Just read this over at JaffeJuice and Joseph extrapolates that the chance basically only 5% of people with the TV on are actually paying attention to advertisements. Wow, I thought it was only half of advertising that was wasted, we just didn’t know which half
41.2% are channel surfing, 33.5% talking to others (in the room or on the phone) and 30.2% mentally tune out.
Anyway, I’m not sure how representative I am but I can’t bare to watch television that is not time shifted in some way, in fact if I happen to channel surf and find something I want to watch i’ll pause it, and go an do something else for a while and come back so I can watch it with the option to fast forward. Interestingly I do find myself on occasions rewinding if I see a movie trailer or something I’m interested in.
I found some stunning figures on the Marketingcharts.com web site regarding Ecommerce, seriously, I always knew the internet was going to be big, but these numbers are mind-boggling.
More than 85% of the world’s online population has used the internet to make a purchase - increasing the market for online shopping by 40% in the past two years - according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on internet shopping habits.
Another significant point made in this study is that most consumers shop at the same site, in fact 60% of consumers said they tended to shop at the same site over and over. What this means is the first experience that shoppers have with your site matters, big time, you let them down the first time they will never be back. Nail the first experience, and loyalty seems to be almost built in.
This goes for any “first” on your web site, this goes for your registration pages, sign up forms etc. if you lose people their you have likely lost them. On a related note check out this article I wrote a while ago called What Is Your Sign Up Form Telling People, seriously they can even be fun
When I first saw the link on twitterFimoculous with the title “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” I thought someone was going to debunk the whole idea behind it. But what was being debunked was just the concept of roles of people involved in making a trend “tip”, and most importantly the influencer’s. Sounds terrifying to most marketers because the whole idea of finding and cultivating influencers is often the cornerstone of “seeding” viral/WOM campaigns, and as they say in the article marketers spend millions on this process.
The article is on fast company and key point of the article though is to point out that it is not the people spreading an idea that matter as much as the idea itself, and societies readiness for the idea. I think this is one of the reasons that ideas that are laser focused on a niche often succeed, it’s because the idea can be much more finely tuned to appeal the people who will initially receive it. Once it is successful in that very small niche it’s likely you will have the critical mass to get out to the broader audience you seek. It’s kind of like starting a fire, the niche is the kindling
Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
So don’t let all the talk about social objects make you think that marketing is all about the props. The props are great if they spark relationships, and they may look important as markers of relationships… but they’re not the real magic.
Even when a customer is canceling an account it is an opportunity to engage in a positive way, even if it is just making it easy for them to cancel. This is in stark contrast to a lot of “retention” strategies that are designed to keep you on the phone, and pressure you into renewing when it’s the last thing you want.
I’ve been a customer of SEOMoz.org for about 6 months and it was only on canceling my account that I felt compelled to give them a recommendation, mainly because canceling my subscription was such a pleasant experience. Basically their subscriptions are handled through paypal currently, which as any paypal customer will know is hellaciously difficult to manage for the customer and really only lets you know you have a subscription when it renews, so anyway I picked up the phone and chatted with Gillian and she took care of it and even let me know they are working on a new billing system as they are unhappy with paypal for the exact reason i stated.
I’m really looking forward to this panel next week at the Commonwealth Club, it’s called Conscious Capitalism and it is covering topics that I often find myself thinking about and discussing. There must be something in the air as even Bill Gates recently called for kinder capitalism.
The panel is next wednesday (january 30th), it’ll be interesting to meet Nathan as we’ve corresponded over the years but have never met
RAJAN DEV, Chief Operating Officer, Hot Studio
ERIC RYAN, Co-founder, Method
BRANDON SCHAUER, Experience Design Director, Adaptive Path; Co-author Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
NATHAN SHEDROFF, Program Chair, MBA in Design Strategy program, California College of the Arts; Co-author, Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences
CONSCIOUS CAPITALISM: RESOLVING THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CONSUMERISM AND PROGRESSIVE INNOVATION
Why are there 50 varieties of toothpaste on grocery store aisles? How does this fit into the world’s heightened awareness of the need for sustainable business practices, and our own growing individual needs for self-actualization and meaning? Leaders in business, design and innovation will debate why a deeper understanding of human nature needs to be central to a 21st century business strategy and how it can challenge people’s attitudes toward consumerism.
Found this video on Jonnie Moore’s always thought provoking blog. It’s a collaboration of 200 students in an anthropology class that looks at the defining characteristics of students today.
It certainly seemed bleak in many ways, and illustrated how the modern school system of lecture halls and chalkboards were antiquated, but what surprised me is how much the web was mentioned but mainly in the context of facebook. Isn’t there a wealth of information out there on the web, what of wikipedia, or the mountains of blogs out there written by smart, thoughtful people, if they were anthropology students weren’t they reading Grant McCracken? I’m just saying, how many of them were blogging, podcasting, putting videos on youtube? Well actually they are all blogging at http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=119″>mediatedcultures.net, and of course they put this video up on youtube which has been viewed almost 1.5 million times, and they used a wiki like service to edit the document to put the script together for the project, so thankfully it did go beyond facebook
Just saw the new Jack Black/Mos Def movie “Be Kind, Rewind” last night and I loved it, the director also did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind and this movie had a similar quirky quality. Apart from being a very funny movie, it had a wonderfully positive message about creativity, that creativity doesn’t have to be perfect, and sometimes we just have to do something and see what happens.
Without giving too much away the movie is about two guys who are looking after a video store who accidently erase all the tapes, their solution to this is of course to shoot their own versions of the movies over the old tapes with of course very crappy, but very funny results. The resultant home made movie has been, in their words “Sweded”, here’s their explanation:
Here are a couple of movie parody t-shirts which seemed appropriate. These two are both from Last Exit To Nowhere which I Featured once before, and believe me the Robocop reference is entirely appropriate.
And these two are from a new line of movie inspired t-shirts from Kindred Clothing which are wonderfully creative mashups or sweded t-shirts, almost homages.
Of course they are also running a youtube competition for people to create their own sweded movies:
I’ve been an avid Mac user for many years, since about 1996, and actually that’s when I started working on the web. Needless to say i’ve been at the sharp end of peoples decisions as to “what platform to develop for”. When IE and windows were the dominant web platform numerous useful services were blocked to me due to people thinking it’s cheaper to develop for the majority. Thankfully with the help of people like Jeffrey Zeldman and the Web Standards Project more and more people are developing code for standards as opposed to platforms. Developing for web standards means it will work well enough on pretty much every platform that understands web standards, and then you can invest a bit more into “targeting” a specific platform to take advantage of a specific platform.
And yet, these same people who are developing in web standards for browsers have suddenly forgotten all that good practice when it comes to developing for mobile. I mean seriously, I know the iPhone is cool, and has a safari based web browser, but so do most of the Nokia Nseries right (yes, they had safari based web browsers before the iPhone was out)? So all you web 2.0 folks developing iPhone web applications, just remember if you just use web standards they can work for a lot more people. Take a look at this graph of activity on flickr for the iPhone and the top 3 Nseries devices:
(the # of Members is the amount of people who uploaded at least 1 photo the previous day)
This is not supposed to provide accurate market data, but as you can see there are a lot of people out there in the web 2.0 world with Nokia Nseries so it just makes business sense right? Believe me I’m not doing this to pump up Nokia, I’m just tired of mobile apps not working on my N95
I’m going to broadcast some live video from my N95 in a minute using a tool called Qik, the video also has a chat window. Not sure how compelling the content will be, just a quick experiment.
UPDATE: I’m not sure it ended up showing on the blog, but it was working on my Qik site and we even got some messages from someone in Germany, showed up right on the screen as we were recording.
Ok, i’ve set up my own qik url qik.com/tcritic, looks like the embedded video i did just shows what is live. You can see a recording of what we did here qik.com/video/11006
A friend of mine at the San Francisco Law school just let me know about a symposium the law school is holding on Net Neutrality. This full day only costs $50 (unless you want credit in which case it’s $100) and will probably give you a more in depth understanding of this polarizing issue. I for one am planning to build upon the knowledge on this nuanced topic that I have already gleaned from askaninja.com, and of course Ted Stephens.
The University of San Francisco School of Law Intellectual Property Law Bulletin is sponsoring The Toll Roads: The Legal and Political Debate Over Network Neutrality, a symposium to increase awareness about network neutrality, bringing together lawyers, academics, economists, and technologists for a balanced debate on the issue. Panelists include Tim Wu, Richard Clarke, Lawrence Spiwak, and many others.
