pairings are no different than letting Paris Hilton tell me where to buy hamburgers on TV, but one wonders if we are not witnessing the devolution of our career paths to the point where we just throw darts at the royalty-free section of Getty Images to see what sticks.

I hope my job stays more interesting than that.

Who to invite to the party....

It occurred to me as I was setting up this blog thingy that we use and propagate the Internet almost as much to exclude people as we do to include them. I love writing, so blogging was inevitable, and I'm a web marketer by profession so it makes sense that I'd want to get this out to as many people as possible. Eager to accommodate me, Typepad lets me syndicate this to whomever wants it, and I can pass new posts to all sorts of feeds automatically. Look at me now, a shining point of light among the 14+ million blogs out there today, open and accessible to all, a veritable public library of discourse (albeit with only one book available at the moment).

But who do I really want reading this? Messrs. Scoble, Lessig, Kottke, and my Santa Barbara homeboy Searls are, of course, hereby personally invited to read at their leisure. My friends, colleagues and family are also most welcome to check this blog out, if for no other reason than to see a local boy make good by publicly posting sentences with proper subject-predicate agreement. I'd even like to open up the floodgates to virtually any other interested rubberneckers in the blogosphere, whatever their reason may be for stopping by.

At some point, though, this A, B and C list ends, and I wonder if I will pine for a large, heavily tattooed e-bouncer to close off the proverbial e-velvet-rope and thereby deny entrance to any e-riffraff who simply have no good reason to be at the party. The good people at TypePad, after all, have anticipated this and offered me the ability to block offending IP addresses, bless their hearts. In my year or so of blogging experience, I've already used this feature once in my wedding blog, when an entrepreneurial soul tried to get me to visit his online tuxedo accessory store. My wedding blog was for family, friends, and kindred spirits- not for salespeople, so I locked him out. I wonder if any people on this list ever block out e-riffraff?

One is starting to see this sense of selective membership crop up. I've just started playing around with LinkedIn (I know, I'm behind the times here), one of a dozen or so social networking sites that connects you through X degrees of separation to people you'd theoretically get on with. Here, the very benefit provided is excluding anyone outside a known, trustworthy web of resources, much like you might pick sides for dodgeball in 4th grade gym class based entirely on the recommendations of the jocks in your class. So long as you trust your friends to get your back, you never need worry about accidentally choosing for your team the equivalent of the prototypical head-geared spaz who, overcome by a Phys-Ed inspired St. Vitus-like panic, consistently throws his own teammates out accidentally whenever he touches the ball. Or something like that.

I find the massive adoption of these arguably reactionary pushes towards cliquishness or exclusivity on the Web very interesting in an industry that concurrently espouses the opening up of all information as its best and only hope for a bright future.

At any rate, welcome to you all (for now).