Category Archives: Media Trends

Spotify’s here. And Klout Perks are suddenly more valuable.

A music service that I was waiting to land here from Europe has finally arrived and from playing around with it in a short time, it was worth the wait. Spotify enables you to play basically any track of music you like for up to 20 hours per month, for free. There’s also a nice social component to Spotify that allows you to share tracks with others on Facebook or Twitter.

That’s exciting in itself.

What’s also exciting to me is the way I received my invite. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if Klout‘s “Klout Perks” rewards program would be all that impressive right away (the $10 Subway card is cool and “Falling Skies” Survival Guide is nice, but I was looking for even more), but by giving people access to new services by virtue of having a high enough Klout score, select individuals right now can receive an invite to try out the free part of the Spotify service. Suddenly, a score that only means so much to some people gets a little more muscle to it. It means you get tangible goods and services for being strong socially. And that makes improving your Klout score more worthwhile, even if you only give so much credibility to Klout. It also opens the door for marketers to do some good segmenting and invite influentials on Klout to attend events or try product samples.

Whatever music you want, whenever you want. Free and legally. Was that so hard?

Back to Spotify – if you didn’t get an invite yet, there’s a way around the system. For an extra $5-10 per month, you can sign up for the Premium or Unlimited levels, which may be more worthwhile to you anyway, because the free level is more limited in monthly listening time.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. Don’t worry, Pandora, I’m not leaving you behind – you still help me stumble upon new artists like nobody’s business.

What do you think? Is marketing to influential people on social media networks based on their special score (Klout, PeerIndex) a worthy approach? Or is it superficial to you?

What’s the Plus Side, Google?

The concept of the phrase, “Facebook competitor,” almost makes you giggle at this point. Kind of like staring into the Grand Canyon and imagining then and there what could be better. Oh sure, there are other picturesque places. But it’s pretty hard to imagine them being more beautiful than what you’re looking at right now.

Facebook isn’t always beautiful. Far from it. But what it does have are a boatload of relationships between existing friends and family members. And that’s going to be pretty darn tough to break.

Yet, Google is out to try anyway with their new Google+ product. To cut to the chase, Google+ sounds a lot like Facebook with its profile pictures, feeds, etc. The big difference appears to be that you can better organize groups of people – and share what you like with those people specifically rather than your 690 friends on Facebook, 10 of which are real friends. But I digress.

Great idea, Google. And yes, Facebook has had major challenges concerning privacy controls. No doubt about it.

But here’s the challenge – you don’t have to just jab at Facebook with nicer tweeks to the model. In order to dance with the undisputed heavyweight of the social networking realm, you’ve got to full-on throttle Facebook with features that kick its ass. And even if you do, you’ve got to consider just how difficult it is to motivate people to uproot themselves from Facebook and the myriad of relationships they have in place.

It’s not impossible (Exhibit A: MySpace). It’s just that where MySpace was geared to a younger audience in general, the average age of a Facebook user is 38 years old. So there are more categories of demographics that have to get in the moving truck over to Google+.

Of course, maybe Google just wants a piece of the social networking pie. But if I may put on my more demanding customer hat, we don’t just want better technology. We want tools that are easy to use and fun. Google Buzz sounded kind of interesting, but did it enhance our lives over what was already in place? Not really. Same with Google Wave – kind of cool, but also kind of hard to understand.

Probably one of the most frequently mentioned books on business is “Blue Ocean Strategy,” the concept of getting out of the same pond as many competitors and fighting within that pond like sharks. Which essentially Google is not utilizing here. It’s fishing in the same pond and saying to people, “Hey, look at this cool new pole we’ve got for you to try!” We’re looking at that pole, agreeing that, yes, it probably is nice and even better than what we have, but still not enough to make us put down the pole that we’re already using. I think we can agree at least that’s this has been the experience with Google’s most recent efforts.

Google’s had just a little bit of success with that ol’ search engine of theirs. And Gmail. And Google Reader. And Google Alerts. But if you’ll notice, several of these are in the search, research and online storage realm. Not in the “connecting with others” interactivity realm. Anything outside of this set just feels like tinkering to me.

I will say Google has this much going for it: 1) It’s a giant in its own right and 2) If you read the comment streams of articles speaking about Google+, there is a LOT of pent-up frustration about the privacy issues of Facebook. These people want Google+ to succeed and they can’t wait to try it. That raw emotion, acted upon, is going to be honestly more important to the success of this endeavor than the bells and whistles of Google+ alone.

But with all due respect to those folks, Google didn’t work on this project as long as they did just to nab some Early Adopters. To avoid being mentioned in the same breath as “Google Wave” and “Google Buzz,” Google+ has to feel a whole lot of love from the mainstream too.

I don’t think we’ll have to search too long before we know the answer.

Beyond the Click-Through: Revisiting Web Banners as Billboard

I used to hate web banners with a passion – not the kind that sit at the top of the page or to the side, but the ones that literally scrolled across the text I was reading. These are perhaps the dumbest form of interruption marketing I can think of. If you really want to tick someone off into not buying your product or service, this is a great way to go. Essentially you’re saying: “We know what you were reading may have been amazingly important to you but we will prevent you from reading it – at least for a few seconds – until you click the “x” to remove our ad.”

Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.

That said, not all banners are as evil as that variety. And it’s time we gave some of those lesser intrusive web banners a new look without measuring them solely on whether or not someone clicked on it.

“Why?” you say. “Isn’t clicking through the banner to the website the whole point?”

Actually, no. Let’s talk about the worst-kept secret around: People are clicking through less and less. Not always because the banner is bad creatively, but because we’re there for another purpose – to read an article, watch a video, etc. We don’t want to be taken away from that. But does that mean we completely tune out web banners that make us aware of the product or service? Not usually. I’ve seen many a service that I am aware of and understand its benefits well enough…but have never clicked through to the website. I don’t have to. I get what they’re selling. It’s just that I don’t need to have an in-depth experience with them at this specific moment and may buy from them later. Is that bad? I argue that no – it is not.

How is it different than most of the billboards on the highway that you see on your way to work? That’s for awareness. You’re not going to dial their number or visit their website while driving 65mph. But if they’ve done their job well, you’ll remember it.

But that’s the extent of the relationship.

Web banners may work in a similar fashion for awareness yet cost significantly less and have at least 2 advantages:

1) They’re hopefully placed in a setting where your target audience tends to frequent. The traditional billboard is placed in an area where anyone could pass by.

2) There a chance, albeit a dwindling one, that someone will visit your site after viewing the ad. There’s an even smaller chance when you have a traditional billboard that merely has your name, logo and headline on it. Brand building? Maybe. Action taken as a result? Unlikely.

Billboards as we’ve known them aren’t dead. It’s just that we need to be demanding more of them. It’s no longer enough to stick a billboard on a “high traffic” road and say that the ultimate measure of success is that more people are aware of the brand when there are lower cost options to potentially achieve the same thing or better.

Which leads us back to web banners. Let’s agree that click-throughs are generally atrocious – .1% or 1 in 1000. But if we’re to look beyond that and focus more on the awareness/recall factor, we can see that this may not matter nearly as much as we thought, case in point the recent Mashable article, “Why Banner Ads Are Having A Banner Year.”

Yes, you should hold web banners accountable as part of the overall marketing mix to reach your goals. But their success or failure should not be measured in clicks alone. Which is why I think cost per impression (CPM) gets a bad rap at times.

To be clear, I don’t recommend web banners as part of every mix, but it’s time to revisit how they’re judged. In the same vein, it’s time to hold traditional billboards under the microscope too. Could you find greater interactivity in an airport billboard, billboard on an subway station platform (here in Chicago, I’d say we have a good 5 minutes standing next to the message of choice while waiting for a CTA train) or on the train/bus itself where people spend even more time. And beyond placement, are there texting options, QR codes or other immediate response devices that make that ad go farther?

That’s the funny thing about the new media choices. We’re so focused on adding entire new channels, we forget that the old ones we’ve known still have potential use in the right situation. As long as we know which metric to look at and understand it’s not always about the click.

3 reasons why we need journalists more than ever

It’s apparent to me that the very fact that some people wondering if journalism is “dead” in light of the decline of newspapers that there’s a whole lot here that’s getting overblown.

3 reasons why journalists still deserve a seat at the table in the era of new media:

1. All of us can’t repost stuff we find on the web at once and call it “news.”
We need people who take that aggregated flow of endless info – some of it useful and some of it not – and give it greater context. They help us decipher how that information fits together in a world where we’re getting a whole lot more information, not less. Some innovators feel that the world is a better place when info is compiled on top of itself in one infinite stream for us to figure out what we want to do with it. I disagree. Info is good, but we could use better ways to organize, compartmentalize and understand that info. Are we really there yet?

2. If you hear a thousand voices on one topic, it can sound a hell of a lot like noise. You need some trusted authorities on that topic to help provide you with opinions that make sense. It’s not like we’re all experts in every subject. We need reliable sources to help us understand the issues among the flow of information that is often entirely too biased or just plain wrong. Oh, I know some will bring their own bias – but there have to be thought leaders/influencers on all sides that rise to the top of the conversation. It may be a free country where anyone can speak their mind, but it’s good to have these people to help us frame the issues at hand and the corresponding sides to those issues. That way, we aren’t all just talking or – please no – shouting at once.

3. Compiling content is not inherently wrong. But there’s still much more of a need for original content.
To me, it’s not he who has the most content who wins. It’s he who has the most relevant content. So of course we’re going to re-post, retweet, share, etc. But people who merely do this and only this at high velocity each day aren’t content sharing. They’re content shoveling. It’s like my dog who digs a hole at the beach – when she kicks her back legs in the air, a lot of sand goes flying in all directions aimlessly. Well, when someone just repeatedly shares without creating or commenting, there’s just a lot of content flying around without direction. Some will argue that some people are just more natural-born “sharers” and it’s not in their nature to comment or create. I get that to a certain degree. But the balance of those who create and comment is woefully unbalanced on some channels compared to those who share, particularly on Twitter. Sharing is great, but it’s the conversation and dialogue that helps define our stances online. Better to share than not share, but I wonder if some of us can’t come out of our writing/commenting shell to help balance out the audience just a bit better.

For example, when news such as the recent uprisings in Egypt surfaced and we heard voices from inside the revolution via Twitter, I was fascinated. But I couldn’t have understood it all from a steady diet of Tweets either. I needed to hear from an inside voice like Wael Ghonim’s and an outside voice like Anderson Cooper’s. One brought authenticity, the other brought context. Just because we had a new and exciting stream of information to witness, it’s ludicrous to suggest we didn’t need CNN there and that they were “beat” to the story. Their role changed. The need for them to be there didn’t.

Final thought: It’s OK to share, retweet and comment. More than OK. It’s what helps the engine of social media go, after all. But we need more influential creators of content to rise up too. As well as people who provide valuable commentary on existing content. Both of which, by the way, are probably opportunities your brand isn’t seizing enough, but that’s a post for another day.

 

 

The Day the Borders to E-Readership Came Down

In the age of the Kindle and the iPad, the concept of traditional book stores closing these days is becoming commonplace. I fought this trend in my own mind because as much of a digital person that I am, I enjoy the physical nature of a book. Traditional books speak to my sentimental side too — I can remember my grandparents having a marvelous collection of titles that they had accumulated through the years. As a kid, I didn’t know what most of the contents were, but it spurred the imagination to see so many books lined up high and back-to-back against a wall.

So when a flagship book store closes like the one Borders Books and Music had across from Water Tower Place on 830 N. Michigan Ave., it serves as the official signal that, like it or not, the e-reader has won. Think about what a store like this had going for it: A prime location on the Magnificent Mile. Close proximity to shopping and restaurants. 3 floors of regular activity.

And yet, even here, it wasn’t enough. Soon, I believe we’ll be looking at book stores the same way we look at the occasional record store these days – “wow, they still have these things? Who goes there?”

In other words, if you think the Kindle and iPad are popular now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Of course people have them. But I’m talking about a different tier than where we are now. You know how every 3rd person on the street has a smartphone in their possession? This level of mainstream adoption of the e-reader isn’t far behind. The way it is unthinkable for most of us to not have an iPhone, Android, etc. in this day and age will be the way we view the concept of not having an e-reader. Laptops and smartphones will be more important to our daily lives and for connecting with others, but gaining information for news and entertainment purposes in a format that is the most akin to a book or magazine will rank high on our priority list too.

For marketers, it represents a potential new opportunity to a degree. I don’t know how receptive someone might be when immersed in an e-book to suddenly see an ad float nearby but some may put up with it to pay less (not unlike other models where you need to pay extra for ad-free). Personally, I’m skeptical until I see numbers that this will lead to converted sales, but if the goal is more brand awareness without annoyance, it may not be a bad route to at least evaluate in the right circumstances.

What I’m interested in is, now that we’re being pushed toward this medium, how will different audience segments adapt to e-readership and what does it mean for even greater interaction electronically. For example, what does it mean for awareness of transit advertising when even more commuter eyeballs within that bus or train are drawn to Kindles and iPads? Does the age ceiling of the audience raise higher and become older than ever?

In a world without Borders or Barnes & Noble or Virgin Megastores (A library? What’s that?), the choices we’ve had as far as physical options for books are falling like dominoes. The challenge from here for agencies and marketers will be how to engage in sophisticated media planning when the media for the masses we’ve known is looking ever more like a Personal Cloud of media controlled by the consumer. The noise you heard from Michigan Avenue of the doors locking at Borders is just one more pillar to fall in that direction. But as I’ve said before with newspapers, the desire for news and entertainment didn’t die. The format for how people desired the content merely evolved. There’s no point in fighting this evolution either. But make no mistake as a result of this one and other evolutions like it: Marketers need the technological tools for understanding media consumption and shifts in audience behavior to be more advanced than they’ve ever, ever been.